Category Archives: Political Commentary

Twenty Years After The Fall

Continued apologists for the communist monsters, particularly on the left and in academia. Imagine the uproar if Anita Dunn had said “…Hitler, one of my favorite personal philosophers.” And yet Mao murdered many more people, an order of magnitude more, than Hitler ever dreamed of killing.

And unfortunately, the old demon isn’t dead. It continues to insinuate itself into our political discourse, but in more subtle ways, via watermelon environmentalism, and demands that health care is a “right,” and that profits and those who earn them are evil.

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.

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.