Petraeus: the Teacher’s Pet

Something does not sit right with me when General Petraeus weighed in on the controversy just down the road (in Gainesville) regarding the well publicized Koran burning.  For what it’s worth, I do not like such gestures; I find them atavistic, and I also recognize that religion is indeed a sacred thing to those who believe.  For every Muslim who is out there seething and hurling bricks, many more are simply respectful of the religion of their forefathers, scared of western influence in their lands, and are getting from this event the wrong impression of America and its people, which have no natural aversion or disrespect of other people’s religious practices.

There is no reason for either our government or ordinary Americans to sow conflict with Islam, and the best solution, as I’ve said before, is some kind of deliberate separation both at home and in foreign policy with a long run and realistic goal of containment.  This too would be offensive to some, but it’s better than the perpetual conflict we have now as we intermingle both at home and abroad in the name of liberal ideas of universalism. All the same, it is a storied and treasured right of Americans to express themselves, ridiculously if they choose, and it is rather quaint and predictable that an old school fire and brimstone preacher would act in this way. It’s a very American eccentricity at work here.

General Petraeus has suggested that this Koran burning hurts the war effort.  Isn’t that interesting?  What else that Americans take for granted hurts the war effort?  Wouldn’t the recent push for same sex marriage or five minutes of MTV or women wearing bikinis at the beach also offend Muslim sensibilities?  Didn’t our protection of the Saudis from Saddam offend Muslim sensibilities, simply by allowing Americans to set foot in an Islamic land?  Doesn’t our presence now in Iraq and Afghanistan deeply offend Muslims, not to mention the numerous civilians killed accidentally (but inevitably) by airstrikes and drones and scared shitless 19 year old American soldiers.  Indeed, much of our country, some good and some not so good, is deeply offensive to any traditionally religious person.   Nonetheless, none of these things have typically been up for debate as part of a “hearts and minds” campaign halfway around the world.  Recall the Danish cartoons, which were eminently defensible, also caused similar mass Muslim rioting.  Indeed, wouldn’t much that is preached at Christian Churches across the land offend Islam, whether a discussion of Jesus’ divinity, the heretical beliefs of Islam, or the familiar Bible tracts of the South’s Baptist Churches?

There is something altogether gratuitous about Petraeus’ words.  He undboutedly knew they’d be looked on kindly by Obama, in a way that a condemnation of equally problematic pacifist protests would not.  Where was General Petraeus when the Abu Ghraib photos were plastered all over Time Magazine and anti-war protests?  And what of the demoralizing “Bush Lied, People Died” canard?  Petraeus is hardly taking a courageous or conistent stand here; he is simply saying what he thinks the boss wants to hear.  And it is a problem when the military has its own anti-democratic agenda in a free society; the military is supposed to be the instrument of the elected, political branches of government, and those branches (and the people to whom they are accountable) have varied opinions and views on what Islam means, how it should be addressed, and how that view should be expressed by private citizens.

A just war preserves a people and a way of life.  I have not forgotten that Petraeus, ever the politician, let the cat out of the bag sometime ago when asked by Senator John Warner (R-VA) if the war made the US safe, responding “I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind.”  Indeed.  The current war now has a logic all its own, nearly completely separated from domestic security, which can be easily vouchsafed by capping Islamic immigration and pressuring those here to Americanize or go home.  The idea that to win a war American citizens must be cajoled by uniformed military men to show respect to an alien religion shows the ultimate impossibility of the current nation-building strategy, which aims impossibly and unprecedentedly to reconcile western institutions with an ancient, anti-western religion.   This war, animated by ideological principals of universalist liberalism and multiculturalism, threatens as it drags on to degrade the society it ostensibly is being waged to protect.

Blogging Highlights 2008-10

Every so often I try to gather things I’ve written into a “greatest hits” type column.  I believe certain entries particularly clarify my philosophy, as it is expressed in relation to timely items in the news.

I hope my newer readers find these older entries interesting and useful:

Economics

• The Disoriented Middle Class
• Incentivizing Financial Risk-Taking
• Great Depression Economics and Today’s Economic Crisis
• Modern Day Robber Barons

Culture Wars and Immigration

• Liberty and the National Question
• The Death of NASA, a Microcosm of American Decline
• Gays in the Military and the PC Military Establishment
• Terminal Sedation and Euthanasia
• On the Merits and Demerits of “White Nationalism”
• On Teachable Moments (An Essay on Interracial Crime)
• Our Overconfident Elites
• Libertarian Hysteria Regarding Police

Foreign Policy, Terrorism, and America’s Wars

• Russian, Israeli, and American Options re: Terrorism
• Bellicose American Exceptionalism vs. Unpatriotic Internationalism
• On Nidal Hassan
• Obama’s Middle Course in Afghanistan
• Obama’s Marxist Foreign Policy
• Afghanistan–Moving Sideways
• The New Russian Nationalism (It’s Not that Bad)
• The Failure of the Iraq Surge

Philosophy, History, and Other Big Picture Essays

• Churchill and WWII)
• Liberal Universalism as a “Bait and Switch”
• My Own Healthcare Proposal
• The Imaginary Edmund Burke
• Obama Will Radicalize the Right
• Holocaust:  History or Civil Religion
  

Bipartisan Treachery

When you look at the various policies that have contributed to America’s current crisis, it’s evident that a series of bipartisan, popular-with-elites, and thoroughly short-sighted policies have done much to bring us to where we are.   These policies are largely sacrosanct, particularly among elites, in spite of where we find ourselves as a country.  These include the following:

• Free trade orthodoxy that eschews any “industrial policy” and has sent a great number of American jobs and much of America’s manufacturing capacity to the Third World, particularly China.
• A related lack of criticism of our low wage, high consumption economic regime.  Americans’ wages have stagnated and credit–including housing based credit and refinance loans–did much to mask that wealth and wage decline over the last 15 years.
• Support for multiculturalism, diversity, and mass immigration, which has left America disunited, with a lower wage and lower IQ workforce, and problems of Third World violence and terrorist acts that were formerly unknown to America.
• A belief that home ownership is something attainable for all and that public policy should support the housing sector with various subsidies for the uncreditworthy.
• A belief that a college degree is something attainable for all and that it should be subsidized by government grants and loans, which has left many Americans with worthless pseudo-degrees in subjects like “packaging” or “communications” along with mountains of (nondischargable) debt.
• Indifference to unsustainable government pensions, transfer payments and welfare policies, including Medicare and Social Security, which will be insolvent in short order and will ultimately bankrupt the country.
• Indifference to high rates of illegitimacy, which is subsidized by various government policies like Section 8 housing vouchers, food stamps, AFDC, and the like.
• Support for global crusading, interventionism, and other activities that cost a great deal of money, employ our military in thankless and impossible ventures like Iraq and Kosovo, and that create enemies with long memories, while winning us few friends.

The thread that unites these phenomena to me is that they are all mutually enforcing, rooted in cosmopolitanism and sentimentality, and all are far from being solved.  Indeed, some of these problems are being made worse, as in the ram-through of Obamacare.  Elites have offshored jobs and imported cheap labor, which has pushed down wages and reduced productivity-per-worker, as well as the mean IQ, which in turn is masked by easy credit, worthless degrees, welfare policies, deficit spending, and denial regarding America’s various fiscal crises.  The foreign policy problem is mostly sui generis, except insofar as our elites believe so highly in themselves and consider the interests of random Third Worlders equally valuable as those of their countrymen.

In all of these areas, the elites have dissipated the country’s wealth, especially its human capital.  Whether Republican or Democrat, anyone who believes these things does not deserve to govern.

Obama’s Iraq Policy

I read (but did not watch) the President’s speech on Iraq.  Of all the things he has done as President, stopping our mindless “stay the course” approach in Iraq has been something I generally approve.  I also think it’s a testament to his relative moderation on foreign policy that our withdrawal has been orderly.  I disagree with conservatives who say we’re “cutting and running” or that his failure to acknowledge the “success of the Surge” shows his bad faith.  The Surge, in fact, while it tamped down some violence in Iraq, has hardly been a success without qualification.  There is still a significant terrorist presence in Iraq.  Its politics are still corrupt, and its likely future will be as a Shia-led Iranian partner. And the Surge is often credited with a reduction in violence caused by the earlier Anbar Awakening, which itself was caused by the mistakes and oversteps of al Qaeda in Iraq.

The original mission in Iraq (of finding and destroying WMDs) turned out to be largely unnecessary.  Upon this, Bush elevated the secondary mission of installing a friendly democracy.  This led to a seven year counterinsurgency campaign that has ended inconclusively.  It likely created as many Iraqi nationalist terrorists as it destroyed Islamist ones.  And for its modest or nonexistent benefits, it did tie down our forces, cost many American lives, destroy much American equipment, and cost a great deal of money over the last seven years.  If the first part of the Iraq mission was defensible, the latter portion was clearly a mistake.

As a work of rhetoric, however, Obama’s speech was uninspired.  He never seems tremendously comfortable in the commander in chief role.  He keeps our troops’ sacrifices and honorable work on the same plane as jobs for steelworkers or healthcare reform. In other words, he misses some of the romance of the soldier’s life that Bush and Reagan understood.  This is one of many reasons a great many Americans view him as an alien figure, who does not share their values.

Where Obama does not get points from me and where he seems particularly confused is on Afghanistan.  He disagreed with Bush and pulled out of Iraq because he surmised, correctly in my opinion, that the mission was a counterproductive loser.  But why then should the same type of mission be pursued in Afghanistan so many years after the 9/11 attacks? Unlike 2001, there are not significant terrorist training camps there; we are dealing there, as in Iraq, with a nationalist and Islamic insurgency fueled by our presence and the various petty and major grievances Afghans have with our lumbering presence.  The main part of the enemy have fled to Pakistan, which is an on again, off again, partner in the war against al Qaeda.  The mere presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan should not be enough to justify an extended nation-building campaign; al Qaeda is also in Iraq, not to mention Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, and, for that matter, Germany, France, the UK, and the US.  It’s not clear from Iraq that replacing corrupt dictatorships with corrupt, sectarian democracies does anything at all to fight terrorism at a strategic level.  Once again, look at Pakistan, a functioning, long-established Islamic democracy, where large elements of its military and intelligence infrastructure support Islamic terrorists.  In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, limping along with a smaller, but still significant presence, hardly seems the kind of serious change Obama made such a show of in the campaign.  It looks more like hedging his bets in an area in which he is supremely unconfident.  And this course promises to continue blood-letting, expense, and meaningless accomplishments like slightly reducing the daily car-bomb count in countries that have nothing to do with us.

How to use the military to fight terrorism is not an easy question.  But part of the answer seems like focusing on the terrorists themselves and not being terribly concerned with changing the environment that incubates them.  That environment is fueled by a combination of Islam and typical Third World corruption, and it cannot be easily changed.  But what our military can do is blow up camps, lavish informants with cash, use drones to blow up terrorist leaders, bomb terror-supporting countries, sink ships, and otherwise engage in our own version of “hit and run” tactics rather than conventionally, and expensively, trying to transform ancient peoples into good liberal democrats.

The Theory and Practice of America

One notable aspect of the defense of the Ground Zero Mosque is the claim that defending the rights of these Muslims it is part and parcel of living in accord with our traditions of property rights, free speech, and religious freedom.  But this is, frankly, the theory of America.  Yes, these are important and hoary legal rights.  But they were instituted by our Founders and still valued for practical reasons:  we value our own right to worship, we do not want our neighbors policing our worship, we do not want to contribute to the worship of others, with which we may disagree, and we do not want the kinds of violent contests over religion that have characterized much of European history.  In our past, and even now, there were practical limits on the range of expression of speech or religious freedom owing to our common heritage.  Likewise, and with similar practicality, we value democratic institutions because we believe it limits government excess, allows our interests to be filtered through the political process, and prevents the concentration of power in a king or oligarchy.  But, we also knew until recently among whom we were living, voting, and choosing representatives and presidents.  These were not third world rabble on the whole.  We were not going to face violent reactions in either politics or religion if the outcome–conversion or a lost election–were not a desired one.  Once again, experience rendered the theory a practical and beneficient one.

But for liberals–whether neoconservative or “out of the closet” left-liberals–the procedures are often valued without regard for their practical outcome.  And among left liberals in particular, negative practical outcomes are embraced in the name of theories because these outcomes undermine traditional power structures, habits, and people.  Such rhetorical appeals use our honor and contempt for hypocricy as the very means by which our collective happiness will be undermined.  Thus, free speech for Muslims is championed while draconian prosecutions for “hate speech” among our peers in Europe and Canada are greeted with indifference.  Democracy that yields a ban on gay marriage is struck down by the courts, even as it is championed in Iraq to accomplish Sharia or in South Africa to expropriate property from farmers.

If I may paraphrase something I wrote earlier on Bush’s policies on Iraq:  he acted on the assumption that we’re winning in Iraq by turning Iraq into a democracy, but he was mistaken insofar as he believeed “democracy” is a substantive policy outcome and not an interim procedure that could lead to any number of substantive results both for us and the Iraqis.

Procedural schemes in government are justified to the extent they lead to some long-run practical benefit. Procedures and rights are inventions to achieve practical and final ends like safety, commerce, and order. In both foreign and domestic policies, there should be no purely idealistic procedures, if they would likely lead to some abhorrent practical outcome, such as a society’s destruction.

With Bush and his inner circle, the supporters of a deontological and idealistic foreign policy deluded themselves into thinking that they’re the good ones and that their opponents simply lack sufficient commitment to the cause, instead of recognizing that they’re thoroughly ideological in outlook and merely hoping that a positive outcome will result from the unknown nature of Iraqi public opinion as expressed through elections. This was dangerous and irresponsible, considering the stakes.

Similarly, blind supporters of free speech and religious freedom for Muslims in America do not recognize that the lack of commitment to free speech and religious freedom among this subgroup renders that expansion of freedom short-sighted, unwise, and self-destructive in the long-run, or, at the very least, carries some countervailing risks.  What good is “religious freedom” that results in subordination to Sharia in the name of a suicidal consistency and unwillingness to look beyond theory to practice and outcomes?

As Burke stated in reference to another self-destructive experiment in consistency, “Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.”  Indeed.  While rights and legalities are of high importance, they are not of supreme importance.  They are means to an end, and if they clearly do not serve that end because of some changed circumstance, they must be modified, amended, or in some other way adjusted to deal with reality.

Katrina After Five Years

Five years after Katrina, the event still captures the imagination, particularly its fears.  I was living in Houston at the time Katrina hit.  I was able to talk to many refugees at the time, including young people living on friends’ couches and with relatives, working as waitresses and cab drivers and the like.  I also followed the news very closely.  It was truly an epic disaster.

This Did Not Happen and Your Eyes are Lying to You!

It is perhaps not surprising that on the five year anniversary of Katrina, a major revisionist history effort is underway.  Just as the LA Riots became a story of “12 Years of Neglect” and, last week, a single unrepresentative white crime against a cabdriver makes the national news, there have been hints of this revisionism regarding Katrina before.  The real story, we’re told in the Nation and elsewhere, is of racist whites going on a rampage and not the “conventional wisdom” of mass black local government incompetence, collective poor planning by government and individuals, and an aftermath of largely black criminality.

Isn’t this interesting?  Were the stories, then, of shooters harassing rescuers and aid workers at the time all made up?  Was the looting, arson, and mass chaos of the Superdome just an out of control myth?  Was New Orleans, which had the highest murder rate in the nation, suddenly a peaceful idyll upon the mass desertion of the corrupt, but absolutely necessary, police force?  The revisionists’ claims defy all common sense.

I should note one thing missing from most of these stories are raw numbers. How many people were arrested following the storm?  How many crimes were reported?  How many bodies were found and what was the cause of death? And how reliable are each of these numbers; what interest would any of the authors have in redeeming a certain group of people, restoring New Orleans’ reputation, etc.? How do New Orleans’ numbers compare to Slidell, Lafayette, or neighboring Gulf Coast Mississippi?

These Statistics Do Not Matter and Are Totally Irrelevant to Understanding What Happened Before, During, and After Katrina

It’s rather obvious that the usual liberal efforts at distraction, changing the subject, and Orwellian revisionism are underway.  And the reasons are familiar too:   the goal here is to transform this event, which showcased a serious natural disaster exacerbated by corrupt black-run city and an explosion of black crime, into a tale of federal incompetence and white racism in the form of trigger-happy property owners and cops.  While I have no doubt some stories were exaggerated and there was undoubtedly some overreaction by cops and property owners, I also know that some truths are being looked for very aggressively and others are actively avoided.

The group doing the “rewriting” of Katrina–the liberal media–cares not so much about truth in matters of race as it does in events that “fit the script.”  And that script is of evil white racists and innocent (or at worst misunderstood) black victims.  Consider the showcase story in the Nation; a man claims he was shot for no reason by a racist white man with a shotgun.  Is this possible?  It certainly is, especially in the fear-ridden climate after Katrina.  But what if he was a looter?  What if his goal was criminal?  Or what if it appeared to be so?  Would he admit to that?  Certainly not.  Would the Nation reporter ask him? Probably not, or if he did, it would be a pro forma deference to professional standards.

From everything I could see and hear and learn of from survivors while the event was happening, Katrina was terrible and its aftermath was the equivalent of the LA Riots with flooded streets, that crime of all kinds had exploded, that neighborhoods in Houston where Katrina refugees arrived en masse had become more crime ridden, that the 25+ more murders in Houston upon the arrival of the Katrina crowd was not an insignificant uptick in crime, and that any other outcome would truly defy all common sense based on New Orleans’ high crime rate pre-storm. Was there some trigger-happy overreaction by middle class New Orleanians?  Almost certainly.  But what was the cause of this?  Could it be the reasonable fear of massive crime after the storm along with years of negative experience with New Orleans’ underclass?  There’s no reason to think the universe went upside down during Katrina, and that people for many years who were violent criminals suddenly became angels.

It’s About Sharia

I like this article by Andrew McCarthy.  It notes the centrality and particularity of Sharia in Islam.  In other words, Islam is in many ways our cultural and civilizational opposite, with alien manners and mores under which our range of lifestyles would grate.  The aim to impose this unified system on the world is why the borderlands of the Muslim world are often so filled with conflict in a way that the collision of Buddhists and Hindus or Orthodox and Catholic are not. 

I especially like the author’s willigness to move the debate beyond terrorism.  Jihad is not just terrorism.  The harm presented by a Muslim influx into Europe and America is not merely terrorism, though that’s a part of it.  Indeed, an Islamic argument can be made against certain kinds of terrorism. But no Islamic argument could be made against the centrality of Sharia, the need to expand Islam by force (i.e., Jihad), or the necessity of harsh punishments for criticism of the prophet.  The threat of Islam includes a rearrangement of our own values, self-censorship, the denigration of our heros and traditions, threats of private violence, the occasional political murder, and ultimately the subordination of America’s historical people to newcomers whose aim is to rule.  This obviously would take a long time, but it’s also easier to address in its early stages than when it is far advanced. 

Not every Muslim is a terrorist.  But every Muslim is a Muslim.  And it takes a very brief perusal of the Koran and a history book to see that this religion aims to rule the whole world in a literal way.  Why make it easier on them?

Glenn Beck U

I enjoyed this lively piece at Reason’s website on Glenn Beck’s latest attempts to “teach history.”  In fairness, I like some of what Beck says, applaud him for addressing Obama’s racial agenda, and the people I consider myself aligned with instinctually and ideologically seem to like him.  But there is also something off-putting about him.  He’s herky-jerky in style and disorganized in his thinking.  One thing conservative intellectuals can do and should do is provide evidence and reason-based defenses of the prejudices of ordinary people.  These prejudices often have great wisdom built into them, but without some defense based on facts, social science, history, and other evidence, they remain mere prejudices and dissipate rather quickly under the assault of vice, propaganda, and false history propagated by th eleft.

But one problem Beck has is that he refuses to take on certain liberal gods.  He still thinks America’s history is tainted to the core by racism, but he resolves this conundrum by blaming liberals for all of America’s sins, even the ones that were the product of a certain kind of conservatism.  And he does this, often times, by the most convoluted and ridiculous conspiracy theories imaginable, such as blaming the Holocaust on the race prejudice of U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson.

I do believe history is complicated; it’s too easy to find and judge “villains” operating under very different circumstances in the past.  On this question of America’s “racist past,” I believe it was often more complicated than commonly presented, with unevenness of practice and local circumstances and other mitigating factors that deserve consideration as part of the entire record.  Finally, I think the disorder, violence, and decline of America in the age of “civil rights” counterbalances the scales of America’s earlier, often un-Christian racism, in no small part.

Setting aside the particulars of that rather large question, the big problem I have with Beck is best summarized at the end of Michael Moynihan’s article:

A tiny bit of knowledge (no, McCarthy wasn’t completely wrong), combined with an enormous Fox News constituency and an unflappable trust in one’s own wisdom, is a dangerous thing. Beck doesn’t demonstrate the perils of autodidacticism, but the perils of learning the subject while at the same time attempting to teach it.

Woodrow Wilson was an imperial president who cared little for civil liberties; the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression; the anti-communists were on the right side of history. Yes, yes, and yes. But these stories can be told without exaggeration, without relying on conspiracy, without the rehabilitation of a heavy-drinking senator who believed that Gen. George Marshall was a Soviet agent.

All things to consider when dispatching your application (and $79) to Glenn Beck University.

Achievement Gap and Testing

One of the funny things in life is that the liberal elite spends a lot of its time contemplating its genius, much in the manner of Aristotle’s Prime Mover.  And this takes the form chiefly of feeling superior to and contrasting itself with Red State America.  The usual basis of this feeling of superiority is a belief in its own greater wisdom and moral enlightenment, as evidenced by things like recycling, a belief in evolution and global warming, or the merits of “multiculturalism” and diversity.  But the religious belief in equality, on which much of their identity is based, is in fact beset by major evidentiary problems.  For instance, the persistent racial “achievement gap” on test and educational performance, which the media, politicians, and the like so earnestly spend time trying to correct. It must be racism, but this belies common sense, since so many teachers, administrators, and the like move heaven and earth to help minorities do well on these tests.

One dimension of the confusion on the racial achievement gap is a real ignorance of test results and the ways that making tests too easy, or too hard, can eliminate the gap, just as these changes eliminate the value of the test itself in identifying the range of ability.  The graph above by “La Griffe du Lion” illustrates this and is explained here.  (Hat tip to Steve Sailer, of course.)  This is actually pretty easy to understand when you think about it, yet facile references to this or that latest achievement-gap-creating test abound.

Innumeracy, I’ve found, is pretty extreme among the elite, which mostly consists of verbally talented media, legal, and educational personalities.  This is especially true at the second tier–community college professors, journalists in hinterland newspapers, congressmen.  Things like standard deviations or regressions or even basic concepts like a Gaussian distribution are all over their heads.  Math reminds them that they’re not as smart as they think, and when confronted, they usually stamp their feet and mutter something about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  God forbid they drill down on methodology and make a mathematical argument.

I’m not sure being right always trumps being popular.  In the short to medium term, lies can persist quite a long time.  The Soviet Union, itself built on myths of equality, lasted some 70 years.  And education graduate programs are filled with propagandists, mediocrities, and committed leftists.  Then again, how many times can a school district try this or that latest fad, come up with the same result, and not have people wonder if this is just the way it is?  I mean, no one worries about the achievement gap in marathon running or NFL running backs or armed robbery.  In dark corners of the internet–places like La Griffe du Lion, Gene Expression, VDare, and Steve Sailer’s website–the basic foundations of reality on matters of group difference, what is lovingly called human biodiversity, are being settled in a way that any intellectually serious person would ascent to.  And there is evidence this is trickling into the mainstream media, such as David Brooks and Malcom Gladwell.

One possible collateral benefit of having Obama as president will be greater candor on matters of race among all groups. Perhaps we’re in the early stages of the national dialogue on which we’ve been too “cowardly” to proceed.  But like the Soviet Union’s glastnost and perestroyka, this may lead in directions unintended and unforseen by today’s ruling class.

LGF’s Lunacy Comes Full Circle

Legend in his own mind, Charles Johnson has come full circle with his blog, Little Green Footballs.  It began as a fairly ordinary blog.  In the wake of 9/11 it became fiercely pro-American and pro-Israel and did a great deal to collect extensive evidence of Muslim double talk, craziness, violence, and insanity, particularly in the borderlands of the Muslim World.  It also did much to show the western media’s duplicity, pointing out doctored photos in the Israeli-Lebanon war of 2006 and the infamous faked memo in Dan Rather’s attempted expose of Bush’s national guard service.

Then, it started to go bad. There were many purges. Nationalists, Europeans, Christians, and others opposed to Muslim extremism were castigated for being insufficiently pure ideologically and too extreme, even though Johnson’s ideology was unclear, ever changing, and overly connected to personalities.  Then people were purged simply for offending Johnson’s delicate sensibilities.  He finally came out for Obama, purged even more longtime allies and commenters, and now, having come full circle with his liberal instincts, is knocking American politicians uneasy with the 9/11 Victory Mosque.

While I valued its function years ago as a news aggregator, I was always uneasy with this guy’s cultish website relatively early in the game, in particular for its anti-European fanaticism. But ultimately no one was good enough for Johnson.  His website is a shadow of its former self.  Perhaps next he’ll side with Hamas against Israel.  The man is uninteresting and has now become completely ridiculous.