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Bookworm Beat 6/14/17 — Never give a Leftist an opening

June 14, 2017 by Bookworm 16 Comments

The past week has reinforced one of the most important rules in life and politics: Never give a Leftist an opening. Block him at every turn or you lose.

Never give a Leftist an opening about Israel. As I mentioned earlier, I had the pleasure of attending the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech memorial lecture, at which Daniel Greenfield spoke. One of the points he made was that we Jews and Israel supporters should not enter into arguments justifying or proving our right to exist. Some things, after all, go without saying. Nobody asks Norwegians or Germans to justify their right to their ancestral lands and Jews should not have to do so either.

I’ll add to what Greenfield said by noting that there’s also a very practical reason for avoiding arguments, which is that engaging in an argument also allows the opposition to continue arguing. In this regard, I was reminded of something my sister-in-law, the clinical behaviorist taught me: Don’t argue with a teenager! Instead, reflect what they said but constantly return to your rule, a rule that needs no defending or explaining. Otherwise, you will get sucked into the teenager’s world, one in which your teen has all the time in the world and all the energy to incessantly push his or her cause. Two simple dialogues will suffice:

The wrong way to talk to a teen

TEEN: Can I go to the mall with my friends on Monday night?
YOU: No. It’s a school night.
TEEN: But all my friends are going.
YOU: We’ve talked before about the fact that, just because your friends go, it doesn’t mean you can go.
TEEN: Yeah, but everyone is going. I’ll be the weird dork if I don’t get to go.
YOU: You’re never a weird dork. Look at how many friends you have. People like me.
TEEN: They only like me because I do things with them. If you won’t let me go to the mall….
YOU: Look, we’ve talked about how you need your sleep on school nights.
TEEN: That’s silly. You know that even when I’m home I always go to bed late and I’m fine.

And on it goes, with you constantly responding to the shifting sand of your teen’s argument, and your teen taking every one of your responses as a new opening and a new opportunity. After all, you’ve got a life, while the teen has a monomaniacal need to go to the mall Monday night. Who’s got more stamina for the argument?

The right way to talk to a teen

TEEN: Can I go to the mall with my friends on Monday night?
YOU: No. The house rule is no malls on a week night.
TEEN: But all my friends are going.
YOU: Nevertheless, the house rule is no malls on a week night.
TEEN: That’s not fair!
YOU: I’m sorry you don’t think it’s fair, but it’s the house rule. No malls on a week night.
TEEN: Everyone will think I’m weird if I don’t go.
YOU: [Empathetic listening statement optional here.] Still, you know the rule: No mall on a week night.

Israeli’s, Zionists, and anyone else who supports Israel should take a page out of the smart teen parent’s handbook. Israel is a nation that exists. End of story. Live with it. [Read more…]

An inspiring, uplifting, educational, and very fun long weekend

June 12, 2017 by Bookworm 6 Comments

The deeply moving 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Lecture was the anchor for an inspiring weekend that cemented old friendships and introduced me to new friends.

Some of you may remember that, about a week ago, I wrote a post saying that I’d be flying down to L.A. to attend the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Lecture, which Robert Avrech, of Seraphic Secret, and his wife, Karen, sponsor annually in honor of their dear son Ariel, who died in 2003. That weekend (which I extended into Monday) has now finished and I am home again. It was a very wonderful weekend in so many ways.

To begin with, I got a chance to know my in-laws so much better than before and with greater knowledge comes greater appreciation for what great people they are. I know I’ve boasted for years that I have the best in-laws, but in the past I’ve always seen them in a pack, at mass get-togethers. This time, I stayed with my sister-in-law, her husband, and their son. They could not have been more gracious.

I felt genuinely cared for while I was in my in-laws’ house. As a mother, that’s a rare and wonderful feeling. After all, the normal state of the world is that the mother and homemaker cares for others — which is as it should be. That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t appreciate a break in the routine.

The fact is that my in-laws are ferociously intelligent, informed people, and conversation with them is as stimulating as it gets. It wasn’t just politics. Both of them are luminaries in their respective fields, and that too made any conversation interesting.

I love their dogs too.

Having that kind of visit with relatives by marriage could have been enough for a wonderful weekend, but there was more.

On Sunday, as I mentioned at the top of this post, I attended the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture, at which Daniel Greenfield spoke. Before I get to his talk — which was, as one would expect, brilliant — I want to talk a bit about the entire event. [Read more…]

A microcosm of the maddening mix of Progressive hate, ignorance, and nonsense at an American college

April 23, 2017 by Bookworm 9 Comments

Despite a small spark of rationality, Macalester College’s weekly paper displays the Progressive hate, ignorance, and nonsense at an American college.

Knowing my passion for free speech, someone sent me a small sign of hope: a link to a student-written opinion piece from the weekly student newspaper at Macalester University in Minnesota. To give a little context, in 2014 College Magazine ranked Macalester as the “Most Progressive Campus” in America. It’s also No. 10 on the Best Colleges’ “Most Liberal Colleges” list. In other words, it’s your average American college, right up there with some of the most prestigious, such as Yale, Harvard, or MIT, or some of the most embarrassing, such as Missouri or Pomona.

Unlike those other American colleges, however, Macalester is never in the news. I suspect this is because no student or faculty member would ever dream of inviting to the campus someone who doesn’t meet the Progressive purity scale. Without any opposing views, there is no call for violence.

It was therefore a great and pleasant surprise to discover that one young man is defending the free exchange of ideas. What moved Jacob Hill to write was the fact that the staff of the college radio station, perfectly emulating a Maoist re-education camp, grouped together to castigate a fellow employee for having dared to place on the college Facebook page a meme that “satirized the prevalence of white Adidas sneakers among women who claim not to conform to societal norms.” I’m having trouble envisioning how offensive such a meme could be but for the student’s cohorts at the radio station, it was a bridge too far. It was Mao time:

Less than 24 hours after the meme was posted, the original poster (a Mac Radio staff member) went to his WMCN staff meeting as usual. One of the commenters on the meme decided to make a speech calling him misogynistic, racist and homophobic. The speech was met with applause, and much of the WMCN staff agreed that his offensive behavior did not represent the culture of WMCN. He was not offered a chance to respond but rather asked to think about his actions for a week.

Showing a grasp of logic denied to most young Progressives, Hill points out that advancing feelings as the alpha and omega of all disputes ends rational discussion:

A later comment on the original post read: “you don’t get to decide what’s offensive to other people—if it’s offensive to them, that’s it. You don’t get to critique that fact.” This ‘fact’ is particularly what makes offense so messy. No one knows exactly what will offend others. It’s an ongoing dialogue. Macalester students, in their haste to eliminate every suggestion that may be perceived as offensive, missed the opportunity for this dialogue. I don’t personally believe that the poster had malintent, but even if he did, is calling him a racist/misogynist/homophobe really the best way to make your point? Too often, liberal Millennials believe they can end a conversation by calling out someone’s “isms.” Yes, these claims are powerful, but that is precisely why they must be backed by context, logic, and most of all, truth.

There’s more and Hill deserves kudos for every word he writes. This is a young man who, somehow, somewhere, was exposed to an intellectual world that transcends navel-gazing emotionalism that’s par for the course at an American college.

As of this writing, Hill’s short article had garnered three comments: The first agrees with and encourages respectful dialog; the third agrees with Hill and expresses surprise that The Weekly Mac published Hill’s piece; and the second . . . well, the second comment shows that the writer has embraced an authoritarian worldview that brooks no criticism:

I question the decision of the Mac Weekly to publish such a targeted opinion piece, especially as the author writes of the pitfalls of “isolating and humiliating” specific people in the name of a greater conversation. [The author did not name anybody, although it’s reasonable to assume that in a small community, most students could identify not only the daring Facebook transgressor but also his Maoist accusers.] Also: this idea of “listening politely” looks to be teetering quite close to the edge of a compulsory silence.

Hill, as I said, gave me hope. Scanning the rest of The Mac Weekly’s offerings depressed me. In just one week’s worth of writing, there are so many bad ideas. These are bad ideas arising from a solid basis of factual ignorance, unexamined bias, Marxism, Alinsky-esque thinking, self-loathing, third-wave feminism, misandry, and anti-Semitism. Here are just a couple of examples:

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The Bookworm Beat 3/15/17 — clearing the spindle, part deux, and open thread

March 15, 2017 by Bookworm 3 Comments

I’ve cleared my spindle and the articles I linked are a feast for the hungry mind — the Middle East, climate change, policing, gender, Obamacare, and more.

There’s land if the Palestinians want it. Did you know that President al-Sisi in Egypt has offered the Palestinians a state that would include Gaza plus 618 adjacent square miles in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula? This offer reflects the fact that the Egyptians, like the Jordanians, Saudis, and every other Sunni Arab state around can’t stand the Palestinians.

With Iran looming on the Iranian, the Sunni nations are becoming more aware that Israel is their bulwark against Iran. If they can get rid of the Palestinian issue — and get the troublesome Palestinians out of their countries — they can unite to face off against Iran. You can read more here.

The Palestinians, of course, will not go for it. They don’t want their own country. They want the Jews’ country. The question is whether the combined weight of the Sunni Arab world, perhaps with help from the Trump administration, can force them to take what they don’t want and finally, once and for all, leave everyone alone. The problem is that the Palestinians (with a lot of UN help) have raised too many blood-thirsty generations who view Israel as their own land, to be taken with fire and sword.

Once again, a sociologist proves that sociology is not science. I laughed so hard I choked on my morning cereal when I read a Los Angeles Times op-ed by an academic sociologist assuring readers that atheists raise more moral kids than religious people do. The trick to this column is that the atheistic sociologist gets to define what constitutes “morality.”

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that morality means having values that precisely track the Progressive/Democrat social and political agenda. My only question is for how much longer taxpayers are going to let their state and federal monies flow into the academic institutions producing this kind of biased garbage?

One brave man in blue. The ACLU sued the Milwaukee police department alleging (what else?) that it’s raaaacist. This is, of course, nothing more than a shakedown using the court system. Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn refused to be intimidated:

“If they [the police] are willing to risk their lives to protect our disadvantaged communities than the least I can do is be willing to risk lawsuits to do the same thing.”

Flynn said that the ACLU and organizations like them want only to “drive a wedge between the police and their communities.”

[snip]

“The people that actually live in the neighborhoods punctuated by gunfire and non-fatal shootings every night of the week demand effective and responsive policing” while the “concerns of the neighborhoods are never on the agenda of groups like the ACLU.”

Chief Flynn also pointed out that the police are protecting blacks and other minorities, who are significantly more likely than whites to be victims of violent crime. Bravo, Chief Flynn!

[Read more…]

Obama betrays Israel, and Robert Reich says “more, please”

December 28, 2016 by Bookworm 79 Comments

Kerry is an incredibly stupid, evil man. Only stupid people cling to the “two-state” idea given that the Palestinians have already walked away three times from offers giving them everything they asked for and, instead, have doubled down on their genocidal fury. The Palestinians keep the “two-state” solution alive as chum for morons.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement about Kerry’s malevolent, ill-informed speech:

In light of that speech, is it any surprise to learn that Kerry and Obama are working to submit a proposal to the UN that unilaterally recognizes a Palestinian state and gives half of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Please remember, as you read the following, that the last time Arabs controlled Jerusalem, Jews were banned from their ancestral capital. [Read more…]

A short post-Christmas rumination on Christmas songs and the UN

December 26, 2016 by Bookworm 6 Comments

Yes, I know that it’s no longer Christmas anywhere until next year, but I still want to share with you Alan Jackson’s Let It Be Christmas Everywhere:

Here’s the story behind my sharing that video: My daughter loves Christmas carols, so she’s been taking advantage of Christmas playlists. We’ve listened endlessly to “Winter Wonderland,” “White Christmas,” “Sleigh Ride,” and all the pop song Christmas classics. None of the playlists offered “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Finally, having heard Andy Williams and even Nat King Cole once too often, I said, “Let’s listen to a Country Music playlist.” We did and discovered two things:

1. The above Alan Jackson song, which neither of us had ever heard before. (To be honest, neither of us had ever heard of Alan Jackson before.) We were completely charmed by the song. I realized that part of its charm is that it’s a waltz. There’s something invariably charming about waltzes, from Strauss, to Tchaikovsky, to Richard Rogers, to Alan Jackson. American pop music has no room for waltzes. America’s modern “high” art “classic” music has no room for waltzes. County Music, however, still makes room for that lovely, lilting rhythm.

2. You can still hear “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on County Music playlists. Apparently Country Music fans are smart enough to realize that it’s a romantic flirtation song and that there’s nothing “rapey” about it.

My Christmas was nice. I’m now focused like a laser on the new year. I have very high expectations for the new year — including a hope that my most devout wish for the past many years will come true; namely, the total destruction of the UN. In that regard, you cannot do better than to read Daniel Greenfield’s strong essay explaining why we shouldn’t just stop funding the UN but should withdraw from it entirely: [Read more…]

Trump’s taut tweet is a promise to Israel and a threat to the UN

December 23, 2016 by Bookworm 15 Comments

For a while there, despite people’s concerns that Obama would use his lame duck period to shaft Israel, things looked relatively peaceful. We should have known that Obama, like the viper he is, would hide until ready to strike, and strike he did. And like a viper, he didn’t even stand up in a manly way and turn on Israel. Instead, he “abstained,” allowing Israel’s enemies a clear shot at her.

Here are a few good summations of the dreadful thing Obama did:

From Elliott Abrams:

Does the resolution matter? It does. The text declares that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” This may turn both settlers—even those in major blocs like Maale Adumim, that everyone knows Israel will keep in any peace deal—and Israeli officials into criminals in some countries, subject to prosecution there or in the International Criminal Court. The text demands “that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” Now add this wording to the previous line and it means that even construction in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is “a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution also “calls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” This is a call to boycott products of the Golan, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

[Read more…]

With 27 days to go, Obama finally unveils his full anti-Israel animus

December 23, 2016 by Bookworm 2 Comments

I have said since 2007 or 2008 that Obama is an antisemite and that his dream is to do away with Israel and pass the land to the Muslims. Israel’s supporters have feared for years that he would use his lame duck period to attack Israel. And he has, to Netanyahu’s fully expressed anger and horror:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at US President Barack Obama Friday, accusing him of actively working against Israel at the UN — seemingly abandoning all pretense of diplomatic cautiousness after a US abstention at the Security Council led to the passage of a resolution against settlements.

“Israel categorically rejects the despicable anti-Israeli resolution at the UN, and will not adhere to it,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a seething statement after the council voted in favor of the motion 14-0.

“While the Security Council does nothing to prevent the massacre of half a million people in Syria, it is shamefully singling out Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East,” the PMO said.

“The Obama administration not only failed to defend Israel from this harassment at the UN, it cooperated with it behind the scenes.”

In a barely-veiled final repudiation of the administration with which Netanyahu has clashed so often, his office said Israel was “looking forward to working with President-elect [Donald] Trump and with out friends in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, to undo the damage of this absurd resolution.”

In terms of a response, a good start for the U.S. would be to defund the UN and to break off relationships with those countries that voted for it.

And now ask yourself if there has ever before been an American president who used his last month in the White House to punish enemies and to try to make it impossible for the new President to govern? I can’t think of anyone who passed hundreds of regulations, who tried to place a permanent embargo on economic activity (in this case, oil drilling), and who led the UN from behind to try to destroy one of America’s staunchest allies and expose that country’s citizens to mass genocide.

I don’t think Obama’s a religious man and that’s kind of a shame. He really needs to start preparing himself for that walk to Hell when the Grim Reaper finally calls his name.

Here’s Netanyahu’s full statement:

Photo by Zachi Evenor

The cornucopia of information readily available on the internet UPDATED

November 29, 2016 by Bookworm 5 Comments

One of the things that maddens me about my children is how they refuse to take advantage of the cornucopia of information so readily available on the internet. In my day, I actually had to get out of my chair, go to my Dad’s office, get the encyclopedia off the shelf, riffle endlessly through the pages to find the correct entry, and then read that tiny, tiny print.

It was Hell, I tell you! Hell!

Now, all that the kids need to do is to activate their omnipresent smart phone or laptop, type in a few words and — badaboom, badabing — the world’s knowledge is at their fingertips. And still . . . they won’t do it.

Instead, they ask me to answer their questions, something they invariably regret. I either tell them to look it up themselves or, worse, I answer their question in my inimitable Mom style: “So you want to know about the revolution in Cuba and why Castro was such a terribly evil human being? As with all things, if you really want to understand it, we need to start with the Romans.”

In my narrations, everything starts with the Romans, unless I’m feeling particularly cruel and move further back to the Abraham, Moses, Pharaoh, etc. From ancient history, I move on to the early Christians who tried voluntary communal living, to the rise of the feudal state, to the Black Death and its effect on the European economy and peasant rights. That, of course, leads to Renaissance monarchies and, of course, to the Enlightenment, with its two pivotal revolutions (the American revolution, which focused on individual liberty; and the French revolution, which developed the modern idea of the commune); and only then do I really get going.

Most of these conversations end with me saying, “Why are you walking away? I haven’t finished answering your question yet!”

I’m not going to do that to all of you. Instead, I’ll just tip you off to some wonderful things I found on the internet and think you might enjoy. After that, you’re on your own!

The exquisite cognitive dissonance on the Left. I’ll just leave this Yahoo squiblet out here. I don’t need to add anything, do I?

If you’re interested, you can read more about this cruelly irony-unaware initiative here.

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Bureaucrats seeking job security can be incredibly dangerous UPDATED

November 6, 2016 by Bookworm 6 Comments

There are few things more dangerous than a collection of bureaucrats willing to stop at nothing to keep the bureaucracy alive for their own benefit. We’ve seen that here in America. Obama’s bureaucrats, knowing that the good times roll better for bureaucrats under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones, have abandoned their obligation to be impartial civil servants and, instead, weaponized themselves against conservatives.

The diligent Tax Professor reminds us that, five years after being caught actively discriminating against conservative groups, something grossly illegal that ought to have seen many heads roll, the IRS is still at it. We’re also learning, thanks to Wikileaks and a subterranean chorus of voices ,that a corrupt DOJ is working hard to get Hillary Clinton into the White House, despite her manifest violations of America’s national security laws. The list of corrupt Obama bureaucracies that are functioning as legislator, judge, jury, and executioner is a scary alphabet soup: IRS, DOJ, EPA, DOE, DOD, etc.

Here’s some new information for you to consider when it comes to bureaucrats run amok: Did you know that it was British bureaucrats, determined to keep their jobs at all costs, who sparked Arab nationalism in Palestine, creating the dangerous Middle East that consumes the world today?

This story comes from Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, published in 1943. The book’s primary purpose is to describe the role Jewish Palestinians played in defeating Rommel – a task Britain could never have accomplished but for these Jewish troops. Before he gets to World War II, though, van Paassen tells how the British Mandate in Palestine came into being and how the Arabs, who had once welcomed the thought of Jews making that wasteland a more inhabitable place, came to be the fanatic Islamic nationalists the world now faces. Because van Paassen was a foreign correspondent in the 20s and 30s, the book has the virtue of being the recollections of a contemporaneous witness, who traveled widely in the Middle East, met many of the power players, and was privy to original documents. (He even interviewed both Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem!)

Because of the myriad details van Paassen provides about the creation of the modern Middle East in the years during and immediately after WWI, it’s quite easy for someone like me to get lost in the weeds. (My first draft of this post hit 5,000 words before I was even a quarter of the way through.) I’ll just touch upon a few highlights here.

Between the Roman conquest in 70 AD and Israel’s re-birth in 1948, the territory known as Palestine (or Syria-Palestine) was never a nation. It was not even an independent substate in the vast Ottoman Empire that eventually controlled it. Instead, it was simply the southern most end of Ottoman controlled Syria. During all those centuries, nobody cared about Palestine because it was a desolate, swampy, disease-filled wasteland. Here’s van Paassen’s description of Syria-Palestine in the years before, during, and immediately after WWI:

[Read more…]

[VIDEO] “Hillary Clinton is the most anti-Israel candidate in history.”

October 28, 2016 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

If you’re a Jewish Democrat who wonders how Jews can vote for Trump, you need to watch this video. It explains the reality on the ground, which is unrelated to the Clinton camp’s spin: Donald Trump is the most pro-Jewish and openly and consistently pro-Israel candidate ever to have run for President. Hillary, on the other hand, is equally consistent in her hostility to Israel and her obeisance to the Muslim world:

Yes, I too find deeply disturbing that Alex Jones of InfoWars, a long-time Trump booster, is going full Elders of Zion conspiracy theory antisemite. But if the Leftist Jews in Hillary’s train don’t care that she has loud, open support from every BDS promoter, every antisemitic college campus, and every antisemitic Muslim community (both black and Middle Eastern) in America, all of whom are central to the Democrat party, I say that they’re scarcely in a position to get shrill about the fact that there’s a disgusting fringe of antisemitism trailing in Donald’s wake.

The only thing I would ask is that Donald, unlike Hillary, denounce the unsavory views of the antisemites who have tied themselves to him. He doesn’t need to do so to pretend that he supports Jews and Israel, because we know he does. Instead, he needs to do so to distinguish himself from Hillary, who will never disavow the rabid antisemites who sit at the heart of the modern Progressive party.

The Bookworm Beat 10/11/16 — the “election and culture” edition and open thread

October 11, 2016 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I have a hefty batch of links related to the election and the culture wars raging in America. I’ll try to write just enough to pique your interest so that you follow those links or watch the videos:

The reason the Left opposes photo ID for voting. James O’Keefe, who is Andrew Breitbart’s true heir, has a horrifying video showing a surprisingly honest, indeed decent, New York Democratic election commissioner bemoaning the terrible corruption that plagues New York voting, speaking of van loads of people being driven from precinct to precinct on election day to cast multiple votes, and admitting that it’s pure politics that blocks the reasonable use of voter IDs.

Hillary treats people like dirt. Hillary put on her saintly face during the second debate to talk about treating people well. One of the Deplorables has taken issue with Hillary’s pious, and hypocritical, stance. She reminds Hillary of the reprehensible way Hillary treated our troops way back in 2003 — because their hard work savings lives left them dirty.

The Left constantly manufactures crises. Dennis Prager takes the occasion of Trump’s decade-old crude postings to point out that this is yet another in the Left’s endless series of crises that only it can fix through its leadership, its laws, its taxes, its regulations, and its censorship. This type of headline hysteria, especially before a major election, allows the Left to sell falsehoods to Americans through the vehicle of emotion (and we all know how that works now thanks to Scott Adams’ tutelage).

GOP leadership has Stockholm Syndrome. Ace doesn’t use the phrase Stockholm Syndrome but, as he describes the way in which the GOP has bought into all of the Left’s Social Justice Warrior tropes, it’s hard to think of a better description. Republicans are trapped in Washington, D.C., and if they want to survive, they have to adopt their captors’ mindset — something incomprehensible to those Americans still managing to live relatively free, ordinary lives in an increasingly Orwellian America.

Trump is an amateur compared to the Clintons and their Democrat cohorts. I’m seeing Lefty posters going around on Facebook that talk about the fact that Hillary shouldn’t be held responsible for her husband’s actions (rape, assault, regular and workplace harassment) — which would be fine if Hillary hadn’t come out swinging on Bill’s behalf, lying hard and destroying any women between her and ultimate power.

If you take the time, you can look up awful stories about Kennedy orgies (and the possibility that Bobby ordered a hit on Marilyn), Al Gore’s “sex-crazed poodle” attack on a masseuse, Teddy Kennedy’s cold-blooded murder (not the original car accident, but deliberately leaving Mary Jo to drown), LBJ’s filthy language and penile boasting, Anthony Weiner’s sex texts with teens, and on and on. Given that Democrat history, James T. Harris is not about to let dirty words be compared to dirty acts. (Plus, he makes a nice little point about the inherent racism of calling Bill — poor, Southern, sax-playing sex machine — the “first black president.”)

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The Bookworm Beat 9/28/16 — the Israel and Islam edition

September 28, 2016 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Bibi’s speech to the UN. Bibi Netanyahu gave an amazing speech to the UN in which, after cheerfully castigating the UN for its biased and reprehensible behavior, he equally cheerfully assured the UN that Israel is a thriving, dynamic culture making strong new alliances all over the world. You can watch the speech, which takes about 40 minutes or if you prefer reading here’s a link to the transcript:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The UN, begun as a moral force, has become a moral farce. So when it comes to Israel at the UN, you’d probably think nothing will ever change, right? Well think again. You see, everything will change and a lot sooner than you think. The change will happen in this hall, because back home, your governments are rapidly changing their attitudes towards Israel. And sooner or later, that’s going to change the way you vote on Israel at the UN.

More and more nations in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, more and more nations see Israel as a potent partner – a partner in fighting the terrorism of today, a partner in developing the technology of tomorrow.

Today Israel has diplomatic relations with over 160 countries. That’s nearly double the number that we had when I served here as Israel’s ambassador some 30 years ago. And those ties are getting broader and deeper every day. World leaders increasingly appreciate that Israel is a powerful country with one of the best intelligence services on earth. Because of our unmatched experience and proven capabilities in fighting terrorism, many of your governments seek our help in keeping your countries safe.

Obama, with his Leftist idea of historical determinism will discover sooner rather than later that his drive to abandon Israel and partner with Iran will be looked upon as one of the greatest mistakes, not just in American history, but in world history.

Abbas, of course, had to content himself with lies big and small when he spoke.

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The Bookworm Beat 9/21/16 — the “I’m mad as Hell” evening edition and open thread

September 21, 2016 by Bookworm 8 Comments

I can’t say too much lest I breach Little Bookworm’s privacy, but suffice it to say that, after only two weeks at her Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College, she has already taken a giant step in the direction of moronic, damaging Leftism. I have refrained from berating her because that would be counterproductive. Instead, I provided her with objective information about the direction she has taken and she, with all the confident arrogance of an uninformed youngster, has refused to reconsider. I’m not feeling the love today.

I hope blogging helps me vent my spleen. Otherwise, if you read tomorrow that a woman suffered a deadly attack of spontaneous combustion during the night . . . well, that just might be me.

Preachy Leftist “comedians” may be harming Hillary. Mr. Bookworm adored Jon Stewart and was endlessly certain that, if I just sat and watched for a while, I’d be riotously amused and return to the Democrat fold. His confidence in Stewart’s powers of persuasion was misplaced. I found Stewart intentionally both ill-informed and dishonest.

When Stewart resigned, Mr. Bookworm transferred his allegiance to John Oliver and Samantha Bee, both of whom are even harder Left than Stewart, and both of whom have the same shtick: They say something insulting about a Republican or conservative, following it with a strained analogy, and then pause for the adoring audience’s laughter. It’s like a call-and-repeat in the Church of Leftism.

Mr. Bookworm has suggested that I lack a sense of humor, which may well be true. I prefer a bit of wit and intelligence to flavor political insults, so I’m probably expecting too much from the current generation of humorists. I, on the other hand, have tried suggesting to him that these smug Leftist harridans simply aren’t funny.

Ross Douthat might agree with me on that last point. He also thinks that these cultural avatars, along with the Lefties on football teams and at award shows, have pushed themselves into such an extreme political corner that they’re leaving no room for Hillary Clinton to survive:

The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line.

[snip]

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

Isn’t that just delicious? All I can say is, from Douthat’s essay to God’s ear.

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The Bookworm Beat 9/21/2016 — the “hurry up” edition and open thread

September 21, 2016 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Trump has an ideology and it’s a good one. Trump has an actual plan that explains his appeal. How do I know this? Because, for unclear reasons, Politico.com decided to engage in actual journalism. Rather than viewing Trump as Satan in the Church of Leftism, Joshua Mitchell, a Georgetown professor looked at Trump’s actual platform and came up with some surprising conclusions.

It turns out that Trump is not Hitler reincarnated. Instead, he’s breaking the existing political paradigm and coming up with new ideas in American politics (although I view some of them as tried-and-true traditional ideas that worked well for everyone before the Democrats in the old South and the new Progressive party perverted them):

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.
These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

Put that way, how could I not support Trump?

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