RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/

In the annals of moral idiocy, the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday at 95, will ever enjoy a conspicuous place. A gifted and prolific writer, the Egyptian-born Hobsbawm was utterly absorbed by the ideology that fired his youthful dreams of utopia. How he must have savored the fact that he was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia which ushered in so much poverty, misery, terror, and freedom-blighting totalitarian oppression. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me,” Hobsbawm wrote in his memoir Interesting Times in 2002, “I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.”

Indeed. Hobsbawm was adulated by an academic establishment inured to celebrating partisans of totalitarian regimes so long as they are identifiably left-wing totalitarian regimes. Although he claimed to have been victim of a “weaker McCarthyism” that retard advancement of leftists in the UK, Hobsbawm enjoyed a stellar career replete with official honors, preferments, and perquisites. He was showered with honors and academic appointments at home and abroad. His books won all manner of awards. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honor. But the central fact about Hobsbawm, as about so many doctrinaire leftists, was his willingness to barter real people for imaginary social progress. If he “abandoned, nay rejected” the “dream” of the October Revolution, he never abandoned its animating core: an almost reflexive willingness to sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a spurious ideal.

The philosopher David Stove once identified “bloodthirstyness” as the motivating force of Communism and its offshoots. Scratch a socialist and you discover a fondness for the gulag. This describes Hobsbawm to a T. In 1994, the venerable historian discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm’s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, “is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

I think that says us all we need to know about this repellent figure who has at last gone to his reward.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/intellectuals-rally-to-eulogize-stalinist-eric-hobsbawm/print/

I wasn’t going to write about Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who died on October 1 at age 95, but after perusing a few obituaries – and learning, from an article by the novelist A.N. Wilson, that on the evening of Hobsbawm’s death the BBC “altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute” – I feel obliged to weigh in. Not about Hobsbawm himself or his work, with which I am not terribly familiar, but about the appallingly widespread readiness to overlook, relativize, or rationalize Communism.

For Hobsbawm, if you didn’t know, was a lifelong Communist. As the British historian Michael Burleigh wrote the other day in the New Yorker, Hobsbawm exhibited to the end “a dogmatic refusal to accept that the Bolshevik Revolution had been a murderous failure. Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR – not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward – might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.” Burleigh did praise Hobsbawm as a historian – but how reliable a historian can you be when everything you write is distorted by ideology? Burleigh admitted himself that Hobsbawm, in his work, routinely whitewashed Communist perfidy. “Such a cosmopolitan thinker,” Burleigh wrote, “had ironically become imprisoned within a deeply provincial ideological ghetto, knowing or caring nothing for the brave Czechs or Poles who resisted Stalin’s stooges, while being manifestly nonplussed by the democratic transformations of Central Europe since 1989-90.” Nothing ironic there at all: Hobsbawm would simply appear to be one of those “intellectuals” for whom ideology is realer and more important than human beings. Burleigh closed with an apt observation: “Hobsbawm’s implacable refusal to recant his views when faced with their grotesque consequences tells us something about the belligerent mindset of the wider British Left” as well as about “the bovine complacency with which, since Mrs Thatcher, the Conservatives have allowed such dubious figures licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and our universities.” It’s depressing to note that Hobsbawm’s Communism didn’t prevent Tony Blair from naming him a Companion of Honour in 1998.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/presidential-debate-makes-election-alternatives-clear/print/

Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night’s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses the limited government, individual rights and freedom, free market economic policies, and personal self-reliance and autonomy that the Constitution was created to protect. On the other hand, we heard a candidate who endorses big government, group rights, redistributionist economic policies, and the progressive ideal that limits freedom and empowers elites to run people’s lives. In this first debate, Romney and the Constitution clearly won, as the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth emanating from the mainstream media prove.

First, many Americans were seeing the real Romney for the first time. Contrary to the fatcat caricature the Obama campaign and its media enablers have been peddling for months, Romney was warm and jocular, and sensitive to the plight of real people who have suffered under Obama’s policies. He easily had the best laugh lines: “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts.” When Obama lied about lowering taxes for the rich, Romney answered, “I have five boys, and I’m used to people saying things over and over, thinking if they repeat it enough it will be true.” He slyly reminded everybody of Joe Biden’s gaffe that the “middle class has been buried the last four years” when he said, “Middle income Americans have been buried.” Romney responded to Obama’s complaint about $3 billion tax breaks for oil companies by contrasting it to the $90 billion for green energy, landing another punch with, “You don’t pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers.” When Romney was asked about spending cuts, he said he’d eliminate programs that are not “important enough to borrow money from China” to pay for them, like PBS, with an apology to moderator Jim Lehrer. And his early jab, “trickle down government,” should enter the political lexicon.

Thank goodness Romney did not heed all the loopy advice from the right….from Peggy Noonan’s vapors to the scolding from some conservative pundits and the drivel from Henry Olsen with “open your heart Mitt” mush.And thank goodness Obama did heed the advice from his handlers and his worshipful subjects from the mainstream media. They all thought he would cruise instead of crash.

Now both sides are criticizing Lehrer who was just right and recognized what a debate should be.

Here were two men on stage with conflicting vision and agenda for the United States and the future in the most important election of our time and Lehrer let them go at each other…punch and counter punch.

How refreshing compared to the insipid moderating of previous debates.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/rethinking_palestine_2012.html In 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), failed to win U.N. acceptance of Palestine as an independent state1. This year, he lowered the bar to upgraded status within the U.N. In the intervening year, Palestinian finances have collapsed, Palestinians have taken to the street to denounce PA corruption rather than Israel, […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/obamas_freudian_slip_he_wants_to_export_jobs.html President Obama told a September 26 rally at Kent State University in Ohio, “I want to see us export more jobs.” Then he caught himself and continued, “Export more products — excuse me. I was channeling my opponent for a second.” According to Freud, such slips of the tongue reveal true intentions that a […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/911-families-say-obama-set-to-bring-gitmo-to-us-soi New York, NY, October, 2, 2012-9/11 families strongly object to the Obama administration’s plan to purchase Thomson Correctional Facility in Thomson, Illinois without Congressional approval. As stated in our July 27 letter, signed by more than 100 family members, to House Speaker John Boehner, 9/11 families believe this purchase is a back door effort […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-world-without-mohammad-and-islam?f=must_reads Daniel Greenfield’s “Imagine if Mohammed Had Never Existed” (FrontPage, 29 September) is an invitation to explore some alternative “what might have been” history. It is tempting, for example, to imagine recent history and the state of America had President Barack Obama never existed – if, say, Stanley Ann Dunham had decided to try out […]

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/03/obama-would-have-sent-bin-laden-to-civilian-court/

We have a clueless ideologue, or, more likely, a hopelessly dishonest ideologue, as commander-in-chief. There can’t be any other explanation.

The Hill reports that President Obama has said he would have had Osama bin Laden sent to a civilian U.S. court for a criminal trial if the Navy SEALs had captured him, as opposed to killing him. The report is based on a Vanity Fair article derived from Mark Bowden’s new book, The Finish. Using the constitutional term “Article III” as lawyers often do in referring to the civilian federal courts, the report quotes Obama as explaining,

We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III…. I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.

It is hard to know where to begin with anything this foolish. Let’s start with dishonesty. Thanks to the train wreck Obama’s demagoguery against Bush counterterrorism has made out of terrorist detention, our forces have killed in several situations — including the bin Laden raid — when it might well have been possible to capture terrorists. A president who actually believed the fantasy that Muslim populations are swayed by how much “due process and rule of law” we give to jihadist terrorists would never have adopted a kill-over-capture preference. For all his agitation against Bush’s war-paradigm for confronting our terrorist enemies, Obama has made liberal use of it in killing terrorists without any judicial warrants or trials. As he well knows, the law of war is the rule of law in wartime, and he has obviously not wasted much time fretting over due process.

http://times247.com/
THE BLAME GAME: IT’S ALL LEHRER’S FAULT!!!!!
Obama campaign hits Lehrer’s moderating
Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter …
Read more…
Debate rages on Obama’s downward glances
President Obama is getting lots of c…
Read more…
Maher: Obama does need a teleprompter
HBO host and comedian Bill Maher, wh…
Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KCi2iwE
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
Washington Examiner
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Commentary
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
In this first debate President Obama paid the price for the hands-off treatment he has received from mainstream media. His talking points, advanced by his spokesmen in the confidence that they will not be seriously challenged, were refuted by a well-informed Mitt Romney. Read more…
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Twitchy
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Pollster Frank Luntz assembled a focus group consisting of undecided Colorado voters. By the end of tonight’s debate, the group had moved dramatically toward GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Read more…
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
The Hill
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore went on a Twitter rant over President Obama’s performance at the first presidential debate. “Fire all debate consultants now,” he tweeted, adding “This is what happens when [you] pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDDlma4
CNN poll: 67% say Romney won debate
CNN
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
Two-thirds of people who watched the first presidential debate think that Mitt Romney won the showdown, according to a nationwide poll. No presidential candidate had topped 60% in that question since it was first asked in 1984. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDedS4y
Sullivan: Disaster for ‘effete, wonkish’ Obama
The Daily Beast
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
The debate was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument. Read more…
Obama debate performance: Worst since Carter
The Washington Times
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Commentary
Bewildered and lost without his teleprompter, President Obama flailed all around the debate stage last night. He was stuttering, nervous and petulant. Not since Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan has the U.S. presidency been so embarrassingly represented in public. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDugrfy