Bill O’Reilly’s Best Joke Ever

America, History, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-history

Bill O’Reilly is definitely funny. He’s funnier than his sidekick, Dennis Miller, whose humor hasn’t aged well.

O’Reilly was especially hilarious, the other day, when attempting to illustrate the historically unprecedented venom toward Donald Trump and his presidency. Said Mr. O’Reilly, “As a historian … “

LOL.

Bill O’Reilly is no historian. I suppose O’Reilly is an historian in the same way court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is. If you treat O’Reilly’s books as works of history, you’re in deep intellectual trouble. (Join the nation.)

Recommended, in the context of O’Reilly’s “scholarship,” is Thomas DiLorenzo’s review of Killing Lincoln, O’Reilly’s “big, boring bag of nothingness” about the assassination”:

Over 100 books are already in print on the subject, and all O’Reilly and his coauthor do is cut and paste what others have written on the subject, but without including a single footnote! The authors also have the annoying habit of writing things like, “in his mind, he was thinking that . . ., ” as though they could know what Lincoln was thinking when he did this or that 150 years ago. This is a standard practice of the “Lincoln scholars,” who also constantly claim to know what was “in his heart” (nothing but love and kindness, of course) in their writings.
There is nothing at all in O’Reilly’s book about Lincoln’s policies and behavior in office. There is nothing about his statist economic policies, his trashing of the Constitution by illegally suspending Habeas Corpus and mass arresting thousands of Northern political dissenters, his intentionally waging war on Southern civilians in violation of all moral and legal codes regarding warfare, his lifelong obsession with deporting all black people, free or slave, from America, etc. In addition, it is apparently so full of historical errors that it has been banned from the bookstore at Ford’s Theater, the famous site of the assassination.

If you want to understand The Idea of America, read foundational books on American republican virtues (not least the title linked). Begin with the book The Power in The People by Felix Morley, and you’ll be able to watch or read Bill O’Reilly’s folderol, and such stuff, and assess it for the shallow nothingness that it is.

Truth is not about the penny plan, or the red line in Syria, or whether to beat up on Russia or not. It’s about grasping the foundational principles of liberty and the limits of government—the principles Jefferson, Madison, Mason, John Roanoke, John Calhoun held dear; grasping those core issues and applying them to the issues of the day.

The other exquisite text by Morley is Freedom and Federalism.

For starters, let’s see these texts on your coffee tables.

Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge

Britain, GUNS, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, libertarianism, The West

“Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

… The story of Khalid Masood is certainly festooned with the kind of studied failures you find in the tale of American homeboy Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 gay club-goers in Orlando, Florida, wounding 53 others. Mateen might have been a latent homosexual, but he was loud and proud about his orientation as an aspiring Muslim terrorist.

For his part, Masood was a violent criminal with many faces, in-and-out of the Islamized British prison system for inflicting “grievous bodily harm” on his countrymen. At every turn, Masood’s life of crime was met with soft responses. He slashes the face of a café owner in the village of Sussex but receives only two years in jail. A similar, but more severe, offense nets Masood, then Adrien Elms, a brief jail sentence for “the possession of an offensive weapon.”

A penal system that singles out for criminalization and punishment not the deadly assault and the intent behind it, but the possession of a weapon during the commission of said assault, is inviting escalation. (Oh, and once in jail, how about converting this kind of inmate to Christianity? That’s guaranteed to save lives in the future by giving inmates a higher purpose that precludes killing for rewards in the afterlife.)

So it was that Masood journeys from Sussex to Saudi Arabia, like any ordinary English lad would. (Is this now a rite of passage in Britain? BBC News’ correspondent Dominic Casciani seems to think so.) There, he can be found hard at work at the General Authority of Civil Aviation. (Yeah, right!) Then it’s back to East Sussex. With a nicely fattened, fraudulent CV, Masood goes to work for Aaron Chemicals, in Bodiam, a company which, as it appears, hired him despite his criminal record and predisposition to violence.

Speaking of corporate culture, how dangerously politically correct is it? How likely are corporations to put virtue-signaling and politically correct piety ahead of public and worker safety? You be the judge: British security firm G4S employed Omar Mateen, who was out of the closet about his Jihadi sympathies and aspirations. The Swiss security firm Securitas employed Dahir Adan, the Somali, Minnesota mall stabber. Out of all their St. Cloud applicants, Adan seemed like the best bet. …

… Read the rest. “Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is now on Townhall.com.

Does Sean Spicer Still Need To Dignify Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes Allegations?

Anti-Semitism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Judaism & Jews

Why was Sean Spicer nattering about anti-Semitic hate crimes, during a presser the other day? Said Spicer:

“I think that there’s one other piece to this, April. While we unequivocally, no doubt about it, need to call out hate, anti-Semitism where it exists, where’s another thing we have to do. And in your case in particular, I don’t know all of the details, so I don’t want to reference any specific case. But I think we saw this the other day with some of the anti-Semitic behavior that was going out in respect to people of the Jewish faith… we saw these threats coming in to Jewish community centers and there was an immediate jump to criticize folks on the right and to denounce people on the right. And it turns out, it wasn’t someone on the right. And the president said from the get-go ‘I bet it’s not someone from the right’ and he was right.”

Should these accusations still be dignified and pursued when the acts under investigation appear to have been revealed as the combined, un-coordianted efforts of:

1. An African-American scorned. (See “Black Man Makes Anti-Semitic Threats Over Breakup With #Whitegirl.”)

2. An Israeli-American:

The 19-year-old arrested last week, Michael Kaydar, reportedly used advanced technology and voice-altering equipment to call in the threats to more than 100 JCCs, Jewish day schools and other Jewish institutions in the United States in recent months.
While many Jewish groups had blamed white supremacists for the bomb threats, Trump refused to point any fingers. In February he reportedly said that the threats against Jewish communal institutions may be a false flag “to make others look bad.”

Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)

Africa, Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Technology, The West

“Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)” is the latest column, now on The Daily Caller.

From their plush apartments, over groaning dinner tables, pseudo-intellectuals have the luxury of depicting squalor and sickness as idyllic, primordially peaceful and harmonious. After all, when the affluent relinquish their earthly possessions to return to the simple life, it is always with aid of sophisticated technology and the option to be air-lifted to a hospital if the need arises. Is there any wonder, then, that “the stereotype of colonial history” has been perpetuated by the relatively well-to-do intellectual elite? Theories of exploitation, Marxism for one, originated with Western intellectuals, not with African peasants. It is this clique alone that could afford to pile myth upon myth about a system that had benefited ordinary people.

What is meant by “benefited”? Naturally, the premise here is that development, so long as it’s not coerced, is desirable and material progress good. British colonists in Africa reduced the state of squalor, disease and death associated with lack of development. To the extent that this is condemned, the Rousseauist myth of the noble, happy savage is condoned. Granted, Africa’s poor did not elect to have these conditions, good and bad, foisted on them. However, once introduced to potable water, sanitation, transportation, and primary healthcare, few Africans wish to do without them. Fewer Africans still would wish to return to Native Customary Law once introduced to the idea that their lives were no longer the property of the Supreme Chief to do with as he pleased. …

… When all is said and done, the West is what it is due to human capital—people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being’s worth; the aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert makes or breaks a society. Overall, American society is superior to assorted African and Arab societies because America is still inhabited by the kind of individuals who make possible a thriving civil society. …

… Read the rest. “Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)” is now on The Daily Caller.