Archive for 2015
December 7, 2015
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING: Friends, family worried about San Bernardino terrorists, but said nothing.
SENIOR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR EUGENE VOLOKH EXPLAINS THE PROBLEM WITH NO-FLY LISTS to former junior constitutional law professor Barack Obama.
WELL, WHEN YOU’RE THE GIRL NEXT DOOR TO THE MADRASSA, SURE: ‘Girl Next Door’? San Bernardino Shooter Tashfeen Malik Didn’t Stand Out Back in Pakistan.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The New York Times Deploys ‘Stray Voltage.’
Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”
Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about. So the editorial board of the Times has pulled out all the stops to ensure that we talk about gun control instead. Gun control isn’t a great issue for the Democrats, but it’s better than all those other topics of discussion, and the expected angry response from the gun-rights community will ensure that people aren’t talking about topics that make the White House look bad.
And there’s a lot the White House doesn’t want us talking about.
WHO NEEDS OIL, ANYWAY? “Everything they’re wearing comes from a hydrocarbon!”
Has there ever been a better example of liberal overreach than the coverage that followed the shooting in San Bernardino? It started in the immediate aftermath of the attack with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said: “Yo GOP, kinda hard to talk about ‘keeping people safe’ when your peeps are shooting up America,” and the numerous attempts at “prayer shaming” anyone who offered there “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of the horrific event.
Without waiting to learn the actual facts (which turned out to be that the assailants were radicalized Muslims), Moulitsas didn’t just assume the shooters were Republicans; he also sought to score shameless political points.
Usually a rather marginal figure, Moulitsas set the tone for the next few days. Comparisons between the NRA and ISIS abounded, and the ubiquity of the “prayer shaming” that took place makes one wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of coordinated effort. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, for example, both quickly echoed the “God isn’t fixing this” musings of left-leaning media elites.
But at the very least, it was all a prime example of the kind of groupthink that exists among—not just the Left—but also a certain set of young “mainstream” media types. New York’s Daily News took that line of thought to its natural end point Saturday night when they published an op-ed that blamed one of the shooting victims for his own fate. His offense? Being a conservative “Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew” and a supporter of the NRA.
To be fair, this was the media playbook after the Gabby Giffords shooting, where they also took their lead from Markos.
And of course it was coordinated, just as the NYT’s editorial was almost certainly coordinated with the White House.
BAGHDAD BARRY: On ISIS, Barack Obama Is Baghdad Bob:
We all laughed at Baghdad Bob at the time, because what kind of delusional apparatchik would declare that there are no America tanks in Baghdad when American tanks can be seen in the background rolling through Baghdad? Baghdad Bob was funny, because Baghdad Bob was not in charge of protecting us. He was in charge of protecting Saddam Hussein.
But when your own president engages in the same absurd behavior–declaring that ISIS is contained while the group was planning a devastating attack in Paris that it would launch the very next day, or declaring that America is safe from the terrorist threat of ISIS while a terrorist who had pledged allegiance to ISIS was on the run from police after assisting in the execution of at least 14 completely innocent people at an office party in California–it’s not even remotely amusing. It’s terrifying.
Earlier: Clint Eastwood is a prophet:
WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES DIDN’T TELL YOU: Murders are at a record low and falling in the U.S.
The New York Times front-page editorial asserts a “gun epidemic,” which is an odd phrase, unless you think guns themselves — not deaths or shootings — are an evil.
If the editors meant to refer to a gun-death epidemic or a mass-shooting epidemic, here’s a relevant bit of information: Per-capita murders in the U.S. are at their lowest level since FBI records began, and they are trending downwards.
Never let a fake crisis go to waste. Here’s the chart:
BUT WHEN WILL THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT RECOGNIZE THAT? Obama Calls San Bernardino, Fort Hood, and Chattanooga Terrorism.
THE HILL: Sanders: Climate change poses ‘major’ national security threat.
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says climate change poses “major” national security threat to the U.S.
“I mean, we’re talking about, according to the CIA, future, major national security issues when people are forced to migrate because their countries or their land are flooded, they can’t grow food,” Sanders said at a rally in Keene, N.H., on Saturday. “We’re talking about a major, major crisis.”
The Vermont senator said there is no longer any debate among scientists on what causes climate change and what its consequences will be.
“The debate is over. Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing profound disturbances all over America and all over the world,” he said.
Sanders slammed the Republican Party for “rejecting science” on the issue of climate change.
Yeah, Bernie, you’re the reality-based one here.
TWO GRAY LADIES IN ONE:
Here’s NYT editors against terror watch lists in 2014: https://t.co/ikogSfyjEd Here’s same people in 2015: https://t.co/qiztzedxTv Hacks.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 7, 2015
And as Charles spots in an earlier tweet, the New York Daily News continues its epic meltdown.
YES, BUT WHICH NATION? “Barack Obama reassures nation after terrorist attacks,” claims the London Telegraph’s homepage:
And to think, I remember when the Telegraph was considered a conservative newspaper.
AND TO THINK, THEY ONCE SEEMED SANER THAN THE NEW YORK TIMES: The New York Daily News Hates Everything America Stands For.
74 YEARS AGO TODAY, THE JAPANESE BOMBED PEARL HARBOR. Then FDR gave a speech warning about bigoted backlash, and announcing that we couldn’t beat fascism with guns.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on Liberal Nihilism in a Nutshell:
Obama had been elected in 2008 not on what he stood for or wished to accomplish—indeed voters had no idea of what “hope and change” actually meant—but largely for his iconic status as the first mixed-race president, and a perfect storm of events that favored his nontraditional Perot-like candidacy: the September 14, 2008, financial meltdown that at last saw him take a permanent lead in the polls, unhappiness over the Iraq war, the absence of an incumbent vice president or president in the race (the first time since 1952), and John McCain’s lackluster campaign whose central premise was to avoid any negative campaigning that might be libeled as racially driven. The result was that voters did what they had never done in the last half-century: elected a liberal from north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Obama’s dilemma was the same one facing the new nihilistic Democratic Party. Its agenda, once equal opportunity was achieved, became an equality of result, engineered and coerced by the federal government—an ideology opposed by a majority of Americans. The natural expressions of that nihilism were symbolically expressed in the strange careers of “Mattress Girl,” Sandra Fluke, Ahmed the clockmaker, Eric Holder, the National Council of La Raza, and the hunger strike in Missouri Jonathan Butler, the multimillionaire’s son. Its iconographies were the Pajama Boy ads, the “Life of Julia” video, and the hockey-stick climate graph.
The ideological success of Obamism, to the degree that it exists, rests largely in using sympathetic media, universities, foundations, the entertainment industry, and billionaire progressive activists—in the other words, the small but highly wealthy, influential and powerful coastal populations—to convince Americans that it is hip and cool to support agendas that they otherwise suspect, and to scare them that the alternative is a racist, sexist, homophobic America run by wealthy, cruel white male Christians.
Related: John Hawkins on “The Tribalist Liberal Losers Who Want Virtue On The Cheap.”
THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM, AND BOTH TERMS ARE PRETTY DARN DESCRIPTIVE: Harvard Law School Untaped: The Inmates Demand Control of the Asylum. Go ahead, guys. Wreck Harvard. It’s just better for the other, non-crazy law schools.
JOHN C. WRIGHT: Asleep forever.
One might ask: how many people will the Muslims have to shoot before the Left realizes that the Muslim doctrines telling them God wants them to shoot people is the source of the problem, and not the lack of a government-enforced static global climate system? How long until they wake up? . . .
How long until the Left wake up? The answer is: NEVER.
The Left will never wake up to reality for precisely the reason that Leftism is a mental system of excuses and psychological tricks and traps meant to allow the Leftist to escape from reality.
That is what all their rigmarole, jabberwocky, lies and evasions, all their complex obfuscations, and penning endless tomes of endless nonsense from Marx to Keynes to Al Gore, all their riots, marches, protests, sit-ins, think-tanks, media moguls, money laundering, awards shows, convulsions, antics, stunts, clamor, libel, slander, and cacophony is for: Reality avoidance.
That is all that it is for.
Read the whole thing.
HOW MANY SPANISH GALLEONS ARE THERE OFF THE US COASTS: Spanish galleon may contain biggest treasure haul ever found on seabed.
A LITTLE RED DRESS WAS RULED OUT: To Get Obama’s Attention, ISIS Renames Self ‘Global Warming’.
TO ROOM 101 WITH THEM: Mandatory Indoctrination for BBC Officials who Broke Climate “Rules”. One wishes one of them would say Eppur si muove.
THERE GOES EUROPE CARBON QUOTA: Sky lights up over Sicily as Mount Etna’s Voragine crater erupts.
WEIRDLY NOT TALKING ABOUT THE US TREASURY: Our Black Hole’s Magnetic Field Has Been Studied For The First Time.