The Bookworm Beat 1/21/16 — the “world keeps spinning” edition and open thread
Let me dive right in:
The funniest part is that most Leftists didn’t understand that it was a joke. Rep. Mike Pitts, a member of South Carolina’s state legislature, proposed a law licensing and tracking journalists. Myriad journalists responded with abject horror, citing the First Amendment’s protections to support their outrage. Most needed to have explained to them that this was a parody legislation meant to mirror the controls the journalists so fervently seek for people protected by the Second Amendment.
It seems as if Kerry wasn’t the only flip-flopper to seek the presidency. Donald Trump is having to walk back a lot of his former positions. The latest report is the Libya policy that he strongly supported back in the day.
What happens if the Obama administration refuses to indict Hillary? Roger Simon rightly says that this would mean that the rule of law in America has ended. The friend who sent me that link writes “The country is edging ever closer to blood in the streets as the Left tries to destroy their opposition by any means other than the ballot box or adherence to the laws of the land, including the Constitution. My terminology for what I suspect will happen is ‘blood in the streets.’ Simon’s is ‘Civil War.'”
The world’s antisemitism revealed in the approach to the settlements. Caroline Glick never pulls her punches when it comes to speaking the truth about the antisemites around the world lined up to vilify and destroy Israel. This time she takes on the canard that the problem is the settlements. The problem isn’t the settlements. The problem is the Palestinians, the surrounding Arab world, Europe, the Obama administration, and other enablers of rank antisemitism (including some within Israel’s own political class).
Dead Jews; no news. In Israel, a 17-year-old armed with a knife murdered 38-year-old Dafna Meir in cold blood. Meir, a nurse and the mother of six children (four of her own and two foster children), put up a valiant fight, sacrificing herself to save three of the children who were at home with her at the time. It is a tragic, heartrending story that should easily fall into the nightly news category. It also touches upon the issue of Muslim terrorists who have struck practically everywhere on earth save the North Pole. But to hear the media tell it . . . oh, wait, you won’t hear the media tell it. Most of them have ignored it entirely. Those that haven’t ignored the story have gone out of their way to make it clear that she had it coming because settlements. The media stinks. It’s utterly corrupt and completely amoral.
More news on misanthropic Muslims. I’ve said often, and I’ll say again, the Islam isn’t just misogynistic, it’s incredibly misanthropic. I say this because the system believes that men are so vile and uncontrollable, so beastly and uncontained, that they cannot be responsible in any way for themselves should they find themselves in the company of women — or at least women who aren’t draped in tents and don’t smell of sewers. The latest excuse for the Muslim sexual assault spree in Cologne is that the women had it coming because . . . cologne. Yeah, the small “c” cologne. Apparently the women in big “C” Cologne smelled good and deserved to be raped.
The DiploMad has a short, precise history of the Democrats’ real race relations: He wrote it a couple of years ago, but it’s still right on the money. It deserves to be quoted at some length:
The Democrats had a one-party lock on the South. The party of slave owners and secessionists, had become the party of Jim Crow, school segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, poll taxes, and on and on. Many Americans, not to mention foreigners, do not realize not only that the Republican party was formed in opposition to slavery, and that Lincoln was a Republican, but that the famous Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose rulings dismantled the legal basis for segregation and put serious limitations on the power of police, was a former Republican Governor of California. It was, furthermore, war hero and RepublicanPresident Dwight Eisenhower who sent troops to Arkansas to enforce court-ordered desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. Congressional Republicans were the main supporters of civil rights legislation; their votes ensured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, over the opposition of a significant bloc of Democrats–let us also not forget that Congressional Democrats for years blocked Republican efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. All this, of course, is history, but an important chunk of American history that is being lost, distorted, or otherwise flushed down the memory sewer–along with the fact that anti-leftist J. Edgar Hoover proved the most formidable foe of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an organization founded and staffed by Democrats, such as long-time Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
Before getting back to King, let’s address another issue that has been badly distorted and become something of a meme among the quasi-literate left, to wit, the idea that the parties have “switched places.” This is something I have heard from some lefties who, knowing the true history of the Democratic and Republican Parties when it comes to race and civil rights, try to argue that that was then, and this is now. Since FDR or so, they argue, the Democratic and the Republican Parties “switched” places on the race issue, with Republicans taking the role of protecting white privilege and keeping minorities, especially blacks, down.
The truth is quite different. What happened was that the old party of slavers, segregationists, lynch mobs, and secessionists figured out that government programs and intervention were the means to deprive Republicans of a significant voter bloc. The aim was to keep black Americans dependent on the largesse of government and Democrat-run urban political machines. Anyone who doubts that should read the crude comment in which President Johnson revealed the real purpose underlying his massive social program expansion, i.e., to keep black Americans voting Democratic. The Democrats have succeeded admirably in this objective.
If you could teach that to a high school American history class, that would be the best educated high school class in America.
The whole “white guilt over white privilege” shtick doesn’t work for me. I don’t know if it’s because I was raised in a home without money, because my own mother was a slave (slave labor for the Japanese during WWII), because I don’t divide the world into victim classes, or because I reason with my brain not my bowels. It may also be because both my mother and my father were “Jewish mothers” when it came to the whole guilt thing, so I’m made of sterner stuff than the Progressive people of pallor who are flagellating themselves for the sin of having been born white in America.
The Left always has excuses. The Progressive Facebook friends were very excited about a cartoon that purports to show that success in America only happens to rich people. I think that would surprise a lot of Americans — especially those whose parents immigrated to this country between 1890 and 1960. I grew up in a poor home. What mattered wasn’t poverty, it was values. Like generations of immigrants before me, I studied hard, worked hard, and the American system rewarded me. I found the cartoon to be sloppy, badly-reasoned, condescending emotionalism and was embarrassed for those friends who found it meaningful.
This would be a good first step to restoring integrity in science. Dr. Judith Curry, who has bravely stated that the science is not settled, argues that the first thing to be done to return climate science to actual silence is to dismantle the IPCC, which is fatally politicized.
Your government at work. The General Services Administration spent $75 million taxpayer dollars to construct a federal law enforcement facility. That’s a lot of money, but never let it be said that we don’t treat federal law enforcement well. Oh, except that, because the GSA refused to speak to the people who would actually use the building, the building is completely useless for federal law enforcement purposes. It’s a $75 million white elephant, courtesy of the American taxpayer as represented by the grossly deficient, incompetent, and corrupt GSA.
Dogs and humans. The NYT is always behind the curve. It’s finally caught up to the theory that humans and dogs developed together. The NYT (typically) goes front and center calling dogs “parasites.” The way I see it, dogs and humans form the perfect symbiotic relationship, with each providing inestimable benefits to the other.
Fairy tales and their ancient origins. I guess it’s not really surprising either that fairy tales, like dogs, go back a long time in human history. Fairy tales speak to primal fears and core human relationships. Once humans became human, these issues would undoubtedly crop up and stick around in the collective psyche. Oh, warfare goes back a long time too, in case you were wondering. We humans are programmed to violence, and it’s only through careful moral teaching that we set it aside. ISIS prefers our more primitive roots.
