GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Leftists Mark Memorial Day by Vandalizing Memorials

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Obama’s angry, ignorant children strike again.

A Vietnam War memorial in the Venice area of Los Angeles has been extensively defaced by graffiti. The vandalism occurred sometime during the past week, KCAL/KCBS-TV (http://cbsloc.al/1RAa3mg) reported. The homespun memorial painted on a block-long wall on Pacific Avenue lists the names of American service members missing in action or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.

News of the vandalism came as another veterans-related memorial was reported damaged in Henderson, Kentucky. Police say a Memorial Day cross display there that honors the names of 5,000 veterans of conflicts dating back to the Revolutionary War has been damaged by a driver who plowed through the crosses early Saturday.

In Virginia, the Petersburg National Battlefield has apparently has been looted, the National Park Service said. Numerous excavations were found at the Civil War battlefield last week, Jeffrey Olson, and agency spokesman, said in a news release Friday. Petersburg National Battlefield is a 2,700-acre park marks where more than 1,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died fighting during the Siege of Petersburg 151 years ago.

 

All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again.
All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again.

The Moral Relativism of the Left Is Rotting Out Our Military

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Obama has done great damage to our military, reducing its size dramatically, cutting back on procurement and forcing them to use aging equipment, and leading it to demoralizing defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as Kurt Schlichter argues in the Federalist, the worst damage that’s being wrought on our military is the moral rot of leftist relativism.

The problems with America’s military—which has now failed to win three wars in a row against backward fanatics whom the nineteenth-century Brits would have handily dispatched to hell in time for tea—are not merely budgetary. You can’t buy real leaders, leaders with strategic competence and moral courage. Aging equipment, while a problem, is nothing compared to the incompetence and moral cowardice of our military’s senior leaders.

He rightly notes that this rot didn’t begin with Obama’s presidency, but it has broadly metastasized. Our troops were not just handcuffed by highly restrictive Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan that have led to many, many unnecessary American deaths, but utterly shackled in dealing with Afghanistan’s culture of child rape. The senior staff of the military forces (career bureaucrats) decided on a semi-official policy of “See no evil, Hear no evil, speak no evil,” and put troops on the ground in the wretched position of either tolerating child-rape or sacrificing their military career.

So, if the captain acts according to Army values and puts a stop to the child rape, he’s wrong. If he does nothing, and later some congressman or reporter asks the general why his troops aren’t stopping child rapes, the captain is going to be wrong again. If you think the general is going to say, “Oh, the captain as just following my order to allow child rapes occurring in front of him to continue,” you are delusional.

Do you want to lose wars? Because this is how you lose wars.

We have the greatest troops in the world, probably in all of human history. Fighting with old, worn equipment is a challenge, but that can be overcome. The lack of competent, morally courageous senior leaders can’t be.

Why Obama Got Blindsided by the Bergdahl Backlash

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No one in Obama’s Inner Circle has ever served in the military or understands military culture.

In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows.
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The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

To Team Obama, Bergdahl and the rest of those soldiers were just kids who didn’t study hard enough and got stuck in Afghanistan.

Team Obama’s latest gambit — accusing Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers of “swiftboating” him — probably won’t play very well either.

UPDATE (from Jeff): It also doesn’t help that, by his own admission, Obama broke the law in making the Bergdahl swap.

A top aide to President Obama is now apologizing to Congress for not informing lawmakers, as required by law, that the White House was planning to trade…

(Democratic Senator Dianne) Feinstein said that it was “very disappointing” that President Obama decided not to alert Congress about the deal…Feinstein said that in previous conversations with Senators about the trade, “there were very strong views and they were virtually unanimous against trade.” “The White House is pretty unilateral about what they want to do when they want to do it,” she added…

Unilateral? Whoa, did someone say the President was being “unilateral”?!

Coward/Traitor calls Snowden a coward/traitor

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This is rich in iron(y):

Secretary of State John Kerry escalated his criticism of Edward Snowden, calling him a “coward” and a “traitor,” and saying that the NSA document leaker should return to the United States from Russia and “make his case.”

“Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor and he has betrayed his country,” Kerry said in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” with Chuck Todd. “And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”

The point in itself may have merit; we can discuss. But for fun, let’s remember some points about Kerry. The following conclusions have been either proven, or at least well-indicated as likely, by eyewitness testimony and other evidence: [Read more…]

Social Liberalism: Simple-minded and Pernicious Memes

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When I wrote my first post on liberalism as more of a social phenomenon than an intellectual one, I imagined a series of posts dealing with many different implications of that idea.  So far I’ve written three other posts in the series on topics ranging from slogans to leftist intolerance and political changers to the so-called “wealth gap.”

One big topic that I haven’t explored yet–even though I’ve meant to do so since the start of the series–is the way in which liberal ideas are perpetuated on social media and elsewhere through the use of simple-minded memes.  As I considered the idea of social liberalism, one point which came to mind is that so many liberal memes might seem catchy at first glance,  but they are either responses to outlandish straw men, or they make no sense whatsoever when subjected to even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

At Legal Insurrection, Professor Jacobson has written a few posts about the role of the leftist site Upworthy in promulgating memes of both sorts, including a post this past Tuesday on the high cost of low-information voters.  And he’s not the only one to recognize the importance of simple-minded memes for the left.  For example, this post at Breitbart.com takes the idea one step further to reflect on the significance of LOLcats in politics.

What interests me at the moment, though, is that there is a whole class of liberal memes which go beyond the simple-minded to the downright pernicious: they promulgate leftist thinking in a way that seems ironic or clever or humorous, even as they blatantly acknowledge the darker goals of leftist ideology.   I stumbled across a prime example of one such meme on Facebook about two months ago when an acquaintance “shared” a meme which had been promoted by the Facebook group “Being Liberal” back in December 2011.  I’ve pasted the image below.

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We’re all familiar with the common liberal tropes about “beating swords into plowshares” and the frequent lament heard on the left that “if we spent on education or social programs what we spent on the military” somehow all of society’s ills would disappear.   This meme takes that same tack, but uses “irony” to take it one step further by suggesting that the government can use the military to “win the hearts and minds of the population” and put the “locals to work” working on infrastructure politics.

By supposedly employing “irony” to make its point, therefore, it moves from the simple-minded lament about spending more on education and social programs into the territory of the pernicious by endorsing the use of the military as a means of social control.  The person who posts or re-posts the idea can feign ignorance of the pernicious implications by saying that the meme isn’t “serious” or that it is “just making a point through irony,” but it’s a point which betrays the left’s ignorance of the way free people and free markets operate.  The point of the meme is unmistakable:  all good comes through government, and we ought to use the force of government to establish a planned economy.

The Facebook page for “Being Liberal” attributes this meme to one of its readers named Terry Sebolt who wrote in and said (with the disingenuousness common on the left): “”Those were my words, but not my pic. Feel free to put it anywhere you want. I meant every word of it, and hope people enjoy the irony, regardless of credit. It was a throw away line…”

The claim may be spurious, though, as I did some internet searching and the earliest example I could find for the meme online was this appearance on Twitter from August 9, 2011.  I’ve posted a screenshot of the image below.

Screen shot 2013-03-01 at 11.22.28 PM

Regardless of the authorship, though, the claim is intended to make a point by shocking, even though those who quote the statement will try to distance themselves from its actual implications.  Those implications, though, tell us a great amount about the worldview of the left.

What’s even more amazing in the case of the person I know who re-posted this meme is that she is an immigrant from eastern Europe with a PhD in a scientific field from an American university.   She often refers to the bad days growing up in her country under a brutal dictator when everyone was suffering.  And so she moves to the U.S. and spends time in universities and decides that she’s a “liberal” and approvingly re-posts that “ironic” image.  If that’s not an example of a socially-promulgated disorder, then I’m not sure what would be.

Social Psychology, Politics, and Disgust

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I saw this item at Reason.com the other day.  It’s a short piece reflecting on a video of a speech by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talking about how one’s “sensitivity to disgust” is supposedly some sort of predictor of one’s political views.  I haven’t watched the whole video yet, but the speech was given at the Museum of Sex in New York City, so some amount of its content seems designed to appeal to the audience that would be attending a speech in that location.

Jim Epstein at Reason.com summarizes the key points of the speech as follows:

“Morality isn’t just about stealing and killing and honesty, it’s often about menstruation, and food, and who you are having sex with, and how you handle corpses,” says NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics.

Haidt argues that our concern over these victimless behaviors is rooted in our biology. Humans evolved to feel disgusted by anything that when consumed makes us sick. That sense of disgust then expanded “to become a guardian of the social order.”

This impulse is at the core of the culture war. Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.

The full video of the speech is available at the above link.

My reaction to all this is that it 1). depends on how one defines conservative, and 2). it depends on what kinds of things one labels or considers to be examples of disgust.

With respect to point 1)., I think that a large portion of the conservative coalition is rather heavily libertarian-leaning, and it just makes more sense for us to identify as conservative and vote for Republicans because  the Libertarian party seems doomed to remain a fringe party, at least as long as that party’s leadership continues to endorse an isolationist or head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy.  Now while it may be the case that many traditional “social conservatives” have a “high sensitivity to disgust” with respect to issues of sex, I’m not even convinced that that is as widely the case as Haidt’s remarks suggest.  I’ve heard socially-conservative Christian ministers talk about sex in ways that show they may have a better understanding of the variety of human sexual experience than many academics who claim to be experts on the subject.

On the other hand, with respect to point 2)., I can find many, many examples of “disgust” fueling the attitudes of liberals and leftists.  One could begin by looking at their intense hatred of Sarah Palin and anyone like her.  Some of that hatred, I would argue, was fueled by a disgust at the lives of anyone who doesn’t live the life of a modern liberal in a major coastal city.

Most modern liberals are disgusted by hunting, by the people who shop at Wal-Mart, by the petroleum industry, by the food industry, by the military, by evangelical Christians, and by the reality of life in small-town, rural America.  James Taranto and British Philosopher Roger Scruton call it “oikophobia”: it is a worldview which accepts or excuses the transgressions of select special-interest groups or of non-western cultures, while it judges the familiar by a harsh standard and condemns them with expressions of disgust at the nature of their lives.

Support the troops? Yeah, right

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Seen on a hybrid SUV in the (San Fernando) Valley:

FROM THE COMMENTS: James doesn’t “get the point of this post. We have free speech in this country, and that person is exercising his or her view to not support enlisting in the military.”

He’s right. The driver does have the freedom to express his view of the military. And I have the freedom to mock the driver for trying to discourage men and women from enlisting in order to defend this man’s freedom to criticize military service.

That said, point well taken, James, especially about liberals not being the only ones who drive hybrids. I have met a handful of conservatives who drive such vehicles–and sometimes with great enthusiasm.

If only the DoD were something the president ‘liked’

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Whoa. Jim Geraghty at NRO (and hopefully you’re subscribing to his newsletter like I do) offers the tidbit of the day from President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall yesterday (and Moe Lane provides the cued-up video):

We’re still gonna have to make some tough decisions about Defense spending, or even on programs that I like but we may not need.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you your Commander in Chief.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

What To Do With An American Traitor?

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Uber progressive blogger and Islamic terror apologist Glenn Greenwald is whining about how PFC Bradley Manning (alleged Wikileaks source, and anti-DADT activist) is being treated.  It is cute how in the beginning of his piece, Greenwald goes to great lengths to distance Manning from the Wikileaks story; but by the end is lauding Manning’s treasonous behavior and labeling him a “hero” (cue Berkeley City Council).

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime.  Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.  Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.  He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

Oh boo freaking hoo.  Glenn and I had a minor dustup on the topic via Twitter yesterday:

ME:  GayPatriot: RT @GregMitch: Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning held under “inhumane condiitons” possibly constituting “torture.” // Aww, cry me a river.

GG response:   @ggreenwald: You’d be crying a river – and doing much more – if you were held under inhumane conditions without being convicted of anything

My response: GayPatriot: I wouldn’t have committed treason against my country while wearing the uniform cuz my boyfriend dumped me. He’s a pissy bitch.

“Lexington Concord” at RedState has the right idea as to what to do with Manning (and any other Wikileaks sources, I might add).  It is priceless…

Glenn Greenwald is constantly telling us that the reason the terrorists want to kill us is not because they are regressive degenerates who hate Western values like freedom and tolerance, but rather because they just don’t like our military policies and how we’re all meddling in their business.

Well, I am not a man without a heart, so I am willing to propose a solution to Greenwald’s problem which I am confident the Army would be amenable to. As an added bonus, it will serve as an opportunity to validate Glenn Greenwald’s views on the causes of Islamic terrorism. We will give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back, and remove him from solitary confinement. In fact, we’ll let him be around lots of people. We’ll call an emissary with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and tell them that we have a political prisoner to release to them, no strings attached. We will tell them that we are going to release to them an American who thoroughly rejects our interventionist policies and our military meddling – he rejects them so strongly, in fact, that he did everything in his power to see that American soldiers were killed and that Islamic terrorists were given access to our operational details. Therefore, we have decided to let him go to be with the Taliban so that he can self-actualize and join the fight against America with them.

I’m sure that like John Walker Lindh, the Taliban will be happy to have an American like this on board. So we’ll drive Manning out there to meet them at some safe remote location in Afghanistan somewhere, and we’ll release Manning and let him rush to join his new Taliban brethren.

Then we’ll tell them he’s gay.

Sign me up to help complete this diplomatic arrangement!  I think Manning would prefer my solution anyway:  firing squad.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)