Looking Ahead: Republican Candidates for the 2016 Election.

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2016, 2016 American elections, 2016 Presidential Elections, 2016 Republicans, America 911, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, Bill Maher, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, Democrats and Republicans, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Obama, Pat Buchanan, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Sarah Palin, The Blaze

The long, dysfunctional reign of Barack Hussein Obama is drawing at last to its close. Almost 8 years have elapsed since the whooping coronation of America’s first mixed-race President, and in those years, little has been achieved that could possibly justify the initial hype.

Immigration rates are much as they were in 2008. Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite the promises of 2008. The Iraq debacle has plainly not been resolved (despite bewildering Obamanoid claims to the contrary). New, frightening zeros have been added to the National Debt. ‘Obamacare’ has been so unpopular that it looks certain to be revoked on the next regime’s first day of term. Bin Laden, as we are never allowed to forget, was put out to sea on Obama’s watch, but really this only represents a shameful theft of credit from the United States military.

All in all, Obama has not lived up to his initial promise. The spreading realisation of this fact means that the contest to succeed him is destined to be a bombastic and emotional ride. Republicans, from the globally famous (and notorious) to the nearly unknown, are elbowing furiously for media coverage and endorsement.

Given the critical and violent days we live in, the choice of Republican runner will have great international consequences, including for Britain. For that reason I offer here my opinions on the current pack….

Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee isn’t particularly well known outside America, but within the country, he is widely regarded as the most religious Presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. A folksy southerner, Huckabee’s election book is (I think/hope humorously) entitled “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy” and the Senator is vocal in his commitment to traditional conceptions of the family, gun rights, and brash, uncomplicated patriotism.

Huckabee is a naturally divisive figure, as are all overtly religious politicians. Given this reality, I doubt he has the popular support to win a nomination, much less a national election.

DTMW Rating: 6/10.

Jeb Bush.

A member of the politically lucrative Bush dynasty, Jeb Bush should be familiar to most foreign observers. Like his brother and father, he is a middle-ground, compassionate conservative, open to reform of immigration and willing to spend money on public services. On foreign policy, he is tediously conformist – pro-democracy, pro-two state solution, tactful with Russia etc…

There is really nothing to recommend Bush beyond his ability to appeal to a broad selection of Americans. He is not a favourite of the right-wing establishment, and if he is selected as runner, grassroots support may be thin on the ground.

DTMW Rating: 6/10.

Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio is a telegenic, Hispanic neoconservative with opinions and standpoints torn right out of an issue of the Weekly Standard. He is loudly pro-Israel, hostile to the nuclearisation of Iran, committed to halting Russia’s consumption of Eastern Europe, and full-square in opposition to communism and socialism.

For these reasons I rather like him. He might have a shallow, car salesman-like, professional sheen, but he also has an ‘American Dream’ backstory and the right sense of priority to keep that dream alive.

DTMW Rating: 8/10.

Rand Paul.

While most conservatives want to scale back the power of the state, Rand Paul wishes to make it all but disappear. Son of ancient populist Ron Paul, Rand is the young, handsome, smooth-talking and hugely radical driver of the libertarian tea-party movement. He is by a very great distance the most popular candidate with the grassroots of the Republican party.

The only reservations I have with Paul relate to his isolationism. Unlike Rand, I resolutely do not want America to ‘mind its own business’ (as his father would put it). On the contrary, I want the American military to remain the spearhead and shield of modern, democratic civilisation. For that reason alone I would advise voters to look for another candidate.

DTMW Rating: 6/10.

Ted Cruz.

And that candidate might look a bit like Ted Cruz.

Texan Senator Cruz offers a bracing synthesis of neo-conservatism, domestic libertarianism and compassionate social conservatism. Right about most things, willing to use the great American military to protect our friends and punish our foes, anti-government in spirit, compassionate on questions of race and with a long and proven record in practice, I believe that Cruz would make a very competent successor to Obama’s failed regime.

DTMW Rating: 9/10.

Others.

Other candidates running or likely to run include Donald Trump, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum. I don’t believe any of these outliers has the charisma or substance to beat the runners mentioned above.

D, LDN.

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How Does Denial Work?

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Argument, Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Denial over Islam, Hitchens, Left wrong about Islam, Liberalism, Liberals, Niall Ferguson, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Real Time with Bill Maher

The showdown between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher (regarding Islam) has been widely publicised. Affleck’s warped arguments have been subjected to great and detailed criticism (including by ‘liberal’ Muslims) and yet the ideological trenches on both sides remain almost completely unmoved.

That’s no surprise, really. On the issue of Islam, people are only semi-rational. Left-minded folk especially are wedded to their ideas in a very intimate way. Arguments that go against their position are evil spirits. The orthodox defence of Islam is their religion.

I won’t therefore offer yet another analysis of the Maher-Affleck conflagration. I think it will be more worthwhile to consider the human aspect behind the politics; to pose the broad and vital question – How does someone deny the terrors of Islam in the modern world? If we answer this, we may be able to better understand how far we are from winning the argument.

Imagine for a moment that you are a ten-a-penny liberal. Imagine that every night you sit in front of Fox news and scoff at Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and all their stupid bigotries, that you know for certain that they are wrong and that you are convinced Islam is an unfairly maligned religion of peace.

Let’s say that on a single evening, newly severed heads are reported in Syria, Muslim women are reported to have been executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and terrorist plots are frustrated in America and London. As a liberal, your goal is to fail to integrate these events, or else to find an equivalent in the West or its allied nations. If you can’t, then the evil spirits will break through your defensive positions and your political identity is threatened.

Where do you go first? Perhaps Israel. Yes, Islam is surely no worse than Israel. What about all the heads severed by IDF missiles in Gaza? Perhaps if we didn’t bomb the Muslims, they would be perfectly friendly.

Where else? How about America? Damn right. The US army bombs Muslims all the time. So what if those bombs are dropped to liberate Muslims from tyranny? America is a fucking tyranny, right? It’s run by evil corporations and hook-nosed, cigar-sucking Zionists. If anything, the Islamists have come to liberate us.

But you’ve used these self-consolations before and this time, for some reason, they’re not helping. You feel that you might be lying to yourself. In a desperate mood, your mind reaches for the stronger stuff…

Well, what does Bill Maher suggest we do with the Muslims? Kill them all? Put into gas chambers and close the door on women, children and innocent moderates? So what if Islam is violent. Where is all this headed? This isn’t actually a bad argument and so it soothes your mind enough that you are able think about something else.

That’s the end of our experiment. You’re back in an educated, rational mind again. I hope that wasn’t too traumatic. The sort of thinking we have described here has a name. It’s called ‘bad faith’, for which the internet definition is as follows:

‘(in existentialist philosophy) a refusal to confront facts or choices.’

Sartre, one of the greatest popularisers of the concept, chose this illustrative example in his Magnum Opus ‘Being and Nothingness’:

“Let us take the case of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach”; that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents.”

This example fits our subject rather well. The Leftist does not fail to see what we see about Islam because he is ignorant, he does not see it because he does not want to see it. The Leftist has chosen a mindset, not a position. A mindset is invulnerable to temptations from other ways of thinking because it is bigger than the views it holds.

The Western Muslims who are content to smile and proselytise to us now, desire ultimately a society that offends the human spirit. We understand this intention clearly and would rather stop its potential altogether. The Leftists – so expertly cynical in other contexts – deliberately fail to recognise that potential, seeing only the pleasant signs and chastising those who notice the ominous ones. To put it simply, they deploy strategic ignorance.

I really do wonder how they sleep at night. Surely human dignity must naturally spring back from this poise and keep them disturbed. But perhaps I’m wrongly presuming that they retain any humanity at all.

D, LDN.

The Split Personality of William Maher.

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America, Bill Maher, Christianity and Islam, Defend the modern world, Gaza, Hypocrisy, Iraq, Liberals, Michael Moore, Multiculturalism, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Real Time, Television, USA, War

The Liberal position in America is notoriously difficult to define. Many of the ideologies gathered under the term in the US would be classed at ‘Right-Wing’ in Europe (and almost certainly in continental Europe) where the label usually carries connotations of socialism and enthusiasm for the welfare state. American Liberals (against the claims of some Conservatives) are not at that point yet. More often, they align roughly with British centrists like the Orange-book Liberal Democrats or Cameronite Tories.

The American term for Liberals of the European style is ‘Leftist’, or collectively ‘The Left’. These are not often found in Establishment politics, or indeed anywhere close to the heat-field of democratic accountability. Rather they lurk on the fringes of Hollywood, music and (perhaps most of all) the booming trade of ‘political satire’.

A giant on this last stage is a Mr William “Bill” Maher.

Perhaps the most effective satirist in modern America, Maher has never made a secret of his adoration of President Obama (he was a big money donor to Obama’s re-election campaign) or of his violent loathing for White American culture and the rural poor. His well-honed spiel has been to accuse, with the merry confidence of a drunk, anyone exhibiting hostility toward the big-state idea as ‘racist’, a paid-for corporate toady or else a reprobate, homophobic, pro-life creationist. 

And this has worked extremely well. On my personal facebook page, I can never seem to avoid a re-post of Mr Maher’s latest routine, and his television show ‘Real Time’ is one of the most popular of its kind on American cable.

But despite such popularity, Maher has a quirk which makes his acceptance into Liberal high society controversial for more devout believers.

Maher is a Zionist. As a matter of fact, a very orthodox one. The comedian reliably supports the Israeli military in its offensives against terrorism wherever (and in whatever manner) they occur, and most recently found himself in hot water for doing so regarding Operation Protective Edge.

But why would I complain about that, you ask? It’s simple. Mr Maher’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself lies in stark contrast to his consistent refusal to grant this same right to America and Europe.

Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, Maher has repeatedly berated the US military for its excesses and sought (with some success) to diminish the morale of patriotic forces. The Bush regime in particular had no moral fibre for Maher and his baying amen-corner audiences. The invasion of Iraq was motivated by the price of oil. The assault on Falluja was a war crime. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib meanwhile was not a singular episode but rather chimed with the moral tone of the whole enterprise.

Is it unfair to speculate that had the IDF been responsible for any of these events, Maher would have no trouble finding a way of rationalising them? I don’t think so.

And what would that be exactly? Hypocrisy? Tribalism (Maher has a Jewish mother)? Ignorance (that America and Israel are fighting the same wars)?

That I don’t know. But in my humble opinion the right Israel has to defend its liberal society extends to any other democracy, and wrong-headed hypocrites like Maher let us all down by obscuring this fact.

D, LDN.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Cenk Uygur’s Real Politics.

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Bill Maher, Cenk Uygur, Christianity and Islam, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Islamisation of London, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Ottoman Empire, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Rihanna Muslim, Turkish Nationalism, United States, Uygur, Young Turk, YouTube

If you’re interested in politics and a regular user of YouTube, you’ve probably had the misfortune of coming across a video by the ‘Young Turks’ (or ‘YT’ as they now confidently abbreviate themselves).

The ‘Turks’ in question are real Turks by the way (quite an odd sentence, I know). The Lead man (and focus of this post) Cenk Uygur was born in Istanbul and moved with his family to the US as a child. According to Forbes, Uygur was once a fairly standard aspirational-minority Republican (Cuban and Iranian-Americans having provided the model for this), but later shifted after graduating University into the annoying ‘progressive’ more familiar to us.

In 2002, Uygur created the Young Turks internet show; intended no doubt to provide a rival to The Daily Show, then gaining fast in national popularity. That comparison stops at the intention… Jon Stewart, love him or not, is often a funny guy. The videos put out by the YT crowd are….well, not.

In case you don’t know what Cenk Uygur is like to listen to (lucky you!), try to imagine Bill Maher, but with all the humour, charisma, stage presence and wit completely subtracted.

Standard procedure on a YT podcast is for Cenk to show a clip of some intellectual colossus of the political right (the frail and eccentric Pat Robertson for example…) and then snigger righteously into the camera, drawing attention to self-evident flaws, and obvious excess. In many ways, Uygur is a political equivalent of those brave atheists who specialize in critiquing the claims of Scientology. Large arrows. Soft targets.

Still, a lack of humour and/or daring affects many decent people the world over. This alone doesn’t provide a reason to dislike Uygur, let alone describe him (as I’m going to) as ‘sinister’.

What frankly is sinister (and I’m far from the first to point this out) is the very name he chose for the show.

As you’ll be aware, educated reader, the ‘Young Turks’ of the former Ottoman Empire were – while nominally ‘secular’ – instrumental in the mass-slaughter of unarmed Armenian Christians during the diplomatic fog of the first World War. So great was there culpability that even Ataturk himself condemned them for their brutality (and he was hardly a liberal of the kind Uygur now so eagerly waits upon).

But perhaps this is simply consistent with the YT front-man’s real politics.

Mr Uygur, long before his ascension to national renown, made a point of denying that the genocide of the Armenians took place at all, and currently (no doubt encouraged by many a fluttering greenback) only accepts that sporadic acts of violence (intensity unspecified) occurred during the dissolution of the Ottoman system. ‘

Violence? Sorry Cenk, but a million dead Christians in a Muslim empire requires a slightly more detailed explanation.

Why exactly is Cenk so reluctant to do the decent thing here? The consensus on the genocide of the Armenians has already been drafted. He need only initial it. But he doesn’t…

Here’s what I think:

Cenk Uygur is not a ‘liberal’ by nature, or by belief. He is rather a liberal by profession. He has chosen to become a liberal in the same way as someone else might choose to become a plumber or a welder. It’s an occupation, and – in America – a most rewarding one. Deep down however, Uygur remains entirely committed to the myths of Turkish Nationalism.

In regards to the religion of his upbringing, Cenk has only declared a partial apostasy, now self-identifying as an agnostic. Revealingly, this is also the position of most Turkish Nationalists: One foot in the East, another in the West, never fully committing to either; strategic ambiguity.

Under the regime of Tacip Erdogan, the Republic of Turkey seems to be ending its long experiment with Westernisation. As it does so, keep an eye on those who still straddle the divide, and be careful what you believe from them.   

D, LDN.