We have made a decision to discontinue the Moonbat Central blog (though not the Moonbat Central team).
During the months of MBC’s operation, we have discovered and developed an amazing crop of up-and-coming talent. Now we would like to put that talent to work where it can do the most good and get the most visibility.
The reader comment function will continue working until 12 noon Eastern Time tomorrow, Tuesday. Between now and then, readers are encouraged to post their thoughts and say their farewells.
Needless to say, any Bolshevist infiltrators who attempt to disrupt our final good-byes will suffer the blogospheric equivalent of impalement on a dull wooden stake. Don’t even think about it.
Farewell, my friends. It has been an honor to serve with you, bloggers and reader commentators alike, on the frontlines of the culture war.
I would like to thank those who have read this blog and left comments on it. You’re one of main reasons I’ve been compelled to post here. I’ve appreciated your intelligence, humor and insight. I am honored to have written for your enjoyment.
Bargholz, Rightminded, Nanc, RightWingMac, Orangeducks, RedBeard, Tazzmax, Kuhnkat, Sharikov, Madzionist and anyone else who has ever left a comment on one of my posts—thank you!
Moonbat Central shuts down. Women and minorities hardest hit. It’s the story of my life: Just as I find a nice place to meet friends and hang out, the place gets shut down. I thought that, after leaving the USSR, this would stop. Fat chance. In about five minutes, Moonbat Central will be no more.
After days of uncontrolled riots in and around Paris, and the inevitable reflection upon the policies of France regarding Muslims, one has to ask a legitimate question. But it may not be the obvious question about France’s responsibility. The real question has to do with a different application of the word "responsibility." Is France responsible for the caring, nurturing, and prosperity of the Muslims within her borders?
Southwestern Indiana and northern Kentucky just experienced their worst tornado in over 30 years. It seems America is getting hit very hard by Nature this season. Obviously, after Hurricane Katrina, the role of the federal government was expanded, and the social action of the military was more ‘normalized’ than ever. The economy was immediately and perhaps permanently affected. As storm damage increases, it seems masses of people more are subject to government intervension. Add to this the menace of radical Islam in our society, and there must be a grave concern about the whole concept of freedom itself.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, ynet news reports, has put out a leaflet endorsing Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s call to annihilate Israel. The Martyrs’ Brigade is generally identified as the “militant wing” of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and not as “fundamentalist.”
In the leaflet–as reported initially by the Palestinian news agency Maan and quoted by ynet–the Brigade “stress[es] our support of the Iranian president’s position toward the fictitious Zionist state, which will disappear with the help of Allah” and lauds the “Palestinian people, who sacrifice their blood every day for the sake of freeing Palestine and Jerusalem.”
Local moonbats in Michigan are targeting Victoria’s Secret stores because they use too much paper. They claim that using paper causes global warming and pokes holes in the ozone and other bad stuff.
Iraq battle stress is worse than in WWII. But it stems from the combat on the homefront, not the combat in Iraq.
From Sunday Times of London: SENIOR army doctors have warned that troops in Iraq are suffering levels of battle stress not experienced since the second world war because of fears that if they shoot an insurgent, they will end up in court.
Got that Ooo La La Intifada Feeling Lately? Well, there are very few things as amusing these days as watching the French grapple with their backyard intifada. The suburbs of Paris (and some other cities now also) are more dangerous than Jenin, and the French are getting their comeuppance for decades of snootiness, and for anti-American and anti-Israel agitprop.
A new petition is being circulated by a number of groups, including Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, demanding an end to the rabid anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias to be found throughout the University of California system. The petition asks the Governor of California and the officials of the University of California and California State University to address the growing problem of hostility towards Jewish students that is a direct result of the anti-Israel/anti-Zionist rhetoric on UC campuses.
The one man intellectual wrecking-crew known as Professor Noam Chomsky, the austere socialist who owns "a home worth over $850,000 and a vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, valued in excess of $1.2 million" [Peter Schweizer, Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, New York: Doubleday, 2005, p. 25] apparently has experienced his "second thoughts" moment.
France isn’t the only country in soon-to-be Eurabia that’s currently experiencing the violence and mayhem of the Islamist juggernaut. Riots have now broken out in Denmark.
It has been observed, in today’sFrontPageMag for instance, that the Muslim riots presently raging in France highlight the failures of that country, and the feel-good faith of multiculturalism more broadly, to integrate a restive Islamic population. But it also underscores, yet again, the hypocrisy of French elites. Consider the following clippings unearthed by the New York Sun:
Believe it or not, there are some people who suggest that the far left is a little more than a haven for conspiracy theorists and paranoiacs. We leave it to readers to make the call.
A war on extremist Islam rages, but the world’s preeminent human rights organizations are focused on the real danger. We mean, of course, U.S.-run terrorist detention centers:
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Thursday for access to all foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States after a report of a covert CIA prison system for al Qaeda captives.
The judicial left has expended most of its energies this week casting Samuel Alito as too conservative for the Supreme Court. The always impartial Alliance for Justiceassures its supporters that Alito is a sop to the “radical right,” picked by the president for his “backward-looking judicial philosophy.” The People for the American Waygrouses that Alito has an “extensive, extreme right-wing judicial record,” thus proving him to be an “out of the mainstream opponent of fundamental legal rights and protections.” All this is instantly absorbed by likeminded activists in the blogosphere, many of whom have already convinced themselves that Alito is so egregiously conservative that a smear campaign branding him a as a right-winger cannot fail. For them, the Washington Post has some bad news:
World Net Daily reports that Michael Moore may hate US capitalism but he is not above trying to make some wampum from it. Seems Mikey is a large investor in US stocks, including… in Halliburton . "I don’t own a single share of stock!" Moore has often proudly proclaimed. Well, turns out he’s right. He doesn’t own a single share. He owns tens of thousands of shares – including nearly 2,000 shares of Boeing, nearly 1,000 of Sonoco, more than 4,000 of Best Foods, more than 3,000 of Eli Lilly, more than 8,000 of Bank One and more than 2,000 of Haliburton, the company most vilified by Moore in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Yesterday, I posted concerns about the release of prisoners from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Today, there is a lenthy report in the Washington Post about secret prisons of the CIA, in which al-Qaeda prisoners and terrorists are held without the knowledge of anyone save their captors. There are major issues here: the necessity of incarceration; the necessity of covert operations by governments, and the role of reporters in "outing" government secrets and in trying to shape national and world events in general. Reuters deemed the Washington Post report worthy of a separate wire.
If the Left’s larger goal is actually for America to commit cultural suicide, in the interests of competence and even mastery it makes sense to work efficiently toward that end rather than waste time on half measures. In that spirit, the pro-balkanization Left will want to look to France for a compelling three-step paradigm. Step one: Open national borders to immigrants who not only don’t share Western cultural norms but actively oppose them. Two: Encourage a mass influx of such immigrants into the social welfare system, with no expectation that they will assimilate. Three: When the unassimilated enclaves proceed to subvert traditional cultural institutions and social norms, let the president call for "dialogue" and "mutual respect," two Western cultural values for which the unassimilated subculture feels absolute contempt because they stand in the way of the post-democratic society they intend to achieve.
Yesterday’s Anti-Bush Putsch by Senate Democrats May Have Been Coordinated with Today’s Nationwide Anti-Bush Street Mobilization Organized by Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)
Charles Clark Kissinger of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP): planned today’s protests
In the last 24 hours, a veritable anti-Bush coup has erupted.
Two groups — Democrat leaders in the Senate and a network of hard-left street activists coordinated by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) — have launched separate but parallel offensives, both aimed at driving President Bush from office. We at Moonbat Central suspect coordination between the two groups.
Senate Democrats yesterday demanded a new investigation of the Iraq war. Invoking the rarely-used “Rule 21” — generally reserved for impeachment proceedings, national security emergencies and the like — Democrat leaders forced the Senate into secret, closed session to confront what they charged was a White House cover-up.
Fresh from calling for the extirpation of the state of Israel and announcing its intentions to forge ahead with a nuclear program, international reproach be damned, the Iranian regime has instituted a crackdown on all diplomats perceived to be more reform-minded than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that is to say, nearly all of them. ReportsThe Times of London:
Lebanon has been the scene of a recent series of bombs targeting Lebanese patriots and anti-Syria critics. Against that background comes the case of one of Lebanon’s leading human rights lawyers, Muhamad Mugraby. Months after the "Cedar Revolution" and Syria’s official pullout, Mr. Mugraby is facing prosecution in a Beirut military court for his criticism two years ago, in Brussels, of the Syrian-backed Lebanese regime.
Max Boot’s column on the serial prevaricator Joseph Wilson is very much worth a read. Much as Moonbat Central did the other day, Boot lays out Wilson’s off and off relationship to the truth and concludes:
We here at the Moonbat Central have been devoting considerable time and effort to exposing the activities of the pseudo-scholar Norman Finkelstein, on the faculty of DePaul University, a fact that raises serious doubts about whether DePaul should even be considered to be an academic institution at all.
Finkelstein has been declared by the Anti-Defamation League to be a Holocaust denier. The fact that he was born Jewish is used by his supporters, many of whom are Nazis, to justify his views and writings. Most other folks think it simply makes him an interesting clinical case for some psychiatry department. Finkelstein’s presence on the DePaul faculty shows that no academic standards are in effect there at all.
Israel’s invaluable Center for Special Studies reports that the Syrian media glorified the suicide bombing in the Israeli town of Hadera last week, which killed four Jewish civilians and an Arab one. A commentator for Radio Damascus’s Voice of Palestine programs, Fayiz Qandil, told his listeners: “On October 26 the Palestinian people, through shaheed Hassan Abu Zayid [the suicide bomber], dealt a crushing blow to the Israeli terrorists and war criminals in Hadera . . . [the young hero] sent some to their graves and dozens of others to hover between life and death. . . . the Israeli occupation will only be overcome through resistance and martyrdom for the sake of Allah, which break the back of Israeli terrorism . . . ”
The Washington Post gives us unmistakable evidence that Porter Goss is cleaning house at the CIA. And just as we would expect, he’s meeting with stiff resistance. Former and soon-to-be-former CIA agents are happily using their position for partisan gain even at the expense of the war on al-Qaeda, our troops and CIA officers in the field. As you read this article, you can see who the sources of future anti-Bush leaks are by reading sentences like the following:
I couldn’t bring myself to continue watching Geena Davis’ hideous new infomercial for Hillary Clinton (and Wesley Clark) called "Commander-in-Chief," but I understand in tonight’s episode….
Our intrepid hero, Madame President (all genuflect), was reading a book to a room full of schoolchildren when she was told an oil tanker was about to crack up in the middle of the ocean. She stopped in the middle of the book and hurried out of the classroom. At least Hollywood’s president takes her marching orders from Michael Moore.
"Democrats forced the Republican-controlled Senate into an unusual closed session Tuesday, questioning intelligence that led to the Iraq war and deriding a lack of congressional inquiry.
‘I demand on behalf of the America people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted,’ Democratic leader Harry Reid said.
David Horowitz continues his metamorphosis into ubiquitous, pop culture icon. Try though they might, lefty intellectuals just can’t seem to ignore him. He is always on their minds.
Just yesterday, a blogger calling herself Bitch Ph.D. wrote the following: “Inside Higher Ed has a fun piece about scary Halloween costumes for academics. And, of course, yours truly provided the best and most pithy answer.”
In his statement on Samuel Alito’s nomination yesterday, Senator Pat Leahy took the opportunity to bemoan the fact that Alito was not a diversity hire:
The United States military prison in Abu Ghraib just released 500 prisoners, as a gesture of good will to mark the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan. The prisoners were presented with a copy of the Qur’an and $25 on their release for Eid al-Fitr celebrations. Their release was in addition to 1,000 prisoners set free in October at the start of the month of fasting. Is this "Club Gitmo" of Baghdad getting too expensive to operate? How expensive then is it to pay an American soldier to risk his life fighting for the cause of freedom in the world? What is the cost of his life when he’s killed in action?
Everyone knows the Old Grey Lady never passes up a chance to bash the President and throw some unfounded doom and gloom around. Today’s example of the Times’ ability to include Bush-bashing in all sorts of disparate articles can be found in the Arts Section, included in a review of an A&E reality television program:
File this under curious objections to the Alito nomination. Liberal law professor Cass Sunstein is none too pleased with the choice of Alito. Among Sunstein’s objections is that in the “overwhelming majority of cases, he has urged a more conservative position than that of his colleagues.” Well, alright. But isn’t another way of looking at it that Alito’s colleagues urged a more liberal position than Alito? The answer, as Sunstein acknowledges at the very end of his op-ed, is yes: “Alito sits on a relatively liberal court, and hence his dissents are sometimes from relatively liberal rulings,” he writes. That would have been good to know from the onset.
FROM ACTA: In figures released today, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reveals the hypocrisy of universities that seek to restrict U.S. military recruiters from interviewing on campus while accepting billions of taxpayer dollars in grants and contracts from the Defense Department and other agencies.
On Nov.12, 2005, a collection of communists, Marxists, terrorist cheerleaders and anti-war organizers will be holding a conference in Los Angeles.
Dubbed as a "day of Marxist views on the struggle against capitalist exploitation, war, racism and imperialism," the conference will be headed by Brian Becker, former secretariat of the Workers World Party (WWP).
We have made a decision to discontinue the Moonbat Central blog (though not the Moonbat Central team).
David Horowitz continues his metamorphosis into ubiquitous, pop culture icon. Try though they might, lefty intellectuals just can’t seem to ignore him. He is always on their minds.