The reverberations from the loss of House majority leader Eric Cantor to political neophyte David Brat continue, with the usual menu of reasons being trotted out by the punditocracy. But Justin Raimondo says that if you look at the actual details of that race, they go against the convenient storyline that has been settled on in the media.
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Every day reports emerge of new violence in Iraq with large numbers of people being forced to flee their homes and roam the country looking for safety, carrying whatever meager belongings they can. The pictures and stories of these internally displaced people are both pathetic and infuriating to read. It is hard to imagine that before the US invaded Iraq, it was one of the most modern countries in the region with good infrastructure and public services. Now much has been destroyed and the people deeply impoverished.
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Recently pundit George Will wrote an extraordinary op-ed where he implied that concerns about rape and sexual assault on college campuses were overblown and that claiming to be raped conferred some kind of privileged status on women. Here’s how he begins:
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The extraordinary developments in Iraq where the group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), considered to be too extreme even by al Qaeda, is sweeping down from the northwestern part of Iraq, capturing two major cities Mosul and Tikrit and threatening to move on Baghdad, has taken people by surprise, mainly because the US-trained Iraqi military seems to have not put up a fight. We now have the spectacle of Iran sending in troops to shore up the government that the US set up, with the possibility of the US providing aerial support, a bizarre alliance indeed.
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The media has been all agog about the defeat of Eric Cantor in his primary race and drawing all manner of sweeping conclusions. Is the Tea Party coming back to life after everyone declared it dead? Does this signal the end of any attempt at immigration reform? Does this mean that any Republican who deviates even the slightest from unwavering opposition to anything that president Obama and the Democratic party propose is now likely to be defeated?
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My ridiculing of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to say she could empathize with the plight of all the people who are struggling economically and claim solidarity with them by saying that when she and Bill Clinton left the White House they were ‘dead broke’, led to some pushback by some in the comments who claimed that they were in fact poor at that time because of all the legal bills they racked up defending themselves while in office.
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I knew that Eric Cantor was Jewish and that his defeat resulted in the loss of one of the highest-ranking Jews in congress. What I had not realized was that he was the only non-Christian among all the Republican members in the US Senate and the House of Representatives. In other words, when it came to religious diversity in that party, Cantor was pretty much it.
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The huge controversy over the exchange of five prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay priosn (which should have been shut down a long time ago) for a US soldier Bowe Bergdahl captured in Afghanistan has been quite incredible. Once again, we have the spectacle of people seemingly deciding their position on one issue by their views of something else, in this case whether the swap reflects well on president Obama, and then using that to drive their message.
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I have been writing repeatedly about the abusive behavior by the US Customs and Border Protection services. Not only do they harass travelers into the country and seem to delight in inflicting humiliation on them, they also seem to be cavalier with using deadly force. And when complaints are lodged, they ignore them or treat them with contempt.
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