Dude, You Know You're Crazy If You Get Banned From A Ron Paul Event

 Via Economics Policy Journal, 26 August 2012...

iRoot reports:

The following instructions regarding Adam Kokesh are contained in the packet of information for volunteers being trained to help at Ron Paul’s Sun Dome Rally–expected to draw over 10,000.

Now, if you are wondering why Adam Kokesh and an old Ron Paul event are relevant today and missed Jazz Shaw's post on Hot Air, here's the important part of it:

  

A march on Washington with loaded rifles

Libertarian activist and radio host Adam Kokesh is hoping to get 1,000 people to march on Washington on July 4 — armed with loaded rifles. The plan, launched with a Facebook group today, is to gather on the Virginia side of the Potomac, where gun laws are lax, and then march across the bridge with loaded rifles slung over their shoulders into the District, where openly carrying weapons is generally prohibited.

“This will be a non-violent event,” the Facebook group warns, “unless the government chooses to make it violent.” Already, over 200 people have said they’ll attend the march.

Not a good idea.

Obama WANTS something like this to happen and then go terribly wrong. They won’t be a pack of Lone Wolves. Nosiree, Bob. They’ll be said to have marched in our places as sort of representatives of all of us. Then, we will all be condemned…because, after all, we aren’t poor, oppressed, non-assimilated, misunderstood jihadists that may have sustained brain damage from boxing or fell under the Svengali-like spell of an older brother. They have been waiting for something like this since Oklahoma City.

NOT IN MY NAME PLACE!

If you are crazy enough to get yourself banned from a Ron Paul event before it even takes place, dude, looks like C-R-A-Z-Y...and a plant.  And, that is exactly what he is.  From Michelle Malkin:

Before there was a nationwide, grass-roots Tea Party movement, there was another nationwide, grass-roots movement that brought thousands of Americans to Washington, D.C. They called themselves the “Gathering of Eagles.” I covered two massive, GoE rallies against the Soros-funded, anti-war Left in March 2007 and September 2007. GOE activists continue to expose the transnational progressives, anti-military bullies, and phonies who operate under the “peace” banner.

One of the groups that GOE dogged was Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) — whose members have included bomb-threat bullies and death-threat nutballs who threatened to assassinate me, fake Army vet Jesse MacBeth, and another prominent member who smeared the Young America’s Foundation by faking an anti-Muslim hate flyer and smeared David Horowitz with similar race-card playing flyers, then weaseled out of the attacks by claiming they were “satire.”

The last two incidents involved an IVAW member named Adam Kokesh. He marched in uniform in mock patrols for the anti-war movement, paraded around holding an upside-down American flag (see Jonn Lilyea for more), was arrested for defacing signs, and traveled to Germany to urge soldiers to abandon their posts and seek aid and comfort with his anti-war minions.

Kokesh, believe it or not, is now running as a Republican candidate for Congress in New Mexico. And, believe it or not, he is getting positive exposure on at least one Fox News show. He has the backing of Ron Paul, the Republican Liberty Caucus, and the 9/12 Project.

The New Mexico Republican Party has its head in the sand. If you have friends and family in New Mexico, make sure they know who the real Adam Kokesh is.

He is an anti-war smear merchant in GOP clothing. Spread the word.

Yeah, ‘cuz, like a whole bunch of libertarian-leaning Republicans were at the protest about Alberto Gonzales’s numerous use of ‘I don’t recall’ and had their count of the usage posted in a front-page article in the Washington Post.

According to the Washington Post’s sketch columnist extraordinaire, Dana Milbank, Gonzales said “I don’t recall” and its variants (“I have no recollection,” “I have no memory”) 64 times. Milbank is a hard-working columnist who sat through all 11 hours of testimony in the past three weeks from Gonzales and his former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson. He knows his stuff. But former Marine Adam Kokesh, who was based in Fallujah and is now an anti-war activist, kept his own count and came up with 74 “I don’t recalls” (or some such variation). The difference doesn’t really make a difference, the point’s still the same, but Capitol Briefing welcomes readers to scour the hearing transcript and do their own counts.

Adam Koresh with every right-leaning libertarian, Republican, and Conservative's absolutely favourite person. /s

Inside Tiszavasvári, The Crypto-Fascist Stronghold Of The Jobbik Party Where Hungarian Jews Fear For The Future

As the World Jewish Congress opens in Budapest amid a rise in anti-Semitism in Hungary, Colin Freeman visits the town of Tiszavasvári, twinned with Iran and the stronghold of the Jobbik party

By Colin Freeman

As the self-declared "capital" of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party, the town of Tiszavasvári prides itself on being a showcase for how the whole of Hungary might one day look.

Since winning control of Tiszavasvári's local council three years ago on a pledge to fight "Gipsy crime", the party has been on a vigorous clean-up campaign, banning prostitution, tidying the streets, and keeping a watchful eye on the shabby Roma districts at the edge of town. It even swore in its own Jobbik "security force" to work alongside the police, only for the uniformed militia, which drew comparisons with Hitler's brown-shirts, to be banned by Hungary's national government.

Yet Gipsies are not the only bogeyman that Jobbik has in its sights, as a sign on the well-trimmed green opposite the Communist-era mayoralty building suggests. Written in both Hungarian and Persian, it proudly announces that Tiszavasvári is twinned with Ardabil, a town in the rugged mountains of north-west Iran.

 

^{Gabor Vona delivers a speech during a rally against the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in Budapest (Reuters)}

 

On the face of it, there is no obvious reason why a drab rustbelt town in Hungary's former mining area should seek links to a city in a hardline Islamic Republic 2,000 miles away. But this is no ordinary cultural exchange programme, and friendship has very little to do with it. Instead, the real purpose of Jobbik's links to Iran is to show their mutual loathing of the Jewish state of Israel, which the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notoriously declared should be "wiped from the pages of history".

"The Persian people and their leaders are considered pariahs in the eyes of the West, which serves Israeli interests," said Marton Gyongyosi, a Jobbik MP and its leading foreign policy voice. "This is why we have solidarity with the peaceful nation of Iran and turn to her with an open heart."

In many other countries in Europe, such a scheme might be dismissed as just petty town hall posturing, a Far right version of the "Loony Left" gesture politics practised in British town halls in the 1980s. But it is particularly sensitive in Hungarian towns like Tiszavasvári, where anti-semitism has seen Jews wiped from the pages of history once before.

Inquiries by The Sunday Telegraph via official Holocaust archives show a dozen names of Jewish victims from Tiszavasvári, part of the mass extermination programme that gave Jews in the Hungarian countryside only a one in ten chance of survival in 1944, Some simply disappeared, while others like Andor Krausz, a 30-year-old bookbinder, and Rozsi Gruenweld, a 48-year-old shoe merchant, were murdered in Auschwitz, along with among more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews. 

 

^{A Jobbik supporter, the tattoo reads 'My Honor is Loyalty' (Reuters)}

 
It was one of the most intensive anti-Jewish campaigns of Holocaust, and while it was conducted during Hungary's period of Nazi occupation, it was done with the active connivance of the Hungarian state.

'You can see Jobbik's true nature through this," said Peter Feldmajer, the President of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, which today represents an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews, nearly 90 per cent of whom still refuse to disclose their Jewishness publicly. "They hate the Jewish people, and so does the Iranian government, and that is why they have formed this allegiance. It is a shame for Tiszavasvári, and it hurts the memories of those Jewish people who lived there."

Such concerns will loom large in the minds of delegates of the World Jewish Congress, which opens amid tight security today at the Soviet-era Budapest Intercontinental Hotel overlooking the Danube.

Normally the Congress meets in Jerusalem, but this year it has deliberately chosen to convene in the Hungarian capital to highlight what its president, the billionaire philanthropist and cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, describes as a "dramatic" rise in anti-Semitism in Hungary.

Much of the blame for that is attributed to the Jobbik party, which was founded just ten years ago yet now represents the third-largest faction in politics, with 47 of 386 parliamentary seats.

Also in Mr Lauder's sights, though, is the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, whose ruling centre-right Fidesz Party competes for many of the votes that Jobbik now vies for, and who has been criticised for not taking a firm enough stance against anti-Semitism.

"The number of anti-Semitic and racist incidents has risen dramatically in Hungary in recent years," Mr Lauder said last week. "This hatred manifests itself on the streets, in parliament, in the media. The Hungarian government must do more to fight this phenomenon."

The Congress meeting adds to a growing sense of political isolation in Hungary, where earlier this year, the European Union said that Mr Orban's party was placing too many curbs on the judiciary and media, measures it said could ultimately disqualify the country from EU membership.

While Mr Orban insists the measures have been necessary to end decades of corruption and inefficient government under his predecessors, the fear is that such measures are making it all the easier for groups like Jobbik to gain a foothold. A ban on the Jobbik party holding a counter-demonstration at the World Jewish Congress's presence in town has only added to their sense of grievance.

Roughly translated as "the Movement for a Better Hungary", Jobbik's success has far outstripped similar movements in neighbouring former Communist states. Its appeal in towns like Tiszavasvári has been based partly on confronting problems associated with the country's half-million strong Roma community, whom many Hungarians see as crime-prone and welfare-dependent.

But as the global banking crisis has hit Hungary hard, leaving more than 1 in 10 jobless, Jobbik has also revived a folk devil at the opposite end of social spectrum - the wealthy, all-controlling Jews, who were traditionally influential in the finance world.

Barely a month now passes in Hungary without a fresh furore over some anti-Semitic incident. Jewish community leaders have been attacked in the street and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. Far-Right biker gangs have also held ugly counter demonstrations to anti-Semitism rallies, entitled "Step on the Gas" days. Mr Gyongyosi, the Jobbik MP, was castigated recently for saying that a "security" register should be created of Hungarian MPs and civil servants who were of "Jewish origin".

The Hungarian national football association, meanwhile, was recently fined after fans shouted anti-Semitic slogans during a recent World Cup qualifier. And only last week, the leader of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, a charity named after a businessman who rescued many Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary, was beaten up after telling skinhead thugs to stop chanting "Seig Heil" at a soccer match.

"They called me a Jewish Communist," said Ferenc Orosz - who is actually a Protestant - in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. "Anti-Semitism is definitely getting worse. Jobbik speaks about it openly in parliament, and when their supporters see that, they follow suit."

True, while verbal abuse has apparently increased, incidents of actual violence are still relatively rare in Hungary: Mr Feldmajer recollects only around 50 physical attacks in 20 years. And it is fair to say that the bootboy image by no means fits all of Jobbik's supporters, many of whom are respectable working people whose motivations sound little different to the average UKIP supporter. The talk is of frustration with politically correct attitudes to crime and immigration, of children no longer being taught Hungarian history in schools properly, and of a loss of faith in mainstream political parties, whose economic record since communism's collapse is patchy at best.

Typical is Sipos Ibolya, 55, a cheerful schoolteacher who is Jobbik's deputy mayoress in Tiszavasvári. The twinning arrangement with Iran, she insists, is not borne of anti-semitism, but simple national self-interest.

"Economically, the Israelis do have too much power in Hungary," she said.

"But it's not that we're against Jews specifically. If German or Chinese firms became powerful here, we would be against that too."

There was a similarly mixed picture at a Jobbik May Day fair last week, which combined elements of Glastonbury festival with a historical re-enactment society. In front of an open-air stage, burly men tattooed with skulls, crossbones and the odd swastika sat listening to bands play right-wing folk music, whose choruses of "we are all one blood" had them singing along. The sideshows, meanwhile, were devoted to displays of swordsmanship, archery and whipcracking, skill practised by the ancient Hungarian tribes whom many Jobbik supporters see as the country's true forefathers.

But what was billed as a day of harmless, Far-Right family fun also had its darker side. At least one book stall had Hitler's Mein Kampf on sale, and when it caught the attention of the Sunday Telegraph's photographer, a youth was overheard was overheard saying "What are these Jews doing here?" What alarms Hungarian liberals, though, is the way that under Mr Orban's government, such events have become part of the political mainstream. Songs by Far Right bands now do well in the charts, with one group, Carpatia, even receiving an official award, and last year, Hungary's state-funded New Theatre planned to stage a play about a group of powerful Jews who plot the country's downfall. Although it was eventually pulled after an outcry from anti-racism activists, it is hard to imagine such a production getting anywhere near a theatre in many other European countries.

Nonetheless, after the trauma of the Holocaust, most of Hungary's remaining Jews have an all too well-developed sense of perspective about Jobbik. In the old Jewish quarter of Budapest, a maze of cobbled streets, synagogues and smart restaurants, few are planning to take to the streets to mount their counter-Jobbik protests. For one thing, Jews here have learned the hard way to keep a low-profile, and for another, the feeling is that while anti-Semitism comes and goes, it never disappears entirely.

"We do have occasional incidents, and Jews and Gypsies will always be scapegoats in society as long as it exists," said restaurateur Sallai Tunde, 45, whose family were spared Auschwitz by pretending to be Catholics. "But if you talk to those people in their 90s, who survived the camps, then you realise things are not that bad by comparison."

NRA Convention Protesters: Nice, But Clueless And Unsure Of What They Really Want

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Yesterday, the protest outside of the NRA convention consisted of just two or three people — surrounded by press, of course. Today, there are thirty or so. I stood around with them for a couple of hours this afternoon, discussing the issues and asking where they were coming from, and I found them to be charming to a man. (Even the woman with the “assholes” sign is pleasant enough.) Still, they are typical of most anti-gun types that I have met: their hearts are in the right place, but they know not of what they speak. And, worse, when pushed they’re not really sure what they think.

Above, I have cut together a video showing some of my conversations with protesters. Notice the meandering agenda, the lack of detail, and the tendency to mask a bigger agenda in the cloak of “background checks.” This was typical. By contrast, the National Rifle Association’s members are formidable. I have been genuinely impressed at the sheer depth of knowledge that the average attendee boasts — not just about firearms, but about firearms law and about American history. It strikes me that if the gun control movement is to improve its performance, step one will be to master the issues. Without doing so, they will continue to be left in the dust; well-intentioned but railing at clouds.

Dangerous Times: Europe's New Crypto Cults Don't Hate Islam

By James Lewis and Justine Aristea

There is something strange about the fast-rising European "crypto fascist" movements. They are peas in a pod -- with similar political programs, and similar nationalist and anti-capitalist rhetoric. They all hate the two Satans of Iranian propaganda, Israel and America. Yes, the Persian Gulf supplies 40% of Europe's oil and therefore has vast political power in all the countries where the cryptos operate. But they are realy monomaniacal about Israel, which has nothing like the power of the oil states. Most peculiarly, all those anti-foreigner movements don't have a bad word to say about 50 million Muslims who now populate the capital cities of Europe. 

Not one bad word.

All the cryptos use the web to recruit and direct their followers. Just as the invention of radio led to Mussolini's and Hitler's mass appeal, the web is doing so for Giuseppe Grillo and all the others. Some of the cryptos therefore want the voting age to be lowered to 16, so they can catch 'em while they're young.

These movements recruit many thousands of grossly ignorant teens, surfing the web. They use mystery names -- Golden Dawn, Red and Black, Five Stars -- as if they came from a single cookie cutter. They all try to absolve the faded Nazi and fascist parties of the 30s and 40s.

But most important, while the crypto cults rage against foreigners, none of them criticize mass immigration of Muslims. They treat Muslim immigration the way the U.S. media treat Obama.

This is too much of a coincidence. Human beings are not all alike. When we act like carbon copies, something else is going on. The Communist International (Comintern) has run look-alike parties in Europe since 1900. Local communist parties never criticized Comrade Lenin or smiling Uncle Joe. You could tell their loyalties by their blind spots.

It's seems likely that the crypto cults are recruited, paid, trained, advised and controlled by some Muslim power center, like Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the Pentagon recently estimated to have 30,000 agents around the world.

Our bet is that the Iranians are running a new Comintern. With the global web all it takes is money, time, a huge expatriate population to hide in, and a ruthless network of controllers. Tehran runs a ruinous domestic economy for ordinary people, but it does those things very well.

Take our favorite crypto cult leader, Giuseppe (Beppe) Grillo, who imitates Mussolini every chance he gets. A few months ago Grillo's party got only one percent less than Il Duce did in 1922. Mussolini parlayed those first election results into 65% only three years later, using bullying, threats and intimidation. Italy's political center collapse under his assault, and Duce ran the place until Italy itself collapsed at the end of the war.

Following in Duce's footsteps Beppe Grillo tried his own "march on Rome" a couple of weeks ago, but was stopped by the cops and military. Opposition parties finally united in a grand coalition against his movement. But Grillo isn't giving up.

Iranian links to Grillo are too obvious to ignore.

Go back 20 years.

In 1992 Grillo was a minor comedian. That year he meets his internet guru, Gianroberto Casaleggio. Today they are the two commanders of the Five Star Movement, which is run like an army, from the top. Twenty years ago nobody had heard of them.

Four years after Grilo and Guru meet, in 1996, Grillo marries the very wealthy daughter of a multimillionaire Iranian highway builder, NosratollahTajik, who indoctrinates him in Middle Eastern politics. "Everything I know about the Middle East I learned from my father in law" is Beppe's way of saying it. That is why he consistently kisses Iran's tail on his blog -- one of the 10 most visited blogs in the world. On the Satan side of things he smears the Jews, Israel, and America, which are all the same, because the Jews run Israel and America. Got it? Poiltics for morons.

All this good fortune comes to Grillo from Parvin Tajik and his Iranian daughter, who make Grillo a wealthy man, with two Ferraris, several villas, and a big motor yacht. What a lucky guy.

In 1998 Grillo's blog presents his Message to Humanity (Messagio a l'Umanita). You can read it there today. Grillo's Messagio rambles through a lot of disconnected phrases and paranoid ideas. But his full-fledged program is there already in 1998, fourteen years ago. With the help of his web guru, Grillo's blog is popularized under Italy's political radar. Nobody in politics takes him seriously, but millions of kids are becoming Grillinis. Today they vote for Grillo. They are a cult, with primitive and indefensible beliefs, a shared monomania, a split vision of the world into Good and Evil. In terms of real politics, economics, and history they are militantly ignorant.

All that started in the mid-90s as a full-blown play script. The good guys, the evil guys, the fantasy of World War III followed by pure internet democracy, the glorification of Beppe Grillo and his web guru.

Nobody knows how the Movement is funded. It's run by only two people, both of them oddballs. But -- Beppe is a comedian! No political party took him seriously. If he wants to imitate Mussolini, maybe it's just a parody. Parody is free speech. He operates under light cover until early this year.

There is now a whole fantasy universe of Grilloid beliefs about the international bankers, the real history of the Jews (who come from Kazakhstan, not that other place), the way chemotherapy is made to kill you, vaccines make you homosexual, aerial contrails are spreading poison in the skies, on and on. This is a real fascist cult, and many thousands of followers live in that universe. It's all they know.

This year Grillo's Five Star Movement comes out of nowhere and gets 24 percent of the vote -- not much by American standards, but neck and neck with Mussolini's first election. If Grillo plays tough he can block the formation of a government, like Duce did in the 20s, and threaten and intimidate his way to a majority. Mussolini got 65% in his second (and lastl) election. Grillo says he wants 100%.

Today Beppe Grillo is forging an alliance with the far left. As a bloc the radical left owns 18% of the vote. Grillo can take their 18% to get 42% of the Parliament. Some Grillo appointee can then become Prime Minister of Italy.

Remember the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938? By looking for allies on the far left Beppe is trying to recreate the Red-Black alliance of the 30s.

Ole' Beppe is also reaching out to other nativist parties, like France's National Front. In Hungary Viktor Orban's crypto party has just taken power. In Greece, Albania, Spain, look-alike parties are making gains. Ordinary people are desperately unhappy because of the bad economy. They have been lied to by the ruling classes. They were promised peace and prosperity forever, and now they want a scapegoat. In the East some yearn for the Soviet years, when they had work and bread to eat.

Some of these countries have rarely seen a centrist government. Democratic conservatism exists, but less widely than in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and even India, where Prime Minister Singh is a free market economist. When Europeans think "left wing" they think communist. "Right wing" is fascist. The democratic center is always under attack.

If you think the United States is in trouble today from a radicalized left, imagine if both wings were extremists, European style.

Last week the Iranian propaganda agency PressTV published an opinion column denouncing Beppe Grillo as a tool of Goldman-Sachs and the State Department. The Iranian regime is all out to put the blame for Grillo on somebody else.

We wonder why. 

Sorry Protesters, But ‘Muskets!’ Is Not A Good Argument

By  Charles C. W. Cooke

For the anti-NRA protesters assembled outside the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, the above is a common pose.

This intrigues me. We’ve all heard this “muskets” argument before; the implication being that the founding fathers could “never have imagined” modern weapons and that, therefore, the Second Amendment should be interpreted to protect only weapons that were around at the time of ratification. Conservatives quite rightly bristle at this, and respond that if that were true then the First Amendment wouldn’t protect the Internet, digital printing, radio, and so forth. The Bill of Rights, we insist, is not vestigial — it is timeless.

This is true, but there is a better argument: If the Second Amendment did apply to muskets — which seemingly everybody concedes — it therefore applied to what were military weapons. The founding fathers, by the anti-gun brigade’s own logic, were happy for the citizenry to possess the same weapons as did the state. They may be “just muskets” now, but at the time they were deadly. Read George Orwell on how powerful citizens with muskets were relative to the state.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.

If we’re supposed to apply this principle today, we should surely be liberalizing which weapons the people may own in order to ensure parity between citizen and state. Unregulated machine guns anyone?

I thought not.

Protecting Warriors From ‘Uncomfortable’ Speech

By  David French

Though it’s appalling that U.S. Army generals are meeting with an anti-Christian extemist while considering the issue of religious liberty in the military, I’ve been quite skeptical of the more alarmist reports about actual Pentagon policy. So far, reports of actual suppression of religious liberty have been isolated and infrequent, and the military’s existing protections are strong and commonsense. When I’m on active duty, I do not feel as if my religious liberty is suppressed, yet — at the same time — I know that my rights do not trump the need to accomplish my unit’s mission, and if my religious speech caused actual disruption to the mission, I can and should be disciplined.

The Air Force, however, may be sending mixed messages. In a statement to Fox News, a spokesperson said the following:

When on duty or in an official capacity, Air Force members are free to express their personal religious beliefs as long as it does not make others uncomfortable. Proselytizing (inducing someone to convert to one’s faith) goes over that line.

Yet here is the relevant portion of official DOD policy:

4. POLICY. The U.S. Constitution proscribes Congress from enacting any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Department of Defense places a high value on the rights of members of the Military Services to observe the tenets of their respective religions. It is DoD policy that requests for accommodation of religious practices should be approved by commanders when accommodation will not have an adverse impact on mission accomplishment, military readiness, unit cohesion, standards, or discipline.

From a legal perspective, the difference is profound. As a matter of fundamental First Amendment law, prohibiting religious speech merely because it makes another person “uncomfortable” is unconstitutional.  First, by singling out religious speech from other forms of speech for imposition of this special standard, the Air Force is discriminating against religion. Second, the word “uncomfortable” places the speaker completely at the mercy of the subjective feelings of the listener. In other words, my rights would only extend so far as your sensibilities.

Such a standard obliterates the First Amendment.

It also infantilizes warriors. Are we to believe that our men and women in uniform can face the Taliban in battle but can’t withstand an “uncomfortable” conversation? In reality, most soldiers have thick skins, and the ones who don’t need to acquire them. Conversations within the military are wide-ranging, free-wheeling, and often conducted at rather high volume. (The one time I actually had to pull two young soldiers apart, they were about to come to blows over whether Chris Paul was the best point guard in the NBA — perhaps it is time for a strident basketball critic to be invited to the Pentagon.)

The DOD Directive states the correct standard. It reminds commanders of the Constitution, states that the DOD places a “high value” on service members’ rights, then goes on to outline far more objective factors for commanders to consider — mission accomplishment, readiness, cohesion, standards, and discipline. In other words, it places the evaluation squarely within a military context, using factors familiar to commanders across all branches of service.  Even the most vague factor — “unit cohesion” — is commonly understood not to mean that everyone likes each other or agrees with each other (the military’s far too diverse for that), but instead the unit functions as a team in the course of its duties.

The word “uncomfortable,” however, is the language of a poltically correct college speech code.

The Air Force’s statement is so far out of line with DOD policy and so far beyond the bounds of First Amendment jurisprudence that I have to believe the statement is simply a mistake, and not indicative of any actual command directive that would carry with it UCMJ enforcement. At least I hope that’s the case. As it stands, the Air Force should quickly reaffirm its commitment to standing DOD policies, lest it create any (further) confusion.

Simply put, the Constitution trumps our “comfort.”

The Immigration Transformation

A rational immigration reform would attempt to reorient, not accelerate, current policy.

 

By Mark Steyn

Most countries in the world have irrelevant numbers of “immigrants.” In the Americas, for example, only Canada, America, and the British West Indies have significant non-native populations. In Mexico, immigrants account for 0.6 percent of the population, and that generally negligible level prevails all the way down through Latin America until you hit a blip of 1.4 percent with Chile and 3.8 percent in Argentina. There’s an isolated exception in Belize, which, like the English Caribbean, has historical patterns of internal migration within the British Commonwealth, such as one sees, for example, in the number of New Zealand–born residents of Australia. But profound sweeping demographic transformation through immigration is a phenomenon only of the Western world in the modern era, and even there America leads the way.

Over 20 percent of all the immigrants on the planet are in the United States. The country’s foreign-born population has doubled in the last two decades to 40 million — officially. Which is the equivalent of Washington taking a decision to admit every single living Canadian, and throwing in the population of New Zealand as a bonus. Thank goodness they didn’t do that, eh? (Whoops.) Otherwise, America would have been subject to some hideous, freakish cultural transformation in which there would be hockey franchises in Florida, and Canadian banks on every street corner in New York trumpeting their obnoxious jingoistic slogans (“TD: America’s neighborhood bank”), and creepy little pop stars with weird foreign names like Justin and Carly Rae doing the jobs America’s teen heartthrobs won’t do. What a vile alien nightmare that would be to wake up in.

Not so very long ago, its national mythology notwithstanding, the United States was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants. Personally, I don’t see what’s so enlightened and progressive about denuding Third World nations of their best and brightest to be your doctors and nurses, but it does demonstrate a certain ruthless self-interest. By contrast the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them — 12 million — from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants: An engineer or computer scientist is less likely to bring in an unending string of relatives — because his dad’s a millionaire businessman in Bangalore and his brother’s a barrister in London, and they’re both happy and prosperous where they are. Insofar as there is any economic benefit to mass immigration, it’s more than entirely wiped out by chain importation of elderly dependents and other clients for the Big Government state.

So any rational immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the United States by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out the numbers.

Thirty-three million is like importing the entire population of Canada . . . oh, wait, we did that shtick three paragraphs ago. Okay, if you’re black, look at it this way: The demographic clout it took you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsey Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40 percent of Americans who’ll be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to go nowhere?

Speaking of demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican party would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by Charles Krauthammer and other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency” — which I think translates into Spanish as “una parte del electorado conservador natural.” I Googled this phrase and it got no hits, so perhaps Dr. Krauthammer got lost in translation. But I’ll take his word for it that, once America assumes the demographics of California, the Republican party will be unstoppable.

Aside from that electoral windfall, the benefits of Schumer-Rubio “comprehensive” “reform” seem doubtful. Every new arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing reveals some laughably obvious breach of the system. Alert to the possibility that the involvement of various hardworking immigrants in the recent unpleasantness might not be the best advertisement for his bill, John McCain is now proposing that the United States look more carefully at admitting persons “from countries that have histories such as Dagestan and Chechnya and others where there has been significant influence of radical Islamic extremism.” Incendiary Chechens is nothing a bit more bureaucratic oversight can’t cure.

The problem with this instant solution is that Chechnya and Dagestan are not “countries” — or, to be more precise, are not sovereign nations. They’re subnational jurisdictions of the Russian Federation, whose citizens travel on Russian passports. This would be the equivalent of permitting United Kingdom immigrants from Wales and Scotland, but not from England and Northern Ireland. Senator McCain’s proposal could in theory work — if you believe that our post-9/11 state-of-the-art “smart government” will have no trouble distinguishing between a guy from St. Petersburg, and a fellow from Makhachkala, formerly Petrovsk, the Dagestani capital once named after the same tsar as Petersburg. But, if you’re a wee bit skeptical that U.S. immigration officials are capable of distinguishing a Russian from one city named after Peter the Great from a Russian from another city named after Peter the Great, it’s a bit of a long shot — and that’s before the Dagestani from Petrovsk takes the precaution of getting a post-office box in St. Petersburg.

So McCain’s intervention is useful only insofar as it reminds us of the gulf between political “solutions” and reality. When I came to this great land, I was initially worried that the government might find out about my unpaid parking tickets in Moose Jaw and the chain of unsolved prostitute murders in the port of Hamburg. My immigration lawyer explained to me that the examiners devote six minutes to each application, and then say yea or nay. I’m confident that if we toss another 33 million into the mix, we can get that six minutes cut by two-thirds. Much of which can be devoted to checking the background of Dagestani applicants, assuming the immigration official takes no more than three attempts to type “Makhachkala” correctly.

And so it will go with all the other much-vaunted “triggers”: Chances of them ever having any meaningful impact? Zero percent. The Daily Caller has already identified in the bill 999 references to “waivers, exemptions, or political discretion,” meaning that all these “triggers” will be in the hands of a federal bureaucracy that will never pull them, and will take its cue from the left-wing immigration-lobby groups the new bill funds so generously. So what’s the big deal about making McCain’s Dagestani crackdown the 1,000th meaningless safeguard that will be entirely ignored?

Beneath the phony “triggers,” an already rapid transformation of America is about to be speeded up. An informed citizenry would trade all the triggers for a straight answer to one simple question:

Why?

An Idiotic And Politically Suicidal Muffin Pays The Ultimate Price For His UKIP Slurs

UKIP is not extremist. In many ways it is the Conservative Party in exile. Its main benefactors used to bankroll the Tories, and many of its activists have worked for them

By Stephen Glover

People say that plain-speaking, man-of-the-people Nigel Farage is an outstanding political leader.

So he is. Were it not for his great gifts, it is most unlikely that UKIP would have delivered such a triumphant performance.

But there is another political figure to whom the upstart party is enormously indebted.

Without the unflagging energies of this remarkable person, UKIP could never have enjoyed its success. 

The name of this self-effacing hero? David Cameron.

He has abused, alienated and underestimated UKIP almost from the moment he became Tory leader. 

In 2006 he stupidly claimed the party was made up of ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’.

He had no evidence for that gratuitous slur.

As recently as January he dipped again into his book of insults, saying that UKIP contains some ‘pretty odd people’. 

A week ago Kenneth Clarke went even further, describing the party as a ‘collection of clowns’. Other ministers unwisely joined in.

Even during the tumultuous 1980s we didn’t hear language of this sort. It is unusual for democratic politicians to fling such crude invective at their counterparts. 

The wonder is that it should be employed by Conservatives to denigrate a party which, far from being constituted of closet racists, is largely made up of closet Tories.

UKIP is not extremist. In many ways it is the Conservative Party in exile. Its main benefactors used to bankroll the Tories, and many of its activists have worked for them.

Its membership is largely comprised of decent, patriotic types such as you might have seen knocking on doors and organising bring-and-buy sales on behalf of the local Tory party only 20 years ago.

No doubt one or two oddballs have crept in, but that isn’t surprising in an expanding party which still lacks a proper organisation. 

The attempts of the Tory dirty tricks department to smear UKIP before the elections were shameful.

Its main policies of withdrawal from the European Union, and restricting immigration, particularly from EU countries, are shared by at least half the electorate, if opinion polls are any guide.

Other proposals to bring back grammar schools, slash foreign aid and boost defence expenditure also appeal to many right-of-centre voters as well as to some Labour ones, though it may well be true that some policies are not yet fully thought out.

Surely the best evidence of all that the party does not occupy the wilder reaches of lunacy is that it won around a quarter of the turnout in the council elections which it contested, which is an extraordinary achievement.

The British – in this case the  English – do not like extremist  parties. Some of those who voted UKIP may have had only a vague idea about some of its policies, but they grasped that it is a mainstream, right-of-centre party which they can respectably support.

'Fruitcakes and closet racists': David Cameron has abused, alienated and underestimated UKIP almost from the moment he became Tory leader

In demonising UKIP, Mr Cameron has not merely been dismissive of a party that holds very many beliefs which used to be described as authentically Conservative. He has also been rude about a large swathe of the electorate. That is an idiotic, almost politically suicidal thing to have done.

Many will think it is Mr Cameron who has turned his back on Tory principles in his drive to ‘de-toxify’ the party and reposition it in the centre ground. 

Is it the act of a truly Conservative prime minister to increase international aid by a third over the lifetime of this Parliament while savaging defence expenditure?

Lots of Conservative-minded people (and not a few others) have looked on in bewilderment as the Prime Minister has championed gay marriage, in defiance of many religious leaders, and despite there being no great pressure from the homosexual lobby to do so. This was the last straw for many Tory activists. 

Of course I accept that Mr Cameron has been partly constrained by the Lib-Dems, though the question arises as to whether it has not sometimes suited him to blame his partners for a dearth of robust Tory measures.

I also grant that in its school and welfare reforms the Tory-led government has bravely challenged vested interests.

But the fact remains that in so often cleaving to the centre ground, and in speaking so dismissively of Conservative-minded people, Mr Cameron has aided and abetted the rise of UKIP, and lost the support of many more natural Tory voters.

I’m afraid his Olympian disdain towards UKIP, and his lack of regard for his own Tory activists, only increase widespread suspicions that his social background has made him out-of-touch and more than a little condescending.

Now, of course, Mr Cameron says that major lessons have to be learned. But I wonder whether he really knows what that means.

Many leading Tories and some commentators are already saying that UKIP’s success was a flash-in-the-pan, a protest vote that will quickly be reversed when electors are asked to choose a new government in almost exactly two years’ time.

If David Cameron accepts this analysis he will be making the biggest mistake of his political career. I wonder whether he grasps the enormity of what has happened, which is that the right-of-centre vote is being split, in no small measure because of what he has done.

UKIP will very likely win the most seats in next year’s European elections, fought under proportional representation.

It is not necessary for it to capture any seats in the first-past-the-post general election for it to inflict great damage on the Tories. In a host of marginal seats UKIP could serve to let in Labour or the Lib-Dems.

Incidentally, it may not matter to UKIP that its sums don’t all add up since no one expects it to form a government.

Many voters may simply judge that the party’s instincts on major issues such as Europe, immigration, foreign aid and defence are right.

As a way of heading off UKIP at the pass, Mr Cameron is reportedly contemplating legislation in this Parliament to ensure that a referendum on our membership of the European Union is held in the next.

This would be a risky strategy as Labour and the Lib-Dems might very well gang up together to out-vote the Tories. Even if he were successful in getting such a bill through Parliament, UKIP’s vote might still hold up at the general election.

The truth is that in de-toxifying the Tory Party, David Cameron has alienated many on the Right. He should have created a tent which accommodated a wider range of Tory views. 

He ought to have held out a hand to UKIP, not rubbished it. I fear it may be too late to make amends. 

Perhaps only an unlikely economic recovery can save him now. The Conservative family is tragically divided. If it remains so, Labour will be the only winner.