Monday, November 15, 2004

“Fault[y] Lines”

Here’s the thesis being propounded by those who claim that Islam should not be blamed for Islamic terrorism:

“The fault lines are growing,” said Fawaz Gerges (search), a professor of Middle Eastern and International Affairs at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. “It’s not just between the Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s also within Islam itself. It’s a battle between moderate Muslims and extremist forces that threaten to hijack Islam.”

[...snip...]

The militant voices on the street are gaining credibility in more and more places,” said Gerges. “That’s a worrisome trend.”

Part of the reason, many Islamic experts say, can be traced to global communications that forge common points of reference such as al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s defiance or the guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. But even more powerful rallying cries come from firebrand imams and opinion-shapers: that Islam is under threat and it’s the duty of followers to take a stand.

In Amsterdam, a moderate imam, Abdel Eillah, feared the scales were tipping in a troubling direction among Muslim immigrants in Europe who fail to adapt.

“When I hear young men praise violence in the name of Islam, I fear for my faith and I fear for the world. We must fight it before it’s too late,” he said after the Nov. 2 slaying of Van Gogh, whose work included harsh commentary against traditional Islam. “I didn’t like what Van Gogh said, but he should not pay with blood.”

How pleasant it is to hear a Muslim decry Islam-powered violence against us “infidels”! But pray tell, gentlemen: where were you a year or three ago? More to the immediate point, what are you doing to counter the claims of the “radicals” who use Islam’s most sacred documents for their rallying cries?

The Islamic creed holds that the Qur’an is the literal Word of Allah, dictated to Muhammad in a dream by the Angel Gabriel. This is the basis of Muslims’ assertion that it may neither be modified nor interpreted, but must be taken literally. That includes its more charming statements, such as:

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. [Sura 9:5]

and:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” [Sura 9:29]

Christians and Jews have renounced the violent prescriptions of the Book of Leviticus. When will Muslims become willing to renounce these equally bloody doctrines—to repudiate what their Prophet said was the literal Word of God?

Your Curmudgeon does not want to hear any nonsense about how the Qur’an is only truly comprehensible in the original Arabic. If that’s the case, then stop printing the bleeding thing in any other language. We’ll see how many converts the imams make among prison inmates then.

One Question Answered

The liberation of Fallujah has unearthed a not-so-surprising fact:

FALLUJAH, Iraq — U.S. Marines have found beheading chambers, bomb-making factories and even one Iraqi hostage as they swept through Fallujah (search) — turning up hard evidence of the city’s role in the insurgent campaign to drive American forces from Iraq (search).

[...snip...]

So far U.S. troops have only found two hostages, one Iraqi and one Syrian. Marines last week found the Iraqi in a room with a black banner bearing the logo of one of Iraq’s extremist groups. He was chained to the wall, shackled hand and foot in front of a video camera. The floor was covered with blood.

[...snip...]

The Iraqi hostage, who had been beaten on the back with steel cables, said his tormentors were Syrian and that he thought he was in Syria until the Marines found him, the Marine said. Other militants came and went, but “The Syrians were always in charge,” the Marine said.

Syria, be it remembered, is ruled by its Ba’athist Party, just as Iraq was before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There’s been no word yet on whether any evidence of Iranian involvement has been discovered.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

“We’re Sorry”—“You Sure Are!”

Your Curmudgeon cannot fathom the combination of personal inadequacy and personal arrogance it takes to “apologize” en masse to other nations for having failed to win an election. If it weren’t right there staring him in the face, he’d snort it aside. It’s behavior that even an alley-dwelling wino should deem beneath him.

What motivates these people, apart from their obvious contempt for the majority to whom their candidate lost?

Who are they? More to the point, who do they think they are? Even more urgently, when will they grow up?

To those whose mournful mugs stare out of this collection of pictures: You don’t speak for anyone but yourselves. You’re not embarrassing anyone but yourselves. The rest of us might have to tolerate you, but you’ve made it impossible for us to respect you. If the dictionary had an entry for “what whining losers do,” your pictures would appear there.

Along The Democrats’ Whine Trail

From this Robert Kaiser editorial in the Washington Post, we can see that the spate of denial among Democrats and their media boosters has not yet ended:

Democrats older than 55 or so think it’s easy to explain who they are. But their litany of heroes and accomplishments, from FDR and Social Security to Bill Clinton’s balanced budgets, consists of things that must look to younger voters like history, or ancient history. Next August, the Social Security program will celebrate its 70th birthday!

Sorry, it’s not that Democratic Party “heroes and accomplishments” are fossils; it’s that they’ve done immense harm to the country.

When Reagan became the first new Republican to win the White House in 1980, he ignored his predecessors. Dwight D. Eisenhower had left office 20 years before, and Nixon was still treated like a pariah, but this didn’t matter. Reagan was a new voice for a new America, an America that had become, in the 1970s, a country dominated not by the working class, but by the beneficiaries of the post-World War II boom, the great new middle class. Somehow Reagan felt relevant to a majority of voters who liked him and his straightforward views.

But this is to make a very tendentious, highly questionable use of the term “middle class.” The “middle class” has existed at almost all times in our history. Its position relative to the “upper” and “lower” classes has varied. At one time, the distinction between the “middle” and “lower” classes was how assured one was of having dinner; today it’s about whether one can afford a Lexus or a high-definition TV.

Traditional Democrats resist the suggestion that the country needs a “new” Democratic Party for a new age. Indeed, many traditionalists regard the New Democrats as closet conservatives who want to move the party to the center.

They might not be conservatives, but they do recognize a successful message when one shellacks them at the polls.

Democrats won’t—and shouldn’t—turn on their history in the same way, but it is instructive to note that the GOP of Reagan and afterward was constructed independently by people with no great regard for their party’s traditions and history. What they had was a determination to march it forcefully in a new direction. They did this by dint of patient and expensive effort.

Unmentioned here is that the Reagan Era activists believed in that new direction; it wasn’t merely a tactic for regaining power.

The new conservatives were tapping into a demographic shift that obliterated the America that gave rise to the Democratic Party. By early 1973, the postwar economic boom that transformed America was coming to an end, but not before it had created, for the first time, a middle-class majority. From FDR to LBJ, Democratic liberalism had been sustained by a working-class America that all but disappeared in the 1970s. The passion for tax-cutting that caught on in the second half of that decade (California’s Proposition 13, curtailing property taxes, ignited it in 1978) was the first political signal that times had changed. Reagan was elected president two years later, and the era of the new conservatism was underway.

Beginning, arguably, with Proposition 13, the new conservatism has evoked grass-roots enthusiasm that Democrats can only envy. Bush’s victory this month was made possible by the Republicans’ ability to identify, register and turn out more new or sporadic voters than the Democrats did.

Mr. Kaiser appears to believe that taxes were at some point a popular thing. Your Curmudgeon hates to destroy any man’s cherished illusions, but…

Ronald Reagan offered America a simple-sounding alternative approach to a new era. He promised to be strong on defense, low on taxes and tough on soft-headed liberals. Helped by his own genial personality, he created a winning combination that is still the essence of modern Republicanism.

Ronald Reagan articulated to the American people the essence of their own beliefs about what America stands for. He didn’t sell them an untried new package that won them over with glitz or through rhetorical power; he told them that he believed as they did.

Republicans have successfully ridiculed and demonized Democrats as the party of gay marriage, or the party of unilateral disarmament, or the party of dirty songs and violent movies, or the party of divorce, abortion, free birth control for teenagers and the banning of school prayer. They’ve succeeded because all these labels contain an iota of truth, and, much more important, because the Democrats have no coherent view of themselves that could displace them.

A party dominated by a bevy of quarrelsome special-interest groups and a pervasive, half-guilty conviction that freedom, property rights, and international assertiveness are somehow wrong can hardly concoct any sort of message for American public consumption, much less a “coherent view of themselves.”

“You always know where I stand,” Bush said throughout this campaign. The 51 percent who voted for the president in this election knew what he meant, and liked the sound of it. But no Democrat could credibly say anything like that today, because, both as a party and as individuals, the Democrats’ belief systems are muddled, and do not resonate with many millions of Americans.

Finally, a glimmer of insight! “Belief systems”—note the plural—is exactly correct. There can be no integrated Democratic message because there is no integrated Democratic Party; it’s merely a collection of power-seekers and rented allies. “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

There are certainly openings Democrats could exploit. Yes, America is a conservative society. It always has been. But it is a particular and mostly good-hearted brand of conservatism. We believe in God, revere family, love hometowns, see ourselves as gentle and benevolent folk who care for one another, and for foreigners in need too. Even the newest immigrants appreciate the most fundamental conservative attributes of American life, beginning with the reliable rule of law.

If Mr. Kaiser believes that he’s describing typical Democratic Party loyalists, he’s badly deluded. Indeed, he’s enumerated the precise reasons why the Democrats are becoming a shrunken minority party. He should spend some time reading Democratic Underground, to say nothing of Kos, Atrios, and Oliver Willis. He should reflect on the large numbers of Democratic bellwethers (and their followers) who have openly sworn that they’ll leave the country because the GOP has retained control of Washington. Those are today’s typical Democrats, not Mr. Kaiser’s Norman Rockwell figurines.

But we are also, polls make clear, a tolerant and moderate people. Democrats could become the party of tolerance, meaning tolerance for everyone: Bible readers, gay couples and Bible-reading gay couples alike. There is a strain of intolerance in today’s conservative Republicanism, and that’s an opportunity for the Democrats as they try to bring new people into their tent.

More self-delusion, with a dollop of slander for flavoring. To become such a party would require the Democrats to jettison the most important special interests keeping the current party afloat: the Northeastern liberal-feminist elite, the entertainment moguls, the moral and cultural relativists, the transnational progressivists, and the purveyors of unearned guilt for racial and ethnic advantage.

Americans also believe in economic fairness. Most Americans say the Bush administration’s policies principally help the wealthy. Most Americans aren’t wealthy. This is a potential political opening, but only if the Democrats can offer a plausible path to a fairer society. Just bashing Republicans won’t do it.

Pure nonsense. All but about 20% of Americans are wealthy. More, they’re aware of how wealthy they could be if only they could curb Washington’s appetite for power and revenue. It’s the very wealthy—the John Kerrys and John Edwardses, the George Soroses and Stephen Bings—who side most consistently with the Democrats. Why else would the Democratic Party refuse, year after year, to disclose the details of their fundraising and the average size of donations to them?

And a neoconservative foreign policy is hardly a popular platform—couldn’t Democrats come up with a believable approach to national security that actually makes sense?

The worst self-delusion of all. It would have been closer to true before Black Tuesday, but still less true than not. A policy of aggressive engagement in those lands that have given rise to international terrorism, coupled with a cold-shouldered withdrawal from those nations whose governments have attempted to obstruct us, is the most popular international posture since World War II. President Bush’s absolute refusal to bend on it, despite its difficulties and costs, was the true key to his re-election; it persuaded voters that he was sincere, in contrast to his endlessly waffling opponent. The unwillingness to modify one’s views for popularity’s sake stands near the heart of what most of us mean by “moral values.”

What won’t work is some evocation of the past. Yesterday is not America’s thing; tomorrow is. Republicans have found a voice for the 21st century—not one that swept the nation, just 51 percent of it. Can the Democrats find a way to match it? Or will they just keep on whistling?

If we could have excluded the Old Media’s undisguised support of John Kerry and Democratic campaigns of vote fraud from the election results, how much larger would that 51% have been?

Wake up, Mr. Kaiser. The country knows itself better than you do.

For a party to wrest America’s affections away from Republican-style conservatism, it would have to be even more American than the GOP. That is, it would have to be more committed to individual liberty, free markets, low taxes, light regulations, legal stability, judicial restraint, and a Teddy Roosevelt-style attitude toward international affairs. Though the Democratic Party did fit that role in the past—in the days of Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland—it cannot do so today. The odds are poor that it ever will again.

As Long As We’re Discussing Judges Who Think They’re Gods…

Here’s a zinger from Fox News that snapped your Curmudgeon’s eyelids back against their stops:

A judge with an agenda, though, usually has developed ways to protect himself. Several years ago, a judge hearing a string of abortion protest cases was fond of saying “The laws of the State of New York do not apply here, my law applies here,” but directing the court stenographer to turn off her equipment first.

How interesting. Isn’t it a matter of law that an official court proceeding must be recorded, word for word, to preserve the loser’s position and his prerogative of appeal? Just how would a judge justify commanding the stenographer to cease recording an open court session? What would have happened if the stenographer deemed the command illegal, and refused to stop?

That the above “jurist” sat on a New York bench comes as little surprise. New York, after all, is the home of former Chief Justice Sol Wachtler, convicted stalker and extortionist and originator of the idea that the jury trial is obsolete.

A “Creative” Use Of The Language

It’s not often one runs across a genuinely illiterate reporter in the employ of a great metropolitan daily, but it happens now and then:

When Nixon first used the phrase “strict constructionist,” he seemed to have in mind justices who would slow the Warren court’s expansion of the rights of criminal defendants, as well as end court-ordered school busing. By these standards, he succeeded.

But Nixon’s justices did not reverse the Warren court’s expansion of individual rights. Three of his appointees, Justices Warren Burger, Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun, proved to be moderate conservatives, who sided with liberals in cases involving school prayer, affirmative action and abortion. [Emphasis added by FWP]

Your Curmudgeon is unable to see the federal intrusion into education to ban all prayer in school, or the federal imposition of racially biased preferential hiring on employers to benefit selected, politically vociferous minorities, or the federal sanctification of infanticide, as “expansions of individual rights.” An individual right is a protection of individual liberty; it guarantees him that the government has no warrant to interfere with some category of decision he might make. If anything, these measures have decreased individual rights: in two cases, by sucking power up the governmental pyramid, out of state legislatures and local school boards and into Washington, and in the third by denying the most helpless members of our species the legal protections normally accorded to human life.

Today, as a result of those “expansions of individual rights,” we have:

• School children being penalized for saying grace over their lunches or printing the Ten Commandments on their brown-paper book covers, having their Bibles confiscated, and being condemned for “hate speech” for speaking against homosexuality or abortion;
• Employers under threat of shutdown by Washington bureaucrats for daring to have two percent fewer black engineers or Hispanic accountants than the EEO bureaucracy deems appropriate;
• Fully formed, fully viable children being partially delivered and then legally murdered, carved up and thrown away, to spare the mother the humiliation of surrendering them for adoption to some couple that would love them more.

Any day now, your Curmudgeon expects to see an article that labels unlimited searches and seizures, closed criminal trials where the accuser need not be specified, enforced national service, or compulsory voting as an “expansion of individual rights.” Remember that you read it here first.

Is There A Section Of The New York Times That’s Free Of America-Hating Cant?

From a particularly scrofulous article in the Movies section, titled “The Terrorist As Auteur”:

Besides the terrorist as impresario, let us remember that we also have the torturer as video artist. The Abu Ghraib pictures were never just for private use. Some were meant as a spur to other torturers. And some were supposed to be shown to other prisoners to warn them what awaited if they did not cooperate. The digital image—moving or still—has become an instrument of coercive interrogation.

In Iraq, imagery has replaced argument; indeed, atrocity footage has become its own argument. One horrendous picture seems not just to follow the other but also to justify it. From Abu Ghraib to decapitation footage and back again, we the audience are caught in a loop: one atrocity begetting another in a darkening vortex, without end.

The old questions about the war in Iraq—Was it legal? Was it necessary? Was it done as a last resort?—now seem beside the point. The issue now is whether there is any way out of the vortex itself, mutually reinforcing barbarism that ends . . . where?

Ah, the hoary old Cycle of Violence! Good to see you back, Cy. But wait just a moment:

• What is the meaning of the word “torture”? Isn’t it distinct from humiliation?
• Was anyone killed or seriously physically harmed by the American jailers at Abu Ghraib?
• Is there any doubt that the inmates at Abu Ghraib were there for good and sufficient reasons?
• Does Michael Ignatieff, the “auteur” of this article, really expect us to equate the rather mild humiliations inflicted on a few Abu Ghraib inmates by a few cretins, who are even now being punished for it, with the blood tide loosed and maintained by Islamic madmen and Baathist tyrants, who appear immune to any punishment not imposed by American armed forces?
• Isn’t this sort of politicized “Arts” drivel supposed to be Frank Rich’s preserve?

If the Times would like to know why the liberalism it promotes has been losing influence over Americans’ political opinions and selections of public officials, reflecting on the above would be a good place to start.

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Insanity In The Name Of Legally Enforced Sobriety

Jed at FreedomSight has found a shocker:

A Fountain business owner is free on bond after being arrested for allegedly selling chemicals used to make methamphetamine.

Fountain police say 62-year-old Neil Cizek is the first Colorado resident to be arrested under a new state law that took effect July 1. The new law makes it illegal to knowingly sell chemicals used for manufacturing meth.

[...snip...]

Cizek said he’s always asked customers why they’re buying the iodine, asked them for identification, and kept their names on file.

[...snip...]

Cizek is scheduled to appear in court next Wednesday. He could face up to 12 years in prison and $750, 000 in fines if convicted.

Jed’s pithy comment on this atrocity:

So let’s see if I have this right. The state is now requiring store owners and clerks to use their psychic powers to know whether someone is buying a product for an illegal purchase, and will smack you down hard if you don’t do a good enough job of spying on your customers.

[...snip...]

Apparently, nothing gets in the way of the War on (Some) Drugs. Not even common decency.

This is your government on drugs. Any questions?

If They Don’t Scream Like Freshly Castrated Pigs, You Didn’t Hit ‘Em Hard Enough

From a New York Times story on Education Secretary Rod Paige’s resignation:

But he has also created political embarrassments. Earlier this year, for example, Dr. Paige called the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization,” accusing it of opposing No Child Left Behind with obstructionist tactics. He later apologized to the teachers, but not to the union.

Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has been a frequent critic of the administration, said that he saw Dr. Paige as having carried out the agenda of the administration, but hoped that “the next person would be more amenable to finding common ground with the N.E.A.’’

This calls to mind Ann Coulter’s dictum that the Left doesn’t become outraged with conservatives for lying about them, but for telling the truth about them.

The NEA has worked tirelessly to insure that teachers are absolutely indemnified against anything they might say or do in a classroom, and also to insure that no actual education, as sensible people understand the term, actually occurs in a government-run school. They’ve spread innumerable slanders against opponents such as Ward Connerly and the brave souls who’ve worked to undo “bilingual education,” and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain their power and perquisites.

Terrorists? Close enough. All they lack is an actual military arm.

In God’s Name, Display A Little Decency!

I have had enough of this:

Peterson guilty in the murders of wife, fetus

It was a baby, you soulless bastards. A baby boy! The jury didn’t rule that Peterson was an abortionist; it ruled that he’d committed second-degree murder when he killed his unborn child.

That baby, had he been removed from Laci Peterson’s womb by Caesarian section, would have lived and grown as all children do. Scott Peterson’s violent intrusion into his wife’s body killed a human child: his unborn son Connor.

This is the sort of insensitivity that has the “pro-choicers,” and the Old Media that have so staunchly supported their every obscene demand, reeling from the disapproval and rejection of people with actual feelings and morals.

Keep it up, idiots. Maybe when your readership is down to your immediate families and printer’s devils, you’ll become aware of what you’ve done.