It’s Tuesday, December 24th, 2013…but before we begin, a brief thought:
Here’s the juice: it’s like Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness…
…in high places.” By the way, A&E had every right to terminate Phil…just as we have every right not to watch A&E…or any of it’s affiliates!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in a related item, here’s a must-read commentary by the great Mark Steyn, courtesy of NRO:
Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:
Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.
Second joke from the archives:
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”
But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.
Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them…
And why is it so much quicker and more effective to silence any opposition to the Progressive version of Newspeak? Because facts to Liberals are like…
They can’t engage in reasoned debate because they’ve no cogent counter to offer.
Next up, courtesy of American Spectator, Thomas Lifson relates how the…
Creepiest Obama story yet just got creepier
Rick Moran called the hanging of a huge Barack Obama portrait at the US Embassy in London the “Creepiest Obama story yet” yesterday. But it gets worse. Check out the size and placement (hat tip: Weasel Zippers) of the portrait, a tapestry by renowned Chuck Close, a government-approved (National Medal of Arts winner) artist. Ladies and gentlemen, we are well into Dear Leader territory:
That’s right, the portrait of The One We Have Been Waiting For is larger than Presidents Lincoln and Washington, who flank him, almost like apostles. The visual message declares that their significance is that they paved the way for the Lightworker. Was there nobody in the London Embassy able to understand how grotesque this is? Or were people siomply too afraid to speak up?
Here’s the kicker:
“The tapestry is one of 10 that will be made available for sale (at $100,000 each) as part of a fundraiser supporting the Obama Victory Fund.”
That’s right: our Embassy to the United Kingdom is displaying a propaganda portrait created for the purpose of raising a million dollars to propel President Obama to a second term. (“second term”?!?) Inquiring minds want to know who the owner of the portrait is. Has it been loaned to the embassy?
Since we’re on the subject of creepiest of the creepy, Commentary Magazine‘s Peter Wehner details how a never-ending string of lies and half-truths has America…
President Obama is now in Hawaii–but before he departed Washington he gifted us a 62-minute press conference.
In the past, I might have been inclined to show point-by-point why many of Mr. Obama’s statements qualified as ludicrous, unfair, misleading or outright false–including the president claiming Syria and Afghanistan as foreign-policy successes; impugning the motives of those who want stronger sanctions against Iran; insisting that the basic structure of his health-care law is working; referring to the sequester cuts his administration originally proposed as being “damaging” and which “created headwinds for our economy”; and declaring that 2014 can be a “breakthrough year for America.”
But in the wake of what Mr. Obama said on Friday, my reaction was more to tune him out, to dismiss him as an increasingly small and marginalized figure, as a man who is playing a game the rest of us are opting out of…
Speaking of Liberal lies and hypocrisy, they’re the subject of today’s installment of Tales From the Darkside, as the WSJ‘s Jason Riley details…
Jim Brown’s Soul Patrol
Jim Brown: somehow Blacker than thou!
Last week football great Jim Brown suggested that basketball great Kobe Bryant was somehow less black than, say, Jim Brown because Mr. Bryant spent part of his childhood in Italy where his father played professional basketball.
“He is somewhat confused about culture, because he was brought up in another country,” Mr. Brown told talk show host Arsenio Hall. “[Bryant] doesn’t quite fit what’s happening in America.” Back in the 1960s, Mr. Brown hosted a gathering for black athletes interested in social activism. “If I had to call that summit all over,” he said, “there would be some athletes I wouldn’t call. Kobe would be one of them.”
Mr. Bryant replied via Twitter. “A ‘Global’ African American is an inferior shade to ‘American’ African Americans?? #hmm . . . ,” he wrote. And on Sunday ESPN’s Stephen Smith, who’s also black, called Mr. Brown’s comments “inappropriate” and “wrong” and then used the dust-up to make a political point about the diversity of views among blacks that some people don’t want to acknowledge.
“When it comes to the African-American community, you have a plethora of individuals,” said Mr. Smith. “For example, the black population hasn’t given the Republican Party more than 15 percent of its vote since 1964. And anybody who is deemed a black conservative, I am not one of them—I’m a registered independent, just to get that out of the way—but those that I know who are black conservatives are considered pariahs and are ostracized in our communities and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
“But this is how—this is a problem that exists within our community. Because you are from our community, everybody believes that everybody is supposed to be identical to one another and we can’t display or exercise any kind of versatility, all right, or range in our thinking. It’s a problem that we have to deal with.”
Mr. Smith is correct to note that it’s an internal problem. There is a long tradition of policing racial betrayal in the black community, where certain people—sometimes referred to as “soul patrols”—take it upon themselves to determine black authenticity. Of course, the identity politics of the left encourages these attitudes. Democrats appeal to blacks as blacks, not as individuals, and they regularly ascribe racial animus to political opponents. This racial solidarity allows Democrats to take the black vote for granted. But it also results in too many blacks being more concerned about the approval of black America’s Jim Browns and less concerned with whether the liberal agenda helps or hurts black people.
We don’t know the source of Jim Brown’s perpetual anger, but we believe it’s envy; in this case, envy of the fame and fortune earned by modern athletes, Black and White. Which makes the source of Brown’s venom no different from that of the vast majority of other spiteful Socialists.
For more on the subject of spiteful Socialists, yet another WSJ editorial notes another black-eye on American Academia:
Shame of the Academy
The American Studies Association votes to boycott Israel.
The political corruption of the American academy is by now an old story, but every so often it reveals itself in a new and shocking way. The latest example comes from the professors of the American Studies Association, which on Monday announced that two-thirds of its members had voted in favor of boycotting Israel.
Jonathan Marks reports nearby on the association’s internal politics, and readers won’t be surprised at the bullying tactics employed to pass the boycott resolution. This is how the modern academic and media left operate.
Yet it’s still worth pondering what must go through the mind of a professoriate, presumably dedicated to free political speech, that would choose to boycott the most democratic country in the Middle East. The country in which Arabs are treated far better and have far more rights than they do in most Arab lands. And the country that is America’s most reliable ally. We can only imagine what these same professors must teach their students about the supposed crimes of America.
Which brings us to today’s Environmental Moment, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, and The Daily Caller report on another great moment in Liberal tolerance for dissenting viewpoints:
Reddit bans comments from global warming skeptics
A content editor on Reddit’s science forum wrote Monday that the site has banned climate-change skeptics, and asks why more news outlets haven’t done the same. “About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers,” Reddit content editor Nathan Allen wrote in grist. “When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn’t a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.”
Allen explains that climate change became an ironically heated topic among commenters on Reddit’s science forum, /r/science, which he described as “a window into the Ivory Tower” for “non-scientists” to connect with experts like himself…Despite the provocative comments on both sides described by Allen, and Reddit’s reputation as “passionately dedicated to free speech,” the self-described “PhD chemist” decided it was time for the skeptics to go. “After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor,” Allen said. “As a scientist myself, it became clear to me that the contrarians were not capable of providing the science to support their ‘skepticism’ on climate change.”
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this Conservative adaptation of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with two more Signs the Apocalypse is Upon Us; first…
“Massive deception”, “absolutely no work”…and now, practically no punishment!
and second, this from the biggest bastion of rank Liberalism in the Pacific Northwest:
A jury in Washington has awarded a whopping $50 million settlement to a couple that says, if they had known their five-year-old son would be born with a genetic defect, they would have aborted him. Brock and Rhea Wuth sued Valley Medical Center and the Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp) for the “wrongful birth” of their son, Oliver.
…“What is most troubling to me is not that the test results were inaccurate, but that the purpose of the test itself was so that the parents could decide whether or not to kill their own child,” Father Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, told LifeSiteNews.com. “This case, and those like it where ‘wrongful birth’ is used as justification for a lawsuit, really exposes the eugenic mindset which has crept into our culture that some lives are not worthy of life.”
Yes…you make me so happy I wish you’d never been born! If there are levels in Hell…!!!
Magoo
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