ELSEWHERE
Well, I am still capable of being surprised. Top Left-of centre blog Daily Kos (400,000 hits per day) denies it is a liberal blog: "But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I've said a million times, the status quo is untenable. But it has nothing to do with ideology". I have always said that Leftists are interested in power only and that any beliefs or principles that they espouse are just whatever sounds good at the time but I really did not expect to see it so openly admitted in such a major Leftist source. But then I also did not expect that so many passionate advocates of equality would suddenly declare themselves as elitists, either. I have always argued that what the Left say only makes sense psychologically rather than philosphically but even my cynicism seems to have been inadequate for the reality. The Kos author is however showing a typical psychopathic trait: Making amazingly damaging admissions about himself without the slightest awareness of how damaging such admissions are.
But this Leftist pundit recognizes what the Democrats are too: "We must stop the Democrats from being a party that simply wants to win elections and back into a party that actually stands for something important, something more than "not the other guy"."
Wicked Thoughts has just done another attack on the illogicality of Law professor Brian Leiter and his claim that America is becoming a "theocracy".
Australians abroad: "A former State Department official is known to refer jocularly to the power wielded around the world by the "axis of ocker". By that, she means the Australian diaspora - the large community of Australians who live offshore on a permanent or long-term basis.... Given our small population, the rollcall of Australians in top international positions is impressive. They head up businesses such as McDonald's and British Airways; they edit leading international newspapers; they run international organisations and cultural institutions and teach at the world's best universities. Together with other expatriates, they constitute our worldwide web of ideas and influence".
The official seal of Los Angeles county features a large pagan goddess and a tiny Chriistian cross. Leftists want to remove the cross. Dennis Prager comments: "I fear intolerance. And the move to expunge the singular Christian contribution to an American county and city is intolerant to the point of bigotry. No religious Christians, despite their deep opposition to paganism, ever objected to the pagan goddess that is many times larger than the cross. I have found over and over that most Christians who preach faith are more tolerant than most leftists who preach tolerance."
Are CBS learning? "CBS News fired the producer responsible for interrupting the last five minutes of a hit crime drama with a special report on the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat". Maybe not. They also said that they should have been MORE critical of the Bush administration prior to the election. I wonder how? Weren't barefaced lies enough?
Selective support for choice: "The bulk of liberals are an inconsistent lot. Take, for example, their support of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. These same people are almost uniformly hostile to choice in many other areas of life -- just ask them if they support choice in whether one may develop one's own property as one likes, or whether one has the authority to decide on what to spend one's own money (instead of having it taxed away by government).The fact is that this very tiny sphere of authority is all these folks tend to wish to keep out of government's reach."
Dummies not so dumb: "As the furor over the election dies down, with more unseemly whining from sore losers and some unseemly gloating from sore winners, certain stereotypes of Bush voters continue to have a lot of currency among disgruntled liberals. One of them is that Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are dumb, ignorant and out of touch with reality. This notion has been bandied about with quite a bit of smugness. Some on the left have humbly taken to calling themselves 'the reality-based community.' .... David Bernstein, a libertarian who was highly critical of both candidates in the past election, points out on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that in other surveys, Republicans have on average scored higher than Democrats on knowledge of political issues than Democrats -- though voters across the board tend to be woefully ill-informed."
Liberals in the UK: "What all liberals have in common is a touching certainty that they are right. Liberalism is a missionary faith, and proselytising zeal is not normally conducive to sceptical inquiry. Whatever the core values of liberalism, they can surely conflict with one another - and with other goods such as social cohesion. Yet it rarely occurs to liberals to ask themselves whether their values - however vaguely or inconsistently defined - are viable in the long term."
Blair smarter than his party: In a paroxysm of their traditional class envy, the British Labour Party has again legislated to ban all foxhunting -- against the wishes of their Prime Minister. It remains to be seen whether Blair will ever take the legislation to the Queen for her signature, though.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
A GREAT LETTER FROM A CENTRIST TO THE LEFT
Just a few excerpts from Dean's World
"A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today. We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what's "questioning the establishment" to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like me. Culturally, at least.
You also, in your missive, speak of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11." I hope you're aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as used by the great Fascist and Stalinist film producers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I'm sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" seemed tame.....
I've experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys can be when someone dares to question your beliefs. You guys often come off exactly like the theocratic mullahs and the lock-step fascists you claim to hate (but which you, oddly enough, don't seem willing to use American power to try to overthrow)......
We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which would have been done a long damned time ago if we'd had any decency as a country. You don't agree. Fine. You don't have to. But don't think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.
I don't know. Maybe you guys on the left need the stereotyping and the rage in order to motivate people to the polls. But from where folks like me stand, it's your ideas that need to be questioned, and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years. It's you guys who are the reactionaries.
********************************
Just a few excerpts from Dean's World
"A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today. We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what's "questioning the establishment" to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like me. Culturally, at least.
You also, in your missive, speak of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11." I hope you're aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as used by the great Fascist and Stalinist film producers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I'm sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" seemed tame.....
I've experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys can be when someone dares to question your beliefs. You guys often come off exactly like the theocratic mullahs and the lock-step fascists you claim to hate (but which you, oddly enough, don't seem willing to use American power to try to overthrow)......
We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which would have been done a long damned time ago if we'd had any decency as a country. You don't agree. Fine. You don't have to. But don't think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.
I don't know. Maybe you guys on the left need the stereotyping and the rage in order to motivate people to the polls. But from where folks like me stand, it's your ideas that need to be questioned, and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years. It's you guys who are the reactionaries.
********************************
ELSEWHERE
The poor old Guardian! They are trying to cope with the IQ issue and the "dumbness" of the "red" states but they just don't get it. They quote the well-known table of the average IQs of American States and then admit it is discredited. To soften that blow, however, they also say: "Educational statistics also seem to support the (attractive to people like us) smart/dumb divide between the parties. The District of Columbia, which the census records as having the nation's highest population of college graduates (42%), turned in the nation's lowest number of votes for President Bush (9%)." So was it because of all the graduates that DC gave such an amazingly skewed result? Not at all. It is because Washington is one of the world's biggest black cities and we all know how most blacks vote. And we know how many (or few) blacks have degrees too. But perhaps the Guardian doesn't. And a willingness to regurgitate Leftist propaganda is as big an influence as intelligence over who gets one of the many trashy American college degrees.
James Glassman has a splendid piece of sarcasm about how to make the Democrats a winner at the next election.
Anti-religious bigotry: "Liberals scoff, but the balm that comes with being part of a religious community -- the Bible study, youth groups, choirs and, yes, the moral absolutes that often accompany such communion -is real and comforting, unlike the promise of complicated and expensive government programs.... The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs- which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help - is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S."
Blair did his best: "Jacques Chirac dealt a blow to Tony Blair's attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq. As Mr Blair used a keynote speech to present Britain as a "bridge across the Atlantic", President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the "honest broker". Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours."
Jim Lindgren has a comprehensive debunking of all the "voter fraud" myths of the 2004 election.
Reasonable: "Though the economy was sluggish in Bush's first three years in office, it has been quite strong in 2004, with solid growth and low inflation. Using those data, Yale economist Ray Fair expected Bush to garner 56 percent of the presidential vote. But in fact, he gained only 51.5 percent. Why did Bush do so poorly despite the resurgent economy? What happened to those 5 million missing Bush votes? We must conclude that Iraq is the reason for Bush's subpar performance."
Affirmative action hurts blacks. Conservatives have said it for years but now a Left-leaning law professor has produced research confirming it. You can read the man himself on the Volokh blog. He found that AA actually reduces the number of successful black lawyers.
Leftist judge defies the law: "John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, PA, probably had no idea what he was in for last week when his office appeared before Judge Leonard Zito for the conviction and sentencing of 27 individuals accused of using false and stolen social security numbers. Morganelli's investigators had worked for months to prosecute the group, 14 of which had not simply used false social security numbers, but had stolen and used the social security numbers of law-abiding people. But although every one of the defendants pleaded guilty, Judge Zito refused to impose any period of incarceration, nor did he fine the defendants. Zito based his decision on the fact that the defendants were all illegal aliens, remarking that they should never have been arrested in the first place because the men committed the crimes 'strictly for the purpose of working.'"
Harvard researcher surprises Leftists only: "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin,"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
The poor old Guardian! They are trying to cope with the IQ issue and the "dumbness" of the "red" states but they just don't get it. They quote the well-known table of the average IQs of American States and then admit it is discredited. To soften that blow, however, they also say: "Educational statistics also seem to support the (attractive to people like us) smart/dumb divide between the parties. The District of Columbia, which the census records as having the nation's highest population of college graduates (42%), turned in the nation's lowest number of votes for President Bush (9%)." So was it because of all the graduates that DC gave such an amazingly skewed result? Not at all. It is because Washington is one of the world's biggest black cities and we all know how most blacks vote. And we know how many (or few) blacks have degrees too. But perhaps the Guardian doesn't. And a willingness to regurgitate Leftist propaganda is as big an influence as intelligence over who gets one of the many trashy American college degrees.
James Glassman has a splendid piece of sarcasm about how to make the Democrats a winner at the next election.
Anti-religious bigotry: "Liberals scoff, but the balm that comes with being part of a religious community -- the Bible study, youth groups, choirs and, yes, the moral absolutes that often accompany such communion -is real and comforting, unlike the promise of complicated and expensive government programs.... The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs- which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help - is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S."
Blair did his best: "Jacques Chirac dealt a blow to Tony Blair's attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq. As Mr Blair used a keynote speech to present Britain as a "bridge across the Atlantic", President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the "honest broker". Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours."
Jim Lindgren has a comprehensive debunking of all the "voter fraud" myths of the 2004 election.
Reasonable: "Though the economy was sluggish in Bush's first three years in office, it has been quite strong in 2004, with solid growth and low inflation. Using those data, Yale economist Ray Fair expected Bush to garner 56 percent of the presidential vote. But in fact, he gained only 51.5 percent. Why did Bush do so poorly despite the resurgent economy? What happened to those 5 million missing Bush votes? We must conclude that Iraq is the reason for Bush's subpar performance."
Affirmative action hurts blacks. Conservatives have said it for years but now a Left-leaning law professor has produced research confirming it. You can read the man himself on the Volokh blog. He found that AA actually reduces the number of successful black lawyers.
Leftist judge defies the law: "John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, PA, probably had no idea what he was in for last week when his office appeared before Judge Leonard Zito for the conviction and sentencing of 27 individuals accused of using false and stolen social security numbers. Morganelli's investigators had worked for months to prosecute the group, 14 of which had not simply used false social security numbers, but had stolen and used the social security numbers of law-abiding people. But although every one of the defendants pleaded guilty, Judge Zito refused to impose any period of incarceration, nor did he fine the defendants. Zito based his decision on the fact that the defendants were all illegal aliens, remarking that they should never have been arrested in the first place because the men committed the crimes 'strictly for the purpose of working.'"
Harvard researcher surprises Leftists only: "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin,"
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
NOTE: Hotmail has been playing up a bit on me lately. They seem to be under attack from someone. I got nearly 1000 big spam emails yesterday. So if you have emailed me and I seem to not have got your email, it might be a good idea to resend
"DUMB" CONSERVATIVES AND INCONSISTENT LEFTISTS
As an amusing post about John Kerry on Majority Rights reminds me, Leftists are hugely inconsistent in their attitude to intelligence. Just mention the word "IQ" and they will immediately say that there is really no such thing and all men are equal anyhow. And any attempt to measure differences in intelligence (which is what IQ is) is Fascist, racist and all the usual Leftist terms of abuse. Yet here they all are in the post-election period saying that they are heaps more intelligent than conservatives and that their superiority in that regard is enormously important! If I could be bothered, I would be going around all the comments boxes on Leftist blogs and accusing the blog authors of Fascism and racism every time they say how superior they are and how dumb conservatives are. And how they can proudly admit to being elitists (for some examples see Leftists as Elitists) while at the same time believing in equality really quite escapes me. At any event, below are a few more comments on the current Leftist claims:
"A. Barton Hinkle": "Us here in Bush Country sorry. We sorry for being so dumb, voting for dumb President Bush. We know we not so smart. But ain't nothing we can do about it. We try hard. Honest injun! Stay up on current events. Watch Fox News and "Entertainment Tonite." Read Weekly World News - and not just stuff about Bat-Boy, neither. But we no match for likes of you in brains department. Heck, we barely just learn to walk upright. Grandparents' knuckles still all red and swole up.... It true, as recent poll show, that perty near seven out of 10 Bush fans think U.S. have "clear evidence" Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. We admit we fooled on that score. Vice President always hint at connection. Him probably thinking of grand jury indictment sought by Clinton U.S. attorney Mary Jo White back in 1998. Indictment said - we quoting here - "[A]l-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Guess she not so smart either." (Via Keith Burgess-Jackson)
Mark Steyn: "How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was..... If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA." Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton"
Steyn again: "In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't"
Keith Burgess-Jackson: "In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn't the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn't it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it's not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field. Liberals are going to have to face the fact that religious belief is independent of intelligence. It is a function of other things, such as upbringing"
A message to the Left from a truthful bear: "George Bush is President, and he is going to keep being President for another four years. That's not going to change. So telling us how much he sucks is irrelevant. Telling us how stupid the portion of America which voted for him is: also irrelevant. Discussing secession and to hell with those red states: well that's just plain stupid, forget about irrelevant. What is relevant are answers. Solutions, not a list of problems. Declaring that Iraq is a mess is easy, and worthless. Telling us what we should do to fix it is harder, but far more worthwhile. Don't like the operation in Falluja? Fine: how else would you stop the terrorists? Think we should involve allies more in Iraq? Great. How?
*******************************
"DUMB" CONSERVATIVES AND INCONSISTENT LEFTISTS
As an amusing post about John Kerry on Majority Rights reminds me, Leftists are hugely inconsistent in their attitude to intelligence. Just mention the word "IQ" and they will immediately say that there is really no such thing and all men are equal anyhow. And any attempt to measure differences in intelligence (which is what IQ is) is Fascist, racist and all the usual Leftist terms of abuse. Yet here they all are in the post-election period saying that they are heaps more intelligent than conservatives and that their superiority in that regard is enormously important! If I could be bothered, I would be going around all the comments boxes on Leftist blogs and accusing the blog authors of Fascism and racism every time they say how superior they are and how dumb conservatives are. And how they can proudly admit to being elitists (for some examples see Leftists as Elitists) while at the same time believing in equality really quite escapes me. At any event, below are a few more comments on the current Leftist claims:
"A. Barton Hinkle": "Us here in Bush Country sorry. We sorry for being so dumb, voting for dumb President Bush. We know we not so smart. But ain't nothing we can do about it. We try hard. Honest injun! Stay up on current events. Watch Fox News and "Entertainment Tonite." Read Weekly World News - and not just stuff about Bat-Boy, neither. But we no match for likes of you in brains department. Heck, we barely just learn to walk upright. Grandparents' knuckles still all red and swole up.... It true, as recent poll show, that perty near seven out of 10 Bush fans think U.S. have "clear evidence" Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. We admit we fooled on that score. Vice President always hint at connection. Him probably thinking of grand jury indictment sought by Clinton U.S. attorney Mary Jo White back in 1998. Indictment said - we quoting here - "[A]l-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Guess she not so smart either." (Via Keith Burgess-Jackson)
Mark Steyn: "How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was..... If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA." Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton"
Steyn again: "In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't"
Keith Burgess-Jackson: "In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn't the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn't it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it's not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field. Liberals are going to have to face the fact that religious belief is independent of intelligence. It is a function of other things, such as upbringing"
A message to the Left from a truthful bear: "George Bush is President, and he is going to keep being President for another four years. That's not going to change. So telling us how much he sucks is irrelevant. Telling us how stupid the portion of America which voted for him is: also irrelevant. Discussing secession and to hell with those red states: well that's just plain stupid, forget about irrelevant. What is relevant are answers. Solutions, not a list of problems. Declaring that Iraq is a mess is easy, and worthless. Telling us what we should do to fix it is harder, but far more worthwhile. Don't like the operation in Falluja? Fine: how else would you stop the terrorists? Think we should involve allies more in Iraq? Great. How?
*******************************
ELSEWHERE
Does the blogosphere have a memory? Not much of a one, I would guess. In mid-December of 2002 a big blog topic was the defamation case brought by Australian Jewish businessman Joe Gutnick against Dow-Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and various other papers. My main contribution to the debate is here. The fuss arose because Dow Jones published most gross accusations against Mr Gutnick and then absolutely refused to retract them. Mr Gutnick was advised that he would have little redress under American law because American law takes little heed of the truth of such accusations. He therefore sued before the High Court of Australia. Dow Jones cried foul because they did not like being sued under law that required them to be truthful. The outcome of the case has recently been announced: After 4 years and 27 court appearances, Mr Gutnick finally got his public apology and retraction from Dow Jones plus $180,000 in damages and $400,000 in costs. Common decency and a respect for truth would have saved Dow Jones a lot of money. I hope that they learn from it and am pleased that Australian law administered the lesson.
The Dutch pratfall: "The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure. This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate.... Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system. The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart. But it is probably already too late for that.... And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same." More background on the Dutch situation here.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Does the blogosphere have a memory? Not much of a one, I would guess. In mid-December of 2002 a big blog topic was the defamation case brought by Australian Jewish businessman Joe Gutnick against Dow-Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and various other papers. My main contribution to the debate is here. The fuss arose because Dow Jones published most gross accusations against Mr Gutnick and then absolutely refused to retract them. Mr Gutnick was advised that he would have little redress under American law because American law takes little heed of the truth of such accusations. He therefore sued before the High Court of Australia. Dow Jones cried foul because they did not like being sued under law that required them to be truthful. The outcome of the case has recently been announced: After 4 years and 27 court appearances, Mr Gutnick finally got his public apology and retraction from Dow Jones plus $180,000 in damages and $400,000 in costs. Common decency and a respect for truth would have saved Dow Jones a lot of money. I hope that they learn from it and am pleased that Australian law administered the lesson.
The Dutch pratfall: "The recent assassination of Dutch author and moviemaker, Theo van Gough, by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam should come as no surprise to those familiar with the condition of multiculturalism in Holland. Earlier this year, the Dutch government became the first Western state to admit that the multicultural experiment, the biggest socialist fraud ever to be foisted on countries since the Soviet one, is a colossal failure. This admission came in the form of an all-party parliamentary report that basically concluded, among other things, that Muslim immigrants, who make up almost one million of Holland’s 16 million inhabitants, are refusing to integrate.... Ironically, it is the emphasis Dutch governments have placed on multiculturalism that has helped lead to its inevitable downfall. The report states that, in planning their ‘perfect’ society, the biggest mistake the lib-left multiculturalists made was to have immigrant children educated in their own languages, which has resulted in an ethnic separatism in society. This voluntary apartheid from the mainstream has reached the point where it is dangerous for white Europeans to venture into some immigrant neighborhoods where they are regarded as either “an enemy or victim.” The growth of this parallel world has also corresponded with a growth in discomfort among the native Dutch toward the newcomers and a loss of a feeling of security, which is largely due to the new immigrants’ propensity for crime, violence and overrepresentation in the criminal system. The report concludes that the ethnic ghettos must be broken up and the immigrants made to become Dutch if the country is not to come apart. But it is probably already too late for that.... And what is the response of the oh-so-clever Dutch leftists to the multicultural mess they have created? Like after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been either silent or offered only more of the same." More background on the Dutch situation here.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Monday, November 15, 2004
ON NOT QUITE GETTING IT RIGHT:
I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.
And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.
And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.
And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.
But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.
****************************************
I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.
And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.
And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.
And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.
But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.
****************************************
ELSEWHERE
Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.
An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""
Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.
Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".
Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."
There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.
An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""
Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.
Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".
Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."
There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Sunday, November 14, 2004
SSSHH! DON'T TELL THE LEFT THIS:
I find it difficult to restrain my amusement at the way the American Left is at present relentlessly shooting itself in the foot. Their bile and hate has so overcome them that they are saying almost insane things about their election defeat. They seem to be almost uniform in blaming evangelical Christians for their defeat and the abuse they are pouring out at those much-abused people is quite amazing. "Dumb" and "stupid" are just the mildest of the adjective hurled out. "Jihadists", "Theocrats", "American Taliban" are some of the more imaginative descriptions.
Great! Is all I can say. Hurling gross insults at people whose votes you need if you are to win next time is so stupid that it almost confirms the Left as children of Satan. Does the Left really think that Christians will not notice what the Left thinks of them? I think the Left are at the moment doing far more to send the Christian vote to the GOP than George Bush could ever do in his wildest dreams.
And that is the big laugh! A lot of the Christian vote is still up for grabs. The swing to Bush actually had nothing to do with the Christian vote. If any particular demographic is to be blamed for Bush's victory it is actually Catholics and women. The Left are abusing an entirely innocent party!
But I will say no more on the matter. Let us all keep an amused silence about the matter from now on. To check up on what I have just said, however, you could (for instance) read the following:
"The Economist": "Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did".
Mick Hume: "Bring on the most influential myths of the post-election debate so far: that the Republicans won by scaring stupid redneck voters, and by mobilising a powerful block of Christian fundamentalists to vote for their conservative moral values on abortion and gay marriage. It is not hard to see why this should be an attractive explanation/excuse for the Democrats and their supporters on the international left. After all, how can they be blamed for losing to Bush, if the voters are just too ignorant or too bigoted to appreciate their sophisticated arguments? This sort of contemptuous attitude towards the electorate reveals rather more about the left than it does about American voters. Apart from anything else, it is a bit rich to blame Bush for emotive scaremongering when the Kerry campaign was just as guilty... But, as Guardian/Observer columnist David Aaronovitch points out, on closer inspection the 'populist uprising' of Christian conservatives turns out 'to be more or less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare':
Krauthammer: "Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck. In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils." Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?"
Jill Stewart: "But as national Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin noted, President Bush increased his support among occasional churchgoers more than among regular churchgoers. That speaks to support untethered from intense religiosity..... In California, he notes, Bush improved with swing voters: white Democratic men, Republican working women, Latinos with children. Nationwide, women split between Bush and Kerry. Just four years ago, Al Gore won an 11- point female advantage, thanks to a 20-year trend in which women went Democratic. The vanishing gender gap and other trends cannot be blamed on Kerry's failure to pray".
And I love this comment:
"It is not true that the Democrats didn't show sympathy toward fundamentalists during the campaign. They did -- just to the wrong ones. Islamic fundamentalists received a great deal of understanding and tolerance from the Democrats. John Kerry made a point of showing sensitivity to the Islamic community and for it earned numerous endorsements from Muslim Imams. Perhaps herein lies a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat? What if they extended to Christianity the tolerant understanding they extend to Islam? Maybe from time to time the Democrats could refer to Christianity as a religion of peace. One would think a party that can canonize a de facto terrorist and jihadist like Arafat could tolerate a Southern preacher or two. Jerry Falwell has never blown up an airplane like Arafat, but Democrats wouldn't be caught dead in his company".
*************************************
I find it difficult to restrain my amusement at the way the American Left is at present relentlessly shooting itself in the foot. Their bile and hate has so overcome them that they are saying almost insane things about their election defeat. They seem to be almost uniform in blaming evangelical Christians for their defeat and the abuse they are pouring out at those much-abused people is quite amazing. "Dumb" and "stupid" are just the mildest of the adjective hurled out. "Jihadists", "Theocrats", "American Taliban" are some of the more imaginative descriptions.
Great! Is all I can say. Hurling gross insults at people whose votes you need if you are to win next time is so stupid that it almost confirms the Left as children of Satan. Does the Left really think that Christians will not notice what the Left thinks of them? I think the Left are at the moment doing far more to send the Christian vote to the GOP than George Bush could ever do in his wildest dreams.
And that is the big laugh! A lot of the Christian vote is still up for grabs. The swing to Bush actually had nothing to do with the Christian vote. If any particular demographic is to be blamed for Bush's victory it is actually Catholics and women. The Left are abusing an entirely innocent party!
But I will say no more on the matter. Let us all keep an amused silence about the matter from now on. To check up on what I have just said, however, you could (for instance) read the following:
"The Economist": "Look at the figures: the moralists' share of the electorate was only 22%, just two points more than the share of those who cited the economy, and three points more than those who nominated terrorism as the top priority. A few points difference (and the exit polls are, after all, not entirely reliable) and everyone would have been saying the election was about jobs or Iraq. Moreover, that 22% share is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did".
Mick Hume: "Bring on the most influential myths of the post-election debate so far: that the Republicans won by scaring stupid redneck voters, and by mobilising a powerful block of Christian fundamentalists to vote for their conservative moral values on abortion and gay marriage. It is not hard to see why this should be an attractive explanation/excuse for the Democrats and their supporters on the international left. After all, how can they be blamed for losing to Bush, if the voters are just too ignorant or too bigoted to appreciate their sophisticated arguments? This sort of contemptuous attitude towards the electorate reveals rather more about the left than it does about American voters. Apart from anything else, it is a bit rich to blame Bush for emotive scaremongering when the Kerry campaign was just as guilty... But, as Guardian/Observer columnist David Aaronovitch points out, on closer inspection the 'populist uprising' of Christian conservatives turns out 'to be more or less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare':
Krauthammer: "Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck. In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils." Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?"
Jill Stewart: "But as national Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin noted, President Bush increased his support among occasional churchgoers more than among regular churchgoers. That speaks to support untethered from intense religiosity..... In California, he notes, Bush improved with swing voters: white Democratic men, Republican working women, Latinos with children. Nationwide, women split between Bush and Kerry. Just four years ago, Al Gore won an 11- point female advantage, thanks to a 20-year trend in which women went Democratic. The vanishing gender gap and other trends cannot be blamed on Kerry's failure to pray".
And I love this comment:
"It is not true that the Democrats didn't show sympathy toward fundamentalists during the campaign. They did -- just to the wrong ones. Islamic fundamentalists received a great deal of understanding and tolerance from the Democrats. John Kerry made a point of showing sensitivity to the Islamic community and for it earned numerous endorsements from Muslim Imams. Perhaps herein lies a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat? What if they extended to Christianity the tolerant understanding they extend to Islam? Maybe from time to time the Democrats could refer to Christianity as a religion of peace. One would think a party that can canonize a de facto terrorist and jihadist like Arafat could tolerate a Southern preacher or two. Jerry Falwell has never blown up an airplane like Arafat, but Democrats wouldn't be caught dead in his company".
*************************************
ELSEWHERE
Wicked Thoughts has just put up a sweeping demolition of the thoughts of Brian Leiter, the influential far-Left law professor and blogger.
European economic growth only 11% of U.S. growth: "Figures for the third quarter have punctured French delusions of growth altogether. The French economy crawled along at an annual pace of just 0.4% between July and September.... As for Germany, its economy grew by just 0.4% last quarter, at an annualised rate". [For comparison, the most recent GDP growth-rate figure for the USA was 3.7%]
Happiness: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year". [See also my post of Sept. 14th]
Arlene Peck is a bit disturbed at the conciliatory attitude towards the Palestinians coming from the post-election White House.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Wicked Thoughts has just put up a sweeping demolition of the thoughts of Brian Leiter, the influential far-Left law professor and blogger.
European economic growth only 11% of U.S. growth: "Figures for the third quarter have punctured French delusions of growth altogether. The French economy crawled along at an annual pace of just 0.4% between July and September.... As for Germany, its economy grew by just 0.4% last quarter, at an annualised rate". [For comparison, the most recent GDP growth-rate figure for the USA was 3.7%]
Happiness: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year". [See also my post of Sept. 14th]
Arlene Peck is a bit disturbed at the conciliatory attitude towards the Palestinians coming from the post-election White House.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Saturday, November 13, 2004
THE SEMI-SOVIET EU
Peter Hitchens "The E.U. is a top-down creation, an elitist idea with its roots in the branch of European social democracy whose features were internationalism, a loathing of the nation-state, a belief in the benevolent intervention of the state in almost all areas of life, and a belief that capitalism untamed was necessarily evil. Remember that many of the founders of the Soviet Union were well-intentioned and didn't mean to end up where they did.... I'm not saying it's like Stalin and the gulag, but I think the end result could well be quite like Brezhnev, and what some Russians still refer to as the golden time. There was plenty of vodka, plenty of sausage, national pride, but from the point of view of someone who wanted a free society, it was disastrous. The Brezhnev regime, though it wasn't Stalinist, was very nasty to those who persisted in dissenting. The European Union hasn't a gulag, but it also doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have jury trial, or due process as it is understood in the U.S. and the U.K. It has no concept of opposition"
Seceding from the EU: "All of the various secession proposals fail to consider the possibility that no permission should be needed to drop out of the EU. Yet that is the question that needs to be asked first. Should some nation be forced to continue its membership in the EU if it cannot persuade some supermajority of member nations to let it go? Forcing an unwilling nation to remain part of a political association that it does not want goes against all theories of fairness, not to mention human rights. Permission to leave should not be required. Any nation that wants to leave should be able to leave without asking permission of other member nations.... One also needs to consider that failure to allow a group of dissatisfied citizens to leave a political union that they did not want led to the completely unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. So bloodshed can happen when people cannot peacefully exit from a political association that they feel no longer represents them".
More on secession here.
But even the French are getting disillusioned: "Like Britain, France will be holding a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. A bout of stress over both this plebiscite and the separate prospect of Turkey joining the EU has now so diminished French aspirations for Europe that the old passion looks altogether spent. Enter Blair. For a root cause of Gallic anguish is Britain. While Blair will have his own tough struggle to win a UK referendum, what haunts France on both the constitution and Turkey is that Britain has apparently prevailed in making the EU an ever-expanding zone of liberal mercantilism that obstructs political union. An initial heart tremor was diagnosable in early autumn, when Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party heavyweight and former prime minister, astonished France by bidding that the opposition left vote No to the EU constitution in the referendum next year.... The chief argument Fabius advances for rejecting the EU constitution is that it institutionalises Blair's liberal, free-market economic programme, in disregard of social welfare and jobs lost to cheaper, low-wage neighbours. The French now talk of the "English Europe" with the same disdain as Michael Howard's Conservatives talk of "Brussels". Fabius baldly asserts: "The British concept has won." And he does not see why it should be allowed to stand".
Europe from an American viewpoint: "Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics. Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life -- enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative".
And Germany's media are DELIGHTED with Bin Laden as he appears on the recently-released videotape: "Osama bin Laden presents himself as less warlike. ...Bin Laden's latest message gives the impression that the bearded man with the soft voice is looking for a new image, away from the jihad rhetoric to a more factual political message ... Not much is left of his usual flaming Islamist rhetoric. The usual tones of "battle against the infidels" are missing this time. Instead he speaks of the ambitions of the "Islamic nation" for "freedom" and "security" and disproves President Bush with political arguments... Instead of martial armed polemics, Bin Laden uses irony to attest to the failures of George W. Bush. ..." (Via Davids Medienkritik)
Robert Kagan: "Europeans do not fear that the US will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the US and, by extension, the direction of world affairs. If the US is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behaviour. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the US invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because US willingness to go to war without the UN Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged Europe's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system".
And the German left-wing media report glowingly on the "America says sorry" site set up by a few disgruntled Kerry voters.
***********************************
Peter Hitchens "The E.U. is a top-down creation, an elitist idea with its roots in the branch of European social democracy whose features were internationalism, a loathing of the nation-state, a belief in the benevolent intervention of the state in almost all areas of life, and a belief that capitalism untamed was necessarily evil. Remember that many of the founders of the Soviet Union were well-intentioned and didn't mean to end up where they did.... I'm not saying it's like Stalin and the gulag, but I think the end result could well be quite like Brezhnev, and what some Russians still refer to as the golden time. There was plenty of vodka, plenty of sausage, national pride, but from the point of view of someone who wanted a free society, it was disastrous. The Brezhnev regime, though it wasn't Stalinist, was very nasty to those who persisted in dissenting. The European Union hasn't a gulag, but it also doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have jury trial, or due process as it is understood in the U.S. and the U.K. It has no concept of opposition"
Seceding from the EU: "All of the various secession proposals fail to consider the possibility that no permission should be needed to drop out of the EU. Yet that is the question that needs to be asked first. Should some nation be forced to continue its membership in the EU if it cannot persuade some supermajority of member nations to let it go? Forcing an unwilling nation to remain part of a political association that it does not want goes against all theories of fairness, not to mention human rights. Permission to leave should not be required. Any nation that wants to leave should be able to leave without asking permission of other member nations.... One also needs to consider that failure to allow a group of dissatisfied citizens to leave a political union that they did not want led to the completely unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. So bloodshed can happen when people cannot peacefully exit from a political association that they feel no longer represents them".
More on secession here.
But even the French are getting disillusioned: "Like Britain, France will be holding a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. A bout of stress over both this plebiscite and the separate prospect of Turkey joining the EU has now so diminished French aspirations for Europe that the old passion looks altogether spent. Enter Blair. For a root cause of Gallic anguish is Britain. While Blair will have his own tough struggle to win a UK referendum, what haunts France on both the constitution and Turkey is that Britain has apparently prevailed in making the EU an ever-expanding zone of liberal mercantilism that obstructs political union. An initial heart tremor was diagnosable in early autumn, when Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party heavyweight and former prime minister, astonished France by bidding that the opposition left vote No to the EU constitution in the referendum next year.... The chief argument Fabius advances for rejecting the EU constitution is that it institutionalises Blair's liberal, free-market economic programme, in disregard of social welfare and jobs lost to cheaper, low-wage neighbours. The French now talk of the "English Europe" with the same disdain as Michael Howard's Conservatives talk of "Brussels". Fabius baldly asserts: "The British concept has won." And he does not see why it should be allowed to stand".
Europe from an American viewpoint: "Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics. Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life -- enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative".
And Germany's media are DELIGHTED with Bin Laden as he appears on the recently-released videotape: "Osama bin Laden presents himself as less warlike. ...Bin Laden's latest message gives the impression that the bearded man with the soft voice is looking for a new image, away from the jihad rhetoric to a more factual political message ... Not much is left of his usual flaming Islamist rhetoric. The usual tones of "battle against the infidels" are missing this time. Instead he speaks of the ambitions of the "Islamic nation" for "freedom" and "security" and disproves President Bush with political arguments... Instead of martial armed polemics, Bin Laden uses irony to attest to the failures of George W. Bush. ..." (Via Davids Medienkritik)
Robert Kagan: "Europeans do not fear that the US will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the US and, by extension, the direction of world affairs. If the US is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behaviour. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the US invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because US willingness to go to war without the UN Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged Europe's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system".
And the German left-wing media report glowingly on the "America says sorry" site set up by a few disgruntled Kerry voters.
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ELSEWHERE
The main reason some conservatives do read the sneering Yglesias is that he does sometimes make sense -- as here -- where he advises Senate Democrats to go easy on the obstructionism. He does not know the difference between "horde" and "hoard", though. Is he dyslexic or just a hopeless speller?
Transatlantic Intelligencer has a most comprehensive demolition of the utterly stupid Democrat claim that America's actions in Iraq are responsible for European anti-Americanism. You would have to be brain-dead not to know that anti-Americanism was rife in Europe long before 9/11/2001 but Democrats still lie in their teeth about it. The blog author uses hard words like "otiose" and "metonym" (I would have said "superfluous" and "substitute-word") but he makes up for that with heaps of documentation.
An amusing suggestion from a reader that alludes to the likelihood of Arafat having died of AIDS: "I could never understand Hollywood's, the Leftist (progressive) Church's and the Catholic Church's seeming love affair with the PLO and Yasser Arafat. I have to wonder: Is there some sort of an underground gay Mafia connection here?"
Australia's Cardinal Pell says that Islamic fundamentalism is to some extent a reaction against the values-free amorality promoted by the Western Left. (For a pic of the good Cardinal, see here or here).
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
The main reason some conservatives do read the sneering Yglesias is that he does sometimes make sense -- as here -- where he advises Senate Democrats to go easy on the obstructionism. He does not know the difference between "horde" and "hoard", though. Is he dyslexic or just a hopeless speller?
Transatlantic Intelligencer has a most comprehensive demolition of the utterly stupid Democrat claim that America's actions in Iraq are responsible for European anti-Americanism. You would have to be brain-dead not to know that anti-Americanism was rife in Europe long before 9/11/2001 but Democrats still lie in their teeth about it. The blog author uses hard words like "otiose" and "metonym" (I would have said "superfluous" and "substitute-word") but he makes up for that with heaps of documentation.
An amusing suggestion from a reader that alludes to the likelihood of Arafat having died of AIDS: "I could never understand Hollywood's, the Leftist (progressive) Church's and the Catholic Church's seeming love affair with the PLO and Yasser Arafat. I have to wonder: Is there some sort of an underground gay Mafia connection here?"
Australia's Cardinal Pell says that Islamic fundamentalism is to some extent a reaction against the values-free amorality promoted by the Western Left. (For a pic of the good Cardinal, see here or here).
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Friday, November 12, 2004
EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM
More here
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"Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked.
Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country....
So, no - George W Bush is not hated here and in Europe because he removed a genocidal tyrant in Iraq and failed to anticipate the chaos that followed.
He is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing - so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride - America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement.
What it has succeeded in doing is cracking the great dilemma of modern history: how can disparate and ethnically diverse people live together?....
The answer lies not in the post-religious, anti-clerical mania of the European Union which has just rejected a commissioner for espousing mainstream Catholic principles, but in that patriotism so despised by European elites. It is the unifying force of national self-belief with all those ridiculed school rituals - pledging allegiance to the flag, reciting the preamble to the Constitution - that makes America whole and at one with itself. Bush is the personification of that unashamed America and that is why Europe cannot bear the sight of him".
More here
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ELSEWHERE
Master-butcher Arafart is dead. How sad. I was hoping he would live long enough for an Israeli missile to get him. For a summary of the repulsive one's contribution to humanity, see here. And Jeff Jacoby's comment: "Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75, lying in bed and surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves. In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg...."
Good news for Australia's conservative government: "The official unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest levels since monthly records began ..... The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 5.3 per cent in October from 5.5 per cent the previous month.... Releasing the data on Thursday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said the 5.3 per cent jobless rate was the lowest since it began monthly records in February 1978".
Some very biting comments about Americans who despise America and choose to live in Europe instead here. Excerpt: "There are those Americans, or should I say Americans-in-passport-only, who well deserve the title of expatriate. They are predominantly affluent and alienated leftists and they tend to be "writers," i.e., they don't actually write, they in fact have never actually written a sentence, but they nurse their hatred of America during leisurely hours in cafes and kid themselves into thinking that they are writers and patriots. You see them all the time in almost every European city. Mostly male, mostly middle-aged, sitting in cafes, writers all but seldom putting pen to paper. They wear sunglasses, smoke Gitanes and fantasize about under-aged schoolgirls in the delusion that they are experiencing the "authentic" Europe. They know little of the local patois, but fancy themselves fluent".
An interesting argument here to the effect that the Falluja operation is a "Roach Motel" strategy -- first getting the terrorists to "check in" and then killing them off.
Hitchens on the way Leftists hate Christians but praise Islam: "George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he -- and the U.S. armed forces -- have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary -- that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
I have just put up here an article by a British journalist with a few good bits in it that I like: "Contemporary Republicans are not conservatives. On the contrary, theirs is a revolutionary movement aimed at overthrowing much of the post-World War II order at home and abroad." and "After a glorious period of catch-up with US incomes per head, the EU has experienced a marked relative decline since 1990. Behind this lies a worrying deterioration in both absolute and relative productivity performance; and the proportion of people of working age actually at work is only 64 per cent in the EU of 15 members, against 71 per cent in the US, with particularly poor performance in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy and Spain." [He is right about Europe but is still confused by the old Leftist lie that conservatives oppose all change. It is only foolish or Leftist change that conservatives oppose. They would like LOTS of things changed about the world as it is today.].
Michelle Malkin has up a very clear picture of how "compassionate" Democrats are. The "Red States" are the big charitable donors.
There is an amusing post-election picture of Dan Rather here
Dick McDonald has an excellent gloat about the election result from a retired U.S. Navy Admiral.
I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists the claims by Ted Rall to the effect that Democrat voters really are superior -- followed by a demolition of the arguments he presents.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Master-butcher Arafart is dead. How sad. I was hoping he would live long enough for an Israeli missile to get him. For a summary of the repulsive one's contribution to humanity, see here. And Jeff Jacoby's comment: "Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75, lying in bed and surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves. In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg...."
Good news for Australia's conservative government: "The official unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest levels since monthly records began ..... The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 5.3 per cent in October from 5.5 per cent the previous month.... Releasing the data on Thursday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said the 5.3 per cent jobless rate was the lowest since it began monthly records in February 1978".
Some very biting comments about Americans who despise America and choose to live in Europe instead here. Excerpt: "There are those Americans, or should I say Americans-in-passport-only, who well deserve the title of expatriate. They are predominantly affluent and alienated leftists and they tend to be "writers," i.e., they don't actually write, they in fact have never actually written a sentence, but they nurse their hatred of America during leisurely hours in cafes and kid themselves into thinking that they are writers and patriots. You see them all the time in almost every European city. Mostly male, mostly middle-aged, sitting in cafes, writers all but seldom putting pen to paper. They wear sunglasses, smoke Gitanes and fantasize about under-aged schoolgirls in the delusion that they are experiencing the "authentic" Europe. They know little of the local patois, but fancy themselves fluent".
An interesting argument here to the effect that the Falluja operation is a "Roach Motel" strategy -- first getting the terrorists to "check in" and then killing them off.
Hitchens on the way Leftists hate Christians but praise Islam: "George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he -- and the U.S. armed forces -- have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary -- that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
I have just put up here an article by a British journalist with a few good bits in it that I like: "Contemporary Republicans are not conservatives. On the contrary, theirs is a revolutionary movement aimed at overthrowing much of the post-World War II order at home and abroad." and "After a glorious period of catch-up with US incomes per head, the EU has experienced a marked relative decline since 1990. Behind this lies a worrying deterioration in both absolute and relative productivity performance; and the proportion of people of working age actually at work is only 64 per cent in the EU of 15 members, against 71 per cent in the US, with particularly poor performance in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy and Spain." [He is right about Europe but is still confused by the old Leftist lie that conservatives oppose all change. It is only foolish or Leftist change that conservatives oppose. They would like LOTS of things changed about the world as it is today.].
Michelle Malkin has up a very clear picture of how "compassionate" Democrats are. The "Red States" are the big charitable donors.
There is an amusing post-election picture of Dan Rather here
Dick McDonald has an excellent gloat about the election result from a retired U.S. Navy Admiral.
I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists the claims by Ted Rall to the effect that Democrat voters really are superior -- followed by a demolition of the arguments he presents.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Thursday, November 11, 2004
BACK TO THE ELECTION AND ITS AFTERMATH
Both Henneberger and Gould have recent articles out which portray how frantic and extreme Democrat supporters now are in their hatred of Bush and of conservatives generally. Such fury is not the reaction of people who are quietly confident in the truth of their own beliefs. It is the derangement of people who know that they are wrong and who are steadily having their props kicked out from under them. How otherwise to explain the fact that such great preachers of "tolerance" cannot abide over half of their fellow citizens?
I guessed wrongly. It is the voting machines that Leftists are blaming for their defeat: "A large number of states already have electronic voting machines in place. A large number of those do not produce paper ballots at all. Since many pundits have already raised hell about the highly politically partisan Republican ownership and control of these high-tech companies, I won't rehash that here. If you haven't heard about it, you've been living on another planet. If you didn't hear yesterday that many of these machines already contained thousands of votes before Tuesday's polling places opened their doors, you've been relying on mainstream media for your news." [Odd that the machines worked fine when Clinton won! -- though I must say that the American voting system as a whole is a shambles. In Australia, all voters need proper identification to register and all votes are on paper. Leftist outrage might help to get a stupid system reformed].
No tolerance in SF: "The summer of love has given way to the autumn of fear in San Francisco, a liberal stronghold where residents bitterly disappointed by the Bush victory are in no mood to reach out and mend divisions..... Some are canceling plans to travel to neighboring "red states," where Bush drew most of his support. They are asking serious questions about the future of American democracy. And the usual post-election bravado about moving out of the country when a favored candidate loses is sounding different this year. It sounds a lot more serious..... Peace and tolerance have long been the words to live by in San Francisco, known for its large gay community, broad ethnic mix and frequent anti-war protests. But days after the election, many residents said they ... did not know how they could tolerate the Bush administration, or Americans who voted to re-elect him. "I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we're not going to visit them now. It's all Republicans there," said Ron Schmidt, a public relations executive. "We have family in Indiana and I don't want to go there either.""
LOL: "The Bush political team intuitively understood the tone of the U.S. voters much better than the media did. To be honest, I still don't quite understand how certified media junkies like me could have been so wrong. I read the New York Times and the New Yorker religiously. I watch CNN and the networks' evening news programs as well as the gabfests on Sunday mornings, too. Go figure". [Wotta dummy! He probably believes in global warming too.]
Single women: "This year, the Bush and Kerry campaigns joined the media and various women's groups throughout this election to chase a hot new voter, the unmarried woman. Dubbed the "Sex and the City" vote... this elusive group of 22 million women was expected to turn the election in John Kerry's favor. But in the end it was George W. Bush who successfully wooed the single female voter. Bush increased his share of the unmarried women's vote by twenty percent over the 2000 election, more than increases in votes cast by unmarried men, married women or married men.... Today's unmarried woman is independent and mindful of the way in which political and economic issues affect her on a personal level. She wonders whether her investments and retirement accounts are safe from broad fluctuations in stock prices. She follows interest rates and real estate trends... A large part of her pay is taken each payday by government in the form of income and social security taxes to fund programs from which she receives few direct benefits.... Perhaps the Kerry campaign failed to convince unmarried women that the Bush administration has mishandled the economy".
Rare sense from Seattle: "It was Bush's progressive agenda that kept him in office.... The left's conservative policies of get-along diplomacy with dictators and theocracies have been rejected in favor of more progressive and proactive strategies of freedom and pluralism..... Bush's victory was due to the fact that nationally the majority of voters was tired of the status quo, tired of the knee-jerk conservatism of the left and wanted a progressive administration. Kerry wanted to take us back to the ideas, policies and attitudes that prevailed before the 9/11 attack.... The majority of Americans wanted a candidate and an administration with new ideas and a plan, and the Democrats offered an administration that was anti-everything.... . The left has shown itself conservative and reactionary on the domestic front as well, resisting in political lock step such progressive ideas as the testing, standards and performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, against any reasonable limitations on abortion, against any and all aspects of "ownership society" such as partial privatization of social security or health care savings accounts..."
A good gal: "She'd already signed the precinct register when an election worker said her Bush-Cheney T-shirt amounted to illegal electioneering. So Debbie Dupeire pulled it off. Dupeire, who voted in a sports bra, exercise pants and flip-flops, said she was afraid she would lose her chance to vote if she left to turn her shirt inside-out.
There is a good article here on how adversely midweek voting affects American productivity. But I guess that the Australian system of voting on Saturday would be too big a change to ask for.
There is an excellent article on the electoral college system here. One excerpt: "It is precisely because of the Electoral College that the recounting of votes focused on one state instead of many. If the popular vote decided the winner, we would still be bogged down in questionable recounts in dozens, if not hundreds, of counties across the country. The potential for mistakes and abuse would have been enormously compounded, and the cloud over the eventual winner would have been all the more dark and ominous".
A good post on Chicago Boyz: "The core strength of "liberal" America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic "Greater New England" that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism..." [He is right. The slightest knowledge of history will tell you that the Pilgrim Fathers were bungling communists. Their Blue State descendants are just a toned-down version of that]
Rush Limbaugh has some good commentary on the latest Leftist response to their election loss. They think the "Blue States" should secede and join up with Canada. They also claim that the "Red states" are parasitical on the "Blue States" anyhow. Rush gives some reasons why "it aint so".
Chicago Boyz also mentions the current Leftist talk about the Blue States seceding but, despite the obvious precedent of the civil war, seems to take it seriously. He somehow misses the way Anglosphere countries normally deal with territorial differences: States' rights. If Jeb Bush can be persuaded to stand in 2008, the Republicans will have America wrapped up until 2016 so a Leftist push to devolve power away from the Feds to the States should result from that -- which would be highly amusing considering past Leftist love of centralized power and hostility to States' rights.
"Republicans have bigger yards." --Tom Firey, explaining all that red space on the electoral map....
Favourite bumper-sticker: "First I voted for John Kerry and then I voted against him".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Both Henneberger and Gould have recent articles out which portray how frantic and extreme Democrat supporters now are in their hatred of Bush and of conservatives generally. Such fury is not the reaction of people who are quietly confident in the truth of their own beliefs. It is the derangement of people who know that they are wrong and who are steadily having their props kicked out from under them. How otherwise to explain the fact that such great preachers of "tolerance" cannot abide over half of their fellow citizens?
I guessed wrongly. It is the voting machines that Leftists are blaming for their defeat: "A large number of states already have electronic voting machines in place. A large number of those do not produce paper ballots at all. Since many pundits have already raised hell about the highly politically partisan Republican ownership and control of these high-tech companies, I won't rehash that here. If you haven't heard about it, you've been living on another planet. If you didn't hear yesterday that many of these machines already contained thousands of votes before Tuesday's polling places opened their doors, you've been relying on mainstream media for your news." [Odd that the machines worked fine when Clinton won! -- though I must say that the American voting system as a whole is a shambles. In Australia, all voters need proper identification to register and all votes are on paper. Leftist outrage might help to get a stupid system reformed].
No tolerance in SF: "The summer of love has given way to the autumn of fear in San Francisco, a liberal stronghold where residents bitterly disappointed by the Bush victory are in no mood to reach out and mend divisions..... Some are canceling plans to travel to neighboring "red states," where Bush drew most of his support. They are asking serious questions about the future of American democracy. And the usual post-election bravado about moving out of the country when a favored candidate loses is sounding different this year. It sounds a lot more serious..... Peace and tolerance have long been the words to live by in San Francisco, known for its large gay community, broad ethnic mix and frequent anti-war protests. But days after the election, many residents said they ... did not know how they could tolerate the Bush administration, or Americans who voted to re-elect him. "I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we're not going to visit them now. It's all Republicans there," said Ron Schmidt, a public relations executive. "We have family in Indiana and I don't want to go there either.""
LOL: "The Bush political team intuitively understood the tone of the U.S. voters much better than the media did. To be honest, I still don't quite understand how certified media junkies like me could have been so wrong. I read the New York Times and the New Yorker religiously. I watch CNN and the networks' evening news programs as well as the gabfests on Sunday mornings, too. Go figure". [Wotta dummy! He probably believes in global warming too.]
Single women: "This year, the Bush and Kerry campaigns joined the media and various women's groups throughout this election to chase a hot new voter, the unmarried woman. Dubbed the "Sex and the City" vote... this elusive group of 22 million women was expected to turn the election in John Kerry's favor. But in the end it was George W. Bush who successfully wooed the single female voter. Bush increased his share of the unmarried women's vote by twenty percent over the 2000 election, more than increases in votes cast by unmarried men, married women or married men.... Today's unmarried woman is independent and mindful of the way in which political and economic issues affect her on a personal level. She wonders whether her investments and retirement accounts are safe from broad fluctuations in stock prices. She follows interest rates and real estate trends... A large part of her pay is taken each payday by government in the form of income and social security taxes to fund programs from which she receives few direct benefits.... Perhaps the Kerry campaign failed to convince unmarried women that the Bush administration has mishandled the economy".
Rare sense from Seattle: "It was Bush's progressive agenda that kept him in office.... The left's conservative policies of get-along diplomacy with dictators and theocracies have been rejected in favor of more progressive and proactive strategies of freedom and pluralism..... Bush's victory was due to the fact that nationally the majority of voters was tired of the status quo, tired of the knee-jerk conservatism of the left and wanted a progressive administration. Kerry wanted to take us back to the ideas, policies and attitudes that prevailed before the 9/11 attack.... The majority of Americans wanted a candidate and an administration with new ideas and a plan, and the Democrats offered an administration that was anti-everything.... . The left has shown itself conservative and reactionary on the domestic front as well, resisting in political lock step such progressive ideas as the testing, standards and performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, against any reasonable limitations on abortion, against any and all aspects of "ownership society" such as partial privatization of social security or health care savings accounts..."
A good gal: "She'd already signed the precinct register when an election worker said her Bush-Cheney T-shirt amounted to illegal electioneering. So Debbie Dupeire pulled it off. Dupeire, who voted in a sports bra, exercise pants and flip-flops, said she was afraid she would lose her chance to vote if she left to turn her shirt inside-out.
There is a good article here on how adversely midweek voting affects American productivity. But I guess that the Australian system of voting on Saturday would be too big a change to ask for.
There is an excellent article on the electoral college system here. One excerpt: "It is precisely because of the Electoral College that the recounting of votes focused on one state instead of many. If the popular vote decided the winner, we would still be bogged down in questionable recounts in dozens, if not hundreds, of counties across the country. The potential for mistakes and abuse would have been enormously compounded, and the cloud over the eventual winner would have been all the more dark and ominous".
A good post on Chicago Boyz: "The core strength of "liberal" America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic "Greater New England" that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism..." [He is right. The slightest knowledge of history will tell you that the Pilgrim Fathers were bungling communists. Their Blue State descendants are just a toned-down version of that]
Rush Limbaugh has some good commentary on the latest Leftist response to their election loss. They think the "Blue States" should secede and join up with Canada. They also claim that the "Red states" are parasitical on the "Blue States" anyhow. Rush gives some reasons why "it aint so".
Chicago Boyz also mentions the current Leftist talk about the Blue States seceding but, despite the obvious precedent of the civil war, seems to take it seriously. He somehow misses the way Anglosphere countries normally deal with territorial differences: States' rights. If Jeb Bush can be persuaded to stand in 2008, the Republicans will have America wrapped up until 2016 so a Leftist push to devolve power away from the Feds to the States should result from that -- which would be highly amusing considering past Leftist love of centralized power and hostility to States' rights.
"Republicans have bigger yards." --Tom Firey, explaining all that red space on the electoral map....
Favourite bumper-sticker: "First I voted for John Kerry and then I voted against him".
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
I think I will put election commentary on hold for today:
SOME POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Many conservatives have noticed by now that "projection" is very common on the Left: Leftists commonly accuse conservatives of what are in fact their own faults. This is particularly true of psychological diagnoses, as I have shown elsewhere at some length (e.g. here and here). Perhaps the most constant accusation of that kind is that conservatives are stupid -- where the only published survey on the question that I know of shows the opposite -- that it is in fact LEFTIST attitudes that go with lower average IQ.
Projection is classified in clinical psychology as a "defence mechanism" -- basically something used to prop up weak (and often inflated) egos. But it is in fact only a subset of a more general defence-mechanism: Denial. Denial of your own weak points can be accomplished by projection or in other ways. One of the other ways is familiar to all: Deception (often accompanied by self-deception), or claiming that you have virtues, assets or abilities that you do not have. A rather striking example of this is a claim that seems to have become common among Leftists only recently: The claim that they are "reality-based". That they are "realists" is of course a claim that conservatives have always made and Leftists were for rather a long time fairly happy not to deny that but to counter-claim that they were "idealists". But that strategy seems to have fallen out of favour lately. Why? At one level it is presumably an attack on Christians -- representing a claim that Christians are not realists (though one might ask how come Christians control two branches of the U.S. government in that case) but at the psychological level it simply creates a symmetry with projection: If you claim that your enemies have what are in fact your bad points it makes sense to go the whole hog and claim that what are really your enemy's good points are in fact your good points. One example of this self-identification is well-known Leftist blogger Matthew Yglesias -- who subheads his blog: "Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community". In his most recent post as of this writing, however (post of 9th) he twice uses "right" when he means "write" -- suggesting that his grip on reality is in fact pretty shaky. He is at least dyslexic.
*****************************
FROM BROOKES NEWS
President's Bush's victory is a win for common decency The true divide in America is not between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. It is between those Americans who love their country and those who disdain it
China's feelings about the Bush victory Beijing believes that the more informed the American public becomes the more it will shift toward the Republicans
Bin Laden tape proof that President Bush is winning The Bin Laden tape was an admission that President Bush had beaten him
The American economy: recessions and tealeaves The fallacious belief that layoffs could be avoided by maintaining wage earners' purchasing power was responsible for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression
A George Soros myth lives on The myth that George Soros broke the Pound has been solidly entrenched. But that's just what it is — a myth
Details here
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
I suppose everyone is laughing about this: "France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners. In the second of two stunning days that stood to alter French-Ivory Coast relations -- and perhaps Ivory Coast itself -- French forces seized strategic control of the largest city, commandeering airports and posting gunboats under bridges in the commercial capital, Abidjan."
Great English election result! The English just want to be English: "John Prestcott's cherished dream of English devolution was shattered last night when voters overwhelmingly rejected an elected assembly for the North East. The Deputy Prime Minister, was shocked and humiliated when voters threw out his proposals for a directly elected regional assembly in yesterday's referendum by 78 per cent, with only 22 per cent in favour... Despite a huge push by the Labour Party over the last 48 hours to get out their vote, the higher turn out in the end favoured the "no" camp, which was backed by the Tories and UKIP.... The Government is now expected to tear up its twelve-year-old plan to create eight or nine regional assemblies in England to mirror devolution in Scotland and Wales.
More evidence here to suggest that Arafart is dying of AIDS.
Leftists routinely claim that the American economy "traps" many people in poverty. This article shows that few Americans are in fact stuck permanently in poverty and that those who are can scarcely blame others for it.
There is a good post here saying what I have always said about Michael Moore -- that he is simply a clever and well-paid entertainer of the Left. Perhaps because of that, Moore is careful to avoid outright lies -- relying instead on distortions and innuendo. As this post shows, however, official Democrat election propaganda was not so squeamish.
But Moore is a Johnny-come-lately in the Leftist-entertainment business. Noam Chomsky has had the same shtick for years -- with similar lucrative results. There is a good summary of how reality-defying Chomsky is here -- which also notes how useful Chomsky is to the incessant Leftist need to appear "different".
On 3rd., I commented here about the 100,000 post-invasion civilian deaths in Iraq that Leftists are at present claiming. Wayne Lusvardi has put together some additional commentary on the claim here.
I have a good crop of posts up on GREENIE WATCH today
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
SOME POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Many conservatives have noticed by now that "projection" is very common on the Left: Leftists commonly accuse conservatives of what are in fact their own faults. This is particularly true of psychological diagnoses, as I have shown elsewhere at some length (e.g. here and here). Perhaps the most constant accusation of that kind is that conservatives are stupid -- where the only published survey on the question that I know of shows the opposite -- that it is in fact LEFTIST attitudes that go with lower average IQ.
Projection is classified in clinical psychology as a "defence mechanism" -- basically something used to prop up weak (and often inflated) egos. But it is in fact only a subset of a more general defence-mechanism: Denial. Denial of your own weak points can be accomplished by projection or in other ways. One of the other ways is familiar to all: Deception (often accompanied by self-deception), or claiming that you have virtues, assets or abilities that you do not have. A rather striking example of this is a claim that seems to have become common among Leftists only recently: The claim that they are "reality-based". That they are "realists" is of course a claim that conservatives have always made and Leftists were for rather a long time fairly happy not to deny that but to counter-claim that they were "idealists". But that strategy seems to have fallen out of favour lately. Why? At one level it is presumably an attack on Christians -- representing a claim that Christians are not realists (though one might ask how come Christians control two branches of the U.S. government in that case) but at the psychological level it simply creates a symmetry with projection: If you claim that your enemies have what are in fact your bad points it makes sense to go the whole hog and claim that what are really your enemy's good points are in fact your good points. One example of this self-identification is well-known Leftist blogger Matthew Yglesias -- who subheads his blog: "Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community". In his most recent post as of this writing, however (post of 9th) he twice uses "right" when he means "write" -- suggesting that his grip on reality is in fact pretty shaky. He is at least dyslexic.
*****************************
FROM BROOKES NEWS
President's Bush's victory is a win for common decency The true divide in America is not between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. It is between those Americans who love their country and those who disdain it
China's feelings about the Bush victory Beijing believes that the more informed the American public becomes the more it will shift toward the Republicans
Bin Laden tape proof that President Bush is winning The Bin Laden tape was an admission that President Bush had beaten him
The American economy: recessions and tealeaves The fallacious belief that layoffs could be avoided by maintaining wage earners' purchasing power was responsible for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression
A George Soros myth lives on The myth that George Soros broke the Pound has been solidly entrenched. But that's just what it is — a myth
Details here
*********************************
ELSEWHERE
I suppose everyone is laughing about this: "France rolled out overwhelming military force Sunday to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in its former West African colony, deploying troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships against machete-waving mobs that hunted house-to-house for foreigners. In the second of two stunning days that stood to alter French-Ivory Coast relations -- and perhaps Ivory Coast itself -- French forces seized strategic control of the largest city, commandeering airports and posting gunboats under bridges in the commercial capital, Abidjan."
Great English election result! The English just want to be English: "John Prestcott's cherished dream of English devolution was shattered last night when voters overwhelmingly rejected an elected assembly for the North East. The Deputy Prime Minister, was shocked and humiliated when voters threw out his proposals for a directly elected regional assembly in yesterday's referendum by 78 per cent, with only 22 per cent in favour... Despite a huge push by the Labour Party over the last 48 hours to get out their vote, the higher turn out in the end favoured the "no" camp, which was backed by the Tories and UKIP.... The Government is now expected to tear up its twelve-year-old plan to create eight or nine regional assemblies in England to mirror devolution in Scotland and Wales.
More evidence here to suggest that Arafart is dying of AIDS.
Leftists routinely claim that the American economy "traps" many people in poverty. This article shows that few Americans are in fact stuck permanently in poverty and that those who are can scarcely blame others for it.
There is a good post here saying what I have always said about Michael Moore -- that he is simply a clever and well-paid entertainer of the Left. Perhaps because of that, Moore is careful to avoid outright lies -- relying instead on distortions and innuendo. As this post shows, however, official Democrat election propaganda was not so squeamish.
But Moore is a Johnny-come-lately in the Leftist-entertainment business. Noam Chomsky has had the same shtick for years -- with similar lucrative results. There is a good summary of how reality-defying Chomsky is here -- which also notes how useful Chomsky is to the incessant Leftist need to appear "different".
On 3rd., I commented here about the 100,000 post-invasion civilian deaths in Iraq that Leftists are at present claiming. Wayne Lusvardi has put together some additional commentary on the claim here.
I have a good crop of posts up on GREENIE WATCH today
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
BACK TO ELECTION 2004: MY COMMENTS
My first comment is on this plaint from a Left activist: "Contrary to my predictions, we had had a relatively fair election and the American people (or something over half of them) had democratically voted for an extremist Christian regime... In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also terribly hazardous to our own security.... More important, though, we had better take a good hard look at what is happening in the Christian extremist America, dissect it and try to understand it from the inside out."
She could start by listening to what GWB was saying instead of inventing a non-existent bogeyman. Read what GWB actually said about abortion in the Presidential debates and tell me he is a Christian extremist. He's more a libertarian on the issue, in fact. But she's an illiterate anyway: The people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The Afghani is their currency.
My second point is that to regain Federal electability, the Democrats are going to have to do what the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party have already done -- marginalize the far-Left. The Dems know that of course or Kerry would not have presented himself as a GWB clone on practially all policies in the last election. But a last-minute conversion like that is just not convincing. There has to be real change, not cosmetic change. The British Labour party, for instance, was once the anti-nuclear and unilateral disarmament party. Now its leader is America's chief ally in the Iraq war. Quite a change! Just as is already the case in Britain and Australia, America's party of the Left needs to become just an alternative conservative party.
********************************
BACK TO ELECTION 2004: OTHER COMMENTS
"Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched the "old media" --the New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC, and NBC--beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak".
Rove speaks: "Kerry's decision to vote for the $87 billion in funding for troops and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deciding in October 2003 to vote against it, was a bonanza for the president's campaign, "the gift that kept on giving," Rove said. Bush's campaign featured the videotape in thousands of commercials around the country to paint Kerry as a flip-flopper. Rove played down the importance to the campaign of "moral values," which exit polls last Tuesday unexpectedly identified as a major consideration of many voters, especially those who voted for Bush. Rove said 34 percent of the voters were motivated by issues surrounding Iraq and the war on terror, compared with 30 percent motivated by moral values. "What essentially happened in this election was that people became concerned about three issues: first the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes and then moral values. And then everything else dropped off of the plate," he said... On one sideline row during the campaign, Rove said the president's tailor was devastated about a controversy over a box-shaped bulge in Bush's back that television cameras captured during the first debate. The mysterious bulge spawned speculation that Bush aides were feeding the president advice secretly through a radio receiver tucked under his suit jacket. "Nothing was under his jacket," Rove said".
A timely warning: "Democrats did well in the AAA league of politics, the state legislatures. Republicans have to pay attention not only to where they are gaining votes, but also to the states and demographic groups where they are losing them. Last week, more than 80% of the roughly 7,300 partisan legislative seats in the country were up for grabs, as elections for state legislators took place in 44 states. Before the election, Republicans had a narrow 60-seat aggregate nationwide lead in seats, the smallest any party had held since statistics have been recorded. Now the margin is even smaller, but this time Democrats are on top".
How the Catholic vote turned out in 2004: "Mr. Bush carried Ohio Catholics by 10 percentage points - 55 percent to 45 percent - over Sen. John Kerry.... Nationwide, the Catholic vote swung eight points from 2000, when 50 percent backed Al Gore to 47 percent for Mr. Bush. This year, it was 52 percent for the president and 47 percent for Mr. Kerry, a Catholic. "The change in the Catholic vote was crucial to the margin of victory," Mr. Cuccinelli said. .. Mr. Bush obliquely referred to the role Catholics and Protestant evangelicals played in his victory when he noted at a press conference yesterday that, "I am glad people of faith voted in this election." "
Overseas Leftists outraged too: "The re-election of President Bush dominated British newspapers Thursday, and many cast impartiality aside in reporting the result. 'How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?' the liberal Daily Mirror asked in a Page One headline. Inside, several pages of coverage were headed 'U.S. election disaster.' The Independent bore the front-page headline 'Four more years' on a black page with grim pictures including a hooded Iraqi prisoner and an orange-clad detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The left-leaning Guardian led its features section with a black page bearing the tiny words, 'Oh, God.' ... Across Europe, many newspapers expressed dismay at the prospect of another term for Bush... 'Oops -- they did it again,' Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said in a front-page English headline. The cover of the Swiss newsmagazine Facts called Bush's re-election 'Europe's Nightmare.'
The investor vote: "The largest demographic shift in this country over the past 25 years is not the number of Americans whose parents speak Spanish. It is the number of Americans who own stocks directly. In 1978 only 17 percent of American adults owned stocks. Today, more than 60 percent of adults and 70 percent of those who voted in 2002 own stock. The "investor voter" has already changed politics in the past 4 years.... Low stock market values make investors demand solutions from politicians that will increases their wealth. Kerry has chosen sides. In the 1995 debate on capital-gains tax cuts he said, "This week defines the difference between them and us." It's not so wise to define 70 percent of voters as "them." It shows your political age."
Heartening Massachusetts win: "In an unprecedented landslide, approximately 85% voted for joint physical custody of children on Fathers & Families' non-binding ballot question. The lopsided margin of victory was greater than that of any elected official in Massachusetts, including John Kerry, Barney Frank, or Jim McGovern..." The wording: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation requiring that in all separation and divorce proceedings involving minor children, the court shall uphold the fundamental rights of both parents to the shared physical and legal custody of their children"
There is a rather remarkable map here which shows that the Democrat vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. By and large it was of course a "bought" vote: The vote of minorities bought with welfare dollars.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
**************************
That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.
********************************
My first comment is on this plaint from a Left activist: "Contrary to my predictions, we had had a relatively fair election and the American people (or something over half of them) had democratically voted for an extremist Christian regime... In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also terribly hazardous to our own security.... More important, though, we had better take a good hard look at what is happening in the Christian extremist America, dissect it and try to understand it from the inside out."
She could start by listening to what GWB was saying instead of inventing a non-existent bogeyman. Read what GWB actually said about abortion in the Presidential debates and tell me he is a Christian extremist. He's more a libertarian on the issue, in fact. But she's an illiterate anyway: The people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The Afghani is their currency.
My second point is that to regain Federal electability, the Democrats are going to have to do what the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party have already done -- marginalize the far-Left. The Dems know that of course or Kerry would not have presented himself as a GWB clone on practially all policies in the last election. But a last-minute conversion like that is just not convincing. There has to be real change, not cosmetic change. The British Labour party, for instance, was once the anti-nuclear and unilateral disarmament party. Now its leader is America's chief ally in the Iraq war. Quite a change! Just as is already the case in Britain and Australia, America's party of the Left needs to become just an alternative conservative party.
********************************
BACK TO ELECTION 2004: OTHER COMMENTS
"Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched the "old media" --the New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC, and NBC--beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak".
Rove speaks: "Kerry's decision to vote for the $87 billion in funding for troops and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deciding in October 2003 to vote against it, was a bonanza for the president's campaign, "the gift that kept on giving," Rove said. Bush's campaign featured the videotape in thousands of commercials around the country to paint Kerry as a flip-flopper. Rove played down the importance to the campaign of "moral values," which exit polls last Tuesday unexpectedly identified as a major consideration of many voters, especially those who voted for Bush. Rove said 34 percent of the voters were motivated by issues surrounding Iraq and the war on terror, compared with 30 percent motivated by moral values. "What essentially happened in this election was that people became concerned about three issues: first the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes and then moral values. And then everything else dropped off of the plate," he said... On one sideline row during the campaign, Rove said the president's tailor was devastated about a controversy over a box-shaped bulge in Bush's back that television cameras captured during the first debate. The mysterious bulge spawned speculation that Bush aides were feeding the president advice secretly through a radio receiver tucked under his suit jacket. "Nothing was under his jacket," Rove said".
A timely warning: "Democrats did well in the AAA league of politics, the state legislatures. Republicans have to pay attention not only to where they are gaining votes, but also to the states and demographic groups where they are losing them. Last week, more than 80% of the roughly 7,300 partisan legislative seats in the country were up for grabs, as elections for state legislators took place in 44 states. Before the election, Republicans had a narrow 60-seat aggregate nationwide lead in seats, the smallest any party had held since statistics have been recorded. Now the margin is even smaller, but this time Democrats are on top".
How the Catholic vote turned out in 2004: "Mr. Bush carried Ohio Catholics by 10 percentage points - 55 percent to 45 percent - over Sen. John Kerry.... Nationwide, the Catholic vote swung eight points from 2000, when 50 percent backed Al Gore to 47 percent for Mr. Bush. This year, it was 52 percent for the president and 47 percent for Mr. Kerry, a Catholic. "The change in the Catholic vote was crucial to the margin of victory," Mr. Cuccinelli said. .. Mr. Bush obliquely referred to the role Catholics and Protestant evangelicals played in his victory when he noted at a press conference yesterday that, "I am glad people of faith voted in this election." "
Overseas Leftists outraged too: "The re-election of President Bush dominated British newspapers Thursday, and many cast impartiality aside in reporting the result. 'How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?' the liberal Daily Mirror asked in a Page One headline. Inside, several pages of coverage were headed 'U.S. election disaster.' The Independent bore the front-page headline 'Four more years' on a black page with grim pictures including a hooded Iraqi prisoner and an orange-clad detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The left-leaning Guardian led its features section with a black page bearing the tiny words, 'Oh, God.' ... Across Europe, many newspapers expressed dismay at the prospect of another term for Bush... 'Oops -- they did it again,' Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said in a front-page English headline. The cover of the Swiss newsmagazine Facts called Bush's re-election 'Europe's Nightmare.'
The investor vote: "The largest demographic shift in this country over the past 25 years is not the number of Americans whose parents speak Spanish. It is the number of Americans who own stocks directly. In 1978 only 17 percent of American adults owned stocks. Today, more than 60 percent of adults and 70 percent of those who voted in 2002 own stock. The "investor voter" has already changed politics in the past 4 years.... Low stock market values make investors demand solutions from politicians that will increases their wealth. Kerry has chosen sides. In the 1995 debate on capital-gains tax cuts he said, "This week defines the difference between them and us." It's not so wise to define 70 percent of voters as "them." It shows your political age."
Heartening Massachusetts win: "In an unprecedented landslide, approximately 85% voted for joint physical custody of children on Fathers & Families' non-binding ballot question. The lopsided margin of victory was greater than that of any elected official in Massachusetts, including John Kerry, Barney Frank, or Jim McGovern..." The wording: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation requiring that in all separation and divorce proceedings involving minor children, the court shall uphold the fundamental rights of both parents to the shared physical and legal custody of their children"
There is a rather remarkable map here which shows that the Democrat vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. By and large it was of course a "bought" vote: The vote of minorities bought with welfare dollars.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here
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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.
Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions
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Monday, November 08, 2004
Just for a change, I am going to do all-Australian posts today -- but if you need some post-election commentary to keep you going, there is an excellent post here. I understand that the author has already got hate-mail about it!
ANTISEMITISM IN THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
Just a few excerpts from an article by Barry Cohen, a former ALP Federal parliamentarian
I have often been asked if my being Jewish was ever an issue during my 20 years in Federal Parliament. Not to the best of my knowledge. I cannot recall a single anti-Semitic remark from either side of the House. That did not mean that everyone agreed with my views on Israel. Nor did I expect them to. However, while my views remain the same, the Labor Party's these days are very different....
But gradually, Labor's Left and more extremist elements, such as the Greens and Democrats, became increasingly shrill in their denunciation of Israel.... That trend has infected the ALP. The handful of pro-Palestinian supporters has grown steadily as the party has become dominated by the education mafia; former public servants and party union apparatchiks....
I'm sick of the calumny heaped on Israel - most of which is a pack of lies... I don't want even-handedness when it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of terrorist attacks, and the terrorists themselves. I want to hear Labor MPs stand up and be counted. I want to see an end to well-known Labor identities marching behind banners equating Israel with Nazism...
Silence on these issues isn't good enough for me. If people want to criticise Israel, fine - plenty of Israelis do. But let it be reasoned criticism, and if they want even-handedness let them also berate the Arab world for its denial of basic human rights for any of its citizens. Let's hear the Labor feminists take the Arab nations to task for their abominable treatment of women. Let's hear those Labor supporters, who are so loud in their denunciation of homophobia, demand an end to the barbaric treatment of gays. Let's also hear civil rights activists bemoan the lack of basic freedoms available to most of the 300 million Arabs in the 22 Arab countries...
Before the Iraq war one of the most senior NSW right-wing MPs told me: "I understand and support Israel's position, but in my group, I'm the only one." Soon after I told a Labor legend: "Anti-Semitism is now rampant in the Labor Party." I expected a vigorous denial. His response confirmed my worst fear: "I know," he said. For better or worse my character and life were shaped by the anti-Semitism I experienced as a boy and a young man. I was proud to belong to a party that fought all forms of prejudice. Not any longer.
There is a collection of comments on Barry Cohen's article here. Note the claim to virtue from dopey Leftist spokeswoman Plibersek: "In addition, I am proud of my statements criticising the Taliban for its treatment of women in Afghanistan and the mullahs for their repression of democracy in Iran. I do not believe these criticisms make me anti-Arab". Since neither Afghans nor Iranians are Arabs, she was on safe ground there! (Comments via Fabian's Hammer).
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ANTISEMITISM IN THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
Just a few excerpts from an article by Barry Cohen, a former ALP Federal parliamentarian
I have often been asked if my being Jewish was ever an issue during my 20 years in Federal Parliament. Not to the best of my knowledge. I cannot recall a single anti-Semitic remark from either side of the House. That did not mean that everyone agreed with my views on Israel. Nor did I expect them to. However, while my views remain the same, the Labor Party's these days are very different....
But gradually, Labor's Left and more extremist elements, such as the Greens and Democrats, became increasingly shrill in their denunciation of Israel.... That trend has infected the ALP. The handful of pro-Palestinian supporters has grown steadily as the party has become dominated by the education mafia; former public servants and party union apparatchiks....
I'm sick of the calumny heaped on Israel - most of which is a pack of lies... I don't want even-handedness when it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of terrorist attacks, and the terrorists themselves. I want to hear Labor MPs stand up and be counted. I want to see an end to well-known Labor identities marching behind banners equating Israel with Nazism...
Silence on these issues isn't good enough for me. If people want to criticise Israel, fine - plenty of Israelis do. But let it be reasoned criticism, and if they want even-handedness let them also berate the Arab world for its denial of basic human rights for any of its citizens. Let's hear the Labor feminists take the Arab nations to task for their abominable treatment of women. Let's hear those Labor supporters, who are so loud in their denunciation of homophobia, demand an end to the barbaric treatment of gays. Let's also hear civil rights activists bemoan the lack of basic freedoms available to most of the 300 million Arabs in the 22 Arab countries...
Before the Iraq war one of the most senior NSW right-wing MPs told me: "I understand and support Israel's position, but in my group, I'm the only one." Soon after I told a Labor legend: "Anti-Semitism is now rampant in the Labor Party." I expected a vigorous denial. His response confirmed my worst fear: "I know," he said. For better or worse my character and life were shaped by the anti-Semitism I experienced as a boy and a young man. I was proud to belong to a party that fought all forms of prejudice. Not any longer.
There is a collection of comments on Barry Cohen's article here. Note the claim to virtue from dopey Leftist spokeswoman Plibersek: "In addition, I am proud of my statements criticising the Taliban for its treatment of women in Afghanistan and the mullahs for their repression of democracy in Iran. I do not believe these criticisms make me anti-Arab". Since neither Afghans nor Iranians are Arabs, she was on safe ground there! (Comments via Fabian's Hammer).
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