The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Transformation Complete, Charles Johnson Denounces Ronald Reagan

Posted on | December 8, 2013 | 106 Comments

So stunningly rapid was his descent into obscurity that every post about the Lizard King’s latest self-humiliation must be prefaced with a reminder that he actually used to be somebody — cited by Rush Limbaugh! a co-founder of PJ Media! — until that day in October 2007 when he decided that Pamela Geller’s attendance at an anti-jihad conference in Brussels was some kind of hate crime or something.

Blame the Jews? CJ’s unraveling happened slowly and quietly at first. Most people weren’t entirely sure whether this blog war was legitimate, so they ignored it as long as they could. Yet the attacks on creationists and “climate denialists” steadily escalated:

He believes his disagreements with some conservatives should have become obvious in the spring of 2008 when he slammed Ben Stein for his anti-evolution movie, “Expelled.” In numerous posts since, Johnson has derided what he sees as the right’s anti-science bent. “When they teach their children that,” Johnson said, “they are raising a generation of kids who aren’t going to be ready to deal with the world in which science is increasingly important.”


Science! Charles denounced Glenn Beck! Charles denounced Rush Limbaugh! Charles denounced the Tea Party as racist and the Great Purge began — ban! ban! ban! 

LGF exists now as a rancid festering cesspool of eccentric left-wing mania, filled with disgruntled trolls and mindless sycophants, a place where disagreement is disloyalty and opposition is hate.

Because . . . Science!

“Chuck Johnson: Race Detective” — this was it, you see? The same cut-and-paste guilt-by-association game he used against Pamela Geller was expanded: Everyone must denounce anybody or anything that offends Charles Johnson who, having appointed himself the Indisputable Arbiter of Acceptability, purges anyone who does not share his peculiar obsessions. How’s that working out for ya?


Blogs that did not even exist in 2007 — e.g., Professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection — have zoomed to success, while Charles Johnson has made LGF the most spectacular failure in blog history.

OK, so what about CJ’s claim that Nelson Mandela “turned to communists like Fidel Castro” because “Reagan supported apartheid”? This bizarre ahistorical claim was called to my attention because Louise Mensch started talking back to Charles on Twitter:

The question to be answered, however, is not whether Reagan’s opposition to sanctions was tantamount to supporting apartheid.

Rather, the question is, “When did Mandela turn to communists?” And the answer is, long before Reagan became president.

Mandela was “appointed the leader of the newly formed Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla movement, an underground military arm of the ANC,” in 1961, to quote the Washington Post. “After raiding the ANC offices, police [found] documents outlining an armed campaign to overthrow the government. Mandela and nine others [were] charged with conspiracy. . . . After an eight-month trial, Mandela and seven others [were] sentenced to life in prison [in 1964] and taken to Robben Island.”

This happened when the presidents of the United States were John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. If JFK or LBJ (both Democrats) protested the arrest and imprisonment of Mandela, or did anything to end apartheid in South Africa, this has escaped my notice. But as to the wisdom of U.S. policy, either under JFK or LBJ or later under Reagan, it is important to remember that the chief object of our foreign policy was opposition to communism, especially Soviet-backed “wars of national liberation” in Third World countries. Charles Johnson will not let the evident fact that he doesn’t know a goddamned thing about Cold War history (or any other history, for that matter) impede the use of his “Race Detective” skills against Ronald Reagan.

Let the education begin. What do we know about the ANC and its military wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) guerrilla movement, known as MK? From The Diplomacy of Liberation: The Foreign Relations of the ANC since 1960 by Scott M. Thomas:

The less publicized support socialist states gave the ANC was the military training of its cadres. Before the Sino-Soviet split, key ANC personnel were trained in China at the Nanking Military Academy. Soviet bloc para-military training took place in Cuba, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. For more advanced training, recruits went to the Soviet Union.
Unkhonto training bases in Africa in the early 1960s were mainly in north Africa. By 1964, recruits were being trained in Egypt (about 25), in Algeria (about 50-70), and smaller numbers in Ethiopia, Ghana (organized by Ghana’s Bureau of African Affairs, but with Soviet instructors), in Morocco and Tanzania.
Chinese and Soviet training arrangements were made until the Umkhonto’s camps could be built in southern Africa. The first bases were in Tanzania, after independence in 1961, and in Zambia after independence in 1964. According to Anatoly A. Gromyko, the Director of the Institute of African Studies, arms, ammunition and some Soviet training personnel began arriving at these newly established Umkhonto bases after Zambia’s independence. . . .
The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Eastern bloc, particularly the GDR [German Democratic Republic, i.e., East Germany], and Angola trained cadres . . . North Korea and Bulgaria helping to a lesser extent. By the early 1980s, the ANC’s Chief Representative in [East Germany] acknowledged that an increasing number of ANC cadres were being trained there in various fields, particularly law, engineering, and natural science. This was a cover for military training since Umkhonto recruits in the Soviet Union were openly identified with the ANC and the SACP [South African Communist Party], but in [East Germany] they trained in civilian clothing under the guise of doing other courses.
For some Umkhonto recruits there was a country specialization in the progression of training: Mozambique … for political strategy, Angola for weapons training, the Soviet Union for general training, including a platoon commanders’ course in tactics and artillery and an advanced infantry course for officers. The best Umkhonto recruits were sent to [East Germany] for more advanced studies in communications, sabotage, topography, map reading, military engineering, and political theory. …
The [South African Communist Party] was instrumental in forming Umkhonto we Sizwe. …. While Mandela made the arrangements to set up training bases for Umkhonto cadres during his Africa tour in 1962, Arthur Goldreich, a member of the SACP and Umkhonto, went to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the same purpose. Although his trip was to obtain military assistance, including explosives for sabotage, Goldreich tried to convince the Soviets to directly intervene in South Africa, but they declined. They only promised military assistance and reportedly gave Goldreich $2.8 million.
Oliver Tambo has acknowledged he went to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1963. He was accompanied by Moses Kotane, Secretary-General of the SACP, and Duma Nokwe, Secretary-General of the ANC. …
The ANC’s main training bases were set up in northern Angola in 1977. … Five training camps were set up in northern Angola, holding between 2,000 and 8,000 Umkhonto combatants. … [T]he training was given by East German, Cuban and Soviet instructors. …
Developments in Angola were closely connected to the ANC’s relations with Cuba. Six months after military preparations began in northern Angola, in October 1977, Oliver Tambo went to Havana to discuss the role Cuba could play in the liberation struggle. The following year, Alex La Guma, a South African author who was also a key member of the SACP, established the ANC’s office in Havana. …

The fact is, the ANC was allied with the South African Communist Party and, for nearly two decades before Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, the ANC and its MK guerrilla movement were aligned with the Soviet-led communist bloc, including East Germany and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Explain this however you wish, the immediately relevant point is, YOU CAN’T BLAME IT ON REAGAN, YOU IDIOT!

Permit me also to call to the reader’s attention two posts by Professor Donald Douglas at American Power:

Facts are very important to people who care about truth, a category from which Charles Johnson long ago excluded himself.





 

 

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Category: Charles Johnson

Rule 5 Sunday: Slow Turning

Posted on | December 8, 2013 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I am, as usual, obliged to remind the Loyal Readers that while most of the links to follow are quite tasteful and artistic, others are Not Safe For Work, and clicking on them could lead to a serious contamination of your purity of essence, among other unfortunate eventualities. On with the linkagery!

This week we begin with Laughing Conservative and Sophie Howard. Blogfodder debuts with a sampling of Dr. Who companions, Goodstuff returns with Jennifer Lawrence selfies (also the world’s sexiest fertilizer commercial), and Reaganite Republican checks in with Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival. Fishersville Mike has Carrie Underwood, while Ninety Miles From Tyranny offers Girls With Guns, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Morning Mistress. Yankeephil chips in with Fred Astaire for the ladies, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’s Pretty Girls on a Thursday is all about the hot cosplay, and First Street Journal has Life In The Combat Zone.

EBL’s heifers this week include Auburn cheerleaders, Seattle Seahawks Sea Gals, former Scott Walker staffer Taylor Palmisano, A Fish Called Rule 5, and Erin McDonald shilling for Obamacare.

Wine Women and Politics serves up Sensual Delights, TGIF Hot Babes, Delicious Daring & Devilish, Sensual Daring Mysterious & Beuatiful, Subtle Sexuality, and Monday Monday.

Postaldog returns with Gillian Anderson, a double helping of Hilary Duff, Chloe Bennett, Natalie Gulbis, and Amber Heard.

A View From The Beach this week featured Grimm Girls, The Denisovans Sure Got Around (with cavegirl content), Friday Monkey Dacker, That’s Sexist!, “Bottom Of The River”, A Cause I Could Undress For, You’re Excused!, Monday Morning Stretch, and Cheap Bourbon.

Soylent Refuge serves up your morning muffins, followed by an open cockpit, Konnichiwa Cameltoe-San, Monday Motivationer Aerobics, Here Kitty Kitty, Overnighty Amanda Barbara, Tuesday Titillation Heather, Evening Awesome, Humpday Hawtness Featurette Mariella, Falconsword Fursday Classic Kyla, Set The Snoochinator To 1992!, Corset Friday, T-GIF Friday, Linky Love Contenders Or Pretenders, and Weekender Ginger Awesome.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Genevieve Curran, his vintage babe is Marie McDonald, and the Sex In Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret. Also, the obligatory 49ers cheerleader! Dustbury also found Gillian Anderson‘s eel compelling, and also sent in Rebel Wilson with large colorblocks.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline for submitting links to the Rule 5 Wombat is Saturday, December 14.


Category: Rule 5

Rocky Horror Elementary School

Posted on | December 8, 2013 | 106 Comments

“Equal rights” sounds so wonderful. Who can be against equality?

Yet as Richard Weaver warned us long ago, Ideas Have Consequences, and the sledgehammer logic of “equal rights” brutally dismantles every common-sense objection. Even the most obvious facts — e.g., boys and girls are different — must therefore be suppressed to conform with The Equality Principle. So . . .

Boys who think they are girls have a “right” to use the girl’s restroom (wait for it) in first grade:

In Colorado, transgender people are allowed by law to access public or workplace restrooms designated for the gender that matches their identity. That was affirmed in June when the Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled that a 6-year-old transgender girl, who was born male, could use the facilities for girls in her Fountain school.

School board member Kathy Svenson objected to this policy and is now being demonized as a hater for her objections.

In October, Kathy Shaidle called attention to this quote from a Think Progress writer: “The reality of transgender people is also a great natural and moral truth.” In the secular gospel of political correctness, prejudice and discrimination are the only sins. This is an idea whose consequences are generally underestimated, although the recent madness at a cathedral in Argentina is a good clue of what lies ahead.

 

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

 

 


Category: Culture, Education, Gays

Flipping The Benghazi Bird

Posted on | December 8, 2013 | 18 Comments

The wind farm news is probably more symbolic than anything.

Category: humor

FMJRA 2.0: Drivin’

Posted on | December 7, 2013 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

‘Unspeakable Atrocities’

Obama’s Underpants Gnome Economy

‘They Started to Fight Over Her and I Knew She Was Going to Be Raped’

Martin Bashir Resigns from MSNBC, Disappointing Dozens of Viewers

Rule 5 Sunday: Quiet Splendor

Ask NY Times Who Deserves More Pay: America’s Troops or Fast-Food Workers?

‘Why Couldn’t It Be Scott Walker?’ Feminist Tweets After Paul Walker Killed

Slaves of the Progressive Cause

Britain Belatedly Admits It Has an ‘Islamist Extremism’ Problem

1987: Thatcher Responds to ‘Further Intensification of the Armed Struggle’

Shocking Video: ‘Coven’ of Pro-Abortion Women Attack Church in Argentina

‘I’m Not Some Whack Job,’ Says Jailed Alabama Blogger Roger Shuler

‘Suck It, Capitalist-Hating Leftists’

FMJRA 2.0: Riding With The King

INCREDIBLE DISASTER! CATASTROPHE! APOCALYPSE!

Public Education News Updates

Administration Says ObamaCare Site Is Working; CNN Finds Otherwise

Guardian Losing $50 Million a Year?

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.02.13

Cyber Monday: Thanks to the Reader Who Bought the $200 Lego Set From Amazon!

But If They’re ‘Born That Way’ …

Your Tax Dollars at Work: PETA Protests Weird Animal Sex Research Projects

Let the Paul Walker Death Crash Conspiracy Theories Begin!

One Week Until Bill Schmalfeldt’s Next Carroll County Circuit Court Hearing

LIVE AT FIVESEVEN: 12.03.13

VIDEO: ‘ObamaCare … Just Doesn’t Work’

The Left’s ObamaCare Desperation

Ready for the Debt-Crisis Apocalypse?

The Great Conflation

It’s Official: Detroit Is Bankrupt

Anarchy in the UK: Guardian Editor Admits Endangering British Agents

Taylor Palmisano Hates Her Some F**king Mexicans, and Loses Her F**king Job

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.04.13

Why Everybody Hates Atheists

BREAKING: Identity Theft Industry Considering Healthcare.gov Bailout

Arkansas Democrat’s Re-Election Ad: ‘Jesus Told Me to Vote for ObamaCare’

Thanks to the Reader Who Bought the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-Inch HDX Tablet

LGF’s Charles Johnson Blames Bashir Resignation on ‘Right Wing Lynch Mob’

Lunenburg, Massachusetts: Mother Suspected in Fake Racism Hoax?

In The Mailbox: 12.05.13

A Death In Bedford Falls

Ace Hates Him Some Spider-Man

LIVE AT FIVEEIGHT: 12.06.13

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL 40 (at least; mercy rule invoked)
  2. Dead Citizens Rights Society 17 (includes 1 Dead Republican Party)
  3. Regular Right Guy 14
  4. The DaleyGator 9
  5. The Camp of the Saints 8
  6. A View From The Beach 7
  7. (tied) Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, Conservative Hideout, and The Pirate’s Cove 5

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA will be noon on Saturday, December 14.


Category: FMJRA Award

Disapprove of Gay Sex With Teenagers? ‘In That Case Just Shut Your Mouth’

Posted on | December 7, 2013 | 433 Comments

Neutral Objective Journalism:

A columnist for the Huffington Post site says it is homophobic to criticize gay men who use Internet sex sites to meet teenage partners and only “bigots” are offended by such “nurturing intergenerational bonds.”
Publicity about a relationship between 39-year-old Hollywood screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and 19-year-old British diving champion Tom Daley has inspired criticism even from some gay rights activists.
Joshua Epstein, a blogger who identifies himself as a gay progressive Democrat, reacted to the Black-Daley affair on Twitter: “He could be his father. Yuk.” That reaction was condemned by Huffington Post columnist Michelangelo Signorile, who said only “internalized homophobia” could cause gays to criticize such relationships.
“There is an undercurrent in these comments — the ‘chicken hawk’ charge — that suggests that gay men are more likely to sexually abuse underage teens, the ugliest lie about gay men out there,” Signorile wrote Friday in Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices” section. “Hardcore homophobes are predictably pointing to Black and Daley as supposed proof. But many gay men too, so defensive about the charge and deathly fearful of how it’s used, overcompensate by saying ‘yuk.'”
Signorile specifically defended sites that promote “intergenerational” gay sex. “Some younger people are attracted to older people, and vice versa,” he wrote. “There’s even a gay website called Daddyhunt. The famed novelist Armistead Maupin’s 27-years-younger husband, Christopher Turner, founded it. The met on another one of Turner’s sites, HotOlderMale.com. If that’s not your thing, it’s totally cool, but in that case just shut your mouth.” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

Category: Gays, Sex

Grabbing the Other End of the Rope

Posted on | December 7, 2013 | 130 Comments

Rush Limbaugh occasionally says, “I don’t need ‘balance.’ I am balance.”

That is to say, when all the major institutions of politics, media and culture are dominated by liberalism, the conservative who aims to critique and counterbalance the regnant ethos need not concern himself too much with presenting The Other Side of the Story.

As Limbaugh also likes to say, if you don’t like what you hear on his show, you can turn almost anywhere else — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. — and get the opposite viewpoint. The rise of conservative alternative media, especially Fox News, has somewhat attenuated Rush’s status as a lone dissenting voice, and conservative commentary now flourishes online, so it is possible to find an echo-chamber on the Right (what Julian Sanchez called “epistemic closure”). And during the Bush presidency, the Left created institutions (notably Media Matters) based on the dubious theory that Fox News and other conservative media had too much influence.

That theory cannot be reconciled with the facts:

NBC Nightly News  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 million
ABC World News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 million
CBS Evening News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 million
Fox News (The O’Reilly Factor) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 million
MSNBC (Hardball with Chris Matthews) . . . . . 940,000
CNN (Anderson Cooper 360) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605,000

Fox News is, as it proudly boasts, Number One in Cable News, accounting for 68% of the cable news audience. Add in the major network evening news broadcasts, however, and the total news audience is closer to 30 million, of which Fox’s share is about 11%.

In other words, 89% of news on TV is reliably liberal in its perspective, and the Left’s obsession with Fox News is absurd. Why should Media Matters have an annual budget of $10 million to counteract the influence of a network that gets 11% of the news audience?

This understanding of how liberalism continues to dominate the news media should inform how we view the mission of conservative alternatives and, for those of us who operate within the universe of conservative New Media — including bloggers and those who use Twitter, Facebook, e-mail newsletters and podcasts to spread the message — it should shape our understanding of that mission.

Could I write a bullet-point presentation on the insights to be gained from this kind of analysis? Sure, but anyone can look at the data and draw their own conclusions, and one of the most valuable insights is that no one has a monopoly on truth. No blog is an island, as I like to say, and it is important to avoid the narcissistic temptation of thinking that your site is the Only Site That Really Matters, defining the limits of the known ideological universe, a one-stop source for Everything Anybody Could Ever Need to Know About Anything.

All of the forgoing 400-plus words are a sort of preamble to explaining why I sometimes “go off on a tangent,” as critics might say, writing about relatively obscure topics (e.g., “Free Kate“) that some readers view, quite rightly, as being outside the mainstream. Regular readers have come to expect this from time to time, but as it is not my habit to explain or justify my actions — just do the work, and let the work speak for itself — occasionally even the most loyal reader may complain.

“Gosh, Stacy, enough with Bill Schmalfeldt already!” or, “Why aren’t you writing about that awful thing John Boehner just said?”

  1. Modesty of Ambition: How much difference will it make for me to become the 423rd conservative blogger to denounce Boehner’s latest betrayal of the conservative grassroots? Will Boehner even notice? Who am I to imagine that my own criticism would add anything useful or helpful to the discourse?
  2. Avoiding Redundancy: If every blogger takes the same approach to covering current events, we are merely divvying up the same “pie” of readership. Suppose that there are five or six major national news stories being discussed on Fox News, being linked at the top of the Drudge Report and so forth. Unless I have something distinct to add to the discussion, what is the benefit to readers — or to myself — of jumping aboard the punditry bandwagon on every one of those big stories, or any of them, for that matter?
  3. Independent Judgment: Don’t outsource your decision-making to others. Don’t let other people tell you what to think, and don’t let other people decide on your behalf what is important. Part of what we despise about the liberal media is their godawful groupthink herd instinct: “Look! A school shooting! Cancel everything and go wall-to-wall 24/7 on this! Get me a banner chyron: A NATION MOURNS.”

This last point is another case where Rush Limbaugh’s example is helpful. Some days, Rush will begin his show by talking about golf or football — it’s just what he feels like talking about that day — and invariably, he’ll get complaints from listeners who call in to ask, “Why aren’t you talking about The Big Story?” As if Rush were obligated to spend all three hours of his show discussing whatever the latest political headline is at The Drudge Report. Limbaugh doesn’t outsource his decision-making. He didn’t become the most successful radio host in history by letting other people do his thinking for him.

There are some stories that everybody in the news business really is obligated to cover, e.g., a presidential election campaign. But even then, we don’t all have to cover the story the same way, and there are other stories that remain newsworthy.

The Apotheosis of a Secular Saint

Nine hundred words into this explanation, I hope readers get the general point. Maybe you don’t understand every choice I make, and I seldom bother to explain my choices, but just because you don’t know what I’m doing doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m doing.

So . . . Nelson Mandela.

Prior to his death Thursday, Nelson Mandela wasn’t a topic to which I’d ever paid much attention, but in the past two days I’ve written three long posts totaling something like 5,000 words:

Have I “gone off on a tangent” here? That thought crossed my mind this morning when I saw a few posts on the subject (including Doug Hagin at Daley Gator and Bob Belvedere at the Camp of the Saints) and felt the urge to write another long post.

Wait a minute. Why am I doing this? If I write yet another Mandela post, won’t it look like I’m obsessed with this story?

Sometimes you really have to second-guess yourself like that. Step back and ask whether you have lost perspective.

So I had to go through the process of remembering exactly what it was that got me off on this particular tangent. Thursday afternoon, I was working on something else (and babysitting my newborn grandson) when news of Mandela’s death was announced. The coverage on Fox News was not really different from the idolatrous praise issuing from every liberal media organ and, even checking Twitter — where I’m following 5,000 feeds, at least 80% of which are conservatives — I didn’t see much counterbalance to this apotheosis.

“Saint Nelson of the Blessed Necklace,” indeed.

Once I’d changed my grandson’s diaper, fed him a bottle and rocked him to sleep, therefore, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, and I kept it up Friday when, with the TV turned to MSNBC, I consumed a steady diet of the over-the-top effusion of obituary praise to which my own fact-based writing was intended as an antidote.

Well, too much antidote can be a poison and, as noxious as is the liberal media’s lopsided depiction of Mandela’s legacy, you can only go so far to balance it before you start writing “Happy Tales of Apartheid: Recalling the Halcyon Glories of the Botha Regime.”

And that ain’t in my job description.

Like I said, it helps to step back occasionally and ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” In this case, it was about an obvious example of media bias that I did not see other conservatives hastening to correct. And, worse, you had people like Max Boot at Commentary trying to sell conservatives a shiny Whig-history version of Mandela, to produce an Official Conservative Narrative from which no one might deviate without being deemed Unacceptable in Polite Company.

So . . . farewell, Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk.

Atheists, Madmen and the Cult of Progress

Think Progress has done us an unintentional favor by publishing “The Right Wing’s Campaign To Discredit And Undermine Mandela, In One Timeline,” a handy reminder for these youngsters (and Max Boot is only 44, which makes him a callow punk in my book) that those who stood athwart history yelling “stop” — to invoke Buckley’s description of the conservative mission — were generally of an opinion contrary to those expressed by some of their presumptive heirs.

Eminent alumni of elite universities are not prone to intellectual modesty and, although I’m sure Max Boot (BA, Cal-Berkeley, ’91; MA, Yale, ’92) could provide a plausibly persuasive argument for his moral superiority to Russell Kirk, excuse me for saying that Boot shouldn’t bother writing that argument, because I’m not buying it.

“Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
— Viscount Falkland, 1641

“Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”
— Edmund Burke, 1790

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
— G.K. Chesterton, 1923

An attachment to cultural inheritance, a preference for tradition over “innovation,” a skepticism toward the Cult of Progress — by such impulses is the conservative guided, disdaining political fads and intellectual fashions, and respecting the wisdom of his forebears.

My own forebears were, of course, all Democrats. My mother was especially stubborn in her partisanship and once, when I was about 13, she gave me a brief lecture on the virtues of partisanship.

One person, she explained, can make little difference in politics. Your ability to defend and advance your political interests is only effective if you do so through the instrument of your party. People who say, “I vote for the man, not the party” are therefore fools, blown around by the wind and prone to believe whatever they see on TV, because when you vote for the man, you get the party, and if the party in power is not your party, you don’t have any real influence.

Why did my mother feel the need to tell me that? At the time, I was somewhat mystified, as this sermon on party loyalty seemed to come out of nowhere, a fully elaborated argument delivered in response to some casual remark I’d made while my mother was driving me to school band practice. Not until many years later did it dawn on me: I was 13, and so that must have been in the fall of 1972.

My mother voted for George McGovern!

Understand that my parents were New Deal Democrats who had grown up on Alabama farms during the Depression and for whom FDR enjoyed an exalted status perhaps exceeded only by Jesus Christ and Bear Bryant, not necessarily in that order.

But in 1972, even such staunch Democrats balked at the prospect of voting for George McGovern against Richard Nixon.

My parents were Democrats, yes, and remarkably liberal in the context of the times, but they were also quite patriotic, anti-Communist and, because my father worked at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Marietta, their own economic interests were directly affected by the Pentagon budget which those damned hippie peaceniks proposed to slash. (God bless the military-industrial complex!)

Confessions of an Ex-Democrat

My mother died when I was 16, so by the time I had reason to reflect on her 1972 lecture on party loyalty, it was too late to ask her, but what I’m pretty sure inspired it was that she had been arguing with my father about how they should vote. Maybe Dad was thinking about voting for Nixon. My mother, however, was clear: Always vote for your party.

That lecture stuck with me, and I remained a proudly partisan Democrat for years. Yes, I voted for Mondale in ’84, but didn’t even bother voting in 1988 because, really, what the hell was the point of voting for Mike Dukakis in Georgia? In 1992, however, I thought Democrats had finally come to their senses by nominating two moderate Southerners, Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Al Gore of Tennessee, and naively believed that at last we had vanquished the ridiculous ghost of McGovernism that had haunted us for 20 years.

Oh, foolish hope!

Scarcely had Bill Clinton finished the oath of office before he embarked on a series of left-wing initiatives that he had perhaps promised in various speeches or policy papers, but which I — relying on the news media’s depiction of the campaign — had not realized were part of his agenda. What I thought I was voting for was deficit reduction and some help for the working class. (Am I the only one who still remembers the “middle-class tax cut” that Clinton promised but never delivered?) The best way to describe my disillusionment in 1993-94 was what someone said about Clinton’s Cabinet appointments: He promised us a “Cabinet that looks like America” and gave us a Cabinet that looked like the Dukakis senior campaign staff.

Like my mother said: You vote for the man and you get the party and, within a year of Clinton’s election, I realized the Democrats had become a party that not only didn’t give a damn about me, but was in fact openly hostile to my interests and beliefs.

It’s weird how I’d made it all the way through the Carter presidency and the 12 years of Reagan-Bush without noticing this. But I was in college when Reagan was elected and, having grown up as a Georgia Democrat, my natural sympathies were with Carter. And I wasn’t remotely “political” at the time, more interested in women, beer and rock-and-roll than anything else. After graduation, I lived a few years as a happy-go-lucky bachelor, working hard to try to get ahead and playing hard when I wasn’t working, and there wasn’t much time left over to pay attention to what was going on in Washington, D.C. Sure, I became a journalist, but from 1986 to 1991, I mainly worked as a small-town sports editor, and politics had no impact on local sports.

By the time Clinton became president, however, I had become an assistant special projects editor at the daily Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. I had also married a fine Christian woman, bought a little house and had three kids (our twin sons were born five weeks before Election Day 1992). In other words, I was now a responsible adult, a taxpayer and a citizen with a mortgage and a family, and a job that required me to pay attention to the tide of current events.

There was no single “Road to Damascus” moment, but the revolution in my political allegiance was quite rapid once it dawned on me: Bill Clinton was not my president and the Democrats were not my party. Clinton’s loyalty was to Ivy League intellectuals and radical interest groups — NARAL, the gay-rights lobby, environmentalists, gun-control fanatics, ethnic identity outfits and every other subversive hippie “cause” imaginable — and the collective influence of these various left-wing fringe groups on the Democrat Party was such that it had become hostile to the interests of everyone whose pursuit of the American Dream involved hard work and free enterprise.

God damn you Bill Clinton, and God damn the Democrat Party.

Having been lectured by my late mother about the value of partisanship, when I turned, buddy, I turned.

Those damned Democrats had hoodwinked, bamboozled and betrayed me. They had ripped me off, sold me out, stabbed me in the back and fucked me over, and from the moment I realized what a chump I had been, my mission has been simple: Revenge.

The Democrat Party must not merely be defeated, it must be utterly destroyed — humiliated, annihilated, wiped from the face of the Earth so that only a smoldering crater is left to mark its former existence — and my complaint with the Republican Party is that it is overcrowded with half-hearted weaklings and simple-minded hacks who lack the requisite cunning and relentless bloodthirsty eye for the jugular necessary to accomplish this work of political destruction.

See, this is what I understand about politics: It operates on a Newtonian principle. For every action there is an equal and opposition reaction, and the way you make a difference is not by aiming for the moderate center, posturing as The Voice of Reason.

Ultimately, there are only two sides in the fight, so if you’re not doing everything you can to help your friends (and, of course, hurt your enemies) then you’re pretty worthless in politics. To hell with moderation. Winning in politics is about gathering a mob, whipping them into a frenzy of hatred, and making sure they understand that the other party is to blame for whatever it is they’re pissed off about.

Politics is a tug-of-war, and if you see things going in the wrong direction, grab the other end of the rope and pull as hard as you can.

Things have been going in the wrong direction for way too long, and people ought to be more pissed off about it than they are. Sometimes I become angry that other people aren’t as angry about it as I am.

So if I occasionally lose my temper and go off on a tangent, try to understand what I’m doing: I’m pulling as hard as I can, and we need more people pulling on the right end of the rope.

Balance? I don’t need balance. I am balance.

 

Category: Fox News, Journalism, Media Bias, Rush Limbaugh

Shocking Video: ‘Coven’ of Pro-Abortion Women Attack Church in Argentina

Posted on | December 6, 2013 | 97 Comments

You may have seen this video earlier — Ed Morrissey featured it at Hot Air — but I didn’t see it until it was tweeted to me by Covenant College student Keifer Wynn and, because it was in Spanish, at first I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at.

“Abortistas atacan a católicos que defendían la Catedral de San Juan,” is the headline, and the description: “Estas son las hordas de lesbianas y abortistas del Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres.”

So, translation via Google: “Abortionists attack  Catholics defending the Cathedral of San Juan. These are the hordes of lesbians and abortionists of the National Conference of Women.” Keep in mind that when I watched this, I hadn’t even translated the titles yet:

OK, so what the heck is going on there?

Every year in Argentina, the National Conference of Women — sponsored by various non-profit NGOs — gathers in some city and, in recent years, the event has featured a protest against the Catholic Church. So when the radical feminists marched on the cathedral in San Juan de Cuyo on November 24, they were met by 1,500 Catholics who locked arms to form a human shield around the cathedral:

The women, many of them topless, spray-painted the men’s crotches and faces and swastikas on their chests and foreheads, using markers to paint their faces with Hitler-like mustaches. They also performed obscene sexual acts in front of them and pushed their breasts onto their faces, all the while shouting “get your rosaries out of our ovaries.” . . .
While the site of the protest was the front of the cathedral . . . “the whole city awoke to graffiti in favor of abortion.”
Inside the cathedral, 700 people were also in prayer accompanied by their bishop . . .
After unsuccessfully trying to get into the building, the women burned a human-sized effigy of Pope Francis. “If the pope were a woman, abortion would be legal,” they shouted . . .
The police reportedly told the media they were unable to intervene because “they are women.”

Remember, I originally saw this in Spanish, posted by the blogger at Pagina Catolica, who said (Google translation):

Our readers know that the Spanish and American folk tradition, the Coven or Salamanca (in Argentina), is a meeting of witches, in which to realize the devil is present not only acts of sorcery, but also aberrant sexual practices.

Indeed, the raving frenzy of these radical feminists bespeaks an infernal origin. Susan Brinkmann at Women of Grace writes:

According to a report appearing on the Catholicism Pure and Simple blog, some of the youth who defended the cathedral said they had the impression that “it was a ‘satanic attack’ with ‘demonic figures’ being seen as part of an ‘anti-Christian world revolution.’  In one place the extremists lit a big fire and burned an effigy of Pope Francis as they danced around the fire.”

An “anti-Christian world revolution“?

Putas sucios comunistas! (That’s “dirty communist whores” in Spanish, at least according to the Google translation.)

UPDATE: Amazing the things you can learn on Twitter:

 

Category: Abortion, Argentina, Catholics, Feminism, Religion
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