The Bookworm Beat 2-4-15 — The “Obama’s not sad” edition and Open Thread

Woman writingIt’s been pouring paying clients lately, which is a good thing but, as always, it cuts into my blogging time.  I’ll skip the preliminaries and throw myself in the round-up.

It’s a bad thing when our president is happy

My Mom, in commenting on the state of the world today, said “Everybody’s unhappy.” I disagreed. “Obama is happy,” I said. “So is Iran.”

Why are these two happy? Because Obama is working on a grand plan that will hand the Middle East over to nuclear Imams from Iran, that’s why. Victor Davis Hanson carefully breaks the Obama strategy down. You should definitely read VDH’s post, but be prepared to be depressed for hours or even days afterwards.

As for those Sunni outposts that Iran cannot reach or does not want to control, there’s always Obama’s good friend The Muslim Brotherhood.

And that’s why Obama’s happy.

The Jordanian pilot’s immolation is even making Progressives scared . . . except for Obama

Beheadings didn’t seem to move the Progressive class. However, the spectacle of someone being burned alive, a practice not seen in the west since the end of the Inquisition, seems to have hit a chord. I’m seeing genuine upset amongst my Progressive friends.  It turns out that, while it’s okay for the downtrodden, third-world, brown colored victims of the West to behead representatives of American, French, and Japanese imperialism, ISIS goes too far when it puts people in a cage, burns them to death, and produces a snazzy promotional and recruiting video to celebrate the event.

Koran demands that people be burned to death

The ones who aren’t upset, though, are the ones who can do something about it. Not only did Obama issue an utterly anodyne statement in response, Yehuda Remer caught something I overlooked: Obama used the occasion of this gruesome auto de fe to promote Obamacare. No kidding:

Yesterday, as the world watched in horror as ISIS burned Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh alive, Obama took the opportunity to promote Obamacare by contrasting the need to destroy ISIS and his signature healthcare law.

Speaking with a group of supporters in response to the Republicans upcoming vote to repeal Obamacare, the President was asked about the rumored reports and the video that shows Kasasbeh being burned alive by the Islamic State.

“But should in fact this video be authentic, its just one more indication of the viciousness and barbaric of this organization. And I think we would double the vigilance and the determination on the part of a global coalition to make sure they are degraded and ultimately defeated. And it also just indicates the degree to which whatever ideology they’ re operating off of, its bankrupt. We’re here to talk about how to make people healthier and make their lives better, and this organization appears only interested in death and destruction,” Obama said.

That type of psychopathic, callous self-involvement, in its own way, is almost as bad as ISIS’s acts.

The Progressives I know, while finally figuring out that ISIS is a problem, are still squeamish about doing anything about it. I like the idea of using modern weaponry to dispose of them cleanly. While I would hate to die of any type of violence, it seems to me that a swift death is better than slow torture. For that reason, I’m unnerved when I hear that some Arab regimes are speaking of crucifying ISIS POWs.

Kill ISIS fighters, by all means, just as Jordan hanged two ISIS prisoners and apparently intends to increase its bombing raids. It’s a terrible mistake, though, to co-opt ISIS’s sadism as a way to destroy it. Kill, yes, and as many fighters as possible; torture, no, because if we’re not better than they are, why bother fighting them at all? We want our children to be humane, not inhuman.

Obama’s friends are the practical and spiritual heirs of the Nazis

Although the noxious alignment of Leftists and Muslims has resulted in a world in which Israel is accused of being a Nazi nation, the real Nazis fully understood who their ideological heirs were:

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.

He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.

His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.

“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will “not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

There was Eichmann’s Hadith Holocaust with even the rocks and trees finding Jews for the Islamic SS.

Read the rest here.

Obama’s “utterly irresponsible” proposed budget

Of course Obama’s proposed budget, which will dramatically increase debt, burden struggling American corporations, and shaft the middle class, doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing. But there’s more going on than that. Obama’s proposed budgets have always been lousy, so much so that his own party has refused to pass them. This one, however, takes the disconnect to new heights.

I can’t decide if the heights are malevolence, insanity or, as Keith Koffler says, utter irresponsibility, but there’s something very wrong when the president and his team begin behaving in ways that are a travesty of normal behavior. Obama’s not even pretending any more. He’s just toying with the nation he’s trying to subordinate to the good will of Iran and ISIS.

Bret Stephens tells why Netanyahu should give that speech

Even if one ignores the fact that the Obama administration lied when it said that Boehner hadn’t notified it before inviting Netanyahu to speak to the House (a lie that enabled to make Netanyahu look like a pushy arriviste), there is still no good reason for Bibi to stay away from the House and every good reason for him to appear there. As Bret Stephens explains, Obama has been picking fights with Bibi since day one of Obama’s administration, so why should this speech be different.

Here’s a taste of Stephen’s article. You should check it our yourself (use a Google search for the article if you get blocked by a pay wall):

Relations between Israel and the U.S. have been in crisis nearly from the moment President Obama stepped into office. Democratic support for Israel has been eroding for decades. It was the U.S. president, not the Israeli prime minister, who picked this fight.

Oh, and if there’s going to be a blowout in U.S.-Israel relations, is now really a worse time than later this year, when the Obama administration will have further cornered Israel with its Iran diplomacy?

[snip]

This history is worth recalling because it underscores the unpleasant truth about America in the age of Obama. The president collects hard favors from allies and repays them with neglect and derision. He is eager to accommodate the political needs of authoritarian leaders like Iran’s Hasan Rouhani but has no use for the political needs of elected leaders like Mr. Netanyahu. He believes that it is for other statesmen to stake their political lives and risk their national future for the sake of a moral principle—at least as Mr. Obama defines that principle. As for him, the only thing sacred is his own political convenience.

This is the mentality of a peevish and callow potentate. (Emphasis mine.)

Gallup’s CEO — Obama’s government is lying to you

Are you aware of any time ever before when the CEO of Gallup took to the internet to explain that the government is lying to the people? I can’t. But that’s precisely what Jim Clifton, Gallup’s Chairman and CEO, did when it comes to those employment numbers about which the Obama administration keeps boasting:

I hear all the time that “unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.” When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth — the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real — then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t “feeling” something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class.

There’s a reason Tunisia, of all Arab nations, successfully navigated the Arab Spring:

More on the Castle Doctrine (and crazy Leftists at Berkeley)

I’ve blogged here lately about the Castle Doctrine, which has been the subject of an ongoing dispute between me and a Progressive acquaintance. Mike McDaniel, who is one of the best informed gun bloggers in America, used my post as a springboard for a far-reaching, in-depth discussion about the meaning of the Castle Doctrine and the right to self-defense. Needless to say, I’m flattered. My only regret is that I didn’t, and probably can’t ever, write as well about the subject as he does:

To people not intellectually limited to progressive ideology, the idea that a career felon that appears in one’s bedroom in the middle of the night has any “rights” or privileges, or is due any consideration whatever is the height of insanity, but not so to the progressive, whose concern for the miniscule or non-existent humanity of such creatures far surpasses their concern for their innocent victims.

If a criminal that illegally enters one’s home cannot be legally presumed to be there for evil purposes, if deadly force cannot be used against them, when and where, pray tell, could that presumption ever exist? If our homes cannot be a safe zone, a place where we can reasonably expect to let down our guard and have some small expectation of privacy and safety, aren’t we actually living in Hobbe’s state of nature where life is “nasty, brutish and short,” even in our kitchens?

Make your brain happy and read the whole thing. You can learn more here about the legal issues a homeowner in a Castle Doctrine state might want to consider.

Also, if you’re already spending time in Mike’s company, give yourself another treat and read his scathing analysis of the two Berkeley knuckleheads who want to occupy the Berkeley syllabus on the ground that it’s insufficiently diverse. Mike, who is an educator in addition to being a weapons writer, looks beyond this specific idiocy and sees a very damaged education system:

One might be tempted to call them presumptuous twits–which they certainly are–but in many respects it’s not their fault: they’ve been conditioned and encouraged to think this way. There has been a movement in K-12 education for decades that asserts that children are inherently brilliant and creative, and classical education merely represses that brilliance. Teachers should not be a “sage on the stage,” dispensing content and method, but “facilitators,” whose sole job is to encourage the innate brilliance of each child to come out and to encourage it when it does. This movement goes by many names, but “student-centered learning” is among the most common.

Ask any competent high school teacher facing a class half-full of slack-jawed, bored, half-asleep little potheads, or a class of violent gang bangers about the validity of this theory. Such ignorance of human nature is stupefying.

It takes little rational thought to see the flaws in this way of thinking. Children need to learn a variety of new skills, and fundamental to this is content in all of the academic disciplines. Without a common grounding, a common frame of reference, communication itself is impossible, to say nothing of making the neural connections necessary to build bigger, better brains. Children, at any age, do not know what they don’t know or what they need to know, nor do they generally know the methods by which they can attain and use this knowledge.

She carries a mattress, not because she’s a victim, but because she’s crazy and/or malevolent

We’ve all been hearing about performance artist Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who goes around carrying a mattress so that people can feel the pain of her rape — a rape she claims everyone in authority, from the university to law enforcement, discounted. Her supposed rapist, German scholarship student Paul Nungesser is finally striking back, and he’s doing so using Emma’s own words.

You see, after the alleged rape, Emma was still in full and friendly contact with him, going so far on one occasion as to text enthusiastically, if ungrammatically, “I love you Paul.” (Indeed, if you didn’t know that Emma was a Columbia University student, and had only her texts to look at, you’d conclude that she’s only marginally literate.)

Even the credulous “campus rape” media might be figuring out that Emma is a histrionic, exhibitionistic drama queen whose story was so far-fetched that even the kangaroo court proceedings of an American university anti-man rape tribunal couldn’t believe it. I’m not hoping for a return to sanity, though. The extremists who occupy American academia have way too much invested in this lie to let it go.

My friends, they’re famous, dontcha know!

Those familiar with my blogging circle The Watcher’s Council, also know that one of our contributing members is Virginia Right!, which is Tom White’s blog. Tom’s been making more and more of a name for himself. I posted here a while ago about the fact that John Stossel used one of Tom’s songs to illustrate a segment on his show. And now Tom’s been the subject of a very big, nice article in the Richmond Times Dispatch.  Congratulations, Tom!  You deserve the recognition coming your way.

The depressing state of Super Bowl commercials

Ed Driscoll has the best take I’ve seen on the depressing, preachy, misanthropic swamp that remains now that the Left has occupied the once-mighty Super Bowl commercial.

But life is good for one Patriot player

Yes, I exulted when the Patriots won in the game’s final seconds. And then I promptly lost interest in the whole thing, because I’m actually not a fan of either team — except that I seriously dislike the classless Seahawks, while I couldn’t care at all about the less-classless Patriots.

Neo-Neocon, however, took a moment to follow the story of Malcolm Butler, who made the game-winning intercept in the 20th second before zero hour. It’s a nice story about a quiet football hero who swooped in and saved the day.

It’s not a sci-fi thriller; it’s a real plane crash

The footage of that terrible plane crash in Taiwan, which killed at least 25 people, looks like something a Hollywood special effects department would prepare for an “earth getting attacked by aliens” movie:

I hope that those passengers not yet found are rescued alive. They, and their families and friends, are in my thoughts.