Dying In Iraq For Naught

Foreign Policy, Iraq, War

“Master Sergeant Wheeler, 39, a father of four who was thinking of retiring from the Army, became the first American in four years to die.” (NYT) What did this good man die for? He died to “rescue” “20 Iraqi security forces, some local residents and apparently some militants whom the Islamic State suspected as being traitors.”

Totally worth it, right? WRONG. So wrong.

Megyn Kelly: You’re So Vain (And Other Girl Talk)

Aesthetics, Gender, Media, Morality

Your new hair is magnificent, Megyn Kelly. You’re a pretty girl. But boy!, are you vain and a tad vacuous. The way you always bring the Kelly File show back to … yourself. Does that take skill or just all consuming narcissism?

Today we learned from motormouth herself that because she’s so cute (presumably), she was given a stripper name by her sources when investigating a story about a stripper who cried rape.

When she first burst on to the Fox News scene, years ago, Kelly announced in an interview that she was beautiful inside and out. She might have meant to say boastful.

After the much needed dressing-down and time-out forced by her snarling attack on Donald Trump, Kelly was a little more demure. She has since rebounded, rushing to make hay on the Charlie Rose show, where she was utterly charming, as she always is.

Yet the constant onslaught of Kelly charisma has become off-putting.

With Rose, Kelly slipped up again by bringing it back to herself: She told the interviewer and his viewers how Fox News boss Roger Aisles had liked “the package: the smarts, the looks, the voice.”

Her words about herself.

In the same interview, I noticed her glowing (and sweet) references to her kids, but nothing for her husband, whom she often allows into the studio when he has a book to flog (the nepotistic school of journalism is big with bimbo journos). Is all still well on that front? Or, has Kelly been forced to seek the counsel of her favorite wise man, Dr. Phil?

Glad the hair-do is fixed. The Fox News hair stylist is awful. An exemplar of her (or his) creation is Kimberly G-String’s rigid wig. The Hair sits on Guilfoyle’s head like a helmet. Andrea Tarantula’s stiff coif and Megyn Kelly’s old, shaggy hair extensions—all were awful.

Megyn’s new hair is neat. A good cut has replaced the old, matted shag that likely needed extensive reviving before each show.

Let’s leave the spandex, cling-wrap, cheap looking garments the broads on Fox News swaddle themselves in. Surely they can afford some gorgeous couture? Take a page out of Taylor Swift’s wardrobe or Kate Middleton’s. Beautifully tailored, high-end clothes are so flattering if one can afford them, sartorial essentials Ann Coulter is missing too.

Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap

America, History, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Terrorism

“Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

A DAY IN THE LIFE. The Bennett family’s day began with a prayer at “the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.” It ended in the murder of the family’s father, stabbed to death in the Old City as he attempted to save wife and son from the same fate. A rabbi who rushed to the rescue was knifed to death, too. Twenty-two-year-old Odel Bennett found herself running for her life, a blade in her shoulder, as Palestinian onlookers jeered and spat in her direction.

As widow Odel Bennett convalesced with her toddler at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, another Jewish woman (an elderly Iraqi) was recovering at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital from gun and knife wounds similarly inflicted. Her husband lay in the morgue. That couple’s day started on a “Jerusalem city bus, when two Palestinians attacked with knives and a gun,” reported National Public Radio.

Surveillance camera footage uploaded to the Internet show numerous Palestinian-on-Jew attacks in real time. Waiting at a bus stop, these Arabs are wont to turn and plunge a knife into a Jewish neighbor’s back, again and again and again.

Religious imprimatur for the current wave of attacks on Israelis comes from the highest authority in the Palestinian Authority and beyond. In mosques across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, clerics deliver sermons brandishing scimitars, inciting the faithful to “form stabbing squads and cut the Jews into body parts.”

Mosques enjoy the support of the Palestinian family, school and authority.

UNIDIRECTIONAL VIOLENCE. This time last year—and decades prior—Muslims from East Jerusalem raided a synagogue, killing five Israelis.

These unidirectional assaults on Jews are nearly as old as the Tomb of our Patriarch Joseph. Oops: The ancient Nablus shrine was torched, the other day, by Muhammadan peaceniks, acting à la ISIS (in Syria and Iraq). …

Read the rest. “Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED: Prima Donna Paul Ryan Gets His Work-Life Balance & Much More

Business, Constitution, Government, Law, Neoconservatism, Politics

According to historian Clement Wood it is an unwritten law followed “scrupulously,” “although omitted from the Constitution,” that the Speaker of the House of Representatives possesses “the czar-like power” “to recognize only such members as he pleases, and thereby strongly to influence legislation.”

After playing hard to get, pampered prima donna Paul Ryan has agreed to be the czar-like Speaker of the House. (Were you to ask neoconservative kingpins like William Kristol and John McCain who they’d tap for that position, any position, the Ryan/Rubio duo would be the choice. Bear that in mind.)

Ryan haggled until his “conditions” were met. These were for him “to emerge as House Republicans’ unity candidate, endorsed by the three major factions of House Republicans”—the Freedom Caucus, especially—and to “have enough flexibility to spend time with his wife and kids in Wisconsin.” (TIME)

Ryan’s feminist worthy demand for work-life balance—it got the girls on CNN hot, especially Andy Cooper—really irks. Try telling a major high-tech company that you want to enjoy work/life balance, and they’ll tell you in deeds more than in words that you can have your balance, but expect to remain at the same grade till you retire (or are nudged into retirement on account of “laziness”), and don’t expect good performance reviews or raises.

The pampered parasitical political class goes on about Donald Trump tweeting late into the AM. Successful tycoons are accustomed to staying up till the wee hours.

In any event, poor baby got his wish.

Here is Ann Coulter on other unappealing aspects of Speaker-to-be Paul Ryan.

UPDATE (10/24): “Fox’s Charles Payne Calls Work-Life Balance ‘A Bunch Of Crock’ And Calls For Children To Work More.”