Foreign Interventionism Chickens Come Home to Roost in Balkans

America, Foreign Aid, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

Europeans take a little longer than Middle Easterners to get lathered up over American meddling. Clinton and his coterie of left-liberal neoconservative advisers led the 1999 NATO intervention into Yugoslavia, intervening in this centuries-old, ongoing dispute on the side of the ethnic Albanians (and their terrorist arm, the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army).

There was no genocide. The killings were of the large scale craven kind the locals had engaged in for centuries. Soon after the “salve” we Americans applied to solve the problem, Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, leaving only approximately 120,000 under NATO protection. Ancient churches were burned to the ground by the triumphant Albanian Muslims who turned on the Serbs.

America’s national interests were not served in choosing Albanian Muslims over Christian Orthodox Serbs, although Kosovars promise they practice what they term euphemistically “Islam lite.”

Bush followed in Clinton’s trails to hail Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Kosovo is home to the most sacred of Serbian relics and lands. It was Christian before it was Islamized.

Up-to-the-minute reports speak of close to a million Serbians gathering in Belgrade to protest the Kosovo declaration of independence and to express anger at the US. It’s all very well when a handful of people on the Side We Don’t Like break into the U.S. embassy and wreck it. But when close to a million march in solidarity against American policies—a decade hence, no less—they become harder for neocon think tanks to dismiss and diss.

For once, the blame lies squarely at the feat of Hillary’s husband. Former Clintonite, James Rubin, Christiane Amanpour’s toy boy, blames the Russians for the fever that is gripping Serbians—the Russian and Serb leadership. We all know that the people upon whom we visit our policies are but puppets manipulated by evil marionettes–unless those pulling the strings are American. Then the puppets—or puppies—are praised.

Mama Obama

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Judaism & Jews, Race

As you can imagine, it wasn’t an easy item to find in mainstream media. I looked all over for Michelle Obama’s bitter slip of the tongue—at MSNBC’s website, the Washington Times’, and others—before finding it buried at the bottom of the New York Times’ page and framed as cat fight initiated by Cindy McCain. Ditto Time. Michelle Obama makes a snide snippy comment, and Time asks the McCain campaign to comment on Cindy McCain’s retort. Apparently, anyone shining light where the media sheds only darkness must answer for it.

Here’s what Mrs. Obama told a Wisconsin audience:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

A good column calls the events and the characters correctly. I hate to keep reminding my readers, but, if I don’t, who will? As Hillel, the Jewish sage, said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” (Let Obama beat that brilliance) In “Homie Has Some Rings to Kiss,” I did not delude readers about Obama’s militant wife:

“Obama has always seemed a reluctant recruit to racial politics; driven more by expediency and fear—fear of his overbearing wife and the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton.”

Mark Halperin of “The Page” worried that conservative media would begin to scrutinize Michelle Obama if she kept such comments coming. He saw no reason to dissect the sainted one’s vicious remarks.

There is no finessing what Michelle Obama meant. Her comments come from the same bottomless pit from which the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their periodical grievance campaigns; that festering reservoir of racial animus and envy. This is a comment from a woman who’s led a charmed life, yet feels aggrieved and angry.

(An aside: Mama is quite masculine.)

Celebrating the Creeping Caliphate in Kosovo

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Islam, Media, War

Is there any doubt that by intervening in Kosovo, we strengthened the al Qaida-backed, Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army, and Islam’s greater project, to the detriment of Orthodox Christian Serbs? Is there any doubt who the neocons are supporting when they get in Putin’s face about Chechnya, another terrorist entity?

Republicans blasted Clinton, and for good reason, for warring against Serbia. The same principled people have made lingering in Iraq, and loving that equally unjust foreign policy foray, a fulcrum of their candidate’s presidential platform. The Christians of Iraq are numbered; they’ve been eliminated or expunged thanks to Bush’s faith-based intervention.

Geraldo Rivera, the neoliberal (or Neolithic) Fox fabulist, was dancing in the streets in celebration of Kosovo’s independence. What was he celebrating? In whose honor were Bush and his bastardized conservatives prancing about? Was this an ode to Clinton’s folly for partaking in an assault on a Christian country—Serbia—which, as Patrick J. Buchanan reminds us, was “an ally in two world wars, and [had] never attacked us”?

Where is Ron Paul when you need him?

Updated: Putrid Presidential Plagiarism

Democrats, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, Journalism, Morality

As you know, the plagiarism of ideas is, especially to this writer, a litmus test for bottom-feeding scum, plain and simple. Why is lifting ideas worse than verbatim copying? Because only the latter is legally actionable. “Smart” people know this—they know how easy it is to get away with lifting ideas, since that’s legally kosher, if utterly odious and unethical.
Those familiar with my work know that I cite religiously and faithfully—I cite even when I don’t have to really. That’s because of my ethics. On a personal level, it’s because I’m not threatened by anyone. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. Why borrow what I may be able to best?
My last brush with this contemptible conduct came about because of a brilliant and ethical colleague—if not for him, I would not have known I had been kind of victimized yet again. He was incredulous when he came across what he recognized to be my ideas, and those of a primary source I had quoted diligently in my essay, all appropriated as the offending writer’s own.
I fought back, and got a citation appended to this second-hand text. I believe you must fight back, so that those who imagine they deserve credit for your ideas pay by losing face. They now know you’re on to them.
In my case, oddly enough, people whom I quite respected have nicked my rather idiosyncratic formulations. Sean nailed it (I could credit myself with this insight, but it’s his): “what’s at play in these instances,” he explained, “is someone who believes he has said what you said, and in the event that he hasn’t, he, being so great, thinks he deserved to have said it.” Something along the lines of, “Who the hell is Ilana to write stuff that sounds as though I ought to have written it?”
Ugly, unmanly sentiments indeed.
Prior to this last episode, about which I would not have been the wiser without my ethical colleague, there was the “professor”—they are a dime a dozen—with no paper or pixel trail to his name, who decided he deserved credit for my vindicating of Michael Vick.
If you recall, I was the first to offer a detailed and rather idiosyncratic defense of Vick’s dog fighting. Sean Hannity said he had not found anyone other than me to offer a coherent defense, which is why he criss-crossed me on his show. My piece was later published in the Orange County Register too.
Google “Defense Michael Vick.” Who’s right up there after Whoopi Goldberg (who, for obvious reasons, would come first)?
My arguments continued on the blog and took a very distinguishing tack, to which the good “professor” adhered closely. His editor defended this no-name dog of a writer. Yeah, this from a bunch that never shuts up about values—the Values Vulgarizers. (Not to mention the violators of the injunction against Second-Handerism.)
So what do I think of the allegation that Obama lifted words not his for one of his uninspiring Hear Me Roar speeches? If it’s true, I agree with Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, that, “When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader.”
While Obama is accused of some lengthy appropriating absent any word of credit to the primary source, his come-back to Hillary is as impoverished as his plagiarism practice. Obama says she borrowed his “signature chant ‘fired up and ready to go’ in Davenport, Iowa, and later her echoing of his rally cry, ‘Yes, we can!’”
Puh-leeze. Next our “intellectual” will be accusing Hillary of stealing the “You Go Girl” bimbo battle cry. The above is clearly Hillary’s mocking paraphrase of Obama’s call to arms. Before he makes his next empty accusation, Imam Obama ought to know that “Ouch”  has also moved into the public domain.
This particular professor is a bit shabby in this department. All not very surprising, considering my own tales of woe with professors.

Update: Obama ought to have said, “To paraphrase my friend, x,” or something along those lines. However you spin it, it’s not very elevated, coming from a man who prides himself on the proper use of words. Sourcing is part of the proper use of words.