The American Standard Bearer

The Toyota Prius is the current must-have item for the socially hip crowd (read: lefties). It says, “I’m a socially-conscious environmental activist” without actually having to say the words to anyone, which would not be cool. This video clip from the BBC’s Top Gear program points out some of the shortcomings of that thinking and is very funny to boot.

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The whole Prius fad is interesting in that it points out, as well as anything, the liberal left’s penchant for symbolism over substance. Al Gore and his Washington and Hollywood pals promote the “100 miles per gallon” Prius, admonish the rest of us for driving SUV’s (because we don’t want to see our kids flattened like pancakes in a Prius), then hop into private jets that burn more fuel in one day than most of us burn in a year in our cars.

According to the Associated Press, the following photo depicts three Iraqi women conducting an anti-American protest in Baghdad on Monday. The question then is, how does the AP know this is an anti-American protest, as opposed to a pro-American or at least, a pro-Iraq (the liberated variety) protest?

After all, these women are not burning an American flag, carrying placards with slogans such as “Death to America” on them, or any number of other behaviors that can easily be identified as anti-American. In fact, to the casual observer, it’s hard to tell what the purpose of this small tea-party might be.

The point is, anyone who has even marginally followed recent mid-east reporting knows that the Associated Press and Reuters, to be specific, effectively refuse to report anything that might reflect positively on the United States. At the same time, those organizations have demonstrated a fondness for skewing their account of events in such a way as to demonize the U.S. and Israel while portraying Muslim terrorists as “freedom fighters” and victims. One example is the recent scandals surrounding the widespread practice of doctoring photos in order to portray the Israeli army as nothing more than murderous thugs.

It’s sad to think, that lacking any other event that might possibly be portrayed as disparaging to America, the AP slapped up a photo of three women with an Iraqi flag and called it an anti-American demonstration. We know that the women in the photo were not interviewed because the AP attributed not a single word to the bunch, so it boils down to the assesment by some caption-writer in a cubicle somewhere as to what the three women had on their minds.

Democrat Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. represents New Jersey’s 8th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The 8th district includes Paterson, the place of my birth and coincidentally, the place where reliable eye-witnesses have testified that Muslims gleefully took to the streets on the afternoon of 9/11/01.

Pascrell has published a letter to Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode, demanding an apology for the following passage from a letter Goode wrote, “The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

Goode is refering to newly elected Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison who has insisted on being sworn into office with his right hand on the Koran instead of the Bible. And Pascrell has countered by accusing Goode of “wrongfully (equating) the issue of immigration with a fear of Muslim integration in our society.” So, in a country where most of us are passionate about religious liberty, what’s wrong with a Muslim wanting to serve as an elected official informed by his own personal beliefs?

Nothing, if we could reasonably apply the doctrine of seperation of church and state that the leftists like Pascrell are constantly harping about. The trouble is, no such seperation exists anywhere in the Muslim world, and it is foolish to believe that Muslims here in America have anything remotely resembling seperation of church and state in mind.

David Zucker, the guy who brought you the “Airplane” movies, has put together this hilarious send-up of James Baker’s work on the Iraq Study Group.

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It’s worth noting that while Zucker is dead center on his parallel between Baker and Chamberlain – there is no reasoning with someone whose chief goal is your total annihilation, particularly when that person wields some hefty power – there is a good deal more at stake now than in 1938. Though Hitler was able to do an incredible amount of damage in a relatively short time, his days were numbered right from the start.

Given ever-tightening restrictions on Germany’s access to resources, a couple of vibrant, resourceful, determined and completely righteous adversaries (the U.S. and Great Britain), and the moral bankruptcy of the Third Reich, there could be no other outcome.

This time around however, it’s not us against one (or two or three) overly-aggressive maniac. Ahmadinejad, as evil as he may be, is not the main player because this time, there is no main player. If you wonder if our so-called allies in Europe have the will to stand against radical Islam, look at how they have reacted to the radical Islam already entrenched there. They are so afraid of offending anyone that they are simply going to stand by and watch their own countries and cultures crumble.

Islam, as it is emerging in this new century, is a political movement that it’s adherents believe is the will of God. And if you would like to know where campaign headquarters are in your neighborhood, look no farther than your local mosque.

As the Washington Post reports, research psychologists are now investigating the effects of subtle cues on the performance of students in the classroom. One study in particular, planned and implemented by Jennifer Steele of Toronto’s York University and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University, determined to explain how seemingly innocuous influences such as random words could affect the outcome of, say, a test.

Steele and Nalini’s study involved flashing words on a screen for just a fraction of a second. Words usually associated with the feminine gender influenced students to flourish in the arts while words with a masculine connotation raised performance in math. While I have no doubt that there is a lot of truth to this, I also have no doubt that the PC crowd is already hard at work, dreaming up ways to claim discrimination for any group that can claim minority status.

In fact, the insanity has already begun! And a Florida State University graduate student in psychology, driven to action by a recently enacted Florida law that requires an American flag to be displayed in every classroom, is leading the charge. David Butz has recently concluded a study in which he claims that displaying an American flag in a classroom gives an unfair advantage to white students, who exhibit a significant increase in classroom performance over minority students. The minority students in fact, seem to be totally unfazed by the sight of the American flag, with no increase or decrease in performance.

The implication is, of course, that Florida needs to repeal that law and remove those nasty flags from state classrooms as soon as possible, before any more minority students are damaged. The true reason minorities don’t respond as strongly to the flag is more likely that American history is of late, no longer adequately taught, if it’s taught at all. Since so many minority students are newly arrived inhabitants, the meaning of the American flag is lost on them. The sane thing to do would be to require teachers to start teaching American history again in earnest. But given the general attitude within the teaching establishment that America is the root cause of the world’s problems, don’t expect to see anything sane happen any time soon.

Three days ago, our local paper ran an editorial warning of the dangers of conducting financial transactions, whether buying or selling, over the internet. The writer used as an example, the case of a local man who, in attempting to sell his car on a website that offers those services, was offered bogus money orders as payment. The counterfeits, though very realistic, were spotted and the counterfeiter was apprehended.

The problem with the argument is that the internet is really not at fault. Crooks are waiting to part honest people from their money regardless of the medium the transaction takes place in. Would this particular case have been any different if buyer and seller had found each other through our newspaper’s classifieds? Needless to say, our paper like most papers is a stronghold of the “progressive” world view, and the editorialist’s rant reveals the paranoia of the progressive movement towards technology and human advancement.

Perhaps nowhere is this paranoia more evident than in the progressive movement’s baby, radical environmentalism. Now, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the tireless champion of the global warming rationalist crowd, has made a booklet entitled “A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism. Hot & Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge To Journalists who Cover Global Warming” available to the general public. The booklet is the work of the Environment & Public Works Committee of which Inhofe is chairman and challenges the shamefully bad science behind the global warming scare.

In addition, David Deming of the University of Oklahoma testified before the U.S. Senate this week about how the media has manipulated the available information on global warming to support the progressive view of approaching catastrophe. Seeing as how the hallmark of the progressive movement seems to be an utterly irrational aversion to human progress, it seems more fitting to refer from now on to the political left as the “regressive” movement.

This is truly amazing. The ingredients needed to cook up one of these bombs can’t be too hard to come by, especially if you are a reasonably well connected Islamic extremist. They would certainly be easier to obtain than, say, a nuclear suitcase bomb.

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The question is then raised, if deadly explosives like these are so easy to come by, transport undetected and detonate, why then hasn’t there been a single incident within U.S. borders since 9/11? Was the incredible destruction on that day simply the result of a small extremist wing of an otherwise peace-loving religion? Hardly.

The more likely explanation comes from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that feins peaceful intentions but maintains ties with Hamas and other terrorist organizations. CAIR spokesperson, Ibrihim Hooper, who appears frequently on various television programs, said this, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future…But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.”

By education, I take it he means that they intend to use our laws and our penchant for accepting any sort of behavior in the name of diversity to wear our social fabric down until we no longer have the collective will to fight back, much the way they are doing it in Europe.

The Prince of Wales has his well-pressed knickers in a knot over global warming, kicking off his pet project, “Costing The Earth — The Accounting For Sustainability” before an audience of dignitaries at St. James Palace. The Prince warned that we humans are “living on borrowed time,” and “It is our children and grandchildren who will have to pay off this debt and we owe it to them and ourselves to do something about it before it is too late.”

Apparently unaware that Albert Einstein settled the question for once and for all when he declared that we can neither create nor destroy matter or energy, His Highness frets that “We are consuming the resources of our planet at such a rate that we are, in effect, living off credit and living on borrowed time.” Prince Charles has officially joined the ranks of the superstitious pagans who invented the 1.6 gallon toilet, fearing that water would one day disappear off the planet if something drastic was not done.

But putting the eco-scare argument aside, as Mark Steyn points out in his excellent new book, “America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It,” the Prince is worrying about the wrong thing. The UK is teetering on the brink of Islamization, yet British leaders are choosing not to acknowledge that the problem exists. With a disappearing ancestral population (they’re not having babies) and a Muslim immigrant population growing exponentially, Prince Charles’ grandchildren, if he ever gets any, will be lucky if they can survive the Islamic theocracy.

The problem is much farther advanced in Europe than in America, but signs of what is coming are everywhere. A couple of weeks ago, six Muslim Imams were ejected from a passenger jet in Minneapolis-St Paul for behaving suspiciously. They claimed they were only praying but security officials cited their one-way tickets, the fact they requested seat belt extensions, the fact they sat in different sections of the plane and the fact that they were openly denouncing America – in English – as the reasons for their actions. Would you want to get on that plane?

And this week, in a Detroit suburb, a Muslim woman is screaming that her civil rights have been violated because she was asked not to set out her prayer rug and perform her prayers at a local health club. The manager at the Fitness USA club asked Wardeh Sultan not to pray in the gym because he correctly assumed that all of the paying membership might not like the idea of doing their bench presses in a mosque. As with the airport incident, a Muslim “rights” group immediately came forward to charge the health club with prejudice against Muslims.
Of course, if a couple of evangelical Christians were to hold a Bible study at Fitness USA, they would be bounced out on their ears and no one would care.

What happens when funding for the arts, that is, income for artists, almost completely shifts from the private sector to the public sector? Why, you get “artists” whose primary raison d’etre (French artsy lingo) is to think up ways to be as offensive as possible to the people who put the bread on their table.

Enter fledgling “artist” William Gentry whose “The Fat is in the Fire” exhibit was recently asked to take the last train from Clarksville, Tennessee’s Customs House Museum. Gentry’s work included American flags desecrated in various creative ways, including deep-frying them. According to Gentry, his point was to show concern for obesity in America. The more obvious and likely point was to blame America for contributing to obesity in poor people.

Gentry is not alone. There have been dozens of “artists” in the past couple of decades who have garnered national attention by producing works that have no other value beyond shock value, including California lawyer Stephen Pearcy’s controversial American-flag-in-toilet scribblings displayed in the California Justice Department’s cafeteria. Sadly in fact, the era of the talented artist has long since passed.