Category Archives: War Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Thanks, Pat Oliphant

6 Comments

Roger Simon:

Oliphant – whose work I usually find humdrum in the extreme – has done us a favor. Deliberately or not, he has dropped the oldest of phony Leftist pretenses – that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same. The poor, diminutive woman and child of Gaza in his cartoon are being eaten alive by a rapacious Jewish star, not by the flag of Israel. It is the religion or ethnic group (you decide), not the state – Jews, not Israelis – performing this supposedly horrific act.

Well, thank you, Oliphant, you racial primitive you. You let the cat out of the bag we always knew was in there. And you did it in the pages of the Washington Post.

It was always a pretty thin excuse.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Ron Radosh:

in his new cartoon, Oliphant echoes the kind of propaganda once favored by the Nazis in their racist paper Der Strumer, edited by one of Hitler’s top journalists, Julius Streicher. What Oliphant does is show a headless Nazi-like soldier- an Israeli- goose-stepping Nazi fashion with his sword ready for action. He is ready to inflict a weaponized Star of David on a mother and child in Gaza. The right side of the religious symbol of Judaism is depicted as a shark coming at the hapless victims.

If you think the comparison to the cartoons in Streicher’s rag is going too far, take a look at this cartoon. Or this one: the Jewish “monster” with his claw-like hands trying to take over the world. One might wonder if Oliphant consulted this Nazi archive for inspiration.

He probably didn’t have to. They have modern equivalents in Middle East media.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

I Feel Much Safer Now

1 Comment

The new administration is disarming the pilots.

The Bush administration was pathetic on this issue, too, but not this bad.

Anyway, stupid bureaucrats are stupid bureaucrats, whatever party is in power.

[Noon update]

Maybe not:

…this sounds to me like either the Times just whiffed this one massively oooooor the White House did want to do something like that and the trial balloon got shot down very fast by a core constituency.

Let’s hope.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Making Orwell Proud

32 Comments

Some examples from VDH:

Guantanamo is still open, but there are no longer “enemy combatants” there (Perhaps the name of the camp can be changed next?). The old campaign snicker that a naïve McCain really believed that a then-stronger economy is “fundamentally sound” is now the new Obama gospel about a far weaker one. There are to be no more earmarks in spite of 8,000-plus new ones. A $3.6 trillion-dollar budget is proof of commitment to financial responsibility; the remedy of Bush’s borrowing profligacy is to increase the deficit from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion. Bush’s signing statements bad; Obama’s signing statements good. An end to lobbyists in an administration ensure there are over ten; the highest ethical standards mean the nominations of Daschle, Richardson, etc. The changing meaning of words really does trump memory and reality itself.

Not to mention what a disaster that it would be to make health insurance benefits taxable, which was one of the many mendacious ways by which they slithered into the White House, except that now, maybe it’s not such a bad idea:

Now that Mr. Obama has begun the health debate, several advisers say that while he will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits, neither will he oppose it if Congress does so.

Let me translate: “Yes, I don’t want to take responsibility for it, because even my lapdogs in the media might find that too much hypocrisy to stomach after all my demagoguery on the issue last fall, but I’ll sign the bill when it gets to my desk, so go for it.”

Well, actually, I’m not sure that it would make Orwell proud. More likely sad at his own prescience.

General, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”

32 Comments

I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.

[Update Sunday night]

More smart diplomacy, with Russia.

[Monday morning update]

Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:

Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”

“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.

I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.

[Bumped]

[Monday afternoon update]

Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:

With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.

Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:

The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.

Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.

It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.

… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.

In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.

Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.

I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.