MOTUS A.D.: First they came for your Second Amendment rights…

Monday, September 17, 2012

First they came for your Second Amendment rights…

Looks like CAIR has adopted the strategy of Hope ’n Change: never let a good crisis go to waste.

Arab governments are stepping up their demands for regulation of American media to ensure Islam gets more favorable coverage in the United States, while President Barack Obama used his weekend message to again condemn criticism of Islam and to reassure Americans worried war in the Arab region.

Egypt’s Prime Minister Hisham Qandil said Sept. 15 that he expected changes in U.S. law and media practice following the release of a 14-minute anti-Islam YouTube video and a week of ongoing unrest in the Middle East.(snip)

But Qandil’s statement also hinted at more violence if the Islamists’ demands were not met.

Two words immediately come to mind while reading that: “blackmail” and “appeasement.” Both of which seem to have occurred to Big Guy’s Chicago-Rules enforcers too, and they responded accordingly:

“The MOVIE” producer taken in for “questioning” under false pretenses.

Which prompted the Instapundit to observe that the administration “literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.”

It also caused Roger Kimball to get all philosophical,

I remember a line from the philosopher David Hume that Hayek used as an epigraph to The Road to Serfdom. “It is seldom,” said Hume, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once,”

and drove Mark Steyn to imply it might be a “ham-fisted” move (which was immediately condemned as being anti-Islamic):

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion.

So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: "And obviously our hearts are broken ..." Yeah, it's totally obvious.

And he's even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers.

No, no, says the Broadway director; that's too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he's the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he's the greatest orator of his generation, so he's thought about what he's going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there's complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

So here’s where we are so far: first, they came for our Second Amendment rights;