Rush Limbaugh perverts conservatism, says there's no other kind of conservatism than "ideological"

Earlier today on the show.

Actually, conservatism is nothing if it is not at bottom suspicious of ideology, as Theodore Dalrymple reminds us here:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of William Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose death has just passed, that he was capable of writing tragedies only about individuals, or small groups of individuals, because he lived at a time without ideology. The latter was necessary for killing on a mass scale, Solzhenitsyn said. Two years after Shakespeare died, the Thirty Years’ War broke out, which reduced the population of Germany by about a third. The war was ideological.

Solzhenitsyn also said that the dividing line between good and evil ran through every heart. This is not a contradiction: Ideology encourages or makes easier the commission of evil.

The propensity to do good or evil no doubt varies between individuals for inborn reasons; but that propensity follows, or at least can be conceived as following, a normal distribution, a bell-shaped curve. At the extremes of the distribution are saints and monsters, the vast majority of us lying somewhere in between; but the whole distribution can be shifted in the direction of good or evil by circumstances, among which is the prevalent ideology. When the bell-shaped curve shifts in the direction of evil, disproportionate numbers of monsters emerge who do things that, at other times and in other places, they would not do.

I wish Gavin McInnes would tell us what he really thinks about Michelle Fields

Here:

For the record, I think Michelle Fields is full of shit. I think Ben Terris placated her because she’s pretty and he’s a horny beta male. I think her bruises are self-inflicted. She didn’t look down at her arm in the video, which is the first thing you do when someone inflicts pain. I think she’s an attention whore who wants to dominate the news more than she wants to report it. She has a book coming out and all this hype is good for sales. She also has a history of histrionic complaints.

What, she's not a psycho?

This election season remember Mark Levin isn't a Reaganite but a Bush preemptive war advocate

As recalled here:

Lesson not learned, Levin writes approvingly [in Liberty and Tyranny] of what, by all rights, should be the most discredited part of the Bush doctrine:

[A] defensive foreign policy does not exclude the necessity of preemptive action… there are occasions when America has suffered grievously, including on 9/11, for failing to act preemptively.

Donald Trump said Chris Wallace had "blood pouring out of his eyes too" in the same interview about Megyn Kelly

Inquiring minds want to know: How much of Washington D.C. can he fire?

But you didn't know about that because the subsequent coverage made it all about Megyn Kelly.

Here's the full interview with Don Lemon on CNN and Trump says that at about 4:55 in.

So clearly what's on Donald Trump's mind in characterizing the debate is the mercenary character of the debate moderators, and he was completely within reason to suggest that different interpretations emanated from deviant thinking.

h/t Jim Goad here: "Why place things in context when there’s an agenda to pursue?"

How to make Mexicans pay for the fence, and illegal aliens generally self-deport

Charles C. Johnson has a great idea, here:

"[T]here’s a simple way to get them all to go home: Tax the money they send back to the home country. One in nine Guatemalans are in the U.S., and they sent $4 billion back in 2010. Remittances are big money for most of Central America. ... The illegals borrowing $5,000 in high-interest debt to finance their smuggling on a $1,500 income would think twice if we taxed their ill-gotten gains. Some might even self-deport or, better yet, refuse to come in the first place. Indeed, without the $20 billion a year Mexicans in America send home, Mexico would be even more messed up.

"Other countries already tax their foreigners. Why can’t we? We could even use that taxed remittance money to pay off some of the costs we incur from illegal aliens—and build that danged fence."

Europe's being invaded by Muslims and all you care about is Kim Kardashian's big butt

Taki here:

"First we had the suicide of two world wars, then a de-Christianized Europe led by the crooks in Brussels conning everyone about the need for cheap labor and letting in millions upon millions of Muslims. Charles Martel stopped them in Tours, Don John in Lepanto, and John Sobieski at the Vienna gates, but now they’re in and they’re staying. ... The fourth and final African invasion is taking place as I write this, but most of the media are busy covering Jay Z, the Kardashians, and the odd white policeman who handcuffs a black criminal."

Kathy Shaidle is wonderfully quotable yet again

While discussing the purely accidental discovery of a real traitor, here:

"Conspiracy theories are History for stupid people."

It doesn't get much better than that.

She doesn't get out much, but it obviously helps. 



Kathy Shaidle: You can't bomb people back to the Stone Age who never left it

Here:

So after we bombed the crap out of them (although not enough in Germany’s case to suit me), at least some survivors retained memories of their culture’s rational past, all the better to reconstruct or even surpass it. (With an infusion of American billions, that is.)

Today’s Muslim belligerents either have no such past, or are busily trying to eradicate any trace of it. When we bother destroying their strongholds, who can even tell? You can’t bomb people back to the Stone Age if they never left. And in any case, this time we reinstituted the Marshall Plan before we half wiped them out—a fatally ass-backwards move.

Ann Sterzinger on sex-obsessed Islam

Here:

"[A]mong religions in modern vogue, none is more explosively kinky than Islam."

It's true, Islam is sex-obsessed:

"[T]he world’s top porn consumers come out of the Middle East. According to data released by Google, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. Pakistan tops the list at number one, followed by Egypt at number two. Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey come in at numbers four, five, seven and eight, respectively. Pakistan leads the way in porn searches for animals like pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats and snakes."

Charlie Hebdo's Jewish connection: Is "Hebe Dough" behind the controversial Muslim-baiting cartoons?

Have the Jews brought the terror upon France as much as the leftists did who brought in all the Muslims in the first place?

The anti-Semitic terrorist incident at the Paris kosher shop by a member of the same terrorist cell which attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ("Charlie Weekly") should have been a clue.

The whole affair, including the attack on Charlie Hebdo, was primarily an anti-Semitic affair, but no ordinary anti-Semitic affair brought to you by a good ole' 'Murican bubba wearing a white sheet. No, it appears this was strictly an internecine battle between fellow Semites. 

In the comments section to a post at Takimag here one wag mocks Charlie Hebdo for its far-left pro-Israeli support backed by "Hebe Dough".

Does that stand up to scrutiny?

At least two of the victims at Charlie Hebdo were Jewish: Elsa Cayat, 54, and Georges Wolinski, 80. (The terrorists left all the women alive, except the Jewess).

Wolinski, who goes all the way back to the very beginning of the paper in 1960, had helped resurrect the defunct publication in its current form in 1992 with the help of a strongly pro-Israel figure named Philippe Val. It was Val who had authorized the republication of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005 and who also fired an allegedly anti-Semitic contributor in 2008, the noteworthy cartoonist Maurice Sinet. Val also had published controversial value judgments about the Palestinians. In addition, one of Wolinski's co-workers at Hara-Kiri, the predecessor to Charlie Hebdo, was the Polish-Jewish novelist Roland Topor.

Whatever else comes out about the decidedly pro-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, atheistic, anti-religious, morally offensive and far-leftist character of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in the coming weeks and months, one thing is for sure: CHARLIE HEBDO COULDN'T CARE LESS ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH, in France or anywhere else.

Conservatives in America should take note: Philippe Val and the late editor Charb had tried unsuccessfully in 1996 to get the political party of Marine LePen, Front National, outlawed, one of the only political parties in Europe with the guts to stand consistently against the invasion of Europe by Muslim populations.

So-called conservatives in the United States standing in solidarity today or anyday with this bunch of lunatics, perverts and malcontents are as crazy as Charlie Hebdo is.

Taki is Old and Stupid for giving Oliver Stone a Pass

Here, where Stalin's crimes get a total pass, of which Taki would surely have been a victim had he lived under him:

"Stalin never trusted the West, but he had no designs on taking us over from the outside."

Which just goes to show one good pass deserves another.

Imported British "Conservative" Condescends To Instruct Us About Communism

John Derbyshire

Here:

"But Barack Obama was never about the downtrodden masses. If he associated with revolutionaries such as Bill Ayers, it was only to feed off them and advance himself. Once he’d advanced, they went under the proverbial bus, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama. ...

"To be a real communist is to make a serious commitment to a cause. Communism is a hard dogma, completely at odds with the soft-handed girlish narcissism of a late-20th-century American leftist such as Obama, who has never risked, fought, struggled, or suffered."

Well, by this standard most businessmen, and most people who work with and for them, aren't real Americans either because the only thing they're committed to is the advancement of number 1. Nor are they real capitalists, but fascists, ever seeking preferments in law to protect their fiefdoms. Nor are they real Christians, eschewing renunciation of the world and service to the poor.

Serious commitment to anything hardly exists anywhere at any time for very long. There are only degrees of commitment, the few outstanding examples of which momentarily intrude upon our attention, as when devotees of a 7th century bandit religion would just as soon blow them- and ourselves to smithereens as live another day.

Just because Obama is a hypocritical communist fellow-traveler doesn't invalidate classifying him as one. After all, Obama also claims to be a Christian but believes things about the unborn and human sexuality which many a Catholic bishop would say destine him for hell, but people still say he is a Christian. Obama's lavish expenditures on his own presidency, which mark him out as a tyrant according to Aristotle ("the good of one man only"), stand alongside his belief in redistribution of income, in spreading the wealth around, in the same way that his friendship with and fundraising among the rich coexists with his sustained inveighing against them because in his opinion they do not pay their fair share in taxes.

The real problem with calling Obama a communist isn't that it isn't true but that the term doesn't exhaust the possibilities. What is instructive about Obama is that he is a blend of enthusiasms and idealisms, a character Herbert Hoover would have recognized as in the mould of FDR who admired the strong men of Europe, who were at once fascist, Nazi and communist. Obama may be a dilettante communist, but you'll still get an alphabet soup of statist experiments at his dinner table. 

But, of course, communist purists would demur at this point, Stalin having been an "aberration". Yet we still call Stalin a communist dictator and his rule a communist dictatorship even though Stalin's partnership with capitalism and people like Henry Ford arguably aligned Stalinism more with fascism than with communism.

Over time the terms lose their adequacy, primarily because they are invented by human beings who will do nothing if not disappoint, eventually. There's a word for that, but like "communist" the word "sinner", to quote our British instructor, is just not "ironic enough for our very ironic age".

An Historicist Explanation Of Fascism Which Unintentionally Describes America

Seen here:

"Fascism resulted from the mobilization of mass armies, the creation of command economies, and the problem of reintegrating veterans into war-torn societies."

Is there a better explanation than this for what happened in America since The Great Depression, whose presidents have drawn their inspiration, now more, now less, from the strong men of Europe as mediated through the legacy of FDR?

In America the creation of the command economy preceded the mobilization for the world war, but the twin developments set the conditions for the state's new role in American life. 

American-style fascism bloomed in The Great Depression and Second World War and then grew through the post-war cult of education, with its original GI Loan Program writ ever larger year by year with newer names and until finally nationalized under Barack Obama, who owes his political success not to the Marxist socialists who inspired and bank-rolled his education but to Chicagoans whose financial success in real estate depended upon government planning, cooperation and exploitation of the poor. He is the epitome of the strangely blended system. 

The proliferation of American fascism occurred through the decades-long expansion of minor educational institutions, cow colleges and junior colleges into degraded and degrading universities which came to elevate the promise of mere vulgar employment to the status of an educated person's learned and wise perspective. A Bachelor's Degree in Physical Education became the equivalent of one in mathematics, and the sixth grade teacher seriously asks the students today to bring an empty white business "envelop" to the next class.

If an education no longer results in gainful employment, we are told, a sin has been committed against education's one and only commandment: Thou shalt get a credential for a job. From fund-raisers who call university alumni to the Rush Limbaughs and Dave Ramseys of the world, an education in a traditional department of human knowledge which fails to lead to employment is useless and worthless.  

Today there are hopeful signs of acute crisis in this consensus even as it reaches its zenith.

Participants graduate with crushing loads of debt in a new environment of depressed wages, long before they have good jobs, spouses, homes, cars and children.

And while the fields of graduates are white unto harvest and they continue to be recruited on-site by big businesses, many of which are responsible for key program funding for the system itself, the number of available jobs has shrunk dramatically as low American GDP resembles present day Europe more than it does its own much more vibrant past. It's as if the system has reached its limit to perpetuate itself.

The lesser products of the universities end up as functionaries in government union shops in the public school system or as media mouthpieces whose job it is to promote the jobs message, but declining tax revenues in the states and diffusion of media due to technology change the calculus for career-minded teachers and "information" workers. As we've seen in Wisconsin, the people who must pay and pay and pay again have had enough. And today's pad will doubtless become yesterday's laptop.

Those not yet quite up to the college experience who can't get an assembly line job because there aren't any may hope to join the military with the promise of money for education later, after the tour of duty. But the prospects for duty look less likely to include personnel-rich adventurism going forward as drone-war proliferates. Out-of-shape teenagers and malcontents in any event will find it increasingly difficult to join a shrinking all-volunteer military.

The failure of faith in the cult of education will necessarily precede the demise of the system, and it appears to be accomplishing this all by itself by not delivering on its promise. It wouldn't be the first time, but you'd need a useless degree to appreciate that.