Sunday, January 23, 2011

Steyn and Coulter

Just wanted to highlight two of the people I believe are the most enjoyable and capable voices for political conservatism in the media today. I am simply going to provide the links to their websites and a few quotes from them to give you a sampling of their work. I hope they prove as entertaining and informing for you as they have been for me.
Ann Coulter
MUD LIBEL
January 19, 2011


The same people who had blamed Sarah Palin for the massacre at the Tucson Safeway and then taunted her for her "silence" were enraged when she responded.

Last Tuesday, the night before Palin responded, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann mocked Palin's silence throughout his show:

-- "And why is the ever self-promoting Miss Palin so quiet?"

-- "And it's quiet, isn't it?"

-- "It's too quiet."

-- "The silence is deafening from the great Northwest."

It was deemed an admission of guilt that she hadn't spoken about the Tucson shooting or denied the accusations that she had inspired the shooter.

The next day, Palin posted a video response, and Keith immediately attacked her for "the worst timed political statement ever." It's almost as if liberals would attack Palin whatever she did.

Olbermann sneered about Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel," scoffing, "This, to Sarah Palin, is analogous to what is happening to her." No, not only happening to her, but to all right-wingers, tea partiers, Republican politicians, and conservative radio and TV hosts -- all of whom have been accused of complicity in murder.

On the day of the Arizona massacre, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva blamed the "Palin express." The father of Gabrielle Giffords, one of the victims, blamed "the whole Tea Party." The sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, who had failed to lock Loughner up despite repeated arrests and other contacts, blamed "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business." (Dumbnik also said: "We're not convinced that he acted alone.")

A comment on Gawker the day of the attack said: "Palin ... you now have more than just elk blood on your hands."

The next day, New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly wrote, with stunning originality: "Palin may have the blood of more than some poor caribou on her hands." (See -- he changed "elk" to "caribou.")

In an especially prissy "Special Comment" the night of the shooting, Olbermann said that if Sarah Palin "does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics." Ditto for Rep. Allen West, ex-candidate Sharron Angle, Rep. Giffords' opponent Jesse Kelly and "the Tea Party leaders."

In response to the Arizona shooting, the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, banned state employees from going on talk radio, telling reporters he had been a victim of rhetorical violence himself, citing the title of one of my columns from four years ago: "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln."

In that four-year-old column, I supported Chafee's opponent in the Republican primary by pointing out that "the only person who hasn't figured out that Lincoln Chafee is a Democrat is Lincoln Chafee. As the expression goes, if Chafee switched parties, the average IQ on both sides of the aisle would go up."

My column got results: Chafee is no longer a Republican.

But the column did not produce my secret goal, which the governor has now exposed: That John Wilkes Booth return from the dead to stalk people named "Lincoln."

Yes, the governor of Rhode Island is afraid of 19th-century assassins. Whatever you do, Lincoln, don't look under the bed!

After it came out that the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was a liberal pothead who hated Christianity, laughed about aborted babies, never listened to talk radio, hated George Bush and cited "Mein Kampf" as one of his favorite books to annoy his Jewish mother, liberals suspended blaming "political rhetoric" for about two days. Then they went right back to blaming conservatives for the shooting.

The media continue to avoid giving any details and simply announce that Loughner was "anti-government," implying that he's your standard George Will conservative who believes Congress has offended the principles of federalism by encroaching on the states' authority under the Constitution.

In fact, Loughner's "anti-government" beliefs consist of: burning the American flag on video; denouncing our currency with the exclamation, "No! I won't trust in God!"; and wanting to kill cops.

His other big anti-government position is that he believes the government was behind 9/11 -- just like well-known tea partiers Rosie O'Donnell, Obama's "green jobs" czar Van Jones, Rehab habitue Charlie Sheen and left-wing historian Howard Zinn.

If we're looking for a rationale other than "Loughner was nuts," I think the more relevant facts about him are that he was an atheist who detested religion and religious people, made lots of references to satanic New Age "conscience dreaming" (sic) and was involved in the occult.

When a fellow participant on a UFO website wrote a lengthy response to Loughner's question about "what is wrong or right with the current date?" which included the subordinate clause, "a day in Christ is as a thousand years," Loughner fixated on that one line, railing, "I won't listen to that fictitious crap without the author. This is laughable to notice a gospel or writing related to Christ."

Shouldn't we at least bring Bill Maher in for questioning?

This was her latest article posted on her web site. anncoulter.com

Mark Steyn
The Sharia Squad

Steynposts
Sunday, 30 May 2010
A few years back, a propos Salman Rushdie, I wrote:
The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject - and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.
One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "f--- off, or I'll arrest you."
A decade and a half after the Rushdie hit contract, Islamic supremacists decided enough with the legalistic fatwa stuff, let's just kill the guy in the street:
To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh's murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words "Thou shalt not kill". But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape.
A couple of years later, it was the Danish cartoons:
There was a photograph from one of the early Muslim demonstrations in London that I cut out and kept: a masked protester promising to behead the enemies of Islam, and standing shoulder to shoulder with him two Metropolitan Police officers, dispatched by the state to protect him and enable him to incite the murder of others.
I think this is what old-school coppers would call a pattern of behavior. This weekend, the blogger Blazing Cat Fur went along to an anti-Netanyahu protest at Palestine House, a taxpayer-funded den of Jew-hating genocidal eliminationists. He was assaulted by Ali Mallah, local heavy from the Canadian Union of Public Employees and Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation. The Toronto Sun's Michael Coren takes up the story:
Surely this isn’t legal – at least not in countries where Sharia Law doesn’t apply. The bully then told the police that the awful man with the camera was a racist and the cop told the blogger to “keep things peaceful.” Surely this officer should be reminded of the law and that a man who crosses the road to insult and threaten another person is the one not keeping things peaceful.
I'm afraid Mr Coren's view of law enforcement is hopelessly outmoded. The enforcers of the modern "tolerant" "multicultural" society will tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, but they won't tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. From Rushdie to van Gogh to the Motoons, law enforcement has guarded the thugs and harrassed those who draw attention to the thuggery. This is PC policing: There are identity groups who merit the solicitude of the constabulary, and there are the rest of you who don't. Mass Muslim immigration will impose severe strains on the Euro-Canadian welfare states in the years ahead. In increasingly fractious societies, the police will be out in force - upholding not the law but the dopiest fatuities of the multiculti delusion.

This is a blog post from Steyn last summer. His web address is marksteyn.com.

Both Coulter’s and Steyn’s web addresses will have a permanent home under the section listing my political links. Hope you’ll avail yourself of their insights and talents.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Violence and its causes

I want to talk about the current story out of Tuscon, Arizona. I want to dialogue with any and all who have views about the act AND especially the political fallout that seeks to assign blame. I want to dialogue with those who agree with my take on these events, BUT even more so, I want to have a conversation with those who do NOT agree with my views about these issues. Hope there are lots interested in discussing it. Thanks. Dennis.

Sunday, January 02, 2011

New Year's Prayer

I used to be fairly deeply troubled by a passage that is found in the gospels.

"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Matthew 10:36-38

I remember sensing that even if the basic nature of what Christ was saying here was true, it still seemed a bit harsh to force me to be CERTAIN that I did not love my father, mother, son, or daughter, etc. more than I loved Jesus. I simply chose to let this objection go because of His overwhelming display of love and power, but it still occasionally resurfaced in my mind.

Finally, I had a moment of clarity one day, and this insight came to me about this scripture from some of my own experiences.

What does it look like to love your closest family members(spouse, parent, child, etc.) or friends more than Christ? When looking back, I see lapses in the intensity of my love for Him. Whenever that happens, guess who consistently pays the most immediate price for my lull in love? It often seems to be those closest to me. I become a much more self-centered person. And without fail, those who reap the greatest benefit to my increase in consistency and intensity regarding my love for Christ are those closest to me as well. Why is this?

Psalm 119:32 states, "I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart!"

I believe that this is the key. God enlarges our CAPACITY to love others when we seek Him FIRST! I can never love my family or friends or anyone else in my own strength as much as I can love them by way of His strength. Therefore, if I love them more than Jesus, I love them less. However, if I place Christ first, He enables me to love them more than I could have otherwise been capable of on my own.

Therefore, my prayer for 2011 is simply this,

"Dear Lord, enlarge my heart. Give me a greater capacity to express your love to those I'm closest to AND to those who I don't know at all."