The Bookworm Beat — the awesome, very long and interesting August 21, 2014 edition

Woman writing

In self-defense, you shoot to kill.  End of story.

One of the big issues that’s agitating Leftists to an extreme degree with regard to Michael Brown’s death is the fact that, even though he was unarmed, he was shot six times. The Left, raised on an endless diet of violent movies, is pretty sure that one shot from the action hero is enough to bring down any bad guy, either by killing him instantly or disabling him completely. Ah! If only that were true.

In the real world, especially a real world that includes 6’4″, 300 lb guys with violence in their eyes, fury in their fists, and forward momentum in their bodies, you shoot and shoot and shoot until the bad guy is completely, manifestly unable to harm you. (See Russ Vaughn’s article for more on the deadly reality of “unarmed” men.)

You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Instead, listen to my friend Mike McDaniel, who is one of the foremost gun bloggers in America. Writing at The Truth About Guns, he explains just how much effort it actually takes to disable someone. By the way, we should all be grateful for this in case we ever accidentally find ourselves in the line of fire. The body’s resilience doesn’t just slow down taking out bad guys; it also helps good guys.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Mike, who is a former police officer, has been following the Ferguson situation very closely, with special attention to what happened that fateful night. You can read his musings at his blog, Stately McDaniel Manor.

He’s the Clark Kent/Superman of Apple Computers

Lest you think that all Apple employees are geeky, faux-hip, Leftist young people, this story ought to disabuse you of that notion: A reservist who was called up from his job at Apple saved a British general’s life by throwing himself in the path of an Afghani shooter, with the reservist firing his weapon as he went. The fact that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest in no way detracts from his heroism, since a lot of vital areas in his body, including his head and the major arteries in his legs were exposed.  Indeed, he was shot six times, taking two bullets to the leg, one bullet to the shoulder, and three to that life-saving vest.

This was the same attack that resulted in the death of Major General Harold Greene, the highest ranking American officer to be killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. You won’t be surprised, of course, to learn that Barack Obama couldn’t be bothered to attend Gen. Greene’s funeral.

Do I need to remind any of you that Obama is Commander in Chief of the American military? I’m pretty sure that George Washington, the original Commander in Chief, would have ridden from Virginia, through the snow, on horseback to attend such a funeral. And no, a general’s life is not of more worth than a private’s, but the fact is that the military is a hierarchical enterprise and Greene, by virtue of his rank, was very close to Obama in that hierarchy.

Israel scored a game-changer against Hamas last night

Something very, very big happened in Gaza last night: Israel assassinated three of the highest ranking Hamas leaders. Dayenu. But the enormously skillfully strike, which could have been achieved only with extraordinary knowledge, reveals something that should strike a shattering blow at Hamas: “The killing of the three constituted an indication that something in the intelligence discipline at the very top of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades has cracked.”

Although this is a stunning intelligence coup, in the short-term expect escalated violence towards Israel as Hamas leadership tries to prove that there isn’t a gaping hole in its terrorist command structure.

A much-read British newspaper sounds the tocsin against radical Islam

I have a vague memory from our last trip to England of seeing the Express lying around all over the place in underground trains running in the afternoon and evening. People would just pick up abandoned copies and read them as they rode along. I hope I’m correct in this memory, because today’s Express ran an editorial every person in the Western world should read: “Stop blaming Israel and wake up: The black flag of jihad is the REAL threat to the world.

Marx famously said “religion is the opiate of the people,” but in modern England, most of Europe, and too many parts of America, political correctness is the opiate. Citizens in those nations have been blinkered and gagged, leaving them unable to recognize the politically incorrect evil that is radical Islam and, if they recognize it, incapable of speaking up. Unless they can be brought to realize that there is a cancer unleashed in the Middle East and growing in virulence in the West, their opiate addiction will kill them — indeed, it will kill all of us.

William Tecumseh Sherman had the right idea — and Israel seems to be learning from history

Victor Davis Hanson resurrects the good reputation of the much maligned William Tecumseh Sherman, explaining that he was “an attritionist, not an annihilationist.” He understood that one must undermine one’s enemies to win and to that end he pursued a three-pronged strategy that finally brought the civil war to an end:

War in his mind was not a struggle between militaries so much as between the willpower of entire peoples, distant though they be from the battlefield. One chief aim was iconic. Sherman sought to capture cities or traverse holy ground that might offer his forces symbolic lessons that transcended even strategic considerations.

[snip]

Marching through the heart of Georgia to Savannah also reminded the Confederacy that it could not stop a Union army from going pretty much where it pleased — even into the heretofore untouched southern heartlands.

[snip]

His [last] point was to show them that farmboys from Illinois or Ohio were just as tough fighters as Tidewater horsemen or the impoverished rural folk of northern Georgia. Sherman felt that part of the appeal of the Confederacy had been the mythology about its landed gentry, and he felt it essential to expose this as hollow and superficial; after all, he was in Georgia, while Georgian units were not in Ohio….

Sherman’s goal was to separate the population from the leadership, and turn the latter against the former. (Incidentally, the Left did the same thing when it turned the American people against the Vietnam War, even though we were achieving military victory.) To achieve this goal, Sherman did not engage in random, broad-based, genocidal terrorism. Instead, he made careful targeted strikes that hurt the people in a way that made them blame their leadership for the pain they were suffering.

VDH offers this fascinating historical data for a reason: So far, Israel has been following a similar template in Gaza against Hamas. If it can continue to do so, without getting derailed by the world’s endless opprobrium and, worse, Obama’s anti-Israel intransigence, it has a chance of demolishing Hamas just as surly as Sherman demolished the confederacy.

The moving corpses of Hamas

One of the things about opiate addiction is that it makes you stupid. You lose common sense and will listen only to the person or entity that gives you your next fix. In today’s world, the supplier is the welfare state. it gives money and, in exchange, tells the recipients that it’s impolite to notice illegal aliens, savage jihadists, and others determined to wreak havoc on the same state supplying those fixes.

The one good thing about this enforced blindness is that those who benefit from it — the cheats and murderers — get careless. Human nature being what it is, if you know that no one will ever call you on your acts and errors, why try? And that is how one ends up with the moving corpses at the funeral:

Jews speak up for Middle Eastern Christians; Christians stay stubbornly silent

Given the apocalyptic Muslim Middle East that followed closely on the heels of the disastrously managed Arab Spring, should we be at all surprised that one of the few groups to stand up for the Christians being wiped out across Muslim lands is the World Jewish Congress? As you read “Who Will Stand Up for the Christians” keep in mind that even Christians throughout the world are silent in the face of this often genocidal purging.

I suspect that part of the problem lies with the fact that so many Christian denominations (Presbyterian and Episcopalian spring to mind) have allied themselves for so long with the Palestinian cause against Israel that they cannot wrap their minds around the fact that the days of appeasing the Islamist crocodile by throwing it the bodies of Jews are over. That crocodile is hungry and it’s coming for them now. Their groveling, their apologies, and their denials will avail them nothing in this fight. At the end of the day, all they’ll have is the moral stain of having been complicit with evil long after any decent people would have recognized precisely what was taking place in the Muslim Middle East.

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If the anti-Israel crowd is all about human rights, why don’t they protest Turkey’s Cyprus occupation?

A month into the Israel-Hamas war, there are scads of articles pointing out what we here knew all along; namely, that anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli sentiment are nothing but very thinly disguised anti-Semitism. Every time a Jew in France or Sweden or London or America is attacked ostensibly because of the war between Hamas and Israel, a country that is not on the Jewish person’s passport, we know that this is a war against Jews, not against one allegedly poorly conducted nation.

Just because there are so many articles, though, that does not mean there isn’t room for one more, especially if it’s from Victor Davis Hanson. VDH notes that, if people really want to prove that they are for all human rights, not just the rights of Muslims who want to commit genocide against the Jews, they ought to be speaking out against the brutal Turkish occupation of Cyprus. But they’re not. Their silence amounts to a confession.

The UN’s war crimes

David French is doing yeoman’s work, relentlessly press the quite obvious point that the UN, through UNRWA, is complicit in war crimes. Or at least it’s quite obvious to anybody with a modicum of common sense and a functioning moral compass.

The immorality of the genocide against Down Syndrome

I was going to comment on Richard Dawkin’s statement that it’s “immoral” not to abort a baby with Down Syndrome. Then I saw that Peter Wehner already did a fine job. (And if you can’t get past the pay wall, do consider a digital subscription to Commentary. It’s affordable and very worth the money.)

I’m ashamed to say that, back in the day when I was having babies, if I’d learned that my baby was going to have Down Syndrome, I would have given serious consideration to an abortion and for the worst reason of all — having such a child would have been hard on me. The reason for this world view is the milieu in which I lived — West coast Democrat — but that’s not an excuse for that attitude. I didn’t know better then but, looking back, I still feel that I, a well-read, educated young woman, should have had a moral compass that knew better. The best that I can do to make amends is to advocate for life now.

A short list of Obama’s wrongdoings

There are only 821 well-sourced examples of Barack Obama’s lying, law-breaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, etc.? Funny. I would have thought there would have been a lot more.

Come Fly With Me

In the matter of travel, Attorney General Eric Holder isn’t breaking the law. He’s just taking gross advantage of American taxpayers, by flying himself and his family in private and very costly luxury, while paying only the price of coach fare, with the difference being absorbed by an increasingly beleaguered middle class.

More Progressives are noticing Obama’s clay feet

How bad is Obama? He’s so bad that even Maureen Dowd is turning her high school age mean-girl tongue on him, excoriating him for being aloof and disinterested:

His circle keeps getting more inner. He golfs with aides and jocks, and he spent his one evening back in Washington from Martha’s Vineyard at a nearly five-hour dinner at the home of a nutritional adviser and former White House assistant chef, Sam Kass.

The president who was elected because he was a hot commodity is now a wet blanket.

The extraordinary candidate turns out to be the most ordinary of men, frittering away precious time on the links. Unlike L.B.J., who devoured problems as though he were being chased by demons, Obama’s main galvanizing impulse was to get himself elected.

Almost everything else — from an all-out push on gun control after the Newtown massacre to going to see firsthand the Hispanic children thronging at the border to using his special status to defuse racial tensions in Ferguson — just seems like too much trouble.

As is the case for all those other liberals who’ve discovered that their idol has feet of base material, it’s too little, too late. They got him elected twice, and we must now live with the unfolding, unstoppable consequences at home and abroad. Also, although they’re whining at Obama, none seem to have the insight to realize that the problem isn’t just Obama — it’s them too.

It’s their relentless Leftism, their willingness to corrupt all systems to achieve their goals, their love affair with a politicized version of science, their obeisance to political correctness, and their overarching disdain for America that led us to this place. They’ll have learned nothing from this whole experience and, turning from Hillary as to (choke) “moderate”, will next place all their eggs in the Elizabeth Warren basket. Until they show repentance and remorse, I guess I’m just not that impressed when the infighting begins.

Still, some Progressives are having their “crossing the Rubicon” moments

As long-time readers of my blog know, what finally tipped me over the edge in my journey from Democrat to conservative was NPR. I simply could not accept the manifest lies it told about Israel. I also realized that, if it was wrong about Israel, I’d better investigate and see if it was right about anything else. I discovered that, while it’s sometimes right about some things, it’s mostly wrong about most things.

One American Jewish woman is making the same journey with the New York Times: She’s figured out that it lies about Israel. My bet is that her next step is to start looking with new eyes at everything the Times espouses.

Leftists try to destroy writers’ livelihoods and suppress ideas

Would it surprise you to learn that Leftists are intentionally trying to destroy book sales for conservative books? No, of course it wouldn’t. You’ve already heard about Erica Payne, the Progressive activist who was encouraging people to deface Paul Ryan’s new book. I bet you didn’t know, though, that this same mentality thrives on Amazon, where Leftists do their darndest to destroy the ratings for conservative-themed books.

Two examples are My Parents Open Carry and Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!. It would be foolish to deny that many of the comments are clever, albeit mean and ill-informed, but it’s those hundreds of negative stars from people who have never read the book, and who couldn’t be counted on for a fair review in any event, that’s so shameful.

A California Republican shames Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown

Huge kudos to California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who not only refused Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown’s invitation to a luncheon fete for Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto, but who also wrote Brown a letter dressing him down soundly for wining and dining Nieto, even as an American Marine rots in a Mexican prison for the crime of having gotten stuck on a one-way road to Mexico with legal American guns in his car.

This is his letter. (You can click on the image to make it larger.)

Donnelly letter to Jerry Brown re Mexican President

Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink

Central Valley farmers are complaining that, in drought stricken California, San Franciscans are getting preferential treatment when it comes to water allotments. It’s not complicated: San Franciscans are reliably Progressive and vote for Nancy Pelosi; Central Valley farmers are not and do not.  Who cares that the farmers grow the food that feeds the nation?

The unholy union of government and big business

Conservatives fear big government. Progressives fear big corporations. Sometimes they’re both right.

The Perry indictment just gets uglier

California, of course, is not the only state with morally corrupt Democrats. As the risible indictment against Gov. Rick Perry shows, when Democrats have the political bit in their teeth anywhere, they’ll use it unwisely. And in case you thought the complaint was bad, the process was even worse: The grand jury that issued the indictment was stacked.

Fish cannons and turkey drops

Read this story about fish cannons and then you’ll appreciate why it irresistibly reminded my friend Wolf (who has taken a break from blogging at Wolf Howling) of one of the most exquisitely funny moments ever in TV comedy:

Even Taylor Swift has been sucked into a astroturf race row

I’ve never been a big fan of Taylor Swift’s music because she has always used her often whiny songs as kiss-and-tell vehicles for her failed relationships. Every song bad-mouths a past boyfriend, which I think is tacky.

Other than that, I think she’s a lovely young woman. She’s lovely to look at, always dresses charmingly and tastefully, and she’s never been involved in a scandal. This last seems to have come about, not because Swift is lucky, but because she lives a decent life, flying back to her home after every concert, rather than frequenting clubs and parties.

Blameless Taylor Swift, though, has found herself embroiled in, of all things, a scandal accusing her of racism. That it’s a scandal manufactured out of whole cloth makes no difference to the race mongers. They think they’ve found a target by pointing to a video in which she is unable to twerk alongside some black women.

Of course, if you watch the video, you’ll see that the whole point is that Swift shows various dance genres (including some brilliant hip hop/break dancing) that she’s unable to do because she’s a spaz who just enjoys “shaking.” It’s not great music, but it’s charming and only a race hustler running out of material could see it as grounds for complaint:

Now you see it, now you don’t

I love sleight of hand and card tricks, so was thrilled to find a video of someone who is just amazingly good:

Pictures

(With my usual heartfelt thanks to Caped Crusader.)

Islam taking back what it thinks is its own

Conservativsm is the bulwark against savagery

Modern education

Back off or the community gets it

Liberal logic and guns

Wants more government

You voted for big government

Comparing Israel and the Palestinians

Life on Mars

Give me your illegal aliens

Declassify everything

Obama doesn't test well