Given how heavily Catholics outnumber Muslims amidst the electorate, this is, at the very least, bad optics and worse politics. But it’s so ham-handed that it suggest Democrats are doing it out of conviction rather than political calculation.
Two thoughts:
If Obama wanted to quash those “secret Muslim” rumors, this wasn’t the way to do it.
The constant hostility Democrats have shown to Catholics during this Administration suggests yet again that forcing Catholics to fund abortion wasn’t a side issue for ObamaCare, but in fact the central issue. Every knee must bend.
With less publicity than in 2010 it sort of snuck up on me this time. (I looked around in 2011 and couldn’t find anything.)
Sadly, most of the main blogs participating in 2010 seem to have died, though there is a Facebook page dedicated to it, as well as a Tumblr page. (As with the last Draw Mohammed Day, some of the images aren’t safe for work.) But there doesn’t seem to be a main blog for the effort this year.
I have a few major posts in various stages of gestation, so here’s a LinkSwarm to tide you over in the meantime:
Mark Steyn on our heroic Secret Service agents: “It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.”
Does Obama have an $8 billion slush fund to soften the impact of cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the election? (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Pew Survey: GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Borepatch reports on the Dallas Blogshoot. I was too busy and it was a bit too long of a drive for me to make. Which is a shame, since I would have liked to try some of the machine guns, and the .50 cal. Bonus: Ponies!
The word, in this case, is “moderate,” which seems to be particularly tricky to define. Especially when it comes to Middle Eastern political parties. Since you can support Hamas and promise to wipe Israel off the map and still be considered “moderate”…
Maybe. News that the Arab league has suspended Syria indicates Bashar Assad may be on even shakier ground than previously thought. Getting suspended by the Arab League for oppressing your own people is only a couple of steps above getting kicked out of the Klu Klux Klan for being too racist.
And unlike Libya, even a hardline Islamist government would be a slight improvement on Assad, especially in Lebanon, if only because the Sunnis would break with Iran and cut off funding for the Shia Hezbollah.
But it’s hard to tell. When Syrian generals defected at the end of July, that looked like it might have been the final push, but wasn’t. never underestimate a cornered dictator willing to do anything to stay in power.
Will Obama decide to roll out drone strikes in Syria? Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it, as Obama hasn’t seemed terribly interested in Syria, even by the lax standards of his foreign policy engagement. Also, the geography is more daunting than in Libya; to be effective, they’d have to come in over Lebanon or Israel to hit targets in Damascus, each of which presents (different) political problems.
Remember, the only thing unusual about the Norway attacks is the location. Islamic terrorism kills this many people in other places around the globe pretty much every single day.
JihadWatch is saying that the explosion might possibly be related to terror charges against Mullah Krekar, founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam.
This was an important victory, but the war against terror continues. Al Qaeda has a decentralized command structure, so cutting off the head won’t kill the beast.
The fact that it took us just under a decade to track Bin Laden down does not reflect well on the CIA. Human intelligence takes a while to develop, but ten years is ridiculous. We’re lucky he hadn’t died from natural causes already.
It proves, once again, that Pakistan is not our friend. I suspect, fairly strongly, that members of the Pakistani ISI (and possibly higher levels of Pakistan’s government) have been sheltering Bin Laden ever since we routed the Taliban.
Unlike Dwight, I do not believe that Bin Laden’s death ensures Obama’s reelection. It certainly doesn’t hurt, but it’s over a year and a half before the election in a horrible economy upon which stagflation is now taking a firm grip. If the Misery Index is at Jimmy Carter levels come November 2012, Osama’s capture will be a very distant memory indeed.
Why has the picture of Bin Laden’s corpse not been released? Nobody cares how gruesome it is, we want to see it to silence doubters and those who will rave about “Zionist plots” to claim he’s still alive.
Why on earth did we afford Osama bin laden a “proper” Islamic burial at sea? He’s Osama Bin Freaken Laden. We should have stuck it on a spike with a dead pig carcass and let it rot a few days. Those who would get upset at such treatment for the murderer of over 3,000 people aren’t the sort we can win over anyway.
Dwight and Ann Althouse (among many others) are reporting on the vandalizing of a photographic print of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in France. (I’m not going to go into a history of the piece itself, whose heyday of controversy was before most of today’s college seniors were born; I suspect my readers can Google as well as anyone.) The attackers have not been apprehended, but there has been much speculation that they were disgruntled Catholics, though the proof of that is entirely conjectural. Assuming this is true (and not, as Althouse suggests, an inside job), this is like a perfect storm of fail for the attackers:
Destroying other people’s property is wrong. Even if you disagree with them. Even if they’re asshats. (I have no idea if Serrano is an asshat or merely an attention whore.) These are the tactics of left-wingers and jihadists, not thinking members of western democracies.
Andres Serrano is known for Piss Christ, and…um, hold on…let me think…uh, prints of Piss Christ. The guy had his 15 minutes of fame and slipped back into well-deserved obscurity, until you morons came along and gave him another 15 minutes. You’re doing it wrong.
Despite Instapundit’s observation that Christians are just following the examples of Muslims in suppressing blasphemous art, this attack will not actually achieve that end. This is possibly the best possible thing you could do for Serrano’s career. Indeed, I suspect legions of starving left-wing artists all across America have leapt from the futons in their parents’ basements at the news to boldly start working on art offensive to Christians, or at least fill out grant proposals for same. Destroying such art doesn’t intimidate anyone. No, as Islamists have proven again and again, you have to kill people to intimidate others into silence. Not that you should do that, and I’m in favor of the death penalty for killing your fellow countrymen for reasons of political ideology. Then again, this took place in Europe, where they’ve abolished the death penalty. Stabbing a blasphemous artist to death on the rue de martyrs would get you three hots and a cot for life…or until the state has to empty the prisons because they’re out of money.
So whoever did was either a very stupid religious believer, or a very smart guerrilla marketer…
There’s one unqualified success story in the Middle East that Arab countries could use as a template to improve their societies. The problem? It’s Israel.