Monday, September 29, 2014

Good Riddance


Victor Davis Hanson sums up the tenure of the execrable Attorney General Eric Holder.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-moral-failure-of-eric-holder/?singlepage=true

(Added 9/30) -- VDH also nicely details the origins and outcome of the Iraq War and contrasts the actions taken by G.W. Bush and Barack Obama concerning the broader Middle East region.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389094/iraq-was-then-syria-now-victor-davis-hanson

Sunday, September 28, 2014

The Sublime And The Ridiculous


Kevin Williamson takes aim at Lena Dunham and her adherents, a target rich environment --

"A people mature enough to manage the relationship between procreative input and procreative output without recourse to the surgical dismemberment of living human organisms probably would not find much of interest in the work of Miss Dunham.

... It’s not for nothing that, on the precipice of 30, Miss Dunham is famous for a television series called Girls rather than one called Women. She might have gone one better and called it Thumbsuckers. (The more appropriate title Diapers would terrify her demographic.)

...Miss Dunham’s “all about me!” attitude toward the process of voting inevitably extends to the content of what she votes for, which is, in her telling, mostly about her sex life. Hammering down hard on the Caps Lock key, she writes: “The crazy and depressing truth is that there are people running for office right now who could actually affect your life. PARTICULARLY your sex life. PARTICULARLY if you’re a woman. Yup.”

Yup? Nope.

Those of us who have been working against various mandates imposed by the Affordable Care Act are as a matter of fact attempting to extricate ourselves from involvement in Lena Dunham’s sex life, the details of which we would gratefully leave to her own idiosyncratic management. It is the so-called Affordable Care Act that has involved us in subsidizing birth control, abortifacients, surgical abortions, and who knows what else, for the strong, powerful, self-actualized American woman who cannot figure out how to walk into Walgreens, lay down the price of a latte, and walk out with her own birth-control pills, no federal intervention necessary. The very conservative editors of this magazine (National Review) are in fact trying to make it easier for them to do so with over-the-counter birth control. I suspect that Miss Dunham does not know very many conservatives, so allow me to pass along the message: We really, truly, sincerely do not wish to be involved in your sex life.

I would like to suggest, as gently as I can, that if you are voting as an act of self-gratification, if you do not understand the role that voting in fact plays in a constitutional republic, and if you need Lena Dunham to tell you why and how you should be voting — you should not vote. If you get your politics from actors and your news from television comedians — you should not vote. There’s no shame in it, your vote is statistically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and there are many much more meaningful ways to serve your country and your fellow man: Volunteer at a homeless shelter; join the Marine Corps; become a nun; start a business.

And maybe think about acting like men and women rather than boys and Girls."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/388945/five-reasons-why-youre-too-dumb-vote-kevin-d-Williamson

On a related note --