I MEAN, IT’S NOT LIKE BERNIE HIRED PROMINENT ANTISEMITE LINDA SARSOUR AS A CAMPAIGN SURROGATE OR ANYTHING! OH, WAIT. And can’t Bernie’s speechwriter be more… articulate? [UPDATE: Turns out this is the same guy who waxed poetic a few years back about Venezuela’s “economic miracle.”]

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS STILL DISHONEST, AND WATER IS STILL WET: The New York Times Continues its Dishonest Assault on the Trump Executive Order on Antisemitism.

ONCE COULD BE AN HONEST MISTAKE; TWICE IS EITHER GROSS INCOMPETENCE, GROSS DISHONESTY, OR BOTH: The New York Times Continues to Misreport the Trump Executive Order on Antisemitism:

After causing the freakout, the Times improved but didn’t really correct its piece, and was pilloried on Twitter, including by liberals, for its bad reporting.

Unfortunately, this didn’t dissuade the Times, which tonight posted a hit piece on Ken Marcus, head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, for his role in the executive order. You will not learn from this piece that the executive order originated in language from a bill sponsored by Democrats, nor that it has direct antecedents in Obama and Bush II administration policy. Instead, the reporter, Erica Green, asserts that Marcus “has asserted a Jewish ‘national origin’ by fiat,” as if it didn’t reflect policy established in the Bush administration and adhered to by the Obama administration.

MORE ON THE NY TIMES-INSPIRED FREAKOUT OVER TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON ANTISEMITISM: Not only is there nothing sinister about the order, there is nothing novel; the Bush Administration’s and Obama Administration’s Department of Educations had both stated that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects Jews from discrimination based on race/national origin, if the perpetrator is basing his discrimination on perceptions of race or national origin rather than hostility to the Jewish religion. The only thing new in the Trump definition is that it’s official policy via executive order, rather than the subject of informal guidance from the Office of Civil Rights.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL IS AN ENEMY OF FREEDOM: Recently, a pro-Israel group at York University in Ontario held an event that featured former Israeli soldiers. Violence ensued, apparently precipitated by leftist protesters. And Amnesty Canada blames.… York University for allowing the event to proceed, and allowing members of the public to attend:

Given conflicting views about what happened that evening, the worrying ongoing impact on students at York and the important human rights considerations that are at stake, Amnesty International urges York University to go further and convene an independent review of all circumstances associated with the Herut Zionism Club event and its aftermath, with a mandate that includes examination of:
considerations that were taken into account in approving the event, including the fact that the speakers were former members of a military with a clear record of responsibility for war crimes and other serious human rights violations; decisions made with respect to the presence of members of the Jewish Defense League on campus.

WHAT DO YOU CALL A CANDIDATE POOL WITH TWO WOMEN, A GAY MAN, A JEW, A HALF JEW, AND A CATHOLIC?: If you’ve drank a certain type of Kool-Aid, you call this “not diverse”–even though there has been only one Catholic president, and no gay, Jewish, or woman presidents. The obsession with arbitrary and artificial “official” minority status may be the single worse feature of the modern chattering classes.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): On the other hand, if all the candidates were black, we’d be hearing how diverse the Democratic field is!

BUT CONTRIBUTIONS FROM LAWYERS WHO REPRESENT CONVICTED MURDERERS AND TERRORISTS ARE UNDOUBTEDLY A-OK: Buttigieg campaign returns donations from Kavanaugh’s lawyers.

Q. HOW DO YOU SAY “JEREMY CORBYN” IN YIDDISH?: A. Bernie Sanders. Get this: The Israeli government is too “racist” for Bernie’s taste, so he wants to give money instead to the progressive humanitarians of … Hamas! No word on how Bernie feels about throwing gays off rooftops.

WASHINGTON POST, 800 YEARS AGO: Genghis Khan, beloved father to thousands, expert horsebreeder at helm of Mongolia, dies.

MCGOVERN 2020: From (my moderate-liberal Democratic friend) Max Stearns: The Elizabeth Warren Fantasy. Worth reading, but not if asides hostile to Trump will ruin your day.

THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S ACLU: UConn students arrested for engaging in offensive speech. The ACLU of Connecticut puts out a press release denouncing racism at U Conn, apparently endorsing new hate speech rules, and opining that “policing is an inherently white supremacist institution.” Only at the very end of the release do we get a statement from the national ACLU that the speech in question is constitutionally protected.

THIS ISN’T YOUR OLDER BROTHER’S GQ: I have a hard time believing that any substantial percentage of young man are looking for this in a men’s magazine.

NEOCONSERVATIVE FANTASY LIVES ON: Properly understood, neoconservatism is an ideology that supports using U.S. diplomatic and especially military power to spread liberal democracy throughout the world. One would think that Afghanistan and Iraq would have taught the establishment some humility in this regard, but op-eds like this one by William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral and former commander of the United States Special Operations Command, suggest not:

We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?

As is often the case, Trump’s blunderbuss style is far from ideal, but is useful in showing the rot in the establishment.

If we can’t have faith in our nation’s principles, why would the men and women of this nation join the military? And if they don’t join, who will protect us? If we are not the champions of the good and the right, then who will follow us? And if no one follows us — where will the world end up?

Do high-level military officials really believe that Americans join the armed forces to try to liberate “the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?” Or that the U.S. military is capable of doing this? Has nobody noticed the hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives lost trying to fix just Afghanistan, without any significant payoff? Exactly what does the McRaven think the U.S. military can do for the Rohingyas or the South Sudanese?

TRUE, BUT NOT NEW: Progressive base sees religious freedom as hate speech.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SEND IDIOT TRUST-FUND BABIES TO BE INDOCTRINATED AT LEFTIST PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES: They feel guilty that their parents’ created wealth and prosperity, and dissipate the family’s money on highly dubious leftist political ventures. Comment from a friend: “A bunch of Lillian Reardons.”

BUT MUH NARRATIVE: 32% of African American men would vote for Donald Trump over a generic Democratic nominee.

I THOUGHT PROGRESSIVES WERE AGAINST VICTIM-BLAMING: In the wake of a spate of violent crimes against visibly Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, Anti-Semitic hate crimes in NYC have risen significantly in 2019:

Lauter stressed that one of the keys to preventing hate crimes, especially among kids of different backgrounds, is education and long-term partnerships between religious and ethnic communities.

“The Jewish community at one point started withdrawing from its community relations agenda,” she said. “We’re feeling the repercussions now. This is hard work. You’ve got to do the long game on addressing these problems.”

If that’s not blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators, I don’t know what would be. And if the perps had been “white nationalists” instead of local, mostly minority, thugs, I’m pretty confident Lauter wouldn’t be claiming that the problem is insufficient efforts at community relations.

I WISH BERNIE THE BEST AS HE TRAVELS TO CUBA TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEIR EXCELLENT MEDICAL CARE (RIGHT?): Sanders treated for blocked artery.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF PEOPLE CHANGE POSITIONS DEPENDING ON THEIR PARTISAN PREFERENCES: Some of us are old enough to remember that Moveon.org was founded in 1998 to urge Congress to “move on” from impeachment and address “pressing issues facing the nation.” Times have changed.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: More Palestinian flags than British flags in evidence at British Labour Party conference. (H/T Jonathan Sacerdoti).

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…: John-Paul Pagano at NRO on modern blood libel:

Despite its lethality, anti-Semitism is the form of racism most often erased, excused, and even encouraged by people who identify as “antiracist.” One explanation for this phenomenon, increasingly dangerous as harassment, vandalism, and violence against Jews rise across the West, is the failure of Holocaust education to emphasize the importance of conspiracism in Nazi ideology. For their part, soi-disant American antiracists render Jews “white” and “privileged” through a limited lens of race and power, taking an approach that is an allotrope of anti-Semitism and disqualifies Jews from concern.

So when U.S. representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar resolved to visit Israel in August to showcase to the world its peculiar evil, and it emerged that Miftah, the Palestinian non-governmental organization co-sponsoring their trip, had published on its website that Jews bake Christian blood into their matzoh, most major media ignored it. For them the story was the erosion of liberal democracy by the tag team of Trump and Netanyahu, who had barred entry to the congresswomen. There is little indication that the blood libel stirred concern on the left where just a month earlier “Never again” was intoned relentlessly about Trump’s “concentration camps” at the border….

Under intense criticism, Miftah eventually retracted and apologized, but the medieval pitch of the piece was so true that I browsed their website for similar material and quickly found an article by Bouthaina Shaaban, who is now Bashar Assad’s media adviser. There Shaaban writes that Israel stole “Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs.” The blood libel was transferred to the Arab world by Christian missionaries, surfacing in a famous case at Damascus in 1840. Today it is a recurring feature of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.

THE MEDIA COVERED FOR OBAMA’S INCOMPETENCE LIKE IT COVERED FOR NOBODY SINCE AT LEAST FDR: Jamie Kirchik: Critics of the Trump administration’s foreign policy have forgotten the mistakes and misjudgments of its predecessor:

This was the constant, tediously narcissistic background music of the Obama presidency—that his youth and personal sympathy for those who perceive themselves to be the victims of American global hegemony somehow obviated the forces of history and ideology and culture, never mind what other nations perceived to be in their national interest. The Obamians’ determinist view of history could not recognise that the Cuban communists lock up independent journalists because the stale doctrine of Marxist-Leninism demands it; that Iran pledges “Death to Israel” because it sincerely seeks it, that the men in the Kremlin acquire actual glory from the serial humiliations they inflict upon Russia’s smaller neighbours; and that these phenomena derive from cultures and ideologies that will not be attenuated by American apologies and appeasement.

YOU CAN’T CONTROL PEOPLE WITHOUT VIOLENCE: Phil Magness: Even Swedish Socialism was Violent.

But there’s also a neglected dark side to the Swedish welfare model that its “democratic socialist” admirers seldom mention. That same welfare system developed in explicit conjunction with a violent and coercive eugenics policy, intended to ensure its fiscal solvency and prevent abuses of its programs by persons who were deemed genetically “unfit” by the state.

LAWS? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ LAWS: Bernie promises prosecutions of enemies of the people. Underlying violations of the law optional at best. Once a Bolshie always a Bolshie, I guess.

BERNIE SANDERS “JEW-WASHES” LINDA SARSOUR: Linda Sarsour emerges as surrogate for Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

Jew-washing is neologism someone invented for when antisemites on the left use their Jewish origins or closeness to a Jewish person to claim they are innocent of antisemitism, usually after engaging in antisemitic attacks on Israel or its Jewish supporters. So it’s clear what Sarsour gets out of being a Sanders surrogate–she gets to express public support for a leftist Jew, which she believes will rebut charges of antisemitism, despite her long record of it. But what is Sanders getting, beyond losing his last semblance of dignity?