Crusader War College

Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media makes the following comment on the "generosity" of President Obama's "spreading the wealth" that equally applies to Christians who support him based on "its what Jesus would do":

How long before people wake up to that fact that you are only incidentally interested in battling the deficit — sure, it would be nice, but how much more important to you is “spreading the wealth around”? That’s what, in an unguarded, an unscripted moment, you told Joe the Plumber. What was perhaps insufficiently appreciated at the time is the fact that there are two sides to “spreading the wealth around.” There is the open hand that distributes largess (while at the same time fostering dependence and accumulating chits for favors done). And then there is the clenched hand that fleeces other people for the money you require to make the redistribution work. On the one hand there are favors done, loyalties incurred; on the other, there are penalties exacted. I am not sure we have instruments fine enough to determine which is more gratifying to the political class of which you are so ostentatious a member.
(Hattip tipper at Rantburg)

While I believe the loss of freedom in the health care "reform" bill makes it intolerable, I continue to work on my project that has dictated this web site's hiatus, which promises to radically change the game.

Thanks to tipper at Rantburg.

Burning in effigy is a long cherished tradition in America since the Revolution. Hanging in effigy is a different matter.

If you don't want to burn in effigy, get a big fish tank, put a sign over it, and pour ash into the tank....

=> Read more!

Mary O'Grady summarizes the facts of the Honduran "coup":

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

She concludes her article:

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.(P: emphasis added)

Ms. O'Grady pulls her punches, for President Obama also vigorously condemned the Honduran army's action to enforce the Honduran Constitution in obedience to the Honduran Congress and the Honduran Attorney General. This is the same President Obama who dithered for days before limply objecting to the violence perpetrated against Iranians protesting against what they perceived to be a rigged vote. He too shows his true colors. Both he and Hillary Clinton are rushing to support a wanna-be thug and condemn the enforcement of a nation's constitution because they don't want anyone to have an example of how to respond when they do the same.

I thank the Lord for this incredible confluence of events: in every abusive relationship, either existing or heading in that direction, the abuser makes a fatal and noticeable misstep that alerts his victims to his intentions and true nature. However, it is up to the victims to ignore the spin, hype, agendas, preconceptions, and preassumptions that they themselves believe that prevent them from recognizing the implications of the intentions revealed by the misstep, take the information presented to them at face value, and act upon it.

Much of what passes for "commentary" in the MSM are rhetorical and sophilistic attempts to get people to doubt the actionability of their own experience. Canadians claim that they are happy with their health care system, but shout down the complaints of those who actually HAVE to get health care. Those so treated are not being convinced that what actually happened to them did not really happen (although there may be attempts to deny that it happened to others) as much as they are being told that they have no right to act in a logical manner in response to that experience. In a sense, people's ability to respond to abuses are conditioned by their belief that they have the right to respond. Where that "right" comes from varies from culture to culture, but a unique characteristic of tyrants is that the abuser is also the source of the "right" to respond to that abuse.

What does this have to do with Obama's reaction to the situation in the Honduras? The supposed 'right' of Zelaya to be restored to the Presidency, regardless of his offenses against the Honduran Constitution, ignores the fact that Zelaya's claim to be President is based on his meeting the requirements laid out by the selfsame Honduran Constitution that he subsequently flouted. In this sort of worldview, constitutions are supported when they grant power but are not when they revoke that grant.

Of course, constitutions do nothing whatsoever of themselves and by themselves, for they are only collections of words on paper that have neither limbs to act nor mouths to speak. Rather, the power of a constitution lies in the people who believe that "their" constitution grants them the right and permission to respond when the actions of individuals flouts the rights, duties, and requirements of that constitution.

Given this, there are two core threats to any Constitution. The first threat is for its requirements or prohibitions to be ignored. This is especially true of the Constitution of the United States whose design principle was to facilitate the prohibition of the illegal exercise of government power. It was the prohibitions of the Honduran Constitution that Zelaya flouted, and whose punishment is being protested by his like-minded presidential compatriots who find the restrictions imposed by their Constitions on their own actions equally distasteful, and who desire, like Zelaya, to eventually throw those restrictions off. Obama, by his support of Zelaya, shows his true colors in his attitude toward prohibitive constitutions.

Another method for ignoring and flouting a constitution is to hide behind a deliberately mis-designed implementation of due process: the United States Constitution provides for the impeachment and removal of leaders, but the imposition of superfluous bureaucratic restrictions in the name of due process allows representatives and senators to cover for each other so that a vote is never taken. It may even be window-dressing if the majority, motivated by politics, ignores the facts in an actual trial and votes to acquit the truly guilty. The appeals to "due process" and the reminder of the downsides of "vigilanteism" and "mob rule" are used to rob the true victims of the belief that they have a right to respond. In the most egrerious cases, the post-modern view of "there is no truth" is used to erase the distinction of perpetrator and victim, again robbing the true victims of the ability to exercise the right to respond.

The other threat to a Constitution involves revising it to the extent that it permits behaviors that the constitution was originally designed to prohibit. This can be done using an otherwise legal amendment process, such as what Chavez has done with the Venezuelan Constitution (and what Zelaya was caught laying the foundations for). It can also be done by the Judicial interpretative process that permits what was originally prohibited. For instance, the use of Eminent Domain to transfer private property from one person to another is explicitly prohibited, but this prohibition was flouted with the judicial interpretation (Kelo vs. City of New London) that the transfer is legal if there is an incidental public benefit. In the face of such abuses, the victims and potential victims are, again, told to "obey the rule of law" and "due process" to eviscerate their willingness to exercise their right to respond.

The question before us is not how we restore the full rule of Constitutional law, but how we recover our willingness to respond to threats to constitutional rule or violations of the Constitution. We are, to an extent, bound and limited as private citizens because the Constitution explicitly reserves the right to correct abuses and abusers to the authorities it itself authorizes. Ironically, to stop an abusive situation it may be required that some abuse must be dished out: it may be as necessary to violate the constitution in order to save it as an abused wife needs to abuse her abuser. This is already recognized when the normal rule of law breaks down during natural disasters and martial law is declared. It is recognized that Martial law is an undesirable state of affairs if it is permanent, but it is allowed if it is a temporary measure that is removed when the more preferred legal environment is restored, and is imposed with the goal of restoring the preferred legal environment. Cancer damages the body and will kill the afflicted, but surgery itself can also kill the patient. It does not do so because it is skillfully applied and the damage is calculated to restore the patient to health: any surgeon who says "the operation was a success but the patient died" has a criterion of success calculated to save his ego, not his patients.

This is a very delicate subject: nobody except the mob believes in or wants mob rule. A deep respect for living "legally" and respecting the rule of law is necessary in all citizens for a constitutional republic to work, which is why I have problems with amnesty of "illegal" aliens whose behavior and presence testifies that they lack this essential respect.

What is happening is that our respect for law that translates into our belief that our behavior must be "legal" is being gamed. That is, people who benefit from exploiting us through the violation of laws, constitutions, and conventions (and their supporters, beneficiaries, and politicians), head off the exercise of just retribution from the victims by declaring any such actions as "illegal". This happens all the time, and not just in the War on Terror. We see it in sophists and opportunists everywhere.

How do we regain our belief that we have permission to act to restore a truly just society organized as a constitutional republic? Ironically, a hint of a solution can be found in the behavior of Islamists, who have no compunctions about attacking states and nations of all kinds, including those founded on Muslim principles. They act because they believe they have received authorization and permission from a higher authority.

Please note that I am not saying that we ourselves should only trust God to fix the situation, for rarely are worthwhile ends attained easily and without effort. Virtually every Revolutionary leader, from the time the American Revolution ended to the time of their deaths, privately and publicly credited and thanked Divine Providence for intervening at critical times to provide that little extra help or insight or change of circumstance that, when be added to their own necessary efforts, resulted in success.

Rather, what is required is the permission of Him whom the Declaration of Independence called "nature's God" Who "created all men equal" and Who "endowed them with certain unalienable rights". We need to see that there is a vast difference between telling a wanna-be tyrant "we don't need no steeking permission!" and "we don't need your steeking permission!" The first is the response of the mob, while the second is the response of principled free men.

Worth looking at.

Politiken, the New York Times of Denmark, published an article totally out of character for it. Go to Gates of Vienna for the translation.

This is a slightly edited version of the comment I made at Rantburg at the link. Warning, Aris Katsaris hijacked it with his typical looniness.

Time for an "in-your-face" observation, it appears.

The biblical promise to Abraham has been that those who would curse his descendants would be cursed, and those who would bless his descendants would be blessed. Consider the rapid rise and persistence of American power, both military and economic, since the recognition of Israel by Truman in 1948, and continued support until this day, compared to the decline of Europe and the persistent vegetative state of the entire Arabic world whose hatred for Jews (now proxied by hatred for "zionism", which is merely Jews in their country defending themselves, rather than trusting those who consider Jews to be commodities only good for political barter). At the same time, one wonders if the 60s was divine blowback for shafting the Israelis when we sided with Nasser in the 1956 War.

I would say QED, but the proof is only good to those who hold to a judaeo-christian belief of how the world works. Thus, I shall try a different tack.

The decision to be made is whether to support the Israeli Jews in the creation of an explicit Jewish State, or to support the palestinians in creating a temporarily secular state that will inevitably morph into a Muslim State. The odds of it turning out to be more like Turkey than, say, Pakistan, are not good. In fact, they're abysmal: the demonstrated incompetence of Fatah/Hamas as functional governments "serving the people" is a case in point. An analysis of casualty populations refutes the "both sides are morally equvalent" argument: The casualties of Palestinian attacks are mostly women and children, while the casualties of the IDF are young males of fighting age. One would not call the IDF immoral for the occasional death of a civilian any more than one would call Palestinian terrorists moral for the occasional death of an Israeli soldier. The perponderance of the evidence points to a serious Israeli attempt to adhere to Geneva Conventions requirements, as well as a serious flouting of those same conventions on the part of the Palestinians. The patent excuse that the Israeli draft makes the children into "potential soldiers" makes a mockery of what it means to make ethical choices. It also violates the geneva conventions, whose intent is to protect people who are CURRENTLY civilians, and which makes explicit distinctions between legal insurgents and the supportive population within which they operate.

More pertinently, nobody has any authority to issue indulgences for GC violations, since no indulgences are allowed by the conventions. The silence of the conventions in the event of violation is often used as an argument for continued adherence despite violations, but a suicide pact is not a moral document. And if one is inclined to be worried about the rule of law, one should equally worry about the criminals who violate the law than the good citizens who keep it most of the time.

The only GOOD reason for supporting the Palestinians is that it garners Arab support, which means that the oil keeps flowing.

The GOOD reasons for supporting the Israelis is that they are a modern Western nation-state, with a functional judiciary system which has demonstratably shown an ability to override military/government considerations with regard to the Security Wall. I do not think those overridings to be particularly intelligent, but the fact that the Israeli Judiciary has more power over its government in its little finger than every Arab/Muslim Judiciary in the entire world says volumes. Moreover, this is a free people whose technological prowess, on a per capita basis, is far and away the highest in the world.

Thus, the motivation behind the choice of favoring the Palestinians is, based on a physical natural resource. In short, it IS "all about the oil".

The motivation behind the choice of favoring the Israelis is based on qualities of harmony and compatibility between us and them in the fields of the mind (technology and science) and spirit (governance, religion, culture).

To paraphrase a certain sage: Those who love the things of the flesh will support those who give them things of the flesh, while those who love the things of the spirit will support those to give them things of the spirit.

So who, REALLY, is the spiritual people, and who are the materialists, as revealed by their CHOICES, and not their RHETORIC?

Or that's what Riley Driver, a letter writer to Amercian Spectator, notes (emphasis mine):

Ari Kaufman's What Conservative Media? while spot on missed the point on why so may liberal leftists think the media is balanced or conservative.

They know the political ‘stuff' is clearly biased in their liberal leftist direction, but they are railing against the news as a whole.

I first became aware of this when discussing how liberal campuses are with a liberal acquaintance of mine. He vehemently disagreed. His rationale? All those science, math, business, and medical courses that would not yield to opinion or feeling - they were by definition (for him) conservative.

Over time it became clear this was not a random opinion or thought process. Liberals find things that cannot be swayed by opinion or feelings to be intrinsically conservative.

Hit them with facts and more facts and eventually their response will be some form of name calling. It's all they know to do - so far.

But holding my nose and dipping into the DU from time to time and there is a sense of violence in the air when too many facts are presented and name calling no longer satisfies.

Facts - a liberal's conservative enemy.

This is an interesting observation: Conservatism is apparently being associated with the concept of "being resistant to change", but the REASON for that resistance is not even considered. After all, what you believe now is not important, provided that you change your beliefs in response to "opinion and feelings", rather than to unchanging realities such as facts. And religion. And God (who generates both).

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson asks why Americans are hooked on the details of the travails surrounding Anna Nicole Smith, Don Imus, and Alec Baldwin when much more serious things are happening in the world.

After a recap of those serious things, he concludes that our facination with such trivial crap (my words) is because:

... they are the modern equivalents of grotesque carnival freak shows that used to provide a perverse sense of escapism from what people dare not face. Yet as our dependency on such tabloid distraction grows, so, too, do the real dangers that we ignore.

The ghost of Anna Nicole, foul-mouthed Rosie and trash-talking Imus turn out to be the best friends Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin have.

Click on the link and read the whole thing. Recommended.

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The Anchoress Online rips into the culture of flexible truth. A magnificent rant! Here's an excerpt:

A few people, however, are starting to look around and are saying, “well…I might be a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean I have to swallow this crapola.” Or they’re saying, “just because we replaced feckless Republicans with you, that doesn’t mean we told you to demoralize and undercut the troops and leave the Iraqi people to a bloody fate. Or to screw around for your personal gain” They’re saying, “how is it Israel is the bad guy when Hamas - whom we fund like mad - is saying they want to kill all Americans?” They’re saying “what’s this nonsense about some churches needing to get with the times, when the ones that embrace modernity are imploding and the church set most palpably in the 8th century is the one being pandered to, left and right? What’s up with that?”

What some people are actually starting to say is: “When the evidence of something is right in front of my face, why do you insist on telling me that what I am seeing is not what is real, that what I am hearing is not really being said, that what my own reason can sensibly deduce makes no sense? Stop telling me I don’t know what I’m encountering and that my reason is faulty. Stop telling me that the Bush White House “outted” Valerie Plame to punish Joe Wilson, when your own boy Richard Armitage admitted to doing the job. Stop telling me he lied to us about yellowcake while neglecting to mention that the Butler report confirmed the intelligence. Cease this nonsense that everyone loved America until 2003. For the love of Pete, don’t tell me George Tenet is saying something other than yes, Saddam did have WMD. Stop feeding me bullshit narratives that have barely a nodding acquaintance with the truth, because it’s starting to seriously piss me off!”

You need to go read the original article, since the above text is laced with links to relevant articles and postings proving each point.

William Hagan at Insight Magazine is worried that Obama's not taking advantage of the protection he deserves as a Presidential candidate:

At a recent appearance in Atlanta, Sen. Barack Obama drew a crowd of 20,000 supporters to hear him speak at an open air venue. As the first African-American in history to have a real chance at winning our presidency, Obama is tempting fate as a high profile assassination target for numerous individuals.

Despite his high visibility, during his speech in Atlanta most of the cardinal rules of VIP security were violated. First, he spoke to a crowd of 20,000 people who had not been screened for weapons. Next, he spoke on a field which was surrounded by buildings that were a perfect vantage point for any sniper. It is likely that Obama has private security and it is also apparent that they don’t have a clue as to what they are doing. The nation received a clear lesson in the failure of private security protecting presidential candidates when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after declining police protection in 1968. Like Kennedy, Obama could easily be targeted by an individual who, for whatever deranged reason, might want to see him off the ticket for good, and his current lack of security is almost courting this tragic, and historically predictable, result.

The question is: Who is to blame for this lack of security? There is no doubt who would be the first to be called to task if tragedy befell Obama. Every pundit in the nation would point their sharpened swords at the United States Secret Service. However, the Secret Service would not be to blame. Candidate Obama, despite being a clear potential target for assassination, has ignored his own personal security. Presidential front-runners like Obama can obtain Secret Service protection after meeting some minor requirements, but first they must ask for that protection; it cannot be forced upon them. As of Monday April 16th, Obama’s campaign had not requested Secret Service protection.

I personally think Obama is an artfully promoted airhead who has no business even thinking of being President of the United States. Nevertheless, he has a large enough following of my fellow American citizens to merit being voted upon. I agree with Mr. Hagan that that vote should be with ballots, not a bullet, and that he should ask for Secret Service protection.

ZionistYoungster does a great job of slicing up the "compassionate" left when it comes to Darfur.

Via Jim Ray at Dissecting Leftism is this link to an article that concludes:

It is an impossible dream because, while liberalism is, in fact, a mental illness, it is not a disease that can be treated with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It can only be treated biologically. As Swirsky tells us, "conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, narcissism, and Tourette's syndrome, while long thought to be psychological in nature, are now known to be "biological" - thanks to PET scans, MRIs, and other diagnostic advances." As Swirsky notes, "The scans.have revealed the specific areas of the brain that give rise to anger, revenge, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, stuttering, pathological lying, cheating, manipulation, obsessive-compulsive behavior, depressive disorders, even craving for chocolate!"

Soon, it is hoped, we'll be able to add liberalism to that impressive list of behavioral disorders. And since medical science has developed exciting new preparations for treating many of these disorders (e.g. Ritalin for attention deficit disorder, Haldol for psychoses, lithium for bipolar disorder, Wellbutrin for chronic depression, Xanax for anxiety), it may not be long before liberalism can be treated by ingesting a small tablet or capsule each morning before breakfast.

So what are the behavioral characteristics that lead Joan Swirsky to conclude as she has? First, it is a suspicion that the core of liberal `thinking' is the same sort of pathology that characterizes other mental disorders, i.e. a "glitch in the brain that produces `feelings' and behavior over which liberals have no control. Liberals are uniformly glum, not only in their grim demeanors and persistent anger, but also in their outlooks.And when their theories are refuted by hard facts they are unable to process the true from the untrue because their `feelings' always trump their reason."

Secondly, Swirski points out that liberals, in almost every instance, react like children, for whom the most cherished value in life is to be "liked" by their peers. As children see things, "to be liked.is not to engage in conflict, not to fight, not to judge. After all, if you fight with anyone, including Islamic terrorists, they won't like you. And if you judge them as savages, murderers, enemies of democracy, they will fight you. So don't judge them and they won't fight you." Does that sound familiar? It is pure Democrat Party orthodoxy.

Swirsky provides us with a simple litmus test. She says, "the next time you're watching or listening to a liberal, observe the symptoms. Note the anger, the pessimism, the negativity, the name-calling, the bursts of rage, the gratuitous insults, the desire to present an image of `goodness,' the transparent attempt to be liked, the willingness to change an opinion if the old one isn't polling well, and the eagerness to placate our enemies."

Via Steve at Rantburg comes this jaw dropper.

A cleric in a northern Pakistani village has opposed a foreign-funded polio vaccination campaign of the Pakistan government, urging locals not to take any preventive measures against polio "as those killed during an outbreak are martyrs". "I must tell my brothers and sisters that finding a cure (vaccination) for an epidemic before its outbreak is not allowed in Sharia ," said Maulana Fazlullah during a Friday sermon in Mam Dherai village where he is building a madrassa with local funds.

Like Steve said: "That's all you need to know about Sharia"