By Tony Katz
Friday, March 30, 2012
Obamacare's run through the Supreme Court has been a disaster. It has been described as a "train wreck." Justice Antonin Scalia asked if it means that the Federal Government can order people to eat broccoli. Even super-sacred-cow-swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy admitted that this "fundamentally" transforms the relationship between the citizens and the government. However, the story not told is the Lie told by Leftist Leaders to unsuspecting Rank and File Leftists. It's Left on Left crime, and it is just awful.
When Obamacare was passed in a hail of gunfire, under serious time constraints and without any possibility of sufficient review.....wait, that's not how it happened. That's just how the Left made America feel about it. The Affordable Care Act (it's official title, like "BFD" Joe's official title is Mr. Vice-President) was the most important piece of legislation ever enacted by man. Over 2000 pages, Obamacare was the attempt of Progressives to move America more towards European Socialism, with the end hope being a full-on Statist regime....if not hope, then just the inevitable end result.
To move this unseemly proposition forward, Leftist Leaders represented by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Harry Reid had to introduce an individual mandate - All Patriotic Americans Must Purchase Health Insurance Or Pay A Fine! Then, Leftists Leaders had to do something else - lie to Rank and File Leftists.
The job of the Leftist Leaders was to mislead and manipulate the Leftist Rank And File (LRAF); get them to take to social media and blogs and tv shows and radio shows not only to tout the pure, raw genius of President Obama and Obamacare, but to viciously attack (through race and class warfare) those who oppose Obamacare.
The calls of "racism" were heard around the land. Opposition to Obamacare meant you hated black people, poor people, women, puppies; it meant you didn't cry while watching Field of Dreams, you think Snooki makes some good points and that Simon Cowell should wear shirts that are "tighter and whiter."
Eventually, 26 states found the backbone to challenge Obamacare and bring it to the Supreme Court. And there, the LRAF found themselves stunned. In just three days, in only six hours of arguments from Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Obamacare was exposed for what it always was: an unconstitutional power grab against the citizens of the United States.
Two years of campaigning for it, two years of vitriolic hate speech, two years of eating up everything Leftist Leaders Pelosi and Reid sold them (with support selling from Schumer, Frank, Levin, Franken, Wasserman-Schultz and the entire MSNBC line up,) two years of being blind, all ended with a simple question from Justice Kennedy:
Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?
The lie is exposed. Not Obamacare, but that Leftists care about people. They don't.
The Leftist Leaders proved that they can get their followers to do anything, say anything, blindly and unquestioning. What could be more violent than this? Does it need to involve fists or guns in order to be a horrific sight? The LRAF were used as pawns to try to intimidate the American people into accepting this egregious, unconstitutional law; a far reaching, soul thrashing, European Socialist agenda.
Other Leftist Leaders, including James Carville, care nothing for the LRAF, stating that losing in the SCOTUS is a good thing...."the best thing." No Obamacare is a great thing? The LRAF has been victimized!
Soon, the conversation from the Leftist Leaders will be about why Obamacare didn't work (see, racist Tea Party..or racist Republicans….or, just something racist) and why this proves that what America needs is Single-Payer Healthcare. Many of the LRAF will continue to engage this abusive relationship, relishing their Stockholm Syndrome-esqe state of being. We must help them.
Leftist RAF - Save yourselves! We, the Free and Thinking people of America recognize your plight. Left on Left violence is a horrible problem that must be addressed! Do not hide in the shadows! Do not be ashamed! Do not let Harry Reid hurt you anymore. Do not let Nancy Pelosi tell you what you must do for your own good. Stand up and say to your Leftist Leaders "No More!"
LRAF of America - Reject The Left! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Even If It Survives the Court, the Health Care Law Is Doomed
By Scott Rasmussen
Friday, March 30, 2012
Media coverage now implies that the U.S. Supreme Court will determine the fate of President Obama's health care law. But nothing the court decides will keep the law alive for more than a brief period of time.
There are three ways the health care law could meet its end. The first, obviously, is the Supreme Court could declare some or all of it unconstitutional in June.
If it gets past that hurdle, the law also could be ended by Election 2012. If a Republican president is elected, the GOP will almost certainly also win control of the Senate and retain control of the House. While the details might take time, a Republican sweep in November would ultimately end the Obama experiment.
But even if the law survives the Supreme Court and the next election, the clock will be ticking. Recent estimates suggest that the law would cause 11 million people to lose their employer-provided insurance and be forced onto a government-backed insurance plan. That's a problem because 77 percent of those who now have insurance rate their current coverage as good or excellent. Only 3 percent rate their coverage as poor. For most of the 11 million forced to change their insurance coverage then, it will be received as bad news and create a pool of vocally unhappy voters.
Additionally, the cost estimates for funding the program are likely to keep going up. Eighty-one percent of voters expect it to cost more than projected, and recent Congressional Budget Office estimates indicate voters are probably right. But it's not the narrow specifics and cost estimates that guarantee the ultimate demise of the president's health care plan. It's the fact that the law runs contrary to basic American values and perceptions.
This, then, is the third hurdle the law faces: Individual Americans recognize that they have more power as consumers than they do as voters. Their choices in a free market give them more control over the economic world than choosing one politician or another.
Seventy-six percent think they should have the right to choose between expensive insurance plans with low deductibles and low-cost plans with higher deductibles. A similar majority believes everyone should be allowed to choose between expensive plans that cover just about every imaginable medical procedure and lower-cost plans that cover a smaller number of procedures. All such choices would be banned under the current health care law.
Americans want to be empowered as health care consumers. Eighty-two percent believe that if an employer pays for health insurance, the worker should be able to use that money and select an insurance product that meets his or her individual needs. If the plan they select costs less than the company plan, most believe the worker should get to keep the change.
It's not just the idea of making the choice that drives these numbers, it's the belief held by most Americans that competition will do more than government regulation to reduce the cost of health care. For something as fundamental as medical care, government policy must be consistent with deeply held American values. That's why an approach that increases consumer choice has solid support and a plan that relies on mandates and trusting the government cannot survive.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Media coverage now implies that the U.S. Supreme Court will determine the fate of President Obama's health care law. But nothing the court decides will keep the law alive for more than a brief period of time.
There are three ways the health care law could meet its end. The first, obviously, is the Supreme Court could declare some or all of it unconstitutional in June.
If it gets past that hurdle, the law also could be ended by Election 2012. If a Republican president is elected, the GOP will almost certainly also win control of the Senate and retain control of the House. While the details might take time, a Republican sweep in November would ultimately end the Obama experiment.
But even if the law survives the Supreme Court and the next election, the clock will be ticking. Recent estimates suggest that the law would cause 11 million people to lose their employer-provided insurance and be forced onto a government-backed insurance plan. That's a problem because 77 percent of those who now have insurance rate their current coverage as good or excellent. Only 3 percent rate their coverage as poor. For most of the 11 million forced to change their insurance coverage then, it will be received as bad news and create a pool of vocally unhappy voters.
Additionally, the cost estimates for funding the program are likely to keep going up. Eighty-one percent of voters expect it to cost more than projected, and recent Congressional Budget Office estimates indicate voters are probably right. But it's not the narrow specifics and cost estimates that guarantee the ultimate demise of the president's health care plan. It's the fact that the law runs contrary to basic American values and perceptions.
This, then, is the third hurdle the law faces: Individual Americans recognize that they have more power as consumers than they do as voters. Their choices in a free market give them more control over the economic world than choosing one politician or another.
Seventy-six percent think they should have the right to choose between expensive insurance plans with low deductibles and low-cost plans with higher deductibles. A similar majority believes everyone should be allowed to choose between expensive plans that cover just about every imaginable medical procedure and lower-cost plans that cover a smaller number of procedures. All such choices would be banned under the current health care law.
Americans want to be empowered as health care consumers. Eighty-two percent believe that if an employer pays for health insurance, the worker should be able to use that money and select an insurance product that meets his or her individual needs. If the plan they select costs less than the company plan, most believe the worker should get to keep the change.
It's not just the idea of making the choice that drives these numbers, it's the belief held by most Americans that competition will do more than government regulation to reduce the cost of health care. For something as fundamental as medical care, government policy must be consistent with deeply held American values. That's why an approach that increases consumer choice has solid support and a plan that relies on mandates and trusting the government cannot survive.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Vigilantes for Trayvon?
By Robert VerBruggen
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The angry public reaction to the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had a solid basis in fact. The teen was found dead and unarmed. A call placed to police by the shooter, George Zimmerman, proves beyond any doubt that — at least in the early stages of the encounter — Zimmerman was the aggressor. Further, Zimmerman’s story — that after running away in apparent fear, Martin suddenly attacked when Zimmerman gave up on the pursuit — sounds implausible. There should be a trial to determine whether Zimmerman can be proven guilty of a crime, and at first it appeared there would not be.
But that has changed. Despite the police’s reluctance to arrest Zimmerman, a special prosecutor is looking at the incident and may bring charges. The race-obsessed Obama Justice Department is also on the case. Even assuming Zimmerman acted illegally, a fair trial does not guarantee justice for Martin — there may not be enough evidence to prove the shooter guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But to the extent it is possible and consistent with the rule of law, the justice system will address this case.
That is not enough for Martin’s most bloodthirsty defenders, who have taken matters into their own hands. These vigilantes do not have the support of mainstream pro-Martin commentators, and, of course, their behavior does not weaken the legal case against Zimmerman. But they represent a disturbing and shockingly popular departure from the way in which crime ought to be addressed.
The shooting occurred more than a month ago, and soon thereafter, Zimmerman received death threats and moved out of his house, according to his father. But any case can capture the imaginations of a few crazies. It wasn’t until last week that the idea of privately hunting down Zimmerman went viral.
One of the major instigators was a 33-year-old Los Angeles man with more than 4,000 Twitter followers, Marcus Davonne Higgins. Starting last Wednesday, Higgins made numerous efforts to disseminate what he claimed was Zimmerman’s address, through tweets, posts to his Facebook wall, and a picket sign at a rally on Thursday. On Thursday, the New Black Panther Party called for the capture of Zimmerman, “dead or alive.”
Things only got worse from there. On Friday, film director Spike Lee — who boasts a quarter of a million Twitter followers — retweeted a message from Higgins with George Zimmerman’s supposed address. (It turns out that the house belongs to a couple in their 70s, who do not even live in a gated community, and now fear for their lives.) On Saturday, the New Black Panther Party updated its call for vigilante justice against Zimmerman, offering a $10,000 bounty. And on Monday, another Twitter user posted the incorrect address for Zimmerman, garnering 4,000 retweets.
Needless to say, this is unacceptable — and, in fact, much of it is illegal. The New Black Panther Party member who posted the $10,000 bounty has already been arrested. And while the courts have often protected newspapers that publish the addresses of crime suspects and their families, some of the tweets of Zimmerman’s address contain explicit incitements to violence (“He gone learn today”). Simply put, the freedom of speech does not protect the right to suggest that people be attacked.
But aside from the legal ramifications, the threats against Zimmerman are a symptom of the entire debate’s having gone off the rails. Most problematic is that mainstream liberals, rather than encouraging a fair and public trial with all of the relevant information out in the open, are trying to shut down discussion of Martin’s past behavior as “blaming the victim” or “smearing.” Never mind that numerous facts have come to light — Martin was suspended for marijuana, he was once caught in school with women’s jewelry and a screwdriver, and a tweet to Martin from a cousin suggests he “swung on a bus driver” — which could have a bearing on whether Zimmerman’s story is plausible enough to constitute “reasonable doubt.”
Martin’s supporters say they want an arrest and a trial, and it looks like they will get that. A public trial, not private justice, is what the shooter and the victim deserve — and both sides must be allowed to make their case in full.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The angry public reaction to the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had a solid basis in fact. The teen was found dead and unarmed. A call placed to police by the shooter, George Zimmerman, proves beyond any doubt that — at least in the early stages of the encounter — Zimmerman was the aggressor. Further, Zimmerman’s story — that after running away in apparent fear, Martin suddenly attacked when Zimmerman gave up on the pursuit — sounds implausible. There should be a trial to determine whether Zimmerman can be proven guilty of a crime, and at first it appeared there would not be.
But that has changed. Despite the police’s reluctance to arrest Zimmerman, a special prosecutor is looking at the incident and may bring charges. The race-obsessed Obama Justice Department is also on the case. Even assuming Zimmerman acted illegally, a fair trial does not guarantee justice for Martin — there may not be enough evidence to prove the shooter guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But to the extent it is possible and consistent with the rule of law, the justice system will address this case.
That is not enough for Martin’s most bloodthirsty defenders, who have taken matters into their own hands. These vigilantes do not have the support of mainstream pro-Martin commentators, and, of course, their behavior does not weaken the legal case against Zimmerman. But they represent a disturbing and shockingly popular departure from the way in which crime ought to be addressed.
The shooting occurred more than a month ago, and soon thereafter, Zimmerman received death threats and moved out of his house, according to his father. But any case can capture the imaginations of a few crazies. It wasn’t until last week that the idea of privately hunting down Zimmerman went viral.
One of the major instigators was a 33-year-old Los Angeles man with more than 4,000 Twitter followers, Marcus Davonne Higgins. Starting last Wednesday, Higgins made numerous efforts to disseminate what he claimed was Zimmerman’s address, through tweets, posts to his Facebook wall, and a picket sign at a rally on Thursday. On Thursday, the New Black Panther Party called for the capture of Zimmerman, “dead or alive.”
Things only got worse from there. On Friday, film director Spike Lee — who boasts a quarter of a million Twitter followers — retweeted a message from Higgins with George Zimmerman’s supposed address. (It turns out that the house belongs to a couple in their 70s, who do not even live in a gated community, and now fear for their lives.) On Saturday, the New Black Panther Party updated its call for vigilante justice against Zimmerman, offering a $10,000 bounty. And on Monday, another Twitter user posted the incorrect address for Zimmerman, garnering 4,000 retweets.
Needless to say, this is unacceptable — and, in fact, much of it is illegal. The New Black Panther Party member who posted the $10,000 bounty has already been arrested. And while the courts have often protected newspapers that publish the addresses of crime suspects and their families, some of the tweets of Zimmerman’s address contain explicit incitements to violence (“He gone learn today”). Simply put, the freedom of speech does not protect the right to suggest that people be attacked.
But aside from the legal ramifications, the threats against Zimmerman are a symptom of the entire debate’s having gone off the rails. Most problematic is that mainstream liberals, rather than encouraging a fair and public trial with all of the relevant information out in the open, are trying to shut down discussion of Martin’s past behavior as “blaming the victim” or “smearing.” Never mind that numerous facts have come to light — Martin was suspended for marijuana, he was once caught in school with women’s jewelry and a screwdriver, and a tweet to Martin from a cousin suggests he “swung on a bus driver” — which could have a bearing on whether Zimmerman’s story is plausible enough to constitute “reasonable doubt.”
Martin’s supporters say they want an arrest and a trial, and it looks like they will get that. A public trial, not private justice, is what the shooter and the victim deserve — and both sides must be allowed to make their case in full.
Obama's Gaffe Hints at Hidden Agenda in Second Term
By Michael Barone
Thursday, March 29, 2012
"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
So said John Kerry, in Huntington, W.V., on Tuesday, March 16, 2004, two weeks after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by carrying every state but Vermont in the Super Tuesday primaries.
Kerry was responding to an ad run by George W. Bush's campaign criticizing his 2003 vote against an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the Iraq war. Two days later, the Bush campaign ran an edited version of the ad with the "actually did vote" footage added.
Kerry had a defensible position. He did actually vote for a Democratic version of the supplemental that included a provision raising tax rates on high earners. He voted against the Republican version without the tax increase, knowing it would pass. The troops would not go unfunded.
But those 14 words were repeated again and again by the Bush campaign in the next eight months. Kerry was labeled a flip-flopper, and delegates at the Republican National Convention brandished flip-flops for the TV cameras one night.
The "did actually vote" sentence hurt Kerry because it underlined a critical weakness.
Like most other Senate Democrats, including Kerry's vice presidential nominee John Edwards, Kerry had voted for the Iraq War resolution in October 2002. But when things started going badly in Iraq in 2003, and after consistent Iraq War opponent Howard Dean shot to the top in Democratic polls, Kerry like many other Democrats said the war was a mistake and should be ended.
Thus the statement met columnist Michael Kinsley's famous definition of a gaffe: when a politician tells the truth. Kerry supported the war, then opposed the war. Flip, flop.
Fast forward to Monday, March 26, 2012, in Seoul, South Korea. Barack Obama was talking to outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. He was evidently unaware that his comments were audible via an open microphone.
"On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it's important for him to give me space," Obama said. "Yeah, I understand, I understand your message about space. Space for you," the Russian replied.
"This is my last election," Obama said. "After my election, I have more flexibility."
"I understand," Medvedev said. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir." The reference is to Vladmir Putin, the real ruler of Russia during Medvedev's Potemkin presidency.
Note Obama's use of the first-person adjective. Most American politicians speak of "the" election. Obama calls it "my" election. This sort of personalization comes naturally to a leader whose first public reaction to the death of a Florida teenager was, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
But of course what's really damaging here is the implication that Obama has a hidden second-term agenda.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were all quick to pounce. "President Obama signaled that he's going to cave to Russia on missile defense, but the American people have a right to know where else he plans to be flexible in a second term," Romney said.
Romney went too far in characterizing Russia as "our number one geopolitical foe." But Russia is at least a strategic competitor and, despite Obama's "reset," not a particularly friendly or helpful one.
Already in his first term Obama propitiated Russia by canceling missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, both NATO allies. "Were they trading Poland?" headlined the Polish tabloid Fakt yesterday.
And Obama certainly surprised the Catholic bishops with his Health and Human Services decree that Catholic hospitals' health insurance must include coverage of procedures they consider sinful. What further surprises are in store for them and others in a second term?
Obama felt obliged to defend his statement by saying it will take "the next nine, 10 months to work through some of the technical aspects" of missile defense. That's weaker than Kerry's response.
Some commentators are saying Obama's words will hurt less than Romney's press spokesman's "Etch-a-Sketch" analogy. But that hurts mainly in Republican primaries, and Romney seems well on his way to the nomination.
Obama's comment reminds general election voters, most of whom dislike his current major policies, that he might go even further "after my election."
The Republican National Committee has already cut a 60-second spot on Obama's words. You can expect to hear them as often this year as voters heard Kerry's damaging sentence in 2004.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
So said John Kerry, in Huntington, W.V., on Tuesday, March 16, 2004, two weeks after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by carrying every state but Vermont in the Super Tuesday primaries.
Kerry was responding to an ad run by George W. Bush's campaign criticizing his 2003 vote against an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the Iraq war. Two days later, the Bush campaign ran an edited version of the ad with the "actually did vote" footage added.
Kerry had a defensible position. He did actually vote for a Democratic version of the supplemental that included a provision raising tax rates on high earners. He voted against the Republican version without the tax increase, knowing it would pass. The troops would not go unfunded.
But those 14 words were repeated again and again by the Bush campaign in the next eight months. Kerry was labeled a flip-flopper, and delegates at the Republican National Convention brandished flip-flops for the TV cameras one night.
The "did actually vote" sentence hurt Kerry because it underlined a critical weakness.
Like most other Senate Democrats, including Kerry's vice presidential nominee John Edwards, Kerry had voted for the Iraq War resolution in October 2002. But when things started going badly in Iraq in 2003, and after consistent Iraq War opponent Howard Dean shot to the top in Democratic polls, Kerry like many other Democrats said the war was a mistake and should be ended.
Thus the statement met columnist Michael Kinsley's famous definition of a gaffe: when a politician tells the truth. Kerry supported the war, then opposed the war. Flip, flop.
Fast forward to Monday, March 26, 2012, in Seoul, South Korea. Barack Obama was talking to outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. He was evidently unaware that his comments were audible via an open microphone.
"On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it's important for him to give me space," Obama said. "Yeah, I understand, I understand your message about space. Space for you," the Russian replied.
"This is my last election," Obama said. "After my election, I have more flexibility."
"I understand," Medvedev said. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir." The reference is to Vladmir Putin, the real ruler of Russia during Medvedev's Potemkin presidency.
Note Obama's use of the first-person adjective. Most American politicians speak of "the" election. Obama calls it "my" election. This sort of personalization comes naturally to a leader whose first public reaction to the death of a Florida teenager was, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
But of course what's really damaging here is the implication that Obama has a hidden second-term agenda.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were all quick to pounce. "President Obama signaled that he's going to cave to Russia on missile defense, but the American people have a right to know where else he plans to be flexible in a second term," Romney said.
Romney went too far in characterizing Russia as "our number one geopolitical foe." But Russia is at least a strategic competitor and, despite Obama's "reset," not a particularly friendly or helpful one.
Already in his first term Obama propitiated Russia by canceling missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, both NATO allies. "Were they trading Poland?" headlined the Polish tabloid Fakt yesterday.
And Obama certainly surprised the Catholic bishops with his Health and Human Services decree that Catholic hospitals' health insurance must include coverage of procedures they consider sinful. What further surprises are in store for them and others in a second term?
Obama felt obliged to defend his statement by saying it will take "the next nine, 10 months to work through some of the technical aspects" of missile defense. That's weaker than Kerry's response.
Some commentators are saying Obama's words will hurt less than Romney's press spokesman's "Etch-a-Sketch" analogy. But that hurts mainly in Republican primaries, and Romney seems well on his way to the nomination.
Obama's comment reminds general election voters, most of whom dislike his current major policies, that he might go even further "after my election."
The Republican National Committee has already cut a 60-second spot on Obama's words. You can expect to hear them as often this year as voters heard Kerry's damaging sentence in 2004.
Why Do Wealthy People Support Liberal Causes?
By Armstrong Williams
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
I have often asked myself why do so many wealthy people support liberal causes? This is the flip-side of the usual election-year frustration of the liberals with the working classes’ clinging to their guns and religion. In this presidential election year, as in 2008, the Democratic Party, who claim with less and less credibility to be the champions of the poor, have far more money to spend than the Republican Party, who are said to be the party of the greedy upper classes; how could this be?
The simple answer is this: wealthy liberals blatantly use social liberalism and big government regulation to protect their relative position in society. Big government regulation and taxation thwarts the economic mobility of those trying to move up, allowing the elites to remain elite, while still seeming pious for all their apparent efforts to help the little people.
Note that their idea of political action deals always with outcomes, never with principles: they see the federal government as a charitable organization, or a tool which they can use to reshape society. I’m not impugning motives-this is what they openly profess. Conservatives have an ideal government in mind, one that sticks to the principles of the Founders; liberals have an ideal society in mind, and they will tinker with the government until it creates it.
It’s not hard to find examples-wealthy liberals who fortify their positions with their Robin Hood policies are in the news every day. One we’re all sick of hearing about is multibillionaire investor Warren Buffet, who supports raising capital gains and dividend taxes, despite having made his fortune this way. While I respect Warren Buffett, and do not begrudge him his wealth and success, he makes a highly disingenuous case for some very destructive policies. Not only has Buffett made the moral argument that it is “fair” or just to impose an alternative minimum tax of 30% on millionaires, but he has misrepresented both the salary of his secretary (who has allowed herself to be enlisted for his and the president’s political purposes), and about the total percentage tax that he actually pays. What could explain such bizarre behavior from an octogenarian billionaire? Why would a self-made man want to punish success and reward failure?
The answer is that he is already a billionaire. Were he still climbing the ladder, rather than merely trying to maintain his vast wealth, he might have a different view of “fairness.” I would be curious to see what his views were decades ago. It is simply laughable, and deserving of ridicule, that fairness requires that we make an already highly progressive tax system even more progressive than it already is, rather than flattening the tax so that all pay the same portion of their wealth. No one even reasonably acquainted with the facts can maintain that our government doesn’t plunder the wealthy enough; it would require an ulterior motive for such a ludicrous belief.
Here's another example of limousine socialism: Goldman Sachs partners and the president of JP Morgan Chase, of which both institutions have veterans in the Obama administration, both gave strong initial support for the highly partisan, expensive and expansive Dodd-Frank regulation of the financial sector. Their banks are too big to fail: they can afford the roster of lawyers it takes to navigate the regulatory typhoon created by this legislation.
But it is much harder for their smaller competitors to afford these costs. Partners of major Wall Street law firms and the American Bar Association consistently support liberal politicians advocating additional regulation requiring more legal services. It is a universal observation of the philosophers that a nation with many laws is not a good nation, but it is also the universal observation of the lawyers that such a nation is ripe for devouring.
It is in their financial interest to create laws that the layman cannot understand or interpret. It’s not, of course, in the interest of the country—who else thinks it’s a good idea that we not know what we’re supposed to be doing?
In Florida, it is almost impossible for a 50 year old doctor or dentist from another state to get a license to practice. These license requirements are not for patients but are intended to protect existing professionals from competition, the very thing that would help patients by expanding their options and lowering prices.
Rich liberal environmentalists do not appreciate the irony when they propose gas miserly cars for the 99% but fly to environmental conferences in private jets like Al Gore or Barack Obama (in Air Force One, which costs six-figures per hour to run). They want to stop oil drilling and promote green technology with government subsidies to their political supporters in the industry. Few will publicly acknowledge, as Energy Secretary Chu has done, that the best way to increase the use of green technology is to increase the price of gas to $10!
The cost of their policies falls heavily on the poor, and the environmentalists urgently want to shift the blame for this onto greedy corporations and other bogeymen. At the same time, the environmentalists disavow the effectiveness of the market in letting price determine investment in green technology. It is not coincidental that developing countries put a low priority on the environment: they want to become rich enough to join the wealthy countries, who are meanwhile preaching environmentalism.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
I have often asked myself why do so many wealthy people support liberal causes? This is the flip-side of the usual election-year frustration of the liberals with the working classes’ clinging to their guns and religion. In this presidential election year, as in 2008, the Democratic Party, who claim with less and less credibility to be the champions of the poor, have far more money to spend than the Republican Party, who are said to be the party of the greedy upper classes; how could this be?
The simple answer is this: wealthy liberals blatantly use social liberalism and big government regulation to protect their relative position in society. Big government regulation and taxation thwarts the economic mobility of those trying to move up, allowing the elites to remain elite, while still seeming pious for all their apparent efforts to help the little people.
Note that their idea of political action deals always with outcomes, never with principles: they see the federal government as a charitable organization, or a tool which they can use to reshape society. I’m not impugning motives-this is what they openly profess. Conservatives have an ideal government in mind, one that sticks to the principles of the Founders; liberals have an ideal society in mind, and they will tinker with the government until it creates it.
It’s not hard to find examples-wealthy liberals who fortify their positions with their Robin Hood policies are in the news every day. One we’re all sick of hearing about is multibillionaire investor Warren Buffet, who supports raising capital gains and dividend taxes, despite having made his fortune this way. While I respect Warren Buffett, and do not begrudge him his wealth and success, he makes a highly disingenuous case for some very destructive policies. Not only has Buffett made the moral argument that it is “fair” or just to impose an alternative minimum tax of 30% on millionaires, but he has misrepresented both the salary of his secretary (who has allowed herself to be enlisted for his and the president’s political purposes), and about the total percentage tax that he actually pays. What could explain such bizarre behavior from an octogenarian billionaire? Why would a self-made man want to punish success and reward failure?
The answer is that he is already a billionaire. Were he still climbing the ladder, rather than merely trying to maintain his vast wealth, he might have a different view of “fairness.” I would be curious to see what his views were decades ago. It is simply laughable, and deserving of ridicule, that fairness requires that we make an already highly progressive tax system even more progressive than it already is, rather than flattening the tax so that all pay the same portion of their wealth. No one even reasonably acquainted with the facts can maintain that our government doesn’t plunder the wealthy enough; it would require an ulterior motive for such a ludicrous belief.
Here's another example of limousine socialism: Goldman Sachs partners and the president of JP Morgan Chase, of which both institutions have veterans in the Obama administration, both gave strong initial support for the highly partisan, expensive and expansive Dodd-Frank regulation of the financial sector. Their banks are too big to fail: they can afford the roster of lawyers it takes to navigate the regulatory typhoon created by this legislation.
But it is much harder for their smaller competitors to afford these costs. Partners of major Wall Street law firms and the American Bar Association consistently support liberal politicians advocating additional regulation requiring more legal services. It is a universal observation of the philosophers that a nation with many laws is not a good nation, but it is also the universal observation of the lawyers that such a nation is ripe for devouring.
It is in their financial interest to create laws that the layman cannot understand or interpret. It’s not, of course, in the interest of the country—who else thinks it’s a good idea that we not know what we’re supposed to be doing?
In Florida, it is almost impossible for a 50 year old doctor or dentist from another state to get a license to practice. These license requirements are not for patients but are intended to protect existing professionals from competition, the very thing that would help patients by expanding their options and lowering prices.
Rich liberal environmentalists do not appreciate the irony when they propose gas miserly cars for the 99% but fly to environmental conferences in private jets like Al Gore or Barack Obama (in Air Force One, which costs six-figures per hour to run). They want to stop oil drilling and promote green technology with government subsidies to their political supporters in the industry. Few will publicly acknowledge, as Energy Secretary Chu has done, that the best way to increase the use of green technology is to increase the price of gas to $10!
The cost of their policies falls heavily on the poor, and the environmentalists urgently want to shift the blame for this onto greedy corporations and other bogeymen. At the same time, the environmentalists disavow the effectiveness of the market in letting price determine investment in green technology. It is not coincidental that developing countries put a low priority on the environment: they want to become rich enough to join the wealthy countries, who are meanwhile preaching environmentalism.
Time to Vet Obama's Biggest Backers in Hollywood
By Jason Mattera
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Rapper Cee Lo Green flipping off a crowd and dropping F-bombs at an Obama fundraiser wasn’t about, well, a famous American songwriter carpet bombing an audience with R-rated material at a presidential rally.
Neither was the story of Hollywood legend Robert De Niro blathering about America not ready to go back to the days of a “white” first lady really about the sheer stupidity and insensitivity of such a remark.
And nor was Elle Macpherson’s proud proclamation that she’s an Obama supporter and socialist about the obliviousness of a super model worth an estimated $60 million trashing the very type of economic system that bolstered her into fortune and fame.
The real story is that Hollywood is once again looking to market Obama to us like an iPad 2, just like they successfully did in 2008 when they launched a little-known senator from Chicago into stardom, as I explain in my brand-new book, Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers
“It’s not going to be as sexy” as 2008, Obama warned the glitterati recently. “If things are just smooth the whole way through, not only is it a pretty dull movie, but it doesn’t reflect our experience,” he added as he motivated his Tinseltown army to get excited about him one last time.
And they will. The same Hollywood loons who got Obama elected will do so again.
That is, unless we muzzle them.
How? Not the way the Left tries to do, by silencing dissent. But by putting their political stances and public statements under the microscope of scrutiny to analyze whether they live by the same policy prescriptions they seek to inflict on America.
They don’t.
Here’s a sampling:
Harrison Ford cut a commercial on YouTube where he got his chest waxed to bring awareness to global warming. Forget for a moment that nobody wants to see an aging Indiana Jones get his hair follicles ripped out by a beauty parlor babe, it turns out that Ford owns seven aircraft and has stated on the record that he “often flies up the coast for a cheeseburger.”
Barbra Streisand insists that we all have the power to curb global warming by “making simple, conscious decisions in [our] everyday lives.” This talk stands in sharp contrast to Streisand’s own behavior when she’s out on tour. In her contract, for example, she demands that she be supplied with “120 bath-sized towels immediately upon arrival” at production offices. Perhaps she needs all these towels to handwash the army of vehicles she requires for her tour. Among the fleet are thirteen fifty-three-foot semi-trailers, four rental vans, fourteen crew and band buses, and, of course, the requisite limo befitting any limousine liberal.
Matt Damon says he remains committed to the code of nonviolence and peace-loving progressivism his college professor mother indoctrinated him with. “Now I always look at the violence [in a script]. I don’t want it to be gratuitous. Because I do believe that that has an effect on people’s behavior. I really do believe that. And I have turned down movies because of that.” But apparently Damon’s disdain for violence ends where his lust for dirty lucre begins. The Bourne Trilogy, for instance, are orgies of violence. According to Forbes, Damon hauled in $26 million for The Bourne Supremacy alone.
Bruce Springsteen lashes out against tax cuts for the wealthy, arguing that such cuts “will eat away at the country’s heart and soul and spirit." There’s one small problem with Springsteen’s anti-tax-cut posturing: the man is a first-rate tax evader. Because he has a part-time farmer come and grow a few tomatoes (organic, of course) and has horses, he’s able to write off 98 percent of his property taxes in the state of New Jersey. Do the math, by being a fake farmer, the working-class zero Springsteen is making a mint by robbing New Jersey of the antipoverty program funds he says they desperately need.
Michael Moore in 2008 decried Hollywood welfare in the form of so called state tax credit programs. “These are large multinational corporations—Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch—that own these studios,” said Moore. “Why do they need our money from Michigan, from our taxpayers? We’re already broke here?” Agreed. Flash forward to 2010. Following the release of Moore’s pro-socialism, anti-capitalism “documentary” film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a film that has grossed $17,436,509 in worldwide sales, Moore asked his cash-strapped home state of Michigan to fork over $1 million from the State of Michigan Film Office so he could get himself some of that same taxpayer “free cash.”
And on it on it goes. But what makes these hypocrisies particularly egregious is not what they say about human failings, but rather what they say about the illogic of Obama’s radical agenda against America. Not even his staunchest allies in Hollywood live by the same standard they want us all to abide by.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Rapper Cee Lo Green flipping off a crowd and dropping F-bombs at an Obama fundraiser wasn’t about, well, a famous American songwriter carpet bombing an audience with R-rated material at a presidential rally.
Neither was the story of Hollywood legend Robert De Niro blathering about America not ready to go back to the days of a “white” first lady really about the sheer stupidity and insensitivity of such a remark.
And nor was Elle Macpherson’s proud proclamation that she’s an Obama supporter and socialist about the obliviousness of a super model worth an estimated $60 million trashing the very type of economic system that bolstered her into fortune and fame.
The real story is that Hollywood is once again looking to market Obama to us like an iPad 2, just like they successfully did in 2008 when they launched a little-known senator from Chicago into stardom, as I explain in my brand-new book, Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers
“It’s not going to be as sexy” as 2008, Obama warned the glitterati recently. “If things are just smooth the whole way through, not only is it a pretty dull movie, but it doesn’t reflect our experience,” he added as he motivated his Tinseltown army to get excited about him one last time.
And they will. The same Hollywood loons who got Obama elected will do so again.
That is, unless we muzzle them.
How? Not the way the Left tries to do, by silencing dissent. But by putting their political stances and public statements under the microscope of scrutiny to analyze whether they live by the same policy prescriptions they seek to inflict on America.
They don’t.
Here’s a sampling:
Harrison Ford cut a commercial on YouTube where he got his chest waxed to bring awareness to global warming. Forget for a moment that nobody wants to see an aging Indiana Jones get his hair follicles ripped out by a beauty parlor babe, it turns out that Ford owns seven aircraft and has stated on the record that he “often flies up the coast for a cheeseburger.”
Barbra Streisand insists that we all have the power to curb global warming by “making simple, conscious decisions in [our] everyday lives.” This talk stands in sharp contrast to Streisand’s own behavior when she’s out on tour. In her contract, for example, she demands that she be supplied with “120 bath-sized towels immediately upon arrival” at production offices. Perhaps she needs all these towels to handwash the army of vehicles she requires for her tour. Among the fleet are thirteen fifty-three-foot semi-trailers, four rental vans, fourteen crew and band buses, and, of course, the requisite limo befitting any limousine liberal.
Matt Damon says he remains committed to the code of nonviolence and peace-loving progressivism his college professor mother indoctrinated him with. “Now I always look at the violence [in a script]. I don’t want it to be gratuitous. Because I do believe that that has an effect on people’s behavior. I really do believe that. And I have turned down movies because of that.” But apparently Damon’s disdain for violence ends where his lust for dirty lucre begins. The Bourne Trilogy, for instance, are orgies of violence. According to Forbes, Damon hauled in $26 million for The Bourne Supremacy alone.
Bruce Springsteen lashes out against tax cuts for the wealthy, arguing that such cuts “will eat away at the country’s heart and soul and spirit." There’s one small problem with Springsteen’s anti-tax-cut posturing: the man is a first-rate tax evader. Because he has a part-time farmer come and grow a few tomatoes (organic, of course) and has horses, he’s able to write off 98 percent of his property taxes in the state of New Jersey. Do the math, by being a fake farmer, the working-class zero Springsteen is making a mint by robbing New Jersey of the antipoverty program funds he says they desperately need.
Michael Moore in 2008 decried Hollywood welfare in the form of so called state tax credit programs. “These are large multinational corporations—Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch—that own these studios,” said Moore. “Why do they need our money from Michigan, from our taxpayers? We’re already broke here?” Agreed. Flash forward to 2010. Following the release of Moore’s pro-socialism, anti-capitalism “documentary” film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a film that has grossed $17,436,509 in worldwide sales, Moore asked his cash-strapped home state of Michigan to fork over $1 million from the State of Michigan Film Office so he could get himself some of that same taxpayer “free cash.”
And on it on it goes. But what makes these hypocrisies particularly egregious is not what they say about human failings, but rather what they say about the illogic of Obama’s radical agenda against America. Not even his staunchest allies in Hollywood live by the same standard they want us all to abide by.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Obama’s Demagoguery
By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The atrocity at first seemed undeniable: A white vigilante, with a Germanic name no less, hunted down and then executed a tiny black youth — who, from his published grammar-school photos, seemed about twelve — while he was walking innocently and eating candy in an exclusive gated community in northern Florida. The gunman had used a racial slur, as supposedly heard on a 911 tape, and ignored the dispatcher’s urging him to back off.
The apparently racist, or at least insensitive, white police chief and district attorney then covered up the murder. Understandable outrage followed in the black community, but the killing also brought out the usual demagogues. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and the New Black Panther Party all alleged that the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was an indictment of a systematically racist white society. They demanded justice, and the Black Panthers announced a $10,000 bounty on the supposed killer. Even Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter got into the act, dubbing the shooting an “assassination.”
The dispute went national and was soon further sensationalized along racial lines. Others, mostly non–African Americans, countered that the facts were still in dispute and information was incomplete, while noting that just a few days earlier in Chicago ten youths were murdered and at least 40 others shot. Most of those victims and shooters were African Americans, but the carnage did not earn commensurate national attention from black leaders. President Obama himself, who had been silent about the slaughter in his adopted hometown, weighed in on the Martin case and, unfortunately, highlighted the racial undertones — lamenting that the murdered Martin looked just the way his own boy might, had he a son. The latter statement was true but also, of course, true of some of those murdered in Chicago. And given that the black minority currently commits violent crimes against the white majority more frequently than do the nation’s 70 percent whites against its 12 percent blacks, the president’s evocation of race in the Martin case seemed inappropriate to many.
But no crime proves quite as simple as initially reported in our sensationalized 24/7 media. Amid the blaring reports of a racially inspired murder, it turned out that the shooter, George Zimmerman, was actually part Hispanic, with a Latino mother (he was dubbed “white Hispanic” by the media, whereas Barack Obama is not referred to as a “white African-American”), and that he was perhaps not the quick-on-the-draw nut he was caricatured in the press as being. The 911 tape was scratchy, and it was unclear on another recording who said what, or who later was screaming for assistance.
The deceased, Trayvon Martin, was not a pre-teen, but 17 and 6′2″, and the gated community was ethnically mixed and may not have a white majority. True, the supposed vigilante had shot Martin, but he was also a neighborhood-watch designee, assigned to look for supposedly suspicious individuals. And the shooting occurred during some sort of fistfight in which Zimmerman may have been losing. The police, whom most thought should have at least filed manslaughter charges, seemed dumbfounded by a Florida law called “Stand Your Ground,” which could be stretched to mean that almost anyone could use deadly force if he believed that his life was endangered. In sum, what had seemed from media accounts to be a racist first-degree murder, horrifically covered up, on closer examination might have been either second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, some sort of criminal negligence, or even simple self-defense — the point being that we will not know the degree of Zimmerman’s guilt, if any, until all the evidence in the case is released to the public. Daily, new information has emerged, and, daily, the previous day’s narrative has changed.
In other words, the president waded into an ongoing investigation, in which the facts of the case remain murky and in dispute. And instead of playing down the racial component of the tragedy in polarized times, he seemed instead deliberately to have emphasized it.
President Obama had entered into another news story just a few weeks earlier. A law student at the Catholic Georgetown University, Sandra Fluke, had complained in testimony before a congressional committee that religious conservatives, in their wish to thwart provisions of Obamacare, would soon ensure that she, and millions of other women at Catholic institutions, would continue not to have access to free contraceptives. She noted that her present contraceptive needs were not covered by Georgetown and had cost her as much as $3,000 a year. Rush Limbaugh immediately jumped in and in crude fashion labeled Fluke a “slut.” He thundered that her sexual life should not be subsidized either by taxpayers or by reluctant Catholic institutions. Outrage followed Limbaugh’s various smears — which went on for at least three days until, under growing pressure, he apologized.
Then President Obama, sensing political advantage, entered the fray. He called Ms. Fluke to voice his support, while telling the nation that Limbaugh’s invectives were not the sort of American environment that he wished his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, to grow up in.
But, again, indecency these days never proves to be quite as simple as what is initially reported by the traditional media. Limbaugh’s regrettable attack on Ms. Fluke was not all that unusual in the world of hardball television and radio. Liberal television host Bill Maher had routinely smeared all sorts of conservative women with even worse epithets, of the sort that could not even be printed in most newspapers — and Maher never apologized. And late-night talk-show host David Letterman earlier had used the crude term “slutty” to demonize Sarah Palin, and also, in cruder fashion still, had suggested that Mrs. Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex in the dugout with a New York Yankee star. Stranger still, the profane and often misogynistic Maher had just given, in a public stunt, an Obama reelection super PAC a $1 million donation, while Letterman was scheduled to have First Lady Michelle Obama on his program. Was the language of Maher and Letterman the sort that the Obama girls should have to endure?
The reactions to the presidential editorializing were predictable. Liberals applauded Obama for his public stand on behalf of feminists, while conservatives countered that he was selective in his outrage and more an opportunistic partisan than an opponent of crude speech aimed at women. The president had succeeded once more in polarizing rather than uniting the nation.
Then there was the tragedy involving Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when a deranged man shot the congresswoman and killed six bystanders. In all, he killed or wounded 19 innocent people. Even though the maniacal shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had no consistent ideology or discernible political agenda, liberals saw the incident as proof of everything from pernicious white-male tea-party anger to the dangers in Sarah Palin’s use of metaphors such as cross-hairs and targets, and thus leaped in to condemn right-wing bombast. Soon, in response, the president used the occasion to remind the nation of the need for a new civility (“It’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds”) — the subtext being that the popular anguish over his policies had led naturally to a climate that facilitated the Gifford shooting.
But once again, the president found himself in a hole of his own digging. It turned out that while there had been lots of cruel speech, there was no connection between any of it and the Gifford shootings — and certainly no monopoly on it by conservatives. For every bombastic smear on talk radio, there was a commensurate one on MSNBC television. Obama himself later attended a Michigan labor rally in which labor leader and supporter Jimmy Hoffa Jr. bellowed out an implied death threat to conservatives: “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son-of-a-bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” Obama chose to respond to that “take these son-of-a-bitches out” threat to about half the populace with silence.
At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama had waded into another contentious incident, the notorious arrest and temporary detention of Professor Henry Louis Gates, the well-known head of African-American Studies at Harvard. At first this also seemed a clear-cut scandal: Gates was arrested as he simply attempted to get into his own house, after finding his door jammed — guilty of nothing other than being black.
Police were called by suspicious neighbors who noted broken glass, and then in supposedly racist fashion the officers typecast and arrested Gates. Or did they?
When the police arrived, they first routinely asked Gates for identification, which trigged from Gates a vocal barrage at the inquiring officer. Words were exchanged; Gates was detained. The president almost immediately suggested that the police had acted “stupidly,” a behavior that supposedly reflected a general national stereotyping of black males. Again, note the pattern: The president seizes on a local issue, editorializes, and ends up sowing more division. His supporters applauded; but opponents pointed out that had Gates instead politely and calmly explained his situation, the fracas could easily have been prevented. And as for stereotyping, did the president mean to suggest that the police should not be aware that black males (about 6 percent of the population) committed a majority of the nation’s murders (52 percent)?
What do all these presidential interventions teach us — other than that there are two sides to every story? First, that race and gender are flashpoints in our culture, as liberals see justice routinely denied to Americans on the basis of their sex and skin color, and conservatives believe these issues are continually trumped up to further divide the country and serve the political interests of a partisan elite.
But a larger lesson should be the president’s, because a disturbing pattern has developed in his editorializing, which is aimed exclusively at those whose policies and language he implies lead to horrific acts like the shooting of African-American teenagers, the smearing of young feminists, the shooting of Democratic congresswomen, or the jailing of African-American professors. Yet in every case, further evidence, more information, and subsequent events suggested that the president had offered either incomplete or misleading commentary to the nation, predicated not on a desire for healing or truth, but on a wish to gain partisan advantage.
With the world in recession, facing energy shortages, and on the brink of war, it is politically unwise for the president of the United States to offer commentary on contentious issues, especially before the facts of such disputes are fully known. To do so at worst can interfere with ongoing investigations, and at best pits the office of the presidency against private individuals. In every case, Barack Obama cannot conclude that his commentary created greater unity rather than further polarization.
When these national controversies arise, the president should take a deep breath, let emotions subside, and simply announce, if he must say anything, “Let’s wait and see,” and then turn his needed attention to ongoing and impending wars, near economic insolvency, and our energy dilemmas.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The atrocity at first seemed undeniable: A white vigilante, with a Germanic name no less, hunted down and then executed a tiny black youth — who, from his published grammar-school photos, seemed about twelve — while he was walking innocently and eating candy in an exclusive gated community in northern Florida. The gunman had used a racial slur, as supposedly heard on a 911 tape, and ignored the dispatcher’s urging him to back off.
The apparently racist, or at least insensitive, white police chief and district attorney then covered up the murder. Understandable outrage followed in the black community, but the killing also brought out the usual demagogues. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and the New Black Panther Party all alleged that the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was an indictment of a systematically racist white society. They demanded justice, and the Black Panthers announced a $10,000 bounty on the supposed killer. Even Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter got into the act, dubbing the shooting an “assassination.”
The dispute went national and was soon further sensationalized along racial lines. Others, mostly non–African Americans, countered that the facts were still in dispute and information was incomplete, while noting that just a few days earlier in Chicago ten youths were murdered and at least 40 others shot. Most of those victims and shooters were African Americans, but the carnage did not earn commensurate national attention from black leaders. President Obama himself, who had been silent about the slaughter in his adopted hometown, weighed in on the Martin case and, unfortunately, highlighted the racial undertones — lamenting that the murdered Martin looked just the way his own boy might, had he a son. The latter statement was true but also, of course, true of some of those murdered in Chicago. And given that the black minority currently commits violent crimes against the white majority more frequently than do the nation’s 70 percent whites against its 12 percent blacks, the president’s evocation of race in the Martin case seemed inappropriate to many.
But no crime proves quite as simple as initially reported in our sensationalized 24/7 media. Amid the blaring reports of a racially inspired murder, it turned out that the shooter, George Zimmerman, was actually part Hispanic, with a Latino mother (he was dubbed “white Hispanic” by the media, whereas Barack Obama is not referred to as a “white African-American”), and that he was perhaps not the quick-on-the-draw nut he was caricatured in the press as being. The 911 tape was scratchy, and it was unclear on another recording who said what, or who later was screaming for assistance.
The deceased, Trayvon Martin, was not a pre-teen, but 17 and 6′2″, and the gated community was ethnically mixed and may not have a white majority. True, the supposed vigilante had shot Martin, but he was also a neighborhood-watch designee, assigned to look for supposedly suspicious individuals. And the shooting occurred during some sort of fistfight in which Zimmerman may have been losing. The police, whom most thought should have at least filed manslaughter charges, seemed dumbfounded by a Florida law called “Stand Your Ground,” which could be stretched to mean that almost anyone could use deadly force if he believed that his life was endangered. In sum, what had seemed from media accounts to be a racist first-degree murder, horrifically covered up, on closer examination might have been either second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, some sort of criminal negligence, or even simple self-defense — the point being that we will not know the degree of Zimmerman’s guilt, if any, until all the evidence in the case is released to the public. Daily, new information has emerged, and, daily, the previous day’s narrative has changed.
In other words, the president waded into an ongoing investigation, in which the facts of the case remain murky and in dispute. And instead of playing down the racial component of the tragedy in polarized times, he seemed instead deliberately to have emphasized it.
President Obama had entered into another news story just a few weeks earlier. A law student at the Catholic Georgetown University, Sandra Fluke, had complained in testimony before a congressional committee that religious conservatives, in their wish to thwart provisions of Obamacare, would soon ensure that she, and millions of other women at Catholic institutions, would continue not to have access to free contraceptives. She noted that her present contraceptive needs were not covered by Georgetown and had cost her as much as $3,000 a year. Rush Limbaugh immediately jumped in and in crude fashion labeled Fluke a “slut.” He thundered that her sexual life should not be subsidized either by taxpayers or by reluctant Catholic institutions. Outrage followed Limbaugh’s various smears — which went on for at least three days until, under growing pressure, he apologized.
Then President Obama, sensing political advantage, entered the fray. He called Ms. Fluke to voice his support, while telling the nation that Limbaugh’s invectives were not the sort of American environment that he wished his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, to grow up in.
But, again, indecency these days never proves to be quite as simple as what is initially reported by the traditional media. Limbaugh’s regrettable attack on Ms. Fluke was not all that unusual in the world of hardball television and radio. Liberal television host Bill Maher had routinely smeared all sorts of conservative women with even worse epithets, of the sort that could not even be printed in most newspapers — and Maher never apologized. And late-night talk-show host David Letterman earlier had used the crude term “slutty” to demonize Sarah Palin, and also, in cruder fashion still, had suggested that Mrs. Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex in the dugout with a New York Yankee star. Stranger still, the profane and often misogynistic Maher had just given, in a public stunt, an Obama reelection super PAC a $1 million donation, while Letterman was scheduled to have First Lady Michelle Obama on his program. Was the language of Maher and Letterman the sort that the Obama girls should have to endure?
The reactions to the presidential editorializing were predictable. Liberals applauded Obama for his public stand on behalf of feminists, while conservatives countered that he was selective in his outrage and more an opportunistic partisan than an opponent of crude speech aimed at women. The president had succeeded once more in polarizing rather than uniting the nation.
Then there was the tragedy involving Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when a deranged man shot the congresswoman and killed six bystanders. In all, he killed or wounded 19 innocent people. Even though the maniacal shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had no consistent ideology or discernible political agenda, liberals saw the incident as proof of everything from pernicious white-male tea-party anger to the dangers in Sarah Palin’s use of metaphors such as cross-hairs and targets, and thus leaped in to condemn right-wing bombast. Soon, in response, the president used the occasion to remind the nation of the need for a new civility (“It’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds”) — the subtext being that the popular anguish over his policies had led naturally to a climate that facilitated the Gifford shooting.
But once again, the president found himself in a hole of his own digging. It turned out that while there had been lots of cruel speech, there was no connection between any of it and the Gifford shootings — and certainly no monopoly on it by conservatives. For every bombastic smear on talk radio, there was a commensurate one on MSNBC television. Obama himself later attended a Michigan labor rally in which labor leader and supporter Jimmy Hoffa Jr. bellowed out an implied death threat to conservatives: “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son-of-a-bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” Obama chose to respond to that “take these son-of-a-bitches out” threat to about half the populace with silence.
At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama had waded into another contentious incident, the notorious arrest and temporary detention of Professor Henry Louis Gates, the well-known head of African-American Studies at Harvard. At first this also seemed a clear-cut scandal: Gates was arrested as he simply attempted to get into his own house, after finding his door jammed — guilty of nothing other than being black.
Police were called by suspicious neighbors who noted broken glass, and then in supposedly racist fashion the officers typecast and arrested Gates. Or did they?
When the police arrived, they first routinely asked Gates for identification, which trigged from Gates a vocal barrage at the inquiring officer. Words were exchanged; Gates was detained. The president almost immediately suggested that the police had acted “stupidly,” a behavior that supposedly reflected a general national stereotyping of black males. Again, note the pattern: The president seizes on a local issue, editorializes, and ends up sowing more division. His supporters applauded; but opponents pointed out that had Gates instead politely and calmly explained his situation, the fracas could easily have been prevented. And as for stereotyping, did the president mean to suggest that the police should not be aware that black males (about 6 percent of the population) committed a majority of the nation’s murders (52 percent)?
What do all these presidential interventions teach us — other than that there are two sides to every story? First, that race and gender are flashpoints in our culture, as liberals see justice routinely denied to Americans on the basis of their sex and skin color, and conservatives believe these issues are continually trumped up to further divide the country and serve the political interests of a partisan elite.
But a larger lesson should be the president’s, because a disturbing pattern has developed in his editorializing, which is aimed exclusively at those whose policies and language he implies lead to horrific acts like the shooting of African-American teenagers, the smearing of young feminists, the shooting of Democratic congresswomen, or the jailing of African-American professors. Yet in every case, further evidence, more information, and subsequent events suggested that the president had offered either incomplete or misleading commentary to the nation, predicated not on a desire for healing or truth, but on a wish to gain partisan advantage.
With the world in recession, facing energy shortages, and on the brink of war, it is politically unwise for the president of the United States to offer commentary on contentious issues, especially before the facts of such disputes are fully known. To do so at worst can interfere with ongoing investigations, and at best pits the office of the presidency against private individuals. In every case, Barack Obama cannot conclude that his commentary created greater unity rather than further polarization.
When these national controversies arise, the president should take a deep breath, let emotions subside, and simply announce, if he must say anything, “Let’s wait and see,” and then turn his needed attention to ongoing and impending wars, near economic insolvency, and our energy dilemmas.
Where's Obama's Outrage Over Murder of "My" Son?
By John Ransom
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Mmmm, you can almost taste the healing going on around the world.
As the oceans begin to recede, and Pharaoh’s army gets swallowed by the Red Sea, we should pause to thank the man who gave us this moment.
That was some good healing you gave us, Mr. Post-Racial president.
I remember when you first started advocating the Afghan “surge” strategy.
“The Obama administration has taken the same attitude towards a troop surge as they have toward stimulus packages,” I wrote in 2009. “More troop surge, like more stimulus, is obviously better, no matter what the cost or the likeliness to succeed.” I called the strategy “pyrrhic” and “elusive,” serving only political ends of Obama, not the military or security needs of the Unites States:
“Having declared Iraq a lost cause over a year ago, Obama was surprised to see the surge work so well in Iraq. So like most politicians who see something work, he decided to get some surge of his own. Having opposed Iraq, Obama's surge logically will go to Afghanistan, the only war still convenient to the US under his administration.”
Four deployments later, and Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, US Army, has allegedly massacred 16 innocent civilians in Afghanistan.
Between Koran burning, bungled planning from the administration and Obama’s King Pyrrhus act, we’ve made such progress now in Afghanistan that we’re at the point of getting kicked out. The Afghans would rather live under the Taliban than live under the failed Obama surge strategy.
What healing!
“I was in the military, I was in Vietnam, I was an infantry guy like he was," said Bale’s neighbor Stuart Ness, according to Voice of America. "And war does terrible, terrible things to you, and I think everybody would agree that nobody would do something like that if they were really thinking clearly."
And then there was the violence we wrote about earlier this week in Toulouse, France. “Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian descent,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “was shot dead by SWAT police Thursday after a 33-hour standoff at his Toulouse apartment. He is suspected of killing four people at a Jewish school last Monday, including three children, and fatally shooting three soldiers the previous week. Mr. Merah told police before he died that he had links to al Qaeda.”
That’s 12 more cases of Sudden Obama Healing Syndrome.
We can add those bodies to the US count racked up in Libya, Egypt and -coming soon- Syria, possibly the biggest killing field of all thanks to new surge strategies from the administration.
Libya and Syria are places where the US surge has been specially arranged on behalf of France.
But perhaps the biggest healing is the healing that has been going on at home in the US where the strategy from Democrats includes a class warfare surge and a race warfare surge that is contributing considerably to the outbreak of Sudden Obama Healing Syndrome. And it's also obscuring Obama's horrid track record on: 1) the economy; 2) energy; 3) anything that doesn't involve vacations.
I can almost feel an Obama seven-day, six-night vacation coming on.
I don’t know the ins and outs of the Trayvon Martin case, and nor do you.
In fact, I would venture to say that nobody, at this point, really knows what happened when George Zimmerman shot Martin- including our Post-Racial president, who has thoughtfully dragged race into a situation that calls for grace- on all sides.
What healing!
Obama made sure that as the head of the executive branch that he carefully chose what he said surrounding the incident, because the Feds, in this case, will be the ones doing the lynching. It’s very important the he look impartial (wink). And that the Feds end up as the only ones with guns.
But our Post-Racial president did want us to know “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Let’s pretend it was Newt Gingrich who said the same thing: “If Obama had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Sounds a little different? Yeah. I thought the same thing.
I was beginning to think that our First Post-Racial president had no idea what fossil fuels like gasoline were for.
I was wrong. They’re there to fan the flames of more racial healing via the Critical Race Theory that Obama asked us to open our minds and hearts to.
Drill, baby, drill.
It’s all the more amazing because this week the Chicago Sun Times revealed that a nephew of former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, Richard Vanecko, may have confessed to killing someone eight years ago, in a case “where irregularities in the investigation, including false official reports and a case file that went missing” may have contributed letting a Daley of Chicago get away with murder.
And you know what? The kid that allegedly got killed by Vanecko? His name was David Koschman and he looks a lot like my son.
Where has the president’s selective outrage been for the last eight years? Where is the Justice Department on this murder? How did the most powerful man in Illinois react? He appointed the uncle of the suspect as his chief of staff.
I used to live in a country where no one's son was supposed to get killed. But I suppose some groups get more equality than others, especially if you are connected.
In wake of the president’s inflammatory remarks, the New Black Panther Party offered some more healing words backed by m-o-n-e-y.
“Members of the New Black Panther Party are offering a $10,000 reward for the ‘capture’ of George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot Trayvon Martin,” writes the Boston Herald
“The militant group offered the bounty on Saturday,” adds the Houston Chronicle, “and called on black men to mobilize and capture George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch member who killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in February.”
“New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad announced the reward during a protest in Sanford Saturday,” says the Herald. “And when asked whether he was inciting violence, Muhammad replied defiantly: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’”
Wow, you can feel the Us-Against-Them surge really working, huh?
What healing!
Or better yet: What healing?
I guess with all this healing going on, no one wants to talk about jobs anymore.
(Wink).
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Mmmm, you can almost taste the healing going on around the world.
As the oceans begin to recede, and Pharaoh’s army gets swallowed by the Red Sea, we should pause to thank the man who gave us this moment.
That was some good healing you gave us, Mr. Post-Racial president.
I remember when you first started advocating the Afghan “surge” strategy.
“The Obama administration has taken the same attitude towards a troop surge as they have toward stimulus packages,” I wrote in 2009. “More troop surge, like more stimulus, is obviously better, no matter what the cost or the likeliness to succeed.” I called the strategy “pyrrhic” and “elusive,” serving only political ends of Obama, not the military or security needs of the Unites States:
“Having declared Iraq a lost cause over a year ago, Obama was surprised to see the surge work so well in Iraq. So like most politicians who see something work, he decided to get some surge of his own. Having opposed Iraq, Obama's surge logically will go to Afghanistan, the only war still convenient to the US under his administration.”
Four deployments later, and Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, US Army, has allegedly massacred 16 innocent civilians in Afghanistan.
Between Koran burning, bungled planning from the administration and Obama’s King Pyrrhus act, we’ve made such progress now in Afghanistan that we’re at the point of getting kicked out. The Afghans would rather live under the Taliban than live under the failed Obama surge strategy.
What healing!
“I was in the military, I was in Vietnam, I was an infantry guy like he was," said Bale’s neighbor Stuart Ness, according to Voice of America. "And war does terrible, terrible things to you, and I think everybody would agree that nobody would do something like that if they were really thinking clearly."
And then there was the violence we wrote about earlier this week in Toulouse, France. “Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian descent,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “was shot dead by SWAT police Thursday after a 33-hour standoff at his Toulouse apartment. He is suspected of killing four people at a Jewish school last Monday, including three children, and fatally shooting three soldiers the previous week. Mr. Merah told police before he died that he had links to al Qaeda.”
That’s 12 more cases of Sudden Obama Healing Syndrome.
We can add those bodies to the US count racked up in Libya, Egypt and -coming soon- Syria, possibly the biggest killing field of all thanks to new surge strategies from the administration.
Libya and Syria are places where the US surge has been specially arranged on behalf of France.
But perhaps the biggest healing is the healing that has been going on at home in the US where the strategy from Democrats includes a class warfare surge and a race warfare surge that is contributing considerably to the outbreak of Sudden Obama Healing Syndrome. And it's also obscuring Obama's horrid track record on: 1) the economy; 2) energy; 3) anything that doesn't involve vacations.
I can almost feel an Obama seven-day, six-night vacation coming on.
I don’t know the ins and outs of the Trayvon Martin case, and nor do you.
In fact, I would venture to say that nobody, at this point, really knows what happened when George Zimmerman shot Martin- including our Post-Racial president, who has thoughtfully dragged race into a situation that calls for grace- on all sides.
What healing!
Obama made sure that as the head of the executive branch that he carefully chose what he said surrounding the incident, because the Feds, in this case, will be the ones doing the lynching. It’s very important the he look impartial (wink). And that the Feds end up as the only ones with guns.
But our Post-Racial president did want us to know “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Let’s pretend it was Newt Gingrich who said the same thing: “If Obama had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Sounds a little different? Yeah. I thought the same thing.
I was beginning to think that our First Post-Racial president had no idea what fossil fuels like gasoline were for.
I was wrong. They’re there to fan the flames of more racial healing via the Critical Race Theory that Obama asked us to open our minds and hearts to.
Drill, baby, drill.
It’s all the more amazing because this week the Chicago Sun Times revealed that a nephew of former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, Richard Vanecko, may have confessed to killing someone eight years ago, in a case “where irregularities in the investigation, including false official reports and a case file that went missing” may have contributed letting a Daley of Chicago get away with murder.
And you know what? The kid that allegedly got killed by Vanecko? His name was David Koschman and he looks a lot like my son.
Where has the president’s selective outrage been for the last eight years? Where is the Justice Department on this murder? How did the most powerful man in Illinois react? He appointed the uncle of the suspect as his chief of staff.
I used to live in a country where no one's son was supposed to get killed. But I suppose some groups get more equality than others, especially if you are connected.
In wake of the president’s inflammatory remarks, the New Black Panther Party offered some more healing words backed by m-o-n-e-y.
“Members of the New Black Panther Party are offering a $10,000 reward for the ‘capture’ of George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot Trayvon Martin,” writes the Boston Herald
“The militant group offered the bounty on Saturday,” adds the Houston Chronicle, “and called on black men to mobilize and capture George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch member who killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in February.”
“New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad announced the reward during a protest in Sanford Saturday,” says the Herald. “And when asked whether he was inciting violence, Muhammad replied defiantly: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’”
Wow, you can feel the Us-Against-Them surge really working, huh?
What healing!
Or better yet: What healing?
I guess with all this healing going on, no one wants to talk about jobs anymore.
(Wink).
What Will Obama Give Russia If He's Re-elected?
By Terry Jeffrey
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
President Barack Obama would like to do some things for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and President-elect Vladimir Putin that he does not want American voters to know about before they decide whether to re-elect him in November.
That was the intended-to-be-secret message Obama gave Medvedev in South Korea on Monday. But Obama was caught delivering the message on tape -- and, no matter how the liberal media try to spin it, the moment is destined to become emblematic of Obama as a man and as a president.
"On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved. But it's important for him to give me space,'' Obama told Medvedev -- the "him" being Putin.
"Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space," said Medvedev. "Space for you --"
"'This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility," said Obama.
"Yeah. Yeah. I understand," said Medvedev. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir. I understand."
A little context is needed here.
The last time Obama ran for president, the incumbent, George W. Bush, was advancing a plan to place a ballistic missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. The system would include a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 advanced interceptor missiles in Poland. The Bush administration intended the system to give the United States the ability to knock down missiles Iran might fire at U.S. allies and U.S. forces in Europe.
Obama, ever mindful of voters -- including those of Eastern European ancestry -- clinging to their guns, their religion, and their belief that defending yourself and your friends against a missile attack is morally superior to launching a missile attack, was wary of flat-out opposing a defense against Iranian missiles.
On June 16, 2007, when the president of the Poland visited the United States, Obama sounded a mildly hawkish note.
"Since joining NATO in 1997," Obama said, "Poland has become one of America's most important strategic partners, dedicating troops and resources to our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We now have an opportunity to build on this long and deep relationship," Obama continued. "Here is how we can. ... The Bush administration has been developing plans to deploy interceptors and radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as part of a missile defense system designed to protect against the potential threat of Iranian nuclear armed missiles. If we can responsibly deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies we should, but only when the system works."
Obama said nothing then about not deploying the missile defense because he wanted to appease the Russians -- who opposed it. But then Obama was elected president.
In September 2009, more than three full years before his next election, but just a week before he was scheduled to meet with Russian President Medvedev, Obama announced he was scrapping the plan to deploy the anti-Iranian missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. He would replace it, he said, with a partially mobile missile-defense system that could be more quickly deployed.
Medvedev instantly hailed the "good conditions" Obama had created. "I am ready to continue our dialogue," he said.
Obama and Medvedev then negotiated the "New START," a treaty calling for modest reductions in deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads and missiles.
Two years have passed, another election looms. Obama's administration is now advancing its own plan for a missile defense in Europe to protect against Iranian missiles.
In November, Medvedev announced that if the U.S. deployed this missile defense in Europe, the Russians would target it with offensive missiles deployed in Europe.
Earlier this month, Medvedev's ally, Putin, who has served as prime minister for the last four years, was elected to a third, non-consecutive term as Russia's president. Putin ran on a platform of naming Medvedev his prime minister. Medvedev had stepped aside to let Put lead the ticket.
In some ways, the Putin-Medvedev campaign sounded like a liberal campaign in the United States.
The Congressional Research Service reported that according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored the Russian elections, "Prime Minister Putin received an advantage in media coverage, and authorities mobilized local officials and resources to garner support for Putin."
"Besides these efforts," said CRS, "Putin boosted or promised large increases in military and government pay, pensions and student stipends."
Putin outlined his "election manifesto" in a series of seven newspaper articles, including one about what he understood "democracy" to mean.
"He defined this democracy in terms of the rights of Russians to employment, free health care and education, although he admitted that civil society recently had demanded more political participation," CRS reported.
It was to this once-and-future Russian president that outgoing Russian President and future Prime Minister Medvedev promised to bring Obama's message.
"After my election, I have more flexibility," Obama said.
"Yeah. Yeah. I understand," said an apparently sympathetic Medvedev. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir."
In his domestic politics, Obama is often profoundly disingenuous. But in his meeting with Medvedev, we may have caught a rare glimpse of our president expressing unfeigned empathy.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
President Barack Obama would like to do some things for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and President-elect Vladimir Putin that he does not want American voters to know about before they decide whether to re-elect him in November.
That was the intended-to-be-secret message Obama gave Medvedev in South Korea on Monday. But Obama was caught delivering the message on tape -- and, no matter how the liberal media try to spin it, the moment is destined to become emblematic of Obama as a man and as a president.
"On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved. But it's important for him to give me space,'' Obama told Medvedev -- the "him" being Putin.
"Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space," said Medvedev. "Space for you --"
"'This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility," said Obama.
"Yeah. Yeah. I understand," said Medvedev. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir. I understand."
A little context is needed here.
The last time Obama ran for president, the incumbent, George W. Bush, was advancing a plan to place a ballistic missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. The system would include a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 advanced interceptor missiles in Poland. The Bush administration intended the system to give the United States the ability to knock down missiles Iran might fire at U.S. allies and U.S. forces in Europe.
Obama, ever mindful of voters -- including those of Eastern European ancestry -- clinging to their guns, their religion, and their belief that defending yourself and your friends against a missile attack is morally superior to launching a missile attack, was wary of flat-out opposing a defense against Iranian missiles.
On June 16, 2007, when the president of the Poland visited the United States, Obama sounded a mildly hawkish note.
"Since joining NATO in 1997," Obama said, "Poland has become one of America's most important strategic partners, dedicating troops and resources to our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We now have an opportunity to build on this long and deep relationship," Obama continued. "Here is how we can. ... The Bush administration has been developing plans to deploy interceptors and radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as part of a missile defense system designed to protect against the potential threat of Iranian nuclear armed missiles. If we can responsibly deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies we should, but only when the system works."
Obama said nothing then about not deploying the missile defense because he wanted to appease the Russians -- who opposed it. But then Obama was elected president.
In September 2009, more than three full years before his next election, but just a week before he was scheduled to meet with Russian President Medvedev, Obama announced he was scrapping the plan to deploy the anti-Iranian missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. He would replace it, he said, with a partially mobile missile-defense system that could be more quickly deployed.
Medvedev instantly hailed the "good conditions" Obama had created. "I am ready to continue our dialogue," he said.
Obama and Medvedev then negotiated the "New START," a treaty calling for modest reductions in deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads and missiles.
Two years have passed, another election looms. Obama's administration is now advancing its own plan for a missile defense in Europe to protect against Iranian missiles.
In November, Medvedev announced that if the U.S. deployed this missile defense in Europe, the Russians would target it with offensive missiles deployed in Europe.
Earlier this month, Medvedev's ally, Putin, who has served as prime minister for the last four years, was elected to a third, non-consecutive term as Russia's president. Putin ran on a platform of naming Medvedev his prime minister. Medvedev had stepped aside to let Put lead the ticket.
In some ways, the Putin-Medvedev campaign sounded like a liberal campaign in the United States.
The Congressional Research Service reported that according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored the Russian elections, "Prime Minister Putin received an advantage in media coverage, and authorities mobilized local officials and resources to garner support for Putin."
"Besides these efforts," said CRS, "Putin boosted or promised large increases in military and government pay, pensions and student stipends."
Putin outlined his "election manifesto" in a series of seven newspaper articles, including one about what he understood "democracy" to mean.
"He defined this democracy in terms of the rights of Russians to employment, free health care and education, although he admitted that civil society recently had demanded more political participation," CRS reported.
It was to this once-and-future Russian president that outgoing Russian President and future Prime Minister Medvedev promised to bring Obama's message.
"After my election, I have more flexibility," Obama said.
"Yeah. Yeah. I understand," said an apparently sympathetic Medvedev. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir."
In his domestic politics, Obama is often profoundly disingenuous. But in his meeting with Medvedev, we may have caught a rare glimpse of our president expressing unfeigned empathy.
Five Things Children Know That Liberals Have Forgotten
By John Hawkins
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Liberals are actually worse than children, not just because it's so appalling to see adults who view themselves as highly intelligent and sophisticated thinking like little kids, but because in some respects, left-wing thinking is inferior to that of children. There are things that five year olds all across this country know that liberal child-men are intellectually unable to comprehend.
1) Life's not fair. There's probably not a kid in this country who hasn't said, "That's not fair," and has heard a "Life's not fair" in return. You could actually go farther than that. Not only is life not fair, the word "fair" is completely arbitrary and primarily dependent on whose goose is getting gored.
If you're paying 35% of your income in taxes and are being told that it's not "fair" you're only paying that much when almost half the country isn't paying any income tax at all, you probably disagree in the strongest of terms. On the other hand, someone making $10,000 a year might not think it's "fair" for someone else to make so much more money than he does after taxes. If you're a black, Harvard educated business owner with 10 million dollars in the bank, you may think it's perfectly fair that your son gets into a college over a more qualified son of a white garbage collector because of Affirmative Action, but it's pretty easy to see how the person being discriminated against because of his race wouldn't feel the same way.
In other words, one person's "fair" is another's person's "unfair" which can become a huge problem when the government starts defining what's "fair" and putting the force of law behind it. Yes, some of that has to happen in order to have an orderly and law abiding society, but increasingly, what's "fair" is becoming little more than an overbearing government and tyrannical judges abusing the law to do favors for the politically well-connected and voting blocks they think will help "their side." No matter what they do, life will never be “fair" and trying to make it so is an inherently "unfair" exercise in utopianism that has proven to lead to considerably more misery than simply accepting that "Life isn't fair" in the first place.
2) You can't have everything you want. This is something most kids learn when they don't get a pony at Christmas or when their parents take them into a dollar store and tell them they can have "two things."
This is not a lesson liberals seem to have ever learned because their thinking is, "If it's a 'good idea,' then it should be funded, regardless of what it costs, regardless of whether it's worth the money." It's like liberals start with the assumption that we have infinite money and if anyone opposes spending for any reason, it must be because he’s "mean." Did you know we actually have a higher debt load per person than Greece ($44,215 vs. $39,000), a nation that's only being saved from default because richer countries are paying its bills? So what happens when we run out of money, go into a depression, taxes explode, and the checks from the government slow down and stop? Judging by what's happening in Greece, liberals will start throwing Molotov cocktails in the street and blame everyone but themselves for spending the country into oblivion.
3) Good people make the world work. Most fairy tales, boiled down to their essence, consist of someone being put in danger and either learning to overcome the danger through working hard and showing virtue or having a "good" prince, teacher, or fairy godmother help the hero triumph. Who is Superman? Captain America? Spider-Man? They're personifications of goodness and righteousness come to life to protect people and to right wrongs. Children not only believe in goodness; they want to BE that hero when they grow up.
Liberalism, on the other hand, undercuts Christianity at every opportunity and sneers at goodness and virtue. Liberals believe enforcing moral standards is one of the worst things you can do. They consider judging people for bad behavior to be "mean" and impermissible. The liberal replacement for decency, character, and virtue is the pseudo-morality of being "nice, tolerant, and non-judgmental." Of course, you can be "nice, tolerant, and non-judgmental" and still be a bad person, a coward, and generally worthless as a human being. Being genuinely good requires a moral code, it requires drawing a clear line between right and wrong, and it requires having the fortitude to stand up for what's right. The real heroes, the people who make the country work as opposed to parasites who leech off the efforts of better men, generally turn out to be exactly the sort of good people that liberals hold in complete and utter contempt.
4) Liberals think EVERYONE should get a trophy. Oh, you're the right race? It should be easier for you to get into college. You're the right gender? Well, you should get paid more even though you work less because you take three months off to take care of your children. You want to work for a non-profit? Well, you should make as much as that guy running a small business because some people think that's just as valuable.
Wrong.
Life is a competition on an almost infinite number of levels with an almost infinite number of ways to "win." As P.J. O'Rourke has said, "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." If you think "banksters" and CEOs have it so much better than everyone else, you don't demand that the government put you on the same level they are; you become a banker or CEO. If you're a secretary and you don't think it's right that a fireman makes more than you do, become a fireman. If you like having lots of leisure time, but you want to make the same money as someone who works two jobs, then you make your choice as to what you value more and you live it.
Everyone can't be on the same level. Some people will be born with richer parents, better looks, more athletic ability, more brains, a better environment, etc., etc. All of them won't be good at the same things and the only way to make sure they all "get a trophy" in the same areas is to make sure that everyone is equally mediocre. Smart people push for equality of opportunity and let everyone rise to his own level while liberals try to tear people down and turn them all into losers to insure equality of results.
5) Nobody owes you a living. There are a lot of people who have come to believe that they're owed a certain standard of living just for being born in this country. Oh, you're an American citizen? That means you're owed a free education, a house, medical care, a job you enjoy with lots of vacation days, and then early retirement with someone picking up the bills.
Wrong.
You're actually owed "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" all of which you're primarily responsible for getting and maintaining yourself. Even most people's parents expect them to move out at 18 and take care of themselves and newsflash, the government isn't your parents. Because Americans are a benevolent people, we've chosen to put a basic safety net in place to take care of people who fall on hard times. Unfortunately, it has been so abused that we have a whole movement full of bums, thugs, and losers with their hands out, demanding that everyone take care of them because they think they should be children for life and the government should take the place of their mommy and daddy.
Again, wrong.
At the end of the day, you are responsible for taking care of yourself. You want a bike, get a paper route. Want to go to college at a private school for 6 years to get a degree in lesbian studies, then get a job, pay your bills, and pay off your own loans. Live below your means, save some money, get married before you have a kid, and if, God forbid, you do fall on hard times and take government assistance, have the common decency to feel a deep sense of shame for leeching off your betters instead of paying your own way.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
"Liberals love to think of themselves as intellectual and nuanced, but liberalism is incredibly simplistic. It's nothing more than ‘childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues.’ Very seldom does any issue that doesn't involve pandering to their supporters boil down at its core level to more than feeling ‘nice’ or ‘mean’ to liberals. This makes liberals ill equipped to deal with complex issues." -- John Hawkins, September 21, 2007
Liberals are actually worse than children, not just because it's so appalling to see adults who view themselves as highly intelligent and sophisticated thinking like little kids, but because in some respects, left-wing thinking is inferior to that of children. There are things that five year olds all across this country know that liberal child-men are intellectually unable to comprehend.
1) Life's not fair. There's probably not a kid in this country who hasn't said, "That's not fair," and has heard a "Life's not fair" in return. You could actually go farther than that. Not only is life not fair, the word "fair" is completely arbitrary and primarily dependent on whose goose is getting gored.
If you're paying 35% of your income in taxes and are being told that it's not "fair" you're only paying that much when almost half the country isn't paying any income tax at all, you probably disagree in the strongest of terms. On the other hand, someone making $10,000 a year might not think it's "fair" for someone else to make so much more money than he does after taxes. If you're a black, Harvard educated business owner with 10 million dollars in the bank, you may think it's perfectly fair that your son gets into a college over a more qualified son of a white garbage collector because of Affirmative Action, but it's pretty easy to see how the person being discriminated against because of his race wouldn't feel the same way.
In other words, one person's "fair" is another's person's "unfair" which can become a huge problem when the government starts defining what's "fair" and putting the force of law behind it. Yes, some of that has to happen in order to have an orderly and law abiding society, but increasingly, what's "fair" is becoming little more than an overbearing government and tyrannical judges abusing the law to do favors for the politically well-connected and voting blocks they think will help "their side." No matter what they do, life will never be “fair" and trying to make it so is an inherently "unfair" exercise in utopianism that has proven to lead to considerably more misery than simply accepting that "Life isn't fair" in the first place.
2) You can't have everything you want. This is something most kids learn when they don't get a pony at Christmas or when their parents take them into a dollar store and tell them they can have "two things."
This is not a lesson liberals seem to have ever learned because their thinking is, "If it's a 'good idea,' then it should be funded, regardless of what it costs, regardless of whether it's worth the money." It's like liberals start with the assumption that we have infinite money and if anyone opposes spending for any reason, it must be because he’s "mean." Did you know we actually have a higher debt load per person than Greece ($44,215 vs. $39,000), a nation that's only being saved from default because richer countries are paying its bills? So what happens when we run out of money, go into a depression, taxes explode, and the checks from the government slow down and stop? Judging by what's happening in Greece, liberals will start throwing Molotov cocktails in the street and blame everyone but themselves for spending the country into oblivion.
3) Good people make the world work. Most fairy tales, boiled down to their essence, consist of someone being put in danger and either learning to overcome the danger through working hard and showing virtue or having a "good" prince, teacher, or fairy godmother help the hero triumph. Who is Superman? Captain America? Spider-Man? They're personifications of goodness and righteousness come to life to protect people and to right wrongs. Children not only believe in goodness; they want to BE that hero when they grow up.
Liberalism, on the other hand, undercuts Christianity at every opportunity and sneers at goodness and virtue. Liberals believe enforcing moral standards is one of the worst things you can do. They consider judging people for bad behavior to be "mean" and impermissible. The liberal replacement for decency, character, and virtue is the pseudo-morality of being "nice, tolerant, and non-judgmental." Of course, you can be "nice, tolerant, and non-judgmental" and still be a bad person, a coward, and generally worthless as a human being. Being genuinely good requires a moral code, it requires drawing a clear line between right and wrong, and it requires having the fortitude to stand up for what's right. The real heroes, the people who make the country work as opposed to parasites who leech off the efforts of better men, generally turn out to be exactly the sort of good people that liberals hold in complete and utter contempt.
4) Liberals think EVERYONE should get a trophy. Oh, you're the right race? It should be easier for you to get into college. You're the right gender? Well, you should get paid more even though you work less because you take three months off to take care of your children. You want to work for a non-profit? Well, you should make as much as that guy running a small business because some people think that's just as valuable.
Wrong.
Life is a competition on an almost infinite number of levels with an almost infinite number of ways to "win." As P.J. O'Rourke has said, "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." If you think "banksters" and CEOs have it so much better than everyone else, you don't demand that the government put you on the same level they are; you become a banker or CEO. If you're a secretary and you don't think it's right that a fireman makes more than you do, become a fireman. If you like having lots of leisure time, but you want to make the same money as someone who works two jobs, then you make your choice as to what you value more and you live it.
Everyone can't be on the same level. Some people will be born with richer parents, better looks, more athletic ability, more brains, a better environment, etc., etc. All of them won't be good at the same things and the only way to make sure they all "get a trophy" in the same areas is to make sure that everyone is equally mediocre. Smart people push for equality of opportunity and let everyone rise to his own level while liberals try to tear people down and turn them all into losers to insure equality of results.
5) Nobody owes you a living. There are a lot of people who have come to believe that they're owed a certain standard of living just for being born in this country. Oh, you're an American citizen? That means you're owed a free education, a house, medical care, a job you enjoy with lots of vacation days, and then early retirement with someone picking up the bills.
Wrong.
You're actually owed "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" all of which you're primarily responsible for getting and maintaining yourself. Even most people's parents expect them to move out at 18 and take care of themselves and newsflash, the government isn't your parents. Because Americans are a benevolent people, we've chosen to put a basic safety net in place to take care of people who fall on hard times. Unfortunately, it has been so abused that we have a whole movement full of bums, thugs, and losers with their hands out, demanding that everyone take care of them because they think they should be children for life and the government should take the place of their mommy and daddy.
Again, wrong.
At the end of the day, you are responsible for taking care of yourself. You want a bike, get a paper route. Want to go to college at a private school for 6 years to get a degree in lesbian studies, then get a job, pay your bills, and pay off your own loans. Live below your means, save some money, get married before you have a kid, and if, God forbid, you do fall on hard times and take government assistance, have the common decency to feel a deep sense of shame for leeching off your betters instead of paying your own way.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
European Dignity, American Rights
By John O’Sullivan
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
For many years, a delegation of European Union ambassadors to the United States would troop off to Foggy Bottom for an annual meeting with the Secretary of State at which its members would solemnly demand that the U.S. abolish the death penalty on the grounds that it was a violation of human rights. Every year, the Secretary of State or his representative would politely explain that capital punishment was not a federal responsibility but a question to be determined by individual states. And every year this would make not an ounce of difference; the ambassadors would duly turn up the following year and make the same request.
For all I know, this quaint ceremony continues still, in all its showy pointlessness — like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. The European Union has adopted the abolition of capital punishment as one of the main aims of its common foreign policy. It regularly sends out diplomatic delegations to urge lesser breeds without the law — the Philippines, Indonesia, the U.S. — to conform to its high “European values” on this matter. I suppose that, when the financial roof is falling in and the wind is howling through broken windows, giving self-righteous moral lectures to your IMF creditors is one way of keeping warm. (Not the best way, of course, but one way at least.)
Americans tend to be tolerant of such European self-regard. Probably too the diplomats advising the Secretary of State are the kind of people who would oppose capital punishment in the U.S. And being Washington bureaucrats, they may also sympathize with the seeming inability of the EU’s ambassadors to grasp that, under the U.S. Constitution, individual states enjoy genuinely independent authority. That’s not how EU federalism works — and many in Washington prefer the Brussels way.
All this may explain why, so far as I know, the ambassadors have never been sent away with a flea in their collective ear. But it would be a fitting response — and a wonderful educational opportunity for the ambassadors — if Mrs. Clinton were to insist that they take an annual tour of all 50 state capitals so that they could address their concerns on capital punishment to the proper authorities. She would naturally have to grant them Secret Service protection since the EU has a pretty broad program of instructing other countries on what laws they have a bounden duty to pass — international gun control (“the widest possible”), abridging the First Amendment in order to regulate “hate speech” on the Internet, and, of course, abolishing capital punishment. That kind of hubris irritates American voters who are much less deferential to political elites than their European counterparts, and I would pay a scalper’s price to get tickets for a front seat when the ambassadors visited Georgia, New Hampshire, and, above all, Texas.
Okay, it’s a pipe dream to think that a progressive U.S. administration would speak harshly to the Europeans on anything, let alone defend the right of states to retain the death penalty. Some conservatives will also respond tetchily that the U.S. intervenes abroad too, so what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Hrumpf, Hrumpf, etc., etc. But there’s a difference in principle between intervening with dictatorships to protect dissidents from being tortured and intervening in democracies to prevent voters from choosing the laws they live under.
Or so you and I might think. But the EU and its American supporters’ club have a reply to such naïveté — as the distinguished Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte laments brilliantly in his recent book, Sovereignty or Submission. The EU does not root its intervention simply on case-by-case indignation. On the contrary: its intervention on capital punishment is but the tip of an iceberg of theory.
This theory holds that the EU is both the embodiment and main advocate of a new system of “global governance,” under which the ultimate sovereign authority in the U.S. should be not the U.S. Constitution but a network of international treaties on human rights administered by international courts and transnational bodies like itself and the United Nations. And the same would go for all other nation-states — now sovereign, but destined soon to be subordinate to a new structure of transnational power that is rooted in the enforcement of human rights, beginning with the rights of murderers.
So, we should take the ambassadors seriously. They are the diplomatic vanguard of an ideological assault on democratic sovereignty. Why should not the administration, or the U.S. Congress, or a coalition of the major Washington think tanks, or all three jointly invite them to a major forum for a public debate on all these issues?
Start, first, with the issue that the EU Ambassadors have themselves raised, namely capital punishment. They threw down the gauntlet; we should pick it up. When we do so, we shall find the task surprisingly easy.
The European Union is so certain of its own virtue that it simply parades a set of moralistic precepts on the death penalty that the unobservant might confuse with arguments. Its statement of principles on the issue is intellectually trivial and ignores strong points on the other side. For instance, the statement makes the usual self-confident claim that there is no evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent effect in combating crime. There is, in fact, quite a lot of statistical evidence to this effect. However, even if we let that go, there remains an irrefutable case that the death penalty prevents second murders by those who have been previously convicted of the crime. This is the so-called incapacitation effect. In a phrase: Dead men commit no murders.
How many lives might be saved by the incapacitation effect of the death penalty? Up-to-date U.S. figures are hard to find, but earlier statistics show that the gain in innocent lives would be substantial. Professor Paul G. Cassell pointed out in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in 1993: “Of the roughly 52,000 state prison inmates serving time for murder in 1984, an estimated 810 had previously been convicted of murder and had killed 821 persons following those convictions. Executing each of these inmates following their initial murder conviction would have saved 821 innocent lives.” This effect goes unmentioned in the EU statement.
More recent figures from the British Home Office show that, between 1997 and 2007, no fewer than 30 murderers committed a second murder when they were either on parole or had served a custodial sentence and been released. That translates into about 150 innocent victims of second-time murderers in a population of U.S. size — and somewhat more in a population of the size of the entire EU.
These victims go unmourned by bien pensant opinion. In the British debate on capital punishment, we hear constantly — and rightly — about the two men executed in the 1950s for murders of which they are now considered wholly or partly innocent. But we do not even know the names of the 30 victims of our abolitionist penal policy over the last 15 years.
Well then, abolitionists usually respond at this stage of the debate, let us keep murderers in prison forever to protect the public. This sounds suitably hard-hearted, but it neglects the fact that some second murders occur in prison. Even if we were to impose life imprisonment without parole, we would not be able give absolute protection to prison guards and other inmates who form a small but important minority of the victims of second-time murderers. Life without parole is, therefore, no solution, unless we don’t mind if guards and common criminals are murdered. I do mind.
To be fair to the EU’s statement, it does not take refuge in the concept of life without parole. Instead, after a good deal of hemming and hawing, it declares with unwise candor that “a crime prevention policy which admits maintaining imprisoned for life a convicted person who has served in prison a term corresponding to the gravity of the committed crime and is no longer a danger to society, would fail to meet either recognized minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners or the goal of social rehabilitation . . . blah, blah, blah.”
This declaration pushes the EU into an extreme position. If life without parole would violate our commitment to “recognized minimum standards” or the “goal of social rehabilitation,” why does that change when a murderer commits a second or a third murder? The answer is that it doesn’t. So the EU would have to release a serial killer after his third, fourth, or fifth murder once he had served the usual kind of sentence (i.e., six to eight years.)
In practice, of course, they would probably cheat and keep him inside with an excuse — insanity, usually. But in their own eyes they would be violating his human rights and human dignity. And insofar as they remained true to their idealistic principles, they would be sacrificing the actual lives of an unknown but perhaps significant number of innocent people to the human dignity of someone guilty of one or more great crimes.
That is where following the advice of the EU ambassadors would get us. How might they argue that such a preference is more moral or civilized than saving innocent lives at the expense of guilty ones? Let’s find out.
The second topic for our debate might be democracy. The final paragraph in the EU’s statement above is an appeal to the world and, in particular to the U.S., as follows:
In fact, very few European countries, if any, made this choice. Their political elites made the choice for them — and usually did so knowing that public opinion in their countries was strongly opposed to their decision and would reject it in a referendum if given the chance. Many would still do so.
How many? Opinion polls fluctuate on the death penalty in European countries as elsewhere. It rises and falls. But in countries as different as Britain, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Sweden, support for the death penalty since 1945 has usually been a majority, sometimes a plurality, and almost never second to abolitionism. It has strong popular support in every country in the European Union.
The persistence of this support over and against the passionate disapproval of cultural and political elites, their refusal to allow free and open debate on the question, their attempts to ensure that the democratic reinstatement of the death penalty is made impossible by treaty restraints, and above all their constant assertion that rejection of the death penalty is a “European value” demonstrates, paradoxically, that the death penalty in fact has deep roots in democratic opinion.
In particular, proclaiming the abolition of capital punishment as a European value is a self-refuting absurdity so transparent that it scarcely needs pointing out. If it were actually a European value, the claim would not need the reinforcement of constant repetition because it would be taken for granted by all. Since it is repeatedly opposed by large numbers of non-elite Europeans despite this constant reinforcement, it is not a European value at all but merely the policy preference of some influential Europeans. European ambassadors in international forums, while perfectly entitled to defend the abolition of capital punishment as the policy of their governments, are lying when they present it as the settled conviction of their peoples.
By contrast, democracy is a European value — or, at the very least, it is accepted as such by the great majority of Europeans. It even has a walk-on part in the EU statement on capital punishment. But the imposition of abolitionism on Europeans by a combination, hopefully unique, of stealth, moral bullying, and legalist trickery is a manifest subversion of democracy. It demonstrates that when there is a conflict between democracy and strong elite preferences, the EU comes down on the side of the elites.
The reason that capital punishment survives in America but has perished in Europe is not that America is less civilized than Europe, but that it is more democratic than Europe. There is quite a lot of evidence for this on other political topics. Maybe, therefore, the State Department should instruct U.S. ambassadors in Europe to mount an annual protest about the erosion of democracy throughout the EU. It can’t do any harm.
A third possible topic for the debate is the legal agreement among EU counties not to extradite to the U.S. any criminals, whatever their crimes, who might face the death penalty here. This is dressed up as a matter of principle and compassion again, but it is plainly an attempt to dictate law and penal policy to the sovereign United States.
Instead of railing indignantly against it, however, maybe we should take the EU’s arguument at face value and propose an extension of its underlying principle. Quite simply, that principle is that the European Union has a moral obligation rooted in human rights to extend sanctuary to anyone facing the death penalty in another jurisdiction. As it happens most such people happen to be in America. It is also a matter of accident that the principle has so far been invoked by European governments in extradition cases where the convicted person has been seeking to avoid deportation to trial and/or execution. But the principle itself is capable of wider and more generous application. After all, the distinction between not exporting convicted murderers from Europe to America and importing convicted murderers from America to Europe is essentially a navigational one. The U.S. might therefore propose an imaginative extension of the sanctuary principle (making due allowance, of course, for the federalist caveat that individual states would have to consent to this new legal provision for it to be enforced in practice). That qualification aside, the U.S. would propose formally to the EU that, whenever a criminal was found guilty of a capital offense in an American court, he would be allowed to choose between immediate execution and deportation to the European country most to his taste in living.
Like execution itself, this would be a once-for-all decision. The reprieved murderer would lose his U.S. citizenship and any right to return to America. He would become a citizen of his new country — initially, perhaps, a prisoner within it too — but given “recognized minimum standards” and “the goal of social rehabilitation,” we can reasonably assume that he would be walking the streets before long.
On present trends, not many murderers and rapists would be given this chance of a new life in Europe — probably fewer than 1,000 annually. It is possible, however, that when this new legal provision became widely more known, the number of both capital cases and guilty pleas would increase substantially. This change would also, hopefully, introduce a new and cooperative element into plea-bargaining and clear up the heavy backlog of death-row cases on appeal. Complaints of police coercion of confessions would also likely diminish in number.
Some thought would have to be given, admittedly, to the avoidance of any unintended incentive to homicide that might be entailed by this proposal — at least in the United States. Within the European Union, the entrenched regime of human rights and the associated concern for human dignity mean that such considerations long ago ceased to be relevant. Europe’s reaction to such an imaginative exercise in abolitionism can surely be taken for granted . . .
Okay, I know, I know — none of this is going to happen. No U.S. administration is going to put the Europeans on the spot with such intellectual guerrilla tactics, and no bold assertion of American prerogatives will emerge from the State Department. At best, Heritage, AEI, Hudson, and Cato — with perhaps a little covering fire from Brookings and SAIS — might provide the forum and invite the ambassadors for a civil debate, which the latter will succeed in politely postponing to the Greek kalends.
That, however, isn’t the point. If we merely raise such topics, if we discuss such undiplomatic responses in the media, if we threaten fire with fire (or even just with cold water), we change the balance of debate both across the Atlantic and within individual European countries. We strengthen democracy, we hinder global governance, and we blow away nonsense.
There is, as it happens, a fourth tactic that has the advantage of being entirely serious, entirely practicable, entirely embarrassing to any European concerned with real human rights and human dignity, and entirely capable of being raised and pursued by the U.S. State Department.
But it will have to wait until next week.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
For many years, a delegation of European Union ambassadors to the United States would troop off to Foggy Bottom for an annual meeting with the Secretary of State at which its members would solemnly demand that the U.S. abolish the death penalty on the grounds that it was a violation of human rights. Every year, the Secretary of State or his representative would politely explain that capital punishment was not a federal responsibility but a question to be determined by individual states. And every year this would make not an ounce of difference; the ambassadors would duly turn up the following year and make the same request.
For all I know, this quaint ceremony continues still, in all its showy pointlessness — like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. The European Union has adopted the abolition of capital punishment as one of the main aims of its common foreign policy. It regularly sends out diplomatic delegations to urge lesser breeds without the law — the Philippines, Indonesia, the U.S. — to conform to its high “European values” on this matter. I suppose that, when the financial roof is falling in and the wind is howling through broken windows, giving self-righteous moral lectures to your IMF creditors is one way of keeping warm. (Not the best way, of course, but one way at least.)
Americans tend to be tolerant of such European self-regard. Probably too the diplomats advising the Secretary of State are the kind of people who would oppose capital punishment in the U.S. And being Washington bureaucrats, they may also sympathize with the seeming inability of the EU’s ambassadors to grasp that, under the U.S. Constitution, individual states enjoy genuinely independent authority. That’s not how EU federalism works — and many in Washington prefer the Brussels way.
All this may explain why, so far as I know, the ambassadors have never been sent away with a flea in their collective ear. But it would be a fitting response — and a wonderful educational opportunity for the ambassadors — if Mrs. Clinton were to insist that they take an annual tour of all 50 state capitals so that they could address their concerns on capital punishment to the proper authorities. She would naturally have to grant them Secret Service protection since the EU has a pretty broad program of instructing other countries on what laws they have a bounden duty to pass — international gun control (“the widest possible”), abridging the First Amendment in order to regulate “hate speech” on the Internet, and, of course, abolishing capital punishment. That kind of hubris irritates American voters who are much less deferential to political elites than their European counterparts, and I would pay a scalper’s price to get tickets for a front seat when the ambassadors visited Georgia, New Hampshire, and, above all, Texas.
Okay, it’s a pipe dream to think that a progressive U.S. administration would speak harshly to the Europeans on anything, let alone defend the right of states to retain the death penalty. Some conservatives will also respond tetchily that the U.S. intervenes abroad too, so what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Hrumpf, Hrumpf, etc., etc. But there’s a difference in principle between intervening with dictatorships to protect dissidents from being tortured and intervening in democracies to prevent voters from choosing the laws they live under.
Or so you and I might think. But the EU and its American supporters’ club have a reply to such naïveté — as the distinguished Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte laments brilliantly in his recent book, Sovereignty or Submission. The EU does not root its intervention simply on case-by-case indignation. On the contrary: its intervention on capital punishment is but the tip of an iceberg of theory.
This theory holds that the EU is both the embodiment and main advocate of a new system of “global governance,” under which the ultimate sovereign authority in the U.S. should be not the U.S. Constitution but a network of international treaties on human rights administered by international courts and transnational bodies like itself and the United Nations. And the same would go for all other nation-states — now sovereign, but destined soon to be subordinate to a new structure of transnational power that is rooted in the enforcement of human rights, beginning with the rights of murderers.
So, we should take the ambassadors seriously. They are the diplomatic vanguard of an ideological assault on democratic sovereignty. Why should not the administration, or the U.S. Congress, or a coalition of the major Washington think tanks, or all three jointly invite them to a major forum for a public debate on all these issues?
Start, first, with the issue that the EU Ambassadors have themselves raised, namely capital punishment. They threw down the gauntlet; we should pick it up. When we do so, we shall find the task surprisingly easy.
The European Union is so certain of its own virtue that it simply parades a set of moralistic precepts on the death penalty that the unobservant might confuse with arguments. Its statement of principles on the issue is intellectually trivial and ignores strong points on the other side. For instance, the statement makes the usual self-confident claim that there is no evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent effect in combating crime. There is, in fact, quite a lot of statistical evidence to this effect. However, even if we let that go, there remains an irrefutable case that the death penalty prevents second murders by those who have been previously convicted of the crime. This is the so-called incapacitation effect. In a phrase: Dead men commit no murders.
How many lives might be saved by the incapacitation effect of the death penalty? Up-to-date U.S. figures are hard to find, but earlier statistics show that the gain in innocent lives would be substantial. Professor Paul G. Cassell pointed out in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in 1993: “Of the roughly 52,000 state prison inmates serving time for murder in 1984, an estimated 810 had previously been convicted of murder and had killed 821 persons following those convictions. Executing each of these inmates following their initial murder conviction would have saved 821 innocent lives.” This effect goes unmentioned in the EU statement.
More recent figures from the British Home Office show that, between 1997 and 2007, no fewer than 30 murderers committed a second murder when they were either on parole or had served a custodial sentence and been released. That translates into about 150 innocent victims of second-time murderers in a population of U.S. size — and somewhat more in a population of the size of the entire EU.
These victims go unmourned by bien pensant opinion. In the British debate on capital punishment, we hear constantly — and rightly — about the two men executed in the 1950s for murders of which they are now considered wholly or partly innocent. But we do not even know the names of the 30 victims of our abolitionist penal policy over the last 15 years.
Well then, abolitionists usually respond at this stage of the debate, let us keep murderers in prison forever to protect the public. This sounds suitably hard-hearted, but it neglects the fact that some second murders occur in prison. Even if we were to impose life imprisonment without parole, we would not be able give absolute protection to prison guards and other inmates who form a small but important minority of the victims of second-time murderers. Life without parole is, therefore, no solution, unless we don’t mind if guards and common criminals are murdered. I do mind.
To be fair to the EU’s statement, it does not take refuge in the concept of life without parole. Instead, after a good deal of hemming and hawing, it declares with unwise candor that “a crime prevention policy which admits maintaining imprisoned for life a convicted person who has served in prison a term corresponding to the gravity of the committed crime and is no longer a danger to society, would fail to meet either recognized minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners or the goal of social rehabilitation . . . blah, blah, blah.”
This declaration pushes the EU into an extreme position. If life without parole would violate our commitment to “recognized minimum standards” or the “goal of social rehabilitation,” why does that change when a murderer commits a second or a third murder? The answer is that it doesn’t. So the EU would have to release a serial killer after his third, fourth, or fifth murder once he had served the usual kind of sentence (i.e., six to eight years.)
In practice, of course, they would probably cheat and keep him inside with an excuse — insanity, usually. But in their own eyes they would be violating his human rights and human dignity. And insofar as they remained true to their idealistic principles, they would be sacrificing the actual lives of an unknown but perhaps significant number of innocent people to the human dignity of someone guilty of one or more great crimes.
That is where following the advice of the EU ambassadors would get us. How might they argue that such a preference is more moral or civilized than saving innocent lives at the expense of guilty ones? Let’s find out.
The second topic for our debate might be democracy. The final paragraph in the EU’s statement above is an appeal to the world and, in particular to the U.S., as follows:
Long ago European countries, either in practice or in law, made a choice for humanity, abolishing the death penalty and thus fostering respect for human dignity. And this is an ultimate principle that the EU wishes to share with all countries, as it shares other common values and principles such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law and safeguard of human rights.
In fact, very few European countries, if any, made this choice. Their political elites made the choice for them — and usually did so knowing that public opinion in their countries was strongly opposed to their decision and would reject it in a referendum if given the chance. Many would still do so.
How many? Opinion polls fluctuate on the death penalty in European countries as elsewhere. It rises and falls. But in countries as different as Britain, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Sweden, support for the death penalty since 1945 has usually been a majority, sometimes a plurality, and almost never second to abolitionism. It has strong popular support in every country in the European Union.
The persistence of this support over and against the passionate disapproval of cultural and political elites, their refusal to allow free and open debate on the question, their attempts to ensure that the democratic reinstatement of the death penalty is made impossible by treaty restraints, and above all their constant assertion that rejection of the death penalty is a “European value” demonstrates, paradoxically, that the death penalty in fact has deep roots in democratic opinion.
In particular, proclaiming the abolition of capital punishment as a European value is a self-refuting absurdity so transparent that it scarcely needs pointing out. If it were actually a European value, the claim would not need the reinforcement of constant repetition because it would be taken for granted by all. Since it is repeatedly opposed by large numbers of non-elite Europeans despite this constant reinforcement, it is not a European value at all but merely the policy preference of some influential Europeans. European ambassadors in international forums, while perfectly entitled to defend the abolition of capital punishment as the policy of their governments, are lying when they present it as the settled conviction of their peoples.
By contrast, democracy is a European value — or, at the very least, it is accepted as such by the great majority of Europeans. It even has a walk-on part in the EU statement on capital punishment. But the imposition of abolitionism on Europeans by a combination, hopefully unique, of stealth, moral bullying, and legalist trickery is a manifest subversion of democracy. It demonstrates that when there is a conflict between democracy and strong elite preferences, the EU comes down on the side of the elites.
The reason that capital punishment survives in America but has perished in Europe is not that America is less civilized than Europe, but that it is more democratic than Europe. There is quite a lot of evidence for this on other political topics. Maybe, therefore, the State Department should instruct U.S. ambassadors in Europe to mount an annual protest about the erosion of democracy throughout the EU. It can’t do any harm.
A third possible topic for the debate is the legal agreement among EU counties not to extradite to the U.S. any criminals, whatever their crimes, who might face the death penalty here. This is dressed up as a matter of principle and compassion again, but it is plainly an attempt to dictate law and penal policy to the sovereign United States.
Instead of railing indignantly against it, however, maybe we should take the EU’s arguument at face value and propose an extension of its underlying principle. Quite simply, that principle is that the European Union has a moral obligation rooted in human rights to extend sanctuary to anyone facing the death penalty in another jurisdiction. As it happens most such people happen to be in America. It is also a matter of accident that the principle has so far been invoked by European governments in extradition cases where the convicted person has been seeking to avoid deportation to trial and/or execution. But the principle itself is capable of wider and more generous application. After all, the distinction between not exporting convicted murderers from Europe to America and importing convicted murderers from America to Europe is essentially a navigational one. The U.S. might therefore propose an imaginative extension of the sanctuary principle (making due allowance, of course, for the federalist caveat that individual states would have to consent to this new legal provision for it to be enforced in practice). That qualification aside, the U.S. would propose formally to the EU that, whenever a criminal was found guilty of a capital offense in an American court, he would be allowed to choose between immediate execution and deportation to the European country most to his taste in living.
Like execution itself, this would be a once-for-all decision. The reprieved murderer would lose his U.S. citizenship and any right to return to America. He would become a citizen of his new country — initially, perhaps, a prisoner within it too — but given “recognized minimum standards” and “the goal of social rehabilitation,” we can reasonably assume that he would be walking the streets before long.
On present trends, not many murderers and rapists would be given this chance of a new life in Europe — probably fewer than 1,000 annually. It is possible, however, that when this new legal provision became widely more known, the number of both capital cases and guilty pleas would increase substantially. This change would also, hopefully, introduce a new and cooperative element into plea-bargaining and clear up the heavy backlog of death-row cases on appeal. Complaints of police coercion of confessions would also likely diminish in number.
Some thought would have to be given, admittedly, to the avoidance of any unintended incentive to homicide that might be entailed by this proposal — at least in the United States. Within the European Union, the entrenched regime of human rights and the associated concern for human dignity mean that such considerations long ago ceased to be relevant. Europe’s reaction to such an imaginative exercise in abolitionism can surely be taken for granted . . .
Okay, I know, I know — none of this is going to happen. No U.S. administration is going to put the Europeans on the spot with such intellectual guerrilla tactics, and no bold assertion of American prerogatives will emerge from the State Department. At best, Heritage, AEI, Hudson, and Cato — with perhaps a little covering fire from Brookings and SAIS — might provide the forum and invite the ambassadors for a civil debate, which the latter will succeed in politely postponing to the Greek kalends.
That, however, isn’t the point. If we merely raise such topics, if we discuss such undiplomatic responses in the media, if we threaten fire with fire (or even just with cold water), we change the balance of debate both across the Atlantic and within individual European countries. We strengthen democracy, we hinder global governance, and we blow away nonsense.
There is, as it happens, a fourth tactic that has the advantage of being entirely serious, entirely practicable, entirely embarrassing to any European concerned with real human rights and human dignity, and entirely capable of being raised and pursued by the U.S. State Department.
But it will have to wait until next week.
Are the "Less Fortunate" Less Fortunate?
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
In his front-page-of-the-business-section "Economic Scene" column in The New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, "The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate."
Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, "transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent," not the less fortunate.
But for Porter, as for the left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely "less affluent," they are "less fortunate."
Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the "affluent" and the "less fortunate" or between the "more fortunate" and the "less fortunate"?
To understand the left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil, as humanity has generally understood the term. The leftist divides the world not between good and evil but rich and poor.
Because inequality is the chief moral concern of the left, the words "less affluent" or even "poorer" do not meet the left's moral needs. It needs to believe, and to have others believe, that what separates economic classes is not merely how much material wealth members of each class have. Rather, it is the amount of good and bad luck -- "fortune," as the left puts it -- that each class has.
This is how the left justifies high taxes. Isn't it only fair and moral that as much money as possible be taken from the lucky and given to the unlucky? After all, the affluent didn't achieve affluence through harder work, but through greater luck.
To acknowledge that most of America's affluent (meaning those who earn over $200,000) have attained their affluence through hard work is to undermine the fairness issue at the core of the left's understanding of economic inequality and justification for confiscatory taxes.
For the left, affluence is won, not earned. Indeed, English is one of the few languages that even has or uses the word "earn" in regard to income. In Romance languages such as French, the verb meaning to earn is "gagner," which means "to win." In terms of language, in America, people earn their wealth, while in most of Europe and Latin America, people win it.
The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent. While, of course, there are hardworking poor people just as there are Wall Street CEOs who do not deserve their "golden parachutes," in America, differences in income exist largely because of the values and the hard work of those who make more money.
In this regard, The Washington Post reported the findings of Harvard professor Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics:
"People who make less than $20,000 a year ... told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure -- watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way -- putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional."
But for the left, it's all about "fortune."
Every poll about the left, the right and happiness reveals that the further left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be. This is one of the reasons: If you really believe that people wealthier than you are just luckier than you, how can you not be angry, resentful and unhappy?
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of conservatives who make much less money than others -- yet feed their families, own a house and a car, have decent children, derive great meaning from their religion and live in the freest country in the world -- who never call themselves "less fortunate." They call themselves fortunate.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
In his front-page-of-the-business-section "Economic Scene" column in The New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, "The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate."
Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, "transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent," not the less fortunate.
But for Porter, as for the left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely "less affluent," they are "less fortunate."
Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the "affluent" and the "less fortunate" or between the "more fortunate" and the "less fortunate"?
To understand the left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil, as humanity has generally understood the term. The leftist divides the world not between good and evil but rich and poor.
Because inequality is the chief moral concern of the left, the words "less affluent" or even "poorer" do not meet the left's moral needs. It needs to believe, and to have others believe, that what separates economic classes is not merely how much material wealth members of each class have. Rather, it is the amount of good and bad luck -- "fortune," as the left puts it -- that each class has.
This is how the left justifies high taxes. Isn't it only fair and moral that as much money as possible be taken from the lucky and given to the unlucky? After all, the affluent didn't achieve affluence through harder work, but through greater luck.
To acknowledge that most of America's affluent (meaning those who earn over $200,000) have attained their affluence through hard work is to undermine the fairness issue at the core of the left's understanding of economic inequality and justification for confiscatory taxes.
For the left, affluence is won, not earned. Indeed, English is one of the few languages that even has or uses the word "earn" in regard to income. In Romance languages such as French, the verb meaning to earn is "gagner," which means "to win." In terms of language, in America, people earn their wealth, while in most of Europe and Latin America, people win it.
The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent. While, of course, there are hardworking poor people just as there are Wall Street CEOs who do not deserve their "golden parachutes," in America, differences in income exist largely because of the values and the hard work of those who make more money.
In this regard, The Washington Post reported the findings of Harvard professor Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics:
"People who make less than $20,000 a year ... told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure -- watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way -- putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional."
But for the left, it's all about "fortune."
Every poll about the left, the right and happiness reveals that the further left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be. This is one of the reasons: If you really believe that people wealthier than you are just luckier than you, how can you not be angry, resentful and unhappy?
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of conservatives who make much less money than others -- yet feed their families, own a house and a car, have decent children, derive great meaning from their religion and live in the freest country in the world -- who never call themselves "less fortunate." They call themselves fortunate.
We Are All French Now
By Ryan James Girdusky
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The seven savage killings of four Jews and three Muslims by French born Islamic radical Mohammed Merah is not only devastating for loved ones of the victims, but sad for the French nation as they confront the crisis of our time.
Merah, the son of Algerian immigrants, was born in France and raised in the Toulouse, where he would later commit his atrocities. He was one of the hundreds of thousands unemployed Muslim youth that reside in France. With a string of petty crimes and short prison record since his late teens, Merah traveled both Afghanistan and Pakistan where he completed his radicalization, which started from watching Jihadist videos on the internet. Merah explained his reasoning for murder was revenge for the death of Palestinian children, during whose executions Merah shouted “Allah Akbar” or “God is great”.
Merah may have been a lone wolf in the sense he did not have an accomplice in the physical murder, but he now has a cult following. One of those supporters is Abdelkader Merah, the older brother of the murder, who said he was, “proud” of his brothers actions. The elder Merah has been taken into custody after explosive materials were discovered in his car.
The political response has been completely tone deaf from the left-wing and centre-right spheres of French political parties. President Nicholas Sarkozy asked the people of France to come together in unity, while centrist candidate Francois Bayrou said, “because of their origin, of the religion of the family,” are linked “to a growing climate of intolerance”. Only a moderate could blame his own countrymen for intolerance after a radical Muslim carried out a plan to wipe out the infidels. Socialist candidate Francois Hollande wanted to immediately return to discussing the economy and austerity, when right-wing National Front leader Marine Le Pen said, “Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated in our country and political-religious groups are developing due to a certain [laxity],” Hollande responded by calling Le Pen, “a vulture”.
The media was devastated when their first announcement that the killer was a white nationalist and supporter of Le Pen turned out to be incorrect.
Had Merah been a lone incident, had Paris not experienced car burnings during the past few summers and honor killings not becoming more and more frequent; the response by French politicians and media may have been acceptable.
Yet none of the French presidential candidates, save Le Pen, are willing to discuss the fact that France, and to that matter the West, demand nothing of their new immigrants. Restriction and assimilation are four letter words to the political class, their religion states that all cultures are equal no matter how high the body count.
Mohammed Merah is capturing a moment in history, a time when there is economic hardship and new emerging immigrant population refuses to assimilate to their new culture and customs. Merah was not assimilated into the beliefs of Western civilization; Christianity being the national and historic faith, a common language, common heroes, and national mythology. Merah’s idols were Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Abu Ayyub al-Masri; he had not been found pride in Charles Martel, St. Joan of Arc or Charles de Gaulle. Merah as is true with millions of Muslims in France today was more concerned with conquest over conforming.
This, however, is not completely the fault of the third world migrants. Westerners do not demand conformity because they do not understand what it means to be Western. They scuff at the faith that was the foundation to which their civilization and replaced it with the political religion of egalitarianism. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the West is evil, to overwhelm ourselves with the sins of our fathers: slavery, the Holocaust, imperialism… Westerners understand that the actions of Toulouse were savage and something went wrong leading up to the massacre but most can not understand the solution of assimilation because they describe what it means to be Western.
The identity crisis of the West will be front and center in the upcoming French Presidential elections, as it will be in all future elections amongst Western nations because the tragedies of Toulouse are not exceptional to France. We are all suffering from the loss of identity and values, every Western city has the possibility of repeating the tragedies of Toulouse. We are all French now.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The seven savage killings of four Jews and three Muslims by French born Islamic radical Mohammed Merah is not only devastating for loved ones of the victims, but sad for the French nation as they confront the crisis of our time.
Merah, the son of Algerian immigrants, was born in France and raised in the Toulouse, where he would later commit his atrocities. He was one of the hundreds of thousands unemployed Muslim youth that reside in France. With a string of petty crimes and short prison record since his late teens, Merah traveled both Afghanistan and Pakistan where he completed his radicalization, which started from watching Jihadist videos on the internet. Merah explained his reasoning for murder was revenge for the death of Palestinian children, during whose executions Merah shouted “Allah Akbar” or “God is great”.
Merah may have been a lone wolf in the sense he did not have an accomplice in the physical murder, but he now has a cult following. One of those supporters is Abdelkader Merah, the older brother of the murder, who said he was, “proud” of his brothers actions. The elder Merah has been taken into custody after explosive materials were discovered in his car.
The political response has been completely tone deaf from the left-wing and centre-right spheres of French political parties. President Nicholas Sarkozy asked the people of France to come together in unity, while centrist candidate Francois Bayrou said, “because of their origin, of the religion of the family,” are linked “to a growing climate of intolerance”. Only a moderate could blame his own countrymen for intolerance after a radical Muslim carried out a plan to wipe out the infidels. Socialist candidate Francois Hollande wanted to immediately return to discussing the economy and austerity, when right-wing National Front leader Marine Le Pen said, “Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated in our country and political-religious groups are developing due to a certain [laxity],” Hollande responded by calling Le Pen, “a vulture”.
The media was devastated when their first announcement that the killer was a white nationalist and supporter of Le Pen turned out to be incorrect.
Had Merah been a lone incident, had Paris not experienced car burnings during the past few summers and honor killings not becoming more and more frequent; the response by French politicians and media may have been acceptable.
Yet none of the French presidential candidates, save Le Pen, are willing to discuss the fact that France, and to that matter the West, demand nothing of their new immigrants. Restriction and assimilation are four letter words to the political class, their religion states that all cultures are equal no matter how high the body count.
Mohammed Merah is capturing a moment in history, a time when there is economic hardship and new emerging immigrant population refuses to assimilate to their new culture and customs. Merah was not assimilated into the beliefs of Western civilization; Christianity being the national and historic faith, a common language, common heroes, and national mythology. Merah’s idols were Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Abu Ayyub al-Masri; he had not been found pride in Charles Martel, St. Joan of Arc or Charles de Gaulle. Merah as is true with millions of Muslims in France today was more concerned with conquest over conforming.
This, however, is not completely the fault of the third world migrants. Westerners do not demand conformity because they do not understand what it means to be Western. They scuff at the faith that was the foundation to which their civilization and replaced it with the political religion of egalitarianism. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the West is evil, to overwhelm ourselves with the sins of our fathers: slavery, the Holocaust, imperialism… Westerners understand that the actions of Toulouse were savage and something went wrong leading up to the massacre but most can not understand the solution of assimilation because they describe what it means to be Western.
The identity crisis of the West will be front and center in the upcoming French Presidential elections, as it will be in all future elections amongst Western nations because the tragedies of Toulouse are not exceptional to France. We are all suffering from the loss of identity and values, every Western city has the possibility of repeating the tragedies of Toulouse. We are all French now.
Mohamed Merah - Man of the West
By Caroline Glick
Monday, March 26, 2012
The massacre of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times - although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.
On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher.
Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed.
But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served.
Indeed, it hasn't even begun to be addressed. The killer, Mohamed Merah, was not a lone gunman. He wasn't even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about.
He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.
An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime?
Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?
The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.
And he was surely correct.
Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations.
Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl's killers took of him before they chopped his head off.
The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.
Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators."
The exhibitionism common to all the men's behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.
This situation is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West's responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah's death can bring no closure to this story.
There are five interrelated aspects to the West's response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West's response is denial.
Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.
In the case of Halimi's murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi's family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.
Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.
On a lesser note, everyone from the media to Jewish communal leaders in the US abjectly refuse to recognize that mainstream Muslim groups like the Muslim Students Association are sympathetically inclined towards Hamas. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that sympathy for Hamas necessarily entails sympathy for Hamas's genocidal platform of annihilating the Jewish people in the name of jihad.
As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.
Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West's effective collusion with these killers is Western elites' justification of their crimes.
After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah's jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah's name and his excuse at the same time.
Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel's "murder" of Palestinian children.
It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn't murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.
But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn't know that.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.
And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.
French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century's first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura's alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.
The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court's libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.
The appellate court viewed France 2's unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.
Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France's Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France's Supreme Court overturned the appellate court's ruling and ordered it to retry the case.
As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.
In addition to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.
Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.
Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.
As the mother of the teenager said, "All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times."
In the US, Hasan's colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.
The West's complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn't end with their perpetration.
After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers' trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi's killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.
In Seattle, Haq's first trial for his attack on Seattle's Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle's mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn't bother to present the records of Haq's phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.
Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah's death is not a victory of justice.
Monday, March 26, 2012
The massacre of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times - although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.
On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher.
Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed.
But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served.
Indeed, it hasn't even begun to be addressed. The killer, Mohamed Merah, was not a lone gunman. He wasn't even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about.
He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.
An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime?
Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?
The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.
And he was surely correct.
Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations.
Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl's killers took of him before they chopped his head off.
The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.
Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators."
The exhibitionism common to all the men's behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.
This situation is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West's responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah's death can bring no closure to this story.
There are five interrelated aspects to the West's response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West's response is denial.
Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.
In the case of Halimi's murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi's family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.
Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.
On a lesser note, everyone from the media to Jewish communal leaders in the US abjectly refuse to recognize that mainstream Muslim groups like the Muslim Students Association are sympathetically inclined towards Hamas. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that sympathy for Hamas necessarily entails sympathy for Hamas's genocidal platform of annihilating the Jewish people in the name of jihad.
As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.
Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West's effective collusion with these killers is Western elites' justification of their crimes.
After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah's jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah's name and his excuse at the same time.
Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel's "murder" of Palestinian children.
It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn't murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.
But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn't know that.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.
And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.
French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century's first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura's alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.
The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court's libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.
The appellate court viewed France 2's unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.
Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France's Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France's Supreme Court overturned the appellate court's ruling and ordered it to retry the case.
As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.
In addition to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.
Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.
Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.
As the mother of the teenager said, "All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times."
In the US, Hasan's colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.
The West's complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn't end with their perpetration.
After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers' trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi's killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.
In Seattle, Haq's first trial for his attack on Seattle's Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle's mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn't bother to present the records of Haq's phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.
Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah's death is not a victory of justice.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Don’t Erect a Monument to Che
By Carlos Eire
Monday, March 26, 2012
Note: Yale Professor Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, which won the National Book Award in 2003, wrote this letter and submitted it to the Irish Times in response to plans by the city of Galway to erect a statue honoring Che Guevara. The Times demurred, but it was published in the Galway Advertiser.
Dear editors,
As a victim of Che Guevara’s atrocities, as a historian, and as a Cuban of Irish descent, I am deeply disturbed by the fact that the city of Galway is planning to erect a monument to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I don’t mind one bit if those behind this monstrous project want to believe lies — that’s their right in a truly free society — but it would be wrong to allow their abysmal ignorance or willful blindness to stand unchallenged. Those who think highly of Che may be surprised to hear it, but they have way too much in common with Holocaust deniers.
Che was my neighbor in Havana, and I actually saw him in the flesh several times. He lived in an opulent mansion just a few blocks from my very small house, and also ran the prison of La Cabaña, where some of my relatives ended up being tortured and murdered. Their crime? Voicing an opinion different from Che’s. Or, in the case of my uncle, simply having a son who voiced an opinion contrary to Che’s. The awful truth about Ernesto “Che” Guevara is that he was a violent thug with despotic tendencies. Che’s admirers prefer to think of him as a righteous warrior, and often cite certain books that portray him as a saint. I hate to break the news to them: Some books are full of lies. Fortunately, others are not, like the memoir Cuba 1959, La Galera de la Muerte, written by Javier Arzuaga, the priest who accompanied all of Che’s victims to the firing squad during the first nine months of the so-called Revolution. Read it and weep, please, all of you who love Che. We Cubans are the only people on earth who knew the real Che — as opposed to the icon stamped on all sorts of merchandise — but there are many in the world who tune us out, discredit our testimony, and would love to gag us. Somehow, the lie is preferable.
Why?
Ignorance and blind faith. To praise Che, one must overlook mountains of evidence concerning his crimes. But why would anyone do that, willingly? Because some people — especially those who see all of history as nothing but class struggle — need a saint to venerate, someone who they think embodies the cause of the downtrodden. Ironically, though most Che lovers tend not to admit it, they act very much like religious zealots: As they prefer to see it, Che was a saintly crusader for the poor, so everything he did must have been good, and anyone harmed by him must have deserved it. So what if he killed Cubans willy-nilly, without trials, including plenty of poor peasants? Or helped establish one of the most repressive regimes on earth? Or built concentration camps for dissidents and gays, including one with a sign over the front gate that read “Work will make real men out of you”? It’s what needed to be done. It was just. And in this warped religious view of Che the idol, and of politics in general, we who call that false history into question are worse than heretics. We are the unjust cretins who still deserve to be killed by the likes of Che.
Everyone in Galway and Ireland should know this: Che has a lot in common with Oliver Cromwell. Like Cromwell, Che proclaimed himself a liberator and felt justified in committing thousands of atrocities in a land other than his own, all in the name of a higher cause. Like Cromwell, Che stole everyone’s property too, for a sacred purpose. As for reputation: Cromwell received plenty of good press and adulation from those on his side, just like Che. To Cromwell’s admirers — and he had plenty who would eagerly build him monuments — the Irish people were inconsequential obstacles to a higher goal, or worse, despicable papist wretches who deserved no mercy.
Allow me to propose a radical solution to this controversy: If Galway wants to honor Che with a monument, it should also build one for Cromwell, right next to it. It’s only fair.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Note: Yale Professor Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, which won the National Book Award in 2003, wrote this letter and submitted it to the Irish Times in response to plans by the city of Galway to erect a statue honoring Che Guevara. The Times demurred, but it was published in the Galway Advertiser.
Dear editors,
As a victim of Che Guevara’s atrocities, as a historian, and as a Cuban of Irish descent, I am deeply disturbed by the fact that the city of Galway is planning to erect a monument to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I don’t mind one bit if those behind this monstrous project want to believe lies — that’s their right in a truly free society — but it would be wrong to allow their abysmal ignorance or willful blindness to stand unchallenged. Those who think highly of Che may be surprised to hear it, but they have way too much in common with Holocaust deniers.
Che was my neighbor in Havana, and I actually saw him in the flesh several times. He lived in an opulent mansion just a few blocks from my very small house, and also ran the prison of La Cabaña, where some of my relatives ended up being tortured and murdered. Their crime? Voicing an opinion different from Che’s. Or, in the case of my uncle, simply having a son who voiced an opinion contrary to Che’s. The awful truth about Ernesto “Che” Guevara is that he was a violent thug with despotic tendencies. Che’s admirers prefer to think of him as a righteous warrior, and often cite certain books that portray him as a saint. I hate to break the news to them: Some books are full of lies. Fortunately, others are not, like the memoir Cuba 1959, La Galera de la Muerte, written by Javier Arzuaga, the priest who accompanied all of Che’s victims to the firing squad during the first nine months of the so-called Revolution. Read it and weep, please, all of you who love Che. We Cubans are the only people on earth who knew the real Che — as opposed to the icon stamped on all sorts of merchandise — but there are many in the world who tune us out, discredit our testimony, and would love to gag us. Somehow, the lie is preferable.
Why?
Ignorance and blind faith. To praise Che, one must overlook mountains of evidence concerning his crimes. But why would anyone do that, willingly? Because some people — especially those who see all of history as nothing but class struggle — need a saint to venerate, someone who they think embodies the cause of the downtrodden. Ironically, though most Che lovers tend not to admit it, they act very much like religious zealots: As they prefer to see it, Che was a saintly crusader for the poor, so everything he did must have been good, and anyone harmed by him must have deserved it. So what if he killed Cubans willy-nilly, without trials, including plenty of poor peasants? Or helped establish one of the most repressive regimes on earth? Or built concentration camps for dissidents and gays, including one with a sign over the front gate that read “Work will make real men out of you”? It’s what needed to be done. It was just. And in this warped religious view of Che the idol, and of politics in general, we who call that false history into question are worse than heretics. We are the unjust cretins who still deserve to be killed by the likes of Che.
Everyone in Galway and Ireland should know this: Che has a lot in common with Oliver Cromwell. Like Cromwell, Che proclaimed himself a liberator and felt justified in committing thousands of atrocities in a land other than his own, all in the name of a higher cause. Like Cromwell, Che stole everyone’s property too, for a sacred purpose. As for reputation: Cromwell received plenty of good press and adulation from those on his side, just like Che. To Cromwell’s admirers — and he had plenty who would eagerly build him monuments — the Irish people were inconsequential obstacles to a higher goal, or worse, despicable papist wretches who deserved no mercy.
Allow me to propose a radical solution to this controversy: If Galway wants to honor Che with a monument, it should also build one for Cromwell, right next to it. It’s only fair.
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