It’s Tuesday, October 7th, 2014…but before we begin, yet another example of a campaign ad, the central theme of which the GOP should be rolling out across the country…
…particularly as the message is applicable in every single tightly-contested Senate race. Why on earth AREN’T they? You’ll have to tell us, ‘cuz we sure as hell don’t have the answer.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Headlining today’s edition, two views of Team Tick-Tock’s latest debacle in the Middle East. First, Victor Davis Hanson details yet another convenient case of Progressive selective recall:
“…In sum, the only legitimate critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War is that the lives and treasure lost in the chaotic occupation of 2003–06 were not worth the removal of the monstrous Saddam Hussein and the ensuing establishment of a stable, consensual state in Iraq. And the only legitimate defense of Obama’s subsequent policy in the region is that, while he is bombing all sorts of groups in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, has abdicated leadership in a way that has led to mass killing and destruction in the region, has no plans to help craft postwar consensual governments, and does not quite know who his enemies are or what they are planning, he so far has not lost American lives in the process — at least until the ascendant Islamic State flexes its global muscles.“
Actually, we’ve already lost at least one American serviceman to the anti-ISIS effort, though not to enemy fire.
Second, Andrew McCarthy reports the truth behind the latest Obamalie (pronounced “O-balm-ah-lee”, but defined as “another in an unending string of deliberate falsehoods told by an Administration concerned solely with politics”.):
“…President Obama and his subordinates take pains not to mention al Qaeda, particularly in the context of continuing plots to mass-murder Americans, because the president repeatedly and falsely claimed during the 2012 campaign to have “decimated” the terror network and put it “on the path to defeat.” The administration miniaturizes the continuing threat by breaking al Qaeda down into its components and speaking about them as if they were independent actors rather than a global jihadist movement unified by virulently anti-American Islamic-supremacist ideology.
Some of the names Obama officials use for these purposes are simply made up – like “core al Qaeda.” (See, e.g., Tom Joscelyn’s Weekly Standard report, “Misunderstanding al Qaeda”, quoting Susan Rice’s rationalization of “what we call al Qaeda core” [my italics] – what are actually just the network tentacles in Afghanistan and Pakistan). Other names may be appropriated from al-Qaeda’s organizational divisions (internal ones like “Khorasan” or external ones like “al-Nusra” or “Ansar al-Sharia”) and then disingenuously used in a similar fashion to make the global terror network seem like a disconnected and trifling gaggle of “jayvee teams.”
Now comes a corroborating report from Jenan Moussa of al-Alan TV, on the ground in Syria. Ms. Moussa got access to a headquarters of al-Nusra – the aforementioned Syrian tentacle of the al-Qaeda network — bombed during the U.S. airstrikes.
…Again, there is no “Khorasan Group” terrorist organization. It is just a small group of high-level al-Qaeda operatives who were sent to Syria where they were fighting and plotting as members of al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra.“
Speaking of lying Liberals, (as if they come in any other variety!), as The Heritage Foundation‘s Thomas G. West and William A. Schambra relate, deliberate distortion and deception have been the indispensable tool of the Progressive movement since its inception:
“…The Founders believed that all men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights. All are also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we have not only rights but duties. We are obliged “to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves” (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to be life and liberty, including the liberty to organize one’s own church, to associate at work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one’s talents to acquire and keep property. For the Founders, then, there is a natural moral order — rules discovered by human reason that promote human well-being, rules that can and should guide human life and politics.
The Progressives rejected these claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view, human beings are not born free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom is not “something that individuals have as a ready-made possession.” It is “something to be achieved.” In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”
Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right. Dewey spoke of “historical relativity.” However, in one sense, the Progressives did believe that human beings are oriented toward freedom, not by nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains nothing human), but by the historical process, which has the character of progressing toward increasing freedom. So the “relativity” in question means that in all times, people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their particular times, but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true because they are in conformity with where history is going…“
Thus Conservatives and Tea Partiers can be painted as “standing against the tide of history”, the United States Constitution considered a “living, breathing document” rather than the immutable law of the land and hundreds of years of American culture and tradition, not to mention Judeo-Christian values which have stood the test of time over thousands of years, be discarded, quite literally, overnight.
In a related item of Progressive policy run-amok, courtesy of EAGnews.org, it appears one more group of peasants are revolting:
“More schools are pointing out the emperor has no clothes, or in this case, isn’t eating the “rabbit food” being given to everyone else. New York’s North Tonawanda Board of Education is the latest to lash out at the new school lunch rules championed by First Lady Michelle Obama.
“We left thinking, what are we feeding these kids?” school board president Colleen Osborn, said at a recent meeting, according to the Tonawanda News. “We have students of all different shapes and sizes. Some of these kids have lunch at 10 a.m. and then they’re limited and can’t buy other things. It’s a broken system.” The paper reports the board is concerned students may be going hungry.
After taking comments from parents, “Someone in the audience made a good point.” She added, “Michelle Obama put these things into play, but her children go to private school and they don’t have to follow these standards.”
The board is evaluating the program because the restrictions are having an adverse effect on students, particularly athletes, and the portions and quality aren’t what they used to be…”
Since we’re on the subject of hypocritical Liberal nitwits with no qualifications for the position they’ve attained, let alone any idea what they’re doing…
Turning now to the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, the latest rendition of a tiresomely-old refrain:
“…A Watchdog.org analysis of a Colorado Department of Human Services welfare ATM withdrawals database shows that $3.8 million was withdrawn by Colorado welfare recipients outside the state in the past two years. There were withdrawals at out-of-state liquor stores and tobacco outlets, as well as vacation destinations like Hawaii, Las Vegas and even the Virgin Islands, data shows.
State Rep. Tim Dore, R-Elizabeth, who has urged limitations on where welfare recipients can use their electronic benefit transfer cards in Colorado, was shocked taxpayers are apparently funding some exotic travel. “I wasn’t even aware of that,” said Dore, who promised to try to address the misuse of cards at liquor stores, casinos and marijuana shops in the next legislative session after Watchdog asked him about those items for previous stories. “That’s an additional issue we need to look into it.”
Sure “we” will; in the meantime…
And in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, what’s a dedicated anthropogenic-global-warming-disciple-masquerading-as-an-impartial-scientist do when existing hopelessly-inaccurate-and-utterly-dysfunctional-computer-models aren’t in your favor? Why, as the UK’s Independent “reports”, create some new hopelessly-inaccurate-and utterly-dysfunctional-computer-models…which will deliver their erroneous data even faster:
Scientists are to challenge the climate-change sceptics by vastly improving the speed with which they can prove links between a heatwave or other extreme weather event and man-made changes to the atmosphere.
It typically takes about a year to determine whether human-induced global warming played a role in a drought, storm, torrential downpour or heatwave – and how big a role it played. This allows climate sceptics to dismiss any given extreme event as part of the “natural weather variation” in the immediate aftermath, while campaigners automatically blame it on global warming. By the time the truth comes out most people have lost interest in the event, the Oxford University scientists involved in the project say.
They are developing a new scientific model that will shrink to as little as three days the time it takes to establish or rule out a link to climate change, in large part by using highly accurate estimates of sea surface temperatures rather than waiting for the actual readings to be published – a process that can often take months.
Ah, yes; a NEW scientific model. You know, like the ones which still can’t explain why, in direct contradiction to their forecasts and despite continuously increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gasses, the planet hasn’t warmed for the last 20 years!
In a related item, as James Taranto details, whenever Liberals can’t refute the opposition’s facts, they invariably seek to change their feelings:
Can psychologists make global warmists of us all?
Global warmists have a problem, which they hope to solve through therapy–for others.
“If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate change–a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions–the political situation would be very different,” writes New York magazine’s Jesse Singal. Warmists need a way of “convincing a lot of conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.” Achieving that objective “has more to do with psychology than politics.”
How many psychologists does it take to change a conservative’s light bulb? Only one–but the conservative has to want it to change.
Our reference to therapy was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. What Singal has in mind isn’t individual treatment but mass psychology–i.e., propaganda. His argument is that “the climate activist community” has “failed to understand” that “messages targeting conservatives” should be “radically different” from those aimed at liberals. He advises warmists to draw on frameworks from social and political psychology, such as ”moral foundations theory” and “system justification.” That ought to make it possible for them to develop methods to promulgate correct beliefs–or, as he puts it, “to nudge conservatives toward recognizing the issue.”
We’d say all this is unlikely to amount to anything–not because we doubt that the underlying psychological theories have some merit, but rather because Singal and the psychologists he quotes are laughably biased in their understanding of the “problem.”
Not to mention the “problem” doesn’t actually exist!
On the Lighter Side…
And finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the “Just Desserts” segment, courtesy of FOX News and one very agitated gastronome in the Land Down Undah:
Which just goes to prove, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered; she should have been happy with just the cleaning!
“An Australian chef reportedly murdered his girlfriend, cut up her body parts, and cooked them in a pot before fleeing from police and killing himself. Police responding to reports of a bad smell coming from an apartment in Brisbane Saturday found Marcus Volke, 28, in the residence. Volke tried to run from officers through a glass door, leaped over a balcony, and hid in an alleyway before fatally slashing his throat in a nearby garbage bin, Sky News reported Monday.
The grisly scene inside the apartment included dismembered parts of Volke’s girlfriend’s body in a pot on the stove. Other parts of the Indonesian woman’s body were found in garbage bags in trash bins outside the apartment, local media sources reported…”
Good thing Volke refused to be taken alive; rumor has it members of Australia’s Green Party wanted additional charges lodged against him for failing to observe local recycling ordinances.
Magoo
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