"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Thank you, oh, thank you,
Men and women, brave and strong!
To those who served so gallantly,
We sing this grateful song!
Thanks to Dave at Point of a Gun for finding this video featuring third-graders at Tussing Elementary School in Colonial Heights, Va.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Blazing Cat Fur was doing video of an anti-Israel protest in Toronto when he was attacked by Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Union official Ali Mallah:
Blazing Cat Fur points out that Mallah is “vice president of the virulently anti-semitic Canadian Arab Federation.”
You may remember these text messages about Nikki Haley from South Carolina GOP consultant Wes Donehue to Will Folks:
From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 13, 2010 2:55 PM
I just don’t know who has told more people, you or Nikki.From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 13, 2010 5:01 PM
Here my promise to you, man to man. If you tell me that a story will f*ck up your marriage, I’ll do everything in my power to kill it.From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 14, 2010 10:36 AM
Now, I don’t give a f*ck [if] you believe me or not. [You’re] the one who screwed her. You’re the one who bragged about it. She’s the one who told BJ. Yall point fingers at your own damn selves and leave me the f*ck out of it.From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 14, 2010 11:50 AM
I’m going to try to kill it. You need to get BJ to back down. Nothing good will come of this getting out. I’ve already helped bust up one family. No need to take down another one.From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 14, 2010 12:28 PM
I didn’t start this. I just told too many people that it was happening.
OK, so Donehue said he would do what he could to kill the story, but wanted to be left out of it. And as he he says in this video (beginning at 0:42), Donehue “was drug into something I don’t want to be drug into.”
Donehue has been consistent: He wanted no part of this story. So why would Will Folks attempt to portray Donehue as an “instigator”? We don’t know. Perhaps he was attempting to draw as many people as possible into his personal melodrama.
However, so that you might assess Donehue’s personality and character, here is the latest episode of the South Carolina online video program, “Pub Politics,” which Donehue co-hosts:
Here’s something else of interest: Wes Wolfe, the journalist who co-authored the award-winning 2008 “Hit List” article for the Columbia (S.C.) Free Press, talks about how Will Folks reacted to the Haley rumor in 2009:
[A]pparently a little less than a year ago, Folks got himself all worked up in a lather thinking that we were going to break the story that’s consuming so many people these days. But we weren’t. Never were. Never even considered it. Whole thing kind of caught us off-guard at the time.
So Will Folks’ panic about press interest in the rumor a year ago was unwarranted. Nor was the rumor new among South Carolina political types:
By the way, we heard back in early ‘08 that Haley and Will Folks had an affair. There are a lot of people in this state to which the news is not news.
In April, Wolfe shared his extremely low opinion of Will Folks:
After all, the blogger kiddo of S.C. politics has been doing everything short of going to the corner of Gervais and Main to wear a sandwich board to get the dumber people interested in state politics to pay attention to his bullsh*t. . . .
And, let’s not forget that it looks like the anti-social whiner has pissed off one of his last backers, the S.C. Policy Council, a so-called “non-partisan” (yeah, whatever) group chaired by Rick Quinn. The second that started falling apart, the child started ripping Quinn’s boy’s site, The Palmetto Scoop . . .
If Folks was any more needy, he’d be the kitty from Thundercats, sending up a signal to call Lion-O back home. So, by all means, please justify this a**hole’s existence! Otherwise he might go back to fatty coffee beverages and fried chicken!
So Folks is an “anti-social whiner,” and in April 2010 had lost “one of his last backers.” In addition to his low opinion of Will Folks, Wolfe expressed contempt for Folks’ patron, Gov. Mark Sanford and Sanford’s protege, Haley:
Will Folks is a world-class wuss. Coward. Dipsh*t. He hides behind his high-priced attorneys and the imbeciles who give him information, and acts like he’s hot sh*t. That’s most likely why another world-class coward and dipsh*t, Mark Sanford, hired this idiot to begin with. Also likely why his joke of a protégé, Rep. Nikki Haley, did the same.
In the same post, Wolfe says he believes the rumor of a Haley-Folks affair, but understands Haley’s denial:
Why Haley is lying isn’t a surprise. If you f—-d that bald ugly fool, whether you’re married with children or not, would you want the world knowing about it? Doubtful.
Ah, if — the most powerful little word in the English language. But there is nothing tentative, hypothetical or equivocal in Wolfe’s assessment of Will Folks. See Rule 6.