Robert Byrd, D., W.V., K.K.K.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. After all, he changed his mind about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when he realized in 1982 that "black people love their grandsons as much as I love mine."

Witch Doctors At Their Work

British physicians have taken time away from their patient-crammed waiting rooms and busy schedules of packing desperately ill people off with an “Oh, slap a hot water bottle on it and you’ll feel better in the morning” to declare that fetuses before the age of 24 weeks do not feel pain, and thus may be rubbed out without even the tiniest bit of conscience-pricking for Mum or abortionist.  Really? By my count, 24 weeks = six months, and if memory serves, which it does, a not-yet-born baby  is a reactive little soul even before the six-month mark, who doesn’t much like it when his mommy stands shivering in a cold wind and kicks her abundantly to let her know, who moves suddenly—or stops moving suddenly—at the opening strains of Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor or Heat Wave by Martha and the Vandellas, who wiggles in a very particular way upon hearing the tones of her daddy’s voice. Earlier versions of the same doctors—men, mostly, in those days—performed surgeries on already-born babies without anesthesia on the very same grounds: their nervous systems were not fully developed, they wouldn’t feel the scalpel slicing, the retractor opening, the bones cracking . . . need I go on? Are we all dupes and sheep, to be herded into the witch-doctoring huts of abortionists, late-term abortionists, and advocates of the occasional act of infanticide, when there are daily new discoveries in the science of the womb and the certainties of pregnancy and motherhood to be relied upon?

Anonymous Waxes Poetic on Al Gore

It’s not really all that surprising
That Gore finds the global heat rising.
He lowered his zipper
Without asking Tipper,
Aping Clinton without realizing.

Now we see that he’s just a great phony
And he’ll pay her a huge alimony.
For she won’t be SecState
And she’ll dine on off his plate
While he keeps shouting “rub lower, honey!”

Not a Parody: Important News Alert

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Obama, Medvedev make surprise trip to hamburger restaurant.

Open the Mexican Border

Here’s an illegal-immigration-reform package I could live with: Amnesty for all those from south of the border who are here already—those ill-used souls who, having braved coyotes both literal and figurative to get here, are now, with the submissive resignation of the most forbearing lama, slaving away washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, or bent double picking grapes in Napa, or cleaning the toilets of people who look right through them as if they were not flesh and blood, and whose children are serving honorably in the United States military. In what conceivable universe are these put-upon illegal immigrants less worthy than those young men with American passports and graduate degrees in engineering from Michigan State who trot off to Pakistan or Syria to learn jihad and return to the United States cherishing in their blackened hearts the hope of blasting some or all of the rest of us to kingdom come? Not in my universe, they’re not. Open the Mexican border. Hire Israeli-trained profilers to man the crossings and weed out those whose countenances and behavior show them to have inimical motives. For the rest, welcome as a blessing their energy and acceptance and desire for all that the greatest country in the world has to offer its citizens, and help them (by, among other things, educating their children in English) to become citizens themselves.

Vacuumous, or Tom Talks Turkey

There are vacuums in Turkey—a few of them—observes Tom Friedman from Istanbul (and it’s hard to argue with him about that, as his latest NYT column is proof of the existence of at least one).  He loves the place—“Turkey is a country that had me at hello”—and he had high hopes for it last time he visited, five years ago, when he saw all the promise of it: “a country at the hinge of Europe and the Middle East . . . at once modern, secular, Muslim, democratic,” balancing “good relations with the Arabs, Israel and the West.”

Yet today, to his shock, he finds Turkey has an “Islamist government seemingly focused not on joining the European Union but the Arab League—no, scratch that, on joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel”!

Mr. Friedman’s the kind of guy who must see something to believe it—no watching or reading the news for him, apparently, not even in the pages of the newspaper that pays him some $300,000 per annum to discourse with so much flaccid listlessness—so here he is, sojourning among the Turks again, explaining to us, in case we, too, have shunned the news, that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has joined the radical jihadi camp, and warning us that “this could have enormous implications.” 

Erdogan is smart, charismatic and can be very pragmatic. He’s no dictator. I’d love to see him be the most popular leader on the Arab street, but not by being more radical than the Arab radicals and by catering to Hamas, but by being more of a democracy advocate than the undemocratic Arab leaders and mediating in a balanced way between all Palestinians and Israel. That is not where Erdogan is at, though, and it’s troubling.

The vacuums, as he sees them, are these:

·     “The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”

·     There is “no leadership in the Arab-Muslim world. Egypt is adrift. Saudi Arabia is asleep. Syria is too small. And Iraq is too fragile.”

·      “Israel’s failure to apply its creativity to solving the Palestinian problem is another dangerous vacuum.”

·     “Finally, there is a vacuum inside Turkey. The secular opposition parties have been in disarray most of the decade, the army has been cowed by wiretaps and the press has been increasingly intimidated into self-censorship because of government pressures.”

This is terribly troubling stuff, indeed! Yes, others have mentioned some (or all) of it before, but what happy providence for the New York Times to have the scrutinizing Friedman gaze to cast upon it again.

Still, all is not storm clouds and raindrops: “Maybe,” suggests Mr. Friedman, “President Obama should invite [Erdogan] for a weekend at Camp David to clear the air before U.S.-Turkey relations get where they’re going—over a cliff.” And if a weekend at Camp David with Mr. Obama should be a bust with respect to Erdoganic air-clearing—no more than so many cliff-hanging dust motes—there’s always Mr. Friedman’s preferred venue for all things modern, China—which, after all, as a “one-party autocracy” “can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century”—to step in to fill the vacuum.

Worth a Thousand Words

If the tie fits . . .

The NAACP is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Yet some of its members don’t seem to agree. An apparently hard-of-hearing NAACP lynch mob in Los Angeles has forced Hallmark to remove a space-themed graduation card from store shelves, because while the card’s audio component refers to “black holes”—remember, this is a SPACE-THEMED card, about OUTER SPACE, where there are BLACK HOLES—the brainiacs “representing” L.A.’s African-American community hear “black whores.” “That was very demeaning to African-American women when it made reference to African-American women as whores,” said one such genius.  

Hallmark calls the outrage a misunderstanding, claiming that the space theme emphasizes the power the graduate has to take over the universe, even energy-absorbing black holes. . . . “The intent here is to say that this graduate is not afraid of anything,” explained Hallmark spokesman Steve Doyal.

Maybe, maybe not. With futures in the hands of extortionists (and idiots) who spend their evidently not very valuable time seeking and crying racism where there isn’t any, some graduates have plenty indeed to fear.

Obamunism and Other People’s Money

The president of the United States, meeting today with Mahmoud Abbas, the “president” of the Palestinian Authority, announced in his familiar Obamic jargon that the “situation in Gaza is unsustainable” and the U.S. will “move forward” with a $400 million aid package

. . . that will help increase access to clean drinking water, create jobs, build schools, expand the availability of affordable housing, and address critical health and infrastructure needs.  These initiatives result directly from the advocacy and guidance of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, whose leadership is making a difference for the Palestinian people, in Gaza as well as the West Bank. 

Whence this hefty wad of cash to drop upon the unsustainable Gazans and the Israel-inimical West Bankers?  Will a Congress spooked by an increasingly disgusted mob of anti-incumbent voters approve it? Probably, because Mr. Obama and Nancy Pelosi still own enough Members—and after all, it’s “humanitarian.” But golly, that’s a hell of a lot of drinking water to set flowing, as it were, from the taps of recession-straitened American taxpayers into the cupped hands of the Hamas murderers who run Gaza. And speaking of Gaza, how will Abbas, who dares not show his face there (and for that matter rarely appears in the West Bank, either, preferring his home in Jordan to his “homeland” in “Palestine”), and Fayyad, who is occupying himself in the West Bank with building the foundation of a state (on the off chance his “Palestinian” brethren may someday give up their longing for a Judenrein land and statehood actually come to them)—how exactly will these two, one useless and the other engaged elsewhere, administer the Gaza end of this deal?

Here’s where some of our hard-won greenbacks will go:  $75 million “to support the Palestinian Authority’s work to improve infrastructure throughout the West Bank and Gaza.” Yeah, see above: Palestinian Authority not administering an outhouse in Gaza, let alone “infrastructure.” “$10 million in USAID-funded activities aimed at enhancing the Palestinian private sector’s competitiveness.” Which speaks for itself and says nothing. $14.5 million will go for “USAID projects for school rehabilitation, small-scale agriculture, the repair of a hospital facility and other community infrastructure in Gaza.” Remember those thriving greenhouses the Israelis left behind in Gaza after disengagement that the Arabs chose to destroy? “$10 million for the construction of five new UNRWA schools in Gaza.” Throw enough money at UNRWA and perhaps it will agree at last to include the Holocaust in the curriculum it offers Gazan schoolchildren. $240 million for a “mortgage finance program in the West Bank, which is designed to increase homeownership by offering long-term mortgages at fixed and variable rates.” Um . . . Fanny Mae, anyone? Franklin Raines? Chris Dodd?

Mr. Obama reserves his tears for the wholly undeserving: the anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic citizens of the world. He sheds none—not even of the crocodile variety—for the strapped, foreclosed, persevering, marvelous, patriotic citizens of his own country.

A Little Fleet of Reuters News Alerts, In Chronological Order

*OBAMA SAYS SITUATION IN GAZA IS UNSUSTAINABLE

*OBAMA SAYS NEED TO GET ALL FACTS OUT ON FLOTILLA INCIDENT

*OBAMA SAYS U.S. IS PROVIDING $400 MILLION IN NEW AID FOR GAZA, WEST BANK

*OBAMA URGES ISRAEL TO WORK WITH ALL PARTIES TO FIND SOLUTION FOR GAZA

*OBAMA URGES ISRAEL TO CURB SETTLEMENT ACTIVITY, CALLS ON PALESTINIANS   TO PREVENT INCITEMENT

*OBAMA SAYS WILL MAKE STATEMENT LATER ON IRAN SANCTIONS

Must Watch TV

Five minutes of gold.