It's a Beautiful Morning...

Today’s Pic: A snap from the USS Mason (DDG87) commissioning ceremony in Port Canaveral, Florida, April 12, 2003. The Mason is one of SN2’s former rides; he was the Mason’s Chief Engineer, or CHENG. The Navy really puts on a show when commissioning a new warship. I was definitely privileged to attend the ceremony and am still impressed, to this very day.

Ya know, it’s hard for me to let go when I hit on a topic. I’m really not an obsessive-compulsive sort of person, but I’ll forgive you if you think otherwise, given the narrow range of subject matter I’ve been focusing on of late. Things like Iran, the Hezbollah War, criminally-ignorant Lefties, and the BBC. I’ve written about little else lately. So let’s not break the mold. Here’s my latest “find” on one of my favorite subjects: the Beeb. It’s an op-ed in Real Clear Politics by James Lewis titled “The BBC and Home-Grown Terrorists.” Mr. Lewis articulates, quite powerfully, at that, the profound effect Auntie has on Britain’s disaffected Muslim youth.

If you were a young Muslim teenager growing up in Leeds, you too might be fertile soil for Islamofascism. The reason is simple: In a culture pervaded by the BBC, the message of the Labour Left would be drummed home to you over and over again: Britain is evil, America is evil, Israel is evil, capitalism is evil, democracy is a fraud. The education system would teach you a damning picture of the British Empire, which had its immoral side, but was also the greatest civilizing agent in the world for centuries.

[…]

So when some local imam starts to preach hatred of Britain, America, Israel, and Western culture, they are tilling fertile soil. British teens are all prepared to hate their country; it's the in thing to do. They are given a constant set of provocations: Guantanamo, and the "torture" of Muslims; the toilet-flushing of Korans by the evil Americans; the "imperialism" of America and its "poodle" Britain. Israel killing children in Qana. Just recently the BBC produced a "comedy" show with airplanes flying into Westminster, in imitation of 9/11. Is 9/11 the stuff of comedy? It is for the Bolshie Beeb. The show features guest appearances by the two main "news" anchors of the BBC. It's all a big joke to the Left, which secretly sympathizes with the fascists of Londonistan.

Like the United States, Britain is in bad, bad shape to fight a war for civilization. London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone and Oily George Galloway are constantly whipping up more resentment against the West. Muslims from pre-medieval places like Pakistan are easily winning the demographic race. The Jewish vote is now scattered and negligible, and Labour is not above using anti-Semitic cartoons depicting Jewish Conservatives as flying pigs.

I made note of the fact that a large part of the BBC’s Newsnight coverage this past Thursday was devoted to trying to assign blame for terrorism to American and British foreign policy and a justification of disaffected British Muslim “hostility.” And that was just one program. To think the British public is subjected to a constant, day in and day out bombardment of these asininities gives one pause. And you know what’s worse? We in America aren’t that far behind Great Britain. There is a critical difference, however. America doesn’t have near the same problems with unassimilated minorities as the British have. Thank God for that! But that doesn’t mean we’re getting off Scot-free in that regard; the rise of identity politics and the ever-widening culture of victimization create our own versions of disaffected and unassimilated minorities. And while we don’t have anything remotely comparable to the Beeb’s monolithic dominance of British airwaves here in the US, it’s not too much of a leap to compare the Beeb’s perspective with that of ABC/CBS/NBC and NPR. They have much in common. And don’t get me started on the New York Times, or, for that matter, the Academy. The Left is all about self-loathing, be it the British Left or the American Left. I detest that.

The West is at war with a radical ideology that wants nothing less than the destruction of our culture. Our culture needs defenders, not detractors. We most certainly don’t need the Fourth Estate functioning as a Fifth Column. One looks at Britain and wonders, seriously, if it isn’t already too late. And the BBC just prattles raves on, apparently oblivious to the damage they’re doing. What a shame.

While we’re on about recent topics, James Pinkerton, writing at TCS Daily, starts out with Joe Lieberman’s primary loss and discusses political heresy in “Why Political Heretics are Worse than Infidels.”

Joe Lieberman is a heretic. Please don't get me wrong. Nobody, not even Lieberman's enemies, questions the Connecticut Senator's abiding Orthodox Jewish religious faith. But as Tuesday's primary election shows, a majority of Nutmeg State Democrats see their senator as disloyal to the party line, which is increasingly dovish on Iraq. And a heretic, of course, is much worse than an infidel.

Here's the distinction: An infidel is someone who never believed what you believe; an infidel is a stranger, and so there's not much point in investing emotions in him. But a heretic is someone you know well, someone who once believed what you believe, but now has a different faith -- that's much more threatening. You often fight wars against infidels, and in those wars you seek to defeat, even destroy, the enemy. But with heretics, even tougher measures are needed, because the threat of heresy is so much more insidious, threatening to eat away the true faith. So you launch inquisitions against heretics, to eliminate even the thought of heresy. The proper anti-heretical strategy is to torture 'em, make 'em confess, make 'em repent -- and then kill 'em.

Happily, American politics isn't nearly so brutal, albeit still intense. And yet the basic heretics vs. infidels dichotomy explains why intra-party fights are so much more bitter than inter-party fights. To this day, for example, the Democrats know Which Side They Were On in big intra-party feuds -- even if they were too young actually to have been part of the feud.

We might consider, for example, one epochal feud-year for the Democrats: 1948. That was the year that lefty Democrats split off from the party, and from President Harry Truman, to join the pro-Soviet third-party candidacy of former vice president Henry Wallace. Six decades later, that sundering still echoes; The New Republic's Peter Beinart, himself born in the 70s, published a book that revisits 1948. Its militant title, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, signals Beinart's message for today: that the fight against hawkish heretical Democrats has gone too far -- and that the answer is to fight right back. He wants Democrats to draw inspiration from past struggles, from the days when Cold War liberals battled crypto-communists. And so Beinart supported Lieberman, of course, against the primary campaign waged against the incumbent by challenger Ned Lamont. Needless to say, Beinart's left-bashing has been reciprocated by plenty of Beinart-bashing from lefties, including The Nation's Eric Alterman. And so the guns of 1948 are still not silenced, and the wounds are still open.

Pinkerton doesn’t focus only on Democrats, he cites examples of heresy in Republican ranks also. As an example, the ideological underpinnings of the Reagan Revolution were, at one point in time, viewed as heresy by mainstream Republicans. One must be careful in organizing and carrying out political inquisitions of the sort that unseated Senator Lieberman, however. The Law of Unintended Consequences is terribly unforgiving.

Random Notes…

Our bodies are wonderful things. I’ve written all too often about how I hate housework. As an example, I vacuum on an “as required” basis, one definition of “as required” is when I observe the buildup of gray blond hair on my dark blue bathroom rug. As I was emptying the vacuum canister into the trash yesterday I noticed there was enough hair in there to knit a small dog, and it’s always so. It’s a minor miracle I’m not completely bald at this point in life, judging by the amount of hair I shed. My body must devote 25% of its physical energy towards hair production, and that’s a good thing for a semi-vain old man.

Ads that make me smile:

1. The current Mac-vs-PC ads. These ads capture perfectly the essence of what Mac-o-philes like about Macs and rail about PCs. I’m a PC kinda guy, always have been, always will be. But these ads are clever and they do make me smile. The ads won’t convince me to buy a Mac, but they DO make me smile. See ‘em all here.
2. The new Jaguar ads. The new XK is simply frickin’ gorgeous, and the “XK Launch” ad is my favorite in the new series of ads…especially the music used as background. The ads are all well crafted and are beautiful. Here’s an ad campaign that actually could convince me to buy…if I had the money. But…when it comes to the XK, “From $75,500.00” is a helluva lot of money; I’ve bought houses for less. That probably sez more about my age and less about the real estate market and cars, however.

And so it goes…