The Other McCain

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

Christmas Greetings From A Leader

Posted on | December 25, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Positive, respectful, inclusive without selling his own viewpoint out.

Sure wish that other dude would take lessons from Bibi.

via Legal Insurrection

Category: Uncategorized

2012 The Best Year Ever?

Posted on | December 25, 2012 | Comments Off on 2012 The Best Year Ever?

by Smitty
A fine Trifecta outing:

It’s useless to judge the quality of the year as it ends. We’re too close to the details. We know that all of the numbers get adjusted down later. And the Big Doom will like arrive in 2013, though it will be labelled as ‘reform’, one predicts.

Merry Christmas!

Category: Christmas

Peace, Love and Murder: Green Radicals Target Brandon Darby on ‘Hit List’

Posted on | December 25, 2012 | 18 Comments

This hippy-dippy flower-child stuff may sound silly and harmless:

“F–k me open like a prayer book,” the poet declaimed, setting down his guitar to recite. It was Sunday evening on the grounds of an aging, pink/orange stucco home in a Lake Worth immigrant neighborhood, and the Monkeywrench Cafe — a one-time-only affair — was drawing to a close.
The first in a series of events to memorialize and celebrate the passing of the Night Heron Grassroots Activist Center, the cafe made for a day to mist an aging hippie’s eyes: homemade vegetarian fare, untutored acoustic music, a youngish crowd of many genders, and barefoot children scampering across a garden and yard of primitively tended tropical flora.
That spirit of community and concern is what first brought the Night Heron into being three years ago this December, in a faded commercial complex by the FEC railroad tracks north of downtown Lake Worth. Entirely self-funded, it was exactly what it claimed to be — the hub of the quirky little city’s political counterculture, seriously intended, light of heart.

Why would anyone pay serious attention to this ridiculous “political counterculture” center in Lake Worth, Florida? Maybe you should read J. Christian Adams’s article at PJMedia:

The latest newsletter from the environmentalist group Earth First! Journal contains a curious topic — assassinations.
In fact, the newsletter conveniently provides the names, addresses and phone numbers of the assassination targets.

Radical environmentalists have a long history of terrorism, but this “eco-revolutionary” hit list contains a nudge-nudge, wink-wink disclaimer:

Let us say clearly, this is not a call to undertake assassinations of the elite scum who are pillaging the planet and enslaving the populace — but not because we think that is a bad idea. And it’s also not because we think killing CEOs and lobbyists is negative PR either. In fact, most everyone hates these creeps, and many would applaud their demise. Some would even be so enthusiastic as to make a bid on the assassin’s old underwear if given the chance in a government auction, as we found out last year, when the State sold off Ted [Kaczynski]’s personal belongings to further enrich the family of Unabomber victim Thomas J. Mosser, executive of corporate marketing giants Burson Marsteller.

Perhaps this casual, sarcastic tribute to Ted Kaczynski would be of interest to David Gelernter, the Yale University professor who was critically injured by one of “Hut Man’s” mail bombs in 1993. (I recommend Gelernter’s 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.) Or perhaps someone might ask the Discovery network employees held hostage by the Al Gore-inspired “inconvenient terrorist” James J. Lee.

The disingenous disclaimer on the Green extremist “hit list” does nothing to reduce the risk to the targets whose names, addresses and phone numbers they publish — mostly corporate CEOs and other typical villains of the Left’s demonology, but also including Brandon Darby:

The radical left loathes Darby because he is a heretic — a former leftist who helped the FBI break up a plot to bomb the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis. That’s why loony publications like Mother Jones refer to him as a “snitch.”

J. Christian Adams explains the bloody obvious:

Surely the FBI will find it difficult to track down the origins of these threats, right? Earth First is one of several shadowy fringe environmental groups that engage in the euphemism “direct action” but have no centralized structure.  So finding the author of these threats is probably impossible, right?
Except that the author of the assassination list provided contact information:
Earth First! Journal
PO Box 964, Lake Worth, FL 33460
(561) 249-2071

What a coincidence! Lake Worth, Florida, home to a “quirky” counterculture group that quite recently disbanded:

The Night Heron’s core was a lending library, with shelves full of labor history, feminist thought, environmental tracts, anarchist and Marxist theory . . . It reflected the center’s avowedly radical philosophy. . . . [T]he library will live on, as will the center’s co-tenant, the radical environmental journal Earth First! . . .
Address: 1307 Central Terrace, Lake Worth. Call: 561-249-2071.

What? These silly Florida hippies are directly connected to a radical eco-terrorist group that has targeted Brandon Darby for assassination?

Wow. I’m sure Attorney General Eric Holder will make this investigation a top priority for the Justice Department . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 


Category: Brandon Darby, Environmentalism, Terrorism

The Obama Age: ‘That ’70s Show’

Posted on | December 25, 2012 | 6 Comments

In last night’s traditional Christmas round-up — genius! — I began by quoting Rob Long’s doom-and-gloom comments from a New York magazine feature about the post-election National Review Caribbean cruise, an article you should read in its entirety, if you want to be thoroughly depressed about the uselessness of our conservative elite: Wonks, pundits, pollsters and consultants on a free tropical vacation paid for by elderly magazine subscribers who, we presume, were grateful to be in the intellectual presence of the presumed heirs of Bill Buckley.

Near the end of the article — the “print” version is 11 pages — Joe Hagan quotes Jonah Goldberg, who offered this assessment of the cruise:

“This is a more downbeat bunch this year,” he said. “We lost in 2008, but it was almost boisterous and fun. This, a little less so. People were dyspeptic.
“Their conception of what the country is about, they really were sure the country would reject Barack Obama,” he continued. “I do think it hits them hard. The fear I have, why this election stung, I think, Obama has successfully de-ratified some of the Reagan revolution in a way that Clinton never could and didn’t even try to. That’s what freaks people out, that feeling in their gut, either Obama has changed the country, or the country has sufficiently changed that they don’t have a problem with Obama. That’s what eats at people.”

Indeed. You might even say that we are Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption, but if there is any hope of redeeming us from this disaster, it wouldn’t involve a political campaign or a legislative agenda. The problem is the culture, especially the culture of youth, over which Jonah Goldberg and his fellow NRO cruisers — both the geriatrics who footed the bill and the intellectual free-riders — have near-zero influence.

Flashback to Paul Weyrich’s 1999 pronouncement that America had suffered “a cultural collapse of historical proportions.” The demographic aspect of that collapse was apparent to me, and yet where is the evidence that the Bush-era GOP took it seriously? For that matter, where were the conservative intelligentsia? When Weyrich died four years ago, I wrote:

One aspect of the collapse Weyrich decried was the rise of the celebrity culture, wherein the famous people on TV exercise more influence over our attitudes than do the ordinary people in our own real lives.

Has there been any conservative intellectual pushback against that phenomenon? Or has the celebrity culture overwhelmed our intelligentsia? Coming up next on The Daily Show . . .

The consequences are nearly too grim to contemplate, particularly in what it means for the economy, namely a continuation of conditions that resemble the “stagflation” of the 1970s. Obamanomics will forever blight the prospects of an entire generation:

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life — and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.
Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.

Bitter irony: Culture overwhelms politics, and politics overwhelms economics, so that ambitious young people — reacting to cultural cues that told them to oppose Republicans as “rich old white men” — end up supporting a political agenda hostile to their economic interests. It’s the mirror-reverse of the left-wing woe that Thomas Franks lamented in What’s the Matter With Kansas?

And where is our Thomas Franks capable of explaining this?

Ed Driscoll was on that National Review Voyage of the Damned, and Ed has further thoughts on the ongoing Obama Age catastrophe.

Merry Christmas! 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Culture, Ed Driscoll, Election, Election 2012, Intellectuals

Merry Baal-mas

Posted on | December 25, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

The tragedy that is Newtown is but a grain of sand on the blasted beach of abortion, and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs did her part to ensure that the ghoulish tradition of massacring the unborn will continue in Georgia after 01Jan:

The law bans doctors from performing abortions five months after an egg is fertilized, except when doctors decide a fetus has a defect so severe it is unlikely to live. The law also makes an exception to protect the life or health of the mother, though that does not apply to a mother’s mental health.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed a lawsuit on behalf of three obstetricians challenging the law’s constitutionality. The organization says the law violates the state’s privacy protections as provided for in the state constitution.

Oh, the sweetness of waging war on the unborn in the name of privacy! Would that my privacy mattered in, say, the case of ObamaCare. But I guess then that ‘fairness’ trumps privacy, and I’m a raaaaaacist for daring to raise impertinent issues.

God, please show more mercy on these blighted souls than they show on the unborn.

via Memeorandum

Category: Uncategorized

A Holiday Tradition Continues

Posted on | December 24, 2012 | 24 Comments

“We lost. We are losers. . . . Our operatives are incompetent and we live in a dream world.”
— Rob Long of National Review, in an interview with Joe Hagan of New York magazine during a Caribbean cruise in November

Readers expect “Christmas Cheesecake” from us this time year and what kind of conservative would I be if I did not maintain this tradition?

Last year’s round-up was entitled, “Behold, I Bring You Peace, Goodwill, and Also This Gratuitous Vintage Pinup Girl.” Nothing quite so cheers up despondent bloggers the way a pretty girl does, unless maybe it’s a blizzard of round-up linkage:

You know what this means? Read more

Category: Christmas

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Chains Rattling, and Who’s That Ghost?

Posted on | December 24, 2012 | 29 Comments

P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012

“At more than one point in the movie, Breitbart asks members of audiences he’s addressing to hold up their iPhones, pocket cams, and other recording devices and to turn them on. You, he says, are the media. That gesture is the essential takeaway of Andrew Breitbart’s work — and of the documentary Hating Breitbart. Such moments illustrate how something weird and wonderful is happening when it comes to media. . . .
“Andrew Breitbart understood that it’s easier than ever to own a press and that despite the vast, incomprehensible increase in chatter . . . the demand for even more is still infinite.”
— Nick Gillespie, “Hating Breitbart‘s Powerful Post-Partisan Message,” Nov. 2

One of my favorite books is P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, which ought to be on every college freshman’s reading list. It therefore seemed obvious, when I bumped into O’Rourke in the bar of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, N.H., after the Republican presidential debate, that I must introduce him to Andrew Breitbart.

So now I sit here and ask myself, “How would ‘a lone humorist’ attempt to explain the entire tragic situation at Breitbart.com?”

Having spent more than a few hours on the phone talking to people about it the past several days, a reasonably coherent picture is emerging, and I’m not really sure I want to be the guy describing it. In fact, the smartest thing for me to do would probably be to ignore it.

None of my business. Walk away and pretend nothing happened.

Except there’s a federal lawsuit filed by Dana Loesch, which is actual news, and maybe it’s not a good idea to let myself get scooped here.

Andrew Breitbart liked to say he had two modes of operation, jocularity and righteous indignation, and it’s rather unfortunate that he never got around to writing the book, Jocularity: Excuse Me While I Make You Laugh Your F–king Asses Off, because he certainly could.

In his righteous indignation mode, by contrast, Andrew went off on Glenn Beck last year, calling Beck a “coward,” a “snake” and a “huckster” in an interview on Stephen Bannon’s podcast:

You really ought to listen to that entire 13-minute interview. As a matter of fact, a transcript might come in handy, because (a) people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com, (b) the same people depict Stephen Bannon as the villain of the story, and (c) I’m genuinely perplexed by all this.

My advice has not been solicited, because I’ve only worked in the news business since 1986, so what do I know about newsroom management?

Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. There has never been a news outfit that wasn’t afflicted by clueless management, inept editors and disgruntled reporters. “We’re working for chimpanzees,” as a former Washington Times colleague used to say.

Mistakes, conflicts, rivalries, backstabbing — it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, and the key to survival in the business is deciding how much craziness you can stand before you decide to sing that Johnny Paycheck classic, “Take This Job and Shove It.”

What’s bizarre about the case of Dana Loesch v. Breitbart.com LLC is that when Dana wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let her.

Or so Dana alleges, I hasten to add, because the last thing I need is someone suing me for defamation, tortious interference, etc.

“Mongo just pawn in game of life.”

The last thing I need is to insert myself into the middle of the New Media equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad, but as I said a couple days ago, the sharks are going to have themselves a feeding frenzy no matter what I do (or don’t do) and why should I let myself get scooped?

Never mind my dilemma. Hear what Patterico has to say:

I never said this before, but I was personally the recipient of some pretty shabby treatment myself from that organization, after Andrew died.
[M]y experience was not the only such experience. Not by a long shot. And having been through it, it is plenty easy for me to believe that Loesch was also treated shabbily.
And when you treat people like crap, it doesn’t stay a secret.

Read the whole thing, because it’s exactly right. The world of conservative New Media is kind of like a small town, and if a secret is juicy enough, don’t think you’re going to keep the town gossips from doing what they habitually do. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly.

Anyway, this wasn’t my plan for a cheerful Christmas Eve column, and I’m sorry for throwing this bummer on you when we’re all supposed to be making merry. But even heavy burdens are lighter when they’re shared by enough people, and maybe we can crowd-source this problem.

After all, as Breitbart said: You are the media.

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!





 

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Category: Andrew Breitbart, Dana Loesch

Arguably Sacrilegious Genesis Parody

Posted on | December 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Over at Conservative Daily News:

1:11 And Obama said, Let the earth bring forth ACORN, the herb-smoking agitators, and the fruity radicals yielding fruitcakes after their own kind, whose seed of destruction is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
1:12 And the earth brought forth radicals like blades of grass, and herb-smoking agitators after his kind, and the ACORN yielding fruitcakes, whose seed of destruction was in itself, after his kind: and Obama saw that it was good.
1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
1:14 And Obama said, Let there be wealth redistribution in the firmament of the heavens to divide the clean from the unclean; and let there be a sin, to blame man for the seasons, and for hot days, and warm years:

Read the whole thing.

Category: Uncategorized
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