I just came upon this quotation by Robert Heinlein:
If in an argument with your wife you discover that you are in the right, apologize immediately.I think Heinlein is on to something. But the problem is, one would have to be a saint to practice his advice.
We could title this story, “The hate whose name no respectable white person dares speak.”
James P. writes:
Follow up story—no hate-crime charges for black teens. Probably a complete coincidence that the Philadelphia DA is black.Here’s the article:
Teens Held in Attack on Cabbie and Passenger Won’t Face Hate-Crime Charges
By Allison Steele Inquirer Staff WriterThe teenagers arrested after an attack on a cabdriver and his 21-year-old passenger in Center City last weekend, during which racial epithets were shouted [LA replies: Ahh, the passive voice, where would modern civilization be without it?], will not be charged with committing hate crimes, the District Attorney’s Office said Thursday.
“We have to be able to prove that race was the motivator for the crime,” said Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney’s Office. “Just because epithets were said during the crime doesn’t mean it was the reason for the crime.” [JP: Needless to say that would not be the standard if a gang of whites screaming racist slurs beat up a black person.]
The three teenagers charged in the assault, who are black, allegedly spewed racial slurs as they reached through the window and punched passenger Brian Goldman, who is white. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:27 PM
On the evening after her famous escape last week, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard held a reception for foreign diplomats. The UK Telegraph ran this photograph:
PM Julia Gillard is joined by partner Tim Mathieson
to welcome Swedish Ambassador HE Anders
MORE…
The lower half of a certain racial group may not contribute much to American civilization, but they sure are creative with their names. The Seattle Times reports:
Man, who was kicked by a cop in Seattle, guilty in gun caseThe 18-year-old man who was seen on video being kicked by a Seattle police officer after an alleged robbery in 2010 was found guilty Thursday of unlawful possession of a firearm in an unrelated case.
D’Vontaveous Hoston faces 15 to 27 months in prison when he is sentenced on March 2.
The conviction stems from an incident July 22 when King County sheriff’s deputies saw a group of nearly a dozen males gathered near Third Avenue and Pike Street in Seattle. Deputies noted that two males were fighting in the center of the group, according to charging documents.
The fight quickly broke up, but witnesses told deputies that one of the participants appeared to have a gun.
Deputies said they found Hoston nearby and he matched the description provided by witnesses. Deputies found a loaded pistol in Hoston’s waistband, charging documents said.
According to the charges, Hoston told officers he carried a gun to protect himself from police.…
The site has been inactive all day because I have been without an Internet connection—no e-mail, no browsing, no nothing. The internet service provider is unable to fix it so far. It will not be fixed until tomorrow, or even Monday.
Paul Weston, the anti-Islamization writer and head of the British Freedom Party, will be in Manhattan giving a talk about the party and its aims on Thursday evening, February 16. If you are interested in attending, and don’t have my address, write to me here and I will reply with information on the time and place.
When I began reading the below article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, I hadn’t noticed the small captionless photo of a man at the top of the article and was not sure if the race of the suspect was known. Then, as the article unfolded, telling me, bit by intensifying bit, in a kind of liberal self-parody, more and more about the obviously dangerous nature of the man whom the good-hearted hippie-like divorced 44-year-old mother-of-two Sarajane Hakopian had welcomed into her life, I figured he sounded like a black man, except that his name, Brian Mallory, didn’t sound at all black. So, believe it or not, I wasn’t sure that he was black, even though the reader who had sent me the article had said he was black (it’s easy to be wrong about these things, and I try, most of the time, not to jump prematurely to conclusions).
The first remarkable thing about the piece is the title:
Was caring nature a factor in Sarajane Hakopian’s death?Of course that is a theme I am forever sounding, about Eloi women who give their caring, loving, incorrigibly naive and needy selves to rough and uncaring men of different race, usually black, sometimes Hispanic or Muslim, who then kill them. I describe such relationships and such murders as both the ultimate concrete result and the ultimate symbol of liberalism. But I don’t remember a mainstream news story about such a murder ever sounding that un-PC note of realism before.
The article starts out in idyllic tones about how Sarajane Hakopian was the “kindest soul” in Montpelier, Virginia, “the heart of what Montpelier is all about,” as one friend called her. “You always saw her with her tea, inseparable. She was a friend to everyone she met.”
Then the article says that Hakopian was found dead Monday afternoon, and that Brian Mallory is the suspect.
Then we learn that Mallory is a convicted felon, who started mowing Hakopian’s lawn and became her lover, partner, hook-up, or whatever word we’re supposed to use.
Then we learn that Hakopian had two children living with her from an ended marriage. (How many murdered white women have left their husbands, cutting themselves off from a responsible, protective male presence in their life, and are living with men not their husbands?)
Then we learn that there also lived at the house “a parade of young people whose families wanted their offspring to share in Hakopian’s nurturing but strict ways.”
Then we learn that Mallory was convicted of a “brutal armed robbery” 20 years ago, and that he is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 325 pounds.
Then we learn that notwithstanding the warnings from friends about being involved with such a man, Hakopian “saw no boundaries associated with color, religion, political beliefs or social standing”—the only reference to race in the article. I should add that warnings from friends are almost unheard of in these stories of white women killed by their black boyfriends. In almost every such article I’ve seen, everyone around the woman, including her useless brain-dead Eloi parents if they are in the picture, seems completely approving and accepting of the relationship, and no one takes her aside and tells her that she might be putting herself at risk—because, of course, that would be discriminatory and racist, and, perhaps an even more compelling reason for remaining silent, to warn your friend or sister or daughter away from a relationship with a black criminal thug and thus harm the erotic diversity of our society would be a greater tragedy than preventing her murder. In any case, when I read that line about how Sarajane saw no boundaries associated with color I finally concluded, slow reader that I am, that Mallory had to be black.
Then the article said that in February 1991 Mallory “was sentenced to 90 years in prison for robbery, kidnapping and firearms convictions with 56 years suspended.”
It was only then that I noticed the tiny uncaptioned photo of a black man at the top of the article and realized this was Mallory. Here is a larger version of the same photo, along with one of Hakopian:
Sarajane Hakopian and Brian Mallory
Paul Weston, the anti-Islamization writer and head of the British Freedom Party, will be in Manhattan giving a talk about the party and its aims on Thursday evening, February 16. If you are interested in attending, and if you don’t have my address, write to me here and I will reply with information on the time and place.
In March 2006 a European reader (Mr. Particular Swede, later Conservative Swede) dissented from my strong critique of the European secular anti-Islamization manifesto and its promotion of “secular values.” He felt that I was delineating a war between Christianity and secular values, whereas, he said, many secular values are in keeping with Christianity and indeed strengthen Christianity. In response I argued that the general idea of the “secular” or of a secular sphere on one side and the activist promotion of “secular values” on the other have distinct meanings:
When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” he was providing for the authority of a secular sphere as distinct from the authority of the religious sphere. And this was one of the most important things he ever said.However, this secular sphere does not exclude God. It merely operates independently of direct religious authority.
But when modern people promote “secular values” per se, they are specifically promoting things in the light of their not being religious and of having nothing to do with God or any transcendent reality.
To illustrate the difference between doing secular things and promoting secular values as secular values, when the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 drafted the U.S. Constitution, they were creating an instrument of secular government. But they didn’t say, “We’re promoting secular values.” They said, “We’re creating an instrument of government.”
When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, he didn’t say, “I’m promoting secular values,” he said, “I’m inventing dynamite.”
To do a secular thing, like creating an instrument of government or inventing dynamite, does not exclude God. But to promote the spread of secular values as secular values is to attempt to create a world order that excludes God and any transcendent truth. Which of course is what the entire modernist and post-modernist project is about.
Why would the manifesto signers promote “secular values for all,” unless they specifically were seeking to exclude God and religion as such? To advance their ostensible purpose, the protection of liberty from Islamic tyranny, all they had to say was that they were in favor of individual freedom, tolerance, rule of law, etc. By pushing the notion of “secular values” into the center of their statement they make it clear that they are asking for more than individual freedom, tolerance, rule of law etc. They are seeking the creation of a social order that excludes God.
The postmodern novelist Paul Auster (my cousin) is in the news:
Turkey’s PM takes aim at writer Paul Auster over Israel
ISTANBUL | Wed Feb 1, 2012 10:57am EST(Reuters)—Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan branded acclaimed novelist Paul Auster as ignorant on Tuesday for refusing to visit Turkey in protest at the jailing of journalists, accusing the Jewish American writer of double-standards for visiting Israel.
Though a foreign novelist made an easy target, there is rising unease over press freedom under Erdogan among Turkish liberals, many of whom had supported his mission to strengthen democracy and tame Turkey’s coup-making generals. [LA replies: How’s that for an Orwellian statement from Reuters—”his mission to strengthen democracy and tame Turkey’s coup-making generals”? Of course the Turkish military has been since the time of Kemal Ataturk the principal guarantor of the non-Islamic regime that Ataturk founded, along with its freedoms—namely its freedoms from Islamic law. Further, Erdogan’s increasing suppression of the military has meant the effective end of the Kemalist regime and the return of Islamic rule. But lying, leftist Reuters tells its readers that Erdogan, by taming the generals, was seeking to strengthen democracy—the exact opposite of the truth.]
Some 100 members of the news media are in jail in Turkey, one of the highest numbers worldwide. The government insists they are not being prosecuted because of what they wrote.
“If you come so what? If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?,” Erdogan said in a mocking voice to applause from provincial leaders of his ruling AK Party at a meeting in the capital Ankara. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:24 PM
Roy Beck of NumbersUSA sends out this e-mail:
NEWS FLASH—Offered a stark choice on the illegal immigration issue, Florida Latino Republicans today broke nearly 2-1 for the candidate with the firmest opposition to amnesty and the strongest support for enforcement.Mitt Romney’s margin of victory among Latinos was nearly double his margin of victory among Whites.
For those of you who supported other candidates, you have to at least feel some real satisfaction that on the issue of immigration, Mitt Romney the winner was painted as by-far the strongest opponent of amnesty. You may have preferred another candidate—including the President—for other reasons, but most Florida voters went to the polls with the idea that Romney was indeed the toughest on immigration. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:13 PM
Ok, Romney is a huge winner in Florida. Ok, Romney showed himself tough and ruthless against Gingrich—showed that he has the stuff to bring the fight to Obama in the general. And yes, Romney is better on illegal immigration than Gingrich. Does any of this mean that the GOP’s Romney dilemma has been resolved? Not at all. Obamacare remains the biggest issue in this election, and, as Andrew McCarthy argued at NRO earlier in the month, Romney is simply not situated to campaign forcefully and believably against it, because, though he has shamelessly flip-flopped on every other issue in his political career, he stalwartly defends his own version of Obamacare in Massachusetts.
McCarthy writes:
Of course he now says he’d fight to repeal Obamacare, but is Romney really the best candidate to be making that fight? How convincing will he be in decrying wealth redistribution, runaway government spending, and freedom-killing government mandates while he continues championing an overbearing state program that stands as a monument to all those things?
A reader attacks Romney very harshly over his support for legal immigration, and I reply that the problem is not Romney, the problem is all of us, the problem is America.
The stimulating discussion of “social justice,” started yesterday, is still going strong.
See Jake F.’s shrewd point about how a Philadelphia newspaper, while reporting a black-on-white assault, did it in such a way as first to trigger the stereotype of “racist whites” in the readers’ minds.
Michelle Malkin has an exceptionally forceful column posted Monday in which she supports Rick Santorum for the GOP nomination, dismisses Romney, and eviscerates Gingrich. She admits Santorum’s defects (e.g. his record in the Senate as a “big government Republican”), but argues that overall he is a man of principle who has repeatedly and consistently opposed leftist initiatives when both the R man and the G man were embracing them.
Here are the first few paragraphs:
Rick Santorum opposed TARP.He didn’t cave when Chicken Littles in Washington invoked a manufactured crisis in 2008. He didn’t follow the pro-bailout GOP crowd—including Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—and he didn’t have to obfuscate or rationalize his position then or now, like Rick Perry and Herman Cain did. He also opposed the auto bailout, Freddie and Fannie bailout, and porkulus bills.
Santorum opposed individual health care mandates—clearly and forcefully -as far back as his 1994 U.S. Senate run. He has launched the most cogent, forceful fusillade against both Romney and Gingrich for their muddied, pro-individual health care mandate waters.
He voted against cap and trade in 2003, voted yes to drilling in ANWR, and unlike Romney and Gingrich, Santorum has never dabbled with eco-radicals like John Holdren, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. He hasn’t written any “Contracts with the Earth.”
Santorum is strong on border security, national security, and defense. Mitt the Flip-Flopper and Open Borders-Pandering Newt have been far less trustworthy on immigration enforcement. [LA replies: be sure to check out Santorum’s statements on immigration matters that Malkin links to. He has been stronger and more articulate on the issue than I had given him credit for.]
Santorum is an eloquent spokesperson for the culture of life. He has been savaged and ridiculed by leftist elites for upholding traditional family values -not just in word, but in deed. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:51 AM
Here’s a powerful (and very long) anti-Romney piece, by John Hawkins at TownHall. Two excerpts:
Mitt Romney is a repeat of the same show conservatives have seen over and over again and we all know the ending if the candidate gets elected. These plastic men, these political Stretch Armstrongs get inside the Beltway Bubble, the media starts working on them, the establishment starts whispering in their ear and next thing you know, they’re explaining how important comprehensive immigration reform is to the conservative cause or why we need another Bridge to Nowhere.When you’re a grassroots conservative who has been mocked, ridiculed and attacked for believing in conservatism, capitalism, and the Constitution, sold out again and again by people in your own party, and told your nation is on the verge of a debt-driven crisis that could bankrupt us, the last thing you want is to be treated like you’re stupid by a phony Massachusetts moderate who tells you he believes the same things you do when you damn well know he doesn’t mean a word of it.
Never have so many self-interested, politically-gutless establishment space fillers gathered in one place as on the endorsement list for Mitt Romney. If Bob Dole, John McCain, Susan Molinari, Lisa Murkowski, Jim Talent, Joe Scarborough, Mel Martinez, Jim Gerlach, Judd Gregg, Jon Huntsman, John Sununu and Norm Coleman are all lining up behind a candidate in a contested GOP primary, it’s an almost ironclad guarantee that candidate is not going to be worth a bucket of warm spit once he gets into office. If you want to know why you’re seeing so many Tea Partiers lining up behind Newt Gingrich, who despite his flaws has done more for the conservative cause than any other living politician, it’s because they see the politicians backing Mitt Romney and they’re well aware that they’re not friends of grassroots conservatives.
The several items I’ve just posted on the GOP contest are overwhelmingly against Gingrich. That was not my intention, as I’ve been trying to maintain a reasonable balance between the different views. It just happened that the e-mails that came in over the last day, and the articles I came across online, have been overwhelmingly anti-Newt.
Jim writes:
Re your discussion, “The ‘conservative’ versus the liar,” I’d rather have the liar than the “conservative.”Romney is an ambitious man of the establishment of basically conservative mien, but no great conservative passion. This is less than optimal, but not completely unacceptable. Romney was comfortable with American society as it existed in say 1960, and lives his personal life in accord with that. He is not “hostile” to it. And as a technocrat, he is actually educable. We’ve seen that already on the idea of “self-deportation.” Someone has explained it to him in the course of the campaign, and he is intelligent enough, and understands supply and demand well enough, to understand it and has now embraced it (while Gingrich mocks it as impossible). Romney will not charge forward as I’d like, but if the issues arise, conservatives make their case, the Republicans in Congress are willing to move, he can be a positive force. For instance, it’s possible to see Romney actually coming to an understanding of what mass low-skill immigration is doing to the labor market for working class men, and how that affects their ability to be bread winners and have the sort of family life Mormons approve of and Romney signing onto serious immigration enforcement and restriction. It’s at least possible, because Romney is educable.
Gingrich is not educable, especially on any of the important issues related to the “National Question.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:41 AM
Sophia A. writes (January 29):
There are a lot of reasons to dislike both Gingrich and Romney, but the fact that Newt’s major patron is the odious Sheldon Adelson is one of them. The major media have gone on the scent, just recently, with an article in Time magazine and today a front page expose in the NY Times. This knowledge appears to have erupted suddenly. I predict outrage will follow. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:38 AM
I’m not an admirer of former Bush official and hopeful future anybody official Peter Wehner at Commentary, but his short article, “The Real Reasons Conservatives Oppose Gingrich,” in which he refutes the idea that the “Establishment” opposes Gingrich because it “fears genuine change,” seems correct. The fact is, they have many valid reasons for opposing him that have nothing to do with “fearing genuine change..
May one be allowed to observe that the Washington Post neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin does not have much sense of fairness? She writes:
When you are losing a critical state by double digits, your negative ratings are sky high and both the media and your opponents are shredding you on both character and policy grounds, you might get testy. And if you are Newt Gingrich, whose never been known to take criticism gracefully, you might appear unhinged and frantic. Gingrich’s rant that his poor showing in Florida is all the doing of the “establishment” has become comical. It’s the equivalent of the Howard Dean “scream”—a perfect metaphor for an angry and unsettled candidate who knows he’s losing it.In reality, of course, the Republican establishment has been ganging up on Gingrich and trying to destroy him, in an all-out political assault the likes of which we have not seen before in GOP presidential politics. They may have good reasons for doing so; that’s not the point. The point is that Rubin savages Gingrich, not just politically, but as a person, portraying him as psychologically flawed and “losing it,” i.e., losing his mind and his self-control, merely for his pointing to the fact of this assault and saying that it is damaging him.
Alexis Zarkov writes:
I think Mr. Auster’s description of Gingrich as “erratic” and “unstable” is accurate. I recognize the type—he’s a “idea man,” who has little interest in execution. The famous physicist Edward Teller had just such a personality. While a brilliant physicist in his early career, he did not like to follow through and rarely finished anything he started. While working on at the Manhattan Project, he usually failed to complete his assignments, and would drift off to dream about “The Super” (an early, but unworkable, idea for a fusion weapon). In his later career, he was a fount of new ideas, some of them very good, but he left the details to other people. People of this personality type should never hold an executive position because they are too unstable, and lack focus. Gingrich as president would produce a chaotic administration.On the other hand, Romney strikes me as the opposite of a Gingrich. He’s able to prioritize tasks, and focus on what needs to be done. That’s one reason he has been successful in business. Unfortunately this personality type can make for an uninspiring leader. We don’t have good choices for 2112: Obama, Gingrich, and Romney. Unless a brokered Republican convention delivers someone else, we have to go for Romney as the least bad choice.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
— John Milton, Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, 1644
From the Philadelphia Daily News comes the story of three teenagers attacking a passenger in a taxi cab and then the driver, apparently for no reason other than race. While the paper, in a rare gesture, informs us that the assailants were black and the victims white, it doesn’t provide this information until almost the end of the article, even though the very first sentence of the story states that the attackers used racial slurs on the victims. As a result, over the course of six paragraphs and 217 words, the reader knows that it was a racial attack, but he has not been told which race was attacking which. Since the Daily News was so reluctant to be forthcoming on that point, why did it mention race at all? Because, as just mentioned, the attackers themselves used racial slurs—which generally is not the case with the endless series of black-on-white assaults in this country (do you think that black thugs are not hip to hate-crime laws?). Therefore this mainstream media organ, even under the pro-black, anti-white rules of liberal journalism, had no choice but to specify the race of the assailants and the victims, which the mainstream media ordinarily do not do; but, reflecting its pro-black imperative, it didn’t do so until two thirds of the way through the article.
Thugs attack cabbie, passengerIN A HORRIFIC assault in Center City on Saturday night, three teenagers who were spouting racial slurs pulled a man out of a cab to beat him. And when the cabdriver intervened to stop the assault, the teens turned their rage on him, police said yesterday.
About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.
The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:28 PM
Why do people on the left demand “social justice,” and not simply “justice”?
Because the things they want are not just. Therefore they add the word “social” onto “justice,” creating a new concept that bears no relationship to justice, but employs the word “justice” and elicits—from the leftists and their various clients and dupes—the same emotional and moral response as the word “justice.”
Justice, while often difficult to apply in particular situations, at its core has a simple meaning: what is due. It means that people receive what is due to them. Since leftists demand, not justice, but “social justice,” this tells us that the things that are demanded on behalf of the various leftist clients, minorities, and victim groups are not due to them. The left is thus forever calling for and requiring things that are not just. The proof of this is seen in the fact that if these desired things were just, the left would simply ask for justice. But it doesn’t ask for justice, it asks for social justice, proving that its aims are not just.
MORE…
Here is another illustration of why I now believe that America will not turn around before it’s too late.
Several weeks ago an acquaintance told me how the subject of Islam had come up among some colleagues of hers. In the course of the conversation, these people—intelligent conservatives working in a conservative organization—said that Islam is one of the Abrahamic faiths and therefore compatible with our society, that Islam is a tolerant religion, that Islam was an advanced civilization when Europe was backward—all the pro-Islam clichés.
When I heard this, my heart sank. If, after ten years of incessant debate and discussion in conservative publications about Islam, intelligent conservatives have no idea what Islam is but mindlessly repeat the slogans about how it’s a tolerant and culturally advanced religion, if they know nothing more about the subject than what they’ve heard from the Islam apologists, what does that say about our ability as a society to grasp the nature of the Islamization threat and defend ourselves from it?
In this connection, consider Robert Spencer. This industrious man has been incessantly publishing books, blogging, and speaking on the subject of Islam for many years. He is deeply informed on Islam and authoritatively devastating on the side of Islam that of most interest to us, the treatment Islamic law requires of non-Muslims. As an author of books, he is genial, witty, a good writer, and not any kind of fanatic. We are fortunate to have him. (I say nothing here about Spencer’s negative side, which is not relevant to the discussion.) Also, he is not obscure, but is reasonably well known, certainly in conservative circles. Yet the academics and conservatives of whom I speak—again, very intelligent people—seem never to have heard of him, never to have read him or other Islam critics or taken in anything they have to say.
If Spencer’s labors—combined with every day’s news stories which mightily back up his analysis of Islam, not to mention 1,390 years of well-documented Islamic history—have achieved so little, if so many people are not even aware of the deadly and threatening nature of Islam but look on the religion approvingly and welcomingly, or at least complacently, what then will wake them up, other than actually coming under Islam’s power and seeing the truth for themselves? And then it will be too late.
MORE…
And, is it true that Puerto Rico is more white than the mainland U.S.?
I’ve done some polishing and revising on the entry, “Diversity and the reign of fear,” which was posted Sunday morning. It might be worth a second read.
JC in Houston writes (January 27):
Glenn (“Blacks won the American Revolution”) Beck was in rare form this morning. He is unfortunately on the Sirius Patriot Channel while I’m driving to work. It started off with some black activist talking about how MLK was for socialist redistribution and Beck then defending his hero MLK and saying how he wanted just a colorblind society. Beck then went on to criticize the new Lucas film Redtails, another telling of the Tuskeegee airmen of WWII. Beck’s criticism was that the movie had bad acting that didn’t do justice to “one of the most heroic episodes in American history.” And of course Beck blamed this whole idea of “segregation” on “Progressives” and especially Woodrow Wilson.MORE…
Alan M. writes:
VFR is an intellectual accelerator, doing for readers’ reasoning power what the CERN particle accelerator does with sub-atomic particles. The goal is shattering the hard carapace of liberalism—first in ourselves and then in the society around us. The initial blows of logic and reason are shocking only because they collide with the calcifications of untruths we have built as a shell for ourselves. Ultimately, what at first seemed painful is recognized as nourishing as we toss aside the shattered illusions and face reality head on with faith, hope, and, yes, love.
Spencer Warren writes:
What you wrote last week about Romney being a slanderer is fair. But in my view the much more important point is that Gingrich’s colleagues, who owed their newly won power to him, in just a few years forced him out as Speaker because of his terrible flaws as a leader. This alone should disqualify him as a reputable candidate. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:08 PM
Alexis Zarkov writes:
Most of Coulter’s essay tries to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by trying to convince the reader that Romney is really a conservative. The very Romney who said,
I believe the world is getting warmer and I believe humans have contributed to that. It’s important for us for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.… I love solar and (wind) power, but they don’t drive cars. And we’re not all going to drive Chevy Volts.Amazingly, Coulter tells us that Romney wants to staple green cards to graduating foreign students. Does she think this is a conservative, pro-American position? Graduates in science and engineering have faced stagnant salaries for a very long time—there is no shortage, but Romney ignores that in his zeal to hold down American salaries.Coulter would also have us believe that Romney is not the Republican establishment candidate. As pointed out in View from the Right only yesterday, Romney’s top donor is Paul Singer. That Paul Singer who was a major contributor to the Bush campaign. How much more Republican establishment can one get? Of course none of this makes a case for Gingrich. With Romney and Gingrich conservatives are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:33 AM
Max P. writes:
In case you do not know, New Nation News is a website where various local news stories from around the nation are linked. It is similar to Drudge in that there is no original content, just links to mainstream news sites. However, this site focuses exclusively on black-on-white and other minority related crime.WARNING, February 1:Since you frequently provide stories on this subject, I believe newnation.org would assist in your selections.
Michael P. writes:
When I visit the New Nation News site that you linked, my antivirus software (eset nod32) gives me the following alert:
http://newnation.org/Scripts/AC_ActiveX.js HTML/ScrInject.B.Gen virus connection terminated—quarantinedMight be a false positive, but I’d be cautious about sending readers there.
Her usual snark in suspension, Ann Coulter makes an extended argument that Romney is
the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration. (Santorum voted in the Senate against even the voluntary use of E-Verify by employers, which means he doesn’t want to do anything about illegal immigration at all.)Romney is “moderate” only in demeanor - which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich’s, but he doesn’t scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.
Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.
Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.
Mark Levin, like me, is appalled by Romney’s all-out slanders of Gingrich, slanders multiplied by Romney’s campaign millions. He writes that Romney will have so divided the GOP with his anything-goes attacks on Gingrich that he will be unable to unite the GOP if he is nominated. Levin has all but given up on a Republican presidential victory and says that the main effort must be to increase the number of Republican seats in the Congress.
Roger G. writes:
“Levin has all but given up on a Republican presidential victory and says that the main effort must be to increase the number of Republican seats in the Congress.”LA replies:Good grief good grief good grief. This was the very point on which he mocked and ridiculed me when I called in after McCain secured the nomination.
Here is the incident, as Roger described it at VFR in December 2008:
Back in the spring, after McCain had secured the nomination, I called in [to Levin’s program] and stated that I thought conservatives should treat both nominees as opponents, and concentrate our efforts on the federal, state, and local races. To my shock, he was vicious and abusive in his response.… Among his insults, he asked if I thought I was Karl Rove; I wish I had thought to ask if it was unacceptable to raise a political issue on a political show, but I am not a fast thinker. And it had never occurred to me that he would act this way toward a caller who was polite, and was trying to present what—to me—still seems to have been a legitimate topic for discussion.MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:13 PM
I just came upon this devastating audio at the site Race 4 2012:
So now we know that Gingrich is strongly for amnesty in a yet to be determined but still wide open form, and is strongly for the idea that all individuals in America must purchase health insurance. How could anyone believe, after listening to this, that he will exert any serious effort to get Obamacare repealed? And how are Gingrich’s supporters going to reply to this? Will they say that the pro-individual mandate, pro-amnesty Newt Gingich is still their choice, because he’s more, uh, conservative than Mitt Romney?
I’ve said all along that Gingrich lacks a stable self, and that the more incendiary and/or conservative his words sound, the less meaning and reality they have. This would seem to apply to everything he has said in the campaign about his commitment to repeal Obamacare.
Alexis Zarkov writes:
Listen carefully to the Gingrich audio, which sounds edited. If I understand him correctly, then his “must carry” includes the opportunity to opt out by posting a bond. If the bond would pay interest equal to its opportunity cost (around 4 percent per year) then there is no forced purchase. The bond would need to equal the average cost of an emergency room visit, which I’ll guess is less than $2,000. This would make Gingrich’s “must carry” fundamentally different from the mandate, which forces every resident to buy insurance from a private company with no opportunity to opt out. Most people could then avoid government mandated insurance, and stick with what they have now. Of course Obamacare is much more than the mandate, and it includes all sorts of new control over the medical insurance industry such as the coverage of preexisting conditions.LA replies:
Fair enough. However, I’ve read elsewhere (was it Coulter’s article linked above?) that Gingrich favored the principle of Obamacare until last May.Yes, here it is. Coulter writes:
But Gingrich did more than support Romneycare. As former senator Rick Santorum has pointed out, Gingrich supported a FEDERAL individual mandate to purchase health insurance from 1993 until five minutes ago—i.e., at least until a “Meet the Press” appearance just last May. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:36 PM
Chris B. writes:
After viewing the embarrassment that overtook the Prime Minister of Australia this past week [here, here, and here], I was watching a clip from the presidential debates earlier on, and I believe I have solved your puzzlement as regards the reason for Michele Bachmann’s loss in the primaries. In the debates one would view the entire panel of candidates, look at the tall, broad shouldered men (not all handsome of course), and listen to their voices. But every time the cameras panned over to Michele it exposed her diminutive shoulders and tiny stature. Moreover, there was that soprano voice. Although more measured than that of a twelve year old boy, it carried about the same authority. In short, she lost because she was unable to man up. I believe it was Hillary Clinton’s inability to man up that resulted in her 2008 loss as well.
January 30
Irv P. writes:
Chris B.’s comment is like chum in the water for a hungry bluefish (me), but I’m not biting. She didn’t “man up.” LAME! MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:30 PM
The shooter is described as a “black male.” The victim is described as a male, no race. This makes it about an 85 percent likelihood that the victim was white. The fact that the perpetrator shot the victim after he gave him his money makes it even more likely that the victim was white.
From wric.com:
Richmond Police detectives need the public’s help to find and identify a man who shot a United States Marine during a robbery last night in Church Hill.At approximately 8 p.m. Friday, the victim was walking with his girlfriend in the 600 block of North 33rd Street when they were approached by an unknown male who displayed a gun and demanded money. After the victims complied, the male shot the victim and ran away. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:11 PM
The young savage’s mother, Shaquita Louis, wants him released under the recognizance of his aunt (just as the mother of one of the homicidal shopping cart hurlers in East Harlem who almost killed Marion Hedges and caused her permanent brain injury wanted him released). But let’s have some understanding for the family’s situation. The 11-year-old’s sister (more likely his half-sister), Yashanee Vaughn, was murdered last year by her 14-year-old boyfriend, Parrish Bennette.
KGW in Portland, Oregon has the story:
PORTLAND — An 11-year-old boy was arrested in downtown Portland Thursday night after he brandished a handgun in his waistband during an argument with a passenger on a MAX train.The Oregonian reported he was ordered held in custody in juvenile court Friday.
Transit police were dispatched about 8:20 p.m. to the Old Town/Chinatown MAX stop on a report of someone with a gun on the train, said Sgt. Pete Simpson.Officers learned that a group of boys and girls, including two boys age 11 and 13, had been in a dispute with a passenger.
One of the boys had reportedly bumped into a woman’s baby stroller when getting on the train and an argument broke out. [LA replies: No, an “argument” did not “break out.” A black “youth” accosted a mother with baby (almost certainly white) and then threatened her life.]
During this dispute, the 11-year-old reportedly lifted his shirt to reveal a handgun in his waistband, which he began to pull out, Simpson said. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:21 PM
A commenter wrote at Conservative Heritage Times on January 26 (which happens to be my birthday):
Not everyone can blog with the consistency and breadth of a Lawrence Auster (he is almost his own magazine)…
Last Thursday I wrote of …
… Gingrich’s call in 1988 for the Republicans to leave Reaganism behind and move boldly into the future of … neo-Rockefeller Republicanism (?), Tofflerian Future Shockism (?), a high-tech restoration of Me Tooism (?), or whatever it was that was on his ever-restless mind at the moment.In her WSJ column that came out on Friday, Peggy Noonan writes:
But the point is Newt senses the lay of the land. If a new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism looked like it was about to take hold, he’d see the virtues in that. Right now the growth area looks like it’s in opposition to elites and establishments. So that’s where he is.No larger point here. It’s just funny that Noonan and I both thought of the same joke, in almost exactly the same words (i.e., that Gingrich might readily embrace “neo-Rockefeller Republicanism,” or a “new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism”) to illustrate Gingrich’s promiscuous and erratic intellectual nature.
Michael S. writes:
Kathlene M. wrote:“I used to read NRO before I found your website. After that, I lost interest in the writing and opinions there, although I’ll sometimes visit NRO and check out the headlines.”
I can paraphrase that to reflect my own situation.
I used to read LewRockwell.com before I found your website. After that, I lost interest in the writing and most of the opinions there—along with the libertarian utopianism, chronic obsession with government evil (a fixation which I find to be debilitating and toxic), and the adolescent name-calling. (One writer there refuses to use the word “government”; he prefers “gunverment.” Get it? Clever, no? No, not really.) Unlike Kathlene M. and NRO, I do not sometimes visit LewRockwell.com and check out the headlines. I did that a few times, and every time I did, I was sorry. I realized I wasn’t missing anything.
Kathlene M. writes:
Romney’s top donor and fundraising bundler is Paul Singer, the man who helped foist gay “marriage” on New York [see this and this]. Singer is also reported to be quite an attack dog. He finances reporters who use smears to attack opponents. This would explain the new viciousness behind Romney’s campaign.Even though Romney signed the National Organization for Marriage pledge to protect traditional marriage, if he becomes President with Singer’s financial help, he will likely be working to undermine traditional marriage in other ways. I can’t get excited about Romney if he becomes the nominee, especially knowing that he’s supported by Paul Singer and other social liberals (i.e., people from the Guiliani and McCain networks).
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:01 PM
(Note, January 30th: this entry has been fine-tuned since it was posted Sunday morning.)
The other day Gingrich attacked Romney as the “most anti-immigration” candidate (or “anti-immigrant” candidate—the accounts differ), because Romney is not as pro-amnesty as Gingrich. I criticized Gingrich strongly for that. But now, showing once again that the two candidates are equally unprincipled, Romney has attacked Gingrich for having said in Florida in 2007 that people who only speak Spanish have consigned themselves to a “ghetto.” On Fox News this morning, the silly Chris Wallace kept going after Gingrich over this supposedly terribly offensive statement. Gingrich explained that he wasn’t referring to Spanish speakers, but to anyone who exclusively speaks any of the 200 languages other than English that are now spoken in this country. English, he said, is the language of the economy and commercial success (he did not call it the language of our culture, since the contemporary mainstream view is that the only thing that defines America is the economy), and someone who doesn’t speak English has cut himself off from the prosperous American way of life.
Now why was Gingrich’s statement offensive? Presumably because to say that people who don’t speak English are putting themselves in a ghetto is to denigrate their language as a “ghetto” language. It is to imply that they are culturally inferior. But if it’s bad to say that it’s bad for people in the United States not to speak English, that means that it’s good for people in the United States not to speak English. But, in reality, people in the U.S. who don’t speak English tend—just as Gingrich said—to be excluded from participation in the mainstream American economy and relegated to inferior status. Wouldn’t it then be offensive for a politician to declare that it’s perfectly ok for members of certain groups not to know English in this country, and wouldn’t he be raked over the coals for that?
So if you say that people should not limit themselves to a foreign language, you are putting them down; and if you say that it’s fine for them to limit themselves to a non-English language, you are still putting them down.
Yet no one—least of all the candidates who are accused of being anti-immigrant or insensitive toward Hispanics—ever points out the logical impossibility of not offending minorities under the rules of the game in diverse America—because that, too, would be offensive to minorities. In fact, it would be far more offensive than the first two possibilities, resulting in one’s being, not just attacked by a political opponent and questioned by Chris Wallace, but excluded altogether from mainstream American political life.
I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode, “The Cigar Store Indian,” in which Jerry is interested in a woman who is an American Indian, but can’t for the life of him avoid saying things that touch on American Indian sensitivities. He becomes increasingly fearful of her increasingly tyrannical displeasure with him, until he is almost paralyzed.
Here are some scenes from the episode (of course, seeing it on TV is far better than reading the script—the script does not convey the girlfriend’s threatening demeanor and Jerry’s terror):
MORE…
Rudolph Giuliani is GOP establishment, right? But he’s strongly supporting Gingrich and slamming Romney as a career flip-flopper.
In this entry are posted comments responding to the two entries on the embarrassing but iconic (iconically liberal, that is) incident in Australia’s capital city on Thursday, in which the prime minister and her entourage fled in disarray and with very little dignity from pro-Aborigine protesters who were not pursuing them.
Comments on entry, “What is means to have a woman … as the leader of a country”
Roger G. writes:
They do play rugby there (both kinds). Maybe she was unsuccessfully trying to make a tackle?
LA replies:
That’s funny. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:56 PM
Newt Gingrich accuses Mitt Romney of “the most blatantly dishonest performance by a presidential candidate I’ve ever seen” in the latest debate Thursday night. Having been shocked by Romney’s previous slanders of Gingrich, I am ready to believe that it is true. But here are some of the things Gingrich said in the debate. He said that Romney is “anti-immigrant,” and that he, Gingrich, will give Puerto Rico a chance to vote on statehood. You know, so that a Spanish speaking, economically dependent island which is culturally and racially a part of Latin America and has a deep resentment against the United States can become a state of the United States.
That’s Gingrich, the grassroots conservatives’ champion.
Gingrich also said that if Romney is dishonest as a candidate, he will be dishonest as president. Well, then, it is also the case that if Gingrich calls his opponents “anti-immigrant” as a candidate, he will surely do the same as president. And he will have lots and lots of opponents, including you, reader, when he strives to push through amnesty for illegal aliens who have been here a yet-to-be determined number of years or who have been approved by a local community board.
Alexis Zarkov writes:
Mr. Auster wrote:
He [Gingrich] said that Romney is “anti-immigrant,” and that he, Gingrich, will give Puerto Rico a chance to vote on statehood. You know, so that a Spanish speaking, economically dependent island which is culturally and racially a part of Latin America and has a deep resentment against the United States can become a state of the United States.Today Puerto Rico is actually more white than the United States. According to the 2010 Census, non-Hispanic whites are 63.7 percent of the U.S. population. If we add white Hispanics at 8.7 percent, we get 72.4 percent. Compare that to Puerto Rico, which is 75.8 percent white. [LA replies: I am extremely skeptical of these figures. Many people whom ordinary people (of all races) would not consider white are labeled as white today by various government agencies.] MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:07 PM
A reader asks me to clarify the point of my entry, “How could anyone take Ron Paul seriously after this?”, and I reply.
The Daily Mail has many more photos of the incident at the Canberra, Australia restaurant where government leaders were meeting in honor of Australia Day and pro-Aborigine protesters banged on the restaurant windows yelling “shame,” and “racist.” The government leaders are seen fleeing the restaurant, and it’s possible that some of Prime Minister Gillard’s disarray (discussed in the previous entry) was due to her body guard who is dragging her along. But if he is dragging her against her will, which is certainly not helping her escape any more quickly or safely, why did she not take command of the situation and stop him and insist on walking under her own power, as everyone else in the scene was doing?
However, that’s not why I am posting this follow-up. I’m posting it because what we see in these photos is a group of people, including Australia’s top politicians, running away from a threat which, to all appearances, was non-existent. No violent protesters are seen in any of the photographs. No dangerous actions, beyond their initial banging on the windows of the restaurant, are described. There is no indication, verbal or photographic, that they chased or menaced the politicos as the latter fled in near-panic. The Australian political elite and their security guards thus end up looking like a bunch of fools. In the below photo, opposition leader Tony Abbot (wearing sky blue tie), jogging along calmly behind Prime Minister Gillard who is being ignominously dragged backward, looks like the only person in the group who has kept his head.
I don’t want to shrink the photo to fit it on the main page, as that will lessen its drama, so click on More to see it:
MORE…
Beth M. writes:
I’m curious as to why you think that stopping Obamacare is MORE critical to the USA than preventing Amnesty Deux. I think that if there is another amnesty, everybody in the world will think that this is their last decent chance to get a U.S. visa for at least 30 years. Because there is widespread knowledge that there was massive fraud last time around (phony rent receipts, etc., to “prove” you lived here for X amount of time, etc.), there will be breathtaking levels of fraud for Amnesty II, and the number of people applying for amnesty visas will be beyond reckoning. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:49 PM
A correspondent visiting Rome writes:
We went to the Vatican Museums today. The highlight for me was the Pinoteca’s collection of 14th and 15th century paintings. Overwhelming. Such wonders.LA replies:
The early Renaissance (in Florence, the 14th century and the first half of the fifteenth) is in some ways more impressive and meaningful than the high Renaissance.This is because the early Renaissance captures a perfect balancing of the personal-immanent with the spiritual-transcendent. (This happened only one other time—in the sculptures of the fifth century B.C. Athenian Golden Age). But in the high Renaissance, the personal, the self, the ego, begins to dominate.
By the way, how could anyone take seriously as a leader, let alone as a candidate for the presidency of the United States, a man who for many years published newsletters under his own name, such as The Ron Paul Report and The Ron Paul Survival Report, and who now says that he never read the articles published under his name? Which is more disqualifying, to have said that the black population is vastly more violent and criminal per capita than the white population, or to avow that one had no interest in, and took no responsibility for, the words and ideas published in one’s own newsletter?
The Washington Post reports:
In the past, Paul has taken responsibility for the passages because they were published under his name. But last month, he told CNN that he was unaware at the time of the controversial passages. “I’ve never read that stuff. I’ve never read—I came—was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written.” Paul said.A man who could say such a thing has revealed himself as a joke. MORE…
Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative writes:
Extraordinary photos were published yesterday on Australia Day of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, fleeing Aboriginal protesters:
Those photos are amazing. How laughably obvious that “equal” women still have to cower in the grasp of strong men for protection.The commenter is exactly right. If the police forces of the West declared to the feminist multiculturalist elites of liberal society: “You constantly cast aspersions on white men, on the masculine strength and authority of white men. But when your own safety is a concern, you turn automatically to those same white men, expecting us to be there for you. So we’re not playing the game any more. If you want the protection that only we can give you, stop diminishing and degrading us. If you want your pretty heads to remain connected to your bodies, acknowledge that YOUR liberal order and YOUR lives depend on us, and start acting accordingly.”A thin blue line of men willing to do brutal things is all that protects the matriarchy from the barbarians. When those men go on strike, that house of cards will be over.
Of course they will never say this. But if they did, it would transform the entire situation.
And what about Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition party, who was also at the event? Did he, while leaving the restaurant, lean with distraught face and helpless posture into the arms of a security guard? Tell me if you find any pictures of that.
UPDATE: guess what? As Carol Iannone points out, the man at the extreme right of the first picture above, with light blue tie and white shirt, is unquestionably Tony Abbot, as you can see from his photograph at Wikipedia:
Guard with Gillard . . . . . . . Abbot
A reader writes:
Granting that the NY Times will try to put the presumed Republican front runner in a bad light, I think this article brings up some important background on Gingrich.LA replies:Note that Gingrich himself conceded bringing “discredit on the House.” Calling Romney a liar [see this and this] for saying Gingrich brought shame to the House, or whatever the words were, may not have been fair.
Gingrich himself advocated that Republicans vote yes on the resolution criticizing him, to put the issue behind them which the vindictive Democrats were using to paralyze the Republican-led House.Try to imagine what it’s like coming under a relentless effort by the entire leftist establishment of this country to destroy you.
You write: “Calling Romney a liar for saying Gingrich brought shame to the House, or whatever the words were, may not have been fair.”
You are misstating the main issue in this discussion. Romney has stated, repeatedly, that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace.” But Gingrich’s resignation as Speaker had nothing to do with the ethics charges, which the House resolved in January 1997, almost two years before he announced his resignation in November 1998. His resignation was triggered by the disappointing results of the 1998 elections in which the House Republicans lost five seats. If the Republicans had gained five seats, Gingrich might very well not have resigned.
The heartening story of a man successfully using deadly force to defend himself from feral savages comes from NBC Philadelphia, via The Huffington Post. Of course, the race of the “teens” and of their intended victim is not mentioned. Let’s just say, Civilization 1, Savagery 0.
Man Kills Pa. Teen After Being Knocked Off Bicycle: Cops
01/26/2012A 65-year-old man shot and killed a teenager after the boy and his friends knocked the man off his bicycle and tried to assault him, Pennsylvania authorities say.
Police did not reveal the identity of the elderly man, who they released without charges following the incident on the Thun Trail located in Berks County, the Reading Eagle reports.
According to reports, the senior was biking down the trail when the group of boys—ages 16, 16, and 15—knocked the man off his bicycle and attempted to rob him. The man drew his gun and fired two shots, killing one of the boys and severely wounding another, according to NBC Philadelphia.
Cumru Township Police Chief Jed Habecker told WFMZ that the wounded teen had been taken in for surgery.
The third boy, 15, was questioned and later brought to a county Youth Detention Center on unspecified charges, according to ABC.
The mother of the slain boy requested that her son’s name also not be announced until she could alert family members. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:43 AM
(Note: I initially linked the wrong CNN video, an interview of Gingrich by John King on January 24 [in which Gingrich claimed that several witnesses other than his two daughters from his second marriage were prepared to refute his ex-wife’s story, a claim he has since retracted]. The link is now corrected.)
It is already a week old, but if you have not seen the opening exchange between CNN’s John King and candidate Gingrich at last Thursday’s GOP debate about the ABC interview with Marianne Gingrich, it is worth viewing. As I have said before, while Gingrich’s marital history is certainly reasonable grounds for criticizing or rejecting his candidacy, for King to open the debate—held two days before the South Carolina primary in Gingrich was surging in the polls—by questioning Gingrich on the vastly hyped interview in which his second wife repeated already known facts about the end of their marriage, was very wrong. Under the circumstances, Gingrich’s forceful retort to King was both justified and extremely effective, resulting in what some are calling the first-ever standing ovation at a presidential debate.
At the same time, I must repeat that it is ludicrous that the GOP candidates, including Gingrich, have willingly appeared at an endless series of debates hosted by hostile liberal media organizations in which all the questions come from the left and reflect anti-conservative biases. A Republican candidate who was truly ready and willing to resist the power of the liberal media in this country would not just lecture the liberal moderators at liberal-run debates for their biased liberal questions, as Gingrich has famously and properly done; he would insist on having debates in which the moderators have knowledge of and interest in issues that are actually of concern to—gasp—Republican voters.
On Thursday Rush Limbaugh delivered an immense monologue, almost 7,000 words long, about (1) the extremely bitter attacks on Newt Gingrich from other leading Republicans, and (2) the “stunning” (that’s Limbaugh’s word) revelation (posted at VFR this morning) that in 1988 Gingrich said in a televised discussion that while Reaganism had been great, the time for Reaganism was past and the Republican Party needed to abandon Reaganism and adopt a new ideology. Limbaugh keeps repeating that he personally well remembers that throughout the Reagan years Gingrich was a leading champion and expositor of Reagan’s policies and governing philosophy, so he is stunned to learn of Gingrich’s call in 1988 for the Republicans to leave Reaganism behind and move boldly into the future of … neo-Rockefeller Republicanism (?), Tofflerian Future Shockism (?), a high-tech restoration of Me Tooism (?), or whatever it was that was on his ever-restless mind at the moment.
Those are the main points of the monologue. I’m not recommending that you read it, as it is so long, meandering, and repetitive. But if you want an experience of the amazingly complex situation obtaining in the Republican presidential contest at this moment via Rush Limbaugh’s own tortured response to it, you may find it worthwhile to invest the time.
MORE…
I’ve been away from my computer all day, and just got back to 50 emails in my Inbox, about 30 of them comments for VFR. Will try to post them tomorrow.
A very large number of entries have been posted this morning, on the GOP civil war and other things too. As I hope readers will see, I am an equal opportunity critic of both Romney and Gingrich. Yesterday in two entries (here and here) I condemned Romney very severely; today the focus is more on Gingrich again. I am not in either camp and you will find at VFR a wide variety of angles on both candidates. Both candidates are extremely flawed, and extremely dishonest—both are unacceptable in my view. However, we may feel compelled, by the sheer necessity of defeating Obama, to choose one or the other. In the entry, “A civil war about nothing,” I suggest a way for us to support one or the other of these candidates without throwing away our principles.
James P. writes:
In “A civil war about nothing,” you wrote that the Republican battle is “a fight to the death over two candidates neither of whom has ever been a conservative in any consistent and serious sense.” As I previously noted, during Newt’s 20-year Congressional career, he consistently voted conservatively. A “Rockefeller Republican” would not have been constantly re-elected in Georgia. Many things he did after resigning from Congress are bizarre and indefensible, but to say he was not consistently conservative in Congress simply is not true.
Daniel S. writes:
In this clip (at about 6:30) Mark Steyn observes that Newt Gingrich has an “open marriage with ideas.” He notes that he cannot stay “faithful to one idea” and is soon “fooling around” with others. Gingrich’s personal life is but a reflection of his mind.LA replies:
Sounds right. But it raises the awkward (for Steyn) question, how would one describe Steyn’s relationship with ideas?
10 p.m.
Leonard D. writes:
You wrote:LA replies:” … how would one describe Steyn’s relationship with ideas?”
Steyn is a pickup artist in the idea dating scene. He flirts with ideas, and will sleep with the hot ones, but he keeps a harem and won’t commit to any of them.
Hah hah hah hah hah.I’ve had a very good day, and your e-mail tops it off.
A reader in England, who sent the story, writes:
Gingrich is a compulsive liar but simply far more exciting than any other Republican candidate.LA replies:Obama would destroy him in an election is my guess.
He sounds like the “bad boy” to whom women are suicidally attracted.Nietzsche once said that life is a woman. Maybe the GOP is a woman. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:17 AM
A reader in England sent the video of Gingrich in 1988 saying that candidate George Bush the elder should not follow Reaganism. I replied:
Great find. This is persuasive, whereas the Elliot Abrams article charging that Gingrich was critical of Reagan is not persuasive, for the reasons I gave. Here Gingrich is clearly repudiating and rejecting, not some secondary aspect of Reaganism, but Reaganism itself. Also his political prognostication is dead wrong. Bush the elder won in 1988 by running conspicuously (albeit cynically and dishonestly) as the heir and successor of Reagan. If he had run as himself, as he did in 1992, he would have lost.It will be interesting to hear how Gingrich reconciles his 1988 statement with his contemporary claim to being a staunch Reaganite.
In any case, we now know that both Gingrich and Romney distanced themselves from Reagan in the 1980s.
Paul Nachman writes:
I’ve no argument with your ire at Romney for his behavior on the charges against the gasbag. (But would such means never find justification in ends? What if you could have spared the nation Obama by such means?)Nevertheless, Coulter defenestrates the gasbag again, and makes a very good case for Romney in several ways. Although abortion is a subject that doesn’t grab me, I think this is a pretty good story: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:06 AM
I’m not a fan of neocon Bret Stephens at the WSJ, but his article on the GOP campaign is worth reading. He says that the GOP nominee is going to lose in November, and the reason is that the candidates who ran for the nomination were all unviable. His closing passage:
What should readers who despair of a second Obama term make of all this? Hope ObamaCare is repealed by the High Court, the Iranian bomb is repealed by the Israeli Air Force, and the Senate switches hands, giving America a healthy spell of Hippocratic government.That’s the heart of what I’m calling Plan B—that Obamacare is overthrown by the Supreme Court, rather than repealed by the Congress and a Republican president. MORE…All perfectly plausible. And the U.S. will surely survive four more years. Who knows? By then maybe Republicans will have figured out that if they don’t want to lose, they shouldn’t run with losers.
It’s beyond astonishing: a political party whose heart is all about conservatism, in a fight to the death over two candidates neither of whom has ever been a conservative in any consistent and serious sense. Romney, of course, was not even a Republican in the 1980s, and in his 1994 U.S. Senate race he was still distancing himself from President Reagan. I won’t rehearse all the liberal positions he held as governor of Massachusetts in the 2000s (though he did convert to pro-life, as Ann Coulter reminds us). Gingrich, meanwhile, began his political life in the 1960s as a Rockefeller Republican, in the 1990s was an exponent of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock ideology (the diametrical opposite of any and all conservatism, as I explained in a talk in 1995), and in the 2000s partnered up with Al Sharpton for a national speaking tour. See my summary of Sharpton’s vile role in the Tawana Brawley affair and the false charge of rape and kidnapping against Steven Pagones for which he has never repented but which he repeated AFTER Pagones defeated him in a law suit years later).
Philip Klein writes at the Washington Examiner:
In 2009, Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton went on a nationwide tour together, from the White House to multiple cities, to promote education reforms also being pushed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In one video from the tour, Gingrich said, “I really appreciate the leadership Rev. Sharpton is showing all across America.” Just last month, Gingrich called into Sharpton’s TV show to wish him a happy birthday and shower him with praise. “I had such a great time going around America with you” to push education reform, Gingrich told Sharpton. “I will never forget it for the rest of my life. You were tremendous on those trips.… I watched you speak up with courage and with toughness on behalf of children in a way that all my life I will remember and I will honor you for the way you were willing to take on interests on behalf of children.”I’m looking forward to hearing pro-Gingrich conservatives square their support for Gingrich with his extravagantly expressed affection and admiration for one of the most vile individuals in America.
And by the way, there is an honorable way out of this quandary. One could say,
MORE…
Ian T. writes:
In keeping with this week’s theme of miscegenation and its significant drawbacks [see this, this, and this], I wanted to make a point I rarely see anyone touch on: the hypocrisy of female racemixers.Take Doutzen Kroes, the beautiful Dutch supermodel who does campaigns for L’Oreal and Victoria’s Secret. She’s married to an African man and had his child a few months ago. Now, if you asked Doutzen which of her features she most favors, she would probably mention her sky-blue eyes, her silky blonde hair etc. These characteristics, passed down for thousands upon thousands of years, are completely destroyed by her selfish desire to miscegenate not just with some other race, but the human group that’s most different from us in every measurable way. The very qualities that have made her an international supermodel are now lost in the mix and won’t be passed down to her children. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:04 AM
A few days ago VFR posted on the breakup of the supposedly ideal and blissfully happy marriage of Germanic model Heidi Klum and her black one-name husband Seal, whom I had never heard of before (which shows you how tuned-in to the pop culture I am). In eight years of marriage the couple have produced four children, all of whom will spend their lives confused as to their identity.
Kidist Paulos Asrat has a follow-up. According to reports, one of the reasons Klum ended the marriage was concern over Seal’s “volcanic temper.”
Also on the Culturally and Spiritually Lost Celebrity front, Kidist informs us that movie star Liam Neeson is thinking of becoming a Muslim.
Kristor writes:
Walking my dog last night, I was ruminating about your recent entry in which you announced that you had stopped thinking that small steps—e.g. repealing Obamacare—could suffice to turn around our culture’s present disastrous course. It struck me all of a sudden that this change in your attitude represents the death of a last dying ember of your native liberalism. Think of it: taking small steps to fix the world, and move it closer to an ideal situation—is that not exactly the sort of thing that the leftists are constantly doing? Granted, your ideal and mine is not gnostic or utopian, but merely practical. But still. [LA replies: I must jump in here to clarify that the “small steps” of which I spoke were not political acts such as repealing Obamacare, but small intellectual or spiritual steps away from some aspect of liberalism, such as we occasionally see in mainstream conservatives, but which, I said, are not going to gather into a large-scale rejection of liberalism.]We live in a basically liberal culture; that’s part of what we mean when we say that it is “modern.” We are living in a culture that is engaged in working out the last few absurd consequences of the Enlightenment experiment with materialism. If materialism is true, then there is no such thing really as a rule; rules then are, on the contrary, merely conventions. Almost everything we do, and almost all our social institutions, presuppose this materialistic or relativistic notion. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:55 AM
From the time I began to write about immigration in the late 1980s, and then about culture and politics in general in the 1990s and 2000s, I thought that the odds were against our society being saved, but I believed that it was possible. The way I often put this over the years was as follows: Liberalism (or, to be more precise, the rule of liberalism) is doomed, but there are two different ways in which its end will come. Either liberalism will continue until it has destroyed our civilization, and liberalism itself, having been deprived of its host, will also perish; or liberalism will be rejected at some point short of the destruction of our civilization. In my thinking and writing, particularly at VFR, I have always put the emphasis on the second, hopeful possibility.
Last fall, my view on this subject changed. Readers should understand it was not some political disaster or personal trauma that triggered this experience. I simply noticed that my thinking had changed, namely that when I observed or reflected on some false liberal slogan or attitude or belief, on whatever subject, the thought no longer arose in me that this falsity could be corrected or stopped. Instead, it seemed to me these liberal beliefs would continue in existence as the dominant beliefs of our society as long as our society exists. In other words, I now believed that only the first of my two above scenarios of the demise of liberalism was possible. And this change in my thought process was not temporary, but—at least over the last three or four months—permanent.
Here are entries at VFR discussing that change. The first three are short. The fourth is a full length article. I have much more to say about this subject and expect to be adding further entries on it in the future.
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In the discussion on Romney’s Spiritual Quotient (SQ) versus his Intellectual Quotient (IQ), Carol Iannone writes:
Gingrich could be photographed with his three wives and his daughters and their husbands and children. And we could put that photo next to the photo of the Romneys, and caption both with the caption, “How things have changed. Guess which one is the Mormon?”
Republican politics have not been this nasty in my memory. Writing at NRO, Elliot Abrams—former embattled assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration—accuses Newt Gingrich of being a critic of President Reagan, not a supporter and ally as Gingrich himself has been claiming. Abrams supplies various Gingrich remarks from the Reagan years to back up the charge that Gingrich undercut Reagan’s Cold War policies, implying further that Gingrich sided with the Democrats in doing so. Thus:
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A reader says, not unreasonably, that he was treated somewhat unfairly in the “Gingrich vs. Romney” thread, and I reply.
Here is an exchange on Romney’s educational background, followed by an exchange on Romney’s “spiritual quotient” as compared with his intellectual quotient, with a comment by Jim Kalb.
JC in Houston writes:
This video is on Drudge, Gingrich sucking up to Jorge Ramos from Univision on behalf of illegals. It’s nauseating. Why can’t the majority of GOP voters understand just who this repulsive character is.LA replies:
Gingrich’s remarks in this interview make it is impossible to believe that he opposes amnesty.Also, if you think he’s just talking about grandmothers who have been here 25 years, listen again to his last sentence:
“We need to have a serious conversation about how there’s a series of steps that gets us to legality for the entire country.”
So he wants the legalization of all or virtually all illegals.
However, it is also the case that Gingrich (like Romney) is not manically driven, à la George W. Busheròn and John McCain, to legalize all illegals. If as president he did make a move in that direction, it would be defeated, and probably more easily than Busheròn’s mighty efforts were defeated in 2006 and 2007.
At the same time, nothing is certain. It’s possible that a President Gingrich or a President Romney would have a better chance of passing amnesty than Obama, since a Republican president would have more congressional Republicans on his side than would Obama. There is thus a reasonable argument for not voting for Romney or Gingrich if either of them is the nominee. My position remains that I will vote for any Republican nominee, no matter how loathsome and immoral he may be, who is seriously committed to repealing Obamacare.
Kathlene M. writes:
And now to make matters worse for Romney, the Romney campaign has sent out a mass email repeating Nancy Pelosi’s latest insinuation that “there’s something I know” about Gingrich. This is beyond vile. I have lost all respect for Mitt Romney.Here is the article Kathlene sent, it’s by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
Romney campaign sends mass email quoting Pelosi threat against Newt (Update: Pelosi backs off)Jacobson linked to an image of the Romney campaign e-mail. Here from HotAir is the text of the Romney interview at Fox which the Romney campaign itself included in the e-mail:I told you this morning that anti-Newt forces would try to use Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she had secret information about Newt.
And the Romney campaign didn’t waste any time, sending out a mass e-mail quoting Pelosi as well as Romney attacking Newt on Fox & Friends about Pelosi’s statement.
Here’s the e-mail (click to enlarge).
Newt sat on a couch with Pelosi. The Romney campaign is getting in bed with her.
Update: Just as the Romney campaign was seeking to use Pelosi’s threat, Pelosi was backing off. Pelosi’s office says she has no new dirt on ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (h/t Weasel Zippers):
“The ‘something’ Leader Pelosi knows is that Newt Gingrich will not be President of the United States. She made that clear last night,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement.…
But on Wednesday, Hammill repeated that all of the information from the investigation is in the public realm. [LA replies: Do you see the significance of this? Romney has gone so far out that he is making allegations about some dark hidden Gingrich wrongdoing from the ‘90s which Pelosi herself has not made and from which she has explicitly dissociated herself. So Romney is not just a slanderer of a fellow Republican, as I wrote this morning; he is a bigger slanderer than the Democrats.]
GRETCHEN CARLSON: Mr. Romney, what does Nancy Pelosi know if it would be such a bombshell as to why Newt Gingrich couldn’t be president?Think of it. The Democrats spent four years trying to destroy their arch-nemesis Newt Gingrich with trumped-up charges. He gave a college course on politics, and claimed tax free status for it; but they said that the course was really to advance his political ideology and career, and therefore the tax free status was fraudulent. The IRS ultimately found that the course was indeed educational, not political. This was the trivial and innocent matter that the Democrats—facilitated by the liberal media with all their power—blew up into a horrible-sounding scandal and used to taint and bring down Gingrich. And so lacking is Romney in minimal principle, in minimal decency, in minimal conscience, that he is now jumping on the Democrats’ Destroy-Gingrich bandwagon from the 1990s. I cannot print at VFR the words that I have for Romney.ROMNEY: I wish I knew what that was [laughter]. I’d tell people what it is right now.
But that’s one of the reasons why I’m saying that all of the records that were part of the ethics investigation, all of the transcripts, all of the records have to be made public.
Not just the final white-washed report but the full record, the reason that 88% of the Republicans in the House voted to reprimand their own Speaker.…. we need to understand why that is, and those records need to be released, because you know that if Nancy Pelosi knows those things right now, she will hand them to Barack Obama’s campaign if Speaker Gingrich were our nominee.
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The Romney campaign immediately distanced itself from the remarks. But isn’t this the way the truth often comes out, via a statement that is then denied or retracted?
The Hill reports this morning:
Romney adviser Norm Coleman predicts GOP president won’t repeal health lawMitt Romney adviser Norm Coleman, a former senator from Minnesota, predicted the GOP won’t repeal the Democrats’ healthcare reform law even if a Republican candidate defeats President Obama this November.
“You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president,” Coleman told BioCentury This Week television in an interview that aired on Sunday. “You can’t whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what’s been done.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:04 PM
Ken Hechtman, with his insider’s understanding of leftist politics, expands on Alexis Zarkov’s cogent explanation of why Obama killed the Keystone pipeline project: Cap and Trade, which was what the left really wanted and expected from Obama, didn’t get off the ground, so as compensation the left is demanding that Obama stop individual energy projects.
In an amusing column, “Can Newtzilla Be Stopped?”, Jonah Goldberg writes:
“People actually misunderstand what’s going on,” [Gingrich] explained Saturday night after his South Carolina win. “It’s not that I am a good debater. It is that I know how to articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people.”That’s the great thing about Gingrich: He can make describing himself as the divine manifestation of the vox populi sound self-deprecating. Still, he’s basically right. He’s managed to transform into a spokesman for all of the rank and file’s frustrations, insecurities, and grievances as well as their hopes and ideals.
He never could have pulled it off were it not for Romney’s shortcomings. For whatever reason, Romney seems like a creature put on Earth to blend in with the humans and report back what he finds. He clearly likes earthlings, and they in turn find him pleasant enough, and surprisingly lifelike. Occasionally he finds the right words, but he rarely connects them to the right tone. This dearth of convincing passion in the front-runner makes the passionate base of the party want to look elsewhere—even to Newtzilla.
On Tuesday I wrote that Romney lied at the NBC debate Monday night when he said, at least twice, that Gingrich had “resigned in disgrace” from the Congress. I then read more about the House ethics charges in the article about Gingrich at Wikipedia but didn’t get around to posting about it. The article tells that he admitted in 1997 to some very obscure offense and paid $300,000 to make the matter go away, and that after he had left the Congress at the beginning of 1999, the IRS later that year exonerated him entirely of any wrongdoing. Also, as far as the House was concerned, the ethics matter was resolved in early 1997. It was the November 1998 elections, in which the House Republicans lost five seats (very unusual for the non-presidential party during an off-year election), in combination with a rebellion against Gingrich in the Republican caucus, that led Gingrich, the day after the election, to announce his resignation from the Speakership and from the Congress. There was nothing disgraceful about his resignation; he resigned honorably and for ordinary political reasons, namely that his party had done poorly in an election and he had lost the political support of his caucus.
The always valuable reporter Byron York, who covered the story closely at the time, provides a detailed summary of it at the Washington Examiner which is must reading. Basically the ethics charges were a no-holds-barred campaign by the Democrats to destroy Gingrich, using all the resources of the liberal media to construct a picture of wrongdoing by the then-Speaker when in fact there had been no wrongdoing. He was simply teaching a college course, which the media constructed into some sinister criminal activity. York tells a scarifying tale of what it is like to be hated and targeted by the left in this country, what it is like to be the left’s Enemy Number One, which Gingrich was for the four years of his Speakership.
For Romney, a Republican candidate for president, to dredge up the same false, lying accusations against Gingrich that the Democrats and the media had so ruthlessly and massively deployed against him in the 1990s; for Romney to keep repeating that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace,” as though he resigned over the ethics charges, when in fact his resignation had nothing to do with the ethics charges which had been resolved in the House almost two years earlier, and when in fact after his departure from the House Gingrich was ultimately cleared of all accusations of wrongdoing that had been leveled at him by his wicked political enemies, is one of the most despicable things I have seen in presidential politics. Romney has borne false witness of the most vile kind. His reputation as a man of upright character lies in tatters.
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Mark Richardson writes at Oz Conservative:
What obsesses the political class on Australia Day?You would think that Australia Day would be time for a little patriotic pride. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s treated in the media. The media is obsessed in the week leading up to Australia Day with endless handwringing about whether Australians are racist or not. They just can’t leave the issue alone - which reveals, I think, where their heads are at. Even in a relatively conservative paper like the Herald Sun, you just can’t escape the obsession—in today’s edition, for instance, there are no less than three columns all boringly saying the same thing. It’s not that they are sinking the boot in, it’s that their frame for discussing Australia Day is limited to the issue of whether Australians are or aren’t racist in response to diversity and multiculturalism.