A very interesting piece, including at the link some background I'd missed.
What started as a trial against Geert Wilders for alleged Islamophobia has nearly turned into its opposite: a historical case about the message of the Quran. The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization Hitler's "Mein Kampf." What could possibly go wrong?
I believe that last bit was sarcasm, in case you'd wondered, dear Reader.
The three judges hearing the case no doubt decent, modest, postmodern Dutchmen with a minimum knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions will now be forced to debate the nature of a religious text, something that should have never been heard in the court of an enlightened society. In front of the judges and television cameras, the ancient founding text of an entire civilization will be criticized and weighed against one of the most inhumane texts written in the 20th century without any doubt a deep insult to Muslims, radical or not.
Is Mein Kampf a perennial best seller in the Muslim world, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The Muslims might not actually be insulted by the comparison, you know.
There is a way out. The district attorney's office has complied with the appeals court's order to prosecute Mr. Wilders. The trial has started. It should now ask the court for an acquittal. This preposterous trial needs to be stopped right now.
Please don't hurt us -- we're nice people, really!
#2
FTA: "The three judges hearing the case -- no doubt decent, modest, postmodern Dutchmen with a minimum knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions -- will now be forced to debate the nature of a religious text, something that should have never been heard in the court of an enlightened society."
Well, since discussion of the subject was not to be allowed in public they will get that discussion in the course of a trial to limit free speech. My heart bleeds.
If the trial goes as is indicated it will be of great benefit to western civilization as a whole.
Opinion, or Seedy Politicians?
As expected, Barack Obama's 70 minute State of the Union address focused heavily on the economy and the domestic political agenda. This was hardly surprising in the aftermath of last week's catastrophic defeat for his party in the Massachusetts special Senate election, where the Republicans scored an historic victory. American voters are turning strongly against the president's health care reform package as well as his big government vision for the economy, which has contributed to spiraling public debt and mounting unemployment, now standing at over 10 percent.
But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. The war in Afghanistan, which will soon involve a hundred thousand American troops, merited barely a paragraph. There was no mention of victory over the enemy, just a reiteration of the president's pledge to begin a withdrawal in July 2011. Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For Barack Obama the Special Relationship means nothing, and tonight's address further confirmed this.
Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters, but President Obama displayed what can only be described as a stunning indifference towards the defence of the homeland.
The Iranian nuclear threat, likely to be the biggest foreign policy issue of 2010, was given just two lines in the speech, with a half-hearted warning of growing consequences' for Tehran, with no details given at all. There were no words of support for Iranian protestors who have been murdered, tortured and beaten in large numbers by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's thuggish security forces, and no sign at all that the president cared about their plight. Nor was there any condemnation of the brutality of the Iranian regime, as well as its blatant sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the example of Iran showed, the advance of freedom and liberty across the world in the face of tyranny was not even a footnote in the president's speech. I cannot think of a US president in modern times who has attached less importance to human rights issues. For the hundreds of millions of people across the world, from Burma to Sudan to Zimbabwe, clamouring to be free of oppression, there was not a shred of hope offered in Barack Obama's address.
Obama's world leadership in his first year in office has been weak-kneed and little short of disastrous. He has sacrificed the projection of American power upon the altar of political vanity, with empty speeches and groveling apologies across the world, from Strasbourg to Cairo. He has appeased some of America's worst enemies, and has extended the hand of friendship to many of the most odious regimes on the face of the earth. Judging by the State of the Union address tonight, we can expect more of the same from an American president who seems determined to lead the world's greatest power along a path of decline. Ouch.
From the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA.
It is time to dump the Policy Wonks and Democratic Party wise guys.
Everyone said and now everyone knows that the SIMPLER THE BETTER. The more complicated, the more to make people worried about the details. And, that worry becomes grist for the Republican media machines.
So the first step for health reform is to Dump the Congressional Bills......both of them feed into the Republican machine for 2010 elections. Mass. showed that.
We must propose what we know people want and already like.
1. Maintain and expand the Veterans Medical and Hospitals Systems;
2 Expand the Federally Qualified Community Health Centers;
3. Drop the Medicare age to 55 to 64 ---- Republicans will not mess with that;
4. Elevate Medicaid to 150% of the Federal Poverty Level;
5. Open the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program for non federal employees to join;
6 Eliminate Pre-Existing Conditions Exclusions
By doing these actions; you are dealing with winners and known programs. Each of these programs is supported by those in them.
By dumping the Health Exchanges you eliminate the number one grist for the Republican mills, i.e., forcing people to buy insurance. And, to win working people back, voters they are; Dump the taxing of benefits.
These should be done immediately....no waiting time.
Then in a year or two we do another step.
These can and will lead to larger reforms such as a federally administered Single Payer system; and, toward our ultimate goal of a National Health Service in our country.
#1
Maintain and expand the Veterans Medical and Hospitals Systems
...and active duty and retiree medical systems, and Indian Health Care. Point being is that if the bureaucracy had demonstrated to the American people that systems they operate were effective and efficient, the objections would have been mute. However, making them work effectively and efficiently is something you can't seem to do even on a smaller scale, so there's no reason to trust you on the grand scale either.
Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts' special Senate election was for Democratic leaders a moment that can be described in two words, of which I will only print the first here, which is "oh."
Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel-Prize-winner-turned-polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill.
But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition to health care, but their life's work is not in peril.
Democratic officeholders know theirs is. Some are heading for the hills. Four well-regarded veteran congressman announced their surprise retirements in December; two longtime Democratic senators folded in January. Family concerns have suddenly become very pressing.
Others are holding out against the bloggers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "unease would be the gentlest word" to describe House Democrats' refusal to pass the Senate health care bill. Her elegant ears must have burned in that caucus meeting.
Sens. Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, up for re-election in Indiana and Arkansas and facing by far the most negative poll numbers in their long political careers, let it be known that there was no way they would support the reconciliation process, requiring only 51 votes, to jam through a health care bill.
But more than health care legislation is in trouble. I have not seen a party's fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.
The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford's House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. The victory of Scott Brown last week looks like something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.
Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment. Back in 1994, I wrote the first article in a non-partisan publication suggesting that the Republicans had a serious chance to win the 40 seats necessary for a majority in the House. That article appeared in U.S. News & World Report in July 1994.
This year, political handicapper Charlie Cook is writing in January, six months earlier in the cycle, that Republicans once again would capture the 40 seats they need for a majority if the House elections were held today. I concur. The generic vote question -- which party's candidates would you vote for in House elections -- is at least as favorable to Republicans as it was in the last month before the election in 1994.
Nothing is entirely static in politics, and opinions could change. Barack Obama could shift to the center, as Bill Clinton did after his party's thumping in 1994; the economy could visibly recover and start producing new jobs; a crisis like Sept. 11 and a good presidential response could boost the president and his party as Sept. 11 boosted George W. Bush and his party in 2001 and 2002.
But I sense that something more fundamental is at stake. Barack Obama in his first year adopted the priorities of what pundit Joel Kotkin, a Democrat himself, calls the "gentry liberals." Obama called for addressing long-term issues like health care and supposed climate change. He and his economic advisers, like many analysts across the political spectrum, underestimated the rise in unemployment. Talk about "green jobs" has proved to be just talk.
Obama's conciliatory foreign policy and his attempts to mollify terrorists have produced no perceptible positive responses and run against the grain of most American voters. Questioning the Christmas bomber for just 50 minutes and then reading him his Miranda rights has left Obama open to charges that his policies fail to protect the American people.
The cacophony of conflicting advice from left-wing bloggers, pundits and elected officials are all signs of a party in disarray, its central premises undermined by events. Massachusetts may have been a wake-up call enabling the Democrats to recover. But right now they're tossing and turning.
I'd be interested to hear what Peter Robinson and the other professional speechywritey types round here think, but for me the president is pretty much a total bust as an orator. When Jay says below that he's "a very, very good speaker," he is in the sense that he's a mellifluous baritone who'd sound very appealing if you needed a voiceover guy to read some vapid boilerplate for the bland travelogue before the movie on a long-haul flight. But as a persuasive salesman for policy he's bad, and getting worse.
One problem, as Jay pointed out, is that upturned chin. Just as a matter of angles, it looks wrong on TV. So it would be a problem for Hillary or McCain or Ron Paul or whoever would have won. But it's worse for Obama because it plays into the aloof-and-arrogant meme. I don't know why he does it. Are the prompters notched up a hole too high? What's the deal? Why doesn't one of his supersmart advisers get out the wrench and lower them?
As to the content, I think there are several broad stylistic problems that, cumulatively, lead to a bigger one, identified by (of all people) The New York Times's Bob Herbert:
Mr Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted.
Thank you, Captain Obvious, for that remarkable insight.
Why is that? Well, look at the SOTU opening. It's eloquent, but in a cheesily generic way, as if one of his speechwriters was sent over to Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of State of the Unions for Dummies:
They have done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. And they have done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle....
It sounds like an all-purpose speech for President Anyone: We've met here in good times and bad, war and peace, prosperity and depression, Shrove Tuesday and Super Bowl Sunday, riding high in April, shot down in May. We've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing. Each time we find ourselves flat on our face, we pick ourselves up and get back in the race. That's life, pause for applause . . .
There's no sense that, even as platitudinous filler, it arises organically from who this man is. As mawkish and shameless as the Clinton SOTUs were, they nevertheless projected a kind of authenticity. With Obama, the big-picture uplift seems unmoored from any personal connection — and he's not good enough to make it real. Same with all those municipal name-checks.
When he does say anything firm and declarative — the pro-business stuff at home, the pro-freedom stuff abroad — it's entirely detached from any policy, any action, so it plays to the Bob Herbert trust issue. And, when he moves from the gaseous and general to the specific, he becomes petty and and thin-skinned and unpresidential. And, unlike the national security feints and 101 Historical Allusions For Public Speakers stuff, the petulance is all too obviously real....
Posted by: Mike ||
01/28/2010 10:49 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[8 views]
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#2
I love it when I learn a new word! Mawkish - Pronunciation: ˈmȯ-kish
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English mawke maggot, probably from Old Norse mathkr more at maggot
Date: circa 1697
1 : having an insipid often unpleasant taste
2 : sickly or puerilely sentimental
mawk·ish·ly adverb
mawk·ish·ness noun
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/28/2010 11:51 Comments ||
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#3
One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt.
I only want to deal with the "two wars" issue - one war, Hopey-Dopey, in two foreign countries, on numerous battlefronts, including the Homefront and the media front.
The Emporer (still) has no clothes.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/28/2010 11:56 Comments ||
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#4
If you like Steyn like I like Steyn, go read Bob Herbert who looks ... like ... he ... would've voted for The One.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/28/2010 12:02 Comments ||
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#5
And it looks like his "two wars" are expanding to "three or four wars" (Yemen and Somalia).
Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn't change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health care well enough to the easily confused American public. The same familiar strawmen dot the landscape of his rhetoric. (Republicans want to maintain the status quo' on health care. This president is willing to listen to Republican ideas, just so long as he can then forget that he has ever done so.) Narcissism, too, is a constant companion. The opening of the speech, and the end, invited us to regard Obama as the embodiment of the nation. But it is not the country's future that has suddenly come under doubt. It is his administration's. It is not the country's spirit that is in danger of breaking. It is contemporary liberalism's.
Let's try common sense,' said the president. For Obama, that means that expanding Medicaid is the way to reduce the deficit. That increasing the price of energy is the way to create jobs. That further socializing medicine is the way to stay ahead of India. Nothing in his speech suggested that the government's most important economic task might be to create the context of stability in which growth can occur. (Perhaps that thought would have interfered with the theme of change.') Beyond a pro forma sentence, nothing in the speech suggested that any positive economic trend could ever take hold without a direct assist from the federal government. Without its help, firms wouldn't export or get credit. The proposal to forgive student-loan debt on special terms for people who go into public service' typifies this administration's attitude toward the economy: Producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it. On one of the country's true economic challenges, runaway entitlement spending, Obama punted to a commission.
The president's foreign-policy remarks were both perfunctory and otherworldly. Bringing our resources and our ideals into balance is always the difficulty in American foreign policy. Obama resolved the tension by pretending that he had consistently favored democrats and freedom-fighters the world over. In Iran, in Cuba, in China, his actual policy has been the reverse.
Anyone could find something to agree with in an endless speech, and we will dutifully applaud the president's professed desire for new nuclear plants. All in all, though, our impression was of an administration that has no real understanding of the political straits in which it finds itself and thus no way to escape them.
Having chosen not to watch or listen to THE ONE (I'm choosing to watch my losing Spurs) I had saved this from Blackfive.net to watch. I chose the night of the SOTUS to watch it. Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive.net made me do this.
Find yourself a corner, and you will need some tissue. Thank you to all you military folks and you military supporters that roam through the streets, the alleys of The Burg
Posted by Uncle Jimbo
Gen. Pace is one of our great warriors. This speech is a great example of why. We have good officers now, but it's been a while since I've heard a speech like this that made me want to get my boots and lace 'em up. This was back when he was receiving the Keepers of the Flame award from the Center for Security Policy.
#1
Find yourself a corner, and you will need some tissue.
After listening to Barry's angry, blathering lecture last evening, I could have used a quiet corner and tissue as well. He has elevated denial to an amazing new level. Flipping off the Supreme Court Justices in a SOTU address is a sophomoric bullies game. I didn't expect much out of last night's performance. Barry met my expectations.
#2
I liked him and he hit all the notes. I choked up when he talked about his platoon and totally agree with comments about the family. P.S. Dont those Marines have some snappy dres uniforms?
It is high time that we ceased indulging in theatrics and spoke the truth. We all desperately yearn for peace, and the vast majority of us do not wish to rule over Arabs. If we could convince ourselves that our neighbors would commit to peaceful coexistence, we would make major sacrifices. But alas, the prospects for a comprehensive settlement in the near future are virtually zero.
Since the Oslo Accords, we have remained in a state of denial, refusing to reconcile with the reality that the duplicitous vleaders, then Yasser Arafat and today Mahmoud Abbas, rather than seeking to create an independent state, were utilizing terror and diplomacy to dismember the Jewish state in stages. We ignored the relevance of Arafat's repeated call to his people to heed the passage in the Koran relating to the prophet Muhammad consummating the Al Hudaibiya Treaty with the Koreishi Jews and subsequently reneging and killing them. The message clearly signaled that agreements with Jews and non-Muslims may be violated.
Our passion to achieve peace blinded successive governments into accepting the false premise that Palestinian leaders were peace partners, and repeatedly chant the idiotic mantra that the peace process was irreversible and that "peace in our time" was achievable. This cost the lives of thousands in terror attacks and generated successive wars. In conveying this charade to the world at large, we encouraged the false belief that our conflict with the Arabs was a struggle between two peoples to divide land. We maintained this nonsense even after Arafat and Abbas rebuffed Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who had offered them virtually all the territory previously occupied by Jordan and Egypt.
Instead I tend to see 9/11 like this: Middle Eastern regimes, almost all of them, but most notably Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia use various so-called non-state actors to advance their regional interests and deter each other. For instance, Syria's relationship with Jordan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Action Front, and Jordan's friendliness toward the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, means that these two states effectively deter each other--if you use Islamists against me, I will unleash Islamists on you.
Al Qaeda, as a transnational outfit, seems to be a group that has been supported, manipulated and penetrated by a whole number of Middle Eastern security services, including but not exclusive of the Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Libya, Pakistan, and Iraq before Saddam's downfall. This is not to say that any of these regimes have Al Qaeda or any of these terror organizations under their thumb; when you have a group of people with weapons, money and a deadly ideology it is difficult to manage them very closely. I think this is what happened on 9/11--one of these outfits had the wherewithal to carry its war elsewhere and they did, to the United States.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
"The Corner" @ National Review
