The Other McCain

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

Axis Of Socially Inept

Posted on | March 10, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

It must get awful lonely up there in Burri-land:

Although Paco now denies it, his investigation clearly shows the ascendancy of The Axis of Cheesehead above that of the now passe Axis of Fedora.

Passé? Really? Look at the photo at the link above. Quite the dude party you’ve got going there. Now check out the ‘Axis of Fedorables’ portion of this blog, middle column, by the Amazon ad. We stand with Paco amidst a co-ed assortment of fine American ladies.
I realize that you cave- and bog-dwellers in Wisconsin are strangely comfortable with the sad example of gender failure that is the Axis of Cheesehead, but for normal people, your lot is the Axis of Creepy.
And another thing: Tillamook is better.

Update: maybe the Axis of Cheesehead can square away the train wreck that is this Walker recall effort. Or maybe, in some strange way, these Cheeseheads are somehow responsible.

Update II: Bill Quick opines that most wearers of headgear are bald. Now, I tend toward a cueball hairstyle for reasons of minimalism, but I hasten to add that this is not the case with our >50% female membership in the Axis of Fedora.

Category: Blogging, humor, Troglopundit

Hope And Change Under Attack By Christianist Jingle!

Posted on | March 10, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Do not be taken in by this bubbly video! If not for the massive efforts of Barack Obama, unemployment would be 25%, the national debt over $20 trillion, and children would be praying in a non-Mecca direction in schools.
President Obama has barely restrained the onset of the second Dark Ages, on which course Bush the Diabolical had set the country. It was only by timely application of some hard left rudder that the ship of state was spared stacking up on Capitalist Shoals.

‘Game On’, these girls say. As though Hope and Change was some sort of game! How severely disrespectful of the truly serious efforts of Barack Obama to find ideologically pure, politically reliable candidates for the highest offices in the land.

Hope and Change must be defended, lest the narrative be blown away, and stand revealed as Despair and Stagnation. Without revealing the inner raaaaacism involved, this family must be blasted for its lack of diversity*. Otherwise, they could continue to to threaten the Holy Narrative with a series of upbeat, wholesome jingles, provoking the remnant of rational, conservative Americans to good works, heterosexuality, fidelity, fecundity, and a disgusting resurgence in liberty overall.

Do not let this anti-evil succeed, no matter how good it sounds!

via Hot Air

A reference to an article that I can’t find online; must be in Our Dumb Century.

Category: Barack Obama, Rick Santorum, Video

#Kony2012 Video Prompts Uganda to Vow ‘Dead or Alive’ Manhunt for Terrorist

Posted on | March 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

“Take a good look at this face. This is what unalloyed evil looks like. His name is Joseph Kony, and some news accounts call him a ‘leader’ of ‘Ugandan rebels.’ Don’t believe it.
“Kony is not a leader. He’s a terrorist monster, and his ‘rebels’ are nothing but a gang of armed thugs who prey on unarmed innocents.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, March 4, 2008

It’s kind of weird how things come full-circle. Four years ago, I flew off to Uganda with the Christian missionary Pastor Sam Childers, whose book Another Man’s War inspired last year’s action movie Machine Gun Preacher. Pastor Sam, who rescued children orphaned in the brutal civil wars in northern Uganda and South Sudan, was at one point targeted for death by Joseph Kony’s terrorist LRA.

Now an online documentary, “Kony 2012,” has gotten more than 60 million views and attracted worldwide attention, prompting Ugandan officials to pledge renewed efforts to bring Kony to justice:

Kony and his fighters were driven out of northern Uganda in 2005 after terrorising communities for nearly two decades.
“All this hoopla about Kony and his murderous activities is good in a sense that it helps inform those who didn’t know the monster that Kony is. But of course, this is too late,” Uganda’s defence ministry spokesman Felix Kulayigye told Reuters.
“It might take long but we’ll catch Kony, dead or alive. How many years did it take to end the conflict in Northern Ireland? So our hunt for Kony can take long but it will end one day,” he said. . . .
Kony fled northern Uganda to roam the dense forests of Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. Attempts to corner him and his rump LRA force, believed to be 200-300 strong, have failed.

This highlights the problem: Kony and his remaining handful of LRA thugs are somewhere in a vast no-man’s land along the western and northern borders of Uganda. In December 2008, for example, there was a joint Ugandan-Congolese military raid on an LRA hideout in the Garamba National Forest, after which the LRA went on a rampage in Congo and then vanished somewhere near the South Sudanese border.

Finding Kony and bringing him to justice may be more difficult than the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was the No. 1 objective of the United States government for 10 years before bin Laden was finally killed. Uganda, Congo and South Sudan are relatively poor countries without the vast military capabilities of the U.S.

Some people — including my American Spectator colleague Reid Smith — are therefore skeptical toward the idealistic belief that a viral video can bring about Kony’s capture. The video has become controversial, with some critics claiming it oversimplifies the situation and especially that its portrayal of Uganda is misleading:

“What that video says is totally wrong, and it can cause us more problems than help us,” said Dr Beatrice Mpora, director of Kairos, a community health organisation in Gulu, a town that was once the centre of the rebels’ activities.
“There has not been a single soul from the LRA here since 2006. Now we have peace, people are back in their homes, they are planting their fields, they are starting their businesses. That is what people should help us with.”

This is true: The LRA has been chased out of Uganda, and while the Ugandan military is willing to be part of any effort to hunt down Kony, there are limits to its ability to accomplish this goal.

The U.S. has sent a small number of military advisers to assist, but do we really want to escalate U.S. involvement in the region? Or would these African nations, which achieved independence from European colonial powers barely a half-century ago, welcome a European-led military intervention? There are obvious political and diplomatic difficulties involved.

Nevertheless, having written a good deal about Kony and the LRA, I’m glad to see this issue get widespread public attention, even if the prospects of a quick resolution aren’t altogether encouraging. Alyssa Milano has been part of the effort to promote the “Kony 2012” video, and it was through a Tweet of hers Friday that I learned about this viral phenomenon:

Category: Terrorism, Uganda

Joe The Plumber Refrains From Coming Through The Video Feed And Plugging Lawrence O’Donnell’s Mouth

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

I’ll grade Joe a ‘B’ on this performance. He lacks the polish of a seasoned campaigner, but has very clearly done his homework, and doesn’t let O’Donnell’s smarmy nonsense rattle him:

For all of his air of superiority, I don’t think O’Donnell really knows what he’s talking about. A truly comprehensive, simplifying approach like 9-9-9, while perhaps not perfect, would be a substantial improvement over the Byzantine fail bucket that we currently love, and which loves loving us.

The national debt, the increasing deficits, and the lack of a budget are three major indicators that the purpose of our tax code is not funding government operations in any sane sort of way. Rather, the tax code is a tool for control, for punishment of foes and reward of cronies.

Godspeed, Joe. You’re a reformer, who has personally enjoyed the ‘punishment of foes’ portion of the show. I hope that the next time you find yourself confronted with the effluent stream that is Lawrence O’Donnell, he has the pleasure of addressing you as ‘Representative’. That would be just.

Help Joe check DC’s plumbing!

 

Previously:
Joe The Plumber, Coming To A Congress Near You?

via Breitbart

Category: Ohio, Tea Party

VIDEO: A Wake for Andrew Breitbart

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 7 Comments

My son Jefferson tells me that the melancholy Celtic theme music is called “The Blood of Cuchulainn,” and I hope no further introduction or explanation is necessary for this video from Accuracy in Media:

Category: Andrew Breitbart

If Rick Santorum Wins Kansas …

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 24 Comments

. . . it will add to the valuable perception of renewed momentum he got from his strong showing on Super Tuesday, when he won primaries in Tennessee and Oklahoma, as well as the North Dakota caucuses, came within 1% of Romney in Ohio, and ran a strong second nearly everywhere else. And it looks like Santorum is the overwhelming favorite to win Saturday’s Kansas caucuses:

Long-shot Newt Gingrich, weak outside the Deep South, dropped plans for a six-stop swing Friday and Saturday through Kansas. The former U.S. House speaker from Georgia is gambling a couple more southern states — Alabama and Mississippi — can sustain his quest for the nomination.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who remains front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, is uninterested in the Kansas caucus. He won’t personally chase Kansas’ 40 delegates to the GOP national convention.

The key thing here is that Gingrich is not campaigning in Kansas because he’s been forced to fight in Alabama and Mississippi merely to maintain whatever semblance of “viability” Newt’s got left, which frankly isn’t too damned much.

So if Santorum wins Saturday, both Mitt and Newt will try to pretend it’s irrelevant, but a Kansas win would add weight to the perception of Santorum as the conservative alternative — “a two-man race” with Romney, as he says — and thus should boost his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi by a few points. I say all that as a precursor to talking about the polls, which must be taken with a grain of salt.

Unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, where you had lots and lots of polls to compare and try to spot the trend, there have been very few polls in Alabama or Mississippi. It is therefore necessary to say that we can’t tell if the Rasmussen poll of Alabama, showing a virtual three-way tie between Newt, Mitt and Rick, will bear much resemblance to the vote totals on Tuesday. And I’m highly skeptical of the Rasmussen poll of Mississippi, showing Mitt with an eight-point lead.

Remember this: Polls are a lagging indicator in politics. This is why it helps to have a lot of polls bunched up together in a sequence, so you can attempt to plot a trend and extrapolate forward. We don’t have that in this case, so we are in some sense “blind” to what’s happening in Alabama and Mississippi. (I haven’t seen any polls from Kansas at all, but the fact that Newt and Mitt aren’t campaigning there is an obvious sign that Santorum should do well.)

We are merely speculating, therefore, to consider this scenario: Santorum wins Kansas, bumping up his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi, where it is entrely possible that Newt could finish third — and that, my friends, would be the end of Gingrich. It would be bad enough for Newt, who has staked his entire campaign on doing well in the South, to finish second in either of Tuesday’s primaries. But a third-place finish on “home turf” would be the kind of humiliation the Gingrich campaign could not survive.

My buddy Quin Hillyer lives in Mobile and has been covering Santorum’s campaign down there and quotes Alabama Policy Institute president Gary Palmer about Santorum’s speech there: “He looked presidential — he really connected with the audience.” Quin also relates how Santorum stopped a speech to help a lady who fainted.

Santorum’s creating a good impression in Alabama, it seems, and so if we can take the speculation a step further — not a prediction, mind you — think about this not-too-extreme possibility: Santorum wins Kansas on Saturday, then wins Alabama and/or Mississippi on Tuesday, and Gingrich finishes third in all three states. The narrative then would be?

Santorum the Newt-Killer Emerges
as Last Remaining Conservative
Opponent to Moderate Mitt Romney

Just speculation, as I say, but you can see why it may have been too early for Mitt’s boys to say only an “act of God” could stop Romney from winning the Republican nomination. And it looks like Mitt may be having some money troubles.

UPDATE: Press release from the Santorum campaign:

KANSAS CITY ROYALS ALL-STAR MIKE SWEENEY
ENDORSES SANTORUM FOR PRESIDENT
Verona, PA – The Rick Santorum for President campaign is proud to announce that it has received the endorsement of All-Star Major Leaguer Mike Sweeney.
Mike Sweeney said: “I take great pride in the success I’ve had on the baseball field, but even greater satisfaction in knowing that I have spent my entire life embracing Godly principles and instilling these values into the everyday lives of my children, family and friends. After personally getting to know Rick Santorum, I am absolutely convinced that he is the only candidate in the 2012 Presidential race that shares these same core values! The moral decline of our great country must stop now and this can only be achieved through real leadership and real solutions. I believe Senator Santorum has the wisdom, passion and vision to bring our country back to global excellence with those core Christian beliefs that our Founding Fathers envisioned, including protecting the rights of the unborn child, in mind. This election is the most important in my lifetime and as a father, husband, and American I am proud to play on Rick Santorum’s team!”
Mike Sweeney was a five-time Major League All-Star, with a career batting average of .297 and over 200 homeruns. Sweeney played for four Major League teams, including over a decade with the Kansas City Royals. Sweeney is very active in the Kansas City community, supporting various organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of Kansas City and Children’s Mercy Hospital. Sweeney is also the advisory chairman of the Catholic Athletes for Christ and a spokesman for Life Teen, the largest Catholic youth ministry program in the United States.

Over at the New York Times, Nate Silver is counting delegates and projects Mitt Romney getting to barely 50 percent — 1,162, or 18 more delegates than the nominating majority. While I can’t quibble with Silver’s math, the problem is that what he has done is an extrapolation of current trends, which is OK so far as it goes, except that no mere extrapolation can predict future evenst.

Go back to early December, when Santorum was in sixth place in the Iowa polls. No expert at that time would have given two cents for Santorum’s chances of winning Iowa, much less would the experts have predicted that Santorum would be Romney’s strongest remaining rival after Super Tuesday.

What happened? Events happened, events that no one expected in early December. And while no one can deny that, as the situation stands now, Romney is the near-prohibitive favorite to be the nominee in Tampa in August, we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after that, much less what’s going to happen between now and the Texas primary on May 29.

Oh: Texas was originally scheduled to vote on April 3, but a lawsuit about re-districting pushed it back to late May — another one of those “events” no one predicted three months ago. It always pays to be careful about predictions in politics, because events happen.

RECENTLY:

 


Category: Alabama, Election 2012, Kansas, Mississippi, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum

SPLC Adds ‘Misogyny’ to Hate Groups List … and Leaves Me Out? UPDATE: Video of Super-Hot SPLC Vixen Heidi Beirich

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 26 Comments

“You can never go wrong in the blogosphere by having a laugh at the expense of feminists. All sane people hate feminism, and no one hates feminism more than smart, successful, independent women who’ve made it on their own without all that idiotic ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’ groupthink crap.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year,” Feb. 15, 2009

Heidi Beirich, you don’t love me no more? You done forgot about me, your “neo-Confederate” sugar-dumpling?

Sweetheart, I’m plumb heartbroken over being left off your list of “blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists.”

Did Tabitha Hale get to you? In its own way, this omission hurts worse than being excluded from the Blog Con agenda, and not just because it might mean you’ve forgotten those intimate moments with “The Hater You Love to Love.” There’s also the potential damage to my professional career. What would my reputation be without all the free publicity the SPLC has given me over the years?

Whenever I walk into a D.C. cocktail reception, my buddies yell out, “How’s it going, Hate Crime?” They all envy my celebrity status and insist on being in Facebook pictures with me, trying to cash in on the guilt-by-association factor in hopes that you’ll denounce them, too.

And when it comes to “savaging feminists,” honey, I acknowledge no superior. It’s still two months away from our fourth annual National Offend a Feminist Week, but we intend to go all out this year and earn our spot in the Big Leagues of Misogynistic Hate-Mongering:

It is truly sublime that a group the DHS cited in its controversial report on right-wing terrorism now turns to a website called “Man Boobz” for its hate-group reporting.

Yeah, Heidi: Times are hard all over when a Ph.D. like you has to work for a laughingstock outfit like the SPLC, warning America of the Dreaded Woman-Hating Online Menace, but at least the New York Times still takes you seriously.

And as for you and me, dear, we’ll always have our romantic memories of moonlit strolls beneath the magnolias in Montgomery . . .

Shhhh, don’t tell Morris Dees!

UPDATE: CNN features Heidi the Hate-Watching Hottie:

The SPLC’s Heidi Beirich insinuated that racism was alive and well in these groups, without being challenged as to whether some of the groups in the list were really racist. “Obama is an African-American. So there are all these crazy racial theories that you hear about Obama, that he’s not really a citizen, that he’s maybe a secret Muslim,” she noted.
“And all of this has created an incredible amount of paranoia on the far, far right — which is expressed in these kinds of — in this kind of anti-government activism,” explained the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich.”

Oh, you sultry temptress!

Category: Feminism, Rule 5

Explosive: Obama’s Mentor Derrick Bell on ‘Jewish Neoconservative Racists’

Posted on | March 9, 2012 | 61 Comments

John Podhoretz at Commentary on the controversy unleashed by the Breitbart.com video:

Michael Powell of the New York Times reflected conventional opinion in liberal media circles when he tweeted: “Derrick Bell, Radical? We’re to pretend our history cleansed? He fought 4 Civil Rights in Mississippi.”
It is incumbent on Powell and others, if they want to get in on the conversation about Bell, to explain what on earth is mainstream about comments he made in an eye-opening New York Observer interview published on October 10, 1994, that is not available online. Among other remarks, Bell denounced Henry Louis (Skip) Gates for writing a New York Times op-ed condemning black anti-Semitism:

I was furious. Even if everything he said was true, it was inexcusable not to mention what might have motivated blacks to feel this way, and to fail to talk about all the Jewish neoconservative racists who are undermining blacks in every way they can.

Bell went on to say, “Now, that wouldn’t excuse anti-Semitism, which is awful, but it would at least provide a context for this anger…”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has a well-researched pushback against Soledad O’Brien’s assertion that Joel Pollak misunderstood or misrepresented Professor Bell’s “critical race theory” (CRT). As previously noted, CRT has been described as “an academic tradition in which race plays the same role as class plays in the Marxist paradigm.” Anyone who doesn’t recognize CRT as a dangerous species of radicalism is naive.

UPDATE II: It is important also to note just how much toxic unfairness is embedded in Bell’s phrase “Jewish racist neoconservatives.” The attempt to make “neoconservative” a sort of synonym for “Jewish Republican” — if not indeed “Zionist warmonger” — was one of the dirtiest smears of the post-9/11 Left, and you see in Bell’s 1994 comments the bitter root of this kind of smear.

In point of fact, arguably the two most influential “neoconservatives” were both Irish Catholics, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bennett, and if being pro-Israel makes one a “neoconservative” then the word loses all meaning, because such a wide swath of American public opinion is pro-Israel. 

As to Bell’s suggestion that “Jewish neoconservatives” are “racist,” this is a smear that dates back to the mid-1960s, when Black Power radicals like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown took over leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and purged whites from what had been — during the heyday of the civil rights protests — a broad coalition.

This racialist purge at SNCC naturally offended many liberal Jews who had been active supporters of the civil rights movement and who, indeed, counted Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman among Jewish martyrs to the cause of racial equality. Jewish liberals were further offended when the Carmichael/Brown radical axis justified their coup by branded their erstwhile Jewish allies as “racists.”

From this mid-1960s schism can be traced the enduring taint of anti-Semitism that has attached itself to black radicalism. Add in such other elements of political background as the 1967 Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis over “community control” in New York City schools — when liberals sided with Black Power advocates against the Jewish-led teachers union — and you have the historical subtext for a decades-old enmity.

UPDATE III: Jeff “Outlaw” Goldstein:

Professor Bell’s fidelity to the critical race theory he helped popularize and promote is, historically, beyond dispute. And while the move from the Left now will be to pretend the story has no merit, it is incumbent upon those of us on the right to publicize just who Obama once was (and may very well still be) — if only to allow the American people, rather than a gatekeeper press looking to control the narrative and manufacture a kind of fictional character of “Barack Obama,” to decide who he really is.

Now a Memeorandum thread.

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Category: Barack Obama, Culture, History, Intellectuals, Racism
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