Birthers Right and Left

I thought this by Chip Bok was pretty funny:

RLC

Heroes

There's an amazing story of heroism on this video. It's the story of a Marine named Channing Moss who suffered an astonishing combat wound and the men who overcame their own fear and risked their lives to save his. It's very much worth watching.

Thanks to PowerLine for the link.

RLC

Deconstructing the Obama Poster

Philip Kennicott scrutinizes the Obama as Joker objet d'art for the Washington Post and comes to the startling conclusion that it is, in fact, a deeply racist composition. Well, of course. Why didn't we see that? Obama is black. The picture satirizes him. Ergo, the picture is racist. Even a schoolboy could have figured it out:

So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the "urban" makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can't openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and '70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.

The Joker's makeup in "Dark Knight" -- the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world -- emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks -- the thinking goes -- don't just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its "we need to talk this through" episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker's makeup, onto Obama's face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama's association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can't be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he's black.

There you have it plain as can be. Now, some pitiably unsophisticated bloggers have objected to this sort of analysis by recalling that when Vanity Fair ran a similar picture of George Bush in July of 2008 no one offered such astute psychoanalysis as we have from Mr. Kennicott, and certainly no one alleged racism. But what the uneducated rabble in the blogosphere doesn't realize, as our trenchant critic notes, is that the Bush image used the Jack Nicholson Joker. The Obama rendering uses the Heath Ledger Joker, and that, don't you see, makes all the difference in the world. If you don't understand why well, then, you're just not tuned in to the exquisite subtleties of racial signaling and codes to the enviable degree Mr. Kennicott is.

I'm tempted to believe that this article is actually a hoax and that the writer is, in fact, constructing a clever parody of the left's tendency to find racism in every nook and cranny of our public life. If, however, he's serious his essay is surely the sort of thing that causes regular people who don't appreciate their betters to smirk at intellectuals and call them chuckleheads. No one knows who even did the Obama poster much less what he was trying to say in composing it, but then when you're an intellectual like Mr. Kennicott, whose erudition doubtless surpasses what most of us could ever dream to attain, you're freed from the constraints of logic and common sense that bind mere mortals. If you're a "thoughtful man," especially one who endorses and reinforces all the racial dogmas and shibboleths of the left, you're permitted to espouse in venues like the Washington Post pretty much whatever goofball ideas pop into your head.

RLC

Desperation

I'm not defending every person who has vented his or her anger at the recent town hall meetings. Some of the behavior, especially at the Steny Hoyer meeting, makes me wince, and I wish some of the more obstreperous folk would be a little more respectful and less obnoxious in expressing their frustrations. But, having said that, the Democrat National Committee ad that's been airing on tv the last couple of days impugning these people is really shameless.

The ad alleges that these irate folks are actually extremists who are being manipulated, orchestrated, and funded by "high level GOP operatives" and organizations. This is simply an absurd slander as Mary Katherine Ham documents at The Weekly Standard.

It turns out that the "high level Republican operative" who produced the memo that appears on the DNC ad is a libertarian who writes on Facebook to about twenty friends. The fact that he is a very minor figure in his state's politics, however, didn't hinder the DNC from producing a piece that deliberately gives viewers the impression that what's happening at town halls across the country is some sort of nationwide conspiracy organized and funded by nefarious and powerful Republican fat cats.

Here's the ad:

It's pretty ludicrous, actually, to label thousands of mostly senior citizens "extremists" because they refuse to go gently into Democrat health care nirvana. It's also a sign of desperation. Check out Ham's account at the link.

RLC

Only in America

For the last couple of years the United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has been funding an effort to translate moderate Islamic writings into other languages so that more Muslims would be exposed to teachings, for example, that forbid suicide. This, it was thought, would help counter the more extremist Islamists and help diminish their appeal to the masses of Muslims.

It turns out, though, that lawyers at USAID have consulted their law books, read their tarot cards, held seances to commune with the Founding Fathers, and have concluded, incredibly, that this violates the prohibition of using public money to establish a religion. Really, I'm serious. Well, except for the tarot cards and seances.

Apparently, we are in violation of the Constitution if we use public money to try to help one version of Islam prevail over the more violent extreme version. I wonder if this means that tax-payer funded efforts to arrest and kill the radicals before they kill us are unconstitutional. I'm sure we could find a lawyer somewhere who would maintain that the war on terror violates both the establishment of religion clause and the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

Keith Pavlischek writes about it at First Things. It's no wonder people make jokes about lawyers.

RLC

How It Used to Be

Byron links us to a story of racial discrimination from the early forties that would be hard, perhaps, for many of today's young people to imagine. The writer, the daughter of the man who was the victim of what can only be described as some very stupid decisions made by men whose intellectual furniture apparently made such decisions inevitable, draws a number of conclusions about the episode that one wishes were more widely held. You'll like the story.

RLC

Taking The Pols to the Woodshed

I could hardly believe what I was hearing last night and this morning as various liberal talking heads had their righteous indignation at full throttle because a bunch of septuagenarians followed Barack Obama's advice to his supporters in the campaign to get in people's faces and argue. The golden-agers heeded the call of their president and have turned out at various town hall meetings to give their elected representatives a piece of their mind over health care reform.

Democrats were aghast that the tactics of the left would be so unfairly employed against them and have been alleging that people were bussed in from outside, that what happened at the meetings was "orchestrated," that it was "mob-rule," that the geezers were trying to "shut down debate," and so on, but this is mostly absurd. In all the video clips I saw of these town hall meetings the anger of the people was aroused because their representatives were telling them they had to rush health care reform through Congress without really reading what they were imposing on the American people. It certainly seems that it's the congressional leadership and the President who are trying to shut down debate.

Allahpundit highlights the irony. He writes:

• People who want Congress to take more time debating healthcare are shutting down debate.
• Pres. Obama says the time for talk on healthcare is over, but his critics are trying to shut down debate.
• Harassing and threatening the families of AIG employees is awesome; razzing Representatives and Senators is totally bogus!
• Asking Representatives and Senators to read bills before voting on them is killing democracy.
• Sen. Specter saying "we have to make judgments very fast" is awesome. Booing him for saying so is shutting off debate.
• Healthcare protesters are thugs shutting off debate; antiwar protesters are merely "rowdy."

Hot Air has some clips of these encounters with the grey-haired ladies and gents who have so terrorized and scandalized the disciples of Saul Alinsky, as does TCP. Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, posts clips to instruct us on how to do real political thuggery. The clips, of course, are all of various left-wing "protests."

If the folks at these town halls were excoriating Republicans over some Bush initiative you can bet your mortgage that the Democrats and liberal media would be praising them as outstanding examples of American citizenry, but since their ire is directed at the Democrats they're being insulted and minimized. It certainly seems that a lot of reporters and politicians are just psychologically incapable of objectivity and genetically prone to making themselves look and sound like dolts.

RLC

Saving Your Memory

A recent study has confirmed what many suspected: People who engage in activities that exercise the brain, such as reading, writing, and playing card games, may delay the rapid memory decline that occurs if they later develop dementia:

The study involved 488 people age 75 to 85 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of five years; during that time 101 of the people developed dementia.

At the beginning of the study, people reported how often they participated in six leisure activities that engage the brain: reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music. For each activity, daily participation was rated at seven points, several days a week was rated at four points, and weekly participation was rated at one point.

The average was seven points total for those who later developed dementia, meaning they took part in one of the six activities each day, on average. Ten people reported no activities, and 11 reported only one activity per week.

The researchers then looked at the point when memory loss started accelerating rapidly for the participants. They found that for every additional activity a person participated in, the onset of rapid memory loss was delayed by 0.18 years.

"The point of accelerated decline was delayed by 1.29 years for the person who participated in 11 activities per week compared to the person who participated in only four activities per week," said study author Charles B. Hall, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY.

Further studies are needed to determine if increasing participation in these activities could prevent or delay dementia."

Few things are more terrifying to people as they age than the awareness that they're losing their memory. Keep reading, discussing and thinking. It's good medicine.

RLC

Good and Evil among the Lefties

Over at Evolution News and Views Michael Egnor is piqued by the fact that much of the secular left has been very hostile toward the appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institute of Health, but totally mute on the appointment of John Holdren as the President's chief science advisor.

Collins has being severely criticized because, even though he's a highly accomplished scientist, he's also a devout Christian. Holdren is a totalitarian who holds extreme views, some would say genocidal views, about limiting human population. Here are a few that he has committed to print:

• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" - in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women-particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth--could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into public drinking water or in staple foods.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

So why is Collins, a man who would find such views abhorrent, unacceptable to the secular left while Dr. Holdren, a man who would seemingly find himself quite at home in the company of Josef Mengele, is apparently just fine with them?

I don't think it overstates the case to surmise that, for at least some on the left, Christianity is the great evil while totalitarianism and genocide are actually necessary for the betterment of mankind. Read Egnor's analysis at the link.

RLC

Counter-Proposal (Pt. I)

Keith Hennessey is a former advisor to President Bush who writes on insurance matters at KeithHennesy.com In a pair of recent posts he offers first a critique of President Obama's health care reform proposals and second a compelling alternative, the essence of which is incorporated into the Ryan-Coburn proposal crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Tom Coburn. Hennessey writes:

President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs. Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children. The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I. Congress has gone in the opposite direction. Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else: you. The facts are not in dispute. The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:

• No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
• More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
• $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
• More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.

The better approach, Hennessey argues, is to make health insurance companies compete for individual clients as do automobile insurance companies:

While others offer you the hollow promise of government-provided and underfunded health care security, I'm telling you that you're going to have to take more responsibility for decisions about your own health. A well-functioning system will offer financial incentives to keep yourself healthy, and to avoid risky behaviors that are the source of so much of the costs in today's system. You will have to spend more time talking with your doctor and making hard choices yourself, although that's far preferable to spending that time fighting with your insurer or with a government bureaucracy.

You will have to shop intelligently for health insurance and decide what tradeoffs make sense for your family situation. You will have lower insurance premiums but more financial responsibility for relatively minor medical costs, and you can have a tax-free reserve fund that you can spend wisely on everyday non-critical medical expenses.

It means more personal responsibility and control, and less dependence on the government. It means your health security comes from you buying insurance to protect your family against catastrophe, rather than hoping the government won't ration your care when it's needed. Others want to tell you that you have the right to have someone else pay for your health insurance. I think you have the responsibility to provide for your family's health security, and that it's government's job to set rules so that you have affordable options, and to subsidize the poorest who cannot afford basic catastrophic protection.

The right kind of health care reform means your wages will grow faster as insurance premium growth slows. It means portable health insurance that you can take with you from one job to another, so you don't get locked into your current job because you're afraid to lose your health insurance. It means that millions more Americans will be insured because premiums are less expensive and the uninsured can better afford to buy it, not because we are shifting those costs onto other hard-working Americans and small businesses through higher taxes. It means no increase in the short-term budget deficit. It means dramatic reductions in unsustainable long-term budget deficits, rather than the explosive deficit increases contained in the current legislation.

Hennesey's follow-up post in which he lays out what congress should and should not do about health care reform can be read here. This is very helpful stuff and everyone concerned about the current debate over health care should take the time to read it.

Thanks to Hot Air for the links.

RLC

Wasting Time

Are you the sort of person who feels guilty if you spend an hour doing nothing productive or edifying or are you the sort of person who wishes there were more hours in the day just so you'd have more time to squander? Whichever you are you'll enjoy Jonathan David Price's meditation on wasting time at First Principles. Here's Price's lede:

Do not say this to a philosopher but we have more time now than ever before. One would think that since modern men-and modern women too-have more time, they would think less of it. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The same applies to health and money. We are healthier and wealthier than ever, and these facts have neither calmed our fears nor added peace to our souls. Actually, we seem more anxious than ever about how we spend our time.

This newly-won time, occurring on weekends, evenings, and during paid vacations, is called "free time," and it is a byproduct of industrialization. Delayed marriage and fewer children may have also helped. The majority waste their free time without a second thought, egged on by television, video games, and personal billboards (a.k.a. social networking sites), which they may or may not feel vaguely guilty about. But there is another group-perhaps fifteen percent of Americans-that busies itself with doing and getting and self-betterment.

This cadre of overachievers has the opposite problem: it is terrible at wasting time. And even worse at wasting it well. Their days are planned, their evenings booked, futures fixed. From this group comes our leaders, teachers, businessmen, and preachers. Thus, if the likes of YouTube and the proverbial bear pit fill their lists of time wasters, it is commendable. The problem is that they consider leisure to be a waste of time as well. What Joseph Pieper called the basis of culture, leisure-activity outside the field of servile work, the retreat from the world to study it, reflect on it, worship its source, and return refreshed to serve it-is considered to be wasting time. In recent memory, even the everyday connotation of the word has changed to "doing nothing."

Further on he makes the point that when we waste money it doesn't seem so bad because we can always make more, but the time we waste can never be recovered. The question is what exactly is a "waste" of time?

I wonder if spending a couple of hours a day writing a blog qualifies as "wasting time." Maybe it depends on the blog. I'll have to think about that. Anyway, you'll like Price's essay.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

Noses Are Growing

When President Obama insists his health care reform plans would not eliminate private insurance he's being very disingenuous. He certainly wants to eliminate private insurance and have the government take over control of all health care in this country. This is video of Mr. Obama and others explaining that their ultimate goal is to do precisely that. He states clearly that his goal is to get to a single-payer system with the government as single payer:

Two things are disturbing about this: The prospect of government controlling such a huge part of our lives and Mr. Obama's complete lack of candor in his recent pronouncements about his true intentions. He has repeatedly tried to assure voters that he has no intention of getting rid of private insurance, but this is certainly at odds with what he said before his election. How does he expect people to believe him on anything he says if so many of his most important statements are calibrated to meet the demands of political exigency?

RLC

Chavez's Version of the Fairness Doctrine

The left continues its assault on basic freedoms in Venezuela:

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez's drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

The association of radio broadcasters said 13 stations had stopped transmitting, following an announcement Friday night by government broadcasting watchdog Conatel that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations.

Critics said the crackdown infringed on freedom of speech and that owners were not given the right to a proper defense.

"They're closing the space for dissidents in Venezuela," William Echeverria, head of the National Council of Journalists, told RCTV, a private cable TV station, which did not have its broadcasting license renewed in 2007.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government's effort to democratize the airwaves.

"This government has turned into a mutilator of rights," Juan Carlos Caldera, of the opposition political party Primero Justicia, said on Globovision TV.

Antonio Ledezma, the opposition mayor of Caracas, called on Venezuelans to protest the move in the streets.

Another 120 radio stations were being investigated for administrative irregularities and the radio frequency of stations being shut down would be transferred to new community broadcasters, Cabello had said.

No doubt the community broadcasters will be favorable to the Chavez regime. Meanwhile, here in the states proponents of the Fairness Doctrine are taking notes. They must envy the ease with which Venezuela has been able to silence its political opposition.

RLC

Best That They Can Do

In logic there's an informal fallacy called tu quoque, meaning, roughly, "you're one too." It occurs when someone seeks to deflect the force of an allegation or claim made by an opponent by asserting that the opponent or the opponent's allies are just as bad. The irrelevance of the reply is a tacit admission that the accused person, or his supporters, really has no defense against the charges. I thought of this while watching the video of Michelle Malkin's recent appearance on The View.

Ms Malkin has written a book on the extensive corruption in the Obama administration (Culture of Corruption) which won her an invitation to appear on the show. It was amusing that during her six or seven minute segment none of the liberals among the ladies at the table chose to defend the President or his administration against her indictments. Instead they were reduced to protesting that, well, the Bush administration was corrupt too, you know:

If this is the best defense the President's friends can mount against the very serious accusations Malkin amasses in her book then Mr. Obama is in quite a pickle.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

RLC

Racial Profiling

If you think that racial profiling by cops is one of the great evils of our time read this. Written by a retired cop it explains how New York's finest do it every day. What's more, it makes the argument that cops shouldn't profile seem pretty simple-minded.

RLC

The Third Replicator

Writer and psychologist Susan Blackmore has an interesting article at New Scientist on the emergence of what she thinks is a third type of "replicator." The first type is the gene, the parcels of DNA that code for the structure and function of biological organisms. The second type is Richard Dawkins' "meme," which is an idea, or cluster of ideas, that get selected by cultures for various reasons and spread throughout the human population (We might ignore for the moment the fact that the concept of the meme has come to be widely dismissed by scientists).

Blackmore thinks there is a third type of replicator that is spreading across the globe threatening to run out of control - computer technology. She makes an interesting case and her article is worth a read, but the most interesting part of it to me is this:

Memes are a new kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages - copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology? There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains.

If all three replicators are analogous to each other, and all three are expressions of information, and if information is known to be a product of minds, as it is with memes and technology, then is it not reasonable to infer that the gene may likewise be a product of mind? If evolution at the level of the meme and technological information is mind-driven, why would it be unreasonable or even unscientific to assume that evolution at the level of the gene is mind-driven? Just asking.

RLC

What We're Likely to Get

The WaPo's Charles Krauthammer puts on his prophet's cap and tells us what the upshot of Obamacare is likely to be. Here's his lede:

Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he's fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy -- and half the mainstream media did -- you'll believe the second. Don't believe either.

Conventional wisdom always makes straight-line projections. They are always wrong. Yes, Obama's aura has diminished, in part because of overweening overexposure. But by year's end he will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they'll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended.

Krauthammer thinks that "reforming" the health care system is indeed no longer a viable possibility, for reasons he adumbrates in his column, but he thinks that what the Democrats will be able to give him is reform of health insurance:

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no preexisting condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the United States; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.

In other words, insurance reform will come about by requiring that everyone have insurance. The liberal solution to the problem will be to take away more freedom. Wouldn't the better solution to insurance costs be to reform tort and get rid of onerous state and federal mandates that just multiply the cost of premiums for all policy-holders? Unfortunately, these measures would have the effect of impoverishing lawyers who are big donors to Democrat pols and reducing the control of government in the insurance industry. They're therefore as likely to survive congressional scrutiny as a fish is likely to survive being tossed onto the sands of the Sahara desert.

RLC

Looking for Racism in All the Wrong Places

Much of the national media was all atwitter over the fact that two white men and two black men were having a beer together at the White House the other night. The talking heads spent much of the evening and the next morning trying to discern the portents in this event for the future of race relations in this country. They reported assiduously on all the important details like which brand of beer the principals sipped, what role was played by each, whether the vice-president was allowed to say anything, etc.

Meanwhile, if they were really interested in reporting on a significant story about race and racism they should have followed the lead of the Washington Times. The Times has a report on one Jerry Jackson, a Democratic committee member in Philadelphia and New Black Panther who had been charged with intimidating voters in last November's election. It turns out that Mr. Jackson is not just an overzealous Obama supporter but a man infected with a deep-seated hatred for whites. The Times examines Mr. Jackson's Facebook page where they found Mr. Jackson expressing his racism with incredibly vile racial invective.

We wonder whether the media would be looking the other way if Mr. Jackson were a white Republican saying such hateful things about blacks. He's not, of course, so he gets ignored by the traditional media which can rarely find racism anywhere but among middle class whites. Blacks are allowed to be virulent racists, but if a cop investigates a possible break-in which turns out to involve black men then he and the woman who reported it are vilified as the worst sort of human beings.

Here are a few of the ponderings taken from Mr. Jackson's Facebook page:

• "BLACK POWER,BLACK LOVE,BLACK UNITY,BLACK MINDS,KILLIN CRAKKKAS"
• "F*** Whitey's Christmas"
• An image of an execution scene from the cult hit film "Pulp Fiction"
• A photo of a man holding a sign saying, "DEPORT WHITE PEOPLE"
• A derogatory anti-cop poster titled "BEWARE OF PIG"
• An image of Saddam Hussein before his execution
• A photo of a cop sitting next to a black child in a toy car. Beneath the image the phrase "Racial Profiling: It Starts Early"
• A photoshopped movie poster of the "Bourne Supremacy" is re-worded to say "The Bourne White Supremacy" A swastika is added to Matt Damon's cheek, and the scope of his firearm is photoshopped to look as if he is about to shoot a black man. The "n" word is used to describe who "Matt Damon hates" in this movie poster. The phrase, "They should have just stayed in Africa" is photoshopped at the top of the image.

Not only has Mr. Jackson apparently been given a pass by the media but the Obama Justice department chose not to prosecute him for his misconduct at the polls and, just as bad, the man was reappointed to work the polls in the upcoming primary in Philadelphia. I wonder what Professor Gates thinks about that.

If people want to have a conversation about race in this country let it start with the case of Mr. Jackson.

RLC

Spoof

Some people just have too much time on their hands:

Thanks to Politico.com.

RLC

Smiley-Face Fascism

We've often remarked that fascism is an ideological bacillus endemic not, as is commonly supposed, to the right but to the left. Indeed, fascism and conservatism are almost complete opposites of each other. Washington Timescolumnist Jeffrey Kuhner explains why, taking as his starting point Jonah Goldberg's fine book, Liberal Fascism. Kuhner writes:

Both Hitler and Mussolini were national socialists. They were militant pagans hostile to Christianity, religious orthodoxy and tradition. They believed in the cult of personality, mass propaganda and the pseudo-spiritual transformational nature of politics: charismatic leadership as a means of fulfilling people's deepest aspirations. They glorified the state, as well as the subordination of the individual and the family to the collective. They created a corporatist economy that combined big business, big labor and big government. They emphasized the nationalization of key industries, redistribution of wealth, massive public works projects and trade protectionism. They established a so-called "social safety net" through national health care, unemployment insurance and government pensions. They erected a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Fascist social policy was so popular that President Franklin Roosevelt incorporated much of it in the New Deal.

Embarrassed by the horrors of World War II and Auschwitz, the West's liberal elite disowned Hitler and then falsely portrayed him as a reactionary right-winger.

Kuhner then goes on to show how President Obama's policies reflect many of the characteristics of fascism noted above. He hastens to point out that, to be sure, Obama is neither Hitler nor even Mussolini:

He is not a crypto-dictator. Nor does he believe in an authoritarian police state or territorial expansionism. But Hitler and Mussolini were men of a different age, time and national culture; their fascism was distinctly German and Italian.

Mr. Obama's fascism is uniquely American. His revolution is not of blood and iron, but of pork and bailouts. His fascism is a potent mix of incremental socialism, messianic liberalism and puritanical environmentalism. It is not the crude militarism of the jackboot but the sugar-coated, forced spoon-feeding of the nanny state.

Whether it's militaristic or no, smiley-face fascism is still coercive and freedom-denying. It's still totalitarian, and it's still fascism. Let's hope that our elected leaders recognize the road they're taking us down before it's too late. Let's hope, too, that they're not taking us down this road deliberately.

RLC