• Pragerisms

    For a more comprehensive list of Pragerisms visit
    Dennis Prager Wisdom.

    • "The left is far more interested in gaining power than in creating wealth."
    • "Without wisdom, goodness is worthless."
    • "I prefer clarity to agreement."
    • "First tell the truth, then state your opinion."
    • "Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry."
    • "If you don't fight evil, you fight gobal warming."
    • "There are things that are so dumb, you have to learn them."
  • Liberalism’s Seven Deadly Sins

    • Sexism
    • Intolerance
    • Xenophobia
    • Racism
    • Islamophobia
    • Bigotry
    • Homophobia

    A liberal need only accuse you of one of the above in order to end all discussion and excuse himself from further elucidation of his position.

  • Glenn’s Reading List for Die-Hard Pragerites

    • Bolton, John - Surrender is not an Option
    • Bruce, Tammy - The Thought Police; The New American Revolution; The Death of Right and Wrong
    • Charen, Mona - DoGooders:How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help
    • Coulter, Ann - If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans; Slander
    • Dalrymple, Theodore - In Praise of Prejudice; Our Culture, What's Left of It
    • Doyle, William - Inside the Oval Office
    • Elder, Larry - Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card--and Lose
    • Frankl, Victor - Man's Search for Meaning
    • Flynn, Daniel - Intellectual Morons
    • Fund, John - Stealing Elections
    • Friedman, George - America's Secret War
    • Goldberg, Bernard - Bias; Arrogance
    • Goldberg, Jonah - Liberal Fascism
    • Herson, James - Tales from the Left Coast
    • Horowitz, David - Left Illusions; The Professors
    • Klein, Edward - The Truth about Hillary
    • Mnookin, Seth - Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
    • Morris, Dick - Because He Could; Rewriting History
    • O'Beirne, Kate - Women Who Make the World Worse
    • Olson, Barbara - The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
    • O'Neill, John - Unfit For Command
    • Piereson, James - Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
    • Prager, Dennis - Think A Second Time
    • Sharansky, Natan - The Case for Democracy
    • Stein, Ben - Can America Survive? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It
    • Steyn, Mark - America Alone
    • Stephanopolous, George - All Too Human
    • Thomas, Clarence - My Grandfather's Son
    • Timmerman, Kenneth - Shadow Warriors
    • Williams, Juan - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It
    • Wright, Lawrence - The Looming Tower

Is Burning the Koran Equal to the Attack on the World Trade Center?

The Government establishment in Washington apparently equates them. Read the following article by Kerry Picket at the Washington Times:

“At Tuesday’s daily press briefing at the State Department, Department Assistant Secretary P.J. Crowley discussed the attacks of 9/11 and compared terrorists who attacked the United States to a Gainesville Pastor who plans to burn Korans this September 11th. Mr. Crowley had a tough time answering questions from reporters curious about his views on freedom of speech and religious tolerance.

QUOTE:

PJ CROWLEY:”We hope that between now and Saturday, there’ll be a range of voices across America that make clear to this community that this is not the way for us to commemorate 9/11. In fact, it is consistent with the radicals and bigot – with those bigots who attacked us on 9/11.”

Comment:  I haven’t read much about this religious community in Gainsville. 

However, I once taught classes called “Modern Problems” to public school high school seniors.   In general the purpose of the class was to train students to recognize issues and thereby learn, hopefully, to  apply a democratic approach when confronting the nation’s and society’s  problems of the day.   Researching and discussing this issue would have been a must.

I confess that I am split on this burning of some Korans.  Civility dictates that I oppose book burning, period.   But this isn’t exactly book burning.   From my distance, over a thousand miles away from the purpose for the display, and not privy to it from reading, I am judging the  announcement of the burning simply as an ordinary citizen.

The burning doesn’t seem to be a celebration of burning books in general….only one in particular.  Fifty years ago the pastor and his congregation could have expressed themselves much more freely than today.   The burning could have been accomplished with whatever religious or social message the pastor might have reasoned for  staging the event as a right of free speech as long as no one was injured.  Perhaps he is interested in increasing his flock.  

If a Nazi flag showed up, I would find that offensive, but peaceful freedom of expression is essential in a working democracy.   That I might find it offensive does cut anything, as we used to say.

Luckily no one had invented Hate Crime legislation fifty years ago……..a Marxist or Nazi move if ever there was one.

The Florida church group has every right to conduct their burning  of a few books unless they belong to someone else.     They would  have committed no crime!  Those intolerant of their intolerance are the criminals if they go around killing, pillaging and burning as seems to be the ceremony celebrated in countless Muslim communities in these modern times.  

Western societies cower  to Islamic intimidation and murder.  They turn on their own citizens to appease  these Muslim enemies of democratic societies and diminish free expression.  If the Washington establishment is so up tight about a little Florida church burning a few Korans, why is its bigotry so entrenched against those opposing the building of the Islam  victory mosque adjacent to the Muslims atrocity committed at the World Trade Center?

I confess, there is a part of me that is rooting for this little Florida community to make their statement against Islamic murder and the Washington antidemocratic establishment. 

Someday America will have to wake up and confront  the Islamic threat  to our homeland.  We are presently too  cowardly to confront anything Muslim, especially with Barack Hussein Obama in the White House.

How Are Peaceful Muslims Behaving In Sweden?

The following article was written at Brussels Journal by “Fjordman”.

“Last year I wrote an article about how Swedish society is disintegrating and is in danger of collapsing, at least in certain areas and regions. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe. The “Swedish model” would no longer refer to a stable and peaceful state with an advanced economy, but to a Eurabian horror story of utopian multiculturalism, socialist mismanagement and runaway immigration. Some thought I was exaggerating, and that talk of the possibility of a future civil war in Sweden was pure paranoia. Was it?

In a new sociological survey (pdf in Swedish, with brief English introduction) entitled “Vi krigar mot svenskarna” (“We’re waging a war against the Swedes”), young immigrants in the troubled city of Malmö have been interviewed about why they are involved in crime. Although it is not stated, most of the immigrant perpetrators are Muslims. In one of the rare instances where the Swedish media actually revealed the truth, the newspaper Aftonbladet reported several years ago that 9 out of 10 of the most criminal ethnic groups in Sweden came from Muslim countries. This must be borne in mind whilst reading the following newspaper article:

Immigrants are “waging war” against Swedes through robbery

The wave of robberies the city of Malmö has witnessed during this past year is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds when questioned about why they only rob native Swedes, in interviews with Petra Åkesson for her thesis in sociology. “I read a report about young robbers in Stockholm and Malmö and wanted to know why they rob other youths. It usually does not involve a lot of money,” she says. She interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups.

Almost 90% of all robberies reported to the police were committed by gangs, not individuals. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “It’s so easy to rob Swedes, so easy.” “We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.” The immigrant youth regard the Swedes as stupid and cowardly: “The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff. They’re so wimpy.” The young robbers do not plan their crimes: “No, we just see some Swedes that look rich or have nice mobile phones and then we rob them.”

Why do they hate the Swedes so much? “Well, they hate us,” Petra Åkesson reports them as answering. “When a Swede goes shopping, the lady behind the counter gives him the money back into his hand, looks into his eyes and laughs. When we go shopping, she puts the money on the counter and looks the other way.” Åkesson, who is adopted from Sri Lanka and hence does not look like a native Swede, says it was not difficult to get the boys to talk about their crimes. Rather they were bragging about who had committed the most robberies. Malin Åkerström,a  professor in sociology, sees only one solution to the problem: “Jobs for everybody. If this entails a deregulation of the labor market to create more jobs, then we should do so.”

It is interesting to note that these Muslim immigrants state quite openly that they are involved in a “war,” and see participation in crime and harassment of the native population as such. This is completely in line with what I have posited before. The number of rape charges in Sweden has quadrupled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago. Most other kinds of violent crime have rapidly increased, too. Instability is spreading to most urban and suburban areas. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or from foreign parents. The phenomenon is not restricted to Sweden. The number of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants in Western nations is so extremely high that it is difficult to view these rapes as merely random acts of individuals. It resembles warfare. This is happening in most Western European countries, as well as in other non muslim countries such as India. European jails are filling up with Muslims imprisoned for robberies and all kinds of violent crimes, and Muslims bomb European civilians. One can see the mainstream media are struggling to make sense of all of this. That is because they cannot, or do not want to, see the obvious: this is exactly how an invading army would behave: rape, pillage and bombing. If many of the Muslim immigrants see themselves as conquerors in a war, it all makes perfect sense.

Malmö in Sweden, set to become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority within a decade or two, has nine times as many reported robberies per capita as Copenhagen, Denmark. Yet the number one priority for the political class in Sweden during this year’s national election campaign seems to be demonizing neighboring Denmark for “xenophobia” and a “brutal” debate about Muslim immigration. During last years Jihad riots in France, Sweden’s Social Democratic Prime Minister Göran Persson criticised the way the French government handled the unrest in the country. “It feels like a very hard and confrontational approach.” Persson also rejected the idea of more local police as a “first step” in Sweden. “I don’t believe that’s the way we would choose in Sweden. To start sending out signals about strengthening the police is to break with the political line we have chosen to follow,” he said. Meanwhile, as their authorities have largely abandoned their third largest city to creeping anarchy, there is open talk among the native Swedes still remaining in Malmö of forming vigilante groups armed with baseball bats out of concern for their children’s safety. As I argued in another essay: If Arnold Schwarzenegger fails to get re-elected as Governor of California he may like to do a sequel to “Conan the Barbarian.” He could shoot it in Malmö. He will get the extras for free.

What happened to the famous Swedish nanny state, you say? Don’t Swedes pay the highest tax rates in the world? Yes, they do. But tens of billions of kroner, some say several hundred billions, are being spent every year on propping up rapidly growing communities of Muslim immigrants. Sweden has become the entire world’s welfare office, because the political elites have decided that massive Muslim immigration is “good for the economy.” Soon Sweden’s “army” may comprise no more than 5,000 men, five thousand troops to defend a nation more than three times the area of England. Moreover, it may take up to a year to assemble all of them, provided they are not on peacekeeping missions abroad. That Sweden might soon need a little peacekeeping at home seems to escape the establishment. In 2006 the celebrated Swedish welfare state has become the world’s largest pyramid scheme, an Enron with a national flag.

Although Sweden is an extreme example, similar stories could be told about much of Western Europe. As Mark Steyn points out, the Jihad in the streets of France looked like the early skirmishes of an impending Eurabian civil war, brought on by massive Muslim immigration and Multicultural stupidity. Law and order is slowly breaking down in major and even minor cities across the European continent, and the streets are ruled by aggressive gangs of Muslim youngsters. At the same time, Europeans are paying some of the highest taxes in the world. We should remind our authorities that the most important task of the state – some would even claim it should be the only task of the state – is to uphold the rule of law in exchange for taxation. Since it is becoming pretty obvious that this is no longer the case in Eurabia, we should question whether these taxes are still legitimate, or whether they are simply disguised Jizya paid in the form of welfare to Muslims and our new Eurocrat aristocracy. Although not exactly the Boston Tea Party, perhaps the time has now come for a pan-European tax rebellion: We will no longer pay taxes until our authorities restore law and order and close the borders to Muslim immigration.

This is urgent. When enough people feel that the system is no longer working and that the social contract has been breached, the entire fabric of democratic society could unravel. What happens when the welfare state system breaks down, and there is no longer enough money to “grease” the increasing tensions between immigrants and native Europeans? And what happens when people discover that their own leaders, through the EU networks and the Euro-Arab Dialogue described by Bat Ye’or in her book “Eurabia,” have been encouraging all these Muslims to settle here in the first place? There will be massive unemployment, and tens of millions of people will feel angry, scared and humiliated, betrayed by the system, by society and by their own democratic leaders. This is a situation in some ways similar to the Great Depression that led to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Is this where we are heading once again, with fear, rising Fascism and political assassinations? The difference is that the “Jewish threat” in the 1930s was entirely fictional, whereas the “Islamic threat” now is very real. However, it is precisely the trauma caused by the events of 70 years ago that is clouding our judgement this time, since any talk at all about the threat posed by Muslim immigration or about preserving our own culture is being dismissed as “the same rhetoric as the Nazis used against the Jews.” Europeans have been taught to be so scared of our own shadows that we are incapable of seeing that darkness can come from the outside, too. Maybe Europe will burn again, in part as a belated reaction to the horrors of Auschwitz.”

Comment:  What is our excuse here in America?   Why are our Leftists supporting the Muslim victory statement by building a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, for starters?

Obama’s Holiday Message to Jews: Behave and Obey What I Say

This article by Scott W. Johnson was found at today’s Powerline website:  President Obama preaching the following sermon to his American Jewish subjects:

President Obama has noted the holiday. The White House has posted a video of President Obama’s Rosh Hashanah message (transcript here; compare with Obama’s 2010 Ramadan message here). In his inimitable style, Obama provides instruction to us, or “us,” as “we begin this New Year[.]” Obama admonishes us:

At a time when too many of our friends and neighbors are struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, it is up to us to do what we can to help those less fortunate.

At a time when prejudice and oppression still exist in the shadows of our society, it is up to us to stand as a beacon of freedom and tolerance and embrace the diversity that has always made us stronger as a people.

And at a time when Israelis and Palestinians have returned to direct dialogue, it is up to us to encourage and support those who are willing to move beyond their differences and work towards security and peace in the Holy Land. Progress will not come easy, it will not come quick. But today we had an opportunity to move forward, toward the goal we share–two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Obama’s “we” and “us” reminds me of the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Reader Josh Levy comments:

How about just “Happy Rosh Hashanah”? Or how about not saying anything? The Jews of all people don’t need your preaching — certainly not from someone who attended an anti-Jewish “church” for 20 years. Don’t tell us to “help the poor” and “embrace diversity” and “move beyond differences.” We have been commanded to help the poor, to have one law for the stranger as for the Jew, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. If you can’t control your preachy impulse (and it’s clear you cannot), go tell it to someone who needs to hear your message. Go talk to Hamas, go talk to the Saudi-sponsored imams in mosques across America, go talk to the hate-filled leftists on university campuses.

I pray that “we” shall overcome.

Comment:  Well I am not an American president with Marxist and pro Muslim tendencies with a Muslim name anxiously seeking converts.  I am a product of American JudeoChristian tendencies and am seeking converts of a different kind……..to Constitutional American conservatism and the restoration of respect for the Rule of Law  in our democracy.

To all of my fellow Americans of  our Jewish community:

Have a peaceful and happy Rosh Hashanah.   May we Americans forever defend democratic Israel.

USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham Dislikes the Tea Party Movement

To the Left, any group possessing any impulses critical of American Marxism-sensitive Obama and his supporting cast of  characters are “know nothings”.  Before the days of Karl Marx there was, indeed, an American  political party called the KnowNothing Party.  It opposed immigration.    Mr. Wickham impresses his readers by injecting this tidbit of history into his article to smear the Tea Party movement…….It is a movement unhappy with the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama and his cast of characters, including writers like Mr. Wickham.

But one could claim know-nothing belongs to Mr. Wickham himself who opines, “In a throwback to the Wild West”, referring to Nevada Senate candidate,  Sharron Angle had stated that  opponents of (acts) of Congress might resort to Second Amendment remedies to assuage their discontent. 

Then Mr. Wickham turns to the Mason-Dixon line declaring, “It’s the kind of warped sense of entitlement that plunged this nation into a bloody civil war.”

Oh, so “a warped sense of entitlement”  plunged this nation into a bloody civil war.   Well, the war was certainly bloody, all right.  I wonder where this DeWayne went to college.

Democracy has been resurrected by the Tea Party movement.  I am not one of this group.  I have some friends who  are.   Some of them are know-nothings like DeWayne Wickham, but nearly all are concerned Americans……concerned for the future of their children and the direction Obama and the Wickhams want to lead America…..to Marxist caretaker rule.

I am not aware of a Tea Party Manifesto which dictates its policies.  I am aware many topics including some which apparently upset Mr. Wickham, have been raised for review by some within the many groups which comprise the Tea Party movement.  A serious review of the  birthright to children of foreigners who have illegally entered this country is imperative, the sooner, the better.

Mr. Wickham appears to be just another Lefty hack trying to smear this spontaneous democratic and peaceful movement representing the concerns of countless Americans, including me.

Mr. Wickhams writing in USA Today:

Tea Party-backed candidates who have won the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Kentucky, Alaska, Utah, Nevada and Colorado harbor views on a range of issues — like immigration, and the Second and 14th Amendments — that ought to frighten thinking voters into the arms of their opponents.

Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky, blurted out during post-election interviews that he thinks Congress went too far in outlawing racial discrimination by owners of private property. He also said that neighborhood associations and private business owners should be free to discriminate on the basis of race. He has backtracked on both these positions with doubletalk that falls far short of what sounds like a true change of heart.

And Paul has yet to retreat from his support of a call for Congress to find a way to undo the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. In 1856, the Know Nothing Party’s platform called for a waiting period of 21 years before an immigrant could become a citizen. Paul and other candidates, such as Utah’s Tea Party-Republican Mike Lee, say children born here to illegal aliens shouldn’t automatically become U.S. citizens.

Never mind that the Constitution says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens. They want to undo that constitutional provision. The Tea Party-GOP fusion candidates in Kentucky, Alaska, Utah, Colorado and Nevada back Arizona’s immigration law, which for them is an acceptable usurpation of the federal government’s authority.

And then there is Sharron Angle. In a throwback to the Wild West, the Nevada GOP Senate candidate has repeatedly talked about the possibility that people who dislike the actions of Congress might resort to “Second Amendment (right to bear arms) remedies” to assuage their discontent. It’s the kind of warped sense of entitlement that plunged this nation into a bloody civil war.

With the general election fewer than 60 days away, voters ought to focus on reversing the meteoric rise of the Tea Partiers, who are the linear successors to the aptly named anti-immigration Know Nothing movement that flourished for a brief time during the 1850s. It elected eight governors, 43 members of the U.S. House and five U.S. senators during that time. But it ultimately collapsed from the weight of its own intolerance and blurred political vision.

The Tea Party movement claims to be rooted in the traditional — but long compromised — Republican ideals of fiscal responsibility, small government and free markets. But its support of Arizona’s immigration law signals an intolerance of Hispanics that mirrors the Know Nothing movement’s attempt to keep Catholics out of this country.

Left alone, there’s a good chance the Tea Party will sputter out of existence as quickly as the Know Nothing movement did. But that may not be fast enough, given the stand Tea Party candidates are taking on issues. Voters should speed up that process on Election Day.

DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.

“Sentimentality Is The Ally of Ever Expanding Bureaucracy”….. Theodore Dalrymple

Politics and the Cult of Sentimentality……article by Theodore Dalrymple published in the Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2010.

On Thursday of last week, I happened to be reading an article in Le Monde while waiting for a plane at Charles de Gaulle airport.  The article took up a whole page and was titled “Las Vegas Inferno.”  “Inferno” was written in letters an inch tall.

I hold no particular brief for Las Vegas.  I would like to see it, but only in the sense that I wanted to see North Korea (and did): One should experience all that one can of the world, and Las Vegas is surely unique.

The Inferno of the article was that of the homeless of the city, 300-500 of whom live in the concrete-and-steel tunnels built in the 1970s as drains for the torrential rains that often afflict Nevada.  The article says of the people who live in them that they are “the poorest of the poor, poverty stricken rejects in the entrails of the gilded city.”

Poverty-stricken rejects in the entrails of the gilded city:  The words suggest a terrible and cruel injustice done to them.  But who, exactly, has rejected them, and thereby forced them into the entrails?  This way of putting  it inevitably turns them into victims of a cruel world.

Three cases are mentioned – those of Craig, David, and Medina.  Craig has lived in the tunnels for five years, and his belongings have been washed away three times in the past few months.  His food is paid for with food stamps; he gathers money left behind in the one-armed bandits in the casinos above-ground to buy cannabis -”my only drug,” he says.  No further details are offered as to why he resorted to living in the tunnels in the first place. 

David, who has a long scar on his face that is ravaged by alcohol, came to Las Vegas attracted by “the eldorado of greenbacks and the promise of endless job opportunities.”  “Then, in the words of the article, he knew “that slow decline when gambling debts become insurmountable and drugs replace friends”.

On this view of things, the gambling  debts and the drugs that replaced friends had an existence independent of his behavior.  They had agency in his life, unlike him.  The debts came and tooks his money away and the drugs arrived and forced him to take them, contrary to the wishes of his friends.  David is therefore a victim, and nothing but a victim.

Medina, ages 36, is an Indian woman, and she has recently escaped the tunnels.  Her beauty has been destroyed by “abuse and maltreatment.”  She has five children, whom she hardly knows.  I hope I shall not be accused of cultural insensitivity when I write that she must nevertheless have known where they came from.

It was her lover, Manny, “who first dragged me down there into lthe tunnels.”  She thought at first that he was going to kill her, but she went nonetheless, and they stayed there a year. ……

What is startling about all this is that the author of the article evinces no curiosity about how the three came to be in the situation he describes.  Why not?   The questions to ask are so obvious that one must wonder why he did not ask them. 

Part of the problem is that he sees Las Vegas as a manifestation of ” the American Dream”, though actually it is a perversion of that dream.  No doubt the authentic dream – that of individuals endlessly free to reinvent and advance themselves-also has a dark side, as American literature records.  But the tunnels under Las Vegas are not it.

The main reason that the author does not ask the obvious questions is that to have done so would have been to reduce the sentimental raction that he wanted to evoke in his readers.  And a little reflections shows that this reaction depended on a rather cruel premise that if people are to any considerable extent the authors of their own misfortunes, we should exclude them from our pity.  Instead, we turn them into the passive victims of circumstance.

Does it matter that we do this?  I think that it does.   Sentimentality allows us to congratulate ourselves on our own warmth and generosity of heart.  Oscar Wilde said that sentimentality is the desire to have the luxury of emotion without paying fo it.  It turns the people on whom it is bestowed into objects.  It attempts, often successfully, to disguise from them their own part in their downfall.  It suggests solutions to problems that do not, because they cannot, work.    Sentimentality is the ally of ever expanding bureaucracy, for the more a solution doesn’t work, the more of it is needed.

Comment:  I read Theodore Dalrymple whenever I can.  I hope you can find the time to do so whenever you can, too.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 147 other followers