More thoughts on the late Stalinist:

Sometimes, this hypocrisy took the form of amnesia. In 1980, when the Afghans were getting their own taste of the Brezhnev doctrine, Cockburn wrote of their country:

An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world…. If ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.

That, you see, is what they call “speaking truth to power.” Predictably, Cockburn opposed the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. An alleged “radical,” he nevertheless defended the status quo when it came to the most barbaric reactionaries and seemed comfortable with, if not amenable to, the death-cult establishments in Palestine and Lebanon. In fact, when I think hard about it, I wonder why this man was considered a radical at all. When your essential worldview is shaped by the writings of a 19th century German philosopher, you are not a radical. When you publish op-eds by dictators who have been in power since Eisenhower was president, you are, in a very literal sense, a conservative. When you’re skeptical about everything except Josef Stalin, you cannot be said to have a very developed sense of bucking “the establishment.”

Really, these people are quite odious.

“Not yours.”

More thoughts on the hypocrisy and appeasement of the IOC from Ilya Somin.

Like the UN, I wouldn’t shed a tear if the IOC and the Olympics themselves disappeared from the planet.

Not just a family affair.

Andrew McCarthy has some questions for John McCain and Speaker Boehner:

So I was hoping maybe the speaker could explain to us: Hypothetically, if Huma Abedin did have a bias in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, and if she were actually acting on that bias to try to tilt American policy in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, what exactly would the State Department be doing differently?

Yes, I’d like to see an explanation of that, too. But Huma’s not really the problem — Barack Obama is.

Thoughts on the recently deceased Stalinist, Alexander Cockburn.

Andy McCarthy, on how political correctness has taken over both major parties, to the detriment of our security.

The Obama administration and the Republican establishment would have us live a lie — a lie that endangers our liberties and our security. The lie is this: There is a difference between mainstream Islamic ideology and what they call “violent extremism.”

The vogue term “violent extremism” is chosen very deliberately. To be sure, we’ve always bent over backwards to be politically correct. Until Obama came to power, we used to use terms like “violent jihadism” or “Islamic extremism” in order to make sure everyone knew that we were not condemning all of Islam, that we were distinguishing Muslim terrorists from other Muslims. (In a more sensible time, we did not say “German Nazis” — we said “Germans” or “Nazis” and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.) But now, the Obama administration and the Republican establishment prefer to say “violent extremism” because this term has no hint of Islam.

According to the Obama Left and the Republican establishment (personified today by the likes of Sen. John McCain and many, but by no means all, former high-ranking officials from the Bush 43 administration), the only Muslims we need to be concerned about are terrorists, and there is nothing relevant in the fact that they happen to be Muslims. “Violent extremists” are not motivated by a coherent ideology, much less by scriptures from “one of the world’s great religions.” Instead, they are seized by a psychological disorder that inexplicably makes them prone to mass-murder attacks.

The fall-out from this line of thinking is that we must conclude mainstream Islam, everywhere on earth including the Middle East, has nothing to do with violence, and therefore, it is “moderate,” and even “admirable.” Sure, it may be advocating the adoption of something called “sharia,” but we needn’t worry about that. After all, we have Western scholars of Islamic studies (mostly working in university departments created by lavish donations from Saudi royals) who will tell you that sharia is amorphous and evolving — such that nobody really knows exactly what it is, anyway. Consequently, nothing to see here, move along. You are to accept as an article of faith that there is no reason to believe people steeped in mainstream Islam will resist real democracy or that they will remain hostile to the United States. And, yeah, sure they are opposed to Israel, but that is just a “political dispute” about “territory”; it has nothing to do with ideology or mainstream Islam per se.

This reminds me of Jonah’s thesis in his new book of how full of it leftists are when they claim to have no ideology. No, they’re just “pragmatists,” who just want to do “what works.” If we continue to deny that sharia is the goal of our enemies, then we will not fight it, and we will lose. We have to recognize that the “Arab spring” is giving way to a new form of Nazism in the Middle East, except one of Arab supremacy rather than Aryan, but just as totalitarian.

…for the sake of Islam. No duty greater than Jihad.