Our president may be stupid as far as political economy goes (a stupid “you can’t fix”), but when it comes to politics, he is as wily as a fox (see “Obama Cunning, Not Clever”). It is also true that Republicans pushing the Birther conspiracy are, to put is kindly, no match for this very mediocre man.
The bellicoseand bombastic Donald Trump was dealt a well-deserved blow, when, to amplified attention (due to Trump publicity), Obama released a “Certificate of Live Birth.”
The president, who discussed the release at the White House without taking questions, said he had been “puzzled” by the enduring shelf life of the issue and acknowledged the announcement may not put the so-called birther controversy to rest. But he told the public and the media that it’s time to “get serious.”
As was mentioned in “Alien In More Than One Way,” I never understood the fetish with Obama’s alleged elusive birth certificate. “The President is an alien on so many levels, I fail to see why the formality of his birth is more central than the insanity and un-American nature of his thinking (which can be said of many other of his fellow pols, although BO is, admittedly, an extreme case).”
“Besides, isn’t BO American by virtue of his mother being an American? Mother Obama was a natural-born American, so baby BO is as well. The whole thing is a little loopy.”
This side show has sundered a chance to expose the lack of curiosity among Obama’s media acolytes about the president’s heavily guarded school and scholarly records. Obama’s Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago: none has been released, and none of the media that matters have evinced the slightest curiosity about these papers.
Thanks to the Birthers, lost is the opportunity to expose affirmative action, as it ripples through American society, affecting everything from the housing foreclosure crisis—“The Minority Meltdown”—to the highest office in the land.
Yes, I’ve been critical of the irrational, illogical twists and turns in the thinking of Glenn Beck in recent months. (Here). “Skeptic” (the magazine) could use Beck’s conspiracy building tactics to fill an issue on irrational thinking. However, besides exuding goodness, Beck also radiates rebellion. Whatever one thinks of Beck, he is a rebel. And like all real rebels, he too must secede from the system. Glenn’s departure from FoxNews is an act of secession. FoxNews is the system. Beck is no longer able to abide by the ideological and disciplinary constraints imposed by the Republican establishment’s megaphone.
Beck has promised his jubilant adversaries that they were “going to pray for the days of 5:00PM,” intimating that a force of nature has been unleashed on the world. Or as the Judge put it, “Bigger, better and more Beck.”
Go Glenn! Of course, as I had hoped (see “Beck has Left the Building”), The Judge may stand to inherit the slot.
UPDATE (April 7) I: I hear here, and on Facebook, lots of cheerleading for one program, The Judge’s. Or Stossell’s—who is marvelous, but still very much within the remits of conventional, by-the-book libertarianism. I love them both to bits. But none of you so-called “independent thinkers” has noticed that these shows tolerate, 1) the must-have, establishment Tea Partiers, and 2) the Reason and other narrow-faction libertarianism. The shows are still within the, admittedly, wonderful box. Those who say Beck is part of the system are as insane as Beck (who is a good type of insane; a lovable goof, as Huggs put it). Beck is a natural secessionist.
I’m surprised that you’ve all fallen to your knees before (our) ideological correctness, dismissing Beck’s brave act of secession, b/c of his errors of thought. I have news for you: In the liberty-oriented community, people tend to huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, and quibble about detecting and expelling contrarians. Dare to dissent on this or the other point of purity, and keepers of the flame will take it upon themselves to read you out of the movement. This, naturally, makes for tribalism, not individualism. The bad, moreover, have a nasty habit of crowding out the good. Or as one wag once said to me (was it Randy Barnett? I can’t recall), “Quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go.” That makes perfect psychological sense: those who remain feel more secure, group cohesion having trounced intellectual vitality.
Glenn Beck’s announcement that he is going to “transition off” his daily TV program later this year, whatever that means, is about as coherent as Sarah Palin’s July 2009 announcement of her reasons for resigning from the governorship. Has anyone noticed that Beck, like Palin, is inveterately incapable of forming a cogent sentence, and that one of the reasons for this, as with Palin, is that almost everything he says revolves around himself?
In urging a no-fly zone over Libya (link), the neoconservatives wanted more than anything to see the US take the lead, once again, in democratic, faith-based initiatives around the world.
Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (joined by eager pup Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard) were champing at the bit to take the battle for Libya away from the Libyan people and put it where it belongs: the US military. Today, Obama threw America’s heft (such as it is these days) behind a U.N. Security Council no-fly zone over Libya. What this move lacks in glory, from the neocons’ position, it makes up for in the potential for blood, guts and gore. Except that the US—again, from where the neocons are perched—will take a strategic backseat to the UN:
The resolution passed 10-0 with five abstentions, including Russia and China.
The resolution establishes “a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” while excluding an occupation force. It also calls for freezing the assets of the Libyan National Oil Corp. and the central bank because of links to Gadhafi.
Joining in this UN resolution means, in effect, that American funding and firepower will be channeled into one more futile expedition over a Muslim country. Neocons will act disappointed, having been denied leadership position in the expedition. But to all intents and purposes, the US (via our debtholders) will be left to carry the can.
Their detractors—and yes, this butchered Jewish family, the youngest of whom was three months old, has detractors—claim that they were settlers, occupiers of Palestinian land. They deserved to be slaughtered by Palestinians as they slept, their gruesome deaths (images below) “celebrated with carnivals by Hamas which handed-out sweets to passers-by.” (HERE)
The “settler” exculpation—used indirectly by Obama to condemn the victims, not the perps—still does not explain away the existential meaning of stabbing “an eleven-year-old in his heart and slitting a four-year-old boy’s throat.” (HERE) Remember: the Arab citizens of Israel proper prefer to live surrounded by a Jewish majority than migrate to the Palestinian Authority. Shouldn’t they be “encouraged” to pack up and relocate to the PA? Evidently not. For one, their civilized, peace-loving Jewish neighbors have accepted them and granted them full citizenship rights: “They vote. They elect leaders to the Knesset. They serve on the Israeli Bench. They publish Arabic-language newspapers. They preach anti-Semitic hate sermons in their mosques. There is almost no limit to the freedom bestowed on Arabs of any faith within Israel.” (HERE) Why are they not considered occupiers of land not theirs?
Watch the scene of the crime. (Read a write-up.) I’ll continue this tack below.
“In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and indefatigable civil libertarian, elucidates the moral components of the vortex of terror and counterterror, action and reaction into which the Palestinians have plunged Israel. He observes that the number of innocent Israelis killed intentionally by Palestinians is considerably higher than the number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed accidentally by the Israel Defense Force.”
“The vast majority of Palestinians killed by Israelis are directly involved in terrorist activity. Those not directly involved were killed accidentally in the course of legitimate military actions against terrorists. ‘Israel’s moral responsibility for these accidental, although often foreseeable, casualties of war,’ he avers, ‘is in no way comparable to the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists who have deliberately targeted every single Israeli civilian victim.'”
“This distinction, one would presume, is a no-brainer: ‘Every reasonable school of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and common sense distinguishes between deliberately targeting civilians and inadvertently killing civilians while targeting terrorists who hide among them.’ Nevertheless, anti-Zionist bigots, who understand the difference between accidental death and willful murder in ‘other contexts,’ embrace moral relativism when it comes to the Jewish state.”
Professor Dershowitz makes one other particularly chilling observation:
Israel has nothing to gain and everything to lose from inflicting civilian casualties. The opposite is true for the Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian casualties play in their favor, and Israeli casualties play in their favor.”
[SNIP]
I have vehemently opposed Israel’s anti-terrorism reprisals as disproportionate in their use of force. Still, everything said above obtains.
UPDATE II (March 16): Justice is Not Vengeance. The right thing to do is catch the perpetrators, try them, and kill them. Beck is missing the meaning of the grieving father’s words; refracting them through his Christian beliefs. Said Ruth Fogel’s father, Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai:
“I have worked in education many years, and as an educator, I try to strengthen and teach people faith. I understand that I cannot be satisfied with words and that I also must implement the same principles on which I have educated others. This is a test of my faith, and therefore I agreed to be interviewed.
I believe in the country, in our strength and in the strength of the army, and I ask how did this strength not save our children?
… We will take upon ourselves the difficult task and pave for them the path so that life will be victorious.
Their mother and father will pray for them from the Heavens, their grandfathers and grandmothers will give them a lot of love, and the People of Israel will hug them and encourage them to grow and continue in the path of their parents.viewing them through the prism.”
[SNIP]
The above is profound, simple and beautiful, but it is hardly a statement of loony Christian forgiveness. To forgive evil in Jewish thinking is evil. Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai simply expresses his love for his surviving grandchildren and his determination to help them. There is nothing as unhealthy here as forgiveness. That’s a Christian hobby horse. There can be no justice without proportional punishment. Jews get that.
UPDATE III (March 20): TINY TAMAR SPEAKS. This gifted little orphan articulates ideas and has a depth of understanding absent among her peers in the West/US. For those who understand Hebrew:
