Nauseating. Disgusting. Repugnent. Ugly. Cruel. And typical. These words (except the last) seem inadequate to characterize the behavior of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson for his comments about Senator Rick Santorum’s stillborn child.

In case you didn’t know, Santorum and his wife lost their son Gabriel just hours after his birth. He was a premature baby and died two hours after his birth. Robinson saw fit to mock how the Senator and his family chose to deal with this tragedy: “He's not a little weird, he's really weird. And some of his positions that he has taken are just so weird that I think that some Republicans are off-put. Not everybody is not going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child. It was a body that they took home to kind of sleep with it, introduce it to the rest of the family. It's a very weird story.”

I guess Eugene thinks that they should have just composted the unfortunate tyke.

As a matter of fact, there was nothing at all “weird” about this.  As Peter Werner notes in this post on the Commentary “Contentions” blog, the American Pregnancy Association recommends that parents and other children spend time with a deceased infant. Yet the odious Robinson saw nothing wrong with seizing on this terrible incident to smear the candidate. And there was nothing at all unusual about his behavior. Slandering and mocking their opponents in the crudest and most vicious terms is what contemporary progressivism is all about. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

In the unlikely event that I am ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize, I won’t accept it. What decent human being wants to be on the same list with a piece of work like Eugene Robinson?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:25 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 6 January 2012 11:46 AM EST

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So why did he crash and burn? This one’s pretty straightforward: The Governor of Texas, who jumped into the Republican presidential primary accompanied by fireworks, trumpet fanfares and the cheers of conservatives, expired politically in Iowa on Tuesday of self-inflicted wounds. A series of horrifically poor performances in the GOP debate series crippled his presidential bid in its infancy. And though he did better in the last couple of debates, first impressions are the ones that count most. Experiencing a brain freeze on national TV is not the way to convince voters that you’re the man to rescue the country from Barack Obama.

Speaking personally, I was disturbed by Perry’s debate gaffes. Though it’s a mistake to equate glibness with high intelligence or wisdom, one does expect a president to show presence of mind in speeches, debates and other public venues. Beyond that, I thought that Perry’s lack of knowledge of foreign policy was a liability—and, what was worse, he seemed at times to revel in his ignorance. Not good.

Perry has vowed to continue his campaign, but I have a feeling that he’s looking around for the exit sign. You go, Governor.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:53 AM EST

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She just ended her presidential campaign after a poor showing in Iowa, so let’s begin with Michele Bachmann. Why did she crater?

In my opinion, her failure to make an impression comes down to one thing: lack of presidential profile. Though she has the conservative credentials that so many Republican primary voters are looking for, Bachmann came across as something of a lightweight. The more people watched her, the less they could imagine her as president. Maybe that’s unfair to the candidate. But there it is.

For me personally, the deal breaker was her attack on Governor Rick Perry’s Texas vaccine initiative. As a polio survivor, I loathe and revile the whole Bobby Kennedy Jr./Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccination cult, which I regard as an authentic case of mass child abuse. When Bachmann tried to damage Perry by appealing to these irrational fears of vaccination, she lost me. It was such an Obama-like thing to do.

Posted by tmg110 at 2:42 PM EST

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Thought I'd take a bit of a post-2011 break to digest the political lessons of the year and await the outcome of the Iowa caucus. First impression: the Republican nomination fight is far from over. Mitt Romney's narrow victory and Rick Santorum's strong second-place finish indicate that GOP primary voters are not resigned to a Romney candidacy. At this point Mitt still has a better chance than anyone of winning the nomination, but it's no sure thing.

Romney's problem: GOP conservatives just don't consider him a member of the club. They're still looking for that elusive, conservative non-Romney. Today it's Rick Santorum and we'll see if he has staying power. Iowa hasn't settled the GOP nomination fight.

Iowa has, however, performed the useful function of knocking off a couple of marginal candidates. I expect that Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry will soon elect to hang up their skates. The former finished fifth despite spending oodles of cash on TV advertising; the latter finished sixth with a dismal 5% of the vote. Ron Paul, who finished third, and Newt Gingrich, who finished fourth, will probably stick around for the time being, but their chances of winning the nomination are slight to nonexistent.

Individual postmortems and campaign forecasts to follow.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:08 AM EST

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New Year's resolution: If it's Obama v. Trump on Election Day, I'm writing in my own name.

Posted by tmg110 at 12:50 AM EST

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We tend to romanticize old wars and old battles: Agincourt, Yorktown, Gettysburg. Another good example is the Battle of Britain (July-September 1940), rhetorically immortalized by Winston Churchill. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he remarked in a speech to the House of Commons on 21 August 1940. He was referring to the pilots of RAF Fighter Command who, in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, were contesting control of the air over southeast England with Hitler’s mighty Luftwaffe. His words were greeted with prolonged applause that has echoed down to this day. In the high summer of 1940 the fate of Britain—indeed of the world—seemed to hinge on this air battle. Churchill’s "few"—a few hundred RAF fighter pilots, most of them in their twenties—thus entered history’s Valhalla.

If this is your impression of the Battle of Britain, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read Derek Robinson’s Piece of Cake (1983; now available for the Kindle).

Robinson’s novel chronicles the adventures of Hornet Squadron from the outbreak of war in September 1939 to the climax of the Battle of Britain. It’s not a very romantic story, and it’s not Hollywood-heroic. The pilots of Hornet Squadron find themselves pitted against the Luftwaffe with inadequate aircraft. (Their first Hurricane fighters have two-bladed wooden propellers and fabric-covered wings while lacking cockpit armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.) Moreover, the RAF’s rigid peacetime tactics prove disastrous against the well-trained Germans. After taking a pasting in France, the squadron returns to Britain for the great battle. By the time the book ends, only a few of the characters the reader has gotten to know along the way are still alive.

While taking nothing away from the brave young men who fought and died in the skies over England in the summer of 1940, Piece of Cake tells it like it is. War is hell, everybody's scared, the good die young and sometimes survival is merely a matter of luck. This one’s a must read.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:12 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 11 April 2013 9:54 PM EDT

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How thoughtful:

MADALLA, Nigeria (AP) - At a Nigerian Catholic church where a terror attack killed 35 people on Christmas, women tried to clean the sanctuary ahead of Mass on Monday while one man wept uncontrollably amid the debris.

 

>snip<

 

At least 52 people were wounded in the attack, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. Victims filled the cement floors of a nearby government hospital, some crying in pools of their own blood.

 

On Christmas, attacks by the radical Muslim sect left 39 dead across Africa's most populous nation. A bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the nation's northeast.

 

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.

 

"There will never be peace until our demands are met," the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

Well, incidents like this certainly don’t present Islam in a very favorable light. But not to worry! No doubt our dedicated apologists for the Religion of Peace on campus and elsewhere will find some way to pin the blame on the victims. I can hear them now: "The nerve of those damned Catholics, who had the gross insensitivity to build their lousy churches in Muslim Nigeria…"

Posted by tmg110 at 1:58 PM EST

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Then you just might be giving your vote to a 9/11 truther who has speculated that President Bush and the CIA had a hand in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He also believes that America ought not to have fought Nazi Germany. “Saving the Jews,” he thinks, was none of our business. He also thinks it possible that FDR somehow engineered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the nation into war.

This interesting summary of Paul’s lunatic views on foreign policy comes from a former aide, Eric Dondero. The candidate’s spokesman describes this individual as “a disgruntled former staffer.” So perhaps what he alleges should be taken with a grain of salt. Paul has said, though, thinks that the 9/11 attack was really America’s fault; the Islamofascists were simply reacting our oppressive foreign policy. Starting from there, it’s a short hike to the zany conspiracy theories of the 9/11 truther mob.

Would you really be comfortable with someone like Ron Paul in the White House? Think about it.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:44 PM EST

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I just updated WAR FLAGS, my website devoted to military and naval flags of the world, past and present. Check it out!

Posted by tmg110 at 1:16 PM EST

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