I posted a comment on this on a friend’s Facebook page and thought I’d note this here as well. It is honestly bewildering to me the way the Left refuses to recognize that the anti-Western wing of Islam, particularly its jihadists, is adamantly opposed to all that liberals profess to believe and hold dear. I don’t want to jump to the negative conclusion and assume that they’re all either moral cowards or secretly enamored of Islam’s totalitarian impulses, so I keep looking for a more charitable interpretation . . . but so far, I have failed to find one.
Update: Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News has an excellent column up about this, pointing out an important truth:
About the same time Holder was refusing to utter the threat that cannot be named in the Obama administration, security officials in Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim nation and third-largest democracy—foiled a plot to assassinate the president and top officials, massacre foreigners in a Mumbai-style attack and create a state governed by Shariah, or Islamic law.
That last goal provides a clue as to who was behind this violent conspiracy, though Attorney General Holder may not be able to recognize it. But it is important to do so because in spite of 9-11, Times Square and every event in between, Americans are not the primary victims of Islamic extremism. Muslims are.
Over the past decade, radical Islamists have carried out successful terrorist attacks in Amman, Baghdad, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Riyadh and Sharm el-Sheikh, to name a few Muslim targets. Muslim civilians and leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto, are their principal casualties. In the countries and forbidden zones where they have been able to establish Shariah rule, Muslim women are treated like chattel, Muslim gays are summarily executed and Muslim girls are doomed to illiteracy and honor killings.
America may be radical Islam’s fount of all evil. But more often than not, citizens of Muslim nations are their first prey.
Holder and the president he serves do no favor to the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims when they refuse to identify our common enemy. You can’t delegitimize what you won’t even acknowledge exists.
This is a snippet of a presentation given at Stanford by former Hewlett-Packard CEO (and, of course, current GOP candidate for the US Senate from California) Carly Fiorina. It’s a good analysis of the problems that make any real change difficult—something which applies to pastors and churches as much as it does to politicians and governments.
Never mind the polls, he’s nothing of the sort. This sums up why:
Put bluntly, President Obama has hitched his wagon to ObamaPelosiCare. Barring a major foreign-policy catastrophe (which is certainly possible; I’m still somewhat surprised we got no major attacks last year), and maybe not even then, it’s hard to imagine a scenario for 2012 in which his health care bill is popular and he himself is not—and at this point, that’s the only scenario under which a Romney victory is at all plausible. The fact of the matter is, however hard Gov. Romney tries to argue that his plan in Massachusetts was fundamentally different than the Democrats’ national plan, he just has no case; they both come straight from the Teddy Kennedy playbook.
Now, in all fairness to Gov. Romney, the field has shifted somewhat on health care in the last few years; as Stephen Spruiell points out, it wasn’t all that long ago that even the Heritage Foundation supported individual mandates for health insurance, something which is now universally opposed on the Right; Orrin Hatch even submitted a health care bill in the Senate which took that approach. The problem for Gov. Romney is, he took his cue from that and signed a health care bill into law—and now that his bill hasn’t reduced costs in Massachusetts (or helped much of anything else, really), and now that the political center has shifted to leave his accomplishment firmly on the political Left, he’s stuck with it. It’s possible he may be able to find a way to deal with that and put himself back within the conservative mainstream; but until he does that, he cannot with any intelligence be called the GOP frontrunner or anything close to it. As of now, the only thing one can reasonably call his presidential hopes is a mirage.
Does all pop music sound the same to you? Well, as the Aussie comedy/music trio Axis of Awesome points out, there’s a reason for that (note: language warning):
Now, if you’re like me, this immediately reminded you of something else—this bit from the American musical comedian Rob Paravonian (language warning here as well), which takes the same idea a bit further:
Between the two, I’m not sure there’s all that much left to say.
Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) really did say, during a hearing in the House, that he’s afraid that the island of Guam will “tip over and capsize” if we increase our military presence there:
I’d never heard of the groupOK Gountil a month or two ago when my brother-in-law played me the video for their song “This TooShall Pass,” from the album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. I enjoyed it, but the group didn’t really stick in my consciousness until they released a second video for the same song, featuring a most remarkable Rube Goldberg machine:
At first, the most interesting question to me was, did they really shoot that in a single take? (Answer: it took them over sixty tries, and apparently they ended up having to splice two of them together.) With that answered, I discovered that in truth, the most interesting question is this: why did they make a second video to the song when the first one (featuring the Notre Dame marching band) was perfectly fine? As Dylan Tweney wrote on the Wired website,
OK Go developed a reputation for making catchy, viral videos four years ago with the homemade video for “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing around on treadmills. The company ran afoul of music label EMI’s restrictive licensing rules, which required YouTube to disable embedding, cutting views to 1/10 of their previous level. Now, the new video is up—and it’s embeddable, so the band seems to have won this round with its label—and is already generating buzz on YouTube and on Twitter.
Actually, it’s not so much that OK Go won the round as it is that they cut ties with their label and went independent. As one commenter on another OK Go video (“We’re Sorry YouTube”) put it,
OK Go got into a huge fight with EMI and Capitol over how their viral videos were distributed. They wanted You Tube viewers to be able to watch the videos without worries about the labels coming down on people who posted. In the end, they ended up leaving EMI and Capitol and forming their own label. In fact, they were so mad that’s why they created a second video for “This Too Shall Pass” with the Rube Goldberg machinery. This video is just their humorous way of dealing.
In the cheap political calculus that floats around, it’s usually assumed that because conservatives support big business, big business is politically conservative—which in economic terms means in favor of deregulation and the free market. In truth, though, this is a long way off the mark; big business is very much in favor of regulation, because regulation is the simplest way of squashing competition. It’s certainly easier than actually having to outcompete people. Thus the approach of big companies like EMI to something like YouTube is generally to try to regulate it by one means or another so as to maintain as much control as possible over how their material is used; they want to ensure that nothing happens that they don’t approve, and that they don’t miss any opportunity to make money.
Now, I don’t want to minimize the importance of intellectual property and intellectual property rights; it’s morally wrong when people who create things don’t profit from their creations as they should, and I’ll even grant that the companies which connect musicians and authors and other creative types to those who want to buy their creations should also make an appropriate profit for their work. But the approach EMI took here is extremely short-sighted, because it treats the economic process as a zero-sum game; thus it assumes that if someone is able to, say, watch an OK Go video someplace other than on YouTube (i.e., someplace that doesn’t have an ad for EMI up right next to the video), that represents a lost profit opportunity which can never be recovered. That simply isn’t true.
Rather, what OK Go understands and EMI (like many other corporations) doesn’t is that giving things away can often be the best way to make money. The best illustration of this I know of is the success of the Baen Free Library at Baen Books. Baen, founded by the late Jim Baen, isn’t a huge publishing company by any means, but it’s a significant one in the world of science fiction; and spurred on by Eric Flint, one of their authors, they opted years ago to start making a significant number of their titles available free online. As Flint explained at the time,
Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. . . .
Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market—especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people—is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom. . . .
We expect this Baen Free Library to make us money by selling books.
How? As I said above, for the same reason that any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author. . . .
I don’t know any author, other than a few who are—to speak bluntly—cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer’s audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.
Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author—and it’s ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it’s the one form of promotion which people usually trust.
That being so, an author can hardly complain—since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author’s table. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. . . .
The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the “gap” between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.
Of course, some might be skeptical: is it really working? Well, about a year and a half after Flint launched the Library, he wrote an extended piece showing that the Library had actually boosted sales of the books Baen gave away—by quite a significant amount, actually.
The Library’s track record shows clearly that the traditional “encryption/enforcement policy” which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties. . . .
Making one or a few titles of an author’s writings available for free electronically in the Free Library seems to have no other impact, certainly over time, than to increase that author’s general audience recognition-and thereby, indirectly if not directly, the sales of his or her books.
I believe it also—I leave it up to each individual to weigh this out for themselves—places such authors on what you might call the side of the angels in this dispute. For me, at least, this side of the matter is even more important than the practical side. It grates me to see the way powerful corporate interests have been steadily twisting the copyright laws and encroaching on personal liberties in order to shore up their profit margins-all the more so when their profit problems are a result of their own stupidity and short-sighted greed in the first place.
I will leave you all with one final anecdote. Napster, of course, is held up as the ultimate “villain” with regard to the so-called problem of online piracy. The letters I received as Librarian were addressed to the issue of books, not music. Yet I was struck by how often—perhaps in a hundred letters—the writers would mention their own experience with Napster. And, in every instance, stated that their purchases of CDs increased as a result of Napster—for the good and simple reason that because Napster enabled them to sample musicians, they bought music they would not otherwise have been tempted to buy because CDs are too expensive to experiment with.
Not enough? Well, check out what Janis Ian had to say. Or consider a personal anecdote: a few days ago, Ray Ortlund put up a blog post with a video of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s song “Pride of Man.” An embedded video, note. I’d never heard of the group before, and neither had Sara; we now own a copy of their “Best of” album, and I think there’s pretty good odds we’ll buy more before all is said and done. If the record labels had their way (or if, at any rate, they all operated like EMI), that sale would never have happened.
Yes, copyright is important. Yes, intellectual property is important. The laborer is worthy of his hire, after all. But using copyright as a club, seeking ever greater regulation of people’s behavior out of fear of what they might do, isn’t just philosophically problematic—it’s unprofitable, because it has a dampening effect and a chilling effect on the very market on which companies depend. A receding tide lowers all boats, but a rising tide lifts them. Just ask Eric Flint.
Anyone who can’t see the distinction has something wrong with their moral compass. (Most likely, I would guess, the magnetic pull of political idolatry.)
Rahm Emanuel is the latest proof that apologizing is not the same thing as actually being sorry. Of course, he’s proved that before, since he wields his tongue with all the finesse and remorse of Conan with his sword. Here’s Gov. Palin’s Facebook note on Emanuel’s latest verbal fusillade:
The newly-released mind-boggling, record-smashing $3,400,000,000,000 federal budget invites plenty of opportunity to debate the merits of incurring more and more debt that will drown the next generation of Americans. Never has it been possible to spend your way out of debt. So . . . let the debate begin.
Included in the debate process will be opportunities for our president to deliberate internally the wisdom of this debt explosion, along with other economic, military and social issues facing our country. Our president will discuss these important issues with Democrat leaders and those within his inner circle. I would ask the president to show decency in this process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm’s continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts. Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.
The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F—ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities—and the people who love them—is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.
A patriot in North Andover, Massachusetts, notified me of Rahm’s “retarded” slam. I join this gentleman, who is the father of a beautiful child born with Down Syndrome, in asking why the Special Olympics, National Down Syndrome Society and other groups condemning Rahm’s degrading scolding have been completely ignored by the White House. No comment from his boss, the president?
As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Mr. President, you can do better, and our country deserves better.
—Sarah Palin
Of course, we’ve heard something like this before from this administration, as the President compared his bowling to the Special Olympics (on national TV, no less); he made a couple apologies and left it behind him. Now, it appears, he’s hoping his administration will be able to do the same again. I have to say, that doesn’t sound to me at all like “Rahm blinking,” it sounds to me like Rahm Emanuel—and Barack Obama!—trying to pass the whole thing off with a pro forma apology that he didn’t even have to make in person. It’s nothing more than the political equivalent of cheap grace, cost-free pseudo-repentance, and it’s just not good enough.
It’s especially not good enough considering that were the shoe on the other foot, were this a club Rahm Emanuel could use against a political rival, he wouldn’t rest until the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on that rival’s political career. Should he be fired? That would seem to me to be out of proportion to the moral offense—though the political offense here, causing further problems for an administration that’s already struggling when to this point he’s been largely ineffective at pushing his boss’s agenda, might be enough to start the deathwatch—but either COS Emanuel or President Obama needs to do something more here than merely make an empty gesture. It’s not enough to say, “Tim Shriver forgave us,” as if that should settle it; if they want real forgiveness, they need to demonstrate real repentance, of the sort that actually costs something. After all, as I wrote after the President’s Special Olympics wisecrack,
Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.” It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter: because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see. They’re the places where the mask slips. That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.
What makes repentance? A change of heart. And at this point, it seems clear that a change of heart is exactly what’s needed here.
