Amused Cynic

Sunday update:  I’m kinda taking the weekend off, but fortunately, Chris Muir isn’t….

Yes, it’s a recurring theme, isn’t it? First Obamazilla’s so-called Justice Department decided to drop charges against the armed, uniformed black fascists who disrupted polling places in Philadelphia during his coup d’état election….now the so-called Obama Justice Department has smeared a U.S. Inspector General who dared to point out that one of Obama’s AmeriCorps directors was misusing taxpayer money and abusing his “community organizer” status:

Obama’s move follows an investigation by IG Gerald Walpin finding misuse of federal grants by a nonprofit education group led by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star.[...]The IG found that Johnson, a former all-star point guard for the Phoenix Suns, had used AmeriCorps grants to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson and even wash his car.

How’s all that “hope and change” working out for ya now, cracker? How’s your Imaginary Hip Black Friends? Think these skinheads (below) would have gotten the charges dropped by Obama and Eric Holder, if they had been wielding billy clubs at polling places in America? Dumb question, isn’t it? You about to be ruled by da black man, cracker….you got a problem wit dat? Go talk to your imaginary hip black friends and your obsequious white friends that voted them in.

The complaint said the three men engaged in “coercion, threats and intimidation, … racial threats and insults, … menacing and intimidating gestures, … and movements directed at individuals who were present to vote.” It said that unless prohibited by court sanctions, they would “continued to violate … the Voting Rights Act by continuing to direct intimidation, threats and coercion at voters and potential voters, by again deploying uniformed and armed members at the entrance to polling locations in future elections, both in Philadelphia and throughout the country.”

To support its evidence, the government had secured an affidavit from Bartle Bull, a longtime civil rights activist and former aide to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Mr. Bull said in a sworn statement dated April 7 that he was serving in November as a credentialed poll watcher in Philadelphia when he saw the three uniformed Panthers confront and intimidate voters with a nightstick.

Inexplicably, the government did not enter the affidavit in the court case, according to the files.

“In my opinion, the men created an intimidating presence at the entrance to a poll,” he declared. “In all my experience in politics, in civil rights litigation and in my efforts in the 1960s to secure the right to vote in Mississippi … I have never encountered or heard of another instance in the United States where armed and uniformed men blocked the entrance to a polling location.”

Mr. Bull said the “clear purpose” of what the Panthers were doing was to “intimidate voters with whom they did not agree.” He also said he overheard one of the men tell a white poll watcher: “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

He called their conduct an “outrageous affront to American democracy and the rights of voters to participate in an election without fear.” He said it was a “racially motivated effort to limit both poll watchers aiding voters, as well as voters with whom the men did not agree.”

The three men named in the complaint – New Black Panther Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, Minister King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson – refused to appear in court to answer the accusations over a near-five month period, court records said.

Justice Department Voting Rights Section Attorney J. Christian Adams complained in one court filing about the defendants’ failure to appear or to file any pleadings in the case, arguing that Mr. Jackson was “not an infant, nor is he an incompetent person as he appears capable of managing his own affairs, nor is he in the military service of the United States.”

Court records show that as late as May 5, the Justice Department was still considering an order by U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia to seek judgments, or sanctions, against the three Panthers because of their failure to appear.

But 10 days later, the department reversed itself and filed a notice of voluntary dismissal from the complaint for Malik Zulu Shabazz and Mr. Jackson.

That same day, the department asked for the default judgment against King Samir Shabazz, but limited the penalty to an order that he not display a “weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the city of Philadelphia” until Nov. 15, 2012.

Malik Zulu Shabazz is a Washington, D.C., resident.

Mr. Jackson was an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee, and was credentialed to be at the polling place last Nov. 4 as an official Democratic Party polling observer, according to the Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office.

Efforts to reach the Panthers were unsuccessful. A telephone number listed on the New Black Panthers Web site had been disconnected.

The complaint said that the three men were deployed at the entrance to a Philadelphia polling location wearing the uniform of the New Black Panther Party and that King Samir Shabazz repeatedly brandished a police-style nightstick with a contoured grip and wrist lanyard.

According to the complaint, Malik Zulu Shabazz, a Howard University Law School graduate, said the placement of King Samir Shabazz and Mr. Jackson in Philadelphia was part of a nationwide effort to deploy New Black Panther Party members at polling locations on Election Day.

The New Black Panther Party reportedly has 27 chapters operating across the United States, Britain, the Caribbean and Africa. Its Web page said it has become “a great witness to the validity of the works of the original Black Panther Party,” which was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif.

Far too many of you don’t deserve the benefit of this great country, which is why you’ve allowed–and helped–it to be flushed down the toilet with the rest of this planet’s human detritus.

UPDATE:  “The bottom line is that the AmeriCorps IG accused a prominent Obama supporter of misusing AmeriCorps grant money. After an investigation, the prominent Obama supporter had to pay back more than $400,000 of that grant money. And Obama fired the AmeriCorps IG.” Byron York. I am dying to know what all you obsequious Obamacrackers think about this.

As usual, TOTUS (Teleprompter Of The United States) nails his boss’s intent, with this comment.

Big Guy is pretty excited that we’ll be getting to go home to Chicago next week for a speech on his health care reform plan. We’ll be speaking at the American Medical Association there.

It might seem like the wrong forum for Big Guy to talk about how under our health care plan we’re essentially going to take money out of the pockets of doctors and make them work for free, but that’s overlooking two facts. This is Big Guy. And we’re doing it in Chicago. As Toes [aka Rahm Emanuel] says: the doctors will like it … or they can practice medicine at the bottom of Lake Michigan and see how well that billing system works for them.

That quote was from NRO’s Jay Nordlinger a few months ago, just before the coronation of King Obamazilla the First.  There is a really vicious nastiness about the media/celebrity animosity toward Sarah Palin and her family that I still can’t quite get my brain around.  I mean, really, who are these Hollywood types calling other people “slutty.”  Who are these jackasses who have never done a lick of “public service” to criticize someone who saw a problem in her home town, resolved to solve it, ran for office, did it, and then went on to solve other problems as a governor?  This is a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of story, where the protagonist goes on to defeat the  Elmer Gantry/ Barney Frank types.  Are we too “sophisticated” for such a Norman Rockwell self-portrait now?  What is it about Sarah Palin that makes these freaks hate her so?  Does she just have too much of what they want, but can never have themselves?  I think there’s a wicked case of jealousy going on. Hell, it may even be a nation-wide case of feminist penis-envy.

Here’s what Jay said, in part:

Consider one more public figure: Sarah Palin. I keep hearing and reading, in various quarters, that she is a “bimbo.” That is the word I hear about her, rather a lot: “bimbo.” This is a woman, of course, who has been married since her early 20s. She and her husband, Todd, have five children. Sarah is governor of her state; Todd works in the oil fields. From what anyone can tell, they delight in each other, and in their family. They seem almost an advertisement for monogamy: for the married life. And yet people say “bimbo.”

In a nation full of bimbos, Governor Palin is one of the few who aren’t.

It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin’s name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman — more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be — was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose — no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment” (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

At about the same time, Big Hollywood’s Andrew Klavan came up with an excellent column.

I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television, in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback. They say the fight for small government has been lost. They say we can’t have immigration reform that protects our borders. They say we have to distance ourselves from “embarrassing” commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.

No, no, no, no. What the right is experiencing at the moment is a phenomenon called “cultural para-stimuli.” You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s wonderful novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s sort of like peer pressure on steroids. It was discovered by Nobel Laureate Victor Ransome Starling, who found that when he surrounded normal cats with cats whose behavior had been bizarrely altered by brain surgery, the normal cats began acting like the crazy cats all around them.

That’s us–surrounded by the mainstream media. So steeped are we now in their lies about our representatives, their ridicule of our commentators, their demonizing dismissal of the causes we know are just, that we’ve begun to adopt their attitudes toward ourselves! And perhaps chief among the lies they’ve sold us is the lie that they’ve won, that the media are theirs for good and all, and that Americans are going to be hoodwinked and brainwashed by their constant barrage of misinformation forever.

Well, only if we let them. And only if we in the media surrender first.

Interestingly, six months later, even those on the left are noticing the small-minded bigotry-cum-misogyny of which David Letterman represents just the tip of the proverbial “progressive/liberal” iceberg. Forget the fact that he’s a washed-up monkey with cigar-breath and a lame personal life….how, in an allegedly civil society does he get to make the statements he made about Palin’s supposedly “slutty” looks, and her “knocked-up” daughter and not pay the price of true public humiliation? That is more than a bad reflection on him, that is an incredibly bad reflection on the state of American society….which, of course is the society that just elected a pair of angry, resentful affirmative-action types to the White House, and thinks that that simple act allows them to join the “Imaginary Hip Black Friend” club. A nation of bimbos, indeed.

Fortunately, others are noticing, but these commentaries may be just the epitaphs on our collective gravestone, like the moment at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston discovers the torch of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. From Salon, on the Left:

Did David Letterman get a free pass?
Just because you dislike Sarah Palin’s politics doesn’t mean you shouldn’t defend her against sexism.

Amanda Fortini

Jun. 12, 2009 |

If there was any question that a stubborn strain of old-school sexism persists in Obama’s America, one has only to look at certain leaders of what the right wing loves to call the “liberal media” but which is sounding and acting, recently, more like the frat-house media. There, like a virus hiding in the body before, perhaps, staging a comeback, misogyny has found a place to lurk almost undetected, at least by the usually sharp eyes of progressive feminists.

Examine the symptoms of this infection, beginning with David Letterman’s comments (widely noted but insufficiently analyzed) about Sarah Palin “buying makeup at Bloomingdale’s to update her slutty flight attendant look,” as well as his joke about Palin’s teenage daughter: “Sarah Palin went to a Yankees Game yesterday … during the seventh inning stretch, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” (Letterman insists he was talking about her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, who actually had been, well, knocked up, not her 14-year-old, Willow, the daughter who attended the game.) A week before these remarks aired, there was an uglier outbreak of the contagion in the pages of Playboy — never a bastion of egalitarian forward thinking, but still — where writer Guy Cimbalo published a list of 10 conservative women he’d like to “hate fuck,” a term that various observers interpreted as rough sex, sex tinged by rage, or rape. (Gabe Winant wrote for Broadsheet about the “Hate Fuck” story, which has since been yanked by Playboy.) Worse than the violence of the general sentiment was the graphic specificity of the “Hate Fuck Rating” appended to each woman — a list that included Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Dana Perino and Laura Ingraham. On Hasslebeck: “You’d be better served sucking off Regis Philbin.” On Malkin: “Worse than fucking Eva Braun.”

Both cases were met with a tepid response from the left. Though Letterman apologized on Wednesday’s show (see video below), his tone was mock-serious, and his audience chuckled along.

Imagine if, say, Michelle Obama, or Rachel Maddow, or Nancy Pelosi became the target of similar invective. The outcry from the left would be deafening. Shouldn’t liberals exhibit the same sort of decorous treatment we demand for ourselves? Sexist comments like Letterman’s and Cimbalo’s also evoke a troublingly insular, clubhouse atmosphere in lieu of an inclusive political party. What’s more, the gender-based stereotypes they conjure are as stale and ignorant as any voiced by the old Neanderthal right: Pretty women are de facto stupid, sexually promiscuous and low-class. Indeed, it’s the latter slight that has been least remarked upon and is, perhaps, the most disturbing. “Slutty flight attendant” is not just a sexual put-down; it’s a socioeconomic one. Likewise, when Cimbalo says, of right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, “Even a Silkwood shower won’t get rid of the stench of Fascist divorcee and Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door,” the classist sentiment is unmistakable. It’s a combination of gutter misogyny and snobbery, a return to a 1950s kind of insult. This is like saying a woman has a “reputation,” that she’s “that kind of girl,” one from “the wrong side of the tracks.” Cimbalo seems to be holding his nose not at the smell of some supposedly déclassé perfume but at the stench of working for a living, of being middle-class or having middle-class tastes.

And what’s the problem with sexy women, anyway? The facile answer is to say that female sexuality is threatening in some visceral, primitive way. But maybe the deeper fact is that pretty women remind us that the world is essentially unfair — and if the world is unfair, then the progressive quest for fairness may be quixotic and unnatural. There is no more free market economy than your average singles bar. In any case, stern conservative strength in a woman has undone the left for ages: See Margaret Thatcher. Liberals would probably contend that these women present much to argue with, propounding odious views with real-world implications — they do, they do — but why not attack their ideas rather than insult them? Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh incite their share of leftist rage, but I have yet to hear Gingrich maligned as a bimbo, or Limbaugh as a slut (just a “big fat idiot,” to borrow a phrase from Al Franken, an impersonal and genderless slight). Partly, of course, this is because no such terms exist for men — another digression entirely.

Asking why it is that liberal women do not often take liberal men to task for these attitudes is well worthwhile. Maybe we don’t want to appear shrill and humorless, unable to take a joke. Or maybe it’s thought that conservative women are too ideologically reprehensible to merit a defense. But to challenge this kind of sexist talk is not the same thing as agreeing with a woman’s politics. If the left is allowed to remain a refuge for this sort of misogyny, if this virus in the body politic is allowed to flourish, then it is likely only a matter of time before it is once again directed at liberal women who are threatening in some way, as happened to Hillary Clinton. Call Pamela Geller racist for her anti-Islamic views, but leave her “top-heavy frame” aside.

Things are totally out of control, right now, we should all be deeply afraid of what is coming. This is evil. As Mark Levin said the other day, there has never been such a rogue government sitting in control of United States citizens as the one that is sitting there today, in plain site, mocking the history and values of this country. A nation full of anguished Maureen Dowdish bimbos deserves no less, I suppose. But Sarah Palin is me, and a lot of others that the Barney Franks and Barack Obamas of the country now choose to mock, at their peril. We will be back.

RELATED: An excellent post from a blog I just discovered via Instapundit….”Every joke about raping Sarah Palin or her daughter is a joke about raping you.”

FURTHER UPDATE: I really like this blog, it’s going on my highly exclusive blogroll immediately. Good stuff!