I’ve been puzzling over what might be wrong with our national psyche, and I think I’ve figured it out.

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     It’s hard to believe that only nine years after 9/11, our national dialogue has been preoccupied not with reminders of who the individual victims were and how their families’ lives and our own have been forever altered, but with the sensibilities of the Muslim world, here and abroad.  The New York Times featured front page stories all week preceding this memorial date concerning Muslim Americans who feel the sting of discrimination or who also suffered loss on 9/11.  An op-ed piece by Imam Rauf, the soi-disant Muslim moderate who has never devoted his attention to publicly excoriating the so-called extremists of his own religion, took center stage in the newspaper this week to warn us against further antagonizing Muslims and full page ads by various church groups shifted our attention from Muslim saber-rattling to the need for Christian and Jewish tolerance of our Muslim brethren.  Even if the Ground Zero Mosque ends up moving some blocks north, we have already sorely disrespected our fallen heroes of 9/11 and our servicemen and women who are ongoing victims of Muslim violence and hate.  We have willingly offered a victory salute to those who continue to despise and attack us as our politicians and president remind us that it is more important to accommodate the needs of some Muslims than the heartfelt sorrows of bereaved survivors of 9/11 which should include all Americans including Muslims.

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In a press conference Thursday, Dove World Outreach Center pastor Terry Jones revealed that he got a phone call from a Green Beret who had served in Yugoslavia. Here is what the soldier told him, as related by Jones in this MSNBC video:

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As a long time owner of my own small business, I know when a project isn’t working the way it is supposed to. At that point I have to make a decision to cut my losses, shoulder the blame, and move on. Granted, sometimes perseverance is warranted, but in the face of complete failure even the most well-meaning attempts at ‘staying the course’ are at best misplaced, and at worst frighteningly destructive. Sadly, we as a country have fallen into this destructive cycle of disillusionment, made clear early this week by President Obama’s new plan to save the economy and create jobs- three bills totaling $350 billion to improve transportation infrastructure, provide permanent research and development tax credits for business and a proposal that allows businesses to deduct capital investments in 2011.
Unfortunately, his new plan sounds an awful lot like the old plans that have pushed us into record budget deficits and stagnant job creation. This bill is actually remarkably conservative compared to his past bailouts, as President Obama has apparently grown weary of the beating he takes from conservatives when he treads too heavily on the toes of private businesses. I firmly believe that government spending is not the way to pull America out of the recession, but of all the spending bills that have been floated around over the last few years, this is one that I neither love nor hate.
Would the $50 billion for infrastructure be more efficiently used if it had been left in the hands of the taxpayers? Absolutely. But this bill would have at least one conservative ally, Adam Smith, the 18th century author of The Wealth of Nations and champion of free-market conservatives, who believed that infrastructure spending was one the few things that should be handled by the government. This bill should improve the infrastructure which undoubtedly will have some kind of positive effect on commerce. The question I have to ask is why now? The original stimulus bill had over $100 billion in infrastructure spending and we all know how successful that was in stimulating the economy.
The truth is that it isn’t much of a question because the answer is so obvious: political maneuvering. With November elections just around the corner, Democrats are distancing themselves from the Washington establishment that Obama once eschewed but he has now has come to represent. Trying to handicap the chances of these bills passing through Congress before elections would be futile, but I can’t believe that the odds are good the bill will pass. Obama is doing everything possible to show that he still has a grasp on the economy when it is so clearly slipping out of his control. If he truly wanted stimulate the economy with an infrastructure bill, he would throw more than $50 billion at it. Recent estimates put infrastructure needs at $1.6 trillion to modernize air routes, refit railways and repave roads. $50 billion is a peace offering, nothing more, nothing less.
This is a mixed bag of reactions for me. For one, I am disappointed that our president is floundering to find his footing at a time when Americans need strong leadership backed by sound social and economic policy. Political games like the one he is playing now are never going to go away, especially at election time, but the solution to failure is not hiding your failure behind a mask, it is changing the way you think and operate. On the other hand, I am optimistic about the opportunity that is being presented to conservative candidates in the upcoming election and the change of guard that they represent. People point to the Bush years as the cause of all our problems today, but it has actually been sixty years of straying from the ideals and principles that the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution that have turned America into a country they wouldn’t recognize. Democrats and Republicans alike are to blame, and likewise, both parties can be a part of the solution. Libertarian-leaning voters are gathering behind candidates who represent true American values and within the year those candidates will take the floor of Congress and begin to challenge the status quo that has ruled politics since the Great Depression.

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A recent forum in The Nation includes commentaries by seven public intellectuals about the ways Obama is progressing. At least five of them blame his failing on The System and urge that more attention be paid to his “major achievements.” They are not doing any favors to the Democrats’ and the President’s reelection prospects or to his agenda, because they divert attention from those matters in which Obama has considerable degrees of freedom.  I am not referring to past mistakes — those are water under the bridge — but to their extension into the near future.

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Earlier this year, the State of Louisiana passed a law requiring Louisiana courts to base their decisions on American and Louisiana law, not Islamic sharia law. The goal is to pre-empt judges who seek to make exceptions for Muslims - usually at the expense of a woman, in spousal abuse or divorce cases.

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For those few (including President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg) who still think Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a ‘moderate’, here’s proof he’s not. According to the Associated Press: “The imam behind a proposed Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero cautioned Wednesday that moving the facility could cause a violent backlash from Muslim extremists and endanger national security.”

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So, some pro-terrorist, anti-Semite has proposed a ballot initiative in California to force the state’s two public employee pension funds to divest from companies that “support Israeli settlement or supply military products to the government of Israel.”

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I have no idea what to make of Fidel Castro’s latest offering, in which he criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “anti-Semitic attitudes.”

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The Dove  World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida scrapped its plans to hold the ultimate test of whether free speech is still safe in America this past Sept. 11: Koran-burning. Pastor Terry Jones succumbed to criticism from all quarters: Democrats, Republicans, the public, and all their Islamic masters. But it’s natural that everyone was so upset. After all, this is the Muslims’ holy book we’re talking about. I mean, can you imagine burning a German’s copy of Mein Kampf? [End.]

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Suggesting a true cultural shift, Republicans voting in this year’s primary elections outnumbered Democrats by four million, the first time the GOP has outdrawn the Dems in statewide primaries in the last eighty years.

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I recently blogged about the Angelina Jolie directorial debut to be shot in Serbia. The film is about a Bosnian Muslim female and a Serbian soldier who fall in love during the 90s war. So I just wanted to share the thoughts of source/reader/writer Stella Jatras, who thinks the scenario sounds familiar:

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My Indian efriend, an artist in her own right, brought this amazing piece of artistic commentary on the Iranian practice of stoning women. I do not write Muslim. Yes, I know the punishment appears in the Koran. The same punishment appears in the Torah. That does not mean that legal interpretations of the religious injunctions cannot find a way to abolish it.

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Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, recently outlined the Obama Administration’s plan to implement electronic medical records in every American hospital and clinic. She wrote, “Over the last 30 years, we’ve watched information technology revolutionize industry after industry, dramatically improving the customer experience and driving down costs. Today, in almost every other sector besides health, electronic information exchange is the way we do business. A cashier scans a bar code to add up our grocery bill. We check our bank balance and take out cash with a debit card that works in any ATM machine.”

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The Obama loyalists argue that while he is being impolitic, he will leave a great legacy behind. True, they proffer, he may have gone for health care while the people wanted jobs, and tried to bail out Main Street by bailing out Wall Street rather than the other way around. However, look at the first major health care reform in decades, and the first major financial reform in years, and so on. (Actually there are not so many “and so ons”.) The president himself once intimated that if he had to choose, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” Most recently he allowed that he was governing while the Republicans were “politicking,” but now he must also do some of this degrading stuff.

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Yesterday I posted a blog concerning the depiction of Serbs in the movies. As I mentioned, such things as exploding or poison-gas toys are attributed to Serbs in “The Rock” when in reality they were found in a Bosnian-Muslim terror training camp, so Hollywood’s “Serbs” generally do things that have been done TO Serbs in actuality. Nebojsa Malic points to his 2002 article “Images Worth a Thousand Lies,” illustrating another example of this, in which a Serbian orphan rescued from Sarajevo by a journalist became a Muslim orphan in the movie version, titled “Welcome to Sarajevo.”

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Candidate Obama told Charlie Gibson that he would sacrifice economic growth to economic fairness. His Marxist professors failed to teach him that everywhere such a trade off has been tried, the rich got richer and the poor seriously poorer. So he used the 2008 economic crisis to put his ideology into action with the to be expected results. The WSJ editors write

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In my sporadic, haphazard compilations and citations of movies and TV shows that utilize the handy Serb as villain — which, incidentally, includes the first season of “24″ — I neglected to include a whopper: “The Rock,” a 1996 movie starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. Here is what Stella Jatras wrote about it in 2002: “Another one of Hollywood’s anti-Serb war movie[s], ‘The Rock,’ portrays American Serbs as terrorists who mail booby-trapped toys to Bosnian Muslim children.”

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Some time during the long summer, I bumped into Lang Lang in a radio studio and took a moment to congratulate him on his techno-comm skills. Lang Lang and his works can be found on every medium of electronic transmission invented up to and including last Thursday. He is tweeted, facebooked, i-Googled, B&N-ded and, in all likelihood, apped on an abacus. He has a brilliant website, updated 24/7.

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This proves, in my opinion, that the problem for project opponents is not and never was one of religious freedom as proponents assert. If it were, a majority of poll respondents wouldn’t recognize the project’s backers legal right to do this hideous thing.

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An environmental militant named James Lee stormed the building housing the Discovery Channel, armed with explosives, and took several people hostage. After a standoff, police shot and killed the man and the hostages were freed unharmed.

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Jeffrey Toobin’s thorough profile of Sen. Chuck Schumer in a recent issue of the New Yorker provides valuable insights into the micro politics that the Democrats practice these days.

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