Once I Discovered The Matrix I Was Doomed To A Lifetime In This Dystopian Hell

Almost two decades later, this sounds like kind of a familiar - rather than unique - experience, for some overseas at the time (as I soon was) watching 9/11 unfold:

I had just gotten back from a year in France....In the weeks that followed, I watched the American news with one eye, and its European counterpart with the other....The one time my country could side with the U.S. was when America was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went back to the smug relativism of World War II, the icy efficiency of a country never having to fight for either ethics or its existence.

Soon enough, the narrative was clear....Bush was a moron and a puppet. America was killing innocent people for oil. It went on and on, and all I could think was that if I know that these things are not true, then what other lies have I accepted as truth throughout my life?

So I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all unraveled before me.

If, instead of "a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical", this woman had been poor and black - here or in France - then she would've really had a problem.

I Had No Idea (CPAC Spells "Orgy" To Conservatives)

It sounds like conservatives are NOT making web videos of what's really happening at CPAC:

 The day's speeches have ended and conference-going night revelers are about,...My balcony door is open wide, and the bustling din from several parties across the cavernous vestibule soaks the room.

...I'm certain that the vast majority of CPAC attendees, both young and old, are as appalled and embarrassed by these drunken yuck monkeys as am I.


But I think the very fact that these blazer-clad, Cro-Magnon morons could even imagine, for a moment, that it's somehow cool to publicly chant "F**k Obama!" – or "F**k" anything for that matter – speaks to a much larger problem, not just within the conservative movement, but, more importantly, within our entire culture.

…Hitherto it has been "progressives" alone dumping buckets of moral relativist poison into the Potomac. But, in the last decade or so, self-styled "conservatives" have likewise begun drinking the subjectivist Kool-Aid,...

I really like the term "yuck monkeys" for whites:

Look forward to it,...

It's Like That Song That Goes, "If I Was a Boy,..." (Kinda, But Not Quite: That's One Stupid Song)

"Opinion polls suggest every third Republican can be described as a birther. For example, 39 percent,...want more coverage of the issue. Curiously, so do 14 percent of Democrats,...28 percent think Obama was born overseas, and 30 percent do not know. Does that make them birther agnostics?

Needless to say, everyone from Jon Stewart to the New York Times and Huffington Post to Ben Smith have had a ball deriding the stupidity and the extremism of a large section of the conservative movement.

Many on the conservative side have responded to this by suggesting that the Democrats should not throw stones in glass madhouses because the party of hope, change, and audacity has got its own crazy uncle in the basement in the form of 42.6 percent of Democratic voters who do not believe in the official version of events connected with 9/11. These people have become known as 'truthers.'

But there’s something in this mutual 'yo mama' mud-slinging ('Your people are crazy.' 'My people? What about your people?') that does strike me as rather odd, and that’s the assumption of moral equivalence — as if all eccentricities, idiocies, and conspiracy theories were inherently equal. But this is clearly not so. Let us briefly recap:

The birthers believe that Barack Obama lied about the place of his birth so that he could become the president of the United States.

The truthers believe that George W. Bush murdered (by commission or omission) 3,000 of his fellow Americans and caused two trillion dollars worth of immediate economic damage to his country in order to launch two wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, drained another trillion dollars from the Treasury, and provided an excuse to destroy the Constitution and turn America into a police state.

Um, OK.

To put it in fairytale terms (the next closest thing to a conspiracy theory), we are taking here about Pinocchio versus Lord Voldemort on steroids and the stimulus package.

Or to return to uncles once again, it’s the difference between an uncle who wears his underwear on his head and an uncle who sexually molests 6-year-old girls, strangles them, and then buries their bodies in his backyard.

Everything in life, including craziness, is a matter of degrees. That’s why we should be wary of an automatic resort to moral and other equivalence as a debating tactic. To do so risks conceding far too much for the momentary comfort of mental egalitarianism. No country on earth is perfect, true, but the United States has been a hell of a lot better in all respects than the Soviet Union. Democracy (or capitalism) might be the worst system ever invented, as Churchill reminded us, except for all the others. All conspiracy theories are deluded, but not all of them are equally contemptible and dangerous.

The belief that NASA faked the moon landing gave us a few laughs; the belief that the Elders of Zion were conspiring against civilization gave us the Holocaust.

The truth, more often than not, tends to be quite prosaic. On August 4, 1961, Barack Obama was born at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, of an American mother and a Kenyan father. On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda operatives, without prior knowledge by any government (bar that of Afghanistan), used four airplanes as flying bombs against targets in New York and Washington, D.C.

The polls tell us that many, too many, on both sides of politics think otherwise. Personally, however, I would be much more concerned if large sections of my party’s base believed a president to be a mass murderer rather than a con artist. All men might be created equal, but how they choose to pursue their inalienable right to craziness separates the harmlessly eccentric from the dangerously deluded."

-- Arthur Chrenkoff, noticing one of the biggest differences between NewAge liberal, and those notoriously-Christian conservative, crazies - the liberals are "contemptible and dangerous" - which the mainstream media misses (and dismisses) every day, since they're card-carrying members, and not a part of Pajamas Media.

He's A NewAger: Like A Homeopath, He Looks Like He's Doing Something Important, When It's Actually “Abstract, Vapid, And Self-Absorbed”

"I’m embarrassed I missed the superb point [Charles Krauthammer] makes at the end about Obama’s moronic moral equivalence on women’s rights in my post earlier. It really is the most offensive part of the speech. I wonder, though, if The One feels compelled towards relativism because he’s a leftist or simply because, for all the hype, his oratory is formulaic and always includes a passage about how both sides to whatever conflict he’s addressing have legitimate grievances. That’s the real secret to his 'post-partisanship', I think: Unless absolutely forced to, he eschews taking a stand so that he can play President Above-it-all."

-- Allah Pundit, catching all the Obama nonsense that Krauthammer can spew, making us think of a balloon losing Hot Air.

Looking For Liberal Mental Health

The most fun thing about liberals is their overuse of the psychological defense known as projection.

If you want to know what they’re really up to, listen to what they’re accusing you of and voila! It’s actually a confession. Andrew Klavan at Pajamas Media has noted this:

"In an op-ed in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, I teasingly challenged liberals to—gasp!—actually listen to Rush Limbaugh with an open mind. The reaction was predictable, but no less hilarious for that. Email after email practically boiling with viciousness, foul language and hate, accused Limbaugh—and me—of being vicious, foul-mouthed and hateful. Don’t these people own mirrors? I mean, don’t they ever look at their reflections and think, 'Wait… Limbaugh does a radio show about public figures and ideas… Klavan writes an op-ed in a newspaper… then I send a personal email full of four-letter words, ad hominem attacks and vitriol… Oh, hey, I get it… the real shmuck here… is me!!!'”

The other side of that coin is the need to project an image of themselves that typically has no resemblance to the reality of who they are or what they do:

"Leftists have always confused their good intentions with actual virtue. The tyranny allowed to spread by left wing appeasement, the neighborhoods and families destroyed by their corrupt welfare programs, the millions of lives snuffed out by environmentalist hysteria—these don’t show up on their moral scorecards because they meant so very well.

Indeed, so swathed are they in the warm glow of their purposes, any question about the actual results of their actions strikes them as shockingly cruel. A mere rough joke, an outrageous remark, the least untoward language from a conservative—and they reel back, appalled by the display of pure meanness.

What can you do? A conservative must either walk on eggshells or tell the truth loud and proud. You choose."

The results don’t show up on liberal scorecards because scorecards are not allowed.

The entire project began and ended with the announced intentions. They literally detach from the actual doing, as they fish for the compliments of mission accomplished up front.

And if it goes wrong, it’s back to projecting (more like smearing) their own unacceptable (to them) negative performance onto others, deflecting all responsibility.

Victimizers spin themselves into victims. How dare we notice.

They Believe In Nothing - But Each Other

"It appears from the donor list of the Clinton Foundation that there is barely an oligarch, royal family, or special-interest group anywhere in the world that does not know how to get the former president's attention. Just in the days since the foundation agreed to some disclosure of its previously 'confidential' clients—in other words, since this became a condition for Sen. Clinton's nomination to become secretary of state—we have additionally found former President Clinton in warm relationships with one very questionable businessman in Malaysia and with another, this time in Nigeria, who used to have close connections with that country's ultracorrupt military dictatorship."

-- Christopher Hitchens, showing Bill Clinton, nor the Democrat's other choice for president - now the Secretary of State pick - has ever cared about principles beyond (screwing up) talking about them, in Slate.

Rangel, Dodd, Richardson, Blagojevich,...

"Democratic candidates in 2006 ran successfully against what they described as a Republican culture of corruption,..."

-- The Editors, discovering the party that stressed decency - but had a few bad apples - may not have been as bad as having a party in power that believes in nothing, for The Charleston Post And Courier.

Know Who Your Friends Are (TMR's With Israel)

"I am very troubled by the form these protests are taking. It's very dangerous, we're on a slippery slope. Israel can try to win the PR war, but the farther away we get from World War II and the Holocaust, at some point that generation will be gone, so the left had better start looking at itself - and the Democrats should be looking at who's on their side."

-- Patrick Dorinson, a GOP political consultant, on how those who don't remember history are doomed to get a foot in their ass, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Is There A Line In Journalism Or What?

"Vile. Evil. Disgusting. Foul. Take your pick. There is something deeply wrong with our mainstream media."

-- Chuck Johnson, discovering a deported member of Hamas is back, and working for The Los Angeles Times - which don't cut it at TMR - or at Little Green Footballs.

The Great Spirit Ain't Feeling Very NewAge-y!!!

Shout out to "Skeptic" for this: I don't know whether to laugh or cry,...these NewAge Nazis are truly disgusting in that - no matter what another's situation might be - they just won't leave them alone. It's just all about them, and what they want, and what they want is to determine what others are about. Like I said, truly disgusting.

If This Isn't A HUGE Problem Then Nothing Is

"It’s too bad that the people who run mentor programs are often so steeped in bad social theory, nonjudgmentalism, and 'cultural sensitivity' that they discourage volunteers from teaching their mentees how to move up in America."

-- Naomi Schaefer Riley, who TMR couldn't agree with more - please, please, please show me how it's done! - in the City Journal.

Some Folks Are A Little Slow To Catch On

"Creepy anti-democratic politics is breaking out all over."

-- Jennifer Rubin, using the other "c" word that defined Obama's election, as Commentary.

One Way Or Another - Whether It's Behind Your Back Or By Force - They're Coming For Your Kids

Seven Christian students in Quebec have been handed suspensions in the last few days – and could face expulsions – for refusing to participate in a new mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture course that, according to a critic, is a "superficial mishmash of trendy theoretical platitudes' with the goal of convincing children that 'all religions – including pagan animism and cults – are equally 'true.'"

Canada's National Post has reported on the developing confrontation between educators who have ordered students to take the course and students and their parents who object to what they see as a virtual indoctrination into a social and moral relativism.

While seven students already have been targeted for punishment, hundreds more are demanding to be relieved of the obligation to attend the classes, and several parents have begun legal actions,...

In 2005, a change in the law eliminated a family's right to choose among ''Catholic,'' ''Protestant'' or ''moral'' instruction in classrooms, a change that took effect last summer.

Quebec Education Department spokeswoman Stephanie Tremblay told the newspaper school boards have gotten more than 1,400 requests from parents for their children to be exempted from the instruction, which emphasizes feminism over Christianity, and suggests Raelians are centuries ahead of other beliefs.

She also confirmed school boards have rejected every request for an exemption.

She explained it is not "religious instruction."

"It is religious culture," she stated. "We introduce young people to religious culture like we introduce them to musical culture."

...In the National Post, columnist Barbara Kay took school officials to task for teaching what she described as 'a chilling intrusion into what all democratically inspired charters of rights designate as a parental realm of authority.'

She continued, "ERC was adopted by virtual fiat, its mission to instill 'normative pluralism' in students. 'Normative pluralism' is gussied-up moral relativism, the ideology asserting there is no absolute right or wrong and that there are as many 'truths' as there are whims."

"The program is predicated on the worst worst possible educational model for young children: the philosopher Hegel's 'pedagogy of conflict.' As one of the founders of the ECR course put it, students 'must learn to shake up a too-solid identity' and experience 'divergence and dissonance'…

"The curriculum is strewn with politically correct material that openly subverts Judeo-Christian values. In many of the manuals, ideology and religion are conflated. Social engineering is revealed as the heart of the ECR program; in the most recently published activity book, for example, Christianity is given 12 pages, feminism gets 27 pages...."

She continued, "Paganism and cults are offered equal status with Christianity. Witches 'are women like any other in daily life;' 'Technologically [the Raelians] are 25,000 years in advance of us.' And considering that of the 80,000 ethnic aboriginals in Quebec only 700 self-identify with aboriginal spirituality (the vast majority of ethnic aboriginals are Christian), aboriginal spirituality (falsely equated with environmentalism) is accorded hugely disproportionate space and reverence."

...Now the school has started its own court challenge. Principal Paul Donovan told the Post the mandates require relativism.

"What it essentially says is that religion is just, 'You like tomato soup and I like pea soup, so don't be all offended because someone likes tomato soup. It's really just a matter of preference,'" he told the Post. "Religion could be Wiccan or Raelian or any of the new movements or atheism or agnosticism."

Sylvain Lamontagne told the Globe Campus education publication the course is religious fast food.

"We can't do this to children. It will only confuse them," he said. "Religion isn't a Chinese buffet. You can't just pick one and then another however you want."

Kay cited the course's "gloss" of the Golden Rule:

"Christianity's 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' Judaism's 'Love thy neighbour as thyself ' and Islam's 'None of you is really a believer if he does not wish for his brother what he wishes for himself.' All are posited in the ERC text as the same acknowledgement of the common humanity of all God's children," she wrote.

"But in fact, there is a deep interpretive chasm between Christianity's 'others' and Judaism's 'neighbour' – both of which refer to all people – and Islam's 'brother,' which refers only to fellow Muslims. Here is 'divergence and dissonance' truly worthy of 'le questionnement.' But encouraging real critical thinking is precisely what the ERC course employs duplicity to avoid," she wrote.

"Quebec is veering into creepy Orwellian political territory here," she said.

-- World Net Daily

"Big Up" to David Hollander for this one: good looking out!