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Category Archives: Political Commentary
An Elderly Anti-Semitic Racist
You’d almost think that Jeremiah Wright was the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum. I’ll have some more thoughts on leftist/media stereotyping at PJM later this morning.
[Update late morning]
“Socialism represents the future of the west.”
So sayeth the “right wing” Jew hater.
[Bumped]
[Update after lunch]
It just keeps getting better. The guy may have been targetting that well-known bastion of leftist politics, The Weekly Standard. And of course, none of us should be shocked to learn that he was a journalism major…
What A Bargain
Palau is going to take the Gitmo Uighurs off our hands for not much more than ten million dollars each.
This is idiotic.
[Thursday morning update]
…the plan is, apparently, to take Islamists who are driven into violent rages by the sight of a woman with bare arms and let them go in a country full of beaches where “natives often go topless.”
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Bumped]
The Left’s Hatred Of Women
Thoughts from Don Surber:
From left, the women are Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann.
These five women are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.
So-called feminists stand on the sidelines like so many Silda Spitzers or Elizabeth Edwardses or Hillary Clintons, standing by their menfolk while the boys treat women like dirt. Heck, Mrs. Edwards even served as her husband’s attack dog against any critic — even as she knew he was sleeping with his mistress of many years.
It’s kind of ironic, because I recall back in the nineties that these same people stupidly told us that we didn’t like Hillary Clinton because we were “threatened” by a “strong woman” (hilariously ignoring our admiration of Jeanne Kirkpatrick and “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher).
He gets this wrong, though:
Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.
It’s not “liberal” misogyny. These people aren’t liberals, and it’s time we stopped allowing them to get away with slandering true liberals by calling themselves that.
Impromptus
FAQ advice from Jay Nordlinger, on Che, what classical music to listen to, and how to be a journalist. A sample:
I wrote to a Latin America scholar — a superb one — and he said the following: “At one time, I was collecting stuff about Guevara to write a piece of my own, but the subject is so nauseating . . . as if I had to write an article explaining why the Nazis were bad.” Yet such articles are necessary: because the myth-making about Che is strong and mesmerizing. My scholar friend continued, “Are you aware of the fact that there are busts and statues of Che Guevara not just in Central Park but in Vienna and other European capitals?”
Yes, but those busts and statues can be taken down, mentally — with truthful accounts and assessments. With fantasy-puncturing. There is plenty available, for those who wish to see (to see beyond the T-shirt, that is).
My own advice: visit Che-Mart.
He also has an awesome set of classical recommendations, if you’ve never been into it that much.
Which Is Worse?
I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”
I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:
The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.
Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.
It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.
The Liberal-Leftist Mind Set
One of Jonah Goldberg’s readers nails it, I think:
Political thought can be described as a straight line with communism occupying the far left position, fascism the far right.
While I’m in agreement with a lot of its positions I’m not a socialist. For instance, I think some income inequality is probably necessary. And while there are parts of communism that I agree with, there are also parts that I have significant misgivings about, like the relative lack of press freedom and free speech.
There is almost nothing I find appealing or I’m in agreement with when it comes to conservatism.
My own views are pretty centrist. I may lean a little to the left but there isn’t anything extreme about my politics, and besides most of the people I know have similar opinions so I must be pretty solidly in the center.Conclusion:
If I’m in the center, and can find more common ground with communism than conservatism then conservatism must be pretty far to the right; if not exactly fascist very much in the same neighborhood.
Note the false premises that lead to the conclusion, starting with the very first one (which has at least two — the notion that politics is expressible on a single-dimensional axis, and that fascism is the opposite of communisim on such an axis). Another is that such views are “centrist” (a term that again implies that there is a single line to be in the “center” of).
But as Jonah says, their problem is that they don’t understand their own intellectual history, and most of them think that “progressivism” and “liberalism” (neither of which term really applies to their belief system) started in the sixties, when they think about it at all.
Good News
The Democrats will have an uphill political battle to screw up our health care the way they want to.
[Update a couple hours later]
Blue on blue on health care:
“It is all about Democrats,” said Adam Green, chief executive officer of Change Congress, which launched the Nelson campaign. “We only need 50 votes. We could conceivably have 60 votes on our own if we keep Democrats unified. It is a matter of convincing Democrats whose conventional wisdom is based on the old political order. This is an extremely popular proposal spearheaded by an extremely popular president, and it is OK to support it.”
As Michael Barone points out, it’s only popular among young people, who don’t care about it that much, and don’t vote that much. Those of us whose actual health is on the line will fight it tooth and nail, and the “moderate” Democrats know it.
[Mid-morning update]
The Dems have lost the AMA. I applaud the crumbling of this coalition.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More here, from the Gray Lady:
The opposition, which comes as Mr. Obama prepares to address the powerful doctors’ group on Monday in Chicago, could be a major hurdle for advocates of a public insurance plan. The A.M.A., with about 250,000 members, is America’s largest physician organization.
While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.
The devil’s always in the details…
Another Unprovoked Interplanetary Attack
This is like Pearl Harbor all over again:
It is set to impact in the lower-right section of the moon’s near side (see image). Coming in at a very shallow angle – nearly parallel to the ground – the probe has a high chance of skipping across the surface, like a stone across a pond.
It’s all right, though, I’m sure that another presidential apology will be forthcoming directly.
Europe Coming To Life?
An interesting piece on the recent electoral revolt:
The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.
I hope that Americans will wise up as well, next year.
[Update a few minutes later]
As I noted in comments here, immigration, multi-culturalism, democracy. Pick any two.
[Update just before noon]
Here’s a familiar theme:
The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
For establishment politicians, journalists, and academics, these parties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: their existence makes it easy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascist brush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with the likes of Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. No party in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’s Progress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outraged that country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may call Europe’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanced itself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yet despite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed the leftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.
Yes, not “all right turns” are created equal. Particularly when they’re only turns to a slightly different “left” direction. There’s little that fascism has to do with classical liberalism.