Chain-smoking President Barack Obama has lung cancer, White House sources fear as the Commander-in-Chief suffers chest pains, dizzy spells and has lost 25 pounds.
Let us hope this is not true. Cancer treatments so reduce the patient's energy level that he can become unable to do the work and make the decisions necessary for ordinary daily function... and the the job of the president of the United States requires a good deal more energy than ordinary jobs. Lots more decisions, too.
#2
Aw, come on. I don't wish cancer on someone because they disagree with my political opinions. This is exactly the sort of lack of humanity that leftists display on a daily basis. Are we really like them? WWJD?
#5
TW: unable to do the work and make the decisions necessary?
what a golden out for the one.
"I'll decide what to do in Afghanistan after the next round of chemo is over... if i am not too tired"
i personally hoe he does not. for no reason other than it will make him a glorified martyr for the left. kind of like JFK, but without any of the talent.
Posted by: abu do you love ||
11/14/2009 3:00 Comments ||
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#6
Nah, more likely he is stressing out over the job. All of those symptoms listed could be caused by nerves (and it also kind of explains his dithering on Afghanistan, desperate need to have his butt kissed, and his lashing out at people who he thinks have crossed him). It's not that unusual for people to lose their appetites when dealing with anxiety, either.
Sorry, but he looks too good to have cancer, and even if he did, it would be pretty damn hard to hide all of the treatments necessary to deal with it. Besides, PMSNBC and the other bootlickers in the Legacy Media would be falling all over themselves with lugubrious pity pieces if it were true.
#7
My favorite quote with regard to losing weight.
Enjoy:
Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff
#8
Two important bits here. The first is that Obama is in the "sky high risk factor" group for lung cancer. Black males are 40% more prone to lung cancer than are white males, and chain smoking black males are almost uninsurable, because of cancer and high blood pressure.
The second, and perhaps more telling, is that the Globe is owned and operated by very close friends of the Clintons.
Roger Altman, Deputy Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, owns a controlling stake in American Media Inc., which runs five of the tabloids, including the Globe.
Ron Burkle, multi-billionaire, funded the purchase of the tabloids in the run up to the 2008 election, to both support Hillary and to trash McCain and Obama.
So this means first of all that they might have insider information, and want to get the ball rolling to the idea that Obama might have to resign for health reasons, or that he might die in office.
This would make Biden president, and Hillary would pull out all the stops to be made vice president.
#10
So this means first of all that they might have insider information, and want to get the ball rolling to the idea that Obama might have to resign for health reasons, or that he might die in office.
This would make Biden president, and Hillary would pull out all the stops to be made vice president.
I wonder what happens if all this plays out after Congress changes hands. So these guys might have a deadline they're facing even if the condition is treatable at the moment without impacting his work performance.
#13
That a US President that IMO acts as a enemy to the United States would be sick enough to not have the energy to continue his work does not upset me.
#14
crosspatch: Take it in the same vein as a Pravda during the Soviet Union. It might be truthy, it might be a complete lie, but it *will* reflect what their masters want to say.
So why do the Clintons want to say this about Obama?
#15
I disagree with Obama on just about everything. But I certainly don't wish lung cancer on him. What I wish on him is a Republican majority Congress in 2010.
#2
Might be a combination of wishful thinking and making work for the shipyards.
These ships can't be in very good condition. Their reactors need to be refueled (at least) and they're going to need a lot of work. We've followed Soviet Russian shipyard efficiency on other projects. Won't be any better on a Kirov-class battlecruiser.
It's an interesting idea for us, however: we have a couple of big ships in the boneyard that might be rehabbed to provide us with a package for anti-missile defense. Cost would be huge but there is nothing like 40,000 tons of ship under you.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/14/2009 13:42 Comments ||
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#3
I don't know.... lots of double hulled 500K ton oil tankers that could be refitted for all sorts of interesting stuff ... and dead cheap at anchor.
#6
I don't know, Sarge. On paper at least,the Kirov is a powerful ship, with plenty of anti-surface and anti-air missiles, as well as other weapon systems. I don't know how she is as far as anti-submarine weapons and sensors.
Any single ship, however, is vulnerable. It takes a group of ships and submarines organized for mutual protection, and linked together sharing data on targets to be really potent these days. Learning to organize a battle group like that is not something you learn overnight.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
11/14/2009 21:57 Comments ||
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This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder and his boss had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.
Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses intelligence sources must expose themselves and their secrets.
Let's take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs' execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can't help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.
So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and depending on what judge catches the case they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
In early September, Fox News host Andrew Napolitano asked Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, precisely what part of the Constitution authorized Congress to enact health care legislation.
"There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do," Clyburn replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"
"There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do," Clyburn replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"
It was a rare flash of honesty from an elected official, revealing not only Clyburn's ignorance of the Constitution but his overt hostility to the document's system of checks and balances. And Clyburn is hardly alone. In legislation dealing with everything from crime to education, Congress routinely oversteps its constitutional bounds. As Napolitano later remarked, Clyburn seems "to have conveniently forgotten that the federal government has only specific enumerated powers."
Later this term, the U.S. Supreme Court will have a great opportunity to remind Clyburn and his colleagues of those limits when it hears oral arguments in the case of U.S. v. Comstock. At issue is the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which empowers federal officials to order the indefinite civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" persons who have finished serving a federal sentence, or who are currently in the custody of the attorney general because they were found mentally incompetent to stand trial. In other words, the government isn't willing to let these people back on the streets.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the government argues that Congress possesses this authority under the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause, which grants Congress the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States."
Yet as the text itself clearly specifies, any law passed under the Necessary and Proper Clause must also be tied to a specifically enumerated constitutional power, either one of the "foregoing powers" listed in Article I, Sec. 8, or one of the "other powers vested by this Constitution." As James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention, the Necessary and Proper Clause "only extended to the enumerated powers. Should Congress attempt to extend it to any power not enumerated, it would not be warranted by the clause."
So where among the "foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution" did Congress happen to find an explicitly enumerated power to indefinitely detain "sexually dangerous" prisoners?
The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution provides no such authority. Indeed, as a superb friend of the court brief filed in the case by Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett makes clear, "However well intentioned Congress may have been, it had no power to legislate for the purpose of protecting the public from dangerous persons....The Necessary and Proper Clause is not an independent source of Congressional power."
Nor may Congress rely on the Commerce Clause--another favored source for sweeping federal power. Under that clause, which the government has briefly raised as a justification in the case, Congress possesses the authority "to regulate commerce...among the several states," a power the Supreme Court has controversially extended to cover intrastate commerce as well as commerce "among the states." Most recently, in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court permitted the federal government to regulate the local cultivation of medical marijuana in California on the extremely dubious grounds that such cultivation also affected the nationwide market.
Yet the law at issue in Comstock fails to meet even the Court's notoriously generous Raich interpretation--something the Barnett brief is careful to explain. As Justice Antonin Scalia held in his Raich concurrence, "Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so 'could...undercut' its regulation of interstate commerce." Since overturning the law in Comstock would in no way undercut any legitimate federal regulation of commercial activity, neither Raich nor the Commerce Clause apply.
Which brings us back to Rep. Clyburn and his colleagues. With so many members of Congress either unwilling or unable to abide by the clear limitations imposed by the plain text of the Constitution, the time has come for the Supreme Court to rein them in. Enforcing the Necessary and Proper Clause is a great way to start.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/14/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Clyburn replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"
Is there anything in the constitution that prohibits me from building an H-bomb in my garage?
#2
Clyburn replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"
Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
If its not in the document, then it's not permitted. It's rather clear English, except for those legalistically handicapped [who seem to have a very hard time comprehending common English when it doesn't suit their purposes].
We are ignoring the best tools we have for fighting terrorism. Why?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
September 10 America. The phrase signifies a reprise of the terrorism is just a crime mindset that reigned in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Like other observers, Ive groused in recent months that we are back to that self-destructive ethos. I was wrong. If the Fort Hood atrocity tells us anything, it is that things are much worse than they were before 9/11.
For one thing, 9/11 has happened. Before it did, perhaps we had an excuse. But weve experienced the wages of consciously avoiding Islamism. To have retreated into puerile fantasies about a religion of peace is, at this juncture, unfathomable.
Fathom it, though, we must. In 2008, I wrote a book called Willful Blindness to describe governments stubborn refusal to deal with the nature and magnitude of jihadism when it first emerged as a domestic threat in the early Nineties. For a long time, Id resisted writing about the experience of prosecuting Muslim terrorists. Im very proud of what we did, but the story is a painful one of warning signs missed and lives lost. Having lived it, I wasnt anxious to relive it.
Yet, more than a decade after Muslim terrorists declared war on the United States by bombing the World Trade Center, we were still making the same errors, with wishful thinking about Islam still substituting for sober analysis. It seemed important to go back to the beginning, to explore why jihadism is a profound threat, why weve underestimated it, and why it is so perilous to treat a national-security challenge as if it were a mere legal problem. In a display of my own wishful thinking, I subtitled the book A Memoir of the Jihad memoir conveying the hope that the worst of the willful blindness was behind us, and that the misjudgments of the past would yield wisdom in the here and now. Rest at link
Posted by: ed ||
11/14/2009 12:49 ||
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#1
Were not in September 10 America. Weve managed to land in a much more dangerous place.
Yup. The Muslims view our bumbling naivete in Washington like a homeless person views a free lunch. In the meantime, I'm staying away from tall buildings, airplanes and large cities. Maybe we will get away from Political Correcticide and wake up to the dangers before it's too late.
Back in June, liberal columnists at the New York Times lined up to link conservative talkers Bill OReilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh to James von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, and the murder by Scott Roeder of abortionist George Tiller.
Krugmans The Big Hate blamed Fox host Bill OReillys rhetoric (Tiller the baby killer) for the Tiller murder, as well as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for contributing to the dangerously toxic atmosphere.
Warners online entry, The Wages of Hate, read: You can't accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence. But they almost certainly do stoke the flames.
Bob Herbert came in late, on June 20, referring to the killings as right-wing, hate-driven attacks and also blaming over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle Association.
So how did these professional hand-wringers treat another incident of violence, this one even more tragic: A mass killing of 13 people, many of them soldiers, at Fort Hood in Texas by a Muslim Army major shouting God is great in Arabic?
Theyve ignored it.
As of November 13, eight days after the Fort Hood murders, neither Rich, Krugman, or Warner have mentioned the massacre, much less Hasans radical Islamic beliefs. Only Bob Herbert devoted two sentences to Hasan on Saturday, using the killings as a leaping-off point to talk about post-traumatic stress suffered by veterans home from Iraq and Afghanistan (even though Hasan hasnt even seen combat).
The Washingtonn Times may have just been punked over this one.
I love anti-Lefist polemics, but it is my understanding that regulations constricting US Army soldiers from carrying personal weapons on base or storing them on base date from at least the early 70s.
Clinton may have further enhanced them, but many of the restrictions enumerated in this editorial are at least 45 years old.
An excerpt:
Time after time, public murder sprees occur in "gun-free zones" - public places where citizens are not legally able to carry guns. The list is long, including massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School along with many less deadly attacks. Last week's slaughter at Fort Hood Army base in Texas was no different - except that one man bears responsibility for the ugly reality that the men and women charged with defending America were deliberately left defenseless when a terrorist opened fire.
President Obama thinks this guy should be dealt with in the same fashion as Bernie Madoff.
The Obama administration has taken a giant step in its march to throw in the towel in the war against radical Islam. On FoxNews this morning, Peter King said of the decision to try the soldiers of al-Qaeda -- who by their own account have no country but their cause -- as civilians
It certainly is. It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.
The administration is justifying its decisions on the grounds that because the 9/11 attackers targeted civilians they should be tried as civilians. This makes no sense unless you are a Democrat who believes that the "holy war" that Islamic jihadists have formally declared on us is no different from the acts of isolated individuals who have decided to break the law. This is the approach to the war on terror that John Kerry championed in 2004. Now that Americans have had the poor judgment -- the suicidally poor judgment -- to make a leftist their president, this is the strategy our nation is set to pursue.
The decision to try the jihadists in a civilian court is also a decision which will divulge America's security secrets to the enemy since civilian courts afford defendants the right of discovery. It is also a propaganda gift to Islamic murderers who will turn the courtroom into a media circus to promote their hatred against the Great Satan -- a hatred shared by their apologists at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the pro-Castro Center for Constitutional Rights who have pioneered the campaign against Guantanamo and whose influence in the Obama Administration is pervasive. (BTW, The newly appointed lawyer for the president is the husband of Obama's recently departed Maoist communications director Anita Dunn.)
Finally, this move continues and enlarges the refusal of the President and the American Left to recognize that:
1. We are in a war that has been declared on us -- in which we, in other words, are the victims.
2. That the war is conducted by religious armies whose war is inspired by their reading of the Koran.
3. That the number of Muslims who support their war plan is in the tens of millions
4. That they are aided and abetted by many Islamic governments and by the international Left.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/14/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Let the judicial masterbation begin. Obama's lawyers will begin with throwing evidence out because of 'harsh interrogation'. Bush and company will be on trial here; not the terrorists. It is all part of the leftist agenda.
#2
If the Center for Constitutional Rights were legit they'd have to admit that these un-uniformed enemy combatants don't have any fu¢king constitutional rights.
#4
The Geneva Convention says Partisans...men fighting but not in Uniform are not to be regarded as having any rights. You dont have to take them Prisoner. You dont have to abide by any rules on what you do with them.
You shoot them in the field and leave the bodies to rot. You dont even have to bury them.
We only took them prisoner so we could Interrogate them for information...after that they were useless to us. They have no rights. Take this man for a walk down to the Cliff, soldier.
Put them on Trial in a Civilian Court? Its all Bush's fault. Obama just wants to indict Bush, not anything else. Its the kind of man he is.
#6
You guys are missing the point. This "trial" gives them the chance to put the eeeeevilll Amerika on trial. This is something the radical Left has been having wet dreams about since the 60's, if not earlier than that.
KSM? They really don't give a rat's ass about him. If he walks, if he gets fried, it's all the same. But if they think they can knock down the "imperialist hegemon" down to a level where it can't possibly dare to speak up ever again....that, to them, is priceless.
#7
Cornsilk Blondie is absolutely correct. This is Obama and Holder and the other radical Auliskyite left's chance to put he US Government, Military and Intelligence services in the dock, publicly, and have them flayed.
Obama is an evil man, and must be stopped. Not "by any means necessary", at least not yet.
But the damage he is doing to the Constitution, the nation, and liberty is looming as immense.
#8
Yep, it's completely official: Obama's a crappy president. Carter was too. But worst decision ever by a U.S. President? I still think that Buchanan was definitely our worst-est ever president.
Many Indians fear the collapse of Pakistan and the imminent takeover of the state by a rampaging army ofAllah. They worry the Pakistani elite English speaking, whisky drinking, Western and liberal in its personal lives will simply run away, leaving behind a rump civil society: Illiterate and undereducated millions who will become cannon fodder for the Islamists.
Reality may not be so black and white. It is more likely the Islamisation of Pakistans polity and society the tussle between an upper crust that is half embarrassed, half in denial and, at the back of its mind, very, very afraid, and the mullah-jihadi duumvirate will be a gradual one.
For security reasons, external powers will shore up the nominally secular or moderate elite. The debate between local traditions and mono-cultural, Arab interpretations of Islam will be long drawn, and while headed in one direction will not end in one day, perhaps not even in one century. What it will do, however, is paralyse a society and not let it achieve its potential.
How do we know this? Is there a template for Pakistan? Perhaps there is no one template but several, spread across failed states and a variety of Islamic societies caught in a wrenching struggle between the call of a supranational faith and a modernity rooted in nationalism. The author may not have intended it that way, but Sadanand Dhumes book My Friend, the Fanatic (Tranquebar), just released in India, not only interrogates Indonesias conversion, inch by inch, from a country of pluralist Muslims to one where Islamism is clearly on the ascendant, but also offers us a prism through which to understand Pakistan.
As Dhume, a Washington-based writer and cartographer of the many social Islams that inevitably seem to gravitate towards the one political Islam, puts it in a conversation, Indonesia represents the eastern edge of a historical contest between the Sanskritic and Arabist civilisations. The contest was lost centuries ago at its western end Afghanistan and has ceded ground, by miles rather than inches, in Pakistan.
In 1947, Pakistan was a Muslim homeland but still a South Asian country, very much situated in the ethos of the Indian subcontinent. Today, it looks in the direction of West Asia and the Arabian desert for a mother culture and a societal anchor. Likewise, says Dhume, the young Muslim boys and girls growing up in Java are probably the first generation in their communities who do not know who Bhima and Arjuna were. Islamist preachers have, for instance, forbidden rice farmers worshipping a local goddess of fertility, whose origins lie in a pre-Islamic veneration of agriculture.
Indeed, the evolution of Indonesian society in the period following the 2002 Bali bombings is particularly insightful. Dhume reports this in real time. Landing in Bali as a news reporter the day after the attack on the Sari nightclub killed some 150 Australian tourists, he was fascinated by the radicalism that was beginning to become more than just a fringe movement in a country he had travelled to and lived in. He quit his job and decided to become a chronicler of Indonesias new engagement with Islam.
The book is a result of those efforts. Dhume captures a period when the Islamisation debate was no more a passive, theoretical discussion. It acquired a trenchant edge and was, to use a colloquial expression, very in-your-face. It was a period that forced people to make choices, and also pushed upper class elites into denial, dissimulation, saying different things to different audiences, and pretending the problem would resolve itself. In a sense, this could describe Pakistan after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.
There are other parallels. Each time there is a Taliban-triggered bombing in, say, Peshawar, crowds gather and chant slogans against America and India. After the Bali bombings, Indonesia was subjected to numerous and fairly complicated theories arguing American and Israeli intelligence were behind the massacre.
There were comic phenomena, and then there were chilling ones. After Bali, Abu Bakar Bashir, leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, became a terrorist icon and South-East Asias Osama bin Laden. In large swathes of Indonesia, however, he was anointed a folk hero. Herry, the friend and fanatic Dhume refers to in his book title, named Bashir Man of the Year on the cover of the magazine he (Herry) edited.
Herry takes Dhume to meet Bashir in his prison cell, greeting the evil genius as ustad (a term of respect with origins in Arabic rather than Bahasa or any known Indonesian language). Bashir is blunt: Bush said if youre not with us youre against us. Im against them. Its a choice like water and fire, or between carrots and steak. Im a Muslim. Im a leader of Hezbollah (the party of God); he is the leader of the kafirs.
Bashir had made his choice. He expected everybody in Indonesia to make theirs too or face the consequences.
In the time Dhume knows them, Herry and wife have two daughters. The first is named Draupadi, as is so common with Indonesians comfortable with a Muslim religious identity and a Hindu cultural idiom. By the time the younger daughter, Ziyadilma, comes along, Herry has exorcised himself of his pre-Islamic legacy (or baggage). He is now writing pamphlets called Signs of Freemasons and Zionists in Indonesia, exploring hidden meanings in pyramids on United States dollar bills and combining economic grievance with religious prejudice holding forth on the Jewish characteristics of the Chinese.
Is it any different from street discourse in Lahore or Rawalpindi denouncing the scheming Hindu lalas? The economically successful neighbour is always a problem, in Mexico as much as in North Korea. In Islamist mythology, however, the successful neighbour is also the religious infidel, a regional variant of the grasping Shylockian Jew.
In the past half-decade, Indonesia has not surrendered to JI or to the Islamist political parties. Rather, pushed by Australia, it has busted terror cells, and its elite continue their libertine partying amid the dazzle of upmarket Jakarta. The economy too has begun to recover. Yet, even in a country blessed with enormous natural resources and rich economic and social achievement this is not going to be enough. The Islamist straitjacket can be pushed back but never broken. To think that could be Pakistans best case scenario.
Posted by: john frum ||
11/14/2009 05:55 ||
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Is a movement to reform Islam from within already here -- and some of us do not even know it?
On October 27, 2009, the well-known Muslim peace activist from Bangladesh, Shoaib Choudhury, arrived in New York City to give talks on the problem of jihad at several prestigious institutions in the area. Shoaib, as he likes to be called, has gained the respect of much of the world, for his heroic efforts to stop the Muslim persecution of Jews and other religious minorities in Muslim countries. For this, his life has been threatened several times after he was accused of sedition, imprisoned and tortured. He still is at risk of being hanged by the state for his supposed crimes.
Relaxing after a long flight from his native Bangladesh, he met with several counter-jihad activists in midtown Manhattan. The plan was to see how mutual support and alliances could be developed.
Continued on Page 49
Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again -- not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a US-bound Air France flight. The "Shoebomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.
But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He'd spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying "JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK". But we (that's to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign.
Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.
Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.
Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan's "research interests", so there was no need to worry. That's America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two "joint terrorism task forces" stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.
On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Major Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: "SOA." As in "Soldier of Allah" -- which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then Captain Hasan was psychotic. But,
According to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered "how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents". So he got promoted to Major and shipped to Fort Hood.
according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered "how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents". So he got promoted to Major and shipped to Fort Hood.
And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.
Well, like they say, it's easy to be wise after the event. I'm not so sure. These days, it's easier to be even more stupid after the event. "Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda," mused MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "That's not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?
The truth is we're not prepared to draw a line even after he's gone ahead and committed mass murder. "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said General Casey, the US Army's Chief of Staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here." A "greater tragedy" than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the "tragedy" must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish "Troubles", "an acceptable level of violence". Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we'll find out.
"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress -- that's to say, a "Punjabi suit", as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez", to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up -- with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.
Mr Fatah would seem to be a genuine "multiculturalist": that's to say, he's attuned to often very subtle "diversities" between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, "Aw, look. He's wearing ... well, something exotic and colorful, let's not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant."
The brain-addled "diversity" of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch 22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you're openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your emails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long established "research interests". If you're psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there's no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn't count unless you're found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.
Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy" but a national scandal, already fading from view.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/14/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
" The truth is we're not prepared to draw a line even after the Fort Hood MOSLEM has gone ahead and committed mass murder. "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said General Casey, the US Army's Chief of Staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here." A "greater tragedy" than 14 dead and dozens of wounded?
Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the "tragedy" must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish "Troubles", "an acceptable level of violence".
Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we'll find out.
Lets weasel there, Casey, old bat. Lets trade lives and Values for a cushy. You right on that?
This guy has a senior Commission in the US Army? Someone get this man a Pink Sweater. Now I know why the Marines call these guys Gravy Trains.
At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heideggers ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.
#3
Back in my days as a mathematician, I studied Teichmüller spaces. I found out later that Teichmüller was the founder of Deutche Mathematik, the first Judenrein mathematics journal. I still studied the subject, a major portion of Riemann surface theory, but I held my nose when thinking of the man.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
11/13/2009 22:16 Comments ||
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#4
The nazis were quite negative on Western culture in general. Not surprising that the Left has found common ground.
#5
1+1=2 your race or political bent does NOT compute.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
11/14/2009 1:42 Comments ||
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#6
Paul Schmidt AKA Paul Carrel, the German military historian who wrote four outstandinng histories of the Wehrmacht during WWII was a Colonel in the SS and held a position in von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry.
Do those facts invalidate the work he did or alter historical facts?
No it does not.
Do these facts color his work?
I am certain they do, but I am also know that Carrell limited his writing to he war and he used his extensive contacts within the German military to put together these fine texts.
#7
The whole idea that Heidegger was some kind of hardcore Nazi is mostly garbage. Like most intellectuals of his time, he was given two choices in Nazi Germany: play ball or loose his position [at the very least].
He played ball. Most people do.
Heidegger's Field Theory of Being and his attempts to understand how language and thought interact with one another are extremely important contributions to Western thought. Time and Being is an important (if extremely difficult to read) book. That's how it is, Nazi or not.
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.
This summer, 
by David Horowitz
