Mitch Albom: 'Let's Shoot All the Bloggers'

Telling folks like us there’s a double standard in the media is hardly worth the bits and bytes wasted in saying it. May as well say the sky is blue.

Well, it is blue.

There’s a headline over Mitch Albom’s wrathful column in the Free Press today that says, “In the Sherrod controversy, do shoot the messenger.”

Needless to say, many of us remember when Sarah Palin caused a national panic of duck-and-cover when she used target graphics on a map to denote vulnerable congressional districts. But "shoot the messenger" is much more direct than that was.

In fairness, headlines are almost always the work of copy editors, not columnists, so Albom probably didn’t write this one. But he and the editorial page editor certainly saw it before it went to press.

The messenger Albom wants shot is Andrew Breitbart, the man who took Shirley Sherrod’s Size 9 tootsie and forced it into her mouth, and then forced Barack Obama to tell Tom Vilsack to fire her before Glenn Beck had a chance to show the video Monday, which he never did do. And then Breitbart, the fiend, forced the NAACP to release a statement praising the firing.

Well, maybe Albom didn’t actually write that he wants Breitbart shot. But he does write that he wants him to have his “matches” taken away. He wants “punishment” doled out to him “if there were any you could dole out.” Last weeks’ ShirleyFest, writes Albom, isn’t “a referendum on racism,” as some think, but “a referendum on editing. A referendum on Internet blogging.”

But did the bloggers win or lose?

Even so, yowls Albom, fingers tearing at his thick, luscious hair:

[H]ow do you punish a blogger like Breitbart? He simply slithers back into the muck that some confuse with journalism. Who does he have to answer to?

Nobody.

Nobody!

Not a Free Press editor (like the guy who came up with “do shoot the messenger”), not the NAACP, not David Axelrod, not Eric Holder (yet).

Not no-goddam-body!

He can say whatever he wants!

Who does Breitbart think he is? A professional newspaper columnist? Answering to professional editors like we have at the Free Press? I mean, where is it written that a guy can say whatever he wants, without answering to anybody?

The problem, frets Albom, is that blogger Breitbart isn’t “held to any standard.” (Let alone the HIGH standards of truth and accuracy we have come to know and love at the Detroit Free Press).

It’s not that Albom is an opponent of free speech -- you know -- the kind you don’t have to answer for to “nobody.” It’s just that he is opposed to hate speech, because, (I have to infer), Albom is against Hate. And for Love.

Which doesn’t stop him from writing, in a column dedicated to taking Breitbart down, that “I doubt he counts that much,” and, “He simply slithers back into the muck.”

He even attacks Ann Coulter, whose skinny shadow Albom doesn’t deserve to sit in, and who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

Hate makes the political world spin, particularly the blog world. The shrieking Ann Coulter, who can't possibly be taken seriously, actually claimed Breitbart was a "victim" of whomever set him up with this video.

Liberals have a “tell” whenever they’re out in company and can’t say aloud that they hate someone’s guts. They accuses the enemy of hate.

Coulter can’t possibly be taken seriously? Compared to whom? Mitch Albom? She’s one of the few commentators out there I do take seriously, being at least 99 44/100% blunt about exactly where her fine mind takes her. But if he thinks she can’t be taken seriously, then why drag her into his few alloted column inches? And I’ve never heard her shriek.

He also libels Coulter by casting her in a false light as one of the commentators who was particularly critical of Sherrod. In fact, Coulter spoke so highly of Sherrod’s speech, in its totality, that I was, and am, puzzled by Ann’s point of view. But her hypothesis that Breitbart was provided the video excerpt from an unknown party that may, in turn, have been meant to make Breitbart look bad makes as much sense as anything Albom has had to say about this. And how is saying Breitbart may have been a victim here “hate?”

It goes without saying that nowhere does Albom ever once acknowledge that Sherrod was fired by Tom Vilsack and Barack Obama, with the NAACP cheering them on. It’s all Breitbart’s fault.

And if Albom’s standards are so high, then why does he quote Breitbart out of context, exactly the thing he accuse Brietbart of doing, when he writes:

Breitbart's Web site contains pieces like "If Anyone Needs to Apologize, It's Shirley Sherrod." Breitbart actually said the following of Sherrod: "This person has not gotten past black versus white."

Albom forgets to mention that Breitbart was reacting to Sherrod’s statements on liberal cable news shows like Anderson Cooper, where she said this about Breitbart, a man she has never met:

I know I've gotten past black versus white. He's probably the person who's never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it.

I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That's where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.

COOPER: You think -- you think he's racist?

SHERROD: ... I think he's so vicious. Yes, I do.

And I think that's why he's so vicious against a black president, you know. He would go after me. I don't think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.

If it’s standards you’re crying out for, Mitch, you and the Free Press need to find yourselves some, first.

Surely This Isn't Black Racism. And Don’t Call Me Shirley.

“Shirley Sherrod did something that few people have the courage to: she faced her own racial demons, conquered them, and had the audacity to share that experience with others.”
-- Tommy Christopher at Mediaite

"I think it is race. You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards," she said. "We have become more racist. This was their doing, Breitbart put that together misrepresenting what I was saying and Fox carried it."

"[Fox News] intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday. . . I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person." -- Shirley Sherrod, Pioneer of Post-Racial America

Oh, Shirley. If this is you after your post-racial redemption, you must have really been something beforehand.

Breitbart’s original point, lost in the wall-to-wall coverage of all this the past five days, is that Ms. Sherrod’s anecdote about using her office to discriminate against a white farmer was received by the NAACP audience with mild, but unmistakeable evangelical fervor.

(In case you were unaware, the one place where there are never, ever, ever any concerns raised about the mixing of church and state, or the conflation of religion and politics, it is in the black community, especially in its relationship with liberal politics. To paraphrase a well-known Bible passage, wherever two or three black clergymen gather, there is the Democratic Party in the midst of them. My favorite moment in the video (around 1:36 in the Breitbart clip) is when Shirley, who talks freely about praying for guidance in her life, pantomimes being showered with divine wisdom about the whole race/class conflict model that God wants to show her: “That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much white -- it IS about white and black . . .”). A timely revelation, as the Sermon on the Mount is long overdue for revision.)

Here is Breitbart’s original point, exactly, taken from his post on Monday:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

After the rest of the video came to light Frank Ross posted this Wednesday at Big Journalism:

Regardless of what else is in Sherrod’s speech, the first video released on BigGovernment.com features Sherrod telling a tale of racism that is received by the NAACP audience with laughter and cheers. They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. Upon hearing the cheers, Sherrod fails to offer any immediate clarification and even smiles right along with them.

Since then, America’s talkers have divided into three factions: (1) those whites who think Sherrod is an inspirational example of someone who overcame her own prejudices to help one of “them” (2) those whites who think Sherrod is a race-obsessed government careerist, and (3) those blacks who think the white people in groups (1) and (2) are incorrigible racists no matter what they think, do, or say about Shirley Sherrod, no matter who they voted for, and no matter how guilty they feel about being white.

I don’t think Breitbart’s decision to go with this on Monday was a brilliant move. But he couldn’t have been clearer that his barbs weren’t aimed at Sherrod, but at the hypocrisy of the NAACP attacking the Tea Party movement as racists.

The reality of racism in black America is one of the most serious unreported stories of our time.

During the 2008 election, when Fox News had highlights of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons on their patented B-roll video-loop machine (e.g., 10 seconds of scene A, 3 seconds of scene B, 4 seconds of scene C: repeat 3 times every hour for 10 days), it wasn’t Wright’s agitprop heresies I found most depressing. What hurt watching those loops was the Pentecostal joy manifested by his flock at the idea that America and the Ku Klux Klan were coextensive, and that 9/11 was divine judgment by means of “America’s chickens. . . comin’ home to roost.”

Wright is only one man. He and his pop-eyed preaching and his made-up religion don’t scare me. What scares me is how many of thousands of enthusiastic followers, and the tens of thousands of their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, probably think the same. Wright’s Trinity UCC Church isn’t some obscure storefront. So prominent is his congregation, that a politically ambitious and calculating young political creature like Barack Obama selected Wright’s church out of all Chicago to arrange his introduction to Jesus.

St. James wrote once that a spring can’t pour forth sweet water and brackish at the same time. But the Apostle didn’t live to see the fluidity with which racial hate and holy ghost unction harmonize at Rev. Wright’s church, and at thousands of churches like it. I absolutely agree with Breitbart that the key historical datum to be taken from the Sherrod video is the reception by her NAACP audience of her tale of discrimination as something utterly unremarkable, if not commonplace. Of course we do that if we get a chance. We’re getting even. That’s what “justice” means, isn’t it?

It is one of the dreariest realities of this historic moment that the cancer of racism is indeed eating away at a significant portion of America -- it’s just not eating the portion we always hear about. The racial biopsies on Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Fox newscasters and the Tea Party movement -- no matter how many times we have to endure them -- always come back negative.

But the invidiousness of racism in America’s black communities grows untreated exactly because no biopsies are ever allowed. In fact, it’s been prejudged a grave act of moral malpractice even to hazard a clinical diagnosis. Black racism isn’t a worse cancer than white racism -- it’s the identical cancer, with the same pathology, and the same deadly effects on the soul. It’s not the difference between prostate and brain cancer. It’s the difference between cancer that’s being treated and cancer that’s being allowed to take its course. The most dangerous cancer is the one you don’t even know you have.

White America faced up to white racism a half century ago, and whether you are among those who believe it was substantially cured, or among those who think it’s as bad as it ever was (!), no one can deny that the subject of white racism has never left our public consciousness for one blessed second since the 1960s. Back then, the predominately white churches, the TV networks and Hollywood, and the political establishment were all hopping aboard the civil-rights train. No matter what those redneck sheriffs got away with, and thought they could get away with, during the Freedom Rider days, their day was coming to an end, whether they knew it or not. Prominent as Bull Connor’s belly was in news footage from 1963, by 1967 white movie audiences were on Sidney Poitier’s side when his character, Virgil Tibbs, slapped a white patrician in the face onscreen during “In the Heat of the Night.”

And it was the heightened public consciousness, the national moral struggle, that led to the change in white attitudes about race. The change didn’t just take place in voting booths or real estate offices, either, or just thanks to civil rights laws. It took place where it matter ten thousand time more -- in private relations between whites when blacks weren’t even present. It wasn’t only that racist comments were made illegal in schools and job sites and state houses, but on an even more imposing level, racist comments were deemed by the majority society to be, first, impolite, and then, before long, absolutely shocking. The next closest moral crime in white America to racism is smoking, and smoking is still a far distant second. The William Morris Agency wouldn’t have dumped Mel Gibson just because he smoked

Those of us old enough to remember some of how it used to be and sound know there’s been a change from then till now. That’s why no amount of bullshit from the NAACP or John Lewis or other race hustlers about how things are just as bad -- or worse -- than during Jim Crow is so utterly, impossibly ludicrous. They may as well try telling us that today’s 65” plasma TV technology represents no improvement at all over the round 9” Zenith you had to watch the World Series on in 1952.

But there is no sign of such a public consciousness-raising, or moral struggle in the black community over black resentments and unresolved racial bitterness. Stories about racism in the black community garner fewer blips on the national radar than those dubious reports of Sasqatch sightings that make the news two or three times a decade.

Then there are all those college professors and magazine writers and columnists who deny that such a thing as black racism could even exist. Or if it could, what harm it could do, considering that white folks (as we’re told) own and control everything and blacks (as we’re also often told) are still “not free”?

As an outsider and a person of color (white), how could I presume to know directly a lot of what goes on within the black community? I can’t. But we’re allowed to draw inferences from what we see and hear right in front of our faces. For example, we can all see the enthusiastic responses to the race-madness of Rev. Wright by those spirit-filled worshippers at Trinity Church. And we can see the evident approval of Sherrod’s NAACP audience to the pre-conversion portion of her testimony about the white farmer -- the cheering, as Frank Ross said, not for the redemption, but for the discrimination. Both instances allow me to infer that in A.D. 2010, this second year of the post-racial presidency of Barack Obama, racial scorekeeping and using one’s position to exploit an advantage based on race are still perfectly acceptable in polite black society.

And I can conclude from what many (not all) black media figures and celebrities, clergy, and political leaders are saying to their own communities, that they’re taking the exact opposite roles from what their white counterparts took during the civil rights era. Rather than calling their people out of old prejudices, fears, and insularity to the color-blind ideal of Martin Luther King, Jr., the prevailing political-religious message of victimhood, race-centered thinking, and the insistence on political “justice” (retribution) bestows moral legitimacy on blacks harboring resentments, anger, and desires to get even.

Could any clergyman dispense a more self-destructive spiritual lesson to his flock, or substitute a more wicked counterfeit to the Gospel, then one that misapprehends the teaching of Christ as “it IS about black and white. . .it’s all about poor versus those who have”? Could any inner-city schoolteacher do more to insure the failure of her pupils then by endorsing these lessons? How does a black kid, poorly skilled at reading because of lousy schools, surrounded by family elders, neighbors, teachers, church leaders, and media repeating that message to him week in and week out, ever learn that he is a free, moral agent who enjoys more opportunities in America than he would any place else on Earth?

My point isn’t that blacks should be ashamed of themselves for being racist. The race taboo and shame and all that white guilt in white society hasn’t been so good. The restrictions on manners didn’t stop at dictating politeness, but went right past that to dictating our innermost thoughts. The result is an incapacity to deal with the subject at all, (and lots of other subjects, too, including Islam).

I’m not talking about folks being ashamed, just displaying some self-knowledge. I’d just like a little more self-awareness.

Sherrod, when she was comfortable before a friendly audience at the NAACP last March, felt free enough to entertain what she herself considered a “revelation” -- that her earlier decisions as an advocate for poor farmers didn’t have to be steered strictly by her feelings about race. (This is a revelation?!)

But when, through no fault of her own, she found herself the focus of last week’s media ShirleyFest, she instantly reverted to the most extreme racist rhetoric, including heaping up a pile of slanderous charges against Fox News and Breitbart. That wasn’t 24 years ago. That was three days ago. Alas, her 24-hour stature as a born-again post-racialist was over too soon.

DOJ’s Two-Year Labor Brings Forth a Bouncing, Baby – Mouse!

Yet again an independent investigation into Bush-era political crimes has resulted in a no-cause. And yet again the announcement that there is no evidence that what Democrats spent four years denouncing as criminal activity by the Bush White House turns out to entail no criminal activity has left the losers shoplifting a lollipop in the form of a tangential finding that, while not illegal, the actions of the Bush Justice Department were in part, improper.

This carries all the moral gravity of a jury acquitting a man of murdering his wife but admitting afterwards that they did all believe testimony that he habitually came home late from work without calling.

The press is dutifully spinning this as a gratuitous decision by special prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, unrelated to the actual strength -- or utter weakness -- of the facts. The intended message is that, if Dannehy only wanted to she could have charged the Bushies with crimes, but she just chose not to, for reasons we aren’t going to elaborate.

But au contraire, Dannehy’s report, offered to the House Committee on the Judiciary through the filter of Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, details it this way:

The investigative team determined that . . . the evidence did not demonstrate any prosecutable criminal offense was committed with regard to the removal of David Iglesias[indexed in Democrat talking points as the gravest crime of the 21st century] . . . .Additionally, the investigative team determined that there was insufficient evidence to show that any witness made prosecutable false statements to either Congress or the [Office of Inspector General or Office of Professional Responsibility], or corruptly endeavored to impede a congressional inquiry.

Which The New York Times headline presents this way: “Prosecutor’s 2006 Firing Won’t Result in Charges.”

Never mind why.

Here’s the headline in The Washington Post: “Justice Dept. won't file charges in Bush-era firings of U.S. attorneys.”

Just don’t ask why.

Reduced to a sound bite, which is what this will be reduced to if it isn’t ignored all together, the exoneration of Bush will be erased from history, while the “impropriety” charge will be cryogenically preserved for a thousand years as proof of criminal actions that, inexplicably, were left uncharged.

I learned during the 2000 election, and every day since, that no matter how many tribunals or factfinders explode Democratic myths, they simply will not die.

As proof, I offer the response of Congressmanissimo-for-Life Representative John M. Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee whose political mission is now laser-focused on placing former President George W. Bush behind bars, and who now says Dannehy’s decision:

[S]hould not be seen as an exoneration.

“There is no dispute that these firings were totally improper and that misleading testimony was given to Congress in an effort to cover them up,” he said.

Except that Dannehy’s report is an exoneration. And she reports that there wasn’t evidence enough to show either false statements by Bush administration witnesses, or any effort to impede Conyers’s and Patrick Leahy’s obnoxious investigations. The report says not a word supporting any “impropriety” -- disputed or undisputed. More than likely, Conyers never read the 5 ½ -page report, any more than he read the health-care bill.

The only portion of the report at all useful to the Democrats comes in the conclusion, undoubtedly written by Assistant AG Weich, where he explains that Dannehy was only asked to investigate “possible criminality,” while AG Eric Holder must hold the God’s-eye perspective of “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in the law enforcement decisions of the Department [of Justice].”

Oof!

This horse shit statement can only be appreciated after we first re-write the above NYT and WaPo headlines to read, “Default in 2006 Voter Intimidation Case Won’t Result in Judgment Against Black Panthers," or, “Justice Dept. won’t pick up free judgment against wrongdoers in 2008 voter intimidation case.”

Unlike Dannehy’s decision in the Gonzalez-era DOJ firings, the Justice decision to scuttle its own case against the New Black Panther Party really wasn’t made on the basis of a lack of evidence, but in spite of uncontroverted evidence. In short, it was a purely political decision.

And then the other day, a whisper of news escaped about how the Department of Homeland Security has been slow-walking Freedom of Information requests, while “senior political advisers” made determinations based on info about requesters it was illegal to ask for -- “such as where they lived, whether they were private citizens or reporters — and about the organizations where they worked. . . .If a member of Congress sought such documents, employees were told to specify Democrat or Republican.” (“AP IMPACT: A political filter for info requests”).

No politicization there.

Enough Audacity of Hope To Hang Themselves

My man Andrew C. McCarthy makes the helpful suggestion to President Obama that enforcing the criminal laws against America’s material supporters of our ally Israel’s destruction may be one way of proving he’s not fibbing about the “special bond” he’s now saying we have with the Jewish state:

Khalidi’s Audacity of Hope

Will Obama enforce the law or was his claimed commitment to Israel a feint?

Earlier this month, hosting Benjamin Netanyahu — the Israeli prime minister he had humiliated back in March — President Obama was at pains to prove he is not hostile to the Jewish state. In fact, he took umbrage at a reporter’s suggestion that his administration is not committed to what he called the “special bond,” America’s relationship with Israel.

Well, here’s his chance to prove that he was serious, that he wasn’t engaged in Alinskyite misdirection.

Obama’s close friend, the rabidly anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi, is back in the news. The former PLO spokesman has signed an appeal for funds to outfit a ship that would join yet another attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. In the last such attempt several weeks back — a contingent of Islamists and radical leftists, perversely identifying themselves as the “peace flotilla” and armed for hand-to-hand combat — carried out a premeditated attack on the Israeli defense force that denied them passage.

Evacuated by Israel in 2005, the Gaza Strip is controlled by Hamas, the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is pledged, by charter, to the violent destruction of Israel. The jihadist organization has been formally designated as an international terrorist under U.S. law since the mid-nineties. Several people have been convicted and imprisoned for coming to its aid, because providing material support to terrorist organizations is a serious crime.

Hamas remains at war with Israel and has continued firing rockets at Israeli civilians. The blockade is thus a legitimate national-defense measure. Still, Israel does not bar humanitarian assistance, which is permitted entry into Gaza after inspection. The blockade prevents material aid to Hamas. It is necessary because Hamas will not renounce terrorism and is incorrigible in its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.

In this regard, Hamas merely echoes Khalidi, a consummate propagandist who frames Israel as an illegitimate, racist, apartheid state. Khalidi has long contended that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegal. He has a right to be wrong about that, of course. But the Columbia academic has no right to violate American law in the service of his political agenda.

With his insider’s understanding of Obama’s views, Khalidi is betting that he will be immune from any legal consequences for his actions. Indeed, if that weren’t clear enough already, Khalidi and other architects of the Gaza gambit plan to call their vessel The Audacity of Hope. That is the title of Barack Obama’s second autobiographical book — a title inspired by Obama’s former pastor of 20 years, the radical black-liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright (whose vitriol, like Khalidi’s, is copiously spewed at Israel).

Khalidi is not alone in his optimism. In addition to his wife, Mona (who is the president of the Arab American Action Network, which Khalidi cofounded), others who’ve signed the statement urging financial contributions to the Gaza voyage include Medea Benjamin (the founder of Code Pink), Angela Davis (the communist professor and former Black Panther Party member), Michael Ratner (head of the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights, which has coordinated representation for jihadists held at Guantanamo Bay and thus worked in league with many lawyers now serving in the Obama Justice Department), Abdeen Jabara (who, along with Lynne Stewart, represented the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, leader of the terror cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993), and many other luminaries representative of the leftist-Islamist connection about which I write in The Grand Jihad.

There is no question that these radicals are conspiring to furnish a ship for the purpose of challenging Israel’s blockade. The statement they have issued is clear: “In the aftermath of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla,” they write, there has been “increased world-wide scrutiny of Israel’s blockade of Gaza.” Gaza, they insist, “is still under siege,” reduced to an “open-air prison under a U.S.-backed Israeli blockade.” Because of this,

We are planning to launch a U.S. boat to Gaza, joining a flotilla of ships from Europe, Canada, India, South Africa and parts of the Middle East due to set sail in September/October of this year. . . . Citizens around the world have responded to the plight of the Palestinian people and are taking action to help break the blockade[.] . . . We in the United States must do our part.

It is an imperative of American law to prevent individual citizens from imperiling the rest of us, and from souring our foreign relations, by conducting their own foreign policy — particularly when it subverts actual U.S. policy or provokes friendly nations. Consequently, the brazen declaration by Khalidi & Co. ought to put several provisions of the federal penal code into play.

For example, Section 962 makes it a crime to furnish or fit out a vessel in the service of any foreign entity “to cruise, or commit hostilities” against a nation with which the U.S. is at peace. Israel is an American ally and the planned voyage is intended for the benefit of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Challenging a blockade — regardless of whether one thinks the blockade complies with the shifting sands of international law — is a hostile act. The boat needn’t embark in order for Khalidi to violate the law; it is a crime to conspire or attempt such a voyage. That is, the law is being violated now.

Read the rest of what McCarthy has to say about this here.

Everybody Talks About the Twitter, But Nobody Does Anything About It

It’s a sign of just how distorted the perceptions of many Americans are right now that a mainstream story about Sarah Palin’s opposition to the triumphalist 9/11 mosque planned for the World Trade Center site is more concerned with her malaprop, “refudiate.”

This is the headline from an online ABC News article by Joel Siegel:

Sarah Palin 'Refudiates' Ground Zero Mosque
Palin Calls on New Yorkers to 'Refudiate' Mosque Near 9/11 Site

In my view, if I’m the average American who has missed hearing about this story at all, the only sane response to this headline is to do a spit take and cry out, “WTF! What do you mean a Ground Zero mosque! What do they mean a “mosque near 9/11 site?”

Instead, I am supposed to be shocked, tickled, or for all I know, outraged, that Sarah Palin said “refudiate” in a damned tweet message.

Burqa’s Law

Comments from MELANIE PHILLIPS on The Corner at NRO:

The French banning of the burqa has provoked near-hysteria in Britain, where government ministers have rushed to say that banning it would be “un-British” and even that it is a “woman’s right” to wear it. But the issue here is not the rights or feelings of the woman beneath it. The point is the threat it represents to everyone else.

Wearing the burqa is not a religious right: Islam merely requires women to be modestly covered. The burqa is an act of religious war. It is a political symbol, designed to intimidate others by sending the most visible signal possible of the presence of those who want to replace secular rule with theocratic Islam.

It is also an act of hostility towards human society. We cannot see the face, expression, and identity of the individual concealed beneath it, whereas she can see everything about us. It thus creates a radical imbalance of power and destroys the basis of equality on which human beings deal with each other.

Countries that have banned the burqa understand that the threat it poses is not just to the women it enslaves but to themselves.

— Melanie Phillips is author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.

Dearborn Supports Crackers!

Crackers of America, Dearborn welcomes you.

My name is T.R., and I am a cracker.

It’s clear from its context that when New Black Panther and Democratic poll watcher King Samir Shabazz talks about crackers, he’s using the most INCLUSIVE sense of that term to make sure all white people are included. He says, “I hate white people – all of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate 'em.”

I actually never heard the term “cracker” until I was well into adulthood, and I never knew it was a racial pejorative. And then I understood it to connote poor Southern whites, and used as a synonym for a redneck, white trash, a hillbilly, etc. Geneo-victimologically speaking (that’s my newly coined term for the scientific study of ancestry for the purpose of pinning down which other group of persecutors owes you the most in reparation payments) my background is working-class Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian. I think both groups have historically been most resentful, for different reasons, of British protestants. Personally, some of my favorite people have been British protestants. So far, no one has paid us any reparations.

But if you’re just judging me by the color of my skin, then I’ll proudly wear the name, “cracker.”

Once again, with absolutely no thanks to the mainstream TV and print media, it’s getting better known that King Samir Shabazz, who used a nightstick to prevent white people from voting against Obama, proudly and loudly declares that he hates all white people.

Why Americans Hate Fractions, or, Is It Halftime in America?

Bob Gorrell/Detroit News

President Barack Obama’s reluctance to identify Islamic terrorism as our enemy is emblematic of the widespread unwillingness of Americans to just do the math that X = Islam.

I blame it on the higher math functions (starting with 2+2 = ?) never being favorites with we Americans, anyway --maybe because they’re a foreign import: one of the multitude ”historic contributions”of the Muslim nations.

Or at least that’s what what they’re teaching my nephew at space camp this summer, along with campfire discussions on the relative effectiveness of wearing the suicide belt inside or outside your space suit.

Real Americans hate fractions; and as for algebra, equations don’t win football games, you pansies! (although those X’s and O’s are useful for illustrating who’s Us and who’s Them when coach does our play diagrams). Or is that the alphabet?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of reading op-ed pages and watching political leaders on the Sunday shows, it’s that there’s no challenge America has ever faced that can’t be restated as a sports metaphor -- the vast bulk of which are football-inspired. I attribute the failure of this very humble blog to gain a wider audience to my sordid failure, in four years, to even once illustrate a single point by mentioning moving the ball down the field, recovering from fumble, needing to get in the game, to huddle up, take one for the team, to throw a Hail Mary pass, or pointing out that we’re down to the fourth quarter and need to throw one into the end zone.

I say the footballl metaphor has always worked -- until now. Here’s the thing. I don’t think the situation we face now can even be reduced to the simplest X and O diagram, because even that requires knowing what team we’re playing.

Come to think of it, some of us don’t even know what team we’re on. I’m no expert, but when our quarterback has the ball, is he supposed to keep throwing it to the other team’s players?

It’s halftime in America, people.
So we have to give 110 percent.
We have to stay focused.
We have to go out and execute.
We have to step up to the next level.
We have to play with intensity.

And always remember that old story that, I think, Knute Rockne, used to tell about when his players tried to take the field, and:

The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?

A Class-Free America Begins with a Class-Free White House

Henry Payne/The Detroit News

Somebody got murdered on New Year's Eve
Somebody said dignity was the first to leave
--Bob Dylan, Dignity

You may have heard about how President Barack Obama used his invitation to speak at a ribbon-cutting at LG Chem in Holland to try to embarrass fellow invitee, Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra. (“Obama touts stimulus, taking shots at Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra”).

Obama welcomed Hoekstra during his opening remarks at the car battery plant here.* At the same moment, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sent a note to reporters pointing out Hoekstra as a “great quote opportunity!” in the audience. Hoekstra has been a vocal critic of the stimulus package -- which provided funding for projects like the battery plant.

“There are some folks who want to go back, who think we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession,” Obama said later in his comments honoring an advanced car battery factory being built by the company LG Chem. “Some made the political calculation that it's better to obstruct than lend a hand. They said no to the tax cuts, they said no to small-business loans, they said no to clean-energy projects. It doesn't stop them from coming to ribbon-cuttings -- but that's okay.”

Hoekstra, interviewed afterward, called Obama's remarks “unpresidential.”

I’d say “unpresidential” captures it nicely.

Cluelessness as to the dignity of the office seems to be a hallmark of recent Democratic chief executives. Carter had to prepare the schedule for the White House tennis courts himself, gave presidential addresses wearing a cardigan, and, DU has it on good authority, conducted all his phone conversations with foreign heads of state while seated in a booster chair.

Clinton sold access to the White House, used the Oval Office for a motel room, and had Arafat in for visits so often Yasser kept his own “World’s Greatest Terrorist” coffee mug in the presidential dishrack. The late Barbara Olson wrote her book, The Final Days, about the abuses in the closing hours of the Clinton presidency, and the Clinton transition team in 2001 made history for vandalizing White House offices on their way out: the GAO reported intentional “damage, theft, vandalism, and pranks,” such as “removing keyboard keys, placing glue on desk drawers and leaving obscene voicemail messages.” (“Clinton Transition Left $15,000 Damage, GAO Says”).

Because of all the bitterness and strife of the Bush years, (and since, thanks to Obama’s never-sleeping White House Office of Predecessor Responsibility) but W. was elected in part on his promise that he would restore dignity to the presidency -- a promise he kept. (Don’t confuse the indignities heaped on him by his enemies -- and the loss of all dignity suffered by those who joined in -- as reflecting on Bush’s dignity. They never have, and never could).

And then Obama was elected, and here we go again. Susan Dale at Human Events provided one summary earlier this year of the new president’s lack of dignity: “ Dignity: You are Undignified and Shameless, Mr. President”, (and she didn’t even have room to mention the escapade with returning Churchill’s bust to the UK).

Then we have the President of the United States talking about whose “ass” he’s going to kick. Obama likes to kick ass. To date Obama’s impressive ass-kicking tally includes BP, the State of Arizona, Wall Street, the insurance industry, American taxpayers, Israel, and the gulf coast oil industry. The tally of American enemies’ asses he’s kicked so far is still at 0. (But his enemy ass-kissing score has so far beat all records!)

On the scale of unpresidential actions by our chief executive Obama sniping at Pete Hoekstra hardly even ranks. Not when Ahmedinejad and Saudi King Abdullah are laughing at us.
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*The battery plant is an Obama Money green initiative, receiving $300 million in stimulus funds or tax breaks. The batteries will power cars like the Chevrolet Volt, which will take you 340 miles on a single charge -- miraculously economical before you factor in the $5 per mile taxpayer subsidy.

Jihad in Orbit, Or: 'Can You Read Me, Submission Control?'

“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things," NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." (“NASA’s new mission: Building ties to the Muslim world”).

Fly Mo to the Moon
(to the melody of “Fly Me to the Moon,” with plenty of Rat Pack “wow”)

Fly Mo to the moon
Let’s help him pray among the stars
Let them know the muezzin's wail
On Jupiter and Mars

In other words -- kiss the hand
In other words -- sweet submission

Let’s all sing again
How Mo’s zeroes were the best
And now Mo’s close to zero in
His countdown on the West

In other words -- please give in
In other words -- man, we’re through!