Lara Logan: Bomb Raider

Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

I was going to leave the Lara Logan story alone. After all, whatever happened to her, and not all writers are unanimous that she was actually raped, is still an assault and has left her incapacitated for now, and hospitalized. I'm pretty sure, though, that she will bounce back to resume her Lara Logan: Bomb Raider adventure out in the Orient (metaphorically, at least).

I became suspicious of her (actually, I would became suspicious of any female "war" correspondent, blond and pretty, who goes in the midst of war-mongering, sexually frustrated Muslim men) when I started hearing about her personal behavior right out there in the field. Here's what Wikipedia says about her:

Her husband [Joe Burkett] is a U.S. Federal Government defense contractor from Texas, whom she met in Iraq. They had a son in January 2009. Her previous husband, Jason Siemon, was a professional basketball player in the United Kingdom...Joe Burkett's former wife Kimberly Burkett, accused Lara Logan of breaking up their marriage. She was also said to have been courting Michael Ware, another reporter, at the same time as she became involved with Joe Burkett which was said to have resulted in a brawl between the two men.

While the suddenly prudish Wikipedia uses "courting" to describe whatever was going on between Ware and Logan, The New York Post throws out the word "fling" to describes more succinctly what they see. What she actually had was a fling within a fling. Michael Ware is subsequently (consequently?) divorced, as are both Logan and Burkett from their respective spouses, in order to get married to each other. This sounds steamy and romantic, but is as sordid as it gets. I wonder how long this "fling" at (re)marriage will last?

And why isn't Logan at home taking care of her vulnerable toddler, and instead running off ducking bombs? These points are important to consider. We have transferred tremendous responsibility to these people in times of war. We are depending on them to serve us responsibly during difficult, chaotic times. If they cannot do that, then let them set up their own backdrops for dangerous romances. Casablanca might work, but even those protagonists eventually preferred the good guys to the bad ones.

Fake Conservatives

Ever since I deduced that libertarians are very much libertarians at heart (and not the conservatives some claim to be, albeit sporadically), I realized that their libertarian "audience" is so limited that they have to cleverly sell their ideas (and writings) to conservative journals, or subtly downplay their libertarian politics, in order to attract conservative readers.

I've written about this in various posts:

- Peter Brimelow of Vdare fame:
Vdare's Woes
- Ilana Mercer and her articles on conservative sites:
What exactly  is Ilana Mercer?
- Various Canadian "conservatives" who slowly admit that they're libertarians
Where have all the conservatives gone?

There is an interesting discussion at View from the Right after my post "Where have all the conservatives gone", including a response by Canadian writer Kevin Michael Grace. Grace also sent me an email, and I responded. That was the extent of Grace's denials of his libertarian stance, which he never really disproved in either communications.

Here is the email interaction:

Dear Ms. Asrat:

I don't know where you got the idea I am a libertarian, paleo or otherwise. See this. I may be a pessimist, but I am not a nihilist; the biggest influence on my political and social thinking is Hilaire Belloc. As for immigration to my country (Canada), my position is: end it. I see no need for Canada to take in more than, say, 5,000 immigrants a year for the foreseeable future. As for Muslim immigration, my position is: none, ever.

Cordially,

Kevin Michael Grace

Here are the relevant parts of my response, to which he never responded:

I do apologize if I singled you out incorrectly, or unfairly, but this is how I see what's happening. After a prolonged absence, your first article - your comeback article, if I may say so - was on the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Human Rights Commissions. I have written about your article in this post. Surprisingly, I found that your concern over the HRCs and the CHRA was not to disclose their positions on non-discrimination, but to talk about their attempts at censorship - or as you say "self-censorship."

[...]

So, rather than talk about these societal changes, and the historical reasons for the formation of the HRCs and the CHRA, and what fuels them these days which includes high immigration levels, it seems that you preferred to talk about self-censorship as the overriding factor. As I said before, this self-censorship came out of a specific historical and social context. It seems your concern relates to the narrow focus of individual freedoms (of speech, of expression etc.) that libertarians hold dear, rather than to the broader social issues that conservatives try to address, which certainly also includes free speech and expression as part of the whole picture.

The full article, to which Grace responded with his email is: Kevin Michael Grace's Inadequate Take On Section 13 of The Human Rights Commissions.

One of the reasons I took an interest in these writers is because they have a connection to Canada, so I thought they would give me some wise insight into this country. I was pretty much wrong on that, and I'm not even sure how much good they're doing America. (Grace occasionally has his articles published at Vdare, as do Shaidle and Mercer. Mercer is a regular columnist at World Net Daily. Grace has also published in American journals such as Chronicles and The American Spectator).

I have a couple of "letters to the editor" at Vdare (here and here), and I communicated with Mercer for a while, until she her underhanded rude reply to one of my emails which centered around my disagreements on her libertarian politics.

Here is a recent post at VFR discussing Australian blogger Mark Richard's article on the American Right, where Lawrence Auster writes: "...many conservatives are in fact classical liberals or libertarians ." This has been my view for a while now.