FROM BARACK OBAMA. “Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to [Obama’s] right,” Chavez joked on a live television broadcast.” More via Reuters:
“Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday that he and Cuban ally Fidel Castro risk being more conservative than U.S. President Barack Obama as Washington prepares to take control of General Motors Corp.”
“During one of Chavez’s customary lectures on the ‘curse’ of capitalism and the bonanzas of socialism, the Venezuelan leader made reference to GM’s bankruptcy filing, which is expected to give the U.S. government a 60 percent stake in the 100-year-old former symbol of American might. …”
“During a decade in government, Chavez has nationalized most of Venezuela’s key economic sectors, including multibillion dollar oil projects, often via joint ventures with the private sector that give the state a 60 percent controlling stake.”
“Obama has vowed to quickly sell off General Motors once the auto giant is back on its feet, but the government will initially control the company after a $30 billion injection of taxpayer funds.”
OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH. Dialogue is good, dhimmitude is not. From a cursory look, Obama’s speech is festooned with feel-good fantasies, cliches, and plain errors, highlighted by the great Robert Spencer, who provides a point-by-point Guide to the Perplexed (via “Virgil”). Naturally, our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Terrorism, of course, is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam. However, Hussein omits any reference to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as the scholar Samuel Huntington put it. More from me later.
Over to Spencer, who dishes unvarnished truth.
Update I: ME HERE (see Spencer below) Where to begin? In his speech, Obama equated Islam with peace. That’s nothing new in the annals of American presidents. Remember Bush?
About the greatness of Cairo University. Is anyone of these Nobel Prize greatsa graduate?
Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. So what? So do I.
I’m “an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.” So the president is owning his name. After making hay about scribes (like this one) who used it in vain.
Grammar: “I’m aware that there’s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11.” So he’s not such a pedantic writer. Should be: “there are.”
“The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.” Not quite. The adage, bowdlerized from the Jews, is heavily qualified in the Koran. I covered it in “More Fatwa Fibs”.
THIS NEXT ITEM from Hussein, the “student of history,” as he refers to himself, is particularly priceless: “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”
Memo to Hussein, “student of history”: The ideas of human rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. There is no such thing in Islam, despite what our Head Historian says about “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.” Does the latter failed parallelism (pairing a country and a religion) mean that Hussein acknowledges Islam is a political system? Or perhaps he is just bad at constructing corresponding syntactic constructions.
This is growing tiresome: the banality of the cliches Obama uses come straight out of … a Michelle Obama univesrity thesis.
LATER.
Update II (June 6) Krauthammer: Speech abstract, vapid, and self-absorbed. Pretty much. This is good. Watch:
SPENCER: I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning,
…whose Grand Sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, has given his approval — on Islamic grounds — to suicide bombing.
and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.
According to Islamic law, a Muslim may only extend this greeting — Peace be upon you — to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided,” i.e., Peace be upon the Muslims. Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naive non-Muslim Islamophilic Presidents offer the greeting to Muslims.
We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
“Co-existence and cooperation”? When and where, exactly?
Note that Obama lists only ways in which the West has, in his view, mistreated the Islamic world. Not a word about the jihad doctrine, not a word about Islamic supremacism and the imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that existed long before the spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world, which Obama D’Souzaishly suggests is responsible for the hostility Muslims have for the West.
Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.
The idea that the jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, but has no evidence to back it up. The evidence that appears to back it up is highly tendentious — check out here how Dalia Mogahed (now an Obama adviser) and John Esposito cooked survey data from the Islamic world to increase the number of “moderates.”
And of course it was by no means only “the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians” that “has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” It was also the Islamic texts and teachings that inspired those attacks that have fueled this perception. But Obama is not singular in declining to acknowledge the existence of such texts and teachings. In that he is following George W. Bush and every influential American politician, diplomat, and analyst. …
“We’ve been ‘spared’ warning of Strongman Obama’s Orwellian overreach because a Big Man has big guns: the menagerie of morons that is the American media.
The Chief is working in the same tradition as The Decider, only with even less scrutiny and far more impunity.
…the media’s judicial jiu-jitsu has been unconscionable. Are the legal writings and judicial rulings of Judge Sotomayor being scrutinized? Not on your life. Right away, the usual menagerie of morons took on the construction of a meta-argument invalidating the GOP’s yet-to-be-made case against Sotomayor, if you get my drift.
An argument against an argument!
From NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell to the lowliest Democratic strategist: all are advising viewers, first, that to oppose Sotomayor is to risk Hispanic ire. And second, that in order to dodge death by demographics, Republicans must continue to court Latinos slavishly.
For example, making too much of Sotomayor’s Wise Latina Woman cretinous comment is unwise for Republicans, the talking twits tell us. Judge Sotomayor suggested in 2001 that ‘a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.’
The consensus among the commentariat is that this is no time for the GOP to come to the defense of paleface: white judges or white firefighters. (Sotomayor washed her hands off the white, New Haven firefighters, and upheld racial discrimination against them.) The so-called incontrovertible truth at which the Obama media minions are getting is this:
The GOP’s powerbase hangs on Hispanics.
Dogged demographer Steve Sailer has been dispelling this manufactured dogma convincingly for close to a decade …”
Update I (May 29): Go Tancredo! “ALL FOR THE RACE; NOTHING FOR THE REST” is how Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo encapsulated La Raza’s mission. On CNN, Tancredo went on to call La Raza, to which the newly nominated Lady Justice belongs, a Latino KKK. As I write, the heroic Tancredo is hammering David Shuster, an MSNBC hombre—who tried to pin him up against the wall—refusing to back down, backing-up his words impeccably with a tale of La Raza’s honoring of a gentleman whose cri de coeur was “eliminate the Gringo.”
And you know what? When meek WASPs refuse to turn the other cheek, bullies back down. Likewise, Shuster was shushed.
Update II (May 29): Margaret Warner of the PBS’s News Hour talked to legal scholars Emma Coleman Jordan of Georgetown University Law School and Paul Cassell of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah about Sotomayor’s judicial record. Coleman, an African-American woman, called Sotomayor brilliant. What else? Cassell, who actually could be a candidate for this liberally applied designation, said he had read very many of her decisions and that she “breaks to the Left,” sides with the plaintiff in so-called sexual harassment cases, and has a pedestrian mind that is no match for Antonin Scalia’s. That’s the good news.
As readers have noted in this space, one doesn’t wish for a formidable liberal legal theorist, but, rather, for a plodder; someone who can barely digest the facts of a case, much less find the intellectual wherewithal to apply critical race theory to the facts. You don’t want a woman capable of expansive theoretical formulations. However, it is quite clear that this is a double-edged sword; it portends a gravitation toward group think. I am Latina hear me roar, and all that stuff. Sotomayor is Spanish for racial set-asides. It is quite clear from Staurt Taylor’s stellar coverage (National Journal Online) that Sotomayor thinks racial groups ought to be represented in a society’s institutions commensurate with their percentage in that society. An absence of such representation, in this post hoc illogic, indicates discrimination. A subtle mind indeed.
(May 28): In a previous post I said that Obama, who is married to an intellectual pygmy — a mediocrity who graduated from an Ivy League university — seems wedded to the idea of entrenching her ilk everywhere. Pat Buchanan’s on the same page, although Mr. Buchanan is more positive than I am about the Republican’s capacity to counter Obama:
“The process by which Sotomayor was selected testifies to what we can expect in Obama’s America. Not a single male was in the final four. And she was picked over the three other women because she was a person of color, a ‘two-fer.’ Affirmative action start to finish.
Reading 30 of her opinions, GW law professor Jonathan Turley found them ‘notable’ for ‘lack of depth.’
Liberal law professor and Supreme Court expert Jeff Rosen of The New Republic reports, after talking to prosecutors and law clerks, that Sotomayor covers up her intellectual inadequacy by bullying from the bench.
The lady is a lightweight.
What should Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee do?
Abjure the vicious tactics Democrats used on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. Lay out the lady’s record. And let America get a close look at the kind of justice Barack Obama believes in.”
