I understand party loyalty. What about loyalty to your country? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Is it too late to awake? Paul Revere is long dead! (See 2 below.)
Getting real? (See 2a below.)
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From the day Obama burst on the scene I concluded he would prove incompetent.
After seven years of his maudlin self-pity and "pissy fanny" display of pique, I have concluded he is also inelegant. He does not have, nor ever did, the temperament for being president.
If that is not dangerous enough, there is another even greater more pernicious threat we must overcome. Obama will be gone in a year and though the damage he has done will linger PC'ism could last forever.
In my opinion, PC'ism is a phony war perpetrated upon society by liberals and progressives who are engaged in false displays of sensitivity. They sit around their wine and cheese events thinking up ways to restrict speech under the guise they are caring for the feelings of fellow citizens.
Yes, there are thoughtless people in this world who are insensitive in their speech and actions. However, the damage done by PC'ism has reached the level of a world wide scourge and unless it is buried everything that freedom brings will also die. Free speech will/is become (ing) the first casualty..
This virus has now reached our campuses and will spread unless it is laid to rest. PC'ism has been allowed to morph into a subtle ploy used by anarchist. Most thinking people should know what that means and where it will take us.
God save us from the professed do-gooders and elitist intellectuals! (See 3 and 3a below.)
This from a very dear Jewish friend and fellow memo reader regarding Obama. "He’s what my father would call a farbisiner (hater). He hates whites and Jews. Hates Jews double (because they’re also white). Hates Israel.
Combine all that with his instinctive hatred for America and his anti-colonialism—which has brought us to this path.
And Hillary is doubling down on his policies. She’s hoping Obama will call off the dogs. Sadly, it will probably work. And she will win. Depressing.
Have a nice day."
My response: "How can I have a nice day after that? "
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I believe a Trump nomination might have strong appeal to those who feel deeply how we are being under-served by Congress and have been abused by Obama but Liberals and Progressives do not feel deeply about this and those in the middle, who basically, decide who will become president, are also not as angry and frustrated. Trump's appeal will not carry the day as was the case with Goldwater.
What Republicans need to do is select an accomplished executive who has a proven political record, is intellectually honest and will do what he says and has campaigned on and that still leads me back to Kasich and Bush but, for a variety of reasons, I am not sure they could be elected either. Kasich, because he comes across physically unappealing and weak and JEB, because he has not displayed fire, conviction and run a sterling campaign.
In view of Paris, Christie could be a dark horse. He is a good debater, his record as governor has to be considered in light of the fact that he is governing New Jersey, a state beyond hope that has been tarnished for centuries by corruption, Democrats, unions and the Mafia. He also can be abrasive.
With all of the above, I have yet to mention the abject tragic ridiculousness of America torpedoing itself with a female version of Obama simply because she wears a pant suit.
If we are so hell bent for self destruction then so be it because America would not be worth saving after 4 or 8 years of Hillarious. Everything our nation stands for would be flushed down the toilet were she elected. Veracity, integrity, honesty and the list of virtuous adjectives is endless.
Would you really want to have her as a business partner? If so then you are a fool soon to be parted from your mutual investment and maybe even your life. the Clintons' have associated with many no longer living.
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Dick
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The American Left Hates Americans More Than They Hate ISIS
By Erick Erickson
There are a number of compelling arguments to continue to allow Syrian refugees into the United States. A number of prominent evangelical leaders are making those arguments. But the American left is not. Though they favor bringing Syrian refugees into the country, they have decided that Americans are just a bunch of racists who cannot bear debate.
The President of the United States has taken the tacit of claiming it is all political. To the left, everything is political so they cannot fathom that some Americans might have looked at the events of Paris and decided we might want to be more cautious. Nope. To the political left, it is polling, politics, and racism.
Remember, this is a President of the United States who has claimed authority for actions based on polling. Willfully ignoring American opposition to Obamacare in polls, more than once the President has cited polling for other initiatives, including immigration. But on this issue of immigration of refugees, the public has decidedly turned against the President. The public, therefore, is racist.
American leftists in the press, online, and offline are railing against their fellow Americans for daring to object to the refugee plans. The public demands an aggressive response to ISIS and liberals are actually arguing that to fight ISIS would give ISIS what it wants. Therefore, we must not fight.
Prominent liberals are arguing that we should be advocating gay marriage to stop ISIS. Seriously. Others are offering up empty thoughts for Paris and putting French flags on their Facebook pages. But fighting? No, that is too awful to contemplate. We cannot do that because ISIS demands it.
The American public is fairly well united at this time. They do not want Syrian refugees and they want to unleash hell on ISIS. It is the American left, led by President Obama, opposing any action demanded by the public. They treat their fellow Americans with contempt in ways they do not treat ISIS. They say we should be more worried about Americans with guns than ISIS. They say any American who objects to bringing in Syrian refugees must be a bigot.
It would be nice if the President and the left were even half as vile to ISIS as they are to their fellow Americans. But ISIS is an abstraction to the American left. You, however, are their neighbor. So they ponder ISIS and hate you.
1a)
Our Bitter and Graceless President
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2)>> The Peaceful Majority should Speak
A German's View on Islam - worth reading because this is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist--a man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, and owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of our world had come.
My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
The average Japanese individual, prior to World War II, was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians, most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt. Yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
Islamic prayers have now been introduced into Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa too while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?! To whom? Not to the vast majority of Canadians!).
The Islamic way is only peaceful until the fanatics move in.
In Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food products in your local supermarket. Foods on aircraft have the halal emblem, just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding throughout the world.
In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of ?no-go? zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuses to acknowledge British law.
As for we who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts -- the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
2a)
What If Obama’s Sham War Gets Real?
Yes, we get it. President Obama is unimpressed with the critics of his approach to the war ISIS is waging against the West. He didn’t become president to wage wars in the Middle East so he’s not going to treat the attacks in Paris or the manifest failure of the campaign he promised to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group as a reason to change strategies. Moreover, he is, as our Noah Rothman pointed out, eager to bait and debate Republicans about accepting Syrian refugees since he thinks his humanitarian pose enables him to rally the morale of his liberal base and to win news cycles if not wars. Moreover, even if things aren’t going well in the struggle against ISIS, his administration is under the impression that while ISIS may be able to hold its own in Iraq and Syria and strike at Europe, it doesn’t have the capability to inflict an atrocity in an American city. It may be a phony war that he’s waging but, so long as America remains safe, then perhaps his ill-timed comment uttered hours before the Paris attacks about ISIS being “contained” is correct in a limited sense.
The president’s confidence is rooted in his deft political touch. Whatever his shortcomings as a commander-in-chief might be, this is a man who knows how to attack his political foes and to generally dish it out more than he gets. But as much as the president is portraying his critics as paranoid, prejudiced cranks who spread fear, the thing that should be really worrying Americans is that wars are unpredictable things. The president is clearly under the impression that no matter what happens on the ground in Iraq and Syria or even in European capitals, he can skate by without a real strategy to defeat ISIS until he leaves office in January 2017. But the danger here isn’t just that, contrary to his disingenuous taunts aimed at critics, the refugees he wishes to admit pose a legitimate security risk. It’s that the half-hearted war he’s orchestrating could blow up on him before he can kick the can down the road for his successor to deal with. If ISIS’s threats about attacking America are not a pose but a genuine peril, then that is not something the president can talk his way out of.
His reasoning isn’t hard to figure out. Just as the public eventually stopped talking about the ISIS snuff videos, eventually they’ll stop thinking about Paris, too, and the cable news networks will find something else to talk about. At that point, he can relax and just continue not trying to defeat ISIS. And if your only real foreign policy principle is that it was wrong to invade Iraq in 2003, then a stalemate with ISIS doesn’t seem so terrible.
But stalemates that seem like messes America should keep its distance from have a way of growing more rather than less troublesome. After all, the only reason why much of Syria is an Islamist caliphate with the rest dominated by Russia or Iran was because Obama didn’t think it was worth the effort to intervene in Syria in the first year of its civil war when an American effort might have averted the current disaster. For all of his humanitarian posturing about suffering Syrians, those refugees were created by his decision to stay out and to even back away from his “red line” pledge of action if the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its people.
American weakness and lack of leadership helped create this catastrophe and set the stage for what happened in Paris. Given the president’s refusal to look defeat in the eye and to understand that he has to adjust to reality, the question now is what ISIS will do next to expose his folly.
As we watch this hubristic display, Americans are reduced to hoping that ISIS has nothing else up its sleeve and that its threats about U.S. targets are empty boasts. So far as many Americans are concerned, the ISIS war can be phony so long as it doesn’t touch us. The best possible scenario facing the country would be if this time Obama is right, and ISIS atrocities are “contained” to Europe and the Middle East where their savagery has created a genuine humanitarian crisis. But if he’s wrong, and I pray that he isn’t, that’s something that a petulant news conference or a few well-placed barbs thrown in the direction of the GOP won’t fix.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) Political Correctness
By Jesse Bogner
You can’t watch television these days without hearing people talk about political correctness. The term is constantly used and misused to many ends. Donald Trump’s campaign revels in the idea of a need to be rid of political correctness and not-so-subtly proposes that this concept is destroying America. His message is clear. If we want to make America great again, we need to ignore the liberal agenda that bars us from offending anyone and ignores the truth. Political correctness is the reason why people no longer speak their minds and is to blame for the surge of Mexican immigrants destroying America. The danger of this refreshing idea that we need to stop being politically correct is it became a kind of code-speak for racism and bullying. Trump claimed that Mexican immigrants were criminals and racists, that John McCain wasn’t a hero because he was captured, and compared Ben Carson’s temper (also a champion of political incorrectness) to child molestation. However inane and unfounded in fact Trump is, his blatant disregard of political correctness is a large part of his popularity that has lasted much longer than any reasonable person would have assumed was possible some months back.
But Trump is for the crazies and the naïve. I still believe if he goes against Hillary in the general election, it’ll be the most devastating blow to the Republican party, since Watergate, if not ever. Most of the semi-rational minds in his party agree with this assessment. In spite of this, Trump has locked onto two key ideas are that are too powerful to ignore. Firstly, that the government is bought and sold by corporations and secondly, that political correctness is a cancer on the heart of America and the modern world. When I speak of political correctness, I don’t believe in blaming Mexican immigrants for the decline in American greatness, or the right to call women pigs judged solely by the merits of their bone structure, but I do believe political correctness is making honest discourse more and more difficult, if not impossible.
When I began thinking about how I would address this topic, I wanted to relate Trump to the sentimental narratives in the culture that the older white male demographic was fed up with. Things that I agree and disagree with to varying degrees, like the new ideal that there needs to be a term called cis gender to relate to the 99.7% of the population that is not transgender and whether, or whether or not it is racist to place minority actors in subordinate roles to white characters (taxi drivers, maids, etc.) in television and film. I wanted to explore whether Effie, the producer on Project Greenlight, was crazy for freaking out about a black man cast as a limo driver in the very bad movie they were producing. Then I wanted to counterbalance that point with Aziz Ansari’s brilliantly funny, ideologically sound depiction of a childhood where all the Indian characters were racist caricatures on Master of None. How could we find the balance in society without limiting the freedom of the artists making the movies?
I was interested in the ridiculous notion that movies should not be judged on their aesthetic merits, but on their ideological aims. Specifically, I wanted to tackle the absurd notion that the internet was aghast at Quentin Tarantino when he said in an interview profile by Bret Easton Ellis that Selma should have won an Emmy, comparing the Martin Luther King biopic to a TV movie, and compare that to the fury aimed at Francine Prose sixteen years ago for making the “shocking” statement that Maya Angelou’s heavily metaphor-laden prose was bad writing. And then came Paris.
In the grand scheme of things, does anyone really care that self-important filmmakers usually win awards over better filmmakers? It no longer felt all that important to discuss the aesthetic merits of a few heavily lauded minority writers and filmmakers (some good and some bad). I know that it’s not racist to have aesthetic problems with 12 Years a Slaveor Schindler’s List (or any film for that matter), because I look at films in a nuanced way the general population doesn’t care to. I know it is un-American to not let someone have a poor opinion about a movie tackling social issues. Then I came to the conclusion that the very levers that make it racist to criticize a fairly good movie about Martin Luther King also are to blame for the fact it is considered racist by some to criticize Europe opening its doors to 60,000,000 refugees.
I know that social progress comes with some speed bumps, as people navigate the politically correct means of delivering messages. One day you can say something one way and the next, only a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner can say it. I get it. America has a long history of racism, sexism and has been fairly horrible to most if not all minorities at some time or another and this horrifyingly continues to this day in spite of the best intentions of the majority of Americans. In our attempt to improve this undignified treatment of everyone excepting white males with money in their pockets, we need to alter language to ensure we don’t hurt each other quite as much. For the most part this is a good thing. The problem with political correctness is that it tends to ignore nuance and truth in the service of not hurting feelings.
Generally these little hiccups that disallow opinions are not so important. The problem with political correctness broadly is that people cannot criticize anything or anyone in a disadvantaged situation, for fear of going against the corporatized politically correct narrative. Sometimes when I defend Israel, I feel like I’m living in 1984. This is part of the reason Israel gets blamed for everything going on in Gaza, instead of Hamas and the other neighboring Arab nations, and it is entirely the reason that the backward Fundamentalist Muslim beliefs of hundreds of millions of the nearly two billion Muslims in the world get a free pass. We have been conditioned to believe that criticizing anything to do with a minority is fundamentally wrong. The forward thinking people have also been trained to believe that any idea coming from the right is entirely wrong. Again, a lack of nuance.
As a child of the 90s, I was indoctrinated with political correctness from an early age. One day in third grade, we were led into an assembly where we heard the thoughts of a well-meaning person Upper Middle Class woman explaining prejudice to my mostly-white Upper Middle Class Connecticut elementary school. We heard a woman consider what it was to be politically correct and why it was necessary not to call black people black. Instead, we were supposed to say African American. We were told discrimination was wrong. Towards the end, she kind of lost track of her argument and went on a soliloquy about judgment. How we should be prejudiced in our decision-making. That it was necessary to prejudge things from our experience. She gave the example of buying a car and not buying an English car because the prejudiced opinion was that those cars often had engine failure and a boatload of others problems. However, we should not make the same judgments about people.
In spite of all a lot of the other nonsense she was spewing, she was right. Individuals should always be given the benefit of the doubt. It is patently wrong to prejudge them. However, it is not patently wrong to examine the ideologies that influence these people. When we look at Paris, we should remember that Fundamentalist Islam is responsible for the death of Charlie Hebdo last year and 129 more last week. We can’t blindly follow the liberal agenda that it was a heroic act to allow tens of millions of Muslims, many of whom have been infected with Fundamentalist ideology, into Europe and expect everything to run smoothly. We cannot let our well-meaning liberal intentions confuse us into blindly accepting cultures that oppress people and endanger the freedoms we fought so hard to attain and are still fighting for. As much as I would like to help those being oppressed by ISIS, if we do not look at the world realistically for fear of offending people, what values of freedom will we be fighting for?
3a)
From Missouri to Paris
The left should be held accountable for the alternative moral orders it creates.
We are back where we came in. After 9/11, 98 U.S. senators voted to pass the USA Patriot Act. In time, the political and moral solidarity of that moment dissolved. The words “Patriot Act” became anathema on the global left—a moral affront. How long will the solidarity of Paris last?
Before Islamic terrorists murdered 132 people in Paris last Friday, the biggest news story in the U.S. was the bonfire of the academy. Protesters at the University of Missouri forced the resignation of the president of the 35,000-student campus. They said his efforts to reduce racism were “inadequate.” University officials at other campuses expressed solidarity with the Missouri protesters’ goals.
Missouri and Paris have something important in common. Both represent the inability of primary social institutions to defend themselves. American institutions of higher learning are beset by an intellectual anarchy that is eroding their reason for being. In the Middle East, unchecked anarchy has caused millions of refugees to flow into a Europe incapable of handling that crisis and now reeling from its vulnerability to terrorist attacks on normal life.
How has this happened?
Institutions survive for many reasons, but one is that they operate inside a common moral order—a foundation built over a long period of time.
In universities, the basis of that order for centuries has been free inquiry. In the U.S. the country’s founders gave constitutional protection to freedom of speech. They knew that the moral claim for free speech is that it protects the common good.
Since President Tim Wolfe’s resignation at Missouri and since the video of a shouting match between a Yale student and administrator over the university as “a place of comfort,” many articles have described the decline of free speech as a common value on American campuses. One recent student posting said simply, “Hostile speech is not free speech.” That statement describes the revision of a moral title that has been under way in academia a long time.
For years, the liberal academy shunned conservative teachers. Progressive students extended the logic: Failure to shout down certain views, they say, is itself immoral. Now these students organize themselves into mini-mobs—recently at Missouri, Yale and Dartmouth—to silence anyone on campus who they imagine disagrees with them. Once it is established that “hostile speech is not free speech,” they can do anything they want to their targets, because the opposition is . . . no good.
The pace at which university presidents—and boards of trustees, if you can call them that—are acquiescing to this alternative moral order is astonishing. Their broader institutions are left undefended, and their pained restatements of commitment to free-speech are crocodile tears. Freedom of speech is dying on the ivy vines in the U.S.
Some will say that Socialist French President François Hollande’s forceful, eloquent opposition to Islamic terror suggests the European left can still see clearly on the moral imperative of protecting a nation. I doubt it. Their support for him will wane over time, as after 2001.
Through the pitched battles over the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden’s releases of the U.S.’s antiterror surveillance software, and the controversies over interrogations of captured terrorists, the progressive-liberal opposition pressed the idea that these initiatives were not only illegal or unconstitutional but that they were self-evidently immoral.
The war on terror itself became morally distasteful to the global left. On Oct. 29, weeks before the undetected Paris rampage, the European Parliament passed a resolution that all member states should “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden.” On Wednesday, FBI head James Comey said Islamic State’s encryptions were thwarting investigations of terror recruits.
The French may indeed be austere in these matters. Their neighbors are not, and Barack Obama and John Kerry are not. Secretary Kerry expressed Tuesday his ambiguities over the Charlie Hebdo murders. A European version of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which played to cheering progressive audiences in New York, will arrive in time.
President Obama, like a campus protester, has repeatedly expressed in public his moral disdain for the antiterror policies of the previous eight years (even as he quietly continued many of them, notably for surveillance). In fact, Mr. Obama was merely aligning himself with a quarter century of Western progressivism’s moral ambivalence, at best, about national security. The terrorists kill-riding their way across Paris interrupted that long reverie, for now.
Moralistic trumping afflicts both the left and right; witness the right’s embrace of Edward Snowden’s betrayals, led by Sen. Rand Paul. But progressivized liberals run most of America’s universities, and the left presides over national security for the U.S., which means the world.
Imposing an alternative moral order on crucial institutions may be the fruit of political victory, but at some point the imposers should be held to account for the consequences of their morality in a world of practical life.
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