Our unscathed enemy.

American military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been telling us for many years that the Iranians were up to their necks in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were arming, funding, and training terrorists to kill Americans, and doing quite a bit of it themselves. A lot of the lethal “roadside bombs” came from Iran, and a lot of terrorists were either Iranians or foreigners (including Sunnis, contrary to the popular myth that Sunnis and Shi’ites don’t work together) trained in Iran by Iranians.

"The Wikitruth About Iranian Murder of Americans." By Michael Ledeen, Pajamas Media, 10/24/10.

A primer on the Great Depression.

As with every other thing occurring in our national life, the Democrats have embraced economic policies that are stunning in their recklessness and indifference to historical and human realities.

Keynesian policies failed during the Great Depression, and they are failing today. An economic catastrophe caused by loose monetary policies, crushing levels of debt, and appalling lending practices cannot be solved by looser monetary policies, issuance of twice as much debt, and government commanding banks (or, in the case of Fannie and Freddie, “commandeering”) to make more bad loans.

"Depression Within a Depression." By James Quinn, The Casey Report, __/__/10.

H/t: The Daily Crux..

What Liberals Say.

Accuracy in Media has a web site “dedicated to defining liberals not by the accusations or distortions of conservatives, but rather by what liberals themselves have actually said. These quotations [collected by AIM] paint a picture of liberals and liberalism untainted by mainstream media spin."

Here’s a gem:

[Republicans have] transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic fratboys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb, and dangerous.

~ Garrison Keillor.^[1]

This is both ironic and sad. Keillor is a master storyteller, creative, and droll. He often deftly describes the human condition and illuminates our foibles with kindness and considerable insight. Yet, to read this is like turning over a rock and finding some oily, pulsating creature. In Keillor’s view conservatives are street fighters (Nazis, natch), hypocrites, juveniles, chameleons, misanthropes, cheats, exploiters and gullibles suspicious of secular institutions.

Now that’s a list of attributes that you work up at IHOP with a yellow pad and two hours to kill. Something you study on, hone, and polish. Let’s call this an example of the face of humanism, liberalism, and secularism beneath the mask. My hat tip is to an article about NPR’s firing of Juan Williams. Another example of the liberal mask.

Have the temerity to stray a millimeter over the boundary of the liberal-progressive-Marxist reservation and the tolerance for truth and opposing viewpoints evaporates into pettiness and full-bore retaliaton.

Notes
^[1] What Liberals Say. Accuracy in Media .

H/t: P. D’Souza commenting on “Fire Juan Williams Right Now! — Our Sneering Liberal Culture in a Nutshell.” By Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media, 10/22/10.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

The usual European hostility to free speech is on display in Austria in the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

If you care to contribute to her defense fund please visit the Save Free Speech website.

Primer on Islam.

H/t: Sovereign Grace Preterism.

Simple truths.

There is no excuse for any reading person in the West not to know the true nature of Islam. If people don't know it, it is because of the massive veil of illusion called liberalism.

"Our endless, enervating debate about Islam." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 10/22/10.

Ho hum about tyranny.

If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they’d notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it — powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were the words they used, and it’s a good idea for us to learn their language. They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era — the period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example — would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.

I call the present system “Post–Constitutional America.” As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.^[1]

Being generous in my interpretation, I can count about eight people of personal acquaintance in my adult life who are in some way aware of and vaguely concerned about this. My constitutional law professor most certainly was not. Two lawyers are in this group. Bar associations of which I am a member are indifferent to this issue and instead fret over important issues like “civility” among lawyers, “diversity” within the bar, and pro bono work for those who can’t afford legal services.

Sports generate enormous interest and energy among huge numbers of American teens and adults. Abortion, greedy corporations, pollution, routine fluctuations in world temperature, Iraqi civilian casualties, rain forest depletion, gorillas, windmills, melting icebergs, el mismo.

The erosion of liberty, none at all. Nancy Pelosi’s constituents will send her back to Congress without missing a beat. Basic issues of government are an afterthought, if that.

Tea Partiers are something new. We’ll see how much they are energized over rolling back unconstitutional government or if they are just alarmed by fiscal profligacy.

If the word “tyranny” in the title seems excessive, where exactly does a polity go when the hand brake, brake cylinder, and brake lines have been removed? Liberals salivate over each new incremental adoption of socialism but never show the least concern that the great killer nations of the 20th century were socialist regimes. No one in polite society recoils from any simpleton who swoons over socialism. It’s as though it’s just a cosmic given that someone or they won’t let things go past a certain dimly contemplated tipping point into a nasty Steven King landscape.

Let someone pick out some feature of the political agenda of the KKK he finds attractive, however – say, by way of argument, public funds for the Bureau of Shopping Cart Safety Education -- and the better sort will howl about the slippery slope and the unsavory bigger picture in an instant.

Notes
^[1] "How Tyranny Came to America." By Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s, 1994?

The angelic ummah.

That [Andrew Sullivan Venn] diagram [purporting to demonstrate how bloodthirsty Muslim nut job killers are but a fly speck on the circle representing all Muslims in the world] reminded me of a counter-argument I saw in a recent comment somewhere. This was to the effect that virtually no one suggested [during WWII] that we were fighting a "tiny extremist minority" of Japanese Imperialists, or a minute faction of "extremist" Nazis who were unrepresentative of Japanese or Germans at large. When a whole polity is explicitly or tacitly supportive of its most severe political proponents there is no practical sense in trying to differentiate these "groups" from each other.^[1]

Muslims engage in terror, purport to pass sentence of death on mocking Westerners thousands of miles away, take school children hostage and kill them, behead passing Christian schoolgirls, riot in the streets when Egyptian Christians seeks to convert an existing building into a church, pull out the toenails of converts to Christianity, defile Christian churches and wipe themselves with pages from the Bible, defenestrate other Muslims who suggest that the Koran can be interpreted, inflict ghastly medieval punishments on criminals, subjugate women, enslave infidels, marry their cousins, wallow in obscurantism, flog themselves with knives and chains, dress their infant children in suicide bomber costumes, worship the AK and Semtex, systematically expel Christians and Jews from Muslim lands, dance in the streets when hijacked airliners are used to kill thousands of innocent Westerners, create impenetrable enclaves in Western lands, chivvy Western nations for shariah as a parallel legal system, imprison their servants, mutilate the genitals of their girls, engage in “honor” killings, and singlehandedly ramp up rates of violent crime in Western lands (including wholesale arson) but this, pilgrims, has not even a remote connection to Islam. No, Sir. None. Zip.

No. If there is a “Muslim problem” in the world it is those aberrant salafist, Muslim brotherhood, and al Qaida types who all together couldn’t fill up the main runway at Chicago O’Hare if they each wore a three-foot tutu. The rest of the ummah is simply the picture of mental health, adaptation to the modern world, tolerance of other views, and the desire to live peacefully with infidels anywhere they can be found.

I’m buyin’ it, friends. Yes, I am. It’s a complete mystery how people can make a gigantic mental leap and connect the actual words of the Koran with any of that stuff up above.

Notes
^[1] Hannon commenting on "The Western denial of the reality of Islam, taken to the max." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 10/18/10 (emphasis added).

The Rise of Financial Empire.

Wherein the belief that we live in a free republic is challenged.

"The Rise of Financial Empire." By Damon Vrabel, Council on Spiritual, Psychological, and Economic Renewal, 2009-10.

Will the Republicans fight?

No.

The election next month is not about returning the Republican Party to power in Washington. It is about stepping back from this tipping point, this precipice that Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress have led us to. There is a pervasive sense that this is momentous.

The alarm and the urgency that is felt by so many conservatives, independents, and even Democrats who feel they were duped in 2008, arises from the conviction that this may be a one-time chance to pull back from the edge. If American voters do not, with loud and clear voices, issue a commanding halt to the leftward slide next month, it may be too late in 2012 or beyond.

Sam Francis liked to call the Republican Party the Stupid Party. Republican performance under the politically and culturally clueless Bush ’43 provides little reason to think that they would get a different party label from Sam today or that they'll pay much attention to what Mr. Gannon says.

The Republicans will wring their hankies over repealing the whole Obamacare catastrophe and then move heaven and earth to find a way to retain the most “compassionate” provisions. The Community Reinvestment Act will continue without objection as before and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be untouched. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 will not even be considered for repeal. There will be no hearings on the Holder Justice Department abandonment of equal voting rights and its obvious lack of interest in vote fraud. In short, the Republicans will view their new congressional majorities as little more than a cyclical reversal of political fortunes that now simply happens to favor them.

The poisonous initiatives of Obama and the congressional Democrats will largely remain in place. In any game of chicken, the Republicans will play their hands with the usual Republican hesitancy and lack of resolve. Only unimaginably awful events will ever awaken and energize the Republicans.

As an aside, how can anyone believe he was “duped” in 2008? How stupid do you have to be not to learn what was readily available about the cipherous Obama to anyone with an hour’s access to the internet?

"The Tipping Point." By James P. Gannon, The American Spectator, October 4, 2010 (emphasis added).

I'm an Englishman.

I'm an Englishman or see more NCS Manhunt Videos or London (Tv Show) Videos

H/t: Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna.

Strategic imbecility.

The US descent into strategic imbecility has convinced Arab leaders that they should avoid getting on Iran's wrong side.

Read the whole thing.

She’s right.

"Ahmadinejad's target audience." By Caroline Glick, CarolineGlick.com, 10/8/10.