Creeping delegitimization of Israel at UNESCO?

C2 contributor “buzzsawmonkey”, at comment #35 in this thread, sounds the alarm:

As you know, the other day UNESCO asked Israel to remove the “Cave of the Patriarchs” in Hebron from its list of national heritage sites.  This week is the week in which the Torah portion is read that details Abraham’s acquisition of the Cave of Machpelah--now referred to as “the Cave of the Patriarchs”–for an inordinate sum, for the purpose of burying his wife Sarah. It is the first Jewish acquisition of land, the first physical connection of permanence with the Land of Israel.

I do not believe that the timing was accidental.  In effect, the UN was making very plain its complete rejection of the the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel as its homeland. It is not unlike the “invitations to accept Islam” which our media continually misread as conciliatory overtures, but which in fact are last-opportunity conversion demands which precede a war, and as such are in fact declarations of war.

It is my belief that the UNESCO statement, which was largely dismissed as “Oh, the UN’s at it again,” was in fact a declaration of war on the existence of Israel as the Jewish homeland, and on the Jews as a “legitimate” people.

There is probably some really ugly tug-of-war going on beneath the surface. I hope buzz is wrong, but I fear he may be right.

BTW, if you want to read some truly mind-exploding cognitive dissonance among the academic elite gentry, have a look at this.

Krauthammer: The great campaign of 2010

A few days before the Nov. 2 election, Charles Krauthammer writes a blistering indictment of the 0bama presidency:

In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who “sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.’ ” Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to go to the polls to exact political revenge on their enemies – presumably, for example, the near-60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won’t even use “enemies” to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America – but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends – not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.

Indeed.

Yet press secretary Robert Gibbs’s dismay is reserved for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the “disappointing” negativity of his admission that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

McConnell, you see, is supposed to say that he will try very hard to work with the president after the election. But it is blindingly clear that nothing of significance will be enacted. Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them – such as repealing Obamacare – because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama’s broad transformational agenda.

That would have to await victory in 2012. Every president gets two bites at the apple: the first 18 months when he is riding the good-will honeymoon, and a second shot in the first 18 months of a second term before lame-duckness sets in.

Over the next two years, the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform and energy by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emission limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But major congressional legislation to complete Obama’s social-democratic agenda? Not a chance. That’s why McConnell has it right. The direction of the country will be determined in November 2012 when either Obama gets a mandate to finish building his “New Foundation” or the Republicans elect one of their own to repeal it, or what (by then) remains repealable.[…]

The beauty of this year’s campaign, and the coming one in 2012, is that they actually have a point. Despite the noise, the nonsense, the distractions, the amusements – who will not miss New York’s seven-person gubernatorial circus act? – this is a deeply serious campaign about a profoundly serious political question.

Obama, to his credit, did not get elected to do midnight basketball or school uniforms. No Bill Clinton he. Obama thinks large. He wants to be a consequential president on the order of Ronald Reagan. His forthright attempt to undo the Reagan revolution with a burst of expansive liberal governance is the theme animating this entire election.

Democratic apologists would prefer to pretend otherwise – that it’s all about the economy and the electorate’s anger over its parlous condition. Nice try. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll shows that only one in 12 Americans blames the economy on Obama, and seven in 10 think the downturn is temporary. And yet, the Democratic Party is falling apart. Democrats are four points behind among women, a constituency Democrats had owned for decades; a staggering 20 points behind among independents (a 28-point swing since 2008); and 20 points behind among college graduates, giving lie to the ubiquitous liberal conceit that the Republican surge is the revenge of lumpen know-nothings.

On Nov. 2, a punishing there will surely be. But not quite the kind Obama is encouraging.

My prediction: The Dems lose 60 House seats, eight in the Senate. Rangers in seven.

Incidentally, C the K’s prediction is roughly the same as the meta-poll of Electionprojection.com : 62 House seats, 8 Senate seats, and 7 governors (6 to GOP, 1 D to Independent). Cook Political Report has 50-60 House seats (“possibly more”) 6-8 Senate seats, and 6-8 governors shift to the GOP. Rasmussen has the Senate at 48 D, 45 R, 7 toss-up ) namely California, Colorado,Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington, and West Virginia). According to another Rasmussen poll, 2/3 of the country would like to replace the entire Congress and start over. If the whole Senate were up for re-election, it would be a total bloodbath…

Remember: November 2. If it ain’t close, cheating won’t matter — or it would have to be so brazen that it cannot be successfully covered up.

UPDATE: Nate Silver (a Dem) at the NYT’s “538” blog has his own running simulation up. Snapshot now:

Average outcome after 100,000 simulations

	Updated	Democrats	Republicans	Other
Senate	Oct. 30	51.7	48.3	0.1
House	Oct. 30	202.6	232.4	0.0
Governor	Oct. 30	19.1	30.1	0.8

About FiveThirtyEight Methodology »

An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh and His Listeners — With Notes on the Democrat Civil War Already In Progress (via HillBuzz.org)

Whew… Read the whole thing…

  [caption id="attachment_24987" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="When Obama and the DNC attacked Hillary and her supporters, they permanently alienated tens of millions of us from the party. I know for a fact I am not the only guy with a picture like this on his wall who is working every day to bring down the Obama White House and Democrat Party. Not for Hillary, though I love the woman, but for America…because I love this country … Read More

via HillBuzz.org

Zombie: Barry O, He Go: the Cargo Cult Presidency of Barack Obama

A few days before Halloween, from our favorite Undead American: Barry O, He Go: the Cargo Cult Presidency of Barack Obama. [Wikipedia links added.]

The presidency of Barack Obama is a cargo cult. And Obama himself is the new John Frum.

But unlike traditional cargo cults, which persist despite decades of fruitless prophecies, the Barry O cult is disintegrating before our very eyes, as Hope and Change Airport — built entirely out of hollow bamboo and even hollower promises — has failed to attract the predicted heaven-sent magical prosperity.

Read the whole thing. Relatedly, see Richard Feynman’s definition of cargo cult science.

Grand Theft Democracy (via Robomonkey’s Blog)

“Robomonkey” has a roundup (updated as stories come in) of election fraud stories. Go check it out!

Here's just a sample of what's going on in America right now: In Arizona, the state mandate requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote was struck down by the liberal Ninth Circuit Court just in time for the election. Massive voter fraud by an offshoot of SEIU (you'll see a lot of them in this post) has also been uncovered. In Florida, widespread abuse of absentee ballots was discovered when police raided Daytona Beach City Commissioner Derri … Read More

via Robomonkey's Blog

“Convenient” voter touchscreen glitches

Fenway Nation has a roundup of reports of touchscreen glitches in early voting. And, surprise, surprise:

Out in Nevada, there have been reports coming in from Las Vegas and elsewhere in Clark County that voters have found their touchscreen voting machines had already checked Harry Reid’s name.

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

“Something’s not right,” Ferrara said. “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”As it turns out, the technicians for the voting machines are represented by SEIU Local 1107, which has supported Reid’s bid for a fifth term as senator. Perhaps even more ominously, Reid’s son Rory also happens to be the chairman of the Clark County Commission and is running for governor of Nevada.

It gets stranger, however:

In Texas, there have been reports of votes for Republican Gubernatorial candidate Rick Perry being switched to the Green Party’s Deb Shafto and votes for Democrat candidate Bill White being shifted to show Rick Perry, again using touchscreen technology.

Fenway urges everybody to ask for paper ballots instead. Instapundit, the technophile’s technophile, has been doing the same for years.

I am however wondering if “Baghdad Bob” Pelosi knows something about the election none of us do. Which makes it all the more imperative to show up and vote. In democracies, there’s generally a limit above which vote fraud cannot be hidden successfully. This means that if the election isn’t close, either the cheating doesn’t affect the outcome, or the cheating would have to be so brazen that it would come out and bring about the perpetrator’s downfall.

Let’s make sure it ain’t close, and that retail cheating or below-radar-limit wholesale cheating won’t matter.

A gentry, not an elite

Instapundit has been riffing for a few days now on the theme of the American ruling class being a credentialed gentry, not an elite — as well as being “credentialed, not educated”.

Angelo Codevilla’s article and book entitled “The Ruling Class” make a similar point. Let me illustrate this by comparing the USA with France.

At least as much as the USA, in fact even moreso, France is being ruled by the New Class. Not just are very few of its elected officials outsiders to the elite, but arguably the greater part of executive power is vested in a permanent, unelected, civil service bureaucracy. Not only are most of the “elite” politicians, and essentially all of the senior bureaucrats, just graduates of a few top tertiary institutions, but the lion’s share of those not in a technical or medical specialty are graduate of just a single institution: the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration/National School for [Public] Administration).The French refer to this system as “l’ENArchie” and to the members as “les enarques” — and indeed, “enarchy”  would seem to be an appropriate name for such a closed “insider” government.

However, arrogant as this elite may be, and unbecoming as intellectual arrogance is in general, at least these people have something to be arrogant about. Admission to the ENA, and admission to the upper ranks of the civil service, are strictly by competitive exams graded anonymously. The end result is not only much more meritocratic than the US system, but (despite a certain homogeneity imposed by the common education) France’s New Class is ideologically more diverse than its US counterpart. All parts of the political spectrum can be found in its ranks.

In comparison, the US “ruling class” is increasingly becoming, as both Codevilla and Reynolds argue, a clique that admits newcomers based not on raw talent, but on how well they fit in with the existing members in terms of social backgrounds and sensitivities. Once upon a time, an Ivy League honors degree may have guaranteed an education as broad and deep as anything one can (still, albeit with more difficulty than yesteryear) gain in Europe. Exchanges with recent graduates of “elite” journalism schools or “studies” programs at Ivy League schools will very quickly disabuse you of that notion. Nowadays, once admitted to such a program, students are notoriously underworked and undereducated.

This “credentialed gentry” (Reynolds’ term), aside from being every bit as shallow as the current resident of 1600 Penn Ave, through self-selection and peer pressure has become an intellectual echo chamber and “mutual admiration society” (less family-friendly bloggers would use a word starting with “circle”) that is not only becoming ever more alienated from the “country class” but increasingly detached from objective reality.

In the real world, if you have an impressive marketing campaign for dogfood yet sales lag because the dogs don’t like the food, this is a business failure. In the rarified world of postmodern academia, the marketing campaign is all that counts, and the dogs that refuse to eat the food must surely be suffering from a ‘false consciousness’. A country being ruled by such people would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.

Let us tell them loudly, a week from now, that the joke has become stale and we are tired of being its props.

Operation Thoughtcrime: NPR fires Juan Williams

Tom Smith calls it punishing a thoughtcrime, and that is exactly what it is. In the course of upbraiding Bill O’Reilly about his views on Islam, 9/11, and the Ground Zero Mosque, the black maverick liberal NPR commentator and Fox News contributor Juan Williams mentioned that he felt “on guard” when he saw plane passengers in full Islamic garb. I would not wish to feed all the people — liberal or conservative — who felt that way as I would be bankrupted in seconds. (Then again, Molière’s Tartuffe had nothing on the holier-than-thou hypocrites of the American gentry left.)

Immediately Juan Williams found himself out of a job at NPR. While pressure from CAIR (whose despicable spokes-“organ” was utterly demolished by Megyn Kelly on Fox) surely contributed to this decision, there is little doubt that his appearances on Fox News stuck in NPR’s craw. (In fact, an article on NPR’s own website asserts the same.) Methinks they were just looking for an excuse to fire him. (An internal  memo about the firing is a study in self-righteousness and laughable assertions of neutrality.  Besides, the oh-so-intellectual head of NPR — a self-appointed expert in psychiatry — ought to know the difference between “principal” and “principle”. )

Fox News are of course having a field day, and the network offered him a $2M deal within hours. However, as rounded up here, NPR may have scored an own-goal (or “stepped on its own Johnson”, as they say in the South), as liberal and conservative commentators alike think NPR went too far this time. (I cannot remember the last time Whoopi Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh agreed on anything.)

Several GOP senators are calling for the defunding of NPR. I personally don’t give a rat’s backside that there is a New-class Preening Radio out there that is exactly that — but let the New Class pay for its own feelgood station.

As a parting remark, the banishment of long-time valued contributors over trivial offenses after they start contributing at rival outlets is something that… hmm, where did I last see this in the blogosphere?

UPDATE: NPR has one more journalist that appears regularly on Fox News (and, like Juan Williams, is a reliably liberal voice there). And guess what: Media Matters has started going after Mara Liasson. And guess which radical leftist tycoon is a recent big-time donor to both NPR and Media Matters? Yup, got it in one…

UPDATE 2: The NPR CEO meanwhile apologized over the psychiatry remark. See also this WSJ op-ed by a Muslim (!) who shares Juan Williams’ apprehension. Also don’t miss John Fund and James Taranto there. “Public radio vs. the public” indeed.

UPDATE 3: Via Facebook, “Ma Sands” points to a dissident “karma is a real [female canine]” view.

UPDATE 4: moderate Muslims speak out against the firing. on the grounds that forcing people to shut up is not the way to create a dialogue. Of course, this presupposes the left-liberal gentry has any more interest in dialogue than George Orwell’s “Inner Party” did.

Insty, in his roundups (see also here and here), also seems to think NPR went further than even they can get away with.

Insty quotes former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Washington Post: “Williams was wrong about the likelihood of a Muslim in traditional garb being a terrorist — Muslims who wear Western clothing and speak English with Marxist-Islamist vocabulary are vastly more likely to be suicide bombers in the West than a devout Muslim in [traditional garb]. But while his manner may have been clumsy, Williams was right to suggest that there is a troubling nexus between the modern Islamic identity and the embrace of terrorism as a holy act.”

VFW dissolves VFW-PAC

Earlier we reported on the outrage among Veterans of Foreign Wars members (and milbloggers) about the bizarre endorsements made by VFW’s political action committee — which included such well-known “supporters” of our troops as Barbara Boxer, “Baghdad” Jim McDermott, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Alan Grayson,…

Looks like the VFW leadership took matters into their own hands.

It is now evident to most of the VFW leadership, both National and especially the departments, that the VFW has been subjected to extreme negative publicity throughout the nation, and the recent endorsement decisions have, in fact, harmed the VFW’ s reputation and future ability to fulfill our mission.

I cannot let this erosion of public support for our great organization continue. The apparent lack of the committee to address these concerns will lead to a proposal by me, as Commander-in-Chief, to amend the by-laws at the 112th National Convention for the purpose of dissolving the PAC. Meanwhile, under the authority granted to me as Commander-in-Chief in section 619 of the VFW National By-Laws and under section 620 of the Manual of Procedure, I am withdrawing all PAC appointments effective October 15, 2010.

Let’s chalk up one little victory for common sense.

Zombie and the Heinlein Political Compass

In an otherwise very interesting post on how the original ’60s counterculturists and today’s Tea Party may have more in common than they realize, Zombie proposes yet another version of the political spectrum/compass. As I have never had much use for the simplistic “left/right” or “conservative/liberal” divide, I’ve always been intrigued by attempts to come up with something more thorough.

One can, of course, easily add so many variables that one can no longer see the forest for all the trees. One would end up having to do something akin to what statisticians call “principal component analysis”: trying to explain as much as possible of the variation in a dataset using as few variables (or fixed linear combinations of them) as possible. Many attempts have been made: this Wikipedia article, while it obviously has numerous flaws, is a good starting point for reading.

Actually, if I were to give Zombie’s spectrum a name other than the “Zombie spectrum”, I might call it the Heinlein Political Compass. Its two main axes directly refer to two of my favorite Heinlein aphorisms:

A. “Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” (Time Enough for Love (1973) and The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978)).

B. “Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.” (Starship Troopers, Ch. 8 )

This former dictum corresponds to Zombie’s horizontal axis (degree of government control). In the well-known “smallest political quiz” (a.k.a. the Nolan Chart), this variable is split up in two axes, which represent economic and personal liberties. (“The [social] conservative wants the government out of your wallet and in your bedroom; the liberal wants it out of your bedroom and in your wallet; the authoritarian wants it in both and the libertarian in neither”, as the common folksy description goes.)

The latter dictum defines Zombie’s vertical axis, belief in, vs. skepticism about, the malleability of human nature. Stalinists, Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge take one extreme position (best illustrated by the Soviet regime’s approval of the anti-hereditary theories of Lysenko), while Nazism, with its belief in complete racial determinism, takes the other extreme. In more temperate climes one might find, on the upper half of the axis, the liberal who daydreams of people giving up armed conflict or financial self-interest, and on the lower half of the axis, the hard-nosed conservative who may love world peace and lovingkindness every bit as much as the liberal but simply accepts the fact that man isn’t wired that way.

Anyhow, without further ado:

The Zombie/Heinlein chart bears a more than superficial resemblance to Jerry Pournelle’s Political Axes. Pournelle (who has multiple academic degrees) wrote his political science thesis on how people’s political orientations cannot be explained by a single axis. He ended up picking two main ones:

• “Attitude toward the State”: varying from state worship at one (totalitarian) extreme to the state as the ultimate evil at the other (anarchist) extreme
• “Attitude toward planned social progress”.

This latter axis, while strongly correlated with the Zombie/Heinlein vertical axis, is not identical to it. One can still believe in some form of planned social progress (such as trying to undo discrimination against certain groups — or for that matter, in favor of specific groups) while being skeptical that human nature will ever fundamentally change. Note, for example, that 200 years ago the idea of slavery being a moral outrage was considered revolutionary, while nowadays, almost nobody would consider buying and selling human beings as anything other than a moral outrage. Yet I would be hard-pressed to say that human motivations and urged changed in any significant way — only the rules by which the game is played have fundamentally changed.

On a Sabbath note: Both Judaism and Xianity are ambivalent on the “malleability” axis. Certain Christian core beliefs (such as that in original sin) would appear to favor the “innate” half-axis, while others (such as the belief in the transformative nature of ‘accepting Jesus’) point in the other direction. Some interdenominational faultlines cross that axis: compare the Quaker insistence on total pacifism with “Just War theory” (originally Roman Catholic), for instance.

Meanwhile, the Jewish belief in “Tikkun Olam” (literally “healing the world”) would seem to fall on the “malleable” half of the vertical axis, and has been (successfully ab)used by some liberal Jewish theologians to sell Jews on the liberal orthodoxy du jour. However, Jewish rabbinical thought is full of statements that point in the other direction, from mundane skeptical attitudes such as “if you are planting a seedling and they come tell you the Messiah is coming, finish planting and then go greet the Messiah” to the fundamental belief that every human being has innate altruistic (“yetzer tov”, literally “good impulse”) and egoistic (“yetzer hara”, literally “bad impulse”) — and that it is good that human beings are this way, as “were it not for the yetzer hara , nobody would marry, build a house, or beget children” (Genesis Rabbah 9:7).

TIME abandoning the sinking USS 0bamatanic?

Get this (via Jennifer Rubin):

Barack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment. And it is too late for him to do anything about this predicament until after November’s elections.

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.

Wall Street Journal editorial? Fox News? Pajamas Media? No… Mark Halperin in Time Magazine. Adds Jennifer:

The mainstream media, it seems, are cutting their losses. They invested enormous time, credibility, and emotion in bolstering their chosen candidate. But he hasn’t panned out, and new power players are headed to Washington. So it’s time to scramble back to some semblance of realistic coverage and concede that all those “accomplishments” in the past two years didn’t accomplish anything — not an economic recovery, not political ascendancy for Obama, not electoral success for Democrats, and not an era of bipartisan harmony. Just the opposite.

Now, don’t get your hopes up. As soon as viable 2012 presidential contenders appear on the stage or the GOP Congress faces off with Obama, expect the press to return to blocking and tackling for the president. But the magic is gone, the spell is broken. The press has figured out two years later than many of us that Obama is simply another liberal pol — and, as it turns out, an extraordinarily unpleasant and incompetent one.

The always pithy Instaman adds: “Hey, [the media]’ll go down for you, but they won’t go down with you. . . .” Actually, I was thinking of a different preposition to describe the relationship of the MSM with the Naked Emperor.

And let me add something. The moment the New Class/Ruling Class can produce a standard bearer for liberal left policies that is even marginally less of a disaster, they will drop 0bama like a stone and start extolling this one as a savior. Like in this song about the music industry.

UCSB physicist Hal Lewis resigns from the American Physical Society with a screed against climate alarmism and its enablers

Watts Up With That reports that UCSB physicist Hal Lewis (more about him here) resigned from the American Physical Society with a blistering resignation letter in which he dares to call the organization’s position on AGW:

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.- Hal Lewis

Read More at Watts Up With That? who call the letter the scientific equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church gate at Wittenberg.

10/10/10 post: the original “Powers of Ten” movie, and a reflection

In honor of today being 10/10/10, the original “Powers of Ten” movie has been posted on YouTube by its original authors. Here it is (watch on YouTube to view at 480p resolutions):

There is the mysterious passage in Exodus 33:20, where G-d says to Moses: “for none shall see My Face and live”. Elie Wiesel used to interpret this as “…and live as before”. Eventually Moses is allowed to “see” G-d, but not his face. My mental image of this, reading the passage for the first time, was of Moses being shown something a bit akin to this movie, but in an infinitely more vivid fashion: the radical perspective of just how insignificant man is on the scale of the Universe (and its Maker), and how man actually fits in the context of the Universe, is something very few people at the time would have been truly (emotionally, not just intellectually) able to grasp without surviving the experience — or being forever changed.

In the words of one of the greatest poets ever to grace the English language:

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And thou, O L-rd, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before…

Are the VFW endorsing anti-military candidates?!

This is so insane as well as counterintuitive on every level that I just have to pull myself away from overwhelming meatspace stuff to blog about it.

Blackfive reports that VFW-PAC, the political action committee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, has decided not only to endorse Lt.Col. Allen West’s opponent, but to endorse the following list of “friends” of the military (all of them Deemocrats):

Barbara Boxer, Alcee Hastings, Barbara Lee, Steny Hoyer, Barbara Mikulsky, Chris VanHollen, John Dingell, Chuckie Schumer, Pat Leahy and Patty Murray

Barbara Boxer — Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! Patty Murray — Whiskey Tango Echo Foxtrot?! Barbara Lee (D-LSD)?!? (Head explodes.) My father-in-law (z”l), who was very active in VFW, must be spinning in his grave.

The full list (via the Blackfive comments) is even more insane, if that were possible. Alan Grayson?! Jim McDermott?!?

I am asking all of you to join me in contacting the VFW to protest this development; supporting a non-vet over LTC West was the last straw.

Call the VFW at 1-202-544-5868.  Email them at: vfwpac@vfw.org.

Oh yeah, and before I forget- Remember when Obama wanted to charge wounded troops for medical care?  VFW supported him on that, too.  READ IT HERE.

VFW- we are done here.  Fix it, or be gone as a veterans organization.

As it turns out, the VFW-PAC itself is at odds with the national leadership. To wit, this VFW press release:

VFW Leadership at Odds with VFW-PAC

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 8, 2010 – The national line officers of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) are at odds with the VFW Political Action Committee (PAC), calling the methodology process used by the PAC “seriously flawed at best this year and in immediate need of extensive review,” in the wake of the recent congressional endorsements made by the committee.

“Even though the law requires that VFW-PAC be a separate organization, the acronym ‘VFW’ is attached to the committee and the natural assumption is that the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States is somehow making the endorsement decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth, but perception is reality,” said National Commander Richard Eubank.

“Obviously, an organization’s political positions have to reflect the opinions of its members. But those opinions can’t be perceived as ‘off the wall,’ and the methodology used this year to grade candidates obviously is skewed in favor of the incumbent. That isn’t fair, and it actually subverts the democratic process.”

Because of the controversy surrounding the endorsements, VFW line officers have decided to bring the question of continued existence of the PAC to the floor during the 112th VFW national convention in August.

Richard L. Eubank
National Commander

Richard L. DeNoyer
Sr. Vice Commander

John E. Hamilton
Jr. Vice Commander

UPDATE 10/12/2010:

Blackfive’s “Mr. Wolf” is not impressed. More here (via C2).

Campaign sign of the year

Via Don Surber and Insty (who says “Heh”).