* Liberals declare, as though a self-evident truth: “We can’t go to war with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.” Why not? For decades we were at war with that other ideology bent on world domination, communism. Roughly the same number of people were communists in the 1950s as are Muslims today. (Tally up the populations of Red China, the USSR, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on.) We had a sign at the border, too: “Commies Keep Out!” We had in effect a religious test based on your beliefs: If you served the Communist Party, you couldn’t hold certain jobs or participate in the military, even if you were legally an American citizen.
* While in school during the late 1980s, my school offered a course entitled “Communism: One third of the World”. One third of the world is a much larger proportion than one fifth.
* Yes, last night 11 out of 10 late night talk show hosts all denounced guns and those dirty NRA no-goodniks who allow us to own guns. Is there like a journolist II that sends out talking points from the Hillary campaign?
I get the feeling though that this is starting not to work. Hillary said in 2008 that she had not shattered the (imaginary) glass ceiling but that there were now lots of cracks in it. I get the feeling that there are beginning to be cracks in the Democrat coalition.
You have to be pretty desperate to try to connect Omar Mateen to the white frat boy “rapist” from Stanford as if nobody is going to notice that there is a little something different about Omar. And while there are lots of low information voters, most people, no matter how stupid, realize on some level that guns do not walk into nightclubs and go on rampages by themselves. And there is the little detail that Omar was a professional security guard and even in most countries where they don’t allow ordinary people to have guns, security guards have access to them.
Besides being an obvious red herring, the anti-gun crowd has to explain how, if we are not going to build a fence (and god forbid we should do such a thing), it is possible to smuggle across 11 million human beings and mucho tons of drugs every year, but there’s no way that guns will come across the border once we make them illegal here.
You can TRY to change the subject but now you have the candidate of one of the two major parties loudly NOTICING and saying the I-word and it’s going to be hard to memory hole Omar’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and retcon him into a hateful white man like George Zimmerman. Maybe if he had changed his name to Omar Zimmerman?
You can denounce Trump as a badthinking racis’ and try talking about guns instead but he is going to be on the teevee every day at least from now until November so it’s not going to be that easy to shut him up like some poor schmuck whom you can force out of his job for having said a bad word. Even Hillary had to (reluctantly) say the I-word in order to avoid being outflanked by Trump or looking like a total fool.
* It is very characteristic of ideological regimes that are on the ropes that as your position becomes more and more tenuous, you insist on ideological purity even more. If you allow even one whisker of the camel’s nose into your tent then the whole camel may follow, and you can see that the camel is not far away any more but he is right there pushing on your tent flaps . The Inquisition really got going once the position of the church was threatened by the Reformation. The Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on dissent now, because they realize that their legitimacy is in question. They view Gorbachev’s perestroika as an object lesson in what NOT to do.
So the desperate measures (such as no longer maintaining even a pretense of objectivity in the news pages) are a sign of weakness, not strength.
