http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warning-how-gaia-replaced-god/?singlepage=true A review of frequent PJM contributor David Solway’s new book, Global Warning, Trials of an Unsettled Science. A thought experiment. You’re a jury member in a courtroom trial that will decide whether the defendant – man-made global warming advocacy – is, as it claims to be, a disinterested conduit of scientific truth, or, as […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-setback-for-geert-wilders/print/
Last week, even as the Islamic world was erupting in yet another bout of Koran-fueled fury that put the 2006 explosion over the Danish cartoons in the shade, the Dutch electorate, apparently having decided that the clash of civilizations was yesterday’s news, handed Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) , or Freedom Party – the only one of the Netherlands’s several major parties that is seriously critical of Islam and of the country’s current immigration and integration policies – its first setback ever. While the two top parties received about twenty-five percent of the vote apiece, up about five percent from the last election, the PVV got ten percent, down from fifteen. It remains the third largest party, but just barely, with fifteen out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth largest parties will have fifteen, thirteen, and twelve seats respectively.
“For the first time since he founded the PVV in 2004,” reported De Volkskrant on Friday, “Geert Wilders lost an election, and substantially so. How can that be?” The newspaper Trouw claimed to have the answer: “The Netherlands of 2012 is radically changed….the protest vote for the PVV has disappeared.”
On Saturday, I met Wilders’s right-hand man and fellow Member of Parliament, Martin Bosma (48), at a café in Amsterdam, to discuss the election results.
“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he said with a tired grin. It had been a long week and he hadn’t had much sleep.
Bosma rejected the idea that the election had been a referendum on immigration – in fact, he pointed out, “immigration was not a subject during the campaign.” The PVV didn’t bring it up, and “if the PVV doesn’t bring up immigration, nobody does.” This time around, with the Euro in what seem like its death throes, the PVV decided to focus its campaign on the EU. Should the Dutch should continue to slavishly follow directives from Brussels which, among other things, compel it to cough up 56 billion euros a year to subsidize Greece and other countries? The PVV said no.
Alas, the Dutch have always been temperamentally conservative, and, as Bosma put it, “leaving the EU feels like an adventure” – a leap into the unknown. (Of course, the EU itself was an “adventure” that was foisted on them, step by step, without their approval; but now it’s the status quo, and Dutch voters are reluctant to reverse it.) And so, on Election Day, the PVV took a dive.
Still, Wilders and Bosma are in it for the long haul. “Ten years from now, everybody will agree with us,” Bosma told me. “At least about the EU. About mass immigration, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll still be in denial.”
This I frankly don’t get. How can so many Dutchmen, at this late date, still be in denial about the reality of Islamic immigration? How – especially – can they be in denial about it at a time when violent mobs are attacking Western embassies in one Muslim capital after another?
Bosma shrugged. “It’s far away,” he said about all the Middle Eastern mayhem. He gestured toward our fellow customers, most of them elite Amsterdam types sipping lattes. “Ask anybody here what they think of Islam. They’ll say that, well, there are rotten apples everywhere.”
“Even after everything that has happened?”
“Yes. They’re deluding themselves. They don’t want to face the truth. Because if you face it, you have to do something about it.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/charles-bybelezer/the-u-s-s-iran-delusion/ The United State of America is “not setting deadlines” on Iran and is still committed to negotiations which are “by far the best approach” to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last week. To ensure the message was not lost in Hebrew translation, US State Department […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/stephenbrown/europe%e2%80%99s-multicultural-nightmare/print/
“The festival gives expression to our demand for a peaceful coexistence of all humans with their different cultures, languages and traditions.”
– Proclamation of the festival’s organizers.
The beautiful, rosy multicultural paradise Europe’s leftists promised in the 1960s and ’70s manifested itself brilliantly again recently at a Kurdish festival in Mannheim, a German city in the south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg. Almost as soon as the festival began, German police were set upon by hundreds of young Kurds who were encouraged “with words and applause” by thousands of others. When the shocking, hours-long savagery ended, eighty policemen were injured, one seriously, while “more than a dozen vehicles were destroyed” before order could be restored.
Martin Boll, a spokesman for Mannheim’s police, said he had never seen such violence in his 30 years of police service.
“The outbreak of violence by the attackers was enormous,” said Boll, who was described by German newspapers as “visibly shaken” by the events. “Hundreds, if not more than a thousand Kurdish assailants stormed towards the police and threw stones at officials.”
One German newspaper said policemen had to “throw themselves down behind vehicles” in order to avoid the pavement stones, glass bottles, bricks, barricades and even firecrackers that were being thrown at them.
It was estimated 40,000 people, of whom 2,500 were regarded as “violent or violence-prepared,” attended the twentieth holding of this annual “multicultural” event. Most of the previous 19 Kurdish festivals had been held in the German state of Rhineland-Westphalia. An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 Kurds live in Germany, but Kurds had travelled from all over Europe for this year’s festival in Mannheim.
The riot began when officials of a security firm contracted by the festival’s organizers asked two policemen for assistance with a 14-year-old Kurdish youth who was refusing to give up a flag he was carrying of the banned Kurdish terrorist group, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Apparently angry at the police intervention, about 100 young Kurds “suddenly attacked the two policemen from behind and kicked them in the back.” The violence escalated from there as more police and thugs were drawn in.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/obama%e2%80%99s-foreign-policy-fraud-has-come-undone/print/
The mass riots and attacks on embassies do not mark the moment when Obama’s foreign policy imploded. That happened a long time ago. What these attacks actually represent is the moment when the compliant media were no longer able to continue hiding that failure in bottom drawers and back pages.The media successfully covered for Obama’s retreat from Iraq, and the weekly Al Qaeda car bombings and rush to civil war no longer make the news. The media have also done their best to cover for Obama’s disaster in Afghanistan which has cost thousands of American lives while completely failing to defeat the Taliban.
Obama had hoped to cover up his defeat in Afghanistan by cutting a deal with the “moderate” Taliban, but the Taliban, moderate or extreme, refused to help him cover his ass. Attacks in Afghanistan have escalated, but the media have avoided challenging the bizarre assertions from the Obama campaign that the mission has been accomplished and Karzai will be ready to take over security in a few years.
And then the Islamists did something that the media just couldn’t ignore. They staged a series of attacks on American embassies and foreign targets beginning on September 11. These attacks, the most devastating and public of which took place on September 11, were accompanied by Islamist black flags and chants of, “We Are All Osama” in countries across North Africa and the Middle East.
The media have done their best to avoid dealing with the implications of Islamists carrying out a coordinated series of attacks on everything from foreign embassies to peacekeeping forces in the Sinai, by focusing on a Mohammed movie which the Egyptian Salafists exploited for propaganda purposes, rather than on the tactical support and level of coordination required to launch such a broad series of attacks and what the attacks and their scope say about the transformation of the conflict from stray attacks by terrorist groups to armed militias taking control of entire regions.
Rather than doing their job, the media seemed to be dividing their attention between reporting on the carnage without any context and putting out talking points to prevent Mitt Romney from taking political advantage of the disaster. The media’s accusations that Mitt Romney was politicizing the conflict were absurd, especially coming after the New York Times ran an editorial on September 11 attacking George W. Bush for not preventing the attacks of that day and after five years of Obama and his media allies politicizing every suicide bombing in Iraq.
While American embassies burned, the media were determined to go on doing what they had been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They had covered for Obama in three disastrous wars, one of which he had begun and which had exploded in the faces of staffers at the Benghazi consulate. And they are still covering for him, but the conflict has moved beyond the point where it can be relegated to the back pages of the daily papers.
Obama had hoped that the Islamists would see the advantage of allowing him to save face and give them another term of the same inept appeasement disguised as diplomatic soft power. Instead the Islamists seized on his weakness and trumpeted it to the world to humiliate him and the country that he had been temporarily placed in charge of.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/morsi%e2%80%99s-egypt-eyes-nukes/ There are certain obvious parallels between the 1979 rise of the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran and the 2012 rise of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. In both cases, the political takeover was enabled by a Democratic U.S. president who had some degree of sympathy for it. In both cases, a moderate U.S. ally—Reza […]
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/316747/obama-s-truth
More than any Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama in his writings and speeches has worked out an impressive interpretation of American history that culminates in modern liberalism. It also culminates, not incidentally, in him. As a writer, Obama’s strength is telling tales, and his story of America mixes together social, intellectual, and political history. It begins and keeps contending with the Founding– with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He tries to tell a new story about the country that acknowledges, and then contextualizes, traditional views in ways that are meant to be reassuring but that point to very untraditional conclusions.
In The Audacity of Hope, his second book, in a chapter titled “Values,” he quotes the Declaration’s famous sentence on self-evident truths and then comments:
Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundations of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration — that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will — is one that every American understands.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/09/what_obama_thinks_of_americans.html
We know how Barack Obama feels about Mitt Romney. He holds him in contempt — and, speaking through his proxies, has all but called him a felon, tax cheat, and murderer.
Who cares? Trash talk is Obama’s political lingua franca. He relishes delivering these insults face-to-face while shielded by the respect his victims have for the office of the presidency — a reverence he does not share.
What should be important is how he feels about us: the American people. And how should this impact the so-called likeability gap between him and Romney as election day approaches?
In 2008, Americans questioned Barack Obama’s feelings towards Americans. His famous gaffe was the tipoff:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them[.]
So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Yawn — everyone knows about that broad-based insult. And everyone certainly knew that Obama’s “moral compass,” Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., had scathing views of America and toward Americans. One was explained away as a “gaffe” and the other explained away by claims that Obama was never in the pews when a stream of anti-America invective poured forth from Wright — an excuse belied by Obama’s own words in a newspaper interview and by keen investigative work by Stanley Kurtz in his book Radical-in-Chief (pages 320-3).
But Obama’s condescension towards broad swaths of Americans was presaged years before, and it has deepened and widened over the years. In 1990, he said that “suburbs bore me.” By implication, suburbanites bore him but do have their uses — donations and votes, for example.
But Barack Obama has never been able to keep his feelings towards Americans hidden for long. Americans don’t see the contempt too often, though, because Obama’s speechwriters are more circumspect than he is on the stump.
The truth comes out Washington-style: as “gaffes.”
There is a stream of insults that has flown forth over the past few years — and have been all but smothered by the media. That is an anomaly, of course — because if there has ever been a “man bites dog” story that should compel media coverage, it would be a politician — let alone a president — who, instead of delivering paeans to the people, rebukes them repeatedly.
What have these insults been? What do they reveal? And, more importantly, why should we vote for a man who holds such a low opinion of Americans? And why do Americans like a man who clearly does not like many of us?
The Dirty Laundry List
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama must have realized how this might be interpreted, so he added some nice-sounding verbiage, but the deed was done. Bill Clinton had proclaimed in his second inaugural address that “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation” (italics mine). Barack Obama does not agree — and moreover, he says we are not a model for the world and in fact have reasons to atone to it. And Obama has assumed for us the role of atoner in chief.
Very early in his presidency (in 2009), Obama did apologize at least five times, and perhaps as many as ten times, within the first six months of his presidency. We are not worthy of respect.
Furthermore, Americans don’t think clearly. When the red tide of the 2010 midterms became visible, Obama refused to accept responsibility that Democratic policy was at fault. On the contrary, the people were.
President Barack Obama said Americans’ “fear and frustration” is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country’s scared.”
This was echoed recently by Michelle Obama, who depicted undecided voters as “confused” and “knuckleheads.”
People who watch Fox News (the most widely watched cable news outlet — and one Obama has appeared on, opposite Bill O’Reilly, over the years) are a “little stubborn” and don’t understand Obama’s policies. For good measure, he told Republicans in 2009 (pre-Sandra Fluke) that you “just can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done” — as if Republicans just are mindless robots marching to Limbaugh’s tune.
Why should that matter, since Americans are poor listeners anyway?
President Obama recently said that the biggest mistake of his first term was not being a good enough story-teller, explaining that he needs to be better communicate to the American people as to why his policies mattered. (His verbal tic “let me be clear” when he prefaces a point reflects the view that Americans need to pay better attention.) Paul Ryan had some fun with this criticism during the Republican National Convention.
Was the animated version of Obama’s story about his agenda “The Life of Julia” dumbed down enough for hapless Americans? The Julia fiasco was mocked not just for its approach (the moral of the story is that all one has to look forward to is a life of dependency), but also for apparently leaving some important facts on the cutting room floor, resulting in a collection of “bogus” assumptions. Is this the type of story we are told to absorb?
Many of the stories that Obama does tell us, from his own life story (filled with fabrications) to the auto bailout “success” fairy tale to the broken promises regarding ObamaCare and the incessant peddling of tall tales known as Mediscare, lean a bit more toward fiction than fact. Should we trust a man who shamelessly abuses the facts of his own mother’s death for political purposes? As Victor Davis Hanson writes, “[i]f a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain healthcare, then he will fudge on almost anything.”
How true.
Policeman “acted stupidly” when they did their duty and investigated whether a friend of Barack Obama’s (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) was committing a crime. Since Gates is black, Obama commented that there is a “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” So policeman not only act stupidly, but also are motivated by racism.
Barack Obama see a more pervasive sense of racism stalking the land than was evident when he gave his famous 2004 “There is no white America, no black America” speech at the Democratic National Convention. He commented recently that elections are tight when you have a name like “Barack Obama.” This is not the first time he has cast aspersions on Americans. Back in 2008, he said Americans might be reluctant to vote for him because, referring to himself, “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” His grandmother was fearful of black youths because she was a “typical white person,” and he quoted approvingly in his book The Audacity of Hope that “white men’s greed runs a world in need.”
Republicans are “bomb-throwers” and “hostage takers” who sip Slurpees while driving the economy into a ditch. If they want to help, though, they have to sit in the back of the bus. From there, at least they won’t be able to excavate moats and fill them with alligators to kill Hispanics slipping across the border from Mexico. Republicans are members of the Flat Earth Society, though, so how worthwhile would their input be anyway? Might as well stick with the Slurpees — if Mayor Bloomberg permits.
Guess that whole “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America” thing was “just words” back in 2004.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-is-obama-so-quiet-about-the-chicago-teachers-strike?f=puball Why has President Obama been so hushed about this week’s Chicago teachers’ strike? Clearly he has been distracted, what with the unspeakable tragedy of the murder of four Americans in Libya – Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, technology officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – and the ensuing deadly […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/government-of-by-and-for-the-epa?f=puball Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln resolved to take increased devotion to ensuring that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth. Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly […]
