Category: Uncategorized

So Michael Ledeen is lying again as he tries to inoculate himself and his fellow World Demokratic Revolutionists from criticism:

Meanwhile, a collection of frauds, writing in places like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones, continuously recycles a story saying that a neocon (code for “Jewish”) conspiracy duped Bush into going to war in Iraq, and is now arranging the invasion of Iran.

Yes, because all those people just hate Jews, just like Mel Gibson. I mean, they’ve got nothing better to do than just sit around hating Jews. Come on! You’d think that with the way in which the “anti-semitic” slur is fast losing its effectiveness, a bright guy like Michael Ledeen would know better than to try expanding it to encompass neoconservatism.

I was onto this fraud two years ago when Joel Mowbray was pushing that line in his embarrassing “General Zinni, What A Ninny” column – wherein he absurdly attempted to claim that Zinni’s criticism of a bunch of non-Jewish neocons was proof of his Judenhassen. Also, apparently Rush Limbaugh has signed onto the program of insisting that “neocon” is a code word for Jew. Unfortunately for these would-be reality definers, when prominent neocons such as Fukuyama and the elder Kristol have openly defined its meaning, their task is hopeless. At least Ledeen merely tries to sneak it in there via parentheses as if he knows it’s pointless.

I predict that by the time this latest Mideast crisis finally ends, “neocon” will be considered to be a more damning slur than “anti-semite”.

Yousseff Ibrahim demonstrates a neoconnish inability to follow the plot:

After his 2004 re-election, President Bush promised that America would stand behind the Arab world’s pursuit of freedom and democracy, but he has retreated from this policy into nevernever land.

The sight of the American president standing next to Iraq’s militant pro-Iranian Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, inside the White House last week was the depth of depravity in politics.

Nothing symbolizes a bargain with the devil more than those images, which shall live in infamy.

The prime minister of Iraq, the country we liberated from dictatorship, is nothing more than an Iranian Muslim fundamentalist agent. To honor a reactionary fundamentalist in the halls of Congress is to dishonor the great American enterprise to liberate the Arab world from reactionary fundamentalism.

Mr. Bush, have you lost your way?

I just wonder what part of “the will of the people” folks like Mr. Ibrahim and President Bush fail to grasp. If you let a bunch of idiot German socialists decide who is going to govern, don’t be surprised when you get National Socialists and a French invasion. If you let a bunch of idiot women vote, don’t be surprised when you get divorce, infanticide and a Mommy state. And if you let a bunch of idiot Muslims vote, then don’t be surprised when the first act of Congress is to declare jihad on Jerusalem.

Mr. Bush hasn’t lost his way, this was the inevitable result of his way from the start. That reactionary fundamentalist is the fruit of the seed planted by those miraculous purple fingers with whom the pro-war Republicans were so enthralled a few months back.

A poster at the Right-Wing News wonders at the inclusion of a certain commentator on the Right-of-Center Bloggers List Their Least Favorite People on the Right:

I am suprised to see Malkin on this list. I wonder why she made the list.

In part, because I get a vote. Although I was pleased to see that four other right-wing bloggers view her equally askance. That’s a step forward from last year, when she didn’t even make the list. Three others for whom I voted and did not make the cut were Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and John Podhoretz.

I do note my chagrin at forgetting to vote for Andrew Sullivan and Bill O’Reilly. I can only suppose that my subconscious no longer considers them to even nominally belong to the political Right.

An ex-male comments on Feminstasi:

The upbringing point would be a good one if anti-feminists weren’t outbreeding feminists to an almost ridiculous degree. The second half of what you said is really important, though. I think we all need to step up our public activity a notch. Just keeping your friends in line isn’t good enough. I don’t know about you, but I have precious few non-feminist friends in my social circle.

That’s almost surely because non-feminists, like most people, dislike those who believe it is their job to keep us in line and will not accept them as friends. I don’t tolerate feminists, who can seldom keep their mouths shut when faced with anything deemed overly Patriarchal, and I find that unhesitatingly administering a sound intellectual beat-down tends to cause them to keep a safe distance away from me and my social circle. The nice thing is that you never have to start anything, you can always count on a snarky and inappropriate comment to provide you with a socially acceptable opening. A Platonic, questioning approach beginning with “why would you say that?” usually combines maximum effect with minimal upset to neutral parties.

It is interesting, however, to see that a member of the Equalitarian Hemlock Society is capable of grasping the demographic doom that awaits feminism.

By the way, this is a thread that just keeps on giving. Check out this hilarious exchange:

DENNIS: I don’t understand how we’re supposed to get anywhere with the issue of rapists without at least mentioning rape victims. If we restrict ourselves so, it seems like all we can say is “Boy, rapists sure are bastards!”, and then move on to a cat-picture thread.

ZUZU: Mentioning rape victims is one thing. However, you’re trying to put the responsibility for stopping rape on their shoulders by saying things like this: “In a sense, women do need greater social responsibility… namely, they need to report their own rapes and press charges.”

Women do not need greater social responsibility wrt rape. We’re already blamed for it when it happens. What we need is for men to take responsibility for it, and we need to be absolutely sure that we keep the focus where it belongs, on the people who are doing the raping.

Got that? Women not only do not need to take responsibility for their own behavior, such as not mindlessly wandering into manifestly dangerous situations while being weak, helples and unarmed, but if something bad does happen to them, they shouldn’t even be responsible for reporting it!*

If I may remind the reader of my previous assertion that women in Western society are legally considered to be quasi-children, it’s very clear that feminists are the special ed class.

*I will, however, agree with Zuzu that girls who manage to get themselves killed should be absolved of any such reporting responsibilities.

J-Pod, who is going to be known as Jew-Pod soon if he doesn’t arrest his descent into an Andrew Sullivan-like spiral wherein everything from alpha to omega is viewed through an obssesively monomaniacal lens, informs us when hatred is acceptable on NRO:

Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, which means he hates Jews, which means Jews should hate him, which means I hate him and means I hope nobody goes to see Apocalypto and everybody who paid $10 for Passion of the Christ will demand his money back and if they do a special DVD edition of Chicken Run, they will replace Mel’s stinking, drunken, cop-insulting voice with the voice of Joey Buttafuoco.

Now, keep in mind that this is the same guy who only three weeks ago announced his hatred of the French for their treacherous failure to declare war on Hezbollah over their kidnapping of a French “citizen” who was serving in a foreign army. (The IDF, to be specific). So, if it’s right for Podhoretz to hate Mel Gibson for his hatred of Jews, are not Christians compelled by his logic to hate Jews like Abe Foxman, who declares the Catholic Church to be the “arch-enemy of the Jews”? Should they not also hate the organization which embraces a leader holding such views, the ironically named Anti-Defamation League? Are not the French and every French-American now correct to publicly declare their hatred of Podhoretz the Younger himself?

Of course, one can’t expect too much of P the Y, as his dearth of analytical ability is revealed here, twice over:

I made a joke earlier about how a Jew is as likely to be a Shiite sheikh as a Malibu cop. Oops. Turns out Mel Gibson’s arresting officer is Jewish. Which actually makes Mel’s remarks even worse.

No, it actually makes what had previously been completely inexplicable to everyone rather more comprehensible. People would have been similarly bewildered if Mel Gibson had gone off on “fucking niggers” while drunkenly ranting at a white cop, or, alternatively, if it had been a male officer addressed as “sugar tits”. (Insert joke about donut-eating cops here….) The fact that the arresting officer was, in fact, a Jew, makes Gibson’s anti-Jewish rant far less insane and indicates that he was primarily pissed off at a Jew in particular rather than totally unhinged about Jews in general.

It will be interesting to learn if publicly releasing the drunken rantings of individuals being arrested is standard operating procedure or if the Jewish police officer decided to act provocatively in letting the whole world know that someone had called him names.

In any event, here’s the more significant point that all of the media commentators currently indulging in the vapors seem to be avoiding. If Jews don’t run Mel’s world, then why are so many people suddenly declaring that his long career as a movie star and film director are now finished. To me, such responses would seem to indicate that Gibson’s anti-semitism has a basis in fact rather than in psychological problems.

Being an openly pro-Israel evangelical Christian, I don’t share Mel’s antipathy for Jews. However, I also don’t share the idea, held by many of my media counterparts, that Israel and every individual Jew are permanently immune from criticism by virtue of their Jewishness. It is a pity that so many commentators feel this way, because as Podhoretz’s ever-more-embarrassing rantings demonstrate, an absence of criticism is the surest way to intellectual irrelevance.

NRO has been so reliably and remarkably wrong over the last year that I’m beginning to think I may have to move them from Day Trips to Target-Rich Environments.

Wheeler sums up some European differences:

I lived for four years in Europe as a hitchhiker. The Greeks hate the Turks. The Italians love everybody. The English hate the French. The German hates the French and the Turk. The Dane hate the Swedes and the Swede hates the Danish. And everybody, but the Italians, hate the French.

Actually, the Italians quite dislike the Germans but they tend to keep it quiet since they get a lot of tourist traffic from Germany. Surprisingly, despite their obvious ethnic kinship and the fact that their national anthem, The Wilhelmus, boasts of their Germanic blood, the Dutch really hate the Germans.

The Germans fear and admire the Brits, everyone regards the Swiss with friendly suspicion, looks down on the Poles and considers inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, especially the Muslim Bosnians, to be problematic lowlives. The least popular people, however, are definitely the Albanians.

And with the exception of the Italians, pretty much everyone despises Israel and the Jews as reliable troublemakers. I had lunch with some Milanese yesterday, one of whose grandfather had saved twenty Jewish children during the German occupation of Italy, and they were disturbed at the way in which Judenhassen is beginning to come back in vogue again.

I don’t know why people are surprised by this. The Fourth German Reich is already in place, and if you disregard Barbarossa, it already rules over nearly as much territory as the Third Reich ever managed. The fact that it is far more civilized than its brutal National Socialist predecessor means nothing, so were its first two iterations.

LW is impressed:

Your column makes me shudder. It sounds like a liberal leftist propaganda to make us give up our will and allow enemies to rule us. But you present sound facts and reasonable interpretation. In that, I hear shades of Jeremiah, and understand better (all the time) how his contemporaries could brand him a traitor to God and country. Nevertheless, he was presenting truth, and exhorted them to repentance so they could follow God’s plan and truly succeed for Him.

Glen from AOL, on the other hand, not so much:

Your grasp of military history is bunk. Technologically advanced societies defeat less advanced societies nearly every time. That is why Europe dominated the world for the past 700 years, why English is the international language spoken at every airport control tower, why the dollar and Euro are the international currencies why Israel exists and why this is the year 2006.

You pick a few categories of weapons where the Germans were superior in World War II, but they were not the important categories that won the war. Big deal. So what the if Germans had better machine guns, submarines, tanks and rockets that were superior to ours? Assuming that theirs were superior in quality, they were inferior in quantity and they did not have four-engine bombers, long-range fighter escorts, aircraft carriers, or good airborne radars that could locate submarines at night. They wasted their effort developing rockets that were so inaccurate that they could barely hit London and had nothing like the P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator or the B-29 Superfortress (with or without atomic bombs).

If we have the weaker horse, it is because we have too many liberals, pacifists and isolationist conservatives like you.

Yes, those Messerschmitt 262s and 163Bs had nothing on the American prop jobbies. And I’m curious to know why the Germans would have concerned themselves with hunting submarines when their surface navy was confined to port for most of the war. As for the Euro, I’ll just leave it to Glen to discover for himself what currency was weighted the most heavily when it was created.

As for the weaker horse, pointing fingers doesn’t even begin to change the fact that national will, let alone hemispheric will, to win the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism simply does not exist. Why it doesn’t exist and who is responsible is almost completely beside the point.

Goldberg considers Fukuyama on NRO:

So the great irony is this: In Fukuyama’s telling, the new neoconservatism of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan emerges as in many respects the opposite of the old neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. This younger generation, which never went through a disillusionment-migration cycle from Left to Right, simply never internalized the lessons of being deeply wrong about something truly important.

Good piece, I wish I’d written the first half of it. It’s interesting to see how Fukuyama pinpoints the Leninism of the current Republican administration; it’s the same reason I refer to them as World Demokratic Revolutionists.

As for the latter half, since I support neither neoconservatism nor neocons, I regard the difference as being trivial and primarily a matter of varying enthusiasm for the use of government force.

And here I thought we were all were big on free speech:

Jewish groups have called for Oscar-winning American actor Mel Gibson to be ostracised from Hollywood and investigated for breach of race hate laws after his drunken anti-Semitic outburst to a Los Angeles police officer.

Gibson issued a lengthy statement Saturday apologizing for saying “despicable” things to sheriff’s deputies when he was arrested for investigation of driving under the influence of alcohol.

The U.S. Anti-Defamation League said that the apology was not enough and that Gibson should be ostracised by his peers.

Considering that the last time Hollywood decided to ostracize him for his anti-semitism, he made a bajillion dollars and created an alternative distribution channel, old Abe and company might want to rethink their customary point-and-shriek strategy. What Mel said certainly wasn’t polite, but neither was it criminal. I get email saying worse about me nearly every single week, why isn’t the Anti-Defamation League calling for the investigation of my critics?