Category Archives: Journalism

UPDATED: Here Comes The Bomb (Casus Belli)

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Iran, Journalism, Media, Military, Technology, Terrorism, War

More war is on its way—and sooner than you think.

For the last week or so, the president’s most loyal lap dogs—America’s brain-dead broadcasters—have been beating the drum for an urgent need, identified by- and acted on by the Pentagon: “to develop its largest bomb because officials believe [the current arsenal] is not capable of destroying Iran’s fortified underground facilities.”

That acts of war and elections often coincide should come as no surprise. It’s unfortunate, but electability in fin de siècle America still hinges on projecting bully power around the world—an American leader has to aspire to “protect” borders and people not his own, and if they refuse his advances, he should be prepared to bomb them to kingdom come.

Having used the American military to particularly great political effect—the barefaced Barack Obama is preparing to blast Iranians with something even “better” than the BLU-82.

This flaccid, coward of a politician is intent on shoring up his commander-in-chief credentials so as to seduce a militarist America for the second time. The Pentagon, under the president who has perfected the art of state assassination, is working on a “13.6 ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).” It “is the deepest penetrating ‘bunker buster’ currently in the U.S. arsenal, designed to take out fortifications built by Iran to hide their alleged nuclear weapons. (Via The DailyMail Online.)

UPDATE (Feb. 1): “Spy Chief Sees Iran Threats in U.S”:

The U.S., “spy chief James Clapper” “has concluded that some Iranian officials, probably including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ‘are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States as a response to real or perceived actions that threaten the regime,’ according to an assessment provided by Mr. Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence.”

Clapper’s claptrap evidence is here, detailed in my “Is A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) The Fall Guy For The AG (Attorney General)?”

[It’s]…the kind of cloak-and-dagger that belongs in an episode of “The Unit,” not in the courts of a civilized country. To entrap the two defendants, Mansour Arbabsiar and Ali Gholam Shakuri, assistant US attorneys relied on Title 18 of the United States Code. Sections in this “versatile” law were used to ensnare domestic diva Martha Stewart (for fibbing to the Feds about a recipe, not for insider trading).

Andy Sullivan’s Struggle

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”

A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan“:

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.
Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan And MSNBC’s Pygmy (Like Snakes Crawling Out of Hibernation)

Christianity, Democracy, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy” is my latest WND.COM column. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the banishment from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.

If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.

In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.

Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)

America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.”

South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.

Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their bibles, their guns and their bigotries.

Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa. …

Read the complete column, “Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy,” on WND.COM.

The book discussed, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help this cause.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE I (Jan. 13): Prof. Ole Jørgen Anfindsen (his Wiki bio is here) has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on a Norwegian webzine. Prof. Anfindsen blogs at HonestThinking.com. If only I had Norwegian. (Or maybe not .)

UPDATE II: In reply to a reader (snaketrapper) on WND: Had this reader read my book, which references Prof. Hoppe’s “Democracy,” and carries advance praise from him—he might be better informed about this writer’s views and her understanding of the country of her birth, where members of her family, Christian and Jewish, still reside. But, of course, the assorted snakes that have crawled out of hibernation to comment about a book (written by a Jew) that they have in all likelihood not read (or a short column that doesn’t give the right answers to all their questions)—are more interested in asserting uninformed, unfounded, collectivist, irrational biases against the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” than reporting on the issues addressed in the book. I refer this reader to the section in the book titled, “A strategy for Survival.” I will add this: If I have learned anything from writing this book it is this: Anti-Semitism and collectivism are alive and well.

Darn Right It’s ‘Dusk in Ron Paul’s America’

Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, Ron Paul, Uncategorized

“Paul’s supporters say they appreciate the Texas congressman’s bleak stump speech, noting that he’s been proven right on the issues before and insisting that they welcome the refreshing candor of his Cassandra-like message. … The dark tone adopted by Paul represents a dramatic departure from the traditional presidential campaign speech,” complains POLITICO. “[I]t’s dusk in [Paul’s] America, not morning. His rhetoric is also distinctly different from what his rivals are saying, even as they criticize President Barack Obama’s stewardship. Where they see waste, fraud and ineptitude in federal government and Congress, Paul sees lying, scheming and conspiracy.”

“When you count the way they did during the Depression … unemployment is probably closer to 20 percent. That’s why there’s a disconnect. People feel worse than the government tells you you’re supposed to feel,” Paul said. “The unemployment rate is much bigger, the inflation rate is much worse.”
“That’s the harsh reality of it. It is a grim situation,” said Chris Fleming of Manchester, who attended a Nashua event last week. “The whole media blackout plays a role; they don’t like having that message put out. Why would we want to walk around like horses with blinders on?”

[SNIP]
“Remember that no matter their brand of political prostitution (Republican or Democrat), media talking heads are props to the politicos; they mirror the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—among the elites they serve. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged and protected as their masters. These ‘Demopublican Monopolists’ sense that as long as they sustain their respective constituencies, they will retain their perches and their sizable salaries.

But things are a changing. The country is changing. These B-rate minds are paddling as hard as they can to save sinecure. Even if it means not facing reality. The statist men and women of the media are up the creek without a paddle. More than anything they fear losing their status.

Ron Paul makes these vainglorious individuals face reality when all they want is to save face.” (“Media Top-Dogs Kick Underdog Ron Paul”)