Jimmy Carter Archives - Bookworm Room

Fisking a risible argument that Leftists, not conservatives, are reality-based

August 11, 2017 by Bookworm 6 Comments

After explaining how the Left invented a detachment from reality, Kurt Andersen makes the laughable argument that the Left, not the Right, is reality-based.

A shining example of Andersen’s Leftist “reality-based” community.

A Leftist friend of mine told me that novelist Kurt Andersen’s article in The Atlantic, entitled How America Lost Its Mind : The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, is a “must read.” Although the article is ostensibly about a movement that began in the 1960s, one that saw America abandon facts in favor of emotions and magical thinking, the article is really a very, very, very, very long effort to say that Trump voters are credulous and irrational.

Because I am a nice person, I will not ask you to read the article — unless, of course, you are a glutton for punishment and have endless amounts of time. Instead, I’ve worked my way through this magnum opus to distill the essential points in each paragraph. To save you the time of even reading my summation — which, while long, is still shorter than Andersen’s article — here’s a quick summing up of what he says:

During the 1960s and 1970s, America went crazy. It was mostly the Left that went crazy, especially in academia, where our colleges abandoned truth and, instead, settled for moral and cultural relativism, navel gazing, and Foucault’s “everybody makes it up as they go along” theory. This madness swept the land.

Fortunately, by the 1980s, the Left managed to distill only the purest and truest thought from this insanity. Conservatives, meanwhile, embraced the crazy because they believed in God and distrusted both Big Government and the media. They were aided by the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed the crazies to hit the airwaves. First Rush and then the internet convinced conservatives that there is a God, and that both Big Government and the media deserve to be distrusted.

And that’s how we got Trump.

Andersen’s turgid, long, frequently ignorant, invariably condescending, and very nasty essay boils down to a variation of the saying that “Fascism is always descending on America, but landing on Europe.” According to Andersen, “An unprincipled retreat from reality is always bubbling and burgeoning on the Left, but only reveals itself on amongst conservatives.”

That’s really what Andersen takes 117 paragraphs to say. I know, because I read all of them and, as noted above, I’ve set out below a precis of his wordiness, along with my interlineated comments: [Read more…]

Politicians’ external behaviors do not prove whether they have a strong moral core

August 17, 2016 by Bookworm 23 Comments

I don’t particularly like a friend one of the Little Bookworms has, although I feel quite sorry for the young woman. She’s in her late teens, with staggeringly low self-esteem that she buries by indulging in drugs, alcohol, and gender fluid sexual engagements. I don’t worry, though, that she’ll be a bad influence on my child who has – thank goodness – a solid moral core that resists this type of depressing debauchery. In any event, my child is a legal adult and can consort with whomever she likes.

The reason I mention this unhappy young woman is that my Little Bookworm met the young woman’s latest boyfriend. Of that young man, my Little Bookworm had this to say: “He’s a really interesting guy in his early 20s. He’s a total straight arrow. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs.”

I asked the logical question: “What’s he doing with your friend then?”

The answer surprised me. “He’s a drug dealer.”

Well! I immediately told Little Bookworm that, while I have no legal control over her social life, she would do well never to socialize with either the friend or the boyfriend again. I reminded my children ad nauseum when they were growing up that San Quentin (which we can see from our home, so it’s a very real place to them) is filled with prisoners whose primary mistake was to have the wrong friends. If the boyfriend gets arrested while my Little Bookworm is in the same apartment he is, Little Bookworm will find herself in an adjoining jail cell.

Having delivered myself of this practical advice, I begin to think about the difference between apparently moral trappings and genuinely moral conduct. After all, other than the small problem of drug dealing, the boyfriend sounds great – clean cut and clean-living. The package looks good, but the core is rotten.

Looking back in time, we all know about that famous dog-loving, non-smoking, teetotaling vegetarian who sent six million Jews to the gas chamber and started a war that claimed 40 million or so lives within just six years. Hitler, like the boyfriend, was a mass of objectively virtuous behaviors that hid another rotten core.

The opposite can be true too. That is, there are people whose lives appear superficially vice-ridden, but who nevertheless have a strong moral compass. Take Winston Churchill, who was in so many ways Hitler’s opposite during WWII.

Churchill was undoubtedly an alcoholic. He showed exceptionally bad judgment during WWI, leading to the Gallipoli disaster. Many have credibly accused him during WWII of promoting plans that led to unnecessary loss of life, whether of his own troops or German civilians. In addition to loving his wife, mother, and daughters, he had a strain of misogyny that revealed itself in some of his most brutally memorable insults to women who got under his skin.

Despite all those behavioral problems, Churchill had a rock-solid inner morality, one that allowed him immediately to take Hitler’s measure and to be a sure compass during the dark, dark days of WWII. He was Hitler’s light-filled antithesis.

We grow them like that at home too – people whose external behavior is at odds with their true moral (or immoral or amoral) center. Jimmy Carter is Southern Baptist who has always lived a life of traditional rectitude – he is a committed husband, a devout church-goer, and someone who regularly donates his time and energy to building housing for the poor.

I should admire Carter, but I don’t. I loathe him because that pious mantel is wrapped around a man who is a committed anti-Semite, one who routinely sides with the debauched death cult that is Hamas and its followers, a group of people who seek Jewish genocide, murder homosexuals and Christians, suppress women, and use children as shields for their children. No matter how conventionally pretty Carter’s little acts of selflessness, he is (to my mind, at least) a fundamentally bad man.

And of course there are the Clintons. What can we say about the Clintons? Hillary has been married to only one man (although he did allegedly tell an adulterous girlfriend that she cheated on him constantly . . . with women). She’s stood by her man through thick and thin, which seems like the act of a solid, faithful spouse. Still, one cannot help but suspect that her decision to stick it out was driven, not by a commitment to her marriage vows, but by her understanding that she would need someone whose charisma could pole vault her from one job for which she was unqualified and in which she did badly to another job for which she was unqualified and in which she did badly, a pattern that Hillary planned (and plans) to repeat right up until she sits behind the desk in the Oval Office.

To those of us who don’t respect Hillary, the fact that she’s held positions of importance (in all of which she’s conducted herself badly) or that she pays lip service to every Leftist political shibboleth of days past and present does nothing to hide her toxic soul: Hillary is a compulsive liar, a user, a shamefully unindicted felon, and a person motivated by a greed so deep and pure that many of us cannot even begin to contemplate what drives her from one act of crime and corruption to another.

You’d think that after having grubbed in $150,000,000 over a sixteen-year period, Hillary’s greed would be satiated and she’d lie low, but she can’t. Hillary is compulsively greedy and dishonest, a manifest fact that shocks those who believe core morality matters and a fact that, even more shockingly, couldn’t matter less to the legions of Leftists who will do anything to get her into the White House.

Bill is in a class by himself too. He’s such a charming, compassionate man, who really does seem to feel everyone’s pain. A more naturally gifted politician it’s hard to imagine. While I suspect most Americans would cringe at the thought of having Hillary seated next to them at a dinner party, I’m pretty sure most Americans, even those who hate the Clintons – both their politics and their corruption – would have a good time if they ended up with Bill as their dinner partner.

These superficial virtues, though, cannot should never allow us to forget that Bill is almost certainly a rapist, he’s definitely guilty of sexual assault short of rape, he’s a workplace harasser, he’s best buddies with a pedophile, he’s a perjurer and, like his wife, he will do absolutely anything, including selling out his own country, to fill his coffers. His soul is black. But there’s that charm. . . .

As they do with Hillary, the Left so desperately wants to ignore that black soul and forgive Bill his sins, never mind that he has no interest in forgiveness. It’s that need to pin atonement upon him, when he hasn’t really atoned at all, that resulted in one of the most perverse posts I’ve ever seen at the Wonkette blog, home to a hardy, and somewhat . . . um . . . intellectually esoteric collection of rabidly Leftist feminists.

A Leftist named Rebecca Schoenkopf gamely, and rather admirably, decided to tackle head-on an interview that Katie J. M. Baker did for Buzzfeed with Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who has claimed for almost forty years that Bill Clinton raped her.

The interview is a good one and deserves to be read. Broaddrick has never changed her core story in the 38 years since she alleges that Bill trapped her in a hotel room and raped her. Moreover, she’s mostly kept out of the limelight, so she cannot be accused of having made a profitable or high-profile career out of slandering Bill Clinton. Indeed, she might have stayed quiet still were it not for Hillary’s “feminist” insistence that “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

For the 73-year-old Broaddrick, whom Hillary did everything possible to silence and discredit, these assertions were a bridge too far. Suddenly, on Twitter, she started speaking out. “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73….it never goes away.”

Broaddrick comes across as a credible woman who was used badly by both Bill and Hillary and who never got the justice she deserved. But I want to return to Ms. Schoenkopf who, having read the interview, felt compelled to address it.

To her great credit, Schoenkopf has to concede that Broaddrick’s story is credible. To those who challenge Broaddrick, whether because her story has become more detailed over the years or because she speaks with right-wing organizations, Schoenkopf points out that (a) rape survivor’s do that as they grapple with the event and (b) Broaddrick hates Hillary so she’ll naturally be drawn to those who support her as she speaks out against Hillary. Schoenkopf notes that, once one addresses these points:

that’s pretty much all the “I don’t believe Juanita” crowd has. Her friends found her with bruised lips, crying, right after the rape allegedly occurred. That’s what we call “contemporaneous evidence” when we believe women.

Once having accepted Broaddrick’s story as true, however, Schoenkopf seeks to rehabilitate Bill without any help from Bill himself. She first says that it was probably just an 80s power thing that had him respond to a woman’s repeated noes by assaulting her so badly she was left bruised and bleeding.

No.

I lived through the 1980’s in America. They were not like the 880’s in the Muslim Caliphate nor are they like the 2016’s in any ISIS-controlled region. Even back in those benighted times 35 years ago, men understood that trapping an unwilling woman in a room and using brute physical force as a way to have intercourse with her was a criminal act, no just macho posturing.

Bad as that bit of historical rewrite is, the worst thing Schoenkopf does it try to cleanse Bill’s criminal, blackened soul without demanding that he make any effort himself in that direction:

To sum up, I think Bill Clinton could very well have raped Juanita Broaddrick; that it doesn’t make him an evil man, or irredeemable (I’m Catholic; we’re all forgiven, if we’re sorry, and Broaddrick says Bill Clinton personally called her up to apologize). It doesn’t even necessarily make him a bad feminist — you know, later, once he stops doing that.

Sorry, but stopping committing crimes is not good enough. There’s no indication that he stopped because of conscience. There’s every indication that he stopped only because the higher his profile, the harder it became to get away with rape and other forms of sexual assault. In addition, the higher his profile, the easier it was to get women to bed him without his having to make any effort. He has no remorse. He has never repented.

Bill – charming, brilliant, even lovable – is a rotten apple who can be forgiven only if one re-writes entirely the definition of remorse and repentance so that those concepts have nothing to do with the actor’s soul and everything to do with his sycophants’ desire to resurrect his credibility.

The last joker in this deck of presidents and president wannabes is Donald Trump? It’s actually hard to get a grip on Trump’s behavior because of the foul miasma that the drive-by media has created around him. After a youth and midlife spent womanizing (but not raping), he seems to have settled down to marital fidelity. He’s also temperate in his behaviors, because he doesn’t smoke nor drink, and apparently has never done so. One could characterize him as an older man who, having sown his wild womanizing oats, has settled down and has the external morals of an elder statesman.

The Left, however, cannot accept a temperate, normal Donald Trump. The fever swamp that passes for a media today insists that (a) he’s an amphetamine addict and (b) that he’s a NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) devotee. The last is especially funny because this is put forward as the reason he’s hiding his tax returns – as if an internationally known businessman would place front and center in his returns a charitable write-off to a pedophile organization.

The media derides Trump as a monster who tries to boot old ladies out of their homes, while his supporters (many of whom have known him personally for decades) characterize him as a generous, spontaneous, compassionate man who doesn’t hesitate a moment to help out people in need. He’s either a corrupt, inept businessman who’s sued constantly, or a pragmatic man who takes minimal risks, turns real profits, and has a knack for cutting through the red tape and getting the job done. He’s a bully or a warrior. He’s a genius or a fool.

The real question, though, is whether any of the above tell us about the real Trump, the man beneath the weird hair, the crazy outbursts, the crude attacks, the savvy business deals, the generous charitable contributions, the teetotaling (and tweaking?). I don’t think so. Everything I’ve described is window-dressing, none of which is an insight into the man’s soul.

I do have some hope, though, that Trump is one of the good guys and that’s for a reason personal to me: Just as I immediately recognized Obama because he was identical in affect and behavior to a handful of malignant narcissists who have been in my life and made me quite unhappy, Trump reminds me strongly of a dear friend.

Trump and my friend have so many traits in common: quirky, original, often brilliant minds; explosive tempers; mountains of eccentricities; pit bull-like fighting instincts, that include the inability to walk away from an argument or insult; loyalty; and great charm. That’s my friend’s outer shell, just as it’s Trump’s outer shell.

With my friend, this shell is a difficult, prickly one, but the rewards of calling him a friend are tremendous. He has such a deep, strong moral core. You can rely on him for insights about difficult times and help during times of need. He knows what is right and what is wrong. For now, until proven otherwise, I’m going to hope that, once one wipes away the slime the media throws at Trump, he’ll be just like my friend: brilliant, difficult, brave, and truly worth the effort.

[It occurs to me that someone who ought to be included in this post is Oskar Schindler, a ne’er do well who had one of the strongests consciences to emerge in Nazi Germany.]

2016 — the year that America’s ongoing cultural degradation merged with politics

March 16, 2016 by Bookworm 25 Comments

Victor Davis Hanson says that conservatives who look askance at a Trump candidacy needn’t get their knickers in a twist, because he’s no worse than anyone else in our political class, going all the way back to the 1960s. Hanson had the examples (lots of them) to prove it.

When it comes to sexism and womanizing, Trump is just a more honest version of John Kennedy or Bill Clinton.

Subtle encouragement to violence? Trump doesn’t differ from, unless he’s much milder than, Barack Obama gleefully telling his fans to bring guns to knife fights or to punish their enemies.

Fawning over his own genitals? Hey, Lyndon Johnson got there first (and added actual exhibitionism into the mix).

Flip-flopping on Planned Parenthood’s virtues versus its vices? Well, Trump is still better than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s open, and un-punished support for race- and class-based eugenics (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)

And really, no one can top Obama when it comes to being openly boastful about his supposed virtues. Obama the Messiah was going to stop the rise of the seas and cool the planet. Meanwhile, Obama the politician knew that he was the best. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

What’s striking about Hanson’s quite long article comparing Trump’s apparent excesses is that, subject to a single exception, all of the people who have been more boastful, more violent, more amoral, more sexualized, and more exhibitionistic than Trump . . . are Democrats. The single exception that Hanson pulls up is Reagan:

Trump supposedly is inciting violence by creating a climate of violence at his rallies. But did he say, or was it Ronald Reagan who said, at a time of widespread unrest, “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer”? Reagan called not for a punch or two but for something rather more existential.

(One can view Reagan’s remark as a philosophical expression, but it’s also an acknowledgment of the violence that always lurks behind politics — a violence that America had managed to keep out of the actual presidential election process pretty much since Jackson’s time.)

The prevalence of Democrats on the laundry list of bad acts got me to thinking. Ever since Carter, Republicans have prided themselves on being the classier party. Carter was an uncouth peanut farmer (never mind his Annapolis degree and naval background). Bill Clinton was a good ole boy who, when asked whether he wore boxers or briefs, instead of politely freezing out the question, cheerfully answered it. (For those who don’t remember, the answer was briefs.) Given how déclassé the man from Hope was, it really didn’t come as a surprise that his administration came to be characterized by sexual excesses, graft, and all sorts of other trashy behaviors.

Obama, of course, is in a class (or lack of class) by himself. We’ve come to a point in popular culture where it’s considered to be awesome, not embarrassing, that the first couple do fist bumps; that Obama looks “for whose ass to kick;” that Obama characterizes the leader of the Middle East’s only democracy as a “chickenshit;” that our president blames European leaders for his own leadership vacuum; that the First Lady uses venerable rooms in the White House for workouts; that the first couple routinely invites to the White House pop culture performers who advocate violence against police officers and denigrate women; that the president “slow jams” on talk shows; and that the first couple assumes it’s the job of overburdened taxpayers to fund their lavish vacations and nights out on the town.

For a long time, Republicans could claim that their leaders were more polished and sophisticated — that is, they had about them a decorum that was consistent with leading the world’s most powerful nation. Reagan and the Bushes weren’t routinely dropping trou, speaking about lusting after women, ostentatiously partying on the public’s money, loudly insulting other nation’s leaders, or otherwise behaving like people who have never had contact with dignity or decency.

When Ron Kessler published The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, Republicans nodded sagely upon learning that, with the exception of the paranoid Richard Nixon (although Pat Nixon was lovely), Democrat presidents and their families were boors to the Secret Service agents who protected them, while Republican families were polite and thoughtful. It wasn’t about money; it was about class — Republicans had it and Democrats didn’t.

But as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. Beginning in the 1960s, with the Left’s cultural ascendancy, American culture has becoming staggeringly debased, and that downward rush to the gutter has accelerated with every passing year. The retreat from decorum is a Leftist movement. Conservatives were happy with Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best. Leftists brought us All In The Family and Maude. It wasn’t conservative churchgoers who promoted Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It.” Conservatives weren’t attending Madonna’s increasingly debauched shows or applauding Miley Cyrus’s fluid sexuality and compulsive exhibitionism. It was the Left that kept pushing the envelope, moving sex and drugs to the center of our cultural life. Had the right controlled culture, we wouldn’t have pot as the most used drug in America, condom vending machines in middle schools, and free gender reassignment surgery for enlisted men and women.

Given the cultural push from the Left, it’s scarcely surprising that the two most recent presidents from the Left — Clinton and Obama — openly reflect that culture. Clinton was all white trash and sexual excess. Obama has avoided the sexual excess, but keeps trying to prove his black ghetto credibility. Clinton and Obama have played, not only to their political base, but to their cultural base.

Of course, once a culture shifts, it shifts. Kevin Williamson stirred up a storm when he said that white Americans — from working class, to lower class, to middle class — are not deserving of too much sympathy. Instead, he says, they are people who have embraced bad lifestyle habits and have refused to relocate to escape permanently broken economic ghettos. The article is behind a paywall, but I’d like to quote from it briefly:

The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Williamson is mad and his language intemperate, but he’s got a point. The culture that used to characterize the giant middle of America — drug-free, married before children, hard-working, willing to move for jobs, tough, self-sufficient, self-reliant, freedom oriented — is gone. Sure, all over America there are pockets of this old ethos remaining, but it’s dying out.

In this regard, keep in mind how often I’ve told you about my “in” into a seriously poor community, thanks to a close friend whose life sees her living amongst the very white people Williamson describes. Subject to one exception — an alcoholic Native American who grew up in the dysfunctional world of a reservation — the people in this community have remarkably similar backgrounds and behaviors.

Their upbringings are white working class. They are all the products of married parents. Some of their childhood homes were more dysfunctional than others, but all still had the patina of the old American ethos.

In addition to the sameness of their upbringings, there’s also a sameness to the choices they’ve now made: They’ve never married or they have revolving door marriages, the women’s children are not being raised by the children’s father(s), alcohol, pot, and harder drugs are a constant without which they wouldn’t consider life worth living, welfare (cash payments, food stamps, church charity, etc) is a perfectly reasonable alternative to the rigors of paid work, and because paid work is low on the scale of desirable things to do, when this community suffered economically during 2008, not a single person moved away to find employment.

In other words, the people in this community, throughout their lives, have made regular, conscious choices to abandon their parents’ and grandparents’ ethos. They have grown up in and embraced a debased culture. For people whose sex lives include drug-fueled orgies, Trump’s allusions to his penis size, Clinton’s jet-setting to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex island, and revelations about LBJ’s flashing are perfectly normal. These refugees from the great American middle don’t bother to distinguish between the private lives of citizens and the public lives of politicians.

The same holds true when it comes to political lies (“everybody lies”), the failure to indict Hillary for appalling crimes (“prosecutors are corrupt and as long as I keep a low profile, I can get away with most crimes and frauds”), and threats of violence (all the men, and some of the women, have had run-ins with the law for fighting). For much of the new American middle, lies, crimes, and violence have become ordinary. We’re not living the Beaver Cleaver life anymore. Our world — the lower middle and working class world — is Mad Max all the way.

And so we end up with Donald Trump. Victory Davis Hanson is absolutely right that he’s no worse than what the Left has given us when it comes to political class. It’s just that old-timers — and I include myself in that group — have these daft, old-fashioned notions that the men and women who represent America to the world should reflect the best of what we are (or were) not the worst. But Leftist culture eventually washes over everything, including those church-going Evangelicals who hold themselves to high moral standards but who have up expecting the same from their political leaders.

Politics is downstream from culture . . . and our culture and our politics have managed to flow downstream into the sewer, together at last.

[VIDEO] Jimmy Carter endorses Donald Trump — because he has no fixed principles

February 4, 2016 by Bookworm 39 Comments

Whoever did the research to find this clip found a humdinger indeed. In it, Jimmy Carter says that, if he had to pick a Republican candidate, he’d go for Trump, because he has no fixed principles and is malleable, unlike Ted Cruz, who is a staunch conservative, and cannot be manipulated. It reminds me that I’m unimpressed by the list of Cruz’s enemies — the politicians who array themselves against him having consistently proven to be the worst type of quislings. They will always sell out the conservative voters who elected them in order to curry favor with the drive-by media, the Hollywood crowd, and the Chamber of Commerce types (who, if you recall, will always back foreign workers against American labor).

Fun with fools — another “Found it on Facebook” edition, with help from my Progressive friends

August 22, 2015 by Bookworm 10 Comments

I had so much fun the last time I deconstructed the analytically and factually foolish posters I found on the Facebook pages of my many, many Leftist friends, that I thought I’d do it again. As before, my commentary is below each poster:

I’ll Yid with Lid the floor on this one. He describes how he tried to feel true compassion for Carter when the former President announced his cancer. Unfortunately, Carter sank to his usual depths:

I pretty much decided I would keep silent. Especially when he started his press conference on Friday revealing that the horrible disease had spread to his brain. Well—that was until a reporter asked him what he would like to see happen before he died, and when he answered the former president slandered the Jewish State (see video below):

In international affairs I would say peace for Israel and its neighbors. That has been a top priority for my foreign policy projects for the last 30 years. Right now I think the prospects of are more dismal than anytime I remember in the last 50 years. Practically, whole process is practically dormant. The government of Israel has no desire for two-state solution, which is policy of all the other nations in the world. And the United States has practically no influence compared to past years in either Israel or Palestine. So I feel very discouraged about it but that would be my number one foreign policy hope.

Perhaps it’s all the Times he met with Hamas, ignoring their terrorism and declaring they want peace that has clouded Mr. Carter’s memory. But the Author of a book with a title calling the Jewish State an apartheid nation forgets history. The truth is that the last Israeli Premier who did not support a two state solution was Yitchak Rabin. Every prime minister since Peres, Netanyahu, Sharon, Barak, Comb-over...er Olmert, every single one of them declared their goal was a two state solution. Heck under Barack and Olmert, the Palestinians were offered deals which gave them 98% of what they wanted and each time they said no. On the other hand even years after Rabin shook the hands of the terrorist Arafat the Palestinians refuse to recognize the sovereign Jewish State of Israel.

So why would Jimmy Carter take the time to slander the Jewish State at the same time he was announcing the graveness of his illness. That’s easy, Carter hates Jews. (Emphasis in original.)

Read more about the utterly despicable Carter here. I don’t hope for him an agonizing death or anything like that. But honestly compels me to say that I will be delighted when he is no longer around to slander the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

The fact is that antisemitism is a pretty damn good test of a person’s moral decency — antisemites have none, and Carter is not an honorable, decent man. He is, instead, a national embarrassment who didn’t have the decency to retire following his utterly ignominious presidency, one plagued by failure, both at home and abroad. The only thing that saves him from being the worst president ever is Obama’s presidency. Carter managed to survive long enough to be succeeded by a man even more of an antisemite and failure than Carter himself. What a sad record for American politics.

I love the moral equivalency here: Bush and Cheney’s campaign deleted lots of emails, so Hillary didn’t do anything that wrong!

In fact, the RNC did delete a whole bunch of emails in 2007, and they did so in violation of the Hatch act, but the equivalency ends there. The Bush emails were purely political in nature (hyperlinks and footnotes omitted):

The Bush White House email controversy surfaced in 2007 during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an email server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act.[1] Over 5 million emails may have been lost or deleted.[2][3] Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations.[4] In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.[5]

The administration officials had been using a private Internet domain, called gwb43.com, owned by and hosted on an email server run by the Republican National Committee,[6] for various communications of unknown content or purpose. The domain name is an acronym standing for “George W. Bush, 43rd” President of the United States. The server came public when it was discovered that J. Scott Jennings, the White House’s deputy director of political affairs, was using a gwb43.com email address to discuss the firing of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.[7] Communications by federal employees were also found on georgewbush.com (registered to “Bush-Cheney ’04, Inc.”[8]) and rnchq.org (registered to “Republican National Committee”[9]), but, unlike these two servers, gwb43.com has no Web server connected to it — it is used only for email.[10]

The “gwb43.com” domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.[11] Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, “in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications.”[12] The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators.[13]

On April 12, 2007, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that White House staffers were told to use RNC accounts to “err on the side of avoiding violations of the Hatch Act, but they should also retain that information so it can be reviewed for the Presidential Records Act,” and that “some employees … have communicated about official business on those political email accounts.”[14] Stanzel also said that even though RNC policy since 2004 has been to retain all emails of White House staff with RNC accounts, the staffers had the ability to delete the email themselves.

I am not defending the fact that the Bush White House tried to avoid creating records. It’s sleazy and the kind of thing one would expect from political operatives. But come on, Progressive folks! There is no indication whatsoever that what the White House did exposed America’s highest national security secrets to any Hacker who came along. Nor is there any evidence that the Bush White House spoliated documents — which is what seems to have happened with Hillary and the State Department, which deliberate destroyed Benghazi records after Congress had called for their production.

Also, by 2007, when the Bush matter emerged, he was in the lame duck phase of his presidency. There just wasn’t that much political hay to be made of it, so it vanished. This time, however, we have a perennial presidential candidate who has been in the limelight for more than twenty-years and who, in that time, is consistently caught engaged in underhanded behavior. Even if the behavior were morally equivalent (which I do not believe), the political implications are going to be different when the issues arise before a candidacy or at the end of an era.

But again, let me say the really important words that make what Hillary did so heinous: NATIONAL SECURITY and SPOLIATION. Bad Hillary! Bad girl!

I adore my dog and my dog, being part chihuahua, adores me with reciprocal ferocity. I would never confuse myself though into believing that my dog is a moral creature. Perhaps I’m disgustingly anthropocentric, but I believe morality reflects conscious decisions, not instinct. That a cat would rescue her kittens is a wonderful instinctive act completely consistent with Nature’s imperative for the continuation of a species. But that cat did not sit there thinking about the value of her life, versus her kittens’ lives. She just did what she needed.

Years ago, when my son was very little and announced that lions were bad because they hunted down zebras and gazelles, I said they weren’t. “Bad” and “good” imply an ability to make choices about good and bad. When a lion kills, it does so because it is programmed to do so. Moral analysis is not involved. My son, bless his heart, understood. I sure wish the rabid anti-Christians out there had the intelligence of a bright three-year old.

I have one question: Why is it obscene? I understand that we want our judicial system to be from the government, because only the collective will and values of the people should be brought to bear in a criminal case — especially since the government, unlike a private corporation, is theoretically constrained by the Constitution when it comes to criminal process, up to and including sentencing. But considering government’s gross inefficiencies, it would seem to me that (in theory at least) prisoners could fare just as well in a privately run jail, subject to government oversight and competing market forces, as they could in a government-run jail that answers only to itself, no matter how disgracefully managed it is.

What am I missing?

There three things I find funny here. First, Buffet imputes his selfishness to all, as well as confusing charity (which is an altruistic act) with investment (which is a theoretically selfish act that nevertheless yields benefit by pumping money and innovation into the market). Second, Buffet, all historic evidence to the contrary, thinks that government will do a better job of creating wealth than private capitalism. And third, Buffet hangs on to his money with a vengeance. I think I’ll be waiting a long time if I expect Buffet to turn his fortune over to the government for the benefit of the people.

Anyone see the logical fallacy here? Rock doesn’t define the racists. Ordinary people, the one’s who haven’t been brainwashed by our university systems, understand that racism, rather than being endemic in American culture, is almost nonexistent. Our laws are color-blind and the American people will rarely be caught in acts of overt racism — unless you go trolling through the internet’s underbelly for the few KKK wackos, who lack political power or popular support.

In the absence of real racism, the racial justice hustlers are left with “microagressions” that any sentient being understands are faked in order to browbeat and blackmail (hah! racist pun!) ordinary people. So, no, we don’t have to stop being “racist.” We have to stop the race hustlers from lying about what and who we are so that ordinary Americans of all colors can get down to the business of living their lives without government intervention and hustler shakedowns.

As I discuss at greater length below, the problem with American blacks is almost certainly not too little government, but way, way too much. (I’ve also expanded on this thought in a number of prior posts, such as this one.)

Bernie’s good at point out problems. He’s right that it’s a disgrace that so many blacks end up in jail. Of course, his solution is “Thank you, government. May I have another dose of toxic condescension” disguised as genuine welfare. There’s a huge difference between a decent society’s obligation to care for its “widows and orphans” and a racist society’s efforts to keep blacks in perpetual servitude by convincing them that they are incapable of standing and accomplishing things on their own.” Lyndon B. Johnson sure understood how welfare works, and it’s not for the black’s well-being that’s for sure:

Keeping people dependent on the government never lets them develop beyond the infant stage. Depriving them of the right to bear arms keeps them at the mercy of criminals. And constantly telling them that, without the government, they are helpless victims would, if the government were a parent and the blacks a child, be parental abuse that everyone would recognize and decry.

As always, you give the Left a little knowledge and it runs riot in ignorance. While the Founders were adamant that the Federal government not replicate the British government by having a state religion and controlling how citizens worship, the Founders — including the merely “deist/theist” Jefferson — strongly believed that the nation could thrive only on a foundation of Judeo-Christian morality:

“I am a real Christian – that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus Christ.” — Thomas Jefferson

“While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” — George Washington

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

Unsurprisingly, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, expressed most clearly the Founders’ belief (no matter their personal relationship to God) that, while the federal government could not be a religious institution, only a Godly people could handle the freedom their new nation gave them (emphasis mine):

Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man’s right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.

Oh, and about that quotation attributed to Adams with regarding to the U.S. not being a Christian nation, the giveaway is that it was a part of the Treaty of Tripoli. Anyone halfway conversant with that treaty (i.e., no Progressives) knows that this was a treaty signed with the Muslim pirates that the Marines defeated the “shores of Tripoli.” The language was not a disavowal of Christianity but, instead, a reminder that America allowed all people to practice their religion freely, without state intervention (hyperlinks and footnotes omitted):

Article 11 reads:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

According to Frank Lambert, Professor of History at Purdue University, the assurances in Article 11 were “intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.” Lambert writes,

“By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.”[15]

The treaty was printed in the Philadelphia Gazette and two New York papers, with only scant public dissent, most notably from William Cobbett.[16]

I see this everywhere, and it’s a complete canard, one that could be advanced only by people who don’t know that Michele Bachmann has an LL.M. from William and Mary University. I was going to add, as a prop to W&M, that it was Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater, but now that he’s been intellectually discredited on account of his owning slaves when doing so was still the norm, I guess that doesn’t help Bachmann. But back to that stupid quotation:

Several readers asked us to look into whether Bachmann actually made the comments. We obliged and found no evidence backing the claim. We also reached out to Bachmann’s spokesperson, who said the former member of Congress never made the remarks.

[snip]

We also searched three comprehensive databases — Nexis and CQ, which aggregate transcripts, and Critical Mention, which records video and closed captioning — and found no record of Bachmann ever making those comments.

To our knowledge, she hasn’t appeared on Fox News since Trump announced his candidacy. She has commented on and praised Trump in several interviews on different networks, though she has never mentioned his wall proposal.

[snip]

We found no evidence that Bachmann ever said this, and her spokeswoman said she did not, in fact, say it. The meme seems to have satirical origins but is now being passed off as fact. We rate the statement Pants on Fire!

Here’s the really interesting thing about Hitler’s win: He never got more than 30% of the popular vote. What Bernie doesn’t get is that the real problem with Hitler was his fascism — which is a form of socialism that, rather than nationalizing industry, merely co-opts it. (I call this crony fascism, and it’s precisely what the Democrats under Obama have been doing for the last seven years.) The reality is that, once a leader and his party gain total control over all facets of government and the economy — which is precisely what Bernie wants to do — you have a recipe for tyranny and war.

Every time I find these posters, and then track down the facts or expose the logical fallacies, I am reminded again that, while I like my Progressive friends because they are, in day-to-day life kind and enjoyable people, when it comes to politics they are monomaniacs, and are precisely as crazy as the nice old lady down the street who lives an exemplary life and then, when she dies, is discovered to have believed that her home was Martian headquarters and that, in order to continue to placate them, her home must be left to her cars, whom the Martians worship.

Monomaniacs can be great people so long as you don’t find yourself dealing with their particular brand of insanity.

Hillary “Carter” Clinton — or the story of a suitcase

April 16, 2015 by Bookworm 11 Comments

The big banner headline on Drudge today told about Hillary making like the little people by flying coach back to her mansion and carrying her own suitcase. Here’s the tweet that started the story:

Hmmmm. Where have I heard that story before? Oh, wait! I know (emphasis added):

As outlined in my [Ronald Kessler’s] book “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,” Democratic presidents who claim like Olbermann to be for the little guy often are the nastiest with staff and Secret Service agents. Jimmy Carter — codenamed Deacon — was a prime example.

[snip]

For three and a half years, agent John Piasecky was on Carter’s detail — including seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine — and Carter never spoke to him, he says. At the same time, Carter tried to project an image of himself as a man of the people by carrying his own luggage when traveling. But that was often for show. When he was a candidate in 1976, Carter would carry his own bags when the press was around but ask the Secret Service to carry them the rest of the time.

“Carter would have us carry his luggage from the trunk to the airport,” says former Secret Service agent John F. Collins. “But that is not our job, and we finally stopped doing it.” On one occasion, says Collins, “We opened the trunk and shut it, leaving his luggage in the trunk. He was without clothes for two days.”

As president, Carter engaged in more ruses involving his luggage.

“When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base,” says former Secret Service agent Clifford R. Baranowski. “He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag.”

Even when Hillary tries to be one of the little people, she’s a fake and a phony. I’m willing to bet that the suitcase she was carrying was just as heavily packed as the bag Carter slung over his shoulders back in the day at Andrews Air Force Base.

For Obama, there is no “defining moment”

September 9, 2014 by Bookworm 8 Comments

I’ve noticed a phrase that keeps cropping up in connection with articles about Obama: “defining moment.” My most recent sighting was in a Power Line post discussing Obama’s desperate (and manifestly false) efforts to walk away from his claim that ISIS was a “JV” team. There, Scott Johnson ends optimistically:

I think that Obama’s flagrant misjudgment in this case is a defining moment. It is a misjudgment consistent with his 2012 campaign themes in which he declared victory over al Qaeda (“decimated” and “on the run”). It indelibly marks Obama himself as the JV president and he therefore flails away against it.

Scott Johnson isn’t the only one looking for something that will be an epitaph for Obama’s presidency. A couple of weeks ago, a lot of people were pretty darned surprised when Obama, who has known about ISIS for at least a year, and should have known about it for much longer, publicly admitted that he had “no strategy” for dealing with it. Thomas Lifson thought this too would end up defining the presidency:

President Obama has now placed himself in an extraordinarily vulnerable position should ISIS act against the American people with its customary savagery. His arrogant dismissal of it with a sports metaphor, his admission of no strategy, and his track record of dithering and unseriousness combine to make his gaffe into what could become his political epitaph.

Johnson and Lifson are not alone in their search for that perfect gaffe or image or policy. On both the Left and the Right, pundits keeps looking at something Obama has done and opining that, for better or worse, it’s a “defining moment.” In April, after yet another Obama blunder (this one about entrepreneurs) Pat Sajak has helpfully explained what constitutes a negative “defining moment” in a presidency:

It’s as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled “potato” and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day. It’s fun to imagine the hand-wringing that must be going on within the White House as staffers try to figure out how to undo the damage their boss has done with his anti-entrepenurial riff. Defining moments in politics are strange beasts. Sometimes they’re only recognized in hindsight, while sometimes they throw the train off the tracks before a sentence has been completed. Sometimes their effect can be contained and minimized, while sometimes their effect on the political narrative mestastasizes. This one is very bad for the White House.

These defining moments take hold most devastatingly when they confirm what a large portion of the electorate already believes. Taken alone, it seems unfair that a single moment, an unguarded remark or a slip of the tongue can carry such weight. They’re often dismissed as “gotcha” moments, but when voters are able to nod and say, “I knew it,” these moments stick and do terrible damage. We have witnessed such a moment.

Defining moments, whether positive or negative, are definitely useful depending on whether one supports or opposes the president who gets defined. This time around, though, with this president, there will not be any defining moments.

What we forget when we think of the defining moments is the media’s essential role in promulgating them. The Jimmy Carter “killer rabbit” debacle perfectly exemplifies what I mean. Despite Carter’s Democrat creds, the media had tired of him by 1979. The economy was in the doldrums and the world seemed dangerous. The Iranian hostage crisis hadn’t happened yet, but Carter looked weak (something that subsequent events proved). When the “killer rabbit” story broke, the media was all too ready to humiliate him, especially because Teddy Kennedy was waiting in the wings:

For a president who had already weathered lusting after the Polish people, not to mention all the lust in his heart, this was one foolish moment too many.

As you may recall, the media also savaged Presidential Gerald Ford, an exceptionally athletic man, as a clumsy yahoo. When he did what everyone occasionally does — trip — it was elevated into an intellectual and moral failing, defining his presidency in the eyes of a post-Watergate public already jaded by politicians and their foibles.

Obama is different, though. The media absolutely refuses to follow up in any serious way when it comes to Obama’s gaffes and failures. Sure, papers will report on them in a small paragraph in a boring article in the back of the paper and TV outlets might mention them in passing, but there is no real coverage. Unlike the “killer rabbit” moment, which I distinctly remember showing up on the front page of the SF Chronicle, most American media consumers know nothing about ISIS = JV gaffes and lies, or “corpse-man” gaffes, or Hawaii=Asia gaffes, or “red line in Syria” gaffes, Benghazi spin, or even “If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance” lies. These things are strictly insider politics, red meat for the fanatics who follow every little thing. My sister, the quintessential low info consumer has never heard of any of these things unless I, a news nerd, expressly told her about them.

Conservatives can spin these moments as much as possible within the confines of the conservative blogosphere, but they’re not gaining traction and sticking in the larger public sphere. To the extent conservatives lack the all-encompassing national reach of the mainstream media, news stories that ought to be “defining moments” remain insider laundry lists. And no, Fox News alone is still insufficient. While other television news outlets are failing compared to Fox, the fact that the liberals own all of the other television news outlet; HBO, Showtime, and Comedy Central; the major print news outlets; all of the major magazines, from sports to fashion to gossip to household hints; our public schools; and the majority of Hollywood’s top performers means that, while news junkies get Fox, all other low-info consumers . . . don’t.

All is not perfect for the media, though. While it’s experienced consistent success when it comes to quashing negative “defining moments” about Obama, it’s been unable to maintain any positive “defining moments.” Thus, while most Americans haven’t been repeatedly hit over the head with the Big Lie (“If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance”), they haven’t missed the fact that Obamacare has not performed as promised. Likewise, while they probably missed both the “red line” and the JV statements, they’re fully aware of ISIS’s marauding, and are no doubt wondering how this can be happening under Obama’s reign of goodness and light. Voters are getting the big picture (which is reflected in Obama’s collapsing poll numbers), but they’re missing the epitaphs.

Given voters’ increasing disenchantment with Obama, does it matter then that there is no sticky defining moment that becomes a shorthand for everything that’s wrong with the administration? I think it does. Without that sticky imagery, every Obama failing must be defined and disseminated from the ground up. An analogy would be 50 First Dates, the movie in which Drew Barrymore, after a car accident, wakes up every day remembering only the events leading up to the car accident, with no memory of any subsequent events. It’s a cute conceit for a movie, but a miserable way to run a country.

Does the apparently senile Jimmy Carter know anything about Islam?

September 2, 2014 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Islam is premised upon Jihad — war. It’s binary. There’s either war against unbelievers or complete subordination to Allah. What religion is Carter — an increasingly virulent anti-Semite who also seems to be declining quickly into a revolting old age — talking about?

For a more accurate view of Islam as Mohamed envisioned his faith, check out the Islamist fate dealt to Steven Sotloff, may he rest in peace:

P.S. Let me say that I know there are Muslims who do believe in peace, equality, etc., and God bless ’em. They should be encouraged in their beliefs, and encouraged to start a reformation movement in their faith. I’m just saying that these “Enlightenment Muslims” (for want of a better term) are drawing those ideas from a source other than their religion.

The Bookworm Beat — empty house edition, Part II

August 10, 2014 by Bookworm 14 Comments

A moment of calm, so I’m resuming my round-up.

Things are not good all over

Richard Fernandez does a quick survey of the three main issues on America’s plate — Russia, Iraq, and Ebola — and is not sanguine. He’s not screaming that the end is near, but he thinks the optimistic voices (almost all from the Left, including the President’s own voice) are wrong.

I’m not the only one likening ISIS to Genghis Khan

Yesterday, I wrote that, in ISIS, we see a ferocity that has been missing (thankfully) since the time of Genghis Khan. My friend Terresa Monroe-Hamilton had the same thought: ISIS Sweeps The Middle East In A Method Reminiscent Of Genghis Khan. Unlike my mere passing commentary, Terresa details precisely why ISIS is so scary.

I only have one problem with the Genghis Khan analogy. Whenever I see that name written, all I can hear is John Kerry’s smug, vicious voice comparing American troops in Vietnam to “Jeng-jis” Khan.

When will the world realize that, to Islamists, we’re all Jews

It’s not just Israel that pays a high price when the West supports Hamas; ultimately, the whole Western world will be paying that price:

In practice denouncing the Jewish state means siding with the malevolent, murderous forces of jihadism, a stance that not only represents a complete inversion of morality but a suicidal disdain for the interests of western civilisation.

Read the rest here.

And remember:

How to become a popular leader

In Israel, Netanyahu is wildly popular, something that dismays Obama, because that popularity means he can’t bully Bibi. My guess is that, if citizens in the West weren’t subject to a Pravda-esque media that hides Islamist depredations, those leaders who wage war against those same Islamists could also be wildly popular.

Of course, with mass protests in Western streets, you’d think people would be figuring out that the Islamists aren’t just in Iraq, but are all over. This is a scene from a pro-Hamas London protest that allegedly saw 100,000 people take to London’s streets:

I’d say “I pity the poor fools who think those protests will stop with only Israel as the enemy,” but the fact is that those “poor fools” are useless idiots trying to get us all killed.

Jimmy Carter — just plain evil

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter sinks further and further into an abyss of immorality. Alan Dershowitz believes that he’s sunk so low because he’s literally sold his soul to the Saudis, a million here and a million there.

That price tag might explain Carter’s openness about his anti-Semitic, pro-Islamic totalitarian world view, but it doesn’t explain his embrace of that worldview in the first place. You have to be a pretty evil person even to think about selling your soul that way. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that America’s last two Democrat presidents have sold themselves to the Saudis? It speaks to a profound moral corruption on the Left.

I guess being steeped in hypocrisy does wipe clean the moral slate

Why does the GOP have a love affair with Cory Booker?

Eliana Johnson provides chapter and verse showing what a shady character Cory Booker is, as well as being a singularly competent politician when it comes to making good on his campaign promises. Why then, she asks, are Republicans playing nice with him and opting not to provide any meaningful support to Republican challengers? See, it’s things like this that just make conservatives hate the GOP.

News from the gay scene

In West Hollywood, the mayor thinks there should be more parks for dogs and fewer parks for children.

Meanwhile, fat gay men are struggling to fit into a gay culture that is (and always has been) obsessed with physical appearance. If you think women are catty about each other’s looks, you’ve never seen gay men opining about each other.

I did not leave my heart in San Francisco

This fairly accurate spoof is why I don’t regret having left San Francisco behind (although, having been born and raised there, I do still consider myself a San Franciscan — but a San Franciscan from the good old days):

Remember WWI

I wrote here earlier about a ceramic poppy installation at the Tower of London to commemorate the British who died in WWI. Here you can see pictures of this impressive and moving sight.

Pictures

Every time I look at this first one, I want to cry:

Mid afternoon Friday round-up and Open Thread

July 25, 2014 by Bookworm 19 Comments

The lovely thing about summer is that I get to sleep in a little. I like that.

The less than lovely thing about summer is that I am never alone. More than that, if my family is near me, they want me. Sometimes they want me for irritating reasons, such as asking me to do things they’re perfectly capable of doing themselves (e.g., making themselves lunch); sometimes they want me for necessary things that only I can do (e.g., filling out the parent permission form for an activity or dealing with contractors); and sometimes they want me for flattering reasons (“I just want you to sit with me, Mommy.”). No matter the reason, I can’t write when they want me.

Other times, as is the case now, I have little bits and pieces of time within which to write. I’m therefore going to slam stuff out and you’ll just have to excuse the inevitable typos. If I proceed methodically here, I won’t be able to publish this until Monday.

** 1 **

Mitchell Langbert wrote an open letter to his state Senator asking that New York take away tax breaks and financial subsidies for colleges and universities that support the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement:

I urge New York State to eliminate tax breaks and financial subsidies for colleges and universities that support involvement with the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions movement. Such support is already illegal under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code, which prohibits the use of tax-exempt money for political and ideological purposes.

If Langbert is correct in the way he interprets the law, all of us should make a very big deal out of this one, not just in New York, but across America. (Hat tip: JKB.)

** 2 **

So far, Israel is doing very well. Ironically, one can say that she’s doing well because Obama hates her. With past administrations, when the president asked Israel to stop fighting Hamas, even when she was winning, Israel agreed to the request. She did so because all past administrations tacitly or explicitly promised that, if things get really bad, America will have Israel’s back.

Barack Obama, of course, doesn’t have Israel’s back. He’s mostly in Israel’s face, with a shiv aimed at her jugular. The fact that he manifestly dislikes Israel explains why Israel now refuses to listen to his pleas for her to back down. He’s got no carrot to entice her into listening to him, so Israel sneers at John Kerry when he, a Lurch without charm, insists Israel lay down her guns.

Israel is also doing well because Hamas is doing badly. The IDF put out a poster explaining just how badly Hamas is doing:

That poster doesn’t even acknowledge the 150 Hamas fighters who surrendered yesterday.

For more on just how well Israel is doing, you can read an American Thinker article that purports to report a conversation with a very highly placed Israeli specialist and Bibi advisor, or read Tom Rogan’s analysis about Israel’s success is splitting Hamas and Fatah.

** 3 **

That same Israeli specialist and advisor has no doubt about the basis for Obama’s hostility to Israel:

As for what is behind Obama’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, he attributes it to the fact that Obama is a Muslim and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps Obama also sees himself as the Caliph of any future Caliphate.

The other thing the post about the specialist mentions is Qatar’s involvement in funding radical Islam. Qatar also funds lots of soccer. My son loves soccer, and he can’t understand why I won’t let him buy gear from Qatar-funded teams.

** 4 **

Contrary to what the Left says or implies, the war between Israel and Hamas is not a case of powerful white people attacking helpless brown people. In fact, Israel is a multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious society — and all people of good will within that society, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, support stamping out the terrorism emanating from Gaza.

** 5 **

CNN’s Erin Burnett isn’t just another pretty face. She’s a really stupid pretty face, something that comes through loud and clear when Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador U.S., takes her to task for her inanely stupid “but what about the children” plea when it comes to the Gazan children that Hamas deliberate dots around weapons’ sites in Gaza.

Regarding Hamas’s tactics, I’m sure its supporters have made the point that the nature of Gaza (a small, urban area) means that Hamas can’t have nice military bases or remote areas where they can stockpile weapons. That’s true.

What’s also true, though, is that there are choices other than schools and hospitals for storing arms and mounting attacks. Moreover, when your enemy goes out of the way to give you advance warning that it plans to demolish the schools and hospitals in which they’ve determined you keep your weapons and fighters, there are choices other than ordering women and children and sick people to stay in those buildings.

There are always choices — and Hamas, when it chooses, always makes the least moral choice.

** 6 **

Meanwhile, as the world’s Muslims and Leftists castigate Israel for daring to defend herself in a more humane way than any other nation in history, most of the world is turning away from Muslim atrocities in Iraq and Syria. There, Muslims slaughter each other and Christians with fury and brutality, and in great numbers. Looking at this inconsistent behavior, one has to ask, If it’s not the oldest hatred that drives the obsessive focus on Israel, what is driving it?

** 7 **

Sultan Knish explains that terrorism is a tactic like any other. Traditional militaries think in terms of conquering land or towns. Terrorists think in terms of conquering minds through abject fear:

This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.

Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.

The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.

Described that way, it’s hard to imagine how to defeat this profoundly cruel psychological warfare. Fortunately, though, Sultan Knish says it can be done but it will take political courage. Unfortunately, how often does one find courage in politics?

** 8 **

My back garden is dotted with solar lights. They’re cheap to buy and don’t require any electrical boxes, outlets, or cords in the garden. Buy enough of them, and they’ll illuminate deck stairs just enough so that no one falls or will keep people from wandering off a paved pathway into the dirt. It would take a whole let of them, though, plus a full moon, to allow you to read a book by their light. Solar energy just doesn’t deliver that much power, and that’s the problem with trying to turn it into a viable fossil fuel alternative.

** 9 **

You’ve heard it everywhere else, so you may as well hear it from me too: Jonathan Gruber, an important Obama-care architect, has castigated the Halbig decision for daring to read Obamacare’s language literally and, on that basis, deciding that subsidies only support state-run exchanges. Of course the government meant to include federal exchanges when it talked about subsidies, says Gruber.

A few years ago, though, Gruber was singing a different tune, when he gloated about tying subsidies to state exchanges. His theory then was that it would incentivize states to set up their own exchanges. In a sane world, Gruber would lay to rest the DemProg’s discontent with the Halbig decision, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

** 10 **

Kimberly Strassel says that the Halbig case proves that the IRS, which has become an arm of the Democrat party, cannot be entrusted with Obamacare. It will do anything, including disobeying the law as written, to support the Democrat agenda. With that in mind, I wouldn’t just remove Obamacare from the IRS’s purview. I would argue for eliminating it entirely, and starting anew. (Like that’s going to happen.)

** 11 **

I don’t think Noemi Emery really explains the roots of Hillary’s sense of political and monetary entitlement, but in trying to explain it, she sure paints a picture of a women who believes that the White House and millions of dollars should be hers for the asking.

My take is that Hillary didn’t get to this point because of her Arkansas exile or victimized-wife roles. I believe she’s just your ordinary sociopath, who managed to lever herself into a power path, and now wants more just because she’s the sociopath she is. In other words, her history didn’t make her a sociopath; the fact that she is a sociopath shaped her history.

** 12 **

Charles Krauthammer has offered a very interesting theory about Obama’s bizarre passivity as the world burns around him: he believes that the arc of history will go his way so that he can just sit back and watch it happen.

If that idea — that bad guys will wither away in any event — sounds familiar, it’s because you heard it from Jimmy Carter about our own American Revolution:

[I]n some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.

I think in many ways the British were very misled in going to war against America and in trying to enforce their will on people who were quite different from them at the time.

See, if you’re just a little nicer to people on the other side of a quarrel, they’ll fall in line with you. It’s that easy. So if Obama just doesn’t throw America’s weight around, everyone will make nice in the end. Obama is helped in this theory by the fact that he seems happy to have that arc of history bend to Islam, not the western, Judeo-Christian tradition.

** 13 **

In the 1930s, many decent-ish people in Europe and England supported Hitler’s rise. That’s because initially they saw his fascism as the European antidote to Communism. It somehow never seemed to occur to Europeans, accustomed as they were to autocratic government, that the choice wasn’t binary, between a tyrannical government that destroyed the rich and a tyrannical government that co-opted them. Individual freedom never occurred to them. That was stupidity, or at least limited thinking, on their part.

These same Europeans stopped being decent-ish but stupid, and became evil, though, when they still supported the Nazis despite the latter’s increasingly insane antisemitism. That’s another legacy of the European past — it wasn’t just autocratic; it was also antisemitic. European’s embrace of antisemitism into addition to totalitarianism is less forgivable than accepting totalitarianism alone, while the latter is a structural ideology, the former is pure evil.

Fascism and communism may be gone from Europe, and socialism may be dying on the vine there, but the antisemitism lingers on. That oldest hatred seems to be bred into the European DNA. Nor can one just blame the huge Muslim populations in Europe for antisemitism’s resurgence. Just as the Ukrainians and Poles and French, while resenting Nazi invasions, supported Nazi ethnic cleansing, too many of today’s Europeans, while frightened of the Muslims, cheerfully (and almost reflexively) chime in when the cry to “Kill the Jews” rings out.

** 14 **

Mr. Bookworm is convinced that I abandoned him politically when I moved from Democrat to conservative. I keep explaining to him that he abandoned me too, because he’s been moving steadily to the Left. He denies that, since he still rejoices under the name “Democrat.” Hard data, though, seems to support my perception.

** 15 **

A palette-cleanser:

** 16 **

This clever twist on a London Underground map makes a powerful point about Hamas’s tunneling under Israel’s borders and into her towns. If Hamas, instead of being impatient and firing rockets, had waited quietly, it’s possible it could have carried out a terrorist attack in Israel that would easily have rivaled 9/11. Thank goodness, I guess, for impatient terrorists.

Obama wasn’t mugged by reality; he wanted this reality

March 21, 2014 by Bookworm 8 Comments

William Kristol has a good summary about Obama’s inertia in the face of world chaos. I disagree, however, with the language I’ve emphasized:

In late 1979, with the seizure of American hostages by Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was mugged by reality. Carter then tried, however haplessly, to change direction. But Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter. Will Obama increase defense spending, as Carter did? Is he likely to launch a military excursion, as Carter did, over the objection—and then resignation—of his dovish secretary of state?

Carter, whatever his problems, was more hawkish than most in his party. In this he followed in the footsteps of every other Democratic president in the past century. Until Barack Obama.

It’s been a bit bewildering, even disorienting, to watch Obama get mugged by reality and refuse to press charges.

Obama hasn’t been mugged by reality. This is what Obama wanted. That’s why the comparisons with Carter don’t actually work — and it’s not just that Carter only had a four-year term, rather than an eight year term.

When Carter embarked upon his foreign policy, his imagined result was that America would still be a world leader, but one that would lead through Gandhi-esque peace, rather than through arms. When peace didn’t work, Carter pivoted in an effort to return America to leadership through economic and military strength. When he was voted out of office, Reagan did that job and did it well. Carter was a dreadful president and I seriously dislike him for his increasingly overt antisemitism, but he was still a patriot.

Obama is not a patriot. America’s total retreat is what he wanted. That is, he was never seeking world domination through peaceful means. Instead, his stated goal was to cut America down to size and make her just one nation among many. The world cheered him in that goal. Now the world is being reminded of the dictum to “be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

Obama, however, is not weeping over his wishes being granted. He got exactly what he wished for and is undoubtedly pleased with the results. Insulated by his praetorian White House guard and sycophantic media, he doesn’t worry about the downsides of his execrable foreign policies. All he cares about is the fact that he succeeded in weakening (perhaps permanently) a nation he’s always viewed as an overbearing, racist, capitalist bully.

No, the polls aren’t bothering me

September 10, 2012 by Bookworm 22 Comments

We conservatives are very fragile. One SEIU house polling organization (that would be PPP) and one White House press organ (that would be Politico), both of which trumpet Obama’s staggering 5 point post-convention bounce, and we’re already donning sackcloth and ashes.

Yes, it is frustrating that a president with the worst employment numbers since Jimmy Carter nevertheless still seems to be in the game. But as Drudge and others remind us, at this time in 1980, Carter was still in the game too. The parallels to 1980 are actually striking.

Both Carter and Obama presided over a dismal economy that utterly failed to recover on their watch. Both of them presided over the steepest, quickest increase in oil prices in the post-war era. Both of them made love to the Muslim world at Israel’s expense. And both of them got a lot of media protection.

Things are a bit different nowadays. Carter’s love for Muslims and ill-hidden disdain for Israel offended Democrats as well as Republicans, and his flailing about over the Iran Hostage Crisis didn’t help him a bit. As the delegate floor vote at the DNC shows, Obama’s love for Muslims and ill-hidden disdain for Israel sits badly with only about half of the Democrats in this country. Still, polls show that more than 50% of Americans believe Israel deserves American support. What they may lack in philosemitism, they probably make-up in 2012 pragmatism — a pragmatism arising from the fact that both America and Israel have been attacked by Islamists who proudly state their desire to rid the earth of these two nations. The process is more attenuated than the Iran Hostage Crisis, but also more ugly and dangerous.

Also, in 2012, the media love is more blatant than it was in 1980. In some way, that helps Obama more than Carter, because Obama gets such fervent support, whereas the media’s support for Carter was tempered by its old-fashioned belief that it had to appear objective. Nowadays, the word “objective” frequently come out of media talking heads, but no one believes it. And that means that Obama is slightly less well situated than Carter. Nowadays, aside from the true believers, people take what the media says with a grain (or sometimes a shovel) of salt. In addition, the internet means that anyone who is interested can investigate a subject more deeply, whether that means watching the entire speech that the media cut and spliced into scary nonsense, or reading thoughtful analyses that the media would rather die than publish. And of course, there’s Fox (although some have noticed that Fox is embracing the antisemitic side of conservativism, which is very disturbing. One wonders if this is an inevitable result of a major Saudi shareholder.).

Things are also the same now as they were in 1980 on the other side of the aisle: The media loathes Romney every bit as much as they loathed Reagan. In 1980, we were told Reagan was an idiot. In 2012, we are told that Romney is an evil plutocrat. In 1980, even without the internet, voters were able to cut through the noise. In 2012, Romney is pursuing a slow but steady course aimed at cutting through the noise as well.

I think that, as happened with Reagan and Carter, the debates will be a turning point in public opinion. Yes, the media interlocutors will throw softballs at Obama and try to tie Romney up in knots, but that will fail. First, Americans will recognize this cheating for what it is. It will be too blatant and they’ll resent that and root for the underdog — which, in the debate context, will be the beleaguered Romney. Second, Obama will fumble the softballs and Romney will handle the knots. Obama isn’t as smart as he thinks he is; Romney is indeed every bit as smart as he appears to be. With the two men on stage all alone, even in the artificial, biased constraints of a debate, Obama will struggle. Romney may not have Reagan’s wit and charm, but he’ll still run rings around Obama.

So, no, the polls aren’t bothering me. A little less than two months is an eternity in politics and, as things heat up, Obama cannot run forever from his own record.

Talk about damned with faint praise — George R.R. Martin speaks about Barack Obama

August 13, 2012 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I found the show “Game of Thrones” unwatchable, and the book unreadable — both were boring, ugly, and self-involved, which kind of hints at the author’s personality, right?

Anyway, George R. R. Martin has decided that it’s not enough to have his books reveal his petty little soul. He’s now taken to expressing freely and in detail his political opinions. Since one assumes that Martin reads only The New York Times, one can understand, although not forgive, his fact-free, invective-filled ruminations about clearing the voter rolls of illegal aliens, dead people, felons, etc. After all, when the NYT is your information source, you’re going to be a perfect example of “garbage in, garbage out.”

The real insight into Martin’s brain comes when he talks about Barack Obama. The following is an actual quotation, one he made some time ago when I was paying attention to this small little man’s political opinings. Before you read the following, please be assured that I am not making it up (emphasis mine):

Martin, an avowed Democrat from Bayonne, N.J. who has described President Obama as “the most intelligent president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter”, doesn’t often write about politics on his blog, but when he does, it is usually to speak about something he feels strongly about, be it TSA screenings or the Affordable Care Act.

“The most intelligent president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter”? In the face of that kind of intellectual and moral blindness, I’m tempted to come back with something as witty as “I know you are, but what am I,” or perhaps the always reasonable, “It takes one to know one.”

Democrats are imploding, one brain cell at a time.

Obama — even worse than Carter, and that’s saying a lot

August 8, 2012 by Bookworm 3 Comments

You know I’m going to be hooked on a post if, in the second paragraph, it describes Jimmy Carter in these terms:

Jimmy Carter should not have been president. He was incompetent beyond belief; angry about America’s success in the world; wanted us to get our comeuppance; and was and is a mean, reptilian and graceless little man. Being out of office has made him even angrier, meaner, smaller, more anti-American, and even more anti-semitic. He was and remains a repellent creature; if ever anybody could make me ashamed of my country, he could. I can’t forgive him for that.

Well, yes, that does about sum up the man. What’s really depressing, according to the DiploMad, a career Foreign Service employee, is that Obama is even worse:

We now are saddled with another abomination as president: one worse than Carter. The damage Obama has done to our economy and global standing, while immense, can be relatively easily fixed. The real damage he has done is more pernicious and perhaps permanent. He has participated fully and deliberately in undermining the essence of what it means to be an American. Let me explain.

By all means, do let the DiploMad explain, although I guarantee you that the post will depress you — especially if you consider that both London’s bookies and Intrade have put their money on Obama. Obama, the international man of mystery, whose past, the media harangues us, must forever be a closed book, has Leftified America, something from which it may never recover.

H/T: JKB

I find myself agreeing with the slapping woman — but only up to a point

June 6, 2012 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Have you already seen the video of a Barrett supporter slapping him for conceding to Walker in Wisconsin before even half the votes were counted? No? Here’s the video:

I don’t agree with the slap. I think that gal crossed a big line there, even though she asked permission first. Mayor Barrett though, quite reasonably, that she was joking, because nobody with any sense or maturity would slap a politician in that way, especially after he’s suffered what was a painful and, presumably, unexpected defeat.

Although I don’t agree with the slap, I do agree with the sentiment. It drives me crazy when a politician concedes when he sees which way the wind is blowing. We know from last night that the exit polls didn’t reflect the votes (either because people lied, or because absentee ballots skewed things, or because the pollsters erred). This means that statistics are useful predictors, but they’re certainly not entirely accurate. There comes a point, of course, at which it is impossible for the losing candidate to catch up, even if every single subsequent vote goes in his favor (unless the voting is in Chicago or some other county in which dead people hang onto their civil rights). I was not under the impression, however, that Barrett had reached that point of no-return.

Don’t get me wrong here: I’m delighted Barrett lost and Walker won. I just hate the early concession.

This is a very visceral thing for me. I cast my first vote back in 1980. Because of time zone issues, by the time I cast my vote, it was symbolic: Jimmy Carter had already conceded based upon preliminary returns from other states in different time zones. In retrospect, I’m delighted that he lost and that he slunk away into the night (or, at least, he slunk away temporarily before emerging later, more malevolent and antisemitic than ever). What did not delight me, though, was to have my very first presidential vote become manifestly meaningless before I’d even cast it. Had Carter stuck it out a few hours longer, I might had least have thought that I was casting a vote that might make a difference.

In both 1980 and 2012, the correct man slunk away, and the right man won. But I understand those supporters who feel that their chosen candidate is a weeny and a wuss for walking away before the last possible vote has been counted.