Vital Link #5: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition to Be Fair!

Again saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, Emperor Nerobama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to liken our Christian forebears to the homicidal maniacs of the Islamic State.  He said, in part:

… unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place -- remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ ….  So [sic], it is not unique to one group or one religion; there is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.

In addition to being inapt, this latest apology for militant Muslims is historically inaccurate.  You can learn the truth about the Crusades here.  I can’t link you to any similar resource regarding the likewise-maligned Inquisition, but I know that scholars have written books which prove that the negative modern view of it is almost entirely a product of disingenuous Protestant propaganda; if you try, you can find such a work without any help from me, although you probably won’t find any that have the nifty title of this u.c.

Uncommon Commentary #444: This Might Simply Make You Ashamed of Your Comrades

The following sentence appears on page 563 of Sidney Harcave’s Russia: A History: “In November, 1920, it [Soviet Russia] legalized the performance of abortions, at the same time denouncing abortion as an evil which would in time be eradicated.”  Half a century later, proponents of legally induced abortion here in the USA would likewise present fœticide as a necessary evil, whereas now they behave as if it were a violation of their rights merely to have to defend their position on this issue.  I don’t know if pro-choicers ever view the Doman Domain, but, if you who are reading this u.c. are among their number: How do you feel to learn that even the Bolsheviks, who massacred the Romanovs and who created the Red Terror, had a higher regard for the most vulnerable human lives than you do?

Uncommon Commentary #443: Obama Needs to Change His Address

(The pun on “address”, in the title of this u.c., has a double meaning; the word primarily refers to the State of the Union, but the USA would also benefit from Obama-the-Bungle-Boy’s [see the guide to domanisms] not continuing to reside at the White House.)

This past week, when the President of the USA snubbed the traditional media to speak with a bunch of YouTube hosts, one of them told him that the #1 question on Google in this country during the recent State of the Union address was “How old is Obama?”  Assuming that his information is correct: Why did people want to know that, at that time?  Were they curious as to how an apparently grown man could say the childish things that he did?  Or, were they thinking that our chief executive must be much older than he looks, because only someone who is too old to change would (as his oration-on-the-nation demonstrated to be true of him) persist in a mode of leadership that has done so much damage as it has to his party, his country, and his world?

(Incidentally, I really don’t like the idea of an opposition-party response to a State of the Union address, but such a response may become necessary when the occupant of the Oval Office, as the current one always does, transforms the SOTU tradition into an opportunity to deliver a campaign speech.)

Uncommon Commentary #442: How Can He Be a Minority Leader if He’s White?

Senate-Majority-Leader-demoted-to-Senate-Minority-Leader Harry Reid will undergo eye surgery on Monday; the sort of vision that really requires attention in his case, though, cannot be improved through a medical operation.

Uncommon Commentary #441: A Lyin’ Line (Alternate Title: For Someone Who Uses “I” So Often as Obama Does, He Certainly Has Trouble with the “I-Word”)

(The “I-word” is, of course, “Islam”.)

I don’t know whether the majority of Moslems favor jihad versus civilians—and neither does anyone else, because no worldwide survey of Mohammedan opinion has ever been taken—but the quotations in the penultimate paragraph of I Slam Islam? belie what we've all heard so often, with only minor variations, from President Obombast and the like-minded: that jihadism really has no place in Islam, and that the tenets of this legitimate religion—What qualifies a religion as "legitimate" in the eyes of leftists?—have been misrepresented by a handful of "extremists" who carry out, or promote, terrorist attacks.  It's not uncommon for belligerents to tell lies about one another, but our Commander-in-Chief in the War on Terror won't even tell the damning truth about militant Islamists.

Uncommon Commentary #440: Absolving the Criminally Insane Is Itself Criminally Insane

Why does our system of justice consider the psychiatric concept of criminal insanity, and the theological concept of evil, to be mutually exclusive?  Does it never occur to us that perhaps someone’s criminal insanity has resulted from his evil?  Had Adolf Hitler, who was clearly a paranoiac, lived past the end of World War II and been put on trial at Nuremberg, ought he to have been judged “not guilty by reason of insanity”?

Uncommon Commentary #439: Rated PU

Those persons who presented Sony Pictures’ cancellation, and cancellation of the cancellation, of the release of The Interview in the context of a struggle for “freedom of expression” apparently want to believe that this film is to the Kim regime what Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was to the Third Reich: a clever satire of a loathsome regime.  The Interview, however, evidently is not a political statement; critics whose job it is to review Hollywood’s releases so that others will know whether those releases are worth viewing seem all to agree that it’s just a tasteless and mindless film that attempts to derive humor from assassination.  I don’t defend Sony’s initial decision, but to urge people to buy a ticket for The Interview, as the Republican Party did, is going too far. (To be fair to the GOP, I ought to note here that it urged people not to see the film but merely to buy a ticket to do so!)