No, it’s not “violent extremism,” or radical Islam, and it’s not Muslims per se: It’s Islam, and it has been since the formation of the conquering political ideology masquerading as a religion.
And when it comes to Islam, Western leaders are liars or idiots. Embrace the power of “and.”
…is an idiot. No air conditioners are not as big a threat as ISIS, but if you really believe that, turn them off at the State Department.
Gary Johnson, and 74% Donald Trump (13% Hillary).
Of course, the quiz is based on what Trump says, not on what he’s actually likely to do, since no on, probably including him, even knows what that is.
[Update a few minutes later]
A theory of why Thiel supports Trump. Makes as much sense as anything else.
An amusing people-on-the-street interview by Mary Roach. I knew four out of five.
I should do something like this to try to promote my book.
This has already started to be discussed in comments at yesterday’s post, but I want to start a new one: The fourteen worst things for Hillary to come out of it. He basically said she was guilty of pretty much everything, except he wasn’t going to indict her because she was a Clinton.
The Clintons have gotten away with so many felonies over so many decades, Comey didn't want to be the guy to spoil their record.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 5, 2016
[Update a few minutes later]
Comey’s remarks were devastating to Hillary. And no “reasonable” Attorney General meets with the spouse of someone under FBI investigation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Comey sells out the rule of law. And “today’s the day that rule of law died.” And did Comey “destroy Hillary by ‘exonerating” her“?
Pro tip: He didn’t exonerate her any more than Bob Ray did in Whitewater. “Insufficient evidence to indict” is no an exoneration.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is amusing. The State Department refuses to say whether or not Clinton and her aides have retained their clearances.
No one else in this situation would. They’re refusing to say because if they say she and they haven’t, they know the damage it would do to the campaign, as Obama flies her around on AF1, and lets her speak with the presidential seal in front of her lectern.
[Update a while later]
A ” target=”_blank”>mashup from ReasonTV of Comey’s presser and Hillary’s lies. Expect to see a lot of SuperPACs showing this.
On the hundredth anniversary, thoughts on the Somme, from Charles JohnsonCooke.
On display in one cabinet are a couple of pristine machine guns — one a British “Vickers,” the other its German equivalent. My stomach turns inside out at the sight of them. These are the water-cooled monstrosities that were instrumental in producing the great stasis and all of its horrors. Capable of pushing out 500 rounds per minute (eight per second), it convinced both sides that defense was the safest course.
The machine gun, the British journalist Philip Gibbs observed, afforded its bearers the capacity to construct “not a line but a fortress position.” “No chance,” he noted, “for cavalry!” And yet, though the world’s generals knew from experience in Manchuria, from Thrace, and from the killing fields of the American Civil War just how obsolete established military tactics had been rendered by technological change, for much of the First World War the cavalry was given plenty of chances. Mounted or not, advancing forces at the Somme hewed largely to the techniques of old — failing tragically to overcome the conviction that charging with sufficient gusto would, eventually, lead to a glorious breakthrough. It was thus that the poet Rupert Brooke’s romantic conceptions of some “corner of a foreign field that is forever England” gave way to unlovely reality, and those optimistic volunteers who had followed the Ruritanian glory of all that his sonnets promised were met instead with the full might of the Industrial Revolution. There were few fair fights in the Great War — little chivalry or skill or heroism. There was just boredom, and then attrition. Just factory-style death. Just Siegfried Sassoon’s embittered “continuous roar,” and the apocalyptic collision of impregnable defense with naïve attack. In the days of muskets and cannon, one could reasonably expect to push forward to glory. Now, the lions were fed into the meat grinder with everybody else. When soldiers were brave enough to leave their hiding places, the novelist Sebastian Faulks recorded in Birdsong, “the air turned to lead.”
As I noted on Twitter, I hadn’t realized that the battle started exactly fifty-three years after Gettysburg (this weekend is the 153rd anniversary). As Charles notes, the Civil War, particularly the latter stage, with battles like Cold Harbor, provided hints of the horrors to come.
[Afternoon update]
Yes, ideology, not climate change or “Islamaphobia” or racism or poverty or the NRA causes terrorism.
…and people died. A roundup of Benghazi-report links from Instapundit.
The coming constitutional crisis:
How the FBI can look at all this and not recommend prosecution of someone for something in EmailGate strains the imagination. Yet President Obama has clearly signaled that it’s all no big deal. Director James Comey has a tough job before him when he takes the FBI’s official recommendations regarding EmailGate to Attorney General Lynch for action, probably sometime this summer. Since Comey is now under a cloud over the FBI’s embarrassing mishandling of Omar Mateen, the Orlando jihadist mass murderer, perhaps his resignation over that matter would be welcome in the White House, which then could find a new director more willing to bend to Obama’s wishes.
Make no mistake, there are more than a few senior intelligence officials in Washington, DC, who are livid about Hillary Clinton’s willful disregard of clearly defined laws on the handling of classified information. Her misconduct endangered sensitive intelligence programs—and lives. Even if Comey is a sacrificial lamb here, there are high-ranking spies who are perfectly willing to leak the sordid details of EmailGate to the media if the president pulls a Dick Nixon and tries to subvert our Constitution to protect himself and his designated successor.
And in the unlikely event that nobody in our nation’s capital is willing to go public with exactly what Hillary Clinton did, it now seems the Russians may do so. It’s highly plausible that Russian intelligence services, among others, have many of Clinton’s emails, perhaps all of them, given how slipshod her security arrangements were.
If Comey does resign, the Senate shouldn’t approve anyone that Obama nominates to replace him.