DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
A TRUE WORK OF ART
The New York Times reported in 2009 that Art in Embassies spends about $4.5 million a year for permanent art acquisitions; chief curator Virginia Shore said at the time that artists and dealers support the program via favorable pricing; for the embassy in Beijing, an outlay of $800,000 yielded works with an appraised value of $30 million.
Here’s one of the “paintings” from the Art in Embassies exhibit in Stockholm. “Paul Rusconi, Barack Obama, 2008.” Estimated price of 5,000, but sold for $20,000. You can see it up above. The new symbol of America.
…from State Department Spent 4.5 Million for Embassy Art, Had No Money for Benghazi Security
A REPUBLICAN CIVIL WAR
Back when Romney was rammed through the establishment choice, I wrote that the establishment had its shot, but that if it blew it again, those responsible should be prepared to pay the price. No price is being paid of course. Instead, insanely enough, the GOP is trying to purge the Tea Party.
This is fantastically stupid, because Obama won on turnout and organization, he won on volunteers from a passionate member base willing to fight for an extreme program. And where is the GOP going to find the people who will out-volunteer, out-organize and out-donate them? Nowhere. A party of business leaders was a fine proposition in 1821. It’s no more viable today than it was a hundred years ago.
The fiscal cliff is Obama’s way of splitting the Conservative grass roots, who are a threat to him, from the established Republican Party, which is not.
Republicans are worried about being blamed for the economic fallout, little realizing that they will be blamed regardless of what happens. If Boehner gives Obama every single damn thing he wants, the media will still blame Congressional inaction for the economic problems, and unless that narrative is fought back against, the sort of people who get their news from Saturday Night Live will eat it up with a spork.
Is the Tea Party an unparalleled success? Absolutely not. From the moment Doug Hoffman was put forward, it was obvious that there was a serious candidate problem. But that’s natural because if you operate outside the establishment, the people you put forward will not be professional politicians. They will lack basic professional skills, but there are plenty of people who do have those skills in spades. Ronald Reagan was a sportscaster, actor and toured the country delivering speeches before he went into politics. That skillset is not incredibly unique. Neither is the ability to vet candidates before running them up the flagpole.
But while the Republican establishment makes a great deal of Akin or Angle, what are we to make of two-time loser Linda McMahon who handed out “Obama/McMahon ballots and dressed her people up in fake SEIU shirts. Or Meg Whitman. Or Mitt Romney.
The Republican Party has too many super-rich candidates with no ideas or principles. The Tea Party has too many principled candidates with very little understanding of how to run for office. It might be nice if we met somewhere in the middle.
Conservatives are threatening to walk out, but there aren’t that many places to walk to. Still with the Republican brand already toxic, running third party reform candidates committed to a conservative program in local elections might make a difference. The larger problem though is that the Republican Party establishment has the experience and the infrastructure. Both are rotten, but that doesn’t mean that doing without them will be easy.
The bottom line is organize, radicalize or lose. The left knew this and won on it.
Now the Republican Party can try to counter this (Obama’s organization) in two ways.
1. Build up its own community organizer network made up of non-profits linked to conservative religious institutions and advocacy groups that replicate the liberal formula of creating grant-funded community groups that act as political interfaces with entire communities. These groups help residents get benefits and navigate problems with the government. For those who don’t like the benefits part, those groups also provide tax assistance and a variety of similar services. And these groups would target non-minority rural populations that are underserved and do not turn out to vote in sufficient numbers.
or/and
2. Use its own grass roots as volunteers. And the Tea Party is the country’s largest conservative grass roots movement.
Grass roots movements believe in things. They can turn out large numbers of volunteers who passionately believe that they are making a difference, rather than serving the system.
Would Obama have gotten as many volunteers without gay marriage, ObamaCare and the unilateral DREAM amnesty? Probably not. And Republicans who hope to get massive numbers of volunteers on the ground need to stand for actual conservative issues that they intend to implement.
A Republican Party that caters to an establishment elite is never going to be able to replicate the radical left’s organizing efforts.
So there are two choices here. Organize and radicalize or lose. The Republican Party can no longer win a race against a radical leftist without the Tea Party.
ARAB SPRING II: DOWN WITH MORSI
In October I suggested that Egypt and Tunisia might be headed for Counter-Islamist revolutions. Now the small sparks of revolution have exploded into a firestorm in Egypt and to a lesser extent in Tunisia, where the violent Anti-Islamist protests have mostly been ignored.
These protests are mostly a showdown between Islamists and Leftists, and yes both hate America, and we needn’t even go into what they think of Israel, but choosing the lesser of two evils is in this case a viable strategy. The lesser of those evils was Mubarak, but thanks to Obama and his idiot neo-conservative allies that is no longer on the table, barring another military coup. These days it’s the left and while I hardly want to do any cheers for a possible El-Baradei presidency, it’s better than Egypt’s firepower falling into the hands of an international terrorist organization which then uses the country’s large population as suicide bomber cannon fodder, all with a view toward creating a Caliphate.
The American media has taken a cautious approach to the protests, taking its cue from the Obama White House, which continues to back Morsi, issuing a general “stop the violence everybody” message. The European media has been far less discreet, because the old Tahrir Square alliances are still there between Arab Socialists and European Socialists.
The Arab Spring II protesters have shown a good deal of staying power. They have tested the military and won. They have gotten back around the Presidential Palace, and as of this writing, appear to have forced Morsi to postpone the referendum, though this is likely to be another fake compromise. For the protesters the challenge is to use popular unrest as leverage, while the Muslim Brotherhood wants to capitalize on its democratic leverage to ram through Islamic law with Western approval.
Morsi assumed that Egypt would fall just like Turkey. He appears to have made a very grave error. Turkey did have sizable anti-Islamist protests, but never to this scale, in part, because Erdogan and the AKP in Turkey moved much slower than Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt. That is what Erdogan has probably privately told his advisers. The Egyptian Islamists, whether in the ranks of Al Qaeda or in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, were notorious for lacking patience. They wanted their victories right now. The assumption that they had learned anything from their failed terror campaigns does not appear to have been borne out. The Brotherhood may well lose Syria to Al Qaeda and it is at risk of losing Egypt all over again.
INSIDE THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S TORTURE CHAMBERS
You’re no one in the Middle East if you don’t have your own torture chambers.
The central chamber was located at the gate of the palace in front of Omar bin Abdel Aziz Mosque on Merghany Street. The chamber was cordoned by iron barriers and Central Security Forces.
Police officials in uniform were present inside the chamber, as were plainclothes officers from the Nozha police station. Fifteen Brotherhood members were also present, supervised by three bearded men who decided who should be there.
Opposing protesters were brought to the chambers after being detained by Brotherhood members. The kidnappers would take the detained person’s ID card, mobile phone and money before beginning “investigations,” which included intervals of beating to force the confession that he or she is a “thug.”
One pleaded, “I’m a bearded sheikh… It’s Safwat Hegazy who will restore my rights. I’m a friend of all sheikhs.” A bleeding man cried, “I’m an educated person. I have a car. Do I look like a thug?”
After a while, a captive would be transferred to a central chamber, where a Brotherhood lawyer would hand his or her ID card and personal belongings to a senior police officer, who was the head of the “investigations department” in the chamber.
There was blood visible on the pavement outside the chambers. Some Brothers covered it with dust to try to hide it, but some of it remained visible.
This scene, and all those that will follow, has been brought to you by the letter O.
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