It may well be true that the complexities of presidential logistics prevented Barack Obama from traveling to Paris for yesterday’s demonstration against terrorism. But given the lack of any meaningful gesture of solidarity with the people and world leaders who were there, it carries the stench of a lame excuse.

So the President couldn’t make it? Well, then how about the Vice President? He wasn’t available either? Then why not the Secretary of State? Either one of those gentlemen would have served as an appropriate representative the United States. But the Obama Administration just couldn’t be bothered, the President himself reacting to the Paris attacks and their aftermath with a kind of muted petulance. Hadn’t he declared an end to the War on Terror? So why were people still asking him about terrorism?!

In truth it must be awkward for Obama to grapple with the ongoing terrorist threat—given his confident and as it turns out over-optimistic claims, circa 2012-13, that the enemy had been decimated. Then there’s the business of his skedaddle out of Iraq and its unfortunate aftermath. Once can almost sympathize with the President’s desire to talk about anything else—free community college of all, for instance, or the evils of “climate change.” I’m sure that just now Obama wouldn’t welcome questions about his plan to close down the terrorist detention facility at Gitmo!

One hesitates to use the term “national embarrassment” just because one doesn’t like the current occupant of the White House. But America’s no-show in Paris was exactly that: a failure of leadership that made our country look bad in the eyes of the world. It just seems as though Obama is losing interest in the job we’re paying him to do. I know it must be painful for him to measure the realities of 2015 against the hoopla of 2008-09. But come on, Barry—you’re the President, remember? 

Posted by tmg110 at 10:22 AM EST

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So now we’re all Charlie—except that there’s a generous dash of hypocrisy in that boast.

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that was targeted last week by Islamofascist killers, has a long and notorious history of mocking religion, very often in the crudest, most vulgar manner. The magazine’s dead editors, writers and cartoonists are now being lionized as champions of free speech. But there’s something that wasn’t mentioned during yesterday’s giant demonstration in Paris: For years Charlie Hebdo has been under assault by the French government for violations of that country’s laws against “offensive” speech. Even the Obama Administration got into the act. Back in 2012 the White House “strongly condemned” a series of Charlie Hebdo cartoons that had Muslims up in arms. Hmmm, maybe that’s why Obama passed on a weekend trip to Paris…

Recalling these fact one of the magazine’s surviving editors bitterly denounced yesterday’s demonstration, saying in effect, “Where were you then?” Good question!

Is this not a sign of the times? As has become typical, people want it both ways. First, they wish to be seen as sensitive and inclusive. Thus subversive media like Charlie Hebdo must be criticized and pressured to shut up when they offend the sensibilities of certain designated victim groups: Muslims, say, though not Christians or Jews. But when the sequel involves a mass shooting suddenly everyone’s a dauntless defender of freedom of expression who loudly proclaims that the cartoonist’s pencil is mightier than the Kalashnikov.

It’s really not possible to believe that all those people in Paris, emphatically including the “world leaders” who linked arms on the street, are principled defenders of free speech and thought. They’ve given too much evidence over the years that they prefer “sensitivity” and “tolerance.” “If liberty means anything at all,” George Orwell wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Nowadays there are countless people who believe that you and I have no right to offend others’ sensibilities by telling them things they don’t want to hear. And a lot of them were in Paris yesterday, waving Je suis Charlie signs.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:58 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 12 January 2015 9:39 AM EST

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So how should you react to the ongoing terrorist crisis in Paris?

Start by recognizing the threat: not generic terrorism or “extremism” but purposeful violence carried out by the devotees of a totalitarian ideology, political Islam. Contrary to the bloviations of Barack Obama and those like him, what happened in Paris was not a “senseless act of violence.” No, it had a particular point: to intimidate and silence opponents of political Islam. And as the craven response of many in the media makes plain, the vicious attack on Charlie Hebdo succeeded in its object. Henceforward journalists and commentators will be the more reluctant to criticize the demands and pretensions of radical Islamists, adding stark fear of death to their pre-existing sense of political correctness.

It must be said that terrorism has proved a most effective weapon against those postmodern Western elites who run the show in Europe and are so influential in America. Like cavalry horses answering the trumpet, these people respond to each bloody outrage with finger-wagging lectures on the dangers of “Islamophobia”—as if the justified anger of those attacked is more fearsome than the latest fusillade or bomb blast. In this instance their desire to appear tolerant and accepting of difference renders them incapable of a full-throated defense of the enemy’s real target, freedom of expression. Abashed as they are by the perversity and smuttiness of Charlie Hebdo’s broadsides against Islam, our enlightened elites can’t find it within themselves to mount an unqualified defense of what is, or ought to be, a cardinal Western value. The blood had scarcely been mopped up before the “judgment” of Charlie Hebdo’s editors was being called into question. Here in the US, the New York Times couldn’t even bring itself to print the offending cartoons and this is far from the only example of such spinelessness I could cite.

Sure, you can kid yourself that if we all keep calm and carry on “violent extremism” can be defeated. You can kid yourself that each fresh massacre is a “pinprick” by “lone wolves.” You can pretend that what’s happening in Paris was nothing more than “senseless violence.” You can, in short, behave as people in the past behaved when confronted with similar threats such as twentieth-century totalitarianism: deny, rationalize, ignore the obvious. But the Charlie Hebdo attack was not the first such outrage and it certainly won’t be the last. A winning tactic tends to be repeated.

President Obama has been at pains to insist that we, the United States and the West, are not at war with Islam. But this is nothing but a self-serving—perhaps a personally comforting—lie. We are at war with Islam—or with a potent strain of Islam, to which countless millions of Muslims pledge their faith, that poses an existential ideological and philosophical challenge to our fundamental values. This strain of Islam hates and reviles all that we hold dear. Unlike so many hypocritical secular tyrannies, it not only violates fundamental human rights in practice but rejects them in principle. Our own president seems willfully impervious to these realities. Like the appeasers of the 1930s he “goes on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided,  resolved to be irresolute, solid for fluidity, adamant for drift, all-powerful to be impotent.” At this fateful moment in the history of America and the West we could use someone like the man who spoke those words. Instead we have a community organizer-in-chief. And his name, alas, is Legion, for he is many.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:15 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 12 January 2015 9:36 AM EST

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Who knew that former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is an expert on Islam? But it seems so! Yesterday on MSNBC he drew upon his deep store of scholarly understanding to explain that the terrorists who killed twelve people in Paris yesterday are not Muslims at all. Never mind the fact that they shouted “God is great” and “We have avenged the Prophet” as they gunned down their victims. See, they’re just nondenominational “extremists” In like manner ISIS—that’s the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria—has nothing to do with Islam. It’s just a “cult,” Dean informed us.

I don’t know which strikes me more forcibly: Dean’s delusional world-view or his arrogant condescension. On reflection I suppose it must be the latter. Here’s this secular progressive Western elitist issuing fatwas on Muslim doctrine as if he were some turbaned mullah. That hundreds of millions of actual Muslims take a very different view of their religion, viewing Islamofascist terrorism with tacit or overt approval, makes no impression whatsoever on the man. He knows what is and isn’t Islam, so that’s that.

Of course, Dean only said with his trademark lack of tact what many other progressives think: If we in the West just pretend that Islam is a “religion of peace” then reality will conform to our preferences. They seem to think that Islamofascist terrorism can be rebranded as generic “extremism,” completely detached from the religion in whose name it spills so much blood. In this way, they imagine, the dread possibility of a “backlash” against Muslims in the West can be staved off.

That such reality control is likely to have just the opposite effect is a fact that progressives refuse to acknowledge. To deny the obvious—to deny that Islam as such is infected with the virus of terror and totalitarianism—is to ensure that the backlash will come. On the other hand, to accept the truth is not to revile all Muslims as barbarians and fiends. No doubt the majority of Muslims are peaceable people who want nothing to do with violence and terror. In this, however, they get scant support from their religious leaders or, indeed, from their religion itself. Most Germans were not Nazis but that did not stop Hitler and his cabal from inflicting a catastrophe on their country and the world.

In the long run only truth-telling can defeat this Islamofascist scourge. But of course, politically correct progressives like Howard Dean can’t see that.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:27 AM EST

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I will readily grant you that Showtime’s new series, The Affair, which wrapped up its premiere season in December, is not crafted to appeal to a broad-based audience. Indeed, there are two or three things that I don’t like about it myself—starting with the theme song, written and performed by Fiona Apple. Let’s just say that Cole Porter/Rosemary Clooney she ain’t. But on the whole I really enjoyed The Affair. It has one thing going for it that most TV shows do not: None of the characters are likeable or even sympathetic. Perhaps Breaking Bad came close, but from time one did find one’s self sympathizing with Walter White—even knowing that he was, as his sometime business partner put it, the Devil.  But there’s not a single character in The Affair—no, not one!—who attracts the viewer’s sympathy. Imagine a writer with all of Dostoevsky’s talent but one of his humanity and you’ll understand something of this show’s world-view.

The Affair tells the story of an extramarital fling between two sad and not particularly nice people, both of whom for their own reasons are ill content with the trajectory of their lives. Each episode is divided roughly in two, covering more or less the same events but presented first through the eyes of one protagonist and then through the eyes of the other. This is a neat contrivance and very plausible. For instance Noah, the unfaithful husband, sees Ruth as a sexy, seductive flirt; Ruth, the cheating wife, sees Noah as an aggressive horndog. Small details that the viewer learns to watch for signal these and other differing perceptions—of Noah’s wife, of Ruth’s husband, etc. Moreover, the story of their affair is framed within an ongoing murder investigation whose details only gradually become clear. In the final episode past and present converge as you began to suspect that they might two or three episodes earlier. But enough remains unexplained to make the finale a cliffhanger and I was glad to learn that The Affair has been renewed for 2015.

But, as I said, the thing about The Affair that really intrigues me is the unlikeability of the characters. Take Noah. He feels sorry for himself, well, because his life isn’t exactly what he wants it to be. But he’s got a wife and family, a job he enjoys (teaching high-school English), he’s a published novelist. And no matter how hard you try to sympathize with the guy, there’s no escaping the light-minded frivolity of his behavior. Ruth, on the other hand, has a good reason to hate the place she’s in—she and her husband lost their young son in a tragic accident. Okay, fine, but must she constantly display the scarlet V of victimhood?

And as with the protagonists, so with their families and friends. We soon learn to dislike Noah’s whiny wife even though she is a woman scorned. Ruth’s cuckolded husband is, not to put too fine a point on it, a jerk—so it’s hard to sympathize with him either. Ditto down the cast. I found myself reflecting more than once that The Affair communicates some stark truths that are seldom acknowledged: that most men and women are shallow and boring, that most marriages are sad and hollow, that other people’s kids are whiny and unattractive, that sex is a tawdry diversion, that true romance is a sham. Ah, but I admonished myself, such truths only apply to other people’s lives! And that’s The Affair’s real hook: It places the viewer in the role of the Pharisee in the temple crying, “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men!” Let me tell you, the realization of that took my self-esteem down a peg.

Be that as it may, The Affair is smartly written, brilliantly acted—compelling from start to finish. To tell the truth, I’m a bit apprehensive about the show’s second season. Remember how they screwed up Twin Peaks? Let’s hope that a similar fate does not befall this estimable show. Anyhow, I highly recommend The Affair.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:55 PM EST

Updated: Monday, 12 January 2015 9:45 AM EST

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So what’s worse than mowing down a dozen people with automatic weapons while shouting “God is great” and “We have avenged the Prophet”? Describing the shooters as Islamofascists.

If there’s one thing you can count on from our enlightened progressive elites in the wake of a terrorist attack, it’s a finger-wagging lecture about the evils of Islamophobia. Sure, that pile of bloody riddled bodies is rather unsightly—but don’t you dare ascribe responsibility to the religion of peace! After all, those writers and cartoonists who were killed today in France were only executed because they failed to tread Islam with sufficient respect.

Somehow I doubt that the enlightened would display such forbearance if the terrorists in question had referenced the Bible or the Cross of Christ rather than the Prophet Mohammed. We’re still getting lectures about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the proscription of Galileo, the Salem witch trials—blah, blah, blah. Not that I advocate forgetfulness in regard of Christianity’s sometimes intolerant and bloody history. But such things lie in the past whereas on the other hand Islam’s bloody history is being written now—today.

And it won’t do to argue that the Islamofascists don’t speak for or represent Islam. These barbarians carry out their massacres, beheadings, rapes, persecutions with scarcely a peep of protest from supposedly moderate or mainstream Muslims. Probably it’s true that a majority of Muslims do not support or approve of Islamofascism. But a significant minority of them do approve of it, or the depredations of ISIS, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc, etc. would not be possible. Like Hitler and other mass murders before them, the Islamofascists enjoy a significant measure of popular support.

The claims that Islam, a political ideology as well as a religion, makes on its devotees are such that the door to extremism always stands ajar. To point this out is to open one’s self to charges of bigotry and racism from people whose reaction to such horrors as today’s massacre in Paris is first to avert their eyes and then to blame the victim. Such behavior, I suppose, is the postmodern version of a principled stand: emotionally satisfying, morally bankrupt.

Posted by tmg110 at 12:25 PM EST

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Consternation! Angst! Indignation! Outrage! One gropes and fumbles for words adequate to describe the reaction of the Harvard faculty to the terrible news…that in 2015,they’re going to be paying more for healthcare.

You’d probably have to walk a long way across the Harvard campus to find a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who opposed the Affordable Care Act. But in November 2014 said faculty members voted overwhelmingly to oppose “cost-sharing measures” that would boost their out-of pocket costs under the university’s revised employee health insurance plan. It seems that various Obamacare provisions, such as extended coverage for “children” up to the age of 26, free preventive services and the impending “Cadillac tax” on high-dollar healthcare insurance plans, are driving up costs for Harvard. And faculty members are shocked—shocked!—to learn that a percentage of those costs are being passed along to them.

Yes, America, that sound you hear is the rending of academic regalia and the gnashing of professorial teeth in the Harvard faculty lounges as our academic elites grapple with the sad realities of the, ahem, Affordable Care Act. Poor Mary D. Lewis, a history prof, was heard to sob that the increased deductibles and co-pays amount to a pay cut! And economics professor Jerry R. Green thundered that the hikes constitute a tax on the sick!

And we feel their pain, don’t we? Because millions of Americans have already been screwed by the ACA—and misery loves company. When you recall how many academic experts contributed to the design and marketing of Obamacare, when you imagine how many of them snickered at the ignorance of the rubes and rednecks who opposed it, It’s really a pleasure to see this crowd bending over to take their medicine.

Posted by tmg110 at 3:13 PM EST

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Once again there are plenty of contenders for the title—but the jester’s motley has to go to MIT professor of economics Jonathan Gruber, the celebrated Obamacare architect who became an overnight unperson when his impolitic truth-telling went viral.

Gruber, whom the Obama Administration paid a cool $400,000 for consulting services during the design phase of the Affordable Care Act, was caught on video sharing such gems with select audiences as the observation that the bill’s “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” thanks to “the stupidity of the American voter.” So much for the professor’s reputation as a healthcare expert! Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed that she’d never heard of the guy—until video showing her praising Gruber’s analysis of the ACA was unearthed. As for President Obama he waved the whole embarrassing business away, saying that Gruber was just some obscure outside consultant—this despite the fact that White House logs showed him to have been a frequent visitor.

Democrats and their media enablers had a fit. Though some insisted that the whole Gruber business was a “nothingburger” others had to admit that his revelations had inflicted serious damage on the already tarnished Obamacare brand. Perhaps worse, his sneering condescension, practically a caricature of the Ivy League elitist snob showed Mr. & Ms. Flyover Country America just what their lords and masters really thought of them: “too stupid to understand” the intricacies of high-level government policymaking.

Gruber’s humiliation culminated in a farcical hearing before a congressional committee in December 2014, during which he was made to look like an absolute fool—no very challenging task. It was, in effect, the Professor’s coronation as 2014’s Clown Prince, a dishonor well earned and richly deserved. Congratulations, Jonathan!

Posted by tmg110 at 11:01 AM EST

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There are plenty of contenders for the title but nobody made a bigger crater last year than Wendy Davis. The Texas Democratic state senator caused a sensation on the Left with her 2013 filibuster of a bill regulating abortion clinics in the Lone Star State. Well, there’s no surer method than that of winning the hearts and minds of progressives! Davis became the Great Blonde Hope—the smart, sassy, photogenic champion of “choice” who had what it took to flip Texas from red to blue. She announced her run for governor in late 2013 and walked away with the Democratic nomination in March 2014 to the accompaniment of phenomenal media hype.

Alas, from there it was all downhill for Davis.

As the fourth most liberal member of the Texas Senate, Davis was not exactly positioned to appeal to voters statewide. For instance her celebrated filibuster, which really amounted to a futile last-ditch defense of partial-birth abortion (the bill was eventually passed), turned out to be a political liability of elephantine proportions. Nor did Davis prove herself an adroit campaigner; her campaign’s general nastiness and her own gaffes attracted unflattering attention. Responding to criticism from her GOP opponent, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot, Davis sniffed that he should quiet down until he’d “walked a mile in my shoes.” Abbot, who suffered a crippling injury as a young man, is confined to a wheelchair.

Liberal pundits who’d ballyhooed her candidacy suddenly found themselves wondering how badly Davis would lose. The outcome exceeded their most pessimistic expectations. The Great Blonde Hope wasn’t defeated—she was creamed, slaughtered, had her clock cleaned. When the votes were counted it turned out that Greg Abbot had beaten Wendy Davis by 59-38%—a crushing twenty-point margin. Davis, the champion of “choice,” didn’t even manage to carry a majority of female voters. Her run for governor was, in a word, a debacle.

So congratulations, Wendy! In a political year with plenty of tough competition, you were without doubt The Biggest Loser of them all.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:49 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 5 January 2015 6:39 PM EST

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There’s no clearer illustration of the Democratic Party’s disconnection from the concerns of mainstream America than its embrace of environmental fanaticism.

Though environmental activists make rhetorical concessions to populist themes—prating of “climate justice"—the fact remains that environmentalism is the hobby horse of well-off progressives. That is to say, it’s the preserve of people who need not fear the negative fallout from radical environmental policies. A tenured professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, knows no one who works as a coal miner—so what’s it to him if the coal industry is throttled by the EPA? The CEO of a New York City-based nonprofit whose six-figure income and porcine benefits package cushion her against price fluctuations couldn’t care less if government restrictions on fracking cause the pump price of gas to skyrocket. On the other hand, the professor and the CEO get to feel intellectually and morally superior to the bitter clingers who complain about these things. It’s a sweet deal indeed for our coddled elites.

But not for the Democratic Party. Though its fealty to environmental extremism rakes in the campaign cash, the indirect costs to the party are high and getting higher. At a time when jobs and the economy are the number-one issues on the minds of middle-class and working-class Americans, the Democrats find themselves wedded to an environmental ideology that sanctifies limits and restrictions. Progressives of a bygone era celebrated government-sponsored projects like the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. But today’s progressives, though they pay rhetorical homage to such things, are much more likely to be found in court, seeking to prevent dams, pipelines and power plants from being built. Thanks to their influence, the Democratic Party has largely abandoned pro-growth economic policies, instead expressing its residual populism through various expansions of the bureaucracy. The party’s foremost populist is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: the very model of a faculty-lounge elitist and an enthusiastic booster of the regulatory state.

Democrats comfort themselves with the thought that demography is destiny: that the changing character of the US population will deliver into their hands a permanent majority. Or to put it another way, they no longer think it necessary to produce results. Why worry about the economy when history is on their side? This mind-set, I believe, goes far to explain the failure of the Obama Administration to address economic issues in the period 2009-10, when the Democrats had a lock on government power. Instead Obama led his party up the blind alley of healthcare reform and “green energy.” Sure, the latter was supposed to produce “millions of jobs”—but this was nothing more than empty campaign rhetoric. In fact, Obama and the Democrats did nothing for the middle class, nothing for the working class and nothing for minority groups who were particularly hard hit by the economic downturn. The systemic economic problems that candidate Obama decried in 2008 have only gotten worse during his presidency.

The Democratic Party’s fixation on—one might go so far as to say addiction to—radical environmentalism is not the only example of its disregard for what used to be called lunch-bucket issues. But in its overt rejection of economic growth, its embrace of an ideology of limits and restrictions—not to mention its contemptuous attitude toward the concerns of average Americans—the radical environmental agenda sends a clear signal to voters that their priorities are no longer those of the Democratic Party. 

Posted by tmg110 at 1:06 PM EST

Updated: Thursday, 25 December 2014 12:05 AM EST

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