‘He’s done an Andrew Sullivan’

by Smitty

Apparently things are going well, because the concerns over domestic policy and the international situation are so slight that there is time for ‘friendly’ fire incidents.
Donald Douglas and I are about equally disconnected from all of this, but he still provides an excellent play-by-play including this summary:

I’m not out to ruffle feathers, and not Charles Johnson’s by any means. But sometimes you have to take a stand: I think Michael’s wrong on this one: Little Green Footballs gives aid and comfort to the enemies of conservatism, or as The Educated Shoprat notes at this post, “He’s done an Andrew Sullivan. No other way to put it.”

Did Morrissey Miss the Point?

by Smitty
Ed Morrissey seems concerned about these Yemeni enemy combatants, or something:

Barack Obama promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay as soon as he took office for almost two years on the campaign trail, and he made that one of his first actions when he assumed office. Now, suddenly, Obama has discovered what we all knew the entire time — that closing Gitmo means sending terrorists back to countries that won’t secure them, especially Yemen. Now they don’t have a Plan B for some of the worst of the worst.

Ed starts off with noticing the roots on the campaign trail…

How many Yemenis remain at Gitmo? Not just one or two or ten, but 97 Yemenis. That’s about 40% of the inmates at Gitmo. No one else in their right mind would take them, certainly not without some sort of payoff, and they’re the last people we want to bring inside the US.
Now, the Obama administration admits they have no Plan B. No wonder; it took Obama more than two years to discover what most of us had been screaming at the top of our lungs about Yemen and the terrorists.

BHO hasn’t discovered anything of real importance since November 5, 2008.

Ed, why do you think there is even the slightest concern over these Yemenis or GITMO? It was never anything more than a campaign issue, and a deck of distraction cards pointing back to W to play when helpful.

No, the real question is which righty blogger will play the “hate speech” (formerly known as First Amendment) card so powerfully as to score the first flight down there.

Stand Firm in the Faith

One of the oddities of my career in the blogosphere is that, even though I’m a hard-boiled Protestant, my writings on cultural issues have earned me legions of Catholic admirers . . . . My ancestors were Ulster Scots and Covenanters, and respect for the sacrifices they made to defend their independent faith requires me to stand firm in defiance like the Martyr of the Solway. Yet in our secularized society, when so many have been “conformed to this world,” I also stand firm with those of any faith who defy the Contraceptive Culture.

Not Awesome, Ace

by Smitty

AoS has the title “Awesome: Crowd Cheers as GE Shareholder Rips MSNBC”. A questioner inquires if the Janine Garofalo clip is “hate speech”, and the crowd cheers and the suit waffles, and the crowd boos.
Pay attention class: why was Napoleon successful, until Wellington picked up the same baton and flogged Napoleon therewith? Among other reasons, both generals understood the ground.
In noticing JG, in bothering to attach “hate speech” to her pitiful remarks, you’re conceding the ground to the minions of Cthulhu. The Great Old One doesn’t care about JG or Sean Penn or the contents of their blather. All the minions want of you is to support the perversion of the First Amendment, and the need/capacity for government to regulate this new legislative product.
There is a place in the bowels of Cthulhu for JG when, to her sanity-shredding horror, her reign of useful idiocy is at an end. The means of avoiding joining her there is to not concede the ground to artful liars peddling nebulous goods: “fairness”, “hate speech”, and “spreading the wealth” are all markers on bad ground for battle.
Rather than engage the enemy head on, simply ask questions. Let the lack of any foundation in thought, fact, and history make the tower of babble collapse on Old Cthulhu.
Ace may think the MSNBC situation funny, and some sort of win. It was, but not for those concerned with freedom, truth, and the future. Do not concede the ground to the foe.

Update:This cover from the Economist makes the point graphically. The lure is the symbol “hate speech”, the school on the port side is anyone buying into its existence, with Cthulhu “smiling” to starboard.

Thanks for nothing, John Kerry

John Kerry, friend of the newspaper industry?

Troubled by the possible shuttering of his hometown paper, Sen. John Kerry reached out to the Boston Globe on Tuesday, then called for Senate hearings to address the woes of the nation’s print media. . . .
“America’s newspapers are struggling to survive, and while there will be serious consequences in terms of the lives and financial security of the employees involved, including hundreds at the Globe, there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount,” Mr. Kerry said.

Please allow me to point out that no politician ever said the first damned thing about the vital importance of saving the newspaper industry as long as I was working at a newspaper.

And if Lance Burri thinks I’m going to give him any of my blogobucks, he’s crazier than I am. You’re not fooling me, Burri: I see through your shady little scheme!

Pamela Geller vs. LGF

So I wake up from a nap and, curious to know what’s happening out there in blogland, I check Memeorandum and see this headline from Little Green Footballs:

Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascists

OK, to boil it down: Next month, Geller will attend a conference in Cologne, Germany, on the Islamicization of Europe. One of the key figures in the German group sponsoring the Cologne conference is Manfred Rouhs. He has appeared at events with neo-Nazi activist Axel Reitz who, in turn, has appeared at events with neo-Nazi activist Christian Worch.

Whence these associations? I’ve explained it before, but I’ll explain it again: The mainstream “conservative” parties in Europe have refused to address effectively the issues of immigration and multiculturalism. (In Europe, multiculturalism takes the form of pandering to their massive number of Islamic immigrants.) Because mainstream politicians have forfeited leadership on these legitimate concerns of their citizens, the vacuum has been filled by the likes of Reitz and Worch. Ergo, if there is a conference in Europe addressing the question of whether Islamicization is a threat, it won’t be organized entirely by “respectable” types.

Thus, Johnson’s guilt-by-association attack on Geller highlights the real problem we face in America: If the Republican Party and the mainstream conservative movement don’t recognize and respond to our own citizens’ concerns about immigration and multiculturalism, then those issues will be taken over by similarly disreputable groups.

What should Geller do? Cancel her trip to Germany? I think not. Rather, she use the occasion to alert Germans to the consequences of cowardice by their leaders. Germans, perhaps better than any other people, are aware of the heinous results when democracy fails in a time of crisis.

Anyone who has read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich knows that Hitler never would have come to power if the mainstream conservative parties in Germany had more effectively addressed the problems of the Weimar Republic. The German people were desperate for leadership, a credible alternative to the ineptitude of the Social Democrats who dominated Weimar, and Hitler — who had shrewdly studied the tactics of the Social Democrats in his native Austria — appeared to offer such an alternative.

Knowing that history, one sees why so many conservatives were frustrated and outraged about George Bush and John McCain’s open-borders stance on immigration. Anyone who paid attention to talk radio — and I was doing a talk-radio tour to promote Donkey Cons while S.2611 was being debated in the Senate — knew that grassroots conservatives were about 110% against the “shamnesty.” And yet the Republican leadership allowed this opposition to be smeared (and, indeed, John McCain himself smeared them) as “anti-immigrant” and worse.

This was a Weimar-style failure of leadership. The Republicans in Washington were doing the exact opposite of what the people who had elected them wanted them to do. No surprise, then, that the GOP lost the 2006 mid-terms. And then the Republicans nominated as their 2008 presidential candidate the chief Senate advocate of “shamnesty,” who proceeded to demonstrate he was as inept and tone-deaf on economics as he was on immigration.

So, here we are in 2009. The Republican Party is now nearly irrelevant in Washington and Obama and the Democrats are gearing up to push their own “shamnesty.” And what’s Charles Johnson doing? Is LGF rallying conservatives to oppose the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda?

No. Pamela Geller is doing that. Every freaking day. And also getting smeared by LGF every freaking day. The result? She’s doubled her traffic in the past year.

Given the threat we face here in America, I’m willing to let the Germans evaluate how much of a fascist threat Rouhs and Reitz pose to Germany, and I’m willing to let Pamela Geller decide which conferences she does and does not attend.

Mark Steyn, Kathy Shaidle, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller — we’re all “Rightwing Extremists” now.

UPDATE: Linked by Atlas Shrugs, who laughs at the idea of pro-Israel neo-Nazis. Folks, the tectonic plates of politics are shifting, as I’ve realized ever since I noticed liberal feminist Phyllis Chesler citing The Camp of the Saints. And if anybody feels tempted to hit my tip jar, please don’t resist that temptation.

UPDATE II: Linked at Hyscience, who calls Pamela a “common sense-thinking conservative who’s willing to speak out for what she believes in.”

I like “Rightwing Extremist” better. Easier to remember. BTW, trivia time: “Pamela” is Greek for “honey.”

UPDATE III: Robert Spencer accuses me of writing “sensibly”! And he thinks he’s got a libel problem. Next thing you know, I’ll be accused of being “a top Hayekian public intellectual.” No, wait . . .

I’m Pro-Environment

by Smitty

…but not as heavy-duty as some. Dr. Sanity posts a great graphic:

The rest of the post is worth your time. However the good doctor missed this one from the Political Castaway, which really turns the oogedy-boogedy up to 11:

Zowies! That video was from a Conservatism Today roundup.
I was born in Western Oregon. I loves me some forest. But not with such Druidic fervor, I fear.