…with a US National Security Advisor like this.
[Monday morning update]
Today, we are all Israelis. Well, OK, maybe not the National Security Advisor.
Category Archives: War Commentary
A Pithy Comment
…over at Althouse’ place:
A religion that elevates men over women, lets you wear cool robes and headgear and carry guns and take exotic names and shit – what could be more appealing to a stupid boy who hasn’t done anything with himself yet?
Win-win for him.
Sadly, there are a lot more like him out there.
Not So Hip And Edgy
Thoughts on Bill Clinton and Comedy Central, from Mark Steyn:
Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing tea partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the tea partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both “Tim” and “Tea” are three-letter words beginning with “T”: Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you’re for him and he’s for thee, completely interchangeable. To lend the point more gravitas, President Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he’s trying to determine whether that’s his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.
Will it work? For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.” Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the tea-party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare’s opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank’s sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank’s sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore.
It’s all like that. Few people can write so entertainingly about such serious subjects (though Lileks can give him a run for his money).
Too Bad I Can’t Draw
It’s less than a month until “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn explains.
Comedy Central’s Cowardice
Some thoughts:
…note how entirely real radical Muslim threats and violence are treated as just part of the weather — something you have to adapt to — while nonexistent Tea Party violence is an existential threat to the Republic.
Watch out what kinds of behavior you reward, and what kinds you punish. You’re likely to get more of the former, and less of the latter.
[Update a few minutes later]
I liked this comment at Ann Althouse’s place:
Obama is reaching out to Muslims. Maybe he wants to learn the secrets of their success in shutting people up.
It sure looked like a threat to me. I’m sure the Department of Justice will get right on it.
[Update a while later]
Krikorian’s Corollary To Sullivan’s Law: “All organizations that are not actually anti-jihadist will over time become dhimmified and accommodate themselves to jihadism.”
Sounds right to me.
A Quixotic Quest
Roger Simon is trying to get the LA Times to release the Khalidi birthday tape.
It’s never going to happen. I’m guessing that if it ever came to light, it would destroy the president’s support and fundraising ability in West LA. Not to mention New York, south Florida and other places. In fact, I would be completely unsurprised it it turns out that it’s already been destroyed.
Figuring Out Who The Rubes Were
Barack Obama’s reelect numbers are down to 42% among Jews.
[Update a while later]
Is the US still an ally of Israel?
The hard Left’s multiculturalist furor at Israel has made enormous inroads into the Democratic party, as we see with the current “reset” policy of the Obama administration, while the old blue-blood, country-club Republicans who tsk-tsked Israel have almost vanished. Over the last 20 years the Left has reconstructed Israel from a bastion of the traditional liberal Jewish tradition into a Western, capitalist hegemonic oppressor, all of which shows the power of campus multculturalism when a tiny democratic country of 7 million can be reconfigured into a colonial power.
And that hard Left is running the country now. At least until January.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why Barack Obama is making Rashid Khalidi happy. Funny thing, the LA Times never has released the video of the birthday party. I wonder if it even exists any more?
Thoughts On Oklahoma City
And the vile demagoguery of the Democrats in the wake of it, from Glenn Reynolds:
Lies and smears aimed at their fellow Americans, for short-term political gain. This is who they are, and this is what they do. It worked better, however, when there were fewer alternative channels of communication, and when their character was less well-known.
And as he notes, they’re busy going after imaginary “right wing” “terrorists,” while pretending that the real ones, who really do want to destroy our civilization, don’t exist. And they are being ignored to the point that we can’t even describe their motivations. In fact, they were doing it then — the White House and Janet Reno’s justice department shut down any investigation that might have led to the revelation of offshore help for McVeigh. Once they had their white “right-wing” “Christian” (he was an agnostic) terrorist, no need to confuse the American people with John Doe Number Two. Besides, if (say) Iraq had been shown to be involved, they might have had to do something about it.
Who Needs Apartheid
Mark Steyn, on the ugly elephant in the “Palestinian” living room:
If Muslims are so revolted by Jews that they cannot tolerate any living among them, well, they’re free to believe what they want. What is less understandable is the present position of the United States government. The President and his Secretary of State have made it very clear that they regard a few dozen housing units in Jerusalem as a far greater threat to Middle East peace than the Iranian nuclear program. Why is it in the interest of the United States to validate, enthusiastically, the most explicit and crudest bigotry of the Palestinian “cause”?
It’s not bigotry if it’s directed at the Jews, of course.
Ahmadinejad Is No Rube
He’s clearly got Barack Obama’s number:
Unlike the United States, Iran is run by adults. This is why the world fears Iran more than it fears the United States.
Has there been any rally to the side of the United States in this dispute?
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows this and so he mocked Obama: “Mr. Obama, you are a newcomer (to politics). Wait until your sweat dries and get some experience. Be careful not to read just any paper put in front of you or repeat any statement recommended. (American officials) bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”
I remember thirty years ago, when there was so much “liberal” concern that Ronald Reagan would lead the US into war. But just as in 1938, it’s feckless thinking and policies like these that are much more likely to, and one for which we’re not prepared.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thoughts of allies and enemies past:
Why does this matter, other than that it is stupid for a country to treat old friends like belligerents and old belligerents like friends?
In the case of Britain, history resonates. Over the last century it was Britain that, sometimes alone, defended liberal constitutional government, whether from Prussian militarism or the hydra of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese militarism. It was always a reliable partner in the Cold War, and aside from normal periodic spats was a loyal ally in most of America’s postwar fights. We forget sometimes the courageous record of the British in Korea, or their lonely alliance with us in Iraq. Note that this is all apart from the British role in general in the shaping of Western liberal political history, and in particular the protocols and values that underlie so much of the American experiment, from a common language to a rich heritage of literature and thought. For an American president to be woefully ignorant of all that, and why it should count, is nothing short of unbelievable.
Obama is equally clueless about why, for a half-century at least, both Republican and Democratic presidents have forged a second special relationship, this one with Israel. There certainly were not always strategic advantages in doing so, given the Arab world’s vast petroleum reserves, its huge size and population in comparison to tiny Israel, and the global fear, first, of rampant Soviet-inspired Palestinian terrorism, and, subsequently, its radical Islamic epigone.
But he’s throwing that all away. Let’s just hope that 2013 isn’t too late to resurrect the relationships.