Category Archives: The West

CPAC: The Collapse Of The Conservative Movement

Conservatism, IMMIGRATION, Islam, The West

Peter Brimelow captures the collapse in all its vivid, vacuous details. Here are some select excerpts:

“Now, perhaps symptomatic of the general collapse of the Conservative Movement, CPAC is vastly larger but there is no central narrative, and above all, no dissent. …”

“Even back in the 1970s, you sometimes got the feeling that CPAC was run for the benefit of an in-group, despoiling but secretly despising us hayseeds from the boondocks. This is now flagrant. Of course, ‘Inside the Beltway’ has become an intoxicating, and notoriously insular, city-state. Still I’ve never seen a conference in which the speakers and celebrities were so systematically protected, with screened walkways and greenrooms, from contamination by the hoi polloi, general and Diamond alike. …”

“But, basically, I haven’t seen such a cattle call/mass rape of grass roots contributors since I went to my first and last Inaugural Ball in 1980. …”

“In fact, Ann Coulter’s rapid-fire liberal-bashing knockabout routine (much harder than it looks) was easily the most interesting performance. Ann has many jealous detractors among her supposed allies on the Establishment Right, but I have a lot of respect for her intellect and would guess that she could have developed the best political argument too. Significantly, however, she chose not to do so. …” [My emphasis: Peter is polite about Coulter’s lack of intellectual leadership on crucial issues. She’s capable of so much more.]

“Before the conference, Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer searingly denounced ‘the Norquistian Islam-Is-A-Religion-of-Peace orthodoxy that prevails at CPAC,’ telling Newsweek that ‘conservatives…were fearful of being accused of being anti-Islamic or racist for associating with [Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian currently being prosecuted for his opposition to Islamization]”.

“And in fact CPAC did not, as Spencer obviously anticipated, find room in its program for Wilders. Instead, he spoke to a packed ancillary meeting organized by supporters.”

“The immigration issue … was almost invisible. At VDARE.COM we have chronicled its inexorable emergence at CPAC, in 2003 (when Michelle Malkin got a standing ovation), 2005 (when Tamar Jacoby was booed) and 2007 (when, with help from some Presidential candidates, immigration reform patriots dominated the sessions). At every stage, it has been apparent that the CPAC audience was solidly in favor of immigration control.”

“No doubt for that reason, this year the CPAC managers took the incredible decision not to discuss immigration at all. …”

Read “‘Regardless Of Their Doom/The Little Victims Play’: CPAC, Frum, Limbaugh…And America?”

Updated: Oinkbama: Anti-Occident & A Bit Of A Pig

Africa, Britain, Etiquette, History, Politics, The West

Writes Iain Martin of the London Telegraph:

“President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn’t granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.”

This bout of rudeness was preceded by another, after–or some say before—the inauguration: “the White House sent back to the British Embassy a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had occupied a cherished spot in President Bush’s Oval Office. Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair.”

Because they dislike Churchill, the usual, libertarian suspects have applauded this bit of bad manners with the customary childish glee. Without going into Second World War revisionism, one can disagree with many of Churchill’s decisions during the offensive, while at the same time recognizing what defender of the West Diana West put so well:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period. One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.” [Emphasis mine]

“Like the symbolic repudiation of Churchill, Obama’s Marxist attack on free markets plays to the same factions of the radical left he once set out to ingratiate himself with as a young man.”

“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism Obama mentioned above. When a Marxist, Third World-tilting president of the United States sees a bust of Winston Churchill, he sends it packing. He may have proven once again to the Left that he’s no sellout, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t just alienated an awful lot of the American people.

Since the media downplayed and excused OinkBama and his Mama’s poor taste, the American people were none the wiser.

Diana furnishes the perfect postscript: “I have to hand it to the prime minister for giving Churchill-dissing Obama the perfectly targeted dig with the gift of the complete set of the official Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert.”

Update (March 6): Oinkbama’s tacky behavior when hosting a foreign dignitary–the prime minister of Britain—conjures the MTV show “Cribs.” Hip-hop gangsters show off their incredibly gaudy homes, and their CD and DVD collections. Then they send the cameraman packing.

Updated: Oinkbama: Anti-Occident & A Bit Of A Pig

Africa, Britain, Etiquette, History, Politics, The West

Writes Iain Martin of the London Telegraph:

“President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn’t granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.”

This bout of rudeness was preceded by another, after–or some say before—the inauguration: “the White House sent back to the British Embassy a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had occupied a cherished spot in President Bush’s Oval Office. Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair.”

Because they dislike Churchill, the usual, libertarian suspects have applauded this bit of bad manners with the customary childish glee. Without going into Second World War revisionism, one can disagree with many of Churchill’s decisions during the offensive, while at the same time recognizing what defender of the West Diana West put so well:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period. One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.” [Emphasis mine]

“Like the symbolic repudiation of Churchill, Obama’s Marxist attack on free markets plays to the same factions of the radical left he once set out to ingratiate himself with as a young man.”

“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism Obama mentioned above. When a Marxist, Third World-tilting president of the United States sees a bust of Winston Churchill, he sends it packing. He may have proven once again to the Left that he’s no sellout, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t just alienated an awful lot of the American people.

Since the media downplayed and excused OinkBama and his Mama’s poor taste, the American people were none the wiser.

Diana furnishes the perfect postscript: “I have to hand it to the prime minister for giving Churchill-dissing Obama the perfectly targeted dig with the gift of the complete set of the official Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert.”

Update (March 6): Oinkbama’s tacky behavior when hosting a foreign dignitary–the prime minister of Britain—conjures the MTV show “Cribs.” Hip-hop gangsters show off their incredibly gaudy homes, and their CD and DVD collections. Then they send the cameraman packing.

On The Sadness Of Diminishing Things

Aesthetics, America, English, The West, The Zeitgeist

The soul can seek and find solace in an achingly beautiful (and sad) thing. (We’ve gone there before, with “The Magic Of MacNeice.”)

The sadness? For our fading country.

The Judge Who Always Knows What’s Right has sent this along:

The Oven Bird By Robert Frost

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.