…is the new Jim Crow. This is a meme worth spreading, I think, as a key psyop of the war we’re in.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Sixty Five Years
That’s how long it’s been since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, with a second one on Nagasaki three days later, ending the war and probably saving millions of lives. Gerard Vanderleun thinks that it’s been too long (three generations now), and perhaps the world needs another reminder. Nuke something for peace.
I Am Developing A Strange New Respect*
…for Lara Logan.
My lack of respect for Katie Couric continues unabated, however.
*This is the phrase that lefty journalists use when a “right winger” adopts the politically correct position.
What Were They Thinking?
So, I’m watching This Week this morning, and thinking that Jake Tapper is the best host they’ve had since Brinkley left, and of course, the thought is spoiled by an ad of Christiane Amanpour coming on and telling us that she’s taking over next month. At which point, of course, the show becomes unwatchable.
Why in the world did the ABC suits decide that Americans want to get their Sunday morning political news from an Iranian, British-raised anti-American “journalist”? I’ll be watching the ratings, but I won’t be watching the show. Especially if George Will is gone.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Jake Tapper, this is one of the things that he elicited from the always smarmy David Axelrod:
This morning on ABC News’ “This Week,” Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod insisted that President Obama’s recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was simply “too important” to wait for a Congressional hearing.
Yes, when it comes to our nation’s health care, we can’t let that pesky “advise and consent” thing and the US Constitution get in the way. It’s for the children.
The Hidden Costs
…of the Jew-baiting in England.
Western anti-Zionists shy away from the dangerous and painful but legitimate and necessary criticism of Muslim radicals. They prefer the easy, cost-free baiting of any Jew proud enough to feel that his or her own people deserve a state. Instead of turning to the Muslims and saying “why can’t you express a fraction of the self-criticism of the Zionists?” they prefer to repeat the most toxic accusations against the Jews and claim: “I’m not saying anything that Jews haven’t said.”
They are the true Islamophobes — afraid to criticize Islam, eager to join in its chorus of hatred.
And in this act of demission before the Islamist challenge, British opinion makers and shapers also submit to their own bullies, their own zealots who push the Jew-baiting beyond the weekend sport of the salons, into the professional arena of anti-Zionist activism. When the founders of Hamas in 1988 penned their genocidal charter that explicitly targeted all infidels, little did they suspect that within twenty years, those infidels would chant “We are Hamas!” in the streets of London. Who could hope for a more useful infidel than that?
In the European past, Jew-baiting may have seemed relatively cost-free. After all, humiliate a Jew and the worst he’ll do is hector you. Sure, sometimes the sport got out of hand, and killing Jews en masse, or forcing them to convert, or kicking them out may have deeply damaged the economy and empowered repressive forces, like the Inquisition, to go after other religious dissidents. But who really noticed?
Today, however, the situation has changed dramatically because Europe doesn’t just run the risk of internal failure, but getting vanquished by an implacable and merciless foe. By failing to denounce toxic Muslim communitarianism and instead adopting its shrill discourse of demonization about Jews, Brits feed the monster that devours them. If it continues apace, if the British do not make Muslim civility towards Jews the shibboleth of assimilation to a free and democratic culture, they risk losing that civil polity entirely. As always with real anti-Semites, the Jews are only their first target.
As Churchill said, they feed the crocodile in the hope it will eat them last.
Muslim Self Esteem
I have some thoughts on the NASA administrator’s recent comments over at PJM this morning.
[Update a while later]
I see that (as is usually the case) most of the commenters over there can’t be bothered to read or comprehend what I wrote, but instead just take it as an opportunity to vent on a public bulletin board.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. Bottom line:
We all know that Bolden means well and wishes to get his agency on board with President Obama’s larger plan to create a kinder and gentler image to the Muslim world in order to lessen world tension and reduce terrorist attacks against the U.S. Unfortunately, world tensions are rising, and 2009 saw the most foiled terrorist attempts against the U.S. mainland since 2001, so one can wonder about the efficacy of these approaches, or even worry that they are having the opposite effect of what they intend. But the real problem with using NASA as an arm of the State Department’s current politically correct agenda is that it is supposed to have other things to do.
What’s really stupid is that it is doing other things, and good ones, but idiocy like this wipes it off the media map.
[Update mid morning]
Mike Griffin weighs in:
“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”
Griffin calls NASA’s new mission, outlined by space agency administrator Charles Bolden in an interview with the al-Jazeera news agency, “very bad policy for NASA.” As for NASA’s core mission of space exploration, Griffin points out that it has been reaffirmed many times over the years, most recently in 2005, when a Republican Congress passed authorizing legislation, and in 2008, when a Democratic Congress did the same thing.
Too bad that you didn’t take NASA’s core mission seriously, Mike. Instead, you completely ignored the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission and the CE&I contractors, and decided to make NASA’s core mission on-the-job training for rocket designers at Marshall, and building an unnecessary new rocket that didn’t even get the crew all the way to earth orbit without help from the crew module.
“NASA has been for 50 years above politics, and for 50 years, NASA has been focused by one president or another on space exploration,” Griffin says. “Some presidents have championed it more strongly than others, and it is regrettable that none have championed it as strongly as President Kennedy.
Oh, please. NASA has been above politics for fifty years? NASA has been ninety percent politics since its inception. It’s a friggin’ government agency. And Kennedy didn’t champion space exploration — he championed beating the Soviets to the moon in a battle in the Cold War. He told his own administrator that he didn’t care about space.
For all his unhappiness with the new policy, Griffin says blame for the situation does not belong with NASA administrator Charles Bolden, whom Griffin calls “one of the best human beings you will find.” “When I see reports in the media excoriating Charlie for this position, that blame is misplaced,” Griffin says. “It belongs with the administration. That is where policy for NASA is set. The NASA administrator does not set policy for NASA, the administrator carries it out.”
Really? Well, gee, Mike, maybe if you’d carried out the Bush policy, instead of perverting it yourself, the agency wouldn’t be in such a mess now.
What Isn’t Wrong…?
Call me crazy, but it doesn’t look to me like Islam has any self esteem issues at all, let alone ones that NASA is likely to do anything about.
(For those who have been emailing me asking me what I think of Charlie Bolden’s excellent diplomatic adventure. I’ll have a lot more thoughts over at Pajamas Media later.)
Bill Kristol
…has had enough of Michael Steele.
This may indeed have been the last straw.
The Gutless Wonders
Will the world secretly hope that Israel does what needs to be done, and then condemn it?
Sounds just like them. Including our own State Department.
A Grim Milestone
The UN “Human Rights” Council has now condemned Israel more than all other countries on the planet combined.
Well, of course. It is the worst country in the history of the universe.
And who would expect otherwise, with such saints and luminaries as this running the UNHCR?
Really, I think that it’s time to move the whole shebang from Turtle Bay to Brussells, the true “capital of the free world.” After all, the anti-dumbass says so.