Category Archives: English

Michael Savage On Hillary Saga, Selma & A Soulless President

Barack Obama, Conservatism, English, Hillary Clinton

Michael Savage read my mind. I’ve been ruminating on the visceral hatred the liberal media harbor for Hillary Clinton, and have come to Savage’s excellent conclusion: “It’s because they want Elizabeth Warren to run. To them, Hillary isn’t liberal enough.”

“Savage added ominously, ‘If you think Hillary is bad, Elizabeth Warren is even worse.'”

To this I would add only that the media took the same tack with Barack Obama, once they anointed him as their man. The exact dynamics were at play, showcasing that while there was a “red/blue split in the Democratic Party that had become a gash”; there is no such schism in the media.

This from the June, 2008 column, “Mindless Monolith: Media Pick Obama”:

The top Democratic dogs finally got their way: Senator Clinton, who lost her party’s delegates but won the people, will concede the Democratic nomination. Media pack animals are also on top of the world.
From the AP’s Charles Babington to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Wolf Blitzer and his “best political team on television”: They had all worked their hearts out for Obama. …
… By now the red/blue split in the Democratic Party had become a gash. Clinton was getting the red, Reagan Democrats—seniors, whites, blue collar and rural voters. “Barack Obama,” in the words of another veteran news guy, the always-edifying William Schneider, “was winning the blue Democrats: young voters, upscale urban professionals, well-educated liberals and African-Americans.”
Red versus blue meant left versus right. Those who own guns voted for Hillary; those who don’t, and think you should not, voted for Obama. One more thing: Because they’re older, more blue collar, and more conservative …

Also via Kathy Shaidle’s WND, TALK RADIO WATCH column comes an overview of the rest of what the talkers on the right said this week. Kathy, no doubt, mined the best of the week. Other than Savage, there is nothing new, interesting or important in anything said by this lot. See for yourself.

Savage’s thoughts on Obama’s Selma speech are also insightful, contrast as they do with the milquetoast assessment at National Review. OK, not milquetoast, but fawning. If anything, NR writer Quin Hillyer—who echoes Chris Cillizza’s sentiments on the Selma speech—is the fine writer he claims Obama is. The paragraph Hillyer excerpts is vintage Obama in its hackneyed simplicity.

Back to Savage on Selma and on a soulless man (courtesy of Kathy): “’Obama’s Selma speech was a new low point in the American presidency,’ Savage said at the top of the week. Comparing it to ‘classic Soviet propaganda,’ he went on to say, ‘I’ve diagnosed what’s wrong with this man and his presidency: Obama doesn’t have a scintilla of forgiveness in his soul.’”

Breaking: Inadvertently, BHO Inferred Something True

Barack Obama, Christianity, English, Islam

Inadvertently, Barack Hussein Obama suggested a correct inference today. I didn’t say he spoke the truth (other than “the” and “a”); that would be too much to ask. Listen:

The first Crusade was proclaimed almost 1000 years ago; the inquisition a little after that. Indirectly—and in his attempt to draw “moral equivalency between the brutality of ISIS and Christianity”—Barack Obama situated the ISIS phenomenon in the Middle Ages.

From a man whose relationship with truth is at best tentative—that’s the best one can hope for. So what did President Pinocchio say at the National Prayer Breakfast?

Unless [LEST] we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was [WERE???] justified in the name of Christ.

It’s “LEST we get on our high, etc. …”

LEST you doubt that the man’s grammar even with teleprompter—the Millennials write this drivel—is as bad as all that, here’s the tape, sound included.

Obama’s easily as stupid as W. Bush, except that the media cover for him.

Adding Fire Power To The Literary Canon

English, Human Accomplishment, Literature, The West

With respect to the column “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon,” my good editor at Quarterly Review rightly griped that I should have added more titles fit for the precocious child reader.

Leslie’s favorites are Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Seconded. And boy, did I adore Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Add Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. The Hebrew Bible is a very racy, great read. I’m no expert on the New Testament.

Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Economy, Education, English, Literature, Objectivism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

“Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND. The WND version has been scrubbed of the “salacious sex scene,” excerpted below, which happens to be required reading in some kids’ English class:

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state USA is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … [is] not how you interact with adults.”

In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”)

Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines. …

… Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned

Read the rest. “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND.