Right Wing Nut House

It pains me to say it - well, not really because I actually enjoy writing about the idiocy of the right - but conservatism is fast approaching double face palm territory. Have you ever seen such a collection of losers, dunces, moral cretins, and blissfully unaware candidates for high office as showed up for last night’s CNBC debate?

You have a certified imbecile (Perry). A serial sexual harasser (Cain). A chronic flip flopper (Romney). A man who can’t keep his pants zipped (Gingrich). A lunatic (yes Paulbots - advocating a return to the gold standard is bat guano crazy). A religious zealot (Santorum). A Simon Legree clone (Michele “If anyone will not work, neither should he eat” Bachmann). And a candidate who can’t decide whose side he’s on (Huntsman).

It is to weep. At exactly the moment in American history when a rational, logical, coherent conservatism is desperately needed to counter the left’s drive to take us over a fiscal and cultural cliff, we not only get candidates who fall short in almost every substantive yardstick one might desire to measure the worthiness of a nominee, we also have conservatives en mass who cheer for ignorance, applaud mediocrity, roar for moral turpitude, and display an appalling lack of respect for basic conservative principles.

The Herman Cain fiasco is a case in point. One or two women coming forward might be cause for questioning the veracity of the accusers, or blaming the mess on the press. But 5 women coming forward with more rumored to be in the wings? This is not the liberal media going after a conservative candidate, or a case of Democratic women making false accusations. This is a clear pattern of behavior that is totally unacceptable to most rational people, and certainly to most of the electorate.

And yet, Politico reports Cain’s response to a question about hiring a CEO accused of harassment:

The embattled Republican candidate brushed aside the premise of the question and – as he did at an Arizona press conference Tuesday – described reports of alleged sexual harassment as a smear campaign.

“The American people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion based on unfounded accusations,” Cain said. “This country’s looking for leadership and this is why a lot of people, despite what has happened over the last nine days, are still very enthusiastically behind my candidacy.”

The audience was on his side: They booed the initial question and cheered his response.

Cain changed his original answer to the allegations at least three times, which brings up the question of whether he’s a serial liar as well. The press didn’t make him alter his narrative - he did that all on his own, with no help from the “liberal media.”

Don’t tell that to his supporters who appear to be blaming the media for their candidate’s transgressions and his inability to keep his story straight. It is ironic that after spending 8 years chastising Bill Clinton for his harassment of women, that so many conservatives would abandon reason and spin their hero’s behavior as an invention of the press. The only difference is that Hillary blamed the “vast right wing conspiracy” for her husband’s compulsive gropes while conservatives are desperately flailing about, blaming the press, David Axelrod, even the victims themselves for their candidate’s lack of couth and inability to control his manly urges.

Cheering Cain’s dismissive response to substantive allegations that 30 years ago would have doomed a candidate’s chances - as it did Gary Hart - was the low point of the campaign for me so far. “What are they cheering,” I asked myself? What could possibly be so praiseworthy in Cain’s response that would cause so many to ignore the facts and abandon themselves to mindless approbation?

The answer is a special kind of ignorance that ignores objective reality in favor of a ideological worldview that apes the worst of liberalism’s identity politics while selectively, and very carefully choosing fact flakes that buttress the underpinnings of a separate materiality that is unconnected to logic, rationality, and reason. They cheer Cain because not to do so would shatter the fantasy they have created about the media, their opponents, and the world as seen through the prism of rabid partisanship and excessive ideology.

Lumping all media together as “liberals” is idiocy. This is not to say that much of the media is without bias,or isn’t in the tank for Obama and the Democrats. But what ever happened to taking individuals one at a time and not judging them according to some ideological bias based on what they do? It is decidedly unconservative to play identity politics in this way, aping the worst of liberal ideology. Dismissing the Cain harassment story as the product of liberal attack politics doesn’t hold up to reasonable analysis - not when 5 different women have stepped forward to make accusations against the candidate. Blaming the messenger only reveals the right to be blissfully unaware of their own predicament

And yet, all of this is meaningless in the face of the epistemic closure found on the right as it relates to attitudes toward the media, objective reality, and a curious detachment on the part of many conservatives who ignore the painfully obvious shortcomings of their candidates for president — shortcomings that would disqualify them if the right was thinking rationally. Michele Bachmann’s statement on the poor being forced to work before they would be allowed to eat is real 19th century, social Darwinism stuff. Herman Cain’s ignorance of foreign policy is appalling. Rick Perry’s stuttering incoherence, ditto. How did these people get to be taken seriously as candidates by the right while a reasonably intelligent Mitt Romney - a man conservative enough for 80% of the country - is so reviled that many conservatives would rather see Obama president than the GOP candidate if the former Massachusetts governor makes it that far?

Excuse me while I bemoan the state of conservatism by giving myself a double face palm.

I just got a weather forecast for hell: temperatures are dropping and a deep freeze is expected.

Glenn Greenwald is right:

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.  No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.  When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.).  It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its.  The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world.  The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

The problem that the president has ignored and that those cheering the death of this scumbag have forgotten is that al-Awlaki is not a terrorist. He has not even broken the law. He is innocent.

Until he is indicted, tried, and convicted of crimes by a jury of his peers.Then we can drag his terrorist hide to the execution chamber, strap him down, and give him the hot shot. I have no problem with that scenario at all. If there is going to be a death penalty in America, certainly those who advocate the mass murder of American citizens and work to carry it out deserve it the most.

If al-Awlaki had been killed in a drone attack in a cave where he just happened to be hiding along with other AQAP terrorists, we could all hold our noses and say it was a legal hit — despite knowing it to be a transparent fiction — simply because there was no stated intent to single out the terrorist for assassination. A patina of plausible deniability encompasses the act; not satisfactory to purists like Greenwald but good enough as a legal defense.

Recall that our efforts to target Saddam’s and Gaddafi’s known hideouts and bomb shelters could be similarly justified because we were hitting “command and control” targets. If they happened to be where the bombs were falling — a wish devoutly hoped for — well, c’est la guerre.

Indeed, we are at war. And if an American citizen chooses to fight on the other side, he takes his chances like the rest of the enemy combatants.

But knowingly, coldly and with malice aforethought, if we put his name on a missile and use it to kill him, it becomes a shocking transgression against the Constitution and flies in the face of 222 years of American law and tradition. Al-Awlaki was not a terrorst. No court said he was. No prosecutor ever indicted him. No jury ever convicted him. He was, as I said, an innocent American citizen under the law.

Would I be making the same argument if Bush were president? I would hope so. The case of Jose Padilla was similar in the sense that Padilla was innocent, although he was eventually indicted, tried and convicted (not of trying to detonate a dirty bomb). But at the time that he was picked up and indefinitely detained, his rights were trampled upon by a government that used the excuse of being at war to justify his unconstitutional detention.

Targeting foreigners is one thing. Targeting your own for assassination is what the Soviets, Gaddafi and the Iranians do to their citizens.

I hardly think following their example makes us very “exceptional,” do you?

You don’t have to advocate for military intervention to be terribly disturbed by our Syrian policy these last few months. The UN report detailing what’s been going on in Assad’s charnel house shows the moral bankruptcy of a policy that isn’t predicated on preventing civilian deaths but rather the cynical notion that the rest of the world hates us because we can be too aggressive in standing up for what we believe is right.

That is the essence of a “lead from behind” foreign policy. I might add that there is nothing inherently wrong with such a policy. The last 2 decades of American nation building and military intervention actually recommends that we walk a little softer and are more cognizant of the interests of other nations.

But events in Syria demanded we go it alone if necessary. And I don’t think we would have. History has shown that America can make a difference in bringing the rest of the world around to a specific moral position if we take the lead. Besides, the administration explanation that it took time to line up support for Assad’s ouster rings hollow and borders on fabrication. As I point out in my latest at FPM, the administration dilly dallied for 5 long months before even beginning the process of lining up support in the international  community to demand Assad step down. Then, it took less than two weeks to do so:

Why did it take so long? When the protests started in March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying, “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” The administration believed at the time that the protests would put pressure on the Syrian dictator to initiate changes in Syrian political society, forcing him to open a dialogue with the opposition.

This attitude turned out to be a product of wishful thinking rather than reasoned analysis. No sooner had Clinton made that curious statement did Assad begin his butchery. It wasn’t until late April that the administration issued its first set of sanctions against the Syrian regime. The second set, targeting Assad and his cronies, came two weeks later. It was shortly after that, on May 19, that Obama delivered his speech on the so-called Arab Spring, saying, “President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.”

Still short of calling for the Syrian strongman’s ouster, it wasn’t until July that Hillary Clinton claimed that Assad had “lost legitimacy.” This milquetoast statement by the administration stood until the beginning of this month — after 1,500 Syrians had already been massacred — when the US finally began to gather international support for Assad’s resignation.

Much has been made of the statement by an Obama national security staffer in a New Yorker article that the president was “leading from behind” on the Libya issue. The statement encompasses the worldview of the president and most of his advisers, who believe that the status of the United States as the only superpower in the world is detrimental to international relations and that we should be “first among equals” when it comes to building coalitions and consensus on world issues.

Clearly, our actions relating to Syria is another example of that policy. Rather than getting out in front of events and trying to influence them, the administration hung back, watching to see if other nations would take the lead in advocating what is clearly the moral course of action: putting pressure on Assad to leave. That it took five torturous months with Syrian tanks blasting their way into dozens of cities and towns killing thousands does not speak well of the “lead from behind” policy nor the president who oversees it. Obama’s statement roused analyst Michael Ledeen to write, “After months of slaughter, as jaws dropped all over what used to be called The Western World at the spectacle of an American leader who danced all around one of the clearest moral and strategic imperatives EVER, we finally get this [statement].”

Decline by choice? I think there’s something to that. As I’ve said on numerous occasions on this site, if America didn’t exist, the international community would have to invent us. We are a convenient whipping boy, as well as being a tremendous force  - perhaps the only force in the world - for selfless good. Nobody thinks it unusual when we send aircraft carriers to the sites of natural disasters, saving thousands of lives. And while the world might frown on us taking out a dictator like Saddam, or unredeemed mountebanks like the Taliban, they always leave a small place in their hearts where they cheer us on.

No, we shouldn’t take out a thug like Assad with our military. But our actions can create the conditions where he cannot survive in power. Yesterday, the administration finally took the first step toward that goal. That thousands of innocent Syrians died before they managed to rouse themselves and reach that conclusion is a moral failing.

There are times I want to grab some tea party folk by the neck and try and shake some sense in them. Many of them are, indeed, unreasonable and illogical. Advocating not raising the debt ceiling, forcing the government to cut about 40% of the budget in one year, may not be terrorism but they might as well support detonating an atom bomb in New York City considering the similar effect it would have on the economy. You don’t snatch a trillion and a half dollars out of the economy and not see a collapse of some kind. And if it is Gotterdammerung they seek, let them self-immolate and achieve their irrational goals that way.

But really, it is ridiculous to call this a “Tea Party Downgrade.” There was never, ever a chance that the debt ceiling wouldn’t be raised. Less than 100 tea partiers in the House and a few in the Senate could never have blocked the Congress from raising the debt limit. In fact, it was useful for both sides to use that non-existent threat in order to try and get their way.

The 11th hour nature of the debt deal was pre-ordained. Both sides were going to take the talks to the absolute limit before papering over their differences and reaching an agreement. This is the way things are done in Washington — pandering to both bases, both sides playing politics to the hilt, until at the last possible moment, order is restored and a deal is inked.

Right now, a gigantic game of “Pretend” is being played by those who are blaming the tea party for what appears to be a political decision by S&P to lower our credit rating. Both sides are elevating the tea party far beyond their actual influence, pretending that they were obstructionist hooligans who almost caused a catastrophe. Or, in the case of Republicans, well meaning activists whose whims had to be catered to on the spending issue lest Boehner and other Republicans end up being primaried by tea party candidates. This is nonsense. The Tea Party doesn’t have that kind of electoral clout. And while they may score a victory here and there (Senator Lugar seems especially vulnerable), their candidates were soundly defeated in primaries against most GOP incumbents in 2010. (They fared much better in open primaries but only 32% of Tea Party backed candidates won in the general election.)

Pretending what isn’t so in this case was extremely useful to both sides; it gave Boehner an excuse to rule out tax increases and gave Obama a foil upon which he could impale the Republicans while agreeing to a deal without an increase in taxes. Obama, running for re-election, knows full well that raising taxes on anybody - even the rich - is bad politics in an election season. It is not surprising that he “caved” on the tax issue — a stratagem, the logic of which has escaped his more rabid liberal supporters.

I can’t believe that John Boehner didn’t know that no deal he came up with would satisfy the radical libertarians and far right wackos who supported sending the American economy to guillotine. I predicted back in May that there was no deal save balancing the budget now, today, that would placate the extremists who are the most visible members (but not a majority) of the tea party. In fact, if they supported any agreement, it would be the end of them. The Tea Party exists to be contrarians, naysaying is their lifeblood. They cannot exist as majoritarians. The movement would collapse under its own internal contradictions if they ever did achieve power. How could a movement that is, at bottom, anti-government actually run the government?

Neither can I believe that President Obama didn’t realize the same, exact, thing. Thus, this game of Pretend where both sides brought us to the brink, playing out their political games, all the while knowing full well they would come to some kind of arrangement - even if, as it turned out, that the agreement was largely meaningless as a deficit reduction deal.

We are not going to address our deficit problems until our economy is a smoking ruin. Every European nation currently at or near default never addressed their problems either and are now paying for the fact that it is not in the nature of democracies to deal with such intractable issues. Democracy is about consensus and compromise. But the politics that fleshes out a democratic form of government is, unfortunately, made up of politicians, freely elected by the people, who can be unelected in a heartbeat if they were to inflict the kind of pain that will be necessary to solve our spending problems.

The Tea Party doesn’t care about the pain. Like small children, they know what they want and they want it now. But this only makes them juvenile delinquents, not terrorists. They might get some credit for altering the conversation in Washington to reflect the reality that we have a spending problem, but their unrealistic solutions should receive our disapprobation.

There is no way to get spending under control without cutting entitlements and raising taxes. The longer we wait, the higher the taxes and the more we’ll have to cut. It’s a matter of arithmetic now. The administration’s own estimates have us running up $9 trillion more in debt over the next ten years. And that’s with pie in the sky estimates of growth and the nonsensical notion that interest rates won’t rise, thus massively increasing the amount we pay to service our debt.

Within this coming decade, the dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency, we will probably be downgraded further, we will experience at least another recession - or two - and since neither side has the answer to the crisis, we will probably see a string of one term presidents and control of the legislature see-sawing back and forth every two to four years.

And then? Terra Incognito as the ancient mariners used to call uncharted waters. If I’m lucky, I won’t live to see it.

Gee guys…what can I say? I blew it when I accused you, and other peace loving extremist Muslim groups of having a hand in that Norway operation yesterday. I mean, what can I do to make it up to you? Cut off my own head? Drown myself in boiling oil? How about if I chopped off my hand and mailed it to you? Would that make you feel better?

Anyway, there are several VERY important people who are demanding that I apologize for getting it wrong. Well, not me specifically. I knew it was a right wing nut all along. Soon as I heard about it, I said “Yep. Christian conservatives did this.” The tell-tale massive explosions close together. And then there was that carnage at the youth camp. Only Christian conservatives - and you - carry out attacks like that. And since we’ve blamed a lot of terrorism on you guys over the last decade (here’s a list of Muslim terrorist acts over the last two months - pretty impressive, I must say!) I figured that we ought to give someone else a chance to get blamed. Blond haired, blue eyed European terrorists have been in short supply since the Red Brigades and Baider-Manhoff retired. Nice to see we white people are making a comeback in this sphere.

So Glenn Greenwald thinks we do you a disservice when blaming you for any old terrorist attack that comes down the pike:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist… we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target.

He’s right, ya know. You’ve given us very little cause to “dislike” you. I mean, what’s a few thousand infidels being incinerated, more or less? We make far too big a deal out of people dying. After all, it happens all the time, every day in fact. Just a part of life.

Greenwald has a valid point. Terrorism has no “objective” meaning. It could mean Eric Rudolph blowing up the Olympics. Or some Christian wacko murdering an abortion doctor. Or Glenn Greenwald inflicting more of his tortured logic on an unsuspecting world (OK - maybe not terrorism but it’s annoying as hell.)

But Allah forbid it ever mean that 95% of the acts of terror committed on this planet is carried out by friendly Muslim fanatics like you. This “objective” truth must never be uttered lest we hurt your feelings. Far better to point to blond, blue eyed righty extremists as the true terrorists of the world and blame them first when some nutcase breaks into a meeting and starts screaming “Allahu akbar!” while spraying automatic gunfire into the crowd. After all, maybe the perp dyed his hair black, and is only pretending to be a Muslim.

So for what it’s worth, I apologize. From now on, I give all Muslim terrorists the benefit of the doubt and will hold my literary fire until you tell us that you’re the guilty party.

It’s not only the fair thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.

Regular readers of American Thinker know that our coverage of the Weinergate scandal has been thorough, but lacking the wall to wall coverage of some other conservative sites.

The fact that we received no complaints of which I’m aware shows that our readers are smarter than the press. The media frenzy on the scandal has been so over the top that one could be forgiven if they believed the future of the republic hung on whether Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was telling the truth about being hacked, or whether - as it turned out - he is a lying, pathetic, creepy, predatory sexual libertine with the appetites of an incubus and the morals of an alley cat.

The question isn’t whether Weiner is a bomb throwing, ranting, unthinking liberal partisan caught in a juicy scandal but whether his sexual peccadilloes rise to a level that justified the media coverage in the press and on many conservative websites.

The answer is yes…and no. It was nice of Mr. Weiner to present his neck so willingly and give Republicans the opportunity to wield the ax. From a purely political standpoint, this was an important story. A rising congressman (rumored to covet the NY mayor’s office), a darling of the snarling left, a man who set himself up as a spokesman for the downtrodden and those “without a voice” in the halls of power proved to be a target of opportunity too tempting to resist. The nature of politics precludes giving him a pass despite some calls to ignore the scandal because, after all, Weiner never claimed to be a paragon of virtue.

Well, if that’s the case, then why didn’t he reveal his sexual proclivities during the campaign? If it’s unimportant, but voters should know as much as possible about their representatives, why not create an ad with his R-rated pictures and x-rated sexting messages?

Weiner hid his follies because he knew that revealing them would destroy his career and possibly force him to resign (still a definite possibility). He himself thought them important enough to lie about their existence. The logical conclusion then is that if Weiner kept his secrets because they were important then the revelation that he lied about the matter should be equally weighty. Liberals can jabber all they want to about “hypocrisy” but they’re missing the point. Why should “hypocrisy” be the only catalyst for resignation and disgrace? Weiner convicts himself by his own actions in lying to maintain a secret. Not to spare his wife but to save his career was the overall motivation and thinking differently places one in the same category as Santa Claus believers.

So it’s perfectly legitimate to go after Weiner’s scalp - which now hangs proudly on conservative lodge poles around the net. Liberals have similar conquests on their record as well. But this kind of flinging dirt - as old as Philip Freneau accusing John Adams of wanting to be king - is, when reduced to its basic element, absolutely irrelevant to the functioning of government and cannot be seen as the symbolic representation of the opposition that is claimed by the mudslingers.

Weiner’s transgressions are no more indicative of the morals of the vast majority of Democratic party members than Senator Vitter’s visits to prostitutes represented the norm for Republicans. Making such blanket observations is an exercise for partisans. The American people tend to take their politicians one at a time, judging them for their performance and their individual impressions as to how well a politician lives up to the expectations they have set for them. Party loyalty is much less important today than in the past, which makes these adventures in muckraking far less damaging than 100 years ago.

This makes the feeding frenzy in the media and on blogs an exercise in dynamic overkill. A partisan like Andrew Brietbart - a counterpart to Freneau, Callendar, and other newspaper bomb throwers of the past - is a necessary adjunct for any political party (the Democrats have Media Matters’ David Brock who functions in a similar capacity). He has proven to be a canny manipulator of the mainstream press - baiting them, playing them, and forcing them to cover stories they would ordinarily eschew.

But this scandal-churning has a downside; so much importance is attached to, what would ordinarily be considered trivialities, that the salacious gossip crowds out actual news stories.

Megan McCardle thinks that this is actually OK in the Weiner matter since there really aren’t any earth shattering stories that could use additional coverage. This is undoubtedly true. Poor Rep. Weiner chose an awful time to reveal his sexual predilections. Absolutely nothing else was happening in the world that had the journalistic ooomph to push the Weinergate story off the front page.

But if it had, would it have mattered? Almost certainly, yes. The pressure on the young women who were targets of Weiner’s advances would have lessened considerably, keeping them in the closet, thus denying Breitbart the devastating proof he needed to force Weiner into his mea culpa press conference. Conservative blogs would have kept churning but the oxygen needed to keep the story alive in the mainstream press would have been sucked out if there had been a big foreign story, or a domestic disaster of some sort.

So, from a political standpoint, this was an important story. But in the larger context of history and “news,” there wasn’t much there. Another congressman proving himself a lying weasel is not the basis for the kind of over the top, wall to wall coverage Weiner and his dirty pictures have received.

All in all, he just isn’t worth the attention.

The blog post originally appears on The American Thinker

Dick Durbin is about to do what Democrats do best; pander to a minority.

In this case, the minority is Muslim and Durbin sees evil walking the land where there is a threat to Muslim constitutional rights. Politico:

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs a subcommittee on the Senate Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on March 29 on protecting the civil rights of Muslim Americans. The hearing is being billed as the first of its kind for Congress.

Durbin said the hearing is necessary following an increase in anti-Muslim bigorty in the United States, including “[Koran]burnings, restrictions on mosque construction, hate crimes, hate speech, and other forms of discrimination.”

Is it true? Has there been an “increase” in “anti-Muslim bigotry?”

Washington Times:

In 2009, the latest FBi statistics available, anti-Islamic hate crimes accounted for 9.3 percent of the 1,376 religiously motivated hate crimes recorded. That’s far less than the 70.1 percent that were anti-Jewish.

Let’s take that notion by Durbin of an “increase” in anti-Muslim bigotry for a spin and see if he’s right.

FBI stats from 2008 show that there were 105 incidents of hate crimes directed against Muslims, with 125 offenses cataloged involving 130 victims. For 2009, those numbers were 107 incidents, 128 offenses, and 130 victims.

No increase - repeat, no increase - in the number of victims. A less than 2% increase in the number of incidents and offenses over that period.

Let’s look at this from the standpoint of time. What were the statistics for hate crimes against Muslims in 2003?

Incidents: 149; Offenses: 155; Victims; 171

Dear Dick Durbin: Incidents and victims of Anti-Muslim bigotry has gone down considerably since 2003.

Since the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes has risen fairly steadily over that same period - from 1025 victims in 2003 to 1132 victims in 2009 - maybe you’re looking at the wrong religion to investigate, Dicky?

The question is - did he think nobody would look this up and challenge his bald faced lie? Took me 5 minutes of googling to find the reports and less than a minute to find these tables.

This is not a serious effort to investigate anything. It is an outright pander to a religious group that keeps crying wolf about how terrible it is to be a Muslim in America. I don’t dismiss or excuse those incidents by knuckledraggers who commit acts of violence against anyone based on their religion. (Whether there should be anything in the law called a “hate crime” is another story). But we should draw the line when politicians - for no good reason or, in Durbin’s case, manufactured reasons - seek to exploit our divisions for political gain.

Rep. King’s hearings fell short in this regard as well. I don’t buy into the idea that King should have delved into the reasons why right wing kooks get radicalized. That’s a no brainer simply because we’ve had 50 years of studies, polls, and surveys that tell us why Birchers are Birchers, and neo-Nazis need a frontal lobotomy. Paranoia plays a huge role in the radicalization of the far right (and far left) plus fine old American traditions of nativism, anti-popery, and racism. Why investigate what we already know?

But investigating why otherwise rational Muslims could be radicalized by the teachings of someone like Anwar al-Awlaki would have been extremely valuable - not only for law enforcement but for Muslims in particular. Unfortunately, politicians and the professional grievance mongers associated with CAIR couldn’t allow anything to distract us from their “Muslims as victims” narrative. If we ever did, several fat cat CAIR executives would be out of a job and CAIR itself would lose its raison d’etre. It’s hard to be a “civil rights” organization if you can’t claim wholesale violations of your special group’s civil rights.

Is there anti-Muslim bigotry? You’re kidding, right? Of course there is. But there is far more anti-Semitism and almost as much anti-Christian bigotry according to FBI stats. In a free society, one is free to hate as long as you don’t directly advocate to hurt someone or your beliefs don’t morph into acts of violence. Pointing and laughing at a Muslim woman wearing the hijab is impolite and boorish behavior. But is it a “hate crime?” Not as we currently define it according to the law. But if CAIR and other intolerant multi-culturalists get their way, that will change. And then, they will be no different than the knuckledraggers they seek to prosecute. They would have proven themselves to be just as intolerant as any neo-Nazi who needs a brain transplant.

Durbin is a lying politician. But the do-gooders who think they are promoting diversity and respect for others are just as guilty. It is they who threaten our freedom of expression by trying to wildly expand the legal definition of “bigotry.” In a free society, we shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells in fear of offending people.

Most of this article was originally posted at The American Thinker

In my youth, it was popular to say, “The revolution will be televised.” At that time, it seemed magical that we could witness unrest in countries from around the globe almost in real time, not to mention videotape of riots and demonstrations here in the states.

The technology of recording video at the time was laughably primitive. The professional grade video recording equipment may have been “portable” in the grossest sense of the word, but it was still bulky and was awkward to handle. More importantly, home videotape recording equipment was in its infancy and few thought to walk around with a video camera hoping to catch history as it happened.

Perhaps the shocking video of Rodney King being beaten by LA police officers was a seminal moment in history. It was purely by accident that a citizen witnessed the confrontation, was able to grab his home video camera, and in just a few minutes of recording, impact politics, race relations, and history itself in such a way. People still weren’t walking around town and putting themselves in position to capture the moment as it happened. But the potential to do so was there when technology would be able to catch up with history.

Welcome to the future. As we sit glued to our TV’s watching the disaster unfold in Japan and elsewhere, I am struck by the quantity and quality of video that is streaming on TV networks, websites, and an iPhone near you. Truly remarkable, frightening, wrenching images all brought to us largely by cellphone and flip cameras so small they can fit in your shirt pocket.

No one consciously walks around waiting for history to unfold so they can record it. People turn from being spectators of history to chronicling events in the blink of an eye. It is one of the most remarkable, consequential, and, in the end, frightening developments in my lifetime. Historians 500 years from now will be reviewing videos of the various uprisings, disasters, accidents, and probably the foolishness that has been and will be recorded by the omnipresent, all seeing eye of the video camera. It will give them background and context to events that historians from generations prior to the advent of this technology were denied. Will it color their findings in any way? I wonder.

You might ask why this is frightening? The ubiquitousness of this technology when combined with the human frailties inbred in all of us, threatens our personal space in a way that no other technological development in history has been able to do. Government has sophisticated surveillance devices that could easily threaten our privacy if the microphone would be pointed our way. But it is unlikely that the Justice Department would post any videos of you committing crimes (or no) to YouTube, U-Stream, or other video sharing sites. However, your nosy neighbor could take a stealth video of you sunning nude in your backyard and it could go viral before the day was out.

Other, more sinister uses for this great leap forward in telecommunications could easily be imagined. The only thing that constrains the misuse of this technology is the individual’s personal ethics. As usual, the law is behind the curve in catching up to the impact of new technology on our liberty. But since this is, in a very real sense, personal technology and thus, an extension of our own freedom, how can the law deal with the use of private video recordings violating the personal space of someone without impinging on rights like freedom of expression? There are already laws on the books that prohibit some violations of our personal space, but not everything can be foreseen when writing such laws and it is possible that some scenarios would slip through the cracks.

Perhaps it would be helpful to redefine privacy. In an age when your neighbor is as much of a threat to your privacy as the government, we may need broader definitions of what personal space is. This would cover not only cell phone cameras but also security cameras. red light cameras, and other surveillance devices that are proliferating at an alarming rate in cities around the world. It’s bad enough that the state can mail you a ticket for running a red light. But surveilling citizens who have done nothing wrong and present no evidence that they are about to do wrong throws the entire notion of innocent until proven guilty, not to mention “just cause” on its head.

At some point, a clarifying moment will occur and we’ll have a serious discussion of these and other issues regarding the right to privacy. If we are going to err - and that is very likely considering we are all human and prone to it - we should err on the side of more privacy and less intrusion. That goes for both the gargantuan state using awesome technologies to watch our every move and our nosy neighbor armed with a flip camera.

I sometimes surprise myself with my prurient attitudes. After all, my formative years were spent being terrorized by the Sisters of Mercy whose beliefs regarding human sexuality in pre-teens bordered on the pathological. Fundamentalist Muslims had nothing on the good sisters as far as separation of the sexes, and attitudes toward boy-girl romance is concerned, and the resulting fear of God they instilled in all of us about sex in general should have scarred me for life.

Thankfully, there was Playboy to save me. That, and the gradual realization that it wouldn’t fall off if I did it by myself, nor would a bolt of lightening strike me down if I tried to cop a feel from some particularly well-endowed high school hottie.

There were some anxious moments in college when my sexual inexperience and admitted hang ups about sex before marriage mystified the first few women I dated. But nature eventually triumphed - as did reason and rationality as I abandoned my Catholic faith - and I have been a happily, mal-adjusted, perpetual adolescent in my sexual attitudes just like any other red blooded American male since.

I don’t exactly possess the burning passion of the born again free love advocate, but I roll my eyes and look in askance when puritanism rears its ugly head to spoil everyone’s good time. Such is the case at Northwestern University where a popular professor’s Human Sexuality class were treated to an after-lecture bit of fun that made me wish I could go to college all over again:

Northwestern students and administrators are defending an explicit after-class demonstration involving a woman being publicly penetrated by a sex toy on stage in the popular Human Sexuality course last week.

The optional presentation last Monday, attended by about 120 students, featured a naked non-student woman being repeatedly sexually stimulated to the point of orgasm by the sex toy, referred to as a “fucksaw.” The device is essentially a motorized phallus.

The 600-person course, taught by psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey, is one of the largest at NU. The after-class events, which range from a question-and-answer session with swingers to a panel of convicted sex offenders, are a popular feature of the class. But they’re optional and none of the material is included on exams.

Last Wednesday, Bailey devoted six minutes of his lecture to addressing mounting controversy regarding the incident and articulating his educational intent. He told the class he feared the demonstration would impact the after-class events, which are sponsored by the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and he explained the educational purpose of the events.

“I think that these after-class events are quite valuable. Why? One reason is that I think it helps us understand sexual diversity,” he said, according to an audio file obtained by The Daily.

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you,” he said to loud applause at the end of his speech.

Bailey declined to comment for this article due to class preparations that he said last until Friday.

Chicago sex tour guide Ken Melvoin-Berg, who operated the device, emphasized the instructional value of the hour-long session, which also included a question-and-answer period.

“Talking about it doesn’t always lend itself to this sort of thing,” Melvoin-Berg said. “We’re not just talking about it. We’re actually doing it.”

Reading this, I am struck by the fact that every single person who attended the “demonstration” could watch even more risque and explicit demonstrations of how the toy worked on the internet. Thousands of free sites devoted to the subject are available with a click of the mouse. The idea that this would be controversial is a little mystifying when you think about it.

Wisely, the administration ruled immediately that the after class demonstration was a question of academic freedom and they wouldn’t intervene. In fact, given that the lecture was completely voluntary and that students were warned several times before the demonstration began that it would be “intense,” one wonders what all the hub-bub is about.

The educational value of such a “demonstration” is, like all other experiences at college, up for debate. A case can be made that many college age women would benefit from seeing another women reach the “Big O” since about 10% of all women have never experienced it. There is also value for men and women to see how a loving couple shares such intimacy (although how “intimate” they can be while 200 pairs of eyes are on them might stretch the point a little). Also, given that most men believe that foreplay is a dirty word, the idea that seeing a couple share love and intimacy without sexual intercourse might be a boon to women.

If the purpose of the class was to discuss all aspects and mysteries regarding human sexuality, Bailey was well within the boundaries set by the curricula in arranging this voluntary demonstration. With 58% of women reporting dissatisfaction in their sex lives and 36% of men, a little information and live demonstration shouldn’t hurt in improving those figures.

The key, as the therapists tell us, to a satisfying sexual life is partner communication. If the demonstration did anything, it got the kids talking. Helping to remove the restraints in sexual communications is enough of a justification for this unusual “lecture” to be conducted on most college campuses.

As far as I can determine, there were no complaints registered by anyone about the demonstration, although the article mentions “offended parties.” The question then becomes why is it “controversial?” Even the representative of a Christian group on campus was blasé about it:

“Personally, I probably wouldn’t want to witness that, but a student can take or not take the course,” said Christine Woo, a member of NU’s Christians on Campus chapter. “It’s their choice.”

The chances are some NU parents heard about it and may have become upset. But given that attendance was entirely voluntary and that nothing discussed or seen would be subject to an exam, it would seem that anyone who objected to the demonstration either was unaware of the conditions or is uncomfortable with the idea of any sexual activity happening on campus.

Can’t wait for the video…

We are rightly proud of the accomplishments of western civilization over the past 500 years. We have not been perfect - not by a long shot. But gradually, western values and attitudes have permeated the planet, softening the rough edges of civilization, and providing a framework of law where the strong do not always ride roughshod over the weak.

Imperfect, but viable. Flawed, but as a practical matter, better than any alternative.

There is one glaring weakness from which the west suffers in particular that has been exposed time and time again over the last 70 years; our inability to deal with individuals who are determined to act outside the boundaries of “civilized” norms and commit acts of barbarism so profoundly disturbing that they shake our faith in our institutions and belief systems.

This is a consequence of being too civilized. When a Pol Pot, Idi Amin, or a Yakubu Gowon confront the west with the butchery of their own people, we are constrained in our response, stopping short of doing what is necessary to save the innocents from slaughter. It is not a lack of moral courage. Rather, it is the inability to do what is necessary to defeat the evil that is perpetrating such suffering.

It is our refusal to adopt the tactics and ruthlessness of evil in order to destroy it that makes us look weak and helpless in the face of such monumentally uncivilized behavior.

When confronted with evil — the real thing, not the exaggerated, partisan, politically motivated sort of “evil” that right and left believe emanates from their opponents — civilized man freezes like a deer in headlights and fails spectacularly in doing the things necessary to stop it.

It took truly barbaric tactics — including fire bombing German cities and leveling a great many French villages and towns — to defeat Adolf Hitler. Prior to the war, western governments realized in a vague way the threat posed by Hitler’s evil, but refused to lift a finger to stop him until it was far too late.

It took a barbaric weapon to defeat the evil Japanese militarists who literally raped their way across Asia in an orgy of slaughter. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the very cultured and decent Franklin Roosevelt refused to heed the admonitions of his own Japanese ambassador, Joseph Grew, about the threat posed to the world by the unholy alliance of the Imperial Army and corporate war mongers. It took one of the most decent men ever to serve as president - Harry Truman - to order the use of the most indecent weapon ever devised by man and end the militarist’s mad ambitions. We debate the morality of using that weapon and the tactics in Europe to this day.

Since the end of the Second World War, a procession of tin pot dictators, genocidal maniacs, coldly calculating mass murderers, and religious fanatics have marched across the world stage leaving a trail of blood and sorrow so massively beyond the scope of decent people’s understanding, that we failed to grasp the horror even while it was happening in front of our eyes. Pol Pot created a hell on earth in Cambodia and despite desperate cries for help from the lucky few who escaped the mass slaughter, western governments turned a deaf ear and stood by as the Communist butcher depopulated his own country.

The Rwandan genocide — 100 days of unspeakable bloodletting that took the lives of 800,000 Tutsi tribesmen — was known to the entire world and yet, debates raged for weeks at the United Nations whether the mass murder should be referred to “officially” as genocide. The US could have cut off radio broadcasts of the Hutu extremists who were egging on the gangs who were carrying out the killings but failed to do so because it might have violated international law.

Good, decent, civilized people stood by while 800,000 human beings were killed - many of them hacked to death by machete. Our own ingrained sense of civility and virtue prevented the kind of quick action that might have saved tens of thousands of lives.
The problem is obvious; in order to defeat that kind of evil, the tactics used by civilized people just don’t work. One must match evil for evil in order for civilization to win out in the end.

It has always been so. How could we have possibly intervened in Cambodia without causing enormous bloodshed of our own among civilians? The army, government, and population was in such close proximity that massive civilian casualties would have been unavoidable. Our intervention may also have triggered a much wider war with China coming to the aid of their ally. Pol Pot would have been gone, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Cambodians would have been saved, but because our notions of civilized warfare have grown to preclude that kind of mathematical judgment, the west failed to act and nearly 2 million Cambodians died.

Intervention in Rwanda would have been horribly messy. Many innocents would have lost their lives as well as those responsible for the massacres. The Hutu-led government would have almost certainly fought back which would have meant even more civilian casualties. The Tutsis would have resented not being able to take revenge on the Hutus, thus putting them at odds with their putative saviors. The conflict would have degenerated into a guerrilla war with both sides taking shots at the international force sent in to stop the violence. (A similar outcome might have been the case if we had intervened in the Sudan.)

Would it have turned out better than sitting by helplessly and doing nothing? This is a counterfactual where there isn’t enough historical evidence to say for certain either way. But our concern here is why we didn’t intervene. And the answer has to be, in part, that we don’t have it within us to fight evil by being as ruthless and cold hearted as the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity.

The first Gulf War ended after the “turkey shoot” along the Highway of Death horrified Colin Powell and George Bush Sr. to the point that they were concerned that slaughtering Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army would not only be detrimental to America’s image but was inhumane. If we had continued blasting the trapped Iraqis, the massacre of the Kurds in the north and Shias in the south could probably have been avoided, and Hussein himself might have been removed by the military. Our hand was stayed by many factors, but the specter of a bloody march to Baghdad and the prospect of urban warfare with many thousands of innocent Iraqis killed certainly played a decisive role in that decision.

Instead, we gave in to our civilized impulses and not only stopped our attacks, but agreed that the Iraqi military could fly helicopters in the no fly zone for “humanitarian” purposes. This led directly to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shias who revolted against Saddam’s rule.

The results of our overthrow of Saddam in 2003 speak for themselves in this regard. The positive good of getting rid of one of the 20th century’s truly evil tyrants is usually overlooked when an accounting of the human cost of the war is discussed.

Now the civilized world is once again faced with a situation where a madman in Libya is violating every tenet of civilized behavior that the west has worked tirelessly to spread from one end of the earth to the other. There is talk of “no fly zones,” arming the Libyan opposition, sanctions, and other, even less effective ideas to stop Muammar Qadaffi in his insane desire to hang on to power.

But direct military intervention appears to be off the table. The United Nations seems even more inept, more irrelevant at times like this. Not only is it impossible for the world body to make up its mind on even the gravest of threats to innocent people, their collective decisions are so watered down that by the time a consensus is reached, the action recommended is meaningless.

It is left, as it always is, to western governments to take meaningful action. For all intents and purposes, this means the burden falls squarely on the United States of America — the only nation militarily capable and possessing the moral courage to sacrifice its men and treasure in a cause not directly related to its interests. We import only a tiny amount of oil from Libya, nor do we have any trade to speak of with Qaddafi. If we sent in the Marines, it would clearly be an act of self-abnegation.

But we won’t send in the Marines, nor will any western government send a military force into Libya to save the people from their own government. The butcher’s bill would only rise precipitously as Qaddafi’s men would use civilians as human shields to protect themselves. We may indeed rid the world of Qaddafi if we resorted to military force. But at what cost? The minions of evil know well our weakness and play upon it relentlessly.

So the body count in Libya will continue to rise while the world flails about unable to bring itself to ape the tactics and behavior of the evil they are fighting. We may see this as “progress” in the sense that an overly sensitive attitude toward civilian deaths, international law, and the rules of war prevents us, in a grossly rudimentary way, from becoming what we are fighting.

But do the people getting gunned down in the streets of Tripoli see it that way? I wonder.

This article was originally posted on The Moderate Voice.