Tag: politics

The new Spanish Inquisition

Zerohedge reports on some new Spanish laws:

1. If you photograph security personnel and then share these images on social media: up to €30.000 fine (particularly if photo exposes violence used against a member of the public). This fine could increase depending on the number of Instagram or social media followers you have.
2. Tweet or retweet information or the “location of an organized protest” can now be interpreted as an act of terrorism as it incites others to “commit a crime” (now that “demonstrating” in many ways has become a crime). Sound “1984”-ish? Read about Orwell and his time in Spain.
3. Snowden-like whistle blowing is now defined as an act of terrorism. If you write for a local publication, be careful what you print, whom you speak to, and whether the government is listening.
4. Visiting or consulting terrorist websites – even for investigative purposes – can be interpreted as an act of terrorism. Make sure you use “Tor” browser, reject cookies, and don’t allow pop-ups. Not to mention, don’t post it on your Facebook timeline!
5. Be careful with the royal jokes! Any satirical
comment against the royal family is a new crime “against the Crown”. For
example, “What did Leticia and the Bishop have to say after they ––“
(SORRY CENSORED).
6. No more hassling elected members of the government or
local authorities – even if they say one thing in order to be elected,
but then go and do the exact opposite. Confronting them about
this hypocritical behavior. Even if you see them in the street chatting
to a street cleaner, dining at their favorite expensive restaurant, or
having their shoes shined by that physics graduate who cannot find a
decent job in the country, hassling them about their behavior is now a
criminal offence.
7. Has your local river been so polluted by that plastic factory
along the edge that all life has extinguished? Well, tough! Greenpeace
or similar protests are now finable from €601–€30.000.
8. Protests in a spontaneous way outside Parliament are now illegal.
For example if Parliament passes a hugely unpopular bill, or are
debating something extremely important to you or your community, it is
now finable from €601 – €30.000. Tip: Use Google Maps to protest just
around the corner – but don’t tweet the location!
9. Obstructing an officer in the course of their business, “resisting
arrest”, refusing to leave a demonstration when told, or getting in the
way of a swinging baton are all now finable offences from €601 –
€30.000.
10. Showing lack of respect to officers of the law is an immediate fine of €100 – €600.
Answering back, asking a disrespectful question, making a funny face,
showing your bottom to an officer of the law, or telling him/her that
their breath reminds you of your dog’s underparts is now, sadly, not
advisable.
11. Occupying, squatting, or refusing to leave an office, business,
bank or other place until your complaint has been heard as a protest is
now a €100 – €600 fine (no more flash mobs).
12. Digital protests: Writing something that could technically “disturb the peace” is a now a crime. Bloggers beware, for no one has yet defined whose peace you could be disturbing.

Looks like the USA doesn’t have the only government that is actively preparing to face widespread civil unrest. I wonder why that might be?

Why Rand Paul lost my vote

Scott Morefield explains:

As a libertarian-leaning Constitutionalist, I enthusiastically supported Ron Paul in the last two elections. So nobody who knows me was surprised when I declared my early excitement and support of his son, Rand, as a possible presidential prospect even before he won his Senate seat. Both father and son extol so many of the liberty-centered virtues that once made this country great and which are so rarely articulated today.

However, unlike his more ideologically-pure father, whose “take-me-or-leave-me” approach wasn’t one to sacrifice even a sliver of his beliefs for electoral victory, Rand is a bit more pragmatic. As someone who was at times frustrated by Ron Paul’s intransigence on even seemingly unimportant issues to the detriment of his public perception (come on, does anybody in the country actually think killing Bin Laden was a bad thing?), I can appreciate Rand’s desire to at least keep his finger on the pulse of what collective America is feeling….

No matter how you slice it, the fact remains that this Stalinesque push
to remove any vestiges of those “evil” Confederates is bound to alienate
a significant percentage of the very voters Rand Paul should be able to
count on as his base. So, when Rand adds his voice to the commissars,
those of us in Southern flyover country to whom that flag represents the
honor of thousands of Americans who fought and died for their homeland,
not slavery, bristle just a little. We care about a lot of things,
including getting along with folks of all races, but we don’t give two
hoots about what the “beltway” says is politically-correct.

I think Rand Paul sank his campaign when he endorsed the Confederate flag purge. He’s not as bad as Jeb Bush, of course, even Hillary Clinton may not be. But I think most of his father’s supporters, who have always viewed him with a certain degree of skepticism and concern, will look elsewhere as a result of his opposition to the symbol of the South.

When politicians are too clever by half

Apparently Greek Prime Minister Tsipras planned to sell Greece out all along, but he failed to anticipate either the rapaciousness of the Euro-creditors or the national pride of the Greek people:

 Like a tragedy from Euripides, the long struggle between Greece and Europe’s creditor powers is reaching a cataclysmic end that nobody planned, nobody seems able to escape, and that threatens to shatter the greater European order in the process.

Greek premier Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday’s referendum on EMU bail-out terms, let alone to preside over a blazing national revolt against foreign control. He called the snap vote with the expectation – and intention – of losing it. The plan was to put up a good fight, accept honourable defeat, and hand over the keys of the Maximos Mansion, leaving it to others to implement the June 25 “ultimatum” and suffer the opprobrium.

This ultimatum came as a shock to the Greek cabinet. They thought they were on the cusp of a deal, bad though it was. Mr Tsipras had already made the decision to acquiesce to austerity demands, recognizing that Syriza had failed to bring about a debtors’ cartel of southern EMU states and had seriously misjudged the mood across the eurozone.

Instead they were confronted with a text from the creditors that upped the ante, demanding a rise in VAT on tourist hotels from 7pc (de facto) to 23pc at a single stroke. Creditors insisted on further pension cuts of 1pc of GDP by next year and a phase out of welfare assistance (EKAS) for poorer pensioners, even though pensions have already been cut by 44pc. They insisted on fiscal tightening equal to 2pc of GDP in an economy reeling from six years of depression and devastating hysteresis. They offered no debt relief. The Europeans intervened behind the scenes to suppress a report by the International Monetary Fund validating Greece’s claim that its debt is “unsustainable”. The IMF concluded that the country not only needs a 30pc haircut to restore viability, but also €52bn of fresh money to claw its way out of crisis.

They rejected Greek plans to work with the OECD on market reforms, and with the International Labour Organisation on collective bargaining laws. They stuck rigidly to their script, refusing to recognise in any way that their own Dickensian prescriptions have been discredited by economists from across the world.

“They just didn’t want us to sign. They had already decided to push us out,” said the now-departed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

So Syriza called the referendum. To their consternation, they won, igniting the great Greek revolt of 2015, the moment when the people finally issued a primal scream, daubed their war paint, and formed the hoplite phalanx.

Mr Tsipras is now trapped by his success. “The referendum has its own dynamic. People will revolt if he comes back from Brussels with a shoddy compromise,” said Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP. “Tsipras doesn’t want to take the path of Grexit, but I think he realizes that this is now what lies straight ahead of him,” he said.

I was wondering why the Greek government seemed to be so paralyzed; they should already have the drachma ready to go. Instead, they’re just doing nothing, as far as anyone can tell.

This is why representative democracy is a complete failure. The elected representatives are less courageous and less decisive and less willing to act in the national interest than the people.

UPDATE: Zerohedge notes that IT HAS BEGUN. Businesses are listing prices in drachma.

Another SJW lie

As with the marriage parody, SJWs are using the public high ground to create a false picture of changing public views with regards to the Confederate flag.

Washington (CNN)American public opinion on the Confederate flag remains about where it was 15 years ago, with most describing the flag as a symbol of Southern pride more than one of racism, according to a new CNN/ORC poll. And questions about how far to go to remove references to the Confederacy from public life prompt broad racial divides.

The poll shows that 57% of Americans see the flag more as a symbol of Southern pride than as a symbol of racism, about the same as in 2000 when 59% said they viewed it as a symbol of pride.

In other words, nothing has substantially changed, but the government-media-corporate alliance has teamed up in order to sell their version of reality. Confederate flag backers can puncture this propaganda by following the lead of the pro-gun forces and destroying the careers of every politician who supported the attack on the flag, beginning with South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the former Nimrata Nikki Randhawa would completely fail to understand Southern Pride. Along with Sen. Edward Kennedy, she is Exhibit A in the inability of second- and third-generation immigrants to understand the spirit of America, even though they were born inside its geographical boundaries, and even though they believe themselves to love and be loyal to America.

No return

It’s no wonder conservatives are reliably losing when you consider how long they have enthusiastically accepted their enemies as their “opinion leaders”:

A Conservative commentator has tearfully urged the Republican Party to accept gay marriage to prevent the party becoming a “relic”. Speaking in an interview with CNN shortly after the historic Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage was handed down on Friday, S.E. Cupp was moved to tears as she explained gay people just wanted “the human dignity the rest of us have”.

If you want to win, stop paying any attention whatsoever to ideological enemies simply because they put on your jersey and claim to be one of you while arguing the opposite of your opinions and rejecting your beliefs. 

If people want “human dignity”, then they need to earn it by behaving in a dignified manner, not by throwing “pride” parades and behaving like pagans.

And as a general rule, don’t listen to anyone who substitutes tears for rational argument. That’s the lowest and least intelligent form of rhetoric. Accepting the gay agenda has already made relics of the Anglican and Episcopalian Churches. Following suit will do the same for the Republican Party. And it will do the same for the United States of America.

The USA has observably made its choice. It has abandoned faith in God for trust in the god of this world and prince of this age. And once faith has departed from a nation, it seldom returns, as Juan Donoso Cortés observed in his speech to the Spanish Parliament on January 4, 1849.

There are only two possible forms of repression: one internal and the other external; religious repression and political repression. They are of such a nature that when the religious thermometer is high, the thermometer of political repression is low; and, when the religious thermometer low, the political thermometer—political repression—tyranny is high. That is a law of humanity, a law of history. If you want proof, Gentlemen, look at the state of the world, look at the state of society in the ages before the Cross; tell me what happened when there was no internal repression, when there was no religious repression. That was a society of tyrants and slaves. Give me the name of a single people at this period which possessed no slaves and knew no tyrant. It is an incontrovertible and evident fact, which has never been questioned. Liberty, real liberty, the liberty of all and for all, only came into the world with the Savior of the world; that again is an incontrovertible fact, recognized even by the Socialists.

Gentlemen, I beg you to pay attention; I am going to present you with the most marvelous parallel which history can offer us. You have seen that in antiquity, when religious repression couldn’t go any lower because there was none, political repression rose until it couldn’t go any higher, because it went all the way up to tyranny. Very well then, with Jesus Christ, where religious repression is born, political repression completely disappears. This is so true, that when Jesus Christ founded a society with His disciples, that society was the only one which has ever existed without a government. Between Jesus Christ and His disciples there was no other government than the love of the Master for His disciples and the love of the disciples for their Master. That is, that when the internal repression was complete, liberty was absolute.

Let us pursue the parallel. Now come the apostolic times, which I shall stretch from the time of the Apostles, properly speaking, to the period when Christianity mounted the Capitol in the reign of Constantine the Great. At this time, Gentlemen, the Christian religion, that is, the internal, religious repression, was at its zenith; but in spite of that, as always happens in human societies, a germ began to develop, a mere germ of license and religious liberty. So, Gentlemen, observe the parallel: with this beginning of a fall in the religious thermometer there corresponds the beginning of a rise in the political thermometer. There is still no government yet, for government is not yet necessary; but it is already necessary to have the germ of government. In point of fact, in the Christian society of the time, there were no real magistrates, but there were adjudicators and arbitrators who form the germ of government. There was really nothing more than that; the Christians of apostolic times engaged in no lawsuits and never appealed to the Courts: their disputes were settled by the arbitrators. Notice, Gentlemen, how the scope of government is enlarged with the growth of corruption.

Then came feudal times. Religion was still at its zenith during this period, but was vitiated up to a point by human passions. What happened in the political sphere? A real and effective government was already essential; but the weakest kind was good enough. As a result, feudal monarchy was established, the weakest of all kinds of monarchy.

Still pursuing our parallel, we come to the sixteenth century. Then, with the great Lutheran Reformation, with this great scandal which was at the same time political, social and religious, with this act of the intellectual and moral emancipation of the peoples, we see simultaneously the growth of the following institutions. In the first place, and immediately, the feudal monarchies became absolute. Gentlemen, you believe that a monarchy cannot go beyond absolutism: what can a government be beyond absolute? However, the thermometer of political repression had to rise even higher, because the religious thermometer continued to fall: and the political thermometer did in fact rise higher. What did they create then? Standing armies. Do you know what standing armies are? To answer that question, it is enough to know what a soldier is: a soldier is a slave in uniform. So you see once again, when religious repression falls, political repression rises, it rises as high as absolutism and even higher. It was not enough for governments to be absolute; they asked for and obtained the privilege of having a million arms.

In spite of this, Gentlemen, the political thermometer had to continue to rise because the religious thermometer kept falling; it rose still higher. What new institution was created then? The governments said: We have a million arms and it is not enough; we need something more, we need a million eyes: and they created the police, and with the police a million eyes. In spite of this, Gentlemen, the political thermometer and political repression had to rise to a higher pitch still, because in spite of everything, the religious thermometer kept falling; so they rose higher.

It was not enough for the governments to have a million arms and a million eyes; they wanted to have a million ears: and so they got them through administrative centralization, by means of which all claims and complaints finally reached the government.

Well, Gentlemen, that was not enough; the religious thermometer continued to fall and so the political thermometer had to rise higher. And it rose. Governments said: A million arms, a million eyes and a million ears are not sufficient to repress the people, we need something more; we must have the privilege of being simultaneously present everywhere. This privilege also they obtained: the telegraph was invented.

Such, Gentlemen, was the state of Europe and the world when the first rumblings of the most recent revolution told us all that there is still not enough despotism on the earth, since the religious thermometer remains below zero. And now the choice between two things lies before us.

I have promised to speak today with complete frankness and I shall keep my word.

Well then, it’s either one of these two: either a religious reaction will come, or it will not. If there is a religious reaction, you will soon see that as the religious thermometer rises, the political thermometer will begin to fall, naturally, spontaneously, without the slightest effort on the part of peoples, governments, or men, until the tranquil day comes when the peoples of the world are free. But if, on the contrary, and this is a serious matter (it is not customary to call the attention of Consultative Assemblies to questions of this nature; but the gravity of events today is my excuse and I think that your benevolence will also excuse me); I say again, Gentlemen, that if the religious thermometer continues to fall, I know not whither we are going. I do not know, Gentlemen, and I shiver when I think of it. Consider the analogies I have put before your eyes; if no government at all was necessary when religious repression was at its zenith; when religious repression is no more, no type of government will be enough—all despotisms will be insufficient.

This is putting one’s finger into the wound, Gentlemen—this is the problem which faces Spain, Europe, humanity, and the world.

Notice one thing, Gentlemen. In the ancient world, tyranny was fierce and devastating; and yet this tyranny was physically limited, since all States were small and international relations between them all were completely impossible; consequently tyranny on the grand scale was impossible in antiquity, with one exception: Rome. But today, how greatly are things changed! The way is prepared for a gigantic, colossal, universal, and immense tyrant; everything is ready for it. Gentlemen, observe that there are no physical or moral resistances anymore—there are no physical resistances anymore because with steamboats and railroads there are no borders any longer; there are no physical resistances anymore because with the electric telegraph there are no distances anymore; and there are no moral resistances because all wills are divided and all patriotisms are dead. Tell me, therefore, if I am right or wrong to be worried about the near future of the world; tell me whether, in dealing with this question, I am not touching upon the real problem.

There is only one thing that can avert the catastrophe—one and only one: we shall not avert it by granting more liberty, more guarantees and new constitutions; we shall avert it if all of us, according to our strength, do our utmost to stimulate a healthy reaction—a religious reaction. Now is this possible, Gentlemen? Yes, it is. But is it likely? I answer in deepest sorrow: I do not think it is likely. I have seen and known many men who returned to their faith after having separated themselves from it; unfortunately, I have never known any nation which returned to the Faith after having lost it.

“We shall obey God rather than man”

The Lutheran Missouri Synod responds to the Supreme Court’s further rejection of representative democracy yesterday:

A one-person majority of the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong – again. Some 40 years ago, a similarly activist court legalized the killing of children in the womb. That decision has to date left a wake of some 55 million Americans dead. Today, the Court has imposed same-sex marriage upon the whole nation in a similar fashion. Five justices cannot determine natural or divine law. Now shall come the time of testing for Christians faithful to the Scriptures and the divine institution of marriage (Matthew 19:3–6), and indeed, a time of testing much more intense than what followed Roe v. Wade.

Like Roe v. Wade, this decision will be followed by a rash of lawsuits. Through coercive litigation, governments and popular culture continue to make the central post-modern value of sexual freedom override “the free exercise of religion” enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

The ramifications of this decision are seismic. Proponents will seek to drive Christians and Christian institutions out of education at all levels; they will press laws to force faithful Christian institutions and individuals to violate consciences in work practices and myriad other ways. We will have much more to say about this.

During some of the darkest days of Germany, a faithful Lutheran presciently described how governments lose their claim to legitimate authority according to Romans 13…. “We shall obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). Christians will now begin to learn what it means to be in a state of solemn conscientious objection against the state.

One almost has to laugh at the disingenuous way in which the rainbow lobby is frantically claiming the matter to be settled. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Lutheran pastor observed, the issue is now as settled as abortion in the USA, which means it will now become a much bigger and more divisive political issue than before.

The most significant problem with the decision has nothing to do with the actual issue at hand, but the way in which it rendered hundreds of millions of votes cast over decades to be totally irrelevant. The whole point of voting on divisive political matters like this is to avoid politics by other means. But when voting is no longer a permissible option, what else does that leave?

Nor was conscientious objection the only response to the decision, as ISIS took a decidedly different approach to the #LoveWins hashtag. “#Love”, such as it is, already has a bodycount.

 That’s “diversity”? It sure all looks the same to me.

¡Jeb!

No, gracias. I think we’ve had two too many Bushes as president already:

Jeb Bush, a scion of the most recognizable family in Republican politics who fashioned an image as a sober-minded conservative truth-teller while governor of Florida, is running for president.

Bush made his formal announcement Monday afternoon here in his adopted hometown during an appearance at Miami Dade College. His candidacy comes after a week-long European tour and months of intensive behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that erased long-standing doubts about his White House ambitions.

Arguing that the country is on “a very bad course,” Bush told supporters in Miami that the nation had a decision to make.

“The question for me is what am I going to do about it,” he said Monday afternoon. “And I’ve decided: I’m a candidate for president of the United States of America.”

 ¡Mierda! Jeb Bush is not a candidate for president of the United States of America, he is running for the presidency of the United Nations of America and Mexico. I would vote for Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, or the corpse of Josef Stalin before I would vote for a pan-NorteAmericanist like Jeb Bush.

And I’m the great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary.

The diversity camp crumbles

Anyone who has studied the history of racially and culturally diverse societies knew this was inevitable:

A complaint Friday alleged that Harvard University discriminates
against Asian-American applicants by setting a higher bar for admissions
than that faced by other groups.

The complaint, filed by a
coalition of 64 organizations, says the university has set quotas to
keep the numbers of Asian-American students significantly lower than the
quality of their applications merits. It cites third-party academic
research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on
average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher
than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American
students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The
exam is scored on a 2400-point scale.

The complaint was filed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

“Many
studies have indicated that Harvard University has been engaged in
systemic and continuous discrimination against Asian-Americans during
its very subjective ‘Holistic’ college admissions process,” the
complaint alleges. The coalition is seeking a federal
investigation and is requesting Harvard “immediately cease and desist
from using stereotypes, racial biases and other discriminatory means in
evaluating Asian-American applicants.”

This action is particularly significant for its symbolism; Harvard is the throne of American left-liberalism. But the nominally ideological alliance of minorities against the white majority was only going to last as long as the minorities felt they benefited more from that alliance than from flexing their muscle in their own direct interests. Based on what we’re seeing from the Asians in the political world, they are all but done with their “liberal” alliance with blacks, Jews, and Hispanics.

It won’t surprise me if Asians magically become more “conservative” in the next decade as they switch to a Yellow-White (Blue) alliance against the White (Red)-Black-Brown alliance. Politics in the USA and in the UK are becoming less about ideology and more about the straightforward racial power struggles that have historically characterized most diverse societies.

And yes, I use the Red-Blue colors in their original form; Red being the appropriate color for those of the more socialist inclinations.

There is no democracy

It’s time for the Men of the West to understand they do not live in democracies, or even democratic republics anymore. They live in oligarchies. The Ciceronian political cycle predicts aristocracy follows democracy, and that is precisely what we are seeing in the USA and in the UK. What Carroll Quigley described as the “Anglo-American Establishment” has turned its back on even the pretense of democracy known as “representative democracy”.

Airball sent me the following tweet:

“UKIP got 5 million votes & 1 seat. The SNP got 1.5m votes & 30 seats. This is not democracy. Time for English people to speak up.”

That’s not only not democracy, it’s not even representation. It’s not “one man, one vote” either. People still complain that a black individual was counted as three-fifths of a person in the southern States of America, but in the UK in 2015, a UKIP voter is counted as one-one hundredth of an SNP voter.

And it should come as no surprise that the two parties that made the rules, the Conservative and Labor parties, just happen to be the two parties that most benefit in terms of their percentage of seats won exceeding their percentage of the popular vote.

In the information age, there is no longer any reason not to adopt direct democracy. The technology already exists to utilize it. And all the existing evidence from various referenda around the world proves that direct democracy is more sober and sane than the misnamed “representative democracy” it would replace. All the worst features of “mob rule” are present, and then some, in the corrupt version of “representative democracy” that presently dominates; it is considerably easier to buy or corrupt a few hundred “representatives” than hoodwink 50 percent of the population.

In any event, in light of the Tory victory, it should be interesting to see how long it takes David Cameron to start weaseling out of his pledge to hold a referendum on Britain leaving the EU.

An unexpected betrayal

Both Israelis and American Jews are beginning the learn the cost of being House Jews for the Democratic Party:

Sometime in the fall of 2008 I sat down at my desk and banged out an impassioned letter to my sister. She was on the fence, I knew, about the young senator from Illinois who was running for president. There was some talk in the family that perhaps, on at least one occasion, during the Bush years, she had voted Republican.

We chalked it up to her decision, made as a college freshman, to marry a skilled and caring med student, who hailed from Michigan and loved cars. He drove a Chevy, Grand Am — candy red, I think — and called the city of his birth Dee-troit.

Sure, we realized, he was a terrific father and a stand-up guy all around, but he distrusted all things organic — he was in the habit of scrubbing my sister’s farmers’ market apples with hot water and soap — and he wore jeans while skiing. He loved mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce, had a soft spot for ATVs and leaf-blowers.

In short, we didn’t ask who he voted for — there was some hope that he might be a Libertarian — but, in the fall of 2008, the facts seemed quite clear: He was going with John McCain and Sarah Palin. My sister, I feared, might follow suit.

And so I took to the computer. In an email entitled “Politics” — which I reread this week for the first time in the wake of the nuclear framework deal agreed upon in Lausanne, a deal that has left me with the clammy feeling of anticipated betrayal — I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ‘shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights. I even told her to read Frederick Douglass.

Then I lampooned McCain for never having sent an email and mentioned his age. “McCain is 72,” I wrote. “He has had four of five bouts of melanoma. He spent five and a half years in a POW camp. He is dad’s age. Dad is in great shape for his age. He has not been to the Hanoi Hilton. Yet he falls asleep at dinner regularly. Something could happen to McCain. In walks the moose hunter.”

As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony: The nation that had lived under persecution for two thousand years because of its statelessness had, in a sublime moment, carved out a state in its ancient homeland and revived its wizened language only to sacrifice that historic achievement on the altar of — of all things! — territorial expansion.

A deal with the Palestinians, pushed forward by American muscle, was in Israel’s interest, I said. Without a two-state solution, guided by someone like Barack Obama, “Palestinians will outnumber us and will no longer consider 1967 a relevant date. The battle will be for all of Israel and they will win. Everyone will be yelling ‘Apartheid.’ Within two generations we’ll see the destruction of the Third Temple.”

Moreover, I noted, Bush, with his love of Zion, had been a disaster, inadvertently empowering Iran. Obama, with his cool detachment, was just what we needed.

Lastly, I encouraged her to vote Democrat, now, before her Alex P. Keaton-like eldest got the right to vote and cancelled her out. And she did (I think, maybe). She even wrote to me about the beauty of that cold January day in 2009 when he was sworn into office.

What a pity this stab-in-the-back could not possibly have been foreseen… even if I failed to note that his ritual genuflection to AIPAC was even less genuine than it appeared to be at the time.


After eight years of experiencing regular pain between the shoulder blades, conservatives can enjoy the prospect of the knife sticking out of liberal backs.