Archive for 2016

TRUTH: Rand Paul Asks Voters: ‘Have Any of You Ever Worked for a Poor Person?’

Paul, an ophthalmologist, urged Americans to consider that everyone is “interconnected” and whether or not something that helps the business owner also helps the individual employee.

“Our taxes are chasing businesses away. Our regulations are chasing business away and then it is made worse by the fact that we have allowed our government to operate by executive fiat. What does that mean? The president is just doing whatever he wants,” Paul said, citing Burger King moving to Canada to pay less in corporate taxes.

“The president has a Republican Congress and he can’t get anything passed and he can’t pass legislation so he’s just writing executive orders. Well, our Founding Fathers would be horrified by this,” he added.

Analysis: True.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Germany On The Brink.

If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.

You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence. The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.

This need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men. It means giving up the fond illusion that Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in the present.

It means that Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.

Yes.

SHOCKING, IF TRUE: All Of The ‘Sex And The City’ Plot Lines Were Actually Real. “They had a rule . . . Nothing can be written that didn’t literally happen to someone in the writers’ room or someone they knew firsthand. It couldn’t be my father’s brother’s sister’s shoe repair guy — the outlandish physical, sexual things that happened . . . really did happen.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Forget the Arab Spring. Now It’s The Western Spring.

The tension between the forces of political correctness and the pent-up forces of repressed cultural traditions is now bursting like a spring wound up beyond containment. Things may start slowly at first but ramp up rapidly, mirroring Cornelius Ryan’s famous description of the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance as the Red Army stood at the gates of Berlin. . . .

Seventy years later, the question facing people caught in the middle is where to run. There is nowhere obvious. In Europe, Ross Douthat argues, all exits are temporarily blocked. The left has destroyed the middle, leaving only a choice of extremes. “Just last week Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.” . . .

Everywhere one looks the matches are being lit. The sudden outburst of resistance comes the end of what Jonah Goldberg called “a bad day” for the Narrative. A bad sequence of decades since 2001, more like it.

Looking for the exits? Hardly. I’m not trapped in here with you, enemies of western civilization. You’re trapped in here with me. And a lot of people like me, whose patience has come close to an end.