John Hinderaker admires the life-style of leading European socialists, which in the case of IMF chief DSK included $3000 per night single hotel rooms, “an arrangement with Air France that allow[ing] him to get on any flight and sit in first class,” suits from the same tailor favored by President Obama.
After all, when you working on behalf of the poor and the dispossesed, when you are the representative of the worthiest of all possible causes, only the best is good enough for you.
The ruthlessness and appetitiveness of leftwing political leaders is commonly observed. Not surprisingly, a real percentage, DSK, Bill Clinton, have, in the course of their political careers, made a habit of extending the customary socialist perspective on people’s rights and property to womens’ bodies. Why should anyone be surprised at the same philosophy expressing itself in more than one form?
The Paraguaná Peninsula is the little frying pan shaped extension on the west end of the coast directly below Aruba.
Back in December, NYM quoted a Hudson Institute article by the Moroccan-Italian journalist Anna Mahjar-Barducci discussing a report (English translation) from the German newpaper Die Welt which quoted “Western security sources” on Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela signing an agreement with Teheran last October 19th to permit an Iranian missile base on Venezuelan soil.
It was reported in December that construction was intended to commence late in 2011, and the Jerusalem Post repeats a report from last Friday’s Die Welt noting that Iranian engineers have already been on-site.
The location selected for the missile base is at the western edge of Venezuela’s northern coast, as close as possible to American targets.
The Iranian government is moving forward with the construction of rocket launch bases in Venezuela, the German daily Die Welt wrote in its Friday edition.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is Teheran’s most important South American ally.
Iran is building intermediate- range missile launch pads on the Paraguaná Peninsula, and engineers from a construction firm – Khatam al-Anbia – owned by the Revolutionary Guards visited Paraguaná in February. Amir al-Hadschisadeh, the head of the Guard’s Air Force, participated in the visit, according to the report. Die Welt cited information from “Western security insiders.”
The rocket bases are to include measures to prevent air attacks on Venezuela as well as commando and control stations.
The Iranian military involvement in the project extends to bunker, barracks and watch tower construction. Twenty-meter deep rocket silos are planned. The cost of the Venezuelan military project is being paid for with Iranian oil revenue. The Iranians paid in cash for the preliminary phase of the project and, the total cost is expected to amount to “dozens of millions” of dollars, Die Welt wrote.
The Paraguaná Peninsula is on the coast of Venezuela and is roughly 120 kilometers from America’s main South American partner, Columbia.
According to Die Welt, the clandestine agreement between Venezuela and Iran would mean the Chavez government would fire rocket at Iran’s enemies should the Islamic Republic face military strikes.
On his radio program Monday morning, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, who knows Gingrich well but is also close to Ryan, reacted angrily to Gingrich’s remarks. Referring to Ryan’s Medicare plan as “right-wing social engineering” is, Bennett said, “an unforgivable mistake, in my judgment.” Bennett went on to say that Gingrich “has taken himself out of serious consideration for the [2012] race.”
He has as far as any possibility of support from movement conservatives like me is concerned.
Badass of the week has a nice tribute to greatest-Marine-of-all-time Chesty Puller.
Lewis Puller, nicknamed “Chesty” because of his perfect posture and the fact that his torso somewhat resembled a full-size beer keg full of lead bricks, raw muscle and horse steroids, was a hard-as-**** ************ who is almost universally-recognized as the most badass dude to ever wear the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. Not bad, considering that being revered as the pinnacle of toughness by the USMC is kind of like being King of the Vikings or the toughest Klingon to ever set foot on the planet Kronos. In his thirty-seven years of service to the Corps, Puller would rise through the ranks from Private to General, kick more asses than Juan Valdez on an insane bender, and become the most decorated Marine in American history. ...
On the night of 24 October 1942, 700 men of the 1/7 were positioned in a thin, mile-long line, defending an American airfield that was critical for the success of the Guadalcanal operation. They suddenly came under an intense onslaught from the seasoned men of the Japanese 17th Army, who came charging full-speed at the U.S. positions. For over three hours in the middle of the night, Chesty Puller ran up and down the U.S. lines directing his men and giving orders to his company commanders. When the smoke cleared the next morning, the hard-fighting men of the 1st Marines had killed 1,400 of the enemy and captured seventeen trucks loaded with weapons and PlayStations while sustaining fewer than 70 casualties. Before he would leave Guadalcanal, Puller would be shot twice by snipers and hit once with shrapnel from an exploding mortar round, but none of that bullshit would slow him down because he had well over 200 hit points thanks to his 18 Constitution score and the fact that he was a Level 15 Marine Commander. Shit, ****ing Admiral Yamamoto himself could have swooped in on a giant ****ing red dragon that breathed fire right in Puller’s ****ing face and Chesty would have just casually dusted himself off, broken the dragon’s neck, and hurled the Admiral into an active volcano.
BOTW omits mentioning that the Marines on Guadalcanal had been abandoned by the US Navy, which had withdrawn to protect its carriers, and 6000 out-of-supply marines were facing a reinforced 30,000 Japanese. There was no gas for the marine’s airplanes, so Chesty Puller ordered the pilots to position the fighter planes so that their machine guns would be bearing on the Japanese line of attack on his position.
The Marines were still using bolt-action 1903 Springfields, which were relatively slow to reload, and they prepared themselves to break human-wave banzai charges by equipping themselves with extra magazines for their 1911 Colt .45 pistols.
In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson takes the occasion of the imminent release of The Secret Knowledge, a collection of essays representing a combination of anti-liberal rant with conversion memoir by David Mamet to talk with the playwright about his new book and why he has changed sides politically.
Mamet’s parents were divorced when he was young, and he spent most of his childhood after the breakup with his father, a highly successful labor lawyer. The faith in unions that his father instilled in him didn’t survive the screenwriters’ strike of 2007-08—one of the most heavily publicized events in Hollywood history and the most quickly forgotten, so abject was the ineptitude and ultimate failure of the writers’ union. For Mamet it was another turn of the ratchet away from the left.
“They were risking not only their own jobs but the jobs of everyone who had nothing to gain from the strike—the drivers and scene painters and people who are on set 14 hours a day working their asses off. These working people were driven out of work by the writers—10,000 people losing their jobs at Christmastime. It was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw in my life. And for what? They didn’t know what they were striking for—just another inchoate liberal dream.
“The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people’s? One thing they can’t do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd.”
One of Mamet’s favorite books has been Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, published during the First World War by the British social psychologist Wilfred Trotter, inventor of the term “herd instinct.”
“Trotter says the herd instinct in an animal is stronger even than the preservation of life,” Mamet said. “So I was watching the [2008] debates. My liberal friends would spit at the mention of Sarah Palin’s name. Or they would literally mime the act of vomiting. We’re watching the debates and one of my friends pretends to vomit and says, ‘I have to leave the room.’ I thought, oh my god, this is Trotter! This is the reaction of the herd instinct. When a sheep discovers a wolf in the fold, it vomits to ward off the attacker. It’s a sign that their position in the herd is threatened.”
Mamet runs into the herd instinct every day.
“I’ve given galleys of The Secret Knowledge to some friends. They say, ‘I’m scared to read it.’ I say, ‘Why should you be afraid to read something?’
“What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of losing their ability to stay in the herd. That’s what I found in myself. It can be wrenching when you start to think away from the herd.” ...
After lunch we walked back to his office, and on the way he told me of new projects. I wondered how Mamet’s about-to-be-exposed rightwingery will affect his work—and, among critics and colleagues, the reaction to his work. Show business, like all of popular culture these days, is ostentatiously politicized. Actors, directors, producers, and the writers who write about them—all behave as though they received a packet of approved political views with their guild card. They’ll be alert for signs of ideological deviationism in Mamet’s stuff from now on. They may not have to look too far.
Mamet mentioned a screenplay that he hopes will soon be produced involving a young rich girl who applies to Harvard. When she’s rejected she suddenly declares herself an Aztec to qualify for affirmative action. Presumably high jinks ensue. A new two-character play opening in London this fall, The Anarchist, is a “verbal sword-fight” between two women of a certain age, one a veteran of 1960s radicalism, jailed for life on a bombing charge, and the other a reactionary prison governor from whom the aging radical hopes to receive parole. Regardless of the play’s true merits, we can expect the word didactic to get a workout from critics.
After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.
Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor from Flushing, Queens, who late in life developed an interest in street photography. He would travel to Manhattan early in the morning on weekends with a Rolleiflex camera to record images of the Bowery, Chinatown, Hell’s Kitchen or Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and the Cloisters.
45 years after his death, his collection of negatives was discovered in an old cardboard box, resulting in an exhibition earlier this year at the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles.
William McGurn, in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, observed that catching up with bin Laden failed to bring out the best in the president and inevitably caused him a major political problem by bringing up the issue of his past statements and policies on interrogation.
Sunday night.. Mr. Obama rushed a national address on the bin Laden killing. Notwithstanding his later comment to “60 Minutes” that Americans do not “spike the football,” the president appears incapable of doing what would serve him best here: Letting the action speak for itself, and heaping praise on his predecessors (Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush) for their contributions. Instead we got the implication that no one was trying to get bin Laden until Barack Obama arrived in town.
At the same time, all the president’s men were put in the position of denying something the Navy SEALs had made obvious: They owed much of their success to information resulting from policies authorized by President Bush but opposed by Mr. Obama. Thus Leon Panetta found himself bobbing and weaving when NBC’s Brian Williams kept asking the CIA chief whether waterboarding had anything to do with finding bin Laden. When you’ve lost Brian Williams, you’re really lost.
In the end, Mr. Panetta allowed that intelligence often comes from “a lot” of sources. In the past, Mr. Obama and his team could get away with this kind of non-answer, mostly because the connections between Mr. Bush’s policies and his success in keeping us safe from another attack were highly abstract. The bin Laden raid, however, has now thrown them all into sharp relief.
During the 2008 campaign, for example, Mr. Obama asserted it was “the fact” that Mr. Bush “championed a strategy that distracted us from capturing bin Laden, that focused on Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11.” Now, however, we learn that we discovered the courier’s close tie to bin Laden through a top al Qaeda operative, Hassan Ghul, captured in 2004 . . . in Iraq.
During the campaign, we learned that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogations were “torture” plain and simple—”something that undermines our long-term security.” Now we learn that these interrogations in fact gave us operable clues about the courier’s identity.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama told a crowd at an Iowa rally that he was “frustrated with warrantless wiretaps and the undermining of our civil liberties”—and he voted against allowing the National Security Agency to listen in on foreign terrorists calling the U.S. (before flip-flopping on the issue six months later). Now we learn that intercepts of overseas phone calls helped give us the courier’s real name.
So obvious are these connections that Mr. Obama’s smallness in not admitting them is now working against him. For it invites the question that both Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum effectively raised in last week’s debate among would-be GOP contenders: Would we ever have gotten bin Laden if then-Sen. Obama’s policies had been put into effect instead of Mr. Bush’s?
Walter Russell Mead, writing in the American Interest, though a classic representative of the liberal elite, is increasingly uneasy about his own class’s characterstic contempt for their fellow citizens, attitudes of self-entitlement, anti-patriotism, and aversion of self-doubt.
To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public. American elites are genuinely and sincerely convinced that the American masses don’t understand the world, don’t realize that American exceptionalism is a mental disease, want infinite government benefits while paying zero tax, and cling to their Bibles and their guns despite all the peer reviewed social science literature that demonstrates the danger and the worthlessness of both. ...
But by historical standards, the average American is actually ahead of his or her ancestors. Today’s average Americans are smarter, more sophisticated, better educated, less racist and more tolerant than ever before. Immigrants face less prejudice in the United States than ever before in our history. Religious, ethnic and sexual minorities are more free to live their own lives more openly with less fear than ever before. There is more respect for science and learning, more openness to the arts and more interest in the viewpoints of other countries and cultures among Americans at large than in any past generation.
The American people aren’t perfect yet and never will be — but by the standards that matter to the Establishment, this is the best prepared, most open minded and most socially liberal generation in history. ...
By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.
Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. ...
Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically inept and morally confused parody of itself. Probably the best depiction of our elite in popular culture is the petulantly narcissistic Prince Charming in Shrek 2; our educational institutions are like the Fairy Godmother, weaving shoddy, cheap, feel-good illusions into a gossamer tissue of flattering lies. ...
Some of the problem is intellectual. For almost a century now, American intellectual culture has been dominated by the values and legacy of the progressive movement. Science and technology would guide impartial experts and civil servants to create a better and better society. For most of the American elite today, progress means ‘progressive’; the way to make the world better is through more nanny state government programs administered by more, and more highly qualified, lifetime civil servants. Anybody who doubts this is a reactionary and an ignoramus. This isn’t just a rational conviction with much of our elite; it is a bone deep instinct. Unfortunately, the progressive tradition no longer has the answers we need, but our leadership class by and large cannot think in any other terms.
The old ideas don’t work anymore, but the elite hates the thought of change.
Past generations of the American elite were always a little bit nervous about their situation; it is morally difficult for an elite based on birth, ethnicity or wealth to justify itself in a country with the universalist, democratic values of the United States. The tendency of American life is always to erode the power and prestige of elites; populism is the direction in which America likes to travel. Past generations of elites were conflicted about their status and struggled against a sense that it was somehow un-American to set yourself up as better than other people.
The increasingly meritocratic elite of today has no such qualms. The average Harvard Business School and Yale Law School graduate today feels that privilege has been earned. Didn’t he or she score higher on the LSATs than anyone else? Didn’t he or she previously pass the rigorous scrutiny of the undergraduate admissions process in a free and fair process to get into a top college? Haven’t they been certified as the best of the best by impartial experts?
A guilty elite may be healthier for society than a self-righteous one.
Ron Paul says he would not have authorized the mission that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, and that President Barack Obama should have worked with the Pakistani government instead of authorizing a raid. ...
Asked by WHO Radio’s Simon Conway whether he would have given the go-ahead to kill bin Laden if it meant entering another country, Paul shot back that it “absolutely was not necessary.”
“I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary,” Paul said during his Tuesday comments. “I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters into London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”
The name for all this is Rothbardism.
The influential libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard responded to the siren-song of the late 1960s Counter-Culture and the associated Anti-War Movement by trying to form a common anarchist front with the New Left. Rothbardian libertarianism essentially combined fashionable pot-smoking antinomian social libertarianism with old-style anti-New Deal isolationist opposition to foreign intervention.
The Libertarian Party of today is Rothbardian and so is Ron Paul. That kind of libertarian always seems to me to talk as if he resides in Northern California. Those libertarians’ priorities usually start with opposition to US foreign policy and fellow-travelling with the radical left in applying hypertrophied standards of moralism to actions and operations of the United States and her allies and no standards of any kind to the crimes and outrages perpetrated by foreign enemies of America and the West.
Rothbardian libertarians are commonly readily surrendering “realists” on domestic socialism and coercive leftwing egalitarianism, but they tend to be hyper-idealist pacifists and enthusiastic supporters of the left’s latest definition of “International Law.”
Ron Paul has obviously been associated with the Libertarian Party for years, and we are now seeing demonstrated how preposterously Rothbardite his foreign policy views actually are. His positions are obviously incompatible with the responsibilities of the presidency. Most of us care a lot more about seeing the country defended against Islamic terrorism, and even having 9/11 avenged, than we do about legalizing drugs. So I feel reluctantly obliged to confess that Ron Paul must be considered to fail Glenn Reynolds’s “syphilitic camel” test. A rational person couldn’t vote for him, even to get rid of Barack Obama.
The left has been moaning and groaning recently a great deal about how terrible it is that the billionaire Koch brothers financially support a number of conservative and libertarian think tanks and provide funding for conservative forums and seminars.
You don’t hear them complain, on the other hand, about George Soros’s personal network of political advocacy organizations or his extensive ties to prominent members of the establishment media.
When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.
Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code stating: “avoid all conflicts real or perceived.”
This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Centers Business & Media Institute which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.
, published during the First World War by the British social psychologist Wilfred Trotter, inventor of the term “herd instinct.”
