ISIS Was the J.V.

Many people have mocked Pres. Obama’s stupidity for calling the ISIS terror group, “The J.V.” and being the equivalent of a team impersonating the Los Angeles Lakers (O, apparently hadn’t been keeping up with the Lakers’ on-court follies).

But I’m here to defend our Joke Warfare commander in chief.

He can learn.

When ISIS suddenly became more dangerous, The One began to sniffily refer to them as “ISIL,” demonstrating that they had moved up to varsity level.

And now he’s referred to them as Daesh, showing that he’s acknowledging them as professionals. Clearly they’ve earned their Lakers’ jerseys in his eyes.

That he seems to use the terms ISIL and Daesh interchangeably, well, I can only do so much explaining of his mental infirmity.

Pillory Hillary

Remember way back when, in the 1992 campaign, Pres. George H.W. Bush was mocked when he was (allegedly) stumped by a supermarket price scanner? He was portrayed as out of touch with ordinary people; a scion of the insulated, pampered Washington life. Such a man was clearly unfit for office! Here’s the famous N.Y. Times story to remind you.

Reporter Andrew Rosenthal (a truer hack there never was) wrote: “This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life. Today, for instance, he emerged from 11 years in Washington’s choicest executive mansions to confront the modern supermarket.” Rosenthal had his clueless puppet “shake his head in wonder,” at the amazing gizmos he saw at a World’s Fair convention of grocery store technology. It’s amazing that Rosenthal didn’t have Bush in a straw boater, chortling, “Gosh, Jeeves, what a wonder!”

Despite the fact that Rosenthal fabricated much of the story (he wasn’t there though he writes as if he was, gathered the material from the pool report and got several important details wrong and made up several others, etc.), I’m not here to rip him (as much as he deserves it) but rather here to ask, where’s the same reporting on Hillary Clinton?

We’ve learned from her released emails (which she tried to hide and then delete) that Mrs. Clinton, far more insulated from everyday than Mr. Bush was, has no idea how any modern technology works. She seems to have sent large numbers of emails asking her aides how her various communications widgets worked, how they plugged-in, what channel “Homeland” was on, etc. In fact, as part of her defense, she has pleaded ignorance of modern technology and said she needed her home-brew email system because she couldn’t handle more than one communications device at one time. That doesn’t even make sense.

So NYT, is such a technologically out-of-touch person fit for office in a tech-happy world?

I’m pretty sure I know what their answer would be if it was even possible for them to entertain the question.

The Enemy Which Dare Not Speak Its Name

Actually the enemy, crazed Muslims, happily says its name, it’s our cultural elite that refuses to acknowledge that we have an enemy, we are at war and the name of the enemy is Islam (AKA Muslims, radical Muslims and similar names).

This is a follow-up to my earlier post, The Missing Muslims.

Watching sports this weekend again led to a mystery — somebody did something in Paris recently but it’s a mystery as to who it was or even what it really was. According to one of the Euroleague basketball commentators, leading up to a moment of silence, something “violent” happened there but the Euroleague was all about peace. What could it have been?

One other sports commentator nit to pick — I believe it was Paul Romanuk while doing the Maple Leafs/Bruins game on NHL Network Saturday night managed to get in a jab at U.S. Republicans. After showing a clip of some player or coach in a locker room repeating himself over and over in answer to questions lobbed at him, Romanuk said (from my memory), “He was repeating himself like a Republican repeats talking points.” Hey, Paulie, when are those Democrat jokes coming? Maybe something like, “The ice is so white that Democrats won’t play on it!”

Arrrrggghh! Hockey is one of the few refuges from political correctness, NHL, don’t let Canadian turds ruin it too.

While I’m at it, let’s go after another enemy – politically correct racism, as practiced in sports.

As NASCAR winds its season up, riddle me this: Why is it that NASCAR is pressured to stop the endless country music playing? Why are there complaints that NASCAR’s audience is too white and it needs to change itself to “attract” minorities? That its events are in “white” areas like the South (I can’t recall any race tracks in inner city Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.) or rural majority white states like New Hampshire?

Why does Major League Baseball make a big to-do about its “Urban Youth Academies,” designed to recruit more black athletes to play baseball (rather than, say, basketball and football). Why does MLB have a bizarre obsession with Jackie Robinson? For instance every team, even those not in existence when Robinson played, were required to retire his number 42? Why is it the only number featured onstage at MLB-owned MLB Network? Why do people like Chris Rock publicly whine that there aren’t enough black players in baseball yet they would go into nuclear meltdown if someone said that there aren’t enough white players in the NBA or that the rap music played at NBA arenas might be cut back some in favor of something “white”? (Ask former Atlanta Hawks part-owner Bruce Levenson about that last point.)

Despite claims decades ago that whites would abandon sports when black athletes appeared, no such thing ever happened. Yet we have the reverse now — that blacks won’t go to sports wherein they don’t see “enough” black faces competing. Obviously in NASCAR it’s pretty much impossible to see the skin color of the driver but other sports might be subject to such racism. White people flock to the NBA and NFL. Are black people that racist that they won’t go to baseball or NASCAR because of skin colors? I dunno. I see plenty of black people at baseball games.

No one is suggesting a “white” or “suburb” academy for the NBA, NFL (or, for that matter, MLB). Why? Well, obviously it’s a stupid idea. Yet the idea becomes sacred when flipped on its head.

But why should anyone care? Frankly, I find the obsession with skin color to be tiresome. Like most sports fans, I want to see the best — not the skin color. I would love to never have to write about race ever again but liberals will never let it be.

Thought of the Day

That which a liberal can’t control it will attempt to destroy.

Thought of the Day

Debt is bondage.

A Bold Suggestion

That didn’t take long. No sooner was the ink dry on the new national right to gay marriage, than certain folks then began demanding that churches have their tax-exempt status removed if they don’t fall in line and start performing gay marriage services (and with a smile too!). Religion-schmeligion, they crow.

That the destruction of some portion of religious life in the United States was one target of the pro-gay marriage movement was always suspected by some. It seems pretty clear that was true, though one suspects that proponents will deny it until they are blue in the face. The sudden and eagerness to put churches out of business if they don’t toe the line would seem to reveal that is a falsehood.

With that in mind I propose to go even further. How about eliminating the whole 501(c)(3) and other nonprofit, tax-exempt designation?

It makes sense in the wake of the Supreme Court’s extra-expansive reading of the 14th Amendment (Hey, look what we found buried here that no one had ever seen before — a national right to gay marriage!). Some people have countered that since we are using an expansionary view of the “equal protection clause” these days, why not go all the way and take down the progressive tax system? After all, it’s discriminatory against high-earners and gives non-taxpayers an “unfair” advantage vis a vis taxes. So let’s take it to its logical conclusion – everybody pay taxes at the same rate (maybe even same amount?).

Admittedly, relieving them of their tax advantages would doom a lot of religious institutions, especially historically black churches and small rural congregations. They’d need to develop a new business model. Also, the whole private school/college/university complex would take a huge hit. Art and other education foundations would be annihilated, with only the fittest surviving. And a lot of good conservative social and political groups would take it on the chin, never to rise again.

I know this sounds rough but this is only “fair” to the rest of us in the tax-paying private sector. It now gives us “equal protection.” Yes, tax-exempt was meant for certain good societal purposes but what the hey, so was traditional man-woman marriage and we see where that went.

Besides all that loot that will flow into government coffers there will also be secondary benefits. Most of the schools to be hammered are liberal, run by liberals for the indoctrination of youth along with promotion of liberal values. How many of them will survive? And this move will hamper all those arrogant, self-appointed  liberal political, women’s, racial, health, consumer and environmental groups. Labor unions too! The left has long used these as shelters and marshaling yards, all the while clucking that such groups were too good to pay taxes. They’ve used them like the communist North Vietnamese used the shelter of Cambodia to launch attacks into South Vietnam.

Seriously. The 501(c)(3) world has become dominated by the left. Massive foundations founded by conservative industrialists have been co-opted by liberals slowly over the years and decades. Other pleasant-sounding groups such as the Campfire Girls or any number of women’s groups are taken over by left-leaning activists who push conservatives out. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like takeovers are the purest distillation of O’Sullivan’s Law – any group not specifically conservative will become liberal over time.

The tax-exempt foundation/group world has become the left’s playground, its training ground. It uses these groups as soldiers to attack conservatives, traditionalists, businesses, pretty much anyone it doesn’t like. It uses it to indoctrinate through “education” and destroy through “lawfare” and agitation. You can be treated to the ultimate folly of tax-exempt lefty groups demanding that everyone else’s taxes be raised. The sooner the swamp is drained, the better for America.

These people want everyone one to be treated the same in every microscopic detail. Then let’s get to it. Get a job in the real world. Pay real taxes. Suffer under the same regulations that the rest of us do. No 501(c)(3) tax-exempt waivers.

A Lost Thought (Because We Constantly Need Reminding)

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775