Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Lileks Weighs In

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As would be expected:

She doesn’t hate Jews. How could she? Nobody hates Jews. She just wants their homeland dismantled and its residents scattered to – well, somewhere. Take it up with Germany, she notes. Fiddle-de-dee.

Read the comments, as the right-thinking folk of the West line up to applaud her. No doubt some of these people posted it as a Facebook update, leaned back from the keyboard, and felt that rush you get when you know you’ve finally shed some archaic inhibition that kept you from doing what you wanted to do.

It’s okay. You were fooled. You were misled. No one hates the Jews. As for the Yids, the Queers, the lower forms of life known as women – it’ll all sort itself out once the millstone of Oppression is lifted from the breast of the Oppressed.

So that’s what we’re supposed to believe: good will abounds in the world. It flows from the human heart in unstanchable quantities, but now and then things happen. Bad things. Someone makes a movie. Someone dances in public. Someone sits with his wife in a Pakistan McDonald’s. The adults have to step in and make things clear. Calls have to be made. Speech has to be ceased; videos have to be blocked. If you don’t jazz the rabble they’ll come around. Any day now.

Any day.

But yesterday was not that day, and when the mob came to the embassy, it seems there were no Marines to defend the place. Perhaps that’s for the best. In the blinkered, jingo-sodden mindset of Red America, the Marines might have thought weapons free, and mowed the lot of them down. Among the dead would have been a young man – not particularly political, really, caught up in the excitement, really, righteously offended by the existence of a contrapositive argument existing in ones and zeroes on a server in America. His grieving parents would tell the world he had no weapon, he was not a terrorist. Yet they shot him down. Within hours the story would have the Marines outside the gates firing on people who had assembled to list a legitimate grievance – nevermind the security camera footage; the Jews are devilishly good at faking that – and the story would morph in a trice from an act of dogma-sodden barbarism to a tale of conflicting stories that underlines the difficulties of reconciling two sides.

Because the existence of two sides proves the equivalence of two sides. In the larger meta-sense of it all.

As always, read all.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Romney Was Right About That Cairo Press Release

89 Comments

Says the administration.

Funny how some people who claim to be Republicans were so quick to attack him for it, though.

I have to say, though, that no one has talked about one of the most stupid aspects of it. What did they say again?

…continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.

Yes, that’s exactly right. Even assuming that this was a real documentary by a real person who had problems with Muslims, and not a propaganda ploy by Al Qaeda themselves to justify the attacks, which is coming to seem the most likely scenario, that was the purpose of such a flick — “to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Not to attempt to educate people about the nature of Islam or its founder, because they might present a danger to our own values and security. No. It had no purpose than to hurt other peoples’ feelings. And First Amendment or no, in these peoples’ America, no one’s feelings will ever be hurt on account of their religion.

Except Christians who think that we shouldn’t redefine the word “marriage,” and if they do think that, they’re hateful bigots. Or people whose religion requires them to wear sacred underthings. Those feelings deserve to be hurt, and hard.

These aren’t the words of a serious person. They’re the words of a bi-polar kindergarten teacher. And sadly, that seems to be representative of much of the federal government, including those at the Justice Department and in the military who still refuse to admit that the guy who shot up all the soldiers at Fort Hood did it in the name of Allah. We all know that there’s only one religion that can’t be criticized, and we all know why. It is because we are cowards, unwilling to stand up for the principles on which this nation was founded. And because that is a religion which is almost uniquely anti-western, and that also explains a lot about why the Left is in sympathy toward it, and its “feelings.”

Administrative, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Intermittent Blogging

3 Comments

I’m at Space 2012 again today, which is frustrating, because there’s certainly a lot to blog about, with a keyboard hot from Hell. Just go over to PJMedia for a lot of great stuff. How long will the state-controlled press be able to maintain the narrative that Obama is “good on foreign policy“?

[Update a few minutes later]

“We came, we saw, he died.” Just for those who fantasize that Mrs. Clinton would be better on foreign policy than Obama. She is the Secretary of State, after all. This is her foreign policy.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A New Kind Of Leftist

4 Comments

But a Leftist nonetheless:

So what are we dealing with here? A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.

The next step was to shape millions of Americans, especially young Americans, to accept their ideas that the United States was a force for evil in the world, a failed society, a place of terrible racism and hatred for women, and a country where the vast majority didn’t have a fair chance because the system was unfair. In fact, if you take away the varnish rhetoric, they argue that America is a virtual dictatorship of a small minority of wealthy people who just set everything up for their own convenience. Obviously this parallels both Marxist and non-Marxist historical leftism.

The fact that their description of America has so little to do with the actual country makes it all the more impressive that they’ve been able to sell this set of ideas. Having one of their indoctrinated products become president was a special bonus. That doesn’t mean Obama was backed by some conspiracy or singled out for highest office. There are thousands of such people who are in positions of power, including one-third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Obama just perfectly fit the needs of the moment.

Let’s hope the moment has changed.