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.
