THE SOLDIER/CIVILIAN DISTINCTION DOES NOT EXIST IN HAMAS TERRITORY:
This is a gigantic story
The person holding Noa Argamani hostage in his home was an Al Jazeera “journalist” who was ALSO Hamas’ Ministry of Labor spokesperson
His father (also in the house) is a doctor
And all of this was in a “refugee camp”
Dear the West, you’ve been played https://t.co/7ADundzET8
— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) June 9, 2024
INSURRECTION:
Per NBC: “Police said they attempted to arrest one person who climbed a statue, but members of the crowd intervened.” So we are just going to leave that there, then? https://t.co/EKjAjbxcTY
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 9, 2024
Related:
Biden claimed to have run on Charlottesville. Now this is happening at his front door and crickets. https://t.co/xq6W4XlYJN
— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) June 9, 2024
MICHAEL GOODWIN: Joe Biden’s D-Day speech was a bitter mockery of Ronald Reagan.
Joe Biden’s trip to France proved two big things: He’s no Ronald Reagan, and he forgot to pack his patriotism.
Along the way, he also managed to cheapen historic heroes by trying to score partisan political points with attacks on Donald Trump and House Republicans.
Whatever happened to the tradition that partisanship stops at the water’s edge?
Other than that, heckuva job, Mr. President.
Biden’s visit to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion was overshadowed from the start by Reagan’s exceptional speech at the same spot 40 years earlier.
Although the contrast must have eaten at Biden, who bitterly opposed almost everything Reagan did and stood for, White House aides used the Gipper’s speech as a guide for Biden’s.
Joe Biden’s trip to France proved two big things: He’s no Ronald Reagan, and he forgot to pack his patriotism.
Along the way, he also managed to cheapen historic heroes by trying to score partisan political points with attacks on Donald Trump and House Republicans.
To crib so shamelessly from Reagan’s 1984 speech, there has to be some sadistic element of the “anything you put on that teleprompter, Ron Burgundy will read” mindset to Biden’s speechwriters. They had to know that doing so would simultaneously cause reminders of Joe’s long history of plagiarism, and illustrate Biden’s increasingly diminishing state:
Joe Biden essentially plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 speech at Pointe du Hoc today in Normandy. Watch these clips side by side. Wow: pic.twitter.com/jeGgTS2Nnm
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 7, 2024
NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE: The Press Reactions to Israel Rescuing the Hostages Will Make Your Blood Boil.
There are three things certain in life: Death, taxes, and the mainstream press being the worst people on earth. The sheer ability of the journalistic class to take any issue and come down on the wrong side of it is legendary. That dynamic didn’t change after Israel rescued four hostages on Saturday morning.
As RedState reported, a joint operation between the IDF, ISA, and police forces entered the city of Nuseirat, a supposed “refugee camp,” after discovering their location. The hostages were being held in “civilian” homes, with Hamas fighters responding to an all-call to attack the area after the rescue attempt was discovered. That led to a tense firefight in the streets, with a helicopter eventually providing evac from the nearby beach.
Now, you’d think the press would be very interested to know why hostages were being held in “civilian” homes in the middle of a “refugee camp.” That would seem the most prudent question when discussing casualties as a result of the rescue operation. Instead, they simply went to bat for Hamas.
Here’s a primer from The Washington Post before we get to one of the more unbelievable examples.
“How dare those Jews rescue their hostages!” — WaPo, outraged. pic.twitter.com/JYnZdY5ZaC
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) June 9, 2024
Everything about that headline is carefully crafted to mislead. For one, the claim that “more than 200 Palestinians killed” is completely unverified. Those numbers come directly from the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Ministry of Health.” Also absent in them is any admission of how many of the dead were combatants, either because they were members of Hamas or chose to fire on the Israeli forces.
If only the Post had warned us about unverified casualty numbers from the “Gaza Ministry of Health.” Or as the kids say these days, life comes at you fast: Women and children of Gaza are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises, AP data analysis finds.
—AP article appearing in the Washington Post, on Friday.
(Yes, the one and the same AP: Israel Shared Intelligence to Us Showing Hamas Operated Inside Building Where AP, Al-Jazeera Had Offices.)
UPDATE: The Biggest Media Scandal of the Era Has Arrived. “In a normal media ecosystem, there would be extensive internal reviews at the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC and others, concluding with a clear plan for reforming the newsgathering process at these places and holding accountable those responsible for setting the world aflame with obvious lies. I won’t hold my breath. But the AP report, while late, is the first sign of a waking conscience among the press. May there be others.”
#1 AT AMAZON: Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal To Share His Life & His Love. #CommissionEarned
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Jill Biden, Edith Wilson, and the Changing American State.
Biden’s unusually intense reliance on his wife as a cognitive enhancement and an image protector is as inarguable as it is provocative. According to an NBC News profile, she is known in the White House as “the Decider,” and she wields “unparalleled influence.” “She is,” the profile continues, “her husband’s foremost defender. She guards his interests and dignity….Her input is essential in some of the weightiest political and personnel decisions the 46th president confronts.” She is to Biden what the left used to claim Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush, i.e., the power behind the throne.
All of this has drawn comparisons between Jill Biden and another uniquely powerful First Lady, Edith Wilson.
Some historians consider Edith Wilson the nation’s “first woman president”—and not without cause. When her husband, the execrable Woodrow Wilson, suffered a debilitating stroke on October 2, 1919, Mrs. Wilson essentially took over running the White House and, by extension, the entire executive branch. She screened all government business brought to the Oval Office. She handled all serious matters. Because he was left unable to write his name, she forged his signature on official documents. Most notably, Edith Wilson guarded her husband’s “interests and dignity” by keeping his infirmity secret from the public. As William Hazelgrove noted in his 2016 biography of her, Madam President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson, “her Oval Office authority was acknowledged in Washington circles at the time—one senator called her “the presidentress who had fulfilled the dream of suffragettes by changing her title from First Lady to Acting First Man.”
The biggest difference between Edith Wilson and Jill Biden is that Wilson got away with it. While Jill Biden is front-and-center in her husband’s public life at all times, earning the admiration of his supporters and drawing the ire of his opponents, Edith Wilson worked effectively and quietly behind the scenes. Through quiet diligence and discretion, she was able to convince those outside of Washington that all was well in the White House and that her husband was still in charge. His stroke occurred more than 17 months before Warren G. Harding was inaugurated on March 4, 1921. That’s more than 35% of his second term and nearly one-fifth of his entire presidency.
Edith Wilson was able to keep this secret and succeed where Jill Biden has failed, not because she was especially crafty or exceptionally dishonest (although she was both) but because the president was not, at the time, the most important person in the world. The government was small enough and the presidency unimportant enough that no one missed Woodrow Wilson in the slightest. No one outside of Washington noticed or cared that he wasn’t around. No one needed him to fix their problems, right their wrongs or deliver retribution upon their enemies. No one needed him to be the cause of all economic activity or the source of the nation’s self-image. He wasn’t the “empathizer in chief” or a powerful father-like figure. He was a just a guy, albeit a guy with an important job, but not one that was so important that it completely preoccupied everyone’s waking hours. Celebrities didn’t obsess about the man or deliver foul-mouthed press conferences declaring that the world’s fate depended on his reelection. No one cared—and nor should they have.
I’m not sure about that last part, given Wilson’s role in creating the modern American state:
As Robert Curry noted at the American Thinker, 1913 was the Turning Point.
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was the newly elected president. Wilson and his fellow progressives scorned the Constitution and the Declaration. They moved swiftly to replace the Founders’ republic with a new regime.
There is widespread agreement that Wilson did not always show good judgment – for example, in his blunders in international relations – but in the project of overturning the Founding, he and the movement he led selected their targets shrewdly. By the time he left office, the American republic was, as they say, history. The fundamentals of the new regime were in place, and the expansion of government under FDR, LBJ, and Obama was made easy, perhaps even inevitable.
Nineteen-thirteen gave us the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution. That year also saw the creation of the Federal Reserve. This burst of changes marks the effective beginning of the Progressive Era in American politics, the era in which we now live. Wilson was to do much more that would once have been considered out of bounds, but these three changes were enough to change everything. In 1913, the fundamental agreement the Founders made with the American people about the relation of the states and the federal government was broken.
What followed was a tumultuous — and not coincidentally, largely forgotten — decade in America: You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for.
I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.
Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview.
As with the moral revolution of 2020, the hangover that followed was enormous for the American left. In his 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, Fred Siegel wrote that in order to put a fresh PR spin on their ideology after the horrors of the Wilson administration, the self-described “Progressives” of the 20th century’s early years began to call themselves “liberals” instead — a huge stolen base, considering that there’s a vast difference between the traditional laissez-faire meaning of classical liberalism and the racism, eugenics, and “moral equivalent of war” obsessions of “Progressivism.”
MAKE THEM PAY: Universities nationwide face antisemitism lawsuits en masse.
ACE: The Hollywood Reporter Wonders If This Time, Hollywood Really Is In Trouble.
You can’t survive long on costly failure after costly failure.
The Summer Box Office Crisis: Is the Sky Really Falling This Time?With fewer big movies out as a result of the strikes, theatrical revenue is plummeting every week as fans grow accustomed to staying at-home.
ComicsGate had a good point about the word fans: Don’t call them “fans.”
Call them what they are: Customers, or potential customers.
“Fans” suggests that people love you so much they will show up for whatever crap you churn out. t “Customers” suggests you have to woo them and provide them with good value for money.
Hollywood would do well to correct its mindset. No one needs what they’re selling. It’s not fuel or food. It’s a diversion.
They need to stop thinking they’re stars and “creators” and start thinking that they work in a customer-service industry.
And when the customer isn’t being served, there are ultimately repercussions: Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas franchisee closes theaters in North Texas, Minnesota.
MELANIE PHILLIPS WAS WARNING ABOUT THIS OVER 20 YEARS AGO BUT NO ONE LISTENED: A World-Historical Transformation Is Taking Place in Britain, Yet Few Have Noticed. “A world-historical societal transformation is taking place before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. Britain, the erstwhile leader of the Western world and the foundation and source of English-speaking civilization, is in its last days as a free society, and will soon become an Islamic state. Yet despite the mountains of evidence that this transformation is taking place, many will still deny that it is happening at all. They may not even admit it when it overtakes them personally.”
It’s an object lesson in how effectively the left uses bogus claims of racism to silence its opposition.
SOME SERGEANT NAMED SCHULTZ WAS IN CHARGE: Columbia University Closes Investigation Into Harassment of Jewish Students Without Identifying a Single Suspect.
They’d have retina prints and credit histories if it was an anti-trans mob.
STRAIGHT WHITE GIRLS NOT WELCOME: Caitlin Clark will be left off the Team USA roster for Paris Olympics, source says.
I’VE ALWAYS DESPISED THE OLYMPICS AS CORRUPT AND STUPID, SO THIS MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Olympics Create List of Banned Words for Journalists In Regard To Trans Athletes.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Can democracy survive the ‘defenders of democracy?’
In 2024, the greatest test for our Constitution may be whether it can survive the “Defenders of Democracy.”
Ronald Reagan often said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Today, Reagan’s line cannot compare with the line that sends many of us into a fetal position: “I’m a Democrat and I am here to save democracy.”
The jump scare claim is that unless citizens vote for us, the end of democracy will begin shortly. In 2022, House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told “Fox News Sunday” that “democracy will be ending” if Democrats lost the midterms.
The rhetoric has continued to ramp up with the upcoming election.
From President Joe Biden to a host of progressive politicians and pundits, the 2024 election is all about saving democracy. The public has been told that if the Democrats lose power, citizens will be living in a tyrannical hellscape. Vice President Kamala Harris stated in one interview that 2024 “genuinely could be” the last democratic election in America’s history. Dozens of Democrats have said that democracy will end if Biden is not reelected.
The Washington Post even ran an op-ed titled, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Many Americans have tuned out the overheated rhetoric, as shown by Donald Trump’s continuing lead in many polls even after his conviction in Manhattan. The warnings also ignore that our system has checks and balances that protected democracy for centuries as the world’s oldest and most successful constitutional system. These dire predictions would require all three branches to fail in an unprecedented fashion.
While these figures cite the Capitol riot on Jan 6., 2021 as evidence of the pending collapse of democracy, the system worked as designed on that day. Congress refused to be deterred by the riot and virtually every court (including many presided over by Trump-appointed judges) rejected challenges to the election.
The most obvious threats today to the democratic system are coming from the left, not the right.
Read the whole thing.
THEY WRECK EVERY INSTITUTION THEY DON’T CONTROL: Prof. Steven Calabresi: The Left Wing Attack on Judicial Independence and on Justice Alito. “The Left is so mad about the overruling of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the abortion rights case, that they are now trying to force the Supreme Court’s two most principled and brilliant members into resigning or recusing themselves from participating in important cases about the 2020 and 2024 elections, which they have a constitutional duty to help decide.”
JOEL KOTKIN: Libertarians can stay relevant by defending the middle class: They can drop the dogmatic theory and stand up for free-market pragmatism instead. “This year, in which the electorate is restless and disgusted with their main awful party choices, the libertarians are playing a very small role. They are likely to be overwhelmed not only by the candidacy of Independent Robert Kennedy Jr., who was disdained at the convention despite making a strong case against the censorship regimes of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They may not also beat pro-Hamas candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.”
I spent some time in the Libertarian Party in the 1990s, when it seemed to be making inroads. But it wasn’t ready for prime time and it’s gone downhill since.
OPEN THREAD: Who inspires your fabled fools? That’s my claim to fame!
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX wants to build 1 Starship megarocket a day with new Starfactory.
I WAS TOLD THAT THIS DRUG WAS ENTIRELY BENIGN: Huge Study Reveals How Often Cannabis Triggers Psychotic Episodes.
SCIENCE: How far have the medical journals fallen? This far.
I SHED NO TEARS OVER COLLATERAL DAMAGE:
“One of the most complicated hostage rescue missions in history.”
The operation to rescue the hostages from Nusayrat was named "Summer Seeds" and is defined by the IDF as one of the most complex ever for hostage rescue.
The hostages were held in a heavily civilian populated… pic.twitter.com/GOVqaN3L1Y
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 8, 2024
F*ck you EU 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/i6fZzWHjH6
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) June 8, 2024
“We condemn the disproportionate loss of life among Germans during the operation for liberation of Jews from Auschwitz.” pic.twitter.com/LbgQ0PE4R0
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) June 8, 2024
Flashback: The European Union’s Proxy War.
More here.
UPDATE:
Part of the reason Hamas/supporters are so viscerally upset about Israel’s rescue of four innocent hostages from Gaza is that the news will remind a lot of people about the rest of the innocent hostages Hamas monsters have been holding against their will for nearly 250 days. 🇮🇱
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 8, 2024
It has now been confirmed that Noa Argamani was held by Hamas in the home of a Palestinian family, while the other three hostages were held at a separate home.
So tell me again how the so-called ‘civilians’ in Gaza are not just aiding and abetting Hamas? pic.twitter.com/8V4IQmvNyy
— Arsen Ostrovsky 🎗️ (@Ostrov_A) June 8, 2024
There is no soldier/civilian line in Gaza; it exists only in pro-Hamas propaganda.
GEORGE KORDA: Here’s what separation of church and state actually means and it does not apply to faith.
Archived version is here in case the above link doesn’t work.
THEY’VE KIND OF RUINED THEM: No One Wants a New Car Now. Here’s Why. Why are so many Americans forgoing new vehicles? Used cars are not just a better bargain, they retain designs and features more coveted than their high-tech replacements.
They’re bossy, they’ve subsituted touchscreens for knobs even though touchscreens are distracting and less safe because they’re cheaper, and most people don’t want the cockpit of their car to look like a home theater. The Insta-Wife hates screens in the car and bought a year-old Audi loaner from the dealer last year because the new cars had huge screens that couldn’t be turned off, while the older model had a small screen with an off switch. And I was writing about this phenomenon decades ago.
UPDATE: Second link was wrong before; fixed now. Sorry!
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Killer bear: Woman’s death inside her home marks California’s first fatal black bear attack. Probably shouldn’t have chosen the bear . . .
This should end the “controversy” over killing a bear in your living room, but it won’t, because the controversy comes from morons.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.