Monthly Archives: March 2008

March 25, 2008 — John Hinderaker

The National Heroes Tour Comes to Minnesota

Tonight, Scott and I attended the Vets For Freedom National Heroes Tour event at the officers’ club at Fort Snelling. It was a great event. I got there a little early, and was fortunate to meet several people I really admire: Pete Hegseth, David Bellavia and others. This photo is of Ed Morrissey, who covered the event for Hot Air, Jimbo from BlackFive, and an unidentified woman: Meeting David Bellavia »

March 25, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Airbrushing Rev. Wright

Buried in a Washington Post story about Hillary Clinton »

March 25, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Uses of the present

Hillary Clinton has finally weighed in on Reverend Wright. She told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: He would not have been my pastor. You don »

March 25, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Uses of the past

Lionel Chetwynd, the writer/director of “Hanoi Hilton” and other films, wrote this open letter to Barack Obama in response to the Senator’s speech about race relations and Rev. Wright. Invoking his experience in moving beyond hatred towards Germans over the Holocaust, Chetwynd argues that “contextualizing” Rev. Wright’s hatred was a misuse of a “teaching moment.” The teaching opportunity consisted of “not explaining Wright »

March 25, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Let’s Turn Out To Support the Vets

Scott noted this morning that the principal of Forest Lake High School canceled the scheduled appearance this morning by Forest Lake alum Pete Hegseth and his fellow Vets For Freedom. The cancellation was prompted by an unspecified number of complaints from “parents and others;” the others apparently were leftists organized by Democratic Underground. On only a few hours’ notice, the Vets had to transfer their program from the high school »

March 25, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Obama, Israel, and American Jews — it just keeps getting worse

Why does Barack Obama have so many foreign policy and national security advisers whose statements about Israel and American Jews are problematic? We’ve written at length about Samantha Power, perhaps his closest foreign policy adviser until she was forced to resign for insulting Hillary Clinton. We’ve also touched on Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Malley. And by now everyone who follows these things realizes that Obama’s long-time spiritual adviser Rev. Wright »

March 25, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Heroes too hot for Forest Lake Area High School

Pete Hegseth is an alumnus of the Forest Lake Area High School and the founder of Vets for Freedom, which brings its National Heroes Tour to the Twin Cities today. Today’s schedule included bringing the tour to social studies students at the high school. But the principal abrupty cancelled the event when “parents and others” called the school and objected. The Star Tribune story reporting the cancellation is ambiguously headlined »

March 25, 2008 — Scott Johnson

The most prevalent form of degradation in everyday intellectual life

The new book Human Smoke by the novelist Nicholson Baker revisits World War II and finds a troublesome injustice in the Allied cause opposing Hitler. This past weekend Baker’s book won the plaudits of novelist Colm Toibin in the Times Book Review. Toibin found the book “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism.” The Times published Toibin’s review under the heading “Their vilest hour.” Baker’s book has »

March 25, 2008 — Scott Johnson

CAIR for dummies

Is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a civil rights group, as it purports to be? Or is it a terrorist front group? The government treats it as a bit of both. On the one hand, it occasionally collaborates with CAIR on sensitivity training for government agencies such as the FBI and the TSA. On the other hand, the government named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land »

March 25, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Hey, nineteen

Today is the birthday of Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul. The metaphor of royal lineage has some application in Franklin’s case. Her father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, was the renowned Detroit preacher whose New Bethel Baptist Church provided the original venue for Aretha and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. She became a child star as a gospel singer and was signed at age eighteen to a recording contract at Columbia »

March 24, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

The rise of the conservative legal movement

Living in a liberal enclave, I sometimes find myself at social gatherings where folks assume that everyone is a leftist and everyone hates President Bush. In fact, this happened to me quite a bit pre-Power Line. Once, very early in the Bush administration an acquaintance was working himself into a state describing some twisted and nefarious scheme Bush supposedly had concocted. Trying to conceal any trace of irony, I said »