Archive for September, 2009

Progressive Failure

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Which in this case is also the failure of progressivism:

Are We Witnessing the Collapse of Liberalism?
By J. Robert Smith
American Thinker

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama’s world grows bleaker. Liberalism’s world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism?

Remember, at the beginning of the 1980s, no one would have predicted that by the decade’s close the Berlin Wall would fall, communism would be discredited and the Soviet Union would be less than a couple of years away from dissolution.

Though no conservative worth his salt is surprised by liberalism’s shortcomings, the rapidity of its failure is surprising. More importantly, it’s alarming, for though the effects of liberalism’s failure are damaging to us at home, they may prove terrible to us abroad.

Better the corpse be laid to rest than allowed to continue shambling about.

Posted in Domestic Issues, National Politics | 2 Comments »

The Ongoing Folly of Lawfare

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The good news? The UK recently managed to convict a group of three terrorists for attempted terrorism:

Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people
Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent
Telegraph.co.uk

The al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating home-made liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and Canada. The plot had the potential to be three times as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

The convictions followed Britain’s largest counter-terrorism operation and two criminal trials which, in total, cost an estimated £60million.

All three men convicted on Monday had been found guilty at an earlier trial last year of conspiracy to murder, but prosecutors said it was vital to secure a conviction on another charge of conspiring to blow up the aircraft in order to prove that the threat to air traffic was genuine.

The bad news? It took two trials and a hellfire strike.

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Posted in Intelligence, Military, War on Terror | 1 Comment »

An Epithet which must not be uttered

Monday, September 7th, 2009

The English Language is a constantly evolving thing. Having no official governing body, it tends to do so haphazzardly (which is, in the end, a good thing). Efforts to enforce controls on the language (see Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984, or “politically correct” speech on any college campus) are, at their heart, efforts to control thought.

I am brought to these ruminations today by an essay from Hot Air’s Green Room:

The Eff Word
Fascism
By Doctor Zero
HotAir

It’s the ultimate political epithet, the atomic blast that ends calm and measured debate. This makes those who seek to be reasonable and persuasive understandably reluctant to use the word… and those who aren’t interested in either reason or persuasion eager to hurl it at their opponents. There is nothing surprising about the visceral emotions conjured by the mention of its name. The history of fascism is written in the blood of innocents, on a scale that challenges the limits of human imagination.

Indeed it is. That it should be so is something of an irony of history. Fascism is without question an ideology whose history is written in blood. Yet for all its manifest evils, Facism is not the most blood soaked ideology in history. That distinction belongs to Communism, which killed nearly two orders of magnitude more innocents in the 20th century.

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Posted in Domestic Issues, National Politics | 3 Comments »

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