So, ‘Words Matter’ Does Not Mean
‘Words Affect Matter’?

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by Smitty (h/t Weasel Zippers via American Glob)

Liz Cheney is clearly the new hotness:

Barack Obama epitomizes the challenge of homo bureaucratus. While management skills are indeed skills in their own right (not to accuse BHO of possessing such), they are of the necessary but not sufficient variety.
True, leaders delegate to subordinates. Leaders cannot know, or even know how to do, everything. However, once the subordinates glom onto the fact that the leader is capable of precious little past shoe tying, and have no basis for following beyond idle curiosity, things go pear-shaped in a hurry.

As Ancient Commenter Solomon observed:

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.
–Proverbs 29:18

You now have a President who can view substantial, well-grounded negative feedback from the people, say “There is some basis for concern,” and then behave as if condescending to notice the existence of an opposing view constitutes a substantial exchange on the topic, to say nothing of allowing an alternative view to affect policy meaningfully.

Liz Cheney has succinctly verbalized what events tells us. It’s just over five months until we have our national moment of repentance.

You know what to do.

Israel Update: Prime Minister Netanyahu Cancels White House Meeting

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Not giving Obama another chance to snub him:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has canceled plans to meet U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday, an Israeli statement said, in the wake of a deadly Israeli raid on Gaza-bound ships.
“Netanyahu decided to cut short his visit to Canada and return to Israel early,” the statement said on Monday. Netanyahu has been in Canada since Friday for talks with government leaders.

From an account of the battle aboard one of the flotilla ships:

The forces hurled stun grenades, yet the rioters on the top deck, whose number swelled up to 30 by that time, kept on beating up about 30 commandoes who kept gliding their way one by one from the helicopter. At one point, the attackers nabbed one commando, wrested away his handgun, and threw him down from the top deck to the lower deck, 30 feet below. The soldier sustained a serious head wound and lost his consciousness.
Only after this injury did Flotilla 13 troops ask for permission to use live fire. The commander approved it: You can go ahead and fire. The soldiers pulled out their handguns and started shooting at the rioters’ legs, a move that ultimately neutralized them. Meanwhile, the rioters started to fire back at the commandoes.
“I saw the tip of a rifle sticking out of the stairwell,” one commando said. “He fired at us and we fired back. We didn’t see if we hit him. We looked for him later but couldn’t find him.” Two soldiers sustained gunshot wounds to their knee and stomach after rioters apparently fired at them using guns wrested away from troops.

Associated Press video:

UPDATE: IDF video shows rioters on ship attacking soldiers:

Jerusalem Post:

The IDF released footage of the Monday raid on the “Free Gaza” flotilla, which depicted the activists upon the ship attacking soldiers with various weapons, including a large metal pole and other metal objects.
In the IDF takeover, at least 15 activists were killed and dozens were injured.
In a brief interview with the soldiers who were aboard the ships, one soldier said that the attack “looked like the Ramallah lynch.” . . .
International activists aboard the ships opened fire on IDF soldiers who boarded the ships to prevent them from breaking the Israeli-imposed sea blockade, the IDF said Monday.
According to the IDF, the international activists “prepared a lynch” for the soldiers who boarded the ships at about 2 a.m. Monday morning after the soldiers called on them to stop, or follow them to the Ashdod Port several hours earlier.

More at Memeorandum.

UPDATE II: Cubachi has background on the radical group that organized this flotilla:

IHH’s orientation is radical-Islamic and anti-American, and it is close to the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas’ parent movement). IHH supports Hamas and does not hide the connection between them. Hamas also considers its links to IHH and Turkey to be extremely important, and regards Turkey as a target audience for its propaganda network . . .
 In January 2008 an IHH delegation met with Ahmed Bahar, a senior Hamas activist who is acting chairman of Hamas’ council in the Gaza Strip. At the meeting the delegation revealed the extent of the aid it had given Hamas in the Gaza Strip during the preceding year and said it intended to double the sum in the future. In January 2009 IHH head Bülent Yildirim met with Khaled Mashaal, chairman of Hamas’ political bureau in Damascus, and Mashaal thanked him for the support of his organization.

Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Stand With Arizona? Not John McCain

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Thanks to Barbara Espinosa for posting this picture:

That’s Maverick with then-Gov. Janet Napolitano at a 2004 rally against Proposition 200, which requires “individuals to provide proof of citizenship before they may register to vote or apply for public benefits in Arizona.” Prop 200 passed with 56% of the vote and yet somehow, that backstabbing crapweasel John McCain won re-election in 2004.

Attendance at Saturday’s “Stand With Arizona” rally was 7,000:

TEMPE, Ariz. — Seven-thousand people packed into Diablo Stadium in Tempe Saturday night, making sure Arizona knew there are quite a few people who said the new immigration law is just what the state needs.
It was a major event for the pro-1070 movement, a rally bringing people from across the country to Arizona. . . .
“Our economy is gonna keep building the more controversy so I say more, I’ll cause more controversy, I guarantee you in the next two months so they want to keep coming back, that’s great,” added Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Griff Jenkins of Fox News was at the Tempe rally, where he greeted a certain Arizona blogging celebrity:

Speaking of people on a first-name basis with Barbara Espinosa, guess who was on “Meet the Press” Sunday?

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

J.D. HAYWORTH for U.S. SENATE

Flotilla of Fools vs. Israeli Navy

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Like a scene straight from the pages of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a group of activists calling themselves the “Freedom Flotilla” have attempted — and evidently, failed — to break the Israeli blockade of Hamas-held Gaza:

The Israeli Navy made its first contact with a flotilla carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists and thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza shortly before midnight on Sunday, surprising the boats in international waters, according to activists on one vessel.
Israel has vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where the Islamic militant group Hamas holds sway . . .
Named the Freedom Flotilla, and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy of six cargo and passenger boats is the most ambitious attempt yet to break Israel’s three-year blockade of Gaza.
Two television stations reported early Monday that Israeli warships had attacked the ships, killing at least two and wounding an unknown number of people on board, according to The Associated Press. . . .

More on this episode at Israelly Cool.

UPDATE: So, what kind of cargo was aboard the ships in this pro-Hamas flotilla? Brittany Cohan offers a guess on Twitter:

Things that were probably on the boat: rainbows and butterflies. I think world peace was on there too, I am sure.

Of course!

UPDATE II: Richard Fernandez at PJM:

The Turks, who were heavily represented in the flotilla, have already called in the Israeli ambassador.  There is almost certainly going to be an denunciation of Israeli actions from Europe. The incident will mean that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s forthcoming visit to Washington will be even frostier and more difficult than expected.

Well, it was never going to be warm.

UPDATE III: Now a thread at Memeorandum and Moe Lane at Red State comments:

[V]iolent resistance to a military seizure of your vessel will lead to violence in return, and PR disaster or no the IDF acted as a professional military force following the civilian policy of two sovereign governments (Egypt’s also maintaining the blockade).  But this is all the excuse that an Israel-hater needs to break diplomatic relations with that country.
Which means that we’re about to find out the true extent of this administration’s supposed antipathy to Israel.

And for those who haven’t read The Camp of the Saints, this is from a post I wrote in March 2009:

A few years ago, Phyllis Chesler sent me her book The Death of Feminism, and when I got home with it and started reading, I was shocked to see her citing Jean Raspail’s notorious novel, The Camp of the Saints. (That passage is substantially excerpted in an online essay at her Web site.)
For years, Raspail’s 1973 French novel enjoyed a sort of samizdat cult following among critics of multiculturalism and opponents of open-borders immigration policy (which would be more properly termed a non-policy, but let us not digress.) Raspail himself has said that Le Camp Des Saints could not be published in France today because of the “human rights” nonsense that is slowly strangling free speech in Europe (and Canada). And the book’s reputation as a hateful expression of xenophobic nativism makes it one of those Books You’re Not Supposed to Read.
Thus, I was startled to see Chesler, a liberal feminist all her life, citing Raspail’s book as prophetic. Yet Chesler had been able to see past the superficial text of the novel to comprehend its deeper significance as a metaphor for the demoralization of the West. In this sense, Raspail was describing the same larger phenomenon that Shelby Steele describes in White Guilt, that Pat Buchanan describes in The Death of the West, that Michelle Malkin describes in Invasion, that Thomas Sowell describes in The Vision of the Anointed, and that Peter Brimelow describes in Alien Nation.
These are all very different writers, with different interests, different aims, and different philosophies. However, they all share the fundamental understanding that liberalism is a soul-destroying disease, a sort of intellectual anti-virus that exposes its host to destruction by weakening the individual cells of the national immune system. To the extent that your mind is cluttered with the glittering generalities of modern liberalism — “social justice,” etc. — you will be unable to resist and will inevitably succumb to the agonizing spiritual death that beckons at the end of that road.

There is another Memeorandum thread, and comment by Israpundit, Liberty Pundits, Jawa Report, Powerline and Atlas Shrugged.

‘Indigenous’ Mexicans?
La Raza and the Reconquista Myth

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Barbara Espinosa at American Freedom blog sends along these photos from the protest in Phoenix:

“We are here as indigenous peoples of this continent . . . to confront the Racist squatters on our continent who dare to call us foreigners. . . . 500 years of European crimes of trespassing, theft, murder, false borders, and Genocide do not make OUR CONTINENT a European continent!”

Smitty earlier linked to the many photos by Donald Douglas at American Power conveying similar sentiments. 

What you are seeing here is an attempt to delegitimize the United States in the same way Palestinian nationalists have attempted to delegitimize Israel. Like the “Zionism is racism” argument that Palestinians use to justify their terrorism against Jews in israel, the advocates of a Mexican reconsquista proclaim that the mere desire of Americans to control their borders — to have an orderly system of immigration — is “racist.”

Furthermore, playing upon the mestizo ancestry of most of the migrants. these activists portray themselves as victims of colonial oppression — “trespassing, theft, murder,” et cetera. Being “indigenous,” they insist they have a right to reside anywhere on the continent, since “false borders” are a European imposition.

What these activists are attempting to do is to propogate a racist/nationalist myth — a sort of fascism. What else to say about their claim that, because most Mexicans have some native ancestry, that this gives them to a right to reside hundreds of miles north of the homelands of their own peoples? It’s as if the Mayan Empire had belatedly laid claim to Arizona.

The argument of La Raza strives dehumanize whites by depicting whites as genocidal racist monsters. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a direct attack on Western civilization and an invitation to lawless savagery. If U.S. borders and immigration laws are illegitimate, then how can any other U.S. law be legitimate? If “Europeans” are automatically guilty of “trespassing, theft, murder,” then how can these “squatters” complain if they are in similarly victimized by the “indigenous peoples”?

This myth-making mythology is dangerous, and it is time that Americans wake up to the danger.

See Barbara Espinosa’s reports on illegal immigration.

Now, Are You Going To Believe The MSM, Or Douglas’s Fibbin’ Imagery?

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by Smitty

Donald Douglas’s lengthy post on the Arizona SB1070 protest really points out why we need to rely on what reputable outfits like the LA Times, NY Times, and Rachel Maddow tell us, and not the defective output of perhaps well-intentioned, but poorly equipped civilian reporters like Don.

Somebody could walk away with the mistaken impression that a bunch of KKK- and swastika-laden imagery meant a disdain for American sovereignty and personal attacks, when really all that was meant was a show of concern for healthy potassium intake by a bunch of Hindus and Budhhists.

Mr. Douglas is admonished to make a proper study of the Holy Narrative before contributing more of these unhelpful reports.

In all seriousness, there is slight merit in the media not inflaming the reports of these rallies. A tactically difficult situation could develop faster than you can say “Ron Gochez is a knob”. Strategically, the situation is even worse. Beyond the suckiness of the situation is the leadership vacuum besetting the country.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” is not a foreign policy statement, yet we’re mis-applying that ethic in a couple of ways:

  • Lack of meaningful (i.e. enforced) immigration laws
  • Lack of attention to borders

The one picture proclaiming the right to migrate anywhere on the continent represents a notion that must be gently refuted.

Border security, like energy security, is a hard problem.  The country is going to have to insist on candidates with platforms, not platitudes, to address these issues.

Or just learn to speak Spanish.  It’s really not a bad language.  At least the alphabet is familiar, and it’s not tonal like Far Eastern tongues.  So ya got that goin’ for ya.

Update: Carol’s Closet is far less mellow.

Update II: Saberpoint has his way with the sign that is likely to draw the most attention.

Anthropogenic Global Warming
Climate Change Myth Threatens
Noble Savage Myth

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by Smitty (h/t InstaPundit)

Faced with more and more people asking really hard questions about the second most expensive hoax in human history (what can top Marxism?) the Anthropogenic Global WarmingClimate Change community has been forced to explore new means of re-inflating the guilt-bubble:

IT’S not just for the last century that humans have been messing up the climate. It may have been going on for thousands of years.

When hunters arrived in North America and drove mammoths and other large mammals to extinction, the methane balance of the atmosphere could have changed as a result, triggering the global cool spell that followed. The large grazing animals would have produced copious amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from their digestive systems. They vanished about 13,000 years ago.

Noble Savage Myth spokesman Norbert W. Imboodaga was having none of this. In a statement delivered to this blog on a clay tablet inscribed by a stylish stylus and then baked, Imboodaga said:

Tish-tosh. Our myth dates at least to 1672, and thus has centuries of seniority. While we bear no overt animosity to the Climate Change community, and in fact support their cause to the extent of enjoying a lifestyle that makes the Amish look high-tech, we must object to the notion of man, living in a purely natural state, as somehow being outside of nature, and therefore culpable for any side effects of our existence. We live so close to Mother Nature that the Good Mother blesses all of our endeavors by definition. The Climate Change people should just Gaia way.

After delivering this clay missive, Mr. Imboodaga picked up his spear, adjusted his primitive animal-skin clothing, and vanished back into the woods to rejoin his clan.