As I expected, the gunman who murdered three French soldiers recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, three Jewish children and a rabbi has turned out to be an Islamofascist terrorist.

Pretty cheeky, considering the source!

And finally, there’s this prize specimen of journalistic buffoonery from the (UK) Telegraph’s Ed West:

It’s easy to get it wrong because so many of the world’s varied extremists, whatever their motivation and however much they might hate each other, focus their anger and loathing on similar targets—the state, the city, modernity, capitalism, and the one group who embody all these complicating, unsettling changes in the minds of lonely, failed young men—Jews. People often make the wrong call because that’s what they want to believe, because it fits into their narrative. The recent shootings in Toulouse are a case in point. Many people kill in the name of jihad but they do not represent Islam or Muslims, the vast majority of whom will be horrified by the Toulouse killings. It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant.

Oh, baloney. To be rudely frank, I don’t believe that “the vast majority” of Muslims will be “horrified” by the killing of Jews. Since when, Ed?

Posted by tmg110 at 12:14 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 22 March 2012 2:33 PM EDT

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As of today, the Obama super PAC (run by former Obama adviser Bill Burton) has still not returned the $1 million donation it received from the loathsome misogynist, Bill Maher. Well, ladies, it does seem that the President's concern for your honor and dignity is somewhat selective. If you're a woman of conservative views, it's quite all right with Obama for a slimeball like Maher to call you a "dumb twat." Hey, he's got a million reasons to look the other way.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:57 AM EDT

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Here’s a stinging takedown of President Obama’s self-serving claim that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression. No so, explains Commentary’s Peter Wehner:

[At the time of the 1980 election] Prime interest rates were around 19 percent. Inflation was in double digits, with forecasts that food prices would rise by more than 10 percent in the coming year and energy prices by 20-40 percent. Unemployment stood at 7.4 percent (it would eventually rise to 10.8 percent in the early years of Reagan’s presidency). Housing starts were in free fall. And auto sales were down 10 percent from the previous year.

In short, though it’s true that Obama inherited a lot of problems, they were by no means the worst ever faced by an incoming president. Moreover, as Wehner goes on to note, while Reagan had to deal with problems caused by his political opponents, Obama’s were of his own party’s making:

[I]n the words of AEI’s Peter Wallison, the “sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy”—and that “far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system.”

Would it be too indecorous to point out that the Bush administration warned as early as April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged and that their failure “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity” well beyond housing?

In fact, President Bush’s plan for reform would have subjected Fannie and Freddie to the kinds of federal regulation that banks, credit unions, and savings and loans have to comply with. In addition, Republican Richard Shelby, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE (government-sponsored enterprises) reform in 2005. And who blocked these efforts at reforming Fannie and Freddie? Democrats such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, along with the then-junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who backed Dodd’s threat of a filibuster (Obama was the third-largest recipient of campaign gifts from Fannie and Freddie employees in 2004).

So when Obama speaks, as he so often does, of “the failed policies of the past” that got us into this mess, he’s talking about policies that he wholeheartedly supported back in the years before the deluge. It’s an all-too-typical example of this president’s casual, not say dismissive, attitude toward the facts.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:32 AM EDT

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In the anthology Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, David Horowitz made an interesting point about the contemporary Left that may explain such peculiarities as the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, the cult worship of stone killers like Castro and Che, etc.

Horowitz asserts that the Left has lost its optimism. In the past, hatred of the existing capitalist order—which boiled down to hatred of America—was matched by faith in the socialist ideal. Supposedly, the path to the radiant future was marked out by the Soviet Union, the European People’s Republics, Communist China and the revolutionary regimes of the Third World. Even when Stalinism somewhat tarnished the Soviet brand, Western progressives comforted themselves that the “gains of October”—the superior socialist economic model—pointed the way forward. East Germany, for example, was much touted as a successful socialist economy.

Then came 1989.

The swift collapse of the Soviet Union and its European puppet regimes exposed the squalid failure of the socialist economic model. Far from making society wealthier, more just and more equal, socialist economics had institutionalized poverty and inequality. Gone, therefore, was the alibi for communist oppression. Stalin’s tyranny had not, after all, transformed backward Russia into an economic powerhouse. East Germany had not, after all, developed a modern high-tech economy. The optimism was gone. What remained was the hatred.

As Horowitz notes, progressives no longer possess a coherent vision of the just society, nor do they propose any plan or program for bringing such a society into being. But though the dream is dead, the nightmare continues. In the writings of such leading leftists as Cornel West and Noam Chomsky, in the pages of such magazines as the Nation and The Progressive, at Occupy Wall Street rallies and antiwar protests, the hymn of hate resounds. If there’s nothing to be built, then at least America can be destroyed.

From this poisonous root spring such diverse expressions of anti-Americanism as Michael Moore’s goofball documentaries, the demented ranting of Cindy Sheehan and the Constitution-bashing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So much for what the late Christopher Hitchens once called “the moral grandeur of the Left"!

Posted by tmg110 at 12:38 PM EDT

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From the campaign trail: "Cee Lo Green Performs 'F**k You,' Flips Off Crowd At Obama Fundraiser"

Seems a funny way to solicit contributions, but I suppose that being flipped off by an angry black guy gave the guilt-ridden white progressives in the audience a bit of a rush.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:37 AM EDT

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Good news for Barack Obama and the socialist cause: “Supermodel Elle Macpherson Loves Obama: 'I’m Socialist—What Do You Expect?'”

Elle, you’re exactly what I’d expect. You are, in fact, the very model of a modern socialist: rich, super-privileged, out of touch with reality and contemptuous of all those little people who just don’t understand what’s good for them. Marx, that wicked old sinner, must be rolling over in his grave…

Posted by tmg110 at 8:31 AM EDT

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Incidentally, I don't disagree with Fisk's opinion that the US is losing the war in Afghanistan. I suspect, however, that we'd disagree as to the reason. He would no doubt insist that the war was always "unwinnable." That's the Left's standard line on any war undertaken by America. I blame the debacle on President Obama's feckless, politically driven policies. We didn't so much lose this war as give it away. And considering the number of American troops who've been killed or wounded there on Obama's watch, I'd say that he's got some explaining to do…

Posted by tmg110 at 3:36 PM EDT

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The vile and vicious anti-Americanism of the Left is well on display in this story from the odious Robert Fisk, who has seized upon the massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians by a US soldier to spew out this nonsense (Fisk is referring to General John Allen’s cautionary statement to his troops after six NATO soldiers were killed in revenge for the burning of desecrated Korans):

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because—however much I dislike generals—I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings—and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately—in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing—to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Of course, what Fisk suspects is in no way backed up by anything like evidence, and we can probably discount his claim to expertise where generals are concerned. Anyone who has actually served in the military could have explained to this jerk what General Allen was thinking, and there was nothing “extraordinary” about it. He well understands that even well-trained professional soldiers are vulnerable to the atavistic emotions roused by the dehumanizing conditions of combat. One of the purposes of military discipline—indeed, its most important purpose—is to manage these emotions. That’s what General Allen was doing.

Atrocities have of course occurred in all wars, and they are of two types: those resulting from a breakdown of discipline, either individually or at the unit level, and those carried out as deliberate policy. Examples of the first type are My Lai and the recent massacre in Afghanistan; examples of the second type are the Nazi German campaign in the Soviet Union and Islamofascist terrorism.

Fisk pretends to see no difference between an atrocity resulting from a lapse of discipline and one resulting from a deliberate policy of terror. To call him intellectually dishonest would be too gentle a condemnation of the America-hating hard Leftist. He’s an implacable enemy of America—and the fact that he’s alive and well and spewing out this garbage is a sufficient proof of the difference between America and its Islamofascist enemies.

Posted by tmg110 at 3:31 PM EDT

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A superb piece of socio-political commentary from one of America’s most notable thinkers: Angelica Huston: US Returning to “Dark Ages”

That her conception of the Dark Ages is no doubt based on a boozy viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in no way detracts from the scalpel-like incisiveness of Ms. Huston’s analysis.

Posted by tmg110 at 5:37 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 16 March 2012 8:32 PM EDT

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