Quote of the Day

Ed West sums it up brilliantly:

When wealthy, globe-trotting liberals espouse the cause of universalism they often describe it in terms of air travel and airports, a world of vibrant, diverse, cross-cultural pollination. Which is great, for the few wealthy enough to use business class. For the rest of us society has become exactly like an airport – endless security checks, CCTV, government snooping, armed police and all-powerful officials who will arrest you for an inappropriate remark.

Quote of the Day

Via Ace of Spades blog, some badly-needed perspective on America's decision to drop the bomb on Japan, and evidence of a more general problem:

Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was "wrong" seem to be implying "that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs." People holding such views, he notes, "do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots." ... That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law.

Quote of the Day

And talking of the worthless rich, here's Big Hollywood's John Nolte on the cliche that just won't die:

Without the patronizing mantra of “quiet desperation,” what does the left have? Nothing. Only the realization that their own conformity and inability to feel and express joy is their own fault and not someone else’s. Specifically not the fault of an American way of life that for two hundred years has disproved and laughed in the face of the left’s arrogant belief in their own superiority.

Quote of the Day

A long one, since the hipsters need to have things spelled out to them:

We’ve been told for years that suicide bombers who blow themselves up in civilian areas in Israel are “freedom fighters struggling against Israeli occupation.” Does that mean that this Muslim blew himself up to protest against the Swedish occupation of Stockholm?

Sweden has no colonial history, at least not outside of northern Europe. It is a self-appointed champion of Third World countries and has virtually surrendered its third-largest city to immigrant mobs and substantial chunks of other cities, too. Swedish authorities are using the most extreme methods imaginable to suppress any dissent among the native people, who are being ethnically cleansed from their own land. The authorities always side with immigrants against the natives in the case of conflict. Muslims in Sweden can harass the natives as much as they want to and have access to all kinds of welfare goodies and a much higher standard of living than they would have in their own countries. In short, they have no imaginable, rational reason to complain, yet they still blow themselves up.

In Sweden, all the traditional excuses employed by Multiculturalists and Leftists throughout the Western world, fail. This leaves just one possible explanation, the only one never mentioned in Western mainstream media: That Muslims and their culture are fundamentally incompatible with our values and societies.

Quote of the Day

John Nolte sums up what's wrong with not just one film, but with modern Hollywood in general:

For those of you who haven’t seen “The English Patient,” just imagine what Satan would’ve done with “Casablanca.”

Quote of the Day

Greg Gutfeld nails it:

Think about it: if the average Joe expresses anxiety over Islamic fundamentalism, they’re called Islamophobes. But if an editor removes a comic in which Mohammed isn’t even present, that’s not honest to Allah Islamophobia?

Look, the media can’t have it both ways. They cannot criticize the public for concerns over Islam and then pull this stunt over a fear they may get stabbed in front of a Starbucks. If their governing principle in the newsroom is fear, then they should admit it and get the hell off our backs for feeling pretty much the same way.

And the flip side works too: enough with the articles about the dangers of right-wing extremism when it's blindingly obvious that if the right really was as crazed as the MSM says, they'd be in full sensitivity overdrive.

About That 'Tone' Thing...

Following on from the post below, one of the stupidest excuses for liberal thuggery is that, gosh darn it, they're all in favour of robust political debate, but they just prefer a civilised tone.

Kathy Shaidle drives a stake right through the heart of that idiocy here:

Finally, having run out of counter-"facts", sarcastic liberal now objects to your "tone."

You ask if one recites pi to the 50,000th decimal place without error, but does so in a Mickey Mouse voice, if that renders said recitation inaccurate.

Straight From The Horse's....

Steyn catches a liberal OD'ing on scopalamine:

So ethnic cleansing of Jews is a “liberal” position? Albeit an “anti-establishment” one? What’s interesting is that, after spending so many years huffily insisting they’re not anti-Semitic but merely “anti-Zionist”, the British left is now happy to put an explicit call for “the Jews” to be returned to the land of Auschwitz under the category of “criticism of Israel”

As ever, I say: if it's the right that's so extreme, how come it's always liberals who fantasise about murder and ethnic cleansing?

Quote of the Day

Norman Tebbit gets to the heart of the matter:

For the moment, at least, I will not succumb to the temptation offered me by the commenter called “James (1)”, who would like a conversation about “third world immigration, Islamification and a non-indigenous demographic time bomb” – although I would observe to opponents of Islamification that it is quite difficult to beat a something with a nothing.

Exactly right - for all the supposed negativity of conservatism (mainly defined as 'not signing onto to the ten squillion pound boondongle d'jour), it's noticeable that, even forty years later and with complete cultural dominance, the sixty-eighters have never managed to construct anything like a positive vision of society. Instead, we have fifty-somethings still trying to bag the oldsters by making rubbish flicks about how bad the 1950s were.

Quote of the Day

The Maha Rushbo on why socialism sucks:

This massive new entitlement is going to obliterate tolerance. This whole notion of live and let live, there isn't going to be any more of that. Every American is going to be looking at neighbors with jealousy, resentment, and anger at whatever medical care he or she receives because not everybody's gonna get the same. That's the way socialism works.

Exactly. The problem with the 'Common Good' isn't just defining what's good - hard enough though that is - it's defining the limits of what's common. Once everything belongs to everybody, then anything that goes to anyone means taking something from everyone. What's the quid pro quo when you're in hock to the whole country?

Quote of the Day

Kathy Shaidle says what half the country has been wanting to say for years:

We're always scolded that we should be grateful to our "foremother" feminists who paved the way for us in the workplace, but all most of them did was turn offices into sucky boring swear-free non-stop birthday parties and gossip factories littered with cat pictures.

...but don't forget the constant lawsuits too. Hey, if the sexes were reversed, this would be worth at least five million.

Quote D'Jour: Respectable Edition

As ever, Kathy Shaidle hits the nail on the head:

As long as there is such a thing as "class" (in the "hard hat" sense, not the Buckley one...) these disputes will continue within conservatism. The advantage we of the lower classes have is that we are not afraid to call it what it is, whereas Ruffini, Frum & Co. are forced to invent elaborate new theories to "explain" why their personal tastes represent "true" conservatism.

Steyn D'Jour

On why conservatives should treat with contempt liberal charges of 'extremism':

The aim of a large swath of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate speech" prohibitions, activist judges' more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position – even when, in many cases, the "extreme" position is supported by a majority of voters.

Quote Of The Year

Yep, that sums it all up.

Quote Of The Day

James Lileks on the culture wars:

Every new movement gains its authority by inhabiting and supplanting the authority of the previous movement. It only pretends to deny the legitimacy of the previous idea’s authority. Modern art is all about insisting that THIS IS NOT A PIPE right up to the point where it owns the pipe, at which point it is most certainly a pipe, and the most important pipe ever.

Quote Of The Day

No real point to choosing this quote, except that that it shows just how loopy FDR's policies really were:

In the prosecution of the Schechter Brothers, a Brooklyn clan of Kosher butchers who were hounded by federales telling them what to do at every turn–a bizarrely intrusive and unnecessary law required “straight killing,” meaning the brothers had to sell the first chicken that came to hand in the coop instead of selling the chicken the customer wanted–Roosevelt suffered a monumental defeat in the Supreme Court after which one justice heatedly told one of Roosevelt’s confidantes that the Court would not allow FDR to centralize everything.

Quote Of The Day

Steyn explains why the culture war matters:

If the non-political sphere is permanently left-of-center — the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else — it's simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

All of which is by way of saying that if you can't turn on the TV without catching a drama featuring babies being born headless because of pollution caused by evil businessmen, then it's going to be hard to make a case against the ecoloon cause d'jour.

Quote Of The Day

VDH on the new class war:

A few generations ago, Democrats would have opposed Palin but appreciated her blue-collar story, and applauded a working mom who out-politicked entrenched and richer male elites. But now the new aristocratic liberalism has adopted the values of the old silk-stocking Republicans of the 1950s—and so zombie-like worship rather than question entitlement.

Quote Of The Day

The Great Dalrymple on the liberal love of the scumbag:

Intellectuals need to say things that are not immediately obvious or do not occur to the man in the street. The man in the street instinctively sympathizes with the victim of crime; therefore, to distinguish himself from the man in the street, the intellectual has to sympathize with the criminal, by turning him into a victim of forces which only he, the intellectual, has sufficient sophistication to see.

Quote Of The Day

Jonah Goldberg on shoegate:

There's a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don't just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region's problems, we're told how simplistic and two-dimensional we're being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.