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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. Radio Derb on the air here, and this is your pontifically genial host John Derbyshire with news of the hour. First up, the splendid results from this Tuesday's primaries, in which Republican voters, this one included, said to their party bosses: We hate the Democrats, but we're not much fonder of you. |
02 — Primaries: Christine O'Donnell's win in Delaware. I'm trying hard, I really am, not to take too much pleasure in the discomfiture of establishment Republicans over Christine O'Donnell's win in the Delaware GOP primary for Joe Biden's senate seat. The sources of that discomfiture are twofold: political, and personal. I'll get to the personal later. The political complaint is that Ms O'Donnell is too conservative to have any chance of winning that senate seat in the general election. If a Republican is to win a senate seat in a state like Delaware, the argument goes, it has to be a liberal Republican — someone like Congressman Mike Castle, the fellow O'Donnell beat, who's been snoozing over there in Halitosis Hall for seventeen years, and who was ranked by Club for Growth in 2008 as, quote, "least conservative Republican in the House." Castle, said the GOP panjandrums, is just what we need in the senate: all you good Delaware Republicans get out there and vote for him. If you vote for that dreadful O'Donnell woman, you'll be sabotaging our entire strategy for control of Congress. Given such a warning from their wise and far-seeing superiors, why did Delaware Republicans vote for O'Donnell anyway? Well, perhaps they recalled some previous acts of sabotage. Perhaps they were thinking of Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords, turning their coats to give crucial advantage to Democrats in the senate. Or perhaps the name on their minds was Lincoln Chafee, who left the party when things weren't going his way and endorsed Barack Obama. Or it might have been Dede Scozzafava, the darling of the GOP establishment in New York State last year, who withdrew from her congressional candidacy and endorsed a Democrat when conservatives derailed her campaign. What do all those saboteurs have in common? Why, they're all liberal Republicans — just like Mike Castle! So imagine yourself a Delaware Republican. You've got the party poo-bahs and bigfoot conservative commentators telling you to vote for Rockefeller Republican Mike Castle, who might as well have the words WILL SWITCH PARTIES IF ANNOYED branded on his forehead; and you've got Christine O'Donnell, who's taken unwavering conservative positions on everything. What are you going to do? One thing you might do is ask yourself: What would Ronald Reagan do? Back in the early 1960s, when the GOP was dominated by actual Rockefeller Republicans, Reagan was a conservative insurgent supporting Barry Goldwater. It's forgotten now, but the GOP bigwigs back then hated Reagan and Goldwater just as much as today's Republican establishment hates Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and Sharron Angle. So what would Ronald Reagan do? He'd vote for conservatism, even with the certainty of defeat. It was sixteen long years from Barry Goldwater's wipe-out to Ronald Reagan's inauguration, but most conservatives think it was worth the wait. |
03 — Carl Paladino's win in New York. I myself had the pleasure of poking a finger in the eye of the clueless control freaks who run the Republican Party. I don't live in Delaware but I do live in New York, and I am a registered Republican voter, so I got to choose a GOP candidate for governor of my state. The candidate approved by the Republican establishment was Rick Lazio, a decent sort of fellow in himself, but a Rockefeller Republican ol' Nelson would have been proud of, of whom the nicest thing I can think of to say is that he may be a tick or two to the right of Delaware's Mike Castle on a couple of issues. The conservative insurgent here is Carl Paladino, a plain-spoken upstate businessman who has sworm to cut state spending by 20 percent, suggested that welfare recipients be housed in barracks to learn work skills and hygiene, and called for the beating and jailing of Sheldon Silver, the Machiavellian state assembly speaker who fronts for the Trial Lawyers Association. Carl also wants to roll back state laws restricting firearm ownership, empower state officials to enforce immigration laws, join the other states filing suit against Obamacare, stop the Ground Zero mosque, slash state taxes, and cut $20 billion from the state's bloated Medicaid budget. How could I not vote for this guy? Listeners, I voted for him. Not that I don't have some differences with him on the issues. For example, I don't agree that Speaker Silver should be beaten and jailed. A public execution would be my preference, preferably by some slow and painful method … but hey. Carl Paladino's chances of winning the governorship are infinitesimal, given that there are only twelve adult New Yorkers left who are not either on welfare, or members of public-sector unions, or working for Goldman Sachs, and therefore all committed Democrats. I agree with the Republicans of Delaware, though: we shall never get conservatism if we don't vote for it when given the chance, and we shall never get conservatism if we depend on professional pols to deliver it. At this point, citizen legislators and executives are the right way to go. Let the damn professional pols go find real jobs, if they can in this mess of an economy they've created. Carl Paladino, by the way, comes from Buffalo. The last governor of New York State to come from Buffalo was, as Carl points out on his website, Grover Cleveland, whose nick-name was in fact "the Beast of Buffalo." May I offer a modest suggestion to our gubernatorial candidate? Why don't you adopt that nick-name? If you're going to be the bull in the china shop of Rockefeller Republicanism, you may as well advertise the fact. |
04 — Primaries: The Flake Factor. Just a word here about the flake factor. Both Christine O'Donnell and Carl Paladino have been portrayed by their enemies — which means mostly by the Republican establishment and its shills — as flaky. Carl had a ten-year affair with one of his employees, who gave him a love child. He's forwarded on some joke emails on salacious or racial topics. At a meeting with education bureaucrats in Buffalo, he told the city schools superintendent to his face that he'd only gotten the job because he was black — which turned out to be true: when they'd hired a search firm for the job, the city had actually specified black applicants. To his great credit, Carl has never offered any of the groveling apologies that are demanded of people who violate PC protocols. Good for him; I like him even more. Christine O'Donnell likewise has some flakiness in her record, much advertised, and no doubt much magnified, by her enemies, who are the same people as Carl's enemies — professional pols and their water-carriers. She sued ISI, a conservative think tank she'd worked for, for sex discrimination, the grounds of the suit being dubious — it was later dropped. Her personal finances have gotten out of order, to the degree of her getting behind on mortgage payments and having a tax lien filed against her. She's embroidered her résumé. In 1996 she did an MTV spot making a Bible-based case against masturbation. Are you sputtering with outrage, listeners? No, me neither. Shall we weigh those peccadillos in the balance against Barack Obama's 20-year membership of a church run by a white-hating, Jew-baiting extreme-left black radical? And while we're doing so, shall we compare the scrutiny Barack Obama got from the mainstream media when he was running for the Presidency, with the scrutiny Christine O'Donnell got when running for a party nomination for a senate seat in the nation's 45th most populous state? Or how about George W. Bush's struggles with alcohol and his lackadaisical approach to his draft obligations? Or Bill Clinton's outright draft dodging, and flagrant practice of droit de seigneur with the female employees of the state he governed? Or Poppy Bush's business and friendship ties to Mexico's corrupt power elites? Do we want human beings as our elected representatives, or computer-generated avatars? The Republicans of Delaware and New York gave their answer this week. Following Christine O'Donnell's win the official Republican Party said it would not fund her senate race. When that became public, money suddenly started flooding in to Christine's campaign in fifty and hundred-dollar units, from ordinary voters — a sensational million dollars in 36 hours. Yes, Christine O'Donnell may be opposed to masturbation, but against the Republican establishment, she can … hold her own. [Boo, hiss.] |
05 — Mexican sports reporter bimbo. Enough of this boring political stuff; let's get to the real news, the news you want to hear. Let's get to Ines Sainz. The bodacious 32-year-old Ms Sainz is a sports reporter for Azteca, a Mexican TV station. She advertises herself as, quote, "the hottest sports reporter in Mexico," and after a careful scrutiny of the many, many photographs of her available on Google Images, I won't dispute the claim. When I first saw Ms Sainz's picture in my Monday New York Post, in fact, what first came to mind was Steve Sailer's observation that if you watch a lot of Mexican TV you come away with the strong impression that Mexico's women are all imported from Finland. If you're female and want to get on Mexican TV, you'd better be light-skinned, blonde, tall, and slender. Ms Sainz fills the bill. Her clothing choices (which she fills even more precisely) tend towards high heels, skimpy low-cut tops, and jeans that have been left in the drier on maximum heat for about a week. Well, last Saturday this lady showed up at a practice session of the New York Jets to interview one of the players. Afterwards there was what is known in the rather strange jargon of the press as a "locker-room availability." That is, Ms Sainz was shown into the locker room where the Jets players were getting showered and changed following their practice. It pains me to tell you what happened next, listeners. Those genderist patriarchal brutes, the athletes in their locker room, hormones a-pumping after a couple of hours' football, hooted and hollered as Ms Sainz walked in. Yes, instead of greeting Ms Sainz in an appropriate way with the deference and respect due to a female person —a gyno-Mexican — of great professional ability and accomplishment, these knuckle-dragging male supremacists treated her as a sex object. Ms Sainz later told us she was, quote, "dying of embarrassment." The poor woman was blushing all the way down to her sacro-iliac, as the players could clearly see. Well, when the news of this appalling incident got out, all right-thinking citizens were of course outraged. Joanne Gerstner, a functionary of something called the Association for Women in Sports Media, got on her broomstick and flew over to Jets headquarters, where she was met by a delegation of management suits all wailing and slashing at their flesh with knives. After the meeting with Ms. Gerstner, Jets spokes-suit Bruce Speight told the press, quote: We are working with that organization to schedule an educational and awareness session with the team. End quote. It hardly seems sufficient to atone for the pain and suffering inflicted on professional women everywhere by this disgraceful incident. I suggest that all gate receipts from the Jets' next five games be deposited in a fund I have established for the succour of distressed female persons like Ms Sainz, the Society for Combatting American Misogyny, or SCAM. These funds, under the wise husbandry of my research assistant Candy La Foxxe, will be used to establish re-education camps for disresepectful males, where such males will have their thinking corrected by visiting trainers like Rachel Maddow and Rosie O'Donnell. |
06 — Bimbos and Aztecs. Just a couple of follow-ups to that. First, the phenomenon represented by Ms Sainz — which is to say, the bimbification of TV sports reporting, and of TV news in general — is by no means restricted to Mexico. Think of ESPN's Erin Andrews (though don't think too hard); or Alex Flanagan and Lindsay Soto at the NFL network. I'm a big fan of Fox News, but I find it irritating, and a bit patronizing, that Fox seems not to be able to find anyone to comment on matters of law and the constitution, or on political analysis, who isn't a fair-skinned, blonde, tall, trim young female. I find myself wondering if there aren't some fat old broads with something interesting to say. I personally know a few fat old broads, and some of them are pretty damn smart. It's all a bit like the high-class dinner party described by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities, where all the women are trophy wives, or trophy mistresses, or regular wives in deadly competition with trophy mistresses. Quote: What was entirely missing … was that manner of woman who is neither very young nor very old, who has laid in a lining of subcutaneous fat, who glows with plumpness and a rosy face that speaks, without a word, of home and hearth and hot food ready at six and stories read aloud at night and conversations while seated on the edge of the bed, just before the Sandman comes. In short, no one ever invited … Mother. End quote. And the second thing trailing off that bimbo sports reporter story is the name of her employer: TV Azteca. Now, I have occasionally been ticketed by the diversity cops for using the term "Aztec" to refer to Mexicans of the aboriginal stock. Apparently this is a gross faux pas, a breach of political correctness. Yet here is an entire TV station, a very popular one I understand, calling itself "Azteca." What's up with that? Perhaps it's one of those in-group things, like black people being permitted to use the n-word but the rest of us not. Boy, I shall never get the hang of racial etiquette. |
07 — Medal of Honor. Here's something upbeat: the first Medal of Honor awarded to a living soldier since the Vietnam War. The recipient is Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. Sergeant Giunta was one of an eight-man section ambushed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan three years ago. He advanced under fire to prevent wounded comrades being taken prisoner, and killed a key Taliban in the process. Sergeant Giunta reacted to the award with the modesty that soldiers always display under these circumstances, telling the Christian Science Monitor that, quote, "There wasn't a whole lot of thinking that I needed to do. This is my job." End quote. It's not a false modesty, either. Soldiers know there's a big element of randomness in these awards, one action getting noticed when another one, just as meritorious, by chance was not. There's also an element of reciprocity: You advance under fire to rescue a wounded comrade because next time you might be the wounded comrade. And then, as Sergeant Giunta said, there's the matter of not thinking too much, of letting your training take over. I've made it clear on Radio Derb that I'm no fan of the Forever War in Afghanistan. The continuing prosecution of that war is sheer political foolishness. That's no fault of our troops, though. They are carrying out the orders of their bird-brained civilian superiors with loyalty and courage, lions led by donkeys. In incidents like the one that got Sgt. Giunta his award, they show the results of first-class rigorous military training, whose effect is to make inconceivably brave acts into something like reflexes. When your day's work is done, listener, and your dinner gone down, and you're starting to feel it's time for bed, pour yourself a drink and raise a toast to Sgt. Giunta and his comrades. Thanks, guys! |
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[Clip: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have To Do Is Dream."] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has slipped the DREAM Act as an amendment into a big defense appropriations bill the chamber's about to vote on. The "DREAM" in "DREAM Act" is an acronym, D-R-E-A-M, standing for "Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors" Act. The deal is supposed to be that if you are an illegal alien in the country more than five years, were under the age of 16 when you arrived, are less than 35 years old at the bill's enactment, and have graduated high school in the U.S.A., you get amnesty. The idea is that kids brought here by illegal alien parents and put in our schools to get an education funded by American taxpayers, should also get permanent residence rights. You have to give some verbal assurances that you intend to go to college or join the military, but you don't asctually have to follow through on those assurances, you just have to say them. Oh, and if you do go to college, you can pay in-state tuition rates, unlike out-of-state American citizens. Citizens? Who cares about them? Note that once you've got your amnesty and your green card, you can then easily get green cards for your parents. You can also start applying for your foreign brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandpa's ex-wife's second cousin's step-daughter, et cetera, to be admitted under the "family unification" rules. Even setting aside all that, though, the DREAM Act faces a huge problem common to all so-called "immigration reform" measures: administrative overload. If you have any interaction with the immigration authorities, the first thing you see is that they can't possibly cope with their current workload. Mark Krikorian's splendid book The New Case Against Immigration has many blood-curdling examples of this impossible level of administrative work. In one case, a backlog of ninety thousand documents that needed processing was eliminated by shredding the documents. Mark also describes the technique of "lane flushing" at the Ambassador Bridge where Canada meets Detroit. That is, when the lane of vehicles waiting to have their immigration documents scrutinized gets too long, border officials just wave a few hundred through without any checks. Problem solved! These kinds of things are routine in the system as it now is. And Harry Reid wants to add this new huge burden to the work of our immigration bureaucrats? They're going to have to, for example, check that the Guatemalan birth certificate someone just presented is valid. How are they going to do that in a timely fashion, with 200 people on line behind the Guatemalan guy? How are they going to do it at all? What in fact will happen will go like this: Immigration Officer: Did you arrive more than five years ago? What Harry Reid actually wants, of course, is to boost up his Hispanic support in the tight race he's in with Tea Party insurgent Sharron Angle. Compared with that, what does a little thing like the integrity of American citizenship matter? |
09 — Miscellany. Here comes our closing miscellany of brief items. Item: Remember Chris Rock's advice to parents? "Keep your daughter off the pole!" Well, Chris was on to something. A 32-year-old lady in Yorkshire, England was attending a pole-dancing class for keep-fit purposes when she fell and broke her neck. She is now paralyzed, though since her spine was not severed, there is some hope she'll regain bodily movement. She was doing something called a "cross-ankle release" maneuver, where you hang upside down on the pole gripping with your legs. Our condolences to the lady and her family, and let's hope for a full recovery. Meanwhile, observe Chris Rock's advice: Keep your daughter off the pole! Item: Here's a wee news item in Swedish. Could I get that Swedish news feed please, Ahmed? [Mock Swedish.] Here's a translation, for those of you not fluent in the noble Swedish tongue. They're having a general election in Sweden this Sunday, the 19th, and you'll be happy to hear that the more conservative of the two big parties is ahead in the polls — though please remember this is Sweden we're talking about. The election has been spiced up some by a new party, the Sweden Democrats, campaigning for immigration restriction. Sweden's been very hospitable to immigrants from the Muslim Middle East, and of course this has caused no end of crime, disruption, and gaming of the country's very generous welfare system. Jimmie Akesson, the Sweden Democrats' party leader, has called Islam the greatest foreign threat to Swedish society since World War II. The Swedish establishment has done their best to keep this new party off the airwaves and out of the press, but it looks as though they'll pick up a parliamentary seat or two anyway. Good luck to them. Item: In related news from France, which also has an election coming up, President Nicolas Sarkozy continues to expel gypsies living illegally in his country, and he also continues to refuse to apologize for it. This has enraged the Eurocrats who run the so-called European Union. The EU's Justice Minister — their Eric Holder, as it were — is a lady named Viviane Reding, and on Monday she let fly at Sarkozy. Being a bear of very little brain, Ms Reding naturally reached for the Hitler card, saying that Sarkozy's treatment of the gypsies was similar to the mass deportations of World War Two. Sarkozy slugged the lady right back, quote: "I am head of the French state. I cannot let my nation be insulted." End Quote. Sarky also told Ms Reding that instead of deporting the gypsies back to Romania, he would send them to Luxembourg, Ms Reding's native country, if she liked. Ms Reding seems not to have accepted this compromise proposal, perhaps having in mind the national motto of Luxembourg, which is: Mir wölle bleiwe wat mir sin — "We wish to remain what we are." A lot of people all over the world wish to remain what they are, but the globalist elites have other plans for them. Congratulations to Sarky for standing up for his country, anyway. I am sure that our own President would be just as vigorously assertive if some international busybody accused us of human rights violations? Of course he would. [Laughter.] Item: The Pope is on a four-day visit to Britain, the first Papal visit to the sceptered isle since 1982. He shared a drink of Fanta orange soda with the Queen, hugged the Archbishop of Canterbury, and told Britons that science couldn't explain the meaning of life, while neglecting to tell them what grounds there are for supposing that life has any meaning. The visit had gotten off to a rocky start, one of the Pope's flunkies telling a German magazine that, quote, "When you arrive at Heathrow you think you've landed in a Third World country." It's nothing but the truth, but it wasn't very diplomatic. The Reverend Ian Paisley staged a protest, Henry the Eighth rolled around in his grave, but so far the visit seems to have gone off pretty well. Here's my favorite line from the news reports, quote: "Monks and nuns had waited in long queues and were frisked by police." I'm not sure how I'd go about frisking a nun, but obviously the bobbies have got it figured out. |
10 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gents. We're way over time, so I'll just bid you farewell, adieu, auf wiedersehen, goodbye-ee and urge you to tune in again next week for more of the news that matters from Radio Derb. |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]