The Other McCain

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

Terrorism: Obama’s Against It

Posted on | January 2, 2011 | 13 Comments

“I strongly condemn the separate and outrageous terrorist bombing attacks in Egypt and Nigeria.”

Nice of him to make this clear, considering his long association with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers.

Associated Press video of the reaction in Egypt:

This whole throwing-rocks-at-the-police thing doesn’t strike me as the Christian thing to do, but consider how Christians have been abused in the Middle East:

The devastating New Year’s Day terrorist bombing at a Coptic church in Egypt that killed 21 people was the latest in a spate of violent assaults against the Middle East’s vulnerable Christian communities. . . .
The attack in the ancient Mediterranean coastal city was the latest in a wave of violence against once-resilient Christian communities in the Muslim world, some of which date back to antiquity.
Christmas Eve assaults by Muslim extremists killed dozens of Christians in the Nigerian cities of Jos and Maiduguri. And Iraq’s Christians have endured a relentless campaign of attacks and intimidation by the local branch of Al Qaeda.
An Oct. 31 siege on a Baghdad church that killed at least 58 parishioners and staff members sparked a new Christian exodus from the Iraqi capital and the northern city of Mosul. About 1,000 families sought refuge in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish enclave afterward, according to the United Nations. Further threats of violence by Islamic militants caused many Christians in Iraq to tone down Christmas celebrations, and attacks Thursday against 10 Christian targets left an elderly couple dead.

More at  Gateway Pundit, Jihad Watch and Israel Matzav.

Category: Barack Obama, Egypt, Nigeria, Terrorism

‘In One of the Wiser Posts I Have Seen’

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 19 Comments

Eric at Classical Values knows what words to put beside my name in a post about the alleged conflict between social conservatives and economic conservatives.

When (alleged) libertarian Ryan Sager was pushing this “House Divided” angle from one side, I denounced it. And now that some people are pushing it from the other side, I denounce it again.

This allegedly irrepressible conflict between liberty and morality is fictitious, and is never aggravated by people who have the best interest of the conservative movement foremost in their purposes. Go back to my October 2008 American Spectator column, “The Bible vs. the Bailout”:

Some years ago, I was asked to speak to a Christian homeschooling conference — my wife and I have homeschooled our six children — and during the question-and-answer session after the speech, I faced a question for which I was unprepared.
“How has your Christian faith influenced your political beliefs?”
This stunned me into silence for a second. Then I answered: “Well, I guess it comes down to that part about ‘Thou shalt not steal.'”
From there I proceeded to discuss the basic immorality of the welfare state, how it is wrong for government to take money that one man has worked for and give it to someone who hasn’t earned it.
Whereas transactions in a market economy are voluntary and peaceful, the actions of government are essentially coercive, backed with the threat of violence to those who disobey. What government does, it does “at the point of the bayonet,” so to speak. Therefore, the fearsome power of government ought to be constrained to limited and specific purposes — defending the life, liberty and property of citizens.
When government begins to meddle in the economy, picking winners and losers, using appropriations and fiscal policy to transfer money from one group of citizens to another, it divides society into two classes, taxpayers and tax consumers, punishing the former in order to reward the latter.
Such a policy is not merely misguided, it is immoral — indeed, it is sinful, as I told the Christian homeschoolers — and by displaying the spectacle of government engaging daily in legalized theft, the welfare state tends to corrupt the morals of its citizens. . . .

Read the whole thing. My point is that I am an all-around, general-purpose, hidebound reactionary. If I had to pick a “Golden Age” of America, it would be no later than the administration of Grover Cleveland, and quite possibly a good deal earlier.

Nobody can play the “More Conservative Than Thou” card on me. When the passage of Prop 8 in California resulted in outrageous attacks on supporters of the gay-marriage ban, I made pointed reference to Judge Roy Moore’s ruling in Ex Parte H.H. — which is about as hard-core as it gets. And when picking a fight with Conor Friedersdorf over same-sex marriage, I deployed this quote:

“The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is today the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.”

If anyone cares to research the source of that aphorism, be my guest. Like I said, hard-core.

Pundette recently recognized me for one of her “Thirty Favorite Quotes of 2010” for my Mother’s Day critique of the Contraceptive Culture.

Yeah, I’m against the Pill, too. Like I said, hard-core.

Nevertheless, until we can muster a Supreme Court majority to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut — “penumbras, formed by emanations,” my butt! — we must fight the fight we’re in, on a battlefield not entirely of our choosing, under conditions that put us at a disadvantage.

Thanks to the GOP’s biggest congressional landslide in 60 years, the House is clearly under conservative control. Yet Democrats hold a Senate majority and President Obama is still in the White House. The economy is in the crapper and until that’s fixed, American voters don’t give a rat’s rectum about anything else that goes on in Washington.

Why, then, start a squabble about the inclusion of one group, GOProud, in this year’s CPAC?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

If those idiots don’t get their priorities right, we’re never gonna get back to the good old days of Grover Cleveland.


Category: Conservatism 101, CPAC

In Case You Missed It: Merry Revolutionary Christmas From CPUSA!

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 10 Comments

Season’s Greetings from the godless Bolshevik scum:

Christmas time can be so depressing. It brings out some of the worst features of capitalism and rubs them in our faces. . . .
Advertisements spur on feelings of guilt if you don’t buy enough of the right kinds of consumer products for people you love. Creative financing is offered so that lenders can make even more profit. And it is an environmental disaster … more plastic, cardboard and packaging is produced, carted about, and dumped into landfills, vacant lots, and incinerators at Christmas time than at any other time of the year. . . .

If you want to laugh, read the whole thing, which hijacks the Nativity story into a Marxist propaganda tale about the proletarian struggle against bourgeois imperialism.

UPDATE: Adam Baldwin — the actor from Full Metal Jacket, Firefly and NBC’s Chuck — sent me a Tweet calling attention to the CPUSA’s 2009 formation of “a new Religion Commission to strengthen its work among religious people and organizations.” As Baldwin says, this is comedy “gold,” because the chairman of the commission felt obliged to make this admission:

The Bolsheviks adopted an official atheist position, and for many years waged a struggle against organized religion.

To put it rather mildly. One cannot be a believing Christian and also be a Marxist-Leninist. So who did the CPUSA choose to head its Religion Commission? An Episcopalian.

That there’s funny, I don’t care who you are.

Category: Christmas

What Could Possibly Justify Voting for Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago?

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 25 Comments

Three words: Carol Moseley Braun!

Danny K. Davis, a longtime United States representative, has dropped out of the race to become Chicago’s mayor, creating the situation that black leaders here had for months been clamoring for: a campaign that includes only one major African-American candidate.
Carol Moseley Braun, a former senator, became that candidate this weekend, as Mr. Davis announced his plans to step aside and to support Ms. Braun. The Rev. James T. Meeks, the pastor of a large South Side church, quit his campaign about a week ago.
Pressure to unite around one African-American candidate has been bubbling here for months, in part out of fear that the city’s black vote would be split — diminishing its influence and all but ensuring that a white candidate (like Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff) or a Latino candidate (like Gery Chico, a former board of education leader) might win on Feb. 22.

I can see the campaign signs now:

CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN for MAYOR
Because America Needs Another Detroit

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And yes, it is racist somehow: Chicago is the most segregated city in America.


Category: Chicago, Democrats

‘If We Go Back to Darfur, These Arabs
Will Shoot Us, They Will Kill Us’

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 4 Comments

From an Associated Press story about the Jan. 9 referendum for South Sudanese independence:

While some Arab northerners have been selling their southern homes and businesses to move north, Darfuris say they have no plans to leave.
“If we go back to Darfur, these Arabs will shoot us, they will kill us,” Adam said. Now he works every hour he can in a sweltering restaurant in the southern town of Aweil to try to bring his wife to join him.
Darfuris say they feel closer to the south than the north because the horrors they have endured in their own region – bombing and persecution at the hands of government-backed militias – are similar to those inflicted upon southerners during the separate north-south war. Many say they also feel ethnically closer to the African southerners than the Arab-dominated government in the north.
“We are all African,” explained Musa Ali, a Darfuri man who runs a car rental and repair shop in the southern town of Aweil. “We Darfuris and southerners, we are one kind of people … In case of trouble during the referendum, I will not go back,” he said.

The AP’s Maggie Fick unfortunately leads that story with a lot of nonsensical hand-wringing over the prospect that South Sudanese independence will somehow be bad from a human-rights perspective. Ignore that crap. The problem in Sudan is so simple it can be summarized in a single word: Khartoum.

The Arab autocracy that has turned Darfur into a slaughterhouse is the same corrupt regime that fought a 20-year war to try to impose Islamic sharia law on the Christian/African south. Thank God and John Garang, the southerners fought Khartoum to a stop, negotiated a ceasefire and are now barely a week away from voting on independence.

Do not be deceived by any fear-mongering in the media. The only hope for human rights in Sudan is southern independence. If you want to help Darfur, support freedom for Southern Sudan.

Category: Islam, Sudan

2010: The Year of Pamela Geller

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 11 Comments

Several readers have contacted CPAC director Lisa DePasquale to nominate me as “Blogger of the Year” and, of course, I’m flattered.

What are the chances I’ll actually win? Not bloody likely, but even if I were somehow to win the award, the first sentence of my acceptance speech would have to be, “Pamela Geller got robbed.”

Even if you disagree with her politically, can there be any argument that Geller and her Atlas Shrugs readers had the biggest impact of any conservative blog in 2010? Donald Douglas features this video of Geller’s appearance in the 60 Minutes story about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy:

(4:18) “Pamela Geller is a key figure in all of this. She is the Islamic center’s most ardent opponent. Geller is a former New York media executive who writes a politically far-right blog that mixes news, opinion and conspiracy theories. . . . Last December, Geller’s blog appears to have been the first to re-name the Islamic center the ‘Mosque at Ground Zero.'”

Again, I say, you don’t have to agree with Geller to recognize her tremendous impact. Criticize her, call her names, whatever — she made a difference. She was also targeted by the harshest attacks that the Left and its media allies could muster. When they call you a “far-right conspiracy theorist,” you know you’re doing something right. Read more

Category: Atlas Shrugs

‘Break into a Prevent Defense for the Second Half and Try to Preserve a Tie’

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 5 Comments

That’s how Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress describes Eric Holder’s strategy for dealing with the incoming Republican majority in the House:

Despite the fact that the New Black Panthers were captured on video with weapons and fascist-style uniforms at the entrance to a polling place, Holder said: “There is no there, there.” Really? Heady stuff from the attorney general.
When asked about the fact that Holder’s Civil Rights Division is hostile to racially equal enforcement of the law from top to bottom, Holder again deploys another cliché, calling it a “made up controversy.” Holder doubled down: “All I have on my side with regard to that is the facts and the law.” . . .

Read the whole thing. A lot of shenanigans that have gone on during the first two years of the Obama administration will be investigated by House committees in the next two years. There’s a lot of that stuff that’s been ignored because when Pelosi’s Democrats were in charge, they refused to do any meaningful oversight of the executive branch.

Expect to hear lots of administration officials (and their apologists in the JournoList community) making lame excuses for various malfeasances and claiming that the GOP is engaged in “witch hunts,” etc. Keep your grains of salt handy.

Category: Congress, Eric Holder, Piece of Work in Progress

Skepticism Is for ‘Rubes’

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 30 Comments

Really intelligent people, you see, believe whatever they’re told by the experts:

In Charles Johnson’s mind, skepticism toward environmental catastrophism is “anti-science rubbish” and the fact that such an article appears on Fox News just proves that only “rubes” are skeptics:

[Fox News reporter Maxim] Lott is trying to denigrate the reliability of climate science, a typical denier’s tactic; but the real lesson of his list of ‘botched forecasts’ is that climate predictions are becoming increasingly accurate as scientific knowledge increases, and techniques and models are refined.

No, actually, the fact that most of Lott’s examples are from the 1970s and ’80s just shows that the doomsayers have wised up to the risk of short-term projections.

“Population Bomb” hoaxer Paul Ehrlich made a laughingstock of himself by predicting what he expected to happen in five, 10 or 15 years — and all his disaster scenarios proved false. As Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey says, Ehrlich has never been right about anything.

Other doomsayers have learned the lesson of Ehrlich’s example. Nowadays, the purveyors of climate-change “consensus” talk about what will happen in 50, 100 or 200 years. The beauty of putting Doomsday in the fairly distant future is that your prediction cannot be falsified any time soon. By the time anyone can determine whether your forecasts were accurate, you’ll be mouldering in the grave.

The game is clearly rigged in favor of the “consensus.” If you point to examples contrary to their theory — record cold in Miami, Florida, for example — they’ll say, “No, that’s merely the weather. We’re talking about climate.”

Yeah, right.

Da Tech Guy calls Johnson’s advocacy of climate change theory the surest sign that it’s jumped the shark.

Whether of not that’s true, 2010 is destined to be remembered as The Year Global Warming Died. The inarguable highlight of the year was when the world’s climate-change fanatics gathered for a big U.N.-sponsored conference in Cancun, Mexico, a tropical resort location which acknowledged their presence with three straight days of record cold temperatures!

UPDATE: Just incidentally, Diary of Dedalus had an LGF “Flounce of the Year” contest for the best exit by a commenter from Johnson’s members-only site. While I haven’t seen the final tally, the early “consensus” seems to have been Cato the Elder’s “Do It Now” flounce.

That exit was inspired by a fund-raising squabble at LGF. Seems some Lizardoids had objected to Johnson putting ads on the site, so he came up with an idea: “Chip in $10 a month and the site will be ad-free.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I hope no one is under the illusion that this blog is a charitable endeavor. No, we are greedy capitalist bloggers perpetrating an Underpants Gnome scheme to take over the entire freaking blogosphere. That our scheme has so far been only partially successful has not deterred us in the least.

And since we’re talking about predictions here, I’ll boldly predict that at some point during 2011, Charles Johnson will do something laughably stupid.

Given that it’s almost noon on New Year’s Day, this prediction may have already come true.

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Category: Charles Johnson, Global Warming
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