Tag: Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

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FRANCES FOX PIVEN: “She wouldn’t even harm a fly.” “In the course of this brouhaha, it becomes apparent that leftist academics don’t want to be and should not be taken seriously, that the cultural elite can dish out violent rhetoric but cannot take being called on it, that the NYT has blundered into another loser of an argument, and that people who want to waste their tuition money should major in sociology, which has obviously become the redoubt of clueless, revolutionary manqués. . . . Piven denied to the NYT that she advocated violence in the article. It’s hard to see how that defense stands up, unless she is saying that she didn’t know what happened in Greece when she urged the American unemployed to take action ‘like the strikes and riots’ there.”

Here’s a reminder of what Piven’s “strikes and riots” in Greece involved:

At the same time, tens of thousands of protesters marched through Athens in the largest and most violent protests since the country’s budget crisis began last fall. Angry youths rampaged through the center of Athens, torching several businesses and vehicles and smashing shop windows. Protesters and police clashed in front of parliament and fought running street battles around the city.

Witnesses said hooded protesters smashed the front window of Marfin Bank in central Athens and hurled a Molotov cocktail inside. The three victims died from asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, the Athens coroner’s office said. Four others were seriously injured there, fire department officials said.

Just for the record. And here’s the conclusion:

“In sum, this was another week in which the media and cultural elites acted stupidly and were called on it. Twice in a row now they’ve tried to paint their opposition as violent thugs only to be revealed themselves as snobbish poseurs, projecting their own thuggish urges onto others. It was another week in which those living off the productive labor of others deride those others, try to undermine them, and are in the process undermining the very society which makes it possible for such foolish poseurs to live in comfort.”

Indeed.

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I actually grew up in part as a Calvinist fundamentalist myself during the 1970s. My family were adherents of old-style orthodox Calvinism of the kind represented by theologians like J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til, and for a time we were involved with a church associated with the theocratic “Christian reconstructionist” movement of R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North. All of my education up through and including my sophomore year of high school was done at a fundamentalist academy that adhered to dispensational Christian Zionism (think of Bob Jones University and you will get an idea what the atmosphere there was like). During the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a left-wing Chomskyite and it was during this time that I first began to personally encounter PC. Observing the psychology of PC and its behavioral manifestations up close and in an unadulterated form gave me a sense of déjà vu: “Where I have seen this kind of thing before?” Having long since abandoned my previous Christianity by that time, I came to realize that PC essentially amounts to Christian fundamentalism without a Christ (perhaps this explains the Left’s habit of elevating perceived progressive saints such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the status of Christ-like semi-divine figures).

Whatever the true historical trajectory of PC may be, its obscurantist and totalitarian nature is obvious enough. It is ironic that eccentric religious subcultures such as the ones I came from are demonized by the anointed as dangerous theocratic fascists about to carry out an Taliban-like coup any minute now (a view that wildly exaggerates the influence and degree of extremism of such subcultures), while a form of obscurantist totalitarianism that has actually has the support of elites, intellectuals, academics, journalists, and others of genuine influence continues to entrench itself in Western cultural and political institutions.

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But 8 million homes are today in foreclosure or their owners are delinquent in their mortgage payments. Some 5.5 million are occupied by families whose mortgages are at least 20 percent higher than the value of the property, making them prime candidates for foreclosure.

This weekend, Bank of America reported fourth-quarter losses of $1.6 billion and a 2010 yearly loss of $3.6 billion. Its credit card unit took a $10 billion write-down, and its home loan business is still reeling from the fallout of the exploded housing bubble.

Now, facing trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, House Republicans are balking at agreeing to raise the debit limit of $14.3 trillion, though the national debt just crossed the $14 trillion mark.

Are the happy days really here again?

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According to a USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday, 42 percent of those asked said that political rhetoric was not a factor at all in the shooting, 22 percent said that it was a minor factor and 20 percent said that it was a major factor. Furthermore, most agreed that focusing on conservative rhetoric as a link in the shooting was “not a legitimate point but mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.” And nearly an equal number of people said that Republicans, the Tea Party and Democrats had all “gone too far in using inflammatory language” to criticize their opponents.

Great. So the left overreacts and overreaches and it only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats.

Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support.

You can’t claim the higher ground in a pit of quicksand.

Concocting connections to advance an argument actually weakens it. The argument for tonal moderation has been done a tremendous disservice by those who sought to score political points in the absence of proof.

 

Quote of the Day Part Deux

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Let me get this straight, the Anti-Defamation League is demanding that Thomas be punished because she says that she was punished by Jewish groups?

The first to cave was Wayne State, which rescinded, with the ADL’s approval, their “Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in Media Award.”

Isn’t diversity such a strength?

Like Rick Sanchez (A White Hispanic), Thomas, an Arab (who looks white, if not Jewish) views herself as a victim group that is more victimized than Jews.

To emphasize this point, Thomas and Sanchez mention that Jews have more political and media power than their groups. Jewish groups with political and media power then demand that the transgressors are punished for such blasphemy.

I shed no tears for their predicament. For all their squabbling, the ADL, Helen Thomas, and Rick Sanchez are all united in their opposition to a majority White America—something that those who think the Jews are the sole source of all our problems should keep in mind.

On an unrelated note, a number of schools have given honorary degrees to genocidal Black dictator Robert Mugabe. I am waiting for the ADL to object.

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Conservatives are rightly skeptical of much of what government does, and foreign aid has long been something that stuck deeply in conservatives’ craws, having a lineage of doubt going back to the John Birch Society and beyond. Mostly, it seems that hostility to the idea of foreign aid has centered around the fact that it involves taking money from honest, hardworking taxpayers and giving it to undeserving foreign governments. But there’s perhaps an even better reason for the abolition of foreign aid: far from helping, it actively hurts those it intends to help. So says the journalist Linda Polman in a new book, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?

Sierra Leone, the small West African state that was wracked by a brutal civil war – and where this writer lived many years ago working in, I now meekly report, humanitarian aid – is a classic example of the extremes which foreign aid has provoked. Foreign governments, along with various non-state actors, such as warlords and bandits, long ago learned that aid from the developed world and their various agencies is a fairly reliable source of cash. Being the shifty souls that so many of them are, they’ve learned to do whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing. In Sierra Leone, the appearance of amputation as a form of warfare and terror was somewhat mystifying; thoroughly brutal, it was hard to see for what purpose it could be used, other than terrorizing the civilian population – and they were seemingly already terrorized enough, being killed and maimed in the tens of thousands by roving bands of unspeakably violent marauders.

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NEW YORK—Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and died last August from that dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair—so convincingly that some nice guys banned him from speaking just before the end because of his opposition to Israeli policies. (They called him an anti-Semite although Judt was Jewish, which is par for the course.)

Judt wrote an essay about “My Endless New York” which was a gem. At times I think only foreigners can catch the city’s pulse—New York, of course, not being America. The city has never been homogeneous. The finest thing about the place, we are told, is the variety of its sideshows. Sixty-five years or so ago, A. J. Liebling spoke for the city, writing about boxing and the man who laid out the gloves and headgear for the pugs at Stillman’s Gym, or Hymie the Jew who operated sleazy clubs on 52nd Street, or Miss Ira, “the Harlem modiste” who sold turbans to ladies who liked to impress the men late at night. Liebling wrote of New Yorkers so submerged in one environment, such as the Garment Center or Jack and Charlie’s, that they lived and died oblivious of the other worlds around them. I agree. I caught some of that separate world as a teenager, the Park Avenue swells who never ventured anywhere except for their clubs and weekends in Long Island, even when slumming; the Italians and Irish who lived side by side in the Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen and who did manual work and went to baseball games on Saturdays and to church on Sundays; the rich “Negroes” up in Harlem who never ventured south but lived in some splendid houses with beautiful women and were said to be gangsters; the Jews on 47th Street, the Diamond District, who were suspicious of the rest of us and probably had good reason to be.

[…]

Fifty years later the place is different—much less charming, but nevertheless thriving. The swells are no longer, replaced by the rapacious Wall Street beasts. The Jews, Italians, and Irish are now mixing freely with the blacks and Latinos, as they call themselves. New York has always been a world city; Chicago, as Tony Judt wrote, was THE great American one. New York led the world in culture from 1945 until the 80s, when the pursuit of the almighty dollar replaced everything, including culture, religion, and apple pie. Last weekend I drove through Harlem on my way to Connecticut, and the place is once again gentrified, prettied-up, yet violent. Drugs are rife everywhere. On my way out of the city I took stock. In the morning I walk outside my house to Kevin’s, born in Trinidad and as nice a gent as one hopes to meet in the city. He has my three dailies ready, and we wisecrack with the mostly blacks purchasing lottery tickets. Next door two Uzbeki Jews run the shoe store where Ecuadorians and Mexicans shine shoes like no others. Just across them, Panayotis and Dimitris, two Greeks, cut hair, including mine, and Mila, from Moscow, takes care of nails and gives foot massages. An Italian trattoria, Sette Mezzo, serves the best pasta in town, and a broken-down WASP store sells the best antiques, and all this is within twenty-five yards of my tree-lined street. I have two maids, one Colombian and one Brazilian, an Irish-American secretary, my wife is German, and I am an ancient Hellene. This is New York.

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“These men are NOT incompetent or stupid. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.” That comment was made by James Forrestal concerning International Communism being promoted by our politicians in the early 1950’s. It isn’t being politically correct to refer to SOCIALISM as COMMUNISM, however, according to the Communist Manifesto the United States has already become a communist nation. If you have your little pocket size “CITIZENS RULE BOOK,” look on page 8, at the SUMMARY OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, which states “The Communist Manifesto represents a misguided philosophy, which teaches the citizens to give up their rights for the sake of the common good, but it always ends in a police state. This is called preventive justice. Control is the key concept.” In the September issue of NEWSWATCH Magazine titled “The Ten Planks That Are Destroying Our Country – COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.” The article warns us that Americans believe that Communism is dead, but Communism has just become more politically correct.

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The Church was composed of benefactors who did not exercise authority but provided all the social welfare of the people through the perfect law of liberty by faith, hope and charity. That took real faith and doing, forgiveness and giving, sacrifice and love. Being a Christian was not as easy as modern Christians would like to believe.

Instead the modern church sends people to eat at the tables of those socialist benefactors who exercise authority one over the other which makes the word of God to none effect. They were warned that those tables served deceitful meats,[34] that they were a snare[35] and a trap.[36]

The religion practiced today is done at the government temples which provide for the needy of modern society. Those administrators are the priests of the people’s true religion and their government is the new Pharisees of the Coercive Church established by men. Their schemes of social security are formed like those of Herod and the Pharisees and again make the word of God to none effect. What they do on Sunday is just to ease their own conscience or tickle their ears with false hopes so they may give heed to fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.[37]

Christ meant His Church to set the table of the Lord through faith, hope and charity. To depend on the welfare of rulers was to again become entangled in the bondage of their world.[38] Christ came to open our eyes to the sin common in the history of men and to set us free if we will repent.[39]

As we see the unrighteous mammon failing,[40] it is time for the people and the ministers of their church to repent and seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness so that they will be suitable for more righteous habitations.

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Please Note: I do not agree with all of the viewpoints presented in this video. Like the one that says A.D.H.D. is a myth. I’ve had A.D.H.D. for all my life. I know it is not a myth. However, there are some things in this video, that are not a myth and are legitimate viewpoints.  As always around here. I post and report and you decide.

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Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, “an actor.” She was defending her form of political celebrity—reality show, “Dancing With the Stars,” etc. This is how she did it: “Wasn’t Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn’t he in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor.”

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I’ll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not “He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,” though that is true. The point is that Reagan’s career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn’t in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn’t in search of fame; he’d already lived a life, he was already well known, he’d accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can’t just bully them, you can’t just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

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How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all.”

***************

Whatever one might think of Jewish influence in the media, the fact that Joel Stein is allowed to gloat about the fact — and Rick Sanchez hounded for alluding to it — amounts to one of America’s biggest double standards in a crowded field.

This scandal has also reminded me of Stephen Steinlight’s arguments that, pace the ADL & Co., immigration restriction is quite Good For The Jews and that the Jewish leadership should drop its Ellis Island nostalgia. For years, Steinlight has been saying that new immigrants, particularly those from the Hispanic Third World, lack the sentimental visions of Jews as powerless and pitiable held by most American gentiles, and would be far less accepting of Jews in positions of power.

Rick Sanchez’s European physiognomy make him unrepresentative of Latinos in America — but then quite representative of public representatives of Latinos in America — and his comments might be a harbinger of a coming ethnic clash. It seems that the Rick Sanchezes of the world don’t like it when the Jon Stewarts of the world are depicted as oppressed minorities deserving of special status. This might get interesting.

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A little early for this….but:

As far as I can tell, the Huffington Post is the Drudge Report for liberals, with a side helping of Star or the National Inquirer for celebutard gossip. Yeah, they pay a few reporters who got White House press credentials, but so does Fox News. If they’re the future of media, which I doubt anyone under 50 who isn’t bamboozled by Arianna Huffington believes, we’re in big trouble.

Wow! 😯

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We won’t win the war on terror simply by killing, capturing, and imprisoning al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters; but neither can we afford to let up on them. If we pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan before those countries have governments that are stable enough to keep a tight lid on our enemies, we’ll soon be right back where we started. We can use missile and drone attacks and covert forces to kill our enemies in Yemen and Pakistan; but what do you think will happen when the next Umar Abdulmutallab or Faisal Shahzad succeeds in killing hundreds or thousands of Americans? Will we not again retaliate?

The negative effects of permanent war on the U.S. armed forces, on the American people, and on America’s diminishing financial resources are obvious. When compared to the effects of a chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorist weapon going off in an American city, however, those effects become secondary considerations.

No matter how much President Obama or his successor may want to end the permanent war, there is no exit strategy in a war with an enemy that relentlessly attacks the U.S. homeland. We can’t negotiate our way out, like we did in Korea; nor can we simply decide it’s costing too much in lives and treasure and walk away from it, as we did from Vietnam. This time the enemy will come after us.

Whatever your views on America’s ongoing multi-front war, it is not going to end anytime soon. We’ll be fighting this war “for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” The Pentagon, the White House, and the American people must come together on a strategy for sustaining that fight until we ultimately defeat our enemy.

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Eight years ago Pat Buchanan and I founded The American Conservative, an American national biweekly whose purpose was to expose what nation-building does to those stupid enough to want to build. It was my idea and I put up the money, Pat lent his name recognition, and a third person, Scott McConnell, was named editor by me. The first cover’s headline was “How Victory Could Spell American Defeat.”  This was six months before the invasion of Iraq, and Buchanan got it spot on when he wrote that we would be there for at least five to ten years and that the war would cost hundreds of billions.

We all know the rest. There was no “slam dunk.” It’s $750 billion and counting, 4,500 American dead and 35,000 wounded, 100,000 to 300,000 Iraqi dead, 2 million in exile, and uncounted lives wrecked. And there’s no end in sight. Iraq is split in three between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, there is no freedom except for those with the gun, and an oil rich area has failed to provide even reliable electricity. Yet Bush and Blair have declared they would do it all over again, that it’s a victory over tyranny etc, etc, etc. Iraq is lawless and swarming with terrorists, yet the real architects of the war, the neo-cons, have managed to whitewash their part in Uncle Sam’s greatest foreign policy disaster ever. And made it look easy. The whitewash, that is.

Here are a few of the bad guys: Daniel Pipes, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman and John Podhoretz, the Kagan brothers, Dick Cheney, and, of course, the Bobsy twins, Bush and Blair. None of the above are stupid or unread men except for John – four pizzas – Podhoretz. George W Bush sounds dumb but is not. Kristol is a tiny, ugly, rat of a man who always backs the wrong horse, but very clever. Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Pipes and Abrams are ardent Zionists. Cheney was in it for business reasons. Yet despite their smarts none of the above listened to what history had to say. They ignored what happened to the French in Algeria, to the British in Aden and Palestine, to the Russians in Afghanistan and the Americans in Somalia. My magazine cost me millions and I thought it was worth it at the time, but I didn’t take into account the ability of rats to abandon a sinking ship. After the disaster became obvious no one was held to account, however loudly we protested for the guilty to pay some sort of price. Just look at Blair. He got rich and even sits in on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The neo-cons played everyone like the proverbial fiddle. They accused the critics of the war to be anti-Semitic, because – now get this – neo-con was a code word for Jew. Although most of the neo-cons were Jewish, we knew enough to differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, the latter being the reason the neo-cons wanted non-stop war. The debate on anti-Semitism that ensued was the emergency button the neo-cons pushed the moment the war turned ugly and they decided to slither out of their responsibilities.

Quotes of the Day

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But even if the Tea Party fails in the near-term—which is still not a forgone conclusion—so did the Goldwater movement, which was considered a spectacular failure after the catastrophic 1964 presidential election. Predictions were made that the Republican Party would not recover. Yet Richard Nixon, who had campaigned for Goldwater in ’64, took the White House just four years later.

Barry Goldwater, Jr. told NewsMax on Wednesday that establishment Republicans who are bitter over the stunning success of Tea Party conservatives this primary season “ought to keep their mouth shut and just take a look at what’s going on in this country” and that Christine O’Donnell’s win was “no surprise.”

For those who were surprised, it is time to take a closer look.

And remember the lessons of history.

The Tea Party ain’t no joke.

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With friends like that in the GOP, I need no other enemies. As I recently commented on Pajamas Media TV with Stephen Kruiser, the Old Guard may be an albatross as we get into the general election, but the last thing I expected was to have the GOP throw my campaign for the sake of multi-millionaire Democrat Jane Harman. Call me naïve, but I thought the GOP was interested in gaining the House in 2010 with as many seats as possible.

Is that what you want, GOP? Then embrace “unconventional” candidates with a little bit more than slapping their picture up on the GOP website. Provide mentoring, guidance, assistance, information, and data. The GOP isn’t necessarily obligated to financially assist all candidates, but they do have a duty not to work against their own.

While I am pleased the NRSC finally came forth to assist O’Donnell, their initial rebuff the night before was typical and disgusting.

Women represent over half of the electorate. We have much more to offer the party than bringing self-funded millions of dollars or attain attention due to marriages to high-level Republican men.

Our campaign will not be deterred by the snakes in the grass within the party. Or those like Rove that pontificate on what he believes the voters want. We continue to forge ahead.

And a final note to Kevin McCarthy: A majority is one woman with chutzpah.

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Goddard, in a prepared statement, did not agree with Brewer’s decision to avoid future debates.

“It is our responsibility to give Arizonans clear information that will allow them to exercise their fundamental right to make an informed decision about who should lead our state into the future,” his statement said. “Arizonans deserve more than a single discussion of the issues we face.”

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Arizona voters won’t be seeing any more debates between the top gubernatorial contenders.

Incumbent Republican Jan Brewer said Thursday she has no intention of participating in any more events with Democrat Terry Goddard. She said the only reason she debated him on Wednesday is she had to to qualify for more than $1.7 million in public funds for her campaign.

“I certainly will take my message in a different venue out to the people of Arizona,” she said.

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Of course, much as I admired her and refreshing as I found her, Dr. Laura wasn’t perfect. A good listener and a shrewd thinker most of the time, she could get hung up on tangential matters that would sometimes get in the way of the true meat of the caller’s issue. (It sounds as though the notorious call that triggered her resignation eariler this month might have been one instance of this unfortunate tendency.) And the more she grew to embrace her Jewish identity, culminating in a conversion to Orthodoxy, the more Dr. Laura seemed to get drawn into politics, mixing in commentary regarding Israel and the so-called War on Terror, all of which tended to undermine her cred as a nonpartisan, apolitical dispenser of relationship and family advice.

But if Dr. Laura had flaws, she never in any way resembled the caricature constructed of her by her enemies: that of a mean, hateful, rapaciously-judgmental dragon lady. Much as she frequently unloaded on her callers and spoke her mind, Schlessinger as often as not sent them off with a tender word; moreover, she was a true emotional sap, often driven to tears on the air. I vividly remember one call from a young mother with an infant child who shared her tragic story of being stricken by terminal cancer; when she mourned, “I’m not going to get to see my baby walk,” Dr. Laura was so choked up she couldn’t speak, and had to go to a break.

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Glenn Beck’s big rally at the Lincoln Memorial a couple days ago is the talk of the news media and the internet. Liberals are denouncing it, conservatives are walking on air, while tens of millions of people are completely mystified. And with good reason — if Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this massive gathering was a rally about nothing. And while it may have looked impressive, in reality it shows just how impotent and adrift the mainstream conservative movement has become.

Nobody is really sure what it was even about. Beck, who is only famous because he has spent hours a day for the last decade ranting about politics, says it had nothing to do with politics, even though Sarah Palin was the keynote speaker.

It was about “restoring honor” or something, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Or it was a way of “supporting the troops,” depending on which day you talked to Beck.

[………….]

And Palin? She was asked what Martin Luther King would’ve thought of the rally. This was a great opportunity to tell it like it is for all of America to hear. She could’ve said something like: “Martin Luther King? I’m white – why would I give a damn what Martin Luther King would’ve thought about this rally? At any rate, he no doubt would have disapproved, as he was a radical left wing socialist whose movement was all about increasing the size and power of the federal government, and using it to take rights and resources from white people and give them to non-whites. Hell no he wouldn’t have approved, and I couldn’t be more proud of that fact.

[….]

Clearly, Beck’s rally was a vague, confused jumble of meaninglessness. Or, if you prefer, a hot ghetto mess. Yet many conservatives are excited and thrilled, and think that 8/28/10 will forever be remembered as some kind of turning point, as the day when the huge task of “taking America back” formally got underway. In reality, it was the exact opposite. I’m convinced that one of these days, we’ll look back on this as the nadir of the mainstream conservative movement, as its death rattle, as the day the conservative movement gave up the ghost. Hundreds of thousands of white conservatives spent millions of dollars to travel to DC, to stand around and do nothing, after being ordered not to bring any signs to express themselves, while Beck and Palin lectured them on the glories of The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the importance of getting back to the fundamentals of the Christian-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Mormon faiths.

[….]

The demographic changes that have transformed Orange County are also transforming the rest of America. The process may be further along in Orange County, but it’s happening everywhere. Thanks to immigration, sixty percent of the babies being born in Texas are non-white, and it’s only a matter of a few more elections before Texas’s electoral votes go to the Democrats, and when that happens, the GOP can forget about putting one of their own in the White House ever again. And there are many other cities and states that are right behind Texas, and lots more where the process will take a few more decades to have the same effect, but all of America is on its way to turning into Orange County, California.

That’s why the Beck Heads and Tea Partiers are losing their country. Not because they don’t attend their local mosque often enough. But they can’t admit that, because that would be “racist”, and losing your country is a lot better than being called “racist.”

But a conservative movement as willingly impotent as the crowd that came to DC on Saturday can’t go on much longer. At some point it’s going to dawn on them that no matter how much they grovel to MLK and praise his holy name, or how many “conservative” imams they pack their podium with, they still get called racists and Nazis, and their country just keeps slipping further down the tubes.

When that finally sinks in with conservatives, and it may be sooner than we think, things will start to get interesting.

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The future of Iraq will hinge on its security forces after the Americans officially hand them control on September 1st. The forces are much better than they were a few years ago; buckling under pressure is no longer a certainty. Yet even their own generals say they are not really ready. The Iraqi army chief of staff wants American help until 2020. Privately, American officers agree their job is not done. Iraqi intelligence work is poor, extremist infiltrators are common, the air force is in its infancy, some commanders follow nakedly political agendas and initiative in the lower ranks is lacking, as is equipment. Prisoners are widely abused.

It is clear that Iraqis will for many years be plagued by corruption, insurgents, meddling neighbours, and their own stubborn politicians. Ending America’s “combat mission” is a gamble—and gambles can be lost.

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The Democratic comptroller’s spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.

“If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply with the laws concerning tax-exempt financing, we’d certainly consider it,” Sieber told Reuters.

Spokesmen for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson and the Islamic center and were not immediately available.

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More important, what critics of Mrs. Obama have forgotten is that style matters for women in high-profile positions, not just for the pageantry and the symbolism of it, but also for the lessons it can impart. Perhaps there was nothing to be learned from Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton’s $2,000 Oscar de la Renta pantsuits, because they didn’t have much invested in the way they looked. But critics of Mrs. Obama fail to see the powerful message of self-possession that her appearance carries for millions of young women, especially African-American women. Style and the care you put into how you present yourself to the world are not just frivolous endeavors, they are powerful tools of communication. Mrs. Obama uses her own image and appearance to connect with other women and to teach them how to take care of themselves, how to improve their lives. That look is not expensive; it’s priceless.

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To measure his loss, and ours, look at Prepared for the Worst, a collection of his early work published in 1988, or his superb, and sadly still pertinent, book on Cyprus from 1984. Or read his Nation column from May 2001 on Bob Kerrey’s lasting culpability for a massacre in Vietnam. Hitchens was teaching at the New School at the time, making Kerrey, he wrote, “my president”; yet the piece, incandescent with moral outrage, is never callous or crude. “If you look back on the essays that made his name,” Hitchens writes about Noam Chomsky, “you will find a polemical talent well worth mourning, and a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.” I wish Hitchens a speedy recovery, a long life and as much celebrity as he wants. But it’s the Christopher with a feeling for justice I mourn. I miss him very much.

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Fox News chief Roger Ailes has a license to carry a firearm in New York City on his person at all times, according to the NYPD’s newly released list of handgun-permit holders. And he’s not alone among his Fox News colleagues: Prime-time shouter Sean Hannity also has a city license to carry a gun.

Both Ailes and Hannity have a “carry business” license from the NYPD, which permits them to carry a concealed weapon wherever they go in the city. It’s illegal in New York City to possess a firearm without a license. The “carry business” permit is the least restrictive one that the city offers.

It doesn’t come as much surprise that Ailes arms himself — a New York Times profile earlier this year reported that he’s received numerous threats over the years and has had an intruder arrested on his property. “A sign outside his house shows an illustration of a gun and advises visitors that it is under video surveillance,” the Times wrote. Hannity’s license has been previously reported, but Ailes doesn’t appear to have sought the permit until recently. A Fox News spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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The Afghan War was, at its inception, a just war.

If the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and those who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 Americans, we had a right to go in after him, as Woodrow Wilson had a right to send Gen. John Pershing into Mexico to find and kill Pancho Villa after he murdered Americans in New Mexico.

But after the defeat of the Taliban by the Northern Alliance, the overthrow of Mullah Omar and our failure to capture or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora, we decided to stay on and convert the most tribalized and xenophobic land on earth into an Islamic democracy and strategic ally.

We will soon enter the 10th year of this war. And though 100,000 U.S. and 50,000 NATO troops are committed, the Taliban are winning — because they are not losing. They are more numerous, more deadly and more resourceful than they have been since their ouster in 2001.

Even Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the war was a draw. And Biden says we have reached the limit of our commitment.

Thus, what we are looking at is endless bleeding, now running at 60 dead U.S. soldiers a month, with no American military or political leader willing to say when the bleeding will stop or the war will end.

And the home front is visibly eroding. A majority of Americans now believe the war is unwinnable or not worth the cost, and a growing minority in Congress wants out. Some NATO allies are departing. Others are setting deadlines for withdrawal.

As for the Afghans we leave behind, who committed themselves to America’s war, they will, when we depart, suffer the fate of the “harkis” in Algeria, the South Vietnamese army and boat people, and the Cambodians we left behind to the tender mercies of the Khmer Rouge.

Have the politicians, journalists and think-tank geniuses who dreamed up these wars suffered ignominy and disgrace?

Not at all. They are debating and devising a new war — with Iran.