Mark Steyn thinks there may be no recovery for America from the choice of  Big Government Welfare Statism that a majority of the electorate has made:

I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they’ll be routed in two or four years’ time. The president-elect’s so-called "tax cut" will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those who are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, on the dole.

By 2012, it will be more than half on the dole, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the Nanny State. That is the death of the American idea – which, after all, began as an economic argument: "No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. "No representation without taxation" has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it’s unsustainable, and you’ve got to give some of it back?

At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty – for economic dynamism not the sclerotic "managed capitalism" of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business.

 Diana West comments on race as a motive for voting for Obama and quotes the fine (African-American) scholar Shelby Steele:   

In a particularly trenchant post-election column, author Shelby Steele explained how it was that a candidate he describes as "quite unremarkable" regarding public policy (an amalgam of "old-fashioned Keynesianism" and "recycled Great Society") was able, first, "to project an idealized vision of post-racial America," and then "have that vision define political decency." Once these visions were set, Steele writes, "a failure to support Obama politically became a failure of decency."

In this way, the white voters who became Obama’s political base were vested in the success of Obama’s vision – or, rather, in the vision of Obama’s success. Longing to "escape the stigma of racism," as Steele calls it, white voters became "enchanted" with Obama because their support for him provided evidence and certification of their own now self-evident state of "post-racial" enlightenment.

But, as Steele further explains, there’s an inherent contradiction to this unusual, if not historically unique, relationship. "When whites – especially today’s younger generation – proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society … seduces whites with a vision of the racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist … would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally."

Bingo. Here Steele demystifies the great and perplexing divide between those who care supremely about documenting and displaying their own "racial innocence" – and I would put the mainstream media, Obama voters and most politicians including John McCain into that category – and those who don’t. These latter "real post-racialists" see Obama as a man, not an icon, as a politician who emerged from a hotbed of anti-American radicalism, not a sacred totem of enlightenment better suited to a glass case at the Smithsonian than the boisterous tussle of the political arena.

For almost two years, Obama has been, in Steele’s words, evaluated culturally. This has resulted in reverential media non-coverage and now post-election judgments and metaphors that are already beginning to defy satire. Of course, Barack Obama didn’t end the Civil War, isn’t the reincarnation of RFK, and benefits from, but didn’t bring about, the long-entrenched social changes that facilitated his political rise. As he now heads to the White House, it’s crucial that he finally be regarded as a politician, not a messiah, and as a man, not a moral judgment. Otherwise, the cultural juggernaut he seems likely to unleash will be unstoppable.

Read the whole thing here. 

 Here’s a delicious article by Burt Prelutsky (from Townhall):

By this time, I don’t think it will shock anyone if I come right out and admit that I’m not a bleeding heart. When I read about a lava flow or an earthquake taking 500 theoretically innocent lives on the other side of the world, my first reaction is to ask myself if I knew anyone who might be visiting Sumatra or Mongolia. If the answer is no, my second reaction is to get on with my life.

There are, I’m well aware, many nicer, kinder people around – the sort of folks who immediately organize collection drives, so that blankets, canned goods and medical supplies, can be rushed to the survivors. Quite honestly, that would never even occur to me. In fact, when the giant tsunami hit Indonesia a while back, my initial thought was that, as with Sodom and Gomorrah, God was sending a long overdue message to a part of the world where the child sex trade is a major industry.

I do have a hunch, though, that a lot of the same people who are always ready to provide pajamas and peanut butter to people they don’t know are the same ones who hold candlelight vigils outside prisons when serial killers are being executed. Whenever I see them huddled outside in the cold, looking as if they’re posing for stained glass windows, I always find myself wondering how they treat their spouses and their kids when they pack up their candles and go back home.

All that being said, it should come as no big surprise when I confess that I am not in line to receive awards from the ecological zealots. That’s not to suggest that I wouldn’t offer bounties for the hides of spray-painting vandals (aka taggers, graffiti artists, public nuisances). But I certainly wouldn’t ban cigarette smoking in the great outdoors or even in bars and restaurants if the owners wish to encourage that sort of thing. If you don’t like cigarette smoke getting in your eyes, lungs or clothing, you eat, drink and get a job someplace else. If rolling out the red carpet to smokers is a really lousy idea, the place will go out of business. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a free society.

Something else I find irksome is the constant moaning over endangered species. I recently read an article that claimed the earth has gone through four major periods of mass extinctions. About 440 million years ago, give or take a month or so, 85% of marine animal species were wiped out. Roughly 70 million years later, many species of fish and marine invertebrates perished. Then, 245 million years ago, another major extinction of sea and land creatures took place. Finally, a mere 65 million years ago, 75% of all species – including dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers – took French leave. The causes of these massive upheavals have been attributed to volcanic eruptions, huge meteorites and climatic changes which obviously had nothing to do with human beings or the internal combustion engine.

When I read about all those species vanishing from the face of the earth, my immediate reaction is “So what?” But after due deliberation, my response changes from one of mild disinterest to one of jubilation. Imagine if every single time you went outside to collect your newspaper, you had to fight a tyrannosaur for it or had to worry that a pterodactyl was going to swoop down because its idea of fast food is you.

Apparently, there are presently 10 million different species of animal life on earth. Even though, according to this article I read, only a small percent of all animal life has been evaluated, the ecologists estimate that 750 species of fish, 290 species of reptiles and 150 species of amphibians, are currently at risk.

Inasmuch as dogs, cats, horses, llamas, bunnies, cows and guinea pigs, aren’t on the list, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a darn. I mean, how many different kinds of reptiles does anyone need to be really, truly happy?

Thanks to Al Gore and his motley crew, I’m willing to wager that a lot of you suddenly flashed on a mental image of a polar bear going down for the third time. My question is, who cares if polar bears disappeared once and for all? The truth of the matter is that nobody would really miss the vicious brutes. And, what’s more, baby seals would throw a party. 

 David Limbaugh asks his fellow conservatives:

Could you tell me under what moral principle you would advocate, say, conservative cooperation with liberal legislation during Obama’s "honeymoon" period that would further dismantle America’s capitalistic system or undermine our national security?

Right before the election, I wrote that Obama worries me because of his leftist ideas and the Saul Alinsky (Chicago-style, thuggish) tactics his campaign and its surrogates were using to secure the election. Now adding to my concern is all this talk about a new day in America and the need for bipartisanship, which is just an effort at soft intimidation and a strategy to shame the opposition from exercising its vigilance and acting as the opposition party. But even that would be far less troubling if there were fewer gullible people on our side.

Perhaps it’s Obama’s messianic aura and rhetorical generalities of harmonic convergence that blind "intellectuals" to his radicalism and deceive them into believing he’ll govern as a centrist. Maybe it’s his fluency and mellifluous voice that separate pro-life advocates such as Doug Kmiec from their critical faculties to the point they could argue that this poster child for Planned Parenthood was the more pro-life of the two presidential candidates. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editors must have taken a quick slug of the Kool-Aid before opining that Obama now faces "a much greater foe: Democrats on Capitol Hill," who will try to pull this presumed pragmatist to the left.

Dream on, boys. They’ll be headed west together as fast as their partisan legs can carry them. And we better be ready for them, believing our own instincts and powers of observation rather than relying on the lying eyes of our elites and the false assurances of our political opponents who will tell us that left means center and wrong means right.

What is it about Obama’s leftist past and record as the most liberal senator that so many intelligent people do not understand?

 We believe neither in the Christ nor the Antichrist, but greatly like the poetry of the Jewish and Christian bibles in the English of King James’s translators.

In the Book of Revelation, St John the Divine predicts the end of the world, preceded by spectacular calamities caused by the destructive power of terrible beasts. One beast, traditionally the Antichrist, is numbered 666.

He is an economic egalitarian, who will severely curtail the free market, according to Revelation 13:16-18:  

‘And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is the wisdom, Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’ 

Well now, for believers, or for those who enjoy such oddities, here’s the news: 

The day after the election, November  5, the winning number in the Illinois state lottery (evening pick 3) was 666.

Think what you will. 

 From Awdal News Network, Somalia:

The first reports were that Aisha Ibrahim Kuhulow was 23 year old, but her father now confirms for Amnesty International that she was only 13.

The girl’s young age, combined with the fact that she herself contacted the Shabab-militia who controls the town, in order to report the rape, failed to protect her from being sentenced to death by the Islamists for breach of Islamic law in having sex outside of marriage.

This child suffered a terrible death as demanded by the armed opposition forces that control Kismayo, says David Copeman who is responsible for Amnesty’s Somalia-department, to the news office, AP.

Hole in the ground

Thousands of people witnessed the grotesque execution of Aisha at a football stadium in the port town of Kismayo on Monday.

The 13-year old was led in and forced into a hole in the ground. The hole was then filled so that only her head was showing. About 50 men then started to throw stones at her, according to Amensty’s information.

After a while, nurses were called to check whether Aisha was still alive. The thin body was then brought out of the hold and examined. When it was established that she was still alive, she was again placed in the hole so that the stone-throwers could continue.

Shot

When some of the spectators tried to storm the stadium to save Aisha, the militia opened fire on the crowd, and a young boy was killed.

A spokesman for the Shabab-militia expressed regret for the boy’s death and assured that the soldiers who had opened fire would be punished.

However, it would seem that the men whom13-year old Aisha tried to report for rape have little to fear. None of them have been arrested.

 

 

The United Nations said Tuesday that a Somali stoned to death by Islamist militants after she had been accused of adultery was a 13-year-old girl who had been raped while visiting her grandmother.

In the first such public killing by the militants in about two years, she was placed in a hole and stoned to death on Oct. 28 in a rebel-held port city, Kismayu, in front of a crowd, after local leaders said she was guilty under Shariah, the legal code of Islam based on the Koran.

“Reports indicate that she had been raped by three men while traveling on foot to visit her grandmother in the war-torn capital, Mogadishu,” Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, said in a statement.

“Following the assault, she sought protection from the authorities, who then accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death,” Unicef added. “A child was victimized twice — first by the perpetrators of the rape and then by those responsible for administering justice.”

The human rights group Amnesty International has identified the girl as Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow and said she was killed by 50 men who stoned her in a stadium in Kismayu in front of about 1,000 spectators.

When the family tried to report the rape to the Shabab militia that controls Kismayu, the girl was accused of adultery and was detained. None of the men she accused of rape have been arrested.

A Somali news agency adds more disturbing details:

Thousands of people witnessed the grotesque execution of Aisha at a football stadium in the port town of Kismayo on Monday.

The 13-year old was led in and forced into a hole in the ground. The hole was then filled so that only her head was showing. About 50 men then started to throw stones at her, according to Amnesty’s information.

After a while, nurses were called to check whether Aisha was still alive. The thin body was then brought out of the hold and examined. When it was established that she was still alive, she was again placed in the hole so that the stone-throwers could continue.

When some of the spectators tried to storm the stadium to save Aisha, the militia opened fire on the crowd, and a young boy was killed.

A spokesman for the Shabab-militia expressed regret for the boy’s death and assured that the soldiers who had opened fire would be punished.

However, it would seem that the men whom13-year old Aisha tried to report for rape have little to fear. None of them have been arrested.

 The 44 Grad rockets, Qassam missiles and mortar rounds which blasted Israel from Gaza Wednesday, Nov. 5, were fired from houses close to the border fence which Hamas had turned into fortified firing positions. Borrowing Hizballah’s tricks from the 2006 Lebanon war, the Hamas firing squads remove the roofs and cover the top floors with camouflage netting easily removed for attacks.

To spot these heavily-disguised launching pads, round-the-clock aerial observation is necessary.

DEBKAfile’s military analysts report: Two years after the 34-day Hizballah rocket blitz of northern Israel – and five months into an informal truce with Hamas – the IDF is not coping with this tactic.

Furthermore, Wednesday, the civilian front was again abandoned to a heavy missile bombardment. The Israeli Air Force went into action three times to halt the mortar fire on Israeli troops, wiping out two Hamas mortar squads and killing five of its members. But when the missiles began falling on Ashkelon, Sderot and the Eshkol farm region, the air force stayed on the ground.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources further disclose that an anti-tank missile strike against an IDF patrol south of the Kissufim Gaza crossing last Friday, Oct. 31, was not carried out by Hamas, but an al Qaeda cell located in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younes. This cell calls itself Al Qaeda-Palestine.

Senior officers of the Southern Command are sharply critical of defense minister Ehud Barak’s soft, ceasefire-at-any-price policy, our sources report. They say he is only encouraging Hamas to initiate more violations, certain they can get away with it, and is weakening Israel’s hand for recovering its abducted soldier Gilead Shalit.

Barak hit the wrong note when he stressed that Israel wanted to preserve the truce after Hamas dug a 250-meter long tunnel from central Gaza under the Israeli border fence in order to kidnap more Israeli soldiers or civilians. That is no deterrence.

Behold a young hippy woman shall conceive, and shall bear a son, and his name shall be – okay, not Emanuel (‘God with us’), but Barack (‘Blessed’).  However, when Barack becomes President of the United States he will appoint Emanuel as White House chief of staff, and Emanuel will be the one who actually does the job. 

Rahm Emanuel, deeply experienced and full of passionate conviction, has accepted the post of Eminence Grise. He’ll be the wizard behind the curtain. 

Facts about him. He too, like the President Elect, is a politician from Chicago. (Yes, you are right to look nervous!)

He was, bewilderingly, a ballet dancer. But do not expect him to step lightly – he is nicknamed ‘Rahmbo’ for good reason. He’s a hard attacker.

Dare we hope that as he is Jewish and his father was a member of the Irgun, the passionately Zionist terrorist  group (which helped or hindered the birth of the State of Israel depending on your point of view), that he will counter the influence on the President of his good friend Rashid Khalidi, the PLO man? 

I’d say, don’t count on it. Emanuel is a man of the left. For such as he, leftism trumps everything, and in the world at large the left is now predominantly anti-Israel.

We can only wait and see. 

 The headmaster in my last entry, A Comedy for Comfort, would be happy with the meaning of the presidential election as discerned by Ben Shapiro in his Townhall article today:

Barack Obama was the vessel for that [unity] movement. He was an utter cipher. But he embodied the need of the American public for unity by hearkening back to the ultimate unifying feature of American life: third-grade slogans. He spouted Hope and Change. He told us, “We’re All Americans.” He told us, “Yes, We Can.”

From any other politician, it would be ridiculous drivel. From a black candidate, it was inspiring. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson didn’t talk like that – they spoke the language of division. Because Obama spoke the language of unity, he had to be a moderate. So went our logic.

Barack Obama had us from the moment he said, “Hope.” In that moment, Obama accomplished two simultaneous transformations. First, he transformed himself into a moderate. Second, he transformed himself into a messianic figure, the object of our longing: the physical embodiment of America’s progression beyond racial conflict. If America wanted to move beyond conflict, what better way than to embrace a candidate who could end all racial conflict?

And the Obama campaign subtly played on this theme. They implied that if we voted against him, we were engaging in racial hatred; some supporters even implied America would undergo a race war if he lost. That’s the last thing we wanted.

We wanted to feel good again. That is what the Great Election of 2008 was about. It was about Americans’ desire to feel a part of Something Larger. To do something together, as Americans. In today’s day and age, that Something Larger cannot be the America Ronald Reagan preached about – the left has attacked that America as racist, sexist, and selfish. That Something Larger had to be an individual who could provide us with the feeling of unity.

Barack Obama told us that we could do Something Larger simply by voting for him. When he said, “Yes We Can,” and we followed by screaming it, chanting it, shouting his name in unison, we were Doing Something Larger. We were uniting.

America has always recognized that unity for its own sake is useless at best and dangerous at worst. Unifying behind a mysterious charismatic figure promising transformational change may make us feel good, but it is a betrayal of the open and honest governmental debate our Founding Fathers sought and so many Americans have fought and died to preserve.

Americans think they grew up during Election 2008. They think they moved beyond the past. In one way they did. In another, more important way, they regressed dramatically – to a time before politics mattered. In the next four years, there will be plenty of growing up to do.