Today is George Bush's Birthday (George Turns 15)

Today George Bush will be celebrating his birthday. Some will protest and say, that's not true, the president's birthday was July 6. But we're not talking about the same person, apparently. Nor his father. Because this George Bush turns only 15 today.

The George Bush I have in mind is not the one whose full name is George Walker Bush, nor the one whose full name is George Herbert Walker Bush, but the one whose full name is George Bush Abdul Kader Faris Abed El-Hussein (no relation to Saddam). And this George Bush was born in Baghdad on July 11, 2003.

From a post of one decade ago:

As far as can be ascertained, George Bush’s parents named him in honor of some Western leader one of whose recent feats they found to be not only impressive and admirable, obviously, but worthy enough to name their new-born son after. They must have been plenty impressed, in view of the fact that they gave their child the name of someone not of their faith, with linguistic roots not of their culture. (Sort of like a Westerner — say, someone from the Bush clan — giving a newborn son a name such as Mohammed Ahmed Yusuf Bush.)

Now, here is what I suggest. I suggest that the West should send a number of representatives to Baghdad. The type of people that David Brooks calls “the members of the sneering brigade”, “the think-tank johnnies and the rest of the commentariate” in “their usual sky-is-falling mode” — people like José Bové, François Hollande, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, José Luis Zapatero, Jean-Marie Colombani, Plantu, Willem (to name only the Europeans), etc… They should choose a couple of high-visibility VIPs, “arm” them with all the usual arguments, and send them to Baghdad.

And there, they should seek out the parents of George Bush. Once the couple has been found, they should patiently explain the “truth” to them and seek thereby to install some common sense in them. That would include telling them…

• that the war was unnecessary and a sham, conducted for bogus reasons;
• that Iraq, and the world, were far better off before the conflict;
• that the presence of foreign soldiers is “humiliating” for George Bush and his fellow countrymen;
• that they must resent America (or at least, the Bush administration) for the current situation in which thousands have been killed over a period of more than three years and hark back to the previous situation in which the secret police killed several thousands per month with total impunity;
• that, in contrast to the administration of George Bush’s namesake, they, the holier-than-thou members of the peace camp, had (and have) nothing but the best interests of his parents in mind;
• oh, and, of course, that George Bush’s namesake is nothing but a nincompoop and a despicable liar.

Once the parents of George Bush have been converted to the sky-is-falling truth, the “the members of the sneering brigade” could go to work convincing more of Iraq’s population.

The members of “the commentariate” could start with Mohammed, Ali, and Omar, the brothers from Iraq the Model and expand outwards, to include the Iraqis who lost hands and tongues to Saddam’s thugs, had their faced scarred by acid, had their sisters, mothers, and daughters raped, and had their parents, brothers, and children shot down and their bodies thrown into unnamed graves. With luck, “the think-tank johnnies” would eventually reach that vast majority of people who in polls believe life has never been better since the war toppled Saddam and who say they feel more optimistic than they ever had in the past.

Let us join together and wish them “good luck and godspeed with your sacred mission”.

Oh, and by the way, Georgie: Happy birthday!

Related: There's a new George Bush in Baghdad,
six weeks old and screaming in a crib
• Nadia Jergis Mohammed, 34, … told Associated Press Television News:

"I tell you all Iraqis hated Saddam's regime. It was only George Bush who liberated us, without him it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't done it the sons of Saddam would have ruled us for years. He saved us from Saddam and that's why we named our son after him"

July 4th Celebrated on French Radio

Pour le 4 juillet 2018, le Libre Journal du Nouveau Monde fêtait l'indépendance américaine avec une émission de une heure et demie sur Radio Courtoisie (dank U wel à KC).

---

Evelyne Joslain, assistée de Stanislas, reçoit :

• Erik Svane, membre du groupe des Républicains à Paris
• Paul Reen, membre du groupe des Républicains à Paris

Thème : “A l’occasion de l’indépendance des Etats-Unis, point sur l’actualité américaine”

Let’s be honest, the ACLU has never defended all freedoms for all people; For example, it rarely, if ever, defends the Second or Tenth Amendments

If the American Civil Liberties Union was ever a champion of its supposed namesake — civil liberties — it no longer is. 

Thus writes Benny Huang.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the ACLU has quietly drafted new guidelines that address which legal battles it will wade into. Civil liberties are now being balanced with other considerations.

In an eight-page memo, the ACLU agonized over whether and when to lend a helping hand to people it clearly despises. It did not categorically reject the possibility that the organization would defend deplorables’ civil liberties, but it left itself plenty of weaselly escape hatches.

It’s complicated, you see. Really, really complicated.

I suspect that the ACLU has always quietly exercised discretion when choosing its cases even if it didn’t say so publicly. To be sure, even these guidelines were for ACLU eyes only, a clear indication that the organization still wants to be perceived as stalwart defenders of the Bill of Rights.

Maintaining the organization’s public image is paramount. As former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said in a recent interview, “The ACLU defends all fundamental freedoms for all people.”

But it doesn’t and, let’s be honest, it never has. For example, the ACLU has never filed a Second Amendment lawsuit. Their Bill of Rights apparently includes only nine amendments. Or is it eight? Despite the federal government’s extreme overreach, the ACLU rarely sues the federal government for violating the tenth amendment. The ACLU does however fight valiantly for “a woman’s right to choose” (to kill her unborn baby) even though that one doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. Clearly there’s an agenda here beyond motherhood and apple pie.

The ACLU is now admitting that there are lots of factors that need to be considered before taking a case. The first question that needs to be asked is whose rights are being trampled? Is it good people or bad people? Its own side or the other side? Supposed oppressors or the supposed oppressed?

 … While the memo stresses that the ACLU might still decide to take on such cases, it isn’t automatic.
 

And so the great climbdown begins. The ACLU, that great defender of free speech even when it’s inconvenient, is now affixing caveats.

But at least it’s finally admitting what I have been saying for a long time, namely that there’s a conflict between fundamental constitutional principles — free speech, free exercise of religion, a free press — and what they like to call “justice,” which is nothing more than code for their political agenda.

And make no mistake about it, their agenda creates a lot of “tension” — a word that appears eight times in memo — with Madisonian rights. The ACLU will now approach this tension gingerly, hoping that no one notices that it’s deserted its core mission of defending the Bill of Rights. People will just have to understand that its members failed to defend our supposedly inalienable rights only after serious deliberation that made plenty of allowances for, as they call it, “nuanced and intentional consideration of the competing interests.”

At the core of these guidelines is the tacit admission that the ACLU’s “values” are in fact antithetical to the Constitution. On this we can agree. Clearly the ACLU has arrived at a time for choosing even if it doesn’t want to admit it.

Throughout our history there have always been constitutional violations and in every case they were defended by people who believed they had other, more important interests to uphold, such as the protection of public morals, the dignity of the family unit, or wartime necessity, to name a few.

This last justification for ignoring the Constitution is what eventually gave birth in 1917 to the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), forerunner to the ACLU. It was a tumultuous time, with the United States committing itself to war in Europe over the stringent opposition of socialists, communists, and anarchists. Citing the need to mobilize the country for “the war to end all wars,” the U.S. government cracked down on dissent. The CLB argued (correctly) that there was no wartime exception to the civil liberties safeguarded in the Constitution.

[The ACLU memo] is obviously a veiled reference to the recent Masterpiece Cake Shop decision, which was, at the time this document was written, on its way to the Supreme Court. The memo is clearly implying that Colorado really was violating two of the First Amendment’s clauses — free speech and free exercise of religion — but the ACLU just doesn’t care. “Equality” was more important.

In any other context I have no doubt that the ACLU, with its expansive view of speech, would have come to the aid of an artisan compelled to use his talents to create a message of which he disapproves. But not when it’s a Christian baker who doesn’t want to custom-design a cake for homosexual nuptials. “Gays” good, Christians bad.

It would have been bad enough if the ACLU had refused to take on the Christian baker’s case because of other, competing, anti-constitutional values. But it went further than that. It litigated the case from the other side. Not content to stand on the sidelines while Jack Phillips’s constitutional rights were being savaged, the ACLU decided to jump in and get some blood on its own knuckles.

Not that it would ever admit this openly. In court the ACLU attorneys argued that Jack Phillips’s rights were not being violated, which is a more compelling argument than “Yeah, but so what?”

 … The ACLU is suffering from a bad case of cognitive dissonance, trying to navigate a course between what it thinks it stands for and what it actually stands for. It can have the Constitution or it can have its agenda, but it can’t have both.

The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A World of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

The more you think about it, the more you realize how brilliant it was for Donald Trump to state in his first State of the Union address that "Americans are dreamers, too."

In that short phrase, indeed, the president took on what is the entire worldview of the left in a nutshell.

The world perspective of the Democrats in the Donkey party and their allies in the Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness media can be called the Dichotomy of the D's.

The "basket of deplorables" is not just a Hillary Clinton expression for those "offensive, hateful, mean-spirited" Republicans who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." 

A Deplorable turns out to be the description of every "normal" bourgeois Westerner (first and foremost Americans).

Dreamers, by contrast, are not just the nickname given to young illegal immigrants who, according to DACA, ought to be allowed to remain in the United States. Anybody and everybody who is opposed to the above-mentioned caste of untouchables turns out to be some type of a Dreamer.

• Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

From illegal aliens to foreign leftist dictators, the population of the planet turns out to be formed almost exclusively of admirable and deserving dreamers, all the forward-looking prophets in America and just about all the foreigners in the world.

With one glaring exception: all red-blooded Americans and every one of their allies abroad.

Think about it:

Isn't it true that, basically, you can take any position of the left these days — the people who could best be described as drama queens — and apply the D Dichotomy to it: it all turns out to be about the Deserving Dreamers versus the Despicable Deplorables

• Right-wing Conservative journalists, undercover reporters, and/or other conservative activists are called "despicable" by such people as the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, who goes on to say that a real journalist "has to have in his or her heart a desire to make society better" — in other words, the real MSM operative has to be some sort of a dreamer.

Thus it is hardly surprising to find a Times op-ed saying that the ignorant do not have the right to an audience. (The author turns out to be Bryan W Van Norden, “a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University” and therefore, according to Robert Shibley, an employee of the Chinese Communist government. But hey! Don't communists turn out to be dreamers, too?! Fear not, we will get back to the subject…)

• Ted Cruz, during the 2016 debates, echoing Newt Gingrich during those of 2012, summarized the mainstream media's outlook well: explain to us why you Republicans are such cartoon caricatures, while for the Democrats, the questions were: Tell us about your sublime plans (your glorious dreams) to bring our nation, our planet, towards a bright shining future.

Where conservatives are involved, it is, it must be, about the personal, because these deplorable beings are driven by greed or by politics and have nothing but nefarious schemes. They may say the same exact thing as a liberal and have a similar policy to that of a Democrat, but should that happen, it can only be attributed to politicizing and other types of hypocrisy.

Leftists, by contrast, are always, and only, driven by the highest of principles, by their dreams.

Turn back to Barack Obama's Hope 'n' Change. As Ann Althouse points out, this is the dream of destitute people in need. (But conservatives are not against people in need per se; they are for people being, or bringing themselves, "outside" of need — preferably, if and when possible, through their own efforts.)

Think of the adulation (past and/or present) afforded to such people as Che Guevara, Hugo Chávez, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx, as well as, last but not least, Barack Obama, the president who dreamed (and dreams) of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America", i.e., the land of the haters, the (fill-in-the-blank)phobes, and… the deplorables.

Homosexuals, women, blacks, transgenders, illegal aliens, even children and… the mentally ill (!): every minority is composed of victimized, and martyred, dreamers yearning, and deserving, to break free, to tell their story, to give their special brand of wisdom, while every member of the majority, every Christian, every member of the white race (unless they turn good and side with the dreaming leftists or at least pipe down) is an oppressor, a bad person, a despicable deplorable.

(Why do so many American, and Western, citizens, go along with this? Because they get to take pride in being part of the small, élite band of good guys, the club of the virtuous, those wise beings who see how terrible their neighbors in the general population are…)

Here are some more illustrations:

• Why were fans of Jimmy Fallon upset that Donald Trump appeared on his show during the 2016 campaign? Because a dreamer, or someone admired by dreamers, managed (almost?) to make a human being out of a deplorable, i.e., a monster.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel's tears on ABC are clearly the antics of a dreamer upset with the decisions of the deplorables who no longer want to follow the aspirations of his class.

• Stormy Daniels may be a porn star while Sarah Huckabee is a government spokesperson
but Stormy is a dreamer, or on the side of the dreamers, while Sarah is one of the deplorables. (Indeed, even adult actors are not in the same class as deplorables, as can be evidenced on Twitter, which likes nothing better to censor the tweets of conservatives such as Stacy McCain, Milo Yiannopoulos, Kevin Williamson, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, Sheriff Clarke, Mark Dice, and Breitbart, but for which the XXX-rated photos and the hard-core videos of professional porn stars (NSFW) are entirely permissible.)

• Why is Roseanne sanctioned for a personal tweet while Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, and Michelle Wolf get little to no blowback for their expletive-sanctioned shows?

Well, because conservative comics have no excuse for being the despicable deplorables they are, while liberal comics have the excuse that y'know, deep down, they are… deserving dreamers, Hollywood dreamers who to boot manage to correctly identify and mercilessly mock the wicked enemy.

• This is why Hollywood lies about its blatant liberal bias: The artists are the dreamers forced to hide, at least partially, their agendas, i.e., their dreams, because the content thereof is (sigh! how unfortunate!) something the clueless deplorables would never be able to understand. (Needless to say, this is what, in the Ghostbusters reboot or in the Star Wars universe, causes Hollywood (creators and journalists alike), to blame the the fans for not being woke enough.)

• Also, when leftists find excuses for the criminal class while blaming society, what they are basically doing is calling the criminals a type of dreamers whose pipe dreams where shattered by the deplorables of the "normal" bourgeoisie and by the disgraceful society that they or their forefathers created.

• Because deplorables are clueless clods, because Americans are terrible citizens, because “arch-conservatives” are “kooks,” “crackpots,” and “crazies”, it is okay — even necessary and recommended and, yes, encouraged, not to mention, as it happens, rib-tickling — to pull the wool over their eyes. (See the Obamacare promise and Obama's Iran deal…)

Of course, when leftists deplore the stupidity of the American voter or call Americans ignorant hillbillies or opine that Americans are Either Really Stupid or Incredibly Bigoted… Really, Really Dumb People, they are not really making a dispassionate comment on the IQ of the average American, a topic that is open for debate and discussion. Members of the tribe of the virtuous are outraged that the deplorables do not share, or do not support, the dreams of the leftist dreamer class.

Why, by the way, do so many "independent" journalists turn out to be Democratic operatives with bylines? Because, almost of necessity, by the very nature of their work, they must start out as, or become, drama queens — always in search of a crisis, real or otherwise.

Try taking Jim Treacher's ever-green definition of modern journalism and substitute a few choice words for "Democrats":

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on the Dreamers and on the drama queens and on the crisis finders/crisis creators.

Now try doing the same with Iowahawk's journalism definition:

Journalism is about covering important stories detrimental to Dreamers and to drama queens and to the crisis finders/crisis creators. With a pillow, until they (the important stories) stop moving.

Speaking of which, an institution created (no matter how many decades or centuries ago), and run, by deplorables is an abomination; headed by dreamers, it is deserving of nothing but the utmost respect…

Head over to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and see if the deplorable/dreamer dichotomy doesn't make sense in the following sentence:

That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary [i.e., deplorable] voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive [i.e., dreamer] voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

First Amendment rights must be curbed because it enhances the deplorables' free speech to the detriment of the aspirations of the dreamers. As Ben Shapiro writes,

Free speech is just another element of a corrupt republic that must be torn down brick by brick in favor of a better world. When you see Donald Trump as the final iteration of a hierarchical system built to prevent the world from achieving utopia, that system must be dismantled — starting with the freedoms that allowed Donald Trump to become president. It’s that simple for the Left.

With several examples of how dangerous and insane liberals have become, Matt Tapscott asks, along with Craig Shirley and Scott Mauer, why liberals are always so violent.

Easy. Because they are drama queens. Drama queens who split the world into two — Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.

This is why leftists, aka dreamers, cannot maintain peaceful and reasonable discourse, and why protests turn vicious, dangerous, and personal.

Men, inches from her face, screaming at [Florida attorney general Pam Bondi] and blocking her path

In their immigration furor, the spitting mad dreamers can barely tolerate moderate Republicans.

All of these haters must be as bad as fascists. All of them must be as bad as Adolf Hitler.

Because deplorables are such horrid people — can those monsters even be termed human beings?! — they must, in one way or another, be made to shut up.

It is always okay to believe the worst of these "untouchables" and to go about punishing them in any which way possible, from Facebook bans and doxxing to licking their doorknobs and spitting in their food. Not to mention (cough) incivility, blacklisting, and assassination, along with dreamer parents not letting deplorable grandparents see their grand kids.

You get the picture.

This article has lasted long enough.

Let's end it with a view on foreign affairs…

Why did the media ignore Barack Obama's faux pas and half-truths, fawning over his every move, while lashing out at every Trump White House?

As we have seen, because Obama was, and is, an admirable dreamer while Trump is, and was, a despicable deplorable.

What gave secretary of state Hillary Clinton the right to aim for a reset button with Moscow and Barack Obama license to whisper to the Russian president that he would be more flexible after the coming election?

Wouldn't you know it? The deplorables' foes are in fact no foes at all, only dreamers in their own right, and it is only the puerile bigotry of the despicable deplorables that makes them foes in the first place.

The Russians are (somehow) dreamers — that is, unless and until they are said to allegedly side with a Republican (of which, more 8 or 9 sentences down). In the Obama White House, as in the Carter administration, the Iranian ayatollahs are/were dreamers as well.

Go back further to the mid-1970s. Jimmy Carter tries to convince Americans to be more understanding and accepting of communism, while using human rights sanctions on such allies as the Shah of Iran. Why?

America's allies, being allies of the despicable deplorables, become despicable deplorables themselves — they run the gamut from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Chile's General Pinochet to Miami's Cubans and the Florida family members of Elián Gonzales — while the foes of the despicable deplorables (American or foreign) turn out to be no more than misunderstood dreamers.

In this respect, the basic message of the 1960s peace movement and all its Hanoi Janes amounts to  America's deplorables trying to prevent dreamers in North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Kong allies (all of whom were even called the equivalents of America's founding fathers) from realizing their aspirations.

Meanwhile, Americans are bitter and frustrated deplorables clinging "to guns and religion" who have no understanding of foreigners' aspirations and dreams.

All foreigners, all Europeans, in this grass-is-greener simplification, are dreamers — setting up roadblocks to hate speech, implementing gun control, guaranteeing universal healthcare…

Why, in the 1980s, would Ted Kennedy secretly contact Moscow to get the Soviets' help in defeating Ronald Reagan in the presidential election?

Because the leader of the Kremlin was, somehow, a dreamer in his own right while the Gipper was a war-mad deplorable.

Incidentally, as we have seen, Vladimir Putin was a dreamer with whom the deplorables could do business, if only they knew how to expand their vision and, like Barack Obama and the Clintons, be tolerant of and open to his personal dreams.

That is, until the Russian president was accused of having helped a despicable deplorable win the 2016 election, in which case the ally of such a monster instantly became a despicable deplorable himself.

What is it that, for a century now, has given the communists an excuse for the millions upon millions upon millions of citizens they butchered?

You know the line:

"They had good intentions." What does this mean?

They had constructive dreams. Yes, the communists, they were/are dreamers.

Joseph McCarthy was among the ultimate deplorables deserving of nothing but contempt and condemnation. Why so much paranoia about communists who were basically harmless?! Well, okay okay; sure there was that minor matter that they killed millions and millions and millions of Russians, and millions and millions and millions of Chinese, and millions and millions and millions of Cambodians, etc, etc, etc, but (!) c'mon — remember the communists were (or are) dreamers, and they had (or have) good intentions (good dreams)…

Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

How can Nazis be called Right Wing when they denied individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights?

 … the words ‘never again’ are little more than a hollow slogan 

deplores Ed Kozak.

For if we refuse to accept, and more importantly challenge, the ideological origins of a movement that culminated in the systematic murder of millions of innocent human beings, there is absolutely no way we can prevent the same from happening again.

The easiest way of proving that the origins of Nazism are in no way remotely conservative is to start by looking at some defining features of conservatism itself, specifically the European variety.

These include: the belief that a society rooted in monarchy and aristocracy is preferable to mass democracy; that there is a transcendental moral order (what Kirk called the Permanent Things) which in Western Civilization has been preserved and passed down through the Christian Church; that property rights are the very foundation of ordered liberty; and, of course, the universal conservative belief that any necessary societal change must occur slowly and without structural damage to ancient and proven institutions – that problems in society come not from broken traditions and institutions but from broken men and morals.

It should go without saying that Nazism had no love of monarchy or aristocracy. Hitler didn’t reinstate the House of Hohenzollern; he made himself dictator. The notion that the son of a minor civil servant (Alois Hitler himself born a bastard and of peasant stock) had a right to rule over Germany can hardly be called traditionally conservative. Moreover, his great dislike of the aristocratic military establishment is well known; the lack of a ‘von’ in front of his surname was a permanent chip on Hitler’s shoulder. Granted, Himmler liked to play feudal lord with the SS, but his was a ‘feudalism’ based on a half-cocked interpretation of a quasi-mythical pagan past.

This brings us nicely to defining conservative feature number two: Christianity. Himmler’s obsession with paganism is very well-documented. Hitler may have viewed the SS as his personal bodyguard, but Himmler viewed them as a pagan Knights Templar, destined to recreate a utopic, pre-Christian Teutonic society.

Furthermore, the ‘official’ religion of Nazism was positive Christianity, a doctrine that can hardly be called positive or Christian. This ‘Christian’ ideology rejected the Jewish bible in its entirety, rejected Jesus’ Jewish origins, and wished to wipe Catholicism off the face of the earth (stalwart defender of tradition it is) and create a united Nazi protestant church.

Nor can it be said that the Nazis had any respect for traditional property rights. They nationalized industries, advocated progressive taxation schemes, and were virulently anti-capitalist. Now, that’s not to say that conservatism must necessarily be in favour of pure, unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism (see Kirk, Chesterton, etc.), but whereas the traditionalist objection to capitalism is at its heart an objection to the disastrous spiritual and moral effects of industrialisation, the Nazis’ objection to capitalism was rooted firmly in post-industrialist, Marxist interpretations of economics.

The conservative argues that socialism isn’t a cure for the disease of industrial society, but a symptom of the same sickness. As we all know, Nazi property violations weren’t limited solely to estate, they also infringed upon life and liberty with spectacular zeal, especially the life and liberty of those they deemed sub-human.

‘Aha’, says the skeptical reader, ‘this is where I have him! This crazy conservative doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just wrote it himself, the Nazis were a bunch of racists, surely that means they were right wing!’ Now, unlike you, my dear liberal reader, I understand that man is fallen, so I’ll forgive you your ignorance on the matter. First, let’s briefly get this ‘right wing’ thing out of the way, shall we?

Yes, fascists and Nazis were almost from the start called ‘right wing’, but this was a slander employed by other socialists, meant to discredit these socialists of a distinctly nationalist bent in the eyes of fellow radical travelers. If they were ‘right wing’ at all they were the ‘right wing’ of the left.

As Jonah Goldberg explains in his brilliant (and apparently woefully under-read) Liberal Fascism, this is why street fighting between fascists and communists was so vicious in Germany; these people were fighting for the same hearts and minds, the same segment of middle class voters susceptible to revolutionary nonsense. The godfather of fascism himself, Mussolini, was a member of [the Internationale], and the term ‘national socialist’ was in use in leftist circles well before the Nazi party was created.

Now, let me be as clear as possible on this subject: ethnic nationalism, let alone racism, is in no way conservative. The scientific racism of the Nazis, so popular across Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century until the devastating and inevitable result of its assertions, would never have developed if not for nationalist movements.

Nationalism as we know it was one of the earliest leftist ideologies, and remains fundamentally left wing, going hand in hand with identity politics. It was forged, as almost all ideological poisons that plague us today, in the fires of the French Revolution, and developed as a means of undermining the old European order, specifically the grand and, more importantly, multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and, to an extent, Britain.

The idea that countries should be based on single ethnic groups – the promotion of nation states – is an ideologically radical position. To a conservative, culture, not race, is what matters. The cry of the National Socialist is blood and soil, race and nation. The cry of the conservative is king and country.

Thus do the intellectually honest arrive at the inescapable conclusion: Nazism is not conservative. And if it is not conservative, it cannot be truly called right wing. It is a product of the French Revolution, just another bastard child of Rousseau’s love affair with himself, simply one more in a long line of deformed, monstrous political creatures to slither its way out of the primordial Jacobin soup.

The fact that Central and Eastern Europe (really all of Europe for that matter) have a long and at times vicious history with anti-Semitism is well known, and frequently referenced when discussing collusion with Nazis in occupied countries.

What is noted with far less frequency, and is far more important, however, is that fact that not until the dissolution of the Christian monarchies and the introduction of mass democracy was there an organised, systematic attempt to wipe out European Jewry (if you think the Holocaust is in any way comparable to the Inquisition in premise or scope, you comprehend neither). In fact, between the time the Christianization of Europe was completed and the French Revolution, there were really no organised, systematic attempts to wipe out anyone in Europe.

This is the obvious truth we ignore when we censure and censor people who would accurately link Nazism with leftism. Political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn articulated this truth brilliantly:

The fatal year is 1789, and the symbol of iniquity is the Jacobin Cap. Its heresy is the denial of personality and of personal liberty. Its concrete realizations are Jacobin mass democracy, all forms of national collectivism and statism, Marxism producing socialism and communism, fascism, and national socialism, leftism in all its modern guises and manifestations to which in America the good term 'liberalism,' perversely enough, is being applied. The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise.

Only a German people ripped from tradition, a German people starved of Judeo-Christian morality, drugged with the false promise of a better future, and subjected to the authority of those who have no right to it, could stand by and watch, at times cheer even, as millions of human beings – precious, living, breathing human beings – were systematically herded up like cattle and sent to be exterminated like termites.

Make no mistake. There is little difference, if any, in principle between fascism, communism, and progressivism – between Soviets, Nazis, and today’s UK Labour Party or US Democratic Party. The difference lies only in the degree to which those ideological principles are followed through.

All promise a utopian future, to be attained by sacrificing tradition at the altar of progress. All deny class distinctions as well as the old order, politically rooted in Feudalism, morally rooted in Christianity. They deny individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights. And most importantly, perhaps not to be counted among the ideological tenants listed above, but as a result of them, they inevitably end up denying the sanctity and value of human life.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, an elderly Jewish rabbi becomes nothing more than a germ, merely to be cleansed. In Soviet-occupied Lithuania, a respectable businessman becomes an enemy of the people, merely to become part of a statistic.

Students across the globe rhetorically ask how people could participate in something as evil as the Holocaust. The answer is simple: It is the easiest thing in the world to commit evil when one doesn’t believe it to be such, when one exists in a society governed by moral relativism. The choice is indeed between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise. Those who would obfuscate the ideological and philosophical origins of Nazism have made their choice known.

BREAKING: Justice Kennedy to Retire from the Supreme Court

Are we getting tired of winning or what?!

Justice Anthony Kennedy announces

that he is retiring, giving President Trump a critical opportunity to move the Supreme Court more solidly to the right in what promises to be an epic confirmation fight.

National Review's Jack Crowe:

Kennedy’s retirement, effective July 31, will set up a high stakes political battle over his replacement’s nomination.

Kennedy, 81, established himself as as a sought after swing vote for the court’s liberal justices, casting the deciding vote on issues ranging from abortion and affirmative action to capital punishment and gay rights. He announced his retirement in a letter to President Trump.

God bless America, land that I love…



Fox News' Bill Mears and Shannon Bream:

Trump, reacting to the news, called Kennedy a "great justice" and said he'd begin the search for a replacement immediately.

Arguably the most powerful member of the Supreme Court, Kennedy's moderate-conservative views often left him the "swing" -- or deciding -- vote in hot-button cases ranging from abortion to gay rights to political campaign spending.

A Supreme Court vacancy will likely become a key issue in a midterm congressional election year, when control of the Senate is at stake.

Donald Trump at CPAC

True to his promise from 2017, Donald Trump returned to the CPAC gathering at the Gaylord Hotel to a rousing speech.

The two photos above were taken by White House photographer Neshan Naltchayan (Twitter). 


Who dat at 2:08?

These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him

This week, Christian baker Jack Phillips won the narrowest of victories at the Supreme Court

writes Benny Huang,

when seven justices sided with him in a case involving a Colorado private sector nondiscrimination law.

As many commentators have noted, the court seems to have dodged the Big Question at the heart of the matter—whether private sector nondiscrimination laws can be used to compel artisans to create messages that they object to. In one of the greatest copouts of all time the court ruled in Phillips’s favor only because members of the Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission (chortle) displayed clear bias against his religion.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

And that’s an understatement. One commissioner, Diann Rice, sounded much like that blithering idiot who comments on every news item that involves our first freedom:

“Freedom of religion and religion has [sic] been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust. I mean, we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use – to use their religion to hurt others.”

Yeah, because everyone knows that the Nazis were huge advocates for religious freedom.

Actually, no they were not. … The Nazis were opponents of both religious freedom and religion generally.

If the Holocaust teaches us a lesson it’s about state power and the suppression of dissent not that religious freedom is dangerous.

And make no mistake about it, Diann Rice is terrified of religious freedom. When arguments like hers are advanced, we’re no longer having a conversation about what religious freedom means but rather whether it should exist. …

In a way, this supposedly groundbreaking decision was anticlimactic. Government bureaucrats will continue to use these abominable laws as weapons against people of faith, they’ll just be more circumspect in their remarks. No more comparing peaceful noninterference in someone else’s wedding to the slaughter of eleven million innocents. No more berating the victims of these laws as religious bigots. They’ll even pretend, as Diann Rice didn’t, to respect religion and the free exercise thereof.

But nothing will really change.

Why? Because these laws do not impinge on free exercise and free speech rights by happenstance. This is not like a Muslim woman claiming that she’s been discriminated against because she can’t board a plane while wearing a veil over her face. This is targeted retribution against people who harbor views that are disfavored by the state.

Which is what the First Amendment was designed to protect us from. If it fails us now it’s worthless.

When the government uses laws to target certain groups of people, it is treading on constitutional thin ice. Liberals seem to understand this which explains why they constantly argue that perfectly reasonable laws that seem neutral on their face are in fact discriminatory. These laws disproportionately impact one group or another—but usually blacks. The reason for this, of course, is that blacks offend nearly all laws at higher rates than the general population.

Nonetheless, liberals see discrimination hiding behind every law. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, for example, recently announced that his office will no longer prosecute possession of small quantities of marijuana because that’s raaaacist! In 2016, Gotham also “decriminalized” littering and public urination because those laws are racist too.

Any law that liberals don’t like is immediately attacked as discriminatory. Felon disenfranchisement laws, literacy tests, mandatory minimum sentences, even laws against loitering. An Obama-appointed federal judge recently found Texas’s voter ID law to be racist in intent and effect. How the court discerned the intent is very much unclear because there was no smoking gun. If it feels racist it must have been intended as racist.

The voter ID case raises some interesting questions. Is a law’s effect on one group sufficient to strike it down? Or is intent required too? If the effect is so manifest that it can’t be denied, can intent be inferred as the judge in the voter ID law case appeared to do?

I ask these questions because the law that Jack Phillips just beat in court is actually biased in effect and intent. The impact here does not just fall “disproportionately” on people of faith; it falls exclusively on us! While liberals may pretend not to detect the bias inherent in this law, I suspect that they really just love the discriminatory effect too much to part with it.

There’s some evidence that Jack Phillips’s business was targeted precisely because he was known around town as a deeply religious man. Much like Hobby Lobby, faith was integral to his business’s brand. Phillips had previously declined orders for Halloween-themed baked goods, divorce parties, and bachelor parties.

Then one day in 2012, Dave Mullins and Charlie Craig entered the shop and tried to order a wedding cake, which was a strange request considering the fact that they were actually having their ceremony 2000 miles away in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They later claimed that they wanted a pre-wedding party locally though I suspect that all they really wanted was to provoke a fight.

Jack Phillips, who mistakenly believed that he lived in a free country that respected its citizens’ rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, thought that he could decline this order just as he had other orders in the past. By Mullins’s own admission he exploded in anger, shouting “Fuck you and your homophobic cake shop!” …

And we’re supposed to believe that this was about equal access to goods and services.

There were plenty of other bakeries that would have gladly accepted their money. Phillips’s rights should not hinge on this fact but it happens to be true. These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him.

But that’s not all they wanted. Laws have the ability to change hearts and minds—and not always gently. I don’t like this aspect of laws, of course, because I am extremely wary of governments sanctioning official beliefs and punishing all others.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, for example, wrote a column in 2015 in which he expressed his view that church leaders need to face pressure to “take homosexuality off the sin list.” (Note to Bruni: only God can do that.) What’s worse is the context of Bruni’s column: he was writing about the controversy surrounding Indiana’s religious freedom law which he opposed. Clearly, he doesn’t like laws that might protect Christians from the legal pressure he wants to put on them to change their beliefs and eventually to change their churches’ doctrines.

I should really thank Bruni for his candor because he said what defenders’ of Colorado’s law wouldn’t dare say in court. The reason we have these laws is because society is in the midst of a revolutionary change and there can be no hold-outs. Government must lend a hand in corralling the last straggling institutions: churches.

Government has no business trying to change religious doctrine, not even by proxy. But that’s what it’s doing. It sees Big Religion as the last citadel of “homophobia,” a supposedly odious ideology that must be stamped out. They intend to achieve this by forcing Christians to make small compromises with their faith until they fully accept the homosexual agenda. Severe governmental penalties, including the loss of livelihood, have a tendency to make people rethink their core beliefs. This change in the individual Christians’ minds will put pressure on the churches to “take homosexuality off the sin list.”

And that’s why these laws offend the first amendment—not to mention the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments. Though the Supreme Court was too cowardly to decree it, there’s nothing neutral about “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination ordinances.

I’m happy that Jack Phillips was able to hold out against his tormentors but the rest of may not be so lucky because the state is on the tormentors’ side. Be forewarned: this fight isn’t over.

Living Under the Régime of the Doleful Censors: The Tyranny of the Thin-Skinned

The main story of this week's Le Point — which has become France's best weekly — is about the tyranny of the thin-skinned and the cacophony it entails, leading Raphaël Enthoven to say that we are living under the régime of the doleful:

The unanimous decision is the art of destroying or discrediting…

"New censors are raging. In the name of goodness, they control the language, are hermetic to humor, and pretend to be victims."

Actualité Vidéos

Sébastien Le Fol : « C'est la tyrannie des susceptibles »

Publié le 06/06/2018 | Le Point.fr

De nouveaux censeurs sévissent. Au nom du bien, ils contrôlent le langage, sont hermétiques au second degré et se posent en victimes. Enquête dans "Le Point" de la semaine.

How Much Fake News Is There in the BBC's Report on the Argentine Football Team's Refusal to Play Israel?

After reading the BBC's report on Argentina cancels Israel World Cup friendly after Gaza violence, my first reaction was that I wouldn’t be surprised if there is fake news involved in the reporting of this. Offhand, Argentina's leader and government ain’t known to be bad guys…

Read between the fake news lines, and I’m pretty sure that when

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … was told by Mauricio Macri that "there was nothing that I could do"

the conversation was far from short and Argentina’s president was in fact being honest as well as contrite and even apologetic.

However, the Beeb makes it sound like he is standing up to the horrid leader of Israel, strong like a rock and eager to bring the conversation to an end and hang up the phone, and like the Argentine nation is united in this admirable (sic) position!

Keep reading: the same comment can be made for the following sentence:

Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said he believed his country's footballers "were not willing to play the game".

Isn’t that the gist of the story?

The footballers alone (well, some of the team members, at least) — men who are renowned for (ahem) their profound intelligence and deep understanding of international relations — made the decision, i.e., perhaps two dozen citizens of the Argentine nation (pop. 44 million), and the politicians (rightists who would not corner much respect from artists and sportsmen in the first place) were unsuccessful in their efforts to get them to budge.

Go back to first paragraph: 

Argentina has cancelled a football World Cup warm-up match with Israel, apparently under pressure over Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

Under the pressure of whom did Buenos Aires cancel the match?!

Not the international community, apparently, nor the Palestinians or the Arabs, but under the pressure of its own football team, which left it no choice.

The Palestinians and their allies got something right:

In Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Football Association issued a statement thanking Argentina striker Lionel Messi and his teammates.

… The campaign group Avaaz, which had called for the game to be cancelled, praised Argentina's football team for what it called a "brave ethical decision".

Thanking, or praising, the football team, and neither the Argentine government nor the Argentine people.

To this,  Daniel Aronstein (who brought the BBC report to my attention) disagreed vehemently, replying as follows:

this is not a private professional team; therefore placing blame on the cowardly appeasing antisemitic shits in the argentine govt is proper. I like macri's domestic economic policies, so far. but on this he and his comrades are shit. the argentine deep state covered up their complicit involvement in the iran/hizballah terror attack and the murder of nissman who was about to expose it. they are shit. they have decided to support islamoterrorists instead of israel genesis..... (12:3 is operative. as the usa is prospering at a 5% growth rate since moving embassy to jerusalem. so now argentina will descend.)

Hmmmm…

That would be disappointing…

AFP (no friend of Israel, the USA, or the right), however, has this (gracias por Stephen Green):

Israeli media said that late Tuesday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Argentine President Mauricio Macri, with whom he has good relations, in an effort to save the match but that Macri had said he was unable to intervene. …/…

- Argentina team 'not willing' -

Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said before confirmation of the game's cancellation that he believed his country's players had been reluctant to travel to Israel for the match.

"As far as I know, the players of the national team were not willing to play the game," Faurie said.

The status of Jerusalem, always a key sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, surged back to centre-stage when Trump tore up decades of US policy [don't you love the AFP's choice of words and expressions?!] to recognise it as Israel's capital in December. 

The juxtaposition of the law-breaking, but melodious, Obama administration next to boisterous and rowdy Trump presidency teaches us a lesson about our own moral blindness

[The] weird juxtaposition of the vacuous and often law-breaking, but melodious, Obama administration next to boisterous and rowdy Trump presidency has taught us a lesson about our own moral blindness.

Both our media and popular culture, as well as our cultural elite, value style far more than substance. Adroitly breaking the law is preferable to obeying it in uncivilized fashion. Boorishly bragging nonstop about 3 percent economic growth and below-4-percent unemployment is deemed far worse than contextualizing in professorial tones a stagnant economy that in eight years never achieved 3 percent annual growth.

Credentials empower illegality; their mere absence is seen as almost illegal in itself.

Lawlessly “presidential” is a misdemeanor; lawfully unpresidential, a felony. A bankrupt agenda delivered by experts is sanctified; an effective one packaged by amateurs is heretical.

Having engaged in illegality during the Obama administration is better on a résumé than following the law in a Trump government.

And yet still, this one constant keeps reverberating throughout the hysteria: Our elite always values the messenger over the message.

The façade of Camelot exempts empty lawlessness in a way that Queens-accented boosterism seems to nullify real achievement.

That is how Victor Davis Hanson concludes his National Review piece (thanks to Ann Althouse and Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds).

Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media, universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.

Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous. As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.

In calm, ministerial tones, the progressive Obama sometimes slapped a puerile America’s wrists, with frequent admonitions to behave and to not act so illiberally. Or he frequently reminded us, with a frown, “that is not who we are.” Recall that Obama came into office promising that he would could lower the seas and cool the planet, with a generation of young like-minded activists who, we were lectured, were the ones we had all been waiting for. Now president emeritus Obama worries that perhaps his messianic appearance came too soon for us to fully appreciate his divinity.

Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.

Go to the National Review link to read the full list of The Scandals of the ‘Scandal-Free’ Obama Administration

But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions.

His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.

We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community. FBI director Comey lied about the particular sequences of his investigation of the Clinton email scandal. He lied by omission to the president when, in his supposed Oval Office informative dissection of the Steele dossier, he failed to include the fact that it was a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.

 … In addition to such unethical and often illegal behavior, the Obama administration institutionalized deception as a tool of government: hiding from the American people all the side agreements to the so-called Iran deal, itself a blatant effort to bypass the treaty-making responsibilities of the U.S. Senate; fabricating yarns to sell the disastrous Obamacare takeover of health care; using executive orders to enact immigration amnesties after warning that doing just that would be unconstitutional; lying repeatedly about the circumstances of the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap.

Hillary Clinton has never been able to explain why huge gifts to her family’s foundation from Russian interests coincided with the State Department’s approval of uranium sales to Russia, or why anyone would ever pay her husband $500,000 for a short speech in Moscow — and certainly would not now once her political ambitions have at last calcified.

We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e., cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably be impeached.

Criminal Camelot vs. Crude Queens

Why was the Obama administration so corrupt?

Three reasons stand out.
One, it was the first administration in modern history in which the media saw its role as a subordinate and accomplice rather than an auditor; the media thereby empowered corruption.
Two, it exuded a moral zealousness in its promise to fundamentally transform the country and enact social justice; any means of doing so were justified by its exalted ends.
Three, like the John F. Kennedy administration, Obama and his team adroitly calculated that in America’s celebrity culture, what’s hip and cool is often more highly prized than what’s competent and lawful, much less crude and effective.

No one would suggest that Donald Trump obeys the law because he has an inherent respect for the Constitution and the nation’s ethical bearings, although that perhaps could prove to be so. Rather, Trump has not broken the law the way that Obama routinely did quite simply because he cannot. The media is so hostile to his every act, the popular culture has so frequently written him off as crude, and his critics, both progressive and conservative, have become so hysterical over his person, that he lives in a singular 24/7 bubble that faults him for everything from his choice of dessert to the manner in which his daughter holds her child.

The news, both fake and real, is now all Trump, all the time. And because Trump can enjoy baiting his opponents by deliberately being uncouth and coarse, and since he has little respect for past presidential protocol, almost everything is now transparent and nothing is off-limits. …

Filled with Blood and Sand and Tears

The story of D-Day.

The Subtext of Strangers' Questions in The New Yorker