America, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Israel, Media, Racism
As the media told it, not voting Obama was tantamount to racism. By the same (twisted) logic, not voting for McCain ought to have been considered reverse racism. By this calculus, black and Hispanic racism far exceeded Anglo-American alleged racism. Fifty five percent of Anglo-Americans voted McCain, while 95 percent of African-Americans and 67 percent of Latinos voted Obama!
America, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION
Tom Piatak writes a great column about a great American (with whom I’ve disagreed, a fact that has nothing to do with the man’s prescience and patriotism): “Pat Buchanan At 70: ‘He Told You So, You F****ing Fools!’” Read it on VDARE.COM, naturally:
“Both Bush and McCain swallowed the neoconservative line whole. Both see the mission of the United States as using its blood and treasure to spread’ ‘global democratic capitalism.’ Both welcome the mass immigration that is radically transforming the United States. … neither views America as a real country at all, but as the embodiment of an abstract political creed—the ‘first universal nation.’
Buchanan long ago warned that allowing neoconservatives to set the agenda would be calamitous for conservatives. His warning was unmistakably vindicated when the Republicans lost Congress in 2006. And if the American electorate rejects Bush and McCain next Tuesday, it will be rejecting neoconservatism, pure and simple.
Of course, Buchanan opposed the Iraq War that has cast its shadow over Bush’s presidency. He foresaw that removing Saddam Hussein would greatly strengthen Tehran and that an occupation of Iraq would be both costly and deadly.
More generally, Buchanan recognized that the end of the Cold War meant that America must begin reexamining its global commitments and pursuing a foreign policy in line with the one recommended by the Founders—and that failure to do so would be costly.”
The complete column on VDARE.COM.
Reports the Wall Street Journal:
“The world’s major central banks banded together Thursday to flood global money markets with massive amounts of U.S. dollars, in hopes of taming a major source of the tensions rocking the financial system.
[Global Power Boost chart]
In a concerted move, the U.S. Federal Reserve said it will expand or introduce measures to shuttle dollars to major European central banks, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan, so that those banks can provide short-term dollar funding to commercial banks. Officials in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other markets also pledged to inject more money into their financial systems.
The central banks’ moves came in the wake of a meltdown in global financial markets as short-term funding markets seized up and investors piled into U.S. Treasury bills in an unprecedented rush to safety. Concerns about redemptions in the $3.6 trillion money-market industry — a key provider of liquidity to short-term funding markets — and rising strains in the banking system had sent short-term funding rates sharply higher Wednesday. …
The U.S. Fed boosted its U.S. dollar swap line with foreign central banks by $180 billion. (The swap line is an arrangement through which foreign central banks can get U.S. dollars from the Fed.)”
[Snip]
I’m no economist, but as a devotee of Austrian economics, I can’t see how more credit is helpful when the proper correction ought to involve a continued contraction of the hitherto orgiastic lending exuberance.
Affirmative Action, America, Barack Obama, Christianity, Political Philosophy, Racism, The West, The Zeitgeist
A magnificent, crisply argued piece by the peerless Thomas Fleming, who happens to be a nimble stylist as well. Here are some highlights:
• “The appearance of John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback, California’s ‘purpose-driven’ church marks the ultimate ascent of Rick Warren to the Gantry-in-Chief of the P.T. Barnum Church of America.”
• “A liberal, as I never tire of quoting (from Robert Frost), is someone who would not take his own side in an argument. Rich liberals naturally support high taxes and extravagant government expenditures on the poor, preferably the undeserving poor. A male liberal—we can hardly call such creatures men—favors women’s rights; heterosexual liberals favor “Gay” “marriage,” and European-American liberals prefer all cultures to that of Europe. And, if these idiots condescend to note their skin color, they hate it or at least they think they do.”
• “The DNC and the media can tell any lies they like, but they cannot change the fact that the Democratic presidential candidate hates Whites, including the members of his mother’s family who showed him every kindness. Compared with the average self-proclaimed white bigot who says he loves his ancestors, Obama is one sick and sorry excuse for a human being.”
• “[Obama’s] claim to be a Christian is his best evidence that he was never a Muslim.”
• [S]etting aside race-loyalty, greed, and the libido dominandi, how could anyone else hold his nose long enough to vote for anyone who talks in that smarmy adenoidal voice? When Obama gets on his pulpit, it sounds almost like he is swallowing his words in a sea of phlegm. He does not so much speak as (to quote what Alexander Wolcott once said of a theater audience) strum his catarrh. His self-righteous public persona should grate on the sensibilities of normal people–like nails on a chalkboard or the voice of Mariah Carey. And yet, some otherwise normal people voted for him in the primaries and will vote for him again in the general election. Why or rather how?”
• [A]nyone will be better than Bush–is not an easy argument to refute—except in the case of Obama and McCain.
• “However you describe Affirmative Action and minority set-asides, they represent a deliberate and systematic policy of discrimination against people like me in favor of people not like me simply because they are not like me. Such disgusting and immoral policies are worse than any form of racism I have encountered because they teach us to hate precisely those whom we are most supposed to love.”
• “Bigotry these days has nothing to do with the way you treat people or even with what you actually say. Bigotry is what they say you are thinking when they play your speech backward at half speed.”
• “[W]e should not make the mistake of blaming black people for the suicide we continue to inflict on ourselves. We white males are the problem, not blacks, women, homosexuals, or Mexicans. We–at least the liberal part of “we”– turned away from our religion and our civilization; we made war on property and marriage; we rejected Haydn and Sophocles in favor of John Cage and Kate Chopin. We have emasculated ourselves, pithed our brains, destroyed our vision and hearing, and now, all that is left, is to vote for a candidate whose rhetoric at least is telling us to fling our worthless carcasses off the cliff. I blush even to hint at this but John McCain is now the only alternative to suicide.”