Category: World

Lileks rightly takes Gore to task for his latest verbal incontinence:

Today Al Gore upped the ante. He coined a new term for the Internet critics of his positions: digital brownshirts. Yes, yes, it’s over the top. But it’s not the sentiment that raises eyebrows, it’s the position of the person who’s saying it. We don’t expect presidential candidates past or present to indulge in Usenet flame-war lingo. We don’t expect serious party elders to call the other side Nazis, and for good reason: it’s obscene. The brownshirts were evil. The brownshirts kicked the Jews in the streets and made the little kids put their hands on their heads as they stumbled off to the trains. The brownshirts were not interested in refuting arguments. They were interested in killing the people who dared argue at all.

As someone in the blogosphere said recently: whenever someone calls the government facist, and then walks away unmolested, they automatically refute themselves.

Christopher Hitchens writes a scathing denunciation of Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 in Slate:

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

(Hat tip: Power Line)

Yet another nail in the coffin of the UN and the ICRC’s self-righteousness. Reuters has video footage (I’ve mirrored it on my site; the original link is here) of Palestinian “militants” using UN ambulances for getaway vehicles. Two Geneva Convention violations for the price of one! Feh.

Update: more commentary here.

A true liberal — in the classic sense of the word — expresses a nuanced and sophisticated opinion of today’s soi-disant “progressives”:

Remember that [liberal] stuff at the top of this rant I said I believed? I got news for you, cupie-doll, those guys you’re rooting for don’t. They
really don’t. They want to see your gay friends dead, they want to see
your daughters and sisters slaves in their own homes, they do not
tolerate any religion not their specific sect. They want the word of a
man in their religious courts to trump the word of any woman. They
believe in the concept of racism: of second- and third-class people,
and believe this “truth” comes from God. They want to strap your child
to explosives and send your child into the homes of their enemies.
They’re not liberal. They’re not poor and oppressed, they’re wealthy
beyond your feeble imagination and drive fleets of cars out of your
pricerange. They’re not oppressed underdogs yearning to be free.
They’re illiberal medievalists, and you think they’re just dandy. And
yet you drool at the idea that they kill our Marines and Soldiers, and
you hope they win because it makes Bush look bad. You, a so-called
“progressive”, a self-proclaimed Liberal, rooting and cheering for
people as anti-liberal as you can get. You gleefully call Bush a Nazi
while ignoring the real fascists. Nice going, slick. How the hell do
you sleep at night, you brainless wonder?

Read it all.

(Hat tip: The Bitch Girls)