Columnist.
Last week, a psychotic anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigrant, anti-Marxist named Anders Behring Breivik shot up a children's summer camp in Norway. The left wing media was only too eager to point to his ideology as the rationale for the shooting. David Neiwert of CrooksandLiars.com stated that Breivik subscribed to the "theories about 'Cultural Marxism' ... promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others." The Daily Kos tried to link Breivik to Accuracy in Academia and the World Congress of Families. Think Progress blamed Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, blogger Pamela Geller, author Brigitte Gabriel and scholar of Islam Robert Spencer. In short, it was a repeat of the Sarah Palin-Gabby Giffords story, only writ large.
For those who couldn't tell from my name, I'm a Jew. Not only am I Jew, I'm an Orthodox Jew. I pray three times a day to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I keep kosher. I wear phylacteries in the morning, and I say the Shema at night. And I love Texas Gov. Rick Perry's "The Response."
There is a climactic scene in the movie "Rebel Without a Cause," in which two enemies play chicken. The sullen hero, Jim (James Dean), races toward a cliff against the bully Buzz (Corey Allen). Whoever jumps out first is deemed a "chicken." This week, President Obama decided to play chicken. He's so committed to tax hikes that he's willing to drive over a political cliff to get them. Unwilling to compromise on spending and unwilling to cut his beloved stimulus to pay our creditors, President Obama threatened on Tuesday to prevent Social Security checks from going out on Aug. 3. "There may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Obama said. That wasn't it, Obama continued. "This is not just a matter of Social Security checks. These are veterans' checks, these are folks on disability and their checks. There are about 70 million checks that go out."
On Tuesday, a Florida jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of first-degree murder in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee Marie. As so often happens in high profile cases, the jury was wrong. Casey clearly murdered her daughter. Her mom, Cindy, reported that Caylee was missing on July 15, 2008. Casey's cover story was unbelievably ridiculous. When Casey's mom, Cindy, confronted Casey at Casey's boyfriend's apartment, Casey actually claimed that a random baby sitter nobody had ever met had taken Caylee away over a month beforehand.
This week, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, ruled that the state of California could not bar the sale of violent video games to minors. The majority opinion, written by quasi-originalist Justice Antonin Scalia, argued that the First Amendment requires that government not mandate that minors be controlled by their parents. Purer originalist Judge Clarence Thomas took the opposite view. "Although much has changed in this country since the Revolution," he wrote, "the notion that parents have authority over their children and that the law can support that authority persists today."
Jon Leibowitz -- aka Jon Stewart -- is a liar. This week, he sat down with Chris Wallace of Fox News and promptly made an ass of himself. The left cheered, as they are apt to do when they spot the Smirking Smarm-smith, but the truth is that without his trusty audience to cheer his every move, Stewart looked like what he was: a bully, a manipulator, and an intellectually dishonest partisan hack.
President Obama loves the smell of humus in the morning. Smells like ... victory. At least, that seems to be the message resonating from this suddenly imperialistic White House. According to the UK Guardian, "American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement, which is likely to see U.S. troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades." Meanwhile in Libya, President Obama continues to escalate the conflict, despite the fact that he will be in violation of the War Powers Resolution in five days. And in Israel, Obama is attempting to force our ally to come to the negotiation table with a Hamas-backed regime, and to pre-emptively give up all claims to anything beyond the pre-1967 lines, save a few choice areas.
This week has been a shocking one for Hollywood. Shortly after releasing my syndicated column last week, I handed The Hollywood Reporter a bevy of tapes showing tremendous liberal bias in the entertainment industry -- and a tape of one top Hollywood creator, Vin Di Bona ("America's Funniest Home Videos" and "MacGyver"), celebrating anti-conservative discrimination in Hollywood. Matt Drudge linked the piece, sending my book, "Primetime Propaganda," to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller charts. I began receiving emails from underground conservatives in Hollywood thanking me for revealing what everyone in town knows but few could confirm: that liberal Hollywood kills careers of those with whom it disagrees. I even got a few calls from liberals congratulating me on my attempts to open up the industry to different political viewpoints.
Discrimination is not a pleasant accusation to level at anyone. In particular, conservatives have a tough time stomaching such allegations -- we tend to think that for the most part, people treat each other rationally. After all, that assumption is the foundation of laissez-faire economics, which states that the market will ruthlessly weed out all those who practice non-rationality-based decision-making. Sometimes, however, discrimination is very real. And in today's America, Hollywood is its epicenter.
In 2008, Obama grabbed 78 percent of the Jewish vote. Even the most wildly optimistic polling today shows that Obama's support remains high among Jews. It's a result that Republicans simply can't understand -- why do so many Jews continue to support a president who has shown time and again that he stands against the State of Israel? Why the reflexive lever-pulling on behalf of a man who appoints anti-Semites to positions of high power, attends a virulently anti-Semitic church for 20 years, and sees Israel as the cause of the West's conflict with the Muslim world? The answer is deceptively simple: the Jews who vote for Obama are, by and large, Jews In Name Only (JINOs). They eat bagels and lox; they watch "Schindler's List"; they visit temple on Yom Kippur -- sometimes. But they do not care about Israel. Or if they do, they care about it less than abortion, gay marriage and global warming.
Republicans have an unfortunate habit. It's a habit cribbed from the Academy Awards, in which Hollywood rewards somebody who has been around forever with a special trophy. Republicans have their own Lifetime Achievement Award. It's called The Presidential Nomination, and it generally goes to dues-paying members who have spent their last few decades working for the party and clawing their way to the top. Members of the Republican Lifetime Achievement Award club include Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush and John McCain. The latest nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award include Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, both of whom have the excitement factor of dish soap. Now those rebels inside the Republican Party are clamoring for an insurrectionist pick like ... Mitch Daniels.
In the horrifyingly gruesome Robert Rodriguez movie "Machete," a white senator (Robert De Niro) guffaws as his vigilante sidekick (Don Johnson) shoots a pregnant illegal immigrant to death. Then the senator shoots a Mexican himself. "Welcome to America," he spits. "Machete" does not reflect reality. It is a vicious attack on Americans who oppose illegal immigration, portraying them as racist Nazi-types who can't wait to break out their AK-47s for the next anti-Latino pogrom. Thankfully, nobody takes the politics from "Machete" seriously. No one, that is, except President Obama.
On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced to the world that he had personally shot Osama bin Laden in the head. Well, not exactly. But it was close. "I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaida," he said. "I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden ... I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action ... Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan ..."
On April 22, President Obama announced the celebration of the 41st Earth Day. Unappeased, the Earth immediately spawned a tornado that ripped away half of the St. Louis airport, an earthquake in Indonesia, and a rainstorm that kept Michelle Obama from making her scheduled Earth Day event. It's the Earth's party, and it can fuss if it wants to. While Christians across the world marked Easter and Jews marked Passover, liberals marked their annual ode to neo-paganism with hippy-dippy exercises in green self-righteousness. Of course, they neglected to mention that Gaia herself was a Greek hussy who mythologically created the oceans and the depths by an incestuous relationship with her son, Uranus. They also neglected to mention that one original co-founder of Earth Day was a murderer, that its first backers were tie-dyed socialists who hated capitalism, and that Earth Day itself was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin.
Back in the early 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution began to take hold, a group of British laborers rebelled against the technological advances of the day. Taking their inspiration from an obscure British weaver named Ned Ludd, who had attacked and bludgeoned to death two knitting frames after being chastised for laziness, these laborers began wrecking all the new-fangled machinery they could get their hands on. By stopping the march of technology, they mistakenly believed that they could preserve their own low-level jobs. The Luddites, as they came to be known, were defeated swiftly by the British government -- and by technology, which outpaced them and caused the greatest flourishing of population growth, health and wealth the world has ever known -- but their legacy lives on in the Democratic Party. This week, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) announced that the Apple iPad was responsible for unemployment.
For well over a year, I, along with the rest of the conservative base in America, have lamented the lack of decent possible Republican presidential candidates. Despite the fact that he has run the most incompetent administration in history, President Obama remains a solid bet for re-election in 2012. Obama's frontrunner status springs from two crucial facts: first, by overexposing himself in the public eye, he has made himself larger than life; second, the Republican field is pathetically weak.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she will not serve another term under President Obama. Who can blame her? She has become the face of a fecklessly reckless administration, a pathetic press relations lackey for the worst foreign affairs president in the history of the country. To replace her, Obama is reportedly looking to tap another prominent female diplomat. Her name is Samantha Power, and she bills herself as a human rights activist. A Yale University graduate, Power became a leftist foreign policy journalist for various major news organizations. She then came back to the United States, where she attended Harvard Law School. Her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," implicated the United States in virtually every major genocide of the last century. As a fellow radical Harvard Law School grad, she quickly penetrated Barack Obama's inner circle and became his senior foreign policy adviser during the 2008 campaign.
Two weeks ago, I visited New York City with my wife, who was interviewing at a local medical school located in the Bronx. I dropped her at the school. Since I was lacking a car, I hopped on a public bus, intending to take it to the local subway station. I have never been so frightened for my country in my life. The bus itself was fine; all the people on it had places to be. It was the subway station that was truly scary. The station itself looked like a bomb had hit it. Debris covered the shattered tile floor. The stench of vomit and urine permeated the place. Rust layered the tracks; wooden boards between the tracks moldered into dust. The station had clearly been beautiful at one point, but now it looked like a leftover set from "The Omega Man."
What is this really about? As the price of oil skyrockets, as our debt levels rise to new highs and our housing market drops to new lows, President Obama decides that it is a fantastic time to start dropping bombs on Libya. Nobody, including Obama, seems to know what our objective is in Libya. First, it was deposing terroristic thug Muammar Qaddafi; then it was standing up for the United Nations; then it was protecting civilians; now it is some combination of all of them. This is the same man who once explained with regard to Middle East policy, "I can tell you this -- when I am president of the United States, the American people and the world will always know where I stand." Now, finding where Obama stands is tougher than finding a cane-less Waldo in a crowd of Christmas elves.
Blood on the bed. That's what 12-year-old Tamar Fogel saw last week when she opened the door to her parents' bedroom in Itamar, Israel. The blood covered the blankets and the bodies of her father, Rabbi Udi Fogel, and her 3-month-old sister, Hadas. In the other room, her mother, Ruth, lay murdered. So did her brothers, Yoav, 11, and Elad, 4. Five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered in their home last week because they dared to live on historic Jewish land. They were not murderers and were not occupiers. They were people who simply wished to leave in peace and be left alone to bring up their children. Now those children have been buried along with their parents.
