The Razor

Glenn Reynolds is to the blogosphere what TV Guide is to television viewers. Love him (for causing an Instalanche) or hate him (for never linking to your site), Glenn speaks eloquently with links. Case in point, this post:

THE MANTRA USED TO BE “LISTEN TO THE GENERALS!” Now it’s how dare those generals speak!

Obama promised change – and he has sure changed his mind about a lot of things since he took office. And while Bush will someday get credit for success in Iraq, Obama will just as sure get the blame for failure in Afghanistan.

More here. Also, am I the only one who gets a kick out of those who have never served in the military (Pelosi) complaining about the failure to follow the chain of command?

Yale Muslim students are pissed about the appearance of Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist living under death threats for the portrayal of Prophet Muhammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.
Members of the Yale Muslim Students Association have said they are “deeply hurt and offended” that Westergaard will speak on the New Haven, Conn., campus, though they do not plan to protest. The group said Yale fails to recognize the “religious and racial” sensitivities surrounding the matter.

“As an institution purportedly committed to making our campus an educational environment where all students feel equally comfortable, we feel that by hosting Kurt Westergaard Yale is undermining its commitment to creating a nurturing learning environment by failing to recognize the religious and racial sensitivity of the issue,” the group said in a statement.

“Certainly, it would be unlikely for a white supremacist or a Holocaust denier to be a distinguished guest speaker at Yale; hosting individuals who propagate hate is not only a disservice to the minorities that hate is directed towards but to the campus community as a whole.”

Since when has the mission of colleges – especially Ivy League ones – been to provide a “comfortable… nurturing learning environment”? Truth is not pretty. It is often brutal, ugly and downright unpleasant. Yet these students seem unaware of that fact. Instead they want the politically correct liberal arts equivalent of the Wiggles or the Teletubbies – where anything that could make a student squirm is scrubbed from the curriculum.

Worse, Yale and other colleges regularly host holocaust deniers.

Students get face time with Ahmadinejad
Sept. 28, 2009
Iranian foreign relations went from theory to reality for 17 students from the “Iran in International Relations since 1979” seminar last week when they attended a private reception with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York City.

Before an audience of about 100 students from American universities on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad answered questions politely and effusively but avoided directly responding to controversial questions. Though students in attendance said Ahmadinejad’s arguments were logical, they disagreed with many of his statements, including his denial of existing scientific evidence that proves the Holocaust occurred.

We visited with our elderly neighbors tonight. After a dinner of home-made potato soup and grilled cheese, the woman wanted to show us some pictures of her bunnies. As she was flipping through a photo album, she was narrating the subjects. “Here’s our chickens. Here’s our bunny rabbits. Here’s the space shuttle exploding. Here’s Pumpkin as a puppy…”

We stopped her and she pulled out the snapshot of the Challenger disaster. She had an entire series of the launch taken from a church parking lot – about a dozen snapshots all with the church’s cross in the foreground starting with the shuttle in its first seconds of flight and ending with the falling debris and unforgettable crazy spirals made by the solid fuel rocket boosters.

It turns out she once lived near Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and rarely missed a launch until she left Florida and moved back to North Carolina. She was there that day and witnessed first hand the event that I saw on a television screen in college.

I asked her how people reacted, and she acted it out for me. There were gasps followed by shouts of “it’s exploded!” to cries of “no, no, no.” She said that her prayer group held hands as the rockets continued their crazy spiral and the shuttle’s remains rained down on the sea and prayed for the families of the astronauts.

We then went back to her pictures of baby goats and chickens, but I won’t be forgetting those snapshots anytime soon.

French President Sarkozy thinks that Obama is weak and naive.

‘President Obama dreams of a world without weapons…but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

A Frenchman with balls. Mon dieu!

I think we’ll be seeing more pieces like this over the next few years.

President Bush made a courageous decision in the summer of 2006 to reverse direction, but not the reversal sought by Congress (including then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden), the American public, the overwhelming majority of the press (including this newspaper), and even most of his own military advisers. Instead of cutting our losses and pulling out of Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, Bush doubled down. He invested more troops and, more important, embraced an entirely new strategy.

And Bush was right.

Anyone comfortable with children being taught in a public school to sing the praises of Obama might want to consider the future when the Republicans take back the White House.

It’s difficult for Obamanistas to consider today, but just as morning follows night it will happen.

We’ve got to get the government out of the Arts because it’s encouraging stupidity:

Kim Hastreiter, founder of Paper Magazine, developed an idea to create a Department of Alternative Thinking, a “volunteer brain trust/think tank made up of the country’s most creative and maverick minds,” as participants made plans for a follow-up conference.

Department of Alternative Thinking. You just can’t make this stuff up folks. Your tax dollars at work. For change!

Yet another reason to despise America’s worst president.

As Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU’s Voting Project, relates in his book A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, Carter’s board tried to stop the construction of a new “Elementary Negro School” in 1956. Local white citizens had complained that the school would be “too close” to a white school. As a result, “the children, both colored and white, would have to travel the same streets and roads in order to reach their respective schools.” The prospect of black and white children commingling on the streets on their way to school was apparently so horrible to Carter that he requested that the state school board stop construction of the black school until a new site could be found. The state board turned down Carter’s request because of “the staggering cost.” Carter and the rest of the Sumter County School Board then reassured parents at a meeting on October 5, 1956, that the board “would do everything in its power to minimize simultaneous traffic between white and colored students in route to and from school.”

That’s alot more than Joe Wilson ever did.

And why you shouldn’t.

The president scores highly at the UN for refusing to project American values and military might on the world stage, with rare exceptions like the war against the Taliban. His appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear free world, his siding with Marxists in Honduras, his talk of a climate change deal, have all won him plaudits in the large number of UN member states where US foreign policy has traditionally been viewed with contempt. – Nile Gardiner, writing at the Daily Telegraph

Unlike many on the right I don’t instinctively fear Russia or the former Soviet Union. Having studied Russian history and culture over the years I appreciate the suffering its citizens have gone through – usually at the hands of their own government. But understanding Russia one appreciates that at heart it views itself as in competition with the West – a zero sum game whereby any perceived weakness of the Western powers is perceived as making Russia that much stronger.

Eastern European countries also understand this, which is why they are pissed at being stabbed in the back by the Obama administration (who can’t even seem to get the protocol right when wielding the knife). Having been occupied by the Soviet Union for most of the last century, they aren’t very keen on being threatened with another occupation, especially when they see themselves as a pawn by an American administration keen to “reset” relations with their former occupier.

So being an ex-diplomat-wannabe myself, I propose that we offer Russia a grand bargain: They can occupy France, Germany, the Benelux countries, the Nordic states (except Denmark because the Danes understand America better than most of the Euroweenies), Portugal and Spain in exchange for leaving alone the Eastern European countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine. We can even throw in my ancestral Ireland to sweeten the deal. Moscow wants a warm-weather port? How about Lisbon? Is that warm enough for you?

That way most of the Europeans who hate America will get their wish, and those who want to be our allies, get theirs. Russia gets some new friends – and everybody wins.

UPDATE: Since I got someone’s Irish up in the comments I reconsidered and decided to swap out Ireland for New Zealand in the Grand Bargain. Ireland may have its doubts about the USA, but aside from throwing Mary Robinson at us and being neutral during WW2 it has generally been a good ally. So sorry Liamascorcaigh.

As I’ve documented here, here and here, New Zealanders hate America with a passion that scares their sheep. So that they can sleep soundly, I would offer this fly on the windscreen of American foreign policy to the Russians gratis.

Guess it’s obvious why I washed out of the Foreign Service interview process.

The tyrant always talks as if he’s preserving the best interests of his people when he actually acts to undermine them. – Ramman Kenoun

It is claimed that in 1775 Samuel Johnson said “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” although the context of his statement has been lost over time. After reading this piece by Victor David Hanson I’m beginning to wonder if Johnson were around today if he would say the same about claims of racism.

Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming invective episode. Harvard-law educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by comparing her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel who had serially dodged his tax obligations claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.

What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy.

It’s actually not much different then the African kleptocrats who have raped that continent of its wealth and continue to keep the African people in poverty. Dictators like Robert Mugabe, for example continue to blame the US, Europe and the few remaining whites in Zimbabwe for his own policies that have turned one of the most resource rich countries in the world into a shithole.

Will Collier explains why Carter haters like me simply laughed when Carter crawled out from under his rock and peeped about Joe Wilson’s outburst.

And for those too young to remember history’s greatest monster (thanks, Glenn), Jimmah’s empty slander is just another sign of the unbecoming moral vanity at the heart of the modern Left, to say nothing of its overweening intolerance for any hint of dissent.

Yep. Trotting out America’s worst president only proves that the Left hates dissent almost as much as its heroes Che and Stalin. Fortunately for the rest of us their distaste for guns prevents them from handling dissent the same way. It’s much harder to do a Katyn forest or a Great Purge when you support a ban on assault rifles.

A light fog sits in the field near the river as vegetation pops with drops of rain collected on its leaves during several passing showers through the day. A halo of light surrounds the street light near the barn, but there is no sign of the coyotes that appeared there last week. Maybe they have taken heed of my warnings – splashing the bushes and trees with my own pee – leaving a message they understand that says “Here is the boundary between us. Do not cross.”

Of all the places I have been, from the streets of Chicago to the rain forest of Tanzania to the bridges over the Kamo-gawa in Kyoto manned by chanting monks, I never imagined myself here in Carolina with the mountains in the backdrop somewhere through the darkness and the fog. Not that such things matter. Why should we be limited by our lack of creativity after all?

I came to this place because I had to. I needed a place to breathe, to take a respite however brief to view the trajectory of my life now in mid-flight. I needed the uncountable trees that I now call my own whose species are more foreign to me than the acacias and ficus species I learned to identify in Africa. I needed the river whose water I haven’t even touched yet, but take solace in simply knowing that it is there. Most of all I needed the freedom for my suburban soul to thrill itself before it lost the capability forever.

Those are the emotional reasons for coming here that don’t get explained to those I meet.

Free Frank Warner reports the 20 things the Press will not report on while Democrats rule. My personal faves:

• The firing of federal inspector generals for purely political reasons.

• Subjecting Soldiers, Marines, Airmen and Sailors to poor health care at military hospitals.

• Congress leaders accepting kickbacks from General Motors or Chrysler officials in exchange for laws giving GM or Chrysler an unfair advantage over other automakers.

But read the entire thing…

My only solace? The few people left who get their news from the MSM are probably too old or too stupid to get it anywhere else.