Nordlinger's Notes From Paris

Jay Nordlinger reports (Part 1, Part 2) from the National Review's cruise along the Seine:

Just when you think that Paris might — just might — be overrated, you visit again: and you rediscover, “No way — if anything, it’s under-.” Year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, it remains a delight to the eye, mouth, and ear. Paul Johnson is one of our cruisers — one of our special guests. Like Priscilla Buckley, he worked here as a journalist. Paris was down at the heels then — recovering from war and occupation. He remarks on how prosperous the city looks today. It just glitters.

About the banlieues — those “strife-riven” suburbs — we can speak another time . . .

I really don’t like national stereotypes, or generalizations about peoples and nations, even when they’re positive: “The Irish are excellent storytellers,” etc. But I feel like making a statement, so I think I’ll just go ahead: All of my life, I’ve loved being in France, and among French people — not just in small cities and towns, and in the countryside, but in the capital itself.

“Well, aren’t French elites ferociously anti-American?” you might say. A lot of them are — but that is common throughout Western Europe. “Well, don’t you meet people who are vain, godless, immoral, and self-loving?”

Oh, baby, you don’t have to leave home for that . . .

This Is Why Jay Nordlinger Is Fun To Read

From The Corner this afternoon:

The ’Mane Point (Pointe?)
September 8, 2010 3:23 P.M.
By Jay Nordlinger

One of my favorite readers of all time sent me a note that made me wince hard. (Can you wince hard? I guess so.) She wrote,

I was struck by something you said about Rahm Emanuel in this Corner post: making fun of him for being a ballet dancer. Now, I bow to no man in my dislike of Emanuel, but mocking his dancing seems an unnecessarily cheap shot, and unworthy of you. I find his ballet background one of the (relatively few) appealing things about him — and for heaven’s sake, at least he isn’t a lawyer like every other member of the American political class!

Oh, I was badly misunderstood, and my fault, I’m sure! I have always marveled at Emanuel’s ballet background, and bowed to him for it. I have always said it was the thing I liked best about him. (The only thing?) This was back when he was a Clinton aide, long before he became a congressman. Also, in Impromptus, I have at least once remarked on his posture — the best posture in politics, almost certainly. He stands like a dancer. If only his political posture were as good . . .

In the above-mentioned Corner post, I referred to Emanuel as “the foul-mouthed ballet dancer.” Apparently, that came off as negative (!). I never passed a judgment on foul mouths — I can make a room bluer than Massachusetts, pre-Scott Brown. And ballet? I can’t dance for squat, but I’m becoming hard to out-’mane: I’d pay $100 just to watch Julie Kent or Veronika Part go from one aisle to another in the grocery story. (You know how much money I’ve shelled out on those broads over several seasons?)

So, dear readers, please remember for next time: When I say “foul-mouthed ballet dancer,” I’m not necessarily being critical. When I say “Clinton aide” or “Obama’s chief of staff” — that’s different.

One Way To Save Time

Jay Nordlinger, today at The Corner:

One Way to Save Time [Jay Nordlinger]

Few weeks ago, The New Republic had a long, long piece on how Obama and the Democrats got Obamacare through. It was called “How They Did It: The inside account of health care reform’s triumph.” Don’t you love that “health care reform”? Isn’t it interesting how conservatives’ proposals — liberalizing ones — aren’t called “reform”? Only socialization is? Anyway, this was a very long piece, sort of a little book. Someone gave it to me to read. And I thought I’d give it a try.

Before settling in to read it, I sort of scanned it — and my eyes fell on this sentence: “Conservative protesters descended upon Capitol Hill, marching on the lawn and through the House office buildings, hurling racial and homophobic epithets, and — in one case — saliva at Democrats.”

First of all, the punctuation is wrong; there should be a comma after “saliva.” But that’s not the point. I have read quite a bit about this matter: about how the protesters allegedly screamed, or uttered, the “N-word,” and how one of them spat. (Someone did make an anti-gay remark.) And I happen to know these allegations are baloney — or at least very, very much in dispute. Yet this author presented them as fact.

The rest of his article might have been 100 percent accurate — but I didn’t read it. Once you’ve read something like the passage I’ve quoted, you just can’t trust the rest. You know? If he was willing to say that — what else was he willing to say?

Yesterday, I turned to a piece in The Spectator — one of those “realist critiques” they like to run. This one was called “Obama is in hock to the hawks.” And, before really reading, I happened to light on this: “Bush sought to eliminate terrorism by pursuing his ‘freedom agenda’ (liberty imposed at the point of bayonet).” Oh, I see. That was the freedom agenda. Nothing to do with aid to civil-society groups in Egypt and so on (aid that Obama has drastically cut). I could not read the article. Maybe you could have.

P.S. You think the New Republic writer should try to collect Andrew Breitbart’s 100 grand — the money he is offering for proof that the protesters used a racial epithet? You see, liberals need this to be true: because they are invested in the belief that the “tea party” is racist. It’s not just that tea-party activists have a different view of the economy and government. They hate blacks. And if the protesters didn’t use the N-word — well, they should have, according to liberal belief.

Jay hits on something that has been bugging me for a long time. When a writer introduces an allegation as settled fact, makes a claim that insults my intelligence, or throws in a gratuitous insult without bearing as a way of beginning an article - why does that author think I would be willing to waste my time reading the rest of it? It demonstrates a deliberate disrespect for one's potential audience, a lack of seriousness about your writing, and a pandering to low tastes. And where are these people's editors?

It's one thing to expose oneself to contrary views; quite another to slam your head against the wall.

Modern Martyrs

I suspect that you, like I, think that men being forced to die for their faith is something out of the distant past. That being put to death for professing Christianity is an ancient horror story.

We would be wrong.

Jay Nordlinger today here and here:

Son Jong Nam, R.I.P.   [Jay Nordlinger]

Did you forget about North Korea? Oh, I’m sorry, let me remind you. Here’s a little news snippet. Son Jong Nam was “tortured to death for trying to spread the Gospel in his native land, armed with 20 bibles and 10 cassette tapes of hymns. He was 50.”

Don’t want to read any more? I don’t blame you, but I’m going to keep going.

In January 2001, Son was arrested by Chinese police for allegedly trying to convert North Korean defectors in China, which bans foreigners from proselytizing. He was deported home in April, where he was detained and tortured, leaving him with a limp, his brother said. He lost about 70 pounds (32 kilograms) in captivity.

“He was beaten in the head with clubs and given electric shocks,” his brother says, his eyes welling up with tears.

Ah, well, big deal, he lived. Besides, he was a Jesus freak — and you know how icky they are. More from the article:

Son was released in 2004 and sneaked across the border to Yanji to see his daughter, who had been left in the care of a Chinese missionary. He soon decided to return to North Korea to proselytize.

You mean, he went back? One season of torture wasn’t enough for him? Here is another quote from his brother: “I repeatedly urged him to change his mind, but he told me he has something to do in North Korea.”

Okay, let me finish up:

Son was arrested again in January 2006 after police found bibles at his home in the northeastern city of Hoeryong. He was also charged with spying for the United States and South Korea and sentenced to public execution by firing squad.

His brother launched an international campaign to save him. That apparently led his captors to switch to a less public method: torture. “There are many ways to kill people in North Korea,” says his brother.

Oh, for sure. You know, for the last eight years, I’ve heard that the United States tortures people. Can we please have a word other than “torture” for whatever our people did to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in an effort to prevent further mass murder? KSM, as you remember, was the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. He personally beheaded Daniel Pearl. Etc. Alternatively, could we have another word for what real torturers do, in places such as North Korea and China?

KSM is fat and happy, sitting in Gitmo with his elliptical machine and Red Cross visits. (Maybe he is not using his elliptical machine so much, being fat as well as happy.) Anyway, I’ll quit fuming (for a moment). For the complete article from which I’ve quoted, go here.

A P.S. on Son Jong Nam   [Jay Nordlinger]

You may like to know how Son got to be what he became. He started out as a good boy — a loyal North Korean. He served in the “presidential security service” for ten years. Was all hot to fight the “American imperialists,” etc. But then something happened: “His wife, eight months pregnant at the time, was arrested for allegedly saying Kim Jong Il had ruined the economy and caused a mass famine.” “Allegedly,” mind you: She only allegedly blurted out the truth. “Interrogators seeking a confession kicked her in the stomach, forcing her to discharge blood and have a miscarriage.”
So, Son fled with his family to China. His wife soon died. And that’s when he began his other life . . .

An Assassin Missed

Fortunately, Jay Nordlinger minces no words.

The PLO Misses Him; Israel Missed Him [Jay Nordlinger]

So, they missed one: Israel’s secret services missed one. He was Mohammed Oudeh, the “mastermind” of the Munich Olympics massacre. Who was massacred? Nine Israeli athletes. And Oudeh died in his bed, dammit. He was in Syria, which may not surprise you: Syria is exactly the sort of country to harbor Mohammed Oudeh.

I should put that differently: The Syrian dictatorship is exactly the sort of government to harbor Oudeh. (Just as Saddam Hussein harbored Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, etc.)

In his later years, Oudeh said, “I regret nothing. You can only dream that I would apologize.” Mohammed, I don’t even dream it, believe me. He did one good thing in his life, as far as I’m concerned. He titled his autobiography “Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.” I don’t care whether he meant it ironically: It’s still a just title.

Mahmoud Abbas, the great moderate in the West Bank, wrote a letter of condolence to the late terrorist’s family: “He is missed. He was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people’s just causes.”

Uh-huh. Bear in mind that President Obama has much better relations with Abbas and the PLO than he does with the Israeli government.

The New Anti-Semitism Can Give You a Headache

I'll let Mr. Nordlinger do all the talking this time:

Jews, Decoy and Real [Jay Nordlinger]

The news about “decoy Jews” in Holland is making the rounds. And I was especially interested in this column by Paul Belien, available from Hudson New York. (Yes, you read that right: no commas no nothin’.) I’ll excerpt a little of the column, or a lot:

Last week, a television broadcast showed how three Jews with skullcaps, two adolescents and an adult, were harassed within thirty minutes of being out in the streets of Amsterdam. Young Muslims spat at them, mocked them, shouted insults and made Nazi salutes. “Dirty Jew, go back to your own country,” a group of Moroccan youths shouted at a young indigenous Dutch Jew. “It is rather ironic,” the young man commented, adding that if one goes out in a burka one encounters less hostility than if one wears a skullcap.

I wonder what those young Moroccans meant by “your own country.” Helen Thomas means Germany and Poland, chiefly. (She did not specify Auschwitz: That was the “peace activists” and “humanitarians” aboard that Turkish ship.) Do they mean Israel? It must be so confusing for a Jew, this “go home” stuff. Where’s home? Poland? Israel? Mars?

But the Moroccans clearly have a sure sense of home: Holland, and Europe generally...

...Now, check out this bit:

The deployment of “decoy Jews”, however, is being criticized by leftist parties such as the Dutch Greens. Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to provoking a crime, which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.

Got that? If you go out looking like a Jew, and a Muslim physically assaults you, it’s your fault — kind of like it’s your fault if you’re a girl and your skirt is too short. To be on the safe side: Don’t look Jewish. And if you do look Jewish, you had better be Jewish, or the Dutch Greens won’t like it. Or something.

The new anti-Semitism is sometimes hard to keep up with.

Or, if you’re a Muslim, and you assault a Jew who is actually a Jew, that’s kind of bad, but if you assault a Jew who turns out to be a decoy — even though you thought he was a Jew — that’s not so bad, because you were tricked . . . or something.

The new anti-Semitism can give you a headache.

It Took A While

"You know what's great about anti-Semitism? It lets you know exactly who the dirt-bags are."
Andrew Klavan, Klavan on the Culture

Eventually, the truth will out:




Note her language: occupation, "those people"; "Palestine", not Israel. For someone so supposedly smart, insightful, and perceptive, she sure is ignorant, blinkered, and bigoted. She has been a joke for decades now; finally she did something the White House Correspondents Association could no longer ignore. She revealed who she really is, and it's ugly.

As Jay Nordlinger summarized:

A few basic thoughts, occasioned by the Helen Thomas outburst. We owe something to her: She said out loud, in her specially nasty way, what other people think — that Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” (not Israel, but “Palestine”) and that the Jews should “go home”: to Germany, to Poland, to wherever else they came from, or fled from. (Has anyone told Thomas that she should “go home” to Lebanon? I’m sure that Hezbollah would welcome her as a heroine.)

With the hard-core anti-Israel crowd, the problem is not “occupation,” not the addition of in-law suites in Jerusalem: The problem is Israel itself. The very right of that state to exist. People like Helen Thomas are way to the “left,” if that’s the term, of the official position of the PLO. They are in line with Hamas and Hezbollah — and their patron in Iran.

The PLO-niks — Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi — are now the Uncle Toms of the anti-Israel community. Helen Thomas and the flotilla people are in the cool, fashionable forefront.

There is a sadly growing acceptance of anti-Semitism, from those bitter quarters that constantly preach tolerance until it comes their turn to practice it. The growing rise of Islamic radicalism legitimizes it, as hating the Jews is a fundamental element of their idealogy, and the Radical Left has yet to meet a "resistance" movement it doesn't like. It makes no sense - but there it is: they feel more in league with a repressive authoritarian theocracy than with a modern open democracy.

Last word back to Jay:

If the world lets Israel go under, a mere two or three generations after the Holocaust, we will have learned a sick, sick thing about the world... Events large and small — Iran’s nuclear drive, the Helen Thomas outburst — have led me to think about the unthinkable: the loss of Israel. They won’t go without a fight, I feel sure. And I know which side I’m on.

As do I. Do you?



Postscript: Well said, Brickmuppet:

She is gone.

Almost a shame. After all, It's rare indeed to see someone whose face so closely matches their inner beauty.

Nordlinger in Norway

I've been remiss not sharing this with you sooner. Jay Nordlinger has been sharing his journal from his recent travels in Norway.

As usual with Nordlinger, it's a fun read, with gentle stories interspersed with trenchant observations.

Part 1

Part 2

Aside in the Corner 1

Part 3

Aside in the Corner 2

Part 4

Well worth your time.

An Exaltation of Jay

From Jay Nordlinger's latest Impromptu:

I grinned at this letter, and maybe even some liberals will, too?

Mr. Nordlinger,

A friend and I have been discussing “collectives” — collective nouns — such as a “murder of crows,” a “pod of whales,” and a “bevy of swans.” We have been trying to come up with a collective for liberals. We considered a “cacophony of liberals,” an “arrogance of liberals,” and a “piety of liberals.” Then we thought to keep things simple: What about a “collective of liberals”? What do you think?

I like it, much! By the way, here are a few of my favorite collective nouns: a “passel of hogs”; a “mob of kangaroos”; an “exaltation of larks” (many people’s favorite); a “parliament of owls”; a “conspiracy of ravens”; and a “party of jays.”

An Ordinary Housewife With Extraordinary Courage

From Jay Nordlinger, in National Review:

This is an interesting article, too: It gives the obituary of Miep Gies, who died at 100. She was one of the helpers of Anne Frank and her family — one of the helper-hiders. She was the last living. It was she who saved Anne’s diary, unread, to be presented to Anne’s father later. She explained that she would never read someone else’s diary.

And she “despised praise,” to use old language. She said that others had done the same kind of thing she had, and far more dangerous things. Once, someone, or some group, wanted to make a character study out of her, to teach heroism to the young. She recoiled at this: Young people should not “grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

I don’t know about that.

Pugnacious Stupidity

Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus today,. but the bolding is mine:

My particular contribution is a piece on an interesting, maddening case: Nurre v. Whitehead. What is this? Well, in Washington State, there is a high school named for Scoop Jackson — Henry M. Jackson High School, in Mill Creek, outside of Everett. The school had had a little tradition, whereby the wind ensemble got to play a piece of its choice at graduation. But in 2006, there was a problem: The ensemble wanted to play Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria. And the superintendent of schools said no: because playing this piece — even in a strictly instrumental version, no words — would constitute an “endorsement” of religion.

If you think this is bizarre, you are not alone.

A student in the ensemble, Kathryn Nurre, sued. And the case went to the federal district court in Seattle and then to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The student lost, and the school superintendent won, in each court. The student’s backers are hoping that the Supreme Court will hear the case and rebuke the lower courts, providing clear and sane guidelines. The Ninth Circuit has a happy tradition of being overturned. And they are a little funny when it comes to religion — these are the people, remember, who banned the Pledge of Allegiance, for a time (because of “under God”).

I will not rehash the Nurre case in Impromptus — you can read about it in NR — but I’d like to say a few additional words. Biebl’s Ave Maria is less known than Schubert’s, or the one Gounod made from the Bach prelude. But it is an extraordinary, beautiful, transcendent piece. In 1964, Biebl wrote it for a choir of firemen in Munich. (Fire departments were different, long ago and far away.) It eventually made its way to our shores, picked up and spread by Chanticleer, the a cappella group from San Francisco. It is their signature encore. Audiences wait for it and do not want to leave without it. Robert Shaw also recorded it, with his Chamber Singers.

If you don’t know this piece, you’ll want to treat yourself to it.

I also want to highlight the dissent by Milan Smith. He was on the three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit, and that vote was 2 against 1 — with Smith being the 1, of course. Just listen for a second:

I am concerned that, if the majority’s reasoning on this issue becomes widely adopted, the practical effect will be for public school administrators to chill — or even kill — musical and artistic presentations by their students . . . where those presentations contain any trace of religious inspiration, for fear of criticism by a member of the public, however extreme that person’s views may be.

The First Amendment neither requires nor condones such a result. The taking of such unnecessary measures by school administrators will only foster the increasingly sterile and hypersensitive way in which students may express themselves . . . and hasten the retrogression of our young into a nation of Philistines, who have little or no understanding of our civic and cultural heritage.

In my NR piece, I talk a little about the nature of music. The school superintendent admitted that she didn’t know what the words “Ave Maria” meant. (They have to do with a football pass.) But she knew they related to religion, and that’s why she felt she needed to block the piece. She did not want the title printed in the graduation program. In my article, I ask, What if the wind ensemble had said the piece was called something else — not “Ave Maria,” but “Against the Despoliation of the Earth,” or “The Peace of Islam,” or “Ode to Obama”? Would that have been all right?

The school superintendent didn't know what "Ave Maria" meant, but she knew it was religious and therefore, wrong. This is a woman in charge of the education of thousands of children - she sounds like she shouldn't be entrusted with a janitor's mop.

And Nordlinger follows with this observation:

Finally, want to share with you a note from a friend of mine: “At my kids’ school, the singing of ‘Silent Night’ was censored by the music teacher, with humming over the ‘offensive’ parts. So the carol came out, ‘Silent night, mmmm, mmm, mmm, mmmm / All is calm, all is bright / Mmmm mmm mmmmmmm . . . You get the point.” I do. And it is a revolting point. Besides which, said my friend, other songs are not censored: not Native American chants to the Great Spirit, not Kwanzaa songs, not Hanukah songs, not odes to the Norse gods — just the Christian ones.

Arrogantly Stupid

"Stupidity that is arrogant and mean is an especially repellent kind of stupidity."

- Jay Nordlinger, NRO

Violating the Safe Zone

Jay Nordlinger has another great piece up today.

Showing Off, Jay?

One of the more pleasant experiences in conservative commentary is Jay Nordliner's Impromptus column in National Review Online.

Tucked inside are such gems as this:

Show-off sentences? Couple of weeks ago, I wrote, “Recently, I was riding through Nîmes with Tony Daniels. (I know, that’s a show-off sentence.)” A reader contributed,

A few years ago, my wife was visiting with some friends who love to travel. At one point, one of them — who works for the World Bank and seems to have been everywhere — started a sentence with, “When I was in Zanzibar . . .” We all agreed that was a great line.

More recently, I saw one of the Apollo astronauts on a video talking about his experiences. He said, “When I was on the moon . . .”

As Bill Buckley would say, beat that.

Farewell Zimbabwe

Early last month, Jay Nordlinger commented on Zimbabwe:

I saw an AP headline reading, “Mugabe uses birthday bash to rebuke white farmers.” And I’m thinking, “There are still white farmers?” Then I read the beginning of the article:

With his nation’s economy in shambles, President Robert Mugabe threw himself a lavish 85th birthday party Saturday, using the opportunity to call on Zimbabwe’s last white farmers to leave.

“Land distribution will continue. It will not stop,” Mugabe said in Chinhoyi, 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Harare. “The few remaining white farmers should quickly vacate their farms as they have no place there.”

The sheer race-hatred expressed by Mugabe and other African leaders is one of the great undercommented-on phenomena of our time.

Today, Mr. Nordlinger related a letter he had received in response:

...Before leaving Africa, I’d like to publish this interesting and unusual reader letter:

My husband is one of the last remaining white farmers in Zimbabwe. Thank you for your column of March 6 [in which I mention the breathtaking race-hatred directed against these farmers, by their own government]. In 1999, Zimbabwe was projecting to have 6,000 tonnes of coffee for export. This year there were 400 tonnes, and my husband produced 110 of them. Out of over 600 coffee farmers in 1999, there are now only five left in the country.

Five.

It takes generations to build up a country; it can be destroyed in months. And often, as is the case of Zimbabwe, that destruction is aided and abetted by "the best of intentions."

The Character of the Enemy

Jay Nordlinger, writing yesterday in National Review Online:

It’s sometimes helpful to remember the character of the enemy—in this case, the worldwide jihad. And that character is so dark, the mind can scarcely absorb it. I will simply excerpt a news item, without much comment on it:

A woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

Samira Jassam, 51, was arrested by Iraqi police and confessed to recruiting the women and orchestrating dozens of attacks. In a video confession, she explained how she had mentally prepared the women for martyrdom operations, passed them on to terrorists who provided explosives, and then took the bombers to their targets.

“We arrested Samira Jassim, known as ‘Um al-Mumenin’, the mother of the believers, who was responsible for recruiting 80 women”, Major General Qassim Atta said.

The mother of the believers, indeed—believers in, and practitioners of, raw evil. If you would like to read the entire article, go here. Organizing the rapes of women; forcing them to self-detonate, as they in turn murder others . . . it doesn’t get any darker, does it?

George W. Bush said, continually, in a thousand different ways, that Islamofascism represents implacable evil—and that good people have no choice but to combat it. I think he was right. How about that?

Revitalize the Counter-Establishment

Jay Nordlinger, writing in National Review Online:

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a little about Dick Cheney’s image. This stems from a lunch a group of us had with him last week (and I wrote about it here). Cheney is an unusual person: very sensible, very measured, very trustworthy. No wonder he has been entrusted with so many sensitive government positions. He is a calm person, and he has a calming effect on others. He is the kind of man you want in public service — party or partisanship quite aside.

In the course of our lunch, he said that the recent Democratic victory was “part of the normal cycle of a competitive two-party system,” and “fundamentally healthy for the nation.” He also talked about how wondrous it was to swear in the first black president.

And what is his widespread image? He is a kind of Dr. Evil to people, although, unlike the Austin Powers one, not a comical Dr. Evil. He is a right-wing menace, a scourge of civil liberties, a Torquemada. This is absolutely perverse.

And what of President Bush’s image — at least one aspect of it? They say that he is less than bright: that he is stupid. And stupid is the last thing President Bush is. Call him willful, call him stubborn, call him petulant or cussed or difficult. Stupid, he is not.

Consider one more public figure: Sarah Palin. I keep hearing and reading, in various quarters, that she is a “bimbo.” That is the word I hear about her, rather a lot: “bimbo.” This is a woman, of course, who has been married since her early 20s. She and her husband, Todd, have five children. Sarah is governor of her state; Todd works in the oil fields. From what anyone can tell, they delight in each other, and in their family. They seem almost an advertisement for monogamy: for the married life. And yet people say “bimbo.”

In a nation full of bimbos, Governor Palin is one of the few who aren’t.

It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin’s name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman — more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be — was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose — no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment” (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Funny How That Works

Jay Nordlinger, writing today over at National Review:

The history of Communism has taught us that suicide can be a very strange event. For example, you can shoot yourself in the head — four times.

One More Murder at the Hands of Communism

The grasping hand of the old red lie still kills.

Jay Nordlinger, writing today in National Review Online:

I can’t remember whether I mentioned Manuel Acosta Larena in columns past. Anyway, he’s dead now. He was a very brave Cuban, belonging to the dissident group called the Democracy Movement. He died in the hands of Castro’s police. The police claimed it was a suicide — that Acosta hanged himself in his cell. His friends doubt it. And the authorities won’t hand over the corpse for an autopsy.

Of course.

The history of Communism has taught us that suicide can be a very strange event. For example, you can shoot yourself in the head — four times.

Funny how that works.