http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290138
Add class warfare to the list of contemporary political skills that Mitt Romney hasn’t quite mastered.
In a mere 18 hours, he managed first to step on his big Florida primary win with a lollapalooza of gaffes, declaring that he “was not concerned about the very poor.” Then, in the classic GOP style of doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit, he called for raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Gee, Mitt, just for inflation? Why not double or maybe even quintuple the minimum wage?
Such are the perils for a pandering pol, paddling the swirls of the welfare state without a constitutional compass. It should go without saying — although it won’t — that Mitt didn’t really mean to blow off the poor. In the now-notorious CNN interview, he was quick to explain that the poor are not a priority only because we already “have a safety net.” Perfect: While arming the Left with a luscious sound bite with which to caricature him as a callous vulture capitalist, Romney simultaneously stokes the Right’s fear that he is really a man of the Left — or, at least, a man without a core, who doesn’t get that the welfare state is not the solution but the problem.
Romney being Romney, the first problem panicked him, while the second probably hasn’t even occurred to him — and won’t, unless Gingrich or Santorum surges and a little Tea Party stroking is suddenly in order. So, within hours of the CNN fiasco, Mitt shifted into “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” mode and got jiggy with the minimum wage.
The Quote of the Day
A very accurate description of the Arabs from Leon Uris’s book, “The Haj” – http://www.amazon.com/Haj-Leon-Uris/dp/0553248642, first published in 1984 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haj)
“Every last Arab is a total prisoner of his society. The Jews will eventually have to face up to what you’re dealing with here. The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them. They don’t know how to really love. But hate! Oh’ God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you [Jews] have jolted them from their delusion of grandeur and shown them for what they are—a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition … except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You [Jews] are dealing with a mad society and you’d better learn how to control it.” (http://www.masada2000.org/Haj.html)
At the end of his novel, Uris has an exceptional archeologist Arab admit: “We do not have leave to love one another and we have long ago lost the ability. It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century. The return of the Jews had unleashed that hatred, exploding wildly, aimlessly, into a massive force of self-destruction. In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness. We cannot live with ourselves, we never have. We cannot live with, or accommodate, the outside world, we never have. We are incapable of change. The devil who makes us crazy is now devouring us. We cannot stop ourselves. And if we are not stopped, we will march, with the rest of the world, to the Day of the Burning. What we are now witnessing, Ishmael, now, is the beginning of Armageddon.” – http://shimshonit.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/book-review-leon-uris%E2%80%99s-the-haj/
Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/so-sorry_620950.html
I HAVE TOTAL RESPECT FOR WILDERS BUT I HAVE TOTAL DERISION FOR THE “SHOA BUSINESS” MERCHANTS LIKE GERSTENFELD. AN APOLOGY FROM THE DUTCH NOW? AND PROMOTED BY GERSTENFELD WHO PRAISED CHIRAC? AS SHULMAN STATES: “No one knows better than Gerstenfeld the various ways in which European states are turning on Israel, and the disingenuous excuses each one makes—but he doesn’t seem interested in comparing the graceful rhetoric of apology with the actual practice of the politician who apologizes.”
So Sorry The old story: European politician gets in trouble, helps the Jews.
Geert Wilders, the big-gesture Dutch politician who has made a career out of outspoken enthusiasms and denunciations in a country which is careful of its speech, has begun to take on water. In the June 2010 election, the Freedom party, which Wilders created five years earlier, was the third-biggest vote-getter. And when the free-market conservative Freedom and Democracy party and Christian Democrats formed a government with Wilders’s support, polls indicated that Wilders’s party was the most popular in the country. Between October and December 2011, its support shriveled by a third.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
There was a time when Israel did not deal with existential threats by urging the Americans to do something. That time was fairly recent. When Saddam decided he wanted to have his own nuclear reactor, fourteen Israeli Air Force jets put an end to his dream. The year was 1981.
The Reagan Administration supported a UN resolution condemning Israel which stated that it was in “clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct” and which fully recognized “the inalienable sovereign right of Iraq, and all other States, especially the developing countries, to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development.”
Prime Minister Begin, easily the most conservative PM to hold the office, replied bluntly. “No “sword of Damocles” is going to hang over our head.”
Four years ago Israel launched a quieter attack was launched on a nuclear reactor in Syria, this time with the likely approval and assistance of the United States. Now after all the whitewashing of Iran’s nuclear program, it is coming down to the bottom line. Either a comprehensive attack will be launched or Iran’s nuclear program will pass the point of no return.
Friday Afternoon Roundup – Free Market Dissolution http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ In her article, Three Cheers for Romneycare, Ann Coulter insists that Romneycare and its mandate was a Free Market Solution. Of course a government mandate to buy a product is not a “free market” solution, it is a slave market solution. Using a government mandate may be […]
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/02/03/why-no-peace-because-the-pa-tells-its-people-that-murdering-israeli-civilians-makes-you-a-hero/
The trouble with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is that while in the Western mass media it is virtually always portrayed as moderate the PA simply doesn’t act that way. Its contrary behavior involves not keeping its commitments, daily incitement to kill Israelis and destroy Israel in its institutions, and refusal to negotiate seriously.
Above all, it means refusing to make peace in the context of a two-state solution. Among other things, it rejects the idea of a peace treaty ending the conflict–a pretty remarkable stance–or resettling its people within the state of Palestine but insisting many should go to Israel to live–a pretty remarkable stance for what’s supposed to be a nationalist movement.
But then there are the symbolic things that persuade Israelis not to trust the PA with their future fate, even if Israel must deal with the PA and even save it from being overthrown by Hamas.
To put it in one sentence; there is nothing the PA won’t do in terms of justifying the murder of Israelis as a heroic deed that should be considered. Here is a case so extreme—publicized by the praiseworthy Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) that it should reverberate internationally, making people understand the true reason why this conflict cannot be settled. Oh, and it immediately follows PMW’s revelation that the highest-ranking, PA-appointed Palestinian Muslim cleric called for genocide against the Jews.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=256293
Why the US-Israel relationship is unique and critical The history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel stems back more than 3,000 years, unbowed by the sequential rise and fall of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Maccabeans, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Egyptians, Crusaders, Mamelukes and Turks.
In comparison, the history of our own United States dates back 236 years. Although America is a young society, we have shared fundamental principles with the Jewish heritage from the time of our founding.
Today, the bonds between America and Israel are stronger than ever, yet they have never been more threatened.
When our founding fathers crafted the Constitution, they looked to the ancient Israelites for guidance in defining our “certain inalienable rights.”
The words inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” are taken from Old Testament scripture, Leviticus 25:10.
Culture Matters
Ibn Warraq’s eloquent defense of Western civilization
3 February 2012
Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, by Ibn Warraq, (Encounter, 286 pp., $23.95)
Occasionally, the mainstream media will let slip something that reveals the incoherence of multiculturalist orthodoxy. Not long ago, the New York Times reported on an Indian casino in California that had begun purging its rolls of members deemed insufficiently Indian. At the end of the story, an official from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, himself an Indian, remarked: “The tribe has historically had the ability to remove people. Tolerance is a European thing brought to the country. We never tolerated things. We turned our back on people.”
Such honesty about the Western origins of goods like tolerance is rare these days among the media, academic, and popular-culture purveyors of multicultural “diversity.” For them, other cultures are just as good as, if not better than, the West’s—but at the same time, these cultures allegedly endorse Western ideals such as tolerance, gender equality, human rights, political freedom, and the other universal boons to which people everywhere aspire. They deem it Eurocentric or racist to assert the superiority of the West because it originated those goods, even as they castigate the West for its racist, sexist, imperialist, and colonialist crimes. But as Ibn Warraq shows in his thoughtful and compelling new book, the ideals that even multicultural relativists profess have their origin and highest development in the West.
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of a Muslim apostate who left his native Pakistan and now lives in the United States. His first book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, earned him death threats and a pseudonym. Over the years he has published frequently on the unique goods of Western civilization, particularly “liberty and individual dignity,” contrasting these with the intolerance and close-mindedness of traditional Islamic culture. Why the West is Best continues the argument, laying out the defining ideals and virtues that have propelled Western civilization to global dominance.
Warraq’s prologue summarizes, in his view, the values that make the West superior: “rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and expression, human rights, [and] liberal democracy.” These principles, Warraq continues, are not restricted to Westerners but have universal application. They are “the best and perhaps the only means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to live in freedom and reach their full potential.”
The bulk of Why the West is Best further defines these core principles, frequently in contrast with Islamic cultures. Rejecting fashionable materialist explanations for Western success—geography, species distribution, climate, natural resources, or disease immunity—Warraq reminds us that “the economic and technological success of the West began with culture, and with principles embodied in its characteristic institutions.” That culture arose from the melding of Greek, Roman, Hebraic, and Christian influences. The Greeks invented democratic political participation and the rule of impersonal laws and institutions, rather than force. The Romans provided the foundations of our modern codes of law, establishing “a flexible legal framework that combined tested formulas with ongoing innovation,” Warraq writes, eventually broadening the notion of law to include the natural law that transcends tribe, time, or place. Hebraism added the ethical ideals of compassion and responsibility for our fellows that gave divine sanction to alleviating suffering and working for improvement—even in the face of oppressive secular power. And Christianity sanctified the separation of church and state, institutionalizing a moral force to counterbalance the tendency of state power to encroach upon private activity and personal conscience. Insofar as non-Western cultures embrace these ideals, they progress and improve; those that don’t find themselves mired in political oppression, inequality, poverty, intellectual stagnation, and economic failure.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/03/domestic-jihad-victims-deserve-purple-heart/
Domestic Jihad Victims Deserve Purple Heart Posted By Robert Spencer
Editor’s note: Sign the Freedom Center’s petition, Purple Hearts for Fort Hood Heroes.
The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the twelve U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 1, 2009.
The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.
Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”
In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-persecution-of-Lord-Black-7286
A review of A Matter of Principle by Conrad Black
How about tobacco?” The question was really a proposed assignment. By then, I had spent many years prosecuting monstrous criminals. A parade of tobacco execs did not seem to me to fit that bill, even if they’d had the temerity to eschew a treacly show of contrition when grilled by lawmakers about the health risks of their wares. This faux pas had the news cycle spinning and editorial pages in high dudgeon. As night follows day, carnal fever gripped our ambitious little piranha tank: visions of headlines as big-name defendants were laid low by swashbuckling government lawyers, not merely doing justice but doing . . . good. That was the zeitgeist.
As Conrad Black has painfully learned, the tune in our Manichean legal theater is called by the progressive vanguard—the media, the academy, and, in particular, the Lawyer Left. A Matter of Principle is Black’s often gripping memoir of his nightmarish trek through America’s justice system and business governance culture—a system that can work grave injustice, a culture that is all government and no business.1 The nightmare endures: Lord Black of Crossharbour, international newspaper mogul, British peer, distinguished presidential biographer, and for most of his life a lover of the United States, sits for a few more months in a federal prison—convicted, he compellingly argues, of crimes he did not commit.
