Monday, November 21, 2005

Kurt Vonnegut senile and stuck on stupid

Oh yes yet another antiBush screed in the works this one from none other than Kurt Vonnegut, a real chesnut from the 1960s. What's the redeeming value in Vonnegut's work anyway as we approach the 21st century? Unlike Saul Bellow, Vonnegut's value diminishes over time. He sounded cool in high school but that's about it. It takes a grown up to figure out that Vonnegut is a fool. But the adversary culture admires him more particlarly when he sticks his foot in his mouth. James Lileks brilliantly calls out Vonnegut for appreciating ultimate high of suicide bombing. This from a man who made us uncomfortable about the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut has certainly come full circle when it comes to indiscrimate death.

Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high". He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."Mr. Vonnegut ? again, a patriot whose dissent is being cruelly ground into the nurturing earth before your eyes ? seems to think that suicide bombings literally happen in a vacuum, an unpopulated space where the bombers just pop like soap bubbles. It may be painless for them ? alas ? but it is not painless for the victims. You?d think such an obvious observation would go without saying, but we are dealing with an intellectual. What Vonnegut calls brave ? blowing yourself up so you can fly up to the great Bunny Ranch in the sky and rut with fragrant houris blessed with self-regenerating hymens ? does not exactly compare to the bravery required of the survivors.



Read the whole dressing down at Lilek's haunt, the ScreedBlog.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Ah those pangs, get me a phone

If this cretin with a conscience ever gets caught will this enter in to a plea for clemency?

"In my 21 years as a police officer, this is the first time I've ever heard of a crook with a conscience," said Detective Larry Ellison, who is investigating the case.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

PJ Buchanan sees history repeating itself for the Democrats

Patrick Buchanan, hardly a Bush booster, finds the Democrats' case against the President lacking. They tread on murky waters.

With his poll ratings at rock bottom and little to lose, Bush has just escalated the war politics. Democrats who have had it all their way since Cindy Sheehan set up Camp Casey would do well to wonder whether they have not ridden out a little too far into Indian country and are heading for the Little Big Horn where their daddies disappeared long ago.

In the late 1940s, the Party of Truman and FDR was shredded by Nixon, Bill Jenner and Joe McCarthy for having sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta, lost China, and coddled communists and Stalinist spies like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. And there was a reason the attacks stuck. They had the ancillary benefit of being true.

The media may have rewritten history to make the Edward R. Murrow Left look
like the heroes of the era, but the Democratic Party never recovered from the charge its leaders had groveled to Stalin. JFK knew it, and ran and won the presidency as an anti-communist hawk.

A generation later, Nixon and Agnew charged the Democratic Party with having marched us into Vietnam and then, when the going got tough, of having turned tail, cut and run, and gone over the hill to march with the children against the war into which they had themselves led the United States. Those charges stuck for the same reason: They were true.

Between 1961 and 1969, when America was plunged into Vietnam, Washington was Democratic, from the White House to the Capitol to the pro-war Washington Post. When Nixon arrived in 1969, Democrats started calling it "Nixon's War," but the country knew it was a Democratic war. And when the liberals turned on Nixon, America turned on them and gave him a 49-state landslide. Vietnam was the wheel on which liberalism was broken and the FDR New Deal coalition shattered forever.

Now, Democrats have maneuvered themselves onto the same risky terrain once
again.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

A new take on tradition, what exactly are we conserving?

There has been much talk about the great conservative crack-up. Here's an attempt from Lexington Green over at the the ChicagoBoyz blog to recast the tension between dynamist libertarianism and traditional conservativism. He thinks the answer lies in the exploration of what's called the Anglosphere developed by author Jim Bennet

The critical contribution that Jim Bennett is making is providing a unifying framework to do re-found both conservatism and libertarianism. He is taking [traditionalists'] insights and a bunch of other stuff, identifying a genuine tradition which really is ancient, common to us all, at the core of what makes us what we are, that has caused the freedom and prosperity we value. These ideas are not really new, but they needed to be repackaged and re-presented.

This means that the question of "what do conservatives want to conserve" can be coherently answered, finally. The question ?what liberties do libertarians value? can be answered better, by showing where the liberties they value came from, and how they they got here.

Derrick Jackson unloads on gangsta rap.

Derrick Jackson and I have very little in common. On most issues I find myself vehemently disagreeing with this reflexes.

But we apparently agree on the corporate exploitation of young black males by corporate America. The hip hop industry is a con. I laugh everytime Rebbock throws out its human rights awards. The corporation is a study in object hypocrisy.


It is tragic enough that black rappers and hip-hop moguls prostitute themselves to the Fortune 500 with the very stereotypes about violence, stupidity, and sexual drive that white society used to justify slavery, colonization, segregation, and lynching. After slave rebellions, the Underground Railroad, patriotism in world wars, marches on Washington, and murders of civil rights workers, Jay-Z makes millions saying, ''I take and rape villages."

African-Americans can no longer afford to coddle these people. The black czars of gutter hip-hop are the new house slaves. And Reebok's promotion of this material, along with Comcast and other media giants, is just as reprehensible.

In his second-quarter 2005 conference call, Reebok CEO Paul Fireman said that Jay-Z has ''been a great assistance in connecting us to the right people culturally, connecting us, working with athletes . . . Jay-Z is an inspirational person in that community."

Moguls like Jay-Z may be wearing pinstripes these days and Russell Simmons may be urging youth of color to vote, but as long as their foundation is rotten, they are a corrosive force in black culture. If the civil rights establishment is looking for a new crusade, it needs to summon the guts to ignore the billions that flow through the hip-hop industry. At the close of 2004 all top-10 rap singles ranked by Billboard used
the ''n" word in their uncensored versions.


Read the whole column.

Courage

Bravo for Maria Friedman!

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Some people should be ashamed of themselves

Maryland Democrats become unhinged. In the polarizing world of racial politics only the Trent Lotts get punished.

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an "Uncle Tom" and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Operatives for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) also obtained a copy of his credit report -- the only Republican candidate so targeted. But black Democrats say there is nothing wrong with "pointing out the obvious."

"There is a difference between pointing out the obvious and calling someone names," said a campaign spokesman for Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This is nasty stuff.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Michael Barone highlights the Italian American factor; In opposing Alito, Dems face big risks

Michael Barone has a word of advice for Democrats threatening to filibuster nomine Sam Alito. Don't mess with the Italians. They have clout politically all over the Northeast.

But if they[the Senate Democrats] filibuster, they risk alienating another constituency, Italian-Americans. To understand the risk, consider the number of votes cast against the confirmation of Antonin Scalia in 1986. That number was zero. Democrats knew Scalia was a judicial conservative?he had a paper trail as an academic?but they also knew that Italian-Americans very much wanted to see a fellow Italian-American on the Supreme Court.

For many years I have attended events sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation, an organization established in the 1970s in large part to dispel the Mafia stereotype. NIAF has been proud to seat the director of the FBI at the head table as its annual dinner. It was proud that in 1984 the four Democratic and Republican nominees for president and vice president (including Geraldine Ferraro, remember) attended its dinner?the only time in American history, I believe, that four nominees attended a single event.

The late Peter Rodino, longtime chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a liberal Democrat on most issues, once told me with tears in his eyes that one of his greatest regrets in life is that his father did not live long enough to see the first Italian-American on the United States Supreme Court. In 1987 I spent a day in Wilmington, Del., with Joseph Biden, who was running for president. He took me around the town, introduced me to his mother and father, and took me to lunch at a little restaurant in Wilmington's Little Italy. He knew everyone there very well and was very warmly received. The thought later occurred to me: There was no way this guy was ever going to vote against the first Italian-American on the Supreme Court. And no way any senators from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts were, either. They all had their friends in their state's Little Italy, and they weren't going to disappoint them. Scalia seems aware of this. He's reportedly willing to speak to any Italian-American organization that invites him.