Wanted: Mini Moustache Of Understanding
Posted on June 12th, 2010 by D. Aristophanes
Alas, the venerable Atlantic appears to be doing donuts in the parking lot of yesterday instead of taking the on-ramp to the freeway of a prosperous tomorrow. Sometimes when you spill a glass of milk, you have to burn the whole house down around it or the wicketkeepers of tribalism will continue to dance the Macarena of Discord upon the Field of Democratic Dreams.
Yes, it’s true — The Atlantic seeks to hire a Tom Friedman clone.
H/t: Anne Laurie
Moustache required or just admired?
Wicketkeepers are required to have moustaches.
You have to admit, for the Megan McArdle magazine to hire a Lil’ Tommy isn’t exactly out of character. It’s only sad if you like political analysis that is factually correct and that has good insight into the future.
Who the hell wrote that job announcement? It’s drivel.
Hire either Hammer or a Terminator.
Well, I see Bill Kristol’s already got his next gig lined up, after WaPo fires him….
High metabolism. Relentless. Unstoppable. Prolific.
Hire either Hammer or a Terminator.
Or the Duggars.
Michael Kelly’s enduring legacy lives on. Rotten fruit of the fetid tree and all that.
I prefer the Macarena and Cheese of Discord, myself.
Obama’s Treachery
By Geoffrey P. Hunt
Obama’s White House stands accused of tampering with U.S. Senate primary elections involving Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado. Both Democratic primary challengers apparently were urged to drop out of their races by White House operatives in exchange for a job. The details remain murky as storylines from White House officials, along with Sestak and Romanoff themselves, are both evasive and implausible. But this much is clear: Election tampering by Obama treads upon the very foundation of American exceptionalism — free elections in a representative democracy.
Cynics and apologists alike brush aside this scandal. It’s business as usual, both political parties do it, you have to be naïve to believe this kind of electioneering is rare. In fact, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace, had the gall to assert that this kind of election manipulation shows presidential leadership in getting things done.
Well, election tampering and transparent corruption are not business as usual unless you’re a Democrat. Whether it be suppression of the black vote in the south for a hundred years after the Civil War, Tammany Hall politics at the turn of the 20th century in New York, machine politics in Chicago, or bribes and payoffs for votes on health care and stimulus funding, the failure to prosecute polling place intimidation by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia or Acorn voter registration fraud, this is the Democratic Party Way, the Obama Way.
In a quote attributed to Robert Gibbs, Obama’s mouthpiece, “The White House has a legitimate interest in avoiding messy Democratic Party primaries. … Presidents, as leaders of their parties, have long had an interest in ensuring that supporters didn’t run against each other in contested elections.” Oh really? Should presidents bribe rivals to get them out of the way?
Indeed, free elections are messy. President Obama himself said so in his commencement address this year at the University of Michigan: “U.S. politics long has been noisy and messy, contentious, complicated” — a repeat of lines in his 2010 State of the Union, “Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.”
Apparently it’s too messy, excessively contentious, and inconveniently complicated for Obama and his operatives to honor the bedrock principle in American governance.
The Founders, especially James Madison, had great difficulty with direct democracy for good reason. Representative democracy instead offered stability and a check against mob rule. And a greater number of representatives would be an inoculation against corruption by the cabal of too few. But a reliance on representative democracy placed a heavy burden on the process of electing those representatives. “[S]uffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters” (From the Federalist No. 10).
The symbolism of free elections in a representative democracy is best depicted in the 1851 painting The County Election by Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham, now owned by and displayed in the St. Louis Art Museum.
Bingham, who painted a series of mid-19th-century political scenes, shows a typical small-town election somewhere in rural America. This painting evokes the characteristic ritual of American representative democracy, free exercise of suffrage. Of course, in 1851, universal suffrage was not yet the norm. Yet the scene evokes a “noisy, messy, contentious, and complicated process,” as Obama would say. Simultaneously subtle and athletic — with suasion and vote-prodding from a snort of hard cider, heated words, raised voices, muscular posturing, and even a newspaper editor’s rant.
And despite the sweaty, dusty, and strong breath elements of electioneering, the sacred ritual of a fully accessible process — even Election Day mischief-making and influence-peddling, but all in the open, where voters can actually cast a ballot for their choices — is at the heart of the American system of governance.
Obama, riding the wave of a popular coronation, has been imposing governance through the raw power of an unbridled majority and has little patience for this sort of pluralism, especially when it interferes with his agenda. It’s hard to imagine Obama endorsing Bingham’s brand of representative democracy.
Obama’s hollow complaints against assaults on democracy, notably his condemnation of the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United vs FEC during his State of the Union address, are hailed by his Democratic Party bedfellows. Yet how easy it is for these same party hacks and shameless partisans to either ignore or rationalize Obama’s own assault on democracy when he manipulates federal election primaries.
Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed — and, by the way, was enabled by a far greater proportion of Republican than Democrat U.S. senators — Democrats and liberals have been grandstanding self-promoters decrying voter disenfranchisement. But where is this purity of process when it comes to arriving at the actual names on the ballot?
And who are now the champions of suppressing free speech through revival of the Fairness Doctrine and eliminating the U.S. Senate rules on the filibuster and cloture? The Democrats. Who are now advocating the regulation of journalism through the Federal Trade Commission? The Democrats.
Obama and his operatives cannot escape the stench from their wholesale corruption of American governance. And their amateurish bungling is neither amusing nor defensible. Tampering with federal elections is only the latest in long line of brazen, cynical manipulations. Only a few among today’s political class, notably Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), have the courage to call out such treachery by demanding an independent inquiry. How long will their courage hold out?
High metabolism. Relentless. Unstoppable. Prolific.
Because that’s the first thing I think when I see a picture of Friedman…
I’m still amazed that the Atlantic hasn’t fired Ta-Nehisi Coates yet. You know McArdle buzzes building security every time he sneezes…
Blockades and Muslims
No competent legal scholar can seriously question the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade. The Israel Defense Force Judge Advocate has clearly laid out the basis for Israel’s action, demonstrating its absolute conformity with international law.
The truth is that the IDF’s actions were unnecessarily moderate. Blockade is a perfectly acceptable and often necessary act of war. And Israel is at war with the Hamas regime in Gaza, which not only emphatically calls for Israel’s destruction, but also persistently and deliberately attacks the Jewish state, particularly targeting civilians. Britain brutally but successfully blockaded Germany in both World Wars (the blockade as much as any other factor brought about Germany’s surrender in the WWI), while the United States effectively blockaded Japan in World War II.
But what is really ironic is that blockade is a favorite tactic of the Arabs and the Turks. The Turks control two of the world’s critical waterways (the Bosporus and Dardanelles) and have historically blockaded them at will. Meanwhile, the Arabs, in violation of the armistice agreement that ended the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, completely blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba (i.e., not just to limit war materiel), cutting off Israel’s southern port of Eilat.
After the 1956 Sinai Campaign (fought by Israel in part to break the Aqaba blockade), the United Nations stationed “peacekeeping” troops in Sinai as part of the bargain for securing Israel’s voluntary withdrawal from this territory. In 1967 the Arabs told the U.N. to get out (which, of course, it cravenly did) and reimposed the blockade. While it is often said that Israel acted preemptively in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, striking the first blow, in reality, the blockade itself was a belligerent act under international law. Israel was already at war when its warplanes hit Egyptian airfields.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Arabs went one better. Having lost control of the Sinai and unable to maintain a blockade of Aqaba in the face of Israeli air power, the Arabs blockaded the distant Straits of Bab el Mandeb (over a thousand miles from Israel), which separate the Arabian peninsula from Africa. Talk about blockading international waters!
Of course, no “freedom flotillas” full of European and American “activists” sailed to break the Arab blockades, though they were in international waters and in violation of all manner of “humanitarian law” in that they were complete and indiscriminate, blockading foodstuffs and all other goods, not just war materiel.
By comparison, Israel’s blockade of Gaza has been unnecessarily moderate, indeed hardly a blockade in the historical sense at all. Gaza is awash in food and consumer goods. And indeed, the primary intent of the “freedom flotilla,” by the admission of its leaders, was not to resupply Gaza, which is hardly needed. Had it been, the ships could have been unloaded at an Israeli port and the goods shipped overland to the supposedly needy Palestinians. Rather, the intent of the “Free Gaza Movement” was to break the Israeli blockade.
Under the international law of war as articulated in the San Remo Manual (effectively the latest iteration of the law of war at sea), Israel treated the blockade runners like neutral merchant ships — warning the vessels of the blockade and to dock at the port of Ashdod rather than face boarding. Even in boarding, the IDF acted not as a belligerent might have, but as a police force, not opening fire on the vessels, but rather attempting to peacefully steer the vessels safely into the Israeli port.
But the IDF needn’t have done so. The Free Gaza Movement’s flotillas are not humanitarian convoys, but blockade-breakers, and so, in actual fact, belligerents. Israel and Hamas are at war, and Israel’s blockade is a legitimate act of war against Hamas. The freedom flotillas’ calculated attempts to break the blockade are deliberate acts of war against Israel. The wacky but dangerous collection of left-wing activists, Arab and Turkish terrorists, and just plain crazies are not humanitarians, but belligerents in a war. Israel would have been within its rights under international law to have sent the whole motley fleet to the bottom of the sea.
The Israelis did not do this, but rather acted with restraint, dropping paintball-armed commandos onto the deck of a ship filled with armed and violent fanatics — and yet they still face international opprobrium and condemnation. But this, of course, is nothing new. Whenever Israel attempts to please the humanitarians, they are doubly punished — not only by taking unnecessary casualties themselves, but in heightened levels of bogus legal and propagandistic attack.
So in 2002, when Israel sacrificed 23 soldiers rooting out terrorists room by room in the Jenin refugee camp rather than just bombing the place to rubble, they were accused of a massacre. When Israel pulled its punches in against Hezbollah in 2006, it was not only condemned for “disproportionate attacks,” but also mocked for military incompetence. And even though during Operation Cast Lead the IDF went so far as to personally telephone individual Palestinians in Gaza to warn them of impending attacks and urge them to evacuate (an almost laughably considerate form of war), it was accused of all manner of war crimes in the Goldstone Report.
The lesson ought to be clear by now. The humanitarians don’t want peace; they want blood. And they are getting it.
I’m still amazed that the Atlantic hasn’t fired Ta-Nehisi Coates yet. You know McArdle buzzes building security every time he sneezes…
For some reason, I always think that he works at The American Prospect. Probably for the reasons you just outlined.
How I Became a Conservative
By Roland Toy
It started with a basketball game in 1993. There were two fourth-grade classes in my son’s elementary school, and each fielded an eight-player team in an after-school sports league. Both teams were good. My son’s team went undefeated during the regular season. His best friend — we’ll call him Jay — played on the other team, which lost just one game. Eventually, in the post-season playoffs, the two teams were scheduled to face each other for the first time all season in the championship game.
A few days before the game, Jay’s father called me. He and the other parents of his son’s team were “very, very concerned.” Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for the competition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to “bragging rights in the schoolyard.” And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.
He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to “frame the situation as a teaching moment.” Eventually, he got to the money point: He and the other parents of Jay’s team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?
Initially, I was nonplussed. But I heard myself saying something like, “You’re way over-complicating this. The purpose of playing the game is to win it. And by the way, the winning team has earned bragging rights.”
As it happened, the two teams fell out along socioeconomic lines. Most of the parents from the other team were professors at the nearby state university, with a couple of doctors as well. Their coach was a well-published sociologist; Jay’s father taught psychology. Our coach was a private detective with a scar on his face, a reminder of a knife fight he had had in Mexico. One of our team’s parents was a real estate broker, another a chef; one sold insurance, one was a building inspector.
Fast forward two nights to a meeting at my house. Our living room was large enough to accommodate all 32 parents, 16 from each team. The coach of Jay’s team presented the same pitch I had heard from Jay’s father about our obligation as parents to frame the situation into a teaching moment that emphasized sportsmanship. One of our parents responded that sportsmanship is only possible if there’s a sport to begin with. One of theirs said something about helping the children to build healthy self-esteem. One of ours responded that being perceived as too chicken to play the game wasn’t likely to build a whole lot of self-esteem in anybody. One of theirs raised the issue of trophies, suggesting that if the game were played, then every player should receive the same trophy. One of ours said sure, trophies for all, as long as they were marked champion and runner-up and given to the right kids.
My favorite comment came from the real estate broker. He said that for him, after listening to all of the arguments pro and con, failing to play the game just seemed unnatural.
I thought I was a good liberal. Always voted Democrat. Felt a little smug around conservatives. My father served in World War II and loved our country, but he also was a liberal professor who opposed the Viet Nam war, organized teach-ins, and sponsored radical groups on various campuses. During my high school years, our apartment featured a glossy black wall with oversized posters of Leon Trotsky and Ho Chi Minh. But at that meeting, my liberal pedigree buckled permanently under the condescension from the parents of the other team. (The professors spoke to us as though we were being scolded in the principal’s office.) The attempt to manufacture individual self-esteem through group actions, to engineer an equality of outcome based on “fairness” rather than achievement, seemed like an effort to feminize young boys.
By the end of the meeting, it was clear what was really happening. This was a head-to-head confrontation between liberal and conservative values. In my newfound home in the conservative camp, I was not offended by the liberal arguments — that felt a little too like something a liberal might feel. I was just disgusted.
The vote split down party lines. Sixteen for playing, sixteen against. My vote to play was also a way to honor my father. Yes, he was a liberal — but an old-fashioned one. As center for the St. Paul Central football team, he too would have voted to play the game. And in the end, the game was played. We forced their hand by vowing to show up. Whatever they decided, we promised to be there ready to play. But in the interest of good will, we agreed to forgo trophies.
It was a good game. As I expected, my son’s team won going away. Afterwards we all went out for pizza. The parents spoke through frozen smiles. The kids had a great, noisy time. The boys did not feel a need for trophies, and there was a little trash-talking. The outcome did not seem to bother anybody except maybe some of the parents. Seventeen years later, my son and Jay are still friends. Through the years they played a lot of pickup games.
Strange as it sounds, it took a bunch of children and a basketball game to rouse me from a lifelong mushy dream of liberalism.
Man, Troofy, you must have a one hell of a garden with all that horseshit your’re spreading.
Why would we trust anything Obama’s Treachery said?
Believe Me.
I hate liberals for entirely rational reasons.
Shorter How I Became a Conservative
By Roland Toy
I need to have my manhood endorsed quite explicitly, since I have a small penis.
Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh Blargh […] Blargh
The Year of the Conservative Woman
By Bruce Walker
Pundits have already picked up on the theme of the June 8 primary: Female candidates made some remarkable gains. The next senator elected in California, for example, will be a woman. The talk sounds like November 1992, when political articles touted five victories of female candidates in Senate races in California (two races), Illinois, Washington, and Maryland. This was proclaimed the “Year of the Woman.”
But 1992 was actually just the “Year of the Democrat Woman.” All five women who won were leftist Democrats. Democrat women have not doing so well at all eighteen years later. Senator Blanche Lincoln celebrated squeaking by a leftist Halter in very conservative Arkansas, with nearly everyone predicting she will lose her seat in November. Patty Murray and Barbara Boxer, three-term incumbents from very blue states, both face very tough races against Republican candidates in five months. Or consider the biggest electoral story so far in 2010: the astonishing victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, in which he defeated her, Ms. Marcia Coakley, the sitting Attorney General of this bluest of all states.
This would seem to be more the Year of the Republican Woman. Nikki Haley has an excellent chance of becoming the first female governor of South Carolina with her thumping victory in the primary. Sharron Angle also has an excellent chance of knocking off Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In California, two successful women, Whitman and Fiorina, will carry the Republican banner for governor and senator. Susana Martinez is the Republican gubernatorial nominee in New Mexico, and if she wins, which polls show as likely, she will be the first female Latino governor in American history. In neighboring Arizona, Jan Brewer has become a hero to Republicans for standing up with grace, wit, and courage to the leftist establishment media and to President Obama. In nearby Oklahoma, polls show Congresswoman Mary Fallin as likely to be the next governor. If Senator Hutchison had won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Texas, then voters in November across the entire tier of states bordering Mexico (and also Oklahoma) could have elected Republican women as their governors.
Kay Bailey Hutchison, however, did not win, and that is the essence of the political story. It is really the year of the conservative, not the Republican woman. Governor Perry, the man who defeated her, was considered by voters to be a genuine conservative, while Hutchison was considered more of a RINO. The same sort of distinction occurred in upstate New York last November, when Doug Hoffman ran far ahead of Dede Scozzafava in a House special election — he was not the official Republican candidate, but he was the real conservative candidate, and in a Republican district.
Ideology, not political party, and much less gender, guides voters today. Feminists do not lift a finger to help Sarah Palin when she is pilloried with the vilest sort of harassment. Michele Bachmann, another rising star in the Republican Party, is getting noticed precisely because she is an articulate, brave, and joyful conservative — but none of the dreary groups pretending to champion women is touting her for higher office, or even reelection.
The salient fact about nearly all the rising starlets in the Republican Party — Palin, Bachman, Angle, Haley, Brewer, Fallin, and Martinez — is that each is conservative. (Whitman and Fiorina, the two California Republicans, are not conservative, but both of these Republicans, like Scott Brown, are conservative for their state.) Susana Martinez proudly proclaims herself pro-life, a supporter of the Second Amendment, and a conservative. Sharron Angle was supported by the Tea Party and probably won because she was so conservative. Jan Brewer, like Nikki Haley, has a very clear conservative position on every important issue. Mary Fallin has voted for the conservative position 96% of the time, according to the American Conservative Union’s congressional voting scorecard.
Conservatives obviously have no problems with women. Indeed, an increasingly large number of conservative leaders are women. Instead, conservatives have problems with leftists and their policies. The snow job of the left, the myth that somehow conservatives and Republicans are against women, is falling apart at the seams. The use of identity politics or special interest politics, the perversion of representative limited government proposed by the left, may soon run into some stormy seas.
Women are, in many ways, more naturally conservative than men. Bad and dangerous schools, for example, are more likely to arouse direct action by mothers than by fathers. Pornography, juvenile promiscuity, and related social issues are at least as troubling to women as to men. The avalanche of abuse thrown at Sarah Palin shows how much leftists fear strong conservative women. But Palin, like Bachmann and Brewer, are unperturbed. These women, along with others who will win office in November, are changing the face of American politics.
Yep, Republican women are proving they are just as bug fuck nuts as Republican men.
Tl;dr
No thanks, no copy/pasta for me. It’s too early in the morning and this crap in undercooked anyway.
Bookmark this libs, this is how it’ll go down…..
Conservatives obviously have no problems with women.
The cat is pissed at me for waking her up by guffawing loudly.
During an address on Thursday, May 27, 2010 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan, the Obama administration’s lead counterterrorism adviser, provided a transparently bowdlerized perspective on jihad. Brennan’s statements were breathtaking in their profound cognitive dissonance regarding this uniquely Islamic institution, which continues to wreak daily havoc in our era.
Despite over 15,350 jihad terror attacks by Muslims worldwide since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism committed against the United States itself on September 11, 2001, Brennan insisted,
Closing this willfully blind circle of “reasoning,” Brennan further asserted that “describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism — that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.”
Brennan’s views — a dangerous concatenation of hard-left, Islamophilic cultural relativism and the relentless, successful “Islamic dawa” efforts of generations of jihadists — represent the apotheosis of phenomena analyzed with uncompromising lucidity in Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad.
An accomplished former federal prosecutor, McCarthy convicted the infamous jihadist “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning other acts of jihad terror. McCarthy recounted this prosecution in a prior book, Willful Blindness, which characterized the motivating Islamic ideology, goals, and methods of contemporary purveyors of violent jihad. He juxtaposed their openly declared jihad war campaign to the “conscious avoidance” of this threat by both America’s leadership elite and its masses in a game effort “to expose this suicide ethos as it pertained to maintaining our security against the terrorist threat.” In The Grand Jihad, McCarthy extends these previous observations, and focuses upon the more pervasive threat of jihad’s non-violent manifestations, which he describes so appositely, as
Central to McCarthy’s presentation — and containing key extracts eponymous to the book’s title — is a document whose contents were revealed during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihad-terrorism funding trial. This internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991 was written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” the document is indeed self-explanatory.
The Grand Jihad’s masterful, remarkably compendious narrative elucidates how the Muslim Brotherhood program has taken shape, concretely, in America. McCarthy offers this summary assessment:
And McCarthy amplifies this discussion by placing such developments within their global Islamic context, past and present, doctrinal and historical. He boldly introduces the reader to all of the following, without apologetics: how Islam’s understanding of freedom (hurriyya in Arabic) as “perfect slavery to Allah” is antithetical to uniquely Western notions of individual liberty; the doubly totalitarian nature of Islamic jihadism and its accompanying goal of the universal imposition of Islamic Law (Shari’a) on all of humanity; and, finally, contemporary polling data from a rigorously conducted survey indicating that fully two-thirds of a representative sample of the entire global Muslim community (i.e., Muslims from Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia) favor the “strict application” of the Shari’a and the (re-)creation of a transnational Islamic superstate, or Caliphate.
McCarthy’s informed, forthright contemporary presentation recalls the intellectual and moral clarity — and urgency — of his legal antecedent, Antoine Fattal, expressed five decades earlier.
Nine years ago, via the wise and generous mentoring of Bat Ye’or and David Littman, I was introduced to the writings of Fattal. Perhaps best known for serving the Lebanese administration under Amin Gemayel and negotiating a May 1983 Peace Treaty with Israel the Syrians later forced the Lebanese to abrogate, Antoine Fattal (d. 1987) was an esteemed law professor. Fattal also wrote Le Statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam, which remains one of the seminal works describing what Bat Ye’or subsequently termed “dhimmitude,” the legal status of non-Muslims vanquished by jihad and living under Islamic law. Fattal’s treatise contains timeless insights on the jihad and concludes with a very prescient warning about the real peril of this living, uniquely Islamic institution, sounded in 1958 — the year Le Statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam was published.*
Fattal’s meticulous study of the foundational Islamic texts and jurisprudence crystallized these classical formulations of the jihad as an open-ended, religiously-mandated war of aggression.
After similarly detailed attention to the doctrinal and historical legacy of jihad-imposed dhimmitude, Fattal observed,
And Fattal concluded his scholarly 1958 analysis with this warning, which anticipates by fifty years McCarthy’s even more pressing admonition to abandon our delusional complacency, and now.
Andrew McCarthy closes The Grand Jihad with an aptly trenchant commentary on Army Chief of Staff General George W. Casey’s absurd yet pathognomonic observations following Nidal Hasan’s act of mass-murdering jihad terror at Fort Hood. Epitomizing how the toxic amalgam of cultural relativism and Islamophilic jihad-denial fostered by Islamic propaganda has infested even our highest military institutions, Casey whimpered during an NBC News interview, “And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” McCarthy’s rejoinder notes the opposite views of Hasan’s jihad martyrdom operation taken by modern violent jihadists, and their broad-based ideological, if not tactical, supporters within the entire global Muslim community, represented by the Organization of the Islamic Conference — and Koran 3:110.
In the years just prior to his September 1982 assassination, Bashir Gemayel, the late Lebanese president whose surviving administration (under his brother Amin) Antoine Fattal served, implored Lebanon’s indigenous non-Muslims not to accept their dhimmitude (see pp. 43,150,219,236,238,290,298,411) while repeatedly urging Western governments to defend the core values of Western civilization (see pp.12,15-16) against encroaching jihadism. Andrew McCarthy’s brilliant jeremiad The Grand Jihad echoes Gemayel’s sentiments, updated for our era. Let us pray that his clarion call is heeded.
Ha! I love absurd humor. —Gaza is awash in food and consumer goods.
Isn’t copypasta with no linky in violation of copyright law and thus a rip on the fabric of the heart of our country? Why do conservatives hate America?
On second thought Andrew McCarthy is full of shit, and also a slimeball.
Also, I admit that all conservatives are by definition wrong and evil.
@ The Grand Jihad: Actually, I think I agree.
“Mini-moustache”?
DA, your intro is superb, but come on.
Soul Patch of Understanding, shirley.
You know what, guys? Me too. Liberals Rool.
Also, I admit that all conservatives are by definition wrong and evil.
Aw, there aren’t ALL evil. A lot of them are just ordinary cowards.
Soul Patch of Understanding, shirley.
You’re hired! But only so long as it’s a non-ironic Soul Patch of Understanding.
With McMegan away on honeymoon and Andrew Sullivan beginning to show signs of disrepair, somebody’s got to bring up the metabolic level at the New Improved Atlantic Monthly. I wonder if Pastor Swank would be willing to grow a mustache?
I’m sure Swank thinks mustaches are Satan’s crumb brushes.
What will the new Units be called?
High metabolism. Relentless. Unstoppable. Prolific.
I’d suggest either Copy/Paste Troll or Kill Button, both of whom are getting quite a workout in this thread.
Atlanic 2.0! Now with up to 30% more aloe-vera & ylang-ylang!
Bat-Boy rigor. Morton Downey Junior insight.
( OR )
Pravda rigor. Time-Cube-Guy insight
( OR )
POOP rigor. PENIS insight.
( OR … ????? )
Oh shit!
Don’t look now but … but I’m pretty sure I missed my period.
Women are, in many ways, more naturally conservative than men.
One wonders what motivates so many of them to vote liberal, then. The liberal/conservative gap is far greater among women than among men, and it’s not in Troofus’ favor.
I do enjoy the fact that if women are allowed to run in elections today (as liberals, moderates, conservatives or anything else), it’s because liberals of previous generations (male and female) fought hard and won to get them that right. Whatever contempt the “I’ve got mine now so fuck you” conservative women of today may show for the left can’t change that.
Looks like Troofie’s gunning for that Atlantic job here. Do they take plagiarists?
Looks like Troofie’s gunning for that Atlantic job here. Do they take plagiarists?
You’re thinking of the Washington Post.
Wanted: Mini Moustache Of Understanding
OMG! They’re replacing McArdle?
That’s a huge mustache to fill!
The Grand Jihad said,
June 12, 2010 at 16:17
They were bought out by Waldbaum’s and are now an A&P. Please do try to keep up.