Friday morning mini round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesToday is the first day of summer vacation for the kids, so I have a full house that’s only going to get more full as the day goes by.  At peak fullness, I expect to have about 15-20 kids trotting through the yard and the house. Blogging will therefore be sporadic. Heck, thinking will be sporadic (for the teens, too, I suspect). Still, while I’ve got a moment….

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I haven’t blogged yet in detail about Iraq, but I am fully aware of what’s going on there and do have a few quick comments. On Facebook, the DemProgs are blaming Bush. I polite write back to them that, when Bush left office, Iraq was slowly but surely on its way to becoming a functional democracy. It was Obama who made the decision to abandon this delicate, but stable and growing, democratic infrastructure, leaving it completely vulnerable to al Qaeda and, now, ISIS.

I remind these DemProgs that, almost seventy years after WWII ended, America is still in Germany and Japan. It stayed in the beginning to keep those shattered countries from falling apart and becoming prey again to dangerous nationalism, and stayed in the end as a bulwark against communism. In Iraq, Obama cut and ran, leaving Iraq to fall apart and to fall victim to  staggering uprush of Islamism not seen since the centuries after Mohammed’s death.

And speaking of that jihadist push in the years after Mohammed’s death, which was one of the speediest and most bloody conquests in world history, we shouldn’t forget that Islam pushed hard at the doors of Western Europe. Spain fell. France was pressed. Serbia was lost. Byzantine Constantinople was lost. It even appeared, just as recently as the end of the 17th century, that the Austro-Hungarian empire would fall. And all of this happened when Europe didn’t have a strong fifth column of Islamists that it had already invited into the gates.

All of that’s a subject for a longer, more thoughtful post. For today, just a picture. You see, John Hinderaker says that it’s time to call Barack Obama on his “Mission Accomplished” moment:

MissionAccomplished0067

What’s really sad is that I believe that Obama probably does consider the re-Islamization of the Muslim Middle East as precisely that — a mission proudly accomplished. Whether or not he’s a Muslim, something that is between him and his God (whoever that is), Obama is most certainly a cheerleader and fellow traveler.

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Richard Baehr says what conservatives know and Leftists lie about: Cantor’s defeat wasn’t about Virginia conservatives suddenly waking up and saying “Oh, my God! He’s a Jew! More than a decade and we never knew. Throw the Yid out!”

Instead, it was about the fact that Cantor, who gets a few kudos for facing-off against Obama in 2009, is in all other ways a Republican, not a conservative, something he made manifestly clear with his stand on amnesty.

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Showing that Republicans have no learning curve, though, the House Republicans seem to be contemplating electing Kevin McCarthy to replace Cantor as House Majority Leader. If Cantor was a Republican (not a conservative), McCarthy has strong RINO leanings. Elevating him to majority leader will be the Republicans’ way of saying to conservatives “Eff you.” And all the while they’ll be thinking “Your votes? We don’t need your stinking conservatives votes.” That’s the arrogance of the Foggy Bottom mentality, because in fact they do need those stinking conservative votes.

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A sweet two-fer from Burt Prelutsky, one looking at the DemProg mindset and the other looking at the inanities they spout, seemingly with all seriousness.

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Jack Cashill notes something very sinister about the Left’s changed approach to our justice system. At least since Sacco and Vanzetti, Leftists vociferously cried “Innocent!” on behalf of killers and traitors they knew were guilty. That’s bad, but worse was to come with the Zimmerman trial:

The guilty as innocent paradigm caused trouble enough over time, but the Zimmerman case signaled a disturbing trend in leftist agitprop: the innocent as guilty. For the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, the cultural left and its media allies conspired with the forces of government and the vestiges of the civil rights movement to put a conspicuously innocent man in prison for the rest of his life.

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Tom White, who is one of my fellow Watcher’s Council members, is getting a lot of deserved press for the fact that he alone of all political commentators predicted the David Brat victory over Eric Cantor. And I mean really predicted. It wasn’t just the optimistic statement that “My guy’s going to win!” No. Tom engaged in very thoughtful analyses of voter trends and poll data, and worked his way to the right answer. Needless to say, I am incredibly proud of Tom.

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Bowe Bergdahl’s letters home reveal a few things about him: (1) he’s almost illiterate; (2) he’s a loon; and (3) he didn’t like being bossed around in the military. The Left will glom onto items (1) and (2) to justify a presidential pardon. “Look at this,” they’ll say.  “(1) This is what happens when the military preys on stupid people, using them as cannon fodder and (2) nobody should have to work under those circumstances.”

Regarding the “military is evil because it stocks itself with mentally incompetent people,” we know this is untrue. On average, the military has a higher grade of people than the general public. Indeed, it tries to weed out people like Bergdahl (the loons), although it failed signally in his case which is the main finger of blame I would point at the military on the facts currently available.

Regarding the second point, which is that it’s reasonable for unhappy troops to desert, a military friend of mine says it best:

That’s a recipe for chaos. If you don’t like making your bed you can desert? It’s another assertion that anything goes and it’s all about “me.” It’s selfishness and the root of evil and the opposite of discipline. We forget that disciple in a good thing.

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One does wonder if Bergdahl’s looniness relates in any way to his father’s creepiness. It makes you wonder about his mother who, so far, has stayed out of the spotlight letting her loopy, pro-Taliban, Muslim-prayer-spouting husband to hog the microphone.

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Hillary blithely stated that we don’t need to worry about the Gitmo 5 because they’re no threat to the US. Even taking the inanity at face value, maybe Americans will still care that at least one of them may have had a hand in killing 2,996 Americans and other nationals on September 11, 2001.  Nah!  Never mind.  The media will make sure most Americans never know.