M2RB: Aimee Mann & 'Til Tuesday
Hush, hush - voices carry
He said shut up - he said shut up
Oh God can't you keep it down
Voices carry
Hush hush, voices carry
By Roger Kimball
When the motor of history gets
revved up (as it surely is now), it becomes more than commonly difficult to
discriminate between the mere static of events rubbing against one another and
that appoggiatura that announces the main theme of the moment. You’d have
to be pretty thick not to sense that something big is happening in the world.
Just yesterday, the Evening Standard published a
column of mine in which I reprised James Carville’s famous
taunt, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Carville was right, except when he
wasn’t, e.g., at about 10:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, or, as we see all
about us, in the aftermath of September 11, 2012, when some representatives of
the “Arab Spring” stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and murdered
U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats.
What was the most extraordinary
statement to come out of that outrage, or the successive and still unfolding
attacks on U.S. and other Western interests by Islamists across the world?
First prize for naïveté must surely
go to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had this to say about the murder
of those four Americans:
Today, many Americans are asking – indeed, I asked myself –
how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate,
in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how
complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.
I have to say, those were not among
the questions I asked myself. Leave aside the laughable trope that what we did
in Libya was liberate the country. What we really did was
exchange one malign dictator for the dictatorship of a malign, freedom-denying
ideology, radical Islam. What I chiefly wanted to know was, Why was security so
lax at our consulate, especially on the anniversary of the terrorists
attacks of 9/11?
First prize for cringe-making
appeasement also goes to the State Department, even if it
wasn’t issued by HRC herself. Six hours before an Islamist mob stormed our
embassy in Cairo, the
embassy condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided
individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”
It’s perfectly OK to “hurt the
religious feelings” of anyone else — just ask Terrence McNally, whose play Corpus
Christie depicts Jesus having sex with Judas
Iscariot. Perhaps you do not like Corpus Christie. I think it a
loathsome work, but I do not propose to burn down and embassy or murder anyone
because of it. But Muslims apparently deserve a special dispensation. The First
Amendment protects Mr. McNally. But does it protect the author of The Innocence
of Muslims, the silly 13-minute anti-Muslim film by
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (not, as was first
reported, “Sam Bacile”)? We’ll see. Mr. Nakoula has been detained
for questioning by federal probation agents. What do you bet
he is found to have violated probation?
Choice though HRC’s and the Cairo
Embassy’s statements were, however, the most astonishing emanation from
officialdom these last few days was the news that Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put in
a call to the fruity pastor Terry Jones — the chap who some
months ago made headlines by publicly
burning a Koran — asking him to withdraw his support for The
Innocence of Muslims.
Query: Why was the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff calling a private citizen and leaning on him to make a
public recantation? Has such a thing ever happened in the United
States? I cannot think of a precedent. As Michael Walsh notes
elsewhere on PJM, “A clearer breaching of the
civilian-military relationship can hardly be imagined, and Gen. Dempsey ought
to resign in disgrace for his appalling lapse in judgment.” But, as Walsh also
notes, Dempsey certainly will not resign nor will the president fire him.
Which means what?
There is a lot happening now.
Remember Rahm Emanuel’s observation, made in the midst of the economic
meltdown of 2008-2009, that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste”?
What he meant was that a crisis makes people anxious and vulnerable and that it
is easier in periods of crisis to exploit that vulnerability and push through initiatives
to enlarge government, which is why in periods of crisis one should, if one is
prudent, exercise double diligence about acting hastily. As the British
politician and journalist Daniel Hannan recently observed in his book The New
Road to Serfdom, “most disastrous policies have been
introduced at times of emergency.” There seem to be many leaders — beginning,
alas, with the president of the United States — who would have us scrap
the First Amendment in order to cater to wounded Muslim
sensibilities. Andy McCarthy gets it exactly right in “Obama
vs. the First Amendment,” his column for NRO today.
Reflecting on our Cairo embassy’s statement about “misguided individuals,” he
argues that Mitt Romney was right: the statement was “a disgrace.”
It elevated over the U.S. Constitution (you know, the thing
Obama took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend”) the claimed right of
sharia supremacists (you know, “Religion of Peace” adherents) to riot over
nonsense. Further, it dignified the ludicrous pretext that an obscure, moronic
14-minute video was the actual reason for the oncoming jihad.
And here’s the kicker:
[N]o matter how determined the president’s media shysters
are to cover it up: The disgraceful embassy statement was a completely accurate
articulation of longstanding Obama policy.
Andy then gives us a little history
lesson:
In 2009, the Obama State Department ceremoniously joined
with Muslim governments to propose a United Nations resolution that, as legal
commentator Stuart Taylor observed,
was “all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find
offensive.” Titled “Freedom of Opinion and Expression” — a name only an
Alinskyite or a Muslim Brotherhood tactician could love — the resolution was
the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by the 57-government Organization of
the Islamic Conference (now renamed the “Organization of Islamic Cooperation”).
The OIC’s explicit goal is to coerce the West into adopting sharia,
particularly its “defamation” standards.
When I was in Tampa covering the
Republican National Convention a couple weeks ago, I ran into an Arab-American
lady in line for the free coffee Google was dispensing. She was a lawyer, a
conservative of some description, and her business in life was to champion the
Arab Spring and assure that those of us who worry about the imposition of
Sharia are crazy ideologues. Arab leaders “can’t understand” why some American
conservatives are up in arms about Sharia, she told me. “It’s just their religious
law,” as if that settled everything.
If only. As Andy observes,
Sharia severely penalizes any insult to Islam or its
prophet, no matter how slight. Death is a common punishment. And although
navel-gazing apologists blubber about how “moderate Islamist” governments will
surely ameliorate enforcement of this monstrous law, the world well knows that
the “Muslim street” usually takes matters into its own hands — with
encouragement from their influential sheikhs and imams.
We can see what that means today in
Cairo, in Tunisia, in Yemen, in the Sudan — heck, we can see in in London,
where angry Muslims burn the American flag outside our embassy or in Texas,
where an university had to be evacuated yesterday because of a terrorist
threat.
I say “we” can see that is
happening, but it’s not clear that the bureaucrats running the government
can. As Andy notes,
In its obsession with propitiating Islamic supremacists, the
Obama administration has endorsed this license to mutilate. In the United
States, the First Amendment prohibits sharia restrictions on speech about
religion. As any Catholic or Jew can tell you, everyone’s belief system is
subject to critical discussion. One would think that would apply doubly to
Islam. After all, many Muslims accurately cite scripture as a justification for
violence; and classical Islam recognizes no separation between spiritual and
secular life — its ambition, through sharia, is to control matters (economic,
political, military, social, hygienic, etc.) that go far beyond what is
understood and insulated as “religious belief” in the West. If it is now
“blasphemy” to assert that it is obscene to impose capital punishment on
homosexuals and apostates, to take just two of the many examples of sharia
oppression, then we might as well hang an “Out of Business” sign on our
Constitution.
Indeed. The bottom line, which my
friend in the coffee line did not see but Andy McCarthy does, is that “Islamic
supremacists see themselves in a civilizational war with us. When we submit on
a major point, we grow weaker and they grow stronger.”
It’s not only Islamophilic
Arab-American lawyers who refuse to see this. Left-wing African-American
presidents fail to see it as well. What is happening all around us now requires
a president who can effectively discharge his fundamental responsibility: to
protect the United States of America from foreign attack. Barack Obama
has demonstrated his feckless incapacity to do this. Mitt Romney, on the
contrary, has stepped up to the plate. No sooner had the murderous Libyan
attacks happened than he issued a
strong and stern statement rousingly supporting the American
cause.
America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and
against our embassies. We will defend also our constitutional rights of speech
and assembly and religion. We have confidence in our cause in America. We
respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our Constitution
protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles
of our Constitution because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate
source of freedom for individuals around the world.
I also believe the Administration was wrong to stand by a
statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead
of condemning their actions. It’s never too early for the United States
Government to condemn attacks on Americans, and to defend our values. The White
House distanced itself last night from the statement, saying it wasn’t ‘cleared
by Washington.’ That reflects the mixed signals they’re sending to the world.
Spoken like a true patriot and
leader. I’ve been saying for sometime now that I expect Romney to win by
a large margin in November. Bold statements like this (which were
naturally condemned by the left-wing media) increase my confidence. As Andy put
it in his comments on Romney’s statement, “It will be remembered as the moment
the race for president finally became about the real job of a president. It
will be remembered as the moment Romney won.”
Sophie: No, it's not a first.
Voices Carry - 'til tuesday
I'm in the dark, I'd like to read his mind
But I'm frightened of the things I might find
Oh, there must be something he's thinking of
to tear him away-a-ay
When I tell him that I'm falling in love
why does he say-a-ay
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Uh-ah
I try so hard not to get upset
Because I know all the trouble I'll get
Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide
and something to fear-eh-eh
And I try so hard to keep it inside
so no one can hear
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Uh-ah
Oh!
He wants me, but only part of the time
He wants me, if he can keep me in line
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, shut up now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, darling, she might overhear
Hush, hush - voices carry
He said shut up - he said shut up
Oh God can't you keep it down
Voices carry
Hush hush, voices carry
I'm in the dark, I'd like to read his mind
But I'm frightened of the things I might find
Oh, there must be something he's thinking of
to tear him away-a-ay
When I tell him that I'm falling in love
why does he say-a-ay
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Uh-ah
I try so hard not to get upset
Because I know all the trouble I'll get
Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide
and something to fear-eh-eh
And I try so hard to keep it inside
so no one can hear
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Uh-ah
Oh!
He wants me, but only part of the time
He wants me, if he can keep me in line
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, shut up now, voices carry
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
Hush hush, darling, she might overhear
Hush, hush - voices carry
He said shut up - he said shut up
Oh God can't you keep it down
Voices carry
Hush hush, voices carry
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