2012 Presidential Election

Heroism. If this can’t bring us together after another long day of barroom brawling over Delaware, nothing can. I’ve already written about Giunta and will point you to that post as background; what’s impressive about the clip is (a) how humble he is despite formal recognition as one of America’s greatest living heroes, and (b) the View the video

Hmmm. Alternate headline: “Michael Moore figures out way to boost opposition to mosque from 65 percent to 95 percent.” “I want it built on Ground Zero. Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice,” Moore writes in an open letter on his website. “I believe in Read this post

It begins… 15 Muslims killed in rioting over the Koran in Kashmir. A young Kashmiri boy shouts slogans during a protest on the outskirts of Srinagar, India, Monday, that later descended into deadly clashes with Indian forces. ( The New York Daily News ) 15 Muslims were killed today in anti-Koran burning protests in Kashmir. The New York Daily News reported: The Iranians seized on reports of Koran burnings near Ground Zero and elsewhere in the U.S. to fan deadly riots Monday in mostly-Muslim Kashmir. Indian forces killed more than a dozen people and wounded scores more rampaging rioters, who chanted “Down with Koran desecrators” as they attacked a Christian school in one town and government buildings in other cities. They also chanted “Down with America” and “Down with Israel,” cries rarely heard in Kashmir where Muslim rebels have long waged a bloody rebellion against Indian rule. One Muslim was killed in anti-Koran burning protests in Afghanistan on Friday. More… Muslims torch church in India.

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It Begins… 15 Muslims Dead at Anti-Koran Burning Rioting in Kashmir

Obama Derangement Syndrome has now produced a strain as brain-devouring as Bush Derangement Syndrome was. Dinesh D'Souza traces President Obama’s misrule directly to his father – a “philandering, inebriated African socialist.” Why the sudden reappearance of Barack Obama père , 28 years after his death? Unclear. But D’Souza, author of the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11 , lists examples of weird governance: President Obama blocks offshore drilling in the United States while subsidizing it in Brazil. His administration waffles about when and whether banks should be allowed to repay the Bush Administration’s TARP bailout. Obama continues to push for more of a stimulus that has manifestly failed to revive business activity or reduce unemployment. He wants to tax the rich unfairly. He supports (maybe) the proposed Cordoba House; bungled the diplomacy around the release of a Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison; and has reportedly assigned NASA the mission-non-critical task of improving relations with the Muslim world. That list contains a dosage of foolishness, but are these really examples of government so strange as to require a radical explanation? D’Souza believes so, and he has the explanation. Our nation is being held hostage to the thwarted dreams of a “Luo tribesman of the 1950s,” who marinated his hapless son in Fanonian anticolonial politics and “is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” The tell? It’s right in the title of his book: What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father . According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father […] It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet. Sometimes things seem incredible because they are. Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama's non -relationship with his father. The whole point of the book is that the author's paternal heritage is delivered in fragments during brief and usually troubled encounters. While Obama goes on about his father's misfortunes — many of them clearly self-inflicted — in Kenya, there is no evidence for the claim that the elder Obama bequeathed his son a coherent or even a partial political philosophy. The book does track a foggy course through Obama's political growth, toward one inescapable goal: Obama's formation came through and in reaction to his mother, a New Deal leftist whose social views were slightly more advanced than those of her cohort. There's no need to go to Kenya for the kind of indoctrination into Frantz Fanon and socialism D'Souza describes: It was widely available at Occidental and Columbia. In fact, the book's literary interest — and possibly its biggest political misdirection — rests in Obama's putative skepticism about the leftish consensus of the sixties. To listen to D'Souza you'd think Obama’s book was a large-easy-to-read-type call to arms for Mugabean anti-colonialism. In fact, when something close to the grievance-centered politics D'Souza rightly denounces comes up in Dreams , it comes packed in caveats and windy second thoughts. Witness one chapter dealing with the future president's Chicago “community organizer” days that begins: Winter came and the city turned monochrome – black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairies storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds. ZZ! ZZZZ! ZZZZZZ– Huh! (Blink) Shnuff! (Slurp!) Whoa! (Snort!) Sorry, nodded off for a second. So Obama's talking about the militant nationalism of a co-worker he appears to have made up . He writes: Nationalism provided…an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race! […] It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions – between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I’d discovered that I couldn’t escape it if I tried. I would suggest that D’Souza read Jesse Walker’s more closely argued case that Obama is in fact not radical enough. D’Souza, a self-made traditionalist, would probably not agree with the argument, but at least there’s some support for it. In the event, D’Souza’s argument from fatherhood takes a long trip in a circle, in the process revealing more about the president of The King’s College than it does about the president of the United States: At one point, Obama’s sentence “I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil” is described, without explanation, as “eerie.” (A simple “uninspired” would have sufficed.) D’Souza’s thesis is catching on. Sleepless Dave Weigel hears it back from Newt Gingrich , rising master of the politics of personal self-destruction. Bonus: Gingrich closes the audio with a joyful patriotic flourish: “We're the most wonderful, open and chaotic society in human history.” Hope he meant that as a compliment.

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D’Souza Puts Obama On Couch, Discovers Male Elektra Complex

On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, after host Matthews asked if electing a President whose middle name was “Hussein” had “opened a door to better relations with the Arab and Islamic world. Or has it opened a door to more xenophobic American negativity?” the panel mostly agreed that Obama’s election was more of a “net plus” for America’s relations with the world’s Muslim population. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius had a dissenting view that “President Obama raised expectations that there would be a different kind of America. That in itself could be dangerous.” After former CBS News anchor Dan Rather argued that “I think it’s opened the door to both, but, on balance, and in the main, it’s still a net plus in terms of the country’s reputation,” the BBC’s Katty Kay agreed and implicated President Bush in damaging America’s relations with the Muslim world. Kay: “I agree that it’s a net plus, particularly when you compare it with what came before and the invasion of Iraq and how much of a problem that was for America’s relations with the Middle East.” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell concurred: “I agree because after the invasion of Iraq and with this President and his multicultural background, it is a net plus.” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius then weighed in with a more pessimistic take: There’s no question as I travel the Arab world that President Obama raised expectations that there would be a different kind of America. That in itself could be dangerous. When expectations go up, the possibility of disappointment, of chronic disappointment – “but you told us that this would be different and it isn’t” – I think that’s a real danger for us going forward. I think Obama and his advisors understand that. That’s why they’re pushing so hard on the Israeli-Palestinian issue now. The overall discussion was framed around the liberal premise that President Bush had not only harmed relations with the Muslim world by being too aggressive in the war on terrorism, but that those negative relations outweighed such positive accomplishments as overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Sunday, September 12, syndicated Chris Matthews Show: CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let’s get back to the question of our country. We, as a country, elected Barack Hussein Obama. We knew his name was Hussein. We knew of his background from his parentage going way back. The Arab world liked that. The Islamic world said, “Hey, this country’s interesting.” Overall, has the election of Barack Obama opened a door to better relations with the Arab and Islamic world. Or has it opened a door to more xenophobic American negativity? DAN RATHER: I think it’s opened the door to both, but, on balance, and in the main, it’s still a net plus in terms of the country’s reputation. MATTHEWS: Okay. Katty, you agree with that? KATTY KAY, BBC: I agree that it’s a net plus, particularly when you compare it with what came before and the invasion of Iraq and how much of a problem that was for America’s relations with the Middle East. ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS : I agree because after the invasion of Iraq and with this President and his multicultural background, it is a net plus. DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST: There’s no question as I travel the Arab world that President Obama raised expectations that there would be a different kind of America. That in itself could be dangerous. When expectations go up, the possibility of disappointment, of chronic disappointment – “but you told us that this would be different and it isn’t” – I think that’s a real danger for us going forward. I think Obama and his advisors understand that. That’s why they’re pushing so hard on the Israeli-Palestinian issue now. MATTHEWS: I think a grown-up response and childish response are always going to be different. Grown-ups are going to say, “Well, it’s an interesting country. They elect a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.” … (INAUDIBLE) country. IGNATIUS: Don’t look for grown-up responses in America or anywhere else.

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Chris Matthews Panel Sees Name ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ as ‘Net Plus’ in U.S. Relations w/ Muslim World

Paul I’ve been skeptical of claims that the massive problems that confront Greece are a sign of America’s future. For one thing, although we’re not “too big to fail,” we may be too big to be likely to fail in the same way and to the same extent that Greece has. For another, I still put some stock in American exceptionalism. But my prejudices should not be confused with facts or first hand comparative observation. For a different perspective, I offer this report from my friend, and occasional Washington Times op-ed columnist, Ray Hartwell: My wife and I are spending three weeks on a small Greek island that’s off the beaten path for American tourists. We’ve been here before. As it’s a bit like a small town, we know a variety of people, from across the generations and socioeconomic strata. Our conversations persuade us that Greece is a sort of crystal ball for America’s future. We know this assertion has been both defended and debunked in our mainstream media. But the debate in the press has generally been based on the policy views of assorted columnists and pundits. There has been relatively little in the way of reporting on what’s happening on the ground in Greece, much less on what Greek citizens are saying about how their country’s predicament is affecting their everyday lives. So, we set out to talk to people, to see what they are thinking about current events. Some of our sources are folks we’ve known for years, others were relatively more random encounters. Our information derives from discussions with a diverse group of more than a dozen, among them (1) a retired and formerly successful businessman, who is about 70; (2) a current small business proprietor, who’s in his mid-50s; (3) the successful manger of a leading hotel on the island, in her 40s; (4) a retired merchant marine engineer who owns a bed and breakfast and works part time as a property manager; and (5) a restaurant hostess (in her mid-20s) charged with the hiring and supervision of wait staff. One common theme we hear, in remarks directed mainly at the younger generation (and with deliberate exaggeration), is that “nobody wants to work.” The young folks, it is said, “all want to get a public function job.” We find it ironic that having a “public function” job is viewed as synonymous with “not working” — i.e., these jobs offer great security and benefits, and are perceived as a very easy and cushy way to get paid without having to give up going to the clubs at night. Thus, when the small business proprietor looks for people to help him and his wife pick their olives, younger Greeks won’t take the job. So, the work and the pay go to Albanian immigrants. These are not illegals (that’s another story, and also a serious problem here), but rather Albanians who are legal immigrants, already working at other jobs the local Greeks don’t take. So, the Albanians who pick olives for our small business proprietor “moonlight,” taking work that could be done by young Greeks here on the island. Similarly, we see many employees at local restaurants who are not Greek, but mostly from other and less affluent Balkan countries. The young hostess at one of the island’s finest restaurants finds this frustrating, as she would like to have Greek staff given the local character of the establishment. She can’t find Greeks who want the work, especially with the lure of “public” jobs. Many comment, and we’ve certainly observed, that the array of new taxes enacted in connection with government austerity measures have driven prices up significantly, even above the upward trend line that commenced when Greece joined the euro zone. For example, gas prices are up 20% in the last year, to the equivalent of more than $8 per gallon. This is the result of two successive 10% tax increases on gasoline. More generally, the VAT — the inescapable, pan-European sales tax — has been raised, so prices across the board have risen by about 5%. Salaries for those employed in the private sector have not gone up. Public employees have been largely protected, although not wholly immune from recent austerity measures. Retirees feel threatened, fearful they’ve paid into the “system” for years only to face the prospect of dramatically reduced stipends. Everyone also acknowledges that tax compliance continues to be a major problem here. Indeed, a retired businessman says if Greeks had actually paid all the taxes owed over the past decade or so, they wouldn’t be in nearly such bad shape. Of course, we noted that tax compliance has been very good in the U.S., especially when compared to the rest of the world. This means we don’t have a large source of potential revenue available simply from doing a better job enforcing existing tax laws. On this score, we can understand why the Obama administration is ramping up the size of the IRS, and stepping up tax enforcement. They plan massive tax increases for Americans, including a myriad of fees and mandates embodied in health care and other complex and detailed legislation. They know that a result of this will be that tax compliance in the United States will be “Europeanized” — along with everything else. There are positive findings to relate as well, I’m happy to say. For one thing, there are many bright and hard working young Greeks, and they can make a big difference over time. Also, The Greeks have a rich heritage and are rightly proud of it; they do not apologize for their history, not should they. Finally, and most encouraging, the people we’ve queried all understand that too much government, and too much dependence, have caused the current crisis. They know it will be a slow a painful path back to reality, but they are taking the first steps. Thus, our friend the retired businessman said that he’d been a “progressive,” on “the left” and “very anti-American,” for many years, but now he says that if he and others here had learned from America in the 80s and 90s, Greece would be in a different place. In all of this, naturally, it is easy to see parallels with the United States. Each of us has a great heritage; each has made lasting contributions to the evolution and preservation of Western, and human, civilization. Today, we in the United States should all be looking hard at Greece, wishing her people well, and hoping we’ve not already been hurtled further into the abyss by our current administration’s reckless policies.

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Ray Hartwell reports from Greece

It won’t be the first time… Islamists in America and in the UK are calling 9-11 “Burn an American Flag Day” in response to the “Burn a Koran Day” (that hasn’t taken place and was temporarily suspended) I wonder if the MSM will have a mass media apocalypse just like they did about the Koran burnings by some tiny church in Florida? One answer….no. via W-Zip: In response to pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn the Quran on Saturday 11th of September 2010, Muslims around the world will be burning the greatest symbol of disbelief today the American flag. 9/11 has come to symbolise the struggle between truth and falsehood, the Shari’ah and man-made law and submission to God and liberal democracy. This war is manifested on all levels, militarily, ideologically, socially and even economically. On the anniversary of 9/11, we recall the crusader animosity towards Islam and Muslims epitomised by the burning of the Quran, which is intended to attack Islam and humiliate Muslims. We call upon Muslims around the world to rise up and defend Islam, the Muslims and the Quran. Let us call for the Shari’ah to be implemented wherever we are and the regimes such as those in the Muslim countries which never rise a finger to defend the Muslims to be removed. Let this anniversary be a wake-up call for all Muslims that there are two camps in the world today. The greatest symbol of the camp of truth is the Quran and the greatest symbol of the camp of falsehood is the American flag. Indeed one of the many names of the Quran is Al Furqan(the distinguisher). It is the wish of the Americans and their allies to extinguish the light of Allah but Allah has promised victory to the Muslims and Islam will dominate.” Here’s the video:

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Islamists calling 9-11 “International Burn an American Flag Day” to Promote Sharia and war against Infidels

George W. Bush may be almost two years removed from his White House tenure, but the haters are still at work. Gay Marxist playwright Tony Kushner is the toast of London theatre right now for his series of five small plays called “Tiny Kushner.” Included in the set is a reprise of his piece titled “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy,” featuring Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children. (Byron York offered enough of a summary here .) In an interview with the leftist U.K. Guardian newspaper, Kushner demonstrated his hatred is undiminished: “I wrote it after I was arrested at the big anti-invasion rally outside the United Nations in 2003,” he says. “I left feeling immensely depressed because I knew we had left it too late to make a difference. And then a couple of days later, Bush said that he was grateful to us, because we had offered him a ‘focus group’ . I hate that motherf—er , but for once the man incapable of using the English language had hit on something apt: that’s what the progressive left in America was reduced to, a focus group.” By contrast, Kushner expressed patience with Barack Obama, even as he proclaimed that the insights of Karl Marx are proven in America daily: ” Marxism is alive ,” he says. “What happened under Stalin was horrendous, but in point of fact, Marx never really worked out a solution, it was not his doing. But he was an absolutely astonishing reader of history, and of class. His analysis of capitalism is being proved in America every day .” It takes a confident man to say such a thing in public in America, even today. And Kushner has become confident enough to blow his own horn. His latest stand is a refusal to go along with the disillusionment in Barack Obama; instead, he accuses his Democrat detractors of political narcissism. It is a bit surprising to hear Kushner declare himself “very happy” with Obama’s efforts. “The left is shooting itself in the foot,” he argues. “I don’t want to sound contemptuous, but there is a tendency to see politics as an expression of your own personal purity, a character test. It’s not. It’s about learning to advance a progressive agenda by under-standing the working of a democracy.” That pragmatic understanding is, after all, what got Obama elected. The thought that makes Kushner angry – and makes him talk even faster, more urgently – is of his “community” damaging the Democrats’ chances of fending off a rightwing resurrection in the form of Sarah Palin, or worse. That might send gay rights, his core issue, back to the Reagan era. Ambivalence isn’t really in Kushner’s toolbox when it comes to conservative leaders. Kushner told another interviewer (for the U.K. Prospect magazine ) about the Laura Bush piece: “I’ve always thought of it as a struggle between two characters for developing an internal tolerance of ambivalence. People who don’t have it, like George W. Bush, are very dangerous people.” That interviewer, John Nathan, praised him as a prophet, including how “Kushner’s first play A Bright Room Called Day (1984) made a comparison between Reagan and Hitler (he once told me he was being deliberately irresponsible)—and then what happens? The morning after the play opened, the papers carried pictures of Reagan in Germany placing a wreath at the graves of SS soldiers.” Nathan added that Kushner’s next project “is what he once described to me as his ‘next big gay play,’” titled  The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism and Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures. The Guardian’s review delighted in the Laura Bush play as the best part of “Tiny Kushner,” which “reveals his gift for blending the hallucinatory and the political…even here Kushner’s polemical fury at the Iraq invasion is qualified by his residual sympathy for Mrs Bush. Having mouthed the conventional platitudes in defence of the war, she is shocked into a guilty awareness, telling the imagined children ‘we will pay for your deaths one way or another’.” Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times raved: ”The strongest piece of all is Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy , in which First Lady Laura Bush in her literacy-campaigner guise prepares to read Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor episode to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children. As is typical of Kushner at his best, the piece’s attitudes may be obvious but their expression is richly complex and insightful.” Brent Bozell had a different take on Kushner’s work Angels in America : “the theatrical version of one of those crazy letters to the editor that never end and have too many capital letters.”

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Toast of the London Stage: Play With Laura Bush Reading to Dead Iraqi Children

John The Black Panthers were a criminal gang of the 1960s and 1970s that originated in the Bay Area. They committed sadistic murders along with countless other crimes. The Panthers were almost universally despised, and rightly so; but, for reasons that are of interest mainly to psychologists, they garnered support in some liberal precincts. Now they are being celebrated on the London stage in a new show called Tongues on Fire: The far-reaching influence of Panther style and thinking – immortalised by writer Tom Wolfe in his satirical essay “Radical Chic” – can be traced directly to the election of Barack Obama as president. On Saturday at London’s Barbican centre, in a fascinating mixture of music, art and film, some of the most influential figures in American music will bring the Black Panther Party and that pivotal period in world politics back to life. … [T]he version of the Panthers depicted by the waspish, white-suited [Tom] Wolfe from his Park Avenue vantage point – which also highlights their anti-semitism and less than coherent Maoist leanings – could not be more different to the one that Tongues on Fire presents. As the unit put together by David Murray rehearsed last month in a studio just off Times Square in New York, the series of original lyrics and soul-jazz compositions that they ran through celebrated the Panthers as heroic figures, prepared to risk their lives to organise and motivate the millions of black people in America living in poverty. “A lot of things that we take for granted were started by the Panther movement,” says Ahmir Thompson, who was born in 1970. “I was a living result of some of the changes they made in cities. The Panthers organised after-school programmes, art programmes, sports stuff – anything to build the community. Their goal was that we wouldn’t run idle and get into gang warfare. They’d run block clean-ups, an all-day thing where you’d sweep the neighbourhood. They’d have festivals, where they’d have poets come down and speak.” “They had a strong presentation,” says Thompson. “But to me it was not about how they looked, it was about what they stood for. They took the best of Malcolm X and the best of Martin Luther King. It’s important to understand that they were less about protest, because protest was about asking for something. They were about organising – empowerment and getting things done the right way. “That’s how Obama won.” Thus is history rewritten; not, as is so commonly alleged, by its winners, but rather on behalf of its losers. It is a disgusting phenomenon, but let’s be fair: whatever President Obama’s faults may be, has has absolutely nothing in common with the sociopathic Black Panthers.

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Barack Obama, Black Panther?

Far left crank Ted Koppel preached to America today in The Washington Post . The leftist newsman slammed America for “overreacting” after Al-Qaeda murdered 3,000 innocent Americans on 9-11. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap. The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams. He sounds like Obama. Looking at the Left has more on that fateful day in 2001.

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Lib Newsman Ted Koppel: US Over Overreacted After Al-Qaeda Slaughtered 3,000 American Innocents