The Bookworm Beat 2-26-15 — the evening edition and open thread

Woman writing

Alan Dershowitz challenges the talk about boycotting Netanyahu’s speech

Read and enjoy Alan Dershowitz’s fiery denunciation of the Obama administration’s efforts to get Democrats — especially black ones — to boycott Netanyahu’s speech about the existential threat Obama’s policies pose to Israel.

I won’t comment on the article — it speaks for itself — but I will comment on a couple of peripheral things. Dershowitz is a Democrat, but he’s also an ardent Israel supporter. I therefore can’t help but think that, as Obama prepares to break with Israel and ally America with Iran, it’s not a coincidence that Dershowitz suddenly found himself swept up in the pedophile sex scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein.

The other thing is that Obama vicious lies have taken root. When I put Dershowitz’s article up on my “real me” Facebook, I promptly got a comment from a Progressive saying that, while he’s sympathetic to Israel’s concerns, this is all Netanyahu’s fault for trying to interfere in American politics. I swiftly set him right about the fact that Obama lied regarding the whole invitation thing (Netanyahu was invited according to ordinary protocol) and that Obama is trying desperately to interfere in Israel’s elections. Elliott Abrams spells out exactly how the Obama administration is manufacturing a crisis to destroy both Netanyahu and Israel.

Amnesty shows why people in Marin are fundamentally stupid

I’ll tell you why people in Marin are fundamentally stupid. It’s not that they don’t have good brains, because they do. And it’s not that they’re not educated, because they are. It’s because they subscribe to and support a newspaper that, instead of celebrating the fact that the President’s grossly illegal executive legislation re amnesty has been stayed, instead publishes a “cry me a river for the poor immigrants” article decrying the cruelty of those who would deny the President the right to add legislative powers to his executive powers.

To those who say “The article never actually says that,” I agree. It’s not the express statements, it’s the spin. Rather than celebrating a temporary return to the rule of Congressional law, it sobs over the poor criminals who are now caught in limbo because American law might actually be un-augmented by Obama’s newly discovered monarchical powers. (I was going to write “because American law might finally be enforced,” but I realized that, even if Obama cannot write new law, he will never enforce existing law.)

While I’m on the subject of Obama’s unconstitutional behavior regarding amnesty, I have some happy news to report. My friend Wolf Howling, who often comments here (something for which I am very grateful), is reactivating his eponymous blog, Wolf Howling. This is good news for anyone who likes elegant writing, sharp observations, sophisticated analysis, and a writer with a huge fund of knowledge. When it comes to Obama’s unconstitutional acts on amnesty, I therefore can’t point you any place better than Wolf Howling’s comment on the subject.

A few more noises about Obama’s love for country

Scott Walker did something smart. He published in the ubiquitous USA Today a short opinion piece detailing what’s really important to Americans — and what’s important isn’t trying to have Republicans make a window into Obama’s soul. Instead, the things that are important, Walker says, are national security, jobs, and the economy. He speaks to the American people. Only in the last three paragraphs does he address the media, and he puts that Democrat monolith in its place:

There has been much discussion about a media double standard where Republicans are covered differently than Democrats, asked to weigh in on issues the Democrats don’t face. As a result, when we refuse to take the media’s bait, we suffer.

I felt it this week when I was asked to weigh in on what other people said and did and what others’ beliefs are. If you are looking for answers to those questions, ask those people.

I will always choose to focus on what matters to the American people, not what matters to the media.

Amen.

Also on the subject of the media’s effort to have Republicans peer into the deepest, darkest corners of Obama’s mind when it comes to love of country, Wolf Howling (did I mention he’s back to blogging) has something to say on that too:

Let me answer the question. One cannot be a leftie and love any country within Western civiization, all being based on the Judeo-Christian ethic and capitalism in its varied forms. Period. Lefties look to the history of their country and see it as either intrinsicaly evil as a whole or at least at its foundational level, because it was, ostensibly, founded on oppression and exploitation.

So how does a sophisticated leftie define love of country? It is not based on the past, it is based on a vision of the future. What the left has is a utopian “social justice” vision (Marx 2.0) for ______ (insert name of Western country here) that they love, and of course they love being in a society where they can gain the power to move it in that direction. Indeed, it’s their raison d’etre.

Incidentally, Wolf Howling’s comment answers the question Dennis Prager asks, which is whether an American president has ever before denied an existential threat facing America. No, there has never been such a president.  But Obama is not delusional. Instead, he truly hates what America is. Anything that threatens to destroy her as she is, so that she can be rebuilt as he wishes her to be, isn’t a threat, it’s a blessing.

Scary.

Kevin Williamson goes ballistic on Politifact

One of the Left’s primary weapons is it’s claim that, as the “reality-based” party, it lives in a world of facts while conservatives, according to Jon Stewart, live on top of “Bullsh*t Mountain.” That’s why it’s absolutely lovely to see a good writer and thinker — say, Kevin Williamson — go after “Politifact,” a publication that holds itself out as an arbiter of all that is politically factual. In reality, it’s a Democrat mouthpiece that, whenever possible, tries to downgrade conservative factual assertions.

A good example of Politifact’s MO came along when Jonah Goldberg, quoting Kevin Williamson, accurately made reference to the fact that Obamacare mandates that insurance companies must pay for all sorts of alternative treatments, many of which are of dubious value and cannot be scientifically proved. (I should say here, though, that I just shelled out real cash for “triggerpoint therapy” and, after one treatment, am without pain in my shoulder for the first time in three years. Based on an empirical sampling of one — moi! — I’m a believer.)

Politifact, which made a manifestly unreasonable and ineffectual effort to contact Jonah Goldberg before publishing a rebuttal, and an even more manifestly unreasonable and ineffectual effort to reach Kevin Williamson after publishing the rebuttal, published a prima facie flawed rebuttal.  Everything Williamson and Goldberg said was accurate.

Williamson got mad and wrote a post that’s positively Shakespearean in its invective. I won’t steal his thunder by quoting too much here, but I will throw in a sample to entice you over to the whole post:

When I pointed this out [that an after-the-fact email to a dead email address does not constitute investigation] — and noted that National Review is in the telephone directory and has been since the Eisenhower administration, that we employ an energetic young man to answer the telephones, that my email address is obtainable from the web site, that National Review retains the services of various publicists and whatnot for the purpose of connecting its writers with media figures, etc. — “pick up the goddamned telephone,” in short — Jacobson responded in an odd way: by sending the same email again to Jonah the next morning, long after the piece had been published. His editor, the feckless, gormless, and in any intelligent world unemployable Angie Holan, noting the general mockery and merriment that my complaints about Politifact’s practices produced on Twitter and elsewhere, very quickly found a way to get in touch with me — turns out that it’s not that hard! — and asked for a telephone conversation, which I declined, having nothing to say to the intellectually dishonest, the cretinous, or the servile, except in those cases in which I am matched with such on cable-news panels. (Hello, Sally.)

[snip]

For the record, I made no attempt at all to contact Paul Tash, Angie Holan, or Louis Jacobson before writing this. I cannot imagine that any one of them has anything of any interest to add on this or any subject, and my capacity for enduring lies and stupidity is not unlimited.

The Dick Dialogues

Do you remember when I suggested that there is an antidote to the way in which the Vagina Monologues has turned Valentine’s Day into a celebration, not of love, but of the female sexual organ? The answer, I posited, tongue in cheek, is a June 6th “D-Day,” to celebrate the male dick. Gerard Vanderleun is thinking along similar lines.

Gerard also dug up a video of George Bush speaking in 2007, and predicting precisely what happened in Iraq with the rise of ISIS. Whether Bush was right or wrong to go into Iraq, Obama was dead wrong to pull entirely out of Iraq. There’s no excuse for what he did. Two wrongs do not make a right. What happened in Iraq was an egg that couldn’t be unscrambled simply by walking away.

Lies and more lies, this time about Norman Rockwell

The current paradigm in which we live is that all things on the LQBTQRSTUVWXYZ spectrum are good, and that all famous people must somehow have lived along that spectrum, whether they knew it or not. Last year, Deborah Solomon published a risible Norman Rockwell biography claiming that Rockwell was a repressed, or possibly fully expressed, gay pedophile. Sensible people pointed out how stupid her analysis was. Now Rockwell’s granddaughter takes it one step further: Solomon committed a fraud, a terrible fraud.