C-Span: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A couple of sessions watching C-Span confirmed my bias toward conservative commentary as based on grammar, logic, and common sense. First, I watched the measured and immensely learned John O'Sullivan hold his own and more in explaining his new book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, which I am in the midst of reading and heartily recommend. O'Sullivan's interviewer was a Brit named Martin who was friendly, but seemed to have a bit of a Bolshie streak.

O'Sullivan has an encyclopedic command of the decade of the eighties, as an advisor to Thatcher and an admirer of Pope John Paul II, he recounts the extraordinary effect these two had on shoring up the cultural hegemony of capitalism and religion when they were almost overwhelmed by the TUC and atheistic communism. He also knows the Reagan era, including sidelights like Teddy Kennedy's beseeching help from the Kremlin in avoiding Reagan's re-election in 1984. Treasonous peanut farmer Carter also approached the Evil Empire for assistance, two episodes totally blacked out by the MSM and thrown in an Orwellian memory hole.

O'Sullivan treats his subject with scholarly concise phrases and a detached demeanour which impart a sense of deep knowledge and detailed precision.

Switching over to an hilarious half-hour with Karen Armstrong, formerly a Catholic nun, whose book Mohammed, A Prophet for Our Time was being touted by the Arab interlocutor as a profound and detailed indictment of the West, or some such hyperbole.

In fact, the entire Armstrong presentation had her swinging her arms ala Huffington and making outrageous statements about Jack Straw's problems with the veil as betraying some deep hatred of diversity and so on.... She kept saying "it's obvious" and "it's so simple" concerning very counterintuitive thoughts, such as prohibition of a veil making women pant after the Hijab.

FOX-News and conservative columnists were simply maligned as a shibboleth by Armstrong and her Arab host at the National Press Club. He obviously had a bias far to the left of the ultra-left Armstrong, who had body language that resembled Rosie O'Donnell in highest dudgeon.

I wish I had the link, but Armstrong and her Arab friends insistent hectoring of conservative bugaboos reminded me of something a fellow named
Mgrdechian said in a Frontpage interview:

When you look closely at all the things leftists do and say, you can’t help but notice that they almost always have one very obvious thing in common -- a need to bring others down. A need to undermine, a need to obstruct, a need to get in the way and a need to make themselves feel good by doing and saying superficial things that make no sense on any logical, practical or rational level.
Unfortunately, one of the best ways for them to deflect criticism or justify these sorts of behaviors is to hide behind some sort of guise. Disguise their attack against one group as an effort to help another. Disguise their hatred as outrage. Disguise their failure as oppression. Disguise their real agenda in any way they possibly can in order to make the viciousness of it seem as though it was actually meant to be benign.

Armstrong was far more incensed and outraged by Tony Blair and Guantanomo and GWB and Jack Straw and the French refusal to allow the veil in public schools than she was promotional of Muhammed's value-system and religious beliefs, or even some sort of uplifting power of diversity toward a multiculti beau ideal.

They were playing to a home-team crowd of DC journalists from foreign countries who are not afraid of the US and thus in their cowardly way, lash out because there is no downside to doing so. Try that in France and all sorts of bureaucratic problems appear for your foreign journalist, so the ink-stained wretches go along to get along. Only the US and UK seem to inspire journalists with open contempt, perhaps because of their shame at previous compromises in previous postings in countries where an unfriendly article would bring quick retribution.

I read a recent book by Armstrong on mythology and found it very thin. I'm afraid we see another writer resting on past laurels and coasting along while the tide is coming inward.

As O'Sullivan demonstrated, the tide also reverses and The Evil Empire of the USSR is in the dustbin of history, and its outliers in N. Korea, Iraq, Cuba, are less one socialist dictator thanks to GWB. Hopefully, the N.Korean and Cuban gulags will also soon crumble.

Thanks to God's Providence and the miraculous escape of all three from assassination [The Pope's was almost certainly inspired by KGB assets through Bulgaria], the world is a freer and happier place.

Unlike what Armstrong and her hateful Arab host at the National Press Club would bring about, given the world enough and time.