If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
"My administration will value science," Obama said, in what sounded like a pointed reference to his predecessor. "We will make decisions based on facts."Holy hell, Presidents can DO that kind of radical, facty thing with actual science and logic and crap?
We all understand now the significance of this particular insult in the Arab world -- right? But do we really? Somehow I tend to doubt it. The true significance of this attack on President Bush and symbolically on the United States, and its enthusiastic reception in both the Arab world and in our own liberal media has not really been addressed. One part of this story is of course the breathless eagerness with which our own biased leftist MSM quickly grasps onto any story that will support their long-held conviction that the Iraq war was a foolish criminal endeavor, perpetrated on the American people by a clueless ignorant cowboy -- "the unpopular U.S. president".Because they pen breathless screeds declaring a entire religion to be the enemy of the United States of America and therefore demand the cultural annihilation of a billion Muslims or so over a pair of fucking shoes lobbed at a world leader with a 27% approval rating in his own country.
But I contend that this incident provides us with an even more important lesson. One which we should have learned by now but have not. It is simply this: Why should this act of hatred and resentment come as a surprise to us? Haven't we accepted the fact yet that 'blood is thicker than water'; or in this case, that the Arab world's adherence to Islam and to Sharia law supersedes any temporary arrangements of convenience made with infidel governments. Treaties made with Arab (or any Muslim) states are in reality no more than cynical measures of expediency. Realpolitik.
Here is the cold hard truth: Islam is, was, and always will be the sworn enemy of Western civilization in general, and of the United States of America in particular. Any thoughts that we can peacefully coexist without risking subsequent betrayal are foolhardy and delusional. Every time we think we have made inroads into the Muslim world we should be automatically circumspect and on guard. For when push comes to shove, all of those minor political or regional differences between Arab/Muslim states will be quickly set aside when confronted with the common enemy of the infidel West. Until the very roots of Islam are torn out of this culture we will never succeed in establishing any meaningful and lasting peace in this region.
Me, I've had people assume I've everything from Samoan to Indian (Native American and from India itself), Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, North African, Arab, and just about everything else. One one hand, Obama identifies himself as African-American like I do, and the world respects him for it: enough so that he's President-Elect. On the other hand, the insistence of having to classify people as a particular ethnic or racial group has always bugged me to an extent.A perplexing new chapter is unfolding in Barack Obama's racial saga: Many people insist that "the first black president" is actually not black.
Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial — or, in Obama's own words, a "mutt" — has reached a crescendo since Obama's election shattered assumptions about race.
Obama has said, "I identify as African-American — that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it." In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.
But the world has changed since the young Obama found his place in it.
Intermarriage and the decline of racism are dissolving ancient definitions. The candidate Obama, in achieving what many thought impossible, was treated differently from previous black generations. And many white and mixed-race people now view President-elect Obama as something other than black.
It's very interesting to note that a whole lot of people have different opinions about Obama and his racial identity. There's no denying having him in the White House is massive progress for race relations in general. But yeah, people see in him what they want to see in him.
Barack Rorshach Obama.
As today's news again reminds us, the GOP doesn't seem terribly concerned about much more problematic things like the disgusting, virtually no-strings-attached re-re bailouts of Citigroup and AIG. Rather, Republican senators want to drive down wages for American autoworkers and create competitive advantages for their right-to-work states so much that they're willing to inflict massive blows to the American economy to do so. (As Molly Ivors cracks, if there was some way of putting together a bailout that would pay executives and not workers, the bailout might have had a chance.)And that's the bottom line. Screw the blue states, victory for red ones.
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