Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Hero(ine) Of Fort Hood
The woman who stopped a mass murderer. That isn’t the first time that happened. But a requisite condition is that the woman be armed (otherwise her faith in God wouldn’t have been of much help). As the old saying went in the west, “God created man (and woman), but Samuel Colt made them equal.”
There Are A Lot Of Muslims In The Military
Some of them have died for their country. Something to keep in mind in the coming days, and we should be grateful to them and their families.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts from Bob Owens.
The Quality Of Mercy
Courtney Stadd will not have to serve any time in prison:
A former top NASA official was sentenced Friday to three years probation, six months of electronic monitoring and a $2,500 fine for steering contract money to a private client.
…The courtroom was nearly filled with dozens of Stadd’s supporters, many of whom wrote the judge attesting to his good character.
…”The government called this corrupt and a lack of integrity,” Collyer said. “I think it was a closer call than that.
“The jury found that whatever the lack of clarity in ethics briefings, it does not excuse his actions,” she said.
After Stadd told the judge he and his family have been devastated by the case, Collyer said that prison time was not needed to protect the public. However, she said, the sentence she imposed would “send a message to other government employees” to conduct themselves with the highest ethical standards.
Sounds like a sensible judge. Good for Courtney and his family. And it remains galling that no one from the Justice Department seems to be investigating Charlie Rangel.
Let’s Put Them In Charge Of Our Health
“Friends Of The Moon”
Leonard David has the story of the budding lunar environmental movement.
Is this stupid? Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Yes, it is.
The Shooting Gallery
More thoughts on the nuttiness of not allowing weapons on base:
“It’s a tragedy to lose soldiers overseas and even more horrifying when they come under fire at an Army base on U.S. soil,” said President Obama.
Indeed. How ironic: Survive Iraq or Afghanistan then get picked off like a game bird in a bland, institutional “Soldier Readiness Center” in Texas.
Soldiers in other countries are allowed to carry arms on base and even when they are off-duty. In Israel, for instance, soldiers are issued a rifle and then . . . it’s theirs. One sees slender 18-year-old girls, traveling from base, home to the suburbs for Shabbat dinner, still slung with a massive M-16 rifle almost as big as they are. The prevelance of arms doesn’t mean the country experiences the kind of random mass murders seen in the United States. It means that the few times someone has gone crazy with a gun in a city street, he was taken down fast by bystanders.
But not American soldiers. When asked if ordinary soldiers nearby had been carrying their service weapons, Fort Hood spokesman Lt. Gen Robert Cone said piously, “We do not carry weapons. This is our home.” Defense is out-sourced to military police, or even — oh the indignity! — to civilian policemen.
More dips for the tar and feathers.
Gee, why aren’t there ever mass shootings at gun shows?
Read the whole thing. There’s also an appalling story about the USS Cole bombing that I hadn’t heard before.
Continuing To Ignore The Problem
Andy McCarthy expands on some Fort Hood thoughts that I had in comments yesterday:
The depth of the challenge we face is daunting. Hatred for America and the West is rampant in the Islamic world. We are not merely willfully blind to it. Our government, wittingly or not, is endorsing it, and not just by Obama’s apology tours. At his ballyhooed Cairo speech on Islam and the West, the president insisted — over the objections of the Mubarak government — on inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom administration insiders view as Islamists we can work with. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto remains “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” It is the same Muslim Brotherhood that encourages suicide bombings and other terrorizing of Israelis (i.e., “resistance”) in the Palestinian territories. It is the same Muslim Brotherhood for which Qaradawi — who has promised that Islam will “conquer America” — speaks.
Islamism is about a lot more than al Qaeda. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a mass-murder under the influence of principles held by a disturbingly large percentage of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. Rather than condemning those principles as barbaric, it is the policy of our government either (a) to pretend that those principles do not exist, (b) to pretend that they are held only by a teeny-tiny handful of extremists who have “hijacked” Islam, or (c) to encourage the Muslims who hold them by engaging, embracing and legitimizing the leaders who preach them. Under these circumstances, I think Victor’s three-to-six-month timeline is not only sensible; it’s the best we can hope for — and the atrocities are going to get worse.
You can’t win a war when a) the country’s leadership refuses to recognize that we are in one and b) the country’s leadership doesn’t even believe in the concept of victory. At least when it comes to non-domestic enemies.
One Of The Great Flukes Of American History
Dr. K. says that Obamaism is over:
White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.
The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.
November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
One of the reasons that I called it wrong last year was that it was such a perfect storm of unforeseeable events. In 2012 (or even next year), the president won’t be able to repeat his Rorschach act, and be all things to all people. He’s now a much better-known quantity and a lot of people aren’t liking what they’ve learned, and what the press did such a good job of hiding from them last year. Plus, the voters have assuaged their racial guilt by voting for him once, and will now feel no need to continue the punishment by doing so again.
[Update a few minutes later]
Barack Obama’s mandate gap.
The Latest Lies
…from Pulitzer-winning Maureen Dowd. Are any of these supposedly prestigious awards worth anything, any more?