The Bookworm Beat 6-29-15 — the “house divided against itself” edition and open thread

Woman-writing-300x265My dog woke me early, which bothered me at the time but now seems like a good thing, since I can get a little blogging in before the work day begins. Without further ado, a few posts I think are worth you time:

On Democrats and racism

If you read one thing today, you have to read Jeffrey Lord’s open letter to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz asking her when Democrats are going to confess to and apologize for the fact that racism is their legacy to America — and one that they pursued aggressively for more than a century.

After you’ve read it, if you won’t turn yourself into a pariah amongst family and friends, share it around. After all, two can play at the Alinsky game, but for conservatives, the Alinsky game is one in which each individual conservatives must be an activist, because there won’t be a media/Hollywood conglomerate around to do the heavy lifting.

Sen. Mike Lee claims Congress has a plan

According to Mike Lee, there is already pending in Congress “the First Amendment Defense Act that would prevent any agency from denying a federal tax exemption, grant, contract, accreditation, license, or certification to an individual or institution for acting on their religious belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.”

You do realize, don’t you, that there’s something profoundly wrong when Congress has to introduce a bill to protect to primary rights inherent in all people. These bills, unless drafted very carefully, can be quite dangerous, insofar as they are seen as limiting, rather than protecting, rights. Also, as we know from the Defense of Marriage Act, a runaway Supreme Court will use these bills as a stepping stone to destroying the rights they’re supposed to protect.

Who’s the bigot?

A friend sent me a perfect little cartoon about the bigotry driving the traditional marriage foes.

Time for Republicans to pull together

Roger L. Simon is looking ahead to the terrifying spectacle of a fully nuclear Iran, aided by an enthusiastic Obama. He urges Republican candidates to forget their differences for a few days and to pull together in an effort to forestall this disaster:

All the Republican candidates, announced or unannounced, should stop what they are doing and band together over the July 4 weekend to stop the Iran Deal. In so doing, they should reach out not just to their fellow Republicans, but to all Americans, including especially their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. This is an emergency.

Sometimes world events reach a level that petty politics must be put aside and true patriotism come to the fore. September 11, 2001, and Pearl Harbor were such instances. The about-to-be-signed (between June 30 and July 6) nuclear deal with Iran is another. According to the Corker-Menendez bill, Congress only has thirty days to review the deal and (unfairly) needs to muster a two-thirds majority to overthrow it.

Allowing the mullahs a glide path to the bomb, this agreement shifts the international balance of power as nothing since Chamberlain’s famous appeasement of Hitler at Munich. In fact it is worse than Chamberlain, because then the British were weaker than Nazi Germany and needed time. The U.S. and Europe are vastly stronger than the Iranians.

The Iran deal is therefore tantamount to a suicide of the West. And, ironically, the only one who can block it at this point is Ayatollah Khamenei. Barack Obama seems willing to give the Iranians just about anything they want in order to get an agreement. He might as well load a couple of dozen nuclear-tipped ICBMs on the USS Harry S. Truman and sail them over to Bandar Abbas for off-loading.

The rainbow lights on the White House

We’re all used to the spectacle of public buildings bathing themselves in colored lights to celebrate sports victories. In San Francisco, rainbow lights routinely bedeck City Hall in honor of the city’s gays. But the White House?

WhiteHousePride

Steve Crowder puts his finger on precisely what’s wrong with that picture:

This is not the Obama’s house. It’s our house.

It’s one thing for the President to call the case’s victors after the ruling and give a speech hailing the Court’s decision. He’s flip-flopped on rear-admirals getting married. That’s cool. I don’t really care. It’s quite another thing to plaster the ‘gay flag’ all over the people’s house – a slap in the face to many religious groups, millions of Americans who strongly believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and the voters who’d previously opposed this measure in their respective states. Voters who’ve now been told that their vote is meaningless.

But perhaps more importantly, consider this. We’ve looked. Maybe we just haven’t looked hard enough. But as best we can tell, no other flag – or its colors – has graced the White House via lights at any time in the history of ever. Not even red, white and blue on the 4th of July.

Myths about slavery

As the Left gets ever tighter control over how American history is taught in this country, the Patriot Post responds with a few actual, you know, facts.

Incidentally, don’t confuse the facts at Patriot Post with “slavery denial” nor an attempt to deny America’s culpability for doing what it actually did. It simply gives perspective.

Perspective is useful, especially when the other side keeps throwing around numbers (3/5!) in an effort to shut you down.

Kevin Williamson turns his sights on Chief Justice John Roberts

One of the few good things to come out all the bad things happening recently is that Kevin Williamson has hit his stride as a writer:

It is uncomfortable to think about, but our Supreme Court functions in much the same way as Iran’s Guardian Council: It is a supralegislative body of purported scholars, distinguished by ceremonial black robes, that imaginatively applies ancient doctrines “conscious of the present needs and the issues of the day,” as the ayatollahs over there and over here both put it, deciding — discovering! — what is mandatory and what is forbidden as the shifting currents of politics dictate. The main difference is that the Iranians take their sharia rather more seriously than we take our constitutional law: John Roberts’s opinion in Burwell wasn’t just wrong — wrong can be forgiven — it was embarrassing, craven, and intellectually indefensible. Antonin Scalia was right to let him have it with both barrels, but he’d do better to resign from the Supreme Court — it is difficult to see how an honorable man could be associated with it.

The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution did not get around to enfranchising women or abolishing slavery, but they snuck in a constitutional right to gay marriage that we’ve somehow overlooked for 228 years or so: No mentally functional adult, regardless of his views on gay marriage, should be expected to pretend that that is true.

[snip]

The ranks of the Right are filled with a splendid array of gifted and erudite lawyers with unshakeable commitment to the rule of law. Many of them are my friends and colleagues. But their arguments always leave me a little bit cold. We can debate all day about how many Angels in America can have their first dance on the head of Anthony Kennedy’s pen, but we know that the Court’s liberals are going to vote one way, that some of its conservatives will probably vote another, and that John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy will, if the goblins in their heads are sufficiently insistent, ratify whatever Starbucks-customer consensus exists for 80 miles on either side of Interstate 95. That the chief justice went one way on health care and another on marriage tells us nothing at all about the law or the Constitution: It tells us about John Roberts.

Gay marriage — the new heresy

Greg, one of my Watcher’s Council friends, once intended to become a priest, so he is incredibly well-versed in Catholic history and doctrine. He makes a fascinating comparison between the heretical Gnostic way of looking at the Bible, and then comparing it to the Supreme Court’s new school of Constitutional scholarship.

Because I pay attention to the actual facts around the world and not to the neatly packaged news stories the drive-by media parcels out, Mr. Bookworm often uses the fact that he knows less than I do to confuse me of being a conspiracy theorist (a claim he doesn’t retract when, days, weeks, or months later, the drive-by media finally notes those same facts in anodyne fashion, urging readers to ignore them). My quip, always, is that a true conspiracy theorist uses imaginary lines to connect invisible dots.

It seems that our Supreme Court, by finding magical unstated rights in the Constitution, and stating them with romantic fervor, can now be defined as Gnostic, in the grip of a conspiracy theory, or just plain crazy.

Is it time for a third party in America?

Watcher’s Council members and their friends have tackled the question of whether it’s time for conservatives to start a new political party.  Check out what they have to say, and chime into the conversation at the Watcher’s site or here, if you prefer.

And if all this leaves you depressed, I have a link for you:  Jokes from Watcher’s Council members and their friends.