PURELY LOONEY TUNES

by David McCalmont

Barbara Lee (fist), Nikki Haley (sword), and anti-semite (sign)

There are three types of lunatics at loose in the world today: 1) power-hungry socialist Democrats, 2) power-hungry neoconservative Republicans, 3) Anti-Semites of all political persuasions.

The Democrat Looney Bin

The U.S. federal minimum hourly wage is currently set at $7.25 per hour. In California, however, it hovers at the employer-punitive level of $16 (in Berkeley it is $18.07) and is slated to reach $20 by 2028. Yet mental midgets such as Oakland California’s Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Lee are putting up $50-per-hour trial balloons. Perhaps it's done simply to make Republicans feel better about the $20 level. But that would involve a clever use of psychological warfare that far exceeds these people's cognitive abilities. Their ignorance leads to an insatiable appetite to punish their enemies and dictate how everybody should live. With people such as former Black Panther devotee Barbara Lee anywhere near the reins of power, America will always be in danger.

Now the Republicans

For those with eyes to see, presidential wannabe Nikki Haley has shown us her true neoconservative and globalist (but I repeat myself) colors. Were he still alive, Henry Kissinger would certainly not be Ms. Haley's first – or tenth – choice for Secretary of State. His was the politics of realism. He conceded that our enemies wielded power in their own spheres of influence and weren't necessarily the personification of evil. He understood that most authoritarian governments brought a degree of peace and stability in their own areas of control. Utopianism forces us to define a default position of satisfaction in world affairs only as it approaches perfection.

In Nikki’s vision, as best as I can ascertain, America cannot settle back and smoke a cigar of victory so long as there is even one pocket of resistance to our democratic-defined hegemony somewhere in the world. This means garrisoning U.S. troops in every corner of the globe in hopes of squashing outposts of dissidence against secular liberal democracy. A recipe, of course, that amounts to forever wars in hopes of forever peace.

This sounds enormously attractive to our ruling elites, the upper echelon of military leadership, and shareholders of global corporations, all of whom profit from and feed off this vision. Woody Allen famously opined (back in his funny days) that he couldn't sit back and smile if there was one person somewhere in the world that felt miserable. That, in effect, is the psychological disposition of people like Nikki Haley and board member of Liz Cheney’s national-security think tank “Keep America Safe,” neoconservative stalwart William Kristol.

Free of the possibility of being killed in battle, such “visionaries” can feed their imaginations with the fodder of combat-age young adults, and then console their surviving loved ones with platitudes of honor, courage, and heroism in action on behalf of greater goals. This is the personification of evil.

Democracy is the appellation given to those being supported by the U.S. on the world stage. Was Taiwan a democracy when the U.S. signed treaties of military protection with the autocratic rule of Chiang Kai-shek against an expansive Red Chinese regime on the mainland 70 years ago? No, but Taiwan is talked of as practically a 51^st state of the Union because it is now a democracy.

Where does Israel fit into this "democratic vs. autocracy" grand design? Many of those on Nikki Haley's side of the divide would prefer to throw Israel under a Palestinian bus by withdrawing just enough support to force the theocratic state into collapse. Israel, you see, exists in opposition to global secular democratic principles. Nikki Haley is as much in opposition to Making America Great Again as Joe Biden and the entire Deep State are.

More Insanity

It would be unfair, however, to hang the albatross of political and/or cultural lunacy just on individual Republicans or Democrats. Examples can be found anywhere, and many incidents could be used to illustrate the madness. I choose to select members of the First World who’ve combined to form an eclectic phalanx of intolerant, irrational, anti-intellectual street thugs screaming "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free."

The wildest episode surfaced recently in Berlin, Germany, and it encapsulates the pathological anti-Zionist obsessions spewing from the collective colon of the art world.

A Cuban dissident – still a leftist, however – was doing a piece of performance art at the Hamburg Bahnhof in Berlin. The woman intended to spend 100 hours reading Hannah Arendt's lengthy The Origins of Totalitarianism (hardly a crowd pleaser) as a means of poking holes in Germany's censorship rules against publicly criticizing Israel. (At the time it was first published, many Jews were highly critical of Arendt's “banality of evil” theme.)

At exactly the 88-minute point into her recitation ("88" is neo-Nazi code for Heil, Hitler!) a screaming mob interrupted her reading, surprising and terrorizing her two dozen listeners. The event was shut down not by brownshirts wearing jackboots but by a mixed mob of keffiyeh wearers.

Apparently, somewhere near 89% of the Arab world believes the State of Israel must disappear. Seventy-five percent of people calling themselves "Palestinians" and who live in Gaza and the "West Bank" refuse to live in Jordan because doing so would likely mean Israel would become a permanent fixture in the Levant. Their "leaders" (housed in penthouses in Qatar) tell them that is unacceptable. There's no such thing as peace and prosperity, they say, as long as Jews live and exist anywhere.

Call me crazy, but I do believe all the above is enough to send anyone to the nuthouse.