The Other McCain

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

Your Daily Egyptian Update

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 23 Comments

The White House is trying to stay neutral:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that it is “not for me or our government to determine” whether Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should leave office amid massive protests against his rule.
Gibbs said the United States is “not picking between those on the street and those in the government.”

So I guess that if Egypt has elections and the winner is the “Throw the Jew Down the Well So My Country Can Be Free” Party, that’s OK with the Obama administration? More and more observers are warning of the potential danger of the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in a post-Mubarak Egypt:

One might wonder how an organization can be thought to have renounced violence when it has inspired more jihadists than any other, and when its Palestinian branch, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is probably more familiar to you by the name Hamas — a terrorist organization committed by charter to the violent destruction of Israel. Indeed, in recent years, the Brotherhood (a.k.a., the Ikhwan) has enthusiastically praised jihad and even applauded — albeit in more muted tones — Osama bin Laden.

That’s Andrew McCarthy at National Review and, lest you be tempted to dismiss this as mere predictable neocon fear-mongering, here’s a warning straight from the horse’s mouth:

Mohamed Ghanem, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, calls Egypt to stop pumping gas to Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for a war with it’s eastern neighbor.
Speaking with Iranian television station Al-Alam, Mohamed Ghanem blamed Israel for supporting Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Ghanem also said that the Egyptian police and army won’t be able to stop the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

So much for that whole “renouncing violence” claim, eh? To dismiss the jihadist danger is to join the Alfred E. Neuman School of Foreign Policy. The Brotherhood looks positioned to benefit from an Egyptian revolution in much the same way the Bolsheviks benefitted from the Russian revolution, as Drew M. says at AOSHQ: “When it comes to revolutions, it isn’t always those who start them or even gain temporary control who wind up on top when the music stops.” Perhaps you see why the Israelis are defending Mubarak:

Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.
Jerusalem seeks to convince its allies that it is in the West’s interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime. . . .
Senior Israeli officials, however, said that on Saturday night the Foreign Ministry issued a directive to around a dozen key embassies in the United States, Canada, China, Russia and several European countries. The ambassadors were told to stress to their host countries the importance of Egypt’s stability.

Unfortunately for the Israelis, “A military spokesman, Ismail Etman, has appeared on state TV saying the military ‘has not and will not use force’ against protesters,” a statement that Ed Morrissey interprets as “a death knell for the Mubarak regime.”

For Hugo Chavez, the situation in Egypt offers another excuse to — wait, can you guess? — yeah, denounce America! Prompting the ever-droll Dan Collins to observe: “It’s interesting, though, to hear Chavez come down on the side of the status quo in the Middle East, since he’s got such strong ties with the Iranian mullahocracy, who are backing El-Baradei — whose prominence comprises as strong a commentary on the UN’s orientations as one could wish.”

UPDATE: Reaganite Republican notes that a major U.S. Jewish leader has called Mohamed ElBaradei “a stooge of Iran.” ITN News has video showing the continued mass protests in Cairo and Alexandria:

Left Coast Rebel has video of the Cairo demonstration which, if it were a Tea Party rally, would be described as “hundreds of protesters.” Notice that when the streets in Cairo fill up with protesters against Mubarak, liberals scream that there must be elections now — immediately! — or else it’s a human-rights disaster. But when the streets of America filled up with protesters against ObamaCare, liberals said, “Ignore those kooks!”

UPDATE II: Reuters reports:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak offered talks on sweeping reforms with opponents on Monday, indicating that massive pressure from street protesters, Western allies and his own army are ending his 30 years of one-man rule.
After a week of unprecedented rallies against the poverty, corruption and oppression under the 82-year-old military-backed leader, newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman appeared on state television to say Mubarak had asked him to begin dialogue with all political forces on constitutional and other reforms.

Looks like the “ignore those kooks” strategy isn’t working any better for Mubarak than it did for Democrats. Maybe Suleiman can save the regime by spreading rumors that the protesters are funded by the Koch brothers. Then liberals would insist that the U.S. back Mubarak at all costs.

PREVIOUSLY:


Category: Barack Obama, Egypt, Israel

Power Line Gets Scalped: Did Indian Tribe Money Influence Akin Gump Decision?

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 23 Comments

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has the story of how, when Paul Mirengoff criticized the Yaqui Indian prayer offered at the Tucson memorial, his remarks were denounced as “insensitive and wholly inappropriate” by a partner at Mirengoff’s K Street law firm, Akin Gump.

So now Mirengoff’s offensive post has been taken down by Power Line and Mirengoff has stopped blogging there. But there’s a lot more to this story than political correctness run amok.

The lawyer who denounced Mirengoff, James Meggesto, is a member of the Onondago Nation of New York who was hired by Akin Gump in February 2007 — i.e., right after Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats took over Congress. Megesto was one of three lawyers, including Vanessa Ray-Hodge and Madeline Soboleff Levy, hired by the firm at that time as part of an expansion of Akin Gump’s “American Indian law and policy practice” according to a Feb. 23, 2007, press release. Akin Gump’s total haul from lobbying in 2007 was $32 million — an increase of 25% over the previous year.

You may recall that Pelosi and Democrats were elected in 2006 on a promise to clean up the “culture of corruption” in Washington. Exhibit A in the Democrats’ case against the GOP that year? Yeah: “Casino Jack” Abramoff’s shady dealings with Indian tribes.

So in criticizing that Yaqui prayer at the Tucson memorial, Paul Mirengoff wasn’t just being politically incorrect, he was also offending a lucrative segment of Akin Gump’s lobbying clientele, whom the firm had recently hired three lawyers to service. Small wonder that Mirengoff was likely forced to choose: Quit blogging at Power Line or quit working at Akin Gump.

This near-“Dooce” experience calls into question whether a lawyer at a big K Street firm could ever function as an independent conservative voice in the blogosphere. You may recall that Mirengoff was criticized for pushing a bogus Alaska Senate poll which showed Joe Miller in third place in late October. But you may not know that a tribal non-profit, the Alaska Federation of Natives, was the single biggest contributor to a PAC that “reported raising $1.7 million over 38 days in its independent effort to re-elect Sen. Lisa Murkowski.”

While I was unable to Google up any connection between Akin Gump and the Alaska Federation of Natives, I did find a connection between Akin Gump and Lisa Murkowski. (The United Arab Emirates? Hey, not that there’s anything wrong with that . . .) I’ve met Paul Mirengoff and like Paul Mirengoff, and can’t imagine him doing a pay-for-play operation, but you see how being a political blogger could lead to potential conflicts of interest with working for a  K Street law firm that does more than $30 million a year in lobbying business.

The Appearance of Impropriety, so to speak.

UPDATE: Linked by Dan Riehl — thanks! — now a Mememorandum thread and meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein disusses the intentionality angle of Mirengoff’s remarks.

UPDATE II: Linked by Charlie Martin at PJ Tatler. Thanks!

Category: Power Line

Haiku Sonnet For Sarah Palin

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Given a challenge by Sheppard to write a poem for Sarah Palin, and a boring afternoon meeting, I should like to submit:

Haiku Sonnet For Sarah Palin
The Palin fascination
 Infecting the news today
  Really does boggle the mind.

Is she Nemesis, some way
 Causing POTUS frustration
  The very First Teeth to grind?

Yet when she enters the fray
 Her words are pointed, but kind
  Lacking recrimination.

And so should she courage find
 Election devil to pay
  To halt a sinking nation,

The class warfare wounds to bind
 And racial fragmentation
  Refocusing liberty,

American elation
 At last will ‘hit the rewind’,
  Ejecting ‘Chicago way’.

Hence all the trepidation,
 The falsehood and the dismay:
  Visionless know they are blind.

Category: Art, Sarah Palin

Chicken Sandwich, Sweet Iced Tea and a Side Order of Homophobia, Please!

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 8 Comments

The fashionable grievances of the perpetually indignant get a write-up in the New York Times:

Chick-fil-A is among only a handful of large American companies with conservative religion built into its corporate ethos. But recently its ethos has run smack into the gay rights movement. A Pennsylvania outlet’s sponsorship of a February marriage seminar by one of that state’s most outspoken groups against homosexuality lit up gay blogs around the country. Students at some universities have also begun trying to get the chain removed from campuses.
“If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay,” one headline read.

Clyde Middleton reacts at Liberty Pundits:

Look, dude, I’m a Bible-thumping Christian. Homosexuality is a sin. End of story. . . .
Get over yourself. Live your life. Stop trying to find reasons to tell us how hard you have it. It’s boring.

Better yet, if you’re going to get angry over every business run by traditionalist Christians, you should also boycott Domino’s Pizza (founder Tom Monaghan is a hard-core Catholic) and Little Debbies (produced by the McKee family of Collegedale, Tenn., who are hard-core Seventh-Day Adventists).

All of this goes to illustrate the totalitarian spirit of gay-rights radicalism, which aims toward the extirpation of dissent. 

The radicals will not be satisfied so long as anyone is permitted to disagree with, disapprove of, or criticize homosexuality.

Category: Gays

Young Women: This Probably Explains Why Guys Only Want You For Sex

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 18 Comments

Because you’re not any good for anything else:

Basic “female” skills are becoming endangered with fewer young women able to iron a shirt, cook a roast chicken or hem a skirt.
Just as more modern men are unable to complete traditional male tasks, new research shows Generation Y women can’t do the chores their mothers and grandmothers did daily, reported The Courier-Mail.
Only 51 per cent of women aged under 30 can cook a roast compared with 82 per cent of baby boomers.

Now run along and fix me a cup of coffee, sweetheart.

(Via Ace of Spades HQ.)

Category: Feminism

When It Comes to Foreign Policy, Let’s Trust Alan Colmes and Jimmy Carter!

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 29 Comments

Colmes posts this:

Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading voice of Egypt’s opposition, told Fareed Zakaria on CNN that the American conservative fear put forth by people like John Bolton and Thaddeus McCotter that the Muslim Brotherhood will step in and take over Egypt if Hosni Mubarak falls is a myth without “one iota of reality.”

This is just a silly “conservative fear,” you see? And obviously Colmes isn’t buying into that. No, he’s listening to Middle East expert Jimmy Carter!

Mubarak has appointed Omar Suleiman, the country’s intelligence chief, as vice president. “He’s an intelligent man whom I like very much,” Carter said of Suleiman, with whom he says he has maintained a relationship.
“In the last four or five years when I go to Egypt, I don’t go to talk to Mubarak, who talks like a politician,” Carter said. “If I want to know what is going on in the Middle East, I talk to Suleiman. And as far as I know, he has always told me the truth.”

A crash course in How Liberals Think: Foreigners never lie. It’s those damned Republicans you can’t trust.

UPDATE: Yeah, this makes sense, too:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday called to stop the building in the settlements, saying that in light of the events in Egypt, it is important to further the diplomatic process.
Merkel, who arrived Monday afternoon at the head of a delegation of eight ministers for a joint Israeli-German government meeting, shared her assessments with Netanyahu about the situation in Egypt and in the region.

I’m sure Netanyahu must have struggled mightily to resist the urge to inform Angela Merkel: “We’ll let you know when Germans have earned the right to tell Jews what to do. The last time around, it was ‘Here, get on these cattle cars.’ Now, it’s ‘Stop building settlements.’ Maybe you understand why we’re hesitant to comply with German orders.”

Category: Egypt, Liberals

Van Jones and Other Marxist Scum Protest Koch Brothers’ Meeting

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 16 Comments

Yesterday I told you that Herman Cain would be speaking at a conference in Rancho Mirage, California, sponsored by the Koch Foundation. Well, about a thousand smelly hippies turned out to protest the conference and guess who was helping lead them?

Van Jones, the former green jobs deputy in the Obama Administration and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, described the anti-Koch rally as “the beginning of our fight back.”

Twenty-five hippies were reportedly arrested. Click here for some nice photos of the Riverside Sheriff’s Department riot squad who, alas, didn’t get the opportunity to use their batons, pepper spray and tasers.

Category: Herman Cain

Six Days and a Rib

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 51 Comments

Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Paradise, Alexandre Cabanel, 1863

Perhaps seeking to stir the pot in Allahpundit’s absence, Jazz Shaw put up a Hot Air post entitled, “Evolution, Creation and Politics,” to which I appended a comment:

I’m a six-days-and-a-rib kind of guy — a fundamentalist Bible-thumper — because (a) the Bible is true, and (b) saying so makes liberals’ heads explode.
One of the things that the Darwinist laity fail to recognize is how much of their supposed “evidence” of evolution is actually man-made. For example, go to the natural history museum and look at that display illustrating the alleged evolution of the horse. The fossil skeletons are all lined up in a row, purporting to show a direct line of ancestry.
But no such thing is proved by that display. This narrative of “ancestry” is imposed as an intepretation. Various skeletons of horse-like creatures have been unearthed in separate locations, assigned a place in the externally-imposed narrative, and then arranged to suggest that the “primitive” horse was somehow the sire of the slightly-less-primitive horse and so forth, up to the present day. It takes a strongly skeptical mind to recognize that one is being presented with a “just so” story that is certainly not the only possible interpretation of the record.
Extinction does not prove evolution. I can’t say that often enough, because it summarizes the essential error made by common Darwinists. Since childhood, their teachers have dazzled them with despictions of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures and said, “See? Evolution!” But the fact that dinosaurs once existed, and are now extinct, does not prove that any modern creature is “descended” from dinosaurs.
The dodo bird is extinct and if, ten thousand years in the future, its fossilized remains were unearthed, no future paleontologist would be justified in remarking a resemblance between the dodo and a still-extant bird and claiming the dodo as that bird’s evolutionary “ancestor.” Nevertheless, this laughable confusion between extinction and evolution is at work when we find ourselves constantly being told by Darwinists that everything living today is descended from now-extinct evolutionary “ancestors,” an assertion for which there is really no evidence at all.
The Darwinists begin by assuming evolution, and then fitting the available evidence to support that assumption. And when you point out their basic error of logic, the Darwininists then accuse you of being irrational.

In his book, Reason in the Balance, Phillip Johnson describes the basic assumptions of Darwinism as philosophical naturalism, which is one of those ideas that have consequences.

Having spent quite some time studying the arguments over evolution, it has for many years struck me that while the scientific priesthood of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in astrophysics, paleontology and anthropology often disagree vehemently over their own theories and interpretations, they are united by one major agreement: The Bible is wrong.

On that point, they are quite fanatical, and one need not debate fanatics. Merely demonstrate that they are fanatics — occasionally point out their more obvious errors, provoking their predictably intemperate responses — and you will discredit them in the eyes of reasonable people.

The Christian need not assert perfect knowledge of what happened in prehistory, nor be able to dispute every criticism offered of the Bible, in order to maintain his own belief. Indeed, the Bible-believer is exhorted toward a philosophy of humility: “For now we see through a glass, darkly” — our knowledge is necessarily imperfect.

We are also reminded of Paul’s warning to Timothy to avoid “profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.” Many were those who, in the apostolic age, sought to reconcile the Gospel to the scientific and philosophical theories of the time, thus stumbling into all manner of heresies.

Truth endures. Truth is eternal and transcendant. Our knowledge of this transcendant and eternal Truth is necessarily imperfect, but this ought not embarrass us or cause us to accept the “profane and vain babblings” of those who assert the superiority of their “science falsely so called.”

Category: Religion, Science
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