By Selwyn Duke
It wasn’t just that ABC’s Brian Ross was wrong in suggesting that the “Jim Holmes” he found on a Tea Party website was the same man who committed the heinous crime in Aurora, Colorado. It’s that his comment was indicative of stupidity and corruption.
By Selwyn Duke
Just as mighty contests can rise from trivial things, mighty principles are often slain in their name. And good examples of this are often found in sports.
There’s an Olympic runner named Oscar Pistorius who has made headlines for two very unusual reasons. First, he has no legs below the knee. Second, he’s not competing in the Special Olympics — but on the grand stage set to commence in London this month.
Pistorius, a South African whose blade-like prosthetics have earned him the nickname “blade runner,” qualified for the Olympic 400-meter event. And he did it by beating able-bodied competitors. This makes his story inspirational to many, an accomplishment one may think should only be applauded. Yet there is another side to it: Some say that Pistorius may have an unfair advantage.
This claim was made most recently by American Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson, who said that while he considers Pistorius a friend, it’s ultimately wrong to allow prosthetic-wearing competitors to square off against the able-bodied. Writes the Telegraph:
Read the rest here.
By Selwyn Duke
When Barack Obama said in Roanoke, Virginia, recently that “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” he wasn’t all wrong. In fact, he knows well someone whose life thus attests. This person is a man of mixed race who billed himself as black. Growing up in a very liberal state, he was surrounded by guilt-ridden white liberals who told him his flatulence smelled like roses. He benefited from scholarships granted on the basis of race and other types of affirmative action, and was elevated beyond his capacities despite being a marijuana-addled, mediocre student. He wrote a few things (poorly), but “his” magnum opus was penned by a talented terrorist friend whom, he has said, he barely knew. He then vied for public office, and won a state seat by running unopposed. But the best legs-up were yet to come. When he decided to run for the U.S. Senate, he had a prostrate media in his corner. And when he ran for the presidency, they cranked it up into high gear, making this nobody a household name and his nefarious past disappear.
But there’s a kicker here, too: Obama didn’t even get his you-didn’t-get-there-on-your-own speech on his own. It’s essentially the same speech that Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren gave in September 2011 when she said, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”
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By Selwyn Duke
It’s now well established that Chief Justice John Roberts had ulterior motives for upholding ObamaCare. The usual theories involve his being concerned about the Court’s, or maybe even his own, losing of respect by seeming to operate in a partisan manner. But, to ask what may appear a rhetorical question, why such concern about respect? Is it just vanity, the desire to be viewed as a font of temperance and intellectualism? Perhaps. But there actually could be a more tangible area of self-interest.
By Selwyn Duke
Dozens of so-called “Gay Pride” parades took place in cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco this past weekend, and they bring to mind why pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. And the reminder is especially poignant this year, as bare naked politics mixed with the leather-clad revelry.
Many of us have heard the “gay pride” stories the media are mum about: the naked displays and simulated sex acts that, in any other context, would land you in handcuffs not designed for kink. But this year the nefarious goings-on included an invasion by hordes of Barack Obama campaign staffers, who zealously plied the fertile recruiting grounds that are the parades. In fact, writes the New York Times, “The parades could have been confused for Obama campaign rallies. In Chicago on Sunday, 300 of his campaign staff members and volunteers marched down Halsted Street through the heart of the gay district to chants of ‘Four more years! Four more years!’"
Such friendly receptions generally don’t breed shyness, and the Obama operatives were no exception. Writes the Christian Post’s Paul Stanley:
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By Selwyn Duke
Joining the ranks of drug pushers are what I would call polling-place pushers. These are people who run get-out-the-vote drives or at least agitate in that regard, and they are more to be feared than any corner dope peddler.
As an example, pollster John Zogby recently lamented how the young people who catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency are now losing interest in voting. He said to the League of Women Voters (LWV), “I truly am worried about today’s twenty-somethings.” I have seen them move from hope and grand expectations for themselves and their world to anxiety and disillusionment.”
That’s one way of saying it. A more accurate way is this: They’ve made that common transition from naivety to cynicism, which often happens when you’re slapped in the face by reality — especially reality you voted for.
This transition is no surprise, as naivety and cynicism are actually two sides of the same coin. After all, the naïve person and the cynic will tend to see others, respectively, through rose-colored glasses and in dark colors regardless of the moral status of those observed. Thus, neither judges others very well and both are defined by ignorance of reality. This is why the same people are so often both naïve sorts and cynics — at different points in life. The young starry-eyed idealist becomes the old cynic because he had the wrong ideals. And this is perhaps inevitable unless the underlying cause, ignorance, is remedied.
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By Selwyn Duke
Earlier this week I wrote about North Dakota’s extraordinary referendum to ban all property taxes. Quite predictably, the state’s residents reacted to it in a very ordinary way: They defeated it by a wide margin.
This isn’t surprising since people, especially conservatives, are generally uncomfortable with revolutionary ideas. Well, good ones, anyway. This is why only a third of colonists supported the American Revolution; the rest had to be dragged along to the Promised Land kicking and screaming. It’s also why our Founding Fathers were not conservative — or Conservatives.
Assenting to thoroughly stupid but fashionable ideas is a different matter, however. And this is why 67 percent of North Dakotans also agreed on Tuesday to allow the abolishment of the University of North Dakota’s “Fighting Sioux” nickname and Indian-head logo.
In fairness, it should be mentioned that the pathetic, politically-correct NCAA had threatened the university with sanctions if it didn’t comply. Really, though, not only would the sanctions not be that severe, whatever happened to the old American spirit of spending “millions for defense, not a penny for tribute”? Today we spend millions for social engineering, but I guess a penny of sacrifice in the sports arena is too much to ask.
Read the rest here.
