Last-day-of-2015 roundup

In keeping with one of the year's major themes, the rot of the post-American university continues apace:

Oregon State University will hold four racially-exclusive “Social Justice Retreats” focusing on “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and “institutional racism” in the first month of 2016 alone.

During the weekend of January 8-10, the university will have two retreats — one specifically for white students, “Examining White Identity in a Multicultural World,” and “Racial Aikido,” which is specifically for non-white students.

According to the university website, the white students’ retreat will focus on “white privilege,” while the retreat for non-white students will seek to “empower students of color.”

The US State Department has drawn up a list of its "achievements" for the year that indicates level of lunacy that blows up the whole notion of diplomacy and statecraft as those terms have been conventionally understood for millennia.

 . . . the list was inspired by a note-to-staff from Kerry, "summing up a busy year and charting the course ahead." That led Kirby to draw up his list, to which he added the gimmick of "a great hashtag -- which was recently trending on Twitter" -- #2015in5words (as it happens, this hashtag has chiefly become a magnet for five-word comic variations on 2015 being the year in which "everyone was offended by everything" -- but never mind).

Thus do we have State's self-laudatory list of "The Year-in-Review: Pivotal Foreign Policy Moments of 2015." Each moment is summed up in five words with an accompanying paragraph and video clip, meant to show "significant success across a range of issues."

Actually, what most of this list suggests, to interpret it kindly, is that the State Department has decamped from Planet Earth and is by now operating in an alternate universe. This is alarming because the rest of us are pretty much stuck with the real-world fallout.

Ready for the items themselves? Bringing peace and security to Syria, winning the fight against violent extremists, the ensuring of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program, re-establishing of diplomatic relations with Cuba, the strongest climate change agreement ever negotiated.

Those are the biggies. State also pats itself on the back for these giant strides forward into the Age of Unicorns and Rainbows:

The State Department is pleased to remind us that in 2015 Kerry formally assumed the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, promising to protect Arctic ecosystems. Kerry also attended a conference in Chile on the oceans, to which he is personally devoted. And at the UN General Assembly, the U.S. committed itself to ambitious new UN global development goals, with Obama assuring the UN eminences that they could count on the generosity of the American people. The past year also brought diplomatic agreement on a Trans-Pacific trade deal so lengthy and complex that analysts are still debating whether on balance it would encourage or throttle free markets.

Your tax dollars pay these maniacs' salaries.

And here's why we call 'em Freedom-Haters, folks: the Federal Register was swelled with a record number of new regulations in 2015.  81,611 pages worth.

Yes, countries routinely spy on even their allies, and the Most-Equal Comrade's nomenklatura obviously wanted to know what Israel was up to in the run-up to the surrender to Iran. But well after post-America was certain that Israel was not going to employ force to take out Iran's nuke program, you still had these shenanigans going on:

Netanyahu’s discussions with members of Congress on a policy dispute between Congress and the president do not qualify as foreign intelligence. Destroying this kind of information should not have been a close call for NSA. Congress should immediately ask NSA director Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to verify the Journal story and explain why intercepts of private discussions of members of Congress were provided to the White House. If this did happen, both officials should resign.

Second, the White House bears significant responsibility for this scandal. By encouraging and accepting this intelligence, the White House used the NSA as an illegitimate means to undermine its legislative opponents. This represented a major abuse of presidential power, since it employed the enormous capabilities of an American intelligence service against the U.S. Congress. It also probably violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation-of-powers principles and the Fourth Amendment, since surveillance may have been conducted against U.S. citizens without a warrant.

 ISIS has an ambitious agenda for the coming year, per Gulf-based analyst Dr. Theodore Karasik:

 . . . hundreds of sleeper cells in “dozens of countries” will mobilise in an unprecedented bid to spark a huge military retaliation in the Middle East, according to one of the world’s leading authorities on the death cult.

The claim comes as fears grow of a New Year’s Eve terror plot in London and other major European cities including Paris and Brussels cancel or curtail their traditional celebrations to say farewell to the year.

And it's official. Cos faces a felony assault charge. Another one of those stories that brings full circle a point of focus from early in the year, when post-America could no longer deny that the spinner of tales about Weird Harold and Fat Albert, the man who ate Jell-O pudding on TV commercials with grinning rug rats, the wise and even-tempered Dr. Cliff Huxtable, was a doper and rapist of scores of young women. Should have perhaps seen this as a possibility with his frequent appearances at Hefner's parties, but that other side of him was so compelling.

And that is maybe the overarching theme of this year that has mere hours to exist as present time: the post-American cattle-masses will apparently swallow any blob of hooey, no matter how patently preposterous.

Will 2016 be the year of the Great Wising Up?  LITD is not betting the rent.

Still not bringing what's necessary to the war for America's soul

I'm thinking about an assessment that LITD made this year that was flat-out mistaken: That Paul Ryan was going to work out fine as House Speaker.

In my piece, I relied heavily on an American Spectator endorsement of Ryan by Ross Kaminsky. He knows him personally, and convincingly vouched for his conservative bona fides.

And, to be sure, an argument for mitigating circumstances surrounding the passage of the omnibus spending bill can be made. There was a time crunch. Much of the bill's structure was baked in due to the process underway before Ryan had assumed his post.

But there was not even any indication of a tone of disgust or anger. No statement, before signing onto it, along the lines of, "I hate that this bill funds the murder of fetal Americans and the sale of their organs. I hate that it squanders taxpayers' money on windmill subsidies. I hate that it continues to give a pass to illegal aliens. Circumstances being what they are, it is passing and will go to the President's desk, but in the next microsecond, the fight to reverse this kind of evil begins in earnest."

Couldn't we have at least expected something like that?

Let alone actually fighting before the signing, blowing up the whole process, breaking down appropriations into department-by-department packages, as is actually how it's supposed to be done, and sending each one to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, knowing full well the Most Equal Comrade would veto it?

Oh, but that would risk a - hold on for it - government shutdown - and Beltway Pubs have already promised that that weapon will never be found in their quiver.

Which brings me to a concern I expressed in another post more recently - that all Pub prez candidates not named Donald Trump would take an above-the-fray stance in regard to Hillionaire's continued feminist pose, even as she sends her Cosbyesque husband out on the campaign trail.

Indeed, we now see my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, doing exactly that:

Ted Cruz says he won’t use former President Bill Clinton’s political liabilities against Democratic presidential contender and former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

“I am not interested in getting into personal attacks and innuendo,” he said Tuesday at a news conference in Cisco. “Hillary Clinton’s biggest liability is that her policies are a disaster.”

New York businessman Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the Republican race for president, has used Twitter to black Bill Clinton as abusive to women.

“If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!” Mr. Trump said Monday via Twitter.

Cruz says he won’t engage in such attacks.

Instead, he outlined how he would contrast himself with Clinton, should he get the Republican nomination for president.

Look, this is an admirable position for Cruz to take. But consider another factor we ignore at our own peril: It is late December 2015, a dark, grim ugly time in a gravely imperiled, once-great nation. 

Just like the maxim that you don't take a government shutdown off the table when talking about budget considerations, you don't take sexual behavior off the table when talking about defeating the Clintons.

And, as with so much - from an understanding of the Constitution, to basic articulateness, to, yes, gentlemanly behavior -  Cruz is astronomically better suited to wage such a fight than Squirrel-Hair, he of the serial mistresses-turned-into-wives.

This is what is driving the enraged post-American populace into the arms of this narcissistic charlatan: the deep thirst for someone who understands how savage the war for America's soul is and is going to get.

If this nation is going to be worth salvaging, it's only because there was an identifiable good side in the war.

Yes, Squirrel-Hair is willing to pull the trigger, to get as ugly as the bad guys. Do we actual conservatives have such a general, such a chief executive, among us? A Sherman, a Truman?

We'd better. God will not bless any other kind of victory over the Democrats, and we'll remain as hosed as we are with this nation's throat in their grip.

This is what LITD means by being proactive

Don't leave the field open to a non-conservative blowhard to state upfront what all conservatives should have come out of the gate with as a key component of their agendas:

Speaking with Fox News host Chris Wallace this weekend, 2016 GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump made a remarkable statement about what he planned for the Department of Education, if and when he becomes president.

“I may cut Department of Education,” Trump said. “I believe Common Core is a very bad thing. I believe that we should be — you know, educating our children from Iowa, from New Hampshire, from South Carolina, from California, from New York. I think that it should be local education.”

Many Americans agree, especially as the Department of Education has grown into a massive bureaucracy more focused on indoctrinating students in the Islamic faith and “white privilege” than in actually teaching them things that matter, like, say, literature and math.

You real conservatives have such better chops in terms of applying principles to issues like this one. Someone on your staffs should have foreseen that the matter of DoE's existence might come up.

Now, you're all reduced to rushing in to fill the vacuum, to engaging in me-too-ism.

Think of everything that constitutes your set of core principles. And get out front. Don't wait one microsecond, or Squirrel-Hair will be at the front of the line.

Squirrel-Hair changes his tune - today's edition

So S-H goes after the Manchester Union-Leader's publisher in the wake of the paper endorsing another candidate (Christie). A fairly true-to-type move. But consider what he's had to say about McQuaid in the recent past:

To be sure, the Union Leader’s endorsement usually boosts a candidate (though not in 2008). However, failing to obtain that paper’s blessing can hardly be viewed as much of a setback. And even if it were, the proper response of a candidate to this or any other such “snub” is a shrug of the shoulders, if that.

But Donald Trump isn’t the shoulder shrugging kind. He’s all about winning. Thus, in a sneak preview of what a Trump presidency would look like, he is lashing out. And not just against the Union Leader (which endorsed Chris Christie) but also at South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy who had audacity to endorse Marco Rubio.

In New Hampshire, Trump has called Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid a “lowlife” and “just a bad guy.” McQuaid says Trump’s attack is merely a product of the paper’s position on his candidacy:

He says our newspaper is failing and I am ‘absolutely terrible,’ yet six months ago, in June, he said we were all ‘terrific,’

According to the Union Leader, Trump said in June that “The Union Leader, by the way, they’ve been so fair to me, and they are terrific, and Mr. McQuaid is a fantastic man.” 

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Trey Gowdy is experiencing the wrath of Donald. Almost immediately after Gowdy endorsed Rubio, Trump tweeted:

Face it, Trey Gowdy failed miserably on Benghazi. He allowed it to drag out and in the end, let Hillary get away with murder.

He added, “My prediction on the Trey Gowdy endorsement of Rubio is that it will do nothing for Rubio and finish Gowdy.”
In late July, however, Trump tweeted that Gowdy would be his pick for Attorney General. To be sure, this tweet predated the Benghazi hearings. But what would it say about Trump’s judgment if the man he tabbed for Attorney General turned out a few months later to be a miserable failure in such an important event as the Benghazi hearings?

And what would it say about the Republican Party if it were to nominate a thin-skinned, vindictive, inconstant jerk for president? A President Trump would make Richard Nixon seem easygoing, lighthearted, and non-threatening. 

Still somebody in that bleak, grim land known as post-America still loves S-H, to the point of showing up at his rallies to fist-pump, to cheerlead for him in all caps in comment threads, and put him over the top on all polls.

We end this year on a pretty terrifying note.

The jackboots stop at nothing - today's edition

The God-hating totalitarian nature-obliterators will empty out your bank account without even telling you:

Melissa Klein was checking her bank accounts just a few weeks before Christmas when her face turned ashen. The money was gone – every single penny.

Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries had confiscated all the cash in Mrs. Klein’s checking account and savings account as well as a special account set aside for their church tithe.

Yes, friends – the state of Oregon stole money meant for our Lord.

Mrs. Klein and her husband, Aaron, are devout evangelical Christians who own a mom-and-pop bakery – Sweet Cakes By Melissa.
In July, they were ordered to pay more than $135,000 in damages to a lesbian couple after they refused to bake their wedding cake. The Kleins objected because of their religious beliefs.
The judgment was awarded to the lesbians for “emotional suffering.”
Just a few weeks before Christmas, Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian wiped out the Klein family’s bank accounts – taking nearly $7,000.

You will be made to comply. You will be made to turn your back on your God.

 

While Donald Trump is disgusting, he can teach us an important lesson

Something interesting - actually a few layers of things that are interesting - occurs to me as I read about how Squirrel-Hair is unreservedly diving into the heart of the matter by responding to Hillionaire's remark about S-H's "penchant for sexism" and her campaign's trotting out of Billy Jeff the Zipper as the effective weapon of the moment.

First of all, S-H is not wrong. In fact, it's pretty obvious that BJ the Z is an ill-advised poster boy for a mature and gentlemanly view of women.

Secondly, the question is raised, mainly because Trumpbot comment-threaders are already insisting that it be raised, as to whether any other Pub candidate would be willing to go there. The sexism-charge was levied at S-H, not any other candidate, and so we can't be 100 percent sure. But there is a high likelihood that any of them, even the most scrappy (here think Ted Cruz) would try to give it the let's-strive-for-dignity-and-a-substantive-discussion-of-actual-issues spin.

And this brings up a disturbing question: Are we now in the Age of Red Meat, where the most admirable trait a candidate can exhibit is to immediately respond to any personal affront with maximum vociferousness, to stomp on anyone who begins a political food fight with an unproductive distraction about something like identity politics, to use such an instance as an opportunity to demonstrate one's scorched-earth chops?

This is a question about which LITD has some skin in the game. In the course of this post, I have so far used the monikers Hillionaire, Billy Jeff the Zipper and Squirrel-Hair. Longtime readers are also familiar with my use of the synonym Freedom-Haters for Democrats, and their leftist cultural endorsers, of the synonym Most Equal Comrade for Barack Obama. But in each of these cases, great care was given to making sure that the newly-coined term did in fact productively provoke someone hearing it or reading it to consider what the person or phenomenon in question was really all about.


But there we are. Once again, S-H has addressed the public's deep thirst for an unvarnished addressing of plain truths before us.

The sad thing about it is that it did not come from a real conservative. But at this late date, that is not what mainly matters to the supremely frustrated post-American voter.

So the lesson, late as it is for real conservatives  to be learning it, is that we live in raw, crude times much as we've been trying to stave off since the birth of our modern movement. It is what it is. If the point is winning, you must be able to speak forthrightly about BJ the Z's track record as one who thinks of women as sexual playthings, if BJ's "wife" is going to trot him out as a campaign weapon.

Hesitate to do so, and you leave the field wide open to narcissistic blowhards who not only are not conservative, but don't have the best of track records when it comes to dealing with women themselves.

You can't wage this war on an idealized battlefield.

We win or lose in the real world.

Ultimately, only one real banner-carrier of what we're looking for

In early December I did a year-in-review podcast, mostly covering the enraging, despair-inducing, frustrating, disgusting and embarrassing developments on the cultural, economic, legal, political, and world-affairs fronts. To be sure, I included a few uplifting gems. Who wouldn't, given how conspicuous they are in such a grim twelve-month period?

I said that there would surely be more developments as the last two thirds of December unfolded, and indeed there have been. The regime that currently has its grip on the throat of post-America seems completely disinclined to do anything about Iran's two sanctions-violating missile tests this fall. ISIS is making and handing out fake, but extremely authentic-looking, passports to the jihadists embedded in the flow of migrants from the Middle East to Europe. Paul Ryan has shown himself to be afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, and hence as utterly worthless as his predecessor as House speaker, or his Senate counterpart. The Republican party is busting up all over the place. Franklin Graham has left it. Bill Kristol is seeking support for a third-party run by a conservative if Squirrel-Hair gets the Pub nomination. Perhaps most frustrating of all is the conflating, in some quarters, with concern about S-H with some kind of Establishment displeasure at both Cruz and S-H, when that is not what is going on at all.

Then there is that mouth of Squirrel-Hair's, out of which fly seemingly randomly generated attempts at responses to political developments or direct questions from interviewers. There is, of course, the little dust-up over "schlonged," which consumed the better part of the most recent news cycle. And then there is his observation on Hillionaire's absence from her podium at the latest Freedom-Hater debate. Said absence was a number of things - self-centered, imperious, maybe even the kind of occurrence that could raise questions about continence issues - but, for crying out loud, on what basis was it "disgusting"? (Jonah Goldberg has the best take I've seen on this so far: "Mr. Trump has aides that go to the bathroom for him; he's that rich.")

But the one that concerns me most is his response to a question from Joe Scarborough over the mutual-admiration society that seems to have been formed between S-H and Putin. When Scarborough asked if the fact that Putin has had people killed bothered him at all, S-H replied "There's a lot of killing that goes on in the world. We do a lot of killing.")

No one seriously takes this as an indication that S-H has gone all Howard Zinn. I'd say there's a decent chance he's never even heard of Zinn. (And when that Marxist "historian's" life and work were explained to him, he'd no doubt say: "Zinn's a dummy. And this People's History book of his, terrible, terrible.")What it is, though, is an indication of the recklessness he'd bring to the office of President.

Two sober voices in recent weeks - former Congressman and current talk-show host Joe Walsh, and Democrat pollster Pat Cadell - have openly floated the possibility that post-America is on the verge of revolution.

So we are situated in a once-great nation in which totalitarians, narcissists, unabashed opportunists, and skinny little wonks without the first molecule of fierceness or urgency (stemming from the fact that the principles comprising the cores of their worldview are inadequate to a world as dark as ours) hold sway and champions of that which is immutable and unfailingly good appear to have no power at all.

Which brings us to the fact that this is Christmas Eve. It raises the question, as it has every year for over two thousand, just who is adequate, in all circumstances, no matter how daunting, to be that champion? Who is immune to ever getting confused, or succumbing to intimidation, or having his judgement clouded by short-term self-interest?

There is only One. You won't find Him on cable news, or onstage at a summit of the relatively right-minded, or at an Iowa coffee shop, or on the pages of any opinion journal.

And LITD lifts up a heartfelt prayer to Him: Heal this chaos, Lord. Let us see the possibility of a world with more light. If it be your Father's will, may we be spared the fate that looks most likely to befall us.

Amen.

Why we call them jackboots - today's edition

The Human Rights Campaign wants to sic the gummint on schools that are exercising their right to be structured as they see fit:

The 1972 Title IX amendments prohibiting sex discrimination in hiring, housing, and employment at schools receiving federal funds is at issue. The law allows religious schools to opt out of the requirements.

On the heels of their huge Supreme Court win in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision mandating homosexual marriage coast to coast, the radical LGBT establishment is looking for their next win. They believe they have found it in going after religious companies and employers who may hold that accepting a normalization of the homosexual agenda is against their religious beliefs.

Though the 1972 law has nothing to do with homosexual identity, homosexual activity, or so-called transsexuality, the $50 million-a-year Human Rights Campaign is nonetheless asking the federal government to put pressure on any school that has asked for or received such an exemption.

According to a recent report issued by the group, which has a history of targeting Christians, 56 schools have been granted religious freedom exemptions from the law. They claim such exemptions are dangerous for homosexual or transsexual students.

The group is asking the federal government “to regularly report which educational institutions have been granted Title IX religious exemptions and the scope of the exemptions; add Title IX religious exemptions as a searchable College Navigator.” The homosexual group is asking Congress to require the Department of Education “to submit an annual report… [on] compliance and enforcement activities.”

Could their ultimate aim be any more clear?

The contained jayvee team displays some notable business savvy

A certain NATO member is getting its energy need met by cozying up to some rather problematic characters:

How is Barack Obama going to get out of this one? On Tuesday, the Russian military produced an impressive array of evidence that clearly shows that ISIS oil is being smuggled into Turkey on an industrial scale. The evidence included photographs taken by satellite and during aerial reconnaissance missions. What the Russians have shown the world is extremely compelling, and it raises some very disturbing questions. First of all, how involved is the Turkish government in all of this? There is no way in the world that an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil could have marched through Turkish border checkpoints without the cooperation of the central government. Secondly, what did Obama know and when did he know it? The U.S. military has far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do, and so it seems absolutely absurd to suggest that Obama didn’t know what was going on.

This new Russian evidence was presented to the world by Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, and he says that “thousands of oil trucks” have been going back and forth over the Turkish border…

According to Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, Russia is aware of three main oil smuggling routes to Turkey.

“Today, we are presenting only some of the facts that confirm that a whole team of bandits and Turkish elites stealing oil from their neighbors is operating in the region,” Antonov said, adding that this oil “in large quantities” enters the territory of Turkey via “live oil pipelines,” consisting of thousands of oil trucks.

But Antonov didn’t stop there. He went on to publicly accuse President Erdogan of Turkeyand his family of running the entire operation…

“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq. According to information we’ve received, the senior political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family – are involved in this criminal business,” said Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov.

“Maybe I’m being too blunt, but one can only entrust control over this thieving business to one’s closest associates.”

“In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister. What a marvelous family business!”

“The cynicism of the Turkish leadership knows no limits. Look what they’re doing. They went into someone else’s country, they are robbing it without compunction,” Antonov said.

And he is right.

The Erdogan family is knee deep in this scandal, and Barack Obama has known about it the entire time. For much more on the involvement of the Erdogan family in the smuggling of ISIS oil, please see my previous article entitled “The Biggest Obama Scandal? He Knows That Turkey Is Buying Oil From ISIS And He Is Doing Nothing To Stop It“.

Double interesting that it is alpha dog Russia who is pointing this out to the world.

Do you - can you - still consider the Most Equal Comrade your president?

Chilling, pathetic and disgusting.

The MEC has made it more clear than ever this week that he has willfully disconnected himself from the post-American people.

He has no patriotic feeling, no passion for the distinguishing aspects of the American character.

More chilling to consider is the way he gives not a flying f--- about our basic safety.

He has this abstract agenda: carbon emissions targets, outreach to government-employed "transgender" people, subsidized health insurance that is too expensive for anybody to use, whether they're rich or poor, assuming a racial angle in any local law-enforcement situation in which a black American gets shot, regardless of the circumstances, allowing people who are here illegally to "come out of the shadows."

And now we have his utter cluelessness regarding the national mood in the wake of recent jihadist developments.

But then, wait a minute, is it cluelessness? Maybe that is an aspect at most, of something more alarming. The damn son of a bitch is so ate up with his wild agenda the imposition of which is a huge priority  - in comparison to the nation's alarm about being in mortal danger - that he knew not of it.

And he has his propaganda arm covering for him when he lets loose with a careless and thoughtless remark that reveals where he's really coming from:

Who needs a White House press secretary when The New York Times will cover for the president, no questions asked?

That’s what the Times did Thursday, deleting from a story one of the most atrocious things President Obama has ever said.

As part of his effort to turn things around after his recent pathetic speeches on fighting terrorism, the president met with columnists from multiple outlets.
The ground rules said no one could quote him directly — but one of his claims is appalling even when paraphrased.
Obama, the Times reported online, “indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said.”
What? The president of the United States of America didn’t realize how people felt in the wake of two terror attacks because he doesn’t watch enough news?
Pathetic as that excuse is, far worse is that the Times soon removed the passage from its online story, and kept it out of Friday’s print version.
It’s not that it was wrong: The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported the remarks. 

Clearly, someone at the Times stepped in to say, This just makes him look too bad — find something else. Replacing the embarrassing passage was another account of Obama’s familiar arguments against sending in more US troops, or having US ground forces engage ISIS directly. 

This is so egregious a former loyal lieutenant in the MEC's nomenklatura has had to talk straight about it when asked:

David Axelrod said Friday that his former boss, Barack Obama, was “tone-deaf” in his remarks in the aftermath of last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris.

“I thought that he reacted…after the Paris events, when he was over in Europe,a little bit, he was a little tone-deaf there,” Axelrod told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He responded to the fear-mongering without really addressing the fear.”

“I think since that time he’s been trying to catch up on that.”

You see, the MEC sees an opportunity to accelerate post-America's plunge into the advanced stages of leftism - what we used to call "liberalism," in order to be polite to our friends in social situations, or to win the confidence of interview subjects in journalistic situations - and focus on the transformation of human nature itself.

Meanwhile, post-America's enemies know all about human nature.

Ironically, they give more of a f--- about the post-American cattle-masses than the MEC. He just sees the populace of this nation as a canvas on which to implement his deranged worldview. Our other enemies - besides the Democrats -  the jihadists and mullahs and Communists - see us as flesh-and-blood human beings who must submit or be beheaded, burned, raped and drowned.

Will thoughts like these even remotely cross the MEC's mind as he hangs at a sidewalk shaved-ice stand in the Aloha State?

Get your kids out of government schools - today's edition

How's this for a homework assignment?

When the world geography class at Riverheads High School in Staunton rolled around to the subject of major world religions, homework on Islam asked students to copy religious calligraphy. 

It read:

"Here is the shahada, the Islamic  of faith, written in Arabic. In the space below, try copying it by hand. This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy."

The illustrative classical Arabic phrase was the basic statement in Islam. It translated to: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah." 

When students took it home, it was like a spark hitting a powder keg. Some of their parents saw the homework as an attempt to convert their children to Islam.
Calls and emails flooded the school. Some of them demanded the teacher be fired for assigning it.
Cheryl LaPorte had not designed the assignment herself, but took it from a standard workbook on world religions, local newspaper The News Leader reported. 

LaPorte told The News Leader that now her job is to get her students through Standards of Learning tests. 

The county school system reacted.
It removed the shahada from world religion instruction. "A different, non-religious sample of Arabic calligraphy will be used in the future," it said.
And it issued a statement saying no one was trying to convert anyone to any religion. 

"Neither of these lessons, nor any other lessons in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief," Augusta County Schools official Eric Bond said in a statement to CNN affiliate WHSV. 

But that hasn't been enough for Kimberly Herndon, who kept her ninth-grade son home from school.
"There was no trying about it. The sheet she gave out was pure doctrine in its origin," she told WHSV.

"I will not have my children sit under a woman who indoctrinates them with the Islam religion when I am a Christian," she said. 

How long will LaPorte stick to her lame attempt at an excuse?

UPDATE: Lest you think this is an outlier story, check out this "holiday" pageant at a school in Blaine, Minnesota:

Check out some of the lyrics of “Eid un Sa’ Eid – Zain Bhika”:

“Ramadan has come and gone/Eid has dawned up us/Thank you Allah for this blessed day/This is a time of happiness, a time of joy/Thank you Allah for this blessed day.”

Throw in some banjos and a fiddle and I’m sure you’d have a real toe tapper.

Then then song breaks into some Arabic.

“It’s a time of brotherhood, a time of peace/Muslims are singing praises to Allah/Allahu Akbar/Allahu Akbar/”

Now it's true the youngsters also sang "Away in the Manger" and "Silent Night" and a few Jewish songs. But why are they singing a Ramadan song at Christmas time?

I know the lyrics say that Ramadan has come and gone. But in this case, Ramadan was last summer.

One parent told the television station considering recent events in Paris and San Bernardino - a song about Allah would be “insensitive.”

By the way – I don’t seem to recall any outrage from the ACLU or any of those perpetually offended atheist groups that break out in hives at the sound of a Christmas carol.

The Anoka – Hennepin School District is defending the Muslim melody.

They argued that the Islamic song that called on Muslims to “unite to worship Allah” is not really about worship.

“Songs are not performed in a worship setting or to promote religion,” the district said in a statement to WCCO. “But rather in (an) educational setting where students are learning and performing music.”

And besides, any student who did not feel comfortable singing it, was not required to do so.

The school district said they have students from a number of different backgrounds and they try to promote equal opportunities for all students.

Well, all you kiddies from "different backgrounds," you're in America now, and this is a nation with a Judeo-Christian foundation.

 For the moment, anyway. It is quite late in the day.

Who's calling the shots in Syria - and who's not?

Those pesky Russians. They buzz our planes and ships. Their subs and spy ships aggressively hover around the areas where vital undersea cables that carry most of the world's Internet communications are located. They hold frequent back-and-forth state visits with top officials of Iran.
And now this:

The U.S. has stopped flying manned air-support missions for rebels in a key part of northern Syria due to Russia’s expansion of air defense systems there, and the Barack Obama administration is scrambling to figure out what to do about it.

Russia’s military operations inside Syria have been expanding in recent weeks, and the latest Russian deployments, made without any advance notice to the U.S., have disrupted the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to support Syrian rebel forces fighting against the Islamic State near the Turkey-Syria border, just west of the Euphrates River, several Obama administration and U.S. defense officials told us. This crucial part of the battlefield, known inside the military as Box 4, is where a number of groups have been fighting the Islamic State for control, until recently with overhead support from U.S. fighter jets. 

But earlier this month, Moscow deployed an SA-17 advanced air defense system near the area and began “painting” U.S. planes, targeting them with radar in what U.S. officials said was a direct and dangerous provocation. The Pentagon halted all manned flights, although U.S. drones are still flying in the area. Russia then began bombing the rebels the U.S. had been supporting. (U.S. manned airstrikes continue elsewhere in Syria.)

Inside the top levels of the administration, officials are debating what to do next. The issue is serious enough that Secretary of State John Kerry raised it with Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met on Tuesday, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Dunford has discussed it with his Russian counterpart as well, a spokesman for U.S. Air Force Central Command told us.

"The increasing number of Russian-supplied advanced air defense systems in Syria, including SA-17s, is another example that Russia and the regime seek to complicate the global counter-Daesh coalition’s air campaign,” said Major Tim Smith, using another term for the Islamic State.

The increasing number of Russian air defense systems further complicate an already difficult situation over the skies in Syria, and do nothing to advance the fight against the Islamic State, which has no air force, Smith said. He added that Russia could instead be using its influence with the regime to press President Bashar al-Assad to cease attacking civilians. “Unhelpful actions by Russia and the Syrian regime will not stop coalition counter-Daesh operations in Syria, nor will such actions push the coalition away from specific regions in Syria where Daesh is operating,” said Smith. 

Post-America: Russia's bitch.

All that's left is for the Most Equal Comrade to sign the damn thing

The Senate follows the House in passing the omnibus spending package.

These people really are intent on taking post-America past the breaking point, aren't they?

UPDATE: Came across the voting breakdown in the House. Was pleased - and not at all surprised - to see such principled stalwarts as Trey Gowdy and Louis Gohmert among the nays. Disheartened to see Mia Love among the yays. Among the Indiana delegation, of course the great Marlin Stutzman was a nay, as was Todd Young. My own representative, Luke Messer was - sigh - a yay. I first became aware of Messer when I met him in person. I stood beside him at a rally for the mayoral candidate in my city, at which Governor Pence was a featured speaker. Messer was then himself still just a candidate, and in the course of our conversation he struck me as a principled guy. Alas, once they get a swig of that Potomac water . . .

Jihadists among us

A few items that ought to concern you:

Foggy Bottom just plain lost track of 'em:

At a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, a State Department official admitted the government does not know the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners who had their visas revoked over terror concerns.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond told the committee that the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas, 9,500 of which were revoked due to terrorism concerns.

Chaffetz asked Bond where those individuals were located now, to which she responded: "I don't know."

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists.

At issue is how closely the U.S. government examines the background of people seeking entry to the country, including reviews of their social media postings.

"If half the employers are doing it in the United States of America, if colleges are doing it for students, why wouldn't Homeland Security do it?" said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. "We don't even look at their public stuff, that's what kills me."

And a Golden Corral server heard something and said something:

In the latest suspicious incident in Missouri in recent weeks, a Camden County woman told authorities that two men who were Middle Eastern in appearance asked unusual and detailed questions about a local dam, including whether they could rent a boat and tour it.

According to KMIZ-TV, a Camden County Sheriff’s Office deputy was eating at a Golden Corral in Osage Beach, Missouri, when a member of the waitstaff approached him. The woman said that a group of “Middle Eastern” men had come in and asked questions about the nearby Bagnell Dam.

The incident came after several suspicious incidents in Missouri that have led many to believe terrorists may be planning an attack there.

And here's a novel use for a pizza oven. Where were these guys headed?

Turkish authorities detained two suspected Islamic State militants (ISIS) at Istanbul’s main international airport carrying at least 150 original European passports, an official said today.

Counter-terror police detained the suspects, a Syrian and a Turk, at Ataturk Airport after they flew in from a European country, finding they had stuffed the passports into pizza ovens, media reports said earlier.Airport police… found at least 150 fake passports among their personal belongings,” a Turkish government official, who asked not to be named, told

“Airport police… found at least 150 fake passports among their personal belongings,” a Turkish government official, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

The private Dogan news agency said the police seized a total of 148 European passports hidden inside “five mini-pizza ovens”. The suspects have been taken to the anti-terror headquarters of Istanbul police for questioning, it added.

Two hidden cameras, scores of memory cards and SIM cards were also seized, it added. Dogan had said that the passports were all original. Long criticised for not doing enough to stem the flow of jihadist fighters across its volatile border with Syria, Turkey has stepped up the fight after a number of deadly attacks on Turkish soil blamed on IS, making almost daily arrests of would-be jihadists.

Tick tick tick . . .

Pub foreign-policy divide: not between hawks and doves, but among hawks

Philip Klein, in the course of a Washington Examiner piece on the absurdity of calling Ted Cruz an isolationist, makes a noteworthy point about the internal dynamics of the range of GOP foreign-policy views :

As I outlined in my April column (and in a separate piece back in 2013 during the Syria debate), the divide in the Republican party isn't so much between interventionists and non-interventionists, but among hawks. During the Iraq War debate, anybody who supported the invasion was lumped into the same ideological camp and described as "neoconservative," even though some war supporters were more about democratization and others backed a more limited mission of removing the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

In the Obama years, two things happened. One was that some supporters of the Iraq War did soul searching and looked at the foreign policy consequences (the absence of weapons of mass destruction, democracy evaporating, Iran gaining influence) and the domestic political consequences (the 2006 and 2008 elections that brought Obama to power with massive Congressional majorities), and concluded that it was a mistake. Another factor changing the debate was that the nature of the foreign policy challenges made it less clear that regime change was in America's best interest.

In the case of the protests against the Iranian regime in 2009, conservatives were fairly united in criticizing the Obama administration for being slow to recognize the uprising. The reason is that Iran is the worst of all worlds: authoritarian, Islamist, and anti-American.
But when the Arab Spring took hold of Egypt, it was more complicated. Hosni Mubarak was authoritarian, and no saint, for sure, but U.S. interests aligned more closely with his than with the Muslim Brotherhood. And the two different camps of conservative hawks started to go their sepearate ways.

As John Bolton said to me in a 2013 interview: "Neoconservatives thought the Arab  Spring would move the region in a positive direction, whereas the more (national) interest-oriented conservatives believed it might not work out because the conditions weren't right and because the abstract emphasis on democracy doesn't necessarily comport with the actual circumstances around the world."

In Libya and Syria, again, the situation was more complicated — Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Assad are bad dudes, everybody agrees, but at the same time, rebels and terrorists have been all mixed together.

It's a tough one. Leaving Assad alone, for instance, seems prudent, given the multiple layers of the Syrian civil war. On the other hand, Russia, but more to the point, Iran, have a strong vested interest in seeing him remain in power.

I do think there's a strong case to be made that the approach W took, to earnestly endeavor to bring the cultural, economic and political institutions of the West to Middle Eastern lands where treachery and tyranny have been the norm for centuries, was badly misguided.

But again, once you've gone into a country and rooted out the elements posing a threat to the security of the US and its allies, are you responsible for the mess left behind? Is there not a precedent of power vacuums in war-ravaged countries breeding yet another wave of very bad actors?

I think Bolton sizes up the basic dichotomy well. And LITD is inclined to side with those who say, defeat enemies, period. Don't look for "positive directions" where they have never manifested themselves.

Off to a very bad start

We had so wanted to believe the opinion pieces, written by people we considered to be of sober judgement, that Paul Ryan would be just fine as House speaker.

We kept reminding ourselves that he was the only one crafting and peddling a serious reversal of course in the budgeting approach of Congress.

But something kept nagging at us. We couldn't shake the creepy feeling that he had a bad, bad case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

And that creepy feeling has been justified.

The omnibus appropriations bill is Boehner redux.

It damages the cause of conservative government by perpetuating the very programs and priorities the ending of which we have been screaming and roaring for.

With a deadline looming, congressional leaders unveiled "sweeping" tax and spending legislation late last night. The result makes one wonder whether congressional Republicans negotiate directly with President Obama on these deals, or whether they just send corporate lobbyists‎ to do so, thereby cutting out the middle man.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "The agreement…is expected to suspend for two years a tax on medical devices and delay for two years the scheduled 2018 start of the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost employer health plans." Each of these "fixes" to Obamacare will make deep-pocketed groups that much less interested in full repeal in 2017, while the suspension of the Cadillac tax will also make it that much harder to pass the conservative alternative needed to make full repeal a reality. The delay of that tax is also a big win for labor unions.

But that's just the beginning.

The Journal writes, "In one major concession to Democrats, the spending bill won't cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as many conservatives had sought."
The Journal also reports that "the deal would adopt environmental and renewable measures that Democrats want. These include extending wind and solar tax credits, reauthorizing a conservation fund for three years and excluding any measures that block major administration environmental regulations."

And that's not all: "Lawmakers and aides said the spending bill doesn't include any restrictions on the resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the U.S." (It does, however, reportedly "limit certain travel privileges granted to citizens of 38 friendly foreign countries that are allowed to enter the U.S. without obtaining a visa.") 

As always, there's an excuse: the Speaker was under severe time constraints.

Excuses no longer wash with an enraged electorate.

Either what has been happening to this country since 2009 is the deliberate imposition of decline and tyranny and must be reversed with a sense of the greatest urgency, or the enemy - that is to say, the Democrats - will figuratively hold that enraged electorate down and inject it with a hefty dose of befuddled apathy, and then all us cattle-masses will dumbly await our slaughter.

Filling the vacuum in a post-American world

Look who's back in Moscow - for the second time this year:

Iranian General Qassem Soleimani met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials last week in Moscow.

According to anonymous sources speaking to the Iran’s media propaganda arm Fars News Agency (FNA), “General Soleimani held a meeting with President Putin and high-ranking Russian military and security officials during a three-day visit last week to pursue the issues raised during the (the late November) meeting between Putin and Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei (in Tehran).”

Soleimani is the head of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, the paramilitary organization responsible for conducting covert operations in the Middle East. Soleimani and his Quds force have been Iran’s spearhead force fighting Islamic State, organizing and supporting Shia Muslim militias in Iraq and Syria, and propping up Syria’s Bashar Assad. Soleimani’s whereabouts are a close-guarded secret, however he has been perhaps the largest Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria.

At one time, the mysterious Iranian leader was more myth than man, known mostly for his legendary exploits shared among Iranian soldiers. Now, Soleimani has become a cult figure not only in the Iranian military, but across Middle Eastern society. Taking a picture with him on Twitter has become a prized opportunity, and he has even become glamorized in his own Iranian pop music video.

There's the real-life "international community" - countries seeing a power void and forming alliances to their mutual interest. That gets a lot more results than "accords" and "agreements" on phantom notions like an Iran free of nuclear activity, or stopping "climate change."

So post-America sits on the sidelines as enemies and adversaries shape the 21st century world.

Jihad is breathing down post-America's neck

This is happening in real time as I compose this post:

The nation's second-largest school district shut down all of its campuses Tuesday after an emailed threat targeted students at many Los Angeles-area schools.

The shooting in nearby San Bernardino that left 14 people dead this month influenced the decision to close all the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which 640,000 students attend, Superintendent Ramon Cortines said.

Kind of stylistically similar to what is currently happening in Sweden:

Swedish officials are in a state of panic after dozens of citizens received an ISIS threat to convert or die.

ISIS offered Swedish citizens to convert to Islam, pay the jizya or decapitation.

The citizens were told they had three days to make their decision.

I'm aware that police chief Bratton in NYC deemed a similar threat a hoax, but that is an intended secondary effect of terrorism. Agitate the public into an ever-more-skittish state.

I'll post updates as more developments come along.

The death rattle of Western civilization - today's edition

Self-loathing in Albion:

Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, a major inquiry into the place of religion in modern society has concluded, provoking a furious backlash from ministers and the Church of England. 

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A two-year commission, chaired by the former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss and involving leading religious leaders from all faiths, calls for public life in Britain to be systematically de-Christianised. 

It says that the decline of churchgoing and the rise of Islam and other faiths mean a "new settlement" is needed for religion in the UK, giving more official influence to non-religious voices and those of non-Christian faiths.

The report provoked a furious row as it was condemned by Cabinet ministers as "seriously misguided" and the Church of England said it appeared to have been "hijacked" by humanists. 

The report, by the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, claims that faith schools are "socially divisive" and says that the selection of children on the basis of their beliefs should be phased out. 

It also accuses those who devise some RE syllabuses of "sanitising" negative aspects of religion in lessons and suggests that the compulsory daily act of worship in school assemblies should be abolished and replaced with a "time for reflection". 

The report backs moves cut the number of Church of England bishops in the Lords and give places to imams, rabbis and other non-other non-Christian clerics as well as evangelical pastors. 

The Lord of all that exists told his disciples that the day would come when many if not most would willfully refuse to recognize and worship Him. And what happens after that won't be pretty.