Lying in the Age of Obama

By Victor Davis Hanson On July 23, 2013 @ 12:02 am In Culture,Education,Politics 

A Nation of Liars
The attorney general of the United States lied recently to Congress ^[1]. He said he knew of no citizen’s communications that his department had monitored. Lie!
In fact, Holder knew ^[2] that his subordinates were targeting reporters. He also did not tell the truth about the New Black Panthers case ^[3]. He had sworn that there was no political decision to drop the case. Not true; the decision came from the top. He again lied about the time frame in which he first learned of the Fast and Furious case ^[4].
The director of national intelligence also lied, likewise while under oath to Congress. At first James Clapper confessed that he had given the “least untruthful” account ^[5].
Nixon’s Washington used to call that sort of neat lie “a modified limited hangout.” ^[6] Later, Clapper admitted that he had just flat-out lied to Congress. Was he disgraced? Fired? Further confirmation of his “largely secular” lie?
Nope. Nothing followed.
Elizabeth Warren simply invented an entire pedigree ^[7]. That blatant lie helped to earn her a Harvard tenured professorship and a U.S. Senate seat. Ward Churchill was doing well until he dared the country to call out his lies. Who is to say that Warren or Churchill cannot be Native Americans by professing to be Native Americans?
Barack Obama, as is the wont of politicians, has lied a lot — and from the very beginning of his national career. He knew Bill Ayers well, Tony Rezko too. He lied about his decision not to seek the presidency as a newly elected senator, and lied about his willingness to take public campaign financing funds in 2008. He misled about what he would shortly do about most of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols. Obama lied about much of his own biography.
When the president uses emphatics like “make no mistake about it,” “let me be perfectly clear,” and “in point of fact,” we know what follows will be untrue. He did not cut the deficit in half in his first four years. He had no intention of ever doing so. He lies about the circumstances of America’s gas and oil production surge — occurring despite, not because of, him. He lied about his involvement in the radical ACORN community action group, and fabricated about his father’s and grandfather’s World War II involvement.
Tally up what Barack Obama said about his health care initiative, the border fence, and his fiscal policy. Almost all of the major assurances proved lies.
Ministers of Lies
But why pick on the president?
The media routinely peddles “noble” untruths. ABC manipulated a video ^[8] to show George Zimmerman without much injury to his head. NBC edited a tape ^[9] to suggest that he was a racist. The New York Times invented a new journalistic category, “white Hispanic,” ^[10] to suggest George Zimmerman was not Latino in a way that the paper would never suggest that Barack Obama is not African-American or Bill Richardson was a “white Hispanic.”
Much of the prosecutorial testimony in the George Zimmerman case could not be true — unless someone gets grass stains on his back and contusions on the back of the head from pounding on someone atop him. Prosecution star witness Rachel Jeantel made up much of her racist testimony, and boldly confessed as much in her paid-for after-trial interviews.
It’s Not Really the Cover-up
Our current scandals are predicated on lies. No one believed the official White House version that the IRS miscreants were rogue agents from a Cincinnati field office.
No one believes much of the official version of the Benghazi killings — least of all that the violence was prompted by a single video maker ^[11] in the fashion that Susan Rice assured the nation.
The attorney general of the United States lied about the AP/James Rosen monitoring while under oath before Congress.
James Clapper lied about the NSA scandal. All four travesties are still being sorted out. For now the one commonality is that our officials lied about all of them.
Harry Reid knew nothing about Mitt Romney’s tax returns. But lied about them all the same ^[12]. It is hard to know whether Joe Biden lies, or simply believes his fantasies. He assured us that President Roosevelt addressed the nation on television after the panic of 1929 ^[13]. Remember in 1987 when he lifted much of his campaign stump speech from British Laborite Neil Kinnock ^[14]?
Our most treasured icons in the media and literature lie. They tell untruth sometimes in the most serious fashion of claiming the work of others as if it were their own — or simply inventing things out of thin air. Fareed Zakaria plagiarized ^[15]. So did Maureen Dowd ^[16].
Nearly all of Stephen Ambrose’s work, book by book, was characterized by both plagiarism and false statements about archives and interviews. Michael Bellesiles ^[17] was given the Bancroft Award for a mytho-history. If historians could not initially spot the lie, who else could? Or did they try all that much, given the enticing but mythic thesis that today’s gun nuts, not our hallowed forefathers, dreamed up a nation in arms?
Is There Anyone Left Who Doesn’t Lie?
Why do they lie? Because they can. Or to paraphrase Dirty Harry, they like it. We are a celebrity-and wealth-obsessed society, in which ends, not means, count. Barack Obama got to be president — who now cares how?
That Joe Biden habitually makes things up is the stuff of “that’s just old’ Joe,” not a career-ending felony. Hillary Clinton lied a lot when she was first lady about documents under subpoena. She lied as a candidate about being under fire in the Balkans ^[18]. And she lied as secretary of State about the train of events in Benghazi.
And? Those lies were either forgiven or forgotten, or contributed to the “complex” persona that now is among the most widely admired in the U.S.
Lying, of course, is a symptom of hubris. The once leftist and long-haired radical Stephen Ambrose finally assumed that he was Lord or Master Stephen Ambrose, voice of an entire generation, accustomed to instant TV access, huge advances, and minute-by-minute adulation on the street.
Lying won him all that, and he knew it. I remember him over three decades ago flat out lying about most of the details he offered on World War II while on The World At War. So to be sure, I watched the young Ambrose lie again last night on that documentary. But no matter: he seemed cool with long hair, a sweater, and an attitude ^[19], far more hip than the old plodding Brit historians who were meticulous in their honest recollections.
When caught, a dying Ambrose was unapologetic. He must have reckoned, why say “I’m sorry” to a society that did not care how he had become famous, only that he was? Had Martin Luther King, Jr. told the truth that he stole sizable work from other scholars to write his doctoral thesis, he would never have become Dr. King. Omitting that detail ^[20] paid dividends.
We claim that no one fools history, especially in the age of the Internet. I grant few do, at least in the long run. Yet in the 21st century, the rub is not getting caught for plagiarism, but doing a cost-benefit-analysis of the downside of now and again agilely lying and plagiarizing, versus the upside of short-cutting to fame and riches.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a plagiarist ^[21]. But after a brief sojourn in the Washington doghouse, she is back again on television. Bringing up her untruth would be bad manners.
In Ambrose’s case, it seemed a simple decision. It was “take another multimillion-dollar advance and spend 3,000 hours out of the limelight” — or “take the money and simply cut and paste the work of others over a few hundred hours.” Did he fear that his widely read publishers and editors worried about sales, or the integrity of their branded text?
Bernie Madoff ^[22] was a liar par excellence, but for most of his life his investors ^[23] did not question his miraculous luck, given their miraculous returns that came in the mail each month.
It was not entirely money that drove columnists or reporters like Mike Barnicle ^[24], Patricia Smith ^[25], or Jayson Blair ^[26] to lie, but the desire for attention, prestige, and being something more than an honest reporter in our empty metrosexual elite urban culture.

The Cover-up Pays
We repeat the nauseous canard that “it is not the crime, but the cover-up” that gets you in trouble in Washington. But that too is often a lie, at least most of the time. Had Eric Holder told the truth about Fast and Furious, the New Black Panther case, or the AP/James Rosen case, he would not be attorney general now.
If Susan Rice had gone on television and confessed the details about the status and recent history of the security measures in Libya, or the true nature of the post-”lead from behind” misadventure, or the spread of post-bin Laden al-Qaeda franchisers in 2012, she might have been out of a job — either by dismissal or by the failure of her president to win reelection. Lying worked. Obama is president. She is national security advisor.
Had Jay Carney confessed that the talking points about Benghazi were doctored from the outset, it might have mattered in the 2012 election. Lying then and now worked.
Why Do Our Best and Brightest Lie?
There are both age-old and more recent catalysts for lying.
One, lying and plagiarism are forms of narcissism. I know fabrications are born out of feelings of inferiority that makes an otherwise fine historian like a Joseph Ellis ^[27] or a good actor like Brian Dennehy make up an entire war career ^[28], replete with tales of personal gallantry. But they persisted in such seemingly destructive behavior because they assumed that they had reached a level of fame and stature that made them immune from the normal accounting laws of the universe. There is no servant running along our triumphant masters when they star on television, muttering to them “Respice te, hominem te memento,” or at least “memento mori.”
Sic transit gloria? We would counter with vero possumus ^[29]!
Two, lying more often than not pays. Take an ethical shortcut and the odds are small that one gets caught. Yes, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Fareed Zakaria were found out. But after brief anguished penance, they reinvented themselves and returned to the level of their prior stature. Perhaps some young journalist one day will do an Ambrose on them, and review all their previous work. But for what purpose? We know they have been dishonest once, and suspect the modus operandi was not a one-time occurrence. But we also know that the purified water in which they swim is not too toxic for liars and the dishonest.
Liars are good at what they do. Eric Holder certainly is. Again, like a shoplifter, why stop when you have mastered the craft? Does anyone think Patrick Fitzgerald is going to come out of retirement to indict Holder the way he did Scooter Libby for a crime that did not exist, and had it existed was committed by Richard Armitage ^[30] — and known thusly to both Colin Powell and Fitzgerald himself at the outset?
Three, more recently postmodernism has blurred the divide from reality and truth. Tsarnaev is not quite a mass murderer, given his looks and youth ^[31]. Major Hasan is guilty of work-place violence. For thirty years, the acolytes of fakers like Michel Foucault have taught our elites that truth is socially constructed — a relative thing, a power narrative fabricated by those of the right race, gender, and class to perpetuate their privilege. Howard Zinn could publish fantasies because who was to say that they were entirely wrong, and who would dare suggest that his myths were not put to a good cause?
Note that Maureen Dowd, Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mike Barnicle, and Eric Holder shoot their sometimes false arrows at the right targets. Does it then matter that their missiles were occasionally plastic rather than of authentic Native American wood?
Much of what Barack Obama has weaved about his past girlfriend, his parents’ meeting, his father’s/grandfather’s war service, or his upbringing in Hawaii at one point or another is false. But why would I mention that if not for illiberal political reasons? And what a 59-year-old, rural white guy from the Central Valley calls “truth” may not be so for a young multiracial child coming of age in Hawaii, anguished at having door locks clicked by “typical white” people as he crosses the street.
So Why Not Lie?
I end with three reasons to tell the truth. The majority has to tell the truth — to the IRS, to the police, to the DA, to the census — if a consensual society is to work. You readers tell the truth so that the society can survive an Eric Holder or Mike Barnicle. Average people must speak honestly or our elites’ lies will overwhelm, even destroy us. If 100 million tell the IRS lies during audits or take the 5th Amendment, our voluntary tax system collapses. We can take only so many Lois Lerners.
Two, this often sordid, sometimes beautiful world is not the end. There is transcendence. Lies damage our soul. Selling out in the here and now has consequences later on. If you are religious, your immortal soul is lost. If you are not, at least consider that your legacy, heritage, and remembrance are forever ruined. Ask the ghost of Stephen Ambrose. What good was all that money, all those interviews if based on a lie? All the insight and delight that he brought millions of readers was tarnished. And for what, exactly?
Third, we must strive to be tragic heroes, perhaps not as dramatic as Ajax, not as cool as Shane. Would you rather have been Ethan Edwards or Will Cane or have run Lehman Brothers in 2008? Sometimes, in less dramatic fashion, the choices are that Manichean.
We must try to tell the truth, not to doctor films, edit tapes, erase talking points, or lie before Congress, fabricate heroic war records, or invent false sources. Again, why? Because we seek to do the right thing with the full resignation that in the here and now we will often still lose and will lose often and gladly telling the truth.
“We always lose,” says Chris at the end of the The Magnificent Seven after he did the right thing. Or to paraphrase the cinematic T.E. Lawrence about Auda Abu Tayi, we will not lie, as do our elites, because it is simply “our pleasure” ^[32] not to.

The Shawarma Republics are Burning

Thursday, July 18, 2013

The Shawarma Republics are Burning

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 

Syria is burning, not because of the Arab Spring or Tyranny or Twitter, or any of the other popular explanations. The fire in Syria is the same firestorm burning in Iraq, in Turkey, in Lebanon and throughout much of the Muslim world. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy. There is no revolution here. Only the eternal civil war.

Most people accept countries with ancient names like Egypt, Jordan and Syria as a given. If they think about it at all they assume that they were always around, or were restored after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But actually the countries of the Middle East are mostly artificial creations borrowing a history that is not their own.

When Mohammed unleashed a fanatical round of conquests and crusades, he began by wrecking the cultures and religions of his native region. And his followers went on to do the same throughout the region and across the world.

Entire peoples lost their history, their past, their religion and their way of life. This cultural genocide was worst in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe. But the Middle Eastern peoples lost much of their heritage as well.

The Muslim conquerors made a special point of persecuting and exterminating the native beliefs and indigenous inhabitants they dominated. Israeli Jews, Assyrian Christians and Persian Zoroastrians faced special persecution.

Conquered peoples were expected to become Muslims. Those who resisted were repressed as Dhimmis. But those who submitted and became Muslims suffered a much worse fate, losing major portions of their traditions and history. They were expected to define themselves as Muslims first and look back to the great day when their conquerors subjugated them as the beginning of their history. Their pre-Islamic history faded into the mists of the ignorant past.

But Islam did not lead to a unified region, only to a prison of nations. The Caliphates, like the USSR, held sway over a divided empire through repression and force. Many of those peoples had lost a clear sense of themselves, but they still maintained differences that they expressed by modifying Islam to accommodate their existing beliefs and customs.

Islamic authorities viewed this as nothing short of heresy. It was against some such heresies that the Wahhabi movement was born. But these attempts to force the peoples of the region into one mold were doomed to fail.

Islam came about to stamp out all differences, to reduce all men to one, to blend state and mosque into one monstrous law for all. And it did succeed to some extent. Many cultures and beliefs were driven nearly to extinction. Jews, Christians and others struggled to survive in the walls of a hostile civilization. But Islam could not remain united and the divisions resurfaced in other ways.

Muslim armies did succeed in conquering much of the world in a frenzy of plunder and death. But they quickly turned on each other. Rather than conquering the world, they went on to fight over the plunder and the power. Nothing has really changed since then.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire brought in the Europeans to reconstruct the Middle East. The modern states are the work of their hands. A clumsy mismatch of borders and warring peoples. The USSR came after with its own line of coups and Arab Socialist dictatorships. Now the third wave of Islamist tyrannies is on the march. But none of them can solve the basic problems of the region.

Syria is burning not because of human rights, but because it's a collection of different peoples with different variants of Islam who don't get along. A handful are descended from the original natives. The rest are foreign Arab invaders, some more recent than others. The story repeats itself across the region. And across the world.

Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon are just some examples of countries permanently divided by such a mismatch of peoples. Agreements and elections come to nothing because no group believes that they will be treated as equals if they aren't in power. And they're right. Equality doesn't just come from open elections, but from a cultural acceptance of differences. This simply does not exist in the Muslim world where gender differences mean you're a force of corruption or a slave, ethnic differences mean you are the son of a dog, and religious differences mean you're an enemy.
Had the forces of Islam not turned the Middle East upside down, the nation state might have evolved out of individual cultures, rather than as a strange hybrid of feudalism and Great Powers colonialism. For all their bluster and viciousness, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon are abandoned colonies. The Gulf states are even worse, backward clans of cutthroat merchants who are parasitically feeding off the West, even as they try to destroy it.

The rulers invariably marry Western women or women with a large dose of Western blood. Sadat married the daughter of an English woman. Mubarak married the daughter of a Welsh woman. For all that the Hashemites tout their descent from Mohammed, Queen Noor is more Anglo-Saxon than Arab. And the current Jordanian King's mother was originally known as Toni Gardner. Even when they do marry Arab women, they are usually Christian Arabs and British educated.

There's something pathetic about the sight of the post-colonial Arab leadership trying to gain some psychological legitimacy by intermarrying with their former rulers. As if pumping enough English blood into the veins of their offspring will somehow make them as capable as the Empire that ruled them and then left to attend to its own affairs.

But not nearly as pathetic as half of them claiming descent from Mohammed. Both reveal the underlying historical instability of their rule. These aren't nation states, they're hopelessly dysfunctional geographical divisions bristling with Western weapons and money, with interpretations of the Koran and texts on Arab Socialism, where everyone is a philosopher and a scholar-- but no government lasts longer than it takes to overthrow it.

Every colonel and general dreams of empire, and every cleric in his flea ridden robes theorizes on the Islamic state, but none of them can do anything but act out the same murderous dramas. Building their house of cards and then watching it tumble down.

Had Western shenanigans not raised the price of bread, while providing support to local leftists from wealthy families, the Arab Spring would not exist. Now that it has, it's only another excuse for locals to fight their civil wars and then erect another ramshackle regime on the ruins of the old.

This isn't 1848 as some have theorized. It's 848, over and over again. Worse still, it's 748. 

When you don't have a nation, but you do have an army, then what you have is not a state, but a Shawarma Republic. To keep the army from overthrowing the leader, he must find internal or external enemies. When a downturn occurs, and the mobs gather, either the army massacres the mob or overthrows the ruler. Or the rebels cut a deal with some internal elements and wipe out the loyalists.

This is an old regional narrative that has nothing to do with democracy, human rights, Twitter or any of the other nonsense flowing through New York Times columns faster than the sewers of Cairo.

The modern Shawarma Republic has some royal or military ruler at the top who receives money from the West or from its enemies to hold up his end of the bargain. Which to him means stowing the money into foreign bank accounts, sending his trophy wife on shopping trips to Paris and striking a fine balancing between wiping out his enemies and buying them off.

Naturally he carries on the ritualistic chant of "Death to Israel", and if Israel ever looks weak enough, or his new Chinese or Iranian allies kick in the money for a full fledged invasion, he may even take a whack at it. But mostly the chants of "Death to Israel" are a convenient way of executing his enemies for collaborating with Israel.

In Syria, Assad's Shawarma Republic (officially the Syrian Arab Republic, formerly the United Arab Republic, after a bunch of coups and one kingdom, the privately owned fiefdom of the dumbest scion of the clan) is on fire. Because the enemies of the regime, and some of its former allies, got around to exploiting Bashar Assad's weakness.

For now Assad's armies backed by his Iranian allies are in control of the Shawarma Republic of Syria but that might change. Especially now that Turkey and much of the Arab world have stepped into the anti-Assad camp. And when the fireworks die down, and the corpses are cleaned up off the streets, there will be another Shawarma Republic. This one may not be run by the Alawites. But it will be run by someone, and it won't be the people.

The irony is that after turning Lebanon into its puppet, Syria got the same treatment from Iran. And if a revolt succeeds, then it might get the same treatment from Turkey. The big dog bites the little dog, and the bigger dog bites it.

The process can't be stopped, because the Islamic conquests that wrecked the region, the Caliphates that tried to make it static, and the colonial mapmakers who turned it into a ridiculous puzzle of fake countries filled with people who hate each other-- make it impossible.

There was a brief window after the war when the exit of empires and the presence of a large Western educated class seemed as if they might lead to working societies. Instead they led to the pathetic imitations of the worst of the West, dress up generals and scholars cranking out monographs explaining how everything could be made right with their theory. Now it's leading back to Islamism and the bloody clashes in the desert that originated this permanent state of dysfunction.

The Islamic Caliphate as a panacea for the problems caused by Islamic caliphates is about as good an idea as pouring gasoline on a fire. Which is exactly what the Islamists financed by Gulf royals, who can't help cutting throats even when it's their own, are doing.

You can't build a country out of armies and billions of dollars. The reason that Israel works and the Arab world doesn't is very simple. The Jews retained their identity. The perpetrators and victims of Islam who surround them have no roots. Only the sword in their hand and the shifting sands under their feet.

Group Immaturation

Two men, get in a fight and the smaller, weaker guy pulls a gun and shoots the man beating him up.  A tragedy, in the original sense of the word, for all involved.  Of course one man walked away, and the other man is dead—so the tragedy is much worse for one, and his family, than the other.   Both were foolish to get into such an altercation.

Yes, one man was 17….but at that age, you can drive, are a few months away from registering for the draft, and being able to vote….and 17 year olds are routinely charged as adults in criminal cases.  The 17 year old also had an adult-sized body and strength.   Anyone, not a mother, who calls a 17 year-old a “child” or “just a boy,” as has been routine in the Zimmerman trial—for both the State’s lawyers and the Media—is simply being emotionally manipulative and actually purposefully deceptive.   It is fascinating to me that one of the most obvious racial slurs African Americans have faced—is when a black man is called  “boy.”

You expect a man’s mother to plead her son’s innocence.  It’s heard in virtually every trial where a mother testifies.  It happened in this case with both men's mothers.   Part of the feminine instinct is to think only the best about her boy—her child is always only a victim (of circumstances, his friends, a woman, drugs, drink, bad influences, etc), no matter what his age.  What is odd, is when a whole race, through self-appointed “leaders” anoints itself as all victims, calling themselves in essence, all boys.  Of course in a real sense, the dead man—Trayvon Martin—is a victim.  However he primarily is a victim of race-hustling attention-addicts, looking for the next cause to build up their fame and fortune.  Trayvon Martin lost a fight, or a “whoop ass” as his lovely friend, Rachel Jeantel attempted to explain, which he was only trying to give George Zimmerman.  Men who die a violent death, while engaged in violence, are never—by definition—merely “victims,” and neither, in a free country—are a whole race of people.

You’ll note my consistent use of “man” and “men” for Martin and Zimmerman.  It’s interesting isn’t it, that Trayvon Martin is either called his full name, or more commonly by Media and supporters alike, just “Trayvon” (“Justice for Trayvon!”), while George Zimmerman is much more often referred to as just “Zimmerman,” never “George.”  One is a boy…the other a man, so we are constantly told, in a variety of ways.  Boys are accorded less responsibility--and less respect--than men.

The fact is that the photos of Martin initially released to the public, are from years before, when he really WAS just a boy—and are still the ones primarily shown in the Media--and the only ones shown by supporters.  The most current photos of a much older Mr. Martin grimacing with a rapper-style gold-grill in his teeth, or shirtlessly flashing double “F-you” fingers, or openly smoking marijuana…or his hands holding a gun….somehow aren’t loved by Martin’s supporters—or the Media.  Propaganda par-excellence.

In the old west, if two men got in a serious fight and one got shot, he was mourned and buried, and life moved on--his brothers it is hoped, learned, and didn't make the same mistakes (if they took revenge, they were treated as simply outlaws).  A sad situation truly—but since self-defense is a basic human right—when men were men, and considered equal, even in a supposedly more lawless time....people got over it. In as much as that one group—through self-appointed leaders—considers itself eternal victims, a people can be seen as fighting for immaturity.

Rise in Female Breadwinners Means America is a Loser

June 12, 2013

Rise in Female Breadwinners Means America is a Loser

By Selwyn Duke

When women start doing what men have traditionally done, yours is a civilization of the setting sun.  This is brought to mind when pondering a recent Pew Research Center study showing that women are now the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of American households.  You may have heard the story — it created quite a stir on Fox News, with Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly (who became quite hysterical) taking exception to male colleagues' warnings about the development's sociological implications.  But if these two ladies, and the other critics, had reacted rationally and not emotionally, they would realize what is obvious:

The rise in female breadwinners is a sign of a civilization in decline.

Let's start by first examining the study.  While the term "breadwinner" conjures up images of pleasingly plump paychecks, the real story here is the rise of poor single mothers.  Among the 40 percent of women in the breadwinner group, 63 percent are single mothers.  This isn't surprising, since the out-of-wedlock birthrate has risen from about 4 percent in the 1940s to 41 percent today (72 percent in the black community).  So what kind of "bread" are we talking about?  Writes Amy Langfield of CNBC, "The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011."  And, obviously, having large numbers of single mothers, with essentially fatherless children, struggling to make ends meet isn't good for the women, the children, or the society as a whole.

The picture looks better for the married 37 percent of the breadwinner group, but only by comparison.  Twenty-nine percent of these women's husbands are unemployed.  Moreover, Pew describes these women as older, college-educated, and white.  Translation: they're the one-child wonders.  These are often women who postpone childbirth in deference to careerism and then, perhaps after dropping a tidy sum at a fertility clinic, have their sole son or daughter.  Why does this warrant mention?  Because as the documentary Demographic Winter points out, this phenomenon is a significant contributing factor to the plummeting birth rates among Western peoples.  Outside New Zealand, there isn't one major European-descent group with a replacement-level birth rate.  And for all you secular-feminist chauvinists so proud of your cultural hegemony, what do you think happens to values that cause people to erase themselves?

So why can't the Megyn Kellys of the world perceive the rise in female breadwinners as the warning sign it is?  Because their feminist dogma teaches that any female "gain" relative to men is positive, and any criticism of it is blind male chauvinism.  These are the people who cheer girls' "better" performance in schools even though this is largely attributable to boys' worsening performance (and improved female test scores aren't relevant, because the exams, like the boys, have been dumbed down).  It's a mindset that would consider it a good thing if women won every future marathon because men either lost their legs or stopped running.

And that is the point.  If a warring nation must move a few divisions from the southern front to shore up the northern, it isn't a victory for those divisions; it means the war effort is waning.  And if the divisions' generals view it as a personal victory because they'll have the opportunity to distinguish themselves, they're self-centered and ignorant.  

Likewise, it was a sign of crisis when women had to assume men's roles in the factories during WWII, but the idea was that the crisis would end and normalcy resume.  But today we are in perpetual war — culture war — in a never-ending crisis in which we fight ourselves and confuse losses with gains.  No, the intersex wage gap isn't a bad thing, and it isn't good when it starts to close.  The size of that gap correlates with the health of the nuclear family; the larger it is, the greater men's ability to support their families and women's opportunity to stay at home with the children.  No, it isn't good when girls outshine boys in school, as this reflects a society of undisciplined lads and a hostile yet permissive, feminist-oriented academia.

And, no, it isn't good when you destroy patriarchy.  Why?  G.K. Chesterton put it best when he wrote, "What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible."  If you want matriarchy, just go into the black community.  Women rule the roost there, but they reign in a hell born of degraded morals and family breakdown.  There has never been a successful matriarchy -- the notion of a matriarchal prehistory is a myth -- and there never will be.

This is why, ultimately, the feminist model is destined for the dustbin of history.  The only system that ensures the perpetuation of civilization (replacement-level birth rates) is patriarchy; the only system that compels women and men to fulfill their responsibilities to hearth and home is patriarchy.  And this is why, barring the end of man or a dystopian future in which children are lab-created assembly-line style to be the collective's drones, patriarchy is inevitable.

There is no substitute for tradition. The Soviets learned this the hard way, for after undermining the family, sex roles, and religion, mass murderer Joseph Stalin actually outlawed abortion in a vain attempt to combat a bottomed-out birth rate.  But today Russia's population is still declining by 700,000 per year — the wages of their statist sin.

When a people would be invaded or conquered years ago, the men and boys above a certain age would sometimes be killed.  Emasculate a society, and it's no longer a force to be reckoned with.  But we have emasculated ourselves, killing off manhood by neutering men emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.  This won't end well, but for sure it will end.  Because the feminist band can play on, but the rising water will soon drown out their music — for good.

                 Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

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July 14, 2013

Women vs. Men: Who Governs Better?

By Selwyn Duke

Every so often there's that obligatory article asking, "Are Women Superior at_____?" or "Do Women Make Better ______?," with politicians often being the focus.

Of course, the question is always asked rhetorically.  No matter the facts of the case, you'll never hear, "We examined the issue exhaustively from all perspectives, consulted with premier authorities in the discipline, collated the data, and have determined that in this endeavor, women, to employ the official nomenclature, really suck."  In fact, I haven't heard any kind of dismissal of feminine abilities in any area -- of the kind routinely made regarding men -- since a 1993 Golf Magazine piece titled "Women can't chip."

So it's no surprise that National Journal is running a painfully long and vapid article by one Jill Lawrence titled "Do Women Make Better Senators Than [sic] Men?"  The answer is a foregone conclusion, so you don't need to imbibe Lawrence's 4,000-plus-word screed (I may pen a piece, "Do Women Make Wordier Journalists than Men?"), which bears the self-revelatory subtitle "They [women] make up one-fifth of the body [the Senate]. It doesn't look anything like parity (or America), but they believe they can do what the men can't -- namely, get things done."

Now, I'll address what's actually getting "done" momentarily, but, first, can we stop already with the "looks like America" poseur's platitude?  Here's a clue: the Senate ain't never gonna look like 'merica, pal.  The tremendous resources it takes to wage political campaigns alone ensure that we won't see John Q. Publics -- plumbers, carpenters, pipe-fitters, secretaries -- in higher (lower?) office.  The truth?  The media, which definitely doesn't look like America, notices that legislatures or cabinets don't look like America only when favored groups are, ahem, "underrepresented."  But do they ever notice the relative dearth of masons (as opposed to the many Freemasons), or even non-lawyers?  And there's an idea: get those blasted legalistic, mandate-metastasizing attorneys out of government -- whether they be male, female, or San Franciscan.

Getting back to Lawrence's thesis, she says that women exhibit "more collaboration, less confrontation; more problem-solving, less ego; more consensus-building, less partisanship. ... And there is plenty of evidence, in the form of deals made and bills passed, that women know how to get things done."  I'm sure.  With our government, heck, I think we're all gonna get done good.

Lawrence writes that more female senators "could mean less stasis," but what does government get "done," exactly?  Would less stasis mean the production of more cars, TVs, natural gas, wheat, or even Sandra Fluke's favorite product?  No, active government produces more laws, regulations, and mandates, which are virtually always removals of freedom and which hamper the private sector; it raises taxes and steals our money; and it engages in social engineering.  Less stasis means more statism. 

Let's be blunt: liberals will say that women have more political sense for a simple reason.

Women are more liberal.

And some conservatives pay lip service to the idea because of how cultural affirmative action causes them to view certain female politicians.  

It's also because my conservative brethren buy into other myths, such as the notion that women went big for Republicans in 2010.  Actually, they broke for Democrats 49-48 -- a much smaller margin than usual, but still true to form.

Now, Lawrence does acknowledge this in so many words, writing, "The issues traditionally associated with women often involve spending, regulation, and abortion rights[.]"  But she treats the leftist agenda as the default yardstick, crediting female senators with being instrumental in things such as expensive farm bills, ObamaCare, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the recent scamnesty bill, and averting "a government shutdown."  Except for the last effort, however, I can't think of one "triumph" she cites that's constitutional.  And all make stasis seem seductive. They're the kind of accomplishments that cause me to say, well, women can't chip.

Lawrence is fair to the not-fairer sex, though, writing that "some men" are "trying to make things work better"; these would be "[a]spiring deal-makers in today's Senate" such as "John McCain, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, and Tennessee Republican Bob Corker[.]"

And you put all those guys together, and you still have Low T.

Transitioning to High E, Lawrence emphasizes how "[s]ome of the strongest bipartisan relationships are among the women themselves" (that's easy when your ideology is basically the same) and also reports, "The members have thrown showers for women who are getting married or adopting children. They socialize with their families at each other's homes. They run together and discuss how to juggle a Senate career and the responsibility of raising young children."  Yes, it's the Divine Secrets of the Tax-and-Spend Sisterhood.

Look, let's cut the (I'll be sexist) male bovine.  It's well-known by the less brainwashed that women are creatures of the flock; they don't like going against the group, which is one reason I didn't think the women judging George Zimmerman would give us a hung jury (though I did predict an acquittal two days ago).  And, thank God, this time 6 Collaborating Women did the job of 12 Angry Men.  But there's another way of saying women are of the flock.

They are creatures of the collective. 

And of collectivism.

(I explain part of why this is so here.)

Of course, the common thread in all the "Are Women Better?" articles is that women just must be morally superior to men.

Except, uh, for Lois Lerner.

And Janet Reno.

And Hillary Clinton.

And Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren.

And Kathleen Sebelius.

And Susan Rice.

And the Zimmerman trial judge.

And, and...you get the idea.

You see, there is a point almost universally missed here: whatever the sexes' characteristics in general, male and female candidates must endure the same often corrupt crucible when seeking office.  They must get down in the same mud.  They must win the favor of and be elected by the same people, who, as the saying goes, "get the government they deserve."  And who are these people?  Women have long voted in greater numbers than men, so whatever the shortcomings of politicians -- male or female -- the strongest wind beneath their wings is a feminine one.  Maybe the question we should ask is: do men make better voters than women?

But I will answer Jill Lawrence's question: no, the men are better senators.  This is because of Duke's First Rule of Female Politicians: as a rule, you don't find good women in politics.  Oh, there are exceptions -- perhaps, maybe, I suppose.  And there are good traditional women everywhere.

Just not in politics.

Good traditional women are generally at home doing the things women have traditionally done, to state the obvious.  The women you find in the bare-knuckle world of politics are almost invariably cut from the feminist stone, which is why so many have stone faces and stone hearts and part of why, to quote Lawrence again, "[t]he issues traditionally associated with women often involve spending, regulation, and abortion rights[.]"

Of course, we'll only see more women in politics in the foreseeable future.  Society will hail this as a victory, but I'll just echo an earlier article of mine and say that when women start doing what men have traditionally done, yours is a civilization of the setting sun -- and sons.  And when this is the case, it will set on our daughters as well.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

Original from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/07/women_vs_men_who_governs_better.html at July 15, 2013 - 05:28:11 AM CDT

The United States of Sodomy

Of course the title of this little essay is over the top--you may well not be reading this otherwise.   Still, my thesis is that in as much as the U.S. Constitution has become something far from a written document defining our government--and protecting the peoples rights--rather, through the extreme stretching of judicial review, its become a flexible, general, almost blank...document, where the high courts can write whatever policy they in their wisdom want--without any consultation or permission from the people--the supposed sovereign in our system---this means to swear to "protect and defend" the constitution now means to swear to protect and defend sodomy.

Ten years ago, in 2003, the Lawrence v. Texas decision struck down all laws against same-sex deviant sexual behavior, sodomy, and now the high court has said that Congress cannot even define its terms for what benefits it gives through the federal government.  Legally, the Constitution now defends and protects...and even promotes (in states where its allowed--soon to be universal) sodomy.  "Sodomy" is a term derived from the biblical story of Sodom--well known for its sexual degeneracy--which was directly destroyed by God about 2000 BC during the life of Abraham.  In English law--"sodomy" has been broader than just homosexual acts, covering all kinds of unnatural sexual acts.  Still, the main unnatural act under the legal term "sodomy" is same-sex behavior.

Since the US Constitution is legally seen as what the Supreme Court says it is, this means that EVERYONE who swears an oath to defend and protect that constitution--is swearing to defend and protect the propogation and promotion of homosexuality....now even up-to and including the abomination of homosexual "marriage."  What this means is that every member of the military, and law enforcement, at the federal and state levels.....is swearing to defend and protect sexual immorality of the worst and most disgusting form.

To  me this surely gives pause as to whether Christians should now enter or stay in the military or law enforcement--if they do not, by their solemn oath--want to violate their conscience before God.

Islam is the Problem

By Daniel Greenfield

Posted at the Sultan Knish Blog

On a mild London afternoon, two Muslims rammed a car into a British soldier returning to the barracks after working at the Tower of London. They shouted Allah Akbar and hacked and slashed at his body in an attempt to behead him. By the time they were done, his body could only be identified through dental records.Shortly afterward, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act”. London Mayor Boris Johnson added, “It is completely wrong to blame this killing on Islam.”

Now former Prime Minister Tony Blair has thrown in his two pence writing, "There is not a problem with Islam. For those of us who have studied it, there is no doubt about its true and peaceful nature."

Blair previously claimed to have read the Koran every day, but apparently did not get as far as Chapter 5, which contains the verses that the Muslim murderers quoted after their butchery. And that’s understandable. Between his business deals with the Qatari royal family, which is behind much of the terrorism in the Middle East, the Kuwaiti royal family and the royals of the United Arab Emirates, it stands to reason that Tony probably never got past a few verses a day.

It’s easy to picture Tony Blair after a hot muggy day of clasping the greasy hands of Emirs and Sheikhs and trading his expertise for blood money, remembering to always eat with the right hand, not the left, returning to his five star hotel room, climbing into bed with his room Koran, flipping it open to the first chapter, reading, “In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful” and deciding that sounds peaceful enough, letting his head hit the pile of plush pillows and calling it a day. If Tony had made it as far as Chapter 2, where the Koran proclaims “Fight in the cause of Allah”, then the expert on Islam might have been able to entertain some doubts about its truly peaceful nature.

In what the Daily Mail describes as a “brave assault on Muslim extremism”, Blair writes, “There is not a problem with Islam... But there is a problem within Islam – from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam.”

It is rather sad that political bravery now consists of admitting that there may be some sort of problem within Islam and that it “is not the province of a few extremists... the world view goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit.” Having exhausted all his courage by admitting that there is a problem somewhere within Islam, Blair bravely avoids admitting it by babbling about international affairs and the need to intervene in Syria.

Over in Afghanistan, Lee Rigby, the murdered soldier, might have been credited with a brave assault on “Muslim extremism”. Blair, writing a Daily Mail article that concedes that the problem may be a bit bigger than just that legendary tiny minority of extremists is hardly in that category.

Political courage now involves minimizing a grave threat less than all the other politicians who are also minimizing the grave threat. If the political consensus is that the mountain is nothing but a molehill, the brave pol courageously comes out and says that it’s actually a minor hill.

But let’s take Blair at face value for a moment. If there is a problem within Islam, then how can the problem not be with Islam? If Tony Blair had picked up a virulent intestinal parasite on a trip to Dubai, wouldn’t there be a problem both within Blair and with Blair? If there is an epidemic of drug abuse in the United Kingdom, isn’t there a problem both with and within the UK? Can there really be a problem within Islam that involves the willingness of millions of Muslims to kill in the name of Islam that is not also a problem with Islam?

The purpose of Blair’s meaningless distinction is to contend that it’s not a structural problem with Islam, but some sort of aberrant mutation brought on by Western colonialism. The trouble with that is that it requires a willful refusal to address the actual text of the Koran and the entire body of Islamic history.

Even if we were to assume that the problematic “strain” of Islam is not universally representative, who exactly is Tony Blair to declare it so based on his casual readings of a book that contains more death threats per page than the Daily Mail’s comments section?

Governments are not supposed to define the nature of religion or pick and choose between various sects. And indeed the legality of declaring that one form of Islam is legitimate and another is not has frequently been challenged.

It is the role of Muslims to argue amongst themselves what is and isn’t legitimate Islam. Such an argument is currently being waged in Syria using the theology of heavy artillery and death squads. Perhaps Tony Blair should think twice before involving the UK in such an Islamic religious debate or trying to hold one at home.

No government should be determining what is and isn’t legitimate Islam. What they should be doing is addressing threats emanating from Islam. There is no need to study the Koran in order to understand those threats. Muslim terrorists have been willing to patiently explain that they are killing us in the name of Islam. We can take them at their word or, like Blair and Boris, foolishly argue the doctrines of their religion with them.



If Tony Blair returned home from Kuwait City with the Swine Flu, the authorities would quarantine him without making any fine distinctions as to whether there was something wrong with Tony or within Tony. Like the nature of the one true Islam, that is a metaphysical question that governments are not qualified to answer.

If the UK quarantines foreigners and even natives with the Swine Flu, which has killed far fewer Brits than Islamic terrorism, should it not begin quarantining the even more dangerous strain of Islam?

It was Blair’s government that brought the Islamic plague to the United Kingdom in large numbers as part of a deliberate policy to forcibly transform the UK into a multicultural paradise. That policy has led to constant killings by the affected and the spread of strains of Islam to non-Muslims like the two Woolwich attackers.

There is no question that Islam is the problem. When men kill in the name of Islam, they are making a bloody statement that Islam is the problem. The only remaining question is whether to stop importing more strains of the terrorist disease before it’s too late or to waste more time splitting hairs on what exact percentage of the affected are truly dangerous.

1 in 4 British Muslims said that the 7/7 bombings were justified. If 1 in 4 visitors from Pakistan were infected with the Swine Flu, there would be an immediate ban on travel from Pakistan. It may be time to apply the logic of the quarantine to stop the Islamic strain that Blair brought to the United Kingdom.