Category Archives: Media

Served Straight Up

Media

‘The story of Joseph Farah and the president’s “Happy Holiday” card was first reported by The Washington Post, and is now being carried by newspapers around the world. Bush and his multiculti madam sent out 1.4 million cards, wishing the recipients a happy “holiday season.” (The presidential pets featured on the card. How pathetic.) Here’s The Scotsman:

“Joseph Farah, the editor of the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com said that Mr Bush ‘claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian, but sure doesn’t act like one.’ He added: ‘I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it.'”

That’s completely cool. And I hope Mr. Farah didn’t recycle the thing, although I am sure the pinko president had it printed on recycled paper.

‘Israel has tested an anti-ballistic missile, Arrow Weapon System (AWS). According to Jane’s’ Defense Weekly, “It successfully intercepted a target simulating an Iranian Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) in a test over the Mediterranean on 2 December.”
Talk about a quick quip: When asked by the press how far he would go to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, Israeli army chief Dan Halutz replied without hesitation: “2000 km!”

‘Sean Mercer, aka Dr. Rock, on the difference between electrical engineers (himself) and computer programmers (lesser beings): “They (programmers) manipulate ones and zeros; we (electrical engineers) manipulate the laws of physics.” It sounds even better in that tart English accent.

UPDATED (12/8/2023): Monopolizers And Flyters (November 23, 2005)

Culture, English, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Media, The Zeitgeist

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On the flyting that flew between the two, Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway

Who monopolizes the market place of ideas in the Guardian’s view? The answer is assorted activists, liberal-leftists, statists, feminists, and other lightweights. Read the paper’s top 100 intellectuals and tell me it doesn’t distress.

I don’t profess to have heard of all the characters on the list. Far from it. But of those I recognize, I guess I’d go with German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. This is not to say I endorse his views or all his influences (the unlovely Theodor Adorno comes to mind). But this is not about agreeing with a thinker, only acknowledging his place on this list.

I’d also go with Pope Benedict XVI, and the marvelous Australian art critic Robert Hughes whose profundity, knowledge, and critical faculties are a credit to his Jesuit teachers.

I see Newsweek‘s wishy-washy Fareed Zakaria is considered an intellectual giant. Woe is me! Amos Oz is a popular writer (and not a good one when compared with Meir Shalev or Shy Agnon), but hardly one of the top intellectuals around. But if one is of the Left, one has an advantage in the selection process.

Now hold your horses, will you, because I also admire Christopher Hitchens as a stylist, conversationalist, and an extraordinary flyter. What is flyting, you ask? It’s an ancient Scottish form of invective, a true master of which is the MP George Galloway. I don’t care for his or Hitchens’ ever-shifting views, but I loved the flyting that flew between the two. Galloway called Hitchens a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Hitchens responded over the pages of an august publication by likening the lickspittle praise Galloway once bestowed on him to spittle flung in place of argument. Later on, the two dueled deliciously on C-Span, where, I’m afraid, Hitchens proved his uncontested superiority in this spontaneous rhetorical art.

Bennett, Dowd, And The Dames From Yale

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Media, Race, The Zeitgeist

The good news first. Following “careful” capitalistic considerations, The New York Times has curtailed accessibility to its mundane columnists. If you want to read Maureen Dowd, you must sign up and pay. Yippee. About this woman’s simpering, cutesy prose the potent (Camille) Paglia said this: “Maureen Dowd—that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.” Now even if Paglia happens to click on the Dowd hypertext, it goes nowhere, unless one is willing to pay for the flaccid fluff.
Speaking of the best of distaff America, the newspaper of record reported that

“Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others… say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.”

Girls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton interviewed for the piece said they expected to enjoy perhaps a 10-year career, and then quit to tend their tots. Some would go back to work part time only; others not at all. The data.s reliability has been questioned, although the emerging trend is supported by “several surveys of Yale alumni and Harvard Business School graduates,” which show “the majority of women were not employed full-time 10 to 20 years after graduation.”
Parroting the individualist-feminist bromidic line, Cathy Young begs us not to ask women “to sacrifice their personal aspirations to a feminist vision of parity.” That would be “a peculiar kind of liberation.” Young pumps out banalities, but fails to get to the crux: As talented as these women are, for every one accepted into the Ivy League, an equally—or better—qualified man is rejected. That’s the way equal-opportunity admissions operate. The rejected men need the education because they’ll be working a lifetime to support women who can choose not to. Ever wonder why doctors are in short supply? Half the students admitted to medical schools are women. When kids come along, women give up the practice. Thereafter, they resume work on a part-time—or on some other highly personalized—basis. This and not discrimination is why men are frequently paid more: they’re more likely to have maintained an uninterrupted continuum of employment. Naturally, the experts at Gender Studies blame society for this “aberrant” traditionalism. They say there haven’t been efficient social changes to support the endless opportunities given to women.

“Society” is code for the pale patriarchy. That’s you, Bill Bennett. Poor Bill, he entered the lion’s den of demographics! Race baiters duly alighted on him for condemning utilitarian arguments for abortion. On his “Morning in America” radio program Bennett offered this reductio ad absurdum:

“If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

In response, the cultural cognoscenti hastened to label him a racist. Nobody was prepared to say why Bennett is a racist, though. Was it because he denounced as deplorable the idea of aborting black babies, or because his argument was premised on an unspoken truth about “the color of crime”? Instead, those who monopolize discourse in this country quickly stipulated the terms of debate. “It’s about time we discuss race honestly,” intoned the consensus keepers. But stick to the Three P’s—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness. Crime can be discussed as long as it is framed in bogus root-causes terms. Thus even the intrepid Bay Buchanan backed down when Donna Brazile, her CNN boxing buddy, insisted that if blacks were not so horribly and eternally disenfranchised, they would not dominate the violent-crime franchise. (What will it take, pray tell, to get whites to excel in basketball and in the 100-meter dash?)
So far the battered Bennett is holding up (Bush jumped into the ring too). One doesn’t, however, need to be a prophet to foresee a retraction in the offing. Spare yourself the burlesque and beef up your knowledge of the facts.

Death By The West

Islam, Israel, Media, Middle East, The West

The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression—and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors—the Sinai first—Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor. Writer William Anderson pointed out to me that had the Arabs seized parts of Israel in one of their many failed campaigns, there would be no calls to return the land. Come to think of it, before the brutal Muslim conquest, the land was Christia—Egypt, Libya, North Africa, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor were Christian, not so? In Israel the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (By the way, not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Qur’an. Muslim fondness for Jerusalem is almost as recent, and certainly as innovative, as the discovery of Palestinian nationhood.) Yet, what is the West feverishly fighting for? The utter emasculation of Israel. The Bully Bush administration is now talking about Israel’s return to the 1949 “Armistice lines.” Amazing—and all the more so when such “thinking” is applauded by paleoconservatives (and by many libertarians). Aren’t they forever decrying the Death of the West? Paleocons certainly stood firm behind the Christian side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor and Kashmir. And so they ought to have: Muslims have wiped out entire Christian communities in these places, not that the strongmen in power or the talking twits on television have noticed. Yet you’ll often hear paleoconservatives condemn Condi R. and Genghis B. for leaning on, say, Vladimir Putin; but celebrate when they sunder Israel’s sovereignty. It is becoming apparent that to some, bringing about the end of Israel is well worth the deadly price of reviving and consolidating a caliphate. There’s a word for that (besides insanity).