UPDATED: VIDEO: Why Al Franken has to quit and POTUS doesn't

I saw clips from soon-to-be-ex-Senator Al Franken's churlish and mean-spirited announcement that he would be leaving the Senate at some unspecified time in the future. The New York Times described the Democratic Senator from Minnesota as "emotional...defiant and mournful but hardly contrite" as he denied allegations of having groped and made improper advances towards "at least" six women.

Mr Franken again denied the allegations but said he'd resign anyway -- a strange position for a lawmaker of the US of A, where everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Why didn't he insist on having his day in court, so he could confront his accusers mano-a-womano and show them up for the Trumpian conspirators that they undoubtedly are?

Instead, as his Democratic colleagues -- the ones who threw him under the bus -- looked on, the SNL alumnus took a parting shot at President Trump and Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in today's special election in Alabama. (Walt predicts Judge Moore will win by a comfortable margin. Lifetime pct .989.)

Groping for words (this time), Mr Franken told the meeja "I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party."

What Mr Franken really meant is: "How come I have to quit and the other two don't?" Walt will explain four words: It's that picture, stupid! Unlike President Trump or Judge Moore, Mr Franken has been caught red-handed, so to speak.

The allegations of misbehaviour against Judge Moore are decades old, and the only "evidence" that has been produced is an inscription alleged to be in the high school yearbook belong to one of the accusers, of which only a photo has been made public. The lawyer for the offended woman refuses to produce the actual yearbook so the authenticity of the not-very-damning writing can be verified.

The case against President Trump is even weaker, weak to the point of being non-existent. There is only the little Billy Bush video clip in which (if you believe it hasn't been tampered with) you can hear Mr Trump saying that, because of his celebrity status, he could, if he wanted to, grab a woman by the pussy and get away with it. If he wanted to! He didn't say he did that, and no-one -- no-one! -- has come forward to say he did that, or anything like it.

Compare that with the numerous allegation of sexual harassment and misconduct made against Mr Franken's political crony, Bill Clinton, for crimes and misdemeanours which he committed while he was in office as Governor of Arkansas or President of the Excited States of America. In spite of the shitload of evidence against him, Hellery's husband was never impeached and never resigned, so if and when Mr Franken actually leaves the Senate, we'll give him that one. Resigning would show that, at last, he gets it!

BREAKING NEWS: UPDATED AT 1000 today: Beverly Young Nelson has finally admitted that she forged a portion of the infamous high school yearbook that she and attorney Gloria Allred used as proof of her accusations against US Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore. Click here to read the story on Breitbart News. Great timing, eh, since the special election is less than a week away.

With his usual impeccable timing, our good friend Michael Matt, editor of The Remnant, has just posted a video in which he  discusses sexual harassment in politics and entertainment, and asks the question: Where is the media's newfound moral indignation coming from? What did they expect after 50 years of sexual revolution, classroom sex education, free love, and women demanding to be treated just like men? Plus, is there a connection between all of this and the total breakdown of modesty in dress in our culture?

Walt remembers well the hippy-dippy 60s, in which all this started. The middle of that decade coincided with the Second Vatican Council, the beginning of the suicide of the Roman Catholic Church. The steady decline of Western society started in those years. I expect that decline to end -- in the total collapse of western civilization -- any day now.

Muslim journalist admits Mark Steyn was right

Nearly ten years ago, Mark Steyn wrote what would prove to be a best-selling book entitled America Alone. Although Mr Steyn's opus has pride of place on my working library bookshelf, I never got around to reviewing and recommending it in WWW. Click here to read a review by blogger Tim Challies.

Mr Challies admits to borrowing a summary of America Alone's main points from yet another blog, so I'll borrow his.
1) In the ongoing conflict between the West and Islam, both the demographics and the will to power favor the Islamists. That a country like Spain, with a birth rate of 1.15 children per adult women, will extinguish itself in a few generations, while immigrants from countries such as Pakistan (birth rate 4.53) will move in to fill the vacuum.
2) As an aggressive, unassimilated minority edges closer to a majority (as in France, with an estimated 30% Muslim population in the under 20 age group), the character of the democratic institutions will become more closely aligned with Islamic law and culture.
3) The post-Christian welfare state is largely to blame for the pessimism and failures of will demonstrated by Europe.
4) America represents the primary exception to this trend, if only by degree, and that only a concerted effort to save our society stands a chance of reversing these trends.

Howls of indignation and accusations of racism and Islamophobia followed the publication of America Alone is overseas in connection with research for a new book. But his decade-old bestseller America Alone as surely as Eid-al-Fitr follows Ramadan. Among those calling for Mr Steyn's head were two columnists for the Toronto Sun, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan. As their names suggest, both are followers of the Prophet.

Recent events, including the Orlando massacre of nearly half a hundred people by another follower of the Prophet, seem to have prompted Mr Fatah to have another think. Here's the the beginning of his column, headed "West bowing to radical Islam", in today's Sun.

Almost 10 years ago, Maclean's magazine published an essay by Mark Steyn titled, "The future belongs to Islam".
In it, he suggested, "the West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it."
It was an extract from Steyn's then best-selling book America Alone, where he concluded, "It's the end of the world as we've known it..."
There was an outcry among Canada's Islamists, who took Steyn and Maclean's to the Ontario and British Columbia Human Rights Commissions.
My fellow Sun columnist, Farzana Hassan, and I wrote a rejoinder in Maclean's titled, "Mark Steyn has a right to be wrong."
Today, I recognize, Steyn was right and I was wrong.

If you felt it was unfair of me to mention the Orlando massacre in the paragraph introducing the excerpt, please understand that it was the deliberate coverup -- by the FBI, the lamestream media and the liberal elites up to and including Hellery and the Prez -- of Omar Mateem's religion and motive that prompted Mr Fatah to write what he did today. Here's how he puts it.

If there were any doubts the West is abdicating its responsibility to stand up for Western values, the amateur attempts by the FBI to cover up the Islamist nature of the Orlando attack, removed them.
At first, the FBI refused to even mention the fact the Orlando jihadi was inspired by ISIS, but after criticism, released the text of his 911 calls, but not the audio.
It replaced the word "Allah" with "God", despite knowing precise words matter in truth-telling.
It was clearly an attempt to make the attack appear homophobic, not Islamist.
President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton deflected attention from the obvious Islamic nature of the terrorism to a debate about gun control.

Mr Fatah concludes, and Walt concurs, that "Orlando was an act of Islamic terror and of Islamofascism, a doctrine of hatred towards the West and what it stands for, including LGBTQ rights.
It holds secular liberal democracy in contempt, hates non-Muslims, degrades women and is racist towards non-Arabs, especially black Africans.
It is a supremacist death cult that has the end times as its ultimate goal."

Three short, profound statements about our countries today

What follows was sent to me by a resident of the Canadian province of Ontario. These three short, profound statements apply not just to Ontario, or even Canada, but all the AABC countries -- America, Australia, Britain and Canada -- and to western Europe as well. Just change the names of the government agencies and programmes as required. As HST would have said, this is all ye know and all ye need to know about our culture.

1.
We are advised by the liberals to not judge all Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge all gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.

2.
We constantly hear about how the CPP (Canada Pension Plan: the Canuck equivalent of Social Security) is going to run out of money. How come we never hear about welfare running out of money? What's interesting is that one group -- those entitled to their state pensions -- worked for their money, but the other group -- welfare recipients -- didn't.

3.
Provincial Social Services (the welfare department) is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of "free money" ever handed out. Meanwhile, the ministry responsible for provincial parks asks us "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." Why not? The stated reason for this commandment is that "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."

Thus endeth today's Lesson In Irony!

Mark Steyn is "Islamed out"

It would be easy enough for me to post, every day, a great quote from SteynOnline, the excellent blog written by Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, After America, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn and other books which I've praised here in the past. See "USA 'the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world'": WWW 11/11/13 -- great to read after the Prez's State of Disunion speech.

I don't do it -- quote Mr. Steyn every day, I mean -- only because Ed. accuses me of laziness often enough as it is. Today, though, I must risk Ed.'s wrath to give you a snippet from "Hold the Mohamed Salad", Mr. Steyn's trenchant comment on crimes committed by guys named "Mohamed" in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Canada...maybe even the USA.

Mr. Steyn writes: I've spent the entirety of this no longer new century writing about [the Islamization of Europe and the decline of the West]. The remorseless demographic transformation of the western world is the biggest story of our time, so why wouldn't a writer want to write about it? Apart from anything else, once you're aware of it, it haunts your dreams.

But most of us still aren't aware of it. I've been fortunate enough to get a couple of bestselling books out of the subject, but that's no comfort if, by the time they're my age, my children are living in a post-western world. And, of course, you can have a "bestseller" and 99.999999999 per cent of the population need never know of it. Every day I get letters from people who come here via a link from someone or other beginning in effect: "What do you mean, 'the Islamization of Europe'? It's the first I've heard of it."

Really? Why did the Charlie Hebdo guys get killed? Because they provoked Islam. Why is Europe's political class so willing to trade away free speech and women's rights? Because they're desperate to appease Islam. Why did the same young secular childless German women who supported Angela Merkel in her multiculti delusions spend the New Year getting groped and raped by the young men they so generously opened the doors of their country to? Because when you appease Islam you provoke Islam.

I'm pretty Islamed out, because I don't have a lot to say I didn't say ten years ago.

Further reading: "Mark Steyn on the Middle East and our 'societal suicide'": WWW 18/11/15.

Book review: Pat Buchanan blames Churchill (et al.) for both World Wars and the decline of the West -- an argument worth reading

Western civilization is dying! That's hardly an original thought. For the last half-century -- since the flourishing of flower-power and antiestablishmentarianism in the `60s -- many learned and thoughtful commentators have written variations on the theme. Leading the way was James Burnham, whose Suicide of the West (1964) has pride of place on Walt's bookshelf.

Beside it will be placed, very soon, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick J. Buchanan (Three Rivers Press, 2008). Walt is awarer that any mention of Mr. Buchanan is met with snorts of derision from the liberal establishment and their lickspittle lamestream media. But there is no denying that he is an educated and thoughtful man, a keen student of history, whose insights, however contrarian, deserve consideration.

In this monumental and provocative history, the author argues that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen -- Winston Churchill first among them -- the horrors of two world wars might have been avoided, and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of hundreds of millions under the iron boot of Communist and Maoist tyrannies might never have happened, and Europe's central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Walt has just begun reading the book -- it takes me time to get through the books I buy [He moves his lips when he reads. Ed.] -- and, right at the beginning of the Preface, found an analysis worth posting here.

All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.

In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, people of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.

What happened to us? What happened to our world?...

Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith -- in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth.

That Christianity is dying in the West, being displaced by a militant secularism, seems undeniable.... But there is no dispute about the physical wounds that may yet prove mortal. These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years' War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misrules accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.

Walt recommends Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, if only for the Preface and Introduction -- all ye know and all ye need to know.

USA "the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world"

One of Walt's favourite socio-political writers, Mark Steyn, is thinking seriously of moving back to Canada. He left the Great Not-so-white North in a huff, after having to defend himself before Canada's kangaroo court [Human Rights Commission, surely! Ed.] against charges of racism related to his warnings that the West risks being overrun by militant by Muslims.

His most recent books -- best-sellers highly recommended by Walt -- are America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. Reading between the lines of an interview with the Notional Post last week, Walt senses that Mr. Steyn has given up sounding the alarm and calling for a return to small government and economic discipline. In his opinion, changing the direction of the Obama maladministration will be very difficult. "America is the brokiest brokey broke nation in the history of the world," he told Jan Gerson. Here's more from the interview; the emphasis is Walt's.

Q: Let’s have that discussion about how terrible things are about to get: Brokiest broke of all the brokiest countries in the world.

A: On its present trajectory, America is looking at $20-trillion debt by the time this president leaves office, just the federal debt. That will mean the 44th president has run up more debt than the previous 43 presidents combined. It was $10-trillion when he took office. No one has ever spent that much in the history of the planet. And he has nothing to show for it.

The question then becomes, is serious political course correction possible in the United States? And I think the answer to that is very difficult. The question then is whether the rest of the developed world sits back and watches America drag everybody else over the cliff, or whether they start making plans, as Australia and certain other countries are doing, for the post-American world.

The post-Second World War American order is over. [The West] didn’t ask for [this]. The Americans did this to us; we didn’t do it to them. But, you know, it’s a new world out there and we have to look for other partners.

Q: When do we know that we’ve reached the tipping point of the end of the American age?

A: Goldman Sachs thinks that China will become the world’s biggest economic power sometime around 2016. In other words, and if that year is right, let’s just suppose for the sake of the argument it is, it means Barack Obama will end his term in a position no president has been in since Grover Cleveland. We’re in a post-American world. And at that point the question is whether it’s a gentle decline, like for the European empires after the Second World War, or whether it’s, you know, Mad Max on Interstate 95.