Talk of the “atmosphere” of hate will be familiar to anyone who read the left’s reaction to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. But whereas Jared Loughner was a nonideological madman, Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist bent on assassinating an anticommunist American president. At Hot Air, Allahpundit wondered why on earth Democrats wouldn’t just blame Oswald’s communism:
Oswald wasn’t a mainstream liberal or, Lord knows, a mainstream Democrat. He was a fringe leftist, an honest-to-goodness commie. The Oswald apologists could, if they liked, simply emphasize his ideological extremism — his fringiness — as the key to his anti-Kennedy mania.
But they didn’t – just as they defend the Occupy Wall Street protesters, whose movement has been marked by violence, rape, and in one case sympathy for – you guessed it – a would-be assassin who shot at the White House. This is one reason anticommunists had mostly left or avoided the Democratic party. Ralph de Toledano, Whittaker Chambers, and others like them argued there was a design flaw in the American left which would forever hamper their ability and willingness to cast out the crazies, even when they didn’t sympathize with them.
They argued, as the historian of the right George Nash once aptly put it, “that there was a philosophical continuity on the left and that this was disabling to American liberalism, because it could not quite bring itself to have a vigorous enough response to the communists.”
John Podhoretz isn’t impressed with Clint Eastwood’s latest movie:
If you make the mistake of going to see J. Edgar, you will emerge much older by the time the movie finishes, even though only two hours will have passed. Forget all that questionable talk about how those newly tested subatomic particles move so quickly that they violate the rules of time and can order a drink before they walk into the bar. It is Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s only functioning octogenarian director, and not a subatomic particle, who has figured out a way to breach Einstein’s relativity theory. In the theaters in which his movies play, time literally slows down to the speed of an ant. I was so ancient by the time J. Edgar was done that I went home and watched five reruns of Law and Order.
Kerrick also spoke about the current status of the NASA Space Shuttle Program and its official retirement on Aug. 31. The media has caused a lot of worry and uncertainty about the future of NASA’s role in galactic travel, she said.
“Don’t believe the news,” she said. “Through this whole process, I learned not to trust the news.”
Although it is true that the program is gone, Kerrick said, NASA will be around until at least 2020. She also said Orbital, a private company based in Virginia, and SpaceX, a company based in California, are the primary sources of funding to continue the development of shuttles capable of going beyond low-Earth orbit.
It’s unclear whether she really said this stuff, or if the reporter just garbled whatever she actually did say, but there are at least four problems with that last paragraph.
The man you think is a “sucker” because he votes for Republican candidates who don’t seem to give a hoot about him will vote for them every time. He looks at you, the crowd of The-Fix-Is-Always-In, and he casts his lot with the crowd of wealth and initiative.
You see, Mom and Dad, they don’t lie about his prospects. They tell him that he has to sink or swim. They don’t disrespect his willpower by promising that government will make life easier for him. They tell him that they respect his individuality. They tell him straight out what you, the liberal elite, know to be true but will never say. They tell him that life in America is winner-take-all, and that they are the people who will let him keep what he has. They tell him that his religion, his wife’s capacity to reproduce, his children—whether they are “successful” or not—are his treasure. They tell him that they don’t care if he is a person of modest ambition, little sophistication, and humble means. What they value is his capacity to change his own life.
What you tell him is that he should put his life in your hands. Yet you scorn his religion. You mock his faith in the sacredness of conception. You deride his belief in family. You tell him that his love for hunting makes him a murderer, and that his terror at being economically displaced makes him a xenophobe and a racist. Then you emasculate his hope for the future by telling him that if his ship comes in—that dream of a ship that makes the grinding disappointment of daily life worth living through—you’ll help yourself to a big slice of it. And you expect him to believe your rhetoric about fairness and equality when, all the while, you are accusing him of gullibility in his politics and bad faith toward the least fortunate of his fellow citizens. When, all the while, you are living untouched by your own policies. When you are cushioned against life’s hardness, not by government, but by simply knowing other people in your class. You expect him to buy your talk about equitable distribution of wealth when you are sailing through tax loopholes off into the sunset. For this man, his emotions make all the rational sense in the world.