And one more thing!

From R.S. McCain's article quoted below:

If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads. A guy with a gun rack in the back window of his four-wheel drive truck may occasionally vote Democrat, but he's extremely unlikely to be an out-and-out liberal.

I wonder if Mr. McCain knows that hunted meat is generally not kosher. Or has given any thought to the value and persistence of urban Jewish communities. Or if he's just the same sort of "philo-Semite" who loves the Jews as a means to an ends.

This is real, pt 303

I wonder if Michael Medved is an idiot, or just loves him some anti-semitism.

"For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn't solidarity with Israel; it's rejection of Christianity."

He might as well have written, given the conservative audience he's writing for "Man, we Jews are still all jazzed about killing Christ." I mean, it can't be that Jewish tradition tends to lend itself to progressive causes, or the unique place that civic duty and good citizenship holds with Jews as a result of their unique history in the United States, the only reason for a Jew to be liberal is either as a substitute for real Judaism or antipathy towards Christians.

When I read RW and fascist publications, one of their favorite tactics is to call someone a "sabbath goy," a gentile who works for the Jews. I wonder if one might not apply a mirror term to Jews who work with the far right.

As an aside, I'd also like to take issue with McCain's statement that "evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly pro-Israel and philo-Semitic." This is only true to an extent. The types of evangelicals who really love Israel and the Jewish people are not in it for the best interests of the Jews, or because they respect the most stable of the Middle East's few secular democracies, but because Israel has a role to play in bringing about the end of the world. I think philo-Semitic might be a stretch, there.

Just a nibble.

No, Iraq is a place where people live, not a place for us to project our fears and fantasies (that goes for the both of you).

This is real, pt 301.

Human Events may become my favorite place to look for installments to this series, as they published this gem. Aside from some delightfully stereotypical dreck about the difference between the sexes, and a charming bit of gay-bashing, Marsden reveals how disconnected she is from the real world with this:

When men see $45 underwear on a male model in a Hugo Boss ad, what he’s likely thinking (besides “he looks gay”) is that the guy’s wearing the fiscal equivalent of his next beer keg. This is why the underwear purchase loses out.

I have never known anyone to measure beer in kegs. I have never known anyone to buy a keg for himself (except, once, to supply a free-beer-for-all birthday party). The correct conversion between Hugo Boss briefs and alcohol is 3 handles of bottom-shelf liquor, two fifths of decent liquor, 3 cases of Pabst or similar, or 5 sixers of good beer (my numbers may be a bit off because of the recent tax hike here in IL - I'm still adjusting). Marsden's column is full of that phony, sour-tasting populism that conservatives like to trot out alongside their policy pronouncements - when I skimmed Marsden's it seemed to be a standard "I don't want to be a Delta, khaki is such a filthy colour" column of the sort that Human Events and WSJ put out on a regular basis. With a friendly nudge to make you feel like part of the club.

Anti-Jihadists.

Of all the fringe political entities out there, I think the one that most burns me is the soi-disant "anti-jihadist movement." They are a loose group of people dedicated to the idea that a vast, implacable Muslim conspiracy exists, bent on destroying once and for all Judeo-Christian culture and replacing it with a universal Caliphate. If you've ever seen Daniel Pipes or Robert Spencer on the news, or blundered across Bat Ye'or's Eurabia in a bookstore, you've seen them.

Frankly, they frighten me, and I'm a white, Midwestern Lutheran. I am not in their crosshairs. When I read their writings, or see them on TV, I can't help but shudder, though. Something about their wild-eyed insistence that they are fighting a thousand-year struggle against the hordes of Islam bothers me. Something about their insistence that a racial and religious war is coming chills my bones. It chills me, not because I am a dhimmi with my head in the sand (as the anti-jihadists love to call anyone who disagrees with them), but because those who warn most loudly of racial strife are those who do their best to cause it.

They also frighten me because of their deep contempt for what they claim to love. They claim to love the West, in all its glory as the font of science, art, religion, music and technology. Their West, though, is the insular, inward-looking world of the Middle Ages, aware of the outside world only as a threat. The reject the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions (except as an example of the superiority of the West), the political and cultural changes that gave us universal suffrage, birthright citizenship, and popular elections. They hate, and I do not think hate is too strong a word, the idea of republican government. One needs only look at their self-chosen titles and iconography - baron this or that, crusaders' crosses, references to Holgar the Dane and Brigid of Sweden - to see their contempt for everything the West has built since, say, the reign of Barbarossa.

This contempt spills over into the political parties the support. Their anti-modernism and longing for a mythical golden age make them natural allies for reactionaries and fascists. The fracas within the movement over the decision of some members to support the Vleems Belang party of Belgium, a party that glorifies Belgians who served in the SS, shows this fault line. The glowing mentions of the BNP and right-wing German groups on the movement's blogs show them for the fascists they are.

Most disturbing, though, is the behavior of Jewish anti-jihadists. Jews, of all people, ought to be able to see through the "anti-jihadists." A look at the rhetorical tricks used by the anti-jihadists shows them to be eerily similar to those used, both in ages past and today, by anti-semites. Accusations, for instance, of collusion between the banks and Muslims ought to sound familiar, as should accusations of a great Leftist-Muslim conspiracy. The innuendos about improper relations between Muslim men and non-Muslim women common in the movement also should send warning shivers down the spine of anyone who remembers history. The accusation that Muslims are "parasites," and the officially-disavowed but still-common label of "subhumans" should sicken listeners. While I have not yet seen any accusations that Muslims murder Christian or Jewish babies for Eid, I would not be surprised, as accusations that Muslims fabricate wholesale any violence against them are common in the anti-jihadist sphere.

I know that this seems an odd thing to harp on, since we have our own troubles here, but I believe they are connected. The forces of reaction where many hats, but are united by a hatred for everything we have built over the past few hundred years.

Re: Nixonland.

Speaking as a liberal, when are we going to grow some balls and stop running scared? The right - both the cultural right and the corporate right - has been defining the terms of the game so well for so long that we're scared of our own shadows.

We also love the circular firing squad. I've seen people threaten to vote third party in 2012 on the left because of [insert failure of the Obama campaign/admin here] since the end of the primaries. I've seen people threaten to withhold time and money from the national party because we left Max Baucus stay in, or didn't fight hard enough for Franken, or didn't immediately push for single-payer, or didn't let Kucinich win the primary. Our House Speaker, supposedly our party's leader in Congress, is being challenged in a primary. We love to make things easy for our opponents.

Where to start, where to begin.

I'm not even going to comment on the politics here. I'm just going to look at one statement.

Chris Stigall, a Kansas City talk show host, said, “I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.” (from NYT).

This is fucking sad. When I was 6(ish, 1993-Matty says "6 and a Half!") my next door neighbor took care of me for a few days when my mom was in the hospital giving birth to my baby sister (Incidentally, also in Kansas City). My first winter living alone, my next door neighbor loaned me and Mike a snow shovel because we were idiots and forgot to buy one. When I first moved in to my apartment, about a week after moving in, I dropped a glass and cut my foot kind of badly. My "next door" (across the hall, I guess, but closest to me), gave me a handfull of band-aids, even thought he didn't know me from Adam. What kind of sad, paranoid Hell is Chris Stigall living in where he distrusts his next door neighbor that much.*

Edit: We took class time out to watch John Glen's return to space when I was in grade school, we watched Colin Powell's speech to the UN in chemistry class sophomore year. I didn't get a damn thing done in health class because I was arguing about the Iraq war with my teacher (who referred to me as his "liberal buddy, Matt"). The idea of interrupting class for a big speech is nothing new.



*the freaking out because the POTUS wants to say "hey, let's not drop out of High School is a different issue.**
** I lied, sorry. I did talk about the politics.