In this morning’s (the weekend edition) of Jewish World Review there’s an interesting column by Diana West that’s both well worth the read and “what we been sayin’ all dis time!” on the reason there appears to be such a strong symbiosis between the far left and fundamental Islamists (you know, the folks who bring us terrorism).

At some future date, when what Andrew C. McCarthy calls “the freedom culture” is again secure (we hope), the jihad-opposition will see itself divided into two camps in histories written about our current time: those who ineffectually supported efforts to stop “terrorism” and other supposedly generic outbreaks of violence in such lands as Iraq and Afghanistan; and those, far fewer in number (at least in that difficult decade following 9/11), who recognized terrorism as but one aspect of the civilizational assault emanating from expansionist Islam.

If the freedom culture wins, it will be because the latter group grew in influence. And if the latter group grows in influence, it will be due to such books as McCarthy’s excellent, ground-breaking new work, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”

Islam and the Left? Since this notion will raise some eyebrows, I asked Andrew himself to elaborate on this and some other related questions.

Q: Why are Islam and the Left, as you demonstrate in “The Grand Jihad,” not such strange bedfellows?

A: “For all their disagreements on matters like women’s rights, gay rights and abortion, Islam and the Left are in harmony on big-picture matters: They are authoritarian, totalitarian in the sense of wanting to control all aspects of human existence, virulently anti-capitalist, and regard the individual as existing merely to serve the collective. Consequently, they have the same obstacle in common: our freedom culture - i.e., Western liberalism, U.S. constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty. Historically, Islam and the Left ally when there is a common enemy. But I’d stress that what I am talking about here is an alliance, not a merger. I am not claiming, as someone ridiculously suggested to me the day the book came out, that Barack Obama wants to impose Sharia.”

He doesn’t need to, thank you. “Liberal” fascism would suit him just fine.

Read the entire column here.

He just keeps going and going and going…

He started out all right. Jimmy Carter always does. Whether as president or ex-. Remember when he was the country’s bright, shining hope after Richard Nixon’s reign of darkness and then the vague non-administration of Gerald Ford, the Great Pardoner?

But before long Americans were looking back to the nondescript Mr. Ford as if he’d been George Washington. Nothing made the bumbling, likeable Gerald Ford look better than having been succeeded by a walking, ever-talking disaster.

The Carter administration was that bad: stagflation, gas lines, appeasement, never-ending sanctimony . . . . You name a colossal mistake and Jimmy Carter probably made it a policy.

As a former president, Mr. Carter started off well, too, wielding hammer and nails with Habitat for Humanity. Good for him. When he was building houses, the worst he risked was a bruised thumb. But then he decided he was God’s gift to American foreign policy, and began making trouble for every chief executive and commander-in-chief who came after him.

That is so well put…

Was there any part of the globe, from the Caribbean to the Middle East, from Haiti to North Korea to the Balkans, where Jimmy Carter didn’t cozy up to dictators? Wherever he goes, tyrants smile. The long, dispiriting trail of former President Carter’s overseas travels has been marked by one diplomatic disaster after another.

As for Jimmy Carter’s role as a monitor of free-and-fair elections, the low point must have come when he gave his blessings to Robert Mugabe’s takeover in Zimbabwe. Naturally, utter disaster followed. It hasn’t ceased there since.

And now Mr. Carter is at it again, preparing to pay court to just about the bloodiest terrorist leader in the Middle East, which is no mean distinction in those violent parts. He’s about to lend his ex-presidential presence to terrorist chieftain Khaled Meshaal, who as head of Hamas hides out in Damascus under Syrian aegis. (Let others die for the cause in Gaza; its leader is quite comfortable, thank you.)

You go, Greenberg!

The only proper greeting for someone like Mr. Meshaal would be, “You’re under arrest.” Instead, we can expect to see Jimmy Carter pay his usual homage to those who champion violence. He calls this peace-seeking. Which raises the question, if this is promoting peace, what would encouraging violence be?

Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States, and I have since had to rethink my previous belief that people who are elected President are elected because of a combination of common sense, patriotism, the ability to reason, an abundance of perspicacity and intelligence. Back in those days, I was a Democrat with some pretty liberal leanings. I had voted for Carter, in fact, I had never cast a vote for a Republican.

Beebeep! But then along came Jones Jimmuh… and my very first Republican vote was cast for Ronald Reagan, and I haven’t voted Democrat since for any post above San Francisco mayor or city supervisor, and that only because nobody but Democrats ever seem to make it onto the ballot out there. The key is to select the lesser of several wingnuts.

I really, really do try to keep the blockquotes to a minimum and leave most of the reading of a linked article or column to the reader, but this one is just so, so…

The Carter Center in Atlanta, a kind of think tank for failed thought, keeps producing bad ideas. This visit to the Mideast is only the latest. You have to wonder if Jimmy Carter will have his picture taken with a terrorist leader who by now has been responsible for the murders of scores of innocent men, women and children — about 250 at last bloody count.

Of course he will, he’s Jimmy Carter!

I was perusing the comment section at another blog yesterday and read a liberal’s comment that made me thankful he and I were not in the same room — had we been, I probably would have strangled the son of a bitch out of sheer frustration. My own comment, in reply to his, was as restrained as possible, I believe it remained within, though pushing the envelope, the boundaries of respect due the owners of that most excellent site.

I mean, these people (not the owners of said most excellent site, but liberals) are such — such varmints!

Look.

They claim to be champions of human rights, for example. Here in America, human rights are honored more than they are anyplace else on earth. Freedom of speech? C’mon. Here, you can shout obscene jokes about the President from the rooftops if you feel like it.

In the Soviet Union, you’d have been hauled off to the Lubyanka, or perhaps Lefortovo Prison, in a heart beat, and not seen again for quite some time, if at all.

If they needed information they thought you might possess, there was none of this patty cakes BS like water boarding or playing loud music at you, they were somewhat more practical — maybe running some electricity through your genitals, or shooting you up with interesting chemicals like lysergic acid mixed with amatol that might get you to babbling, but might also scramble your brains permanently. Then again, permanently might have only meant a couple of hours, anyway.

So what did American liberals do? They extolled the virtues of communism in all its grand superiority over capitalism, even as they enjoyed instant gratification at the local mall while Soviet citizens were standing in bitter cold, in four and five hour lines, to buy a potato.

North Vietnam, an oppressive communist regime, invades the south, and our country defends the South Vietnamese against the north and its VietCong terrorist apparat. Liberals at home fight tooth and nail against the conflict. They influence politicians, who influence the war effort itself, prolonging it by several years. They eventually succeed in getting our troops pulled out. They rejoice. Ho Chi Minh’s communists sweep into South Vietnam and butcher hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then they enslave the country under said oppressive government.

Meanwhile, here in America, the liberals are celebrating their “victory”. They could care less about the fates of those poor souls thousands of miles away, human beings they’ve helped murder as surely as if they’d been there, splattering brains across the ground.

In the 1990s, there was brutal conflict in the Balkans. Muslims were slaughtering Christian Serbs, and Milosevic’s people were killing Muslims.

The EU, led by Germany, exploited the violence in order to get a foot in the door for influence in the Balkans. They altered intelligence reports and manipulated the media to paint a gruesome picture of Muslims being victimized via
“ethnic cleansing” by Milosevic’s people. Peaceful, nonviolent Muslims, victimized!

Then-boss liberal Bill Clinton bought into it and got us into it, and we helped eliminate a lot of obstacles al-Qaeda and fellow travellers faced in the day-to-day ethnic cleansing operations they were engaged in over there.

Milosevic was arrested and tried for his “crimes” — and died in custody five years later without ever being convicted of anything.

Muslims in the Balkans continue murdering Christian Serbs to this day.

Onward to Iraq, and to the global war we are waging to defend ourselves against the abolition of liberty under Islamic rule.

There we are again — which side are liberals on?

The other side, of course, as usual!

America’s enemies, any enemies, have never had a better friend than a liberal.

You want some liberal friends? Just declare war on the United States and they’ll be coming out in droves to shake your hand or, if requested, stick their noses wherever you wish.

Liberals….

Certainly not on our side, ever, yet when you state this obvious truth, they will actually argue the opposite, as often as not with that smug smirk that brings out the strangler in many of us….

I used to agree with the old saying that “you can never have too much education”. Now, however, I’m not quite sure.

Oh, no, I’m not knocking education, it is important, hell, vital. What I’m thinking is that it seems like the majority of the media’s {of course, it is the media} most-quoted “hallowed” intellectuals today are extreme liberals, and I thought of one possible reason for this: Too much education.

Look at it this way — you get a teenager who has not fully developed a mature political viewpoint, purely due to a lack of “real-world” experience (you know, putting bread on the table, paying taxes, sweating overstrained household and personal budgets, worrying about corporate downsizing in their fields or from their own employers, looking for a job in a glutted market, etcetera). He/ she goes to college for four years and earns a BA or BS, then says “hasta la bye bye” and heads for the marketplace. For four years, he/ she has most likely been exposed to more than a little of the liberal political bias that seems to pervade on our campuses these days, but the new graduate’s got a strong mind and still thinks for himself.

On the other hand, whether to quench a thirst for higher learning, earn more saleable credentials, both, or simply to get mom & dad to continue supporting him/her (sad to say, but from my own observations, the latter would appear to include significantly more “hims” than “hers”), the graduate might continue on to earn a Master’s, then a PhD and end up branching off into other areas and earning other degrees, eventually going into teaching college.

We’re talking career academics, people who do little else but teach others what others taught them. It would be like spending an entire military career in boot camp, first as a recruit trainee for 500 months or so, then becoming a drill instructor. Meanwhile, the country’s been to war five times but our career boot camper has never been to any of them, and he’s training other people to go to war.

Our academics, likewise, spend their entire lives buried in what amounts to society’s training compound without ever being tested by the outside, and real, world. They are the theory side of Theory vs Practice. Consequently, they apply that theory to their opinions of what practice should be, which is more often than not like comparing an orangutang to an aardvark.

A concept (like socialism, or that diplomacy works well on people whose only demand is that you let them butcher you), even one that has repeatedly and historically proven not to work but looks good in theory is meat and drink to them. They become so immersed in their reality-sheltered world that the lives of large groups of people they don’t know don’t even matter to them, unless their circumstances help “prove” the theory at hand.

When confronted with practice-based evidence that their theories are ‘way off base, they simply ignore the new facts because they don’t fit the “accepted” scenario. This is a phenomenon known as “pontificating”, a pomposity that often afflicts those who spend too many years walking among Plato’s groves.

Somewhere along the line, one of their common theories has mankind living in harmony, good health, prosperity and peace as one global political entity, in which multiculturalism is playing an early role — deprivation of national identity. In their Utopian myopia, they don’t see the same rights they use to preach freely thus being taken away as one consequence of their theory. And remember what I said about previous failures of the concepts they espouse not mattering? We need only look to the European Union to see what happens when countries give up even an iota of their sovereignty to join in such a pact.

For some reason, too much education seems to lead to the taking of an adversarial position to the United States and our form of government as it was intended by our founding fathers, and as such has been the most successful political experiment in history. According to the output of these lifelong academics, too much education seems to cause support for failure and opposition to success.

If these people are the spokesmen for the “most educated” in this country, we’re in baaaaaad shape.