Osama, Obama: He is not really lying

The fact that the administration ‘s story about the death of Bin Laden keeps changing does not mean that it’s hiding anything. Liberals and progressives can’t think straight. That’s why they don’t get the simplest messages such as : “Don’t spend more than you have,” and “Don’t wait for the guy who keeps shouting he hates you to hit you, hit him first.”

Incidentally, the difference between liberals and progressives is that the former, by and large, would like what they affirm to be the truth. The latter don’t care because their end justifies the means. I asked one of my progressive Facebook “friends” last week whether he thought that 9/11 was an inside job. It’s a straight question. It should allow for a straight answer. He responded with a torrent of sentences, some about things I did not no know anything about. At the end, there was no answer to my question. His name is John Wolfe. Look him up for a sample of dissembling. I don’t mind give him the publicity for educational purposes.

LeftThought is so twisted, left-wingers often cannot espouse the logical consequences of their own assertions. Here is a current one. In World War Two, we killed about 500,00 uniformed Japanese soldiers to destroy the hideous hyena that was militaristic Japan. None of those soldiers received legal counsel, none had a fair trial. Most were conscripts. Many had not killed anyone. Mostly, their mistake is that they did not offer to surrender. Yet, when one man brags on the world media about killing thousands of Americans and thousands of others (many of them fellow-Muslims), when he proclaims loud and clear his intention to kill more, when he explicitly targets civilians and incites others to do the same, when he does all this under cover of darkness, out of uniform, outside the boundaries of a properly constituted army, a part of the American Left wants to extend him constitutional guarantees devised to protect the innocent.

When you point out the mental confusion inherent in such a stance, they never hold their ground. Quickly, they change the subject to the many crimes of America in general and of the Bush administration in particular. (Of course, current events in the broader Middle-East demonstrate with blinding clarity that G. W. Bush was right all along.) My main point here is that the problem we are facing with a big segment of the American Left is not this or that policy they favor but a cultural problem. They prize neither logic nor facts. Their overall understanding of the world is a mental health pathology.

Note that I have not said a thing about Democrats in general. The Democratic Party is comprised of several segments. These include most African-Americans, who would vote Democrat if Democratic Party leaders were lynching them. (Lest you think I am being gratuitously outrageous here, remember that they used to do exactly that.) Then, there are genetic Democrats, people who vote for the party because their grandfathers did. (Let’s be honest, there are genetic Republicans too.) Then, there are the many union rank-and-file who are simply voting their bread and butter. Many of them are normal on every other issue. They just have a blind spot when bread comes up, and another one for butter. Many are patriots nevertheless. Finally, there is the hard, collectivist left-wing that has been trying to capture the Democratic Party for forty years. That’s Obama’s Left. Those are his friends and his entourage. They are the bearers of the perverse culture I alluded to above. Our universities overflow with them (although most college professors are only knee-jerk liberals.)

I am perplexed by some of the commentaries I hear in the media about Bin Laden’s untimely demise. Even some conservative pundits use the word “assassination.”  Makes it sound nasty and it’s false. It was the killing of an enemy during an on-going war. Bin Laden never sued for peace; he had ten thousand opportunities to surrender. He might even have been able to negotiate his surrender. His choice! Wrong choice, or right choice, depending on what you want from life. Remember that the same thing happened to 500,000 Japanese soldiers. What’s the underlying thinking, I wonder. If you are famous, you shouldn’t just get killed?

I also keep hearing left-wing commentators allude darkly to the Geneva Conventions. I haven’t looked. I wonder if they say anything about someone not in a regularly constituted army acting on behalf of a state killing civilians on purpose while out of uniform. I don’t need to look. I am ready to bet that if there is any mention of such scum, the Conventions say: not covered.

Personally, I have only two comments. As I have said before, disposing of the body was a big mistake. They should have frozen it to answer ulterior questions. The White House is so silly, it probably really believed it showed Muslims respect by dumping it into the sea. In fact, Muslims religious authorities with no dog in that fight immediately commented that so-called “burial at sea” was completely disrespectful for Muslims who have died either on land or close to land. Some people manage to have their cake and eat it too. President Obama manages to have his soup of bitter herbs and to eat it to. All the same. He gave the order to pull the trigger. Not many on my side would have bet before-hand that he would do it. Give credit….

My second comment is that the SEALS who conducted the operation are even more disciplined than they are rumored to be. Me, I would not have resisted the temptation to shoot him in both knees and then, to gut-shoot him. It’s not fair how easily and how quickly Osama went.

Now, a sad commentary about the aftermath of the announcement of Bin Laden going on to his reward. I have written several times on this blog and I have said several times on my show that I have known Muslims all my life and that I have hardly ever met one I did not like. (My radio show “Facts Matter” is on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080 AM. It’s on every Sunday from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line.) These cordial relations are not enough to make me close my eyes or my ears. As always, I pay attention to what did not happen. All the heads of state and heads of government of Muslim nations made all the right noises after the death notice. However, my attentive monitoring of the media did not show me any popular celebration in the same countries, not one. Remember that Bin Laden and those he inspired have murdered many more Muslims than Americans non-Muslims. His being rub off the surface of the earth should be enough of a cause for celebration among Muslims. That it’s not requires an explanation

It seems to me inescapable that this absence reveals the following moral calculus among many Muslims, I think, perhaps among most Muslims: Killing Americans is a good thing. Killing Muslims is kind of acceptable if the killer killed enough Americans. Nobody is perfect! I hope I am wrong. I hope someone will show me in logical terms the absurdity of this analysis.

There is a good piece relevant to this discussion in the May 7/8 Wall Street Journal (p. c2) by Irshad Manji. Its title speaks for itself:  “Islam Needs Reformers,  Not Moderates.”

I don’t see why American Muslims who hate Islamist terrorism haven’t yet formed something like a league of  “Muslims Against Terrorism.” It would help dissipate the confusion of people like me if I am, in fact, confused.

I also keep hearing ad nauseum that the killing of Bin Laden is not going to stop terrorism. It gets repeated to the point that it sounds almost futile to have accomplished this long-sought goal. That’s stupid. Al Qaida is a classical charismatic movement. Its leader is an essential component even if he had become only a symbolic figure. The fact is that there have been Islamic fundamentalists for one hundred years. They did not get their act together to mass-murder infidels until the regretted Osama showed them the way.

One more thing: The media are irresponsible in their lack of fact- checking. They don’t even look at their own images. Bin Laden was not living in a “mansion.” He was living in a large, ugly concrete house such as there are thousands of in that part of the world, including India. And it wasn’t worth a million dollars. You could buy its neighbor for $100,000. It’s a small thing but it means that powerful news networks are not paying attention.

PS   Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. It’s official in most California schools, I believe. No one with whom I crossed paths in the two days preceding could tell me what the celebration celebrated. Anglos couldn’t, Mexican-Americans couldn’t, and Mexicans couldn’t. The latter were able to inform me of what it wasn’t, however: not Mexican Independence Day. I am the only one I know who knows, apparently. Read up on it. It’s a strange story.

Debating Leftistanis on Radio

Before I presented on my radio show the essay entitled: “Journey Into Leftistan,” also available on this blog, a man I stage in the essay contacted me through Facebook. John Wolfe offered to debate me on my radio show. ( “Facts Matter” comes on on Sunday on KSCO Santa Cruz, 1080 AM. It’s from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line while it’s going on.)

Mr Wolfe’s offer was serious and I treated it lightly at first. I shouldn’t have done that. It happened because whenever I converse with someone who calls himself a “progressive,” I can’t control the devil in my that pushes me to toy with with his mind and try to make him cry. I shouldn’t. I will try to not do it in the future. Of course, I can’t promise anything, because of the same devil, obviously. In spite of all, I had most of the day to consider Mr Wolfe’s offer. I have decided to decline it. The reasons are listed below.

1     My radio station, KSCO, is right in the middle of Santa Cruz, one of the worst sixties time warps in the world. I am guessing my listeners don’t need more left-wing exposure. I am guessing they cannot avoid leftist viewpoints if they try. Why, we have the University of California at Santa Cruz on our hill! Angela Davis is a (quiet) full Professor of “The History of American Consciousness”there (o rretired from it). If you don’t know who she is, that means you are wonderfully young and possibly innocent. Look her up. It will be fun, I promise.

If a handful of my listeners tell me that my perception is mistaken, that they would like me to debate Mr Wolfe on air (if nothing else, for the sport), I will retract my decision.

2   Mr Wolfe and I almost certainly have irreconcilable differences with respect to basic values. I believe that the best way to avoid incipient violence is to threaten the would-be aggressor with overwhelming force, with much greater violence. I and the police forces of all civilized nations are on the same page about this. Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he is in favor of “proportionate response” to aggression. It means that if someone throws a stone through your window, you are only allowed to throw one stone through his window, if that.

If I debated Mr Wolfe on my show, I am pretty sure that our value differences would quickly bleed into the debate. That would be a waste of time for all, especially for the listeners. Values come from experience filtered through judgment. They never change through discussion.

3  Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he has access to a multitude of facts that have never reached my ears. This, although I confess to listening to National Public Radio several hours each day. That’s in addition to reading the WSJ, and Le Figaro every day, plus the Weekly Standard, plus Atlantic Monthly, and watching tons of American cable network television, and watching the French-language network TV5, also every day. And, of course, I rush to Al Jazeera in English on-line every time something new happens in the Arab world.

Given all this, I would have to ask Mr Wolfe to name his mysterious sources for his facts, and then, I would have to check them out. I am technically and intellectually incapable of doing this while on the air. Not doing so would be taking the serious moral risk of helping Mr Wolfe spread false rumors. Of course, I believe that facts matter, not a little, a whole lot. Incidentally, I am not calling Mr Wolfe a liar. I just know that many people, especially reformers, find whatever facts they need wherever because their bullshit detector is permanently on the “off” position.

4     If none of the above had any validity, I would still have to wonder whether it’s appropriate to give a tribune to someone with Mr Wolfe’s inexplicable emphasis. Here is what I mean: Mr Wolfe is obsessed with Israel and its misdeeds, real and invented. Even if everything Mr Wolfe and his friends alleged about Israeli atrocities were true, even if he they had left some out, even if there were twice more real killings by Israelis than they allege, the fact would remain that Israel in its whole existence would have killed fewer Arabs than Saddam Hussein in one average year. I am completely sure, Mr Wolfe never lifted a little finger to denounce Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Arabs. Mr Wolfe’s obsession is in itself objectionable even if he is right on everything. He would have to give me a legitimate reason for his obsession with Israel before I would give him the mike.

He might surprise me and do just that. I would enjoy making a tight U-turn on this one. In the meantime, no, I don’t want to give special airtime to “progressive” Mr Wolfe. If he bothers to call my show, as he could have done today, I will certainly bring him right to the head of the line, if nothing as a courtesy to someone who calls from far-away Tennessee. And, of course, he can use as much space as he wishes in a comment on this blog to this posting and to the one that preceded it.