The disastrous results in Israel's election are yet another example of the right cannibalizing itself. It's not the first time this happened in Israeli political history or American political history or European political history. It's an ongoing theme whose motto is still, "No enemies to the left." What the "mainstream" conservatives fear most of all is a drift to the right. Some of this is the whimper of whipped dogs. Every party to the right of Stalin has had to spend decades fending off accusations that it was the second coming of the Third Reich, the KKK and Genghis Khan. The Pavlovian training has taken hold and every conservative echelon is expert at going into damage control mode when it senses that its own right might do something that would give the left fuel for their accusations. But there's another factor at work here. It's cultural. Mainstream conservatives have become another arm of the urban technocracy. They want many of th...
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The Great Power of Washington
As I write this the sun has set, the shadows crawling up and down the grid of America's first truly planned city. There was a time when it was thought that the Potomac extended across the continent and the city of government would lie at the opening of an interstate aquatic highway. That was not to be. And like so many other dreams of government, the Washington City Canal has seen better days. Washington D.C. is America, as many of the men and women who work in government envision it. It is a place of great wealth and great poverty. Incomes continue to rise for those in government. D.C. and its bedroom communities hold some of the greatest reserves of wealth in the the country, but its poverty level hovers just below 20 percent. And nearly a third of the children of the capital of our government live in poverty. Gun control is very much on the minds of the government elite these days, and it should be, working in a city with a higher murder rate than Mexico City. African-Ame...
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The Guns of Obamerica
Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won't have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls. You won't find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica. 67% of firearm murders took place in the country's 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since. Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places that have run by De...
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The Authenticity of Fake
Last week featured the shocking revelation that two athletes had lied to the whole country for years in order to become rich and famous. This is the same thing that politicians do except without the exercise regimen. Moral theater is an odd event in a country which has mostly given up on morals. In the absence of any notion of right and wrong, the only truly punishable offenses involve hurting people's feelings. That includes famous people "betraying our trust" by doing something that we didn't expect them to be doing thereby deceiving us into liking them for the wrong reasons. That code means that it is completely acceptable for a public figure to be amoral as long as they are honestly up-front about it. Or as long as they embrace an absence of characters and standards as the basis for some sort of savvy post-media in the media image where they acknowledge that they do everything only in order to get attention as a way of commenting on the attention-getting ten...
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Friday Afternoon Roundup - Locked and Loaded
LET'S GET RIGHT TO THE POINT While the White House was busy drafting proposals to ban assault rifles, the last of the regulations imposed on Saudi travel to the United States after September 11 were being taken apart. While some government officials were busy planning how to disarm Americans, other officials were negotiating the transfer of F-16s and Abrams tanks to Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt. Obama is unwilling to trust Americans with an AR-15, but is willing to trust a genocidal terrorist group with Abrams tanks and F-16 jets. The F-16’s M61 Vulcan cannon can fire 6,000 rounds a minute and the 146 lb warhead of its HARM missiles can do a lot more than put a few dents in a brick wall. The Abrams’ 120 mm cannon can penetrate 26 inches of steel armor making it a good deal more formidable than even the wildest fantasies of San Francisco liberals about the capabilities of a so-called “assault rifle.” While Obama has not been willing to respect the Constitution of the United St...
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You Cannot Be More Liberal Than a Liberal
So after a long bout of mocking Mitt Romney for saying that he sought out binders full of qualified female appointees, complete with protesters outside one of his campaign offices dressed in binders, the appointed hour came and the new cabinet of the man who was too good for binders of women was white and male. There was some awkward fidgeting in the media. A few suggestions that maybe there should be a little more diversity. And that was followed by the new official talking point that diversity doesn't matter, it's all about the impact of the policies. Suddenly the Party of Affirmative Action began making conservative arguments for merit and representation, over racial preferences. To some this was proof that liberals don't really believe in anything. And that's true and it isn't. Modern American Liberalism is the movement of a wealthy white upper class meant to suppress the working class and the mercantile class. Think of it as the revenge of the barons ag...
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100 Wars
The French are in Mali now, being shot at by Islamists armed with the very same weapons that France airdropped into Libya. Either those or the weapons that France sold to Gaddafi in the preceding period when European countries were competing to be his arms dealers. The joke is equally bleak, either way. It used to be that decades would have to pass before a bad policy unraveled, but these days it only takes a few years to go from arming a tyrant to arming the rebels to shooting at the rebels. In less time than it takes a pop star to go from fresh faced to train wrecked, Saif Gaddafi went from the toast of European academics to a mass murderer, Gaddafi's opposition went from Al Qaeda terrorists to brave rebels, then the brave rebels, many of whom were actually Iraqis, Tunisians and Jordanians, shot up an American diplomatic mission, hooked up with some of Gaddafi's Tuaregs to take over Northern Mali, shot them up and began carving out their own Islamist Emirate. In barel...
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