The Wikipedia article on the Tyler Clementi suicide reports:
It is a fourth degree crime in New Jersey to collect or view images depicting nudity or sexual contact involving another individual without that person’s consent; it is a third degree crime to transmit or distribute such images. The penalty for conviction of a third degree offense can include a prison term of up to five years.The article is written entirely from the point of view of Clementi. From the beginning I have said that Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei did a very evil thing when they put on the Web images of Clementi engaged in a private sexual act. But is there another side to this that we need to understand? In our long discussion of the case the other week, Dean Ericson suggested that Clementi, far from being a tortured innocent driven to end his own life, killed himself for the cold purpose of wreaking revenge on the people who had embarrassed him.
Dean wrote:
MORE…
Scott C. writes:
The police commander who was investigating the Hartley murder has been decapitated.While repetitive, this story from the Christian Science Monitor confirms the above and includes the Texas DPS warning about traveling to Mexico. The printed newspaper includes a map showing the site of the attack, which does not appear online. Apparently the Hartleys went far into Mexican waters to take photographs of ruins in Old Guerrero and were attacked on their return near Rio Salado. [LA replies: Last week I saw a map showing that the “no fear” Hartleys had gone as far into the Mexican side of the lake, to the end of a deep inlet on that side of the lake, as anyone could go.]
Also, there was a witness who saw Tiffany being chased by three boats, which lends credibility to her story. He has been interviewed by local authorities.
In addition, a student from UT Brownsville-Texas Southmost College was killed last week in a bus hijacking while traveling to visit family in Mexico. The University of Texas system suspended travel to Mexico for research, meetings and conventions months ago. But this freshman wasn’t on a university-related trip, just a kid going to see relatives.
The situation on the border is out of control. There was a bomb threat at a Mission high school yesterday. And a carjacking ring was arrested recently. They prefer to steal cars with people in them because cars with keys are more valuable in Mexico.
People who don’t live down here have no idea how dangerous the region has become. But these links should give you a clue. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:14 PM
Spencer Warren writes:
Today is the 50th anniversary of the most traumatic experience of my childhood: Bill Mazeroski’s home run leading off the bottom of the 9th inning to win the seventh game of the World Series for Pittsburgh over the Yankees. Easily the most exciting game I’ve ever seen. Today is a state holiday in Pennsylvania.LA replies:
Hah. I was standing in the den of our home in Union, New Jersey watching the game with my ten years older sister Karen, who was for Pittsburgh as she was on the left and anti-Yankee. She was leaping up and down in triumphant joy at Mazeroski’s home run. I was broken. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:47 PM
I agree with Noemie Emery’s article, “Perhaps Democrats regret using strong-arm tactics,” in which she argues that the Democrats doomed themselves when they forced the passage of the health care bill last March against the public’s wishes and against the normal legislative rules.
It’s worth recalling the amazing “counterrevolution” that occurred in the two months following Scott Brown’s revolutionary election last January 19. For the next six or so weeks at this site (see archive page for period between Week of January 24, 2010 and Week of March 21, 2010), I obsessively followed the Democrats’ numerous remarks on the prospects of their reviving and passing the health care bill, and I repeatedly came to the conclusion that notwithstanding Dems’ repeated statements that they had figured out a way of moving forward, other statements by Democrats indicated that they had no way of moving forward, and therefore the bill was dead. But my conclusion (shared by most people on the right) turned out to be horribly wrong, because the Democrats ended up doing something unprecedented in historical memory and not predicted by anyone: they moved to pass the bill despite the fact that the country opposed it and they did so by means of gross legislative trickery never used before on a bill of this importance.
The adamantine spirit that drove the Democrats to spit in the country’s face was seen in a photo of Majority Leader Harry Reid that I posted on March 10 with the caption shown below:
This is the face of a man who has given up all hope of the good,
a man who has said, “Evil, be thou my good.”
Just before I read the below article by Tony Blankley in the Oct. 12 Washington Times, I had the vivid thought that Team Obama, with their lame and pathetic attack on the Chamber of Commerce, are acting like a White House in the final two years of its second term, rather than a White House in the second year of its first term. Then I saw Blankley making the very same point, but on a different basis: Obama’s selection of in-house staffers to top positions.
Obama breaks out the sandbagsWhite House deepens bunker mentality as electoral disaster approaches
Based on the recent appointments of the two most powerful staff positions in the White House, it appears that the White House is descending deeper into the bunker in anticipation of the expected shift in congressional majorities next year. The selection of Pete Rouse for chief of staff and Tom Donilon for national security adviser are both in-house promotions. Moving deputies up to principal rank is more typically seen in the seventh and eighth years of a White House administration—when an administration often has lost its instinct for innovation and creative responses to changing events. Moreover, in each case, a senior figure is being replaced with a staffer. Rahm Emanuel was a congressman who was in the senior leadership of the Democratic House when he became chief of staff. Gen. James L. Jones had been supreme allied commander in Europe and four-star commandant of the Marine Corps before he became national security adviser last year. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:05 AM
(Note: a commenter explains how the congressional race in his distrct backs up Morris’s observations to a “t”.)
Morris and his wife Eileen McGann write in today’s New York Post:
Running from BamThe single most amazing thing in this year’s campaigns is that no one is defending President Obama’s legislative accomplishments.
Obama’s impact has been revolutionary: radically changing our health-care system, betting our national solvency on “stimulus,” erasing the line between the public and private sectors. Yet there is an almost total lack of support for his program on the stump.
Democrats’ campaigns consist almost entirely of personal attacks on their opponents. If they dabble in issues, they go for those on the periphery of our politics, trying to milk fear from GOP discussions of privatizing Social Security and tax reform.
But nobody is arguing that the stimulus worked or that ObamaCare is a good thing or that GM is recovering because Obama bailed it out. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:55 AM
I’m posting a lot of conventional political articles today, but conventional politics are very interesting right now.
Richard Viguerie writes at Politico:
Tea partying past George Allen
10/12/10 4:55 PM EDTThe Virginia tea party convention last weekend was the largest tea party gathering to date. It’s a sign that the constitutional small-government movement is getting more traction, and that the big action—even on federal issues and races—is likely to be at the state level. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:39 AM
Amidst all the terrible news for Obama, there is one item that is not bad. Remember the continual Republican gloating, month after month, about Obama’s “plummeting” approval rating, which was, we were told a hundred times, in “free fall”? Well, guess what? In a piece at The Daily Caller, which otherwise predicts sweeping losses for the Democrats, it is reported that Obama’s approval rating is holding at 45 percent, exactly where it’s been for the last six months. When we last discussed this issue, some commenters pointed out that while the “plummeting” description was incorrect, the president’s approval was steadily declining. But for whatever reason, that has turned out not to be the case. I personally am not happy about this. I think he ought to have an approval rating of 25, an approval rating of zero. But the fact is that the touted fall has not happened.
MORE…
Fox News reports:
Chamber Refutes Foreign Money Charge, Accuses Administration of ‘Fear and Smear’
October 12, 2010The Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday refuted Democrats’ claims that it could be pumping foreign money into U.S. elections, accusing the Obama administration of “grasping at straws” in a last-ditch bid to shift public opinion.
Bruce Josten, executive vice president of government affairs at the Chamber of Commerce, described as “laughable” a new Democratic National Committee ad that all but accuses his organization and top GOP strategists of illegally using foreign donations for political purposes. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:08 AM
Here is Bob Schieffer’s widely noted interview with Obama consiglieri David Axelrod on “Face the Nation” last Sunday which has many observers stunned. The thing that stunned me the most, but which Schieffer didn’t make anything of, was when Schieffer asked, “Do you have any evidence that this [foreign money that is supposedly being spent by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] is anything other than peanuts?”, and Axelrod replies, “Do you have any evidence that it’s not?” That really brings you up short. It’s the president who has been making this charge of “criminal” behavior by the Chamber of Commerce, but now the president’s man says that the White House doesn’t have to prove that the charge is true; others have to prove that the charge is false. Amazing.
But more damaging to the White House than that one line is the whole drift of the discussion, captured by Schieffer’s riposte, “Do you, I guess I would put it this way, if the only charge the Democrats can make three weeks into [sic] the election is that somehow there may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?” The exchange continues for another minute after that, and as you watch Axelrod continue to speak about this utter triviality regarding the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the truth of Schieffer’s words sinks in. Axelrod doesn’t believe what he’s saying, as shown by his lack of energy and his hangdog, almost embarrassed expression. The Obamites are out of gas. Their former lies are all used up, they have no new lies that will work. And everyone is seeing this.
(In particular, watch Axelrod at 3:17, when he finished his answer to Schieffer and looks at him for a moment with an almost pleading expression on his face.)
Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports:
Prosecutors in the trial of anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders say he should be acquitted of group defamation.The populist Dutch MP is standing trial for defamation of Muslims as a group because of his comparison of the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He is also charged with inciting hatred and discrimination.
Public prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman now say his comments on the Qur’an referred to Islam and its holy book, and not to Muslim people.
In explaining their call for acquittal on the defamation charges, the prosecutors also explained that statements contained in the MP’s film, Fitna, referred to Islam as a religion and not to its followers. Even though the statements could hurt the feelings of Muslims, that was not the same as defamation of the group.
On Friday, the prosecutors will either press for Mr Wilders to be found guilty on the incitement charges or for him to be acquitted. If they call for a guilty verdict, they will also put forward what they consider an appropriate sentence. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:31 PM
Jacob Gershman reported at the Journal on July 1:
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that, if elected governor this fall, he would push to legalize gay marriage in New York during his first year in office.Yet the editors of the New York Post today condemned Carl Paladino for distracting public attention from the real issues of the campaign by criticizing Cuomo over his support for the homosexual agenda.Asked by a reporter if he would make the passage of a same-sex marriage bill a priority in his first year on the job, Cuomo told reporters in New York City: “It’s a priority.”
State lawmakers, he said, “have their hands full with their current legislative agenda, most notably the budget, but my opinion, my policy point of view, it is a priority.” Asked if he thinks a gay marriage bill could pass the Legislature in 2011, an off-election year, Cuomo replied: “Do I think it can? Yes.”
Earth to New York Post: if the man who is currently the favorite to win the governorship says that homosexual marriage will be a top priority of his, then it is a real issue, isn’t?
(Readers can send an e-mail to Bob McManus, the editorial page editor, and Adam Brodsky, the deputy editorial page editor.)
Tim W. writes:
Andrew Cuomo took his daughtersLA replies:
to see this. And that is a relatively tame photo. I got it from the Flickr photo sharing website, which bans outright nudity. Cuomo took his daughters to see and participate in this event, which is considered fine by our darling liberal media. But it’s dangerously radical to object to it.
I have a challenge for all the mainstream media. The broadcast media should air the pride parade in its entirety, unedited. The print media should print graphically representative photos of the parade, rather than the few sanitized photos they always show. Not only won’t they do this, but they can’t, because it would violate their own decency standards to show the parade in full. Yet each of these media outlets will continue to pound on Palladino for calling these parades disgusting and unfit for children’s eyes.
Yet the New York Post, to its utter disgrace, said that Paladino’s criticism of Cuomo over this was an improper intrusion into Cuomo’s private family life. It was nothing of the kind. The parade was public. Cuomo brought his daughters to participate in this parade. Paladino’s main point is that it is wrong to teach children that homosexuality is as acceptable as heterosexuality and marriage. That’s not a private issue. It’s a moral and social issue, affecting us as individuals and as a society. Only a person who has yielded to doctrinaire liberalism or libertarianism would argue that it’s wrong, extremist, crazy, a rant, to discuss critically the morality of homosexuality and its place in society. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:12 PM
The New York Post’s editorial page editors (as well as its news reporters), denounce Carl Paladino today. Their main point is not to say that he’s a bigot, but to say that he is distracting attention from the main issues of government spending, taxes, and job loss:
This has profound implications for the welfare-state leviathan New York has created over the decades—along with the crushing, and ultimately unsustainable, tax grab needed to feed it.Evidently the Post’s editors are unaware that Democratic governor Paterson and the Democrats in the state legislature (with “Republican” Mayor Bloomberg’s passionate support) have been striving to pass a homosexual “marriage” law for New York State, and that the Democrats will doubtless continue to try to pass it if Cuomo is elected. Far from being a distraction from “real” political issues, Paladino’s opposition to same-sex “marriage” aims at the center of real politics today. We can only assume that the Post’s “conservative” editorial page now supports homosexual marriage, by their denunciation of Paladino for opposing it, and by their calling such opposition “inflammatory.”That’s what Paladino should be talking about each day from the moment he wakes up—that and the ethical swamp Albany has become.
Instead, New Yorkers get inflammatory rhetoric about gay marriage.
In New York State, liberalism is not only in the saddle; no opposition to liberalism is permitted.
MORE…
Meanwhile, every major Republican figure in the state also attacks him.
Look at how slanted the entire article is, starting with the first sentence. Remember, this is (supposedly) a news article.
Carl takes pop-shot at Andy
By FREDRIC U. DICKER in Albany and DAVID SEIFMAN and LEONARD GREENE in New York
October 12, 2010Carl Paladino got back to the pressing issues facing the state yesterday—like accusing gubernatorial rival Andrew Cuomo of being a bad father for taking his daughters to the Gay Pride Parade.
Paladino, who has insisted that a candidate’s kids—including his own 10-year-old daughter out of wedlock—should be off limits in political contests, attacked Cuomo for taking his young girls to the city’s gay parade last summer.
“Why would you bring your children to that?” Paladino said. [LA writes: that’s a damned good question, and he should keep asking it.]
Andrew Cuomo walking in this year’s
Gay Pride Parade with his daughtersThe Republican candidate said Democrat Cuomo “has already displayed his lack of interest in being a good father.”
“I mean, for God’s sakes, he exposed his children to that nonsense of extremists in the Gay Pride Parade,” he said. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:49 AM
The man who has virtually defined left-Democratic politics over the last decade sounds like a different man. From the New York Times blog, Oct. 11 (via Drudge):
Soros: I Can’t Stop a Republican ‘Avalanche’Wow. Talk about changing times.George Soros, the billionaire financier who was an energetic Democratic donor in the last several election cycles but is sitting this one out, is not feeling optimistic about Democratic prospects.
“I made an exception getting involved in 2004,” Mr. Soros, 80, said in a brief interview Friday at a forum sponsored by the Bretton Woods Committee, which promotes understanding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
“And since I didn’t succeed in 2004, I remained engaged in 2006 and 2008. But I’m basically not a party man. I’d just been forced into that situation by what I considered the excesses of the Bush administration.”
Mr. Soros, a champion of liberal causes, has been directing his money to groups that work on health care and the environment, rather than electoral politics. Asked if the prospect of Republican control of one or both houses of Congress concerned him, he said: “It does, because I think they are pushing the wrong policies, but I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”
John Hagan writes:
John Thune looks like a president, and he’s running in 2012. Christopher Christie, who I like, looks like a mess. If Christie is serious about running for president he needs to clean himself up. Christie is something of a conservative pop icon right now, but from what I know of his views he’s not very conservative at all.John Thune is my dark horse right now for the 2012 election. The Weekly Standard did a fantastic article on Thune showing that he’s got real substance. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:41 PM
Andrea Peyser asks, “How can a secular nation endorse a children’s show aimed at pushing one religion?”
The answer is very simple, once you look beyond the formal meaning of our nation’s liberal creed and understand its real meaning. It turns out that the prohibition on pushing religion in the public square only applies to traditional American religions, which are oppressive and exclusive and stand in the way of a level playing field for all beliefs. It turns out that the prohibition on pushing religion in the public square does not apply to alien and threatening religions, which are the very oppressed and excluded entities for whose benefit the playing field must be leveled. Liberalism levels the playing field, not by giving all religions equal rights, as it claims, but by taking away rights from our religions, which have too much power, while giving those same rights to the alien religions, which don’t have enough power. Right-liberalism (procedural equality of rights for everyone) is a front under which left-liberalism (the systematic surrender of our society to the Other) advances itself.
MORE…
Carl Paladino talking about homosexuality is like Pamela Geller talking about Islam.
- On an instinctive level Paladino knows that there’s something wrong with homosexuality and he says so, telling a Hassidic congregration yesterday that homosexuality is not “an equally valid and successful option” with heterosexuality, just as on an instinctive level Geller knows that there’s something wrong with Islam and she says so, telling the New York Times, in clear and uncompromising terms, that no believing Muslim can be a moderate Muslim.
- But then, under questioning from Matt Lauer on the Today program, Paladino turns around and says, “My feelings about homosexuality are unequivocal. I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever,” just as Geller tells the Times that she has “no problem with hijab … no problem with burqa … I don’t care,” and she has also said that she no problem with mosques so long as they’re not within two blocks of Ground Zero.
- Paladino says, instead, that his only problem with homosexuality is telling young children that it’s equally acceptable with heterosexuality (an example of which, he said, was Andrew Cuomo taking his daughters to a homosexual pride parade, where “men wearing speedos are grinding up against each other”), just as Geller says that her only problem with Islam is the union of Islam with the state.
Update and reply to Hesperado: Of course, the union of mosque and state which Geller opposes is the very essence of Islam; Islam in practical terms is the sharia law. But there is much about Islam and the Islamic threat which does not involve the union of mosque and state. Jihad itself does not involve the union of mosque and state, rather it aims at that union and at its dominance over the world. To say that one opposes only the union of mosque and state is to make oneself helpless against the Islamic jihad which leads ultimately to the union of mosque and state. Also, as I said above, if the only thing Geller opposes about Islam is the union of the religion with the state, then what basis does she have to oppose the Ground Zero mosque, or honor killings, or all sorts of things about Islam that do not involve the state?
(On a funny side point, note how Lauer repeatedly pronounces “homosexuality” as “homosexually.”)
MORE…
Time says that the president is viewed as being “in over his head” by the entire media and political elite. This has to be the roughest judgment ever rendered on Obama.
Monday, Oct. 11, 2010
Why Obama Is Losing the Political War
By Mark HalperinBarack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment. And it is too late for him to do anything about this predicament until after November’s elections.
With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:26 PM
Jim C. writes:
Ann Coulter says Gov. Christie would be Barry’s worst nightmare. I think she’s right.LA replies:
While I, like others, have been very favorably impressed by Christie, the immediate thought that arises regarding a Christie presidential campaign is that it’s too soon. He became governor in January 2010, and would have to start campaigning for president in early 2011, after having been governor for just one year.But look at it this way. Woodrow Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, took office in January 1911, was nominated in mid 1912, and was elected president of the U.S. in November 1912. Thus he made himself available for the nomination just a little over a year after he became governor. That would seem to remove the practical objection to a Christie candidacy. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:56 AM
Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:
I saw you mentioned Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons [here and here] in relation to the Duke “sex thesis.” I actually think this is now an underrated Wolfe book. He is treating the insights of socio-biology and genetics as an intellectual revolution nearly complete—see his former essay “Look Your Soul Just Died.” I think it is an excellent work that tries to retrieve free-will in an environment, college, where taboos have been so reversed that we are left with our uncivilized impulses for status, sex, and power and little else. I find the novel disturbing and I say this as someone who, theologically, is as strongly predestinarian as a Papist can safely get.Carol Iannone replies:
Yes, that’s the meaning of the title, I am an individual person, not a collection of driven genes. I make choices that hurt or help, and so on.
I can understand the New York Post having it in for Carl Paladino after his threat to “take you out, buddy,” to the Post’s state editor Fredric Dicker the other week. But now the Post is going overboard in its anti-Paladino fervor. Its front page headline today is
CARL GAY RANTAccompanied by a very strange photo of Paladino looking like a mad sinister gnome out of The Ring of the Nibelungen.
Alarm over homosexual ‘brainwash’ GOP governor wannabe Carl Paladino yesterday told a Brooklyn Hasidic congregation that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking homosexuality is OK.
Thus the Post tells its readers that the statement that children should not be brainwashed by homosexualist propaganda is a monstrous “rant” against homosexuals.
In fact, Paladino’s speech was not a rant at all, but a standard conservative and Catholic and traditional Jewish criticism of the normalization of homosexuality in our schools and culture, the same criticism that the Post itself has articulated repeatedly over the years. If I had a dollar for every Post editorial attacking Heather Has Two Mommies and similar efforts in the schools to normalize homosexuality I could purchase a Park Avenue duplex. Yet now the Post characterizes its own past position as an “[anti-]gay rant.”
Here is the beginning of the New York Time’s story, which gives more of the speech than the Post’s
MORE…
Melanie Phillips gives Tony Blair credit for belatedly (and without acknowledgment of his own shift) criticizing the ruinous Western leftist illusion, once held by himself, that Islamic extremism is driven by Western unfairness to Muslims and can be appeased by appeasing Islamic extremism. But then she shows how he continues to subscribe to other ruinous illusions about Islam that characterized his prime ministership, such as the belief that if only the Israel-Palestine conflict could be resolved, Islamic extremism would come to an end.
Then let us remember that by contemporary British standards, Blair, this hopeless liberal fool, is a right-winger because he supported the war in Iraq.
In the same entry at Atlas Shrugs that I’ve linked below, Pamela Geller reproduces the part of the New York Times’ interview with her which that august mountain of liberal lies posted online on Saturday. For those of us wondering what Geller’s bottom line on Islam is, it makes a useful read. She says right out that the only moderate Muslim is a secular Muslim, that is, a non-believing Muslim. Meaning that no believing, observant Muslim can be considered a moderate. Very good. I didn’t know she had taken this strong position. But then, in the usual incoherent Geller manner, she also says this:
Honestly, I have no problem with hijab, I have no problem with burqa, I have no problem with purple hair. I don’t care. What I’m saying is the separation of mosque and state needs vigilance, that’s what I’m saying. And all you need to do is look at the current global map and the historical evidence to see what happens when you get these increased demands to Islam.This is absurd. The Ground Zero mosque, for example, has nothing to do with some union of mosque and state, yet Geller opposes it. The Campbell’s Soup Company’s adoption of halal has nothing to do with some union of mosque and state, yet Geller opposes it. Rifqa Barry’s father’s threat against his daughter has nothing to do with a union of mosque and state, yet Geller opposes it.
Existentially, Geller opposes, not just a union of Islam and state. She opposes Islam itself. But because of her underlying right-liberalism or libertarianism, combined with her habitual shoot from the hip style, she is unable to articulate consistently that which she existentially feels.
The problem with Geller is not that she is an extremist. The problem with Geller is that she fails to relate together the multiple ideas that are popping off in her head all the time and try to reconcile them and resolve their mutual contradictions. The problem with Geller, in short, is that she doesn’t think, and she leads her readers into the same intellectual incoherence and resulting paralysis about the Islam problem that she herself evinces. At the same time, through her passionate advocacy, Geller is helping bringi the Islam threat to the fore of public attention, and this is good.
Here is the interview excerpt, proceeded by Geller’s introduction:
MORE…
(Correction: A reader had sent me the linked article, and I missed its date: 1998. Still, it’s such a remarkable story that I will leave it up, and maybe we’ll find out if it really happened.)
But the details are sketchy. The story says the lighting hit during a match, when the score was tied 1-1. This doesn’t make sense. Soccer players are spread all over the field, with the players of the two teams mixed together. How could all the players of one team be killed, and none of the players of the other team? This is too strange, and I would not accept it as true until there is a fuller report on it.
MORE…
While the knee-jerk dump-on-Obama journalism which has become an industry unto itself has frequently made me skeptical, this piece by knee-jerk Obama-dumper Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph cannot be so easily dismissed. It’s based on five recent news developments, each of which by itself would look very bad for the president, but the totality of which seems devastating. The five developments are:
1. A new Gallup poll suggests the November mid-terms could result in the biggest victory for Republicans in the House since 1894 (when the Republicans won 100 seats).2. The Senate now hangs in the balance.
3. The economic figures are grim.
4. A quarter of Democrats have turned against the president.
5. George W. Bush is now as popular as President Obama.
(Update: Geller replies to the Times.)
The New York Times has a long profile—or rather a hit job—on Pamela Geller, focusing on her role in sparking the debate over the Ground Zero mosque. I mostly skimmed it rather than reading it, as most of it is an expression of liberal prejudice and outright lies rather an attempt to describe things, and this makes it unreadable. I myself have serious problems with Geller (for example, the way she along with Robert Spencer immediately accepted the truth of a liberal hit job on an anti-Ground Zero mosque rally in August with which she and Spencer weren’t involved). But is she crazy, is she extreme, is she a spreader of hatred of Muslims? No. But that’s the way the article paints her.
(And please note: the simple thing I just did for Geller, saying that a liberal hit job on her was a hit job, is something that she herself will never do for any Islam critic who is not within her personal circle, as shown by her and Spencer’s response to the attack on the August rally.)
Also, the October 8 Times has an article on Ann Coulter, focusing on her speech to the homosexual Republican group GOProud at an event called Homocon. Naturally, the Times describes Coulter as “far right.” It also refers to her as an “right-wing, evangelical Christian.” What is the basis for that? Coulter in the last year or two has occasionally referred to herself as a Christian, which I found odd, as there’s nothing about her persona, nothing about her message, that is Christian, let alone evangelical. It becomes even more absurd to call her a right-wing evangelical Christian when she’s supporting a homosexual organization that is campaigning for homosexual “marriage.” We inhabit an unreal world of discourse, in which extreme left-liberalism defines normality, and anything one inch to the right of extreme left-liberalism is the “right,” anything two inches to the right of extreme left-liberalism is the “far right.”
MORE…
From the L.A. Times blog (via Hot Air), based on an audio tape of the phone conversation:
With evident frustration, Brown discussed the pressure he was under to refuse to reduce public safety pensions or lose law enforcement endorsements to Whitman. Months earlier, Whitman had agreed to exempt public safety officials from key parts of her pension reform plan.“Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be—that they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em, will cut them a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.
At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: “What about saying she’s a whore?”
“Well, I’m going to use that,” Brown responds. “It proves you’ve cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:13 AM
I normally think of Paul of Powerline as a reasonably honest writer. But today he wrote something that makes him look like a pure partisan hack:
Last decade, liberal Democrats decided to impose a system that encouraged and enabled home ownership by people who could not afford to buy homes. This decision played a major role in nearly wrecking the banking system and in throwing the economy into a deep recession.Paul would have his readers believe that only the Democrats were behind the disastrous expansion of home mortgages aimed at spreading home ownership to more blacks and Hispanics. He would have his readers believe that the great George W. Bush and lots of Republicans had nothing to do with it, which, of course, is not true, as I pointed out in 2008: MORE…Now, even as the economy labors to overcome the effects of that recession, the same crowd is about to strike again.
Michelle Malkin is suspicious of Tiffany Hartley’s story about how her husband David was shot by Mexican bandits on Falcon Lake and she escaped. She looks in detail at the constantly changing and contradictory accounts Tiffany has given to several news programs. Having read the accounts, I’ll just say this: Tiffany comes across like her own one-woman Rashoman.
Are there inborn sexual differences between the races? Naahh, don’t you dare think it!
CNN carried this undated story two days ago:
Kenyan polygamist with 100 wives diesNairobi, Kenya (CNN)—A notorious Kenyan polygamist known for marrying 100 wives died this week after a short illness, the nation’s state media reported.
The lanky man—nicknamed “Danger” because of his charm and ability to woo women—had nearly 160 children, according to the Kenya Broadcasting Corp.
Ancentus “Danger” Akuku was in his 90s.
His family was so large, he built a church and a school for them in the western town of Kisumu, KBC said.
Akuku admitted the size of his extended family made it impossible to keep track of them. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:55 PM
This entry is not apropos of anything important. It’s just an example of the sort of odd and inexplicable thing you run into every day in the media.
The New York Times published this AP article on September 26:
Fla. Man Drowns While Attempting Birthday Bet
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 26, 2010DANIA BEACH, Fla. (AP)—Authorities say a South Florida man who bet $50 that he could swim across a canal behind his house drowned while attempting the feat.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release that Timothy Jordan of Dania Beach had been celebrating his birthday when he announced the bet. He would have turned 46 on Tuesday.
Deputies say Jordan was drunk when he stripped down to his boxer shorts and jumped into the canal. He made it about halfway across when he started struggling.
Divers recovered his body just after 4 a.m. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:43 PM
Alexis Zarkov writes:
Karen Owen set out to do a spoof on the academy and sex, never intending it to be public. In a letter to Deadspin (which published her slides) she wrote,
As the ashamed author of this slide show, I am horrified at your choice to include all the names that you did. While I cannot stop you from publishing it, this item was never meant to be seen outside of a very small circle of people. Obviously, it has gone viral. However, your inclusion of the real names are causing this awful situation to escalate even further and is actually starting to affect peoples’ lives in ways that go far beyond mere embarrassment. Remove the names immediately, or I will be adding your blog post to the list of things I discuss with my attorney when we meet. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:29 PM
Since when did U.S. News & World Report, which I thought was a centrist-liberal newsmagazine, become a PR sheet for conservative websites and Sarah Palin? Palin met with Newsmax editor Christopher Ruddy and “50 conservative leaders” in a “meet and greet” at Ruddy’s offices in Palm Beach, and U.S. News plays it as
Sarah Palin Takes A Big Step Toward 2012 Run for PresidentThroughout the piece, an unnamed insider is repeatedly quoted as saying that the meeting shows that Palin is planning to run for president.
“This was an indication that she’s strongly considering running,” said one insider. “She was very knowledgeable and gave intelligent answers, despite how she’s been characterized,” added the insider. “And she was extremely charming.”Obviously the insider is Ruddy himself, who is shown in no fewer than four photos in the article meeting and escorting Palin. The article also talks up Newsmax, saying that it “plays a broad role in conservative politics and is fast becoming the place [italics added] for potential 2012 GOP candidates to be seen. Already Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have stopped by for interviews. One conservative leader told Whispers that Palin’s trip to Newsmax was the strongest sign yet that she’s planning to run.”
Again, I’m struck by the strangeness of this piece, as it reads more like a public relations release than a news article. Wikipedia does not indicate that U.S. News is anything other than the meat-and-potatoes newsmagazine it has always been.
A big deal is being made of the fact that Michelle Obama has been found by some poll to be considered the most powerful woman in the world.
What have I been saying, over and over, to the scorn or irritation of critics, ever since the Democratic Convention in August 2008, in an entry entitled, “The woman of wide shoulders, from the city of the big shoulders”? That Michelle looks like a male body builder, with the largest trapezius muscles (the ones bulging disconcertingly around her neck) ever seen on a woman:
Or, as I put it in March 2010, she looks like Victor Mature in a Roman gladiator movie transposed to today’s White House, with a U.S. Marine obediently holding a flag behind her:
Moreover, as I’ve noted, Michelle has been actively campaigning for the position of world’s most powerful woman. Also from VFR in March 2010:
Read VFR, and you’ll see next year’s headlines, this year.
MORE…
A recent female graduate of Duke University (which by coincidence, or rather by synchronicity, just happens to have been the model for the liberal arts college in Tom Wolfe’s novel of student sexual liberation, My Name is Charlotte Simmons) has written and released on the Web a mock academic paper in PowerPoint format recounting her college career of sexual promiscuity. Her “achievements” included going to bed with thirteen Duke athletes, whom she rates on a sexual grading scale. The document has the university community in a tizzy, but, as is usually the case with liberals, it’s not clear what they are upset about, nor, based on their own premises and beliefs, why they should be upset about anything. Having permitted and fostered an academic environment in which extreme student promiscuity is the norm, why should the university be bothered by a student who writes about her promiscuity? Is it that she named her partners? Or is it the way she objectifies them? Or is it that she went after and wrote about athletes? Or is it the fact that she released the document on the Web? No one seems to know for sure. Liberals have difficulty articulating these things to themselves. They just feel, instinctively, when something has gone “too far,” and then they respond in consternation or horror to the very thing they have encouraged or taken for granted up to this point, refusing to see the causal connection between the thing they approve and the thing they disapprove.
Laura Wood at The Thinking Housewife reflects on the university’s and the liberal media’s clueless reaction to the event, and suggests how a non-clueless university would have reacted.
A long-time Indian reader and commenter at VFR, Palalalli S., has an entry at his own blog recommending my writings to his fellow Indian traditionalists. I thank Palahalli and look forward to the continuing growth of traditionalism in his country and mine. Namaste.
Jennifer Rubin at the flagship neoconservative journal Commentary has an article, “California, There it Went,” in which the former California resident tells how the once-Golden State has so declined that now when she visits it from her current home she feels nothing but indifference and distaste. In this 3,000 word article the words “immigration,” “immigrants,” “Hispanic,” “Mexican,” “illegal aliens” do not appear. She writes about the financial and cultural downfall of California, wholly ignoring the main thing that brought California down. She talks about the ruinous growth of government in that state, not mentioning that government largely grew in order to meet the ever growing demands of the ever growing dependent and dysfunctional Hispanic and Third World population. She complains smugly about California smog, never reflecting that the hideous crowding on California’s highways has been caused by the ballooning of the state’s population by post 1965 immigrants and their descendents.
The neoconservatives are of course passionate, relentless, moralistic advocates of wide open immigration and of the Third-Worldization of the U.S. population. They are therefore as responsible for the ruin of California as any political faction in America. For them to bemoan the destruction of California, while remaining silent about the role the Third-World immigration they support played in that destruction, is an act of chutzpah so gross, well, I was about to say that it calls down the censure of God. But since I can’t speak for God, I’ll just say that the neocons have earned for themselves a uniquely dishonorable place in the history of our time.
MORE…
After listening to Rick Sanchez’s entire job-ending radio interview with Pete Dominick (Part 1 and Part 2), most of which was an obsessive complaint about Jon Stewart for supposedly putting Sanchez down as a Hispanic, I wanted to get more of a sense of Stewart. I’d seen bits of Stewart’s program The Daily Show over the years and had never been particularly impressed. But I found this item from early 2010 in which he furiously and hilariously sends up Glenn Beck’s chalk-board simplifications of American history. He can’t stand Beck’s persona and his way of presenting ideas, and neither can I. We may not agree with Stewart’s total dismissal of the conservative insight that progressivism leads to totalitarianism, but it can’t be denied that the man has talent and brains.
MORE…
(Note: this entry includes an admittedly unsatisfactory discussion by me of the meaning of the word “paleoconservative” and how it has changed over the years.)
(Correction, Oct. 9: Michael Dougherty has written to me saying that he “did not quite forgive Sobran for his appearance there. I just wanted to say I enjoyed his writing and thought his personal choices pretty reckless.” After reading the article again, I agree with Mr. Dougherty that he did not quite forgive Sobran.)
If you want to get a taste of what the writing and reading community at The American Conservative is like, see Michael Brendan Dougherty’s brief obituary to Joseph Sobran and the many comments that follow it. Doughtery sets the tone by giving his highest praise to a 2006 Sobran column in which Sobran expresses regret that we in the U.S. will not have the opportunity to “enjoy” the spectacle of George W. being hung from the neck until dead like Saddam Hussein. He criticizes Sobran’s appearance at a Holocaust denial conference in 2002, but forgives him for it. Some of the commenters call Sobran an anti-Semite, the majority defend his positions on Jews. Also among the comments one sees expressions of one of the ruling paleocon assumptions: that if a writer has been fired or excluded from the mainstream, as Sobran was when he lost his position at National Review, that justifies his spending the rest of his life indulging in reckless, hate-filled statements. As though a person were not responsible for his words and actions, whatever his place in society, whether at the center or at the margins.
MORE…
Yesterday Carl Paladino gave a three minute TV presentation in which he attempted to put behind him the uproar over his personal life, his accusations about Andrew Cuomo’s personal life, and his unseemly confrontation last week with a New York Post reporter, and to restate his platform for saving New York. He says that many of our legislators are “crooks,” that New York is in a “death spiral,” that our young people leave the state as soon as they graduate. He said he will cut taxes by ten percent and spending by twenty percent. He outlined a persuasive sounding plan for rooting out the pervasive corruption that controls state government.
I think he comes across very well and seems like a genuine human being, something that no one could say about the repulsive Andrew Cuomo. If Paladino can stop acting like a crazy man and act like a governor over the next three and half weeks, I’d say he still has a chance of coming from behind and winning. But the transformation is not going to be easy for him. Even in the process of supposedly putting aside the personal accusations, he couldn’t stop himself from observing that “Andrew’s prowess [with women] is legendary.” Notwithstanding that slip, Paladino’s “reset” was successful as far as this voter is concerned. Last week I had written him off. Now I am disposed again to vote for him.
MORE…
On September 29 Fredric Dicker, the New York Post’s state editor and long time Albany correspondent, asked gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino what proof he had for his charge that Andrew Cuomo had had adulterous affairs during his marriage. Paladino erupted against Dicker and threatened to “take you out, buddy” if the Post sent another “goon” to observe the house where his former mistress lives with their out of wedlock daughter. (See the Post’s interview with Mrs. Cathy Paladino.) It was the day after his face-off with Dicker that Paladino retracted his repeated claim that he had evidence of Cuomo’s affairs. The two stories, from September 30 and October 1, are below.
MORE…
Christine O’Donnell is putting forth messages in her U.S. Senate race that do not, shall we say, make her seem like someone who is moving with the Tao, i.e., she looks as though she’s lost her mojo. See AllahPundit’s critical dissection of her ads; his commenters are even tougher.
William R. writes:
I thought you might like this vignette from an otherwise routine article on Obama’s declining popularity and its effect on the mid-terms (“Obama on voters’ minds,” by A.B. Stoddard).
A reader passed along an obituary this week for a man who died last month in Rome, Ga. Donald Unsworth was 78—husband, father, grandfather, veteran, former police officer, safety director of the Floyd County Police Department and owner of both Rome Driver’s Training School and Carter’s Hardware and Auto Parts. The obituary said Unsworth would always be remembered for his generosity and his willingness to help needy families and friends, and suggested donations to the American Cancer Society. Additionally, Unsworth asked to be remembered in two years, requesting that contributions be made in his name to whoever is running against President Barack Obama in 2012.
On October 4, I posted an entry in which I demonstrated that Peter Brimelow had misinterpreted Joseph Sobran’s words when he said that Sobran had converted to immigration restrictionism three years before his death. As I showed, Sobran wrote that as a result of reading Patrick Buchanan’s State of Emergency, he now realized, contrary to his previous beliefs, that certain immigrant groups would very likely not assimilate into American culture. But as I also showed, Sobran’s response to this realization was not to advocate a reduction of Third world immigration, but to say that America is headed for bad times. Meaning that the immigration would harm America, and that there was nothing we could do to stop it (let alone reverse it).
So my question for Mr. Brimelow is: in light of my article about Sobran, does he still believe it to be the case that Sobran became an immigration reformer/restrictionist? I ask the question, not to start a controversy, but to get closure on a point of fact. The question is of particular interest to me because, as I’ve shown over the years, various persons are given credit for taking immigration restrictionist positions which, in fact, they have not taken, and this is one of the factors that hobble the moves for immigration reform.
MORE…
It’s the second post-season no-hitter in baseball history after Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.
Roy Halladay is a veteran with 320 career starts. This was his first appearance in a post-season game.
As the New York Times points out, “Halladay had a run-scoring single in the second, meaning that he has more hits (one) than he has allowed in his playoff career.”
MORE…
Also, how the rare lie by a white about a nonwhite violent crime is different from the frequent black hoaxes about white hate crimes
The other day I wrote about the murder of David Hartley by Mexican criminals on the Mexican side of Lake Falcon in Texas and the escape of his wife Tiffany.
James N. writes:
I’m suspicious about this one.LA replies:Remember the case of Charles Stuart? He killed his wife and said she had been shot in the head by a black carjacker near the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
I had just moved to Boston, and I found the story implausible. Although native Bostonians were all very vigilant re: black crime, the event Stuart described had never happened before (or since) in Boston, especially in the neighborhood he claimed it did. My Brooklyn spidey sense had never so much as had a tingle there, so I called him a liar.
A month later, after the police had become suspicious of him, he killed himself and left a confession.
This story (the husband being shot in the back of the head by “pirates”) makes no sense. For Americans, and especially locals, concerned about illegal immigration and crime, it seems like the nightmares they must be having.
But, like Stuart’s story, we have to recognize that the usual beneficiary of a spouse’s murder is—the other spouse.
Don’t be surprised if this story starts to fall apart as time goes by.
I’m glad you mentioned Charles Stuart, because after Bethany Storro admitted to police that her story about a black woman throwing acid in her face was false and that she had thrown acid in her own face, I wanted to talk about the two big earlier false stories like that. One was the Stuart story from so many years ago, but I couldn’t remember his name; the other was about that woman who drowned her children in her car and tried to cover it up by saying that a black man had kidnapped her children. What was her name?The point I would make is that these cases are not the same as the hate crime hoaxes by blacks that we have all the time. In the latter, the intention is to concoct stories that indict whites as race haters, in order to advance the liberal and black view that whites are racists. But in the three instances I know of in which a white person made up a story about black violence, the liar’s motive was to construct an alibi for an actual crime that the liar had committed. In each case, the white person concocted a fictitious black criminal because he thought, based on the actual ubiquity of black violent crime, that such a story would be believed and would work as a cover for his own crime, not because he had a program against blacks. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 06:45 AM
Michael Barone’s answer returns us to the dominant Democratic reality of the last ten years, which we may have forgotten over the last two years because of the left’s relative calmness following the election of Obama:
Sheer insanity.
Or, if you prefer, sheer Bush hatred.
Or, if you prefer, sheer anti-Americanism.
Barone writes:
So why are Democrats less enthusiastic? And why has “the progressive donor base,” as Democratic consultant Jim Jordans reports, “stopped writing checks”?I don’t think it’s just because the economy remains sour or that President Obama failed to jam a public option in the health care bill.…
For it is not economics but foreign policy that has motivated the left half of the Democratic Party over the last decade … [Obama] has left these Democrats disappointed.
They hoped to see an abject and abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within weeks of the Obama inauguration. They hoped to see a beginning of withdrawal from Afghanistan not in July 2011 but in the early months of 2009. They hoped to see the detention facility at Guantanamo closed and shuttered and the detainees tried in civilian courts or freed to regale the media with tales of torture. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:52 PM
Obamacare is the most unpopular major legislation passed by Congress since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.That is a powerful statement. It was the Kansas-Nebraska Act which began to break the country apart in irreconcilable disagreement over the issue of slavery in the territories; triggered the formation of the Republican Party based on opposition to the Act and the corresponding dissolution of the Whig Party which was not equipped to deal with such a divisive issue; turned Abraham Lincoln, as a result of his eloquent opposition to the Act, into a national figure and the Republican nominee in 1860; made the Southern Democrats become increasingly uncompromising in their demand for the right to expand slavery beyond the Old South, and thus led ultimately to the Civil War.
— Michael Barone, speaking last night in Minneapolis
Obamacare has opened up a similarly irreconcilable disagreement over the size and scope of government power in the United States.
Barone explores the same idea in this column.
(Oct 7: Discussion continues.)
(Note: this entry, written with the intention of ending discussion at VFR about the “No Pressure” video, opened up a new discussion. See in particular Kathlene’s comment presenting evidence that the video maker did not mean the murders humorously or ironically, but seriously—they are seriously saying that it’s ok to blow up children for the sake of environmentalist purity. Also, when I pointed out to Kathlene in an e-mail that this is not a snuff movie, because in a snuff movie an actual murder is filmed, she suggested that it be called a fantasy snuff film, which I think really hits the mark.) A cultural critic does not need to talk about every cultural barbarity. There are certain things so sick, repulsive, and degrading that they should simply be ignored. That’s the way I feel about the “No Pressure” environmentalist murder video from Britain which so many people have been talking about, and which I regret linking the other day. I regret it because, to my mind, even to criticize such an evil thing is to allow it to enter our minds, which we should not do, and give it a reality that it should not have. Many people are puzzling and cerebrating over the real motives and intentions of the video maker. I have no interest in his motives and intentions. I don’t wish to have the subject in my mind in any form. To treat something that is beyond depraved as a normal subject of conversation is to degrade ourselves.And it has been worse in this case, as many people writing about the video are not just condemning it, but getting “into” it and speculating about it from all sorts of odd angles.
This is not to call for ignoring the reality of evil. As J. Krishnamurti once put it, if you want to know what is in a department store, you do not need to get out of the elevator at each floor and look at every item on that floor. You can look out from the elevator and see that this is the toy department, this is the men’s clothing department, this is the homes furnishing department and so on, and that is all you need to know. Similarly, in order to understand evil sufficiently, it is not necessary to examine every particular form of evil, no matter how evil it may be. However, since I did post something about the video, which triggered some comments, I am posting the comments that have come in, though I myself will have nothing more to say about the matter, and will not be posting anything more about it (other than, as is unavoidable, replying to replies to this entry). That also is a form of cultural criticism.
MORE…
John Press writes:
I have been making an effort to turn the Tea Party movement into a culturist movement. Mostly that has consisted of my sending around my newest video. It is the Brooklyn TEA Party taking on the Voorhies mosque.LA replies:
I don’t think that you can re-direct an entire movement in the direction that you would like them to go in. Things just don’t work that way. You need to build up your own ideas, on your own terms, and then people who are interested will be drawn to them.
A reader writes:
I received your thank you note ages ago and just wanted to wish you well.It would be negligent not to thank you in kind for the immense amount of help and consolation you’ve brought to me these last few years MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:16 PM
John Fund writes at the Wall Street Journal today that if yesterday’s Gallup numbers hold up,
some word more cataclysmic than “tsunami” would be needed for the Democratic losses.
I just realized that I didn’t get around yesterday to posting my promised answer to the Sanchez Conundrum.
This is the Sanchez Conundrum:
If you work in media, or in any other very politically correct industry, and you’re being interviewed on television, and your interviewer tells you that Jews (like, supposedly, Hispanics) are an oppressed minority in the TV news field, can you truthfully correct his ridiculous statement without saying something that will get you fired?
In the meantime, readers are welcome to send in their own answers, and I will post them along with mine.
Update, Oct 7: Sorry, I didn’t get around to writing on the Sanchez issue on Oct. 6. Will do so soon. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at the Steve Sailer group’s treatment of the Sanchez story (over 200 comments). It’s wall-to-wall anti-Jewishness. Here’s a typical comment:
Simon Bar Sinister said…Perhaps, like “Draw Muhammed Day,” we should have “Tell the Truth About the Jews Day.” They can’t fire everyone!
10/01/2010
(Note: a reader counters my glass-half-empty approach, arguing that Brinkley’s criticism of Islam is “a moral triumph of sorts.”)
Here is a liberal—former New York Times reporter and current Stanford journalism professor Joel Brinkley—wimping his way into a sort of Islam-critical position. He starts off by making it sound as though the increasingly vocal and vociferous Islam critics in America and Europe whom he catalogues are bigots, but by the end of the article he says that so long as the moderate Muslim majority continue doing nothing to try to hold back the extreme Muslim minority, it is only “human nature” for people to blame Islam itself, and not just a small minority of fanatics, for the provocative and warlike statements and acts of the extremists.
MORE…
David Brooks’s op-ed today about Rahm Emanuel, whom he knows well, is interesting reading. The most interesting part was that every time Brooks has written a critical column about Obama, he has immediately heard from Emanuel about it. I didn’t realize that Brooks had that much clout. It’s a glimpse into the existence of the high level Washington journalist—the White House carefully follows what you write, and openly and undisguisedly tries to influence you to write things more to their favor.
MORE…
Tim W. writes:
There are a lot of stupid Democrats in both houses of Congress (Patty Murray, Alan Grayson, Sheila Jackson-Lee … ), but this Republican from New Orleans sets the record for political cluelessness. He’s Congressman Joseph Cao, who is of Vietnamese ethnicity. He was elected in something of a fluke in 2008, defeating scandal-plagued incumbent Democrat William Jefferson, who was subsequently convicted on bribery charges. This is a normally Democrat district, but Jefferson’s obvious guilt (he’s the guy who kept his bribe money hidden in his freezer) and a low black turnout, an aftermath of Katrina, allowed Cao to narrowly win. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:30 AM
(Note, Oct. 7: Clark Coleman explains the Hartley’s risky behavior as an outcome of the liberal psychology.)
Karl D. writes:
I just saw Tiffany Hartley—the widow of David Hartley who was shot in the head by Mexican pirates on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake on the Texas-Mexico border—being interviewed on Fox News. While crying her eyes out, she explained that the couple knew the risk of going over to the Mexican side of the lake, but she said that their motto in life was “No fear.”LA writes:While I have no idea if the couple were liberal or not, I think that sums up the liberal mindset. When approaching potentially dangerous situations, simply cut off one’s rational brain and one’s instincts and say, “No fear.” As if those words were some magic spell that will protect you from reality.
Here is full coverage of the incident at the Mail. The Hartleys, who have been married for eight years and were high school sweethearts, were jet skiing (I don’t know what that is) on Falcon Lake. A gang of bandits attacked them in three boats and shot David in the back of the head. Tiffany tried to rescue her husband by pulling him onto her jet ski, but the bandits were shooting at her too, and she faced the agonizing choice of being killed along with her husband or fleeing for her life.His body has not been recovered. In fact, it is not known for sure that he is dead.
For more stories on suicidally naive and careless whites who get themselves killed by nonwhites, see “Black and other nonwhite violence against whites: a grim collection.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:50 AM
Rick Moran, who does not support Geert Wilders’s positions on Islam but only his right to speak, has a brief article at American Thinker on the re-opening of the Wilders trial. As I mentioned in the previous entry, it looks as though the trial is going to be stormy. Unfortunately (as John Dempsey has informed me), Moran makes a stupid and false statement about Wilders:
There are “fighting words” and then there are opinions. Saying the Koran is no different than Mein Kampf and Muslims the same as Nazis may be wrong on its face but jailing someone for saying it is a greater wrong.Wilders has never said that Muslims are the same as Nazis, and it would be completely out of character for him to do so, since, as is well known by those who have paid any attention to Wilders over the years (a group to which Moran evidently does not belong), Wilders is constantly repeating his mantra that he has no problem with Muslims as human beings but only with the political ideology of Islam. Of course Wilders has, entirely correctly, pointed to parallels between the Koran and Mein Kampf, and it would appear that Moran, one of the many less-than-actually-intelligent writers who man the ramparts at American Thinker, translated that into Wilders’s saying that “Muslims are the same as Nazis.” MORE…
Well, I didn’t think it would happen, but it did. The trial of Geert Wilders for hate speech, namely for “inciting hate and discrimination” against Muslims, recommenced yesterday, after an incredible adjournment of eight months (supposedly in order to arrange for the scheduling of witnesses!), and it happens at the very moment when a new Dutch government is being formed of which Wilders’s own Freedom Party is an indispensable prop. Thus the new Justice Minister who will be overseeing the prosecution the aim of which is to put Wilders in jail will be a member of the government that couldn’t exist without Wilders’s support.
The anti-jihad blogosphere including VFR intensively followed the lead-up to the start of the trial last January and February and was left in the lurch when the trial was suddenly suspended after one day; adding to the confusion was the fact of the suspension didn’t become clear for several days. Below are several VFR entries about the trial from last January and February if you want to catch up.
As always, the main U.S. resource for information on the trial will be Gates of Vienna. Here is GoV’s brief coverage of the first day of the trial, but I warn you, what happened yesterday (whatever it was) is quite confusing. These are not the sort of intricacies in which I will take much interest. That is why GoV is so useful.
MORE…
The blogger Half-Sigma finds some interesting right-wing ideas in Mitchell Heisman’s 2,000 page suicide note. Heisman wrote:
[W]hat should be done if technology allows humans to give a voice to the voiceless; a means of cloning the Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons who dominated Europe until the coming of current Europeans? They will have perfectly legitimate grounds to protest the genocide of their ancestors, and rail against the present European occupiers of what was once their homeland.Heisman reminds me of myself: he takes a premise and follows it through to its logical conclusion in order to show its real meaning. Too bad about his nihilism, which he also followed through to its logical conclusion. Conservatism lost a potentially interesting thinker when Heisman killed himself.If we are serious about the spread of equality and justice, perhaps we must demand that contemporary governments use technology to right this atrocious wrong and resurrect Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons from the genocidal rampages that victimized them. Cloning could be used to help them regain their numbers. Reservations of land could be set aside as due compensation. Ultimately, however, justice demands that they retake all of the lands they once occupied.
By the way, Heisman’s argument is directed not just at liberals, but at the paleocons and “alternative rightists” who condemn Israel as a criminal oppressive state for supposedly having stolen the Arabs’ land. If their position is based on principle and is not just an expression of anti-Jewish resentment, these supposed right-wingers should support the re-Neanderthalization of Europe, just as they should support the re-Red Indianization of North America.
MORE…
(Note: a reader takes strong exception to Jim C.’s idea that Boehner would be a good president. He says Boehner and McConnell represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party.)
Jim C. writes:
John Boehner would make a formidable candidate; just saw him on Hannity, and I was impressed.LA replies:
He’s too strange. He’s always seemed strange to me, since he first emerged into prominence as one of the GOP leaders after the 1994 victory.Jim C. replies:And he should have changed the spelling of his name to “Baynor” or something like that when he entered politics, so it would have looked the way it is supposed to be pronounced. No one’s going to vote for a man for president whose name looks as thought it’s pronounced “Boner.”
I’d give him a second look: he strikes me as a man of the people, very intelligent, and honest. Strange is Newt Gingrich and President 106 IQ.[LA replies: Jim C. has the fixed view, which I think is ridiculous, that Obama’s IQ is no higher than 105. Though now I see he’s raised it to 106.]LA continues:
Can you imagine going through life with a name that looks as though it’s pronounced “Boner”? And you’re constantly having to correct people who say, “Mr., uh, Boner?” “No, it’s BAYnor.” I wouldn’t do it. I would change my name.Maybe that’s why he’s so strange. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:15 PM
Discussion continues today in the following older entries, among others:
“Not in the Mood”: the discussion with Mencius Moldbug about whether a return to a traditionalist society is possible, about whether I am too liberal, and about whether Mencius has anything useful to contribute.
In “Is Islam a religion?”, see Alan Roebuck’s excellent comment which clears up certain confusions.
In the entry on Catholic Darwinism, a commenter questions my objection to the Catholic idea that Darwinian evolution created the human body, and God then injected the human soul into the human body.
Another comment arguing that Rick Sanchez was fired because he challenged the view that Jews are victims. (On this same issue, tomorrow I will post my solution to the Sanchez conundrum: what do you say if you’re being interviewed on television and the interviewer makes the utterly ridiculous suggestion that Jews are an oppressed minority in the television news industry? Is there a way of truthfully correcting his absurd statement without getting fired?
(Note, Oct. 5: substantial comments on Sobran’s immigration position follow the main entry.)
Peter Brimelow introduces the late Joseph Sobran’s last article, a disjointed and rather meaningless reconsideration of William F. Buckley. Brimelow says that he himself was put off by the article at first, and put it aside, but now,
I wonder if I was too harsh. The article is somewhat off-topic for VDARE.COM, but at least it reiterated Joe’s very belated formal conversion, which he credited to the influence of Pat Buchanan, to the cause of patriotic immigration reform—something that some of his obituarists, for example Larry Auster, seem to have missed.I was intrigued to read this. The career of Sobran’s views on mass non-European immigration had run from complete indifference in 1994 (as you can hear by listening to my close questioning of him from the floor following his speech at the first American Renaissance conference, where he admits he has no interest in or concern about the issues of immigration and race—the latter being the principal subject of that conference), to, in 2006, the standard liberal Christian open borders mindlessness, as indicated by this remark he made in April 2006:
I can’t imagine Jesus standing on the border to turn them back.So I didn’t know what Brimelow was talking about. MORE…
(Note: the original title of this entry was, “That environmentalist snuff movie.” That was incorrect. In a “snuff” movie, so I’ve heard, an actual murder is filmed. This movie portrays people being blown up when they decline to sign on to the radical environmentalist program, but of course the murders are fictional portrayals.)
Philip M. writes from England:
Take a look at the four minute video in this article, if you care to.It is by smug leftie British film and sitcom writer Richard Curtis, and is supposed to be a humorous call to get involved in a campaign to reduce your carbon footprint by 10 percent. As you will see, it tries to achieve this by showing children and adults alike being gorily blown up for not agreeing to take part in the initiative. It has obviously been a spectacular own-goal by the environmentalists, making them look like despotic-fundamentalist nutters. Which of course, they are. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:34 AM
Writing at Alternative Right, the idiosyncratic black conservative Elizabeth Wright tears apart Glenn Beck’s pitiful “Restoring Honor” rally. She sees many of the defeatist, racially clueless things about it that I saw, but she’s much more vehement on the subject. One thing Wright cannot stand is weak white men who surrender to blacks. Indeed, back in 2008, after she and I had been in friendly correspondence for a while and she had posted a few comments at VFR, I made one comment about Obama that she regarded as insufficiently tough-minded, and she instantly wrote me off, telling me that I had “crawled into that safe cave with most other white men.” If she felt that way about me, on the basis of a single blog comment, imagine how she feels about the Martin Luther King-loving, white-guilt-invoking-to-a-mass-white-audience Glenn Beck.
MORE…
Having made a complete jackass of himself before a congressional committee on the subject of illegal immigration, the utterly unfunny comedian and kneejerk liberal Stephen Colbert is the recipient of an open letter from the aunt of teenager Jamiel Shaw, who was murdered in Los Angeles by an illegal alien. The letter was posted at Michelle Malkin’s site:
MORE…
The AP reports:
O’Donnell TV appearances began with chance meeting
WILMINGTON, Del.—Ever since Christine O’Donnell as a college student had a chance meeting with a television producer at the 1992 Republican national convention, she has never been too far from the cameras.
Long before the tea party upstart burst onto the political scene last month to win the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware, she regularly appeared as a commentator on TV news programs, representing her own Christian organization and speaking for other conservative advocacy groups. And she wasn’t shy about expressing her views, whether about sex, religion, AIDS or even witchcraft. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:46 AM
Now we have the absurdity of a “gay right”—homosexual “conservatives” who are in favor of homosexual “marriage” and open homosexuality in the military. And Ann Coulter is their entertainer.
Ben Smith writes at Politico:
MORE…
An occasional series on the sub-standard thinking, writing, and editing that are so common at establishment conservative websites
This is the opening paragraph from “An October Surprise? Tell It to the Marines,” by Ken Blackwell, at Townhall.com:
MORE…
The discussion, “How is a return to traditionalist society possible?”, continues, with Kristor’s response to Bobby D.
The tortured and tortuous life of former movie star Kelly McGillis, from a violent rape by two black thugs in her Manhattan apartment 30 years ago (for which one of the rapists served three years and then committed a similar rape), to her sudden departure from Hollywood and stardom 20 years ago, to her recent lesbian “marriage,” is told in the Mail. There are so many twists, loose ends, and disturbing facts in this story that there is no way to sum it up or perhaps even, after further thought, to make sense of it.
P.S. Of course, the Mail doesn’t tell us that the rapists were black. It also doesn’t include photos of them, as it often helpfully does in such stories. How then do I know? The name of the only named rapist is Leroy Johnson.
MORE…