‘Conscience,’ Hamlet says, ‘does make cowards of us all.’

Or does cowardice claim the name of conscience – steal its identity – in order to excuse itself? 

Conscience should drive us, as individuals, to do what we believe to be morally right. But it may be a self-flattering word we use to explain why we do certain things that we actually do out of craven cowardice itself, or the sort of moral vanity that makes us want to appear virtuous rather than to act virtuously.

Governments, nations, and crowds also cover their actions with the same deceptive claim, attributing to conscience what they really do out of weakness, fear, stupidity,  hypocrisy and ideological romanticism.  

False conscience calls itself by many other names, among them these: political correctness; respect for multiculturalism or ‘diversity’; a striving for ‘social justice’ or economic equality or ‘fairness’;  remorse for (largely imaginary) historical sins. Under such names all kinds of idiotic, unjust, destructive and evil things are done.    

Exempli gratia from the real world: 

In the US millions of voters elect an unqualified candidate to political office because he is black.

Navies refrain from capturing pirates, or (even better) summarily killing them, because ‘they have human rights’.

Liberal democratic welfare states keep and protect alien Islamic preachers of terrorism and sedition, lavishly house, feed, educate and medically treat them (and their pluralities of wives and families) at the expense of their intended victims, the indigenous population, because if they’re returned to their own countries they may be tortured or executed – or even because some witness at their possible trials might be tortured.

Western governments abrogate freedom because citizens use it to criticize Muslims and their beliefs. 

European police refrain from enforcing the law against Muslim offenders.  

In Britain the rule of a single Law of the Land, the very thing that makes it possible for people of different provenance to live together in harmony, is arbitrarily abandoned by the acceptance of Sharia as a second system of law, although it is incompatible with and contradictory to the enchorial system. 

Western nations reduce their defensive power to the point of ineffectiveness while vicious tyrannical regimes, inimical to the West and motivated by a declared intention of aggression, acquire arsenals of nuclear weapons. 

Governments interfere in markets and impoverish the people.  

Jillian Becker  November 21, 2008

 Dick Morris and Eileen McGann write in Townhall:

The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.

At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

According to The Washington Post, it would "examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks’ operations."

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various "exotic" financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct "regular vigorous reviews" of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices…

Bush, to say nothing of Obama, has given the government control over our major financial and insurance institutions. And it isn’t even our government! The power has now been transferred to the international community, led by the socialists in the European Union.

Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn’t have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him. It was under Bush that the government basically took over as the chief stockholder of our financial institutions and under Bush that we ceded our financial controls to the European Union. In doing so, he has done nothing to preserve what differentiates the vibrant American economy from those dying economies in Europe. Why have 80 percent of the jobs that have been created since 1980 in the industrialized world been created in the United States? How has America managed to retain its leading 24 percent share of global manufacturing even in the face of the Chinese surge? How has the U.S. GDP risen so high that it essentially equals that of the European Union, which has 50 percent more population? It has done so by an absence of stifling regulation, a liberation of capital to flow to innovative businesses, low taxes, and by a low level of unionization that has given business the flexibility to grow and prosper. Europe, stagnated by taxation and regulation, has grown by a pittance while we have roared ahead. But now Bush – not Obama – Bush has given that all up and caved in to European socialists.

The Bush legacy? European socialism. Who needs enemies with friends like Bush?

 Ruth King writes on the stupidity of linking anti-Semitism, which is wholly irrational and deeply unjust, with "Islamophobia’ which could not be more justified and reasonable.  The whole article is well worth reading. Here is a quotation from the end of it:

Muslims have killed more Americans than any group or state since the end of the Vietnam War. Yet, in an unflagging effort to reassure Muslims we were continually told that these terrorists “hijacked a great religion” and those who use it for violent ends are engaged in a “perversion” of the faith.

 

Even seemingly honorable defenders of the faith have masqueraded as moderates until they were apprehended for conspiring to aid or fund jihad and al Qaeda through communal or charitable organizations.

 

There are over 200 documented episodes where the “perverters” of the faith have been apprehended and thwarted in deadly plans right here in the United States. The charges all range from financing Islamic terrorism, obstructing justice by refusing to testify or by aiding terrorist wannabes, to stockpiling and transporting explosives and weapons, attempting to bomb airlines and military bases, providing false tips to federal law enforcement, assault and murder of family members who dishonor the family, smuggling false passports, committing arson and conspiring to kill and maim civilians. There are probably an equal number of “sleeper cells” which have been discovered and thwarted but an unsettling number which continue to operate and plot under the radar of law enforcement.

 

Is it irrational or bigoted to fear them? No. It’s prudent.

 

We should we demand that our elected legislators consider our safety and homeland security and confront and condemn putative terrorists and those who aid and abet them instead of pandering to the whining and pretended “victimhood” of those who would destroy us. I am afraid for our country. I fear creeping Sharia, and it is high time for the purported great majority of peaceful Muslims to speak out loudly and forcefully against fanatical hatred of Jews and Christians and to denounce violence and terrorism and dreams of a global Caliphate.

 

Finally, is it not perverse to trivialize the historic shame and curse of anti-Semitism by linking it to the calculated whims and deceptions of those who practice, preach and promote Jew hatred and genocide?

 

 You betcha!

 zombietime announces, and we agree, that THE WAR IN IRAQ IS OVER, and the victory should be celebrated online on November 22. Go here – there are some great pictures:

We won. The Iraq War is over. 

I declare November 22, 2008 to be "Victory in Iraq Day." (Hereafter known as "VI Day.") 

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government, and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won. 

What more indication do you need? An announcement from the outgoing Bush administration? It’s not gonna happen. An announcement from the incoming Obama administration? That’s really not gonna happen. A declaration of victory by the media? Please. Don’t make me laugh. A concession of surrender by what few remaining insurgents remain in hiding? Forget about it. 

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat: 

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ

And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it’s up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration. 

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day. 

 Timothy Sandefur writes:

Liberals have lately been making much of the purported anti-intellectualism of conservatives in the late election. No doubt they’re right. But I must say I find it laughable that this charge would come from liberals of all people. The left in this country has had a long and dismal history of embracing a wide variety of anti-intellectual credos.

Start with the most obvious: the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &c.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas can simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.

These ideologies masquerade, unconvincingly, as intellectual movements, but they are simply attempts to ignore ideas, or to shoot them down with reactionary appeals to political dogmas. They treat the world of thought with the same contempt as a street thug, except that they phrase his appeal to violence in more clever terminology. In the end it is the same: power over thought, force over reason…

“Radical chic” is a leftist phenomenon, not a conservative one. It was, and is, liberals who accord street thugs and petty vandals the respectability of academic honors. The terrorist Bill Ayers? Or the terrorist Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of the U.S.S.R.? She’s presidential chair at U.C. Santa Cruz. It was liberals who not only gave the anti-intellectual thug Norman Mailer pop icon status, but handed him the mantle of a respectable intellectual. The Jack Abbott case was a curiosity to them, and a source of gossip. When he stabbed his wife with a penknife at a dinner party, almost killing her in 1960, was that the end of his run as a leftist intellectual? Hardly. The left respects its anti-intellectual thugs.

Very similar to their awe for ideological violence is the liberal respect for consistently leftist liars like Michael Moore. Moore was made of, by, and for liberals, and he remains a celebrity to liberals despite the fact that there is probably no more recklessly anti-intellectual a figure in America today (with the possible exception of the moronic liberal darling Cornell West). He has contempt for anything approaching a truthful description of reality or a reasonable theory of politics or economics. His work is a set of cheap thrills for those with a knee-jerk hostility to the free market. Yet those thrills don’t even add up to anything like a sensible plot. His lies and distortions are well documented, and even turn off some thoughtful liberals. Yet he is still admired by a great many others, who are more committed to the party than to the basic facts. If that isn’t anti-intellectualism, I don’t know what is.

What about the “Bush lied, people died” meme? No serious person can believe that the Bush Administration consciously lied about the intelligence on Iraq in order to trump up a war to seize Iraqi oil. Yet tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people believe this, and proudly say so on the bumpers of their cars. Is this the intellectualism of the Democratic party?

Many rank and file liberals believe a whole host of basic untruths, and do not bother themselves with examining their beliefs any farther than their emotional prejudices allow them. Consider the environmentalists, who believe in a wide variety of panicky flasehoods about the state of the earth. Al Gore made a film riddled with misleading or half-true claims. Did the left correct him or urge him to be more intellectually honest? No, they gave him an Oscar.

It doesn’t get much better when you move to the more moderate liberals, either. Liberals believe that government can efficiently allocate resources, and run, say, a health care system for hundreds of millions of people, despite the basic failures of such systems in other countries. And they believe this, not because they disagree with the discoveries of economists like Friedrich Hayek, or have an answer to the problem of rent-seeking, a term which most Democrats have probably never heard. No, they believe this because of their emotional commitment to wealth-redistribution, a commitment based on a moral premise—that the wealthy should pay the bills of the poor because poverty is “unfair”—which they rarely even bother to defend. Ask why your earnings should be taken from you by the state and given to someone else, and you will rarely get an intellectual answer. I’ve certainly never been given one. I’ve heard a lot of emoting, and a lot of accusations of nefarious corporate meanness, and a lot of heart-rending stories about how hard it is to be poor. But an intellectual defense of redistributive government? That’s a rarity.

The leadership of the American left appeals not to ideas but to emotion—envy, usually, or panic—to move party members to embrace empty promises of material prosperity through government manipulation, promises no competent economist can fail to see through. The left is fond of violence and power, and the romanticism and iconography of thugs who are transformed into celebrities among leftist intellectuals. Liberals are this country’s leading practitioners of race and gender politics. Barack Obama exploits the power of crowds to chant empty slogans promising that the laws of economics can be magically suspended if we just have enough faith (“Yes, we can!”)…. And yet this is not the party of anti-intellectuals and populists?

The US victory in Iraq is bigger than even President Bush and his outgoing administration seem to realize. 

First, it can now be proclaimed as victory: 

 If Barack Obama had gotten his way, Iraq would now be in the hands of Islamists, and America’s image would have suffered a crushing blow. He voted to cut off funding for the troops, just when they needed it most, and still refuses to admit he was wrong.

Well, he was wrong, and George W. Bush deserves credit for refusing to back down when all around him were losing heart: “The war is over and we won.” [Quotations from Little Green Footballs]

And, secondly, how big and important the victory is can be best be understood from a study published by the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. It tells how the jihadists in Iraq, Zarqawi and his successors, prepared to re-establish the caliphate. They even had the caliph chosen and ready. They saw this as a step to Islamic world domination. After Zarqawi himself was killed in June 2006, his followers ‘determined to turn Iraq into a battleground [and] the incubator for their grand vision of a unified Islamic empire under the aegis of a ruling caliph.’ This vision enthralled a new generation of jihadists. As  a winning ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (assuming, as it were, the al-Qaeda franchise) they could have drawn thousands more fighters. They declared an ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ which was to be the center of victorious Islam, with Baghdad as its capital. Had the surge not take place, had it not turned the local tribal leaders against the jihadis, the triumph of militant Islam over the United States would have been seen throughout the Islamic world as a victory of historic proportions, ‘a victorious Islamic regeneration’; a caliphate might well have been established, and the non-Muslim world subjected to an onslaught of terrorism – possibly nuclear terrorism – without precedent.

The study is long, but very interesting and well worth reading. Here are two riveting passages from it:

The American public was uncurious as to the identity, nature, and goals of its enemy in Iraq. And, unfortunately, U.S. leaders and commanders were mostly complicit in such willful unawareness. The lack of interest on the part of the public was partly due to bitter partisan recriminations over the Bush administration’s policy in waging the Iraq war, and over who in Washington was to blame for the insurgency that ensued. Consequently, the doctrines of the Bush administration regarding preemptive strikes and democracy in the Middle East came under incessant scrutiny from the administration’s domestic political foes. Meanwhile, the doctrines of the jihadists were overlooked or, in the few cases where they were considered, dismissed as esoteric. Fantastical as they may be, these doctrines do indeed motivate and inform the enemy’s actions and strategy, and their significance was not recognized…

The corollary to the military defeat now being experienced by the jihadists is the even more agonizing prospect of doctrinal collapse: the heralded caliphate is stillborn, and the glorious vision of a reinvigorated Islamic state has been smashed. The anguish and demoralization brought about by this byproduct of battlefield victory cannot be overstated. To smash the dreams of a man who lives for a cause, who endures cruel deserts and damp caves while awaiting martyrdom, is a fate far worse than death. In a battle of wills, young men are able to summon the necessary willpower to press a button and to detonate themselves among innocent bystanders. They do so for the cause of jihad, and for the deferred utopia of a resurrected and avenging Islamic world power. Nothing breaks the will of the individual jihadist more than to see his ideology begin to bear fruit, only to watch that fruit rot away right before his eyes. Such has been the impact of the Zarqawist Islamic State of Iraq—the caliphate-to-be, under the Commander of the Faithful Abu Umar al-Baghdadi the Qurayshite—and such the bitter aftertaste of its ruinous downfall.

(This news and commentary was first posted on October 26 – before the election. As it was accidentally removed, we are re-posting it here.)

Gateway Pundit reports:

The LA Times is holding a video that shows Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who are openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama even gives a toast to a former PLO operative at this celebration. 

If the American public saw this  side of Barack Obama he would never be elected president.

But, the media refuses to release this video.

LA Times writer Peter Wallsten [apparently basing his story on research carried out by Debbie Schlussel – JB] wrote about Barack Obama’s close association with former Palestinian operative Rashid Khalidi back in April.
Wallsten discussed a dinner held back in 2003 in honor of Khalidi, a critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights.
Barack Obama has denied his close association with Khalidi, too.

According to Wallsten the evening not surprisingly turned into a classic Jew-bash: 

"During the dinner a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Barack Obama also praised the former PLO operative during the event.
And, Obama confessed that his family often shared dinner with the Khalidis:

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases… It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation – a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table," but around "this entire world."

…The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Khalidi and the Obamas were great friends in Chicago and often shared meals together.
By the way, Khalidi was also best friends with Bill Ayers.

 From Power Line:

More than any other cartoonist now working, I think, Michael Ramirez makes incisive points with his drawings. Like this one; click to enlarge:

It’s an excellent point: the real Bill Ayres scandal is not that he is pals with a guy who turned out to be President; it’s that he has had, over a period of years, a considerable influence on how children in Chicago have been educated. And that influence has been entirely pernicious. Ayers’ radical, racially separatist curriculum has been studied and has been found to be educationally worthless. In today’s liberal world, of course, that doesn’t put him out of business. On the contrary.

Bill Ayers happens to be famous, by virtue of his relationship with Barack Obama and the fact that some years ago, he bombed the United States Capitol and other landmarks. But how many other "educators" share Ayers’ perspective and values, but have never bombed anything and don’t happen to be friends with the President-elect? That number is huge. No one is tracking their influence on our youth, but isn’t it obvious that the influence of leftists in our public and private schools is both vast and malign?

 Here are some extracts from an article by Burt Prelutsky. Please read it all.

When I realized that Sen. Obama would soon be President Obama that the nightmare began. I truly felt overcome with grief, the kind you feel when a loved one dies. In this case, the loved one was America…

Looking back, I think the left-wing cancer took root in the 1960s and the funeral took place on November 4th. That’s why I’m having a really hard time putting up with people who are so darn jubilant about Obama’s victory. To me, it’s as if they’re dancing on America’s grave.

I know that a lot of people will regard me as a racist for being so depressed over the election result. I am probably the least racist person in America. As I’ve always said, people who hate others because of their race, religion or national origin, are just plain lazy. After all, once you get to really know people, there are always better reasons than that for despising them… 

Besides, it does no good to deny being a racist. Once you have to deny it, you’ve already been labeled. But I have to ask, if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and I had been upset about it, would I be branded a misogynist? The fact is, I would have been less upset if she had been elected. But that’s only because I only object to her politics and her voice. Her circle does not include the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Louis Farrakhan and Rashid Khalidi. Aside from Hillary Clinton’s colleagues in the Senate, her only questionable associate is Bill…

One of my friends wondered how it could be that I wasn’t thrilled to see millions of black people, including Jesse Jackson and all of Kenya, in rapture over Obama’s victory. I told him it’s one thing for Obama to garner 96% of the black vote when he’s running against a Republican such as John McCain, but quite another when he got 91% of the vote in the primaries when he was running against a liberal such as Sen. Clinton. That, to me, reeks of racism, and I see no reason to celebrate it.

I went on to say that it often seems to me that it’s only conservatives who ever took to heart Martin Luther King’s fervent wish that we all learn to judge our fellow men by their character and not by the color of their skin.

I concluded by telling him that he had every reason to be ecstatic that a man who shared his politics was elected, but that Obama’s color shouldn’t enter into it, and that if I and many like me were disgruntled about the election, it had nothing to do with Obama’s pigmentation, everything to do with his character and his leftist agenda. We elected a president, after all, the leader of the free world, not a prom king.

If there is one bright spot in all this, it’s that I won’t have to spend the next four years listening to John McCain begin every sentence with “My friends.” The sad truth is, I pick my friends far more wisely than we pick our candidates or, for that matter, our presidents.

 Michelle Malkin writes that Paulson ‘doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing’. Here’s part of her article (read the whole thing): 

Members of Congress who let themselves be bullied into switching their votes on the bailout should be experiencing the biggest case of buyers’ remorse in U.S. history. They fell for what Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit" – the disastrous idea that a federal bureaucrat has the knowledge to do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy. They gave unchecked power to a single government official without a clue…

Wielding his enormous authority, Paulson is desperately throwing our money at banks in a futile attempt to convince them to lend. Instead, those banks are either hoarding the cash or acquiring more assets. In other words: Paulson is helping the banks that were "too big to fail" grow even bigger with taxpayer backing. Swell.

The White House says: "We’ll just trust our treasury secretary to implement the program." President Bush insists "government’s role will be limited and temporary." Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Barney Frank is shrugging off the lack of bailout disclosure by both the Federal Reserve and Treasury. But as I reminded readers before this latest bait-and-switch admission, Hank Paulson is not to be trusted. I repeat:

This is the man who proclaimed the subprime crisis "largely contained" in April 2007; "near the bottom" in May 2007; and "largely contained" again in August 2007. This is the man who pledged that he had "no interest in bailing out lenders or property speculators" in October 2007 and couldn’t "think of any situation where the backdrop of the global economy was as healthy as it is today."

This is the man who patted himself on the back for refusing to "put taxpayer money on the line" to rescue Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15 – and then turned around the next day and engineered the $85 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG. This is the man who vowed he had "no plans to insert money" into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and then turned around and committed $200 billion in capital and credit lines to those corrupt, bloated, crumbling institutions.

This is the man who declared that "the worst is likely to be behind us" in May 2008.

Emperor Paulson’s bipartisan courtiers in Congress berated anyone who dared challenge his wisdom. Minority Leader John Boehner sniffed: "This is no time for ideological purity." Well, ideological pollution begat this mess. It’s time for a fiscal-conservative counterinsurgency to disrobe and disarm the charlatans before they do more harm.