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November 23, 2010

Profile Muslims or Pat Down the Masses?

By Selwyn Duke

With all the bad press the TSA has received recently, we can’t be sure if the acronym stands for Transportation Security Administration, Touches Sensitive Areas or Truly Scandalous Attention. But, for sure, its pat downs and sci-fi radiation screeners give many of us another good reason to avoid the increasingly unfriendly skies. Yet while the TSA right now has supplanted the IRS as the bureaucracy we most love to hate, its policies are merely part of a longstanding cultural trend: the failure to recognize that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

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November 20, 2010

Saul Alinsky Meets Dr. Seuss: Obama Pens Children’s Book

By Selwyn Duke

When discussing a new study about liberals’ and conservatives’ favorite television shows recently, pundit Bill O’Reilly and his guests mentioned that liberals like works about “flawed people.” If this is so, they will certainly appreciate Barack Obama’s just published children’s book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters.

Much like Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” (which the author wrote for his 12-year-old son), Obama’s book was penned for his children Malia and Sasha — hence the subtitle A Letter to My Daughters. Unlike Kipling’s poem, however, I very much doubt his kids will be the better for reading it.

The book features 13 American “heroes” whose traits the president sees in his daughters. And it does include traditional figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein (I guess a bone had to be thrown to the dead-white-male set) and Neil Armstrong. Yet it also includes the troubled jazz great Billie Holiday; artist Georgia O’Keefe, who sometimes posed nude for photographs; and socialist Jane Addams, who, quite fittingly, was a community organizer.

Read the rest here.
November 16, 2010

U.S. Left: Onward Muslim Soldiers

By Selwyn Duke

When I think of modern America, conjured up is an image of a boxer who, while sometimes bobbing, weaving, blocking, and occasionally directing a blow with his right, intermittently hits himself in the head with his left. I also might then imagine how the other man in the ring would laugh upon witnessing the spectacle of an opponent who, inexplicably, does half his job for him.

The latest hard left thrown in our masochistic, self-flagellating land is the reaction to the Oklahoma constitutional amendment forbidding judges from using international or Sharia law when making decisions. First, and not surprisingly, a lawsuit was filed. The plaintiff was executive director of the Oklahoma CAIR chapter Muneer Awad, who claimed that the amendment’s targeting of Sharia violates First Amendment rights. This prompted U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange to block the measure by issuing a temporary restraining order that will remain in effect until a November 22 hearing. So, as is the modern American way, this issue will be hashed out in the courts.

More interesting, however, are the diverging reactions in the courts of public and pundit opinion. While most Americans are cheering the 70 percent of Oklahomans who passed the amendment, the left-wing media’s and fogosphere’s reaction is as predictable as the lawsuit: They are leveling accusations of bigotry against the good residents of the Sooner State. For example, Michael Stone at Examiner.com writes, “The law is an embarrassing absurdity that reflects an unflattering portrait of ignorance and bigotry on the part of many Oklahoma voters.” And NationalPost.com pulls no punches, stating right in a headline, “Anti-Sharia law in Oklahoma has smell of bigotry.”

Read the rest here.
November 10, 2010

Understanding the Election Results beyond Skin Deep

By Selwyn Duke

In just the way some voters believed that Obama’s 2008 ascendancy heralded a new era of hope-and-change leftist hegemony, it’s easy to view the November 2 elections as the beginning of an unstoppable tidal wave of Tea Party triumph. But while I can get caught up in moments just like anyone else — I awoke bug-eyed after staying up freakishly late watching election returns — I always bear in mind that politics is but a series of moments and that, in reality, it’s only in places such as England that tea time is a permanent fixture.

For sure, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Axis (which, lamentably, is still intact, although its shock troops have been decimated at the Battle of Midterm) put the fear of godernment into much of the electorate. Yet fear, like all emotion, is a transitory state. A cat may find itself fleeing from a donkey one day and an elephant the next.

And that was the difference this election: The independents who fled from the Republicans just two years ago ran from the Democrats last week. And while many want to view the results as a soulful sea change in America, the reality is that the same old patterns emerged.

Read the rest here.
November 4, 2010

Stinking in America: Is Not Washing the New PC Trend?

By Selwyn Duke

People such as me are often accused of wanting to return to the 19th century. But, if the New York Times is right about a new trend, some on the Left want to go back to the Middle Ages. What is that trend? Avoiding soap, deodorant, and even bathing regularly. Today, though, it’s often for environmental reasons.

It seems that top-notch Western hygiene has now joined SUVs, Wal-Mart, tobacco (not the wacky kind — it’s in fashion), guns, McDonald’s, and white males in the Museum of Politically Incorrect Persons, Places, and Things.

For example, Guardian writer Kira Cochrane tells us about 51-year-old environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, who boasts that he’s gotten his water consumption down to about “20 litres a day,” that he’s “as clean as everyone else,” and that he’s trying to reduce his “carbon footprint.”

If I were Donnachadh, I’d be more concerned about my stink footprint.

Read the rest here.
November 4, 2010

When the Democrat Party Left You Behind

By Selwyn Duke

Many years ago, a very nice lady with whom I was having a political discussion announced to me, “I’m a Democrat.” My immediate response was, “By birth or by choice?”

It’s a relevant question for many Americans, as some treat party affiliation as if it’s akin to ethnicity. It can work like this: Their pappy was a Democrat, and their grandpappy was a Democrat, and their great-grandpappy was a Democrat, so they have to be one, too. This is despite the fact that the party has changed along with the generations. Their grandfather is gone — and so is the party which he once supported.

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November 1, 2010

Caught Red-handed: CBS Reporters’ Scheme to Undermine Republican Joe Miller

By Selwyn Duke

In a case of JournoList redux, mainstream media reporters have again shown that their business is propaganda, not news. In a shocking voicemail accidentally left on the cell phone of Alaska GOP senatorial candidate Joe Miller’s spokesman, Randy DeSoto, journalists can be heard scheming to manufacture stories for the purposes of undermining the Republican’s campaign. Reporting on the story, WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein writes:

the journalists can be heard plotting to "find" a "child molester" among the politician's supporters.

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October 29, 2010

The Democrats’ Final Recourse: Massive Vote Fraud

By Selwyn Duke

The reports are rolling in from all over the country. A Craven County, NC resident attempts to vote a straight Republican ticket but his choices come up straight Democrat four times, despite receiving assistance from poll workers. In NC’s Lenoir County, registered Democrat Ervin Norville also tries to vote straight Republican but finds that his ballot has the names of several Democrat candidates selected. Boulder City, NV resident Joyce Ferrara says that when she and several others went to vote for Sharon Angle, they found that Senator Harry Reid’s name was already checked off. In Dallas County, TX’ congressional district 30, Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson’s name was the only one on the ballot in a few locations (no, she isn’t running unopposed). And some states have been late in mailing out military absentee ballots, whose recipients, interestingly, are known for their Republican leanings.

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October 26, 2010

Blaming Religion for Homosexual Suicide

By Selwyn Duke

Can a waning phenomenon have a waxing effect? If a survey conducted on the relationship between religious messages and homosexual suicide is to be believed, the answer is yes. The survey, conducted jointly by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Religion News Service, found, writes Kirsten Moulton in The Salt Lake Tribune, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that messages from U.S. religious pulpits are connected to the rising rates of suicide among gay youths….”

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October 23, 2010

Juan Williams’ Forgotten Victimizer: The Man in the Mirror

By Selwyn Duke

If anyone should feel loved right now, it’s social commentator Juan Williams. His firing by National Public Radio (NPR) for comments he made on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor has drawn harsh criticism from all quarters, left, right and center. And I join this defensive phalanx. Sacking a man for saying that he gets “worried” and “nervous” aboard a plane when he see people “identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims” with their traditional garb is an example of political correctness run amuck. Heck, Williams was merely giving voice to a disquiet felt by a majority of Americans.

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