Noo, It Can't Be THAT...

It's been nine days since the bombings at the Boston Marathon and with one perpetrator dead and the other

wounded and in custody, I thought I would jot down a few thoughts about this whole sorry episode:

1. Overall, excellent police work. The suspects were identified, located and neutralized in four days with no additional loss of civilian life. (One MIT campus police officer was killed, sadly, and a Boston PD officer was critically wounded in the pursuit.) You can't really expect more than that.

2. The placement and timing of the bombs coupled with no claim of responsibility initially suggested a crafty, well-trained adversary but now we know that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were probably just partly-trained amateurs. Dzhokhar was clearly identifiable in multiple photos at the scene, he blabbed on his Twitter account the day after the bombings and both perpetrators remained in the Boston area, so if they had a plan to remain anonymous and quietly escape, it was poorly executed.

3. On the day of the attack, the legacy media like David Sirota and Dina Temple-Raston were practically wetting themselves in excitement, hoping against hope that the bombers were angry white guys like Timothy McVeigh, but five days after the Tsarnaev brothers were neutralized, I've seen nobody on the Left who made these accusations retract their statements. It's OK, then, to impulsively blame the NRA in particular and angry white guys in general for the worst terror attack since 9/11 because the Left just knows that's what the Right really wanted to do. That's not journalism.

4. Conversely, I've noticed the Left is disappointed that the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslims. No matter how many times Muslim terrorists attack us and our allies, no matter how many people they kill, no matter how many times they announce their outright hatred for America and democracy and Christianity, the Left is surprised when they follow through on their threats. As smart as liberals claim to be, ignoring piles of empirical data in favor of a political agenda is stupid, and deadly.

5. Since Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended last Friday, a parade of liberal commentators like Juan Williams, Chris Matthews and Dianne Feinstein are suddenly concerned about his civil rights. Jay Carney has defended the Justice Department's decision to try him in criminal court rather than remand him to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation as an enemy combatant, even though he repudiated his citizenship by taking up arms against his country and there's plenty of justification and precedent for doing so. This handwringing over civil rights is in line with liberal ideology, that treating terrorism as a crime and not an act of war demonstrates to the rest of the world that the United States is not a vengeful tyrant. The libs crave the approval of the international community, they want other countries to love us, they'll fall all over each other to protect the rights of half-baked bombers but simultaneously defend Priest-King's authority to kill American citizens with Predator drones on just the suspicion of terrorism, which only enflames Muslim sentiment against us. This fundamental contradiction in liberal philosophy - more concern for the rights of the murderer than his victims, advancing policies that cancel each other out - is what drives conservatives like me crazy.


6. As much as the Left doesn't want to admit this, it was Muslim ideology that drove the Tsarnaev brothers to commit this heinous crime. Maybe Tamerlan felt disconnected and isolated in his adopted country but that wasn't because he was mistreated. If he was radicalized by Anwar al-Awlaki, now dead at Priest-King's hands, and Feiz Muhammad of Australia, it was because violent jihad appealed to him, not because he was neglected and ignored and pushed aside. He was granted political asylum and various government benefits after he arrived in the United States, he became a promising Golden Gloves boxer with hopes of making the US Olympic team and his brother Dzhokhar attended a prestigious Boston area high school and earned a $2500 college scholarship, and despite their attaining UScitizenship, they never really assimilated into American culture and that is at the heart of the issue. Muslims have been attacking us for forty years because their ideology drives them to it. We are the enemy, we are the Great Satan, we protect Israel, we persecute the Palestinians, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and killed the great Muslim heroes Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the sheikh of sheikhs Usama bin Ladin. We represent all that has gone wrong with the umma. The Tsarnaev brothers detonated their bombs at the Boston Marathon, murdered a police officer and wounded another because we had it coming as far as they were concerned, regardless of how much the United States had done for them: If your adopted country gave you every benefit, then you still blow them up. That is what we are dealing with, and as long as the Left clings to their irrational belief that all human beings are good and reasonable and that tolerance and dialogue can overcome intractable cultural differences, then Americans will continue to die, for absolutely nothing.

American Gulag

There are three major obstacles to the establishment of pure, unadulterated socialism in America:

• Christian and Jewish conservatives
• The Republican Party
• The National Rifle Association

The Christian Church and conservative Jews oppose homosexual marriage and abortion, both elements of the socialist agenda, on religious grounds. To force them to accept homosexual marriage, the Left decouples marriage from its religious origins, characterizes marriage as a purely secular contract and frames gay marriage as a civil rights issue, such that religious conservatives who oppose changing the law are perceived as bigots. To protect and advance abortion, the Left compels those institutions managed by religious groups - schools, universities, homeless shelters, food banks and the like - to provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion to their female employees free of charge, reasoning that by engaging those institutions and not the churches and synagogues themselves, liberals are respecting their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The Left purposely places conservative religious groups in a dilemma: Obey the law and violate their deepest religious principles, or defy the law and risk prosecution and the closure of the institutions that serve so many.

To break the Republican Party, the Left employs a multi-pronged approach. They begin by offering special benefits to favored constituencies: Free abortion and contraception coverage to feminists, amnesty to illegal immigrants, "stimulus" spending to labor unions, forgiveness or lenient repayment terms to people who have defaulted on their mortgage or student loans, aggressive regulation of financial institutions to the Occupy Wall Street crowd, and so forth. They characterize Republican opposition to massive deficit spending as favoritism to the rich, they gerrymander Congressional districts to eliminate Republican seats, they demonize Republican candidates - even Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, men of impeccable character - as hopelessly corrupt, selfish patricians. They play Republicans against each other, courting moderates like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Chris Christie with lavish dinners and favorable press coverage while attacking conservatives like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. If the Left cannot split the GOP into conservative and moderate halves, neither strong enough to challenge socialist hegemony, they'll settle for a weakened and emaciated whole.

For most Americans, guns are the ultimate guarantor of personal safety and the ultimate expression of their Constitutional rights. Private gun ownership has restrained tyrannical governments here and abroad, putting a brake on dictatorship, which explains why authoritarian regimes usually begin by banning and confiscating private firearms. The Left doesn't want any restraints or brakes on the advance of socialism and they're not above exploiting human tragedy for political advantage, so attacking the NRA as uncouth beasts insensitive to the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, and breaking their political influence, is the third major effort for liberals. Universal background checks (even if a father wanted to bequeath a favorite deer rifle to his son, a background check would be required) will lead to national gun registration which will lead to national gun confiscation. (Recall what happened in New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.) For the Left, the unfettered march of socialism is worth the cost of a citizen unable to defend himself against criminals, or ten citizens, or ten million. The people's ability to practically resist their government must be eliminated and so must the NRA.

The epic failures of socialism across the globe do not dampen the enthusiasm of the American Left for its full implementation here. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, have all tried their hand at socialism and had every tool of state coercion to make it work and they all failed. Even China abandoned pure socialism in favor of market capitalism because not to do so would have resulted in ruin. During this seventy-five year experiment, however, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people suffered poverty, unemployment, seizure of their private property, starvation, false arrest and imprisonment, torture and death - North Korea is a model society to the Left, if they would only admit it - all to prove the proposition that common misery is preferable to common opportunity. The fervor with which the Left worships mediocrity, the vigor they apply to achieving it in the face of overwhelming proof of socialism's disaster, is simply irrational, and to succumb to their efforts will condemn us all to the largest and worst gulag of all.