For almost a century, and especially in the past seventy years, the most dangerous thing to be in the Arab world has been a moderate.\u00a0 Throughout the Middle East,\u00a0 throughout the past generation or two, the first priority for Arab extremists – before even killing Jews – has been to eliminate or drive off all moderates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I bring it up not out of animus toward Arabs – don’t be an idiot – but to point out an area where American liberals act just like the PLO, Hezb’allah and Hamas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To the American liberal, the greatest enemy are the apostates; the women, blacks, Latinos, gays and other minorities that break with liberal dogma and vote conservative.<\/p>\n
The left – as the National Review notes in an editorial earlier this week<\/a>\u00a0– is even baking it into the language:<\/p>\n The idea that there exists a meaningful subset of \u201cwomen\u2019s issues\u201d has always failed to account for the fact that \u201cwomen\u201d is a category that in the American context contains both Condoleezza Rice and Rachel Maddow, both Republican governor Susana Martinez<\/a> and Democratic gadfly Eva Longoria<\/a>. Jeane Kirkpatrick was arguably the most powerful American woman of her time, and her issue was fighting totalitarianism<\/a> at a time when Democrats were not much inclined to do so. Was that a women\u2019s issue? It certainly was in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany . . .<\/p>\n One has to squint with some dishonest intent to conclude that the political tendency that represents women\u2019s interests obviously is the one associated with Bill Clinton and Teddy Kennedy rather than the one associated with Margaret Thatcher and Nikki Haley.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s certainly charitable.<\/p>\n The Democrats\u2019 attitude toward women \u2014 from the pity-party celebrity of Sandra Fluke to multi-millionaire Lena Dunham\u2019s demands for subsidized birth-control pills \u2014 has always been based on a handful of strategies linguistically related to the word \u201cpatriarchy\u201d: patronizing, patronage, paternalism, etc., something you would think that their feminist supporters might have noticed. But women, like African Americans and other minority groups, are for the Left a means to power, and the Democrats\u2019 treatment of them is every bit as instrumentalist as was Bill Clinton\u2019s treatment of the White House intern pool.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And some conservative feminist group needs to print this next graf\u00a0– admittedly, in small type – on a t-shirt:<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Democrats\u2019 war on women \u2014 women who own or desire to own their own businesses, who are looking for decent jobs, who wish there were a way to get their children out of failing schools, who are concerned about the flood of illegal immigrants across our borders, who pay more in taxes than they do for housing or health care or for housing and health care combined, who own guns, who pay utility bills, who wish for credible responses to Ebola and the Islamic State, who resent being reduced to their genitals as a matter of political calculation \u2014 that war continues, as pitilessly and remorselessly as any Levantine jihad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The whole thing is worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For almost a century, and especially in the past seventy years, the most dangerous thing to be in the Arab world has been a moderate.\u00a0 Throughout the Middle East,\u00a0 throughout the past generation or two, the first priority for Arab extremists – before even killing Jews – has been to eliminate or drive off all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-men-and-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48140"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48152,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48140\/revisions\/48152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}