My Review of "Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer"

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s work detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”

“Banality” was the word Arendt chose for Eichmann’s bureaucratic officiousness in the Third Reich’s Ministry of Death.  That term, however, hardly fits the acts of a self-assured abortionist who regularly snipped the spinal cords of babies born alive, kept infants’ feet as trophies, ran an illegal prescription drug mill, and hired assistants who were totally unqualified to perform medical duties in a filthy, ramshackle facility.  What’s surprising about Gosnell, however, is that his greed and macabre callousness existed alongside an often cheerful disposition that accompanied various acts of charity.  Consequently, Gosnell had a good reputation among most of the poor community he both served and exploited.

Additionally, the authors’ prison interview with Gosnell gives the impression of a self-confident individual with at least moderate intellectual and artistic talent -- a man with a positive outlook on the future who enjoyed traveling abroad, namedropping (a friend of slain late-term abortionist, George Tiller), and playing Chopin on the piano.  Nevertheless, Gosnell clearly overestimated his professional and intellectual abilities as indicated by his desire to represent himself in the trial at which he was ultimately found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison -- a sentence the doctor is confident will one day be overturned.

The term “banality” does comport, however, with the lassitude and indifference displayed by Pennsylvania’s abortion-oversight bureaucracy --  whose officials were all too willing to forego inspections, let gross violations slide, and dismiss even complaints associated with the deaths of two women Gosnell treated.  Pennsylvania’s pro-choice Republican governor, Tom Ridge, comes in for special criticism by the authors for his “hands-off” policy vis-à-vis facility inspections -- though they also note that the state’s bureaucratic malfeasance extended well beyond Ridge’s tenure.   

Accordingly, Gosnell’s late-term abortion house of horrors was exposed not by folks charged with the responsibility of making abortions “safe,” but rather by a cop investigating the source of some illegal prescription drugs.  The unsanitary conditions in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society

clinic -- e.g. cat feces, urine stench, milk jugs stuffed with aborted baby parts -- raised enough concerns to begin a probe of Gosnell’s “official” practice. 

The death of another patient opened additional investigatory doors.  This immigrant from Bhutan (mislabeled “the Indian woman” by Gosnell) had the misfortune of being heavily anesthetized by one of Gosnell’s unqualified assistants who took orders over the phone from the absent doctor.  Lies told by Gosnell and his staff about the treatment of Karnamaya Mongar didn’t deflect Detective Jim Wood and district attorneys from finally attempting to determine how far Gosnell had gone beyond the illegal distribution of prescription drugs.

Eventually the prosecution brought seven murder charges against Gosnell for killing live babies plus another charge for Mongar’s death.  Though the practice of “snipping” the spinal cords of late-term babies was common at Gosnell’s clinic, the prosecution required clear evidence that infants long since deceased had actually been alive before being murdered.  However, since there was no other logical reason for utilizing this unusual procedure on aborted fetuses, the authors estimate that Gosnell, who specialized in late-term abortions, killed “hundreds” and possibly “thousands” of live babies over the decades.

McElhinney and McAleer’s work provides an extensive account of Gosnell’s defense, presented by one of the state’s premier attorneys, Jack McMahon. McMahon’s cross examination of a prosecution witness who occasionally performed legal abortions at a prestigious hospital contains some of the most damning testimony in the book.  The defense lawyer argued skillfully that there is precious little difference between what Gosnell is accused of doing to live babies at his poor community facility and the legal approach to a live fetus (i.e. baby) after an attempted abortion in an upscale hospital.  In the halting words of a respected female physician, they would “just keep it warm you know.  It will eventually pass.”         

The book also highlights other legal absurdities.  In Pennsylvania, for example, it is legal to abort a fetus at 23 weeks and 6 days, even a minute before day 7, but it is a crime to carry out the same abortion a minute later -- a distinction akin to legally sucking the brain out of a baby a few inches before it exits the womb or illegally snipping its spinal cord moments later.  Ironically, Gosnell, who regularly manipulated ultrasound data to fit abortions within the state’s legal limit, appears to have believed Pennsylvania permitted abortions up to 24 and a half weeks, as his incomplete and often inaccurate records regularly noted the age of late-term fetuses as 24.5 weeks.

Given the brutal nature of late-term abortions, it’s hardly surprising that our pro-choice national press devoted minimal time to Gosnell’s trial.  After all, wall-to-wall coverage would doubtless raise profound questions about the morality of abortion and especially late-term abortions -- as it did with Gosnell’s pro-choice jury and the book’s once pro-choice author, Ann McElhinney.  Only a prominent USA Today editorial penned by The Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers prodded mainstream journalists into providing slightly more coverage.

This gripping and detailed book about Gosnell is a further attempt by McElhinny and McAleer to remedy that widespread media blackout.  In the near future the same husband-wife team will release a feature-length film to further publicize the largely suppressed truth about “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”   

When one considers what this book reveals about the gruesome details, moral incoherence, and institutional trappings surrounding late-term abortions, it becomes easier to see how an arrogant, controlling doctor like Kermit Gosnell could continue for decades cheerfully snipping live babies’ spinal cords and committing medical malpractice on a grand scale.  After all, Gosnell is precisely the type of person who would be drawn to such a macabre specialty, all the while deeming his den of depravity a service to the community.     

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Cf. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/abortion_and_the_banality_of_evil.html

Abortion and the Banality of Evil

By Richard Kirk

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s [work] detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell ...

"Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer"

I have long thought that the widespread practice of abortion (c.50 million since 1973, and over a million a year currently) is the "original sin" at the heart of America's moral depravity. The upcoming book and movie about abortionist Kermit Gosnell exposes in gruesome detail the largely unspoken and unseen reality of this depravity.

The following material is from BREITBART:

Gosnell — who has been called America’s “most prolific serial killer” — operated what the 300-page grand jury report later called a “baby charnel house,” in which he regularly killed babies born alive at his clinic, which itself was staffed with inexperienced nurses and littered with blood-stained furniture and the remains of fetuses stored in basement freezers. Gosnell was later convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and hundreds of lesser charges, and in 2013 was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But before the film comes out, McAleer and McElhinny will release Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, through Regnery Publishing on January 24. The book details the investigation that ultimately brought Gosnell down, and also examines the mainstream media’s reluctance to cover the story due to its subject matter.

In this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book, McElhinney describe how she came to investigate Gosnell’s story and why it changed her thoughts about the practice of abortion forever.

"I never trusted or liked pro-life activists. Even at college I thought them too earnest and too religious. I thought the shocking images they showed were manipulative. I distinctly remember my argument: a heart transplant is gross to look at, too. I don’t want to look at pictures of that, and heart transplants are brilliant. So back off, prolifers with your scary pictures. I also didn’t trust the provenance of the pictures; I was sure they had been photo shopped.

If the anti-abortion position was so strong, it should be able to argue without resorting to emotionally manipulating its audience with fraudulent horror pictures.

Once you have this mentality, it’s very easy to completely dismiss pro-life activists. And the universities of the world are teeming with young people just like that young person I once was.

Fast forward to April 2013 and Kermit Gosnell’s trial in Philadelphia, when everything changed.

Nothing in the intervening years had shaken my feelings on the subject.

But the images shown in the courtroom were not from activists, they were from police detectives and medical examiners and workers at the 3801 Lancaster Ave clinic. The expert testimony describing “good” abortions was from OB/GYNs who had been performing abortions for thirty years. The witnesses swore an oath to tell the truth and to present the evidence, and they did, under pain of penalty for perjury.

What they said and the pictures they showed changed me. I am not the same person I was.

Abortion arguments from pro-abortion advocates tend to avoid any actual talk of how an abortion is done and what exactly it is that is being aborted. I know a lot about both now.

I now know that what is aborted is a person, with little hands and nails and a face that from the earliest times has expression. The humanity in all the pictures is unmistakable, the pictures of the babies that were shown as evidence in the Gosnell trial—first, second, and third trimester babies, in all their innocence and perfection.

I also know that in a proper, legal abortion babies are poisoned in their mother’s womb by injecting a needle filled with potassium chloride into the baby’s heart. Then the baby is suctioned out in pieces. If the baby is bigger, forceps are used to pull it out in pieces— an arm, a leg, the head often torn from the torso. If the head is too big to pull out, the abortionist makes a hole in the base of the skull and the brain is sucked out to collapse the skull so the head can come easily. That’s how it’s done when it’s done well.

Reading the testimony and sifting through the evidence in the case in the research for this book and for writing the script of the movie has been brutal. I have wept at my computer. I have said the Our Father sitting at my desk. I am no holy roller—I hadn’t prayed in years—but at times when I was confronted with the worst of this story I didn’t know what else to do.

I have had a profound sense of the presence of evil in the actions of Gosnell and his staff and their complete lack of conscience. Most disturbing of all is the banality of the evil; in the clinic they joked and laughed amidst the carnage.

I am absolutely certain that the dead babies spoken of in court were unique people whom the world will now never know. I hope this book and the movie go some way to mark the fact that they lived and in their short lives made a difference. Time will tell. This story can change hearts and minds; it has mine.

I can’t reconcile the certainty of the babies’ humanity with the fact that killing babies in the womb at these same ages is perfectly legal in many parts of the U.S. Kirsten Powers put it eloquently: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb—as in a routine late-term abortion—is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

The jurors had to listen to the stories of the lives and deaths of Baby Boy A Abrams (29.4 weeks), whose photograph is on the Internet; Baby Boy B (twenty-eight weeks), whose frozen remains were found in the clinic—the medical examiner’s photograph of him with his neck slit is online—Baby C, who breathed for twenty minutes before Lynda Williams “snipped” his life; Baby D, who was delivered in a toilet and tried to swim to safety before Adrienne Moton slit his windpipe; Baby E, who cried before Dr. Gosnell cut his neck; and Baby F, who moved his leg up to his chest before he was killed. They saw pictures of the forty-seven dead babies discovered at the clinic the night of the raid, their remains stuffed into old milk cartons and kitty litter containers.

These babies sent Gosnell to prison. But more than that, they are the most eloquent evidence we have ever had of the reality of abortion.

The media have tried to ignore their stories.

We will not."

"Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer," is due out January 24 from Regnery Publishing.

Chappaqua Hill' -- The Bleach Bit Tantrum

Chappaqua Hill' is throwing a fit,

O'er the email fuse Comey has lit.

A congenital liar,

Her pantsuit on fire,

As she yells, "Where the hell's my BleachBit!"

Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, by Fred Lucas

Who should read Fred Lucas’s book, Tainted by Suspicion?  Folks whose knowledge of Aaron Burr comes primarily from a milk commercial, individuals who think Benjamin Harrison was one of the Beatles, and especially moderately informed voters who labor under the illusion that there once was a golden age of political decorum in the United States.  Indeed, even history buffs are likely to discover a plethora of new facts and perspectives by perusing Lucas’s analysis of The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections -- specifically the elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000.

“Historiphobes” should be pleased to know that Lucas, a veteran White House correspondent, doesn’t overwhelm readers with unnecessary facts and generally focuses attention only on relevant details.  Most folks will easily cover one or two elections in a single sitting -- without the twin dangers of drowning in mind-numbing minutiae or being starved with cartoonish oversimplification.

For each contested election Lucas provides a succinct portrait of the primary candidates, issues, and campaigns -- descriptions that belie any notion of a kinder, gentler era of political discourse.  Indeed, on the whole, one could easily conclude that modern campaigns are less vicious than their 19^th century predecessors.  In 1876, for example, Democrats chanted “Tilden or blood” when it appeared the supporters of Rutherford B. Hayes were going to string together enough disputed electoral votes to overturn what appeared to be a Tilden victory -- a victory achieved, one must add, with the help of KKK vote suppression in the South.  Fortunately, Tilden was more politic than his most ardent supporters, especially since both he and Hayes (subsequently known as “Rutherfraud”) were ready to end Reconstruction.    

The election of Jefferson in 1800 stands out from the others as it represents the nation’s first transfer of power from one fledgling party to another -- a transfer accomplished peacefully despite palpable distrust of the man Federalist partisans denounced as an atheist with sympathies for a French Revolution that only recently had produced a bloody “Reign of Terror.”  These fears led some members of the House of Representatives to consider Aaron Burr a preferable alternative to Jefferson when both received the same number of electoral votes for President.  Lucas clearly explains the reasons for this Constitutional crisis and points to a little-known player who helped avoid a rupture that would have threatened the existence of the young republic.  In addition, Lucas offers insights into Aaron Burr’s political life that adds a degree of complexity to the simple portrait of Burr as the unprincipled person who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and sought to become Emperor in the Louisiana territory.      

Twenty-four years later, Andrew Jackson, principal founder of the Democratic Party, was willing to wait till 1828 to capture the Presidency that eluded him in a four-way race where he received a plurality, but not a majority, of electoral and popular votes.  Lucas describes the relevant ins-and-outs of the perfectly legal decision by the House of Representatives to award the Presidency to John Quincy Adams.  This decision, however, was denounced as a “corrupt bargain” by Jackson supporters when another contender in the Presidential race, Henry Clay of Kentucky, was named Adams’s Secretary of State.  Old Hickory’s successful 1828 campaign began promptly when he was nominated by the Tennessee state legislature in 1825.  So much for the idea that only modern campaigns seem interminable. 

Older folks are probably familiar with the chicanery that occurred during the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race.  While Lucas provides a few specific examples of election fraud in Kennedy’s favor, he’s doubtful they changed the ultimate outcome of the election. This is certainly a debatable point since, as Lucas notes, Kennedy carried Illinois by a mere 9,000 votes and Texas by 46,000.  A little-recalled aspect of the 1960 election that Lucas also explores involves the Alabama ballot that was split between five Democrat electors pledged to Kennedy and six unpledged electors who ultimately voted for Virginia Senator Harry Byrd.  Given this split, it’s plausible to argue that over half of the Democratic vote in Alabama wasn’t for Kennedy.  Thus, Nixon, at least according to Congressional Quarterly, actually won the national popular vote by 60,000.  Perhaps the most significant detail in Lucas’s account of the 1960 election is Nixon’s patriotic reason for not contesting the vote.  Such a legal battle amid the Cold War would send the wrong signal to nations about America’s democratic system. 

Lucas’s discussion of the 2000 Bush-Gore election provides a detailed but readable summary of the litigation in Florida and concludes that, as in all the other cases, nothing was stolen.  He emphasizes that while the Supreme Court split 5-4 in favor of stopping the Florida recount, it was a 7-2 vote that rejected the hand counts taking place in only four select Democratic counties, with varying standards.  Lucas also notes that Bill Daley, son of the Chicago mayor whose political machine cranked out phantom votes for Kennedy in 1960, was a prominent member of Gore’s legal team.  On the other side, of course, was Florida Governor Jeb Bush, George W’s brother.

A “what if” chapter concludes each election analysis.  What if Gore had been President?  What if Grover Cleveland had won in 1888 instead of Benjamin Harrison? (That election was never formally contested but was included because Cleveland won the popular, but not the electoral, vote.)  Citing various historians and journalists, Lucas illustrates how widespread opinions are on these what-if questions.  He thus adds to Yogi Berra’s observation, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” the fact that it’s also very hard to make predictions about the past.  I feel safe, however, in predicting that anyone who reads Tainted by Suspicion will be wiser for the effort.

I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already, by Roger L. Simon

Why do few people change their political views “even in the face of literally earthshaking world events” like 9/11?  Roger Simon’s answer to that question is “moral narcissism.”  His book explains the nature and consequences of this malady that was largely spawned by members of the “Least Great Generation,” folks, including the author (1943), born during or shortly before World War Two -- radical-wannabes that include John Lennon (1940), Tom Hayden (1939), Abbie Hoffman (1936), and Gloria Steinem (1934).    

An illustration of moral narcissism not employed by Simon is the Seinfeld character, Elaine -- a woman whose sense of moral worth is derived from opinions that coincide with fashionable progressivism (Greenpeace activism, contempt for pro-lifers, contempt for her boyfriend’s “Jesus fish,” contempt for Christian music radio presets, contempt for women wearing fur coats).  Despite a largely self-centered, shallow, and promiscuous life, Elaine is convinced she’s a “good humanitarian” and proves it by self-consciously complimenting her waitress on “doing a great job.”  

The examples provided by Simon, unfortunately, aren’t fictional and have had disastrous, perhaps fatal, consequences for the nation -- fashionable anti-capitalist Marxism (espoused by thousands of well-compensated professors as well as Pope Francis); a nostalgia for racism that stokes racial hatred by inventing micro-aggressions that supposedly explain and thus excuse black criminality; climate-change ideologues who declare the issue settled (a ridiculously anti-scientific assertion) and who label anyone who dissents from the media-enforced consensus (even MIT’s premier climatologist, Richard Lindzen) a “denier.”   

Radical environmentalism is another arena where moral narcissism flourishes, a movement whose DDT ban, spawned in 1962 by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths in Africa.  Then there is the non-judgmental, all-religions-are-equal view of Islam that blames Western imperialism for causing terrorism -- a pat-oneself-on-the-back brand of “tolerance” that ignores or chooses to remain ignorant of Islam’s bloody, expansionist history prior to the era of Western imperialism.

The primary goal of moral narcissism is not “to do” good, but rather “to feel” good about oneself for having “the right opinion”-- i.e. opinions promulgated by those who deem themselves superior by virtue of their “enlightened” views.  These moral mandarins consist primarily of left-wing politicians, leftist academicians, the mainstream media, and almost all the entertainment industry.  Like Seinfeld’s Elaine, it isn’t how one lives one’s life that counts; it’s the political and moral slogans one mouths.  Indeed, the moral stature gained from being politically au currant serves as absolution for what used to count as personal moral failings -- an arena where non-judgmentalism is demanded by political correctness, at least with respect to ideological soulmates.   

Sympathy for Fidel Castro boosts one’s moral standing since Castro supposedly believes in a utopian socialist state where folks contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs.  Never mind that the dictator lives “a lifestyle, including yachts and private islands, that would be the envy of George Soros, while his citizens suffer in penury under constant surveillance, the specter of imprisonment looming.”  Identifying with various victim groups and spouting politically correct mantras likewise “allows Hillary Clinton to go from undergraduate Alinskyite to Chappaqua plutocrat with a net worth in the tens of millions without missing a beat.”  The destructive consequences of leftist policies for minorities aren’t what matter.  What matters is that Hillary and the current narcissist-in-chief feel morally superior to Rubes in flyover country.

Just when you think Simon is becoming tiresome (as he does when repeating polling statistics about gay marriage) he provides a critical insight in chapter 24 that should have been placed near the book’s beginning: “Moral narcissism . . . is a way of explaining away evil, blaming all ills on social causes and therefore pushing back the necessity of examining the human soul or one’s own, of not seeing the possible darkness within . . . moral narcissism obscures reality and therefore threatens democracy. That not everything is perfectible, that there is evil in the world, and that evil is likely to remain forever.” In short, self-scrutiny is replaced with verbal orthodoxies promulgated by an American nomenklatura eager to secure moral status, financial perquisites, and a stream of personal indulgences by endlessly repeating politically correct slogans that are overwhelmingly destructive when applied to the real world -- slogans that promise financial and personal retribution for “bigoted” dissenters.

One major mistake in Simon’s analysis is his wrongheaded O’Reillyish attempt to appear “fair and balanced” by briefly pointing to moral narcissism on the right -- as if opposition to gay marriage or to abortion on demand were in the same league as vacuous shibboleths like refusing to acknowledge radical Islamic terrorism.  Far from being rewarded for the former views, believers are ostracized and punished by the dominant P.C. culture.  Moreover, no serious Christian or Jew would use these moral views to evade self-scrutiny.  Simon’s brief foray into narcissistic equivalence has the effect of putting serious, self-sacrificial morality in the same category as a self-deluding political ruse that rejects any morality existing outside the self -- as if principled abolitionists would be biased “moral narcissists” not much different from slaveholders who mouthed the slogan “popular sovereignty.”

This same confusion infects Simon’s final chapter, which presents his self-proclaimed “bias” as a neocon-libertarian, someone who favors intervention abroad and libertarian lassitude at home. The latter part of that equation does, indeed, represent a degree of “moral narcissism” on the author’s part, allowing him a small measure of expiation from colleagues in the fields of literature and entertainment for the grievous sin of rejecting, for the most part, the self-inflating worldview they embrace with a frantic death grip.

Despite these lapses, Simon’s book is well worth the time taken to understand the head-snapping moral contradictions that permeate the worlds of George Soros (chapter 21!), Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.         

Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi, by Kenneth Timmerman

This book by Ken Timmerman contains several blockbuster claims that match Wag the Dog deception in their audacity -- claims backed with evidence ranging from extremely solid to highly plausible.  In the former category is the assertion that neither the Cairo riots on September 11, 2012, nor the Benghazi attacks that began later that night were inspired by the infamous YouTube video produced by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the shady Coptic Egyptian living in Southern California.   

By now informed observers concede the latter point, but most are unaware of the evidence demonstrating that the earlier Cairo riot had long been focused on demanding release of the Blind Sheikh.  As Timmerman puts it, the one-minute, thirty second “Arabic language trailer, which virtually nobody had actually seen, was only tacked on at the last minute to attract additional bodies to a demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo that had long been in the works.  It did not drive the crowds, or the organizers.  It was simply an afterthought.”  Indeed, on September 10, in an interview with the Blind Sheikh’s son and the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, CNN reporter Nic Robertson explained, “This is the protest calling for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman” -- an interview that all but disappeared from CNN’s website after the media eagerly adopted Obama and Clinton’s YouTube spin on both Cairo and Benghazi. 

In Deception, Timmerman provides an Afterword that focuses on the Iranian Quds Force commanders who were actually behind the well-organized and long-planned Benghazi raid.  Anyone desiring more details on that attack, however, should consult Timmerman’s previous work, Dark Forces: The Truth About Benghazi (2014).  Even when it became obvious (after the Presidential election) that the White House YouTube explanation was  deceptive, little information was provided about the terrorists actually involved -- and none was disseminated about the central role played by an Iranian regime the Administration was eager to portray as a reasonable treaty partner.      

Perhaps the most damning assertion in Deception is the claim, backed by substantial evidence, that the Obama Administration intentionally promoted the YouTube video so that, in the aftermath of Benghazi, it actually became a cause celebre in the Muslim world.  Obviously the “promotion” of the video was accomplished via denunciation, but the $70,000 spent for air time on seven Pakistani television channels “only served to further inflame Muslims and to spark more violent protests: 83 in all, by the time it died down a month later.” Journalists facilitated this audacious project by gullibly repeating the blame-the-video narrative that was “pre-cooked and spoon-fed” to them “by anonymous sources at the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”     

The shadowy internet vehicle for widespread dissemination of the video was NewsPoliticsNow, whose NPN3 channel not only removed the video after it went viral but also went off the air and “erased all trace of its existence -- at least to ordinary users.”  NewsPoliticsNow appears to be related to a company called Stanley, Inc. which, according to its website “provides services to the U.S. federal, civilian, defense and intelligence agencies.”  Stanley, Inc., in turn, has as its corporate parent, CGI, the group that “won the initial $678 million contract to build the Obamacare website” and whose Senior Vice-President, Toni Townes-Whitley has “long-standing ties to First Lady Michelle Obama.”  Moreover, other top Stanley and CGI execs “are big Democrat party donors” and CGI Federal president, Donna A. Ryan “enjoyed high-level access to top Obama administration officials.” 

In short, Timmerman provides readers with numerous indicators that the Obama administration helped the video go viral while creating the impression that they had “absolutely nothing to do with it.”  The immediate goal of this deception was to deflect responsibility from the administration for the disaster in Benghazi, but another benefit was to create public pressure for what became (via Nakoula’s dubious imprisonment) backdoor enforcement of blasphemy laws in the U.S.  After all, Secretary Clinton not only promised grieving relatives that the maker of the video would be punished, she also “embraced news laws banning blasphemy as Secretary of State and instructed the United States Ambassador to the United Nations to vote in favor of them, reversing years of U.S. opposition.”  UN Resolution 16/18, which includes serious restrictions on free speech, was apparently being utilized by DOJ official, Tom Perez, when, instead of assuring Congressman Trent Franks that the Department of Justice would “never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against a religion” instead responded by criticizing “hate speech” and “racist speech” -- a detour consistent with Perez’s past support for the idea that criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination.

Unfortunately, the preceding topics constitute less than half of Timmerman’s book.  The rest of the work is largely devoted to the legal and personal woes of Cindy Lee Garcia, the actress who, unwittingly, portrayed the mother of the young pre-pubescent girl (Aisha) given to Muhammad as one of his many brides.  While Cindy’s story merits inclusion on a summary basis (especially in light of Google’s unusual unwillingness to remove the offensive video promptly and that corporate giant’s close White House ties) many readers will be distracted by the space devoted to Cindy’s thoughts and travails.  Yes, Google and probably the White House were putting Cindy through a legal and personal hell, but at the same time dozens of folks were being killed abroad because of the Administration’s strategy of deception.  Meanwhile, the American public was being bamboozled in the midst of a Presidential election.  Finally, the video-maker wound up in prison for several months, for what was, de facto if not de jure, a blasphemy charge.  Anyone wishing to focus primarily on the major issues outlined in the review above might want to employ other Timmerman materials -- or read this book selectively.

The Ty Cobb Libel

I'm wondering whether the lefties at ESPN will care about the historical libel perpetrated against Ty Cobb by a series of journalists--beginning with a lying drunk, Al Stump, and continued by a series of lazy and complicit journalist-historians who don't bother to check facts that are available for anyone who cares to consult them. Those unvarnished facts are summarized in the linked Imprimus article by an actual non-lazy historian--Charles Leerhsen.

 http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/

The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson

What kind of criticism would prompt a major publisher to withdraw from circulation a New York Times best seller by a recognized scholar?  One would think the objections would have to be weighty and the critics unquestioned experts in the particular field.  In the case of The Jefferson Lies one would be mistaken to make those assumptions.

In 2012 David Barton’s popular analysis of Thomas Jefferson was pulled by its publisher, Thomas Nelson, based on what appears to have been an academic putsch designed to protect the now-popular view of the third president as a secular deist and hypocritical, slave-holding philanderer.  This uprising was led by a motley intellectual crew who, for the most part, had little or no expertise in the subject matter at issue.

The re-release of The Jefferson Lies by WND Books begins with an extended preface in which the author discusses the largely picayune objections raised against his original work -- primarily by a psychology professor from Grove City College, Warren Throckmorton.  These somewhat arcane refutations should have been placed at the end of the work -- allowing Barton’s clear and convincing evidence to speak first for itself.  That evidence primarily concerns “lies” about Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, “lies” about Jefferson’s supposed hypocrisy vis-à-vis slavery, “lies” about the ex-president’s position concerning the separation of church and state, and “lies” related to Jefferson’s religious beliefs.   

Barton’s most startling revelation concerns the brazenly dishonest claim that DNA evidence had proved Jefferson fathered one of Sally Hemings’ children.  This blockbuster story in Nature magazine (November 5, 1998) was splashed with gusto all over the national media.  The retraction of this “proof” came eight weeks later -- with all the impact of an obscure page 16 correction.  Equally significant was the political end to which the initial DNA lie was employed, coming as it did in the midst of the Clinton-Lewinsky impeachment imbroglio.  To cap it all off, that headline story in Nature was written by a Clinton supporter, historian Joseph Ellis, who, as it turns out, was as much a liar as the President he supported.  Barton provides an amusing list of Ellis fabrications that extend from the sublime (serving on General Westmoreland’s staff during the Vietnam War) to the ridiculous (scoring the winning touchdown in the last football game his senior year in high school). 

In point of fact, as Barton makes clear, the DNA evidence actually excludes Jefferson as the father of Hemings’ son, Thomas, the child typically said to be Jefferson’s.  Moreover, the other Hemings child that could possibly have been Jefferson’s, Eston, was most likely sired by Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, and not by the sixty-five-year-old former President.  Indeed, Eston was a Randolph family name and the child’s conception coincided with a possibly extended visit by Jefferson’s brother to Monticello.  Moreover, Randolph, unlike Thomas, often fraternized with slaves, a fact noted in the memoir of Isaac Jefferson, a Monticello slave who observed that Randolph “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”      

Ask anyone nowadays if DNA evidence has proven Jefferson was the father of one or more of Sally Hemings’ children, and chances are the answer, if any, will be “yes.”  Thus, as with Oliver Stone’s rewrite of JFK’s assassination, the mainstream media, corrupt academicians, and a sensation-seeking pop-culture have again conspired to manipulate history for their own ends.

The Jefferson Lies also marshals an abundance of evidence from letters, laws, and public declarations to show that Jefferson was certainly not a deist as that term is now understood.  Nor did he possess any view of the “separation between Church and State” that mirrors the modern transmogrification of those words by the courts.  Indeed, Jefferson himself regularly attended church services that were held in the Capitol building and approved various laws that involved missionary work among Indian tribes.  What Jefferson clearly opposed were established churches supported directly by state governments like Virginia and Massachusetts.  Indeed, it was the infringement of their religious liberty by the state of Connecticut that the Danbury Baptists most feared -- the group to whom Jefferson penned the letter containing the now-infamous “separation” phrase.

In short, the Jefferson that emerges from the evidence presented by Barton is of a man who provided financial support for the publication of bibles, embraced a non-denominational piety, had numerous friends (and numerous enemies) among the clergy, clearly expressed the idea that God acts in history (often using the term ‘providence’ that was commonly employed even by evangelical Christians), and honestly desired to free his slaves but was unable to do so because of the numerous Virginia laws that made emancipation, for Jefferson, a financial impossibility.  That Jefferson expressed uncertainty about the de facto, rather than the de jure, equality of the races is hardly surprising given his historical circumstances.  But this historical “given” is regularly ignored by folks who delight in disparaging America’s past in order to enlarge their already exaggerated self-esteem.      

The most disappointing chapter in Barton’s work concerns the “lie” that Jefferson was an atheist and anti-Christian.  What is off-putting here is not Barton’s general argument but his regular insertion of judgments about various Christian groups’ orthodoxy -- judgments that obviously correspond with the author’s preference for traditional Trinitarian Christianity.  These unnecessary observations about “unfortunate” religious movements lend a parochial odor to an otherwise scholarly work.

So who should read The Jefferson Lies?  Anyone who thinks that Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton have a lot in common, anyone who thinks Thomas Jefferson supported the modern notion of “separation of church and state,” anyone who thinks Jefferson was a hypocritical racist, and anyone who thinks academia and the publishing world aren’t partisan cesspools. 

Islam: Facts or Dreams by Andrew McCarthy in Imprimus

Two poignant paragraphs from the full article linked below:

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/3/

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi – Not a “Non-political” Movie

Since the film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi premiered last week, I must have heard the term “non-political” used a dozen or more times to describe the movie.  If by “non-political” one means that the film doesn’t mention Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton by name, then the description is accurate.  But if “non-political” means having no political implications, the word is wildly inaccurate. 

13 Hours is, according to the most reliable witnesses of the events that occurred in Benghazi on September 11 and September 12 of 2012, a gut-wrenching exposé of the lies and criminal neglect perpetrated by the aforementioned President and Secretary of State.  Those most reliable witnesses are the five surviving warriors whose accounts of this long night are detailed in the book 13 Hours in Benghazi upon which this cinematic presentation is based.  It was their heroic efforts that doubtless saved the dozens of individuals in the CIA annex that was about a mile from the diplomatic compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith were murdered.  Indeed, even those two deaths might have been avoided had the annex security group been cleared immediately by their bureaucratic superior to join the fight at the ambassador’s compound.

One lie exploded by 13 Hours is the politically-expedient deception that the Benghazi attack was caused by a demonstration that got out of hand--a demonstration inspired by an Internet video.  The attack on the Benghazi consulate and later on the CIA annex was clearly an organized assault that employed an array of heavy weapons including machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, GPS-guided mortars, and artillery mounted on gun trucks.  Indeed, a couple of the fighters in the film even joked with each other between attacks when they heard that some media had linked the violence to a “demonstration.”  It was as if these warriors were all too aware of how reality is regularly distorted for political purposes. 

Another dubious proposition that becomes hard to swallow is the official assertion that no help was available for the dozens of Americans under attack.  13 hours undermines this notion by periodically posting times on the screen during the seemingly interminable period from the first attack around 9:40 p.m. till around sunrise the next day when the final assault took place.  The movie doesn’t say why military aid wasn’t sent immediately, but it does vividly portray, in the person of the bureaucratic head of the CIA annex, a mentality that put professional standing above all other considerations.  It doesn’t take much imagination to extend that same self-centered perspective to the AWOL President of the United States who clearly wished to downplay a terrorist attack on 9/11 during his reelection campaign--a campaign in which Al Qaeda was repeatedly said to be “decimated” and “on the run.”

The clear focus of the movie is on the bravery of the six protagonists who fended off large groups of well-armed attackers in the face of bureaucratic resistance and political incompetence.  When aid finally arrived, hours were lost at the Benghazi airport thanks to uncooperative Libyan officials.  Then more precious time was wasted trying to locate the annex that was only a short distance from the torched diplomatic compound.  The film also emphasizes how utterly inadequate security was in Benghazi, noting that no other Western country maintained a diplomatic presence in this highly unstable city where numerous terrorist attacks had already taken place.  In short, the U.S. government’s desire to project an image of cooperation, trust, and stability clearly outweighed its concern for the safety of individuals stationed there.

Though the film doesn’t discuss the memorial for the four slain Americans at Andrews Air Force Base, any politically sentient individual will remember the efforts by President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to blame an Internet video, not an organized terrorist attack, for this tragedy--a misdirection campaign that went on for weeks and eventually resulted in the imprisonment of a hapless video maker.  The events portrayed in the film, however, not only make this claim totally implausible, they also make all but certain the assertions by Sean Smith’s mother, Tyrone Woods’ father, and Glen Doherty’s sister that Hillary Clinton repeated this audacious cover story to them at the memorial service.  After all, as far as the Secretary of State was concerned, what difference at that point would the true cause of the victims’ deaths make to their relatives?  Better to blame a shady foreigner in Southern California than to risk adverse political fallout.  Moreover, we now know, thanks to Hillary’s private email server, that shortly after the Benghazi terrorist attacks she acknowledged the truth about the assaults to her daughter, Libya’s president, and Egypt’s prime minister.

13 Hours clearly portrays the neglect and effective abandonment of dozens of Americans in Benghazi during a prolonged series of terrorist attacks.  In doing so it exposes the mendacity of the Obama-Clinton Internet video explanation of events that three relatives of the deceased insist the Secretary of State repeated to them at the memorial service.  If this highly plausible representation of what actually took place in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, has no political ramifications, then the truth, for all electoral purposes, no longer matters in America. 

P.S. I wrote this article before a very similar piece by Dan Henninger came out in the WSJ on Jan. 21.       

Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party, by Dinesh D’Souza

A liberal who’s been mugged, it’s said, becomes a conservative. But what does a conservative become when he’s mugged by a corrupt, politically-driven justice system? Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party answers that question. D’Souza now views the Progressive movement as a criminal enterprise designed to pull off the biggest heist in world history—effective control of the enormous wealth created by America’s entrepreneurs. This bounty, the author argues, was made possible by the country’s embrace of a capitalist system that rewards industry and customer-centered innovation and discourages the hitherto ubiquitous ethic of theft. Democrats, however, through a reversal of traditional American values, seek to acquire power by vilifying wealth-creators and rewarding “victims” with trickle-down shares of the national loot—all while portraying themselves as righteous advocates of social justice.  

D’Souza’s book begins by discussing aspects of his prosecution for illegally contributing $20,000 to a friend running for a Senate seat in New York State. Of his case Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz commented, “What you did is very commonly done in politics, and on a much bigger scale.  Have no doubt about it, they are targeting you for your views.” Dershowitz’s opinion coincided with D’Souza’s ownd—namely, that his politics and especially the negative portrait of Obama in his 2016 documentary had ticked off the protagonist-in-chief himself. Clinton-appointed judge Richard Berman, however, denied D’Souza access to papers that could prove selective prosecution, arguing in Alice in Wonderland fashion that only evidence of selective prosecution could justify access to papers that would provide such evidence. 

Thanks in part to his lawyer, liberal Democrat Ben Brafman, D’Souza was able to avoid the prosecution’s desired prison stint of ten to sixteen months—an outrageous punishment since, in the defendant’s words, “no person who had done what I did had even been prosecuted, let alone sentenced.” Instead, D’Souza’s sentence consisted of 8 months of overnight confinement in a halfway house, community service, psychological counseling, a $30,000 fine, and five years probation. By contrast, consider Democrat fundraiser Sant Singh Chatwal, who clearly tried to buy influence, instructed a government witness to lie under oath, and made “more than $180,000 in straw donations to several Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton.” For these far more egregious offenses “Chatwal received a fine, community service, and three years probation.  No prison time, no confinement.”

During his eight months of overnight confinement with “more than a hundred rapists, armed robbers, drug smugglers, and murderers,” D’Souza began to see prisoners and a flawed justice system in a different light. He also began to understand “the psychology of crookedness”—a “system of larceny, corruption, and terror” that’s “been adopted and perfected by modern progressivism and the Democratic Party.” 

Instead of accusing Progressives of ignorance or naiveté, as most conservatives do, D’Souza focuses on corrupt motives that can be boiled down, a la Nietzsche, to envy and the will to power. The con-man pitch in this case is the cultivation of envy, justifying theft by accusing wealth-creators of unfairly exploiting workers or consumers and making themselves (i.e. Democrats) the arbiters of redistribution. In this regard, D’Souza explores the connection between mafia-friendly con-man, Saul Alinsky, who died living the Goodfellas dream life in Carmel, California, and his two most famous pupils, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The author also investigates the emotional tie between the President and his father—a consummate con-artist and polygamist. Instead of focusing on “anti-colonialism,” as in prior paternal analyses, D’Souza now emphasizes outright criminality and skillful lying, traits that connect the failed elder Obama to his wildly successful offspring who, in true Chicago style, perpetrates his cons inside the system. (E.g. If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.)

To carry out their grand political heist, Democrats must marshal the emotions and votes of an army of envious underlings--stoking resentment among minorities, women, the poor, immigrants, gays, and other potential victim groups. In addition, this gigantic con requires intellectual support supplied in spades by academics like John Rawls who employ their philosophical sleight-of-hand to plausibly transfer money and goods from their creators to others—all for the greater good and, of course, via the state. Cultural indoctrination in the unfair-society pitch of progressive politicians is accomplished by inundating Americans with television programs, news stories, and Hollywood films that feature crooked businessmen, victimized minorities, oppressed workers, heartless millionaires, and hypocritical ministers. These professional propagandists promulgate their ideas out of envy, seeing themselves as members of the rightful ruling class based on their superior intellects and abilities. This same exalted self-image applies to educators who chafe over not being recognized and rewarded by their society any better than the average plumber. 

D’Souza ends his book with suggestions for exposing and defeating the progressive con—a task that requires courage, confrontation, and inroads into the near monopoly progressives enjoy in academics, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Stealing America is also filled with raw conversations between D’Souza and fellow inmates—exchanges that provide significant insight into the world these criminals and their hapless government overseers inhabit.

At the very least D’Souza’s experience with the legal system provides one excellent example of the overlap between the “psychology of crookedness” and the motives and methods of progressive politics. His poignant analyses of the Clintons, the two Obamas, and Saul Alinsky, however, provide considerably more fodder for an audacious thesis.        

Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party, by Dinesh D’Souza, Broadside Books, HarperCollins Publishers, November, 2015 (336 pages, $29.99, Hardback) 

Climate Change Fraud or Yet another group of facts that will be ignored by the mainstream media

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/30/twelve-reasons-paris-climate-talks-total-waste/

Notes on Bernard Lewis' book, THE CRISIS OF ISLAM

Chapter three deals with the history of conflict between Islam and (mostly) European

powers from the time of the Crusades till the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why? To

show the importance, or lack of importance, of the Crusades and Western imperialism

 to the current “Crisis of Islam.”

Lewis notes that the Crusades don’t loom large in Arabic history and that “Awareness

of the Crusades as a distinctive historical phenomenon dates from the 19th century, and

the translation of EUROPEAN [my emphasis] books on history” (bottom, p. 50). Read

the rest of the paragraph (top, p.51) for the remainder of Lewis’ summary. Only in the

last two centuries have the Crusades have become a prototype of European imperialism.

Concerning this European imperialism, Lewis points out that it came in response to

centuries of Islamic expansion--an expansion that included the Christian holy lands,

North Africa, Spain, and Eastern Europe. It is instructive to remember that Islamic

(Ottoman) armies were besieging VIENNA as late as 1683! The crisis of Islam was

precipitated when Muslims began to lose, rather than win, the imperialist struggle (read

the first, and only, full paragraph on p. 52). Islam had no problem with imperialism

when they were the imperialists--only when infidels began to win (cf. the paragraph on

“apostasy” on p. 55). The crisis of Islam, in a few words, amounts to this: “Why are

the infidels winning? What can we do to stop them?” [My words, not a quote from

Lewis]

In the last few pages of chapter three Lewis shows how European imperialism--an

extension of the historical “counterpunches” to Islamic imperialism--has shaped policy in

the Middle East. These “countries”--largely creations of 20th century League of Nations

mandates--sought out patrons that were adversaries of their colonial masters. Thus, links

between Syria, Iraq, and Germany were established--to weaken the Brits. After WWII,

links with the Soviet Union were sought to offset American power in the region. After

the fall of the Soviet Union, no counterveiling power presented itself--a fact that

facilitated the rise of groups like Osama’s which claimed that they (Afghan rebels) were

responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Lewis denies that imperialism, per se, had devastating economic consequences--pointing

out, for example, ways in which countries with imperialist backgrounds are academically

and legally more advanced than countries (like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) without

such imperialist histories. On the other hand, Lewis sees the “strengthening of state

authority” and its mechanisms for repression as an important negative aspect of the

“modernization” that accompanied European imperialism (p. 58).

Chapter eight concerns the origins of Wahhabism--the sect of Islam with which Osama

bin Laden is associated. Its violent, intolerant character (directed primarily against

Muslim rulers who are considered apostates) is reviewed in the first few pages of the

chapter (see the bottom of p. 122). The sect arose, in Lewis’ view, because the gradual

erosion of Islamic power had become obvious even at the geographical centers of

Muslim authority by the mid-18th century.

The chapter then explains how this sect became dominant in the regions where the house

of Saud gained power in the early 20th century. When oil wealth was added to the mix,

the result could be compared to an extensive KKK educational system funded by massive

oil revenues (p. 129).

As Western ideas and power are viewed as the source of the problems experienced by

Islamic countries, and as capitalist and communist solutions are seen as failures, “pure”

(i.e. Wahhabist) Islam, became an increasingly attractive social and political alternative

to reverse the crisis of Islam.

Chapter nine describes historical precedents of terrorism, emphasizing especially that

there is no basis in orthodox Islam for contemporary suicide terrorism. The intentional

killing of innocents was pioneered by nationalists but has been taken over by religious

extremists of the bin Laden stripe. The last few pages describe the views/demands of

radical Muslims vis a vis the United States--their view of 9/11, of American depravity

and political cowardice. Lewis concludes with a subdued plea for Western countries

to support the forces of liberalization that exist in Iran and Iraq--or to face a bleak

future. (In other words, he is asking Americans to show some backbone in Iraq and

not to conform to the image that bin Laden publicizes of a paper tiger with no courage

or staying power, p. 162).

All page numbers assume the paperback edition of Lewis’ book.

Book Review: “A DISGRACE TO THE PROFESSION”: The World’s Scientists – in their own words – on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science, compiled and edited by Mark Steyn

The final episode of Seinfeld involved a “Good Samaritan” court case that featured witness after witness testifying passionately about the moral misdemeanors perpetrated against them by the show’s protagonists: Elaine, George, Kramer, and Jerry. One segment simulated a TV newscast in which Geraldo’s onsite reporter summarized the testimony. The number of prosecution witnesses, she concluded, “just went on and on and on into the night.” That’s the feeling one gets reading the negative evidence Steyn has amassed in this work about the litigious climatologist and “hockey-stick” inventor, Michael Mann.

Steyn’s book is, in fact, a series of relatively short “testimony” segments by scores of “witnesses” to the shoddy science and shocking intimidation tactics employed by Mann and colleagues. The book also indicts various science publications and organizations for malpractice, especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a bureaucracy headed till his resignation in 2015, following charges of sexual abuse, by Dr. Rajandra Pachauri, formerly “Indian Railways engineer at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi.”

Steyn divides his work into 12 chapters which contain, in total, 120 testimony segments. Almost all focus on damning observations about Mann’s methods, conclusions, and harassment of dissenting scientists—many of whom are still in the anthropogenic global warming camp. Thus, the book isn’t a broadside against apocalyptic climate change per se but rather a barrage against Michael Mann, the inventor of global warming’s most effective propaganda icon—the “hockey stick” diagram of global temperature. (Note: The diagrammatic “hockey stick” is lying flat with only the blade projecting upward to represent an unprecedented temperature rise in the last century.)

To obtain this ominous shape that Al Gore and the IPCC seized upon with orgasmic enthusiasm, Mann obliterated two mainstays of traditional climate science: the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the opinion of many eminent scientists this feat was accomplished by employing dubious statistical analysis, by using and even manipulating scanty tree-ring evidence, and by tacking on actual thermometer readings for recent times to tree-ring proxy data that was largely employed to erase significant climate variations in the past. These methodological shenanigans resulted in the apocalyptic headline that summarized the Mann-dominated IPCC report of 2001, namely, that 1998 was “likely” the warmest year in the warmest decade in the warmest century of the past 1,000 years—a headline gobbled up by lazy and politically-motivated climate journalists. 

Probably 5% of Steyn’s extended “brief” against Mann, et al. consists of extended resumes of Mann’s critics—a procedure designed to show that scholars like MIT’s Richard Lindzen, NASA’s Roy Spencer, and renowned physicist Freeman Dyson are, indeed, expert witnesses and not the scientific JV team. Here’s a sample of those critiques: “The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell’s Ministry of Information” (Dr. William Happer, Physics, Princeton); “The blade of the hockey-stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques” (Dr. David Legates, U. of Delaware, Climatologist); “The behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession” (Dr. Henrick Tennekes, former Director of Research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute); “The work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies” (Dr. David Deming, Geophysicist, U. of Oklahoma); “That was a mistake and it made tree-ring people angry” (Dr. Gordon Jacoby, pioneer in dendrochronology); “Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data… Yet that’s exactly what he did” (Dr. Philip Stott, Biogeography, U. of London). The damning critiques go on and on and on—in detail. The above comments are only chapter headings, and the individual resumes all include a large number of professional achievements. 

Another swath of Steyn’s evidence concerns the University of East Anglia Climate Research emails that were hacked into and published in 2009, resulting in the “Climategate” scandal. These communications give credence to the claim that there is or was a “Big Climate” mafia headed by Michael Mann—a group as eager to protect its fame and grant-producing turf as Michael Corleone was to defend his crime syndicate. Fortunately, Mann and company “only” employ stigma, blackballing, and control of peer-reviews to achieve their objectives. Two cases in point: In 2014 Dr. Judith Curry, former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology observed that her “challenge to the [climate change] consensus has precluded any further professional recognition.” She also mentioned that she worries about younger scientists without tenure protection. That same year the 79-year-old distinguished professor Lennart Bengtsson was forced by “enormous group pressure” to resign “for the sake of [his] health and safety” from the advisory board of a think tank that promoted rational skepticism about global warming.

As a closing bonus, Steyn explains the origin of the “97% of all scientists” mantra that Mann and President Obama confidently throw around whenever the “settled science” of climate change is at issue. Short story shorter: 97% comes from a survey conducted for a thesis by a University of Illinois graduate student who, having received 3,146 responses to a two-question online questionnaire sent to 10,257 earth scientists, eventually identified 77 “experts” of which 75 (97%) were found to agree with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. There’s no word as yet on the identity and views of the other 10,180. 

One might ask why Steyn is so hell bent on exposing Michael Mann rather than broadly addressing the issue of climate change—and why he structures his book so that it reads like the sequential testimony of a hundred different witnesses, interspersed with witty Steyn asides? The answer is that Steyn, National Review, et al. are being sued for defamation by the aforementioned Dr. Mann. In other words, true to form, Mann is using intimidation to silence critics. Specifically, the legal case concerns a National Review blog post dated July 15, 2012, in which Steyn quotes aerospace engineer Rand Simberg’s negative comments about the Penn State hockey-stick inventor, including the remark that Mann has become “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.” Steyn proceeds in a mere 147 words to distance himself somewhat from Simberg’s metaphor, to identify Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent ‘hockey-stick’ graph,” and to note that the same college President who “declined to find one of its star names [Paterno] guilty of any wrongdoing” and who was forced to resign over the Sandusky scandal also oversaw the exculpatory investigation of Mann after the “Climategate” emails were made public.

The fact that this speech-suppressing defamation suit in the D.C. courts has been going on for years without media outrage clearly shows that Steyn's derogatory book title applies to American journalists and courts as much as to the now-greatly-diminished Penn State climatologist.

Adios America: Review of Coulter's New Book

Goodbye to the prosperous country founded by overwhelmingly Protestant colonists in the 18^th century. Hello to the third-world multicultural mélange with a distinctly Mexican accent, appalling cultural norms, and a clearly leftist political orientation. Such is the vision of the United States given by no-holds-barred pundit Ann Coulter in her latest book, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

Coulter’s subtitle summarizes her basic thesis—that America’s immigration policies since the decisive Edward Kennedy bill in 1965 have altered our demographic makeup so radically that the nation will be unalterably degraded if immediate changes aren’t made to our legal and illegal immigration practices. Kennedy’s legislation, despite passionate assurances to the contrary, (Coulter: “If you like your country’s ethnic composition, you can keep it.”) soon became the vehicle for fundamentally transforming America’s immigrant population from largely European to overwhelmingly Third World in origin.

Indeed, Coulter observes in her heavily annotated work that about 50 million Mexicans, more than a quarter of that nation’s population, has already migrated, either legally and illegally, to America—a figure derived by employing data other than census forms that folks unlawfully in the country clearly don’t complete at the postulated 90% rate. Overall, thanks to family reunification policies and notoriously lax enforcement of sanctuary laws, “since 1970, nearly 90 percent of all legal immigrants have been from the Third World.” Accordingly, the country now accepts “more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain” and “in just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant—including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.”

The devastating consequences of accepting millions of immigrants from cultural backwaters are evident in crime statistics—stats that Coulter says are incredibly hard to secure since it’s now deemed racist to ask how many incarcerated folks are foreign born. Despite the virtual blackout on such data, it’s clear that immigrants (legal and illegal) constitute a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s prison population. “The U.S. government admits that at least 351,000 criminal immigrants were incarcerated in the United States as of 2011.”  The “at least” in that sentence should be emphasized in view of the importance government officials place on “not” tracking such politically explosive information.

Many of these criminals, Coulter observes with biting irony, are committing crimes that Americans just won’t do. Adios America is replete with atrocities that most news outlets won’t specifically attribute to immigrants. Instead a “man” or “residents” are to blame for gruesome crimes—child molestations, gang rapes, sex-trafficking, et cetera. Consider, for example, a 1998 New York Times story in which the journalist employs a remarkable number of misleading terms in his report on a vicious gang-rape in Fresno, California (“working class city…men and boys…24-year-old man…teen-ager…five adults…seven juveniles) all the while avoiding specifically identifying both the perpetrators and victims of these crimes as Hmong immigrants. To further confuse readers, the reporter throws into his story an inapt comparison to a decade-old fraternity sexual assault of a mentally disabled girl in New Jersey and an irrelevant reference to a white supremacist gang in Fresno. Coulter adds that “over the next year, about three dozen Hmong men were indicted for a series of gang rapes and forced prostitution of young girls in the Fresno area.”  

The truth that PC journalists are loath to admit is that Third World attitudes toward women are generally abysmal when compared with the United States. Thus, the fact that young Hispanic girls in the U.S. are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to give birth between the ages of ten and fourteen is perfectly consistent with Mexican law where “in thirty-one of thirty-two states… the age of consent for sex is twelve.” The lone exception is Mexico State where the legal age is fourteen. Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Hispanics have the highest unmarried birthrate in the U.S., “even higher than American blacks,” a fact that “accounts for a raft of social problems…that will never be identified as the consequence of mass immigration.” It’s also important to note that in the Third World a child’s (or even a woman’s) “consent” is a very malleable concept.

For Coulter one of the most egregious aspects of American immigration jurisprudence is the notion that any baby born in America, regardless of the mother’s legal status, automatically becomes an American citizen. That baby then becomes an “anchor” used to bring the rest of the family to America. Coulter argues that this reading of the Fourteenth Amendment was “cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982” and has given rise to a flood of planned births in the U.S. by illegal immigrants. In Stockton, California, for example, “70 percent of the 2,300 babies born” in 2003 at that city’s “San Joaquin General Hospital’s maternity ward were anchor babies.” Coulter adds to that statistic one more fact: “By 2013, Stockton was bankrupt.”

The policy of bestowing American citizenship on the progeny of individuals who purposely break U.S. immigration laws is so crazy that even Nevada Senator Harry Reid blasted it in 1993: “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right?” But soon afterward, Coulter notes, “Democrats discovered that parents of anchor babies were voting for them! Suddenly Senator Reid decided it wasn’t insane to give citizenship to children born to illegals…. To the contrary, it was racist not to do so.”

According to Coulter, another journalistic con-job foisted on the American people involves polls about illegal immigration. These surveys typically require respondents to choose between two unreal alternatives: 1) rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants or 2) granting these same folks a “pathway to citizenship” based on a long list of conditions—paying fines and back taxes, learning English, taking citizenship classes, no access to welfare, et cetera. The first alternative omits the option of self-deportation, a choice that would become much more likely if an E-verify system that checks an employee’s social security card were made mandatory for most employers. The second alternative involves preconditions that are never actually imposed on illegal immigrants. Another possible response omitted from most polls would be letting illegal immigrants remain “in the shadows”—an option most illegals obviously favor over returning to places like Guadalajara.

Coulter’s book also sheds light on the role played by one of the world’s richest men in America’s immigration debate. That man, Carlos Slim Helu, is a Mexican citizen “whose fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally” and sending billions of dollars back to relatives in Mexico. Coulter’s expose focuses primarily on the fact that in 2008 this shady financier “saved the New York Times from bankruptcy.” Following Slim’s quarter-billion dollar loan, the Times became increasingly strident on the issue of illegal immigration. In pre-bailout 2004, for example, a Times article described the nation’s southern border as under siege.” Ten years later, when Latin Americans were more egregiously “pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama ‘go big’ on immigration and give ‘millions of immigrants permission to stay.’ What a difference,” Coulter observes, “one thieving Mexican billionaire makes!”

While accepting millions of Third World immigrants is clearly, on Coulter’s evidence, bad for America, “it’s fantastic for Democrats” as well as for businesses that profit from this vast source of low-wage labor. Wealthy folks seeking cheap maids and nannies also have an interest in maintaining a ready supply of uneducated domestic workers who can be paid off the books and further supported by taxpayers. Incredibly, Coulter informs us that until 1970 immigrants to America actually “made more money, bought more houses, and were more educated” than native-born Americans. That was before Edward Kennedy’s lasting gift to the Democrat Party fully opened the Third World spigot.   

  

Coulter’s advice to America and to largely oblivious GOP Presidential contenders is to “just shut it down. No more family reunification, no more scam marriages, no more refugees, no more phony asylum cases (which is all of them), and no more ‘high-tech workers’ providing slave labor to Microsoft.” A fence on the southern border, an end to “anchor baby” status, and “a timeout on endless immigration from the Third World” are required if America is itself to avoid becoming “a Third World republic that will never elect another Republican—in other words, ‘California.’”

Adios America is full of anecdotes and will doubtless be dismissed as merely anecdotal by folks who profit from our current immigration system or who mindlessly repeat the bogus mantra, “Diversity is our strength.” (Consider the effects of “diversity” in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Rwanda.) In truth, however, Coulter’s book contains a raft of important statistics as well as a number of compelling arguments that should give pause to anyone willing to scrutinize the effects of America’s legal and illegal immigration policies over the last five decades. 

Operation Desert Mirage, Et Cetera

After a number of military vets decried the Obama administration’s failure to name its campaign against Islamic State terrorists, the White House finally muted that criticism by providing one of the most anodyne designations imaginable for its martial effort, “Operation Inherent Resolve.”

One would have thought that the head of the self-designated party of nuance would at least have selected a title that wasn’t oxymoronic. As pundit Tucker Carlson noted, “resolve” is an act of the will and as such shouldn’t be confused with attributes that are inborn or “inherent.”     

In any case, based on an average of seven airstrikes-per-day, there obviously will be no “Desert Storm” under this Commander in Chief for whom “Delayed Restraint” may be an “Inherent” characteristic. One can compare that ratio with the average of 138 sorties per-day during NATO’s campaign against Serbia or the 800 daily airstrikes in the 2003 war against Saddam Hussein.   

Given these facts on the ground (or rather in the air), there are several more descriptive names that could have been attached to the campaign against Islamic State:

Operation Apparent Resolve would point to the gap between appearance and reality in this anti-terror exercise—a gap that also exists between Vice President Joe Biden’s bombastic “follow them to the gates of hell” rhetoric and the administration’s “let’s not call it a war” spin.

Operation Bootless Venture is a title that combines an air of fecklessness with the President’s up-front assurance to the terrorists that no U.S. “boots on the ground” will be employed in its “resolve” to a) “limit and contain” ISIL or b) “degrade and destroy” those same butchers.

Operation Pass the Buck would emphasize for midterm voters that such force as the administration eventually applies to these rapists and murderers of infidels is only the result of President George W. Bush’s invasion policy and the stubbornness of Iraq Prime Minister Maliki for not agreeing to a “Status of Forces Agreement”—this despite the fact that Obama himself claimed credit in 2012 for withdrawing all American troops from the country and leaving behind a stable democratic government.

Operation Apologize in Advance would reflect Mr. Obama’s view of American history as exhibited in the “America Culpa” Tour that he made at the beginning of his presidency. This operational title would let everyone know that the Commander in Chief’s Nobel Peace Prize heart isn’t in this endeavor that regretfully reinforces the leftist image of America as a bellicose power responsible for many or even most of the world’s problems.   

Operation Blame the Video would be nice if it hadn’t already been used to shift responsibility for Benghazi from an organized terrorist group to a pathetic immigrant in Southern California who spent months in a Texas prison for his much-publicized “crime” of defaming Muhammad in an Internet movie trailer.

Operation Leading from Behind would accurately convey the President’s foreign policy strategy and the expectation that someone else will provide ground troops to counter what his own Secretary of Defense described as an “imminent threat” to the country. 

Operation Phantom Coalition would also tout this Leading from Behind meme while taking note of the help we can expect from our international partners—including NATO- member Turkey.

Operation Exit Strategy would emphasize what’s most important to the Obama Administration in any conflict—getting out.  After all, as the President said, all wars must come to an end. And the quickest way to end any war is to exit the battlefield—consequences be damned.

Operation Desert Mirage employs alluring Middle Eastern imagery to summon up a vision of something that isn’t really there. The name also suggests the fanciful hope that the burgeoning Islamic State will disappear like a pathetic J.V. team when confronted with a determined non-American opponent—an army composed of recently-trained Syrian farmers and pharmacists.

Finally, there is the most provocative title for Obama’s containment campaign against ISIL, Operation Political Expediency—a designation that would reflect the administration’s need to do something dramatic in light of Americans’ outrage over the beheading of one of their countrymen.

I can hear Bob Beckel’s Democrat head exploding as I compose the preceding sentence —indignant that anyone would dare suggest his President would put military lives on the line for purely political purposes. As if that same President didn’t withdraw precipitously from Iraq for political reasons and thus set the stage for the nation’s collapse—and as if Mr. Obama didn’t announce a specific date for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan at virtually the same time he instituted a surge of troops in that supposedly crucial theater—and as if the Commander in Chief and his Secretary of State didn’t promote a palpably false “spontaneous demonstration” story about the terrorist attack in Benghazi to preserve the President’s campaign slogan about a dead bin-Laden and a decimated Al-Qaeda, creating for voters an Internet-video fiction that Hillary had  the audacity to repeat even at the memorial service for Benghazi victims. 

Sorry, Mr. Beckel, for office-holders of that ilk, Operation Political Expediency would have been a perfectly accurate designation—though not, of course, politically expedient to employ.