The Christmas Story is about [whatever has the Left worked up at the moment]

Not long ago, I remember hearing the Christmas Story being about a homeless, unwed mother being shunned by society.

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Now, the Story is about a Middle Eastern refugee family.  Sheesh.

It's bad enough when the secular left tries to hijack Jesus for its causes; it's downright shameful when a church does so, betraying its ignorance of the Book upon which its faith supposedly rests.

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For the record, Jesus' family fled to Egypt during a period when the government was seeking to murder Him -- but He was almost certainly a year (or more) old by then, when the family was living comfortably in a house (Matt 2:11) in Bethlehem.  At no point during the birth narrative was the family fleeing anything.

You can read it yourself, if you like.  That'll give you a leg up on the church pictured here.

Appeasers hate those who confront evil (Obama's idealism v. Netanyahu's realism)

Dennis Prager has a concise explanation for why the Obama administration is so offended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard line against the Islamists:

Appeasers hate those who confront evil.

Given that this president is the least likely of any president in American history to confront evil — or even identify it — while Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly vocal and eloquent about both identifying and confronting evil, it is inevitable that the former will resent the latter.

The negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program are today’s quintessential example. Those who will not confront a tyranny engaged in terror from Argentina to the Middle East, and which is committed to annihilating another country, will deeply resent Israel and its leader.

Why can't Netanyahu understand that the terrorists don't need to be confronted and defeated; they need jobs?

Our Dangerous Historical Moment?

Historian Victor Davis Hansen, writing in NRO on February 19, notes the geopolitical similarities between the world of the 1930s and the world of today:

Putin, the Islamic State, and Iran at first glance have as little in common as did Germany, Italy, and Japan. But like the old Axis, they are all authoritarians that share a desire to attack their neighbors. And they all hate the West.  

The grandchildren of those who appeased the dictators of the 1930s once again prefer in the short term to turn a blind eye to the current fascists. And the grandchildren of the survivors of the Holocaust once again get blamed.

The 1930s should have taught us that aggressive autocrats do not have to like each other to share hatred of the West.

The 1930s should have demonstrated to us that old-time American isolationism and the same old European appeasement will not prevent but only guarantee a war.

Meanwhile, some of the left's apologists, such as Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack at Slate, paint a rosy picture worthy of Pravda's descriptions of unrelenting Soviet triumph.  As long as the "progressive" tribe is in power, the trend lines are incapable of being anything but positive:

The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.

We have been told of impending doom before: a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a line of dominoes in Southeast Asia, revanchism in a reunified Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a coming anarchy that would fracture the major nation-states, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks that would pose an existential threat to civilization.

Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

If the United Nations had existed in the 1860s…

Imagine, if you will, that the United Nations existed in the 1860s. 

Upon receiving news of Sherman’s March to the Sea, it would not be farfetched to presume that the leading power of the day, Great Britain, would have assembled a coalition of the willing and, armed with the appropriate UN resolutions, intervened on behalf of the Confederacy*.

By the rules of “humanitarian intervention” under which we apparently operate today, it doesn’t matter whether or not Lincoln had any legitimate interest in keeping the union together** – the actions of his generals would have brought upon the north the wrath of the nations.

Just saying.

* Just like today, the nation leading the coalition would have had its personal reasons for wanting to deal some serious hurt to the offending government.  So then, as today, one wonders if the motivation for the intervention would have been completely altruistic.
 
** I have my own opinions on this, but they are not germane to this post.

In Libya, it may be that the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy – but the Obama administration has no clue one way or the other

Yesterday, Byron York wrote about the staggering incoherence of the decision process that led to our “kinetic military action” in Libya:

Admiral James Stavridis, commander of NATO and overall chief of U.S. and coalition forces in the Libyan war, says American intelligence agents are "examining very closely" the rebel forces for whom U.S. forces have gone to war.  So far, Stavridis says, the U.S. has discovered "flickers" of the presence of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, although Stavridis calls the opposition leadership "responsible."

[…]

Stavridis' testimony raises two questions.  One is the extent of al Qaeda and other terrorist presence; what is a flicker?  The second question is why the United States did not complete its "due diligence" before, and not after, going to war. "I don't say this critically of you, because you didn't make this decision," Inhofe said to Stavridis, "but wouldn't that have been a good idea to find out before we took the steps we are taking?"

Why are we in Libya right now?  Who are these rebels that we’re assisting?  Do we really know enough about the “opposition leadership” to conclude that they’re “responsible”?  Does the Obama administration really care if they are?  When is the last time that the U.S. took sides in a civil war, knowing little or nothing about the side we supported?