France Archives - Bookworm Room

The French election provides another entry in the “Do Progressives even listen to themselves?” category

May 8, 2017 by Bookworm 5 Comments

Macron’s victory in the French election has provided Progressives with another opportunity to reveal their hypocrisy, stupidity, and all-around nastiness.

I had a marvelous trip this past weekend, and came back yearning to blog, only to find waiting for me a legal project with a tight deadline. While I work on that, though, I want everyone to enjoy yet another exquisite example of Progressives on parade. This particular example is a very silly Progressive’s response to the French election, which he used as an occasion to attack his fellow Americans. As with other screeds from Progressives, the author is either a hypocrite or blessed with an extraordinary lack of self-awareness:

For those reading this on an iPhone, let me compress the message to reveal its idiocy or hypocrisy, whichever description you prefer. In the wake of Macron’s victory in the French election, Mr. Franks begins by praising the French people for their gracious forbearance and ends with ad hominem, exceptionally nasty insults against his own countrymen. Somehow or other, forbearance as a virtue leaked away in just three paragraphs.

Also, in the idiocy category, where in the world do Progressives keep coming up with the idea that Jihadists hate it when we yield to them? Have you seen al Qaeda or ISIS saying that? I haven’t.

Photo credit: Macron World Company INC. _DDC0082 by thierry ehrmann. Creative Commons license.

The Bookworm Beat 9/15/16 — the “polls they are a’changin'” edition and open thread

September 15, 2016 by Bookworm 17 Comments

If Bill Clinton and Al Gore couldn’t do it, then no one can. A Leftist Facebook friend posted an article from The Hill with a lede saying that Donald Trump “floats rolling back food safety regulations.” The implication, obviously, is that in Trump’s America, we’re all going to die from salmonella and e. Coli. Read through to the end, though, and you discover that Trump is instead making a remarkably sensible suggestion:

Trump’s economic policy plan also calls for “an immediate halt to new federal regulations and a very thorough agency-level review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.”

Agencies would be required to list all regulations and rank them in terms of their contribution to growth, health and safety. The goal, Trump said, would be to strengthen the rules that are useful and reduce the rules that harm the economy.

One of my Leftist Facebook friends stopped with the lede, of course, and envisioned our nation drowning in fecal matter emanating from food-poisoned Americans. In a comment, I quoted the above language and suggested that it was a good idea to control regulations, which are so big no one can know them, are often non-effective, are frequently inconsistent with each other, and are too often quasi-legislation.

To seal it for this Leftist, I reminded him that Bill Clinton had assigned Al Gore this very task of cutting back on America’s burgeoning regulations, although it never came to anything. And that’s when my Facebook friend essentially said “Well, if Al Gore and Bill Clinton couldn’t do it, then no one can. After all, Trump has never been a politician, and he’s really stupid, so what does he know?”

My reply was that voters may be hoping that it’s an advantage that Trump hasn’t been a politician. He may have out-of-the-box (i.e., out-of-D.C.) ideas that actually work. The response? A reiteration that Trump is stupid. (Has there ever been a Republican candidate, no matter how successful and brilliant, whom the Left hasn’t called stupid? I don’t think so. It’s a tired idea.)

Agencies must be reined in. Exhibit A in the “agencies need to be cut back and God willing Trump is the man to do it” category is the fact that the FBI thinks it is more important than Congress is. So it was that Jason Chaffetz had to explain to the acting FBI chair that, no, Congress gets to have all of the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview — and then serves him, then and there, with a subpoena.

The funny thing about the WaPo’s indictment of Trump as a scam artist. The Washington Post is beside itself with excitement that ardent Hillary supporter, and pay for play attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is starting an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. I got three paragraphs into the WaPo editorial supporting this investigation and castigating Trump before I broke into uncontrollable laughter:

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[VIDEO] When human hyenas circle their prey, having this helps UPDATED

January 18, 2016 by Bookworm 31 Comments

A video has emerged from France purportedly showing a gang of Muslim immigrants armed with rocks and truncheons, descending upon a lone French man. The way these human predators slowly close in on the Frenchman reminds me of nothing so much as hyenas encircling a wounded lion or elephant. If this video is real, the Frenchman was fortunate in that he was armed and made it clear he was willing to defend himself. Not all Europeans are so lucky — especially, of late, European women, who are completely at the mercy of the hyenas in their midst:

In situations such as this, guns save lives. And if the situation had escalated, and (assuming the video is what it purports to be) the Frenchman had been forced to fire at the thugs, killing one or more, it would have saved the life worth saving. As for the other lives . . . well, in a civilized society, you shouldn’t be stalking and threatening ordinary people. If you do, in a sane society, you’re assuming the risk that you, the bad guy, may not walk away from the encounter.

UPDATE: Danny Lemieux, who is fluent in French, provides further, even more disturbing, information about this video:

Book, there was an error in translation: the news commentator makes clear that the person carrying in the video was a policeman (obviously plain clothes). Ordinary citizens in France are not allowed to carry – the people that he was protecting would have been completely vulnerable. The other things to note are that: a) this happened in plain daylight; b) this was apparently a fairly nice section of the town and c) ordinary traffic in the background was totally unaffected by what was happening and d) the police felt powerless to call back up, crack heads and make arrests. This is really, really bad…far worse than I imagined. It tells me that the violence has now spilled out of the “zones sensibles” (“no go” zones) into the communities at large.

The Bookworm Beat 12-1-15 — “Last month of the year” edition and open thread

December 1, 2015 by Bookworm 5 Comments

We’re 11/12 of the way through a rather challenging year. I wonder what the last month will bring, not to mention the remaining 12.5 months of Obama’s presidency. Well, the future will be what it will be. Let’s use this round-up, which I compiled with a friend’s help, to focus on the present:

JFK’s assassination killed America

The 1950s had its economic ups and downs, its worries about a nuclear future, its Red scares, its Jim Crow/Civil Rights face-off, etc., but overall the 1950s was defined by its boundless optimism. People, including Democrats, believed that America was a wonderful, world-saving country, and that the future held immeasurable promise. In other words, the general outlook was a complete 180 from the dislike Progressives feel for America and the despair with which conservatives view it.

George Will says that Kennedy’s assassination did this. What Will adds to this bromide is important. It wasn’t Kennedy’s actual death that wrought the change, he says. Instead, in order to avoid admitting that a communist killed their hero, Democrats had to savage America:

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified JFK’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.”

[snip]

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism.

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

That’s as scathing an indictment of the Leftist mindset as one can imagine, as well as a sad eulogy for the end of the American dream at the hands of the people who claimed most to represent that dream.

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The Bookworm Beat 11-29-15 — the “tidy office-tidy mind” edition

November 29, 2015 by Bookworm 2 Comments

Inspired by Marie Kondo’s advice that true organization begins with throwing out everything that is neither useful nor sentimental, I am continuing to plow through every nook and cranny in my house. This is the first organization system that’s made sense to me, which is why I haven’t already given up and relapsed into my usual vaguely tidy-looking mess. My mind is also a vaguely tidy-looking mess, but it’s still yielded these interesting links:

Ignore people who tell you Cruz is divisive and uncooperative

According to those rooting for candidates other than Ted Cruz, he’s an arrogant blowhard who won’t play well with others. In fact, Cruz’s work history proves that the opposite is true:

At the FTC, Cruz’s agenda could have been written by Milton Friedman.

Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers. Based on his early support of disruptive online companies, Cruz has some grounds to call himself the “Uber of American politics.”

Moreover, and perhaps surprising to some, Cruz sought and secured a broad, bipartisan consensus for his agenda. Almost all of Cruz’s initiatives received unanimous support among both Republicans and Democrats.

Ted Cruz a consensus-builder? He was, at the FTC.

Read the rest here. Cruz has the chops to make the best kind of President: True conservative values, love for America, phenomenal intelligence, and the ability to work and play well with others.

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John Kerry’s reprehensible statements following the Paris massacre were all about Islam denial

November 23, 2015 by Bookworm 13 Comments

In the wake of the Paris massacre, John Kerry went out and made a fool of himself. There’s nothing new there, but I did want to comment on something I did and to explain why I did it — or more accurately, why I didn’t do something that every other commentator did. My point in writing this is to prove that I’m not quite the half-wit people may have assumed I am.

Let me begin with Kerry’s words:

In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

Everybody and his uncle latched onto the first part of that paragraph, in which Kerry seemed to say that satirical journalists and Jews were legitimate terrorist targets. I went in a different direction and focused on the second part where, in keeping with the Democrat-party line, Kerry again denied that massacres — whether ten months ago or a week ago — have anything to do with Islam. It occurred to me later that some readers might have thought I was stupid, careless, or otherwise deficient for not lambasting Kerry for his bizarre statement about legitimate and illegitimate terrorist attacks.

All I can say is that I’m not as stupid as I look. I actually had an analytical framework that I’d completely clicked through by the time I sat down and wrote. I’d processed Kerry’s remarks, and concluded that the most important part was his denial about Islam’s role. Everything else was just Kerry’s generosity in giving us an opportunity to see his obtuse brain working through a problem.

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The Bookworm Beat 11-18-15 — “the mother of all round-ups” edition and open thread

November 18, 2015 by Bookworm 4 Comments

I have been collecting links for days and will try to share them all with you. Here goes:

Only conservatives are paying attention

In an attempt to deflect attention of Muslim depredations in Paris, the Left and its foot soldiers (all of whom seem to be my Facebook friends) immediately attacked Americans and other Westerners for failing to pay attention to a bombing the day before in Lebanon (an ISIS v. Hezbollah bombing, so it was Horrible People v. Horrible People). I eventually got tired of commenting on their posts to the effect that I have been paying attention to all of these attacks, primarily because they are all different manifestations of a single radical Islamic entity, and I’ve been trying to get everyone to pay as much attention as I do.

Emma Kelly says what I was too polite to say explicitly to these Leftists: The reason you didn’t know about these other attacks isn’t because the newspapers didn’t report them, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.

I’ll add something that Kelly didn’t, though: You weren’t paying attention because American and European media outlets don’t want you to see that Islam is a problem, so they report on these incidents, but downplay them. Meanwhile you get loud noise about Ben Carson’s alleged lies, Hillary’s brilliance, Republicans’ meanness, Donald Trump’s hair, and Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy.

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John Oliver’s potty mouth ravings reveal what’s wrong with the Left’s approach to Islamic jihad

November 17, 2015 by Bookworm 14 Comments

John Kerry is a rather frustrating Secretary of State, not just because he’s uniformly awful, but because he’s so stupid there’s nothing left to parody. The guy parodies himself. Take, for example, his deep and profound statement following last Friday’s Islamic massacre in Paris. It is a tour de force of mental disorganization, banality, and incoherence.

The mere existence of a statement like this from our State Department attests to the depths to which our nation has fallen under the Obama administration. Even Hillary did a better job of saying nothing. And when I say that Kerry said nothing, I mean it. He especially had nothing to say about who perpetrated the massacre:

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it. [Emphasis added.]

Did you get that? Our Secretary of State is baffled, completely baffled, by the Paris attackers’ motivation. The only thing he knows with certainty is that Islam had nothing to do with it. The killers’ cries of “Allahu Akbar” were a mere coincidence. They were probably just struggling to say something clever in French, along the lines of “l’état, c’est moi” or even “hinky dinky parlez vous” but, because they were hopped up on speed to facilitate the slaughter, were at a loss for words and used “Allahu Akbar” as their default statement.

John Kerry can be excused his meaningless fatuity because no one listens to him anyway. Most people tune out politicians. Instead, they listen to pop culture figures.

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The Left’s inordinate fear of speaking Islam’s name #Paris

November 15, 2015 by Bookworm 36 Comments

Immediately after radical Islamists slaughtered at least 128 people in cold blood, and wounded more than double that number, my Facebook feed lit up with posts and posters expressing solidarity with the people of Paris. I’m posting here a sampling of the images included in the posts. As you scroll through them, think about what’s missing:

(Yes — the posters included things this dumb)

In addition, Facebook added a feature so that people can have a French flag layered over their profile picture. Here’s an example of an overlay that several of my Facebook friends used:

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Brief thoughts about today’s news #Paris #Islam #Mizzou #terror #Yale

November 13, 2015 by Bookworm 15 Comments

Before I begin, I want to extend my sincerest condolences to the French people. This Mumbai-style attack is terrible and cruel.

Having said that, I feel obligated to point out that France, which has expended a great deal of energy trying to appease the Muslim crocodile (including trying to undermine Israel at every turn and punting on a moral nation’s obligation to protect its Jewish population) failed as signally at appeasement as Churchill implied would happen to all appeasers.

I was speaking to a friend who said that the Paris attack would almost certainly improve Marine Le Pen’s political prospects. Although she’s a socialist through and through, she at least understands that the medieval strain of Islam is France’s enemy, just as it is the enemy of all civilized nations. Thinking about Le Pen, I realized that we have a Le Pen too: Donald Trump.

Unlike a true conservative who believes in individual liberty, which can only be achieved through limited government, Trump, a former Democrat, is a Big Government guy in both theory and practice. And like Le Pen, the only thing that really distinguishes Trump from any other statist political figure is that he too is hostile to immigrants. They are both xenophobic nationalists. Neither is a true conservative.

As it happens, I support Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration. As it happens, my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, is also a hardliner on immigration but — and this is why I like him so much — he’s also a true individual liberties kind of guy, one who believes federal government should fulfill limited functions that happen to include strong border and national security.

And of course, let me be one of many to comment that, last I heard, Obama still can’t make himself choke out the words Islam or Muslim.

Closer to home, I’m getting the feeling that the Mini Maos who have taken over America’s colleges and universities might have finally broken through the wall of ignorance behind which middle class parents have been hiding when it comes to the Leftist insanity they’re funding. I had three Progressive friends ask me today (because they know I follow the news fanatically) what the heck is going on. I was happy to explain.

Indeed, I’m wondering if today won’t be an inflection point — a “come to Jesus moment,” if you will — when mindless liberals finally realize that conservatives are not racist, censorial fascists, but have, instead, been the tocsin desperately shouting out a warning about the dangers of fascism at home and Islamism both at home and abroad. Certainly, every Progressive with even a few functioning brain cells should ask him or herself if things in Paris would have been different if the Parisians had concealed-carry. And those who have been watching events in Israel must surely have noticed by now that the best defense against a terrorist with a knife is a gun.

The Bookworm Beat 10-29-15 — the spindle overload edition and open thread

October 29, 2015 by Bookworm 11 Comments

So much to share with you (23 separate articles at last count) and so little time. I’ll therefore get right down to business and you might want to give yourself some time to review all these fascinating articles at your leisure:

Another pundit figures out Cruz might be the man

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz, and have done so since he took a stand on Obamacare. Ross Douthat (whose writing I respect) has suddenly realized that those of us who support Ted Cruz might be on to something.

Ted Cruz makes sense on taxes

Certainly Ted Cruz’s flat tax plan ought to help people realize that he’s offering genuine change for the better, not just platitudes and painful socialism. Heck, you’d think that all Americans would support a candidate who wants to deep six, or at least severely de-fang, the IRS and, in doing say, make our tax system fairer and make doing business in America more tempting for both American and foreign corporations.

Daniel Greenfield waxes eloquent on the heckler’s veto that is Islam’s stock in trade

After clearing his throat about the Obama administration’s despicable pandering to Palestinian terrorists, along with its sickening chastisement of Israel (this from an administration that would never dare blame the victim if a drunk woman walked naked through a biker’s bar), Daniel Greenfield gets to the real point, which is the fact that the West lets the mere threat of Islamic anger paralyze it.

The world’s one billion Muslims, whose delicate emotions are always infuriated by something, enforce an Islamic status quo in which no non-Muslim dares to violate the Muslim superiority complex.

[snip]

Some might say that the billion Muslims are just looking for things to get angry at… but that would just make a billion Muslims angry.

When buildings fall or buses blow up, when people are stabbed, shot or exploded by the unofficial representatives of the bilious billion, we go right past the crime to the anger that motivated it. “Why do they hate us?” becomes the question and Muslim anger becomes the pivot of national security policy.

Since Muslim anger causes violence, we stop terrorism by tiptoeing around anything that might make them angry. Minor things mostly like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. If you’re a Coptic Christian who makes a YouTube video about Mohammed, you can be sent to prison when some of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda locals murder four Americans while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

After weeks of brutal Muslim murders, Kerry has gotten Israel to reinforce a ban on Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism because it offends Muslims. Next up, maybe Jews will be restricted to the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs again. Because that was the “Status Quo” under the Muslim conquest.

As my lengthy quotation in this “quick hits” round-up reveals, Greenfield’s article falls into the must-read category.

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The Bookworm Beat 10-27-15 — “it’s just another day” edition and open thread

October 27, 2015 by Bookworm 13 Comments

I’ve been going through my emails, with 200 down, 300 or so yet to go. Even though I’m only less than halfway through, I’ve discovered marvelous articles hiding in my email box thanks to friends from all over.

Did Merkel unilaterally doom Europe?

We no longer subscribe to the great man or great woman school of history. We’ve also abandoned the notion of high tragedy arising from the hubris of said great men or women. Perhaps, though, it’s time for us to revive that genre.

Daniel Greenfield convincingly argues that Germany’s Angela Merkel, with her mad plan to replace her country’s shrinking, aging population with Muslim refugees, will have single-handedly done to Europe what generations of Muslim conquerors have tried to do, which is to turn it into a part of the global Caliphate:

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