»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro     John Derbyshire here, folks, with yet more crude, mean-spirited commentary on the dismal state of the world.

Ancient Yiddish joke: A guy goes to a tailor to get a suit made. How long will it take? he asks the tailor. A month, he is told. "A month?" he protests. "It only took the good Lord six days to make the world!"  "Yes," says the tailor, "and just look at it!"

Well, that's how I feel. That's how you'll feel too, I hope, after your weekly fix of Radio Derb!

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Concerning Ward Connerly's ballot initiatives to eliminate race quotas, an Obama spokesman said this:

Senator Obama believes in a country in which opportunity is available to all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or economic status. That's why he opposes these ballot initiatives, which would roll back opportunity for millions of Americans and cripple efforts to break down historic barriers to the progress of qualified women and minorities.

End quote.

So in Wonder Boy's bizarro world, "regardless of race" means you gotta have quotas.

Well, that was last week. Here's something we learned this week, courtesy of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 28. Obama was speaking to a Chicago convention of "minority journalists." "Minority journalists" — what does that mean? Like, conservative journalists? That would be a minority! But no, these were not conservatives. We know that because they demonstrated their contempt for the tradition of journalistic objectivity by standing up and cheering when Obama came in.

Well, here is the thing Obama said, quote:

I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.

End quote.

So Wonder Boy supports reparations, right? That's what it sounds like, right? Doesn't seem to me like there's much wiggle room there. Perhaps some media interviewer will ask Obama for a clarification. [Laughter.]

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Can't anybody do anything about the McCain campaign? Look at this new campaign ad, comparing Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Setting aside the fact that half the American population thinks Paris and Britney are wonderful people, and would probably vote them into the Presidency given the opportunity, what's the point?

Barack Obama has a whole slew of policy proposals of degrees of craziness ranging from Bozo the Clown to Fidel Castro. He has very helpfully laid out those policy proposals in major speeches, like the Colorado Springs speech and the Berlin speech that I parsed at length in last week's Radio Derb, and that speech to minority journalists I just reported on.

This isn't brain surgery, John. Wonder Boy isn't exactly hiding his light under a bushel. What's holding you back? You afraid he'll call you a racist?

John, if you just stand dead still in a corner somewhere and don't say a word between now and November, Obama will call you racist. If you pick Al Sharpton as a running mate, Obama will call you racist. If you divorce Cindy, marry Whoopi Goldberg, and adopt the entire infant population of Malawi, he'll call you racist. If you swear that your first act as president will be to extend Martin Luther King Day to the entire four years of your administration, Obama will call you racist.

You're a white guy, John. All white folk are racist. That's what they teach them in those fancy colleges Obama went to. It's a given.

Pay no attention. Go on the attack, John, or get out of the race.

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Back in April Mr. Topolánek announced that he wouldn't be attending the opening ceremony of the Peking Summer Olympics because of Chinese human rights outrages in Tibet and elsewhere. Well, a few days ago, at another press conference, Mr. Topolánek said that he had accepted an invitation from his country's Olympic committee to make a less formal visit to the games in support of Czech competitors.

So far, so hardly-newsworthy, but hold on a minute — what was that lapel pin Mr. Topolánek was wearing at this news conference? Could it be … a Tibetan flag? It certainly could.

The ChiCom authorities went into deep indignation mode. Doesn't the Czech government know, as the whole world knows, that Tibet has been an inseparable part of China since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, at the very latest?

China's ambassador in Prague made an angry protest; the Czech ambassador in Peking had to go and grovel to some Head Commie In Charge there. Probably the Czechs were told, as offenders usually are in these situations, that "the feelings of the Chinese people have been hurt."

Poor things! Still, having your feelings hurt is probably easier to endure than having your country occupied by a much larger neighboring communist power, a misfortune in which the Czechs are well placed to sympathize with the Tibetans.

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Notwithstanding promises they made to the IOC when they were angling for the Games, the ChiComs have now made it clear they will block unfriendly websites to everyone attending the Games.

Given the kinds of things we've said about the ChiCom mass murderers, torturers, stealers of other peoples' countries, and enemies of freedom and civilized values here on NRO, they may very well consider us an unfriendly website. This puts you in the excruciating position of having to decide between attending the Olympics, or listening to Radio Derb.

That's some decision to have to make, and I'm just glad it's not me making it.

To help the decision-making process along a bit, here's Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas claiming that the international hotel chains have been ordered by China's secret police to install government monitoring software so that they know what hotel guests are looking at on their computer screens.

What about those promises the Maoists made when they were awarded the games — promises of press openness, no internet censorship, and so on? Well, they were lying.

That's what communists do, they lie. If you believe anything they tell you, you're a fool; and the biggest fools in this case were the International Olympic Committee. I could have told them if they'd asked me, but they never did, I don't know why.

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Here are a couple of other Brits who are likewise thankful to have escaped from the place: Stephen Whittle, who is 41 years old, and his friend Simon Sheppard, who is 51. These two men fled from Britain to Ireland, and then got a plane to Los Angeles. On landing in L.A., they claimed political asylum. From Britain.

Why? Well, they'd both been convicted and were out on bail. Whittle had been convicted on five counts, Sheppard on nine counts, of publishing, quote, "racially inflammatory written material," end quote, on a website called www.heretical.com.

You can go there yourself and see the kind of things they posted. There's some seriously crude stuff there all right — Holocaust denial, rude remarks about women and homosexuals, anti-black and anti-Chinese, and — horror of horrors! — anti-Muslim. There's also some non-offensive stuff, some of it quite funny in a sophomoric way.

But wait a minute: How come we can go to that website and read the material that Whittle and Sheppard have been convicted in Her Majesty's courts for publishing? Ah, well, you see, because the website is hosted here in the U.S.A., and so it comes under the protection of the First Amendment.

Those protections don't exist in Britain. At least, they don't unless you are a radical Muslim. Radical Muslims can demonstrate in public calling for non-Muslims to be murdered, and the British police stand by and watch — protecting them, in fact.

Not only that, but imams in British mosques can whip up hatred against the majority population and, if a TV camera crew dares to film them, the camera crew gets investigated by the police for race crimes! This actually happened. In Britain the expression "racially inflammatory" comes with a big arrow that only points one way.

I won't be inviting Stephen Whittle and Simon Sheppard round to dinner at my house any time soon because I don't care for Nazis. I hope they get the political asylum they're asking for, though; and I urge and beg all Radio Derb listeners to hold on tight to our First Amendment with both hands, and with all the strength you've got. The PC crowd will take it away from us if they can figure out a way to, and then it'll be next stop Sharia Law, with jail for anyone who complains.

That's where Britain is headed. That's where we'll be headed too if we lose our First Amendment rights.

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Admittedly, our present state of knowledge about how life, and then intelligent life, comes into existence is incomplete, so it's entirely possible that there is some big thing here we just don't know yet. On the best understandings we have, though, intelligent life should not be a sensationally rare thing in a big cosmos like ours. So where are they?

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thinks he knows. Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and he is co-holder (with Alan Shepard) of the record (nine hours) for the longest time spent exploring on the Moon's surface, by foot and moon buggy. Well, Mitchell told a British radio station that, quote, "We have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real, though it's been covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so." End quote.

The thing I can't make up my mind about is: Which is dumber? — believing in UFOs, or believing that any government, let alone every government, could keep a secret for sixty years?

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I'll praise it, too, to the degree that I am praising the prowess of General David Petraeus at doing what he was charged to do, and the professionalism and courage of our troops in carrying out their orders. For a political commentator in a nation under civilian rule, though, the question that must always be asked is: Setting aside the brilliance with which our military obeyed their orders, were they the right orders? Did the faithful execution of those orders work to America's national interests?

There is no doubt they worked to Iraq's national interests, but that is not the question.

Here is Ralph Peters, who often writes sensible things, telling me that our Iraq operation dealt a decisive defeat to al-Qaeda. That reminds me a bit of those apologists for the space program in the 1960s, telling us that if not for the Apollo program we wouldn't have had non-stick saucepans. If you want non-stick saucepans, get a bunch of materials scientists together, give them a lab and a budget, tell them what you want, and let them get on with it. You don't have to send a man to the moon.

Similarly, if we wanted to defeat al-Qaeda in 2003, we should have gone to where they were — which was not Iraq — hunted them down, and killed them. We didn't have to spend a trillion dollars and four thousand American lives putting Iraq to rights.

It's nice that we have put it to rights — nice for the Iraqis, anyway, who can now suck greedily on the U.S. taxpayer's teat for the rest of their lives. It just wasn't necessary — was, in fact, a colossal waste of American blood and American treasure.

And we don't even actually have our non-stick saucepan. I mean, al-Qaeda's still there, up in the Hindu Kush, where they were when we started.

Still, there is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Fallujah, so I guess the Iraq War has been a success, even if a perfectly pointless one.

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This has proved to be too much for the municipal fathers in the Chicago suburb of Lynwood, Ill. They have passed an ordinance levying a $25 fine on anyone showing three inches or more of their underwear in public.

The money quote here in the Associated Press report was from a young Lynwoodian who is unhappy with the law because, he says, it infringes on matters of personal style. He added, quote: "Leaders should spend money on making the area look nicer."

Er, isn't that the whole point?

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First the depravity. Back in July 2007 — and please keep the dates in mind here — in July last year, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes murdered a woman and her two daughters, aged 17 and 11. This happened in the little town of Cheshire, Connecticut. Komisarjevsky and Hayes both had long rap sheets, and in fact both were free on parole at the time after sentences for burglary.

Well, last July these two vermin broke into the home of Dr. William Petit. They knocked him unconscious with a baseball bat, then they terrorized Mrs Petit and her two daughters for seven hours. At last they strangled her, poured gasoline over her, and set her on fire. The two girls were bound and gagged upstairs. They died from smoke inhalation. Dr Petit survived somehow. That's horror number one.

Now here's horror number two: Komisarjevsky and Hayes won't go on trial for this crime until at the earliest summer of 2009 — two years after their crime.

Here is an explanation from the state Attorney General, quote:

This case requires a great deal of preparation, not only for the prosecution, but for the defense, as well. So, obviously, it's going to take longer to go to trial.

Two years? Is it me, or is this insane?

Here's a law professor at Quinnipiac University with some further explanation, quote:

Because of its notoriety, because there has been an extensive amount of forensic work done, (the case) lends itself to lengthy delays.

End quote.

He then adds that, quote, "long delays in criminal cases almost always benefit the defendant."

Oh great. So not only do Dr Petit and the people of Connecticut have to wait two years just to see these creatures in court, it is to the murderers' advantage that this should be so. Something's badly broken here.

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With that rate of inflation, of course, your ten dollar bill will be a hundred billion again by this time next week — but hey, there's nothing in Zimbabwe to buy anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Meanwhile here's Senator Obama again, with yet another sneer at us knuckle-dragging primitives who are offended by his blackness, quote:

I don't look like all those other Presidents on the dollar bills.

That got a big laugh from the crowd of liberals he was addressing, people who would never, ever notice a black person's blackness … except of course when hustling him to the head of the line with an Affirmative Action ticket.

And you know, Barack, while it's true that you don't much resemble any of the Presidents on our U.S. money bills, after reading about your policy proposals, both fiscal and social, I must say, you are starting to look like the guy on my Zimbabwe hundred-billion dollar note.

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The only consolation I can offer is that things will undoubtedly be even worse next week. I'll be here to tell you all about it on Radio Derb.

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