Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn says that a mass murder apparently isn’t reason enough to cause the Army to use common sense in assessing diversity.
…Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?
The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.
“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez,” to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage. …
In Forbes, Tunku Varadarajan ends with practical processes that the Army should follow in order to keep soldiers and citizens safe.
…The PC–political correctness–problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army’s mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the “don’t-jump-to-conclusions” mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.
So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.
Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.
Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.
Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.
David Warren comments on the political correctness that aided in the act of terrorism.
…There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn’t), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, “Muslims should stand up against the aggressor.” Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue? …
…Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media’s clichéd presentation of the “tragedy of a man in despair.”
This deadly enemy of the West — the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination — is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this…
…It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst. …
Karl Rove looks at Obama’s sliding poll numbers.
…That’s only the beginning of Mr. Axelrod’s problems. If the 2010 midterms are nationalized, they will be a referendum on Mr. Obama’s increasingly unpopular policies. For example, in the newest Gallup survey released on Monday, only 29% say they’d advise their congressman to vote for the health-care bill. This is down from 40% last month. A Rasmussen poll out this week shows that 42% of Americans strongly oppose the bill, while only 25% strongly favor it. …
…High unemployment and the president’s low approval on jobs and the economy (which is at 46% in a CNN/Opinion Research poll released last week), won’t by themselves sink Democrats. But what will hurt are the beliefs that Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill was a flop and that he doesn’t know how to speed up the economic recovery.
Mr. Obama’s approval on handling the deficit in the CNN/Opinion Research survey is now 39%. The president’s plans to triple the deficit over the next decade is causing a level of angst among independents that we haven’t seen since Ross Perot ran for president in the 1990s. This angst has given Republicans a four-point lead in Gallup’s generic ballot (48% to 44%), putting the party in a better position than it was in spring 1994, just a few months before its historic takeover of Congress. …
Victor Davis Hanson posts in the Corner about the issues Bush inherited. And he didn’t whine about it.
George W. Bush inherited a recession. He also inherited the Iraq no-fly zones, a Middle East boiling after the failed last-minute Clintonian rush for an imposed peace, an intelligence community wedded to the notion of Saddam’s WMD proliferation, a Congress on record supporting “regime change” in Iraq, a WMD program in Libya, a Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Osama bin Laden enjoying free rein in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a renegade Pakistan that had gone nuclear on Clinton’s watch with Dr. Khan in full export mode, and a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole).
In other words, Bush inherited the regular “stuff” that confronts most presidents when they take office. What is strange is that Obama has established a narrative that he, supposedly unlike any other president, inherited a mess.
At some point, Team Obama might have at least acknowledged that, by January 2009, Iraq was largely quiet; Libya was free of WMD; Syria was out of Lebanon; most of the al-Qaeda leadership had been attrited or was in hiding; a homeland-security protocol was in place to deal with domestic terror plots; European governments were mostly friendly to the U.S. (unlike during the Chirac-Schröder years); and the U.S. enjoyed good relations with one-third of the planet in China and India.
The fact that in the Bush years we were increasingly disliked by Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Kim Jong Il, Morales, Ortega, and Putin, may in retrospect seem logical, just as their current warming to the U.S. may prove to be cause for alarm, given the repugnant nature of these strongmen. …
John Stossel explains that the current problems we have with health care are caused by the government.
…Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to “homeowners” who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance. …
…Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that’s impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won’t talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?
Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians’ refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won’t solve our problems.
Freedom will.
Walter Williams, in Townhall, discusses Congress’ unconstitutional attempts to control society.
…Speaker Pelosi’s constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It’s not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress’ health care proposals. It’s not a matter of whether you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It’s a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue.
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it authorize Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance? If Congress gets away with forcing us to buy health insurance, down the line, what else will they force us to buy; or do you naively think they will stop with health insurance? We shouldn’t think that the cure to Congress’ unconstitutional heavy-handedness will end if we only elect Republicans. Republicans have demonstrated nearly as much constitutional contempt as have Democrats. The major difference is the significant escalation of that contempt under today’s Democratically controlled Congress and White House with the massive increase in spending, their proposed legislation and the appointment of tyrannical czars to control our lives. It’s a safe bet that if and when Republicans take over the Congress and White House, they will not give up the massive increase in control over our lives won by the Democrats.
In each new session of Congress since 1995, John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a measure “To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.” The highest number of co-sponsors it has ever had in the House of Representatives is 54 and it has never had co-sponsors in the Senate until this year, when 22 senators signed up. The fact that less than 15 percent of the Congress supports such a measure demonstrates the kind of contempt our elected representatives have for the rules of the game — our Constitution. …
In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. argues for less prison time for nonviolent offenders. Another unintended consequence of the drug war.
The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.
But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it’s a running sore that rarely generates dramatic “news.” That is our criminal-justice system’s incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.
Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men — many of them fathers — to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.) …
The Economist reports on the growing deer problem in the U. S.
Mark Steyn says that a mass murder apparently isn’t reason enough to cause the Army to use common sense in assessing diversity.
…Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?
The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.
“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez,” to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage. …
In Forbes, Tunku Varadarajan ends with practical processes that the Army should follow in order to keep soldiers and citizens safe.
…The PC–political correctness–problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army’s mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the “don’t-jump-to-conclusions” mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.
So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.
Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.
Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.
Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.
David Warren comments on the political correctness that aided in the act of terrorism.
…There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn’t), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, “Muslims should stand up against the aggressor.” Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue? …
…Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media’s clichéd presentation of the “tragedy of a man in despair.”
This deadly enemy of the West — the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination — is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this…
…It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst. …
Karl Rove looks at Obama’s sliding poll numbers.
…That’s only the beginning of Mr. Axelrod’s problems. If the 2010 midterms are nationalized, they will be a referendum on Mr. Obama’s increasingly unpopular policies. For example, in the newest Gallup survey released on Monday, only 29% say they’d advise their congressman to vote for the health-care bill. This is down from 40% last month. A Rasmussen poll out this week shows that 42% of Americans strongly oppose the bill, while only 25% strongly favor it. …
…High unemployment and the president’s low approval on jobs and the economy (which is at 46% in a CNN/Opinion Research poll released last week), won’t by themselves sink Democrats. But what will hurt are the beliefs that Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill was a flop and that he doesn’t know how to speed up the economic recovery.
Mr. Obama’s approval on handling the deficit in the CNN/Opinion Research survey is now 39%. The president’s plans to triple the deficit over the next decade is causing a level of angst among independents that we haven’t seen since Ross Perot ran for president in the 1990s. This angst has given Republicans a four-point lead in Gallup’s generic ballot (48% to 44%), putting the party in a better position than it was in spring 1994, just a few months before its historic takeover of Congress. …
Victor Davis Hanson posts in the Corner about the issues Bush inherited. And he didn’t whine about it.
George W. Bush inherited a recession. He also inherited the Iraq no-fly zones, a Middle East boiling after the failed last-minute Clintonian rush for an imposed peace, an intelligence community wedded to the notion of Saddam’s WMD proliferation, a Congress on record supporting “regime change” in Iraq, a WMD program in Libya, a Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Osama bin Laden enjoying free rein in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a renegade Pakistan that had gone nuclear on Clinton’s watch with Dr. Khan in full export mode, and a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole).
In other words, Bush inherited the regular “stuff” that confronts most presidents when they take office. What is strange is that Obama has established a narrative that he, supposedly unlike any other president, inherited a mess.
At some point, Team Obama might have at least acknowledged that, by January 2009, Iraq was largely quiet; Libya was free of WMD; Syria was out of Lebanon; most of the al-Qaeda leadership had been attrited or was in hiding; a homeland-security protocol was in place to deal with domestic terror plots; European governments were mostly friendly to the U.S. (unlike during the Chirac-Schröder years); and the U.S. enjoyed good relations with one-third of the planet in China and India.
The fact that in the Bush years we were increasingly disliked by Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Kim Jong Il, Morales, Ortega, and Putin, may in retrospect seem logical, just as their current warming to the U.S. may prove to be cause for alarm, given the repugnant nature of these strongmen. …
John Stossel explains that the current problems we have with health care are caused by the government.
…Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to “homeowners” who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance. …
…Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that’s impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won’t talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?
Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians’ refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won’t solve our problems.
Freedom will.
Walter Williams, in Townhall, discusses Congress’ unconstitutional attempts to control society.
…Speaker Pelosi’s constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It’s not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress’ health care proposals. It’s not a matter of whether you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It’s a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue.
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it authorize Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance? If Congress gets away with forcing us to buy health insurance, down the line, what else will they force us to buy; or do you naively think they will stop with health insurance? We shouldn’t think that the cure to Congress’ unconstitutional heavy-handedness will end if we only elect Republicans. Republicans have demonstrated nearly as much constitutional contempt as have Democrats. The major difference is the significant escalation of that contempt under today’s Democratically controlled Congress and White House with the massive increase in spending, their proposed legislation and the appointment of tyrannical czars to control our lives. It’s a safe bet that if and when Republicans take over the Congress and White House, they will not give up the massive increase in control over our lives won by the Democrats.
In each new session of Congress since 1995, John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a measure “To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.” The highest number of co-sponsors it has ever had in the House of Representatives is 54 and it has never had co-sponsors in the Senate until this year, when 22 senators signed up. The fact that less than 15 percent of the Congress supports such a measure demonstrates the kind of contempt our elected representatives have for the rules of the game — our Constitution. …
In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. argues for less prison time for nonviolent offenders. Another unintended consequence of the drug war.
The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.
But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it’s a running sore that rarely generates dramatic “news.” That is our criminal-justice system’s incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.
Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men — many of them fathers — to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.) …
The Economist reports on the growing deer problem in the U. S.