Culling the in-basket

I’m still catching up, but this stuff caught my eye:

Geert Wilders, on Islam and Western culture.  This link, by the way, ties in tightly with the next link, since both involve looking at people’s actual words and acts, rather than suppositions about who, or what, they are.  As I keep saying regarding Islam, we don’t need elaborate myths or conspiracy theories to see the sharia-ists as a problem.  That is, since time immemorial, when it came to the Jews and their supposed crimes (whether eating Christian children or controlling the world’s wealth) the absence of any evidence whatsoever supporting these alleged wrongs was taken as proof that this is what the Jews were doing, only they were doing it so well, and so secretly, that no one could tell.  The same is true for the Truthers.  To them, it makes perfect sense to advance a theory belied by their own eyes (there were those planes) and belied by the science, as well as a theory that would require hundreds, if not thousands, of people to keep a secreet.  That type of thinking, aside from being antisemitic, is paranoid and delusional.  With the Islamists, there is no need to imagine conspiracies or behaviors.  Islam is open about its nature, and the sharia-ists are open about their goals.  Wilders gets it.

One who doesn’t get it is Ron Chernow, who assures us that we shouldn’t consider the Founders’ writings (the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence  and the Bill of Rights), because the Founders were complicated people and it just confuses foolish right wingers to focus obsessively on their actual words.  Okay, I’ve simplified it a bit, but read it and tell me that’s what his little opinion piece doesn’t boil down to:  “The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything. Never has the country produced a more brilliantly argumentative, individualistic or opinionated group of politicians. Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day.”  Get it?  Don’t look at what they wrote and don’t look at their political documents:  just focus on their fights and People Magazine-esque personalities!