Can you guess what these numbers represent? They all connect to recent news stories.
- 99.9
- 25,120, up from 24,795 in 38 days
- 0
- 7, down from 110 in 5 years
- 226 to 59
- 9 to 0
- 57.7 million
First, 99.9 is the percentage of Muslims, according to a recent statement from President Obama, who reject the radical Islamist interpretation of their religion. Not 90 percent, mind you, not 95. Oh no. As the old gospel song put it, even 99 and-a-half wouldn’t do, but it had to be 99.9 percent. I’ve seen little to no reporting about this statement, other than from the great Roger Simon who calls it “Obama’s Biggest Lie,” and links to the evidence contradicting the statement, as if any person on the planet needed such evidence. Look, our president just isn’t that smart of a man, despite certain of his undeniable talents and intuitive smarts. And, worse, he’s a habitually dishonest man. There’s no need to ask whether in this case, it is either a scandalous ignorance, or a brazen dishonesty, that shames him. We have every reason to assume it is both. He is often dumb, often duplicitous, and here he is dumb about his duplicity.
And the scandal, as I keep saying, is not about Obama. It is about the contemporary Democratic Party and its legacy media organs that refuse to let any on their side say any significant bit of the truth about him, leading to his utterly undeserved enjoyment of a 45% public approval rate at present.
2) 25,120 is the number of deadly Islamic attacks carried out, and only since September 11, 2001, according to the count by the website The Religion of Peace. I first told pomocon readers about that site’s count and its methodology 38 days ago, but 325 more attacks have occurred since then. My, that 0.1% sure have been busy.
3) Zero is the number of Democrats in the Colorado legislature who voted for “a bill in the Colorado that would have allowed religious clubs on the state’s college campuses to set rules on faith for its leaders.” By voting against that bill they voted against elementary religious liberty. And against elementary associational liberty. See the stories on the CSU de-recognition of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship as a student club. Sure, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court will probably get around to itself requiring what this Colorado law would have. Probably. Although not so probably if HRC is elected, and certainly to be reversed anyhow if she or another Democrat is elected in 2020.
As Rod Dreher, a man who like a lot of more-orthodox religious folks would love to vote D from time to time were it not for the pattern he sees here, says, “It was a party line vote. Naturally. I believe that there is nothing the Democratic Party won’t do to religious believers in the name of advancing LGBT rights.” That’s right, but what I would stress, is that it’s not just the liberty of religious associations that’s taking the hits, and that the developing logic here does not require the excuse of LGBT rights. Socialist clubs will have to let their student members vote in libertarians to officer status if they so choose, and so on, and so on.
This is the Democratic Party of today.
4) 7 is the number of remaining pro-life Democrats in Congress, down from 110 just 5 years ago. See this recent Salena Zito story, which presents that number in the context of explaining the recent abandonment of the pro-life stance by Ohio representative Tim Ryan (D), a guy who once was on the board of DFLA, Democrats for Life in America. Note that some of those remaining “pro-lifers” vote with the Democrats on abortion issues nearly all the time. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, for example, has in many years earned a 100% rating from NARAL.
5) 226 to 59 was the vote in the Canadian Parliament against a bill legalizing assisted suicide, back in 2010. Now this is not one of those “that’s so five years ago” numbers, since the Canadian Parliament would have likely voted similarly this year. It’s just one of the increasing numbers of numbers in our proud liberal democracies that happen to be totally irrelevant.
6) For 9 to 0 was the vote count in Canada’s Supreme Court recent decision that said Canadians have a constitutional right to such euthanasia. Not that it would have mattered had it been 5-4! The grim details about what this really means as a policy-issue, as opposed to its odd salience to the broader suicide-of-democratic-say-issue, are to be found on the excellent NRO blog, Human Exceptionalism.
7) 57.7 million is the number of abortions that have occurred in the United States since another landmark of judge-ruler dictation, Roe v. Wade.
You think that number is depressing? Consider what a horrible day it will be when that number passes 100 million, as it likely will, and likely before 2060, if current trends hold or only dip slightly. Hitler murdered 6 million in his camps, many more on the battlefields, and communist leaders have around 100 million intentional or negligence-caused deaths on their hands so far, and in late-19th century India and China old-fashioned famines took somewhere between 31 to 59 million lives total. But apparently, we smiling Americans, guided by the heart-in-the-right-place types that run the Democratic Party, the legacy media, and our precious universities, are going to outpace all natural disasters and tyrannic regimes.
Alas, I have no humor to offer you today. All I can say is, today is a day when we celebrate, alongside the legacy of another giant, the moral and political example of Abraham Lincoln (R).