Friday Afternoon Roundup - Changing the Conversation

 The entire Breitbart-Sherrod-NAACP-Tea Party mess is a lesson in how the left tries to sabotage and undermine conversations that don't suit it. It's a real time event version of what the Daily Caller chronicles in the Jornolist archives show about the media strategizing against Palin.

The Democrats used their NAACP organization to try and brand the Tea Party as racist, thereby changing the conversation from criticisms of the Obama Administration, to an attack on the Tea Party itself, in order to delegitimize it, and discourage people from participating it. Breitbart's Sherrod attack was the equivalent of the "plate glass window" strategy that Jornolist members proposed to use by protecting Jeremiah Wright, by going on the offense against a Republican figure. The entire Sherrod soap opera served as a warning about the political uses of racism, and it changed the conversation from whether the Tea Party is racist, to whether the NAACP is racist. Breitbart understands this. Many of his critics at some conservative blogs don't.

These are ugly tactics, but they may be the only kind that work in an environment dominated by ruthless far left agendas in both the media and the political sphere.

Similarly the Daily Caller's Jornolist archives have made the invisible wizards behind the media coverage into the subjects, which is something they don't want to be, unless it's the occasional flattering profile. The Jornolist archives going public undermines the wall of silence surrounding the media club.

In the 2008 election, the media left kept changing the conversation over and over again. It won in part by being able to do that enough times, that the real issues were never heard. But now the left is having trouble doing it. They've tried to launch attacks on the opposition. They've tried glamor and photo ops. But it's still the economy, stupid. And they have found no real way to change the topic for very long.

So now it's come down to bare knuckles. And Breitbart has demonstrated that with a limited budget, and no official political backing, he can still change the conversation. And seriously impact what is going. Which is more than many of his conservative critics have been able to do.

And until they can do that, it might be time to get out of Breitbart's way.

Moving on, remember when George W. Bush was being blasted by liberals for saying, "You're either with us, or you're against us." Bush was talking about the terrorists. But liberals have revived the term for a domestic purge from the party.

He said he supports primaries as needed to keep the party's moral compass. "We have to do our vetting process. You're either with us, or you're against us in the progressive movement in America," he said.

So "You're with us or against us" is wrong when applied to terrorists, but right when applied to conservative Democrats.

And that highlights the differences between Republicans who wanted to use strong tactics to protect all Americans from terrorists, vs Democrats who want to use harsh tactics to win their ideological wars in order to repress all Americans.

As a mirror of what's to come, let's take a look at Germany

"I think it's sensible that people who knowingly live unhealthily carry a responsibility for it in a financial respect," said Mr Wanderwitz, who is also head of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats's group of young parliamentarians

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Recently the German Teachers' Association recommended weighing children in class each day and reporting the seriously overweight to social services, who would have the power to remove them to clinics.

Although opposition politicians blasted the "fat-tax" proposal, researchers at the Jacobs University in Bremen claimed its work proved that the majority of the public would back a tax on people whose unhealthy lifestyles landed them in hospital or under other medical care.

Crazy? If Michelle Obama had her way, it wouldn't be. And this is what the Culture of Mandatory that the left is imposing leads to. Mandatory government controls over everything. Constant repression and divide and conquer tactics to keep the population from turning against them.

And what else is Germany leading the way in... openly surrendering its sovereignty by raising the idea of importing police from Muslim countries to patrol its streets.

The police union for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) stunned Germans this week when it announced it would bring policemen from Turkey to help patrol the turbulent streets of some immigrant neighbourhoods in NRW cities. With this announcement, the state’s police administration is admitting domestic police forces can no longer handle violent Turkish and other youths of immigrant backgrounds inhabiting these quarters.

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According to Die Welt, the Turkish police would patrol the immigrant Turkish areas in their own uniforms together with German policemen.

Which would mean a Turkish occupation force functioning in the heart of Europe. And if Germany doesn't go for it, how long before France decides that it might be a good solution. Especially with automatic weapons being used against French police.

Sarkozy's proposed Mediterranean Union might pave the way for Muslim occupation forces patrolling Paris. For European authorities, the advantage of such an arrangement would be no more worries about racism or the use of force. Of course it would also mean an accelerated course to Eurabia, and the last gaps of Europe.

Farfetched, again not really. Let's turn to the UK for a moment...where its defense secretary states that Britain no longer has the cash to defend itself from every threat,

But Dr Fox has given the strongest signal yet that it will have to give up one or more of these capabilities, which have been maintained at the same time as contributing to collective security pacts such as Nato. “We don’t have the money as a country to protect ourselves against every potential future threat,” he said. “We just don’t have it.”

The military had to be configured only for “realistic potential future threats”, he said, hinting at a substantial cut to conventional forces such as tanks and fighter aircraft.

“We have to look at where we think the real risks will come from, where the real threats will come from and we need to deal with that accordingly. The Russians are not going to come over the European plain any day soon,” he added.

...much like the Germans didn't.

Unfortunately the same thing has already happened in the US. We just don't talk about it. Clinton aggressively cut back on the military. The Bush Administration undid some of those cuts, but at the same time refocused on insurgent warfare, and dulled conventional American warfighting capability. We're much better at dealing with insurgents and terrorists, but we may not be ready for a conventional war anymore.

And the Obama Administration run by left wing radicals has redoubled its attack on the US military

Despite the C-17’s military importance and humanitarian utility, the Obama administration has signaled that it will stop purchasing the C-17. Yet the need for C-17s will continue to grow because each year older, less reliable, and less capable C-5A airlifters dating back to the 1960s are being retired from the fleet because they are over 40 years old and beginning to fail. C-17s are needed to fill the void. We will need more C-17s simply to maintain our military and humanitarian capabilities.

Yet if the administration gets its way and effectively shuts down the C-17 program, just a few short years down the road we taxpayers will have to pay out billions to ramp up a new plane and production line or we’ll be forced to go to the Russians or the French in hopes that they will bail us out by selling us or leasing to us second-rate airlift aircraft.

One might assume that the administration is cutting the C-17 program to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, but the cost of the needed five C-17s in 2011 is as little as $1.3 billion — total, not per plane. Choosing to cut the C-17 program to save only $1.3 billion in 2011, will cost U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars in the years that follow, and possibly make our military dependent upon the Russians or the French.

This “budget cutting” plan is like a homeowner refusing to patch a hole in their roof to arguably save $200 this month, when in the following months the repair costs will skyrocket into the thousands of dollars.

Additionally, with unemployment at or near record levels, why would we want to kill off the wide-body military aircraft business in the United States and effectively export those jobs to France or Russia? C-17 production supports over 30,000 jobs in 44 states and provides an annual economic impact of $5.8 billion to the U.S. economy.

If this sounds familiar, the Obama Administration did the same thing to NASA. The end result is that we have no space program. And NASA is now a self-esteem clinic for Muslims, and a playground for global warming fanatics. Apply that same paradigm to the military, and you wind up crippling international operations. Which may be exactly the goal. Not only today, but years into the future even when Obama is out of office.

But would someone like Rosa "Luxemburg" Brooks really want to do that? Do you even need to ask.

The situation is a good deal worse in Israel, where the IDF has been demoralized by constant "peace is around the corner" propaganda and rules of engagement that restrict soldiers from pretty much doing anything unless they can get the terrorists to sign a notarized letter first. Sharon's purge of generals critical of his Gaza plan and Olmert's reconfiguration of too much of the IDF as a domestic police forced, led to the disaster in Lebanon. There's no telling what might happen in a conventional war.

All this is making the free world look more and more like the 1930's, demoralized and unprepared.

Meanwhile in Israel, the radically activist Supreme Court doubled the jail sentence of Shahar Mizrahi, a police officer who shot a Muslim car thief while the latter was trying to run him over. This isn't that much of a surprise, considering the Supreme Court is radically left wing, anti-Israel, pro-Muslim and in general out of control.

"How children tell a policeman father, law-abiding, going to jail because he did his job as a cop?", He said. "I have a child of three and a half year old child. The little boy still did not understand all the drama going on, but the big boy and know. I'm going to tell him that now."

The truly obscene thing is that this is happening while terrorists are going free.

But the police have been the support for the radical left wing judiciary, and ministry of justice, which could not have terrorized so many conservative politicians, including the transparently fake rape case manufactured against former President Moshe Katzav, without them. So if the police is now starting to feel the sting, they might consider that they have more in common with the people they have been persecuting, than the people who have been giving them their marching orders.

Meanwhile Taysir Hayb, an IDF soldier, was just released after six and a half years in prison for accidentally shooting Tom Hurndall, a member of ISM, a radical pro-terrorist organization, which has endorsed terrorism, yet ISM's terrorist collaborators such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall who managed to get themselves killed while aiding terrorists, have been turned into martyrs for blood libels aimed at Israel.

Israel has meanwhile put on trial and convicted a number of soldiers and commanders. None of this has helped its image any. Instead every conviction is used by left wing groups as proof that Israel really is evil. Meanwhile stories such as the Arab rape case involving Sabbar Kashur are transformed into more propaganda ammunition to feed the raging endless hate against Israel and Jews.

As Lee Smith at Tablet magazine points out, this mainstreaming of hate operates via key media blogs that focus in on anti-Israel material, and then redistribute it.

If not quite as popular as adult-content sites, the anti-Israel blogosphere is a dirty little thrill that major U.S. media outfits have mainstreamed for the masses, the intellectual equivalent of the topless “Page Three” girls that British tabloids use to boost circulation. Among the dozens of blogs and websites obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby, Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss (a project of The Nation Institute), Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon, and Stephen Walt’s blog on ForeignPolicy.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) sit atop the junk-heap.

“Whenever one of these guys writes about me, I can tell without having looked at their blogs, because my inbox quickly fills with anti-Semitic invective,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and a frequent target of Weiss, Greenwald, and Walt. “Whenever I see a subject line with something like ‘You fascist Zionazi,’ it’s pretty much assured the link in the email will lead back to a post from one of these guys.”*

Some of these bloggers, like Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, were widely published journalists prior to their careers as Jew-baiters...

Jeffrey Goldberg believes that big media companies have morally blinded themselves to the ramifications of using anti-Semitism to attract readers. “I suppose that to the managers of Foreign Policy, traffic is traffic,” Goldberg says. “But in the course of building that traffic they’re surfacing some fairly dreadful invective about Jews. I don’t think they’d be comfortable surfacing the same kind of invective about African-Americans or other groups. But there seems to be a high tolerance for hosting a Jew-baiting blog.”

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While it is difficult and in some cases perhaps undesirable to keep reader-comment sections completely free of insults, racist slurs, paranoid rantings, and threats of violence, it is also the case that some authors and certain subjects, regardless of the author or argument, are more likely than others to stir up the cesspool. Robert Mackey’s The Lede blog at The New York Times serves up a steady diet of Israel-related stories that give hardcore anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic commenters a home at the paper but is energetic in removing the most egregious posts.

One might say that anti-semitism has become the new pornography of the left.

Via Boker TOv boulder, America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

At Real Americans Defend Israel, America - It is Time to Step Away from the Trash Heap ...

Most Americans grew up listening to the warnings of their parents "You will be judged by the company you keep" and "Choose your friends wisely". Common sense, correct?

For the past year and a half, since Obama took office, we have slowly slipped further away from commons sense teachings of not only our parents, but also away from the high morals and teachings of our founding fathers.

As the President has apologized to the world and many Islamic leaders, for America's existence, it has suddenly made me think that much like Iran's willingness to see Israel wiped off the face of the map, Obama has taken up that same banner of ideology, only he uses that banner against the very country he was elected to protect and defend - the United States of America.

Just as no person on earth is perfect, neither is any country led by imperfect men. However, America usually learned lessons from its mistakes and carried on and marched forward, always prepared to assist other nations whenever that "call" became necessary.

What has changed?

I believe what has changed is the friends America has been keeping lately. You know, those terrorist organizations that would not blink an eye to see you, me, our families and our nation destroyed. One example would be Sept. 11th, the darkest day I have lived through in over 65 years and what made the grief even more sorrowful was watching our enemies dancing the the streets, rejoicing while close to 3,000 American citizens died on one sunny morning in September.

...the entire thing is worth reading

Israpundit looks at a backlash in the IDF toward the constant probes

At Seraphic Secret, the horror of life in Gaza has been finally exposed... and there isn't a Starbucks anywhere in sight.

On a horrible closing note, here's a 2 year old Muslim girl being taught to hate Jews and Christians already. And this isn't happening in Gaza. It's happening in New York.

It's no wonder that concerns about a new American born generation of terrorists are rising. Because this is now here. All the way. Incidentally the little girl's replies about Jews and Christians are from a basic prayer that Muslims say every day and is at the beginning of the Koran.

Then he recited the Fatiha, which is the most common prayer in Islam: “In the name of god, Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. All praise is for Allah, our lord, the lord of the worlds, the compassionate, the merciful, master of the day of judgments. Oh, god, Allah, you alone we worship, and you alone we call on for help. Oh, Allah, guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have earned your wrath or of those who have lost the way.”

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Allah asserted that the two paths He described here are both misguided when He repeated the negation ‘not’. These two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them.

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This is why they were led astray. We should also mention that both the Christians and the Jews have earned the anger and are led astray, but the anger is one of the attributes more particular of the Jews.

This is not some random extremist craziness. This is mainstream Islam.