Cold Fury

Harshing your mellow since 9/01

Category: Bah!

Me-too Republicans

Posted on      by      8 Comments

Some things never change.

Eighty years ago, “Me Too” described Republicans eager to publicly second the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, a feeling so pervasive that the party nominated for president in 1940 a man who a few months earlier registered as a Democrat. “Me-Too Republican” generally conjured up not opportunists but an oversocialized character longing for approval from his Democratic neighbors and colleagues but clinging, perhaps out of family tradition or some other cause that also spoke to his desire to fit in, to the GOP label.

The phrase now refers to something different. But the conformity and reflexive support that characterized that Me Too endures in this #MeToo. Me Toos “me too,” too, after all.

Prominent Democratic politicians insist that decent people must believe the allegations against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford, a woman who refuses invitations to testify under oath, whose story conflicts with that of the man she names as an eyewitness and the notes taken by her therapist, who cannot pinpoint the approximate date or precise location of the alleged assault, and whose history of supporting ActBlue and other left-wing causes indicates a possible motive to take down the president’s pick.

Her story seems suspect. But if you express something short of belief, many see you as suspect.

Okay, look, here’s the damned deal: let’s stipulate the lying liberal whore’s every assertion. There’s no compelling reason to, and certainly no evidence to back it up, but let’s go ahead and do it. So what do we have, then? A few teenagers got drunk at a party, and she ended up with one of them grabbing her tit and pawing clumsily at her clothes for a few seconds. And then…

That’s it. By her own account, NOTHING ELSE HAPPENED. He grabbed her by the tit momentarily, and that is the ABSOLUTE WORST of it.

And now she all of a sudden claims to have been traumatized by it for almost four fucking decades. Although, oddly enough, she never once mentioned it to a living soul, not until Kavanaugh’s name turned up on Romney’s list of prospective SC nominees in 2012. Kavanaugh has been vetted by the FBI six times already, and never ONCE was this non-event mentioned. Not one time.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to handle this dirty, transparent, manipulative attempt to do away with due process and the right to confront one’s accuser in open court. This would be the wrong way:

In Judge’s Defense, Republicans Shouldn’t Descend to Dems’ Level

Oh, Jesus tapdancin’ Christ. Right out of the gate, you know what’s coming. Ain’t like we haven’t seen it a blue million times already, after all.

Weaponizing a vague and unverifiable claim of sexual assault from Kavanaugh’s teenage years is a fitting capstone to what has been a truly grueling and repugnant confirmation process. The question now becomes, will Republicans respond in kind? Fearing for their grip on the Supreme Court if Kavanaugh is defeated and Democrats take control of the Senate, will they overreact and lash out at Ford? Will they attempt to discredit Ford by questioning her motives, her veracity, or even her sanity? My view is that this would be a serious error, as well unfair to Ford herself.

Fuck Ford, and fuck what might or might not be “fair” to her or any other such low-down, scurvy sewer rat as she. She eagerly lent herself to the sleaziest of smear campaigns for purely partisan purposes, and is manipulating the process even now with her ducking and dodging and cutesy-coy maneuvering. She’s gotten “death threats,” has she? Boo fucking hoo; so has the decent man she slimed, and his whole family too. This sort of thing is a tried-and-true Democrat Socialist tactic, and it’s more than past time it splashed back on them. If she has to spend the rest of her worthless life in hiding, I solemnly promise you I will not give a single shit.

This isn’t some noble, civilized debate we’re having here, with honorable opponents who respect the rules and can be counted on to conduct themselves with integrity and decorum. This is a war to the knife against craven guttersnipes who will stick at nothing at all to win. If you can’t get your head around that, you’re better off staying indoors with the women and children.

On the other hand, Republicans face real danger. If they were to treat Professor Ford with, the same savagery and contempt that has been inflicted on Brett Kavanaugh, there is a possibility that public sympathy for the Judge would evaporate, and the whole affair could turn into an ugly mess.

No, Republicans must be the adults in the room. They must treat Judge Kavanaugh, and his accuser, with the sort of fairness, circumspection, and respect that has eluded their Democratic colleagues throughout the process. Republican Senators thus far have shown every indication that they intend to do exactly that: they will act responsibly and judiciously, and they will show sensitivity to Professor Ford and allow her to keep her dignity. Americans will thus be left in no doubt about which party is acting in good faith.

The entire bare-knuckles campaign to defeat the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh can be likened to a leftist tantrum, characterized by vitriol as well as futility. The numbers in the Senate, after all, are with Republicans, and thus the truth has always been that, as long as Republicans keep their cool and close ranks to support a solid conservative nominee, nothing and no one can prevent them from confirming a good man like Brett Kavanaugh.

Wanna bet? For my money, they’ve already done it. It’s for sure and certain that FeinSwine has already gotten everything she wanted out of this and then some.

The timing of Feinstein’s release of information regarding the initially anonymous woman accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault was simply impeccable. Democrats knew they had no reasonable chance of stopping his confirmation, but Feinstein, a savvy and old-school politician, found a way to turn lemons into lemonade. Feinstein may have wrought a political masterpiece.

It is very likely that Feinstein knew in July, when her constituent sent the allegation to her, that it was so lacking in any kind of detail and backup that it could not derail Kavanaugh. But that didn’t mean that the allegations from Christine Blasey Ford could not be politically useful.

By releasing the information at the last hour, Feinstein put Republicans on the judiciary committee and the White House in a catch-22. They could either vociferously defend Kavanaugh and look like they were once again defending an abuser of women, or throw him under the bus and have to scramble to nominate and confirm a new nominee.

If, as increasingly appears to be the case, the GOP stands behind Kavanaugh in the face of this allegation, Feinstein has created a Me Too moment that Democrats can campaign on in their attempt to take back Congress, just as she did in 1992. It is, in a word, brilliant. One can almost see Mitch McConnell smiling and fist-bumping her, saying, “Well played, Di.”

This guy too, strangely enough, argues for the GOPe to “take the high road,” as if that had ever worked before. I certainly agree that it would be nice if our opposition was honest, trustworthy, dignified, and reasonable—if our disagreement was over Constitutional nuance, a debate about how best to maintain the integrity and relevance of the Constitution and its insistence on limited government and individual liberty.

Too bad that none of that is true, not one word of it. In truth, this isn’t a “debate” at all, not in any meaningful sense. It is an existential struggle, a semi-cold war against a dishonest, dishonorable opponent who NEVER argues in good faith, but is always jockeying for a position from which he can slide the shiv into freedom’s back. The Kavanaugh Kerfuffle is in no way unique, extraordinary, or atypical. It is merely the latest chapter in a very old playbook.

And there’s a reason for that: it’s worked for them every time up till now. That’s thanks to the collusion of the GOPe, combined with the above-the-fray prissyiness of those of us who misguidedly insist on this “high road” nonsense and recoil in horror from the thought of getting their hands dirty and their raiment soiled in an unseemly gutter brawl. It’s an essentially passive, defensive strategy, which is the wrong tack to take when what is required is a proactive, offensive, vigorous, and unrestrained effort.

What we’ve been seeing all these years is Mike Tyson pitted against the Marquess of Queensberry—or Little Lord Fauntleroy, more like—yielding its perfectly predictable result. And if you think the Kavanaugh fight has been ugly, just wait till Ruth Bader-Ginsberg either croaks or is carted bodily off to the glue factory. We ain’t seen nothing yet, folks, and we’d all damned well better be ready and willing to get as down and dirty with the scuzzbuckets of the Left as necessary if we want to keep from losing what little of our country is still left to us.

The “high road” is every bit as useless and irrelevant now as the effete feebs who smarmily scold us about its importance are. Until we’ve well and truly clobbered the Marxist moonbats, by any means we can contrive, we need to keep Miss Manners on the sidelines, and Emily Post’s Blue Book Of Social Usage firmly tucked away in our back pockets. Well, unless we intend to clout a shitlib over the head with it, that is.

Share

So shut ’em down already

Posted on      by      Leave a comment

Heartiste spells out what’s up:

We’ve gone from:

THESE ARE THE FACTS

to

I WANT TO BELIEVE

to

I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

to

YOU MUST BELIEVE

Next stop:

NON-BELIEVERS IN THE NEVER-WRONGNESS AND SAINTLINESS OF WOMEN WILL BE SHOT AT DAWN

Well, not precisely. They don’t seem too much interested in believing Paula Jones, Juanita Brodderick, or Karen Monahan, just to name a very few.

Update! Gotta include this:



Methinks it’s about time the Vichy GOPers stopped saying OK and got on with things, but I ain’t holding my breath. In fact, after seeing Grassley’s “deadline” (much akin to Obama’s “red line” fan-dance) prove to be about as firm as an overcooked noodle, I now predict that Kavanaugh will NOT be seated on the Court—certainly not in time for the next session, and very likely not at all. Meanwhile, speaking of Karen Monahan (from the link above):

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison pushed back Friday against allegations of domestic abuse, saying his accuser fabricated the story about him.

The Minnesota Democrat also dismissed a medical record that named him as the abuser, but said he can’t be sure more people won’t “cook up” allegations against him.

Yeah, I just bet. But he’s a Muslim, so thumping on his women is a-okay with you shitlibs, right? Right.

Share

The monkey speaks his mind (again)

Posted on      by      Leave a comment

Hitting on something that has been bugging the hell out of me.

If Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed I think we are lost. Governance-by-riot will be firmly in place, and I see no way out of it. The flashes of backbone that we are seeing in the Republican leadership is gratifying, but until it is confirmed by a timely vote it will just be more of their typical obfuscation in service of the corporatist wing of the party. What makes me sick is that these very same Republicans take off the gloves when they are in tough primary races, but can’t seem to retain that killer instinct when it matters.

And another thing…why aren’t Republican operatives asking Feinstein to recuse herself from the confirmation process because they have credible evidence that the letter was actually a plant by the Chinese spy who was until lately in her employ? Yeah…it’s called tit-for-tat. And the Republicans need to be doing more of it.

Figured out what it is that annoys me about this yet? Walsh’s latest, which I’ll be excerpting more of in a separate post, provides another strong hint (my emphasis throughout):

(Kavanaugh) does indeed shift the balance of ideology on the court away from Anthony Kennedy’s whimsy toward a grounded, conservative respect for the law. And when the next liberal justice shuffles off, and Trump appoints yet another originalist justice, their slim hopes of goose-stuffing social change down the throats of the American people via judicial fiat will be gone for a very long time. And so will their self-image of being on the “right side of history.”

This week will be crucial to putting the Democrats back in their boxes. Let’s see if the GOP will take it.

We all hope they will, but if they do it will be because of the new-breed, Trump-supporting types rather than the same-old-same-old Establishment hacks. Which brings us ’round to the annoying thing: how many times have we all read the dire warnings from our side’s pundits—the best and brightest among ’em too, like Reynolds and Schlichter—about how the Democrat Socialists aren’t gonna like it much when the GOPe gets back into power and uses Dem-Soc tactics and MO’s against them? Schlichter calls it “the New Rules,” as in the Left is gonna hate ’em. People on our side talk about this in the most rapturous terms, as if the threat alone might somehow get results.

And it never, ever happens. It took everything short of hooking his flappy man-boobs up to a super-duty car battery to get Yertle McTurtle to finally use Harry Reid’s nuclear option against them, and even then it was unexpected to the point of shocking when he did it. And that is the first, last, and only example I can think of of Republicans at last turning the tables and ramming some of the Democrat-Socialists’ own shit down their throats, despite who even knows how many opportunities when it was fully justified and might have truly made a difference.

Instead, it’s always been an empty threat, and the Left has always known it. It’s the reason they’re so unhinged over Trump: he talks a tough game…and then he follows up by going out and playing hardball against them.

And he’s kicking their scrawny asses up between their shoulder blades by it too, and solidifying his already damned firm support in the bargain. Any bets on whether the Vichy GOPe will take the hint, learn the lesson, and finally start moving the ball instead of the goalposts?

Share

Damn the torpedos!

Posted on      by      2 Comments

Full steam ahead.

MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.

Fight nukes with nukes.

Put the confirmation vote back on the docket for Thursday of next week.

Have Dr. Ford testify under oath in full view up the public.

If she provides no more evidence or the Democrats make a scene and turn it into a circus.

Confirm Kavanaugh.

To let the Democrats delay this one day is a win. To let them take out Kavanaugh as a casualty in their war on Trump is a huge win. It would make Trump a lame duck with more than two years left in his first term.

If they get away with this, no Republican could ever run ever again. All the Democrats would need to do is find some former high school classmate willing to accuse a candidate of sexual misconduct half a century ago.

If that happens, we might as well start the shooting now, because we are headed for a Hitlarian or Stalinist purge, but instead of accusations of treason and execution, it is accusations of sexual misconduct and the total destruction of a person’s income and livelihood on national TV.

Ask yourself is that any worse? To one day find everything you built yourself up to be, torn down, so you end up jobless and unemployable, shamed in front of your family.

That cannot be the tactic that is allowed to win.

This cannot be the ideology that is allowed to win. They’ve gotten away with way too much already. Now it’s too late to stop them with anything less than bullets to their empty heads. That’s on us, I guess, for being too complacent and indulgent and not nearly vigilant enough, as in “the price of freedom is…”

That said, I support the above proposal unreservedly. And if Yertle McTurtle feels otherwise, he needs to get his useless ass the hell out of the way and let somebody who isn’t a backstabbing fraud take charge. This bit of mushmouth blah-blah ain’t helping:

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lambasted his Democratic colleagues for seeing “a political advantage” in withholding the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh until the 11th hour of his confirmation process.

True, sure. But the only way they can gain the benefit of that advantage is IF YOU HELP THEM—by sitting on your hands flapping your jaws without ever actually doing anything.

“That this process has played out with so little order and so little sensitivity lies solely at the feet of Senate Democrats, who saw a political advantage in leaking this to the press instead of vetting it through proper channels,” McConnell added.

“But this is where we are.”

So move us forward then, Vichy GOPers: schedule the vote for fucking five minutes from now, hold it come hell or high water, and support your party’s elected President by sticking together and ratifying the goddamned nomination. Let the sneakthief shitlib plotters weep and wail and bluster and threaten; they’re going to do that anyway, no matter what you do. There is absolutely NO reason to treat with them honorably, in hopes of holding some “higher ground” that means nothing, and which The Main Enemy has no interest in or regard for anyway.

The lying liberal whore’s allegations are unsupported, unverifiable, and without demonstrable merit. Gossamer-thin as they are, they’re more than adequately refuted by credible testimony from many who know the man well as to Kavanaugh’s character, which is without blemish and unimpeachable. The spurious charges are purest bullshit, a sick fairy tale cobbled together for malign purposes; they deserve to be laughed out of all debate, and should NOT be taken seriously by anyone not assisting with such a heinous plot.

To Hell with her, and to Hell too with every last Republican who still insists on play-acting as if this despicable smear campaign is anything other than what every sensible, sane person knows it to be: a desperate attempt to hang onto undeserved, illegitimate power. Period fucking dot. No such sensible and sane person should be even mildly interested in harkening to one more word out of her filthy, lying yap, nor be willing to grant her a forum in which to utter it. To do so would be folly, worse than a waste of time.

Confirm the man now, or surrender and be damned. That’s it. There’s nothing more to say.

Share

The essential truth

Posted on      by      Leave a comment

Steyn hits the most important point of L’Affaire Kavanaugh:

It is immensely depressing to think that in a few days’ time the upper chamber of the national legislature of the most powerful nation on earth will conduct hearings into which teenager groped what at a drunken high-school party thirty-six years ago. Or possibly thirty-eight. Or thirty-five. Or thirty-seven. But it’s somewhere in that ball park, notwithstanding that Professor Ford cannot reliably place the date, or even the year.

Which is the main reason why this event should not be occurring. On the present set of facts (and, given previous form, Dianne Feinstein may have more two-month-old info yet to disclose), there is nothing that can be proved. By her own account, Ms Ford cannot identify the house where the party occurred, or explain how she came to be in that house, and how she got home that night. She admits to being very drunk – too drunk to recall certain basic facts, but not to recall telling details. She was not a friend of Brett Kavanaugh, and never saw him again after the party. You could not take that to the county attorney, but you can take it to the United States Senate, thirty-six years later. There is a reason for rules of evidence and statutes of limitation – not because justice has a sell-by date, but because the determination of it does.

Nevertheless, I expect she will be “credible”. She has had four decades – or at any rate the six years since she first mentioned the incident at “couples therapy” in 2012 – to fix the summer of ’82-ish in her mind. In real courts, the best testimony is as near to contemporaneous as you can get – the statement you give immediately after the mugging or the car theft, before time and telling lead you to believe you saw him in the glow of the street lamp outside the Thai restaurant…when there is no street lamp on Maple Avenue, and the Thai restaurant closed three months before the incident took place. But we are now licensing a select group of crimes where the the normal rules of evidence do not apply.

And so what matters is that she will tell a narrative which (like Jeffrey Wright’s seersucker and docksiders) fits half the country’s preconceptions of the evils of the other half.

If Republicans fold on this, they might as well forget about getting anybody through a Senate confirmation ever again.

Annnnd BINGO, there it is. It is simply inconceivable that even Vichy GOPers don’t realize this—an obvious truth from which one can only conclude that they just don’t care, as long as they can get their precious Uniparty/Deep State business-as-usual back.

This isn’t about what Kavanaugh may or may not have done as a teenager. It isn’t really even about Kavanaugh himself. This is about who really runs things in Washington. It’s about power. It’s about setting an example—a demonstration of what happens to anyone uppity enough to attempt real, substantive change to Mordor On The Potomac’s status quo, pour encourager les autres. Above all, it’s about forcefully adjusting the expectations of the MAGA Deplorables—about putting us in our place; about establishing the distinction once and for all between rulers and ruled; about making it clear what bucking the Ruling Class too hard will get us in the end: nothing.

They assume one hell of a lot about how much shit we’re willing to eat without taking to the streets in open, violent rebellion against them, don’t they? But just because they’ve been right this long doesn’t mean they’re always going to be. “Too early to start shooting the bastards”? Claire Wolfe’s famous assertion looks less defensible with every successive Deep State outrage against the very concept of self-rule and “the consent of the governed.”

Share

STAMPEDE!

Posted on      by      2 Comments

Hard to believe, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this:

Sen. Jeff Flake wants to postpone vote on Brett Kavanaugh; Update: Statement from Sen. Collins.

Bob Corker, too, is on board with this shameless nonsense. This guy has the right of it:

Screen-Shot-2018-09-16-at-20.27.32-573x600.png

If True Conservative Principle™ Quislings like Flake and co. want to ensure that no Republican SC nominee will ever again make it past the Democrat-Socialists to a seat on the Court, let them go ahead and “delay” the Kavanaugh vote because of some made-up, irrelevant, thirty-year-old horseshit spoon-fed to ’em by their master Feinstein.

Let ’em see what happens to their corrupt sham of a political party afterwards. And then let ’em burn in the fire they will have ignited via their own despicable, sleazy machinations, the slimewads. To a fucking crisp.

Outbreak of sanity update! The plain truth.

Sen. John Kennedy called the confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh “an intergalactic freak show” and said he was embarrassed for Congress by the accusations of sexual misconduct leveled at the Supreme Court nominee.

“So far, it’s pretty much been an intergalactic freak show,” Kennedy, R-La., told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Most Americans are looking at this – most mainstream Americans – and they’re thinking that Congress has hit rock bottom and started to dig.”

Kennedy added: “I have been embarrassed by the whole process and, frankly, I’m – no disrespect to Senator Feinstein or to Stanford Law School – but I’m a little bit offended. I sit on Judiciary Committee. They’ve had this stuff for three months. If they were serious about it, they should’ve told us about it.”

Oh, they’re not serious about investigating the allegation. They’re not serious about getting the truth out, nor about seeing “justice” done, nor about providing succor or closure to the “victim.” They’re serious about hogtying Trump—about securing him to the Deep State leash at last. And with the aid of baglapping Uniparty-GOPe scum like Flake, they might possibly even win this one.

Share

No harm, no foul

Posted on      by      3 Comments

Steve Scalise said…wait, what now?!?

Color me shocked: Number Two (how apropos) Congressional shitweasel with a nominal (R) after his name tries to blame political violence on both sides. Even after taking a rifle bullet through his literal ass from a deranged Democrat leftard moonbat:

(MORDOR ON THE POTOMAC) “Unless more leaders speak out against this violence, it will only continue. Instead of calling for harassment, we need more leaders in both parties to condemn this rhetoric and the violent actions of their supporters.

We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines of this issue. I am calling on everyone, whether Republican or Democrat, to call out violent actions and violent rhetoric. If you have to resort to violence, you’re probably losing the argument.
Let’s return to civility, for the sake of our democracy.”

Best of luck with the white flag “both sides are equivalent” horseshit, Congressturd Scalise.

Now, given that elsewhere in his statement Scalise mention several specific incidents, all of which involved Democrat-Socialist partisans (in the WW2/Italian sense) attacking Republicans, an argument could be made that he wasn’t proposing any kind of moral equivalence here, I dunno. But either way Aesop is all over it:

This kind of sophomoric false equivalency virtue-signaling is why people voted President (Not My Guy) Trump in, passing up thirteen of your pussilanimous pussy cronies and fellow namby-pamby Pollyanna douchecanoes to get to him, and have turned their back on business-as-usual Marquess-of-Queensbury-Rules-waving backstabbers like you, and your whole RINO “Dying With Dignity, and Losing With Pride” faux-conservativism of the last 30 years.
Strong message follows.

So get this straight, Congressman Assbag:

I’m not “promoting” violence, I’m promising it.

There will be no unilateral disarmament.
And there will be no unilateral “return to civility”.
It’s a binary value: either everybody does it, or nobody does it.
Trying that any other way is suicidal.

Rep. Scalise is hypocritically mouthing PC pablum from the shadow of his wheelchair, if he forgets so soon the two guys who used violence on his behalf, by plugging the lone gunman that put an AK bullet through his hips and left him bleeding and crippled on the softball field, waiting for the coup de grace shot. Pity they hadn’t taken the “no-violence” pledge a year earlier, huh?

So he’s either a moron, or a hypocrite.
Given his job, it’s impossible to select from two such likely choices.
And, let’s be honest, nothing says he cannot be both.

There’s only one side screaming to go out and start violence. For nearly two years now, non-stop, and ever more boldly by the day.

The other side is simply vowing to finish it.

In a better world, Scalise’s call for everybody to condemn political violence committed by anybody might be a position worth taking. America in 2018 is not that place. Instead, it’s a place where the Democrat-Socialist Party openly encourages violence against their opponents, simply and exclusively because they lost an election they expected to win. They have weaponized the government itself and used it in a brazen attempt to overturn a legitimate election and seize power via palace coup. They have launched meritless “investigations” and applied pressure up to and including prison in hopes of turning someone, anyone, into useful accomplices against Trump.

The Vichy GOPe, rather than condemning this skullduggery and sedition in the strongest terms, has sat quietly by as usual, playing their habitual part as shambolic, muttonhead losers forever turning the other cheek as the Democrat-Socialists slap them stupid; being Deep State termites themselves, they hope only to get back to business as usual and have no interest whatever in defending a President who has done far more to advance principles they greasily claim to revere than the whole lot of them together ever managed.

This craptastic kakistocratic kabuki is being watched by millions of Americans who elected Trump to do exactly what he’s doing: to disrupt this shitshow, to bust up the status quo of corruption, futility, and failure; to reverse or at least stem the dismal tide of depravity and destruction the Left has deluged Heritage America under; in short, to RESIST, to FIGHT, to take the offensive against the Degenerate Left at long, long last.

Like Aesop, I can’t quite see those people just sitting back and letting this happen. They’re fed up; they told the PTB so in no uncertain terms when they defiantly elected Trump. The PTB’s response was to double down on their decades-long assault against the Normals, do away with the idea of the people having a say in their own governance via our system of elections, and really let those freak flags fly. We’ll see what that gets ’em.

Share

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome blatherskite?

Posted on      by     

Wherein we ponder yet again one of the burning questions of our age: is this egomaniacal jackass NEVER going to do the decent thing and just go away?

Guess not.

Capping off a week where Senate Democrats embarrassed themselves at what should have been the semi-serious vetting of a Supreme Court justice, along comes our foot-stomping former president to remind Americans of who, ultimately, is responsible for infantilizing national politics.

Friday’s speech was yet another reminder of why Donald Trump won in 2016: Voters rejected Barack Obama as much as they rejected Hillary Clinton. After a decade of binging on this skilled politician’s oratory cocktail of empty platitudes, self-puffery, and finger-wagging scoldings, we were burned out. Americans started to notice that the soaring rhetoric did not match the accomplishments. There was a creeping sense the same man who once promised his vision was “not red states or blue states, just the United States” had done more damage to the body politic than any other president in recent memory.

And he wasn’t even a good tactician for his own side. In fact, while this political mastermind was in the Oval Office, his party lost more than 1,000 seats to Republicans across the country.

Far from the speech being the “greatest, most timely, and most important in the history of this country” as oneDemocratic activist described it, Obama’s speech sounded like an updated version of every speech he’s given in the past few years. It was filled with whiny platitudes about moments in time and stark choices and inequality and demagogues. He veered between warnings about fake patriotism while insisting it’s our civic duty to vote the way he wants. He pouted about not getting credit for the country’s booming economy. Both sides are culpable for the current political divide, Obama admitted, but Republicans are much more to blame. (Perhaps he missed this week’s spectacle at the Kavanaugh hearings.)

He trotted out the same well-worn complaints about voting rights and climate change. Solutions always come with a price, such as a carbon tax and higher minimum wage. After eight years of trying, he still can’t come up with a convincing sell on how to fix the nation’s failing immigration system: “Democrats talk about reforming our immigration system so, yes, it is orderly and it is fair and it is legal but it continues to welcome strivers and dreamers from all around the world.” Huh?

There were more nuggets of nothingness: A vacuum in democracy. The politics of fear. Stand up to bullies not follow them. We need more women in charge. The best way to protest is to vote. Walls don’t keep out threats like terrorism or disease.

Pretty boring stuff from a guy who is widely considered by the media as one of the greatest presidential orators of all time. It’s doubtful that Chris Matthews felt a thrill up his leg as he listened to this snoozer.

Like hell. You know good and well the loathsome toad was sporting a tiny chubby throughout the whole ordeal.

Best part of it all? Oshitstain, after floundering haplessly for eight years and wreaking nothing but spiralling economic misery, attempting to steal the credit for Trump’s economy—an economy which took off only after Obama’s clumsy thumbprints were removed entirely from it.

Share

Clueless

Posted on      by     

Can he really be this stupid, this insular, this out of touch with obvious reality? Really?

Seriously?!?

NBC News’s Chuck Todd wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic titled “It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining – and to Start Fighting Back.” Much of it wasn’t about the urgency for journalists to defend their work, as the headline suggests; it was mostly focused on how Roger Ailes and Fox News are to blame for growing American animosity towards the news media.

Todd starts by explaining there’s a “new kind of campaign,” a campaign meant to destroy the legitimacy of the American news media.” He quickly pivots to prominent figures in conservative media, accusing Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson of attaining wealth and power by “exploiting the fears of older white people.”

However, he admits that President Donald Trump “didn’t start this fire” of people hating the mainstream media. That honor, according to Todd, belongs to Fox News founder Ailes. The “Meet The Press” host gave Ailes the title of “the godfather of the Trump presidency.”

“Take the word balanced. It sounded harmless enough. But how does one balance facts?” Todd asks.

Seems easy enough to me, Chuckles: you report ’em, and keep your opinions about ’em to yourself. But hey, I’m not a trained, professional “journalist.”

“A reporting-driven news organization might promise to be accurate, or honest, or comprehensive, or to report stories for an underserved community. But Ailes wasn’t building a reporting-driven news organization. The promise to be ‘balanced’ was a coded pledge to offer alternative explanations, putting commentary ahead of reporting; it was an attack on the integrity of the rest of the media. Fox intended to build its brand the same way Ailes had built the brands of political candidates: by making the public hate the other choice more.”

Nobody needs to worry about any outside campaigns to “destroy the legitimacy of the American news media”; the American news media, to include one Chuck Todd, did that all by themselves, thanks. Sexton takes Todd’s self-serving drivel apart:

Meanwhile, you have one of the allegedly down-the-middle reporters at CNN comparing Antifa, a group the U.S. government has warned is a domestic terror threat, to soldiers landing at Normandy and telling us “all punches are not equal.” But hey, no need to concern ourselves with a lack of balance at any network besides Fox News. In fact, my even bringing this up as an example of media bias is probably just more whataboutism that Chuck Todd would prefer everyone ignore.

Here’s the truth. The people who make up the media lean overwhelmingly to the left and are spectacularly bad at recognizing their own biases. That’s why conservatives are forever forced into the position of trying to point out that the media’s laser focus on the bad behavior of one set of partisans (those on the right) is not the complete story. There is another side to the story which often gets less attention because it doesn’t grab people like Chuck Todd as equally significant or important.

That’s why, just as an aside, you so often see the “GOP seizes on…” headlines. That’s a signal that people on the right are worked up about something which the media doesn’t think is a problem and therefore can only cover at all if they make it a story about the GOP’s odd (or perhaps dishonest) behavior.

The examples, statistics, and patterns confirming not just “some” but overwhelming liberal bias—damned near universal liberal bias—in the “mainstream” media are simply too voluminous to bother listing in this post; plenty of them have been discussed here over the years, but nowhere near all. To hear no less a libmedia leading light than Chuck Todd attempting to pooh-pooh it goes well beyond straining credulity; you almost have to feel sorry for the man. Almost. Back to Wulfsohn for our closer.

At least MSNBC doesn’t attempt to portray itself as fair and objective, unlike CNN. All you have to do is ask Todd what pro-Trump pundits are on NBC’s payroll. The answer: there aren’t any. You’ll find plenty of Never Trumpers, but you won’t find any Republican who will defend this president. To CNN’s credit, they actually do have pro-Trump commentators, albeit ones often greatly outnumbered by Trump haters.

On a side note, Todd has a lot of gall to question the journalistic standards of Fox News right as his own network is being accused of killing the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story. In fact, on the night Todd’s piece was published, Ronan Farrow accused his former employer of blocking him from further reporting. So while he craps on a competing network, his own network’s credibility is being burned to the ground.

What Todd resents the most about Fox News is the fact they’re the first to highlight media bias and profit from it. They’ve dominated in ratings for almost 20 years. A huge audience is sick and tired of being informed about current events with a liberal slant. Fox News became the anecdote (uhh, antidote, maybe—M), the counterweight to the rest of the mainstream media, who shield Democrats and demonize Republicans.

Todd is either clueless or lying, I’m not sure which. Either way, he’s preposterous…and pathetic.

Share

Reality bites

Posted on      by     

Weasel, weaseling.

In a segment on NPR’s “On Point” Friday, a fellow guest compared me to an Adolf Hitler supporter because I said something positive about President Trump’s tenure in office. Yes, seriously.

After I said some of Trump’s norm-breaking actions are good — namely his call for civil service reform and attempts to curtail some agencies’ powers and regulations — Norman Eisen, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and, ironically, co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said my support of Trump reminded him of the people who have supported authoritarian, mass-murdering regimes.

Our conversation begins around the 31-minute mark, here,where you can listen to what I said about President Trump that prompted this characterization from Eisen:

When Bre was speaking…I couldn’t help but think of those who greeted, don’t take offense, please, Bre, but those who greeted the other tyrants of the past 100 years. Whether they were of the left, like Lenin and Stalin, or the right, like Hitler — not saying Trump is Hitler, making those same claims about the evil that needed to be swept away and the change that needed to happen.

My favorite part of this is that he told me not to be offended right before he compared me to enthusiastic Nazis or Joseph Stalin supporters. He also says he’s “not saying Trump is Hitler,” then proceeds to make precisely that comparison. While Eisen is saying this, you can hear the host, David Folkenflik, try but fail to stop him. It’s like watching — or in this case, listening to — a car crash in slow motion.

I am writing this to draw attention to the tone from some of Trump’s critics. To them, everything merits a comparison to Hitler, and to make the “mistake” of saying a positive thing about President Trump — even when that positive thing is sandwiched between skeptical comments about him — is labeled as tantamount to helping the Nazis construct concentration camps. That’s so detached from reality and people who cannot see that should have no credibility.

So what is and what is not allowed to be said in public about the president without being called a Nazi? I said I wish Trump could tweet less and focus his lib-owning powers on regulatory rollbacks and taking down the administrative state. To Eisen, for some reason, that sounded like support for Nazis. One of us needs a reality check, and it’s not me.

Wouldn’t help any. Again: their argument isn’t with us. It’s with reality. They more of it they get, the harder they run from it, fingers stuffed deeply in ears every step of the way.

What amuses me here is Eisen’s gutless, cowardly attempt at having his cake and eating it too. By trying to forestall or at least deflect any righteous, wholly justified anger at these outrageous slanders (“Don’t take offense,” I’m not saying Trump’s a Nazi,” immediately before doing precisely that), Eisen establishes himself as King Of The Fucking Pussies.

Wear the crown proudly, Poindexter. It all leads me to ask yet again: how in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed world did we ever allow such mincing nincompoops to steal our country from us?

Share

Antisemitic Jews

Posted on      by     

A few of the other distasteful groups some on the alt-right choose to align themselves with: Joo-hatin’ libtards, self-hating Jewish libtards, and…guess who.

Anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart had spent years arguing that Hamas was a potentially moderate organization. Then when he was questioned at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, he played victim. 

But as Caroline Glick notes, there was every reason for Israeli authorities to question Beinart’s visit, because the anti-Israel BDS activist had participated in anti-Israel protests in Israel. Beinart was not, despite his claims, detained. He was asked about his participation in that protest by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. The Center, despite its name, is used by Jewish Voice for Peace members, a BDS hate group, which also, despite its name, advocates for and supports terrorists who attack Israel. 

JVP members are on the banned list. Beinart had participated in a protest organized by a group that it used as a vehicle. So it’s completely normal that he was asked about it just as visitors to this country are asked about their membership in prohibited organizations such as the Nazi, Communist and other totalitarian parties. The BDS blacklist that bigots like Beinart rave about is no different than the United States blacklist on anyone who “has used a position of prominence to endorse terrorism.” 

That’s the BDS movement. 

JVP declared that it was proud to host Rasmea Odeh. Odeh had been convicted of a supermarket bombing in Israel that killed Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner: two Hebrew University students. It called the terrorist an “inspiration” and used the hashtag, #HonorRasmea. That’s using “a position of prominence to endorse terrorism” which gets you banned from both the United States and Israel. 

Beinart writes for The Forward, a paper notorious for attacks on Israel and Jews that veer into the anti-Semitic. Typically anti-Semitic Forward headlines include, “3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race” and “Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather.” 

Did I neglect to mention yet another of those distasteful groups above: the absolutely batshit insane? Consider the oversight hereby corrected, then. But wait, there’s more…and worse.

Jewish power, Karl Marx, whose bearded visage still sneers from The Forward’s old building, claimed, is self-interest. That self-interest has corrupted Jews. And Jewish self-interest has corrupted the world. Only socialism, enlightened global altruism, can redeem the world from the corruption of the Jews. 

Behind the special pleading, the foaming outrage, the laughable invocations of Jewish tradition and morality, Beinart, Eisner, The Forward and Jewish Voice for Peace are working off the same Marxist critique of Jews. Israel’s crime and that of its Jewish supporters, they contend, is that its self-interest has corrupted Jewish morality. The only way to redeem the Jews is to destroy Jewish self-interest. 

To destroy Israel. 

Only by abandoning their self-interest, their power, even their survival, can they atone for what Marxist anti-Semites, from their great bearded master on down, see as the ‘original sin’ of the Jews.

Peter Beinart, The Forward and JVP aren’t putting forward bold new ideas. Their Jewish sources are not, as they claim, the prophets of Israel or the Kotzker Rebbe, but the original prototype of the anti-Jewish Jew. Their prophet is the pathological anti-Semite who raved, “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” 

Over a century and a half later, Marxist criticism of the Jews has made few innovations, replacing Judaism with Israel, and to a lesser degree, money with power. Leftist anti-Zionism is so hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism because its roots are still in the same anti-Semitic Marxist sewer. 

The Anti-Jewish Jews preach the salvific powers of the left to redeem the selfishness of the Jews. Only the left can save Jews from Jewish power. Only the left can redeem Jews from clinging to their guns, bible, and land by destroying Israel.

Boy, the irony is strong with these ones, ain’t it?

Yeah, I ain’t gonna be joining the chorus of “JOOZ DID IT!” conspiracy theorists, Right, Left, or Confutated, thanks. I don’t care how vociferously they preach their frothy gospel, here at this websty or anyplace else. Try peddling it someplace else, guys; there’s no market for it here.

Share

Stolen glory

Posted on      by     

They stepped in it. They splattered it all over themselves. Now they’re frantically trying to clean up the mess.

Legendary Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin took a swipe at the upcoming movie “First Man” late Sunday for its director’s decision not to show the planting of the American flag on the moon during the historic 1969 mission.

Aldrin, 88, who was the second man to step on the moon, behind crewmate Neil Armstrong, posted historical photos of the flag-planting and added the hashtag “Proud to be an American.”

In previous posts Saturday, Aldrin shared photos of himself wearing a T-shirt with the tagline “Buzz Aldrin, Future Martian” that shows an astronaut planting the American flag on the Red Planet.

Chazelle himself also released a statement, insisting the omitting of the planting of the US flag had nothing to do with politics.

“The flag being physically planted into the surface is one of several moments of the Apollo 11 lunar EVA [extravehicular activity] that I chose not to focus upon,” he said on Friday.

“To address the question of whether this was a political statement, the answer is no. My goal with this movie was to share with audiences the unseen, unknown aspects of America’s mission to the moon — particularly Neil Armstrong’s personal saga and what he may have been thinking and feeling during those famous few hours,” the director added.

When he was, y’know, planting the American flag on the fucking moon. In celebration of a wholly American achievement. The Soviets got to low orbit before petering out. Nobody else has managed to do even that much. Hell, even we can’t manage it anymore. It might be a past glory, now long behind us. But it’s still OUR glory, no matter how much that indisputable fact disrupts the feel-goods of globalist shitlibs.

The article quotes Armstrong’s kids as saying they actually agree with the shitlibs on its being a “human” achievement, but who gives a stinking damn what they think? None of them have been to the moon yet either. Anytime they want to go plant themselves a UN flag up there, they’re welcome to try. Maybe Once-Great Britain, Turkmenistan, Sierra Leone, and Burkina Faso can help out.

Share

Peer pressure

Posted on      by     

Looks like another victory for the Left in their struggle to destroy normality.

“Rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among teens and young adults may be a social contagion linked with having friends who identify as LGBT, an identity politics peer culture, and an increase in internet use, finds a study out this month from a Brown University professor. The study was quickly yanked from Brown’s news releases after a transgender activist feeding frenzy, and the journal it was published in is reconsidering the publication. There is a parent and researcher-driven petition to stand behind the publication of the first study to look in detail at rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

The petition includes the following graph about gender referrals in the United Kingdom. Anecdotal and news reports, as well as the rapid recent growth in transgender treatment centers, indicates a similar phenomenon inside the United States.

“[T]he parental reports in this study offer important and much-needed preliminary information about a cohort of adolescents, mostly girls, who with no prior history of dysphoria, are requesting irreversible medical interventions, including the potential to impair fertility and future sexual function,” says the petition. “In any other group of children, these grave consequences would be seen as human rights violations unless there was significant and overwhelming evidence these procedures would be beneficial long-term.”

Actually, there’s “significant and overwhelming evidence” of the opposite, starting with the incredibly high suicide rates for the tiny handful of poor mentally-ill people who truly are gender dysphoric.

“The spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence,” said the statement from Bess Marcus, the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health. “At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work.”

Except on topics like climate change, on which “the science is settled” and therefore must never again be debated.

The reason trans activists went nuts is that the study reinforces what plenty of parents, public health experts, and doctors have been saying: Transgenderism looks a lot like a dangerous fad. It’s telling that their response was to demand suppressing the results. It’s also telling that Brown chose to prioritize the unreasonable demands of a tiny minority above the potential well-being of children and the process of scientific inquiry.

Because the potential well-being of children and the process of scientific inquiry aren’t useful in advancing the liberal agenda. Read the rest; as Pullman says, it’s telling, to say the very least. Which is why the Leftists at Brown are suppressing it, natch.

Share

Where’s MY white privilege, dammit?

Posted on      by     

Self-loathing is an essential—perhaps THE essential—component driving the modern liberal psyche.

The concept of ‘white privilege’ was popularized by Peggy McIntosh in a 1989 paper written at Harvard University and titled, “White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack.” It was written as a personal, experiential essay, and it details 26 ways in which McIntosh’s skin color has been decisive in determining her life outcomes. This hugely influential paper has been responsible for the subsequent proliferation of a rigidly enforced theory of privilege throughout social movements and university classrooms. So central has this doctrine become to progressive politics, pedagogy, and activism, that to even question its validity is to invite the inquisitorial wrath of ‘social justice’ radicals. But it is for this very reason that it is important to subject McIntosh’s ideas to scrutiny. So let us return to the source and to first principles and unpack Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack…

Follows, a close examination of the tremendously large silver spoon ensconced in the gormless nitwit’s mouth from birth, a matter far more of wealth, social position, and access to a network of lofty connections than of race. She doesn’t seem interested in groveling apologetically for those things, oddly enough.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since. Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy. Many of her points are demonstrably economic. One is left to wonder why, given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin color, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work. If she did take to the streets in support of some cause or other, she left no trace that I can see. Nor, as far as I can tell, has she spent any time teaching the underprivileged or working directly to better anyone’s condition but her own. Instead, she has contented herself with a generous six figure salary, and has not shown any particular eagerness to hand her position over to a more deserving person of color.

Very few of the people reading this article—whatever the color of their skin—will have even the vaguest idea of the comfort and privilege in which Peggy McIntosh grew up and to which she has since become accustomed. Nor will we have access to the world of opportunities that she has been fortunate enough to enjoy. But even though the lifetime of privilege McIntosh has experienced is almost certainly due to her wealth and not the colour of her skin, she nevertheless found a way to share this irksome burden with the illiterate children of Kentucky coal miners, the hopeless peasants of the Appalachians, poor single mothers struggling to make ends meet on welfare, and the vast majority of whites in the United States and throughout the world who never had the chance to attend Radcliffe or Harvard. She simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin color. Without, of course, actually redistributing any of the wealth that, by her own account, she had done nothing to deserve.

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh’s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose—it helped to mainstream a bitter zero-sum politics of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence. Even so, it was readily embraced by progressively-minded professors who might otherwise have had trouble squaring their thirst for social justice with their high six figure salaries. In the last decade, this dogma has come screaming out of the nation’s august halls of learning and into mainstream civil discourse (although to call most of what passes for discourse today ‘civil’ somewhat labours the definition). And, still, we are endlessly and forcefully reminded that to question this concept in any way is, in and of itself, racist.

That’s probably enough excerpting; it’s a deep, well-conceived and crafted piece which goes into some unexpected places and is deserving of a read in full. Good comments, too.

McIntosh’s unwelcome gift of the burden of her own misguided guilt, neurosis, and self-flagellation is one the world could have done without. Whatever happened to the notion of a becoming sense of gratitude, responsibility, and noblesse oblige as an accompaniment to the good fortune of being born into a life of wealth and privilege, anyway?

If we’re all going to have to shoulder the load of stupid PC-Progtard angst, though, I’m gonna have to insist that they lay off their damned appropriation of my culture: “The Language Police Want Y’all to Adopt the Gender-Neutral, Non-Sexist ‘Y’all’.” Help, help, I’ve been microaggressed!

Seriously, though, the idea of sensible people “uniting” with such useless skinbags for any purpose at all seems fanciful beyond even the wildest science-fiction these days. Not even something as cataclysmic as the events in John Ringo’s Posleen War series could do it, seems to me. I know that whenever a gaggle of ’em goes out to attempt a “dialogue” with the Posleen in hopes of finding a “peaceful resolution of our differences,” “compromise,” and “reconciliation” with them—and you know damned well they would—I won’t be making any attempts to talk ’em out of it.

(Via KT)

Share

Laid to rest

Posted on      by     

Steyn on McStain:

What differentiated McCain from your cookie-cutter RINO squish was the sheer brio of his viciousness. I mean that as a genuine compliment: without it, he’d have been Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe. In fact, he was pretty much reduced to that by the generally bland weekend obits: In their determination to show respect to a war hero who’d battled cruel illness, they generally dropped all mention of the stuff that made him fun and human. On air he bantered with a showbiz professionalism: When he and I appeared together on “The Dennis Miller Show”, he said he had a real respect for me because that ridiculous accent was a lot harder to keep up for three hours than you’d think. Off-air it was more cutting, snide, vindictive, and extraordinarily petty. As I wrote during the 2000 campaign:

It turns out that, in an ideologically-riven Congress, John McCain is a truly bipartisan figure: both sides loathe him. There’s a persistent rumour that the only reason his fellow Republican senator, Utah’s Orrin Hatch, decided to get into the race for president last summer is that he can’t stand McCain. Senator McCain concedes that he called another Republican, Iowa’s Charles Grassley, a ‘f**kin’ jerk’, but says that he and Chuck are now ‘friends’ (‘friends’ in the context of the US Senate means they have the warm, close, personal relationship of, say, Suha Arafat and the Israeli government). When he was a humble Congressman, the Atlantic Monthly reported McCain’s altercation in the aisle of the House with Democrat Marty Russo: ‘Seven-letter profanities escalated to 12- letter ones and then to pushes and shoves.’ It takes a while to decipher this code but, reconstructing the incident, ‘seven-letter’ is a reference to ‘a**hole’ and ’12-letter’ to ‘motherf**ker’. One mayor back in his home state says that he’s not happy with the idea of McCain having his finger on the nuclear button.

So on Sunday the senator released 1,500 pages of medical records proving conclusively that he is not clinically insane – though for my own part I’d like to see what’s in the handful of pages that were held back ‘for personal reasons’. But, for the moment, we must accept the word of his doctors that John McCain is not, to use the medical term, stark staring nuts.

Nonetheless, in private many senators agree with that Arizona mayor… So, throughout New Hampshire, at one campaign stop after another, someone stands up and asks about the rumours that he’s explosive and out of control. ‘Boy,’ says McCain with mock solemnity, ‘that really makes me mad.’ The crowd laughs. ‘I was just exploding about that earlier this morning.’ More laughs. ‘Look, my friends, I get angry sometimes. I get angry when I see Congress wasting billions on weapons systems even the Pentagon doesn’t want. I get angry when I see 12,000 of our brave fighting men and women living on food stamps. I get angry when I see the lobbyists and special interests in Washington corrupting our democracy. I get angry when I see gross injustices perpetrated…. ‘ Etc.

Actually, there’s no evidence that John McCain has ever got angry over any ‘gross injustice’ or matter of public policy. Every incident recounted by Senate colleagues revolves around some piffling perceived slight; mention weapons systems and McCain is perfectly calm, but use the last piece of Senate toilet paper and he calls you a motherf**ker.

The real John McCain was far more interesting than the vapid obituarists would have.

To repeat: McCain was the pluperfect example of absolutely everything wrong with our government and the people in charge of it—the living, breathing representation of the wrong turn we’ve taken, where it’s left us, and how extremely arduous a journey it will be getting back, assuming we ever do. We’re well rid of him.

Share

America-hating shitlibs strike again

Posted on      by     

Hollywood is perfectly happy to bowdlerize their own output, so long as it advances the PC narrative.

The new Neil Armstrong film, First Man, got a boffo premiere at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, with rave reviews for the movie and its Canadian star, Ryan Gosling.

But if you go to the film looking for an interesting interpretation of history, don’t expect any American flag waving. In fact, one of the most iconic moments in history is missing. When Armstrong planted an American flag on the Moon, it acknowledged that while we went to the Moon for “all mankind,” getting there was a singular American achievement of astonishing proportions.

So why no Stars and Stripes?

Oh, I think we all know that well enough by now.

“First Man” is getting rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival, but critics noted the unpatriotically sanitized flick is missing something important, and Gosling explained he worked with French-Canadian director Damien Chazelle and the Armstrong family to decide on its key moments.

“I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement (and) that’s how we chose to view it,” he said.  “I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.”

A Navy fighter jock, test pilot, and astronaut, a “humble guy”? Not likely, chump. He might’ve been a polite guy, an unassuming guy, a considerate guy even. But I’ve known quite a few of them over the years myself, and I can tell you for sure that “humble guys” don’t excel in the business Armstrong was in. In fact, they don’t even enter it in the first place; arrogance—egotism, even—is pretty much a prerequisite, akin to a watch repairman’s steady hand and clear vision, a doctor’s empathy, or a veterinarian’s fondness for animals. As for that “human achievement” horseshit:

Was this really a “human achievement”? Sure, it was. So let’s send a bill to every country in the world to help pay the $200 billion we spent getting there ($25 billion in 1967 dollars).

American corporations designed the system that took us to the Moon. American workers built it. The American taxpayer paid for it. And Americans flew the damn bird. It is historically inaccurate and terribly, terribly unfair not to recognize the one nation that achieved the impossible dream of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.

Ahh, but see, recognizing that is the very thing that frosts their nuts, and is why they have to rewrite history to avoid acknowledging it.

NASA strapped Armstrong and his fellow flyboys into a tiny, claustrophobic little capsule on top of what is basically an enormous (the equivalent of 36 stories tall) three-stage bomb, pointed it in the general direction of the Moon based on calculations done with slide rules, wished them good luck and bon voyage, and lit the fuse under their asses. When Armstrong dropped the lander on Luna, he had something 15 seconds of fuel left, having overflown the planned landing area because of unexpected boulders. They fucking did something that no other nation on the planet ever even dreamed of doing, and came back home safe and sound.

And now NASA is reduced to “Muslim outreach.” Meanwhile, our own domestic film industry thinks it’s a fine idea to just give away a purely and uniquely American glory to be spread around to all and sundry, for the wholly fucked-up reason that they hate their own country and just…just…just can’t even.

If this shit-flick propaganda movie doesn’t bomb to an absolutely record-setting proportion, if it makes a single dime for the twerps behind this disgusting insult to truth and history, then there is NO justice in this world.

If they weren’t going to tell the story straight, they shoulda left it alone altogether. Then again, I guess we should all just be grateful the Hollyweirdos didn’t remake him into a black female transgender lesbian dwarf or something.

Stolen glory update! Chuck Yeager responds:



Via Glenn. Reynolds, I mean, not John.

Humble pie update! Okay, I may have to grant “humble guy” after all. But with a big, fat caveat that renders the admission moot.

In 1988, while working at the Reagan White House, I was afforded the rare opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Armstrong in the White House and it was, and is, one of the highest honors of my life. I was conducting interviews at the time for my first book, “Footprints – The 12 Men who walked on the Moon Reflect on their Flights, their Lives, and the Future.”

Gosling is correct about one thing for sure. Armstrong was beyond humble. Weeks after our interview, he called me to ask that I not use it. He told me how very sorry he was to ask, but that upon further reflection, he was not comfortable talking about himself and did not want anyone to get the impression that the mission was about him.

I agreed immediately with his request.

While greatly disappointed – we ended up scrambling and using existing public quotes for the book – I was deeply impressed at how truly humble Armstrong was and how important it was to him that others receive the credit he believed they deserved.

On that subject, Gosling was only half correct when he speculated that: “…I don’t think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero.”

While Armstrong never viewed himself as a “hero,” he was incredibly proud to be an American. An American, who before becoming a test pilot and the first human on the moon, was a highly decorated naval aviator who flew 78 combat missions during the Korean War.

With regard to the slight against the United States and of the American flag being left out of “First Man,” Gosling jokes: “I’m Canadian, so might have cognitive bias.”

As someone who has more relatives in Canada than the U.S. – my family making its way from Nova Scotia to Boston decades ago – I would say his bias has nothing to do with Canada and everything to do with being liberal.

When I spoke with Armstrong back in 1988, he – along with all 11 other men who walked on the moon that I spoke with – very clearly saw the moon landing as an American achievement and was in fact, quite proud to plant the American flag in recognition of the American blood, sweat, and tears which helped get him and Buzz Aldrin to the surface.

Of course he did, and was—and damned well should have been, as should we all. No shame in that, nor is there any insult or derogation to anyone else implied. It’s just simple fact, which no amount of shitlib historical revision can change. As always, their argument isn’t really with us; it’s with reality.

(Via Ed)

Share

Reach across the aisle…

Posted on      by     

And blow me.

Who is the John McCain of the Democratic Party? The “maverick” who disagrees with his or her party’s orthodoxy and is willing to confront it? Is there such a figure?

Instead, an analysis of Congress by the Lugar Center found that, of the top 10 most bipartisan U.S. senators, just one—Joe Donnelly of Indiana—is a Democrat. Overwhelmingly, most of the “reaching across the aisle” is reaching from the Right.

In a piece that almost reads like parody, for example, the Washington Post just ran an article entitled “Five of John McCain’s most courageous political moments.” At the top of the list: The speech he gave when he lost to Barack Obama. (“Of course the media loved McCain,” one longtime Republican told me this week. “He’s a Republican who lost.”)

All the other moments involved McCain either attacking a Republican or defending a Democrat.   

The media can’t stop admiring the many times Sen. McCain took to the floor of the Senate to criticize Republican positions on issues like immigration or campaign finance reform. OK, fine. So where is the Democrat who’s done the same?

Can you imagine a Democratic senator giving a speech condemning the #AbolishICE, open-borders wing of his or her own party? Making the case, as economists have, that large-scale immigration by low-skill workers hurts the wages of Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder? A speech arguing, as labor unions did for decades, that the Democratic Party should be the party of strong borders in the name of economic justice?

That speech will never be given, because there isn’t a single “maverick” on the Democratic side of the aisle to give it.

A speech like that would actually help create the sort of bipartisanship we’ve been celebrating in the life of Sen. McCain. The tricky part: Finding a Democrat with the courage to give it. They would be ostracized from their own party.

Don’t believe me? Ask Joe Lieberman. In 2000, he was the Democrat’s nominee for Vice President of the United States. In 2006, he was driven out of his own party in a primary and had to run as an independent to hold onto his Connecticut U.S. Senate seat. What was Lieberman’s alleged sin? Working too closely with Republicans. One in particular: Sen. John McCain.

They’re fine with self-seeking schmucks like McCain, right up until they’re no longer useful to them or threaten them in any conceivable way. Then the knives come out again, until such time as the phony “Maverick” can be made use of once more. The Real Right ought to start treating its conciliatory “bipartisan” turncoats just like the Left does theirs…and the NeverTrumpTards would be a fine place to start.

(Via Ed)

Share

Chutzpah

Posted on      by     

My God, the BALLS on this woman.

On CNN Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was asked to comment on the heartbreaking case of Mollie Tibbetts, the Iowa teenager who was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant.

Rather than simply offer condolences to the Tibbetts family, Warren said they “have to remember” that it’s important for the country to focus on “real problems” like helping illegal immigrants. She then launched into a rote political diatribe lamenting the treatment of illegal aliens at the Mexican border.

Mollie Tibbetts has been separated from her mama forever because an illegal immigrant brutally murdered her. Unfortunately for Warren, there are no Democrat talking points to help her with that sad reality.

Yeah, sure, but how’s that going to help with beating us all over the head with the Democrat Socialist agenda?

Solway was right in the piece I excerpted below: they’re positively Luciferian. All they’re missing is the horns, tail, and cloven hooves. The sulfur stench they’ve definitely got covered, though; it wafts around freely every time they open their filthy yaps.

Update! Ace notes the Kermit Gosnell Strategy in full effect with the libmedia scum on this. Which in its turn brings us ’round to this: “And They Wonder Why We’re Angry.” If we weren’t, we’d be every bit as morally derelict, depraved, and despicable as they are.

Share

AT LAST: Russia-collusion/election-rigging smoking gun FOUND!

Posted on      by     

And it’s pointed directly at the head of the Grand Wizard of the Coup Cucks Clan himself.

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.

At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.

Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.

So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

Julie Kelly has done some excellent journalistic work here—REAL journalism, not the kind we’re all too accustomed to. I’ll quote from it extensively here, because…because…well, because I just can’t help myself, dammit.

I found an article in the Standards archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. “Putin’s Party” is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players—including the Hillary Clinton campaign—and Bill Kristol to derail Trump’s candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article’s content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that “conservatives” had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

Kristol’s article hits on every single one of the Simpson-Steele talking points: Trump forced the GOP to water-down language on the Ukraine in the party’s platform (it didn’t happen); the Russians were behind Wikileaks’ release of the DNC’s hacked emails (unproven); Trump encouraged foreign powers to interfere in the election (he didn’t); and Trump would not honor U.S. commitments to NATO (an overblown assessment of Trump’s NATO criticism nearly all the Republican candidates made). He listed a handful of unknown Trump campaign associates who would soon become household names, including campaign manager Paul Manafort; national security advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn; and foreign policy aide Carter Page. (Strzok and the FBI formally opened their investigation into the three men—and campaign aide George Papadopoulos—on July 31, 2016.)

The content of Kristol’s piece closely mirrored reporting by other news outlets at the same time. (Lee Smith wrote about how the Fusion-planted media echo chamber evolved before the election.) But despite the flimsiness of the accusations, Kristol took his advocacy a step further.

Did he ever. Which oughta be enough to send you off with a quickness to peruse the rest of it. Bottom line:

Unfortunately, there are still some conservatives who trust Kristol and the Standard fairly to report on the Trump presidency and Republican Congress. It’s important that the public fully understands what role Kristol and his publication played—and continue to play—in fueling the biggest political corruption scandal in American history.

Kristol asks a lot of questions on Twitter. It’s time for him to answer some now.

Meh, why bother? He’ll only lie about his key role in the most damning and damaging political scandal in American history. Hats off to Kelly anyway, for her truly great work in digging up this whole bait-shop’s worth of worms.

Share

Social media is death

Posted on      by     

Ye Olde Vodkapundit spells it out:

The beauty of the pre-social media internet is that it was flat. That is, anyone could publish a website, and every website existed on the same plane as every other. The hyperlink held us bloggers to account, by directing readers to the source material which they could judge for themselves. A one-man blog could go toe-to-toe with major publications, simply by the blogger’s ability to write well enough to attract, maintain, and grow an audience. See: Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and many, many others.

Social media killed that.

Instead of a flat plane populated by millions of websites, each social media platform is a silo, designed to keep readers and users clicking away inside the same platform… day after day, minute by minute, like hamsters in a Habitrail. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, your ability to go toe-to-toe with the majors is limited by the platform’s reach — and more importantly, by the platform’s tolerance of you and of what you have to say.

Hence, deplatforming, and the stultifying unpredictability of developing your audience in someone else’s silo.

As somebody who got started back in those early halcyon days of the relatively level playing field that existed back then, I can flatly say that Stephen has his finger dead on it here.

Share

Relentless

Posted on      by     

At what point do we draw a line under this and call it what it truly is: government-endrosed and -abetted harrassment and persecution of a member of a hated religion to deny his Contitutionally-protected (supposedly) right to freely practice and express his beliefs?

In June, the Supreme Court decided the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, issuing a powerful rebuke to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for its “religious hostility” toward Christian baker Jack Phillips. Phillips had refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, and the commission had compared his decision to religious arguments in favor of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism.

Now, the commission is again going after Phillips for declining to create a custom cake — this time a cake celebrating transgenderism. On Tuesday night, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian law firm that represented Phillips before the Supreme Court and helped him gain an important 7-2 victory, filed a federal lawsuit against the commission to forestall action against Phillips.

“The state of Colorado is ignoring the message of the U.S. Supreme Court by continuing to single out Jack for punishment and to exhibit hostility toward his religious beliefs,” ADF Senior Vice President of U.S. Legal Division Kristen Waggoner declared in a statement. “Even though Jack serves all customers and simply declines to create custom cakes that express messages or celebrate events in violation of his deeply held beliefs, the government is intent on destroying him—something the Supreme Court has already told it not to do.”

On the very day the Supreme Court decided to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop (June 26, 2017), a caller asked the bakery to make a cake with a pink inside and a blue outside, celebrating a gender transition from male to female. The shop politely declined, but Phillips believes that the same lawyer, on other occasions, requested that he create other custom cakes with messages that violate his faith — a cake celebrating Satan and a cake with Satanic symbols. The lawyer, a man identifying as a woman, goes by the name Autumn Scardina.

Shortly after the Supreme Court gave Jack Phillips his win, denouncing the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for “religious hostility,” the state began to investigate Phillips again, finding probable cause that he had discriminated against the transgender lawyer who Phillips believes placed the call.

In other words, the horribly-misnomered Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission—a mangling of language so staggering in its grotesquerie as to shatter credulity—is nothing more than the exclusive plaything of a single obssessive psychotic freak.

That’s your tax dollars at work, Colorodans. Which means that now, it’s your move.

To forestall a second round of litigation, ADF filed suit against the commission in federal court. Jeremy Tedesco, ADF’s senior counsel and vice president of U.S. Advocacy and Administration, told PJ Media his firm would “preemptively file a lawsuit in federal court to try to stop what the commission is doing.”

“We think the circumstances are uniquely aligned to do that,” Tedesco explained.

All well and good, I guess. But it couldn’t be more clear at this point that when it comes to getting these odious fascists off our backs and out of our lives, the only thing that’s ever going to do the trick is to start killing them in job lots. At the very least, this Autumn Scardina creature in particular should be doxxed, terrorized, robbed of his/her/its livelihood, surrounded by screaming, fist-waving protesters every minute of his/her/its day, and generally hounded until he/she/it breaks down into a blubbering, trembling pile of disagreggated protoplasm.

And in case anybody out there persists in making the mistake of thinking this is about cakes in any way, shape or form:

While the commission — and some liberal Supreme Court justices — argued that Phillips had discriminated against the same-sex couple in 2012 based on their sexual orientation, he constantly argued that he merely wished to opt out of creating a cake to celebrate an event he did not consider a true wedding. This was not the first time Phillips had turned town such cake orders, either. He has always refused to bake any Halloween-themed cakes, which are consistently in demand every October.

Furthermore, when Craig and Mullins requested their cake, Phillips offered to sell them anything else in the store, but they refused. Phillips was not engaging in discrimination against them — he was refusing to bake a cake that would convey a message he disagreed with.

Ironically, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission actually defended another baker who refused to bake a cake that would convey a message. In 2015, the commission declined to take up an appeal involving Azucar Bakery, which refused to bake Bible-shaped cakes with messages against homosexuality. The bakery’s owner, Marjorie Silva, said she refused to bake the cakes because the writing and imagery were “hateful and offensive.”

The very same commission that defended Silva’s free speech rights trampled on Phillips’ free speech rights. This was one major reason why the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips. (The Court was also persuaded by the commission’s outrageously offensive comparison between Phillips’ religious refusal to bake the cake and a defense of Nazism, which was particularly egregious because Phillips’ father fought in World War II and liberated a concentration camp.)

If all the freak actually wanted was a goddamned cake to “celebrate” his/her/its dementia and depravity, he/she/it could have gone to who even knows how many other bakeries and gotten one easily enough, up to and including the above-mentioned Silva’s shop. No, this self-loathing abomination’s true goal is the suppression of the right to practice one’s religion freely and in peace. Bottom line:

“The most common misconception amongst people generally and people who care about religious freedom is that you can win a case and then walk away,” Tedesco, the ADF lawyer, explained. “We always tell our friends that our opposition doesn’t rest. I don’t think there’s any better example of that principle than this same commission taking up essentially the same case against the same man.”

“The Left and progressively-minded commissions like this will never rest,” Tedesco warned. “It’s just a matter of eternal vigilance.”

“If we tire out, if we become weary in defending these things, we will ultimately lose these freedoms for the next generation,” he added, ominously.

Taking this and every other God-given freedom away from those who desire only to be left alone is precisely the goal of Leftist swine, and they will never tire or relent in pursuit of it. They will rise from their own noxious ashes again and again and again, as many times as it takes, until they get what they want.

Repeat after me: they will not stop. They will have to BE stopped. Lawyers and lawsuits won’t do it. Angry op-eds won’t do it. Listening to Rush Limbaugh every day won’t do it. Voting certainly won’t do it. Nothing short of actual physical confrontation and violence will.

Well, so be it then. Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out. Try as I might, I can no longer see any way this restart of the long-stalled Darwinian-selection process doesn’t begin soon. As dismal as I once considered the prospect, I can no longer honestly say I give a damn. Let them reap what they’ve sown; may they have joy of their foolish, fascist choice.

Share

Sympathy: limited

Posted on      by     

More cheese to go with all that whine, stat!

The media keeps claiming that President Trump is encouraging violence against them. But the media are not the true victims here, and they will largely have themselves to blame if violence does befall them.

Talking about Trump, MSNBC’s Katy Tur said last Friday: “Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?”

The New York Times’s Bret Stephens even wrote a piece over the weekend titled: “Trump will have Blood on His Hands.”

“I warned that this inflammatory language [by Trump] is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence,” said New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. CNN’s Jim Acosta echoed that warning: “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in the conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.”

The solution, of course, is very simple: they can stop being out-and-out Democrat-Socialist propagandists and start working as actual journalists. Unfortunately, that appears to be another of those jobs Americans, or American liberals at any rate, just won’t do. But Lott has another angle to cover here:

Mass public shooters may begin to realize that shooting up a liberal media outlet would create a publicity firestorm. These shooters crave attention and pick targets where they can cause maximum casualties and gain maximum notoriety. Let’s hope that people don’t get to thinking that killing people in the media is a special ticket to notoriety.

Of course, this is no different than the impact that the media has on these attacks by continually mentioning these killer’s names.

Reporters decried the Capitol Gazette shooting as “one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in US history” and said it “may be the worst mass shooting of journalists in the country.” While understandable from the media’s perspective, giving so much excited coverage creates an incentive for someone else to come along and try to cause an even bigger sensation.

Compare for a moment the news coverage given to the Republican congressmen who were shot at last summer or the threats of violence against the daughters of Congressmen Jason Lewis (R-MN) or Lee Zeldin (R-NY) with the coverage that the media gives to vague threats of violence against them. In Lewis’s case, the threats against his daughters came immediately after completely dishonest attacks by CNN and others in the media that he was disappointed that he could no longer call women “sluts.”

If you were a killer who craved attention, who would you attack? A Republican congressman or someone in the media?

There is surely no symmetry here. The media doesn’t acknowledge any responsibility for threats on congressmen and the attack on Republican congressmen last year.

There was also no similar mainstream media outrage when President Obama accused Fox News of being “destructive” to the country or said that his administration needed to “pretend” that Fox is a “legitimate news organization.” The Obama administration even spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen and also CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. But the mainstream media acted like it was Fox News’s fault for being in Obama’s crosshairs and they ignored Attkisson’s case.

Obama expected the mainstream media to be nice to him. In 2008, he kicked newspaper reporters from the Dallas Morning News, New York Post, and Washington Times off his campaign plane because their coverage wasn’t favorable enough.

Obama could have clapped half of the whores of the White House press brothel in irons and tossed them into a dungeon and the rest of them would have gone right on fellating him just as enthusiastically as before.

With the mainstream media’s constant false claims about supposed lies by Trump (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) and the frequent allegations that he is a racist, one can only marvel at the media’s self righteousness and thin skin. Many reporters have made it their jobs to lie about Trump, and when he calls them out for it they accuse him of endangering their lives.

Last I looked, I saw no mention whatever in the Constitution of any right to constantly, relentlessly lie about a sitting President in the hope of bringing him down or making it impossible for him to govern according to the will of the people as expressed by their having elected him. Nor do I recollect any right to pose as impartial reporters of the day’s news while acting as shills and cheerleaders for one party.

When Trump calls the media out for being exactly what they are, we Normals out here in bitter-clingerland enjoy it tremendously and consider it no more than their due. Then, when the pompous blowhards tremble and quake in fear, whining about being “endangered” after having shamelessly encouraged hatred and violence against us for so long, we find it amusing.

Somehow, I seem to recall an old saw about the inadvisability of sowing the wind, as well as the unpleasant consequences of having gone aheand and done so anyway. Maybe some shitlib journo-hack could look that one up for us sometime, in between bouts of making stuff up about Trump, then jizzing himself over the weekly “OH, WE GOT HIM NOW!!!” ploy. Failing that, we can all just sit back and watch as certain chickens come home to roost.

Frankly, if anybody’s ass just HAS to be beaten and/or shot, I’d just as soon it be them instead of us for a change.

Share

The Tyranny Party

Posted on      by     

Tell me again all about how Trump’s the “authoritarian,” libtards.


One of the nice things about a core curriculum—sadly disappearing from most of higher education—is that it forces you to read books you would otherwise have skipped. Although this can be painful in the moment, it often pays off in unexpected ways.

Sigmund Freud is not a writer I would have picked up had he not been assigned. But I’m glad he was. The older I get, and the more of the Left I see, the more useful becomes Freud’s concept of “projection,” an unconscious defense mechanism that protects the ego from guilt or anxiety. It has amazing explanatory power and can help one make sense of a trove of recent books by left-wing writers, and one disgruntled former conservative, that blame Donald Trump for “authoritarianism” in American politics.

What, according to the authors reviewed here, is authoritarianism? They all attempt definitions, which are more or less similar. We may therefore take one as representative. The authoritarian, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die,

1) Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,
2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,
3) tolerates or encourages violence, or
4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

Gee, none of THAT sounds familiar at all, does it? Final analysis:

The most certain way a once-stable republic gives way to tyranny is when the republican spirit of its people is eliminated or undermined. All such regimes decisively depend for their success and longevity on a foundation of virtue in the people. How’s that going in our time? None of these books has anything at all to say about the family, the bedrock of representative republicanism. Only Mounk treats religion at any length, and then mainly to lambaste figures and societies to his right for being insufficiently deferential to Islam. Nor do these writers even mention the government-driven erosion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “mediating institutions,” another bedrock of American democracy. All of these goods—and more—have been under persistent left-wing attack for at least two generations. The health of democracy seems not to have improved during that period. The connection seems obvious enough but these authors glide right past.

In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!

The second is that the Left has internalized, mostly without realizing it, the classical case that the only truly legitimate regime is the rule of the wise. For them, it comes dressed up in its modern guise as Hegelian historicism, but either way, it’s ironic that in today’s cisgender Euro-bashing fiesta, their whole political philosophy rests on two quintessentially dead white male arguments. But, hey—they believe they are the wise. Not those dumb rednecks. When the pieces start to fit together in your mind, you begin to realize why the modern Left wants to make America more like those South American countries with a pale upper class, a darker lower class—and no middle of any shade. Because they get to be in charge. Uppity low-income, middling-I.Q. whites are troublemakers. They think they deserve a say. Trump gives those nettlesome, red-hat-wearing proles a voice. What else do you need to know to grasp that Trump is bad?

The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?

It’s Michael Anton, so there’s plenty more between my excerpt blocks, all of which you’ll want to read.

Share

Still the same

Posted on      by     

Who gives a shit?

Since April, 1992, an international peacekeeping or monitoring force of some type has attempted to reduce the mayhem in war-wracked Somalia. Subtract 1992 from 2018: you get 26 years.

Prepare to add more. This week the UN Security Council voted to maintain the UN and African Union Somali peacekeeping operation (African Union Mission in Somalia, AMISOM) through at least 2020.

Troops from Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti and Ethiopia man AMISOM and do the brunt of the fighting and security work in southern Somalia. AMISOM soldiers battle Al Shabaab Islamist terrorists, protect the national government in Mogadishu, the capital, and attempt to separate warring Somali clans.

Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti have immediate security interests in Somalia. Al Shabaab has struck Uganda with several terrible terror attacks. It makes sense their troops serve with AMISOM.

American special operations forces also conduct raids, drone attacks and surveillance missions against Al Shabaab.

Why are Americans involved? Al Shabaab has ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State. In 2006, the group managed to seize Mogadishu. 2006 pre-dates the Islamic State but Al Shabaab envisioned establishing a militant terrorist state. To be succinct, Somalia in 2006, like Afghanistan in 2001, was an anarchic nowhere apocalyptic terrorists could use to launch global attacks.

So create a highly radioactive glass-lined crater where Somalia used to be and call the job done, then. Lather, rinse, repeat with Afghanistan and any other Muslim shithole that even looks like attacking us, until the mere thought of doing such makes them involuntarily wet themselves in terror.

Yeah, I know, ain’t gonna happen. But a fella can dream, can’t he? The truth is, Somalia ain’t worth the cost of a single Blackhawk helicopter, much less the lives of those American soldiers who died in Bill Fucking Clinton’s ill-advised, bumbling, pointless, and costly UN-mandated clusterfuck there. The idea of involving ourselves there again to any more complicated or risky degree than simply nuking the site from orbit makes me very nearly ill with disgust. Somalia is their shithole; they made it what it is. So let them fix it, then…or not, as they may prefer. Whatever.

Share

Acosta doubles down

Posted on      by     

And steps in it again.


The truth IS prevailing, Jimmy boy. That’s what’s happening right now…and it’s driven your side right into daylight barking madness.

Pro tip: you and your faux-journalist ilk aren’t supposed to even HAVE a side, Jimbo. But you do, and we all know you do. Hannity gets the last word:


Bang fucking ZOOM.

(Via Breitbart)

Share

Categories

Archives

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." – Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Subscribe to CF!
Support options

SHAMELESS BEGGING

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:



Click HERE for great deals on ammo! Using this link helps support CF by getting me credits for ammo too.

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS FEED

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

E-MAIL


mike at this URL dot com

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless otherwise specified

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

All original content © Mike Hendrix