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Totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of totalitarians
but on the vices of liberals.
-- Albert Camus
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The drawing I did back in 1993. (The model was written up most justly in the book The Undressed Art.) The quote is from Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, "Why Spain?" (p. 301), reviewed by Erika Dreifus.
Who's a monster?
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Well, well. The true face of Obama foreign policy brain trust shows itself.
First thought: If only all partisan liberals took responsibility for their attitudes and actions in a like manner.
Second thought: It's more damage control than responsibility, however. She's a well-heeled intellectual, ideas are her currency. She doesn't need to be officially on board to still influence Obama's foreign policy or his other advisers.
Last year Men's Vogue fawned over the (well-stiletto-heeled) "Genocide Chick" (click for pic).
Left-liberals occasionally hit the right note when critiquing their own.
While best known for his political cartoons, and while his sculptures disgust me with their lumpy, leaden forms and gunmetal sheens that belie artery-hardened (and -hardening), leftover socialist realism, Paul Conrad pulls off a good, almost very good, caricature with this Janus-faced bust 0f Bill and Ms. Rodham Clinton.
The head conveys much truth about America's preeminent, not just symbiotic but Siamese, power couple. They think as one, indivisible, with Bill the major, more stalwart partner. The penile Pinocchio (like a thumb, no?) peers hard into the past, whereas she of steely smile and more poised coif beams eagerly ahead, buttressed -- always -- by Bill.
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btw, Gentle Reader, my instinctive, lip-curling aversion to Conrad is not unlike the one I bear toward George Segal -- particularly his Willy Loman-esque Holocaust forms. Exposition of that, however, will have to be for another time...
* Update *
Welcome Seraphic and Atlas readers!
(Everyone, please don't let your alarm and disgust at this "Chebama" image interfere with the longer, harder work of parsing Obama's own words and deeds. Exhibit A: Stephen Hayes. -JMK)
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Watch for these and other anti-American signs in Obama's campaign. Larwyn emails: You think if Mitt had a Hitler poster in one of
his campaign offices it wouldn't be FRONT PAGE. How about just a POPE
poster? (Photo from Obama campaign office in Houston, found at Don Surber's site.)
Let's point out that Ernesto's evil ideology killed 100 million human beings while Hitler's evil ideology killed maybe a quarter of that. At every step of the way card-carrying liberal elites were fascinated by Ernesto's evil ideology. They were captivated by it and sometimes even directly adhered to it. Recall also that Ernesto's evil ideology was the final hope and ambition of the assassin of Democrat John Kennedy -- Kennedy, in whose image Obama's is being burnished. But Alas! both the irony and criminality are lost on today's Democrats.
Had Oswald somehow lived to see Ernesto emerge in world affairs, he would have been slamming his tin cup against his cell's steel bars to celebrate El Comandante's "exploits," first before the bloodied execution walls of Cuba, then amid the humid heights of the Bolivian jungle.
(Photo from Political Party Poop.)
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Meanwhile, from "Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption" at the American Thinker:
Consider these numbers on recent Google searches using only Obama's name plus one other word:
* Obama + messianic 75,200
* Obama + savior 226,000
* Obama + prophet 312,000
* Obama + Christ 504,000
* Obama + change 4,540,000
A glowing (if recycled) portrait of Ms. Rodham Clinton dominates the cover of this month's TV Espanol, a Spanish-language only advertising circular distributed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Tucked deep inside among the many ads for beauty salons, personal injury lawyers, real estate brokers, and even Oriental massage parlors is a two-page profile of the candidate. Making the cover of TV Espanol is nothing to take lightly -- at 170 pages thick it outweighs every other freebie I've seen, from left-of-center rags to Jehovah's Witness mags. Ms. Rodham Clinton is a true estrella in the Mexifornia firmament.
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(Note: This image is not photoshopped.)
Update: "The Evita Factor"
Fans of Liberal Fascism, unite!
Earlier this month, before dropping over $30 for the debut of Jonah Goldberg's (so far, wildly popular) Liberal Fascism, for $5 at a used bookstore I picked up for the first time ever a Pat Buchanan title, The Death of the West (2000).
I'm glad I did. It's a summary of the cultural, demographic, and economic trends that are the downfall of Western Civilization. It makes no particular case against militant Islam, although it does identify some of the harm it had already caused American interests; hence it cannot be accused of being particularly "Islamophobic" nor "isolationist." It identifies a culture war within American society, unappeasable and unavoidable -- very much as others, post-9/11, have acknowledged the jihad with Islam.
Rarely, however, do I notice Pat mentioned by name by post-9/11 counter-jihad pundit-authors. To pick a few, Mark Steyn in America Alone, Melanie Philips in Londonistan, or Claire Berlinski in Menace in Europe. Yet several of his basic observations and ideas pop up in their work -- declining Western birth rates, for example, or plummeting church attendance in Europe. If a schism exists between Pat and the rest, it seems to me everyone involved would benefit from a spirited debate that identifies just what are their (our) common interests. (In LF Goldberg devotes a few pages to him, btw.)
With an indecisive GOP primary season afoot (uncertain, weary, and chaotic all at once; "the party's falling apart," says Dick Morris) someone's got to ask: Where is American conservatism headed? How well (or poorly) is the Republican Party its "home"? And since the November election will be, in part, a second referendum on "The Bush Doctrine": Of the flagrantly liberal aspects of Bush's record -- nation-building abroad, government expansion at home -- which are worth keeping, amending -- or dismissing?
In The Death of the West Pat is neither grim nor optimistic, just diagnostic. For all the pitched partisanship and great American romance that make up a presidential election, it would be good also to administer a dose of Pat's "DoW-ism" to the Republican and national discussions already underway.
* * *
A pleasant surprise of DoW is its more than occasional literary references. In a way that in no way relies on the academiklatura (something which would surprise and annoy them, would any deign to read it) Pat clearly is well-read in American letters. He quotes from novels and essays only to illustrate his political points, but also -- mirabile lectu -- Pat believes that Western literature should be read (and written) to bolster, not undermine, the West. History -- not "the text" -- is literature's proper reference. In today's culture war that's radical. (That also helps to explain why so much contemporary scribbling may be many things, but certainly not literature.)
One of Pat's sources is James Burnham's The Suicide of the West (1964). It's out of print, but not impossible to track down in used form. So after finishing The Death of the West, I ordered a used copy of The Suicide of the West. It does not disappoint.
A heartening passage about modern literature runs as follows:
It is also ironic that liberalism -- so prevalent among modern intellectuals and so widely regarded as the truly creative outlook in modern society -- has failed to attract any of the major creative writers of our century. Professor Lionel Trilling [described by a former student here] who seldom deviates from the liberal line on specific political or social issues though he is mildly heterodox in theory, discussed this little remarked
but surely significant fact in an article published in 1962 by the magazine Commentary. He pointed out that none of the major writers has been a liberal and that most of them have been anti-liberal; and that there is no great twentieth-century literary work infused with the liberal ideology as De Rerum Naturae, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, and War and Peace were infused with other ideologies. In the twentieth century, Professor Trilling declares, there has been "no literary figure of the very first rank . . . who, in his work, makes use of or gives credence to liberal or radical ideas." Many secondary writers and a substantial majority of critics have been and are liberals; but Henry James, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot -- all of whom the liberals so much admire, so frequently imitate and so endlessly comment on -- have all been, often explicitly and scornfully, anti-liberal. (pp.135-136)
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Search inside this book!
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* Update (01/03) *
A pathological and bizarre script, no? Or am I missing something here?;
Irshad Manji on the exceptional leader Bhutto wasn't.
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As a supplement to last week's visceral, visual, and musical reaction, here's Pamela Bone in The Australian of January 2:
If the fact that she was a Western-educated woman seeking power in
lands they claim as their own was not reason enough, killing her meant
they could disrupt the scheduled elections and maintain instability in
Pakistan, which would allow them to continue using that country's
territory to train the increasing numbers of willing martyrs, funded by
trillions of dollars from opium sales.
* * *
Fausta continues to round up probing links, video clips, including a link to the source of this image:
* * *
Benazir Bhutto becomes an unwilling (including far from perfect) martyr for representative democracy, and is it just me who thinks Ms. Rodham Clinton is out of tune with the day the Muslim music died?
If she had the right stuff, if she were a great leader waiting for History and not just a politician waiting for opportunity, Ms. Rodham Clinton would be making the Speech Of Her Life about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Muslim jihad, about the sanctity of the democratic process and women's eligibility for politics, about the savagery of the mortal enemies of freedoms we habitually take for granted, and about the shining moral, political, military compass that the United States of America is (or should be) to the entire world. She'd be making the Speech Of Her Life and the whole world would be watching. Instead of frigid heiress to the highest office she'd be an avenging Amazonian androgyne -- Jack Kennedy, Maggie Thatcher, and Athena rolled into one -- if Ms. Rodham Clinton had the right stuff.
But she doesn't, so she's not.
Instead she's calling for "an international, independent investigation" into the assassination. Yes, let's investigate al-Qaeda. That'll teach 'em! The leading Democratic presidential contender is a one-worlder machine pol who once a decade will wow a women's conference in an imperial capital, but ... chug upriver into the heart of History's darkness?
Not on your life -- and not on Benazir Bhutto's death.
In the wake of Bhutto's assassination every hour that passes without a great intervention by the woman being sold to the American electorate as a genius, as a compassionate heart, as a champion of children and the disadvantaged, etc. etc. is another reason why "Hillary" is indeed a brand name, is another reason why she's a cranky, overeducated, cuckolded White Hausfrau and not a majestic statesman.
On behalf of all prospective voters, I gotta say, Show us -- not your tits, Hillary -- show us your blood!
That's what Benazir did.
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Show us what you're made of, old gal. At this arresting moment in world history, we have a right to demand of The Woman Who Would Be Potent POTUS Over Us, What the hell flows through your veins? and What are you willing to do to prove it's for real?
While she's miscalculating an answer, waiting for a cooked up cue during a cardboard Q&A, I'm gonna cue up a little Tina ...
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... then a little T & A.
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Aside: Found at Andy Cooper's weblog, intellectual boytoy Reza Aslan speculates that the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein -- and Ms. Rodham Clinton's initial support for it -- led to Bhutto's assassination. Says who? Says Obama's people, says Aslan.
Related: Brando via Coppolla & Milius via Conrad, "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared." (scroll down)
Lisa Schriffen @ NRO on the USSR's long shadow over, MSM's "deathwatch" in the subcontinent.
The most pitched and informative takes on Bhutto, Paki politics rounded up by Pamela and Fausta.
