Posted on April 22, 2024 by John Hinderaker in Israel, Leftism, Liberals

Lesser Of Two Evils

Am I a fan of Alec Baldwin? No. I am not sure how he got famous, and I don’t think I have ever seen him on screen or on television. And I harshly criticized his careless handling of a firearm that resulted in a death on the set of a movie in which he starred.

However. There are worse people. And in this video, you see one of them, as someone accosts Baldwin in a public place and demands that he say “Free Palestine” and “Fuck Israel” so that she will leave him alone:


One can only wish that he had hit her harder.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart

The Daily Chart: A Family Affair?

One of the most interesting aspects of the current political scene is the polling evidence showing Donald Trump gaining strength among minority voters, which is causing panic among Democrats. Why is this happening? Explanations run the full spectrum, from inflation to wokery, but here’s some curious evidence (from an Economist/YouGov survey) that it may be as simple as having children:

Chaser—while we’re looking at Trump-Biden surveys, this one is fun (and adds to a hypothesis I have about why Trump is going to win):

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Music

And then the darkness fell

Today is the anniversary of Glen Campbell’s birth. Campbell established himself as a brilliant session guitarist with the Wrecking Crew and then proceeded to record some 65 solo albums in the course of a long career that greatly contributed to the beauty of the world. It’s hard to get a handle on his vast body of work, but perhaps most notable was his partnership with songwriter Jimmy Webb. Below is the original hit version of Webb’s “By the Time I Get To Phoenix” (1967).

Webb also wrote a follow-up for Campbell. Even if you weren’t listening to the radio in 1968, you probably know “Wichita Lineman.” That’s Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kaye on the lead-in politely inviting your attention to this knockout song. That’s Mr. Campbell himself on lead guitar. Glen said that he and producer Al DeLory filled in the place of a third verse with a guitar solo that he played on a DanElectro six-string bass guitar or baritone guitar belonging to Kaye. According to American Songwriter, this was Campbell’s favorite of all his songs.

Their partnership remained fruitful in the ’70s and ’80s (work documented on the bountiful Raven compilation Glen Campbell Reunited With Jimmy Webb: 1974-1988), although without the chart success of their earlier hits. Among the peaks of their later work is Webb’s haunting “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” also covered by Joe Cocker, Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, Nanci Griffith and others.

I don’t think any performance of this moving song surpasses Campbell’s emotional reading of it (video above, in concert with the South Dakota Symphony in 2001). Although female performers have gravitated to it, the song is preeminently a man’s lament over a fickle lover. Webb’s old flame Susan Ronstadt inspired much of his most intriguing work, and my guess is that she was the inspiration for Webb’s lyrical exploration of the metaphor in the song’s title. She must have been the inspiration for the song in the video below as well.

Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011. He went public with the diagnosis and embarked on the farewell tour featured in the documentary Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me. The 2011 disc Ghost On the Canvas was to be his final recording, but he revisited a few of the highlights of his career during the recording. His producers added a spare backing to the tracks and released See You There in 2013. Five of the album’s 12 songs are written by Webb, including the lesser known “Postcard From Paris.”

Webb annotated one of his discs featuring updated versions of his songs with several of his favorite performers, including Campbell. When it came to Campbell, he wrote that he had been a fan since he first heard “Turn Around and Look At Me” when he was 14. He said that he considered Campbell “the greatest natural entertainer and performer that America has ever produced.” He added: “I used to literally pray that God would let me grow up and be a songwriter and be lucky enough to have Glen Campbell record one of my songs.” He didn’t leave it there. He concluded: “I rest my case for the existence of God.” I wanted to recall Webb’s striking testimony in the context of Campbell’s birthday today.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Higher education

What we’ve got here

The Columbia campus appears to have been taken over by the pro-Hamas kill the Jews crowd among the student body. Jessica Costescu rounds up the news in the Washington Free Beacon story “Columbia University Campus Unravels in Face of Escalating Anti-Semitic, Eliminationist Protests.” The New York Post reports “New anti-Israel tent city takes over Columbia University lawn days after NYPD raid as activists vow to stay ‘forever.’” In other words, the takeover continues.

The New York Post cover story relates the call of Rabbi Elie Buechler to seek safety off campus. Rabbi Buechler is Director of the Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus at Columbia/Barnard Hillel.

In a long roundup of its own yesterday evening, the Columbia Spectator quotes Rabbi Buechler’s group chat with 290 students: “The events of the past few days, especially last night, have made it clear that Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.” More: “It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved,” Buechler wrote. “It is not our job as Jews to ensure our own safety on campus.”

The Spectator quotes a Columbia spokesman: “As President Shafik has said repeatedly, the safety of our community is our number one priority. Columbia students have the right to protest, but they are not allowed to disrupt campus life or harass and intimidate fellow students and members of our community. We are acting on concerns we are hearing from our Jewish students and are providing additional support and resources to ensure that our community remains safe.”

You have to draw on Twitter to get a true sense of what is happening. The tweet below provides just one of many examples.

Students of ancient history may think of analogues.

What is going on here?

Columbia’s Hamas supporters are conducting a massive hatefest that has been tolerated by university authorities.

The hatefest is anti-Semitic in nature. It is full of anti-Semitic threats and harassment.

University President Shafik is guilty of abdicating her authority.

Civilizational constraints are conspicuous by their absence.

Law enforcement must be called in immediately to restore order.

The university has been gripped by a raving madness inimical to its mission as an educational institution.

Classes are to be held remotely today (more here).

To adapt a line from Cool Hand Luke, what we’ve got here is failure to excommunicate.

Posted on April 21, 2024 by John Hinderaker in Arab Israel conflict, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel

Iran Triumphant?

As the dust seems to be settling in the Middle East, who is coming out on top? Perhaps, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh write in the Wall Street Journal, it is Iran. First, some history:

Iran’s theocratic regime has to stand as the most successful imperial power in the Middle East since the British Empire. The comparison would offend the mullahs, but both managed to patrol large swaths of territory by relying on proxies—imperialism on the cheap. Soon after coming to power in 1979, Iran began putting together its collection of terrorists and militants. In Lebanon, it created Hezbollah, established a tight relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization (especially its lead military organization, Fatah) and later funded the more explicitly Islamic Palestinian rejectionist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The clerical elite learned early that they could inflict pain on their adversaries with a measure of impunity if they hid behind their proxies. Their record of achievement is extraordinary.

Follow the link for a rather lengthy account of those achievements. On to the present:

Through all of this mischief, Iran’s territory remained immune from retaliation as its embattled adversaries kept insisting that they could not expand the conflict.
***
Khamenei surely anticipated severe Israeli retaliation [following Gaza’s October 7 massacres], while also assuming that the old rules would prevail: Iran would stoke its “rings of fire,” inflaming Israel’s frontiers through its proxies, and the ever-anxious West, led by the escalation-dreading Biden administration, would step in and impose a settlement on Israel. A badly battered Hamas would eventually emerge from its tunnels and declare victory.

For a while, it looked as though Iran’s bluff was being called. But now:

To a large extent, the script has played out as Iran anticipated. Forced into unforgiving urban warfare, Israel has scorched Gaza. Facing increasing pressure from the White House, the IDF hasn’t moved on the last Hamas redoubt in Rafah. Unwilling or unable to sustain a significant occupation elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli forces are already encountering insurgent attacks in cleared areas.

Then followed Israel’s assassination of General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and six of his deputies in Damascus, Iran’s launching of hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel, and Israel’s response:

The scale of Iran’s retaliation surprised many. The Iran-Israel duel had been a confrontation with understood limits: Iran relied on terrorism and Israel on cyberattacks and targeted assassinations. The Syrian civil war stretched those limits but didn’t erase them. The Islamic Republic built armed encampments on Israel’s borders; Israeli planes continuously pummeled them. Yet both sides exempted each other’s territory from direct assault. All that changed when Tehran shot hundreds of projectiles at Israel on April 14, followed by Israel’s retaliatory attack on targets in Iran on April 18.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was widely criticized for describing Israel’s Isfahan attack as “lame,” but I agree with him. Is this where matters will come to rest? If so, isn’t Iran in the driver’s seat? Hezbollah is more or less untouched, the Houthis are unscathed, and Hamas, not having been exterminated, will claim victory and plot new October 7s.

And Iran may decide to go nuclear:

Khamenei must wonder now if his situation would be better if Iran had already tested a nuclear weapon. Would Israel have attacked one of his cities if it had to think about the prospect of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv? As successful as the axis of resistance has been for Iran, it has not checked offensive Israeli actions. A combination of Islamist proxies and an Iranian bomb, however, might well do the trick.
***
In reality, there are no technical barriers left that Iran’s engineers cannot overcome. Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization and the regime’s most well-credentialed nuclear engineer, recently remarked: “We have [crossed] all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology.” Whatever the reasons behind Khamenei’s apparent reluctance to give the final green light, what’s happened since Oct. 7 must certainly give him pause about this hesitation.

The Gaza war has clarified the struggle between Israel and Iran. The Palestinians, surely much to Hamas’s displeasure, are again bit players in the Middle East’s new great game. In such a contest of wills, nothing checks one side better than the fear that the other might actually use a nuclear weapon. The Islamic Republic obviously doesn’t fear Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The same can’t be said for the reverse. With the ultimate weapon behind it, Iran would be not just a nation of consequence but a regime too dangerous to fail for those Americans still dreaming of regime change. Nuclear weapons don’t change everything, but they change a lot.

In the past seven months, America and Israel have been shocked by two events that were once unthinkable: the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel’s mini-Holocaust, and Iran’s missile attack, the first direct assault on Israeli territory in 45 years of unrelenting enmity. The next surprise may well be an unexplained seismic tremor in one of Iran’s deserts.

Hamas appears to have gotten away with the horrors of October 7 and lived to fight another day, under the sponsorship of Iran. Israel needs regime change in Iran to stop the endless warfare with Hamas and Hezbollah. But its first real opportunity to try to seriously undermine the mullahs has passed without significant result. Is there any reason why the Ayatollah should doubt that he has the upper hand?

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Anti-Semitism, Education

It Isn’t About Israel (2)

Not wanting to be left out, anti-Semites at Yale are camping out to support genocide against Israel. They have made various demands on Yale’s administration. It will be interesting to see the result: it isn’t easy to get to Yale’s left.

Here you see a depressingly large number of Yalies demonstrating:

The climax came when they tore down the American flag:


Yes, these people would like to kill the Jews and destroy Israel. But it is America–freedom–they really hate. They are enemies of civilization, but they have friends in high places.

By the way, this is Yale’s seal. Note that the words on the book–Yale’s motto, “Light and Truth”–are in Hebrew. It is a remnant of a long-gone, and much better, time.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Fake News, Law, Media Bias

The Times Weighs In

Check out this headline from today’s New York Times, on the criminal trial that is under way in Manhattan: “Will a Mountain of Evidence Be Enough to Convict Trump?” I understand that readers of the Times tune in mainly to get their daily dose of Trump-hate, but is the Times even pretending to be a newspaper anymore?

The trial, which could brand Mr. Trump a felon as he mounts another White House run, will reverberate throughout the nation and test the durability of the justice system that Mr. Trump is attacking in a way that no other defendant would be allowed to do.

Got that? Trump is attacking the justice system. I think it would be more accurate to say that the Democratic Party’s corrupt New York justice system is attacking Trump.

They will also seek to bolster the credibility of that key witness, Michael D. Cohen, a former fixer to Mr. Trump who previously pleaded guilty to federal crimes for paying the porn star, Stormy Daniels.

Classic New York Times reporting. The idea that Cohen has pled guilty to “federal crimes for paying the porn star,” and that his plea is strong evidence against Trump, is delusional. Andy McCarthy explains:

Cohen did not plead guilty in federal court because of campaign-finance violations, which were merely an opportunistic add-on. Cohen pled guilty because the SDNY had him dead-to-rights on serious fraud charges.

Cohen committed bank fraud in connection with a multimillion-dollar line of credit. Bank fraud carries a penalty of up to 30 years’ imprisonment. As the most severe offense he faced, it was the driver of the federal sentencing guidelines that would apply to his case. …

In addition to the bank fraud, Cohen pled guilty to five counts of tax evasion, each carrying a potential five-year prison term. By the Justice Department’s description, these felonies involved over $4 million in unreported income. …

That is why Cohen pled guilty. He was looking at years of incarceration. And as is common when a suspect is in such straits, Cohen desperately sought to become a cooperating witness for the government.

As for the “mountain of evidence,” what does it show? That Trump’s company falsely characterized payments to Cohen’s law firm as legal expenses, when in fact Cohen was being reimbursed for making entirely legal payments to Stormy Daniels. That is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has run.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the jury won’t convict Trump. But if the jury does convict him, it will only be because they are in the grip of the crazed Trump-hatred which the New York Times ceaselessly seeks to promote.