In last night’s debate, Marco Rubio aptly described the mainstream media as the Democrats’ super PAC, but that didn’t hold him back from reentering the arena this morning. And, as day follows night, CBS’s Charlie Rose went after him, playing defense lawyer for Hillary Clinton. During the debate, Senator Rubio pointed out that last week’s Benghazi hearing brought Hillary Clinton’s lies into sharp relief. Rose tried to defend her, blathering about how the CIA’s understanding of the attack evolved, but Rubio would have none of it — explaining how Clinton knew it was a coordinated terrorist attack from the start, told her family and others that, and yet lied to the country, blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video. Rose badgered Rubio, but the candidate calmly stood his ground, and was particularly good when Rose sought to brush him back by sternly warning that Rubio was making “a very serious charge” — it’s not a charge, Rubio said, “It’s the truth.” My inclination is always to ask why our candidates bother to go on these programs. But the fact that it’s very much worth your time to watch proves it was very much worth Rubio’s time to appear.
Not that long ago, Austria’s Nazi collaborationist party was accusing Hungary of being Nazis for the whole border security thing. Now Austria appears to have had enough and has caught fence fever.
Austria on Wednesday said it plans to build a fence at its main crossing with Slovenia, the first such barrier between two members of Europe’s document-free travel area, in one of the clearest signs to date of how Europe’s migrant crisis is undermining Europe’s institutions and sowing discord across the bloc.
News of the plan, aimed to slow the stream of migrants headed toward Germany via Austria, drew sharp criticism from Berlin. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to preserve freedom of travel across the continent, even as she struggles to maintain her own open-door refugee policy in the face of mounting opposition at home and growing impatience in other European countries on the migrants’ route.
“The federal government and the chancellor repeatedly have stressed that we believe that the refugee crisis can’t be solved with the building of fences,” Ms. Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.
I still believe in the ideal of a liberal arts education—even if, in practice, I’ve become more than a bit disenchanted.
As an undergraduate some 20 years ago majoring in religion and philosophy at Wingate University—a small, Southern Baptist institution in North Carolina—I was fortunate to have been taught by genuinely dedicated teachers who saw to it that their students received the classical education in the liberal arts for which they signed up.
To put this point another way, my professors resisted the temptation—a temptation that’s all too common among the professoriate in the contemporary academy—to abuse their vocational privileges by preaching to, rather than teaching, their students. The classroom, my instructors seemed to realize, was not the proper venue in which to air their political and ideological predilections.
In pursuing my master’s degree in philosophy from Baylor University, I became increasingly aware of some of my instructors’ political views, but there existed a reasonable degree of intellectual diversity in the department. This latter fact, coupled with my professors’ unquestionable commitment to the welfare of their students, made my time at Baylor one of the most enjoyable periods of my life.
“Not many people make national news by bringing a homemade clock to school,” gushed Time as it named Ahmed Mohamed to its list of “The 30 Most Influential Teens of 2015.” “But the ninth grader’s arrest, after teachers and authorities mistook said clock for a bomb, kicked off a national debate over racial profiling—and a outpouring of support for Mohamed, who was personally invited to the White House by President Obama (who called his clock ‘cool’). In October, he accepted a full scholarship to a prestigious school in Qatar.”
Racial profiling? Really? What race is jihad terror again? What race is carrying what could be a bomb to a school? I keep forgetting.
In any case, Time’s selection was perfectly fitting. Ahmed Mohamed probably deserves to be on the list more than any of the other 29 teens. As he hobnobbed with world leaders and was hailed as a hero by the international media, his influence was undeniable; the only question was whether it was a positive or a negative influence.
For Time and its mainstream media colleagues, of course, there was no question that Ahmed was a positive influence. He was a symbol of everything the media wants us to believe about Muslims and Islam: that Muslims are inventive, hard-working, industrious, and unjustly harassed by an out-of-control, racist and “Islamophobic” law enforcement establishment.
Before the Muslim terror stabbing spree, Netanyahu had made repeated efforts to meet with the leader of the PLO. And for once, Abbas, the PLO leader, had not been averse to a meeting.
Instead it was Secretary of State John Kerry who told Abbas not to meet with Netanyahu.
Abbas went to the UN and disavowed the Oslo Accords. The first Muslim stabbings of Jews, with the encouragement of the PLO, began a few days later.
It is unlikely that Kerry had directly told Abbas to escalate the violence, but he had sent him the same effective message by coordinating with the PLO boss at the expense of Netanyahu. The top terrorist came away with the understanding that the administration favored him and was hostile to Netanyahu.
And he was right.
So Abbas decided to see what another outburst of violence would net him.
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the editor of TruthRevolt.com.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has officially launched a campaign called “Stop the Jihad on Campus.” During the coming fall term, from October 26- November 6, 2015, the Freedom Center will be holding a series of “teach-ins” to raise student awareness about Islamic jihad, and to combat the pro-terrorist propaganda of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood which has become such a familiar presence on American campuses.
The campaign invites students who believe in our Constitution and who are opposed to the genocides taking place in the Middle East against Christians Jews, and Muslims who don’t support jihad to participate by holding a teach-in on your campus to tell the truth about what is happening in the Middle East and to expose the threat to Americans here at home.
People died. Hillary lied.Obama lied, too.They lied early.They lied often.They lied deliberately.
They lied about the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, at the hands of al-Qaeda-tied terrorists.
They lied, but not to protect vital national secrets or flummox America’s enemies.They lied to get reelected.
And they lied directly, knowingly, and repeatedly to the American people.
Although I am a confirmed and consistent critic of Hillary and Obama, I long had cut them some slack regarding their first comments about the Benghazi attack. Thanks to the fog of war, I thought, they could not be blamed if they initially misattributed this deadly onslaught to a mob inflamed about an incredibly amateur Internet video that dissed the Prophet Mohammad. If they innocently got it wrong in, say, the first twelve hours after the assault began, they might deserve a grudging pass — at least for those early announcements.
It’s about time!
Colleges are hanging flyers around campus with phone numbers of officials that students can call to consult with about whether or not their Halloween costume is perfectly politically correct.
“Unsure if your costume might be offensive?” asks a poster that’s been hung around campus at State University of New York at Geneseo. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions.”
The poster contains the phone numbers and e-mails of five (five!) campus officials that students can contact and discuss the very important issue of whether or not what they will dress up as to get drunk in will be advancing social-justice causes.
Wesleyan University has been hanging similar posters around the school — but with six (six!) numbers listed.
#share#It’s not clear whether students will be able to reach these numbers round-the-clock through Halloween weekend. Hopefully they will. After all, Halloween is a very serious issue, and can not be treated as if it were just some fun little holiday that’s a chance for people to use their imaginations and have some fun without taking each other too seriously.
If there’s a consensus about Wednesday’s GOP debate, it’s that the CNBC moderators had a train wreck. Among the non-conservatives who thought the moderators were horribly biased and inept were HBO’s Bill Maher and Ron Fournier of the National Journal. But Ohio governor John Kasich said afterwards that he was “very appreciative of how they did their job.” Kasich “thought they did a good job” and said that the raucous, interruption-filled debate was “well controlled.”
John Kasich’s perception of the debate reality is worthy of Rod Serling’s old mind-bending TV show.
Every four years, one Republican presidential candidate attempts to first win “the media primary,” primarily by accusing other GOP candidates of “extremism” while at the same time flattering the mainstream media. In 2008, that candidate was John McCain — although his love affair with the media ended as soon as Barack Obama was his opponent. In 2012, it was former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who crashed and burned.
‘Ted Cruz is only going to be popular,” a lefty correspondent sniffs, “in those places where the Osmonds are still popular.” If that is true, then the news for Senator Cruz could not possibly be better, inasmuch as this puts Nevada into play: Donny and Marie signed up for a six-week stint in Las Vegas back in 2008, and extended, and extended, and will be performing in the showroom now named for them until the end of 2016, at least. Good tickets for the reliably sold-out show are $260 each — no laughing matter when one considers that the Osmond demographic includes some pretty large families. It can be hard to see it from Williamsburg or Petworth, but the culture isn’t (only) what the hipsters think it is. If Senator Cruz proves as popular as Shania Twain and NASCAR, he won’t just be president — he’ll be president-for-life.
And that is of some interest, given that Wednesday’s debate very much left the impression that this is a Ted Cruz–Marco Rubio race.
About those other guys . . .
Jeb Bush’s performance confirms an earlier judgment of him, that he was a pretty good governor a long time ago with no special oomph today, a decent man whose misadventures on the critical policy questions of immigration and education, along with his too-familiar surname, are like heavy boots on a drowning man. His strategy to push Senator Rubio to the side in order to be positioned in such a way that the bulk of the reasonable-to-just-short-of-howling vote should fall upon his head as fading reality-television grotesque Donald Trump enters the Norma Desmond stage of his campaign, leaving Senator Cruz to wage a pyrrhic campaign for the moonbats, was too calculated. It was so calculated, in fact, that Senator Rubio was able to deftly parry it simply by pointing out the calculation. Bush père screwed up by reading his stage directions aloud — “Message: I care” — whereas the (younger) younger Bush stood mutely by as Senator Rubio read aloud from his playbook. It was like watching the smartest kid in the fourth grade mangle his own name at a spelling bee.
