Late Night Laugh: Last Laughs

Profits For Me, But Not For Thee: The Utter Hypocrisy Of Noam Chomsky, Closet Capitalist

From The Hoover Digest:

One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky’s work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest 1 percent. The American tax code is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor—like 80 percent of the population—pay off the rich.”

But trusts can’t be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning,” set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

Chomsky favors the estate tax and massive income redistribution—just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.

When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: “I don’t apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren,” he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. Although he did say that the tax shelter is okay because he and his family are “trying to help suffering people.”

Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite the anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist he has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd puts it, writing critically in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those “open to being ‘commodified’—that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be.”

Chomsky’s business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at $12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.

Can’t go and hear him in person? No problem: you can go online and download clips from earlier speeches—for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about “Property Rights”; it will cost you 79 cents. You can also buy a CD with clips from previous speeches for $12.99.

But books are Chomsky’s mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales. As publicist Dana O’Hare of Pluto Press explains: “All we have to do is put Chomsky’s name on a book and it sells out immediately!”

Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: “If you look at the things I write—articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever—they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I’m kind of a parasite. I mean, I’m living off the activism of others. I’m happy to do it.”

Chomsky’s marketing efforts shortly after September 11 give new meaning to the term war profiteer. In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from $9,000 to $12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand.

He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via e-mail that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, the pushlisher had sold the foreign rights in 19 different languages. The book made the best-seller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.

Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. “When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most,” Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn’t have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, “have to do with protectionism.”

Protectionism is a bad thing—especially when it relates to other people. But when it comes to Chomsky’s own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you’d better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky website (www.chomsky.info) and the warning is clear: “Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission.” However, the website does give you the opportunity to “sublicense” the material if you are interested.

Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.

Chomsky has even gone the extra mile to protect the copyright to some of his material by transferring ownership to his children. Profits from those works will thus be taxed at his children’s lower rate. He also extends the length of time that the family is able to hold onto the copyright and protect his intellectual assets.

In October 2002, radicals gathered in Philadelphia for a benefit entitled “Noam Chomsky: Media and Democracy.” Sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Democratic Left, for a fee of $15 you could attend the speech and hear the great man ruminate on the evils of capitalism. For another $35, you could attend a post-talk reception and he would speak directly with you.

During the speech, Chomsky told the assembled crowd, “A democracy requires a free, independent, and inquiring media.” After the speech, Deborah Bolling, a writer for the lefty Philadelphia City Paper, tried to get an interview with Chomsky. She was turned away. To talk to Chomsky, she was told, this “free, independent, and inquiring” reporter needed to pay $35 to get into the private reception.

Corporate America is one of Chomsky’s demons. It’s hard to find anything positive he might say about American business. He paints an ominous vision of America suffering under the “unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations.” He has called corporations “private tyrannies” and declared that they are “just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism.” Capitalism, in his words, is a “grotesque catastrophe.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the retirement portfolio.

Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.

When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio he reverted to a “what else can I do?” defense: “Should I live in a cabin in Montana?” he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in “green” or “socially responsible” enterprises. They just don’t yield the maximum available return.

The Unity That Divides Us: Obama’s Vision Of A Conforming America

Over the last few days, we have been discussing Barack Obama’s carefully crafted appeal designed to appeal to Middle Class American voters (see part one and part two). Obama and the Democrats want America to see themselves as a part of a happy proletariat, misunderstood and abused by conservatives. Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world.

Obama and his supporters also believe that a collective ‘unity’ of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies empower a society. Their strength, they believe, are in the numbers of those who share their ideologies. Obama and many of his supporters also believe that they have every right to design a society based on what they believe is in the best interest of that society at any given time. They also believe that an unwillingness to conform to their ideals poses a threat and quite possibly a danger to the society of their creation.

For today’s leftist, it is about ‘the color of one’s skin’ and not the ‘content of character. It is about image and not substance. The deliberate obfuscation continues and the blurring of reality continues. As the left indicts America as self absorbed and drunk with materialistic inclinations, they ignore yet another truth. Over the last few days, we have been discussing Barack Obama’s carefully crafted appeal designed to appeal to Middle Class American voters (see part one and part two). Obama and the Democrats want America to see themselves as a part of a happy proletariat, misunderstood and abused by conservatives. Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world.

Today, we will further examine Barack Obama’s relationship with the Middle Class.

From part one:

For some, Middle Class is defined as the college educated manager/teacher/engineer types. Most doctors, lawyers and accountants see themselves as ‘Middle Class.’ Others see the ‘real’ Middle Class as the small business people who employed others in small offices, factories or retail shops. Still others see the Middle Class populated with skilled tradespeople or unionized factory workers, Still others see the real Middle Class as the highly motivated group of people with pickup trucks who place classified ads stating they will do anything, anytime, anywhere and have enough skills to get the job done. Others clean 2 houses a day, 5 days a week for $150 a day, cash ($1500 a week, tax free- not too shabby).

Then there are the ‘others’ of another and parallel Middle Classes- blacks, Asians, Jews, and so one.

What do these Middle Class groups have in common? Absolutely nothing. They don’t mingle socially, culturally or even politically. This begs a question: To whom is Barack Obama (and others) talking? The answer is simple and unadorned. Obama, et al, are talking to the Middle Class consumers in all of us. What unites the disparate Middle Class is consumerism.

Obama wants you to believe that if he promises a consumer paradise, a political paradise will follow. In fact, he demands it (not unlike the leftists who preceded him). Leftists and populists have always intoxicated populations with promises of wealth, usually extracted from the wealthy. The promise of equal opportunity pales in comparison to the promise of the equal distribution of wealth.

Even as the left and Barack Omaba speak about ‘renewing and repairing’ American influence in Europe and elsewhere, the proposed makeover is designed to appeal to a narrow- and very non Middle Class constituency. Those who loudest demand that America recast herself are the same people who venerate the most self absorbed, materialistic and tyrannical regimes in Africa and the Arab world, places where greed, corruption, excess and deceit are the defining adjectives of those regimes. They are places that abuse their citizens and make a mockery of human rights.

When leftists talk about ‘negotiating’ and ‘diplomacy’ with these regimes, they are asking that we find a way to accommodate and elevate their evil as an acceptable alternative to the values of democracy. They are not demanding that these regimes assume a more democratic stance.

Capitalism, as Dr Sanity points out, is predicated on the diversity of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies:

Capitalism allows the basic nature of man to creatively express itself by mastering the physical world. The instinctual energy Freud spoke of is directed away from the destructive pursuit of power over other people and sublimated toward acts of creation, which further both the individual’s life and all of civilization…

They correctly noticed that the instinctual energy of the proletariat was being harnessed both for the individual’s good as well as the society under capitalism; and yet were unable to appreciate the fact that unless you accept the reality of human nature and give it the freedom to transform all its most negative aspects into something positive for the individual and the culture/society, then you end up crushing all human initiative, creativity, and productivity…

Simply put, totalitarian systems–whether from the left or the right (and that includes Marxism in any of its incarnations, whether religious or secular)– actively promote the most negative, primitive, and immature aspects of human nature. In fact, they give a societal/institutional blessing to such behavior; and thrive on the resulting projection, paranoia, distortion, and denial of reality…

Because nowhere is there more violence, naked aggression, envy, greed, oppression, racism, injustice, slavery, poverty, and misery than in the shining examples of socialism and communism in today’s world…

Therefore they tend to be already invested in the psychological holy trinity: the deification of victimhood; the supremacy of feelings over reason, and the glorification of self-esteem over self-control; and are predisposed to think of a career in psychology as the heroic pursuit of “social justice” for the poor, unhappy and oppressed masses.

As Dr Sanity points out, the entire raison d’etre of the left is wrapped up in identity alone.

This is anathema to the real Middle Class, whose members define themselves by their efforts, work and achievement. That is a very different constituency. If Barack Obama embraced the real (and very capitalist) Middle Class, he will alienate his leftist supporters.

Free societies evolved and political expression advanced when those societies came to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs. We advanced because we allowed each of us the freedom the opportunity to achieve whatever it was we were capable of in any endeavor we chose. No one told us what to do, what to think or what to invent. In free societies, possibilities were open to all, irrespective of their political persuasion.

The ideal Leftist state today would take a dim view of anyone or group that might demand lower taxes, changes in the state welfare benefits, or demands for any kind of accountability. The lesser burden on the individual and lesser control of the individual by the state, might empower that individual. In the Leftist state, any kind of individualism and real self expression, empowered or otherwise, represents a threat to the state.

Of course, when it is all said and done, the new leftists are driven by one reason and one reason only: to counter the incoming high tide of truth. Revolutions today aren’t about Marxist or socialist agendas. Those agendas are now as they were a century ago- they are about power.

Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright and their supporters need to upend free societies, capitalism and market economies, because those things empower societies, appeal to man’s higher self and have no room for ‘identity’  based politics and victimhood. An empowered Middle Class stifles their voices and grab for power. They become like everyone else, measured by their character and not their racial. cultural or religious identities.

From Africa to South America to Eastern Europe, the idea of character as defining are the ideas that have liberated and empowered billions of people. The war of ideas is over and the socialist/identity agenda has been soundly defeated on every front. The high tides of freedoms and the aspirations of free men can no more held be back than the high tides of the oceans. Today’s’ leaders of ‘the revolution’ will be forgotten. Their proved excesses in death, destruction and the curtailing of human rights have guaranteed their legacy- and the legacy of their supporters. Barack Obama knows this and therefore speaks in generalities and high minded platitudes. Barack Obama and his supporters believe they don’t need to convince the American public they have better ideas, only that they are better people.

Leftist political voices are not Liberal voices. Where are the voices demanding freedom for oppressed peoples?  Nowhere to be heard. Today’s leftists support the oppressors! The failed economies, failed education systems and entrenched failed human and civil rights disasters all scar and identify these nations- and are of no concern to the left. In fact, the despots and totalitarian regimes found all over the world are reflective of what passes for leftist ideological leadership.

The only agenda the left have refused to endorse is the only that has succeeded and the one agenda that is gaining ground, worldwide- capitalism. The real revolutions today are not for socialism, but rather, for political and economic freedoms.

As Barack Obama courts the Middle Class he hates- recall Shrinkrapped’s remarks,

Don’t forget, Obama belonged for 20 years to a church that explicitly rejected “middle classness” in favor of racial solidarity.  He is dangerously empty of everything except conventional leftist ideology

it bears remembering that we are morally obligated not to get along with those whose ideas are and beliefs espouse oppression and repression. We are morally obligated not to give them a platform from which to preach their hate and we are morally obligated not to equate their values with our own. While we cannot stop anyone from believing what they will, we are morally obligated to deny them credibility.

Portions of this post have been previoulsly published.

Dark Secrets On Pitcairn Island: Fletcher Christian’s Sad Legacy

Child abuse used to be a taboo subject, of course, but that does not explain why Britain abandoned the girls of Pitcairn to their fate.

From The New Statesman:

Until a few years ago, Pitcairn Island had only one claim to fame: it was the haven of Fletcher Christian’s band of mutineers, who fled there after deposing the captain of the Bounty, William Bligh. It was a British colony, too, but as far as Britain was concerned, it was a tiny, remote outpost that seemed capable of running itself and never caused any problems.

When allegations emerged in 2000 of systematic child abuse dating back generations, the British government declared itself as shocked as anyone else. Colonial officials had been wholly unaware of the situation, claimed the Foreign Office. The little community – 230 people at its height, now down to about 50 – had its idiosyncrasies, of course, but it seemed a tranquil place, with no crime. And the islanders were all Seventh-Day Adventists.

The protestations of ignorance were repeated as Britain set about organising trials on the rugged, surf-lashed rock, perched in an isolated corner of the South Pacific. Behind the scenes, though, recriminations flew.

Early in the police investigation, at a time when just two victims had been interviewed, Martin Williams, then Pitcairn governor, wrote to his superiors in London: “I have no doubt that these are not unique cases. It is far more likely that they are a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for 200 years.”

Williams, who had visited Pitcairn only once, but appeared to have the measure of the place, added: “If we now launch charges against the two suspects, this may well kindle feuds and resentments about similar cases which have occurred over the years . . . about which . . . nothing has ever been done.”

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers in 1790 and still home to their descendants, has been a British possession since 1838. It was governed first out of Fiji, 3,400 miles away, and then, from 1970 onwards, from Wellington, similarly distant. Unlike other territories, the island never had a resident British official. Governors visited fleetingly, the locals put on their best faces, and years, sometimes decades, went by before the next visit.

That, however, was not the only contact between Britain and its far-flung outpost. Although, for much of Pitcairn’s history, communication was limited to radio telegrams, and letters that took months to arrive, copious amounts of correspondence flowed between them.

Some of that correspondence, stored in colonial archives in London, Auckland and Pitcairn, makes disturbing reading. In 1950, for instance, Albert Moverley, a New Zealand teacher stationed on the island, notified the governor’s office that a relative of the local magistrate had raped a ten-year-old girl so brutally “as to cause the child physical injury”.

Another teacher, George Allen, dismayed by a spate of schoolgirl pregnancies, warned British officials that “if such interference with children by grown men continues, then there is bound eventually to be a breakdown in the health and social structure of the community”. Those schoolgirls included 15-year-old Vanda Young, who died in childbirth because the baby was “too big for her”, according to Allen’s predecessor.

The island’s birth records revealed that most Pitcairn girls had their first baby between the ages of 12 and 15. (One girl was on her fourth pregnancy by 15.) Britain was sent those records, along with the minutes of council meetings, including a meeting in 1970 at which the “raping or illicit carnal knowledge of a girl aged 11 years” was discussed.

The documents were also seen in London, yet no one saw fit to take any action, it seems, on being presented with allegations of prepubertal girls being raped. The colonial authorities did not even try to find out whether the cases had been properly investigated. And the same applied to murder: one teacher in the 1950s reported that a local man had allegedly strangled his wife (and was now beating wife number two black and blue).

Instead, Britain left Pitcairn to police itself – although the policeman and magistrate were related to everyone in the community and the criminal justice system was a farce. An islander who reported a crime was liable to find his goats gone the following day, or his trees poisoned.

Child abuse used to be a taboo subject, of course, but that does not explain why Britain abandoned the girls of Pitcairn to their fate. More likely, colonial officials regarded the islanders as a bunch of natives with dubious sexual morals, incapable of behaving any better. Their habits were the subject of discreet amusement in both Fiji and Wellington. As for the girls, Britain considered them promiscuous, too.

Since the trials, in which ten men were convicted by 2006, Britain has belatedly focused its attention on Pitcairn. Police and social workers have been sent out, and enormous sums of money ploughed into the island – at least £15m since 2000, according to the latest figures I have obtained. Britain is also giving 50-odd people nearly £2m a year in budgetary aid: surely one of the highest per capita expenditures on any community anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, the victims of sexual abuse have yet to receive compensation. The UK’s criminal injuries compensation scheme does not apply to the overseas territories, and requests for a parallel scheme to be set up have gone unanswered. The women are so frustrated by the government’s apparent indifference that they have considered launching a class action.

The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon

Once free and equal, Lebanon’s Christians now struggle against tremendous odds in a country dominated by Syrian politics and an increasingly Islamized culture.

From The Lebanese Armed Forces Website:

Before he was exiled from the Soviet Union, the great writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was outspokenly critical of Patriarch Pimen and the Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy whenever he sensed they were cozying up to the Communist authorities. After going into forced exile, however, Solzhenitsyn fell silent on this issue. When reminded of his earlier criticisms and urged to continue in that vein, he replied firmly and without hesitation that he no longer felt he enjoyed the moral right to speak out against the perceived errant behavior of the Russian Orthodox Church because he was no longer sharing directly in the daily historical-existential trials and tribulations of his people and his church living under Soviet rule. In other words, criticizing from a distance can be a dangerous business and also risks becoming unethical.

I mention Solzhenitsyn’s studied caution only to suggest that a similar prudence is required when evaluating the behavior of Christians native to the Middle East, especially those of Lebanon—an ancient and beleaguered Christian community that proudly traces its roots in an uninterrupted line all the way back to the time when Saint Paul set sail from Byblos on his first missionary voyage to the West.

Middle Eastern Christianity, which includes the Christian communities of Lebanon, has had to contend over the past 1,300 years with living in close proximity to, and often under, Islam, the religion that early on became dominant in the region. Over the centuries, Western interest in, and subsequent incursions into, the Middle East have taken on many forms—a lot of them proving disadvantageous to the Christians of the region. The eventual defeat of the Crusades, for example, precipitated a violent Islamic backlash against the indigenous Christians, particularly those like Lebanon’s Maronites, who had cooperated with and supported the crusading hordes.1 Later Western commercial and imperial expansion into Ottoman domains seemed at first to resuscitate the sagging fortunes of local Christian communities, only to have them witness a return of persecutions once the inevitable Western retreats occurred. Rivalries among the European powers in the Levant and in Egypt often enlisted the native Christians on the side of one and against the other. This too had its deleterious effects, culminating in the 1861 massacres of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus that left a lasting scar on intercommunal relations, and aggravating the repeated oppression of Egypt’s Copts to this day.

I am not suggesting that all Western involvement in the affairs of the Near and Middle East over the centuries has been detrimental to the region’s Christians. Far from it. However, the fact remains that the West’s interaction with the Middle East was always designed to serve primarily the West’s interests. This includes the Protestant missionary activities of the nineteenth century, which, after failing to make noticeable headway among Muslims, turned their energies to converting the local Christians to the creeds of Europe’s great Reformers. Resulting tensions and mutual misunderstandings between the native churches and the newly transplanted Protestants linger to the present.

Meanwhile, the reputed tolerance of Islam, particularly for the “People of the Book,” as Jews and Christians are designated, created in reality the dhimmi system of second-class servitude, which, under the guise of toleration, was actually a system of subtle repression and dehumanization leading to gradual liquidation.

Repeatedly the advice offered to Middle Eastern Christians by Westerners—the sincere among them as well as the self-serving—would counsel restraint, circumlocution, and a self-effacing posture vis-ˆ-vis the dominant Muslim majority; in other words, a resignation to the perpetuation of dhimmi status in the name of mere survival and not rocking the boat. The one community in the region that has persistently resisted traveling down this demeaning road is the Maronite Christian community of Lebanon, along with assorted portions of Lebanon’s other Christian communities—the Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and even Protestant. This has earned them a number of by now familiar adjectives in the specialized as well as the popular literature, the most benign of which has been “obstinate.”

In pretechnological times, the rugged and inaccessible geography of Lebanon’s mountains acted as a natural refuge for persecuted minority communities fleeing oppression. For this reason an accurate, if colorful, description of Lebanon’s recurring crises in religious turmoil, including the most recent agony of the past 20 years, is to refer to them as chapters in the ongoing drama of freedom under siege. This time around, however, the devastating technologies of modern warfare, coupled with the array of hostile neighbors and other foreign meddlers, broke down the natural protective barriers and rendered the siege far more destructive. The full brunt of the prolonged assault that commenced in 1975 was borne by the Christians, who also found they had to contend with a series of negative stereotypes about them, generated and popularized mainly by a host of Western journalists. These distorting stereotypes were quickly internalized by many in the West and did irreparable damage to the image of a community that was fighting for its life.

The first stereotype would be that of a ruthless minority out to do everything it can to preserve its political and economic privileges by keeping the Muslim majority deprived and in a subordinate state. The truth is that pre-1975 Lebanon, despite its many blemishes and imperfections, enjoyed a degree of equitable power sharing among its constituent communities that was unique in the Middle East—a liberal atmosphere that has all but vanished today following the silencing of the guns and the lowering of the Syrian curtain of occupation.

A second stereotype holds that Christians in Lebanon are affluent out of proportion to their numbers, and that they enjoy prosperity at the expense of the Muslim majority. This simply ignores the poor rural Christian population. Moreover, regarding relative poverty, many among Lebanon’s poorer Shiite Muslims practice polygamy—for which the Christians cannot be blamed—thereby increasing the squalor index by adding large numbers of children to the ranks of the wretched. Today we see that the Christian middle class has been hit the hardest, and any significant money in the country is not in the hands of the impoverished Christians, but the monopoly of a Muslim-dominated plutocracy led by megabillionaire Prime Minister Hariri. In other words, the very tangible “trickle down” effect that characterized Lebanon’s economy before 1975 has simply evaporated.

According to a third stereotype, this was a civil war from day one—the implication being that these savage Lebanese were just itching to get their hands at each other’s throats. In fact, the conflict began as a Lebanese-Palestinian (specifically PLO) war that quickly acquired features of civil strife and internal confessional polarization fueled by the heavy-handed involvement of outside actors, principally Syria and Israel (not forgetting Iran and Libya and an assortment of mercenaries).

As for the horrific sectarian atrocities and massacres laid cavalierly at the doorstep of Lebanon’s Christians, once again a responsible investigation of the matter—as conducted, for example, by the German scholar and Lebanon expert Theodor Hanf of Freiburg—reveals that eight out of ten massacre victims throughout the entire Lebanon war were Christians, that the targeting of Christians was in most cases deliberate, and that the main purpose was to terrorize the community and precipitate massive population dislocations, particularly from the outlying Christian and mixed villages in the country.

I am by no means here denying the grave flaws and chronic shortcomings of Christian leadership, both political and spiritual, in Lebanon: the ineptitude, the mediocrity, the frequent bungling, the wasteful and at times bloody squabbles, the many missed opportunities, the insular parochialism, the clannishness and feudal vestiges, the absence of a unified stand, the corruption of character, and the mercantile mentality. All this regretfully is part of the picture.

To stop there, however, as so many have chosen to do, is to form a truncated view of the overall reality. The tremendous odds against which the Christians of Lebanon—the people and their leaders—have had to labor have been truly mind-boggling: oil money, Western neglect joined with Western appeasement of Islam and of Syria and Israel, erroneous and often tendentious media depictions, the absence of a strong and reliable external ally, the multiplicity of fierce external foes, and the demographic dragon. Even the finest leadership in these circumstances would buckle under the combined weight of such staggering negatives.

Back in the 1970s and ’80s it became disgracefully fashionable in Western policy and media circles to put down the Lebanese Christians, particularly the Maronites. These attacks often bordered on outright racism. Similarly today it has become fashionable to lay all the blame for the Bosnian conflict on the shoulders of the Serbs. If the priorities of certain Western governments and their policy planners (Washington included) have dictated that such one-sided obfuscations serve as the basis for ethically dubious policies, the priorities of self-aware and morally critical Christians in these same Western countries ought to be markedly different.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are possible among the Christians of Lebanon, and between them and their brothers in Christ in the West. A stronger spiritual bond is attainable, and a more solid and all-embracing ecclesiology is not an imaginary goal. Indeed, there is good news coming out of Lebanon for a change; important strides have been taken in the direction of inter-Christian and interchurch reconciliation:

• A milestone gathering of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiastical officials took place in North Lebanon a couple of years back, paving the way for further rapprochement between these two key Christian churches. One fruit of this has been the recent encouragement by Rome of the Uniat Greek Catholics or Melchites to return to the fold of the Orthodox church.2 This is in keeping with parallel developments in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. Before—one hopes long before—the year 2054 (the one-thousandth anniversary of the Great Schism), the Catholic and Orthodox churches will be reunited, and Lebanon will have played a modest part in this great endeavor.
• Pope Shenouda of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, along with a number of representatives of other Middle Eastern churches, paid a visit to Lebanon in 1996 that was marked by a spirit of ecumenical openness and dialogue that heralds a new age. Although the visit was laden with unnecessary political declarations made by the visitors in line with Syrian positions on regional disputes, and although it was marred by an offensive pilgrimage to the site of the Israeli massacre in the southern Shiite village of Qana (offensive because the visitors, on their way to Qana, traveled silently past Damour and Jiyya, two coastal Christian towns that in 1975 were totally destroyed and their inhabitants massacred or violently evicted from their homes), the visit of Pope Shenouda was nonetheless a significant step in the direction of greater understanding and mutual acceptance among Middle Eastern Christians.
• A crucial special Synod for Lebanon, called for by Pope John Paul II, was held in the Vatican in 1995. Under the heading “Christ Is Our Hope: Renewed in His Spirit, in Solidarity We Bear Witness to His Love,” the synod brought together representatives of Lebanon’s multivaried Christian family, along with Muslim observers, and demonstrated the Vatican’s abiding commitment to Lebanon as the home of free Christianity in the Middle East. The official statement that was issued following the synod was nothing less than revolutionary in its bold candor and its grasp of the situation on the ground in Lebanon. Among other things, it called for the complete withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and for the first time used the technical terms “cultural pluralism” and “multiculturalism” to describe Lebanon’s divided society, as well as employed the term “consensual democracy” (i.e., democracy by communal consensus) to point the way toward an eventual political solution for Lebanon based on a federal formula of communal autonomy and power sharing.
• Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch, Nasrallah Sfeir, the country’s leading spiritual and ecclesiastical figure, has for some time now been outspoken on human-rights abuses and the curtailing of freedoms perpetrated by the Beirut authorities at the behest of their masters in Damascus. The Patriarch’s courage to speak out has restored the respect and historical-national stature of Bkerke, the patriarchal seat of Lebanon’s Maronite church and the traditional vanguard of defense for the Christians of the country and the region.
• Perhaps the most significant development and the source of the greatest joy is the growing evidence throughout Christian Lebanon of a spiritual revival among the youth. Prayer groups, catechism groups, and Bible-study groups are sprouting everywhere, and I was privileged over the past two years to have taken part in some. The enthusiasm and spiritual dedication glowing in the eyes of these young men and women after 20 years of war and occupation are for Lebanon tantamount to a resurrection from the dead!
• Last, the Middle East Council of Churches appears on the verge of broadening its hitherto exclusive fixation on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem to include such vital issues on its agenda of priorities as the welfare of native non-Muslim minority communities (mainly the Christians), the state of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the region, women’s issues, and Christian unity.

Alongside this good news, there is, unfortunately, plenty of the bad to grapple with. Lebanon’s Christians face the grave dangers of corrosive attrition ahead, which can be summarized as follows:

• Syrian occupation. The longer this lasts the more permanent and the deeper the damage sustained by the Christians. Already freedoms across the board are in eclipse, and with the rubber-stamp Parliament in place following the 1996 elections state-managed by Damascus, the Syrians will be in a position to run legislation through the Lebanese chamber affecting such sensitive areas as education, demography, and politics that will have a negative impact on the Christian community.
• Islamization. Left to wallow in its present stagnant state, Lebanon is being steadily and irreversibly Islamized. Whether through the policies of the Saudi-backed Hariri, who purchases vast real-estate properties from needy Christians and staffs government and civil-service appointments exclusively with Muslims, or whether on the other end of the spectrum through the growing power of the militant Iran-inspired fundamentalist organization Hezbollah, whose leaders state openly that they are working for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Lebanon—Islamization directly threatens the free Christian presence in Lebanon.
• Continued delay in the completion of the Middle East peace process. The longer it takes to arrive at actual peace treaties between Lebanon and Israel and between Syria and Israel, the worse it will be for Lebanon’s Christians. Whenever one of Lebanon’s two borders is closed, the country automatically falls a virtual hostage to the other open border. When the border with Israel opens, unchecked Syrian hegemony is bound to be diluted.
• The crisis of leadership. Unless credible and competent leadership emerges soon among the Christians of Lebanon that will unify them and wisely chart a future course for them designed to protect and promote freedom, prospects look quite bleak. This is something only they can do for themselves.
• Western apathy. In the hard-nosed world of realpolitik, petroleum-free Lebanon does not amount to much either strategically or economically for a country like the United States. Injecting other human and value-oriented parameters and ingredients into the policy calculus of Washington that would elevate Lebanon on the scale of foreign-policy priorities is in itself an awesome and daunting undertaking requiring prayer and patient hard work.
• Demography and emigration. Perhaps the greatest single danger facing Lebanon’s Christians in the coming years is depletion through emigration and declining birth rates. It is estimated that throughout the long war years, close to 900,000 people—the vast majority of them Christians—left Lebanon. Only a fraction have since returned. To make matters worse, a dubious decree approved by Parliament in 1994 naturalized some 300,000 people (mostly Syrian Muslims), or the rough equivalent of 10 percent of Lebanon’s population. If naturalization of the remaining Palestinians in the country—who are overwhelmingly Muslim—goes through as part of an overall peace settlement, then the Christians will be in dire straits. Reliable statistics are infernally hard to come by in a place like Lebanon, but the best and most optimistic estimates place the Christians today at around 40 percent of the Lebanese population.

Given this alarming roster of perils afflicting the Christians of Lebanon, what can concerned American believers do to make a difference, both for Lebanon’s Christians and for Christians throughout the region? I submit nine suggestions:

1. Seek out the facts and overcome prejudicial stereotypes. To rediscover Lebanon’s Christians firsthand and experience their joys along with their fears is a good start. Come to Lebanon more often and meet and live with Christians there. Enculturate yourselves with the region’s Christians.

2. Speak out candidly and forcefully on human-rights violations and the squeezing of freedoms to which the Christians of Lebanon and the region are being subjected. This should be their response to the oft-heard argument that always reduces the issue of Lebanese and Middle Eastern Christians to one of sheer numbers, and offers majority rule and numerical determinism as the answer. Without guarantees for minority rights, majority rule—especially in an Islamic context—is a sure recipe for injustice and oppression.

3. When peace treaties are finally signed, support full and swift normalization between Lebanon and Israel. I am convinced that a very special eschatological role awaits the Christians of Lebanon with respect to the Jewish people. I certainly don’t intend this to imply political support for the State of Israel, as some fundamentalist Christians in the United States would have it. I mean it rather in the straightforward sense of Saint Paul in Romans 9, 10, and 11. The fate of free Middle Eastern Christianity after peace ought to be the top priority for American believers involved in the affairs of the region.

4. Coordinate efforts with other concerned Christians in the West. A unified Western Christian effort on behalf of Middle Eastern Christians is far more effective than a fragmented one.

5. Promote a bold new mission to Islam through the continued use of all the latest technologies: Radio, television, satellites, faxes, computers, the Internet, electronic mail, and so on. None of these technologies, however, or others that may replace them in the future, can take the place of an active and direct and personal life witness in Christ aimed at Muslims. Once a genuine life witness in Christ is offered to Muslims, the rest is up to the Holy Spirit.

6. Put pressure on the U.S. government to establish the principle of reciprocity for Christians living in Islamic lands. Today, Muslims can freely travel to the West, where they can choose to reside permanently, build Islamic places of worship, run their own religious schools, dress in their traditional apparel, publish religious material, and otherwise take full advantage of the liberal and open atmosphere prevailing in Western countries to live their faith and preserve their cultural identities. The same opportunities of self-fulfillment ought to be made available to Christians, either indigenous or coming from the outside, who already live or choose to live in predominantly Islamic domains and states.

7. Criticize the U.S. government’s leniency with the Syrian regime of President Hafez Assad, in particular with its flagrant excesses in Lebanon.

8. Propose federalism as the only just and viable political formula for a heterogeneous and divided society like that of Lebanon, which contains communities embodying widely differing world-views living side by side. Peaceful coexistence within the framework of a federal system of government providing plenty of local, communal, and sociocultural autonomy is the preferred future course for Lebanon’s Christians.

9. Throw the spotlight on the plight of the Christian inhabitants of South Lebanon and the self-declared Israeli Security Zone there. These people are very afraid that once Israel withdraws as part of a final peace deal, they will become targets for vendettas and reprisals and punitive attacks by Hezbollah and other extremists. No peace deal should go through that does not offer the Christians of South Lebanon ironclad international guarantees against the possibility of such outrages.

Lebanon’s history offers a unique example of peaceful and creative coexistence between Muslims and Christians. At a time when tensions between Islam and Christianity are increasing at many points around the world, it is imperative that Lebanon’s legacy not be squandered.

Why Obama Doesn’t Really Want to Drill For Oil

Falling oil prices mean less profits for Obama supporters.

When VeraSun Energy inaugurated a new ethanol processing plant last summer in Charles City, Iowa, some of that industry’s most prominent boosters showed up. Leaders of the National Corn Growers Association and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, came to help cut the ribbon — and so did Senator Barack Obama.

Then running far behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in name recognition and in the polls, Mr. Obama was in the midst of a campaign swing through the state where he would eventually register his first caucus victory. And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country’s second largest corn-producing state, he delivered a ringing endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the parties and their presidential candidates.

In the heart of the Corn Belt that August day, Mr. Obama argued that embracing ethanol “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.” America’s oil dependence, he added, “makes it more difficult for us to shape a foreign policy that is intelligent and is creating security for the long term.”

Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota. Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, “he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.”

Mr. Obama’s lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Not long after arriving in the Senate, Mr. Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation’s largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state.

Jason Furman, the Obama campaign’s economic policy director, said Mr. Obama’s stance on ethanol was based on its merits. “That is what has always motivated him on this issue, and will continue to determine his policy going forward,” Mr. Furman said.

Asked if Mr. Obama brought any predisposition or bias to the ethanol debate because he represents a corn-growing state that stands to benefit from a boom, Mr. Furman said, “He wants to represent the United States of America, and his policies are based on what’s best for the country.”

Mr. Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his role advising the Obama campaign on energy matters was limited. He said he was not a lobbyist for ethanol companies, but did speak publicly about renewable energy options and worked “with a number of associations and groups to orchestrate and coordinate their activities,” including the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition.

Of Mr. Obama, Mr. Daschle said, “He has a terrific policy staff and relies primarily on those key people to advise him on key issues, whether energy or climate change or other things.”

Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to achieve “energy security” while also slowing down the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.

Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.

Many economists, consumer advocates, environmental experts and tax groups have been critical of corn ethanol programs as a boondoggle that benefits agribusiness conglomerates more than small farmers. Those complaints have intensified recently as corn prices have risen sharply in tandem with oil prices and corn normally used for food stock has been diverted to ethanol production.

“If you want to take some of the pressure off this market, the obvious thing to do is lower that tariff and let some Brazilian ethanol come in,” said C. Ford Runge, an economist specializing in commodities and trade policy at the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But one of the fundamental reasons biofuels policy is so out of whack with markets and reality is that interest group politics have been so dominant in the construction of the subsidies that support it.”

Corn ethanol generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it, while the energy ratio for sugar cane is more than 8 to 1. With lower production costs and cheaper land prices in the tropical countries where it is grown, sugar cane is a more efficient source.

Mr. Furman said the campaign continued to examine the issue. “We want to evaluate all our energy subsidies to make sure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth,” he said.

He added that Mr. Obama favored “a range of initiatives” that were aimed at “diversification across countries and sources of energy,” including cellulosic ethanol, and which, unlike Mr. McCain’s proposals, were specifically meant to “reduce overall demand through conservation, new technology and improved efficiency.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama has not explained his opposition to imported sugar cane ethanol. But in remarks last year, made as President Bush was about to sign an ethanol cooperation agreement with his Brazilian counterpart, Mr. Obama argued that “our country’s drive toward energy independence” could suffer if Mr. Bush relaxed restrictions, as Mr. McCain now proposes.

“It does not serve our national and economic security to replace imported oil with Brazilian ethanol,” he argued.

Mr. Obama does talk regularly about developing switchgrass, which flourishes in the Midwest and Great Plains, as a source for ethanol. While the energy ratio for switchgrass and other types of cellulosic ethanol is much greater than corn, economists say that time-consuming investments in infrastructure would be required to make it viable, and with corn nearing $8 a bushel, farmers have little incentive to shift.

Ethanol industry executives and advocates have not made large donations to either candidate for president, an examination of campaign contribution records shows. But they have noted the difference between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain.

Brian Jennings, a vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol, said he hoped that Mr. McCain, as a presidential candidate, “would take a broader view of energy security and recognize the important role that ethanol plays.”

The candidates’ views were tested recently in the Farm Bill approved by Congress that extended the subsidies for corn ethanol, though reducing them slightly, and the tariffs on imported sugar cane ethanol. Because Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama were campaigning, neither voted. But Mr. McCain said that as president he would veto the bill, while Mr. Obama praised it.

When it’s all said and done, Ethanol is no bargain.

The Race Card: Progressive Politics As Usual

As the NYT, the progressive blogosphere, et al, work themselves into a lather about which candidates are playing the race card and which candidates are aren’t, a short history lesson is in order.

Left wing syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall referred to Condaleeza Rice as a ‘House Nigga.’ Strange as it might sound, none of the leftist hypocrites calling for Coulter’s apology made the same demand of Rall.

Michelle Malkin hit the nail on the head when writing of Rall. She asks

…Which other minority conservatives are you just itching to tar as “HOUSE NIGGAS” or “HOUSE CHINKS” or “HOUSE SPICS?”

(It’s also valuable, by the way, to see Rall’s mainstream media clients such as the Washington Post continue to stand by him…while at the same time, moan about the lack of civility in public discourse.)

Rall is not the far Left fringe. He gets away with this pen-and-ink-stained excrement because he reflects the closet thinking of mainstream media editors across the country and their mainstream liberal audiences. His work is reportedly carried in 140 newspapers. He and his ilk are everywhere. I grew up with his kind. I went to school with his kind. I work in the media with his kind. I have been getting contempt-filled, profanity-laced, “You-are-a-traitor-to-your-race/You banana/coconut/Aunt Tomasina/white wannabe” diatribes from his kind in my mailbox for the past 12 years.

When advertisers were being pressured to ditch Coulter. Rall gets a pass.

Dr Sanity’s The Left’s Theory Of Relativity hits the mark. In looking at the outrage (and their own shallowness) of the left in demanding that Coulter be excoriated, she notes

For Democrats and the left, there is no “disconnect” or even cognitive dissonance about such contradictions. As a group that wholeheartedly subscribes to moral relativity and subjective ethics, it makes perfect sense that they have no problem with any “moral authority” as long as that authority just happens to agree with and justify their beliefs.

After all, if morality is relative; if truth is subjective and there is no objective “good” or “bad”; then why bother to look any further?

Cindy Sheehan is a prototype of an “absolute moral authority” on the Iraq war because her son was killed in Iraq. To the leftists, it doesn’t matter that there are hundreds–even thousands–of parents who happen to believe the opposite from Sheehan about the war. The only opinion that matters and conveys “authority” is one that they agree with…

the persons in question have become the left’s vocal “moral authority” because they happen to agree with the left’s beliefs about the key political issues and are anti-Bush , anti-Republican, along with varying degrees of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalistism thrown in for good measure.

What these three examples (and there are many more) have in common is both a breathtaking subjectivism and relativism in one breath; and ideological absolutism in the next.

They all demonstrate the inherent philosophical and psychological contradictions that the postmodern left exploits in order to achieve political power. They are perfectly aware that their positions don’t make any sense and can be refuted by anyone with basic knowledge of logic and logical fallacies; but their goal is to maintain the psychological denial necessary to believe in the left’s ideology. Interpreting this defense and exposing it is essential to countering that ideology.

Clarence Thomas has been referred to as an ‘Uncle Tom,’(see Time here ) and Black conservatives are often called ‘Uncle Toms’ and worse. Jesse Jackson called black conservative Ward Connerly a ‘house slave.’

Theres’ more, from How The Left Trashes Black Conservatives:

The late columnist Carl Rowan sarcastically suggested that “if you give Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [former Klansman] David Duke.” San Francisco mayor Willie Brown called Thomas not only “a shill for the most insidious form of racism, but also a man whose views are “legitimizing of the Ku Klux Klan.” Brown added that Thomas “should be reduced to talking only to white conservatives,” and “must be shut out” by the black community.”

The ugliness goes on and on. Political scientist Manning Marable asserts that Thomas has “ethnically ceased being an African American.” Movie director Spike Lee calls Thomas “a handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.” Author June Jordan characterizes him as a “virulent Oreo phenomenon,” a “punk-ass,” and an “Uncle Tom calamity.” The late Haywood Burns, who was the dean of a New York law school and chairman emeritus of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, called Thomas a “counterfeit hero” whose ideals had “crushed or forever deferred” the dreams of millions of blacks. Columnist Julianne Malveaux told a television audience, “I hope [Thomas’s] wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease. . . .He’s an absolutely reprehensible person.”

The article continues:

Thomas was denounced as a “pimp” and a “traitor” to the black community. With comparable contempt, the Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference once said, “I have told [Thomas] I am ashamed of him, because he is becoming to the black community what Benedict Arnold was to the nation he deserted; and what Judas Iscariot was to Jesus: a traitor; and what Brutus was to Caesar: an assassin. Missouri Democrat William Clay labels Thomas and other black conservatives “Negro wanderers” whose goal is to “maim and kill other blacks for the gratification and entertainment of ultraconservative white racists.” Similarly, Mr. Clay described black conservative Gary Franks – when Franks was a Connecticut congressman – as a “Negro Dr. Kevorkian, a pariah,” who exhibited a “foot-shuffling, head-scratching brand of Uncle Tomism.”

Former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks denounces black conservatives as “a new breed of Uncle Tom [and] some of the biggest liars the world ever saw.” Afrocentric historian John Henrik Clarke calls them “frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation.” The late Khalid Abdul Muhammad put it still more bluntly: “When white folks can’t defeat you, they’ll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you.” It is notable that Muhammad’s words – though very crude – express precisely the same message that Mr. Bond expressed somewhat more delicately.

Perhaps the most effective response to these many inanities comes from, of all people, Clarence Thomas. “Long gone is the time,” he says, “when we [blacks] opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. [But] somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and demand conformity to that norm. . . . [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.”

Of course, there are also sacred Uncle Toms:

Civil rights leaders of the 1960s were called Uncle Toms by more militant Blacks. Whitney Young, Executive Director of the Urban League from 1961 to 1971, was a “radical integrationist.” His willingness to work with Whites led to charges that he was an “Uncle Tom.” Reverend Martin Luther King’s unwillingness to advocate retaliatory violence led Stokely Carmichael to accuse him of “Uncle Tomism.” Bayard Rustin, one of the chief tacticians of the Civil Rights Movement, was also called an “Uncle Tom” by Black militants. Roy Wilkens was called an “Uncle Tom” because he publicly stated that Blacks could achieve political power “in the system.” Civil rights leaders were judged to be too passive, too religious, too eager to integrate — too much like the stereotypical Version A “Uncle Tom.” Older, more established Blacks have often been accused of being too conservative, too passive, and too desirous of White approval. In the 1950s Louis Armstong was called an “Uncle Tom” by young bebop musicians.

In recent years the “Uncle Tom” slur has been directed against Christopher Darden, the Black member of the prosecution’s team in the O.J. Simpson murder trial; Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer; Karl Malone, the Utah Jazz basketball player; and Colin Powell. Cornell West, the author of Race Matters and a lifelong civil rights activist, was called an “Uncle Tom” by the African United Front because of his “support” of Jews. The “Uncle Tom” slur has even been appropriated by other ethnic groups to exert in-group pressures on their members. A Native American, for example, who is believed to be too friendly with or admiring of Whites, is called an “Uncle Tomahawk”; Chinese Americans use the term “Uncle Tong.” Even W.E.B. DuBois, arguably the greatest, most sustained civil rights voice of the 20th Century, was called an “Uncle Tom” — by Marcus Garvey, who added that DuBois was “purely and simply a White man’s nigger.”

Bill Cosby has yet to be called designated an official ‘Uncle Tom,’ despite uttering some very Uncle Tom like remarks. See this, for starters:

Cosby told the audience that being poor had a different meaning to older generations and said the “housing project was set up for you to move in, move up and move out….” One of my grandmother’s favorite admonitions was “You don’t have to be rich to be clean.” Yesterday’s gross material poverty among blacks is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by the worse kind of poverty — poverty of the spirit.

Bill Cosby also admonished blacks to stop blaming the white man for our problems. “This is a time, ladies and gentlemen,” Cosby said, “when we have to turn the mirror around.” He’s right again. Nobody can sensibly argue that racial discrimination has altogether disappeared. The relevant question is: How much of what we see can be explained by racial discrimination? The 70 percent illegitimacy rate among blacks is devastating, not to mention unprecedented, but can it be blamed on discrimination? Is the white man responsible for today’s all-time high number of black single-parent families? What about the crime rate that has turned many black neighborhoods, once stable and civilized, into battlegrounds and economic wastelands?

Look for Bill Cosby to be the next ‘Uncle Tom.

As Dr Sanity notes,

The truth is that the postmodern leftists don’t need to believe anything that they say. In fact, they can easily ignore evidence that contradicts their arguments; never acknowledge that their arguments (or more precisely, their beliefs) have been debunked and; and ultimately they can simply redefine words or resort to word games.

Which is just a lot of psycho speak for saying the leftists don’t don’t give a rats ass for anyone but themselves.

And that’s just a nice way of saying they are nothing but hypocrites and full of crap.

Oily Hypocrisy: ‘Until the U.S. opens its offshore waters to oil drilling, it will be seen as the world’s worst energy hypocrite’

From The American:

If you think that the issue of offshore drilling is only a matter of interest to American environmental groups and the U.S. Congress, think again. At last month’s World Petroleum Congress in Madrid, the blatant hypocrisy of U.S. energy policy—demanding that OPEC members expand their oil drilling efforts while restricting offshore drilling here at home—was a prominent topic of discussion. Indeed, the U.S. ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf was mentioned by three of the most powerful people in the global energy business: the head of OPEC; the chief executive of Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras; and the Saudi oil minister. All of them said the United States should start drilling in its offshore areas.

During a press conference in Madrid, Chakib Khelil, the Algerian oil minister and president of OPEC, was asked what the United States could do to lower oil prices. He mentioned three things: stabilize the value of the dollar, increase energy efficiency, and “open up your exploration. In Algeria, we have a bidding round going on. We are open. The U.S. also needs to open…offshore Florida, offshore Alaska, need to be opened to exploration.”

On the same day that Khelil brought up offshore drilling, Petrobras CEO Sergio Gabrielli also mentioned the issue. Over the past decade, Petrobras has been one of the world’s most successful oil firms. That success has been due almost entirely to its expertise at finding vast amounts of oil in Brazil’s offshore territory, often in water depths exceeding 5,000 feet. Responding to a question from an American reporter about oil prices, Gabrielli pointed out that Petrobras is actively drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He then said that the offshore United States “is an area that may have large volumes of recoverable oil. We think that the Outer Continental Shelf will give access to new areas. We think that part of this constraint on supply right now comes from areas that you cannot go. And the U.S. is one area that is limited to increased exploration.”

During the final speech of the World Petroleum Congress, an event known as the Dewhurst Lecture, Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Al Naimi said, “The limits to future petroleum supplies have more to do with politics than with geology and resource availability. For example, the most promising acreage remaining in the U.S. is located offshore, most of which is off limits to the industry.”

American politicians can denounce the Saudis and OPEC all they like. They can rage about the price of gasoline and the evils of Big Oil. But until the United States opens its offshore waters to oil drilling, it will be seen as the world’s worst energy hypocrite.

Robert Bryce is managing editor of Energy Tribune magazine. His latest book is “Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence.’”