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Blogging has been light here because I have been busy over at Foolishness to the World.

Most interesting column by Glenn Fairman

At Glenn Fairman writes at American Thinker about  the ways statist policies destroy real charity:

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the reprobate descends to the squalor of the pigsty before he comes to his senses, repents, and returns to the Father. It is in the concrete realization that one has either abysmally squandered his resources or that his poor choices will soon seal his destruction, that true life altering changes can be made.

Government, in its anti-wisdom of unreflective compassion, has effectively ordained the unintended consequence of sanctioning and subsidizing the "pigsty." Why return to the father when one can keep his "pride" and continue eating pods alongside his piggish brethren? The government, many layers removed from the multiplicity of social pathologies and the genuine causes of impoverishment when dealing with aid recipients, oftentimes short circuits the natural internalized reflection necessary for a lasting remediation leading towards a moral/spiritual self-examination. In fact, its ham-handed blundering and ignorance of human nature exacerbates the dilemma.

Clearly, the nonjudgmental and wisdom-free manifesto of the bleeding heart ensures that life within the pigsty will harden and metastasize generationally, and that the propagation of one's young within the velvet snare is reduced to a perverse economic incentive of sorts. Meanwhile, the fruits of such ill-conceived compassion are manifold: the inculcation of stubborn pride and sloth, the folly of short term benefit over long term self-worth, the destruction of the natural family, learned helplessness, generational indolence, cultural infantilization, and the eclipse of the classical virtues. One can go on ad nauseum.

Perhaps the most devastating argument against the government assuming the communitarian burden of indigent aid is the moral one. A judgment-free redistribution of money ensures that dependency will continue and perpetuate. Going further, the individual virtue one acquires from giving aid "up-close and personal" effectively dissolves, helping to sever the reciprocal bonds of duty and obligation that comprise the healthy fabric of civil society.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/the_prodigal_and_the_political.html#ixzz2FDy3KQeR

So when did suffering lose all meaning asks Brian Dijkema

The Cardus blog is a great place to visit.  Check out this excerpt of a recent post by Brian Dijkema.  Cardus is a think tank that does serious reflection on Christian social doctrine and how it applies to present public policy:

“The reasons people want assisted suicide include fear of being abandoned, dying alone and unloved—and of being a burden on others.”

Loneliness and love aren’t usually topics that come up in conversations about euthanasia. But the point above, raised by Margaret Somerville at a recent event hosted by the deVeber Institute at the University of Toronto, suggests that euthanasia is far from simply a legal issue. It is first and foremost a cultural issue—an issue that sheds light on how we understand what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human community.

Closely related was another observation made by Somerville in one of the law classes she teaches at McGill. She noted that her students no longer see death as the ultimate antithesis of life. Her students think that “yes, death is bad” but quickly add “but suffering is worse.” In the course of her remarks she noted that this tendency to view suffering in life as a fate worse than death is a leading cultural driver—alongside horribly muddled language—of the movement towards physician assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Suffering no longer has any meaning. And therefore a life with suffering doesn’t either. She noted that the most common place where suffering is seen as possessing some sort of meaning, even positive meaning—religion—is in decline, and that this too is a contributor to the euthanasia movement.

All of which caused me to consider two things: 

First, what happened? When was it that suffering lost meaning?

Go on over and find out. 

Some prophetic words about Egypt

Let's not be naive about the Arab "spring."  It's odd that the Egyptians protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi's seizure of absolute power are getting such scant coverage in the Western media now, while the revolution that will soon bring total sharia to Egypt got all kinds of favorable coverage.

Andrew G. Bostom wrotes at American Thinker.

Theodore Roosevelt penned these remarkably prescient words in a 1911 letter to his longtime correspondent and friend, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, reflecting upon Roosevelt's post-presidency visit to Cairo, Egypt, the previous year.

The real strength of the Nationalist movement in Egypt ... lay not with these Levantines of the café but with the mass of practically unchanged bigoted Moslems to whom the movement meant driving out the foreigner, plundering and slaying the local Christian, and a return to all the violence and corruption which festered under the old-style Moslem rule, whether Asiatic or African.

Roosevelt's concerns about the recrudescence of "old-style Moslem rule" -- that is, a totalitarian sharia (Islamic law) not reshaped or constrained by Western law, may now be fully realized a century later.

Less than two years after the forced abdication of Egyptian President Mubarak, we appear to be witnessing the ultimate triumph of the electoral ascendancy of vox populi, mainstream Egyptian Islamic parties -- and most prominently, the Muslim Brotherhood.  Muhammad Morsi, the Brotherhood's freely elected presidential candidate, has successfully outmaneuvered a minority coalition of secular-leaning Muslims, and Christians, to orchestrate the passage of a more robustly sharia-complaint Egyptian constitution.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/morsis_totalitarian_mandate_is_sharia.html#ixzz2DuA3ygxn

Cardinal Ravasi's clarification

Here it is from the Culture.va website:

Clarification NoteIn reference to the article by Giulio Meotti under the title “The Vatican on Gaza: Israel is a Baby-Killer”, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi categorically denies having said or implied this assertion.

In presenting Pope Benedict’s most recent book, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, did comment on the following phrase “In our own day, the mothers’ cry to God continues unabated” (The Infancy Narratives, p.113). In doing so, he elaborated with humanitarian concern and in light of the news of recent days: “This cry of the mothers who have lost dramatically their children has returned again and again throughout history, and has done so again in these days in Gaza.”

Obviously, the Cardinal’s concern extends to all those who live under the clouds of suffering, fear and violence. Hence he has repeatedly expressed his solidarity also with Jewish victims and does so again, particularly with those who have had cause to weep during the latest cycles of escalation.

His Eminence intends to retain his strong links with the Jewish world. He has repeatedly visited and often resided in Israel, including in moments of tension. He is engaged in multiple collaborations and friendship with Jewish culture and communities, especially the Italian Jewish community. His prayers are for peace and for the stability of the current ceasefire.

Pontifical Council for Culture, 23 November 2012

Is he denying he mentioned Herod and the massacre of the Innocents?   Or is he saying whatever he said never meant to imply Israel is a baby-killer?   I am sure he did not mean the latter, but if he did say the Herod remark, this clarification will probably not travel very far to undo the damage of Giulio Meotti's widely shared article.

No, the Vatican did not call Israel a Baby-killer

But sadly a Cardinal made a passing remark which has been interpreted that way.

Here are samples from a Jewish source and an Islamic source.

The Vatican on Gaza: Israel is a Baby-Killer”

By Giulio Meotti, Italy

First Publish: 11/21/2012, 11:45 PM

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Vatican Council for Culture, commenting on the war between Israel and Hamas, delivered a severe attack on the Jewish people: “I think of the ‘massacre of the innocents’. Children are dying in Gaza, their mothers’ shouts is a perennial cry, a universal cry”.

The Catholic Church high official equated Israel’s operation in Gaza against terror groups with the New Testament story of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies in his effort to kill Jesus.

Ravasi, who is one of the most popular Catholic cardinals and the director of the Church’s policy on culture, called Israelis baby-killers in a shameless form of anti-Semitism which subtly accuses the Jewish State of trying to murder the new Jesus, symbolized by the Palestinian people.

And from Islamic Daily News

The Vatican On Gaza: “Israel Is A Baby-Killer”

Published Monday, November 26, 2012 By IND. Under Palestine

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Vatican Council for Culture, commenting on the war between Israel and Hamas, delivered a severe attack on the Israeli aggression: “I think of the ‘massacre of the innocents’. Children are dying in Gaza, their mothers’ shouts is a perennial cry, a universal cry”.

The Catholic Church high official equated Israel’s operation in Gaza against terror groups with the New Testament story of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies in his effort to kill Jesus.

Ravasi, who is one of the most popular Catholic cardinals and the director of the Church’s policy on culture, called Israelis baby-killers.

One of my friends wrote me she has had to explain to her Jewish friends, "No, the Vatican did not say this."  Cardinal Ravasi was speaking for himself not the Catholic Church.   But the optics are terrible.  

I hope Cardinal Ravasi retracts this unfortunate remark and apologizes.   In the meantime, Nostra Aetate  represents the teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish people.  My bolds.

As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation,(9) nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading.(10) Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle.(11) In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).(12)

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ.

Jack Cashill reflects on Jim Jones

And finds some sobering parallels over at American Thinker:

Not surprisingly, it was while at college -- Indiana U -- that Jim Jones got his first injection of Marx, and he was hooked from the beginning. Given that promoting communism in 1950's Indianapolis held about as much promise as promoting traditional marriage in contemporary San Francisco, Jones took another tack.  "I decided how can I demonstrate my Marxism," he would recount years later.  "The thought was 'infiltrate the church.'"

In 1955 he and his wife Marceline did just that, opening the Peoples Temple Christian Church in Indianapolis. Here, Jones embarked on a second strategy, this one a proven winner in Communist circles: exploit America's Achilles heel, racial injustice. This he did as well, recruiting hundreds of Christian blacks and then subtly shifting their focus from Jesus to Marx, all the while reinforcing their fear of White America. In 1965, he moved the whole shebang to Ukiah, about 100 miles north of San Francisco up Highway 101.

By 1970, the Peoples Temple had shed all but the illusion of Christianity. "We are not really a church," one of the leaders confided to Debbie Layton, a Jonestown survivor, "but a socialist organization.  We must pretend to be a church so we're not taxed by the government."Layton remembers Jones explaining "how those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment -- socialism." In his own reminisces, Jones called religion "a dark creation" of the oppressed.  Salvation would come through other channels. "Free at last, free at last," he led his temple comrades in prayer, "Thank socialism almighty we will be free at last."

Faux Christian that he was, Jones pioneered the "social justice" mission. 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/obamas_jonestowns.html#ixzz2COkuCsxQ

Were the blackmailers the Obama administration?

One of my favorite American pundits says:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think the really shocking news today was that General Petraeus thought and hoped he could keep his job. He thought that it might and it would be kept secret, and that he could stay in his position. I think what that tells us is really important. It meant that he understood that the FBI obviously knew what was going on. He was hoping that those administration officials would not disclose what had happened, and therefore hoping that he would keep his job. And that meant that he understood that his job, his reputation, his legacy, his whole celebrated life was in the hands of the administration, and he expected they would protect him by keeping it quiet.

And that brings us to the ultimate issue, and that is his testimony on September 13. That’s the thing that connects the two scandals, and that’s the only thing that makes the sex scandal relevant. Otherwise it would be an exercise in sensationalism and voyeurism and nothing else. The reason it’s important is here’s a man who knows the administration holds his fate in its hands, and he gives testimony completely at variance with what the Secretary of Defense had said the day before, at variance with what he’d heard from his station chief in Tripoli, and with everything that we had heard. Was he influenced by the fact that he knew his fate was held by people within the administration at that time?

Read the rest, because it might explain why Petraeus, contrary to the testimony of others in the CIA that a spontaneous response to a video precipitated the Benghazi attacks.  I personally get incensed at the "blaming the video" line that came from Hilary Clinton, Susan Rice and even Obama when he spoke at the UN because last I checked the United States was not under Sharia law but the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and our freedoms should be protected by American leaders not thrown under the bus to appease Islamic radicals.  

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/11/13/krauthammer-white-house-held-affair-over-petraeuss-head-favorable-tes#ixzz2CDFACZ7Z

The ridicule tactic

Robert Spencer again on the tactic of ridicule used by the Left:

In this age of Obama, this is what passes for public debate: the politically incorrect one is subjected to scorn and ridicule, is not allowed to respond, and the Leftists who are doing the ridiculing then congratulate themselves on their moral and intellectual superiority. It is not debate, but rather anti-debate, the absence of discussion, the parody of discourse. The point, in fact, is not to refute the assertions and claims of the ideological deviant in question, but merely to signal to the ideologically obedient that this person is to be shunned, is not to be listened to, not to be taken seriously, and above all not to be believed or emulated.It is the tactic of hyenas, of totalitarians, of the Nazi brownshirts who used to show up at the lectures of dissenting professors, not to argue with them, but only to heckle them, threaten them, and demoralize them, so as to intimidate them into silence. They thought that they represented the future, the dawning of a new age of justice, when ancient wrongs would be righted and ancient evils be put down forever. They thought tomorrow belonged to them.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/russell_brand_and_the_degeneration_of_the_public_discourse.html#ixzz2C1EbAKLA

Petraeus resignation is not only fishy to me

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page Mag:

Apparently overcome with guilt over an extramarital affair, General David Petraeus abruptly resigned as director of the CIA Thursday. A suddenly socially conservative Barack Obama accepted his resignation Friday, as Petraeus explained in a statement made public Friday afternoon (the time when all stories that the administration wants to bury are released). But Petraeus’s statement simply didn’t hold water — not only because it assumed an Obama as strait-laced as Pat Robertson, but also because it comes just after the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked him to testify in its investigation of the Benghazi jihad attack and subsequent Obama administration cover-up.

-SNIP-

Parson Obama, that well-known moral crusader who praised Ted Kennedy as an “extraordinary leader” and Barney Frank as “a fierce advocate for the people of Massachusetts and Americans everywhere who needed a voice,” may indeed have been so indignant over Petraeus’s affair that he accepted his resignation with alacrity. On the other hand, maybe his willingness to see the last of Petraeus had something to do with the statement that the CIA issued onOctober 26: “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

America, this could your last chance before decline is inevitable

From Daren Jonescu at American Thinker:

As America is the only nation left in which freedom is still on the ballot, this definitive U.S. election means even more, in truth, than most voters may realize.  It is a referendum on the survival of modern civilization.A recent blog post at the Weekly Standard displays the results of a BBC election poll taken in various countries around the world.  The results demonstrate that if the rest of the world were allowed to vote, Barack Obama would win in a Saddam-like landslide. Throughout what is left of the civilized world, Obama's superiority to Mitt Romney, and in general Democrats' superiority to Republicans, is the default assumption, regarded as beyond question.  One who objects to that opinion has a lot of explaining to do.  And one who dares to admit thinking the United States of America a very agreeable proposition is regarded as either an infidel or a dope. These two presuppositions -- that the Democrats are the good guys, and that America is essentially a bad thing -- should always be understood as a pair.  Together, they reveal exactly what the modern Democratic Party and the American media have spent decades trying to hide from their fellow citizens -- namely, that to prefer the Democrats is to dislike America. That international landslide of support for Obama is a clue to what this U.S. election represents to that minority of us among foreigners who understand what anti-Americanism really means.  Other nations have their advantages -- Korea's low tax rates have helped her to grow from third-world to top-tier economy in little more than a generation; Canada's banking system weathered the 2008 recession better than America's -- but there is only one nation in which individual freedom is regarded not as a "system" or a "policy," but as a pre-political principle, a true foundation.  If you share this principle, then America is, at present, your only practical hope for the future of mankind.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/the_us_election_is_a_referendum_on_civilization.html#ixzz2BRvxWe4a

A classicist looks at Benghazi

One of my favorite columnists, Victor Davis Hanson, writes about Obama and Benghazi over at the Corner, from the perspective of Sophocles:

In Sophoclean terms, hubris (arrogance) — often due to a character flaw (amartia) — leads to atê (excess and self-destructive recklessness) that in turn earns nemesis (divine retribution).  In that tragic sense, an overweening Obama must have known that — despite the Drone killings — al-Qaeda was far from impotent. And it was not wise, as Obama once himself warned, to high-five the bin Laden raid and leak to the world the details — knowing as he did that bin Laden’s death was not his trophy alone (or indeed a trophy at all) — but better left an unspoken collective effort of military bravery and the dividend of the often derided Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that Obama had both damned and then embraced. Ironically (another good Greek word), it was probably not so much an obscure video, but the constant chest-thumping about the grisly end of Osama that infuriated the al-Qaeda affiliates. Nothing, after all, is quite so dangerous as talking loudly while carrying a small stick.

Meanwhile, Obama would continue to bask in the removal of Gaddafi, but shirk the hard, dirty work of securing the postbellum tribal landscape. Chaos on the ground in Libya logically ensued — and yet was ignored, as the intervention had to be frozen in amber as an ideal operation. That narrative was again ironic, given that Obama had been among the most vocal in pointing out the vast abyss from George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” to the Iraq insurgency.

Because Obama now cannot explain how his staff and subordinates watched a real-time video and did not react as most Americans would have responded, he is saddled with a long, drawn-out tragic dilemma — knowing that the predetermined end will prove bad and so avoiding it brings only temporary relief. Americans can deal with stormed embassies and lost ambassadors — but not their commander in chief of the world’s most deadly military watching real-time videos of the carnage before going to bed to prep for a campaign stop in Las Vegas (a city Obama himself once preached should be avoided). Either an administration discloses or does not disclose — but why, the public will ask, leak the covert details of the cyber-war against Iran, the Osama mission, and the Predator hit protocols, but not inform the public how our own were murdered? All that is hubris and simply asks too much of the public.

Dr. Dawg accuses me of running a half-way house

and all I get is a measly  80 hits above my usual very low traffic.  

The Binks is baaaaack

With a great assortment of things to read and see.

Foolishness to the world

Don't forget my other blog Foolishness to the World which I update regularly.

Throwing the Constitution under the bus . . .

like a bunch of dhimmis after the terrorist attack on Benghazi.  A video was to blame?  That's what Obama surrogates trotted out for a long time after the Sept. 11 murders on American soil in Libya.

That's the Obama administration.  Check out this article by Andrew McCarthy over at PJMedia (my emphases):

Under the supremacist interpretation of sharia — Islam’s totalitarian societal system — that is regnant in the Middle East, non-Muslim Westerners who seek to implant Western ideas and institutions in Islamic countries are deemed enemies who must be driven out or killed. As U.S. Ambassador to Libya, as an American attempting to transition the former Qaddafi dictatorship into something approximating Western democracy, Christopher Stephens was deemed an enemy worthy of killing; therefore, sharia ideologues killed him, along with three other similarly “culpable” Americans.

That is what happened. It is, moreover, what President Obama and his administration knew happened. They no doubt knew it while it was happening. They undeniably knew it within hours of its happening. And in spite of knowing it, they weaved a web of lies, over a course of weeks, to obscure what happened. They did so in gross violation of the president’s oath of office, and in a willfully anti-Constitutional conspiracy with Islamists against American free expression rights — a conspiracy resulting in the unforgivable prosecution of an American citizen for exercising his First Amendment right to make a video negatively depicting Islam. A video top administration officials, including the president himself, fraudulently portrayed as the catalyst of murderous Islamist savagery, intentionally obscuring the role of sharia.

That could be the explanation for the headline of this post. But it is not.
The headline, instead, is a quote mined from a bull’s-eye column by the American Spectator‘s stellar Jeffrey Lord. “Sharia,” he concludes, “killed Ambassador Chris Stevens.” And unlike anything you’ve read, Jeff compellingly connects some damning dots.

The local al-Qaeda franchise in Libya is called Ansar al-Sharia — literally, the “helpers of sharia.” The organization’s goal, the goal shared by all Islamists, not just those who seek it by violent jihad, is to “impose sharia.” So declares Ansar al-Sharia’s emir, Mohammed Ali al-Zawahi. Entirely consistent with that goal, Lord reports Zawahi’s proclamation that Ansar “is all about doing ‘battle with the liberals, the secularists and the remnants of Gaddafi.’ The terms ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ of course mean Americans and Westerners.”

Stanley Kurtz on why Obama is using such a divisive strategy

From The Corner:

Yet the truth is, Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority, a coalition that would forever put an end to Clintonian triangulation and usher in unfettered leftist Obamaism instead. Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left.

Over at The Nation, Richard Kim gets it. Writing about the Lena Dunham “first time” ad controversy, he speaks of it as part of an effort “to realign the electorate towards the Democratic Party for a generation.” But the best place to read about Obama’s larger strategy is “Hope: The Sequel,” the New York Magazine piece by John Heilemann that got attention last May but bears rereading now. When it comes to the course of the 2012 Obama campaign, Heilemann clearly nailed it.

His piece describes an Obama campaign willing to risk turning off socially conservative Democrats and independent voters by hyping leftist social issues. President Obama evidently made this strategic decision himself, and he publically began to adopt it with his “evolution” on gay marriage in May of this year. While Obama’s team is solidly behind the strategy, Heilemann makes it clear that some prominent Democrats don’t like it. Instead, they fear it as an excessively divisive approach that puts the great asset of Obama’s likeability at risk with middle-ground voters.

Obama’s strategy, says Heileman, is built around the idea that he can win with a coalition of the “demographically ascendent,” African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people. To a degree, the bad economy has pushed Obama toward this approach. The obvious hope is that economic weakness can be countered by appeals to socially liberal women and young people on cultural issues. But don’t underestimate the extent to which this strategy is a deliberate decision that could have gone otherwise, as the behind-the-scenes opposition of some Democrats indicates. Obama is clearly willing to abandon centrist voters and place his own likeability at risk for the sake of creating a socially and economically liberal Democratic coalition that would allow him to govern securely from the left.

The egregious failure at Benghazi

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker outlines the latest revelations, but here's the part that struck me the most.  I saw Tyrone Woods' father in Fox News last night recounting this very event and it makes me almost sick with revulsion:

These reports are troublesome enough, but they were to be capped before week's end by the account given by  Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods one of the Special forces men murdered in this assault:He said the President was cold and appeared unsympathetic at the ceremony at which the bodies of the slain were returned. Secretary Clinton  whispered that the administration was going to have the producer of the film trailer arrested, showing she was still playing the lying game and, at the same time, demonstrating  the administration's utter disregard for the Free Speech guarantees of the Constitution. But that wasn't the worst of it. The rock bottom of sleaziness was the question asked by the Vice President:"Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?"

Read this again: "Secretary Clinton  whispered that the administration was going to have the producer of the film trailer arrested, showing she was still playing the lying game and, at the same time, demonstrating  the administration's utter disregard for the Free Speech guarantees of the Constitution."

People died.  Obama lied.  But he and his administration have also betrayed the fundamental principles of our American constitution and our inherent rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Couple that with Obama's speech to the United Nations in which he said  "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."   Then he tried to make a moral equivalence to slander to the burning of churches and incitement to violence against Shia pilgrims and so on.   

 I hope we see a landslide repudiation of this man and his dhimmi policies come November 6.  I think the whole Benghazi debacle boils down to this:   Obama had to prove that his policies in the Middle East were working, that Osama was dead and he had successfully recalibrated the American image in the Muslim world.   Bowing and scraping and apologizing for America were part of that strategy.

Then Benghazi and Cairo happened, and in both cases sovereign American territory was breached by Islamists, and in Benghazi there was no mob precipitating the violence, but a planned attack with sophisticated weaponry that people don't ordinarily bring to demos.   So, this had to be planted in the "America's at fault" narrative Obama has been spinning since he took office.  So some obscure YouTube trailer was blamed and the producer arrested by brown-shirted men who came knocking on his door in the middle of the night.   You know, even if this video DID form the pretext for violence somewhere, to throw constitutional rights under the bus and apologize for our freedoms no matter how egregiously someone might be exercising them, is what grates me most because it is this kind of policy that led to the death not only of Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Ambassador Chris Stephens but also of those who died at the hands of the Fort Hood killer whose radical Islamism was not checked because of political correctness.  

Mark Steyn has a must-read column about all this  at the Orange County Register:

"We're going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video," said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I'll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did "have that person arrested." By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president's re-election campaign.
You'll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden's bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

Obamanomics and why America cannot survive if he wins another four years.  A real look at why third quarter economic growth showed a slight increase from the Wall St Journal.

As problematic is where the growth came from and where it has gone missing. Consumer spending provided the most lift, perhaps helped by the asset burst inspired by the Federal Reserve's money printing. If Mr. Obama is re-elected, he should buy dinner for Ben Bernanke and the Fed Governors for their in-kind political contributions. The problem is that consumers can't continue to spend if the overall economy doesn't grow fast enough to raise incomes faster than it is.
The other big third-quarter growth driver was federal government spending, which rose 9.6%. Overall government outlays rose 3.7% and accounted for about 0.7 percentage points of the 2% overall GDP increase. Economist David Malpass calculates that growth in private output was closer to 1.3%. So much for the private economy "doing fine" and the government slumming for dollars.

A parody of that sick Obama commercial

Stephen Crowder parodies that Lena Dunham commercial for Obama:

From the tell-all book about Joe Biden

Over at The Corner, some excerpts from Patrick Brennan:

The best bits, as you might expect, regard his personal experiences with Biden:

In the prologue, Connaughton recounts the 2008 campaign gaffe when Biden predicted that Obama would be tested soon into his term. In a meeting with Connaughton and some of his other advisers a few days after the election, Biden revealed that he had been upbraided by an angry Obama.

“Biden told us that Obama had called him and told him sharply that he didn’t need public tutoring: ‘I don’t need you acting like you’re my Henry Higgins,’” Connaughton writes. “Biden said his private reaction was, ‘Whoa. Where did this come from? This is clearly a guy who could restrict my role to attending state funerals or just put me in a closet for four years.”
Biden added: “I’m going to have to earn his trust, but I’m not going to grovel to this guy. My manhood is not negotiable.”

And how did Biden like to remind staffers of just what a man he was?

Connaughton recalls a story from the lead-up to Biden’s ill-fated 2008 presidential run. “Later in the campaign, a twenty-three-year-old fundraising staffer got into a car with Biden with a list of names and phone numbers: ‘Okay, Senator, time to do some fundraising calls,’” Connaughton writes. “Biden looked at him and said, ‘Get the f**k out of the car.’”

Peggy Noonan on Obama

An interesting excerpt of her latest column at the Wall Street Journal:

Which gets us to Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics," published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn't received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president's key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn't know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he'd been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened. In time Republicans came to think he doesn't really listen, doesn't really hear. So did some Democrats. Business leaders and mighty CEOs felt patronized: After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like "window dressing." One spoke of Obama's surface polish and essential remoteness. In negotiation he did not cajole, seduce, muscle or win sympathy. He instructed. He claimed deep understanding of his adversaries and their motives but was often incorrect. He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner, was a "country club Republican." He was often patronizing, which in the old and accomplished is irritating but in the young and inexperienced is infuriating. "Boehner said he hated going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures," Mr. Woodward writes.

Mr. Obama's was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for Republicans trying to negotiate with Republicans. Through it all he was confident—"Eric, don't call my bluff"—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day.
They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized.

Stanley Kurtz on Obama's class warfare election

From National Review's the Corner, here's an excerpt of Stanley Kurtz' post:

I’ve been struck by commentators on both the right and left treating Obama’s leftist campaign as a matter of strict necessity. For a couple of years, conventional wisdom has held that the weak economy left Obama little choice but to turn this into a base election. Then conventional wisdom was upended by the conventions. Bill Clinton’s dubious but effective attempts to exonerate Obama from economic blame could easily have been combined with a centrist campaign — and presidency. Obama’s class-warfare campaign was a choice, not a necessity. But to see that is to suggest that Obama is a leftist by conviction, and many have been reluctant to do that.

Remember when Obama told Diane Sawyer he’d rather be “a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president”? That was a swipe at Clinton, Obama’s lifelong model of what not to do. In that same interview, Obama explained that he didn’t want to go “small bore” just to avoid controversy and secure re-election. That’s what Clinton did, and that’s what Obama wants to avoid. The president is willing to take significant political risks for a shot at transforming America in a second term. Reelection flowing out of a class-warfare-based campaign would further that goal. Is it so hard to believe that Obama means it when he runs left? After all, he was the most liberal senator before he became president. So where’s the mystery? The real mystery is our refusal to see what’s staring us in the face.

Here’s where Obama’s political past is illuminating. Obama joined a leftist third party in 1996 precisely because he was dissatisfied with the direction of the Democrats under Bill Clinton. That’s why the New Party was created to begin with. I explained in the final chapter of Radical-in-Chief, two years before the fact, that Obama would run a class-warfare campaign in 2012 because his leftist community-organizing buddies see that as a strategic key to transforming the country. Again, as Crook himself correctly says, Obama could have done otherwise. The president’s strategy was a choice based on background and conviction.

"Does this kind of gradual journey sound familiar to anybody else?

This gradual journey is so familiar to me!  To me it has been about learning to confront reality as it is, rather than how we hope it will be, while at the same time finding hope where it belongs---in Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven, not in utopian schemes that ignore the sinful reality of human nature. BTW, my big hope in the upcoming American election is that political correctness loses big time and we can start naming things what they are rather than cloaking them in misleading euphemisms, whether it is regarding abortion, jihadist attacks or anti-poverty measures that grow dependency and block voters rather than help liberate people.  Go on over and read this and follow the ample links by David Swindle at PJMedia:

Over the weekend I published the first in an ongoing series of book blog posts by me here at PJ Lifestyle: 23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards.

This more than 17,000-word, free, online ebook features six sections of books on a variety of subjects: autobiographies, history, polemics, American exceptionalism, media, and science. (And included throughout are various YouTube videos and custom photos of relevant excerpts.)

The three autobiographies that begin this series each tell a different variation of a story familiar to many PJ readers: the liberal “mugged by reality” reemerging after disappointment as a more tough-minded conservative who recognizes the world’s evil and can call it by name. (Victor Davis Hanson refers to this as the tragic view.)

In reflecting on these narratives, one point often goes unsaid: the journey from Left to Right usually takes awhile — years, sometimes even decades. PJM CEO Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, the late Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation, and leading occult author James Wasserman’s In the Center of the Fire each show as much for men traveling very different careers. For all three the journey out of so-called liberalism required many difficult realizations and personal struggles with both private life experiences and the big national stories.

When one’s ideology fails, a new process of searching for answers begins. The experience resembles a fish out of water flailing about on the shore. One flop forward, another scared slide backwards toward the progressive ocean.

I resisted accepting the “conservative” and “right-wing” labels for years; my own transition from Chomsky reader andNation subscriber during college in 2005 to conservative new media editor in 2012 came in baby steps. I drifted from the hard left wing of the Democratic Party circa 2006 to the (imagined-in-my-own-head) Centrist Liberal wing of the Democrats by 2008. (Thank two and a half years of pay-the-bills-type jobs while developing my freelance writing career for those small gains.) I then flopped over to a disillusioned, independent “New Centrism” (my own term years before “No Labels”) as Obama came into office and his hard leftism emerged. (What was a radical like Van Jones doing in a “post-ideological” administration? Stanley Kurtz would answer that question.)

Initially I empathized with the polite, “center-right” David Frum/David Brooks-style “sophisticated” conservative circa Fall 2009. During 2010 and 2011 the ideological shift continued into more aggressive Tea Party and anti-jihad positions, though my “social liberalism” still remained. Only in the last year — as I’ve returned to a belief in God andgrown certain in my need to someday become a father — does it feel like I’ve come all the way to the Right, thus inspiring an unashamed identification with social conservatism and family values. (That I still support state-level legislation favoring gay marriage for the kind of socially conservative, every-human-being-on-the-face-of-the-earth-needs-to-endeavor-to-get-married reasons that Jonathan Rauch argues in his book can remain an ongoing debate for another day…)

Does this kind of gradual journey sound familiar to anybody else?

Debate analysis and some humor

From Tim Stanley of The Telegraph:

Obama blew his closing statements by developing ultra-energetic conjurer’s hands (“Look at the hands, not at the cards, look at the hands…”)

-snip-

The real difference was in style. In his closing statement – after Obama was done making the Ace of Spades disappear – Romney channelled Reagan by looking straight into the camera and asserting his faith in America. It was empty, sugary stuff that will make liberals sick. But it was infinitely preferable to Obama’s constant, nasty attacks. Sometimes in life, the nice guys do win.

Karin McQuillan at American Thinker:

Words don't matter as much as body language when voters decide on the man they trust to lead the nation.  Despite all the policy debates, all the fact checking, all the pundits, we don't weigh and balance and research, not most of us.  We don't even use our forebrains.  We use the most primitive part of our brains, the part that can smell danger, that smells who is the alpha male, who is the omega, who is the rogue.  The nose knows who is the real leader.  We can smell a winner.

Mitt Romney passed the smell test for the third time last night, and Barack Obama failed. Choosing a president isn't a beauty contest, although good looks help.  It is about masculinity.  It is about confidence and calm strength.  Romney was the happy warrior of the debate.  He was the guy so big he doesn't have to pick fights or show off his muscles.  They are obvious from his stature and how he conducts himself.   Obama was the junk yard dog, trying to protect his turf by mean looks and threatening to bite.  He didn't actually get his teeth into Romney a single time.  Obama's attempt at a steely gaze came across as unpleasant, hostile, even silly.  He didn't faze Romney, and he didn't win anyone's confidence.   He made himself smell nasty.  A snapping dog doesn't make people feel safe.

And Hillbuzz blogger Kevin DuJan, a gay blogger in Chicago, takes some amusing liberties in his live-blogging the debates last night.  He must have become a little punchy towards the end.

OBAMA: China is a partner.  It needs to follow rules.  I insist that China plays by the rules.  We need a level playing field and a trade task force.  We have brought more cases against China and we won those case.  Hey, ho, raise the roof.  There are steelworkers who are selling tires to China now and I saved those jobs.  There are gay steel workers in Springfield who love me and those guys know how to work hard and to play hard and that makes me ha…uh, happy.

ROMNEY:  China wants a stable world.  They don’t want war.  They don’t want protectionism.  They want economy to work. They have 20 million people moving to cities looking for jobs.  China wants to be with a strong America.  China does not know what to make of us cutting out military.  They see America withdrawing from world.  We need trade relations with China that work.  China artificially holds down the currency.  We lose jobs that way. I will label China a currency manipulator and they are stealing designs and counterfeiting goods.  We need to make them understand they have to play by rules.

SCHEIFFER:  Is you trying to start a trade war or something?

ROMNEY:  China doesn’t want a trade war.  We have a trade imbalance now.  We can’t just surrender.  We have to say to China, look you are playing aggressively but you can’t keep doing these things.  China takes counterfeiting products and sells things using our serial numbers.  China can be our partner but not steal our jobs on an unfair basis.

OBAMA:  Romney sends jobs overseas.  He likes doing that because he hates all of you. If we listen to Romney there would be no gay steel industries and we’d be sending all those jobs overseas because Romney is evil.  He is going to send those jobs to China. Are you making investments in education?  Bitch, I’m going to hire MATH TEACHERS up in here.  They will do the math to double the exports.  There are currencies that are part of the math and I am going to press it.  Press it, yo.  Press it like it’s hot.  I will transition from Afghanistan to Mathganistan and sends signals that America is a specific power and we will work through with the ships to held them pass through countries.  I have basic standards.

Read more http://hillbuzz.org/livestream-debate-transcript-foreign-policy-debate-between-romney-and-obama-in-boca-raton-florida-on-10222012-10222012

From the insightful Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

Just as the greater use of contraceptives and availability of abortion have trimmed the left's upcoming generations but not those of more traditional voters, the increased employment of women  and not just in those jobs we call "the caring professions," but in jobs where daily they can see at first hand the effects of bad policy on their economic opportunities, seems to me to factor into this. 

When you want to hire an employee but the uncertainties about tax planning and the market and your obligations under Obamacare mean you can't, soft appeals to minor extraneous issues fall on deaf ears. When you cannot afford to fill the tank of your car to get to work, pay for your health insurance, or feed your family, while Obama is tossing away more billions on green energy fantasies, ethanol subsidies, or Fluke's birth-control pills, just turn up the heat on your ire. When your savings evaporate, your property is worth less and bonds in Delphi are made worthless to benefit UAW members, your tax bill rises to pay for illegal aliens' social costs, diversity training for doctors, lunchroom monitors checking to see if you packed a healthy enough lunch for your kids. or TSA bullies to pat down the underwear of enfeebled oldsters and crying kids at airports, Obama's offers to provide more government regulation are unpersuasive.

Ladies are More Than Their Lady Parts
Then there's the insult of an appeal that assumes that over half the population is so focused on their reproductive parts that nothing else matters much to them. I mean that does seem terribly regressive when you consider it. And it is an equally poor judgment that assumes free contraceptives and no limits on abortion are the choice all women want to make.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/the_war_on_women_backfires.html#ixzz29wZqpHJ1

Some debate afterthoughts

I watched Tuesday night's debate.  Here are some after-the-debate comments I found interesting that you are not likely to see in the mainstream media.

From Drive-by Pundit via American Thinker:

Out of all the dishonest statements, evasions, and disquieting responses from Obama, though, one particularly stood out.  It was his response to an audience member who asked: "What has your administration done or plans to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?"After mumbling some unconvincing boilerplate about how much he deeply "believes in the Second Amendment," Obama said: "Frankly, in my hometown of Chicago, there's an awful lot of violence, and they're not using AK 47s.  They're using cheap handguns."

I was astonished.  Not just me, but my son and his fiancée, who is fresh out of the 'hood.  As if rehearsed, we all simultaneously leaped from our seats, hooting in total derision, loudly wondering what "hometown" he was talking about -- Nairobi?

Get this: the first "black" president of the United States, the man who worked as a South Side community organizer in Chicago, really believes that "folks" in the ghetto are still running around in afros, dashikis, and platform shoes, ducking behind Buick Electra 225s while taking potshots at each other with zip guns and .22s, once commonly referred to as "Saturday Night Specials."  Seriously?

Obama couldn't be more mistaken if he added that black gangbangers also schedule nightly rumbles with straight razors and switchblades after the malt shop closes.

No self-respecting gangbanger would be caught dead with a "cheap handgun."  These are people who think nothing of plunking down $500-plus for the latest pair of Air Jordans.  Do you think they're going to skimp on firepower?  The brothas and sistas of the hood are strapped with some serious, expensive heat, like Rugers, Glocks, and Berettas.  In some cases their handguns are blinged out with gold or silver plating, mother of pearl grips, and precious gems.

From the brilliant Stanley Kurtz over at National Review's The Corner:

The chief symptom of liberal distress is an intense form of denial.  Liberals now actually deny that conservatives exist.  There are, of course, strange, cartoon-like images that liberals call conservative, yet these bear little resemblence to complex conservative human beings with thoughts capable of posing a reasoned challenge to liberal convictions.  In psychiatic terms, liberals have split off an all-bad version of conservatism in an effort to defend against the intolerable reality of actual threats to the liberal point of view.  I don’t think this denial has quite reached the level of psychosis.  Perhaps we could call it high-functioning borderline instead.  At any rate, we are now clearly in the realm of pathology.

The problem is visible in the 2012 presidential and vice-presidential debates.  If we treat President Obama and the three debate moderators as manifestations of a troubled liberal mind, the progress of the debates makes perfect sense.  It is an exercise in the gradual breakdown of denial, accompanied by increasingly frantic efforts to shore that denial up.

The first debate reflected a relatively stable form of denial.  It had been going on for years, after all.  President Obama and Jim Lehrer simply assumed that no conservative opponent existed.  There was thus no need to prepare, no real need to show up, and no need for the moderator to impose time limits or interrupt the conservative with questions.  It’s easy enough to crush a stick figure.

Once Romney broke through this first form of denial, more active and less stable attempts at denial were required to hold reality at bay.  In the next debate, Vice-President Biden adopted a manic air, automatically rejecting all of his opponent’s arguments as absurd.  Biden’s comportment was socially dysfunctional and could not be maintained consistently throughout the debates, yet it served for a time to stave off a severe threat to liberal self-esteem.  The moderator, meanwhile, sharing the vice-president’s disregard for Paul Ryan’s existence (as anything other than a cartoon bad-guy) was oblivious to Biden’s bad behavior, and so refused to stop it.

By the third debate, the liberal patient’s internal conflict was out in the open.  Obama was forced to deal with his opponent as an actual being, worthy of serious argument.  Yet this distrurbing intrusion of reality forced the moderator into an embarrassing public display of total denial, simply negating the reality of Obama’s Libya coments, and breaking with her proper role (more social dysfunction).  Frequent interruptions of the conservative’s argument were necessary for the moderator at this point.

A serious look at last week's debate

Mark Steyn on Big Bird and why he should not be on the government teat

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it's no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their "safe house" in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president's Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes." The butchers of Darfur aren't blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven't given enough cookies. I'm not saying there's a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary ... well, actually, I am.

Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let's go back to his central thrust. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting receives nearly half-a-billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who, in turn, disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don't know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Sen. Jim DeMint, the President of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Sen. Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: they've been in "public service" their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.

Mitt's decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counter-arguments from Democrats: 1) half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? 2) everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it's sold nigh on a billion bucks' worth of merchandising sales (that's popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.

She didn't love her husband when she married him

But she does now.  Most interesting testimony from a Jewish woman who met her husband through a matchmaking process.  (H/t FiveFeetofFury, which is always interesting but not always "safe for work."):

I realize that not thinking about intimacy in the context of marrying someone is a foreign idea to most people. I dated in a totally different paradigm. My husband and I view marriage from a Torah perspective, meaning that we see marriage as a creation of G-d. In the Jewish marriage (when everything is working right, and thank G-d our marriage is healthy and holy), intimacy is holy. It's something special that produces souls even when physical reproduction does not happen. Dating in a holy way allowed us to set the stage for building an "everlasting edifice."

Instead of thinking about intimacy, I was way more concerned with finding out if Y was someone who I could live and cooperate with. I wanted to know if the issues that we disagreed on would be stumbling blocks down the road. One of my rabbis advised me, "Watch the way a man treats taxi drivers and waiters." We were simultaneously building a friendship and monitoring every single word and action on every single date. What does any of that have to do with touching? 

We made a decisive effort to maintain objectivity. We checked in with the matchmaker after every date. We didn't speak on the phone, text, or email between dates until after our fifth time going out, and even then, the conversation was light and none-too-intimate. The result of this was that when I got married, I didn't love my husband, but I felt like I was making an informed choice. I liked him. I trusted him. I found him to be pleasant-looking and well-groomed.

Almost two years later, we are definitely in love. My husband is my best friend and my favorite person in the world. As a religious Jew, I can't discuss details of intimacy with you. My bedroom door is closed to the world. And that's the point: Intimacy is holy. What I can reveal to you is that instead of crashing and burning and seeing the flame wither away after marriage, we've experienced the opposite. Every day we get closer and love each other more. 

Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt on the debate

Some great lines from Mark Steyn's interview on the Hugh Hewitt show (my emphases):

HH: The latter, definitely. I’m going to come back to the substance of the debate in just a second, but I want to pause on MSNBC, and indeed, much more. Whether it was Michael Moore or Bill Maher or Andrew Sullivan or the MSM’ers like David Gregory and a host of CNN’ers, they all were apoplectic. It was like the Lord of the Flies adapted for debates, and they turned on him, and they said…why the anger, Mark Steyn, on the left?

MS: No, well, and I think they also turned on poor, old Jim Lehrer, who had been hailed…Politico did some preposterous thing on how he was the master of moderation and everything. And now, they treat him like that guy who did the video. He’ll be lucky if the L.A. County Sheriffs aren’t around his house to get him on parole violations. I mean, this guy…you know what it’s like? It was like, somebody said this last night, it’s like when a boxer who’s come up with so many fixed fights actually finds himself in the ring with somebody who is real. And by the way, that, just to go back to Jim Lehrer for a moment, I thought one of the very best moments about ten minutes in was when Romney fired, in effect, fired Big Bird and Jim Lehrer.

HH: Yes.

MS: I thought that is so cool to tell the moderator you’re going to cut off his funding.

HH: Yes, it was…

MS: And Jim Lehrer lost control of the format, and you know, I don’t know whether it was because of that, or whether he’s thinking oh, my God, this time next year, I’m going to be doing the night shift on WZZZ, but all that stuff that makes these debates normally unwatchable, you know, you’ll have a 90 second pre-rebuttal of the third question’s rebuttal, and all that kind of thing, and they just had at it. And so Romney, that was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just…I mean, Big Bird, I don’t care. I loathe Big Bird. But skewering Jim Lehrer, wow. Super cool, man.