Without a Stable Moral Currency, There Is Terror Without Trust

Richard Fernandez

The crisis of confidence in Western institutions can be described as a crisis of morality. The public has discovered that many public figures are shams. The #MeToo sex scandals, the accusations of collaborating with foreign powers, and most recently the Epstein case have undermined the reputation of our social betters. They are perceived are no better than the common clay and probably a good deal worse. This has undermined the trust that formerly allowed them to exercise authority over the public.

Once the realization hits that the Ruling Class is not only worse than the Country Class - but incredibly incompetent - you have a truly revolutionary situation.

What changed was the realization that without morality there is no trust and without trust, nothing works. Unchecked, this will result in a low-trust society where nobody can rely on the formal rules and reliance is placed on nepotism, tribalism, personal loyalty, and threats to transact business at all...

The instability of moral currency [outside of Christianity] combined with the immutable record-keeping of blockchain systems creates the worst of all possible environments: one in which people are irrefutably responsible for acts that may become retroactively reprehensible. Today's hero can easily be tomorrow's racist. You live in fear. Just as money is the measuring stick of economic values a stable morality is the necessary metric of political and social action. Without it, you can have terror but not trust.

A MUST READ.

What kind of crazy world are we living in, when the only people speaking in defense of “traditional morals” are Chinese Communists?

Ling Bing, the women’s basketball team coach at Huazhong University of Science and Technology of Central China, posted a photo of team members carrying the banner online, The New York Times reported [April 20].

“Protect traditional Chinese morals,” read the banner. “Defend core socialist values. Resist corrosion from decadent Western thoughts. Keep homosexuality far from campus.”

Upon receiving backlash for posting the picture, Ling noted what he perceived to be a “double standard” — gay students flaunt rainbow flags at graduation, but the banner held by his basketball team was deemed wrong, as reported by The New York Times.

Is the Republican Party the party of Conservatives?

At National Review Online, Jim Geraghty asks the question: Does the RNC Deserve the Blame for Cuccinelli’s Loss? One of the comments following the essay claims that "all Republicans are Conservatives."

 

Are they?  I strongly disagree.

The national candidates that the Republicans have fielded since Reagan have all claimed to be conservative, talked the talk, but did not walk the walk. They paid lip service to smaller government and lower deficits but did nothing to achieve those objectives while in office, or were rejected at the polls.

 

I remind you that Bush 1 opposed Reagan for the nomination the first time he ran.  And that when he was elected as Reagan’s heir disposed of his followers as quickly as possible and then raised taxes, giving the Democrats their main talking point to defeat him for re-election.  Need I remind you that Bush 2, who I supported because I supported the Iraq war, created a whole new entitlement and was a profligate spender who created TARP? Both Bushes bought into the “Republicans are mean” myth, one creating those “thousand points of light” and the other trying to sell “kindler, gentler?”

 

And how about McCain who pandered to every liberal institution and movement that that he could find: amnesty, global warming, Gitmo. He was the MSM’s picture of the perfect Republican. Of course they only supported him until he was nominated. The only conservative thing he ever did was bring Sarah Palin onto his ticket. The same Sarah Palin whose back still shows the scars of McCain’s handlers’ knives.  It's hard to say who tried to damage Palin more during the 2008 election, Team McCain or Team Obama.

 

George Romney was a truly nice man; moral, upright and no one’s idea of a conservative. When he was questioned about his conservative credentials he said that he was “severely conservative.”  When you have to say that, you are not. He was chosen by the Republican establishment precisely because no one would really identify him as a genuine conservative. Rather, he was the competent alternative to Obama. How did that work out?

Did these people lie? Not in the same way Obama lied when he said that you could keep your health care plan. But they say what they want you to hear. There is a cultural gap between the Republican establishment and the conservative base. The establishment is more comfortable with the reigning orthodoxy as expressed by Obama and less comfortable with the pieties of the Right. Most of them probably agree with Obama about the “bitter clingers.” Most of them don’t really believe that marriage should be defined as between one man and one woman; they have “evolved.” Most of them would rather open the borders so that this issue would go away. They have lived with deficit spending so long that it no longer really bothers them as a fact, simply as an issue to be used to win votes. They campaign as conservatives because that’s where their base is, but when they get back to Washington, they shed their conservative disguises like you would take off your jacket except when it’s time to throw a bone to the base.

 

It's very difficult to gain prominence while defying the dominant culture.  This is especially true on the political arena because you are opposed by those who dominate the avenues of communication.  If you say you support traditional marriage, the media tells everyone that you are homophobic.  If you oppose abortion for any reason you are waging a war on women.  If you oppose waste and corruption in welfare programs you are accused of wanting to starve the poor.  If you want to enforce the immigration laws you are accused of hating immigrants and minorities.  If you want to make education more affordable by reducing the cost you are accused of being anti-children.  And the ones making the accusations are not your political opponents, but the supposedly "impartial" media.  One of the interesting statistics coming out of the election in Virginia is that Ken Cuccinelli got the majority of married men and married women.  As one wag put it he got the moral vote.

 

The commenter is wrong about his assertion, but raises a very good question. Who is a real conservative and how can you tell? What is a real conservative? That’s a question worth debating.

Worse Is the New Normal - By Design

Mark Steyn replies to a comment made by a reader:

an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change.

But we live in a world which is actually very carefully balanced on a precipice. We may be wealthy, fat, living in McManions. But the modern world around us is actually much more than simply assemblies of brick, wood and metal. It’s a finely tuned system that’s very vulnerable to disruption. Let the power go off for a few days or weeks and you quickly find that you can’t cook. Let the time expand to a few months and you run out of food because there is no transportation, no refrigeration, no light or heat, not “health care” system. High rise buildings become uninhabitable to the average urban dweller. It’s at that point that you realize that all the gadgets that make our lives what they are become useless lumps of metal and plastic little more use than the raw material from which they were formed. It’s at that point that the people who are most likely to survive are the naked nomadic herdsmen you once saw pictured in National Geographic magazine, if they actually still exist.

Steyn concludes:

Obama’s pointless, traceless super-spending is now (as they used to say after 9/11) “the new normal.” Nancy Pelosi assured the nation last weekend that everything that can be cut has been cut and there are no more cuts to be made. And the disturbing thing is that, as a matter of practical politics, she may well be right. Many people still take my correspondent’s view: If you have old money well managed, you can afford to be stupid — or afford the government’s stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a social-activist celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat whose benefits were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. If you’ve got a wind farm and you’re living large on government “green energy” investments, you can afford it. If you’ve got the contract for signing up Obamaphone recipients, you can afford it.

But out there beyond the islands of privilege most Americans don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error, and they’re hunkering down. Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers.

George Orwell, after attending a meeting of impoverished but passive miners, remarked sadly that “there is no turbulence left in England.” The Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment, have made a bet that there is no turbulence left in America, and the citizenry will stand mute before Obamacare’s wrecking ball. Unless they’re willing to accept a worse life for their children and grandchildren, middle-class Americans need to prove them wrong.

It takes a lot to destroy a nation as big and wealthy as ours.  But the very things that have made us wealthy have created vulnerabilities that most people are as unaware of as were the people who boarded those jet planes on 9/11/2001 and failed to live till the end of the day. 

How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Robert Stacy McCain talking about the Pope and the African migration to Europe.  The Pope tweeted:

We pray for a heart which will embrace immigrants. God will judge us upon how we have treated the most needy.

From a news report:

 

Pope Francis has visited Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of refugees who have lost their lives trying to reach the European Union. The pope also criticized what he called the “globalization of indifference.”

McCain responds

The “globalization of indifference”? Hey, dig this, Pope: How about encouraging the localization of responsibility?

If everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible. If it’s Europe’s job to take care of Africans, what is Africa’s job other than building boats so they can try to get to Europe? How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Also, speaking of “how we have treated the most needy,” Pope, I checked my records and you’ve never hit my tip jar. Just sayin’ . .

I have a great deal of respect for the Catholic church, in fact I am a Christian (of the Protestant variety), but it seems to me that many religious leaders make noises that are designed to place them morally above the rest of humanity.  Now, in many cases they are, and taking care of the poor is a moral imperative.  But taking care of the problems in Africa by encouraging them to move to Europe is not a moral solution to a problem.  It's preening; a characteristic of Liberals in and out of religion.

60 percent of Richmond families are single parent

Well, it could be worse. 

And sure enough,

Within the African-American demographic, that number spikes up to 86 percent, a number that surpasses the national average.

Happy Father's Day.

The Obama “Jokes” that Aren’t

Glenn Reynolds linked to an article in the Wall Street Journal Tax Audits Are No Laughing Matter; the subhead is “A president shouldn't even joke about abusing IRS power.”

Reynolds commented:

Remember, Obama joked about auditing his enemies in 2009. At the time, I warned about the damage to the “trust and voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends,” but Obama didn’t get much pushback elsewhere. Now, however, people need to be fired, and most likely prosecuted, to drive home the appropriate lesson. And Obama himself needs to be taken to task. The Post editorial is just a start.

Here’s what I have noticed about Obama’s “jokes.” They are a way of disarming the opposition by mocking them. If you joke about sending the IRS after your opponents, it makes it much harder for people the IRS is going after to get other to pay attention. They are going to be laughed at and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. One of the Tea Party groups that had trouble getting a tax exempt status is in Richmond, Virginia. They complained but got no help from anyone in the press or in government.

Obama has several times joked that he is a Muslim and a Socialist. He did so most recently at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

“Look I get it,” Obama joked. “These days I look in the mirror, and I have to admit I’m not the strapping, young, Muslim socialist that I used to be.”

It was a laugh line and the Washington Press dutifully laughed. I have no idea whether he is actually religious or not. I believe that his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation, America damning church was designed to advance his political career rather than his salvation. I also believe, based on his family background and the testimony of friends from his college days, that he is Leftist and believes that the State should be the center of decision making in a society. If that’s the case he is - at best - a socialist. If he actually is either a Muslim or a Socialist making a joke about it is much more effective way of deflecting the accusation than either ignoring it or denying it.

This technique is the flip side of Obama’s straw man argument, his favorite technique. Karl Rove gives several examples in this article in the Wall Street Journal.  Here's one:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, "I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity." Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity.

The use of these rhetorical devices is designed to mislead, much like a magician uses misdirection while he does his tricks. In a politician it's the technique of the rogue, the demagogue. The role of the press should be to expose this kind of deception. It doesn’t even require investigate skills, simply knowledge of the language and awareness of how words can be used to deceive. That’s Journalism 101 and one of the pre-eminent practitioners is James Taranto who writes Best of the Web. Too bad that most of the rest of the press are, as Glenn Reynolds says, "Democrat operatives with bylines."

Gosnell Abortion Mill vs. Virginia Law Regulating Abortion Clinics

The dead tree version of the Virginian Pilot's front page featured a story about Virginia’s decision to make sure that abortion clinics meet certain sanitary and access standards. The story is heavily slanted toward the pro-abortion side.   The Pilot's editors want abortion even if the place where women get abortions are unsafe and unsanitary.  And what better hook to unsafe and unsanitary abortion clinics than Kermit Gosnell's Women's Medical Society?

But do we get a story about the Gosnell Abortion House of Horror?  

I was only kidding. Of course not.  The Virginian Pilot doesn’t mention it.  Won't mention it.  And no one else in the MSM does either.  And even some Liberals are beginning to notice.

In fact, there has been only one brief story in the Virginian Pilot about Gosnell.  Pssst: Pilot editors, according to the grand jury testimony Gosnell had a "whites only" waiting room!

 And that should not surprise anyone. The stories that get coverage, the stories that produce editorials are the stories that fit the Liberal narrative. That’s why the death of Trayvon Martin is covered in excruciating detail and engenders numerous outraged editorials. It fits the narrative – the movie that Liberals of all colors and sexual identity have running through their heads - of whites killing blacks. And if reality doesn’t correspond to the movie images? No problem, they’ll make the fake real. And if the white guy isn’t really white he becomes an honorary white, a “white Hispanic.”

The multiple murder of babies, and at least one mother woman, in a Philadelphia abortion clinic gets one obligatory mention and then is never mentioned again, on the assumption that if the MSM doesn’t mention it, it never really happened. Like the tree in the forest. If no one hears it, it doesn’t make a noise. The most common way that the press lies is by what it fails to mention. As one very smart person once said, 99% truth is 100% lie. 

Speaking of lying liars, there is no mention of Gosnell at POLITICO. 

The doctor's last name, "gosnell," is Politico's third most searched term and also yields zero matches having to do with Kermit Gosnell.

Judging by the number of search inquiries, there is a demand for this story Politico is willfully choosing not to fill -- and doing so for obvious political reasons. And it is not because Politico shies away from abortion issues.

A search for "Susan Komen," yields 166 matches, but that is because Politico was part of the media lynch-mob that browbeat the private breast cancer charity into continuing their funding of Planned Parenthood.

A search for "Todd Akin" results in 865 matches, because Politico was part of the media lynch-mob that used a stupid abortion/rape comment made by a nobody Senate candidate to aid and abet Democrats during the 2012 elections.

 

Oh, and Planned Parenthood is OK with killing the baby born alive.

At the Washington Post, the excuse for non-coverage is that the Gosnell killings are a “local crime story” just like the rampage of Maj. Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood was “workplace violence” and illegal aliens have been transformed by the AP into “future Democrats.”

Billy Valentine, who works at SBA list had a pertinent response "Policy angle here is whether abortion clinics should be regulated. A national issue as many states enacting regs." Exactly! How is it possible that Newtown leads to a national discussion on gun violence and policy led by the President himself but Gosnell's house of horror leads to not one word anywhere about proper restrictions on abortion?
 

UPDATE: 

Here is a photo of the courtroom’s media section:

 

We are looking for whistleblowers: if you have any information regarding why your employer is not covering the Gosnell trial, please submit it here. Your anonymity will be protected.
 

UPDATE 2: 

 

Ed Discoll:  Old Media Slowly Awakens to Gosnell Horrors

The key word is slowly.  In fact they appear to be dragged kicking and screaming (sort of like aborted babies) into writing about it.  The MSM is busy trying to work out what their approach should be.  They could either try to minimize the damage to the MSM-DNC "overculture," trying to convince people that Gosnell and his clinic were unique.  Or they could counter-attack, blame the Crazy Christian Right by claiming that the Right-to-life folks made abortion so hard to get that Gosnell prospered because if it.  I suspect that this will be the line.

And from RedState: Can You Imagine the Coverage If It Were Dogs?

Liberals, and even reporters who try to be fair minded, often complain that conservative decided to leave and go do their own media thing with Fox, talk radio, etc. Well, this is an example of why conservatives had to do that. Otherwise many stories many Americans care about would never be told.

 

Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night through the course of the trial. It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news.

Accused witch tortured, burned alive in Papua New Guinea

Multiculturalism in action.

Someone will find a reason to blame George Bush

No one has been arrested although lots of people took pictures.

The morality of "Gun Free Zones"

Thomas Sowell

If you don’t want to have a gun in your home or in your school, that’s your choice. But don’t be such a damn fool as to advertise to the whole world that you are in “a gun-free environment” where you are a helpless target for any homicidal fiend who is armed. Is it worth a human life to be a politically correct moral exhibitionist?

If Good and Evil Exist, God Exists

As a second feature:
Do You Have Free Will?

It's time to Occupy Hollywood.

Nowhere else in this country is there so much inequality and so much financial corruption as in Hollywood. One of Glenn Reynolds' readers:

In this month’s Vanity Fair, Johnny Depp admits he’s overpaid. Roughly $300 MM from the Pirates series.


Coincidentally there’s a lawsuit being filed against a studio by unpaid interns for exploitation and breach of contract I think.


Anyway, maybe this is a good time to create a law stating that no-one involved with the making of a movie can make more than 10x the lowest person’s salary.


And that all participants must have an equal share of profits.


Maybe we should Occupy Hollywood and Vine.

And from another Reynolds posting:

Hollywood accounting is crooked on a scale that would make any Wall Street firm blush. David Prowse, the very tall actor who wore the Darth Vader costume in the original Star Wars trilogy, recently remarked in an interview that according to the studio, Return of the Jedi has never made a nickel of profit, so Prowse has never been paid any residuals. The film grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide, but the studio rigged the books to show zero net profit, almost thirty years later. In the course of explaining why this sort of thing is commonplace, Atlantic magazine notes that even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is currently on the books as a net loss.


As a fascinating article at Film School Rejects chronicles, movie studios engage in all sorts of viciously “unfair” practices, such as using their muscle to virtually extort theater owners, stealing intellectual property, and marketing their lesser films with fraudulent “reviews.” Any of these practices from a Wall Street firm would prompt a rush of patchouli-scented basement-dwelling youth that could only be stopped with pepper spray and plastic nets.

Semen Soaked Suite

I always wonder about the carpet in the hotel rooms.  But the walls?

Is it time for that conversation on race?

Commenting of the rioting in England and the flash mobs in the US, Dorothy Rabinowitz opines:

The looting-bankers defense turns out to have been popular across the ocean as well. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy had also divined—in a column last Tuesday titled "From London to Philadelphia, youths erupting over the theft of their futures"—that the bankers and their kind were to blame for the rioters in Britain and the flash mobs in America.

Think of their actions in both places, he advised, as the "alley version of the Wall Street bum rush and rip-off." First, explained Mr. Milloy, "there were flash mobs of bankers and mortgage lenders picking pockets, looting businesses, taking over homes." Now the young were using "a crude version of the same tactics" as they struck out in anger.

Mr. Milloy was apparently offended, too, that the black mayor of Philadelphia, Mr. Nutter, had advised young black men, after the flash riot there, that they would do well to find jobs. But, Mr. Nutter told them, they couldn't come to interviews with hair uncombed, a pick in the back, shoes untied, full arm and neck tattoos, and their pants half down. They weren't going to be hired looking like that, the mayor noted, "because you look like you're crazy."

Mr. Milloy, who described the mayor's remarks as even "nuttier" than others he had heard, had evidently found the remarks insensitive to these young. Youngsters who rioted and took part in flash mobs felt disrespected—that was why, Mr. Milloy explained, they were "threatening to destroy what they can't have. And why not?" It was a strategy that had worked, he added, for tea party anarchists.

For some reason, Mr. Milloy neglected to mention a key element in the violence of these youths—namely that it has been entirely and indisputably racial in its targets. The attackers are invariably young blacks, the people they assault invariably whites. This was true in Philadelphia as it was in Wisconsin, in Chicago and everywhere else that has seen these mobs.

And in the comments:

(a)The police in Cambridge questioned a man trying to break into a home (Henry Louis Gates and what turned out to be his own home) led to weeks of mainstream media reporting, a "national conversation about race," vilifications by President Obama and the "beer summit."

and yet (b) Marauding gangs of black youth beating whatever white people they come across in a number of cities across the country has elicited ... nary a peep. The race-obsessed New York Times ran for weeks with unsubstantiated (and ultimately probably untrue) claims of racially tinged comments by Tea Party members. This? Nothin'.

Indeed.

The Cleveland Gang Rape Story from the New Black Panthers Perspective.

A story that was a local and an internet crime story made it to the pages of the NY Times written by James McKinley, Jr.  Along the way, the story line made a curious turn.

The facts of the story are these: an 11-year-old girl in the small Texas town of Cleveland was gang-raped by about 18 boys and men. We know it happened because there are video records of the events. We know it was rape because 11-year-old children cannot legally consent to sex.

Gang rape is not something that civilized people excuse. Gang rape of children is worse.  Yet the treatment the crime received in the NY Times is curious. In the Times, the focus was not on the effect gang rape has on a young girl but the effect that criminal prosecution for this crime has on the perpetrators.

The NY Times is no stranger to stories of gang rape. A few years ago its news and editorial pages were devoted to the accusations of a Durham, NC stripper/prostitute who claimed to have been gang raped by members of the Duke lacrosse team. Those stories focused on the evil that lurks in the hearts of rich white athletes at exclusive colleges. When the accusation turned out to be bogus and the prosecutor punished for pursuing the case for political reasons, the Times treatment was straight out of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Was that the reason the Times decided to make this a story about young men having their lives ruined by being accused of a crime? Could it be that they learned a lesson from the Duke Lacrosse case? That seems unlikely. There was no physical evidence in the Duke Lacrosse case; the Cleveland rapes were videotaped.   The crime is racially charged, dividing the community.

The tone of the NY Times story mirrors that of Quanell X, leader (according to Wikipedia) of the New Black Panthers in nearby Houston. Like the NY Times reporter, Quanell X focuses on the rapists.

“Listen to me good, you stand by your children and don’t let them convince you to walk away and take a plea deal for some trumped up charges.”

According to a TV reporter, he accused the police of being like the KKK. Like the NY Times reporter Quanell X blamed the girl’s parents. The Times reporter uses a neighbor to introduce the parents fault in this:

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record.

In a classic case of blaming the victim, the NY Times notes:

They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

New Black Panther Quanell X:

“She lives in another community. If she lives in another community you mean to tell me that the only men in Cleveland Texas that had sex with that girl are black men that’s locked up in that jail.”

Following a public push back to the tone of the original article, the NY Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane promised that the NY Times would print another story that was more properly balanced between blaming the rapists and blaming the 11 year old girl.

Under our system of law, you are innocent until proven guilty. It’s possible that some of the men accused of this gang rape are innocent. It’s instructive that the original story chose to present the rape from the perspective of the New Black Panthers.  The episode is racially charged.  The girl is Hispanic, the rapists are Black.  According to some reports, there is tension between the Hispanic and Black communities, not just in Cleveland.  The NY Times, always a bellwether for Liberal opinion, may just have taken sides.

Some may say that this is a teachable moment.

Qaddafi (like Hosni Mubarak) only recently became a villain. (The Bat Signal.)

Commenting on the decision of a few pop music stars to give back the money they received from K. Daffy for personal appearances, Ed Driscoll references “the Great Celebrity Implosion of the 21st-century.”

I prefer the explanation in one of the comments that follows. T.S. remarks that most of the pop stars are like Nelly Furtado.

Nelly Furtado is a garden-variety Gen Y arts community fashionable liberal from Vancouver. It’s probably a mistake to make too much of her politics. A deep thinker she likely ain’t. She went from being a high school candy raver, to a hip hop chick, to a neo- folkie-singer/songwriter-hippie chick, to a glamorous pop star (and symbol of young single female sexual “empowerment”). Her biggest hit song was about being “Promiscuous,” bit in its verses, she still managed to give shout outs to Amnesty International and Steve Nash.

Ms. Furtado’s politics have always appeared to be those of the kind of trendy liberal who thinks that taking the positions of the fashionably reflexive Left equates to being socially conscious and doing the right thing. In giving the $ million back to Mr. al-Qaddafi, she’s most likely doing what she thinks (or her PR people think) is the right thing to do.

So why is she – and some of the others like her – giving the money back (or to charity)? Have they realized that K. Daffy was a bad man?   Well, not at the time.

“In terms of pop culture relevancy, Anti-American Muslim dictators from North Africa were thought to be pretty freakin’ cool when Bush was president. After all, those guys were standing up to the oppressor and raising a fist in the air and speaking truth to power and showing solidarity and trying to change the world and all of that. So until the recent Libyan uprising, it made all the sense in the world for American entertainers to perform for Qaddafi … Plus, for the old-timers, Qaddafi’s animus toward and defiance of Ronald Reagan earned him big props, though that hasn’t been much of a factor for a while — 1986 was way before most young fashionable liberals’ time (Ms. Furtado included).”

What changed? Obama ...The Lightworker  

But now that President Obama has decided that it’s time to officially condemn Qaddafi, the message has been sent like the Bat Signal to everyday fashionable Gen X, Gen Y and Millennial liberals — hipsters, SWPL, single city girls, college students, Bikhram yoga instructors, NYT readers, AOLHuffington Post readers, DJ’s, bartenders, news reporters, advertising executives, entertainment professionals, etc. — that Quaddafi is a BAD GUY. If President Obama says you’re bad, then you’re bad. And now that the President has decided it’s time to call Qaddafi bad, everybody knows that Qaddafi is indeed bad. You know, like Mubarak and the Governor of Wisconsin.

So it’s a little harsh to rake Nelly Furtado over the coals for being a hypocrite. She’s probably very sincerely trying to do the right thing. She just lives in a world in which Left Wing and low-information liberal narratives are the rule. And in that world, al-Qaddafi (like Hosni Mubarak) only recently became a villain.

I wish I had said that.

The Myth of Constitutional Constraints

A column penned by Ann Woolner has in a two words that set my teeth on edge. Those words are “constitutional constraints.” Speaking of being constrained by the constitution conjures up the image of the constitution as an actor; an actor that sets limits. But that’s not how the American judicial system has evolved. The only actors are the judges, and, as one famously said “the constitution is what the judges say it is.” For some judges (I don’t know how many but they appear in the news almost daily) the constitution is a weapon that allows they to impose their concepts of fairness and justice on the rest of us.

Need an example? A hundred years ago, it was illegal in most venues to commit homosexual acts. Today, the Supreme court has struck down laws against those acts and, taking a giant step, many judges have decreed to those same homosexuals can marry. Same constitution; different judges.

Attempting to ridicule concerns that the courts would allow the imposition of Sharia law in the US, Woolner uses the example of the courts enforcement of the ban of polygamy.

Besides, as it is, no religion can trump American law in U.S. courts when the two fundamentally conflict. The Supreme Court said so when it ruled that Mormons couldn’t violate a federal ban on polygamy.

In view of the court rulings on same-sex marriage, I have never understood how the courts can claim that laws against homosexual marriage are unconstitutional, but laws against polygamous marriage are constitutional. There is no specific language in the constitution that limits the partners in marriage to two.  

 Forget about the tortured justification for striking down bans on homosexual marriage. The simple reason behind all these rulings is the fact that many judges have friends and relatives who are homosexual and they have determined that if two men or women who are gay love each other they cannot be prevented by law from getting married because it abridges their freedom. So, why can’t three or more?  Simple, they don't know many Mormons and most Mormons are not agitated about polygamous marriage.  How's that for a constitutional principle? 

We are told that a “living constitution” must adjust to the evolving standards of the community and that judges are in a position to understand the evolution of these standards. But that is apparently not the case. If it were so, laws will be changed if the people approve and judicial fiat will be unnecessary. Yet when allowed to vote on the matter, a majority of Americans oppose homosexual marriage and I am certain that the same is true of polygamy.

Liberals like Ann Woolner like to use the excuse that the constitution protects us against radical changes in our laws or culture and smears those who voice those concerns as engaging in “irresponsible fear-mongering.” When it comes time to impose her version of law and justice on the American people by judicial fiat, she will, like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, jerk the constitutional ball away from us and we will land, like Charlie Brown, on our collective asses as she laughs and tells us what fools we were.

Is Tolerance a One-Way Street?

Daniel Henninger writes "Tolerance at Ground Zero" in which the Ruling Class has gathered around the right of Muslims to erect a mosque near the spot where their fellow followers of Islam murdered nearly 3000 Americans.  He discusses the tolerance exhibited by the members of the American Ruling Class and notes that - in the case of Christianity vs. Islam - tolerance is a one way street.

Muslims vs. the West

The “West” developed immersed in - some say because of - a Christian culture. That culture is under assault from various directions.  It is most violently attacked by Islam. It would be useful if political leaders in Islamic countries would, in response to the welcome that their religion has received in the West, reciprocate by openly allowing Christians to establish churches in their countries; to worship and proselytize, as Muslims are allowed to do here. So far we see no sign of that happening. It is not even on the agenda of those who loudly proclaim that they are the representatives of the millions or billions of “moderate Muslims.”   Is toleration of other religions going to be another one-way street?

Christianity vs. Humanism

Christianity was the default faith of the vast majority of the American people until the mid 20th century. Even now, three out of four Americans profess to be Christians. Yet the secular forces of the Ruling Class has pushed the open expression of Christian expression out of the public sphere as if somehow - when Christians speak of their faith in school assemblies or erect a crèche in a public park at Christmas time - they create a theological terror. Was it really true that in 1950, when many school days began with a Christian prayer, religious expression was not repressed and Christian symbols were found in public parks the US was a theocracy? To hear the ACLU and its ideological supporters explain how those acts created an "established church" that must have been a fact.  But we know that it was not.  How were we ever led to assent to having our voices and our expression of faith be stifled by this perversion of the first amendment?  Is tolerance for religion in the public sphere only to be allowed if the religion threatens you with death if you dissent? 

Gays vs. Straights

Sex has always been a big deal in all cultures; sexuality is closely intertwined with morality. The do's and don'ts are defined - to put it in old-fashioned terms - around sin. We in the West have become rather blase about it; putting sex on public display in every venue we visit. As a substitute for religious rules, the more "enlightened" create their taboos around public hygiene. In other cultures - such as Islam - this is not the case. We're casual about sex while Islam is deadly serious.  In our culture, open homosexuality was considered bad form by irreligious people and a sin by the more observant religious. But the "gay community" has demanded not just the tolerance of "averted glances,"  but public acceptance of its views of morality. Today we are being told that if we do not celebrate and asset to homosexual weddings we are not just homophobic, but we are evil. That our concepts of sin are, frankly, outmoded. A judge has ruled that

Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.

He has found it to be a "fact" that opponents of homosexual marriage are driven by (irrational) fear, that they rely on (irrational) stereotypes, that people who oppose same-sex marriage believe homosexuals are "inferior." He makes much of the fact that a large proportion of the people that voted for Prop. 8 were religious; making his ruling - in effect - a judgement based on a religious test. Until this ruling, religious test were not permitted under our constitution. The religious orientation of the people voting for or against this proposition should have absolutely no bearing on a legal judgement, but in this case it had a definite bearing.

The obvious distaste this judge has in his devaluation of religious value systems has more than a little of the flavor of Orwell's "1984" where it was not simply good enough to acquiesce, we have to positively assert our love of what we opposed before.   Not to do so exposes you as a bigot, and removes you from the Ruling Class, to be cast into an outer darkness, awaiting oblivion. 

We shall see.

Screenwriter Says Hollywood Conservatives ‘Have to Meet in Secret’ and ‘Talk in Whispers’

Che Guevara at the Bay of Pigs

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands!" snarls Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his diaries. "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"


Alas, the "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" very rarely reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged, and blindfolded men and boys. "He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still," gloats Che Guevara in his diaries, describing the death agonies of a bound Cuban peasant he had just shot in the temple with his pistol. "Now his belongings were mine." (Unwittingly, here Che Guevara gives us communism in a nutshell: cowardly murder and theft.)


Che made Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. His models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin. The Cheka came to Cuba with Guevara.


But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara's defense of Cuba, Rufus T. Firefly's defense of Freedonia in Duck Soup comes across like Anthony McAuliffe's of Bastogne.


The Bay of Pigs, we're led to believe by Castro and his dutiful media/academic minions, was Fidel and Che's crowning glory. "Imperialism's First Defeat!" as the Castroite press crows to high heavens. Yet in their recent movie, so closely mentored by Castro's propaganda ministry, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro somehow "overlooked" Che's glorious role in the epic victory. Hummmm...?


Odd, perhaps -- until you realize that a historically accurate depiction of Che Guevara's military exploits would be impossible to direct and cast without the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus. To wit: The Bay of Pigs invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and a tape recording of battle.


The wily Comandante Che immediately deciphered the Yankee-Imperialist scheme! That little feint three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse! The real invasion was coming here in Pinar Del Rio! Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded, and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs, and mirrors did their stuff just offshore.


Three days later, the (literal) smoke-and-mirror show expended itself, so Che and his troops marched back eastward, where Che could taunt the (safely captured and disarmed) freedom-fighters. Freedom-fighter Manel Menendez parachuted into the inferno of Soviet firepower known as the Bay of Pigs and ripped into the Communists to his very last bullet, like his entire band of freedom-fighting brothers who inflicted casualties of 20-1 against their Soviet-led and -armed enemies.


Castro rules today primarily for one reason: The Knights of Camelot cut off the bullet supply to Manel and his freedom-fighting Band of Brothers. During dinner with your humble servant here many years later, Manel described Che's visit. "We'd all run out of ammo and been captured and herded into an enclosure," he recalls. "And so here comes Che, strutting and sneering as usual. He strutted up and looked around with that famous sneer of his. Then he started snickering. Many of us were wounded, but one of our guys faced him down and said, "Well I guess you'll send us all to the paredón (firing squad) now, right, Che?"


"No," Che snapped. "No paredón. We're gonna hang all of you, slowly! The firing squad's too good for you."

"I was standing close to Che at the time," recalls Señor Menendez, "and got a close-up of his face when he was talking. It was plain from the way his eyes lit up that the man was sick, mentally ill, a bona-fide sadist. Sure, most military commanders or wartime leaders -- Patton, Chesty Puller, Winston Churchill, whatever -- bad-mouth and taunt enemy soldiers. But that's during combat, to get the troops fired up for the kill, etc. Here, the combat was over. We were uniformed adversaries, but completely disarmed. So look, don't even ask me what I think when I see him on a T-shirt, or when I see him presented as some kinda military genius!"


Not surprisingly, in his heated battle with a tape recorder and roman candles, the masterful Comandante had managed to wound himself. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post-April '61 pictures of the gallant Che (the picture we see on posters and T-shirts was shot a year earlier).


Che's hagiographers and their Castro regime mentors are mostly mum on the details leading to this wound. But we can read between the lines and speculate. Apparently, the sight of the bottle rocket's red glare and the sound of tape-recorded bombs bursting in air roused Che to a Pattonesque fury. He drew his pistol and prepared to lead the charge against the Yankee juggernaut. "¡Arriba muchachos!" he bellowed, as his men sprung from their trenches with bayonets gleaming, and charged a tape recorder. With the amplified soundtrack from The Sands of Iwo Jima blaring in the background, Che stood atop a tank turret and turned to his men. "Let's wipe 'em out!" he yelled, while waving his pistol overhead in the manner of Clevon Little in Blazing Saddles.


Then he managed to shoot himself through the chin.