The Other McCain : Page 2370 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Our friend Charles Krauthammer began his column last week by asking, “Who doesn’t love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?”
Some on the right, that’s who. . . .
As Krauthammer puts it, “All revolutions are blissful in the first days. The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.”

Of course, this hint of an intra-neocon skirmish is merely the preliminary bout, Kristol’s warm-up for the main event:

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Generally speaking, I’m a bigger fan of Kristol than of Krauthammer, mainly because Krauthammer is such an anti-Palin snob. In this case, however, I share Krauthammer’s forebodings of an Egyptian revolution and dislike Kristol’s effort to enhance his own Strange New Respect quotient by dissing Beck.

BTW: Regular readers will note that, after seven consecutive days of nearly non-stop Egyptian blogging, I gave it a rest Friday.

There’s only so much of this foreign-policy punditry stuff I can stomach, and unless somebody prosposes to hit the tip-jar to send me to Egypt — Fear and Loathing in the Lobby Bar of the Cairo Hilton — I’m going to blog about other stuff for a while.

Sarah Palin Quotes Instapundit

Posted on February 5, 2011Comments

First, it was “blood libel,” now she’s using “Army of Davids.”

Next thing you know, she’ll borrow his “Heh.” Or maybe, “They told me if I voted for John McCain . . .”

From the Department of Not Exactly News: Chris Matthews Is Very Confused

Posted on February 5, 2011February 5, 2011Comments

You can’t make up stuff as funny as this:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“I feel ashamed about this. I feel ashamed as an American, the way we’re doing this. . . . We’re not handling it as Americans should handle a matter like this. And I don’t feel right about it.”

There’s a lot of commentary concentrating on the fact that Matthews criticizes Obama, but as Ed Morrissey says, the whole 12-minute clip is worth watching.

Like many liberals trying to make sense of the Egyptian crisis, Matthews has been whipsawed between his support for democracy and his support for Democrats. It’s enormously upsetting to Matthews because he so very much wants to credit Obama with doing the right thing, even when (a) it’s not really clear what “the right thing” is, and (b) Obama is quite obviously doing everything wrong.

Putting aside the frightening thought of Islamists turning Egypt into Iran-on-the-Nile, conservatives have a much easier time making sense of this crisis: We expect Democrats to bungle foreign policy. We never believed Obama had any kind of miraculous abilities, and we especially jeered at Obama’s naive notion that the secret to foreign policy was to celebrate every week as “Be Nice to Foreigners Week.” Continue reading From the Department of Not Exactly News: Chris Matthews Is Very Confused →

Virginia Muslim Institute?

Posted on February 5, 2011February 5, 2011Comments

Somebody mentioned this in the comments the other day when I was up to my neck in Egypt blogging, but I just saw it again at 1389 Blog:

VMI is celebrating the Muslim invasion
and occupation of Spain in 711 AD.

And then I read this:

The March 23-25 celebration entitled “711-2011: East Meets West” and organized by VMI’s Center for Leadership and Ethics, is scheduled to feature standard Muslim apologists Reza Aslan and Akbar Ahmed. VMI Superintendent Gen. J.H. Binford Peay has even filmed an invitation to the celebration.

So the poison of “multiculturalism” does its deadly work everywhere, even in the hallowed halls of Lexington, Va.

They need to change the name from VMI to WTF.

‘The End of Blogging’? No, It Just Proves That Nothing Succeeds Like Success

Posted on February 4, 2011February 5, 2011Comments

Elizabeth Spiers is taking over as editor-in-chief of the New York Observer — a minor blip of media news that is rather more significant than it would appear at first glance.

Earlier this week, the Observer ran a long article entitled, “The End of Blogging,” a grabby title that misinterprets the changes that are actually happening in the online world. Of course the irony is that the paper’s new editor is — you guessed, didn’t you? — a blogger:

Spiers is the founder of Dead Horse Media, which created highly successful blog properties such as Dealbreaker, Above the Law and Fashionista. She has also served as founding editor of Gawker.com and editor in chief of mediabistro.com.

She’s got some print-journalism background, too, but Spiers’ stock-in-trade is turning blogs into “properties.” As Joe Coscarelli of the Village Voice points out, “Spiers has been given the task of making the Observer ‘a website with a newspaper, rather than a newspaper with a website.'”

The much-analyzed Observer “End of Blogging” article — which got ripped apart by Chris Rovzar, among others — utterly misunderstood (or perhaps, cluelessly misrepresented) the phenomenon of online communication. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether or not you call your site a “blog” or whether you call the elements “posts” or “articles.”

A thing is what it is, regardless of what you call it. Continue reading ‘The End of Blogging’? No, It Just Proves That Nothing Succeeds Like Success →

‘How Many Girls Have to Die?’

Posted on February 4, 2011Comments

Liberals obviously want this story to go away, but the abortion industry has got too much innocent blood on their hands, and Americans are tired of being taxed to pay for this shameful criminality. Dr. Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life:

“It is time to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their seedy business practices,” said Dr. Yoest. “For too long, they’ve lived off the American taxpayer with little or no oversight. In the last week alone, we’ve seen proof in Philadelphia that women’s lives were at risk while officials turned a blind eye to what goes on at an abortion clinic. Then we saw video of a Planned Parenthood clinic manager in New Jersey talking about how to manipulate the law to cover up the abuse of underage girls captive in the sex trade. Today we see video from Virginia of possible misconduct in a Richmond Planned Parenthood clinic.
“How many girls have to suffer and die before we investigate the abortion industry? At some point, substandard care for women becomes criminal.” . . .

Read the whole thing.

Fun With Lizards

Posted on February 4, 2011February 4, 2011Comments

There’s all kinds of news I need to be blogging about today, but offline duties intervened and — as much as I know it bores most of you — I just had to call attention to the latest in Johnsonoid craziness.

Charles Johnson went on a rant about “stalkers and dimwitted creeps” — a rant thoroughly and hilariously mocked — and in the process, CJ linked back to a 2009 thread that included links to a couple of former LGF fan sites. But those two ex-sycophants have since been banned from LGF, as Diary of Daedalus had noted in November. So . . .

Someone at Diary of Daedalus pointed out that Charles had, by linking to this 2009 thread, accidently called attention to “praise” from ex-LGFers who now despise their former idol. Well, CJ claims never to read the “stalker” site Diary of Daedalus, but overnight he killed the links and — here’s the payoff, for connoisseurs of irony — Chen Zhen at Diary of Daedalus created a flashing GIF showing the deletion.

ROTFLMAO.

What’s going on over at LGF these days? Nobody would know if it weren’t for the gallant ex-Lizards who toil diligently to keep us informed on the latest laughable developments in Lizardlandia. But just imagine how embarrassing it is to Charles Johnson that he is so irrelevant at a time when interest in the Egyptian situation is delivering big traffic to Michael Totten and Weasel Zippers and other conservative bloggers.

Criticism of U.S. intelligence on the Middle East gets analyzed by Ed Morrissey and Jim Hoft for the benefit of thousands of readers, but who bothers anymore to see what Charles Johnson has to say? Who even cares?

Back in the day, when a big story like this would break, LGF threads would be swarming with hundreds of keen-eyed conservative commenters linking the latest important news. Ah, but then Charles Johnson gave into his resentment of Pamela Geller‘s success, and began banishing every commenter who didn’t go along with his anti-Geller jihad and now . . .

OK, sorry to bother the readers with this mention of LGF. We’ll get back to blogging about interesting stuff, I promise. Just as soon as I can quit laughing.