2016 June 13^th

Last night I watched a few minutes of Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News. O’Reilly has a limited acquaintance with logic. The discussion moved to what could be done about the easy availability of AR-15 the weapon of choice for most mass murderers. Mateen, the shooter in Orlando was no exception. Part of the problem is that Florida has essentially no restriction at all on gun ownership. When O’Reilly started pontificating about the difficulty of controlling access to AR-15s he said that if they were banned in this country they would just be smuggled in from Mexico as drugs are now. For O’Reilly then it would follow that our laws against drugs are useless because people can easily get them from Mexico. Sheesh!

Then this morning on CNN Chris Cuomo interviewed Secretary Clinton on what should be done about terrorism. She took the opportunity to commiserate with the families that were grieving and made some comments about not excluding Muslims or marginalizing those who live here. That wasn’t enough for Cuomo who seemed hell bent on getting Clinton to commit to something that might incite a political firestorm; she didn’t bite. The he brought on a Republican Congressman from Texas. Now, surely there would be some delicious controversy—nope! The Congressman when asked to comment on Clinton’s remarks by Cuomo said, “I’m not going to politicize this tragedy.” Bless his heart!

George Will tells us this morning that anti-Semitism endures in Britain; it also endures here. Then he turns eloquent and tells us that, “…anti-Semitism is also growing in the fetid petri dish of American Academia.” (Could this phrase, “fetid petri dish of American academia” be the result of a decline in the demand for George as a college speaker?) George Will is conflating disgust with Israeli policies, their construction of settlements on territory acquired by conquest, with the hatred of Jews; it isn’t. Iran, a nation intensely devoted to an irrational hatred of Zionism still has a healthy (if nervous) Jewish population. Will claims that a former chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, calls the idea that “…hating Israel is not the same as hating Jews” a canard. He is simply wrong about that. Many American Jews are not at all happy with Israeli policies. They are hardly anti-Semitic.

I can’t neglect Mona Charen; she held forth about the Stanford University rapist. He was recently slapped on the wrist for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster on the Stanford Campus. I assumed that she would have something to say about the judge who sentenced this man to time served plus three months in Jail (It was his first offense you know and his father was very upset at his being branded as a sex offender.) There wasn’t much emphasis on the mild punishment. I thought that perhaps alcohol would be to blame as the woman had passed out from drinking too much and her assailant was nearly dead drunk as well. No, Charen didn’t see alcohol as the problem. In the last line of her column she blames the surge in campus rapes on “the hook up culture.” This phrase is used to indicate casual sex between couples barely acquainted. How this is responsible for rape where one member of the couple is clearly not consenting Charen doesn’t say. Perhaps the “hook up culture” offends her sense of morality enough that she simply must find it at fault for something. Who knows?