“In a democracy, I realize you don’t need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels,” he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel’s top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. “When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people.”
. . . . He said the dictator “speaks” for “all” the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator’s conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba’s elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as “the most democratic in the world.” Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people’s since he was turned out of high office by 44 states.
Yet a dictator does not speak for the people. Properly speaking, a dictator speaks for none of the people. A dictator speaks only for himself, while “the people” are transformed, through force and fear, into an abstraction, an instrument, a rhetorical trope. On the contrary, it is only in a democracy where the government can morally and lawfully be said to speak for the people, since it was morally and lawfully chosen by the people to speak for them. Which means that Mr. Carter has matters precisely backwards: It is in democracies such as Israel where the views of the leadership matter most, and in dictatorships such as Syria where they matter least.
When asked about Carter’s trip, Obama had a non-response.
“I’m not going to comment on former President Carter,” Obama told reporters while campaigning in Indianapolis. “He’s a private citizen. It’s not my place to discuss who he shouldn’t meet with. I know I’ve said consistently that I would not meet with Hamas.”
Had Obama given Carter the verbal smacking the ex-president deserved, I think he’d have moved up in public opinion. Not only did Obama miss another Sister Souljah moment, but he also demonstrated that he lacks the intellectual honesty to follow his negotiate-with-anybody-stance to its logical conclusion.
At least by Carter’s logic, even as President Carter himself didn’t speak for us. It’s a pity all the political prisoners in the Middle East will almost certainly not see it that way.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has today said that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is “unavoidable” and that it would help maintain social cohesion.
Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4’s World At One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
He says that Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He added Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.
Dr Williams said there was a place for finding a “constructive accommodation” in areas such as marriage - allowing Muslim women to avoid Western divorce proceedings.
Hey, I’ve got a brilliant idea. If Muslims don’t relate to the British legal system, GET THE FRACK OUT OF BRITAIN. Why the HELL should we bend over backwards to accommodate a 12th century legal system in a modern western country? Leftists like Dr. Williams always tell us that we should be accepting of other cultures - well that door goes both ways.
If you want to live in the west and enjoy all the freedom and prosperity it provides you should live by our rules. If you want to live under sharia law - move to Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Those are my four issues in this campaign — which I happily give Apollo credit for — and I’m more confident that John McCain will make better decisions on them than Mitt Romney. That’s why I just voted for him.
McCain was one of the few Republicans to support the war and criticize its prosecution before it became popular for Republicans to do. He backed the Surge from the beginning and through its darkest hours and has been proven to have been right.
On judges, McCain voted for all of President Bush’s nominees, including Justice Alito, a vote he has vehemently defended. Even if John Fund was right and McCain would nominate justices more like Roberts than Alito, I know I’d be a perfectly happy man.
Mitt Romney is a good guy and I’m not going to fault anyone who votes for him: he’s infinitely preferable to McCain on fiscal matters and he doesn’t buy into the man-made-global-warming-will-destroy-the-world-thank-you-Al-Gore stuff. On those issues — as well as immigration and campaign finance/1st amendment issues — we’re going to have to fight McCain, especially those like me. But so long as we emerge from a better Iraq and appoint reasonable justices, I’m willing to fight those fights.
Snarky Bastards briefly covered the story of Farfour, the Jihadi mouse of Hamas children’s television, who was eventually beaten to death by a Mossad agent (on camera). Well, Palestinian boys and girls have a new friend in Narhoul, the wingless Jihadi bee!
In addition to teaching Palestinian children about the virtues of jihad and martyrdom, Narhoul also provides a forum to discuss the Prophet’s teachings on animal cruelty — by showing what you’re not supposed to do to realcats.
A couple of years ago, I wondered how long it would be until Jihadis started releasing videos of themselves kicking puppies (crusader puppies, of course). I think this is pretty close.
MARDAN, Pakistan — The bomb that ravaged Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming processional in October appears to have been rigged to the clothes of a baby who was held up for the former prime minister to embrace, Mrs. Bhutto said.
A man approached her armored truck, Mrs. Bhutto recounted, and was trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi. She remembers gesturing for the man to come closer.
“It was about 1 or 2 years old, and I think it was a girl,” Mrs. Bhutto told The Washington Times in her first public remarks about the baby.
“We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother, I love babies, but the [streetlights] had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.”
Mrs. Bhutto would have been killed, she said, if she hadn’t stepped back to loosen the shoes on her swollen feet.
I’m a little confused as to how a bomb small enough to be attached to a toddler could do so much damage but — assuming this report is accurate — jeez.