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The Daily Mail has many more photos of the incident at the Canberra, Australia restaurant where government leaders were meeting in honor of Australia Day and pro-Aborigine protesters banged on the restaurant windows yelling “shame,” and “racist.” The government leaders are seen fleeing the restaurant, and it’s possible that some of Prime Minister Gillard’s disarray (discussed in the previous entry) was due to her body guard who is dragging her along. But if he is dragging her against her will, which is certainly not helping her escape any more quickly or safely, why did she not take command of the situation and stop him and insist on walking under her own power, as everyone else in the scene was doing?
However, that’s not why I am posting this follow-up. I’m posting it because what we see in these photos is a group of people, including Australia’s top politicians, running away from a threat which, to all appearances, was non-existent. No violent protesters are seen in any of the photographs. No dangerous actions, beyond their initial banging on the windows of the restaurant, are described. There is no indication, verbal or photographic, that they chased or menaced the politicos as the latter fled in near-panic. The Australian political elite and their security guards thus end up looking like a bunch of fools. In the below photo, opposition leader Tony Abbot (wearing sky blue tie), jogging along calmly behind Prime Minister Gillard who is being ignominously dragged backward, looks like the only person in the group who has kept his head.
I don’t want to shrink the photo to fit it on the main page, as that will lessen its drama, so click on More to see it:
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Beth M. writes:
I’m curious as to why you think that stopping Obamacare is MORE critical to the USA than preventing Amnesty Deux. I think that if there is another amnesty, everybody in the world will think that this is their last decent chance to get a U.S. visa for at least 30 years. Because there is widespread knowledge that there was massive fraud last time around (phony rent receipts, etc., to “prove” you lived here for X amount of time, etc.), there will be breathtaking levels of fraud for Amnesty II, and the number of people applying for amnesty visas will be beyond reckoning. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:49 PM
A correspondent visiting Rome writes:
We went to the Vatican Museums today. The highlight for me was the Pinoteca’s collection of 14th and 15th century paintings. Overwhelming. Such wonders.LA replies:
The early Renaissance (in Florence, the 14th century and the first half of the fifteenth) is in some ways more impressive and meaningful than the high Renaissance.This is because the early Renaissance captures a perfect balancing of the personal-immanent with the spiritual-transcendent. (This happened only one other time—in the sculptures of the fifth century B.C. Athenian Golden Age). But in the high Renaissance, the personal, the self, the ego, begins to dominate.
By the way, how could anyone take seriously as a leader, let alone as a candidate for the presidency of the United States, a man who for many years published newsletters under his own name, such as The Ron Paul Report and The Ron Paul Survival Report, and who now says that he never read the articles published under his name? Which is more disqualifying, to have said that the black population is vastly more violent and criminal per capita than the white population, or to avow that one had no interest in, and took no responsibility for, the words and ideas published in one’s own newsletter?
The Washington Post reports:
In the past, Paul has taken responsibility for the passages because they were published under his name. But last month, he told CNN that he was unaware at the time of the controversial passages. “I’ve never read that stuff. I’ve never read—I came—was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written.” Paul said.A man who could say such a thing has revealed himself as a joke.
Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative writes:
Extraordinary photos were published yesterday on Australia Day of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, fleeing Aboriginal protesters:
Those photos are amazing. How laughably obvious that “equal” women still have to cower in the grasp of strong men for protection.The commenter is exactly right. If the police forces of the West declared to the feminist multiculturalist elites of liberal society: “You constantly cast aspersions on white men, on the masculine strength and authority of white men. But when your own safety is a concern, you turn automatically to those same white men, expecting us to be there for you. So we’re not playing the game any more. If you want the protection that only we can give you, stop diminishing and degrading us. If you want your pretty heads to remain connected to your bodies, acknowledge that YOUR liberal order and YOUR lives depend on us, and start acting accordingly.”A thin blue line of men willing to do brutal things is all that protects the matriarchy from the barbarians. When those men go on strike, that house of cards will be over.
Of course they will never say this. But if they did, it would transform the entire situation.
And what about Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition party, who was also at the event? Did he, while leaving the restaurant, lean with distraught face and helpless posture into the arms of a security guard? Tell me if you find any pictures of that.
UPDATE: guess what? As Carol Iannone points out, the man at the extreme right of the first picture above, with light blue tie and white shirt, is unquestionably Tony Abbot, as you can see from his photograph at Wikipedia:
Guard with Gillard . . . . . . . Abbot
A reader writes:
Granting that the NY Times will try to put the presumed Republican front runner in a bad light, I think this article brings up some important background on Gingrich.LA replies:Note that Gingrich himself conceded bringing “discredit on the House.” Calling Romney a liar [see this and this] for saying Gingrich brought shame to the House, or whatever the words were, may not have been fair.
Gingrich himself advocated that Republicans vote yes on the resolution criticizing him, to put the issue behind them which the vindictive Democrats were using to paralyze the Republican-led House.Try to imagine what it’s like coming under a relentless effort by the entire leftist establishment of this country to destroy you.
You write: “Calling Romney a liar for saying Gingrich brought shame to the House, or whatever the words were, may not have been fair.”
You are misstating the main issue in this discussion. Romney has stated, repeatedly, that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace.” But Gingrich’s resignation as Speaker had nothing to do with the ethics charges, which the House resolved in January 1997, almost two years before he announced his resignation in November 1998. His resignation was triggered by the disappointing results of the 1998 elections in which the House Republicans lost five seats. If the Republicans had gained five seats, Gingrich might very well not have resigned.
The heartening story of a man successfully using deadly force to defend himself from feral savages comes from NBC Philadelphia, via The Huffington Post. Of course, the race of the “teens” and of their intended victim is not mentioned. Let’s just say, Civilization 1, Savagery 0.
Man Kills Pa. Teen After Being Knocked Off Bicycle: Cops
01/26/2012A 65-year-old man shot and killed a teenager after the boy and his friends knocked the man off his bicycle and tried to assault him, Pennsylvania authorities say.
Police did not reveal the identity of the elderly man, who they released without charges following the incident on the Thun Trail located in Berks County, the Reading Eagle reports.
According to reports, the senior was biking down the trail when the group of boys—ages 16, 16, and 15—knocked the man off his bicycle and attempted to rob him. The man drew his gun and fired two shots, killing one of the boys and severely wounding another, according to NBC Philadelphia.
Cumru Township Police Chief Jed Habecker told WFMZ that the wounded teen had been taken in for surgery.
The third boy, 15, was questioned and later brought to a county Youth Detention Center on unspecified charges, according to ABC.
The mother of the slain boy requested that her son’s name also not be announced until she could alert family members. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:43 AM
(Note: I initially linked the wrong CNN video, an interview of Gingrich by John King on January 24 [in which Gingrich claimed that several witnesses other than his two daughters from his second marriage were prepared to refute his ex-wife’s story, a claim he has since retracted]. The link is now corrected.)
It is already a week old, but if you have not seen the opening exchange between CNN’s John King and candidate Gingrich at last Thursday’s GOP debate about the ABC interview with Marianne Gingrich, it is worth viewing. As I have said before, while Gingrich’s marital history is certainly reasonable grounds for criticizing or rejecting his candidacy, for King to open the debate—held two days before the South Carolina primary in Gingrich was surging in the polls—by questioning Gingrich on the vastly hyped interview in which his second wife repeated already known facts about the end of their marriage, was very wrong. Under the circumstances, Gingrich’s forceful retort to King was both justified and extremely effective, resulting in what some are calling the first-ever standing ovation at a presidential debate.
At the same time, I must repeat that it is ludicrous that the GOP candidates, including Gingrich, have willingly appeared at an endless series of debates hosted by hostile liberal media organizations in which all the questions come from the left and reflect anti-conservative biases. A Republican candidate who was truly ready and willing to resist the power of the liberal media in this country would not just lecture the liberal moderators at liberal-run debates for their biased liberal questions, as Gingrich has famously and properly done; he would insist on having debates in which the moderators have knowledge of and interest in issues that are actually of concern to—gasp—Republican voters.
On Thursday Rush Limbaugh delivered an immense monologue, almost 7,000 words long, about (1) the extremely bitter attacks on Newt Gingrich from other leading Republicans, and (2) the “stunning” (that’s Limbaugh’s word) revelation (posted at VFR this morning) that in 1988 Gingrich said in a televised discussion that while Reaganism had been great, the time for Reaganism was past and the Republican Party needed to abandon Reaganism and adopt a new ideology. Limbaugh keeps repeating that he personally well remembers that throughout the Reagan years Gingrich was a leading champion and expositor of Reagan’s policies and governing philosophy, so he is stunned to learn of Gingrich’s call in 1988 for the Republicans to leave Reaganism behind and move boldly into the future of … neo-Rockefeller Republicanism (?), Tofflerian Future Shockism (?), a high-tech restoration of Me Tooism (?), or whatever it was that was on his ever-restless mind at the moment.
Those are the main points of the monologue. I’m not recommending that you read it, as it is so long, meandering, and repetitive. But if you want an experience of the amazingly complex situation obtaining in the Republican presidential contest at this moment via Rush Limbaugh’s own tortured response to it, you may find it worthwhile to invest the time.
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I’ve been away from my computer all day, and just got back to 50 emails in my Inbox, about 30 of them comments for VFR. Will try to post them tomorrow.
A very large number of entries have been posted this morning, on the GOP civil war and other things too. As I hope readers will see, I am an equal opportunity critic of both Romney and Gingrich. Yesterday in two entries (here and here) I condemned Romney very severely; today the focus is more on Gingrich again. I am not in either camp and you will find at VFR a wide variety of angles on both candidates. Both candidates are extremely flawed, and extremely dishonest—both are unacceptable in my view. However, we may feel compelled, by the sheer necessity of defeating Obama, to choose one or the other. In the entry, “A civil war about nothing,” I suggest a way for us to support one or the other of these candidates without throwing away our principles.
James P. writes:
In “A civil war about nothing,” you wrote that the Republican battle is “a fight to the death over two candidates neither of whom has ever been a conservative in any consistent and serious sense.” As I previously noted, during Newt’s 20-year Congressional career, he consistently voted conservatively. A “Rockefeller Republican” would not have been constantly re-elected in Georgia. Many things he did after resigning from Congress are bizarre and indefensible, but to say he was not consistently conservative in Congress simply is not true.
Daniel S. writes:
In this clip (at about 6:30) Mark Steyn observes that Newt Gingrich has an “open marriage with ideas.” He notes that he cannot stay “faithful to one idea” and is soon “fooling around” with others. Gingrich’s personal life is but a reflection of his mind.LA replies:
Sounds right. But it raises the awkward (for Steyn) question, how would one describe Steyn’s relationship with ideas?
10 p.m.
Leonard D. writes:
You wrote:LA replies:” … how would one describe Steyn’s relationship with ideas?”
Steyn is a pickup artist in the idea dating scene. He flirts with ideas, and will sleep with the hot ones, but he keeps a harem and won’t commit to any of them.
Hah hah hah hah hah.I’ve had a very good day, and your e-mail tops it off.
A reader in England, who sent the story, writes:
Gingrich is a compulsive liar but simply far more exciting than any other Republican candidate.LA replies:Obama would destroy him in an election is my guess.
He sounds like the “bad boy” to whom women are suicidally attracted.Nietzsche once said that life is a woman. Maybe the GOP is a woman. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:17 AM
A reader in England sent the video of Gingrich in 1988 saying that candidate George Bush the elder should not follow Reaganism. I replied:
Great find. This is persuasive, whereas the Elliot Abrams article charging that Gingrich was critical of Reagan is not persuasive, for the reasons I gave. Here Gingrich is clearly repudiating and rejecting, not some secondary aspect of Reaganism, but Reaganism itself. Also his political prognostication is dead wrong. Bush the elder won in 1988 by running conspicuously (albeit cynically and dishonestly) as the heir and successor of Reagan. If he had run as himself, as he did in 1992, he would have lost.It will be interesting to hear how Gingrich reconciles his 1988 statement with his contemporary claim to being a staunch Reaganite.
In any case, we now know that both Gingrich and Romney distanced themselves from Reagan in the 1980s.
Paul Nachman writes:
I’ve no argument with your ire at Romney for his behavior on the charges against the gasbag. (But would such means never find justification in ends? What if you could have spared the nation Obama by such means?)Nevertheless, Coulter defenestrates the gasbag again, and makes a very good case for Romney in several ways. Although abortion is a subject that doesn’t grab me, I think this is a pretty good story: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:06 AM
I’m not a fan of neocon Bret Stephens at the WSJ, but his article on the GOP campaign is worth reading. He says that the GOP nominee is going to lose in November, and the reason is that the candidates who ran for the nomination were all unviable. His closing passage:
What should readers who despair of a second Obama term make of all this? Hope ObamaCare is repealed by the High Court, the Iranian bomb is repealed by the Israeli Air Force, and the Senate switches hands, giving America a healthy spell of Hippocratic government.That’s the heart of what I’m calling Plan B—that Obamacare is overthrown by the Supreme Court, rather than repealed by the Congress and a Republican president. MORE…All perfectly plausible. And the U.S. will surely survive four more years. Who knows? By then maybe Republicans will have figured out that if they don’t want to lose, they shouldn’t run with losers.
It’s beyond astonishing: a political party whose heart is all about conservatism, in a fight to the death over two candidates neither of whom has ever been a conservative in any consistent and serious sense. Romney, of course, was not even a Republican in the 1980s, and in his 1994 U.S. Senate race he was still distancing himself from President Reagan. I won’t rehearse all the liberal positions he held as governor of Massachusetts in the 2000s (though he did convert to pro-life, as Ann Coulter reminds us). Gingrich, meanwhile, began his political life in the 1960s as a Rockefeller Republican, in the 1990s was an exponent of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock ideology (the diametrical opposite of any and all conservatism, as I explained in a talk in 1995), and in the 2000s partnered up with Al Sharpton for a national speaking tour. See my summary of Sharpton’s vile role in the Tawana Brawley affair and the false charge of rape and kidnapping against Steven Pagones for which he has never repented but which he repeated AFTER Pagones defeated him in a law suit years later).
Philip Klein writes at the Washington Examiner:
In 2009, Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton went on a nationwide tour together, from the White House to multiple cities, to promote education reforms also being pushed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In one video from the tour, Gingrich said, “I really appreciate the leadership Rev. Sharpton is showing all across America.” Just last month, Gingrich called into Sharpton’s TV show to wish him a happy birthday and shower him with praise. “I had such a great time going around America with you” to push education reform, Gingrich told Sharpton. “I will never forget it for the rest of my life. You were tremendous on those trips.… I watched you speak up with courage and with toughness on behalf of children in a way that all my life I will remember and I will honor you for the way you were willing to take on interests on behalf of children.”I’m looking forward to hearing pro-Gingrich conservatives square their support for Gingrich with his extravagantly expressed affection and admiration for one of the most vile individuals in America.
And by the way, there is an honorable way out of this quandary. One could say,
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Ian T. writes:
In keeping with this week’s theme of miscegenation and its significant drawbacks [see this, this, and this], I wanted to make a point I rarely see anyone touch on: the hypocrisy of female racemixers.Take Doutzen Kroes, the beautiful Dutch supermodel who does campaigns for L’Oreal and Victoria’s Secret. She’s married to an African man and had his child a few months ago. Now, if you asked Doutzen which of her features she most favors, she would probably mention her sky-blue eyes, her silky blonde hair etc. These characteristics, passed down for thousands upon thousands of years, are completely destroyed by her selfish desire to miscegenate not just with some other race, but the human group that’s most different from us in every measurable way. The very qualities that have made her an international supermodel are now lost in the mix and won’t be passed down to her children. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:04 AM
A few days ago VFR posted on the breakup of the supposedly ideal and blissfully happy marriage of Germanic model Heidi Klum and her black one-name husband Seal, whom I had never heard of before (which shows you how tuned-in to the pop culture I am). In eight years of marriage the couple have produced four children, all of whom will spend their lives confused as to their identity.
Kidist Paulos Asrat has a follow-up. According to reports, one of the reasons Klum ended the marriage was concern over Seal’s “volcanic temper.”
Also on the Culturally and Spiritually Lost Celebrity front, Kidist informs us that movie star Liam Neeson is thinking of becoming a Muslim.
Kristor writes:
Walking my dog last night, I was ruminating about your recent entry in which you announced that you had stopped thinking that small steps—e.g. repealing Obamacare—could suffice to turn around our culture’s present disastrous course. It struck me all of a sudden that this change in your attitude represents the death of a last dying ember of your native liberalism. Think of it: taking small steps to fix the world, and move it closer to an ideal situation—is that not exactly the sort of thing that the leftists are constantly doing? Granted, your ideal and mine is not gnostic or utopian, but merely practical. But still. [LA replies: I must jump in here to clarify that the “small steps” of which I spoke were not political acts such as repealing Obamacare, but small intellectual or spiritual steps away from some aspect of liberalism, such as we occasionally see in mainstream conservatives, but which, I said, are not going to gather into a large-scale rejection of liberalism.]We live in a basically liberal culture; that’s part of what we mean when we say that it is “modern.” We are living in a culture that is engaged in working out the last few absurd consequences of the Enlightenment experiment with materialism. If materialism is true, then there is no such thing really as a rule; rules then are, on the contrary, merely conventions. Almost everything we do, and almost all our social institutions, presuppose this materialistic or relativistic notion. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:55 AM
From the time I began to write about immigration in the late 1980s, and then about culture and politics in general in the 1990s and 2000s, I thought that the odds were against our society being saved, but I believed that it was possible. The way I often put this over the years was as follows: Liberalism (or, to be more precise, the rule of liberalism) is doomed, but there are two different ways in which its end will come. Either liberalism will continue until it has destroyed our civilization, and liberalism itself, having been deprived of its host, will also perish; or liberalism will be rejected at some point short of the destruction of our civilization. In my thinking and writing, particularly at VFR, I have always put the emphasis on the second, hopeful possibility.
Last fall, my view on this subject changed. Readers should understand it was not some political disaster or personal trauma that triggered this experience. I simply noticed that my thinking had changed, namely that when I observed or reflected on some false liberal slogan or attitude or belief, on whatever subject, the thought no longer arose in me that this falsity could be corrected or stopped. Instead, it seemed to me these liberal beliefs would continue in existence as the dominant beliefs of our society as long as our society exists. In other words, I now believed that only the first of my two above scenarios of the demise of liberalism was possible. And this change in my thought process was not temporary, but—at least over the last three or four months—permanent.
Here are entries at VFR discussing that change. The first three are short. The fourth is a full length article. I have much more to say about this subject and expect to be adding further entries on it in the future.
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In the discussion on Romney’s Spiritual Quotient (SQ) versus his Intellectual Quotient (IQ), Carol Iannone writes:
Gingrich could be photographed with his three wives and his daughters and their husbands and children. And we could put that photo next to the photo of the Romneys, and caption both with the caption, “How things have changed. Guess which one is the Mormon?”
Republican politics have not been this nasty in my memory. Writing at NRO, Elliot Abrams—former embattled assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration—accuses Newt Gingrich of being a critic of President Reagan, not a supporter and ally as Gingrich himself has been claiming. Abrams supplies various Gingrich remarks from the Reagan years to back up the charge that Gingrich undercut Reagan’s Cold War policies, implying further that Gingrich sided with the Democrats in doing so. Thus:
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A reader says, not unreasonably, that he was treated somewhat unfairly in the “Gingrich vs. Romney” thread, and I reply.
Here is an exchange on Romney’s educational background, followed by an exchange on Romney’s “spiritual quotient” as compared with his intellectual quotient, with a comment by Jim Kalb.
JC in Houston writes:
This video is on Drudge, Gingrich sucking up to Jorge Ramos from Univision on behalf of illegals. It’s nauseating. Why can’t the majority of GOP voters understand just who this repulsive character is.LA replies:
Gingrich’s remarks in this interview make it is impossible to believe that he opposes amnesty.Also, if you think he’s just talking about grandmothers who have been here 25 years, listen again to his last sentence:
“We need to have a serious conversation about how there’s a series of steps that gets us to legality for the entire country.”
So he wants the legalization of all or virtually all illegals.
However, it is also the case that Gingrich (like Romney) is not manically driven, à la George W. Busheròn and John McCain, to legalize all illegals. If as president he did make a move in that direction, it would be defeated, and probably more easily than Busheròn’s mighty efforts were defeated in 2006 and 2007.
At the same time, nothing is certain. It’s possible that a President Gingrich or a President Romney would have a better chance of passing amnesty than Obama, since a Republican president would have more congressional Republicans on his side than would Obama. There is thus a reasonable argument for not voting for Romney or Gingrich if either of them is the nominee. My position remains that I will vote for any Republican nominee, no matter how loathsome and immoral he may be, who is seriously committed to repealing Obamacare.
Kathlene M. writes:
And now to make matters worse for Romney, the Romney campaign has sent out a mass email repeating Nancy Pelosi’s latest insinuation that “there’s something I know” about Gingrich. This is beyond vile. I have lost all respect for Mitt Romney.Here is the article Kathlene sent, it’s by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
Romney campaign sends mass email quoting Pelosi threat against Newt (Update: Pelosi backs off)Jacobson linked to an image of the Romney campaign e-mail. Here from HotAir is the text of the Romney interview at Fox which the Romney campaign itself included in the e-mail:I told you this morning that anti-Newt forces would try to use Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she had secret information about Newt.
And the Romney campaign didn’t waste any time, sending out a mass e-mail quoting Pelosi as well as Romney attacking Newt on Fox & Friends about Pelosi’s statement.
Here’s the e-mail (click to enlarge).
Newt sat on a couch with Pelosi. The Romney campaign is getting in bed with her.
Update: Just as the Romney campaign was seeking to use Pelosi’s threat, Pelosi was backing off. Pelosi’s office says she has no new dirt on ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (h/t Weasel Zippers):
“The ‘something’ Leader Pelosi knows is that Newt Gingrich will not be President of the United States. She made that clear last night,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement.…
But on Wednesday, Hammill repeated that all of the information from the investigation is in the public realm. [LA replies: Do you see the significance of this? Romney has gone so far out that he is making allegations about some dark hidden Gingrich wrongdoing from the ‘90s which Pelosi herself has not made and from which she has explicitly dissociated herself. So Romney is not just a slanderer of a fellow Republican, as I wrote this morning; he is a bigger slanderer than the Democrats.]
GRETCHEN CARLSON: Mr. Romney, what does Nancy Pelosi know if it would be such a bombshell as to why Newt Gingrich couldn’t be president?Think of it. The Democrats spent four years trying to destroy their arch-nemesis Newt Gingrich with trumped-up charges. He gave a college course on politics, and claimed tax free status for it; but they said that the course was really to advance his political ideology and career, and therefore the tax free status was fraudulent. The IRS ultimately found that the course was indeed educational, not political. This was the trivial and innocent matter that the Democrats—facilitated by the liberal media with all their power—blew up into a horrible-sounding scandal and used to taint and bring down Gingrich. And so lacking is Romney in minimal principle, in minimal decency, in minimal conscience, that he is now jumping on the Democrats’ Destroy-Gingrich bandwagon from the 1990s. I cannot print at VFR the words that I have for Romney.ROMNEY: I wish I knew what that was [laughter]. I’d tell people what it is right now.
But that’s one of the reasons why I’m saying that all of the records that were part of the ethics investigation, all of the transcripts, all of the records have to be made public.
Not just the final white-washed report but the full record, the reason that 88% of the Republicans in the House voted to reprimand their own Speaker.…. we need to understand why that is, and those records need to be released, because you know that if Nancy Pelosi knows those things right now, she will hand them to Barack Obama’s campaign if Speaker Gingrich were our nominee.
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The Romney campaign immediately distanced itself from the remarks. But isn’t this the way the truth often comes out, via a statement that is then denied or retracted?
The Hill reports this morning:
Romney adviser Norm Coleman predicts GOP president won’t repeal health lawMitt Romney adviser Norm Coleman, a former senator from Minnesota, predicted the GOP won’t repeal the Democrats’ healthcare reform law even if a Republican candidate defeats President Obama this November.
“You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president,” Coleman told BioCentury This Week television in an interview that aired on Sunday. “You can’t whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what’s been done.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:04 PM
Ken Hechtman, with his insider’s understanding of leftist politics, expands on Alexis Zarkov’s cogent explanation of why Obama killed the Keystone pipeline project: Cap and Trade, which was what the left really wanted and expected from Obama, didn’t get off the ground, so as compensation the left is demanding that Obama stop individual energy projects.
In an amusing column, “Can Newtzilla Be Stopped?”, Jonah Goldberg writes:
“People actually misunderstand what’s going on,” [Gingrich] explained Saturday night after his South Carolina win. “It’s not that I am a good debater. It is that I know how to articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people.”That’s the great thing about Gingrich: He can make describing himself as the divine manifestation of the vox populi sound self-deprecating. Still, he’s basically right. He’s managed to transform into a spokesman for all of the rank and file’s frustrations, insecurities, and grievances as well as their hopes and ideals.
He never could have pulled it off were it not for Romney’s shortcomings. For whatever reason, Romney seems like a creature put on Earth to blend in with the humans and report back what he finds. He clearly likes earthlings, and they in turn find him pleasant enough, and surprisingly lifelike. Occasionally he finds the right words, but he rarely connects them to the right tone. This dearth of convincing passion in the front-runner makes the passionate base of the party want to look elsewhere—even to Newtzilla.
On Tuesday I wrote that Romney lied at the NBC debate Monday night when he said, at least twice, that Gingrich had “resigned in disgrace” from the Congress. I then read more about the House ethics charges in the article about Gingrich at Wikipedia but didn’t get around to posting about it. The article tells that he admitted in 1997 to some very obscure offense and paid $300,000 to make the matter go away, and that after he had left the Congress at the beginning of 1999, the IRS later that year exonerated him entirely of any wrongdoing. Also, as far as the House was concerned, the ethics matter was resolved in early 1997. It was the November 1998 elections, in which the House Republicans lost five seats (very unusual for the non-presidential party during an off-year election), in combination with a rebellion against Gingrich in the Republican caucus, that led Gingrich, the day after the election, to announce his resignation from the Speakership and from the Congress. There was nothing disgraceful about his resignation; he resigned honorably and for ordinary political reasons, namely that his party had done poorly in an election and he had lost the political support of his caucus.
The always valuable reporter Byron York, who covered the story closely at the time, provides a detailed summary of it at the Washington Examiner which is must reading. Basically the ethics charges were a no-holds-barred campaign by the Democrats to destroy Gingrich, using all the resources of the liberal media to construct a picture of wrongdoing by the then-Speaker when in fact there had been no wrongdoing. He was simply teaching a college course, which the media constructed into some sinister criminal activity. York tells a scarifying tale of what it is like to be hated and targeted by the left in this country, what it is like to be the left’s Enemy Number One, which Gingrich was for the four years of his Speakership.
For Romney, a Republican candidate for president, to dredge up the same false, lying accusations against Gingrich that the Democrats and the media had so ruthlessly and massively deployed against him in the 1990s; for Romney to keep repeating that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace,” as though he resigned over the ethics charges, when in fact his resignation had nothing to do with the ethics charges which had been resolved in the House almost two years earlier, and when in fact after his departure from the House Gingrich was ultimately cleared of all accusations of wrongdoing that had been leveled at him by his wicked political enemies, is one of the most despicable things I have seen in presidential politics. Romney has borne false witness of the most vile kind. His reputation as a man of upright character lies in tatters.
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Mark Richardson writes at Oz Conservative:
What obsesses the political class on Australia Day?You would think that Australia Day would be time for a little patriotic pride. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s treated in the media. The media is obsessed in the week leading up to Australia Day with endless handwringing about whether Australians are racist or not. They just can’t leave the issue alone - which reveals, I think, where their heads are at. Even in a relatively conservative paper like the Herald Sun, you just can’t escape the obsession—in today’s edition, for instance, there are no less than three columns all boringly saying the same thing. It’s not that they are sinking the boot in, it’s that their frame for discussing Australia Day is limited to the issue of whether Australians are or aren’t racist in response to diversity and multiculturalism.
John Dempsey writes:
Over and over you have repeated how intelligent you think Romney is, but I can’t find where you’ve offered any evidence as to why you think this. If you have, can you point me to it? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:26 PM
What an evil, anti-human thing liberalism is. In the name of humanity and compassion, it tells blacks that they are as capable as whites and can succeed in all fields as well as whites. Then, when blacks find themselves not doing as well as whites, and in fact doing very poorly, they are sure that the system, the institution, is neglecting them in some way. So blacks spend their lives in roiling anger, because whites keep flooding them with the message that everyone is equally capable, everyone should go to college, everyone should do equally well in college, everyone should do equally well in life.
At Duke University, a group of black students is protesting
an as-yet unpublished study by Duke researchers saying black students match the GPA of whites over time in part because they switch to majors that require less study time and have less stringent grading standards. Opponents of affirmative action are citing the study in a case they want the U.S. Supreme Court to consider.The climate is contentious and strained, because in the name of equality a top university has admitted many black students who simply lack the intellectual ability to do the academic work that is called for at that university. But no one will say that. For our society to recover from this insanity, all that’s needed is for people to speak the truth, and to keep speaking it. But no one—no one with any position or any stakes to protect in mainstream society—will speak the truth. America will sink into the ocean before anyone speaks the truth.But the students say the research is just one example of an environment in which many black students feel uncomfortable.…
“These are really just symptoms of a contentious and strained racial climate here,” [black student leader Nana] Asante said.
Kathlene M. writes:
If you take away Romney’s economic message, what will be his appeal to Independents and Republicans in this election? Mark Steyn offered this parody of a Romney stump-speech line:LA replies:“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”
That’s not exactly firing people up. If the economy should suddenly improve right before the election (and it very well could happen as you’ve written before), what will be Romney’s appeal if he’s been ignoring all the cultural issues that many Republicans care about?
Other than in debates, in which he generally speaks cogently, I have not heard his speeches. Are they really as vapid as that? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:29 PM
Jessica K. writes:
This photo pretty much says it all (and more pictures here).It’s from a bar attached to The University of Helsinki called “Club Swagga.” It caters to African students and the Finnish girls who want to meet them.
Much Eloi taxation lies ahead in Finland, I believe.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
You’ve repeatedly said that the repeal of Obamacare is the transcendent issue of this general election, and that a lot of compromises might have to be made that in other years we could afford not to make. I agree with the premise, mostly. My question is, what happens if the Supreme Court effectively repeals Obamacare by ruling in a conservative direction not only on the core issue of the individual mandate, but also on the severability of the mandate from the remainder of the bill? In other words, if the SCOTUS does the job that we expect a Republican White House and Congress to do, what then? Does that change your calculations, and does it change them in favor of one candidate or another? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:25 PM
A reader argues that I (along with the entire conservative universe) was unfair to Gingrich last year when I said that he had called the Ryan Medicare plan “right-wing social engineering,” and I reply.
Col. B. Bunny at Intergalactic Source of Truth quotes part of Thomas Bertonneau’s insightful comment at VFR on why so many people prefer the G man over the R man.
Alexis Zarkov writes:
Obama killed the Keystone XL pipeline to placate the environmentalists in his base, who believe that America should eventually abandon all use of hydrocarbon transportation fuels. In pursuit of that end, they promote policies designed to make hydrocarbons more expensive so that less of it will be used. Let’s not forget that Obama announced in 2008 that if elected president he would make energy costs in America “skyrocket.” Like the environmental activists, Obama believes in the dire threat of global warming, and he wants the U.S. ultimately to abandon the internal combustion engine because it emits carbon dioxide as a byproduct of combustion.Yes, Democrats can be that crazy, and have been that crazy for a very long time. For example, in 1969 (before the energy crisis, and before the supposed threat of global warming) California state senator Nicholas Petris (Democrat of Alameda County) introduced SB-778 which would ban the internal combustion engine (including the diesel engines in trucks) in California by 1975. He did this to combat air pollution, and this insane bill passed the State Senate, but died in committee in the State Assembly. One wonders how the legislature could contemplate, let alone pass, a bill that would paralyze California’s population and utterly destroy its economy? The answer: legislators are so profoundly ignorant of basic science that they believe (on faith) that the automobile industry can easily develop a substitute for the internal combustion engine that doesn’t use hydrocarbons. “Make them do it and they will.”
Over the years the craziness of the California Democrats has metastasized throughout the party nationally. Make no mistake: Obama and the Democrats want eventually to eliminate the entire national network of pipelines carrying hydrocarbon fuels and replace it with a massive electric grid. Therein lies the ultimate fallacy of the “green” energy program. They don’t understand that doing so is a virtual impossibility, because electric energy flows cannot economically replace chemical energy flows. We couldn’t even replace a small fraction of that network. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:20 AM
I saw the last 45 minutes of the debate tonight, and if I left aside aside everything I know about Gingrich and Romney, and just looked at them stand there and speak, the impression I would have is that either of them would make a highly credible presidential nominee or president.
However, after the debate (or the “conversation,” as the pompous Brian Williams called it) was over, NBC replayed an exchange from earlier in the evening in which Romney said that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” from the speakership. That is false. Gingrich did not resign in anything like disgrace. There had been unhappiness in the Republican caucus with his leadership, and when the House Republicans lost several seats in the 1998 elections, Gingrich did what traditional parliamentary leaders commonly do when their parties lose elections: he stepped aside.
Romney needs to be more aggressive, but not by telling lies about his opponents.
UPDATE: And here’s another superficial reaction on my part. Readers have wondered why I am so dismissive of Santorum, who is, after all, a social conservative, which Romney and Gingrich are not. The fact is, Santorum’s personality (either whiny and self-righteous, or rambling, tiresome, and lacking any gravitas, or all those together) so turns me off that I find myself unwilling to contemplate him, let alone contemplate supporting him.
January 24
Andrew E. writes:
I would suggest that you to watch the first 20 or 30 minutes of the debate if you can. Brian Williams allowed Romney and Gingrich to have an extended sparring session to open the debate consisting mostly of Romney attacking Gingrich on his record as Speaker and his consulting work for Freddie Mac. I thought Gingrich withstood the onslaught very well. During the exchange I felt Romney looked almost desperate as well as decidedly un-presidential. Gingrich is clearly the better debater and has Romney singing to his tune now. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:01 PM
In the debate tonight (the third debate in one week—INSANE) Romney’s explanation of his illegal immigration policy remain as it as been in the past—utterly confusing and incoherent. It is extremely complicated double talk or triple talk. I distrust him deeply on this.
At the same time, even if he has a hidden agenda in favor of amnesty, it is not something he is passionate about, like G.W. Bush, and he would not stubbornly keep pushing it against the will of his own political base. So this is not a decisive issue in the election.
The fire this time continues, in the entry, “Why do people hate Romney?”
In yesterday’s entry, “Gingrich vs. Romney,” I said Gingrich was too unstable to be elected president. One reader wrote: “You say Obama is stable yet Gingrich eminently unstable. You provide no examples of instability.” Another said: “What makes Newt Gingrich so obviously unstable that he automatically becomes unelectable?” When commenters demand proof of something that has been written about so widely, particularly at this site, and is widely acknowledged well beyond this site, I frankly wonder about their bona fides or their ability to process information.
Gingrich’s famously unstable and erratic public character is shown chiefly in the fact that he repeatedly comes out with super-charged statements and important-sounding positions which get conservatives excited, but which he then immediately contradicts or abandons for other super-charged statements and important-sounding positions. It is shown in the fact that there is no connection between his words and his actions. There is no continuity—i.e., stability—to the man, and thus he would be, at best, deeply problematic in any high leadership position, as his House colleagues found him to be.
See, for example, this entry from last May, where I wrote:
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When a South Carolina reader asked me last Friday for my opinion about whom to support in his state’s primary, I said that I hoped that Gingrich would win, not (obviously) because I supported him, but because I wasn’t ready for the contest to be over at this point. I wanted the two main candidates to have it out.
Well, Gingrich did win in Caroline, and the two sides sure are having it out. The passions Gingrich’s victory has unleashed are scorching, as can be seen everywhere in the conservative Web, including the comments posted today at VFR in “Why do people hate Romney?”, as well as in “Why they’re going for Gingrich.”
What a spectacle. Conservatives are now in a civil war over two candidates neither of whom is a conservative in any serious sense.
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Yesterday VFR posted a story about a white British woman who received an extreme stab wound from her long time black lover and father of her children, and who was put in jail for a week for refusing to testify a second time about the crime because she found it too stressful. Today a reader, who is himself an immigrant and naturalized citizen, explains why he finds it difficult to sympathize with white women who get themselves into such situations by hooking up with dangerous and inappropriate men.
James P. writes:
On the radio this morning, the hosts interviewed Tucker Carlson about South Carolina. Carlson asserted that the Republican party was broken, and asked rhetorically how did we get to a point at which the Republicans have fielded such weak candidates? His answer: George W. Bush. He said Bush was a terrible President and no conservative, and miscasting his policies as conservative did lasting damage to the party.LA replies:
In light of Carlson’s comment, I should say that all through the Bush years, this blog kept pointing out, probably more than any other publication in the country, the fallacy of believing that Bush was a conservative, and kept attacking mainstream conservatives for their extravagant support for him. Throughout the 2004 election cycle I repeatedly stated that it would be better for Bush to lose, because if he won, it would mean the destruction of the Republican Party as a conservative party. Bush’s second term led to the disastrous election of Barack Obama, and the continuing disarray in Republican / conservative ranks that we see today.MORE…
During the 2007-08 Republican primary contest, I commented frequently about the widespread Republican dislike of Romney, which much of the time seemed to be based on trivialities: he was “too perfect”; he was “plastic”; we “don’t know who he is,” etc. For vague and evanescent reasons like this, Republican opinion makers and voters rejected a candidate who was infinitely superior to the broken-down basket case McCain whom they did nominate.
The Romney dislike of 2008 has evolved into the Romney detestation of 2012. Take a look at this thread at Lucianne.com. The animus expressed against Romney by one commenter after another is virulent, poisonous. I get that the animus exists. I don’t get why it exists. It seems irrational.
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In an appearance on Fox News this morning, Ann Coulter is highly critical, not so much of Gingrich, as of his supporters, who she says are acting like children: “Apparently, South Carolinians would rather have the emotional satisfaction of a snotty remark toward the president than to beat Obama in the fall.” Of course, the Gingrich troops say that they support their man because he can beat Obama in the fall.
Kathlene M. writes:
I think that in this article at Redstate.com Eric Erickson pretty well nails it as to the overall message of Gingrich’s South Carolina win.I saw some of Gingrich’s speech afterward. What impressed me was that he actually talked about the Obama Administration’s anti-religious bigotry. He actually used those words: “anti-religion bigots.” He even stated that, if Obama wins re-election, he will become even more tyrannical. So Gingrich vowed to remove all the czars as a first step if he were elected President. This really resonated with the crowd and I’m sure many viewers. When does Romney ever talk forcefully like this about Obama, beyond economic terms? As far as I know, he hasn’t.
Here’s part of the Erickson article in which I’ve highlighted the key points: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:30 PM
Here is the Daily Mail’s headline:
Mother stabbed and left in coma by brutal boyfriend is JAILED … just because she was too traumatised to testify against himWe learn that Sacha Williams-Rowe’s long time boyfriend and father of her children, a fellow by the upper class sounding name Lloyd Lothian, stabbed her in the belly with a kitchen knife and almost killed her, leaving a lengthy, reverse L-shaped scar going down her belly and then to the side. And how was the case resolved? The defendant was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of “unlawful wounding,” while the victim was sent to jail for a week for declining to testify a second time.
What the heck. VFR readers ought to see the injuries caused by the obvious attempted murder that the British justice system called an “unlawful wounding”:
With a name like Lloyd Lothian, he’s as British as can be.
Why did Obama nix the Keystone oil pipeline project, which, bringing crude oil all the way from northern Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast, would have created many thousands of jobs and supplied four percent of America’s annual energy needs? The president himself says that a deadline that the House Republicans set on a decision on the project did not give the administration enough time to determine environmental impact. Indeed, the headline of the above-linked story in the print version of the January 19 New York Times announces that “politics”—i.e. Republicans—stood in the way of the pipeline. Thomas Lifson at American Thinker retorts that there are already many thousands of miles of pipelines in the affected area and that there have been no safety problems. He is at a loss to understand why Obama did it, since there was nothing but gain to be had from the project, and nothing but harm from rejecting it—including sending Canada’s business and oil to the Chinese (Canadian PM Steven Harper said he was “profoundly disappointed” by the decision), and greater, not lesser, environmental impact:
… any rational environmentalist understands that the decision will actually harm the environment, because the oil will instead be piped across the Canadian Rockies, to the coast of British Columbia, for shipment to China, instead. The sad fact is that loading and unloading oil from tankers results in spills from time to time, not to mention shipwrecks. Tanker transport of oil is much more environmentally hazardous than pipeline transportation.Could the answer be—as a correspondent has suggested to me—that Obama simply hates America and wants to harm it?
The New York Times, of course, approves the president’s decision, saying we need to develop alternative sources of energy. Remember that the Times defended the administration’s half-billion dollar throwaway to Solyndra and stalwartly denied that the president had done anything in that affair for which he could be criticized. An attitude which, if it is indicative of Obama’s own thinking, suggests that the motive for the rejection of the pipeline was green ideology: the country must have development of alternative sources of energy, and nothing done in pursuit of that, whether it is eagerly transferring billions in taxpayer money to doomed green companies favored by the administration, or stopping the Keystone pipeline project, can be gainsaid.
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Associated Press — 2 mins 56 secs agoWASHINGTON (AP)—Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona announced Sunday she intends to resign from Congress this week to concentrate on recovering from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt a little more than a year ago that shook the country.
“I don’t remember much from that horrible day, but I will never forget the trust you placed in me to be your voice,” the Democratic lawmaker said on a video posted without prior notice on her Facebook page.
“I’m getting better. Every day my spirit is high,” she said. “I have more work to do on my recovery. So to do what’s best for Arizona, I will step down this week.”
Giffords was shot in the head and grievously wounded last January as she was meeting with constituents outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. Her progress had seemed remarkable, to the point that she was able to walk dramatically into the House of Representatives chamber last August to cast a vote. [The article is here.]
(3:12 p.m.: Comments begin here.)
Those who support Gingrich support him largely because they think he can take the fight to Obama and win the general election, while Romney, they believe, is too much of a soft Republican moderate to do the same.
It’s time for a reality check.
Let’s put aside our enthusiasms, our fears, our hopes, and our hype, and honestly ask ourselves a couple of very simple questions.
Can one reasonably imagine Mitt Romney losing the election for the presidency? Yes.
Can one reasonably imagine Mitt Romney winning the election for the presidency? Yes.
But can one reasonably imagine Newt Gingrich—Newt Gingrich!—winning the election for the presidency? No. It’s absurd, it’s impossible, it’s an off-the-planet fantasy. [Note: the preceding sentence is too sweeping, and in a comment further down in the entry I retract it.]
If you’re not persuaded of what I’ve just said, ask yourself this: has America ever elected an obviously unstable character as president? No, it hasn’t. Obama, notwithstanding his anti-American leftism, is a stable character. Romney, notwithstanding his unstable policy positions, is eminently a stable character. Gingrich is eminently an unstable character.
Conclusion: if you want the Republican Party to have a reasonable chance of beating Obama next November, you cannot support Gingrich for the nomination.
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Paul K. writes:
Heidi Klum and Seal have announced the break-up of their fairy-tale marriage. According to the Daily Mail, “Their union was believed to be one of the strongest in show business—reinforced by regular public declarations of love and an annual ceremony to renew their wedding vows.”As a long-time observer of the celebrity scene, I know that nothing suggests a rock-solid marriage like regular public declarations of love and well-publicized annual renewals of the wedding vows.
On a positive note, in contrast to many similar pairings . . .
. . . it appears that Klum will get out of the relationship alive. 
Captain Francesco Schettino of the Costa Concordia committed not one, not two, not three, but four inconceivable and totally unnecessary errors or misdeeds: (1) taking the ship off course close to the island of Giglio for entirely frivolous reasons, resulting in the collision with an underwater rock and the fatal damage to the ship, a 160 foot long gash in the hull reminiscent of what happened to Titanic; (2) continuing to sail the ship northward past Giglio harbor and not turning it around until forty minutes after the collision, instead of pulling immediately into the harbor which was ahead of the ship off its port bow at the time of the collision; (3) delaying the order to abandon ship for about an hour after the collision, even though his engine crew told him a few minutes after the collision that the ship had suffered irreparable damage; and (4) abandoning the Costa Concordia himself even as people from Giglio, including its deputy mayor, had rowed out to the ship and were helping rescue passengers and crew.
It’s just about the worst behavior by a man in a position of authority that I’ve ever heard of. It’s amazing that a thousand or two thousand people didn’t die, instead of the 32 who did. Thirty-two dead, many more injured, and a half billion dollar vessel destroyed, for no reason.
Mark Steyn writes:
On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”While the loss of our culture’s ethos of chivalry is very regrettable, was it the reason the male crew members pushed past the female passengers to get in the life boats? Consider the fact that of the 1,000 crew members, at least 300 were Filipinos and the rest were largely Asian and Latin American. Mario Pellegrini, the deputy mayor of Giglio, who went out on a small boat to offer advice on the best way to get people on to the island, later told the National Post:If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.
“There was total confusion and then mounting panic as the ship tipped further on to its side. I found no officers on board, not only the captain but also no officers, and the rest of the personnel were all Asian and spoke no Italian and also very little English.” [Emphasis added.]
So yes, again, there has been a decline of chivalry in the West, due to feminism and radical individualism. But that is not the explanation for the crew’s unchivalrous behavior, because the crew came overwhelmingly from cultures that are not known for having a tradition of chivalry. An additional factor is diversity. Men who may be willing to risk or even sacrifice their lives for women of their own culture and race, will be much less willing to do so for women of a different culture and race.
Blaming the Costa Concordia disaster on the West’s loss of chivalry is like announcing, “Inequality in America is on the increase,” without mentioning that inequality is increasing because of the influx of poor Third-World immigrants. It’s like saying, “Anti-Semitic violence is on the rise in Europe,” without adding the clarification that the anti-Semitic attacks are all being carried out by Muslims.
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Lawrence Kudlow at NRO quotes Romney at the debate Thursday night:
You’ve got to stop the spread of crony capitalism. [Obama] gives General Motors to the UAW. He takes $500 million and sticks it into Solyndra. He stacks the labor stooges on the NLRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement.… He has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement. He turns down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America.Kudlow continues:My view is capitalism works. Free enterprise works.… There’s nothing wrong with profit, by the way. That profit went to pension funds, to charities. It went to a wide array of institutions.… And by the way, as enterprises become more profitable, they can hire more people. I’m someone who believes in free enterprise. I think Adam Smith was right. And I’m gonna stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign. I know we’re going to get hit hard from President Obama, but we’re gonna stuff it down his throat and point out that it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.
… Governor Romney capped his strong performance with a Reaganesque summation. As he has in the past, he criticized Obama for trying to “transform” America from a merit society—an opportunity society where people are free to choose—to a European-style entitlement society. Romney said, “We need to restore the values that made America the hope of the Earth. . . . [President Obama] has made it almost impossible for our private sector to reboot. . . . I will defeat Barack Obama and keep America as it’s always been, the shining [city] on a hill.”Meanwhile, as Gingrich has shockingly adopted left-wing rhetoric, charging (as Kudlow paraphrases Gingrich’s attack) that “Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was involved in nothing more than vulture capitalism, looting companies, and destroying jobs. Keeping class envy alive.”
Clearly Romney is a better man than Gingrich, both politically and personally. But as I’ve said in another entry today, I don’t want Romney to win the race after only three primaries.
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Douglas P. writes:
Rick Sanctorum, a candidate whose platform appears to be based solely on Luke 18:11: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as these other men are.” Sanctorum’s continuously proclaims that he is a true conservative unlike the others, has always had a sanctified political record unlike the others, and will always stand out in God’s eyes unlike the others.
Clark Coleman forwarded to me Roy Beck’s January 15 e-mail about Rick Santorum’s new immigration stand, along with this note:
Very surprising move by Santorum. After being one of the worst candidates on immigration, he suddenly proposes ending our chain migration system. In other words, he speaks out about reducing LEGAL immigration when no other candidate will ever address anything but illegal immigration, and he has personally had a weak record on immigration, including his votes as a Senator (e.g. he voted against having e-Verify even as an OPTIONAL system for private employers to use).I’ve copied the Beck e-mail below, trying to keep something resembling his formatting: MORE…
Allan E. writes:
Subject: GETTING READY TO VOTE IN SC; WOULD LIKE YOUR OPINIONSince Michele Bachmann is no longer in the race, who do you like now? I have been leaning toward Ron Paul (I realize you loathe his views; it was really just last man standing for me after looking at the other choices). Then I became more favorable of Gingrich for standing up to the race-baiting questions of Juan Williams. After reading your latest entry on the confusing and contradictory situation we face, I realize I cannot vote for Gingrich.
For me, the most important issues are stopping immigration (illegal first, legal second), separating from the Islamic world, and standing up to “black run America”. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:58 AM
A reader argues that Newt Gingrich’s marital history should not be a bar to his being nominated for the presidency and being elected president, because morality is a private concern and politics has and should have nothing to do with morality. I reply.
It’s no wonder that conservative voters and even many conservative opinion makers such as Rush Limbaugh are contradicting themselves like crazy right now; the reality they are presented with is overwhelmingly confusing and contradictory. For example, they are looking for a conservative presidential nominee to run against Obama. Is Gingrich the conservative one, because he stands up against the liberal media and the racism card, while Romney lacks such mettle? Or is Romney the conservative one, because he stalwartly supports free enterprise, while Gingrich attacks Romney’s business success, sounding shockingly leftist notes in doing so? We could make a long list of such head-swiveling contradictions in this campaign. Further, the conservatives themselves don’t seem to be critically aware of their own contradictions, but just keep rotating their heads each time the tennis ball passes in front of them. Limbaugh is an extreme example of this, his statements about Gingrich, pro and con, being all over the place.
The latest twist in the conservatives’ confusion concerns Gingrich’s marital history.
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The black intifada against whites continues. When will our society acknowledge that these are not random, unconnected events, but part of a pattern?
James P. sends this from the Daily Mail:
A Vietnam veteran was so badly beaten up in a random attack by a gang of teenagers that his skull was fractured.Edward Schaefer, 64, who lost an eye while serving his country, was attacked from behind as he walked to meet his wife at a bus stop in the Olney district of Philadelphia.
Police have now arrested one of the six male suspects, after dozens of tip-offs from the public and help from schools, CBS News reported.
But the search is on for the remaining members of the gang who left Mr Schaefer with injuries to his head and hands.
Officers say one of the gang started the attack and then the others joined in. [JP: Typical of such attacks!] …
Kate Schaefer, the victim’s wife, told Eyewitness News, ‘They just smashed every bone in his face. I can’t tell you the words. I guess I was just happy that he was alive.’ The attack happened shortly after 6pm on Tuesday. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:24 PM
Inspired by the reflexive anti-American fallacies of Ron Paul and his intellectual mentor Robert Pape, the blogger Stogie has coined a term that I will need to add to my catalogue of non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism: the Blowback Theory of Islamic Extremism.
I see that some of Stogie’s commenters are still in Standard Denial Mode. Thus one argues that the Barbary pirates had nothing to do with Islam—they were merely pirates who happened to be Moslem, along with lots of non-Moslems in their ranks. Evidently the statement by Tripoli’s ambassador in Britain to Adams and Jefferson in 1786, in which he justified the piracy on purely Islamic grounds of divinely mandated aggressive jihad against all non-Moslems, made no impression on this commenter.
Karen Armstrong has of course similarly argued that the vast Moslem conquests of the seventh century had nothing to do with Islam; the armies that swept across Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and northern Africa and subjected them to Islamic rule were merely conquerors who happened to be Moslem. And then consider the fact that probably the majority of America’s “intellectual” class follow Armstrong’s ideas.
Such is the continuing power (I’m almost tempted to call it a supernatural power, though of the dark kind) of the modern West’s suicidal denial of the truth about Islam.
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Josh W. writes:
Regarding your post on the continuing murders of Western troops by their Afghan supposed allies, I just read this article on CNN and there is quite an assortment of quotes from various official parties. Sarkozy’s observation that “The French army is not in Afghanistan to be shot at by Afghan soldiers” is nice, but of course he doesn’t identify for what purpose the French Army (and other Western militaries) is in Afghanistan. This is probably because the intended outcome can’t be articulated beyond the nebulous concept of “stability.”Interestingly, the only completely clear statement consistent with reality came from the Taliban itself:
“This was the latest attack by those sensible and zealous Afghans who have entered the enemy’s army and it was also the best one so far as it killed more soldiers than any other such attacks before.”
Duh. It’s in plain English and makes perfect sense. We are being attacked because we are their enemy—the corollary being, of course, that THEY are OUR enemy. Am I the only one who is disturbed by the fact that the Taliban’s spokespeople make more sense than our own? What is the matter with us?
These home boys made the homicide squad’s job easy. Reuters reports:
Police investigating three murders arrested 43 feuding New York gang members on Thursday based on evidence collected from monitoring what the gang members were saying about the cases on Twitter and Facebook, authorities said.I’m not sure if this is what Bill Gates was thinking of when he said that making computers and the Internet widely available to disadvantaged minority youth would help them learn to read and write.
Andrew McCarthy takes apart Ron Paul over his statements about the Taliban in Monday night’s debate, statements that are viciously false and off-base (“The Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians … their main goal is to keep foreigners off their land”), yet serve the paleolibertarian, anti-American cause.
But McCarthy goes astray at the end, arguing for a continuing U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan that is fated to be endless and hopeless: “Of course we should avoid unnecessary wars. But when we find ourselves in necessary wars, we need to win them.” So he actually believes we can “win” in Afghanistan.
It would seem that, just as McCarthy has thus far failed to persuade his colleagues at NR about the reality of Islam and the fatuousness of trying to democratize it, I have thus far failed to persuade Mr. McCarthy on the fatal mistake of becoming politically and militarily involved in the internal affairs of any Muslim country. Yes, we have the ability to destroy a troublesome Muslim regime, as we did in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Yes, we have the ability to target terrorist groups and terrorist camps with our military forces, which we must continue to do. What we do not have is the ability to plant our forces more or less permanently within a Muslim country, operating as its government’s ally and facilitator against opposing Muslim factions, and enjoy success or victory. We did not succeed in Iraq; we helped quiet things down enough in Iraq, after several years of horror initiated by our occupation of Iraq, so that our forces were able to withdraw without an instant collapse of the government. Iraq is of course still a mess. And there is zero prospect of success in Afghanistan.
UPDATE, January 20, 7 a.m.:
The last point is underscored by the lead article in today’s New York Times, which finally admits the largely suppressed story that we’ve been hearing from Diana West for the last year or two: the ongoing murders of Coalition forces by their Afghan “allies.” Today, “four French service members were killed and a number were wounded … when a gunman wearing an Afghan National Army uniform turned his weapon on them…” The Times, relativistic and anti-American as always, casts the problem as “mutual contempt” between Americans and Afghans. (That is like describing the Crown Heights riots in 1991 as a “fight between blacks and orthodox Jews,” which the Times also did.) Of course, no Americans and other Coalition forces have murdered their Afghan “allies,” the murders have all gone the other way.
Still, the truth that the Times lets out is devastating to our effort there:
… the most troubling fallout has been the mounting number of Westerners killed by their Afghan allies, events that have been routinely dismissed by American and NATO officials as isolated episodes that are the work of disturbed individual soldiers or Taliban infiltrators, and not indicative of a larger pattern. [LA replies: Hey, do you think maybe the Times itself will stop reporting jihadist attacks in America as the work of disturbed individuals and not part of a larger pattern?] The unusually blunt [classified Coalition] report, which was prepared for a subordinate American command in eastern Afghanistan, takes a decidedly different view.Via Diana West, here is more on that suppression, from USA Today:“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” it said. Official NATO pronouncements to the contrary “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest,” said the report, and it played down the role of Taliban infiltrators in the killings.
Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces.The change in policy comes after at least three allied troops have been killed by the Afghan troops they trained in the past month and follows what appears to be the deadliest year of the war for NATO trainers at the hands of their Afghan counterparts. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:40 PM
When a damaging fact is being discussed about a Democrat, and it’s been revealed before, even if “before” means the previous Friday afternoon, the media tell us that this is “old news,” and therefore meaningless, and therefore everyone should stop talking about it. The underlying message is that the bad is only bad when it’s brand new.
Yet when a damaging fact is being discussed about a Republican, and it’s been revealed before, even years before, the media tell us that this is a new, shocking “revelation” that will end the Republican’s political career.
I am speaking, of course, about Marianne Gingrich’s upcoming interview with ABC in which she will say that her then husband asked her in 1999 to accept his then five-year-old affair with Callista, and that when she rejected this proposed “open marriage” arrangement, he divorced her.
While it is damning that Gingrich behaved in this way, it is not news, since Marianne told the public about it two years ago. Yet the entire media, reversing their philosophy about the supposed meaninglessness of old news, are treating it as new, and therefore terribly important.
The supposedly conservative Daily Caller brainlessly echoes the liberal media’s treatment of the story, reporting that “a forthcoming ABC News interview with his ex-wife Marianne Ginther promises to add intrigue and confusion in the coming days. Ginther will reportedly reveal [emphasis added] that he asked her to tolerate his infidelity with an “open” marriage.” And Peter Wehner at the Commentary blog speaks of the “revelation [emphasis added] by Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, that he wanted an ‘open marriage.’” Though maybe these conservative sites are not mindlessly following the liberal media, but are simply anti-Gingrich.
I of course believe that Gingrich’s personal history is highly relevant to his suitability for the presidency. That is not the issue here. The issue is that information revealed by the second Mrs. Gingrich in 2010 is being falsely treated as though no one had ever heard it before. And ABC, by coming out with this interview on the eve of the South Carolina primary, is playing a dirty game.
(Note: Comments on this entry begin here.)
There have been many fascinating things to write about, and a bunch of readers’ comments from a couple of days ago not yet posted, but I was preoccupied with computer-related things all day Wednesday, and also (I know this may be hard for some to believe) just not in the mood for blogging.
Meanwhile, the anti-copyright piracy bills that were stopped in the Congress on Wednesday as a result of widespread outcry are much worse than I had realized. Must reading is Adrian Hon’s article in The Telegraph, posted at Lucianne.com. Here is the key passage (with the incorrect spelling “US” changed to “U.S.”):
According to these acts, if a U.S. site (or a foreign site that has its domain name registered in the U.S.) is found to be “committing or facilitating the commission” of copyright infringement, then, on the request of a rights holder, it is subject to seizure in a way that many scholars believe violates due process, depriving people of a fair hearing and suppressing free speech.It’s absolutely unbelievable. How could such an insane, tyrannical bill have passed a Senate committee on a unanimous vote? Our legislators are idiots.It gets worse. If the targeted site is not based in the U.S. and thus cannot be seized, then the following actions must occur:
1) U.S. sites and search engines must remove all links to the foreign site
2) U.S. advertising services must no longer serve ads linking to the site, or display ads on the foreign site
3) U.S. payment networks must cease all transactions between the foreign site and U.S. customers
4) U.S. service providers to block access to the foreign site via DNS blacklistingIn other words, a rights holder would be able to accuse a website anywhere in the world of facilitating piracy simply because a user posted a comment linking to a file sharing site, and the site would completely vanish from the internet. Anyone using any U.S.-based search engine (which includes pretty much everyone in the UK) would not be able to find it, and anyone in the U.S. would discover that typing in its URL would lead to nowhere.
Long-time VFR readers may remember how, a few years ago, VFR was forced off the Web by the single complaint of a single person to whom I had sent a group e-mail. He complained to my hosting service (instead of simply writing back to me and asking me to take him off my mailing list), and as a result the hosting service took VFR offline with no warning to me. I only got the site back online as a result of several days of humbly begging and pleading.
Now imagine that a single complaint from a single person who claims that his copyright was violated by site X can result in site Y being taken off the Web and vanishing because of a single link at site Y to site X, even though site Y had nothing to do with the copyright infringement. This is the tyrannical madness that the U.S. Congress was prepared to foist on the world, if it hadn’t been stopped by Wikipedia’s strike and the protests of other major Web entities.
MORE…
Two bills were swiftly moving through the Senate and House which were aimed at stopping Internet piracy of copyrighted materials, but which were far too broad in their reach. For example, they would have made a site such as Wikipedia responsible for determining whether all the content at any site it linked was legal. Wikipedia saw this as a threat to its very existence, and went into action. Last night the online encyclopedia went dark for 24 hours, directing readers to a statement about the two proposed laws and the need to stop them. By mid-day today, as reported at the New York Times, a host of senators and congressmen who had supported the bills backed off, saying that while the piracy issue was important, the bill should be written carefully and not rammed through. Funny, I thought (hah hah) that legislators were always on guard against thoughtlessly written bills that were being rammed through.
Not everyone is happy about the sudden turnaround. Former senator Christopher Dodd, who since leaving the Congress has found himself a comfortable perch as head of the Motion Picture Association, denounced Wikipedia’s one-day strike:
“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging,” he said.Three cheers for Wikipedia and its founder, Jimmy Wales.
Now if the same “flash-strike” technique could only be used to get Congress to stop importing Islam and the rest of the non-Western world into America, to eliminate our tyrannical anti-discrimination laws and the bureaucracies that enforce them, to repeal Obamacare, to get the federal government out of education, etc.
MORE…
In the preceding entry, “Oh racism card, where is thy sting”?, I’ve added the following comment about the famous Juan Williams / Newt Gingrich exchange in last night’s debate, in which Williams said that Gingrich had insulted blacks by suggesting that young black men work as janitors:
… here’s another odd thing about it. On one hand, America is obsessed with black dysfunction, black low academic achievement, black criminality, black unemployment, lack of a black work ethic, lack of black family formation, black overall failure, etc., and what to do to solve these problems.The discussion continues in the original entry.On the other hand, if a Republican politician reasonably suggests that it would be a good thing for young black men to gain work experience and a work ethic by starting in a humble job like janitor, that is seen as an insult to blacks! The implication being that blacks are all so well-functioning and successful that it would be beneath them to be janitors!
So which is it, Mr. Williams? Are there indeed serious problems with black functionality and black employment, as the liberal media are constantly telling us, or are blacks so talented and accomplished that it’s an insult to suggest that they start at modest jobs?
If Gingrich had made this argument to Williams, it would have been even more sensational.