In post-America, how loud and obnoxious you are is directly proportional to your influence on public policy

I have yet to weigh in on the Washington Redskins name "controversy," mainly because it makes me embarrassed for our society that something so trumped-up and trivial has gained such momentum.

But Mark Davis has waded right into it, and his observations are worth passing along:

An AP poll last year found the percentage of respondents wanting a name change: 11 percent.

I grew up in suburban Washington. Long afternoons of my youth were spent at RFK Stadium, home of the team from 1961 to 1996. Part of the soundtrack of my childhood is the sound of 57,000 fans singing at the top of their lungs, “Hail to the Redskins/ Hail victory/ Braves on the Warpath/ Fight for Old D.C!”, as the Redskins Band, made up primarily of scores of middle-aged black and white people, marched from end zone to end zone wearing headdresses.

Were these people engaged in some kind of mass derision of Native American culture? Was the name chosen as an intentional epithet?

Assertions of this type stretch the definition of stupidity. Who names a team after something negative? From ethnic imagery like Vikings to occupational imagery like Steelers and Packers, names are chosen because they convey a desirable trait. From the Kansas City Chiefs to the Atlanta Braves to specific tribal choices like the Florida State Seminoles, the focus is on tradition, fleetness of foot, ferocity in battle.

Yet there are those who suggest with a straight face that “Redskins” carries the same wounding power as the N-word. This grotesque, insulting lie diminishes anyone foolish enough to utter it.

The “R-word” is invisible today, except for its description of Washington’s football team. There are no tales of Cherokee or Sioux men and women stung by the “R-bomb” as they go about their daily existence.

But we now have lawyers from the federal copyright office, whose salaries are paid withour tax dollars, preoccupying themselves with this nonsense.

UPDATE: Robert Tracinski at The Federalist says the patent-office ruling should terrify all of us:

This ruling isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a slope we’ve already slid down: bureaucrats in Washington are now empowered to make subjective decrees about what is offensive and what will be tolerated, based on pressure from a small clique of Washington insiders. Anyone who runs afoul of these decrees, anyone branded as regressive and politically incorrect, is declared outside the protection of the federal government.

Post-America is a whole different kind of place from the United States of America.

This is how it's done

As Erick Erickson said, this was "balls of steel" on display.

The darkening world at a glance on a Thursday afternoon

Roundup of the latest:

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says Russia is resuming its military buildup at the Ukraine border.

ISIS has seized the Al Muthanna facility where mustard gas, sarin, VX and Tabun are believed to be stored.

At the Nogales detention center for illegal alien children, the kids are sleeping under aluminum foil blankets.

The IRS still wants us to swallow the notion that no backup exists for Lois Lerner's e-mails, and that they're gone forever due to her hard drive having been recycled.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

You know the phenomenon: the ever-tightening circle that FHers are trying to draw around what constitutes acceptable polemical discourse, with everything outside it being beyond the pale.  There's a good chance you've been involved in comment-thread snits on Facebook or elsewhere in which your expression of a fact-substantiated viewpoint is met with feigned gasps of horror and calls for ostracizing.

Now a major probable presidential contender starts conflating viewpoint-expressing with the preferred means of warfare of our jihadist enemy:

Cue Hillary, who describes the opinions of those who oppose her thusly:

We cannot let a minority of people, and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people, hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people,” Clinton said during a live CNN town hall.

“We,” said the aspiring head of the federal government,
“cannot let”—As in, “allow.” What remedy, pray tell, does she have in mind for this outrageous epidemic in free thought?
“a minority of people”—The minority, the protection of whose rights Thomas Jefferson called a “sacred principle” in his First Inaugural Address and whose endangerment at the hands of a tyrannical majority James Madison called the Republic’s “great danger?”
“and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people”— Regardless of the truth of this dubious assertion, she seems to repeat it to justify her advocacy for the prohibition of the minority’s dissent, which makes it sound like someone never glanced at a Founding document. “Screw ‘em, majority rules,” the working draft of the Constitution proclaimed.
“hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”— Let me see if I can rephrase the idea of a “viewpoint that terrorizes the majority” in such a way that a longtime Democratic politician might understand it. There’s an old adage originally used to describe journalism and oft repeated by the activist Left to give itself airs— “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Hillary Clinton and liberal activists are the comfortable. They require a “safe place” where the presence of others who deign to disagree cannot “trigger” them. Your mere opposition to an asinine limit on mag capacity, which was a demonstrable disaster in incompetent governance in her home state of New York, rises to the level of “terrorizing” for a woman who famously couldn’t figure out if that term applied to anyone involved in Benghazi. But for you, law-abiding citizen, not a problem.

When we're talking opposing views on gun policy, you're a terrorist. When the subject is the climate, you're ignorant about science.  When it's human sexuality, you're a bigot.

It's long past time to worry about no longer getting invited to the cool parties.  There's nothing cool about Freedom-Haters' parties.

Speak.  Act.  Defend.

LITD often titles posts "They Smell Weakness"; this one's called "Why They Smell Weakness"

Secretary Global Test's set of priorities is going to get us all murdered in our beds:

Today, Secretary of State John Kerry decided that the most important issue he could possibly be addressing is the state of the world’s oceans.

Yes, the oceans.

What about the fact that Iraq isdisintegrating before our very eyes? The Sunni radical group ISIS is attempting to create a caliphate state in the Middle East from inside Syria down through Iraq. Those who disagree are being brutallyand viciously murdered in public.

However, I guess John Kerry had ample time to discuss the oceans today.

Besides the events occurring Iraq, it must be a slow day for news. Oh, wait.

What about the conflict in Ukraine? How about Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi who is being held in a Mexican jail? Who really cares about the projected 90,000unaccompanied children pouring over our southern border? It is a dire humanitarian crisis.

Or, one could add, the latest jihadist moves in Africa (resort town attack in Kenya, more kidnapped girls in Nigeria) or the need to find out just who kidnapped the three Israeli teens.

So just why would a well-informed, well-traveled guy like Global Test focus on the oceans at this particular moment?  Maybe to give the Most Equal Comrade a platform for his latest circumvention of the Constitution:

President Obama on Tuesday announced plans to create what could be the largest marine preserve in the world, an initiative that aims to protect "pristine" Pacific Ocean environments but could run into opposition from the fishing industry and lawmakers worried about the president's use of executive power. 

The president announced his plans via video message at an oceans conference hosted by the State Department, and attended by actor Leonardo DiCaprio.  

"We can protect our oceans for future generations," Obama said, vowing to use his "authority as president" to protect "some of our most precious marine landscapes." 

The president did not get into detail in his video message, but officials say Obama is considering a massive expansion to the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, to protect it from drilling, fishing and other actions. The protected waters surround a group of mostly uninhabited islands, controlled by the U.S., that sit between Hawaii and American Samoa.

The Washington Post reported that Obama is looking at expanding the preserve, from almost 87,000 square miles to nearly 782,000 square miles. The monument, created by President George W. Bush just before he left office in 2009, includes seven islands. 

The Post reports that the designation is expected to face opposition from the U.S. tuna fleet, which operates in the region. Republicans in Congress have called the proposal another attempt by the administration to test the limits of executive power. 

Those wacky post-American overlords.

In case you were wondering about that "rapprochement" business you've been hearing about . . .

As usual, the Iranians sing a different tune than Secretary Global Test and the appeasement-pushing propaganda machine in post-America:

As U.S. leaders signal a willingness to partner with Iran in the fight against Iraqi terrorists, senior military officials in Tehran are warning of repercussions for the United States if it meddles in Iraq.

The head of Iran’s armed forces on Tuesday called the United States “supporters of terrorists” and warned the Obama administration against any intervention in Iraq, where extremist terrorists are seeking to depose the American-backed government.

Iran’s warning came less than a day after senior Obama administration officials expressed optimism about partnering with Tehran and signals that the White House may be misreading Iran’s intentions in Iraq.

The State Department in recent days has taken heat for ignoring its own warning about Iran’s efforts to destabilize Iraq. U.S. official have instead conducted a full court press to convince the nation that Iran and America have a “shared interest” in the region.

Senior Iranian military and political officials do not share this rosy view and are now issuing warnings to U.S. leaders as the violence in Iraq hits new highs.

Iranian General Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the country’s armed forces, slammed the United States and blamed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for sponsoring terrorist groups in Iraq and the region.

Same pattern we see in the nuke talks.  Post-America looks for "signs of willingness to abide by international norms"  and the mullahs respond with contempt.

A person can't even relax poolside at a Kenyan resort without jihadists shooting the place up

At least 26 dead in the resort town of Mombasa:

Caliphate Muslim terrorists stormed a costal resort town in Kenya on Sunday and rampaged through the streets murdering everyone in sight.

[snip]

several buildings including hotels, restaurants, banks and government offices were razed to the ground.

On the run, my a--.

 

E-mails of six more IRS employees go poof

 I guess you can't blame them for their brazenness.  Cattle aren't known to be real bright, and they can see that their pretty far along in their project of turning post-America into a nation of cattle, ergo . . .

Still, the ears of astute folks like LITD readers perk up at a development like this:

The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS recently informed Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the targeting scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the events that led to Lois Lerner’s revelation in May 2013 that the agency had used inappropriate criteria to review the applications for tax exemption.

The lawmakers expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

I know, it's easy to get inured to these things.  With indications of entropy overtaking the civilized world coming hourly now, digesting and prioritizing them is a tricky business.

Bust one, release 12

What a wacky ratio.

Post-America has arrested Ahmed Abu Khattallah in Libya.  He's the guy reporters from CNN, the NYT and some Europeal newspapers had interviewed in hotel coffee shops in Benghazi in the last few years.

Meanwhile, the Most Equal Comrade "quietly" orders the release of 12 nasty jihadists from the Parwan Detention Center in Afghanistan:

But no worries: the Pakistanis say they’ll monitor these jihadis to make sure they don’t have any “militant ties.” That’s right: the pro-jihad Pakistani government will make sure that everything is fine.

The MEC's idea of reaching out to the Muslim world, I guess.

A rift between Reasonable Gentlemen

The two most prominent Beltway Pubs afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome usually have no daylight between their positions on anything, but for John McCain, Lindsey Graham's willingness to work with Iran regarding Baghdad is a wackiness too far:

John McCain, for one, isn’t buying his long-time sidekick’s line. Normally, there is no distance between “the two amigos,” but McCain quickly ripped Graham’s call for cooperation with Iran. He argued, as I have, that working with Iran would: (1) inflame sectarian tensions, (2) strengthen the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, (3) drive more Sunnis into ISIS’s ranks, (4) empower the most radical Shia militants, (5) deepen the Iraqi government’s dependence on Iran, (6) alienate U.S. allies and partners in the region, and (7) set back the prospects of national reconciliation.”

It would also likely weaken our position in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, assuming there is any strength in our position to begin with.

The linked writer adding his own bit of analysis is Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.  Count LITD among those in concurrence as well.

Iraq has ISIL to catalyze its fall; post-America has the Freedom-Hater party

Nancy Pelosi, who is not only cool with homosexual "marriage," but the extermination of fetal Americans, but still fancies herself a faithful Catholic, is warning San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone no to attend next week's National Organization for Marriage march in Washington, DC.

She's no lone voice in the wilderness, though.  In fact, among California Freedom-Haters, the consensus is fairly monolithic:

Pelosi is not the only Democratic San Francisco politician sending Cordileone a letter decrying his participation in the march. Last week, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome issued a joint letter to the bishop protesting his participation. In the letter, cited by the Chronicle's Carla Marinucci, they wrote: "We ask that you will reconsider your participation and join us in seeking to promote reconciliation rather than division and hatred …” They said the march was “organized by some of the nation's most virulently anti-LGBT organizations and leaders.”

Oh, and the regime overlords have been busy trying to make life difficult for  the organization, too:

The National Organization of Marriage was also targeted by the federal government in the IRS scandal.

What these utterly mad civilization-destroyers obviously do not get is that when the jihadists set up full-blown sharia here, they and those with unconventional sex lives whom they champion will feel the sword of the new order on their necks right beside the Christians, Jews and those with a general yearning for common sense and decency.

Make 'em prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt

Sheryl Atkisson offers a detailed list of documentation that she says the House Ways and Means Committee ought to demand from the IRS, but her list really boils down to one demand:  Prove to us that there really was a hard-drive crash and that it means all those e-mails are irretrievably lost.

The IRS embodies the evil at the core of this regime

You and I will continue to submit forms and send money to the Internal Revenue Service, for two principle reasons:  underneath all the waste and expenditure on the imposition of tyranny and decline, government does indeed have some Constitutionally-specified functions that require financing, and, well, you know, you're forced at gunpoint to do so.

But if you're not doing whatever you can to hasten the day when this instrument of totalitarianism is dismantled, your apathy will corrode your soul.

On a Friday afternoon, the IRS buries, deep within a document, the "admission" that it had a computer crash that wiped out the most important e-mails between Lois Lerner and and various parties in other areas of government regarding conservative non-profits  in the investigations into this pantsuited thug.

"Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they're just now realizing the most critical time period is missing?" said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "If there wasn't nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?"

The Oversight Committee is one of three congressional committees investigating the IRS over its handling of tea party applications from 2010 to 2012. The Justice Department and the IRS inspector general are also investigating.

Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of tea party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it.

If anyone in the Obama administration outside the agency was involved, investigators were hoping for clues in Lerner's emails.

"The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS' response to congressional inquiries," said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. "There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general."

It's so obvious, you say.  This is such a blatant obstruction of justice!  You know what your overlords say to you in response?  "Pipe down, you insignificant cow.  Go read some celebrity gossip, or watch a hockey tournament, or post some pictures of your cat on Facebook."

When I started this blog, I did a little soul-searching about the name, and some terminology.  Was it really late enough in the day to give a writing venue of mine a moniker with such a palpable touch of hopelessness?   And using the term "Freedom-Haters" as a synonym for "Democrats."  Was it possible that it was an indulgence of venting and adolescent snottiness?  And was the term "post-America" actually grounded in reality?  After all, I can look out my office window, and see all manner of well-dressed engineers, IT experts, bankers and civic leaders driving by, or, at midday, parking their cars and walking to the always-busy pizza place at the end of the block.

This week has convinced me that none of it was over the top.  I stand by the name and the terms. We may well have lost the civilization that uniquely blessed humankind and saved it from the dismal nature of its existence in every other situation in history.  If such a way of life can ever occur again, our species will probably have to start from scratch.

Post-America is viewed as a patsy by its neighbors to the south

Ryan Lovelace's NRO article on the gang presence within the flood of illegal-alien youths coming over our border is an important read for its main point, but a couple of paragraphs stuck out for me because of how clearly they illustrate the presumptive attitude, the sense of entitlement, among these teenagers who read notices in their home newspaper that now is the time to head north.  Here's one:

“I’ve heard people come in and say, ‘You’re going to let me go, just like you let my mother go, just like you let my sister go. You’re going to let me go as well, and the government’s going to take care of us,’” Cabrera says. “Until we start mandatory detentions, mandatory removals, I don’t think anything is going to change. As a matter of fact, I think it’s going to get worse."

That's the toxic mix of a  sense of entitlement among a populace, a sense of urgency among publicly-financed, caring and well-meaning personnel on the ground, and cynical, power-hungry bureaucrats - with bona fides as card-carrying Freedom-Haters - that hollowed out Detroit.

And here's one that drives home the fact that this flood had by no means run its course:

“It’s just frustrating to know that we do all this paperwork just for them to walk out the door,” Cabrera says. “When these people get released they call back home and they say, ‘Hey, you know what? We got released, and if you come with your family they’re going to release you as well.’”

You now know all you need to know about the dynamics of immigration-policy discussion in Washington.  It's obvious why Freedom-Haters want carte blanche border porousness: It assures a huge new influx of people with a dependency mindset who will keep them in power.  It's also fairly clear that Pubs afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome who might talk a good game about "border security first" and "reform is not amnesty" are really just scared to death of being called bigots and xenophobes.

This whole crisis was cooked up by moral monsters who understand nothing of the greatness and preciousness of the country they rule over.

Voters recognize the difference between real conservatism and more Beltway hollowness

I immediately had suspicions about Room to Grow from the the instant I discovered Peter Wehner was involved. That guy makes my teeth grind.

It's a blueprint for a concept du jour called "reform conservatism."

In her latest WSJ column, Kimberly Strassel demonstrates that the Dave Brat victory makes clear that this little movement or whatever it is is longer on "reform" than it is "conservatism."

Mr. Brat's victory is surely awkward for a new wing of the conservative movement that has taken to arguing that the whole free-market, supply-side, Reaganesque agenda is passé. Humbly declaring themselves the "reform" conservative moment, this group has made some waves with their manifesto "Room to Grow"—including introductions by former Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner and National Affairs Editor Yuval Levin. "Room to Grow" has some interesting ideas, all overshadowed by the book's central premise: That conservatives need to embrace government to better endear themselves to the "middle class."

The authors are clear that politics, not principle, needs to drive conservative policy. Nowhere is that clearer than in the chapter by former Bush Treasury official Robert Stein on tax policy. A summary: Marginal tax rates are no longer popular because they don't give much to the middle class. Republicans instead need to embrace redistribution and lard the tax code with special, conservative-approved handouts for said middle class—namely a giant tax credit for children, similar to that proposed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee. (The book has many more tax-credit suggestions, too.)

Absent from the chapter is any recognition of why Reagan, and the party, embraced tax cuts. It's this thing called "economics." Cutting taxes on capital—and cutting high marginal rates—spurs investment, which grows the economy, which benefits everyone, including the middle class. The good politics follows. The middle-class beneficiaries of Reagan's economic boom showed their own appreciation by signing up for a conservative political realignment that lasted decades.

This emphasis on "helping the middle class" was one of the many things that irritated me about Mitt Romney.  Hell, the Most Equal Comrade uses that kind of rhetoric.

The principles of economic freedom are not situational.  You don't tweak them in order to target particular people who, at a given point in time, happen to be in a particular income bracket.  They apply to everyone, from muckety-mucks to those with nothing.  And, as Strassel says in the money line of of her piece when addressing the sniffing way "reformers" speak of 1979, "Good economic policy doesn't have a sell-by date."

How things go in a post-American world

When there is no more United States of America and there is a fresh and inviting leadership vacuum, you get Russian tanks in Ukraine.

"Columns of armored personnel vehicles and artillery have entered through checkpoints seized by terrorists," Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said at a news conference in Kiev, the capital, citing his nation's intelligence sources and referring to separatists in the east.

Avakov said Ukrainian troops engaged the Russian convoy and destroyed some of the armor.

News agencies in the region also reported sighting Russian tanks for the first time since rebels took up arms against the Ukrainian government in March.

Dmitry Tymchuk, head of the Kiev-based Center for Military and Political Research, wrote on his Facebook page that an armored convoy was seen heading for Donetsk, the largest city held by the rebels.

It's in our faces now.