“Iran-Contra didn’t rack of that kind of body count. Watergate didn’t rack up that kind of body count. Sarah Palin’s daughter’s boyfriend’s mother, or whatever stupid story they were chasing around Wasilla for months, that didn’t rack up a body count. There were hundreds of dead Mexicans from a gun running program run by the United States.”

(more…)

Ah, why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? He is one of us, is he not? He even wants to help Andrew Breitbart – and even us poor little old folks here at Big Journalism. Things here would be fine with a little free counseling from Friedersdorf, who, as Features Editor, helped run website Culture 11 into the ground in record time, ” its lifespan was like one of those bugs that hatches, mates, and dies in just a few days,” wasting millions in the process. Oh, the unaccomplished Conor Friedersdorf was still in grad school in 2008. But he knows it all. I suppose the boy learns quick.

When I criticize Mr. Breitbart, or his sites Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Journalism, part of my project is pressuring them to do better work. In fact, I’d happily provide my counsel to anyone at those sites privately and free of charge, and I think that much of the critiques I’ve published thus far are constructive.

Here is Conor Friedersdorf posting on Andrew McCarthy. Friedersdorf defends the Marxist Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), while calling McCarthy “ridiculous,” “dishonorable,” “odious” and “terrifying” as a public servant, dismissing his arguments as specious and simply slurs. He also defends the Left, while reviewing McCarthy’s book with this headline: “The Manifold Inaccuracies of Andy McCarthy’s New Book.” Why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? (more…)

No introduction from me necessary. Read the whole thing and weep:

But what did the “loss” of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination, because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” — you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever — “that captured the world’s imagination.”

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite — that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don’t even need an “imagination.” Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassas and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Va. In the old days, you needed an “imagination” to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism, the sight of Pearl’s severed head is a mere click away.

We’re not going to show it to you here, but as Steyn says, it’s only a mouse-click away.

So watch us, and be aware: whatever happens to us, happens to civilization.

(more…)

In a recent column I wrote for Irish Examiner USA, I mentioned an email I received that was politically correct but that I thought was very funny. I debated including it in the column but decided against it for the sake of my publisher.

Apparently we’re no longer allowed to laugh at anything remotely unflattering to ourselves or certain minorities, and that’s not only a shame, it’s downright dangerous.

Joan Rivers used to tell jokes about Italians; Don Rickles insulted everybody, and Jackie Mason still tells jokes about Jews. Now it seems as if some Hispanics are now being encouraged to be as testy over slights as are certain Muslims over perceived disses of the prophet Mohammed.

Here at Big Journalism, however, the mission should be to write about things too edgy for the MSM so here it is and if you’re black or Hispanic and get offended, you need to check your humor level. You may be a few quarts low. (more…)

We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.

That was the arrogant declaration of victory from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nearly two years ago, regarding the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Geert Wilders’ short film Fitna.

“Red lines” indeed – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms.

The influential OIC is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia.” (As I’ve written here before, Islamophobia is a mythical beast that the OIC and collusive groups like CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, use to intimidate us into craven appeasement.) Their goal is to abridge our free speech by making criticism of Islam an international crime; their strategy works because the West has been so emasculated by multiculturalism that we’d rather embrace cultural suicide than offend the tender sensibilities of such violent barbarians as the Danish cartoon rioters. (more…)

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville

In part one we discussed how there are only two forms of government. In part two we discussed the history of those two forms. Now we’re going to discuss how the BG (Big Government, aka statist) types have infected our political system.

We’ve all heard the sordid history of Communism and hard socialist countries, which are all totalitarian dictatorships. Nations like North Korea and Zimbabwe are economic basket cases which have famines and moribund economies; police states in which human rights are non-existent. Cuba keeps its citizens prisoner and rations food. These are just a few examples of what happens when BG systems are taken to their extremes.

Human beings operate mostly out of self interest. BG systems allow an elite class to have complete control over every aspect of the public’s lives. Those who love power love to abuse it. (more…)

Two years ago today, William F. Buckley moved on to the great Firing Line in the Sky where he is, no doubt, still debating the wisdom of turning over the Panama Canal with the Gipper. Buckley’s legacy lives on, not only in the remarkable generation of writers that he spawned after he first dared to stand athwart history and yell stop but, in an odd sort of way, in the manner in which some of the liberals he defied over the course of five decades seem to pine for the great man’s genteel ways.

On a personal note, Buckley was one of the two great influences in the creative life of this particular – not particularly humble – correspondent. The other was that irascible Chicago newspaperman/Everyman: Mike Royko. It’s difficult to imagine an odder couple, but Buckley and Royko shared at least a couple of common characteristics. One took them on at one’s peril (and very few ever successfully did so) and neither could be neatly constrained within an ideological box. Royko was classically liberal, but he openly scorned the liberal elite. Buckley became the symbol of the conservative movement, but he refused to let the movement define him, cutting his own path through the ideological jungle when necessary, most famously when he argued for the legalization of many illegal drugs. Agree or disagree, both Royko and Buckley were thinkers, and honest thinkers to boot, who had a knack for expressing their thoughts with the kind of panache that left their readers breathless in awe. (more…)

Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I feel compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference: (more…)