The Other McCain

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

It’s ‘Make My Wife Happy’ Day!

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 10 Comments

That’s right: Today is the day when readers get to do their part to bring joy to the heart of Mrs. Other McCain.

And as the old saying goes, “A happy wife makes a happy blogger.”

Actually, I just made that saying up.

Same way I just made up “Make My Wife Happy” Day.

Sue me.

What this actually is — and clever readers automatically suspected it — is yet one more desperate attempt to persuade readers to hit the freaking tip jar. Unlike some other bloggers out there, however, I consider it an obligation to give readers extra value for your contributions, to provide incentives for you to kick in $10 or $20 to help pay the bills.

Did I ever mention Mrs. Other McCain looks hot in a bikini? Read more

Category: Mrs. Other McCain

Did Someone Say ‘Desperation’?

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 9 Comments

Yeah, it’s Ed Driscoll talking about the attempt of liberals to make sense of their election “shellacking” through conspiracy theories.

By the way, Michael Gerson’s invocation of John Stormer’s 1964 book None Dare Call It Treason is unfair to John Stormer, a patriotic American whom I interviewed in 1999 after the publication of his book None Dare Call It Education.

There is, perhaps, some analogy between (a) the inability of Americans in the mid-1960s to understand why Cold War liberalism failed to cope effectively with the Soviet menace, and (b) the inability of liberals in 2010 to understand why Democrats lost the election. But Stormer’s conspiratorial interpretation of events at least was aimed at defeating a real existential threat to the United States, whereas liberal conspiracy theorists like Matthew Yglesias and Steve Benen are merely seeking scapegoats for partisan political purposes. (Scapegoats — you know, like that evil Nazi Glenn Reynolds.)

Certainly, there were those during the Cold War who interpreted every unfortunate development as evidence of Bolshevik treachery. The problem was that liberals refused to confront the real evidence of such treachery. The question “Who lost China?” was a legitimate question and — between the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Rosenberg case and other documented examples of pro-Communist subversion — there were legitimate reasons to believe that Soviet agents and/or communist sympathizers were deliberately betraying their country.

Rather than lend their aid to efforts to expose security risks and prevent the propagation of subversive doctrines, however, the leading lights of liberalism from the 1940s through the ’60s instead strove to convince the American people that the greater danger to the commonweal was anti-communists like Joe McCarthy. And it was this typical reaction — i.e., “anti-anti-Communism” — which did so much to convince many conservatives that liberals were secretly pro-communist.

Most younger Americans today know very little of Cold War political history, and what they know of it consists of liberal mythology about the evils of McCarthyism. American anti-Communists are portrayed as a collection of dimwit kooks, demagogues and warmongers. That one can trace a straight line of influence from Whittaker Chambers (who exposed Alger Hiss) to William F. Buckley (who co-authored a book defending Joe McCarthy) to Ronald Reagan — you know, the guy credited with finally winning the Cold War — is one historical circumstance that students today are expected to ignore.

Because no one can expect to gain a tenured professorship if he writes his Ph.D. thesis with the aim of vindicating American anti-communists, there are very few defenders of Chambers, Buckley and Reagan in academia, and anti-communism therefore lacks respectability among the intelligentsia. And so Gerson doesn’t hesitate to depict John Stormer as a tinfoil-hat kook.

But look again at the 1964 question asked by Stormer that Gerson quotes: “Is there a conspiratorial plan to destroy the United States into which foreign aid, planned inflation, distortion of treaty-making powers and disarmament all fit?”

Yes, there was such a plan and there still is such a plan. It’s called “liberalism.” Its adherents do not admit or declare their intention “to destroy the United States” — and may not consciously intend such a result — but the result will be the same, if liberalism prevails. Consider for a moment New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s battle cry for class warfare:

What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.

One need not be a conspiracy theorist to discern in such rhetoric very familiar ideas — “workers of the world unite,” “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” etc. — and no one is accusing Bob Herbert of being an agent of the KGB. Yet what are these “forces that nearly destroyed the economy”? Doesn’t Herbert mean capitalism? And is his phrase “working Americans” not a synonym for the proletariat? And what are these “equitable solutions” that Herbert urges us to adopt?

You see that certain harmful ideas are being advanced which, however, are not called by names that would cause us to take alarm. This is the sort of phenomenon that long ago inspired a poet’s maxim, which in turn inspired a famous book title.

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
— Sir John Harrington

Category: Economics, Liberals

Religion of Peace Update

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 13 Comments

No sooner had I compiled an extensive report on the rape jihad in England than we have this headline:

Somali-American accused of plotting
to bomb Oregon tree-lighting event

Sven Olsen Mohamed Mohamud had gotten in touch with an “unindicted associate” in Sweden Pakistan and expressed an interest in anti-abortion activism “violent jihad.” So the feds arranged a sting and supplied the fanatical Lutheran Muslim with a van rigged up with phony explosives:

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would blow up a van laden with explosives but instead brought federal agents and Portland police swooping in to take him into custody.
Mohamud yelled “Allahu Akhbar” and tried to kick agents and police as the arrest came, according to prosecutors.

Of course, if Mohamed Mohamud and Sven Olsen were both boarding a plane in Portland, the decision of whether Mohamed or Sven got an enhanced TSA screening would have to be as random as a coin-flip. Or else the ACLU would say “Allahu Akhbar” “see you in court.”

More at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: We now have a photo of the suspect, and a report from the New York Times, which includes this stunning paragraph:

The arrest marks another episode in which Somalian-Americans are accused of radicalism. In 2009, after a sweeping federal investigation of more than 20 young Americans believed to have joined a militant Islamist group in Somalia, authorities charged two of the men with providing material support for terrorism. In 2008, another man under investigation blew himself up in an attack in Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber.

Did you see that? They said “militant Islamist”! The New York Times actually referred to the Religion of Peace™ by name! That’s Change We Can Believe In.

Meanwhile, the FBI’s press release about the arrest is online.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin posts photos of the “broad strata of society” implicated in jihadi terrorism.

UPDATE III: The word for this is “pathetic”:

I’m not aware that any “right wing blogs” tried to “turn this into a defeat for the Obama administration” and I certainly didn’t make any partisan political references.

Michelle Malkin does make an important point when she says, “Violent jihad. Two words the current occupant of the White House won’t say together and about which he remains in stubborn denial.”

But then again, Malkin also often excoriated the previous occupant of the White House — that would be the Republican, President Bush — when he rhetorically obscured the specific nature of the jihadist danger.

Category: Oregon, Terrorism

VIDEO: Couple Saves Six-Month-Old Baby Daughter From Carjacker

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 2 Comments

Your heart-warming feel-good story of the day:

Category: Crime, Video

World Shocked by the Alarming Urgency of Jennifer Aniston Mexico Bikini Pictures

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 4 Comments

They tried to warn us, but their warnings were in vain. After all, who could have imagined it? It transcended in magnitude anything mankind had ever known.

Nothing in all previous human history could have prepared us for the sight of Jennifer Aniston in a purple bikini.

UPDATE: “Clearly I have much to learn.” Yeah. Sandra Bernhard nude? Dude, that’s just so wrong.

Category: American Power, Celebrities, Rule 5

Report: ‘Issues of Culture, Ethnicity and Identity’ Raised in U.K. Rape-Gang Case

Posted on | November 27, 2010 | 35 Comments

A report on the sexual exploitation of British girls as young as 12 by a gang led by two 28-year-old Muslim men found that cultural issues were “a critical factor in making [the victims] easy targets for abusers.”

Official agencies “missed opportunities” to protect two victims of the gang, according to the newly released report by the Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Board (PDF).

England was shocked this week by the news — made public after the conclusion of three trials in which nine men were convicted — that at least 27 girls in Derbyshire had fallen prey to the gang led by Abid ­Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat, “each British-born and of Pakistani origin with an arranged marriage,” according to the U.K. Daily Mail. Authorities say the gang may have had dozens more victims.

Saddique and Liaqat cruised the streets in a BMW looking for young girls, sometimes approaching them near schools or shops. The men would use cell-phone calls and text messages to “groom” the girls, then ply them with alcohol and drugs and invite them to parties where they would be sexually assaulted. One girl said she was gang-raped by eight men. Read more

Category: Crime, Culture, Great Britain, Pakistan, Religion, Sex

They Told Professor Glenn Reynolds That If He Voted for John McCain . . .

Posted on | November 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

. . . the Department of Homeland Security would be cracking down on the Internet. And they were right!

Category: Uncategorized

I Blame Nick Saban

Posted on | November 26, 2010 | 6 Comments

Out-coached. That is all.

Category: Alabama, Football
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