Five Years of Best of the Web
Taranto has a retrospective on this, the fifth anniversary of Best of the Web. There have been voices of reason disrupting the moral wilderness that is the mainstream media since that day in September, but few so pithy at keeping the window of sanity cracked open just far enough to see through it.
It's been sixty or so years since the end of the big war when it started to become clear what had happened to the Jews. For millennia various folks had tried to come up with a solution to the Jewish problem, but Hitler had really given it a go. Afterward, one or another enterprising Jew came up with the phrase 'never again,' and a movement was formed to try to ensure this was so. They even have their own country now that they defend vigorously and, so far, successfully.
But it's not been easy, as we see Jews attacked again in Europe, both verbally by the elite, and physically by the not so elite. I've never met an actual Holocaust denier (to my knowledge), but I've met people who will quibble with the numbers of the murdered pleading, 'look, it wasn't all that bad as people say.' A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real genocide.
For many years it was also not easy for me to feel through the gap of time the horror that must have been. They made us read the 'Diary of Anne Frank' in school, but it was ultimately a sterile exercise taught in the light of day. I also remember my Grandfather had a book with small black and white photos of the bodies piled up that the soldiers found upon liberating the camps. At the time it was more disturbing to my Mother that Gramps showed them to me than what I felt when I saw them. I couldn't make the personal connection in my young mind.
September changed all that.
The horror that I now know is that of the apologists. Defeating the enemy is not the problem. We could blow up the entire Middle East: after deporting anyone with a swarthy complexion or a funny look in their eyes. Then take their oil. We have the technology. But of course we don't have the will, or the desire.
What we have is the desire to be left alone, which is what the apologists are selling; and what we need is the will to fight, which is what the apologists are trying to defeat; which is the fight that Taranto among others is fighting.
By far the biggest success in this war has been the defeat of John F. (wrong war, wrong place, wrong time) Kerry as the standard bearer of the apologists. In this battle Taranto certainly earned at least a good conduct medal for coining the mocking eulogy, 'Kerry* who by the way served in Vietnam.' It reminded me, as well as those of the left, of our biggest defeat, and who among us was responsible.
Never forget. Go visit.
Update: LYT comments and Dave Scott responds. I also intrude on Lukes comments.
