DANIEL GREENFIELD: PART 2 WEEKLY ROUNDUP….SEE NOTE PLEASE
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
DEAR SULTAN: NO ONE DISPUTES THE NECESSITY FOR VETTING…..BUT, AND THIS IS A BIG BUT…CALLING HIM A STEALTH SHARIA OR A FIFTH COLUMN CANDIDATE AND REFERRING TO BLOGGERS WHO PRINT DIFFERING OPINIONS AS “ASSHAT” OR “PISHER” IS DUMB AND VULGAR., AND THEN TO ASCRIBE “SINISTER” MOTIVES TO THE PERRY CAMPAIGN IS RIDICULOUS. AS TO PERRY’S RECORD ON ISRAEL, IT IS NOT BASED ON A DEFENDER OF JERUSALEM AWARD….IT IS BASED ON DECADES OF SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL BASED ON FAITH AND AMERICAN INTERESTS LONG BEFORE HE SOUGHT NATIONAL OFFICE…. AND YES! GOING FOR THE PERSON WHO CAN DEFEAT OBAMA IS CRITICAL….AND NO CANDIDATE IS PERFECT….RSK
FEAR OF VETTING
So Michele Bachmann ran a fairly effective ad aimed at Perry’s record, albeit with a cheesy voiceover, and the discussion was 50 percent voiceover, 49 percent “she’s crazy and should drop out) and 1 percent ad content.
The reluctance to vet Perry isn’t new, as Michelle Malkin, Robert Spencer and many others have discovered. Some in the party insist that they have their man and that he’s the only one who can beat Obama and it’s best not to look too closely at him or at his record. The lack of serious discussion about his record is troubling, and it’s going to backfire, if not now, then during the general election.
Bachmann’s ad was fairly mild. She didn’t use a photo of Perry surrounded by smiling ACORN members as he signs a bill, or Perry at a La Raza conference where he tells them that an Arizona style immigration law is wrong for Texas.
The points she made are some of the same ones that the media is going to be hammering over and over during the campaign. Along with Texas’ unemployment stats. Texas’ debt will come up every time Perry mentions the National Debt. And Texas’ spending will come up every time that cutting spending nationwide does. That’s the flip side of having a record.
None of this means that Perry shouldn’t run, it means that it’s a lot better to deal with this now, than to wake up in the middle of a general election having to deal with issues that everyone was shielded from by a cone of silence.
The reliance on lazy talking points that don’t mean anything has become ubiquitous, for example, I have lost track of how many times the Defender of Jerusalem award has been brought up, when that award was not given by the government or the city, has nothing in common with the original such award given out by the Jabotinsky Foundation, and was actually awarded to Perry by the private foundation of a Brazilian oilman.
Why bother pointing that out? Because the NJDC and every liberal group will, and they will do it far more ruthlessly, because that Brazilian oilman’s antics provide quite a lot of material. And it’s better to know all this ahead of time, than to be caught flat footed by talking points that don’t hold up because they were developed in the absence of contrary facts.
To put it bluntly this is why we have primaries, not coronations. Perry may win, but he doesn’t deserve to win unless he can answer ads like these. There is no consensus that he is the most conservative candidate and there’s no reason that he should be shielded from criticism.
Bachmann deserves credit for challenging his record.
ILLEGAL TOPICS
Speaking of illegal topics, I happened to hear Limbaugh today warn Republicans against addressing the tax credits claimed by illegal aliens. His reasoning seemed to be that it would distract from the jobs issue.
I don’t follow that reasoning. Making the argument that illegal aliens are pushing up unemployment is actually a handy talking point. So why come out against it? I don’t know. Certainly there are always worries of upsetting the Latino vote. But then again the Republican frontrunner is now a bit of an open borders guy. Just maybe illegal aliens are a thing we don’t discuss anymore.
SHAWARMA REDUX
Lawrence Auster at View from the Right has an interesting take on my piece on the Shawarma Republics
Islam cannot develop stable, reasonably humane societies because Islam consists of crushing everything but itself. From the beginning, the victory of Islam has meant the suppression of the culture, ethnicity, religion, and all other traditions of the Islamized country. The whole Islamic world thus consists of suppressed cultures/peoples struggling to live within the stranglehold of Islam. The only way this will-to-life can express itself is through eternal civil war against other cultures/peoples. Whichever group emerges victorious becomes the oppressor, using the fist of Islam to keep down all other groups.
Religion as the justification for endless war. Since religious validation in Islam occurs with victory, then Allah literally is on the side of the biggest cannons, so long as they aren’t manned by infidels.
I would add one point that Greenfield doesn’t make. Why is the West so utterly blind to the reality of Islam and imagines that each new breakout of the eternal Muslim civil war is a quest for constitutional liberal democracy? Because the West has become imperialistic. Meaning that it sees itself as the only true form of political order in the world. Therefore it cannot acknowledge the existence of other forms of order (or disorder) unlike itself. It must imagine these other forms of order as merely immature versions of itself, seeking to become like itself, to “transition” to democracy. So the West can never take Islam seriously or try to understand it in its own terms.
There is certainly that element there, even the Soviet Union at one point tried to view Islam as a kind of prehistoric Communism, and Islamists certainly cater to Western leftists in this way by presenting it as a beacon of human rights and feminism.
But the West, under leftist influence, is subject to two contradictory beliefs, on the one hand it believes that human values are universal, on the other it believes that its own system is the best way. Exceptionalism and universalism make difficult bedmates. The only way to resolve this basic contradiction is to believe that our system is the best… and that everyone practices it already.
Muslims are guilty of the same kind of convoluted reasoning when they insist that everyone is actually a Revert from Islam.. since Islam is the original religion.
In any case there’s more to Auster’s piece that you should read.
WHEN SHARIA MET FIDEL
The Italian daily Corriere della Sera is reporting that Hezbollah is setting up a base of operations in Cuba in order to extend its ability to reach Israeli targets in Latin America…According to the Tel Aviv daily Yedioth Ahronoth, three members of Hezbollah have already arrived in Cuba to set up the cell, which will allegedly “include 23 operatives, hand-picked by Talal Hamia, a senior member tasked with heading the covert operation. The clandestine terror operation is reportedly called “The Caribbean Case.”
And so the growing alliance between South American Marxists and Middle Eastern Islamists continues.
LIVING IN TRASH
Then came the “Yard Waste” bins because, well, in large cities large cities were suppose to compost all this crap from yards into rich humus. This of course led to humus mountains outside of all large cities and programs where the cities would give you some compost if you picked it up. That you were hauling the composted yard waste back to the yard after it had been hauled to the compost heap from the yard was, well, sort of glossed over. But the compost mountains grew anyway.
At this point you had, behind your house or to the side, a trash can, a glass and plastic recycling bin, and a yard waste bin… minimum. But you do not, it seems, have enough bins behind your house since the city can, it seems, charge you for picking up each and every bin as well as sell you the bin in the first place.
This is a good deal for the city and now it seems the cities want to extend it to yet another bin. This is the small green bin for the “organic kitchen waste” previously known as “garbage” that previously went into, well, your “garbage can.”
The deal here is that you are supposed to pick through your garbage with your hands and put into the new tiny green bin only the choicest bits of pre-compost compost. Then you set that bin out on the day for it’s collection after a week of pawing through the crap.
That makes four (count ’em) 4 bins to keep track of and to pay for, each one more foul than the one before.
There’s a metaphor here for liberalism, but I don’t want to touch it.
CRAZY LIKE A FOXMAN
Abe Foxman is still at it again with his Sharia is just a myth invented by crazy racist things. And Adam Taxin has Jerry Gordon’s rebuttal to it here.
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