Bah! – Page 18

DeSantis lets ego and ambition get the better of him

Posted on May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 by Mike

And with that, I’m all done with the guy.

Ron DeSantis Busts the Media’s Stranglehold
Months of speculation and questions of “Will he or won’t he?” came to an end on Wednesday evening as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) made it official that he is indeed running for president in 2024.

DeSantis made his announcement on Twitter, appearing in a live Twitter Space with CEO Elon Musk. The announcement was initially riddled with technical errors because the number of listeners crashed Twitter’s servers multiple times. That may sound like a major problem, but it reflects the interest in a DeSantis candidacy.

Twitter ended the Space after about 20 minutes without a substantive announcement, but the stats showed that 387,000 people tried to tune in. A new Space opened up shortly after that, and host David Sacks said, “I think we melted the internet.”

“I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” the governor began. He highlighted some of the issues that are plaguing our country under Biden’s leadership: the border crisis, crime, the economy, and woke cultural domination, among other issues.

“We must return normalcy to our communities,” he added.

DeSantis promised to “reestablish integrity in our institutions.” He mentioned bringing the U.S. military back to its mission of defending the country, citing his military service.

Not a single item of which he will be allowed to accomplish as Under-Siege “pResident,” even assuming TPTREALLYB allow him to “win” in the first damned place. Thus is the curtain brought down at last on for-real, genuinely worthwhile accomplishments like this:

DeSantis Signs Law That Strips Illegal Aliens of Their Drivers Licenses; Leftwing #Resistance Media Shrieks That Minorities Are Terrified of DeSantis
—Ace

So let’s get this out of the way.

DeSantis just signed a law that has illegals worried and the leftwing #ResistanceMedia shrieking.

Axios:

An undocumented 22-year-old woman sat on her bed in Tampa last week and called her mother, listening to the ringing tone, hoping for another option. When her mother answered, the sound of her soft voice reminded the woman there weren’t any.
“We have to leave Florida,” the woman said.

What’s happening: A new law that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed this month to tighten restrictions on Florida’s undocumented community is driving immigrants out of the state.

The legislation voids out-of-state driver’s licenses for those without proof of citizenship, bars municipalities from using state money to issue identification cards for undocumented immigrants and requires most companies in Florida to verify the immigration status of new hires, among other restrictions.

It also repeals a state law that allowed some undocumented immigrants to obtain a license to practice law in Florida.

[…]

State of play: Some undocumented workers in South Florida are not coming to work or they are leaving job sites because of the law — which will come into effect July 1, CBS Miami reports.

CNN cries that blacks, Hispanics, and LGBTQ+ers aren’t “safe” in Florida and should flee the state in terror!

Which, far as I’m concerned, is just another add to the long list of Ron the (once) Great’s accomplishments as FLA Guv. It’s a sad day, folks, whether you like DeSantis (yes, I know plenty of y’all don’t) or not. With this foolish, onanistic fuck-up, we didn’t just lose a great governor; we now stand in very real danger of losing Florida too.

The wrong question

Posted on May 17, 2023May 17, 2023 by Mike

PJM’s Kevin Downey ax’s it.

The Warped Unreality of the Leftist Mind: How Many Lies Will These Idiots Swallow?

A: All of ‘em, as many as it takes. The REAL question, though, is: How many can they make the rest of us swallow, or at least pretend to?

There are people who can’t admit when they are wrong. Some folks are reluctant to admit they’ve been conned. But pinkos are emotionally weak toilet people who tie their political leanings to their self-esteem. They’ll swallow lie after lie, lest their political peers call them a horrible name — like, say, a “conservative.”

In other words, the Bolshies will eagerly lap up lefty lies to stay in the commie club, because it’s better than being considered a (gulp) Republican.

When asked why he was having trouble with working-class voters in the Midwest, then-president Obama said the following:

And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In one sentence, the great orator managed to remind threaten people that those who do not vote for him are to be considered angry, racist, xenophobic, gun-toting hillbillies. Mind control 101.

Leftists also need to feel they are better — dare I say superior — to someone, and that someone is you.

The better to see hear genocide you with, my dear.

UNPRECEDENTED!!! Except when it isn’t

Posted on May 15, 2023May 15, 2023 by Mike

The author’s conclusion is spot-on, incontestable, and utterly priceless.

Senator warns about 1,200 year drought, torrential rains soak Front Range
Climate anxiety is so prevalent among the younger generation who are brainwashed to think they’ll die unless the planet is rid of modern conveniences and meat products, they’re turning to substance abuse to escape depression.

It’s no wonder, when we have the likes of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet warning his Twitter followers of an impending 1,200-year drought across the West.

Upon further investigation with informed scientist Dr. Google, it turns out we’re not facing a 1,200-year drought, as clearly signaled by the torrential rains sweeping the Front Range.

As The Guardian explains, weather climate has actually been around for centuries, but the last drought of this magnitude in Colorado and the southwest was the year 800 A.D.

Tim Kohler, an archaeologist and professor at Washington State University, says the current megadrought is different from prehistoric dry periods. “This one seems to be more severe than any of the previous droughts and just as long,” he says. “But the really bad news is all the previous megadroughts took place without the influence of increasing greenhouse gases. Now we are playing a new ballgame and scientists don’t know what to expect.”

In other words, the current drought that scientists say is the cause of climate change, is just like the drought we had 1,200 years ago before climate change. Only this is more serious, because we don’t know what to expect, because of climate change.

TA-DAAAH! A real masterpiece of pretzel-contorted Leftard “logic,” wouldn’t you say? Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™: is there ANYTHING it can’t do? Apparently not, no. In light of where I ran across this one, what can one possibly say but: Heh. Indeed.

(Via VP Stephen Green)

First thing we do, let’s ban All The Things

Posted on May 11, 2023May 11, 2023 by Mike

Why we can’t have nice things anymore.

‘The Wrong Side Of History’ Is The One With Air Conditioning, Dishwashers, And Gas Stoves
These campaigns unfurl the same way every time. Leftists float some outrageous invasion into personal freedom in the name of stopping climate change or enhancing safety. When conservatives react with indignation, the media gaslights the country, casting critics as a reactionary cabal itching to start a “culture war.”

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but you know, I still maintain that a Biden appointee to the Consumer Product Safety Commissioner, Richard Trumka Jr., probably told Bloomberg News that gas stoves were a “hidden hazard” and “any option is on the table,” and then argued that the state could ban anything that “can’t be made safe” — which includes ladders, bikes, candy bars, cars, forks, desks, bathtubs, and televisions, and so on.

Oh, stop being such a hysteric; no one is going to take away your straws or light bulbs or combustible engines.

“No, Biden Is Not Trying to Ban Gas Stoves,” the New York Times assured its readers. The GOP “freak out” over the government “coming for your gas stoves” was “outright nonsense,” explained MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Though, they all argue, gas stoves are basically mini Chernobyls that are killing your children as we speak — especially minority children. All the pseudoscience says so. And if you disagree, you might be one of those “Gas Stove Denialists.”

“Gas stoves became part of the culture war in less than a week,” added NPR. “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars,” explained Time Magazine. The Washington Post claimed that the “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars.” The “culture war” can never be instigated by leftists suddenly shifting societal norms but only by social conservatives who pick needless fights over piddling, long-decided issues.

As Axios noted, gas stoves had become the “Right’s new fight,” which was somewhat confusing considering “the Right” didn’t bring up gas stoves in the first place. But the natural state of the world — the inevitable evolutionary finale of any policy debate — resides on the left. The speed of progress merely hinges on compelling the knuckle-draggers to see the light.

Ahh, but you didn’t really think they’d stop with just gas stoves, did you?

As Christian Britschgi in Reason points out, the Biden administration “has proposed tightening energy efficiency standards for 16 product categories, including many home appliances. The DOE has opened or finalized rules on microwave ovens, normal ovens, refrigerators, and laundry machines in just the last few months.” The Biden administration’s counterintuitive policy initiatives ensure that you’ll be compelled to buy crappier appliances at higher prices.

A-yup. All things, please note, that Whypeepuh dreamed up, engineered, and made a reality. Meanwhile, the Leftard Red Wreckers can do nothing, invent nothing, create nothing except chaos, destruction, and general human misery. And they’ll never, ever forgive us for that.

Rand was RIGHT

Posted on May 5, 2023May 5, 2023 by Mike

Over lo, these many years, he’s developed a funny little habit of that.

Rand Paul says Democrats know the ‘consensus is switching’ on Fauci
Rand Paul says Democrats are “quietly” beginning to understand they got it wrong on COVID orthodoxy and the imagined infallibility of Anthony Fauci.Remember back when the senator would question the nation’s top doctor about the U.S. funding gain-of-function research and Fauci would get mad?

“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about. And I want to say that officially: You do not know what you’re talking about!”

After jousting a few more times in Senate hearings, Paul kept asking important questions that no reporter was ever going to ask about the U.S. National Institute of Health’s alleged involvement with the Wuhan lab in China.

Fauci just kept saying, pretty much every time, that the senator didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then we learned Paul knew what he was talking about.

In a broad interview about the pandemic and its legacy released this week, Sen. Paul told Free the People’s Matt Kibbe (who is on the board of BASEDPolitics) that Democrats have been humbly admitting to him and other Republicans that they might have got some of the pandemic narrative wrong.

On Fauci and gain-of-function research in particular.

“Even now, Democrats are quietly coming to us, they know the consensus is switching on this,” Paul said.

“They still don’t want to be part of it because Fauci’s the leader of the Democrat party now for them,” Paul told Kibbe. “He’s this icon and they don’t want to do anything that tarnishes him. And they see it as a partisan effort.”

Paul continued, “They’re coming quietly to me and saying, ‘well, we probably would work on a bill to maybe regulate gain-of-function research, how taxpayer dollars are spent on this.’”

Hrm—maybe I’m wrong on this, but it’s been my understanding all along that gain-of-function research already WAS illegal in the US, which is why Fauci had to sneak his megabucks into other nations’ facilities to get it done more or less under the radar. Bold in the original, by the by, not mine.

Question now is, when will the homunculus Fauci be made to PAY for his decades of evil skullduggery and blithering incompetence? Instead of being allowed to just quietly slink away into a plush, cozy retirement, overgenerous Federal pension fully intact?

“Nobody is coming for your gas stove”

Posted on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Mike

Except, of course and as usual, when they are.

New York Becomes First State to Pass Legislation Banning Use of Natural Gas for Heating and Cooking
The Biden Regime said reports claiming they were seeking to ban gas stoves was a conspiracy theory.

Chuck Schumer went out of his way to chastise those concerned saying, “Nobody is taking away your gas stove.”

Although Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm mocked the millions of Americans concerned about the federal government’s plans to put restrictions on gas stoves, she admitted the Biden Regime wants to ban “some” gas stoves.

Now, New York State is banning the use of natural gas for heating and cooking in some new buildings.

According to The New York Times, “The provisions will require new buildings to be constructed with only electric hookups for appliances and utilities beginning in 2025. The law will go into effect for buildings with fewer than seven stories beginning in 2026. The requirements will kick in for taller buildings by 2029.”

Gonna be veddy interesting to find out where they think the electricity to power those new appliance hookups is going to come from—especially once the millions—hundreds of millions, that is—of mandatory EVs start being plugged in for the hours of intensive re-juicing necessary to move the useless fire hazards more than forty feet. Before they, y’know, explode, then burn your house to the ground.

Unavailable for comment at presstime were all those “avid lifelong hunter” D卐M☭CRATs who absotively, posilutely aren’t coming for your guns.

Oh noooes, Evel crashes AGAIN

Posted on April 22, 2023April 22, 2023 by Mike

What a pluperfect asshole.

Heyyyyyy! Party Crasher!! Evel had that! #send #besttoyever #partycrasher #evelknieveltoys #stuntcycle #evelknievel
Get yours👉🏼 https://t.co/N8cxxkhCic

Thanks @ogdp TikTok for the great jump 🙌🏼 pic.twitter.com/itfZpCAU3I

— Evel Knievel (@evelknievel)

April 22, 2023

See what I mean? What kind of weapons-grade dick-with-ears would jump in to bat around a vintage toy like that, chancing busting the thing all to smithereens on the asphalt? I had one of those myself back when I was but a wee sprat, and I can damned sure tell ya what woulda happened to this dude if he’da dared do that to mine. He’da wound up with a gaggle of the neighborhood rugrats latched onto his ankles, chawing on his ears and kicking him in his tiny, withered nutsack, that’s what. Hell, I had a scruffy, mean-ass pitbull pup back then, yclept Heinz, that woulda made mincemeat of his sorry ass, just on principle alone.

I mean, okay, I checked, and they DO still sell ‘em, for the low, low price of…40 smackers? Jeez. That said, at least it isn’t irreplaceable or anything.

But still. Jerkwad.

The ever-unpopular Ron DeSantis

Posted on April 22, 2023 by Mike

Looks like maybe Uniparty DC didn’t care for the cut of his jib.

D.C. Uniparty declares DeSantis Man Bad
“We don’t like his personality!” they seethe.

The Uniparty corporate media machine is launching a new series of attacks against Florida’s governor, after recent polls show that he may present the greatest threat to a second Biden term at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

During his time in Congress, Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t go out of his way to befriend Washington, D.C. Swamp Creatures, and unsurprisingly, that means he doesn’t have glowing reviews within The Swamp.

There appears to be a coordinated line of attacks going after the governor’s personality, which serves as an attempted distraction from his overwhelmingly supported record in office.

On Friday, D.C. establishment website Politico ran with the headline: “How to lose friends and alienate people, by Ron DeSantis.”

In the piece, former Swamp Creature rep Dave Trott (R-MI), who maintained a 49% (F) Heritage Action voting record, ranted to the corporate press that DeSantis does not like to schmooze with fellow lawmakers and their corporate lobbyist friends. Trott was infuriated by the fact that DeSantis did not appear interested in spending the time to get to intimately get to know the Washington, D.C. Beltway class.

On Thursday, The New York Times, a far-left blog based in Manhattan, ran a piece with similar themes.

Lots of recent stories have criticized DeSantis as too introverted, unwilling to talk to corporate media reporters, and uninterested in fashion. This Florida Man has the chutzpah to both ignore them and not care about what they think. The audacity!

Well, good, fine by me. All the more reason for Da Guv to stay where’s at, in Tallahassee, where he’s actually been able to do some good. And despite all the ongoing whoopjamboreehoo about an “imminent” announcement that he’s throwing his hat into the 2024 ring circle-jerk, I note once again, with great relief, that DeSantis still has yet to utter Word One about any such.

Keep it up exactly the way you’ve been doing, Ron. Let them fill your campaign war-chest with their money, sure. Let them blibber, babble, and “speculate” all they like. Let them wriggle, weasel, shuck and jive. Let them carry on with all the usual maneuvering and manipulation. But don’t let yourself be seduced by them, I beseech you. For many of us who support you fully and firmly now, that would be a deal-breaker for sure.

As FLA gov, DeSantis has accomplished many good and worthwhile things, taking the Culture War battle to The Enemy in a way that only a governor can. As president, he won’t be allowed to accomplish a gott-damned thing; assuredly, TPTB will see to that. So let them have it then, and straight to hell with them all. Lay down with such as they, and all any putative dissident will ever get up with is the blasted fleas.

If there ever is to be a genuine political counterrevolution, it must be launched from the State Houses, not the White House. In the end, even a man possessed of as gargantuan, as overwhelming a personality as Trump’s still couldn’t get it done, except as a strictly temporary thing. So why would any more modest soul even bother trying? Better to play a winnable game than to wastefully expend time and effort on a futile, preemptively-rigged one.

Harbingers of doom

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Mike

That would be shitlibs, whose endless, depthless misery is just begging to be shared with the entire world.

From the ‘Everything Enjoyable Is Bad for You’ Files: New Car Smell Gives You Cancer
The famed fictional advertising wizard Don Draper said it in Mad Men: “You know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car.” But that TV series was a long time ago and the time it depicts even farther from ours. Now we live in a sadder, more fragile age, in which even the smallest pleasures are to be denied us. The new car smell is no longer the smell of happiness; it is the stench of cancer, decay, and death. Welcome, Don Draper, to the enlightened twenty-first century.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported Friday that a new study has made a grim discovery: “The much-loved smell of a new car is caused by cancer-causing chemicals.” Well, of course! What pleasure, large or small, hasn’t been touched by the Left’s obsession with doom? Take weather reports. On warm, sunny days even just a few years ago, TV weather maps were green and pleasant, studded with images of smiling suns and blooming flowers. Now, for exactly the same temperatures, they are full of oranges and reds and images of extreme heat, working hard to sell climate change hysteria.

Major sports have not only been thoroughly politicized, but they have also become the vehicles for the same buzz-killing hysteria. Were you excited about the beginning of a new baseball season? Not so fast: AccuWeather wanted you to know that “MLB season is here: Experts warn lightning is a danger at games.” Now, maybe it really was true that “upwards of 90% of the lightning that happens in the United States, specifically the lower 48, occurs during baseball season,” but life is fraught with risks. Do the guardians of acceptable opinion want us to live in fear, cowering in terror at the prospect of a sunny day and forgoing a happy outing to a baseball game for fear of being struck by lightning? Why, yes. Yes, they do.

In line with the overall atmosphere of fear and gloom, the Daily Mail explains that “a cocktail of leather and plastics creates a gasoline-like odor which becomes more intense in the heat — due to an increase in energy available to odor-causing molecules.” And so if you’re enjoying your brand new car, pull over, stop, and get out of the vehicle. Quickly: “Sitting for just 30 minutes every day in a car exposes you to dangerous levels of carcinogens formaldehyde and acetaldehyde. These chemicals are linked to myeloid leukemia and rare cancers such as in the nose.” And so one day soon, when you step into your new electric car, you may find that the fabled new car smell has been relegated to the odiferous dustbin of history.

OH NOOOES WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIEEE!!!, they all ree-ree-reeeed. Which, to me, amounts to the best imaginable argument that, instead of wallowing in pointless agony along with the killjoys of the Gehenna-obsessed Left, we should all strive to wring every last ounce of enjoyment and happiness out of every single day that we possibly can.

And yet the weak, weepy Sad Sacks wonder why any intelligent person would reject the idea of living like they do. As if their neverending search for new sources of anguish, new and ever-more-fearful threats to life and limb, acts as some kind of lure and/or enticement to join them in their misery. As if the sound of kvelling, kvetching, and complaining rings at all appealing in our ears.

Sorry, idiots, not even slightly tempted over here. Life’s tough enough as it is, without your pathetic ilk going well out of your way to make it worse.

DeSantis’ popularity cratering among FLA Repugnicunts

Posted on April 16, 2023April 16, 2023 by Mike

Says “several”anonymous GOPe legislators, one anonymous lobbyist, and…a FLA Senate D卐M☭CRAT.

Florida Republican Lawmakers ‘Frustrated’ With DeSantis
Everything in the 2023 legislative session is going as Gov. Ron DeSantis has planned, as the Republican-led legislature is solely pushing through the Governor’s agenda prior to his announcement that he will run for President in 2024.

As we stated before, this is DeSantis’s world and lobbyists, lawmakers, media reporters, and state employees are just living in it.

But just as supporters of Gov.DeSantis’s soon-to-be-announced presidential campaign

Which, despite having been touted as “soon-to-be-announced” for many months now, still hasn’t been, I can’t help but notice.

continue to promote his accomplishments of the past four years, more and more DeSantis-friendly supporters, who have to work with the Florida Legislature, and lawmakers themselves, are starting to expose what could be a chink in the Governor’s armor—his alleged lack of loyalty and selfish legislative agenda.

According to several Republican lawmakers, DeSantis’s push to get his entire agenda passed through the legislature has left the caucus “exhausted” and “frustrated,” echoing the growing sentiment of lobbyists that DeSantis’s specific agenda has allegedly left many issues on the table, not to be heard because they did not conform with his overall agenda.

How unfair, having to buckle down and, y’know, do your fucking jobs. That sound you may be hearing is me playing “Hearts and Flowers” on the world’s tiniest violin, to express my sympathy for your suffering such an awful injustice under this thuggish DeSantis despot.

All of the Republican lawmakers spoke to The Floridian on the basis of anonymity for fear of retribution by the Governor and/or his executive office, but State Senator Jason Pizzo (D!!!) gave a very candid take on the growing concerns within Republican circles.

“It’s all about DeSantis. This place is run by his iron fist,” said Lobbyist X. ” And Didn’t we just elect him to govern for four more years?”

A very “colorful” Pizzo then pivoted his frustration for DeSantis to the state budget, where he claims he “successfully sued DeSantis on the budget, saying that the DeSantis Administration in the “midnight hour” created new policy on immigration.

“Where the f-ck are they? But where are they? You couldn’t find 49 people somewhere in Florida. And while yours and my property insurance is f0-cking exploding, we have $12 million to go blow for private jets,” questioned Pizzo. We don’t fly military vets in private jets from the state of Florida coming back from deployment, but it continues.”

Pizzo is referring to the $12 million dollars allocated in the Florida budget to transport illegal immigrants, and the aforementioned 49 illegals who were flown from the Texas border to Martha’s Vineyard. When he filed the complaint, which was dismissed on technicalities, Florida had already spent $1.56 million on the flights.

Cry me a river, little open-borders D卐M☭CRAT bitch. Then go take yourself a flying fuck at a plate glass window, you and all the rest of your fellow whining, over-entitled ProPol remoras. Shipping a planeload of border-jumping wetbacks to the very heart of Rich Shitlib Playground so as to acquaint the snobbish robber-barons who disport themselves thereabouts with the harsh realities of the policies they so stridently pimp was a genius move, the very epitome of poetic justice.

Admittedly, Ron DeSantis may yet turn out to not be the All-That-And-A-Hot-Fudge-Sundae his more rabid supporters purport him to be; we’re a long way from any final verdict being reached on that one. But crying in your craft beer about his upsetting of the Uniparty applecart to pursue his own agenda probably isn’t a very effective means of rallying Real Americans to your cause, I’m thinking. The people of Florida recently re-elected him—overwhelmingly—to do exactly that, after all.

Orc-elf miscegenation

Posted on April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 by Mike

I won’t belabor the point by excerpting the body of Ace’s post, since D&D is a topic I neither know anything nor give a damp fart about. Nonetheless, there’s something I’d like to make mention of here.

Woke Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast to Replace Half-Elf and Half-Orc Races in Dungeons and Dragons… Claiming That “Half” Races are “Inherently Racist”

Except, of course, when it’s young White women being urged from every corner of the culture to take up coal-burning we’re talking about, that is. Now, THAT sort of race-mixing, the Wokester fucktards all in favor of.

Oh, SNAP

Posted on April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 by Mike

This one has to smart a little. Or it would, if the raddled old soak had a lick of sense. Or, y’know, shame.

Wake me up when you want to talk about what kind of society you’ve created, where young people want to kill children. And don’t know what gender is.

The last 70 years. Inexorable leftward cultural shift. And this is where we are.

— BullshitSquared (blue check) (@xenophonrocks)

April 11, 2023

Ouch! San Fran Nan resembles that remark.

Via Glenn, who calls it “harsh but fair.” Which, y’know, is perfectly true.

American reality, then and now

Posted on April 9, 2023April 9, 2023 by Mike

Rogert Kimball notes some crucial distinctions, none of which we dare call “progress.”

On Good Friday, I chanced across a photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline at night from Good Friday in April 1956. Three skyscrapers, dominating the space, feature certain windows illuminated to form gigantic crosses to commemorate that most solemn of Christian holidays. The year 1956 was not that long ago. But how much has changed in those 60-odd years! Can you imagine such a public display of Christian affirmation in New York today? Nor can I.

As it happens, the picture is one I received the other day in one of the eleventy million damnable-nuisance emails I get daily from Twatter.

New York City, Good Friday in April 1956. Left to right: 60 Wall Tower, 20 Exchange Place (formerly known as City Bank Farmers Trust Co.), and 40 Wall Street. (Photo by Ed Peters/NY Daily News Archives). pic.twitter.com/Rk40iSYKyr

— olasem (@olasempruch)

April 7, 2023

Quite telling, no? Back to Kimball.

That was then. Now things are different.

I thought about that disjunction between then and now when reading through Washington’s Farewell Address this weekend. Washington had intended to withdraw from politics when his first term ended in 1792. He asked James Madison to draft a valedictory statement but, when the time came, bickering among some of his Cabinet, especially between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, convinced him to run again. He set the original document aside.

Follows, a deep dive into the history and meaning of Washington’s justly-renowned Farewell Address, delivered in 1796 after much revising. Then:

It pains me to say it, but I suspect the Farewell Address retains but a rhetorical claim on America circa 2023.

As does the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Thomas Paine pamphlets, the Federalist Papers, et al.

Then, in 1796, Washington’s exhortations and admonitions had purchase in the political, economic, and moral reality of America. Now, they mostly echo like antique sentimentalities, more or less like the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Who still takes that seriously?

Among the younger generations, who even knows what the Pledge of Allegiance is, or for that matter ever even heard of the long-since-abandoned thing?

Even the tone of the document seems chiseled from another world.

Because it in fact was—from another and a very different country, at the very least. Certainly, the words came from a radically different kind of leader than the sad, sorry excuses for such we’re currently burdened with. Onwards.

One important theme of the address is the importance of the union of the states to the preservation of peace and prosperity. Devotion to the union, Washington says near the beginning of the address, is “the palladium of your political safety and prosperity.” What a splendid deployment of the word “palladium,” a “safeguard” or “protection,” from Παλλάδιον, a statue of Pallas Athena that guarded Troy!

The substance of the address seems even more distant. Consider Washington’s strictures against the formation of factions, which echo and expand upon the arguments of Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist. The deployment of factions, Washington writes, puts “in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.”

Washington was warning about a possible future prospect that has become our daily reality.

Indeed, Washington’s admonitions could be torn from today’s political headlines. “The alternate domination of one faction over another,” he writes, “sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Are we there yet?

Alas, I think we all know the answer to that well enough.

Much as I might like to, I can’t excerpt anymore of it without doing fatal violence to the whole concept of Fair Use. But Kimball goes on at length from there in like vein, of which you should read the all.

You LOST, get over it

Posted on April 6, 2023April 6, 2023 by Mike

IMPORTANT NOTE TO HER HERNESS™: Nobody likes you. Nobody wants you. Why? Because you’re ten pounds of worm-riddled shit crammed into a five-pound sack made out of diseased-rat fur, that’s why.

And THAT, you evil, self-absorbed cuntbitch, is nobody’s fault but your own.

Hillary Clinton tries explaining how Douglass Mackey and his evil memes cost her the election
Hillary Clinton simply cannot accept America didn’t want her. And this latest nonsense where Douglass Mackey and his memes somehow interfered in the 2016 election is just more fodder for her bruised, wrinkled, evil ego. Did Mackey make some stupid memes? Oh yeah. But does any sane, logical person really think these memes kept Hillary from winning?

C’mon.

Watch her try and explain how evil it was, snidely pretending THIS is what cost her the election. Not that the most unpopular GOP candidate in modern history was still more popular than she was.

We used to think nobody’s voice would be more annoying and cringe-inducing than Obama’s…we were wrong. So wrong.

And how. But, as Alexander Pope famously said, to err is human, to forgive divine. Which, neither “human” nor “divine” are concepts Her Herness™ knows anything whatsoever about, as we all too well know.

“No one is above the law,” eh?

Posted on April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 by Mike

Ooooh, tell me that fairy tale again, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

No One Is Above The Law? Give Me A Break
Plenty of people are “above the law.” James Clapper, who lied under oath to Congress about spying on the American people, is above the law. John Brennan, who lied about a domestic spying operation on Senate staffers, is above the law. Unlike Trump advisor Peter Navarro, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was never going to be handcuffed and thrown in prison for ignoring a congressional subpoena. He is above the law.

Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, is also above the law. The then-Secretary of State set up a private server in her home to circumvent transparency surrounding her slush-fund foundation. She sent 110 emails containing marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information. Eight of the email chains contained “top secret” information. Every one of those instances was a potential felony punishable with up to ten years in prison.

We learned all of this from James Comey, then FBI director, who noted that Hillary had been “extremely careless” in conducting her business. Comey didn’t recommend charges because, he claimed, the state couldn’t prove Clinton’s intent — even though “gross negligence,” not intent, was the only standard he needed. Gross negligence and extreme carelessness are synonyms. Comey concocted a new standard to protect Clinton because she is above the law.

When Hillary’s husband, also above the law, perjured himself under oath, Democrats argued that puritanical conservatives were only pursuing Bill because of some trumped-up charge over “sex.” Using that logic, Trump’s campaign finance charges related to Stormy Daniels’ “hush money” are also about sex. This is different because Trump is the boogeyman, and everyone knows he’s guilty of something. The important thing is getting that mug shot.

Don’t worry, though; former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, “Everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” By “everyone,” she means Republicans. And if you think this authoritarian formulation is an accident, you haven’t been paying attention. When Democrats were smearing Brett Kavanaugh as a (gang) rapist a few years back, Mazie Hirono was asked whether the then-nominee deserved the “same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?” After all, this wasn’t about any judicial disagreement but about alleged criminal behavior. The Hawaii senator responded, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”

In other words, if you’re a conservative, your politics are evil; and if your politics are evil, you’re probably evil. I imagine that was the rationalization used by Kamala Harris when reading obvious fabrications about Kavanaugh into the Congressional Record. It is likely the rationalization of Lois Lerner or Merrick Garland — both above the law — when they weaponized government agencies against political opponents. It is almost surely the rationalization of Alvin Bragg. This is what justifies the contemporary left’s increasing comfort with deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies. For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice (if that) but a way to exact poetic political justice.

Like every other soiled, battered American institution which has been perverted and warped by them, the “justice” system is there strictly as a convenience for them—a tool, yes, to be used as they see fit in pursuit of their malignant authoritarian agenda. Nothing more, nothing less.

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