Category Archives: Reason

In The Media, It’s All About The Angle, The Spin

Anti-Semitism, Europe, Islam, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Reason

You ought to take note of the media’s meta-narrative on the issues, by which is meant the overarching theme that infests each and every news story. You’ll discover that there’s an angle, a spin. Thus, bimbo Brooke Baldwin (transcript not up yet), a CNN anchorette, framed a perfectly logical statement made by ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU as “controversial,” in Baldwin’s words. Said Bibi:

“I would like to tell all of the European Jews, and all Jews wherever you are, Israel is the home of every Jew.”

Because the thought process of the ubiquitous bimbo is so obtuse (blunt, not sharp); it’s hard to discern what is meant by such utterances. In other words, why is what Bibi said controversial? This is unclear to the rational individual.

The truth is that the subordinate satellites states that make up Europe refuse—and no longer have the power—to properly and vigorously defend their innocent citizens, Jewish and Christian, from an identifiable threat:

… the Monster State is inherently both stupid and evil. Like a primitive organism, it answers to nobody and nothing but its reflexive need to grow.

To wit, the Monster State refuses to protect its people from plagues. It welcomes high-risk travelers from the Ebola hot-zones. Simultaneously, it quarantines aspiring fighters for Jihad here at home, in the West, so the homeland is the only arena in which they can act-out.

The nightwatchman state of classical liberalism would keep killers out of the country, not in the country.

What Bibi said follows from an irremediable reality articulated in “A Modest Libertarian Proposal: Keep Jihadis OUT, Not IN.”

UPDATE III: Lincoln Bedroom Or The American People’s House? (Founders & Foreign Entanglements)

America, Israel, Reason, Republicans

The reference in the title to the Lincoln Bedroom alludes to a practice Bill Clinton inaugurated of renting out this White House bedroom to big-time donors.

By the same token, I’m wondering whether the American People’s House is for hire too. The White House is fulminating because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing a dangerous game. Fox News explains:

The Obama administration reportedly is fuming over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to address Congress in March regarding the Iranian threat, with one unnamed official telling an Israeli newspaper he will pay “a price” for the snub. …

… In public, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest politely describes this as a “departure” from protocol. He also says the president will not meet with Netanyahu when he visits in early March, but has attributed that decision only to a desire not to influence Israel’s upcoming elections.

But in private, Obama’s team is livid with the Israeli leader, according to Haaretz.

“We thought we’ve seen everything,” a source identified as a senior American official was quoted as saying. “But Bibi managed to surprise even us. There are things you simply don’t do.

“He spat in our face publicly and that’s no way to behave. Netanyahu ought to remember that President Obama has a year and a half left to his presidency, and that there will be a price.”

Background via The Atlantic:

Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday asked [Natanyahy] back to address a joint meeting of Congress for the second time in less than four years. In fact, Netanyahu would become the first foreign leader since Winston Churchill to appear before Congress three times. (He also spoke during his first run as prime minister in 1996.)
This invitation, however, is even more important for a number of reasons. First, the February 11 speech will come just over a month before Israel’s legislative elections, and the prestige of an address to Congress could boost Netanyahu domestically. (Never mind that it was Netanyahu’s own Likud party that accused Obama of interfering in Israel’s elections just two years ago.) Yet it also coincides with a mounting confrontation between Congress and President Obama over Iran sanctions legislation, and Boehner pointedly announced the invitation just about 12 hours after the president, during his State of the Union address, pleaded with lawmakers to give nuclear talks with Tehran more time.

This is not the first time Prime Minister Netanyahu has pulled a self-serving political maneuver by inserting himself into American politics. This time, Bibi’s move may backfire. Obama is a dreadful cur, all right, but he is OUR mongrel.

In any case, it was an abomination when Mexican President Felipe Calderon was allowed to address the Congress in May of 2010, and it is an abomination for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have been permitted to issue forth before a joint session of the American Congress. Calderon, you recall, was toiling tirelessly for the benefit of millions of Mexicans living in the US illegally. From the White House Rose Garden, and then again in an address to Congress, he chastised overrun Arizonans for “forcing our people to face discrimination.”

Netanyahu is not as bad as all that (I’ve always “supported” him, in as much as a writer who is not a Fifth Columnist can.) And both these respective foreign leaders are patriots, looking out for their countrymen.

The American people’s representatives are the traitors here. (This time, it’d the stupid Republicans.) For it is they who’ve permitted this reoccurring spectacle; it is they who’ve turned the American People’s House into a House for hire; a one-way exchange program for foreign dignitaries.

Whose House is it, anyway?

UPDATE I(1/24): POLITICAL PROPRIETY. Reply to Facebook Thread:

It’s frustrating how intellectually inflexible readers are these days. For the most, they did not read (or absorb) the rationale of the post, simply because it is impartial, non-partisan, and articulates matters of decorum and political propriety from an American, not that of a Fifth Column’s, perspective. Why I say that readers reject reason and, rather, respond with the gut? The post says explicitly that letting Mexico’s PM parade his opinions in America’s parliament is just as pathetic/wrong; just as vulgar. There is no anger against Bibi; I like him a LOT. There is simply that matter, I repeat, of political propriety.

UPDATE II: Founders & Foreign Entanglements.

Yoni Isaacson: It is not uncommon for visiting heads of state to address the hosts Parliament though. Here,, Congress is just trying to reclaim its role as a centre of power that has been eroded so much by executive presidents. What a way to do it.
4 hrs · Like

Ilana Mercer: From the fact that it is not-uncommon, it doesn’t follow that is right. We do not judge right or wrong by might or majority or frequency of occurrence. However, your assertion, Yoni, is not necessarily correct. It is quite uncommon in the US to invite foreign leaders to yuk it up—make a case for their policy of choice— in the people’s Congress. (Obama certainly did not speak in the Knesset last he visited Israel. And why should he have?!!) The American Founders were very clear about staying out of foreign entanglements.

UPDATE III: PROCESS VS.CONTENT.

Craig Smith: Ilana, From experience, I know where you stand. but I was taken aback by that particular column. From an initial perspective there is a very abstract common denominator in the two cases. Beyond that, neither the circumstances behind nor purpose of the Mexican and the Israeli Prime Ministers appearing in the WH and Congress, respectively, are at all the same. I know you know this, and you went on to address that point in your comment above. Yes, I had a gut reaction. I do that sometimes.

Ilana Mercer: Craig Smith, it’s about process, not content. I don’t want any foreign dignitary appealing to my corrupt representatives. The American System, Craig Smith, is a system emphasizing process. It doesn’t say that we should honor freedom of religion only with the good religions.

Comments Off on UPDATE III: Lincoln Bedroom Or The American People’s House? (Founders & Foreign Entanglements)

Written by on

UPDATED: Cameron On Criminal Culpability (Vs. Obama)

Britain, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised: This is how progressives have been depicting the Muslim murderers in their midst. Progressives, after all, come from the school of “thought” whereby crime is caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

According to this pervasive, widely accepted, therapeutic worldview—rapidly colonizing conservative thought, too—the poor barbarians of France’s burbs were driven to do their diabolic deeds.

Feelings are what count in the progressive perspective, for progressivism does not follow logic or a systematic thought process, as Jim Ostrowski points out in his book on the topic.

Likewise do libertarians, for their part, reduce immoral conduct to the fault of the state. Thus the state is said to have driven the barbarians of the burbs into a death cult that counsels killing.

Under the heading “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION, the column “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” exposes this libertarian logical contradiction—for if one holds that human beings have free will, thinking of human beings as determined entirely by forces beyond their control doesn’t fit.

From “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION:

For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state. In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s “the-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual- and aggregate group dysfunction.

In other words, Muslims have the capacity and freedom of conscience and will to decide how to respond to events that enrage and are indeed unjust: US foreign policy.

That’s my own political philosophy.

It’s therefore encouraging to see that British Prime Minister David Cameron does not give credit to the-state-made-me-do-it argumentation about the Islam-inspired killing of innocent Europeans. Flanking progressive Barack Obama—who does saddle society with blame for the erupting burbs of France, and contra Ray McGovern—Camerson said:

You can have, tragically, people who have had all the advantages of integration, who’ve had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer, who still get seduced by this poisonous, radical, death cult of a narrative.”

UPDATE: “Obama: Europe needs to better integrate Muslim communities…”

Obama the progressive feels (for he does not think) that Islam-inspired crime is the fault of the French. They did not dish out sufficient freebies and fraternité.

“Our biggest advantage … is that our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans and there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition,” he said.

“There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case… it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.”

MORE moron.