RUTHFULLY YOURS

Britain is in denial. There is no real public debate on a historic event that is transforming the country. Mention of it occasionally surfaces in the media, but the mainstream political class never openly discuss it.

What is that historic event? By the year 2050, in a mere 37 years, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation.

This projection is based on reasonably good data. Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population of the UK grew at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, making Muslims 4 percent of the population in 2008. Extrapolating from those figures would mean that the Muslim population in 2020 would be 8 percent, 15 percent in 2030, 28 percent in 2040 and finally, in 2050, the Muslim population of the UK would exceed 50 percent of the total population.

Contrast those Muslim birth rates with the non-replacement birth rates of native Europeans, the so called deathbed demography of Europe. For a society to remain the same size, the average female has to have 2.1 children (total fertility rate). For some time now, all European countries, including Britain, have been well below that rate. The exception is Muslim Albania. For native Europeans, it seems, the consumer culture has replaced having children as life’s main goal.

These startling demographic facts have been available for some time (see ‘Muslim Population “Rising 10 Times Faster than Rest of Society”’, The Times, 30 January 2009. Also the work of the Oxford demographer David Coleman). But on this historic transformation of the country there is silence from the political establishment.

Not everyone agrees with these demographic figures. Population projection, some say, is not an exact science. Perhaps the Muslim birth rate will drop to European levels.

But this seems to be wishful thinking. For years it was believed that Muslims would enter what is known as “demographic transition”, with European Muslim birth rates falling to native European levels. But that demographic transition has not happened. In Britain, for example, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities continue to have significantly higher birth rates than the national average, even after more than 50 years in the country.

Over the short term (a few generations) demographic forecasting is as scientific as any social science can be. Britain and the rest of Europe are in native population decline and European Muslim birth rates are up. If that trend continues, then the projection of a majority Muslim population in Britain is sound. Even the highly respected economist and historian Niall Ferguson accepts the figures.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/300-christian-nigerian-girls-forced-into-slavery-by-islamic-jihadis?f=puball

CBS news reports today the number of Nigerian Christian girls kidnapped by followers of Islam at gunpoint, on April 14, 2014, may total more than 300. The kidnapped girls are reported to range in age from 15-18.

News reports speculate the girls have been moved by force into the adjacent countries of Cameron and Chad. Many of the Christian girls were sold off to their kidnappers for approximately $12.45 US and forced to ‘revert’ to Islam. The remainder of the girls will likely be sold off as sex slaves to the highest bidder as booty by supposedly their Boko Haram kidnappers.

NAACP, NOW, ACLU, CAIR

A quick look at the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) website makes no mention of these 300 black Nigerian Christian girls being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Since April 14, Lorraine Miller, Interim President & CEO of the NAACP has been silent on this modern day slavery of black girls.

The recent May 2 home page of the NAACP website is obviously more concerned with the LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s offensive remarks and Wisconsin’s voter ID Laws. The NAACP says they are also concerned about Human Rights issues by sending a 13 member group to Geneva, Switzerland to address the UN Human Rights Commission. The problems the NAACP were addressing in Geneva was voter suppression, stand your ground laws, and felon voter disenfranchisement.

Let’s move on to NOW the National Organization For Women. The May 2 NOW website front page was silent on these Nigerian girls forced slavery. The ‘NOW Read This’ current events does not mention these 300 Nigerian Christian girls being kidnapped, sold into slavery, and many of their forced conversions to Islam.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website on May 2 had no mention of these 300 Nigerian schoolgirls ultimate violation of their civil liberties. The ACLU has a long history of speaking out on Civil Liberty issues outside the United States, which makes this groups silence on these Nigerian schoolgirls so problematic.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/was-the-benghazi-video-story-the-brainchild-of-hillary-clinton

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had a vested interest in lying about Benghazi and permanently concealing the truth, Obama to ensure his reelection prospects in 2012 and Hillary to protect hers for 2016.

It is noteworthy, however, that Hillary Clinton was the first administration official to associate the video with the Benghazi attack, she was clearly its most aggressive and persistent advocate and, later, the most defensive (“what difference does it make”) when doubts were raised in Congressional hearings.

All of the following denote the time in Washington, DC.

September 11, 2012 2:00pm, Terrorists begin to set up checkpoints around US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

September 11, 2012 2:30pm, US Ambassador Chris Stevens ends a meeting with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin at the Benghazi Consulate, likely involving the movement of weapons from Libya through Turkey to the rebels in Syria.

September 11, 2012 3:40pm, Stevens informs Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli, Libya that the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya is under attack.

September 11, 2012 4:00pm Hillary claims she was informed of the attack.

September 11, 2012 4:32pm, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are informed of attack.

September 11, 2012 5:00pm, Obama, Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey meet at the White House at which time Panetta informs Obama of the Benghazi attack. After the meeting was over, they did not hear from Obama again or anybody else at the White House for the remainder of the evening.

Why Negotiations Collapsed – American Perceptions and Future Indications

Effective foreign policy requires a balance between the predictable and the unpredictable. Alliances require careful maintenance and no surprises while adversarial relationships sometimes require unpredictable responses. It is the unique gift of the Obama administration to have reversed this equation.

The collapse of peace negotiations was wholly predictable and has finally taken place. Efforts are now being made to assign blame and exert pressure on the parties. In a series of off the record interviews with Israeli newspapers, unnamed American officials involved in the negotiations have quite predictably put most of the blame on Israel. Careful reading, however, reveals more about America than it does Israelis or Palestinians.

In a wide-ranging interview with veteran Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, blame was systematically assigned to Netanyahu and his government and a single, overarching cause: “people in Israel shouldn’t ignore the bitter truth – the primary sabotage came from the settlements.”

“Settlements” are indeed a primary issue, both for peace negotiations and for Israeli politics. But “settlements” have become a kind of deus ex machina for both domestic and international critics of Israel, the first and last explanation for why bad things happen.

One of the more remarkable statements from Barnea’s interlocutor shows just how little understanding there is regarding “settlements” as an Israeli political issue. “We didn’t realize continuing construction allowed ministers in his government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks.”

Since the 1980s there has been a predictable manner in which low and mid level Israeli committees embarrass prime ministers engaged in peace negotiations with announcements of construction tenders, some for projects far in the future. This is a major Israeli political problem, but reasonably informed American observers should at least be aware of it.

Amazingly, the Americans appear not to have been. Instead, they reacted with outrage, which is more foolish than simply being surprised and disappointed, since it rewards the Israeli right wing. It also betrays just how ill-informed American diplomats appear to be about the convoluted, if not demented, nature of Israeli politics and bureaucracy. Allowing Abbas to collapse the talks because of housing tenders issued for Gilo – a Jerusalem neighborhood that no reasonable observer could possibly expect to be evacuated – is doubly so.

The outsized and deeply personal nature of the negotiations agenda in American foreign policy is reflected elsewhere. Moshe Ya’alon’s overly blunt outburst against Kerry, in which he said the Secretary of State was only interested in winning a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an Israeli-Palestinian agreement at a time when American allies were under threat around the world, is thus characterized as deeply hurtful; “the insult was great.”

At the time American officials reacted with even more pique: ““We were shocked by Moshe Ya’alon’s comments, which seriously call into question his commitment to Israel’s relationship with the United States.”

Ya’alon’s remarks were accurate but ill-considered, and were in keeping with many being made by nervous American allies. But the American response then and now seems to be that Israelis should simply shut up.

Barnea reports that the US perceives the hero of the recent negotiations to be Tzipi Livni, who “fought for all her might to promote the agreement.” This may be so, but characterizing Livni as the righteous woman of the hour simply amplifies the longstanding perception that she is the Obama administration’s favored successor to Netanyahu. This will not do her any good politically.

Despite it all, and to Kerry’s credit, progress was made and an agreement was outlined. But one obstacle remained, Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Here too the American official betrays something bordering on criminal ignorance:

“We couldn’t understand why it bothered him [Abbas] so much. For us, the Americans, the Jewish identity of Israel is obvious. We wanted to believe that for the Palestinians this was a tactical move – they wanted to get something (in return) and that’s why they were saying ‘no.’

Recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is, for Abbas and the Palestinian leadership, if not the majority of Palestinians, a declaration that Jews have historic rights as a nation and a people, not simply a religion. Such a declaration would end the conflict once and for all by mandating that a Jewish nation-state may stand alongside a Palestinian state. And for those reasons it was out of the question.

The American habit of seeing Israel as a Jewish state is comforting, but the inability to understand that Palestinians refuse to do so out of religious convictions that Jews are a religion, not a people entitled to sovereignty in their historic homeland, is absurd. If the Arab-Israeli conflict has a “root cause,” this is it. But American blindness is not surprising, since the religious context of international affairs has never been well-understood by American policymakers, and has, since 9/11, been deliberately obfuscated, denied, and pushed far to the background.

The following is an expanded version of the speech Mr. Fitzgerald delivered to the New English Review Symposium on June 19, 2010.

Shortly after the 9/11/2001 attacks, that have entered history under the too-casual shorthand of “nine-eleven,” the American government began to plan to conduct a war against those whom, it correctly believed, were those most immediately involved in the attack. These were the members of an identifiable group called Al Qaeda. Its head was a mediagenic son of a Saudi billionaire, Osama Bin Laden, ably seconded by the scion of a prominent Egyptian family, Ayman Al-Zawahiri (his great-uncle Azzam Pasha had been the first Secretary of the Arab League), with others who had, from their lairs in Afghanistan, been plotting against the West at least since 1993, when the first attack on the World Trade Center took place. And within months it carried out that plan, directed not only at Al Qaeda but at the Taliban that had given Al Qaeda refuge and succor in Afghanistan.

For the first few years of that war, the word “Jihad” was seldom used. Instead, the Americans had set out, so American political leaders said, to defeat a “handful of extremists,” those who had “hijacked a great religion.” The two most important leaders in the West, Bush and Blair, both assured the world that Islam was a religion of “peace” and “tolerance” though no historical evidence for this absurdity was adduced. – Blair even let it be known that he carried a Qur’an around in his pocket, which was meant to suggest his appreciative familiarity with its contents.

Nor did the word “Jihad” have any application in the war that began in Iraq when the Americans invaded that country in March 2003, with our leaders having been convinced by Shi’a Iraqis in exile that if only we were to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraq could become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations, for American policymakers, unaware of the real nature of Iraqi society, and the sectarian and ethnic fissures within it, fell for the line that Ahmad Chalabi and others peddled. They wanted to fall for such a line, of course, wanted to believe that “democracy” could be transplanted to a Muslim country, and wanted to believe, as well, that the combination of “democracy” – what Bush described as “freedom for ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East,” and prosperity, which would surely come if the Americans encouraged all those members of the Iraqi middle class just waiting to give free rein to their entrepreneurial flair under American direction, and this would make Iraq, a “key” country in the Middle East, a grateful and devoted friend of the United States. Nothing was said about the Shi’a-Sunni split, nothing was predicted about a Sunni refusal to acquiesce in the certain loss of power, or in the Shi’a determination to hold onto power that until the American invasion had been held by the Sunnis during the entire history of modern Iraq.

And no one wanted to consider that American interests might be better served by allowing sectarian fissures to fester, rather than to work to diminish them, and that, furthermore, instead of promoting Arab-Kurd reconciliation, or at least the avoidance of hostilities, it might make more sense to support a non-Arab people, the Kurds, in their attempt to extend their autonomy, even possibly to attain an independent state, for the spectacle of a non-Arab Muslim people successfully throwing off the Arab yoke could prove salutary for the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs, and who might be made to understand that despite the universalist claims of Islam, the treatment by Arabs of non-Arab Muslims, and many of the practices that Muslims adopt, demonstrate clearly that Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. And the recognition that this is so might make Islam slightly less appealing, or at least more vulnerable to attack, among those 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs, and do not have an ethnic identity, ‘Uruba, or Arabness, that reinforces Islam.

No, as in Afghanistan, so in Iraq, the subject not to be mentioned was Islam. American soldiers were taught nothing about Islam, and it was only here and there, as in an Arabic class taught by a Jordanian Christian in Tikrit, that some American soldiers were exposed to virulent denunciations of Islam.

The American military went out of its way not to make clear to its soldiers just what the ideology of Islam inculcated, which might, had it been understood, have made the troops more intelligently wary, but would at the same time, if the lessons about Islam had been thoroughly understood, would also have made the American effort in Iraq and Afghanistan seem more obviously foolish to those asked to conduct that war. So they were not taught.

And the entire premise of both wars was that in each country there was something called an “insurgency” and, for some of the Leavenworth colonels who were said to form such an impressive Brains Trust for General Petraeus, there were also said to be “laws” that governed “insurgencies.” Foir example, we were treated to the information that, “in general, insurgencies last about ten years.” This was a ludicrous conclusion, one whose silliness can be seen if, for example, we solemnly declare that “our research shows that, on average, civil wars last 12.7 years” or “our research shows that, on average, wars last 11.2 years.” Such notions offer a false arithmetic certainty. They ignore all kinds of things, but the biggest thing of all that is ignored is that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people we thought we were fighting were Muslims, and the people whom we were aiding were also Muslims, if of a slightly less virulent or fanatical brand – though even this does not adequately describe the situation in Iraq, where now Sunnis, and now Shi’a, of different kinds and with different interests, seemed to be the most dangerous enemy of the Americans, and their goals. While the Shi’a were still not certain that they would have control of the country, they were the least difficult to deal with. When some of the Sunni Arabs believed that they had more to gain by collaborating with the Americans, and in any case welcomed all the money and weapons the Americans could give them to fight Al Qaeda (which had made the mistake of attacking local Sunni Arabs), understanding full well that that money and those weapons could be used later on against the Shi’a or, if necessary, against the Americans themselves, they were perfectly wiling to collaborate, in tribal allegiance temporarily assigned to “The Awakening,” and this was misinterpreted by the Americans as a great strategic achievment, when it represented merely the temporary rental of some allies who, for reasons of their own quite different from ours, were willing to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Americans never allowed themselves to see their task in Iraq and Afghanistan as connected to a larger effort, that effort seen best as a war of self-defense, not by America alone, but by all the non-Muslim nations, against those promoting Jihad. There was a lot of talk about the “center” of the “war against terrorism” – first that “center” was Afghanistan, and then that “center” moved to Iraq, and then that center moved back to Afghanistan, and then it was located hovering somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and lately we read that perhaps the “center” has shifted to Yemen – or perhaps to Somalia, or somewhere else. It never was suggested that the very idea of a single “center” for Islamic terrorism – or, still more obviously, for those conducting Jihad through other instruments, such as deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest – made no sense. It showed a misunderstanding that the problem was not a “failed state” here, or a malignant regime there, but rather, the ideology of Islam, its appeal, its demands and pressures, that never let up, on non-Muslims, whether those non-Muslims lived in countries dominated by Islam, or whether they lived in countries that had always been peopled by, and developed by, non-Muslims who had, in an excess of negligent enthusiasm for the Idols of the Age, Tolerance and Diversity, had without too much thought, allowed milions of Muslims to settle within their borders. There is no “center” for Islamic terrorism, and no “center” for those who use other, even more effective, because less attention-getting, instruments of Jihad, in order to promote the Cause of Islam. as connected to the world-wide march of Islam, a march – or a Jihad, rather – made possible not because of any changes in the ideology of Islam, but in the ability of Muslims to conduct, or think they could conduct, Jihad against non-Muslims everywhere.

The received wisdom and unexamined assumptions underlying the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to forge peace between Israel and her enemies are as predictable as the ignominious collapse of this latest attempt. We are now well into the seventh decade of this false knowledge and the spurious narrative dominating American foreign policy under administrations of both parties. Just how old and worn this narrative is can be seen in the late John Barrett Kelly’s The Oil Cringe of the West, a collection of reviews and essays that originally appeared in the critical decade of the 1970s after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars.

Kelly was a New Zealander who earned his PhD at the London School of Economics. In the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the most influential scholars on the Middle East. Like Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis, he was a respected advisor to governments and commentator and on the region who was not afflicted with the sentimental romanticism and civilizational self-loathing that continue to distort Western foreign policy. Dedicated to facts and objective analysis, Barrett was no partisan, criticizing all sides equally when criticism was due. More important, he was the enemy of unexamined opinion and ideological fashion, which of course made him an enemy to the anti-imperialist, Arabophilic establishment, especially in England.

Kelly’s 1973 description of the foreign policy establishment’s view of the Israeli-Arab conflict and Britain’s culpability in creating it is a jewel of concision and eviscerating wit. That view pertains “less to the mundane affairs of men and governments than to the most solemn matters of faith and dogma––of British guilt and Arab innocence and the doctrine of redemption through vicarious atonement.” One can hear the echoes of this sensibility throughout Obama’s notorious 2009 Cairo speech. Also reprised by Obama is Kelly’s reconstruction of the historically false narrative generating that sensibility, which deserves quotation in full: “Britain promised independence to the Arabs during World War I and betrayed that promise afterwards. The worst act of betrayal was the Balfour Declaration which led to the formation of the state of Israel. Arab unity was stultified by British obstinacy in propping up reactionary regimes and opposing revolutionary movements. Although Britain has at last seen the error of its ways and has left the Arabs alone, it still bears the stigmata of past misdeeds. Until these have been erased and the guilt purged, the Arabophile order must toil at its penitential labours, ritually flogging the irreverent and ceaselessly chanting the orisons of repentance.”

Forty years later we still see in England the baneful effects of this false history in an anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism, in the cringing appeasement of Muslim sensibilities, and in the vigorous Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement that seeks to dismantle Israel politically on behalf of the Arabs who want to destroy her root and branch. And ever since Edward Said’s fatuous Orientalism––that toxic stew of historical lies and Foucauldian folderol––this same myth-history now dominates the American intellectual establishment as well. It bespeaks not just the noble-savage/Marxist romanticizing of the colonial dark-skinned battlers against Western imperialism, but the concomitant self-loathing and cheap guilt that in Britain followed the intellectuals’ disenchantment with the Empire, and that has been aped in America by professors and pundits who think that biting the cultural, political, and economic hand that amply feeds them is the height of cosmopolitan sophistication.

It may be warm outside now, but from colder hearts a winter blizzard is blowing. These cold hearts are frozen in the endless winter of Islam that leaves them empty of mercy for even their own daughters.

The title of Robert Spencer’s new book, “Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In” may reference the now infamous Arab Spring, but its focus is more on domestic policy than on foreign policy. This is less of an analysis of what went wrong in Egypt and Tunisia, though that is also addressed, than what has gone wrong with how the United States deals with Islamic terrorism at home.

The problem with Jihad is that we don’t talk about Jihad, as Spencer writes. The first and most effective wave of the Jihad was a political assault by Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as ISNA and CAIR against even discussing the threat. When the next wave of terrorist attacks arrived, policymakers, soldiers and law enforcement officers were left blinded and censored.

Today the situation is worse than ever.

Arab Winter Comes to America is less about the past than the present, less about lands abroad than our own streets and cities. The Arab Spring cracked regimes that had sought a middle ground between the unfettered savagery of Islamic law and the modern world. The Arab Winter may take longer to crack the West which is trying to walk the same fine line, suppressing blasphemy against Islam as hate crimes and silencing criticism of Islam as Islamophobia, but the book suggests that it can and it will.

Robert Spencer, a scholar of all things Islamic, dwells less on the texts than on the failure of our own establishment to draw the right conclusions from them. Having faced personal censorship in the US and the UK by governments that should instead have been listening to him, he is ably positioned to describe the process by which groups linked to terrorism preemptively silence those scholars and experts who would denounce them for what they are while using the threat of youth “radicalization” as blackmail.

“The only people who have perfect clarify about who they are and what they hope to accomplish, are America’s foes,” Spencer writes regretfully.

From Nidal Hasan to the Boston Marathon bombings, Arab Winter Comes to America examines wasted opportunities and missed warnings that could have prevented the mass murder of Americans. And even as Obama and his advisers claim that Al Qaeda has been all but defeated, Spencer warns that the real struggle between our civilization and the medieval terror theocracy out of the desert is only beginning.

“In a joint statement, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said the ruling represents “the latest blow to jobs and affordable energy. The administration’s overreaching regulation will drive up energy costs and threaten jobs and electric reliability,” the pair said. “We cannot allow EPA’s aggressive regulatory expansion to go unchecked. We will continue our oversight of the agency and our efforts to protect American families and workers from EPA’s onslaught of costly rules.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate emissions produced by coal-fired power plants in order to protect downwind states from deleterious effects of pollution.

The 6-2 ruling in the latest battle of what has been termed the “War on Coal” is a big victory for the Obama administration and environmental groups who maintain burning coal represents a health risk to those with respiratory problems. It also indicates the nation’s highest court is likely to side with the EPA on other issues related to their regulatory powers.

“This is great news for millions of people who suffer from serious health problems caused by the soot and smog-causing pollution from power plants in other states,” said John Walke, director of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Implementation of these long overdue protections will prevent thousands of premature deaths and save tens of billions of dollars a year in health costs. The EPA safeguards follow the simple principle that giant utility companies shouldn’t be allowed to dump their dirty emissions onto residents of downwind states. The Supreme Court wisely upheld this common-sense approach.”

But EPA critics maintained the decision will stifle economic development, especially in coal-producing states. Utility companies and coal producers attacked the regulation, maintaining it was unnecessarily broad and require coal-fired facilities to reduce emissions beyond what is needed.

In a joint statement, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said the ruling represents “the latest blow to jobs and affordable energy.”

“The administration’s overreaching regulation will drive up energy costs and threaten jobs and electric reliability,” the pair said. “We cannot allow EPA’s aggressive regulatory expansion to go unchecked. We will continue our oversight of the agency and our efforts to protect American families and workers from EPA’s onslaught of costly rules.”

Americans are outraged by old, sick and pathetic Donald Sterling’s racist rantings—and the manipulative con-artist mistress who recorded their conversation.

But consensus ends after the expression of furor. Who among us is without sin to offer the first bid for his franchise?

If the NBA establishes the precedent that it can force the sale of an owner’s property because of one’s illiberal speech, however odious, what now is the new standard of behavior? A sort of descending French Revolutionary justice, predicated on the sound and fury of the mob?

Harry Reid believes the Washington Redskins owner should be targeted next for his insistence on keeping the Redskins logo. Should he too be forced to sell and by whom—his fellow morally superior owners? Should the Orlando Magic owner, Doug DeVoss, be hounded out of the league—as was recently suggested—because he opposes gay marriage? How many owners don’t believe in the idea of man-made global warming? Oppose illegal immigration? Doubt the wisdom of affirmative action? Can we scour their emails, tap their phones, or ask the public for their private indiscretions?

And who will police the police? Oddly, some of the very public officials who weighed in on the Sterling matter themselves have a sorry record of racist speech—and in the public, not illegally taped private, realms. Could any of them in their retirement pitch in to buy the Clippers?

Let us quote them, with following brackets of what might have been the conservative equivalent. Vice President Joe Biden called in to record his outrage. Did not Biden himself once offer a creepy racialist riff—creepy precisely because he claimed that Obama was the “first” (not the second or two-hundredth) so-called clean black presidential candidate? [Imagine Dick Cheney claiming Colin Powell was the first “clean” black qualified to be secretary of state.]

Harry Reid is outraged too and wants more franchise owners held to account for supposedly bigoted views. Reid’s own racist rant was more pathetic than was Biden’s because he waded into the details of “light skinned” and “Negro dialect.” [Imagine Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praising Allen West because he had no “Negro dialect.”]

On one level, it’s not fair to say that children of successful politicians shouldn’t enter politics themselves. In a just world, the sins of the father really should not be visited upon the sons; so too should the successes of fathers not prohibit their sons and daughters from seeking similar success.

But . . . but . . . but, insists something from the core of my being. There’s something deeply unsettling, in a nation founded with a hearty disdain for hereditary emoluments, about a national political class that consists of the same names for generation after generation. Aside from the Adamses and perhaps the Livingstons, America’s Founders did not establish anything approaching political dynasties. There’s something innately healthy about public office as a meritorious call to service rather than as a birthright.

Now, though, the Republican donor class seems increasingly likely to lure yet a third Bush in three decades into the presidential arena, with a prior Bush serving as U.S. senator a generation before. Furthermore, reports CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Mitt Romney may be inclined to make a third run for the White House (a fourth Romney run in 50 years, after his father’s 1968 effort) if an increasingly arrogant Jeb Bush somehow decides not to run. And on the donkey side of the fence, of course, Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner to make hubby Bill the first former president to become First Gentl . . . , er, First Straying Husband.

Meanwhile, in 2014, Jimmy Carter’s grandson and Sam Nunn’s daughter are running statewide in Georgia, while a who’s-(father is)-who of second-generation politicos fight not just for election but for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Mark Udall, son of former presidential contender Mo, is in a tight race in Colorado; Mary Landrieu, daughter of former New Orleans mayor and HUD secretary Moon, is in one in Louisiana; Mark Begich, son of tragically killed former U.S. representative Nick, battles in Alaska; likewise in Arkansas with Mark Pryor, son of former senator and Arkansas governor David. Firmly ensconced in the Senate are, from Pennsylvania, gubernatorial son Bob Casey Jr., and, from Arizona, top admiral’s son John McCain.