Catching up with Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio

In recent years, while many other major American cities have declined precipitously in quality of life, with crime statistics booming and workers and taxpayers fleeing to the suburbs, New York City has thrived. This is no coincidence. After the living nightmare of the 1970s and 80s that can still be seen in movies like Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) – a time when the subways and Central Park and whole neighborhoods seemed to have been taken over by criminal gangs and the police had been defanged by feckless, politically correct mayors such as John V. Lindsay, Abe Beame, and David Dinkins – Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) turned everything around by making vigorous use of the police department and city courts. Things kept running relatively smoothly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-13), although one could argue with his nosy nanny-state policies, such as attempts to control the consumption of soft drinks.

But then along came de Blasio. On the surface, his election made no sense. Giuliani had almost surely saved the Big Apple from fiscal disaster and civil disorder of the sort that has plagued cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. De Blasio, an out-and-out Marxist, was fiercely opposed to the kind of governance that had pulled New York back from the brink. He bought into the idea that heavily policing high-crime black neighborhoods is racist. In July 2015, we made note on this website of a proclamation he had recently issued congratulating The Nation, a far-left weekly published in New York, on its anniversary. The proclamation painting a glowing picture of The Nation, depicting it as a positive moral force that “mobiliz[ed] its readers to articulate and reaffirm their values and to take action in the name of progress (necessarily ruffling not a few feathers along the way).”

In fact, as we pointed out at the time, The Nation was the flagship publication of American Stalinism. Over a period of decades, it passionately defended (or minimized the significance of) Stalin’s Gulag and show trials, systematically demonized Stalin’s critics, and mocked and vilified American freedom. Nor did The Nation‘s insipid politics evaporate with the death of Stalin or the fall of the USSR. After 9/11, Christopher Hitchens, a longtime Nation columnist, quit the magazine because he was disgusted by its editors’ view that America had deserved what it got. He called The Nation “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” De Blasio’s praise for The Nation should have discredited him for all time in the eyes of every New Yorker who had lived through the city’s darkest day. But it didn’t.

Nor, bafflingly, have New Yorkers been put off in significant numbers by his various social and economic policies, which have changed New York’s course, heading it once again for that proverbial cliff. By ordering an end to the NYPD’s spectacularly effective “stop and frisk” strategy, which certain self-styled leaders of minority communities had criticized, de Blasio showed that he cared more about good relations with race hustlers than about the safety of New Yorkers. Similarly, by putting an end to an equally successful Muslim surveillance program, de Blasio showed that he was more interested in being praised by groups like CAIR than in protecting his city from another 9/11.

Cops turn their backs on de Blasio at funeral for slain colleague Wenjian Liu, January 4, 2015

Also, De Blasio repeatedly gave the impression that he viewed cops as racists. When two police officers were murdered during his term, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association blamed their deaths on de Blasio’s anti-cop rhetoric. Not long after, when he attended the funeral of a policeman who’d been killed in the line of duty, the police officers in attendance turned their backs en masse on the mayor.

One might have hoped and expected that some Democrat would have come along and mounted a serious challenge to de Blasio at the primary level, or that the GOP would have found a candidate capable of defeating him in the general election. But no – de Blasio sailed smoothly to re-election without much at all in the way of opposition. It’s not only one of the more puzzling chapters in recent American political history, but also a potential tragedy for the one American metropolis that has done the best job of weathering a decades-long tide of destructive political correctness in the nation’s City Halls.

Posted on November 27, 2017November 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Osama’s favorite lawyer: Lynne Stewart

As we saw yesterday, lawyer Lynne Stewart, who died on March 7, was caught passing messages between her client Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” and his terrorist followers. What happened next? Quite properly, she was arrested and charged with providing support to terrorists. And what happened after that? Quite predictably, a veritable army of far-left organizations, socialist publications, and terrorist front groups shrieked in protest. So did Pravda. Among the donors to her defense committee was George Soros’s Open Society Institute. And guess who recorded a videotape in which he championed her cause? Why, none other than Osama bin Laden himself.

Not surprisingly, the folks at The Nation were at the forefront of Stewart’s defense. David Cole wrote: “Stewart, a 65-year-old who has never committed a violent act, now faces twenty to thirty years in prison. Do you feel safer?” Cole accused the Justice Department of “turn[ing] an administrative infraction into a terrorism conviction that, unless reversed, will likely send Stewart to prison for the rest of her life.”

Stewart’s trial dragged on for years. She committed perjury. Her sentencing didn’t take place until 2006. At that event, the judge, John Koeltl, showed that he, too, had a soft spot for Stewart. Instead of sentencing her to 30 years, as required by official guidelines, he gave her 28 months and – perversely – praised her for her “public service…to the nation.” She promptly began gloating over her victory and resumed consorting with terrorists and other criminals.

Judge Robert Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was not impressed. “From the moment she committed the first act for which she was convicted, through her trial, sentencing and appeals,” Sack wrote, “Stewart has persisted in exhibiting what seems to be a stark inability to understand the seriousness of her crimes.” In 2010, Sacks’s court asked Koeltl to reconsider the sentence. Koeltl, who himself had been appalled by Stewart’s appalling conduct and lack of contrition, agreed that he’d made a mistake and upped her prison term to ten years. “Lynne Stewart,” wrote Matthew Vadum, celebrating the tougher sentence, “is a terrorist and a traitor and ideally she should have received the death penalty.” His logic: by conveying instructions from Rahman to his followers, Stewart “became a terrorist in her own right and back in the good old days would have been put to death, as her fellow traitors the Rosenbergs were.”

But in 2013, when she said she was dying of cancer, Koeltl was pressured by the Obama Administration and by a bevy of Stewart’s radical allies to release her on “compassionate grounds.” Dick Gregory went on a hunger strike, vowing not to eat until Stewart was free. Koeltl caved. Stewart was allowed to go home. A socialist newspaper later recalled the joy this kindled among Stewart’s fans: “Our Lynne, the people’s lawyer, woman warrior and courageous freedom fighter, finally was coming home.” After her release, Stewart resumed her career of standing up for murderers. Indeed, last year Michelle Malkin reported that Stewart was “as unrepentant and unapologetic as the rest of her rotten hippie pals in the bloodthirsty Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army and Black Panther movement” and was continuing “to endorse murdering her ideological enemies in the name of peace and social justice.” In her last years, Stewart celebrated the new wave of cop-killers, calling them “avengers” whose actions “spoke for some of us” and who were “avenging deaths that are never and have never been avenged since the ’60s and ’70s.”

Rahman died only 18 days before Stewart did. “He was a personification of an American hero,” she told the New York Times.

Posted on May 31, 2017April 23, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Lynne Stewart & the “Blind Sheikh”: a love affair

Over the course of her career, Lynne Stewart – who died on March 7 and whose career we began looking at yesterday – defended Weather Underground cop-killers David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. Black Panther Willie Holder, and Mafioso Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. But she had her standards. She wouldn’t represent a Nazi or a white supremacist. But she admired Islamic radicals. She saw armed jihad as the solution to oppression in the Middle East, and had no problem with the prospect of victorious jihadists introducing sharia law into conquered territories. She even said she would have taken Osama bin Laden as a client. She came close: her most famous client was Omar Abdel-Rahman, the famous “blind sheikh” who plotted violent acts against the U.S. and whose own terrorist crew, the Islamic Group, was closely tied to al-Qaeda.

Rahman was a key figure behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the USS Cole bombing in 2000. His public statements made clear his desire for the destruction of America and the killing of as many Americans as possible. When he was given life in prison in 1996 for his role in the World Trade Center attack and on unsuccessful efforts to blow up United Nations Headquarters and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels in New York City, he vowed that “infidel” America would “be destroyed” and that “nothing [would] remain.” His life sentence caused Stewart to break into tears. She actually saw this bloodthirsty creature “as a fighter for national liberation on behalf of a people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism.” And she admired – believe it or not – “his honesty, his strength of character, his teasing humor.” (In 2003, she called Rahman “a very learned scholar” who “deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak.”) In an effort to obtain Rahman’s release, his followers carried out the 1997 Luxor massacre in which, as Daniel Greenfield has noted, “European tourists had their ears and noses cut off before being killed.”

Remains of European victims of the Luxor massacre await repatriation.

After Rahman was locked up, Stewart was allowed to visit him on the condition that she not act as a conduit between him and anybody on the outside. But she was soon caught on tape transmitting coded messages to and from his jihadist comrades. Michelle Malkin has spelled out Stewart’s crimes: “Stewart ferried messages to the Blind Sheikh from fellow jihadist Rifa’l Ahman Tara urging him to support a new wave of Islamic violence in Egypt – and then smuggled out a coded order to his followers lifting a ceasefire between his terrorist group and the Egyptian government.” On surveillance videos, moreover, as the Middle East Quarterly explained, “Stewart could be seen shaking a water jar or tapping the table while [the translator] and the sheikh exchanged communications that were then later disseminated to the sheikh’s followers.”

In other words, Stewart made it possible for Rahman to send out the word to terrorists in Egypt to resume killing. What happened next? Tune in tomorrow.

Posted on May 30, 2017April 23, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Ed Asner, 9/11 Truther

HOLLYWOOD - MARCH 07: Actor Ed Asner arrives at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held at Kodak Theatre on March 7, 2010 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images) *** Local Caption *** Ed Asner — Ed Asner

We’ve seen in the last couple of days that beloved actor Ed Asner is a hard-line socialist – if not an out-and-out Communist – and a champion of the Castro regime in Cuba.

Castro isn’t the only guy Asner has stood up for. As Mark Tapson noted in a 2012 article, Asner is one of those celebrities who seem drawn to murderers (especially cop-killers):

Asner testified as a character witness for accused cop killer Kenneth Gay and has spoken out publicly on numerous occasions protesting the death sentence of the celebrity set’s favorite cop-killer, Mumia Abu Jamal. Asner was also a member of the International Committee to Free Geronimo Pratt of the vile Black Panther Party, arrested in 1970 for murdering a Los Angeles schoolteacher.

Asner also embraces the crudest kind of socialist economics. In 2012, he narrated Tax the Rich, a brief propaganda video for children created by the California Federation of Teachers. “You have to see this outrageous and amateurishly animated video,” wrote Tapson,

to believe just how blatant and exaggerated is its class warfare propaganda. It’s shot through with the Occupy movement’s language about the decent 99 percent versus the insanely greedy 1 percent. It asserts that the heartless rich (all white men, of course, as opposed to the diverse commoners) became wealthy through tax loopholes, tax cuts and tax evasion; they are blamed for causing the decline of public services and crashing the economy, for buying politicians and suppressing votes, and for controlling the media which then hypnotizes the people into believing there is no alternative to capitalism.

The video, intended for the brainwashing of young minds in the classrooms of California and written by a staffer who, as of 2011, earned $139,800 a year, occasioned the following criticism by political commentator Tucker Carlson: “There’s really no overstating how dumb this is. The idea that there are any California teachers currently in classrooms in charge of children who agree with that, is horrifying.”

Amusingly, however, in 2013, when asked by an interviewer for Russia Today whether he had any concerns about the discrepancy between the salaries of “top Hollywood actors” and those of, say, nurses and schoolteachers, Asner said: “Hollywood actors are at least putting out some semblance of beauty or style or acting. I think it’s unfair to list them as part of the one percent.” The rules, in short, apply to corporate executives and the like, but not to me and my fellow TV and movie stars.

septembermorn — A mock-up poster for the Truther movie that never was

As if all this weren’t enough, Asner is, in addition, an outspoken 9/11 Truther. In a video taped for a 2004 Truther conference in Toronto, he called into question the responsibility of Osama bin Laden and suggested that members of the U.S. government had been behind the atrocity. In the above-mentioned interview with Russia Today, he repeated his charge that the official story of 9/11 was a lie. In his opening remarks at a 2007 Truther “symposium,” he referred to the U.S. as a “so-called democracy” and to the atrocity itself as “so-called terrorism.” He narrated a Truther documentary, “Solving the Mystery of Building 7.” And in 2012, along with several other actors (among them Woody Harrelson and Martin Sheen), he called for a new investigation of 9/11 and announced his participation in a planned feature film entitled Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator (the title was later changed to September Morn), which, Asner promised, would show that “Al-Qaeda couldn’t have done it.” This project soon fell apart as a result of angry disputes, with participants telling different stories about what had happened.

Bottom line: terrific actor. And hopeless stooge.

Posted on November 9, 2016October 24, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

John Pilger’s “great game”

How better to introduce John Pilger than to quote from a notorious piece he published in The Guardian in July of 2002? The piece in question, we hasten to point out, isn’t much more appalling that many of the other things he’s written during his more than half-century-long career. But it certainly is representative, and it spells out his worldview with considerable – and disgusting – clarity.

“It is 10 months since 11 September,” he wrote,

and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the ‘war on terrorism’ – when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them….There is no war on terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.

Those sentences pretty much sum up Pilger’s worldview. Everything that happens in the world can be explained by a single, overarching, black-and-white narrative: the West, with the U.S. at its helm, is an evil force, poisoned by cutthroat capitalism, bloodthirsty imperialism, and an abiding illusion of freedom (Pilger refers to America and its allies as “societies that call themselves free”) and motivated by an unflagging lust to overpower and control the rest of the planet.

This is the aforementioned “great game.” Every non-Western nation is a victim of this game; every non-Western people is virtuous; every non-Western culture is superior to the West.

All the tensions in the Middle East, therefore, are the fault of Israel, which is nothing more or less than a terrorist outpost of the West, run by the likes of “supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon.” (“[T]he Zionist state,” Pilger has written, “remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined.”) Hamas, Hezbollah, all of them, are only reactive forces, lashing out in defensive response to the West’s vicious assaults.

In the same way, Castro is a hero, and Cuban freedom fighters are terrorists. Today’s Japan is “very ultra-nationalist…the kind of Israel of Asia, for the United States,” while today’s Communist China is an innocuous country that seeks only to develop its economy without Western interference. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua were saints; their opponents were demons. When it comes to sheer wickedness, the worst Taliban fanatics, in Pilger’s view, have nothing on “the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington.” Ukraine’s 2014 democratic revolution was “Washington’s putsch in Kiev,” and it turned Ukraine “into a CIA theme park right next to Russia.”

On and on it goes. Ho Chi Minh was a good guy; the U.S. waged the Vietnam War not just against North Vietnam but against all of Vietnam, “north and south, communist and non-communist.” (No mention, of course, of Ho’s epic brutality, of the pernicious role of China, or of the dark reality of Communism in postwar Vietnam.)

Even Osama bin Laden himself was not so horrible compared to the real bad guys: “Al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan,” wrote Pilger, “were kindergartens compared with the world’s leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.” Yes, he actually wrote that. All too often, his stuff reads like some kind of parody of knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

Who is this clown? We’ll dig deeper tomorrow.

Posted on July 25, 2016July 19, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Trimming Hedges, part two

Yesterday we started looking at Chris Hedges, a journalist and commentator who is a hero on the radical left – and, above all, a hero in his own mind. He routinely describes the U.S. as a totalitarian power, and routinely represents himself as a courageous truth-teller about that totalitarian power.

But that’s not all. When he’s not depicting the U.S. as a dictatorship, he’s celebrating the real tyrannies. Get a load of this, from last February:

We have a renaissance in Latin America taking place that is extremely exciting. Nations like Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador.…Venezuela has spearheaded Latin America’s emergence from literally centuries of subordination to the U.S. regarding media, economic policies, culture, and international relations. That alone is a killable offense in the eyes of Washington.

Like other critics of his persuasion – and other writers in The Nation‘s stable – Hedges has in recent years become a fixture on RT (Russia Today), the Kremlin-owned TV network, where he reliably bashes the U.S. and Israel (and what he describes as their lapdog mainstream news media) and stands up for assorted terrorists and tyrants. Appearing on RT last November, he describedfreedom of the press in the U.S. as a myth – quite a claim to be making on a TV network run by a government that orders hits on opposition journalists.

And this past January, rejecting the claim that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was an act of jihad, he argued that the atrocity had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but was, rather, an understandable response by “the global dispossessed” to a life of “poverty, aimlessness, and despair” that is the fault of the wealthy and privileged people of the Western world.

Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons about Islam, Hedges insisted, were not brave free-speech acts carried out in defiance of acts of terrorism, but were inexcusable assaults on the poorest and most helpless people in France; the murdered cartoonists had been mocking the only thing that oppressed and brutalized Muslims have to cling to, namely their religion, and the Muslims had responded in the only way they had available to them. “When everybody is chanting ‘Je suis Charlie Hebdo,’” Hedges maintained, “what they’re really chanting is, you know, ‘We can’t stand dirty Arabs.’” (For good measure, he also called the killing of Osama bin Laden a “war crime.”)

But Hedges’s way-out-there views aren’t the worst thing about him. We’ll get around to that in our next installment.

Posted on July 31, 2015July 15, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

De Blasio’s appalling proclamation

Bill_de_Blasio_11-2-2013 — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

Here’s a new item for our ever-growing files on The Nation – whose well-nigh nonpareil history of useful stoogery we’ve dipped into rather frequently since beginning this site – and on current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose participation in a City Hall tribute to Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe we’ve also taken note of. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the left’s Manhattan-based flagship weekly and the Big Apple’s stridently progressive mayor ended up in the same item. The convergence of the twain took place earlier this month, when de Blasio issued a proclamation declaring July 6, the magazine’s 150^th anniversary, “The Nation Day” in New York City.

Yes, politicians issue such proclamations all the time. And, yes, they rarely mean very much. Last year, after all, de Blasio himself declared August 20 “Al Roker Appreciation Day,” in honor of the Today Show weatherman’s 60^th birthday.

But the text of de Blasio’s proclamation about The Nation was not just the usual empty boilerplate. Recalling the magazine’s founding in 1865 by prominent abolitionists, de Blasio stated: “A century and a half later, the integrity and audacity of America’s oldest weekly magazine are still very much intact.” He went on:

New York has served as The Nation’s home and history-making partner through Emancipation, the Great Depression, two world wars, the civil rights movement, and into the age of technology. Whether taking politicians to task, exposing the lasting effects of war, profiling our state’s progressive labor movement, highlighting the intersection of economic justice and criminal justice, critiquing the rising cost of higher education, reporting on conflicts in Syria or South Sudan or outlining strategies for keeping hope alive, The Nation continues to shed light on the disenfranchised, mobilizing its readers to articulate and reaffirm their values and to take action in the name of progress (necessarily ruffling not a few feathers along the way).

This spectacular load of B.S. might have penned by editor Katrina vanden Heuvel herself. In pretending to sum up The Nation‘s history, it entirely omits, among much else, the magazine’s decades of vigorous Stalinist apologetics, of poisonous personal attacks on anti-Communists, and of enthusiastic support for enemies of America and of liberty. It ignores the magazine’s inflexible devotion to a far-left, freedom-hating ideology and its routine practice of blithely twisting or deep-sixing facts that make that ideology look bad.

17/11/05-CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS-Christopher Hitchens, a controversial British-born, U.S.-based journalist; former left-wing, now a conservative, was in Toronto on Thursday to speak at the Grano Speakers Series. He spoke to the Star in his hotel room in the morning.(Photo by Peter Power/The Toronto Star)pmp (Photo by Peter Power/Toronto Star via Getty Images) — Christopher Hitchens

Speaking of ideology, perhaps the most outrageous part of de Blasio’s proclamation was its opening: “Healthy debate. Consistent reflection. Diverse voices. Nuanced perspectives.” Right. Tell us another. We only wish the late Christopher Hitchens were alive to read this nonsense and comment on it. Hitchens, of course, was the longtime Nation contributor who, after 9/11, dared to dissent from what had instantly become the magazine’s party line about that atrocity – namely, that the U.S. had “asked for it” – and ended up quitting the staff in 2002.

In his last column for The Nation, Hitchens lamented that it was becoming “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” Among the inhabitants of that echo chamber was (and is) Katha Pollitt, whose first response to 9/11, it will be recalled, was to write an article explaining why she wouldn’t let her daughter, in the wake of the atrocity, fly the American flag –that vile symbol of imperialism and oppression – from the window of their apartment, which was located only a few blocks from Ground Zero.

No city suffered more on 9/11 than New York. No American magazine showed less sympathy for the victims, and more “understanding” for the perpetrators, than The Nation. For the mayor of that city to issue an official proclamation congratulating that magazine on its anniversary – a proclamation in which he whitewashes its history and overlooks its disgusting reaction to the attack on the Twin Towers – is a disservice both to the truth and to the people of the city he was elected to serve.

Posted on July 7, 2015July 6, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

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