Leftward ho! – Page 23

Steps along the road to ruin

Posted on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 by Mike

Communism needs a healthy host, a prosperous one that can support the first years of communism, preferably one where communist agents can be voted into office with messages of socialism. This is what makes a democratic republic with a capitalist system the most susceptible to communist propaganda. Socialism is the stepping stone, the softer version that cooperates with capitalism to keep the economy strong, but it is how a capitalist system transitions to communism.

The role of socialism is to engage the citizens of a successful and wealthy capitalist system. From their wealth and leisure, those who have benefited from capitalism are confronted with its failures in exaggerated form. The plight of a single person living in poverty is magnified to represent an entire class of people “left out” and “downtrodden” with the recipient of the message having no possible understanding of those terms. It seems wrong that they are wealthy and others are poor, but the rules are the same for everyone and no one can protect someone from themselves or their decisions. Socialism takes advantage of these poor decisions and the self-inflicted victims of them to institute social programs that can never succeed except for a few propaganda examples, because they cannot change human nature and that is the true cause of the disadvantaged. The purpose is to create more social programs, more government, more government employees working continually toward the ideal of communism, which is universal employment by the government that equals total control of the population.

The question never asked is: “How will communism avoid the same failures?” The truth is, they can’t and don’t intend to. It is a selling point, not an objective. But, they will control the information about those failures and they will not cease to exist, but cease to be reported.

Gee, none of THAT sounds familiar at all, now does it?

Found this ‘un via e-mail tip from TL Davis, for which I thank him. At a cursory glance it appears to be a quite new blog, but I’m gonna go ahead and throw 12 Round into Ye Olde Blogrolle and my bookmarks anyway, on the expectation of more good work to come.

Permanent revolution, permanent crisis, permanent instability

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Mike

All features, not bugs.

What this means is that socialism, at least revolutionary socialism, cannot function outside of a crisis. It is a last resort position a desperate people will tolerate in times of extreme duress. That’s the odd thing about the concept. It is an admission that the radical program cannot exist in easy times. It can only thrive when the people, or at least a large swath of them, are sure their existence is on the knife edge. It also means the revolution can never achieve its stated goals.

This contradiction within radicalism is important to keep in mind when looking at modern politics, broadly inclusive of current events. In America, we have been in some form of crisis since the turn of the century. Under Bush the Minor, it was Islamic terrorism that put us on permanent war footing. The ruling class stripped away most of our remaining rights in the name of fighting this existential threat. America now has political prisoners and a security state that spies on citizens.

In the Obama years, the permanent crisis over Islamic terrorism slowly gave way to a laundry list of left-wing bogeymen. Racism, antisemitism, various imaginary crimes against imaginary identity groups. The rape hoax on campus was a classic example of trying to maintain the permanent crisis. Coeds were supposed to act as if Chad and Biff were lurking around every corner, ready to rape them. Of course, this warranted preemptive strikes against Chad and Biff in self-defense.

What the last two decades have been, really starting after the Cold War, is the bourgeois version of permanent revolution. The managerial elite maintain a militant and independent approach to politics, seeing themselves outside of society. They are the revolutionary class that is driving progress by driving the revolution. When they shriek about threats to the democracy, they really mean a threat to the revolution, their revolution, the managerial revolution.

The old radicals understood something about the class war they promoted. Marxist intellectuals understood they lacked the stones to fight for their cause. These were soft men who lived soft lives. The working class, on the other hand, had lots of tough guys comfortable with violence. The bourgeois class was also full of soft men, comfortable living the liberal lifestyle. In a genuine class struggle, they would not stand a chance against the working class. They would not fight.

Ahh, but that’s one of the things that demonstrate the true genius behind Gramsci’s revision of Marx’s original revolutionary theory, see. A slow, semi-clandestine takeover of society’s culture and institutions renders it unnecessary to fight. When done according to Gramsci’s clever recommendations, the frog ends up boiled without any struggle at all.

The managerial revolution, on the other hand, is led by radials, who make many of the same assumptions. The difference is there is no working class. They destroyed it by auctioning off the industrial base. Instead they will use their power over institutions, like the police, the security apparatus, finance and so on, to intimidate the middle-class into going along with the program. The permanent crisis legitimizes endless intrusions into daily life by the managerial state,

The thing is, the permanent crisis has another flaw. It channels the natural energies of a people away from industry and community. The permanent revolution becomes a bonfire onto which is thrown the social capital of a people. For the revolutionary, society is the sum of men, exclusive of their inner connections. They place no value on the social capital they burn for revolutionary fuel, because they see no purpose in it. To the managerial class, society is just kindling.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the Chinese Flu. The federal state is paralyzed by the growing incompetence of the managerial class. State and local responses have been incoherent, because the normal social capital that would animate such a response has been largely destroyed. You cannot have a community response when there are no natural communities of people. Clusters of strangers in temporary developments named after what was knocked down to build them are not communities.

The purpose of government either eventually becomes or is from the beginning to grow, to consolidate and then expand its power over its subjects to the widest extent it can. The problem is that it’s just not possible to effectively micromanage a nation as enormous and heterogenous as this one, no matter how overgrown and intrusive the central government may become. The more power it tries to reach, the more its grasp is exceeded, and the more apparent its metastasizing failure.

Worse (for them), this escalating failure drives them to attempt to regain the upper hand by imposing a veritable blizzard of niggling laws and regulations, which only results in most of those petty edicts being either slyly circumvented, ignored, or even contemptuously defied. Lather, rinse, repeat, until one of three things happens: 1)the bloated system collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and futility; 2) the subjects rise up in righteous outrage to overthrow it, either violently or through other means; 3) the whole mess spirals down into exhaustion and irrelevance, the collapse into dissolution, decrepitude, deprivation, and utter futility more or less accepted by its population as just the natural order of things. Unless and until things get so bad that large numbers of them begin to starve, at which point see No. 2.

Why, it’s almost as if God His Own Self might have stacked the karmic deck against Big Government and all its works, ain’t it?

That’s entertainment!

Posted on March 12, 2020March 12, 2020 by Mike

Gonna need a bigger blog, buddy.

Joe Biden’s Top Ten Mentally Deficient Moments
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is losing his mind in public. Unlike the classic movie Network, wherein an aging news anchor pours out his soul and righteously condemns our shallow artificial culture, Biden’s public meltdown mostly consists of spouting half-remembered anecdotes, confusing basic historical details, threatening to fight everyday Americans, and generally acting like a bewildered crank. Biden, who suffered multiple brain aneurysms in 1988, is basically liable to say anything out on the campaign trail, creating a precarious situation for a Democrat Party that has inexplicably made him their presumptive nominee.

Here are Biden’s Top Ten Mentally Deficient Moments.

Anybody thinking that committing political punditry for a living is an easy grift, consider for a moment how tough it had to have been to whittle this list down to only ten items. On the bright side, though, the folks at NF will be able to do another Top Ten listicle in a week or ten days max, continuing merrily along on that schedule until Senile Joe crumbles irretrievably into full-on babbling dementia, is bunged into the back of Hillary!™‘s Collapsemobile vanbulance, and hauled quietly off to the Ha-Ha Hotel for a nice, looooong “rest.” Then they could maybe compile a 40-volume series, chronicling the entirety of the addle-pated old coot’s shambolic output for posterity.

Y’know, I mentioned in the previous post how depressing it is that our political shitshow has decayed to the point that we have an open, self-proclaimed Marxist running for President instead of being shown to the city limits atop a stout rail, clad only in hot tar and chicken feathers, as is due and proper. So how much more depressing is it that the same party’s only other serious contender is a patently senile old corruptocrat, his condition rapidly worsening before the nation’s very eyes in real time…AND YET HE’S WINNING?!?

End game? Ain’t none

Posted on March 8, 2020March 7, 2020 by Mike

Too much: never enough.

There simply is no stopping point or ideological boundary line for the left.  There’s no point where the general liberal consensus says, “OK, we’ve arrived at our destination.  Hallelujah, we’re here!  We’re now liberal enough!”  Just when you think they’ve finally reached the point of maximum possible craziness, they march on.

For this reason, I foresee that many more liberal icons will be destroyed in the future, simply because at some point in their lives, they made the mistake of thinking, “The here-and-now is pretty much where we’ll stay.  The here-and-now is the end point of our liberal ideology.  The actions or comments that are appropriate and safe today will always be appropriate and safe.”  Nope.  The leftward drift will continue ad infinitum, such that acts that seem OK and reasonable today will soon be viewed as evidence of some unpardonable sin that is treasonous to the cause.

Bernie Sanders is not the left’s political end point, either.  He may seem extreme today, but in the not too distant future, we’ll look back at Bernie with nostalgia for how quaintly midstream he was.

What, you mean the way opposition to gay “marriage” went from being a perfectly reasonable, near-unanimous sentiment to unalloyed Nazi genocide in about, ohhh, twenty minutes or so?

Quoth moi, from one my very own song lyrics: A hundred miles an hour/Ain’t no brakes. To wit:

I didn’t know I was writing about “liberalism” when I came up with that one, I promise I didn’t. And yet it works just the same, in this case anyway.

But see (just to meander a bit further afield here), that’s the magic of songwriting: one’s audience can individually glean many different meanings, including contradictory ones, from the self-same set of words. And they will, to. Shoot, if I had a nickel for every time some female walked up to me after a show or some other place to sassily proclaim “You wrote that one about ME, didn’t you? I KNOW you did!!” I’d be…well, I’d be something other than a failed musician, at the very least.

Never mattered a bit whether I actually knew the dame or not, seemed like. She would always know, of a rock-solid certainty, that SHE was the one I’d had in mind throughout the wearing struggle of the creative process—humbly begging the favor of The Muse via downing shots of whiskey and staring endlessly at a blank sheet of paper—when all I had really been doing was just trying to cobble something together that at least rhymed half-decently and wasn’t too embarrassingly trite, nonsensical, or just plain goddamned stupid to be performed onstage night after night and/or distributed internationally on thousands of CDs.

But hey, what the hell do I know, right?

On a roll, picking up speed

Posted on February 29, 2020February 29, 2020 by Mike

John Nolte is feeling the Bern.

If there’s one cliché the idiotic pundit class gets right it’s this one: candidates matter.

Candidates matter more than issues, and they matter more than whatever real or contrived sins shimmer in their past.

A young inexperienced black radical who spent 20 years in a racist church should not have beat a respected war hero, but that’s exactly what happened in 2008. Why? Because No Drama Obama was the better candidate, the alpha male, the one who wasn’t the neurotic who quit the campaign to go and save the economy.

A New York billionaire who used to be a Democrat and who never held elective office had no chance against 16 seasoned Republican politicians, and he kicked their collective butts. Why? Because Donald Trump was the better candidate, the alpha male, the one who was never caught off guard, who knew how to fight the media, who stood his ground and made us laugh. He was pure competence.

Sure, some of us vote on the issues, but in the end, in the age of mass media and TV — and history proves this — it’s the candidate who matters. And all this talk about “lanes” is pure psychobabble. There’s only one lane in presidential politics: the Competency Lane, and a Jurassic Marxist owns that lane. Why? Because…

Elizabeth Warren is a shrill neurotic, Pete Buttigieg is a platitude-spewing dork, Joe Biden is as shockingly corrupt as he is past his prime, Amy Klobuchar has all the charisma of a clock radio, and Mike Bloomberg is a humorless, sour-faced dwarf.

Bernie’s Bernie. He’s tough, hard to catch off guard, comfortable in his skin, actually believes in something, and that’s why he’s winning.

How important can “voting the issues” really be anyway, when everyone already knows that the winning candidate’s platform will end up tossed out the window and forgotten around, ohhh, five minutes or so after the victor checks into his new Oval Office digs anyway? Hell, the one and only President we’ve had in years who even tried to make good on at least some of his campaign pledges is Trump, and just look at how little credit he gets for the effort.

I’m telling you folks, Bernie could quite easily fall ass-backwards into winning this thing. Horrible as he is in all ways great and small, he’s the only Democrat-Socialist generating real energy and excitement out there, even if that passion is strictly limited to the stupid, the ignorant, and the ill-informed. Nonchalantly assume it can’t possibly happen, and you could well end up with the same stunned, despairing expression splashed across your mug as our adversaries were sporting the morning after Election Day 2016.

Sign o’ the times

Posted on February 29, 2020February 29, 2020 by Mike

The Long March continues.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The U.S. Air Force changed lyrics in its service anthem by dropping gender references that exclude women.

The change announced Thursday by the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. David Goldfein, is designed to make the service friendlier to women, The Gazette reports.

“Our song must reflect our history, the inspiring service and accomplishments of all who’ve served, and the rich diversity that makes today’s Air Force indisputably the strongest and most capable in the world,” Goldfein wrote in a message to airmen, cadets and academy alumni.

The change originated when female Air Force Academy cadets asked Goldfein why the anthem’s third verse hailed the bravery of men, but not women.

The third verse is meaningful to cadets at the academy near Colorado Springs, where it is sung after sports victories, but students took issue with the third line: “To a friend we send a message of his brother men who fly.”

In the new version, the line is changed to read, “To a friend we send a message of the brave who serve on high.”

Other gender references in the song remain, including “at ’em boys, give ‘er the gun.”

My first thought was to vent some spleen over this trite silliness, but then I realized how very difficult it’s becoming to even give a shit at all these days.

Portrait of a loser

Posted on February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 by Mike

I first posted this one back when it originally appeared in 2016. As something of a counterpoint to my gloomy take below, and with the CF archives remaining hosed for the foreseeable future, I think it’s time to trot it out again.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.

And then, a mere four years on, hey presto! Bernie The Klown somehow finds himself the nouveau-wealthy owner of three (count ’em, 3) palatial mansions. The TeeWee ad fairly writes itself: Are you a shiftless, talentless bum who is completely bereft of any useful skill, incapable of earning an honest living for yourself and your family? Are you nonetheless unshakably convinced that you’re destined for greatness—your ego inflated beyond reason, your sense of self-regard and worth wildly out of whack with your negligible real-life capabilities? Do you believe that your comprehensive failure to contribute anything to society in no way negates your presumed right to dictate how others conduct their lives? Then the career-politician grift just might be the racket for you, my friend…

The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.

All our elections come down to that. They have for a good while now, actually.

The Founders were appalled at the awful prospect of the eventual rise of a parasitic professional politician class to plague their carefully-crafted new nation. The sordid tale of how a grubby, toxic little insect like Red Bernie flailed about his entire life with pluperfect futility—a failure, a nullity, a waste of skin without redeeming quality or virtue—until falling assbackwards into the political cesspool, where he prospered far beyond his due, explains why they felt that way…and confirms the wisdom of their opinion, too.

Ship: SAILED

Posted on February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 by Mike

Wait, you mean to tell me that Red Bernie is a *gasp!* COMMUNIST? And that Amerika might actually be in danger of lapsing into *GASP!!!* SOCIALISM?!?

Why, SAY IT AIN’T SO, MCGEE!

Democrats are almost out of time to change the trajectory of the race, although it remains to be seen if Sanders fantasizing about Cuban literacy rates slows him down. Some Democrats are begging the New York Nondisclosure Agreement to carpet bomb the airwaves and social media with attacks on Sanders knowing that if Sanders sails into the convention with a significant lead, they will be left holding a menu with a couple of equally horrible choices, the political equivalent of Brussels sprouts or liver and onion.

Their hope to pull off a convention bait and switch works only if somebody can keep the delegate count close. But who can pull it off? Mike Bloomberg? Not without a charisma transplant and the removal of layers of baggage. So far, he and Shrill Indian have combined to net one more delegate than is currently in the hands of the candidate from Minnesota who nobody has noticed is in the race. Joe Biden? He was last seen fantasizing about running for the Senate, even as his South Carolina firewall is fraying. Pious Pete, the Bible “scholar”? Sanders could not have hand-selected a better field of awful candidates to propel him.

An increasing number of Democrat talking heads are resigning themselves to the Sanders storm rolling in and trying to prepare the ground to receive its rain. Liberal revisionists have tried out two lines while the race is still somewhat in play: the Paul Krugman he’s not really a crazy Marxist…he just plays one on TV special and the one about vote for Bernie because he won’t be able to do the crazy stuff he has promised. These are political losers, but they are just the warm-up act for the socialism revisionism to come. Today’s Democrat Sanders critics will soon pivot to singing homilies to socialism.

Um—”WILL SOON pivot” etc?

Just now noticing all this, are ya? But Red Bernie ain’t the biggest problem we have here, not by a long yard.

So how did we get to the point where the nation founded by champions of liberty is on the cusp of nominating a man who is a fellow ideological traveler with history’s greatest foes of liberty? The Democrats have been on a steady march toward this Marxist moment for generations.

Ronald Reagan, in one of the greatest American orations, delivered back in 1964, saw that we were heading toward the moment, noting that “back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”

We are now 84 years past that 1936 Al Smith epiphany, and we are nearing the finish line, which is not surprising, since socialism is the natural destination for big-government Democrats as each successive generation ups the ante on the generation that came before.

Most Americans don’t yet appreciate just how much Marxism and its grievance-mongering offshoots have become the university mainstream in America, but this is of profound importance. America’s colleges, with a few notable exceptions, have been churning out Marxists for decades, which is why an old Marxist who looks like a madman is this year’s surprise hot political commodity.

The short-term problem for Democrats is that there are still too many older voters they need with an understanding of history who are horrified at the prospect of socialism.

But the long-term problem for Republicans is that the balance is tilting farther toward Marxism with each passing year as academia continues to crank out Marxist voters and influencers who are changing the ideological balance of society. Even if Sanders gets demolished in the 2020 election, Democrats will not tack to the center, since socialism is now the beating heart of their party. Sanders’s candidacy is the outcome of this tectonic shift, not the cause of it.

Although I’d argue that it isn’t “are changing the ideological etc,” it’s “HAVE changed,” that last bit is nothing but solid, 24k gold truth. Which then brings us right ’round to another ugly but inescapable fact, one I keep repeating: The war for America was lost long, long ago. The battle to reclaim it, should there ever be one, must be initiated in the Leftist indocrination factories we’re pleased to misnomer “public schools” to have any hope of attaining anything but the most transitory success. So far, I see no sign whatsoever that enough of us even realize that, much less that any such battle is being waged.

If the US was anything remotely like the nation it properly should be, the very idea of an avowed Marxist—particularly a buffoonish, all-thumbs crackpot as just plain stupid as Bernie The Klown—making a serious run for President would be so preposterous as to make the welkin ring with gales of laughter from sea to shining sea. Instead, somehow…well, here we all are.

America, let this once seemingly impossible concept sink in, and sink in deep: It can happen.

Sanders can win. Not just the party nod. The election.

The Wall Street Journal fretted recently: “Democrats are waking to the prospect of a nominee who wants to eliminate private health insurance, raise taxes on the middle class, ban fracking and put government in charge of energy production, make college a taxpayer entitlement, offer free health care to illegal immigrants, raise spending by $50 trillion, and tag every down-ballot Democrat with the socialist label.”

Journal editorial writers apparently believe simply repeating those erstwhile bogeymen will ensure McGovern 1972-style catastrophe for Sanders and his party in the fall.

Inquiring readers want to know: what country are they are living in?

And that “socialism” word: will younger voters really desert Sanders in droves over a couple comments praising Cuban communists? The Berlin Wall fell before a substantial bloc even drew breath. Communist China is our biggest trading partner. Millennials and beyond have a vague notion that socialism has been bad for Venezuela, but not why.

“Moderate” Democrats tried the Journal’s roundhouses on Sanders Wednesday, and didn’t lay a glove on him. Sanders countered with research purporting to show his Medicare for All budget-buster would save money. Cited praise for the Castros from the sainted Barack Obama. Ridiculed efforts to align him with the NRA.

And he pointed to strong head-to-head polling numbers against Donald Trump and burgeoning grassroots support.

Not to come off too Eyore-ish on y’all or anything, but don’t for a moment kid yourselves that it can’t happen, people. For one thing: know how our side likes to point to the humongous, wildly enthusiastic crowds every Trump rally draws as evidence of his grass-roots invincibility? Well, don’t look now, but guess who else is beginning to enjoy a similar level of support?

The above article’s title quite correctly states: “This is not McGovern’s America.” Once again: THAT, not Red Bernie or any other specific individual, is where our real problem lies.

Waiting.

Update! Did somebody mention the government schools just now?

It has been long known that American “education” institutions are spectacular failures at teaching the rising generation about their birthright to self-governance. The famous 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared it a national crisis that “In many schools, the time spent learning how to cook and drive counts as much toward a high school diploma as the time spent studying mathematics, English, chemistry, U.S. history, or biology.” Things only got worse.

Today, 4 in 10 Americans who are younger than 39 disagree that the United States “has a history we should be proud of,” according to a 2019 poll by FLAG/YouGov. The poll also found that half of all Americans agree the United States is a sexist and racist country, including two-thirds of millennials. Millennials showed the lowest level of agreement with the statement, “I’m proud to be an American.” Thirty-eight percent of “younger Americans do not agree that ‘America has a history that we should be proud of,’” according to the poll.

2019’s annual poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 37 percent of millennials think the United States is “among the most unequal societies in the world.” Despite their curricula’s obsession with so-called multiculturalism and diversity, they clearly have zero sense of what life is like in most of the world, and how that contrasts with the United States’ singular freedoms and opportunities.

The VOC poll found that 70 percent of millenials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. It also found that “57% of Millennials (compared to 94% of the Silent Generation), believe the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and inequality over the Communist Manifesto.”

That poll also found that large percentages of younger Americans said communism was presented favorably in their elementary, middle, and high schools.

But of course. The one is what gets you the other. Cause and effect, man.

Yet another thing I’m beginning to sound like a broken record on, I know: Gramsci was a diabolical genius, the Long March Through The Institutions he inspired a most horrifying success.

Bernie blowout!

Posted on February 23, 2020February 23, 2020 by Mike

America That Was hardest hit.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) can claim to have won the popular vote in each of the first three early states in the Democratic Party presidential primary with his victory in Nevada on Saturday night.

It is the first time a candidate for any major party’s nomination has won the popular vote in all three of the first states.

Opposition to Sanders within the Democratic Party remains strong. There are serious doubts about whether he would be able to defeat President Donald Trump in a general election. His “democratic socialism” is a fringe left-wing philosophy.

Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. I’m afraid observable reality, grim though it be, suggests otherwise. Left-wing philosophy is one hell of a lot less “fringe” than it should be, that’s for sure.

Nature, taking its course

Posted on February 15, 2020February 16, 2020 by Mike

UNEXPECTED!™

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman. He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution. Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people. The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

SPOILER ALERT: it played out exactly the way it always does, in every place it’s tried. Shocking, I know.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba. With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well. But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart. The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union. When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

The once vibrant island nation of Cuba is but another place where socialism added to its unbroken trail of failure. The country’s capital, Havana, was once an international tourist destination. Known as the “Jewel of the Caribbean,” Havana was a glamorous city with beautiful homes and modern vehicles. After six decades of socialism, only the communist rulers and their cronies live in upscale homes, and the country’s poorly maintained roads are traveled by junker cars built in the middle of the last century.

Easy prediction: the longer they cling to socialism, the more all of these things will worsen. In some quarters, this strange phenomenon of escalating decay, collapse, and chaos is known as “bad luck.” In others, it is sometimes referred to as “getting the government you deserve—good and hard.” Not to worry, though; it’ll be diff’runt here in the US.

I find this next bit of puffed-up, self-dramatizing sanctimony hilarious:

Among the greatest heroes of the Cuban Revolution were two foreigners whose battlefield exploits were so legendary that they became the only non-Cubans to be awarded the rank of Comandante in Castro’s army. One was an idealistic 29-year-old American named William Alexander Morgan, the other a ruthless Marxist revolutionary from Argentina named Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Hailed by Castro for acts of valor that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Americano,” Morgan said he joined the Cuban Revolution because “the most important thing for free men to do is protect the freedom of others.”

Uh huh. And then—as also always, always, ALWAYS happens under Marxism/communism/socialism/Progressivism/WTFever—EVERYBODY’S freedom was taken away—along with their hope, their health, their wealth, their dignity, and their future. One just imagine the eager naif Morgan’s surprise at yet another thing that always happens:

A fervent anti-communist, Morgan was personally assured by Castro that communism would play no part in the future of the new Cuba. But once Castro had consolidated an iron-fisted grip on power, he revealed his true stripes.

NO! That just can’t be right. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

I don’t quite grasp how any halfway intelligent person can honestly claim to be both a socialist revolutionary and a “fervent anti-communist” without suffering severe neck, spine, and brain injury from the whiplash effect of extreme cognitive dissonance. But that’s what the man says, so maybe I missed something somewhere along the line. Anyhoo, at the end of this article is a link to another worthy compendium on socialism’s inevitable failure from the same author.

How the Trump admin went off the rails

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Mike

Personnel is policy.

Unlike a George Bush (either of them), Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C. with no connections to the DC policy establishment. In fact, he arrived after a bruising primary and general election that left him alienated from the GOP establishment. The GOP establishment might not have called his supporters “a basket of deplorables” but they nodded their heads and chuckled when they heard it. The same establishment had gotten rich and fat off illegal immigrant labor and outsourcing American jobs to wherever. They were used to keeping the GOP base in line with promises and crumbs (George W. Bush had GOP majorities for 6 of his 8 years, how much did they accomplish in regards to slowing illegal immigration or reducing abortion?) while delivering zero. When Trump arrived in Washington he was reliant upon the very same people who had opposed his election to staff his administration.

Some hard-core NeverTrumpers were hired in an attempt to placate factions in the GOP. Some cabinet secretaries, like, for instance, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, pressed to retain Obama appointees or bring in registered Democrats with whom they had worked into senior policy positions. The head of the White House personnel office overseeing the hiring of political appointees went to an “end of the world party” when Trump dispatched Ted Cruz in Indiana. A guerrilla war was fought against the Administration by using the security clearance process to force out many of Trump’s most loyal followers.

Streiff then links to this piece, which fleshes things out a bit further.

In past administrations, a candidate’s allegiance to the president was vetted and considered a plus, if not a must. So why is the Trump White House filling any of these spots with people who have been openly (or privately) hostile to the president?

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor summed up the absurdity of the situation on Fox News. “I think President Trump lost control of the whole appointment process in staffing the government shortly after the election,” he said. “He ended up appointing large numbers of people who subsequently brought in their friends, almost all of whom were opposed to Donald Trump and his agenda.”

Indeed, the appointment of never-Trumpers was aggressively championed and insisted upon by some senior Cabinet members. Some candidates were directly approved by the president himself, while others were proposed by White House political staffers as compromise picks with Cabinet secretaries. Many others slipped in because, despite their anti-Trump sentiments, they had not revealed — or were not asked about — their views in public. Some of the appointments appear to have been downright disastrous. Although many never-Trumpers hired early in the president’s term have departed, others have been elevated or reshuffled as new never-Trumpers continue to enter the administration’s ranks.

The permanent-bureaucracy insiders, in serving their own interests and safeguarding their sinecures, are keeping their eyes on the long term. Back to Strieff.

This, by the way, is not unique to Trump. Historically, party outsiders have failed or been co-opted by the system because, just like Trump, they arrive with a popular mandate but because they are outsiders, and threatening outsiders at that, the formal and informal levers of power are often out of their reach because they can’t put enough of their supporters in mid-level policy positions. When results don’t materialize, the reformer is turfed out by the voters and we all go back to the way it was.

Which, of course, is the desired outcome, the whole point. It’s the grimmest of ironies, and the neatest of tricks: the system has been so thoroughly rigged to serve the interests of its career players by thwarting any true outsider elected to clean out the rot—to “drain the swamp”—that it actually functions as a self-perpetuation mechanism, ensuring said outsider will be removed when he inevitably fails to get the job done.

Put another way, the Deep State ouroborus produces antibodies to counteract and flush away potential threats to its own continued existence and supremacy. Kinda daunting to think of FederalGovCo being so awesomely resilient, virtually immune to all but cosmetic, trifling reform or restriction. More daunting still, though, is the question of whether this systemic self-defense mechanism came into existence organically, just as a natural consequence of the gummint having metastasized far beyond its intended limits, or whether its establishment was the intentional, coordinated result of insider engineers who knew just what they were building, why they were building it, and how to build it right.

The latter scenario isn’t merely daunting but downright scary, in truth—because successfully animating such a monster would have required true genius on Dr Frankenstein’s part. A people who value Constitutionally-ordered liberty will need him to be something a good bit less than that if he’s ever to be defeated, his abominable creation laid to rest.

Two sets of laws

Posted on February 15, 2020February 15, 2020 by Mike

Or maybe just one set, actually. But it doesn’t apply to Deep State operatives, Democrat-Socialists at all levels, PantiFa goon squads, and Leftists generally—it applies only, exclusively, and most stringently to us.

Justice in Amerika is now officially a sad, unfunny joke. This is no longer arguable; it is ugly reality. And it is intolerable.

DOJ drops probe into former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
“It is an absolute disgrace that they took two years and put my family through this experience,” McCabe said Friday.

Words fail me. I just…can’t even.

The Justice Department has decided to abandon its efforts to seek criminal charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to a letter sent to his attorneys.

McCabe’s lawyers were told last September that he should expect to be indicted on charges stemming from inaccurate statements he made to FBI investigators about his actions around the time of the 2016 election. However, no indictment was ever returned, leading to speculation that the Washington-based grand jury probing the matter took the rare step of rejecting charges.

Or—in plainer, more honest speech, with the weasel-wording left out—lying to the FBI. Y’know, the exact same thing as poor Roger Stone, who could righteously explain a thing or two to the scumball McCabe about being persecuted, I bet.

Prosecutors had been cagey since that time about the status of the investigation into McCabe, who has been a frequent subject of public attacks from President Donald Trump. In theory, they could have presented the case to another grand jury, but on Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington informed McCabe’s attorneys that it was giving up its quest to charge the FBI veteran.

“We write to inform you that, after careful consideration, the Government has decided not to pursue criminal charges against your client, Andrew G. McCabe,” prosecutors J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston wrote on behalf of the new U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Tim Shea. “Based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the Government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”

And with that, it’s now officially over and done. The only conclusion to be reached by any sentient being is that not ONE of the treacherous swine who actually, literally plotted to overthrow a duly-elected, legitimate President by nefarious and illegal means will ever face a reckoning for their crimes. None will face justice. None will suffer consequences. None will be duly punished. Comey. Clapper. Brennan. Stroozzzkkk. Page. None of them. Not a single one.

For TREASON. For SEDITION. For corruption so blatant, so arrogant, so patently wrong that even now, as cynical as I have become from observing this mind-warping shitshow, I still am shocked by it.

Not so much as a slap on the wrist. Not even a good scolding. Nothing. For any of them. Mark my words.

If I was Trump, I would resign immediately and flee this blighted, contemptible trainwreck of a country as fast as I possibly could, for anywhere at all, never to return or even once look back. The torment and persecution he and his family have endured for three long years—REAL torment, REAL persecution, something a lying asswipe like McCabe knows nothing whatsoever about, his self-serving whining to the contrary notwithstanding—were for absolutely nothing. His efforts and achievements are as pearls tossed before swine: Herculean labors undertaken on behalf of benighted fools wholly unworthy of them.

Game over, people. Gangster government won, America That Was lost. That’s a wrap.

Oh, and speaking of horsefaced cum-dumpster Lisa Page: expect to have lots more enraging victory laps like this one shoved down our throats in the days ahead, as longtime Deep State op Bill Barr allows the perps, one-by-one, to slip through his fat fingers.

Cheers, Andy. pic.twitter.com/9xy3hBEzqc

— Lisa Page (@NatSecLisa) February 14, 2020

“I am done being quiet.” Cute, very fucking cute. But why the hell not? She’s guilty as hell, free as a bird, and untouchable. Page and the rest of her cabal give not one damp fart what the dimwitted flyover rubes think or say about anything whatsoever. They don’t have to; they’re in charge, are going to remain in charge, and you oafish knuckleheads will just sit back and take whatever the DC Elite think you deserve to have dished out to you, foot the bill for it, then happily moo for more of the same. They know it now, having just received confirmation from the highest Swamp/DoJ authorities that they can do whatever they please with total impunity.

Sickening, that’s what. This country is finished, and it damned well ought to be.

No harm, no foul update! No matter how cynical you may be, you ain’t near cynical enough.

The Army will not launch an investigation into a decorated officer who was a key witness during the impeachment inquiry into President Trump and then removed from his White House National Security Council (NSC) position, officials said Friday.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said Lt. Col. Alex Vindman will begin a stint at a military college later this year, but he will be moved to a short-term assignment in the meantime. McCarthy did not provide any details on the new assignment.

“Colonel Vindman was scheduled to come back to the Army. He was detailed to the National Security Council in about the May-June timeframe,” McCarthy said during an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “We brought him back, he’s got basically a bridging assignment for a couple [of] months…and then will be heading on to a senior service college this summer, and there’s no investigations of him.”

Because of course there aren’t. Deep State rats look out for their nestmates, don’tchaknow. His “fired” twin brother was himself shuffled into another cushy sinecure at the Army General Counsel’s Office, so that he can continue the vital work of keeping “democracy” safe from The People’s unwelcome input or influence.

Funny how all of our “victories” seem to be short-lived, quickly and quietly magicked into defeat by further sly, behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery by TPTB, innit?

But hey, I’m happy that the heroic Doughboy twins landed on their feet after only a couple of days out in the cold, I really am. As long as dangerous malefactors like Manafort, Stone, and Flynn each pay their debt to society with a good, long stretch in lockdown for their heinous “crimes,” we can all rest assured that “justice” has been served. Right?

*SPIT*

Pissed off update! Lou Dobbs lays into ’em.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs went off Thursday on Attorney General William Barr following Barr’s criticism of President Donald Trump for his tweets.

“I guess I am so disappointed in Bill Barr, I have to say this. You know, it’s a damn shame when he doesn’t get what this president has gone through, and what the American people have gone through, and what his charge is as attorney general,” Dobbs said.

“Where the hell is the report? Where the hell are the indictments? Where the hell are the charges against the politically corrupt Deep State within the Justice Department, the FBI, and why in the hell aren’t we hearing apologies from someone in that rancid, corrupt, department about what they permitted?” he asked.

He also said, “To hear this attorney general complain about this president, who’s fighting every one of those damn people to do the right thing and get this country straightened out. And it’s his mission to do so, not to carp about his boss.”

“And by the way, I don’t want to hear any crap about an independent Justice Department. This Justice Department, as does everyone, works for the president. It is part of the executive branch.”

Bang! Zoom! Couldn’t have said it better myself. Good on ya, Lou.

Buttplug slammed, Biden objects

Posted on February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 by Mike

Wait, somebody’s still paying attention to a word confused Uncle Gropey says?

Joe Biden called Rush Limbaugh toxic after the conservative radio host said President Trump would “have fun” with the fact that Pete Buttigieg is gay.

“Look, you know, you saw — you just had on what Rush Limbaugh said,” the former vice president said Thursday on ABC’s The View. “I mean, my God. But it is part of the depravity of this administration. I mean, the idea that, you know, Pete and I are competitors, but this guy has honor, he has courage, he’s smart as hell.”

Biden, who like Buttigieg is a Democratic candidate for president, was reacting to a clip The View aired before his appearance in which Limbaugh suggested on his show Wednesday that Trump would try to target the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s sexuality on the campaign trail.

“They’re looking at Mayor Pete, 37-year-old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they’re saying, OK, how’s this going to look, 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to ‘Mr. Man’ Donald Trump?” the host said. “What’s going to happen there? And they got to be looking at that, and they’ve got to be saying, that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness, and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America’s still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president.”

I’m still rooting for Buttplug to win at all, y’know. As I keep saying, I simply can’t WAIT to see what happens on his first trip to Saudi Arabia on the arm of his First Whatever. And the mocking sneer on Putin’s face when President Buttplug minces out to greet him in his clingiest black cocktail dress and matching pumps is going to be even better than the one Vlad dismissed Barky with every time he was in a room with the slope-shouldered, jug-eared moron. Poor Vlad will probably bust a blood vessel from the tremendous strain of trying not to laugh in Buttplug’s face.

San Francisco priorities

Posted on February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 by Mike

James Woods is back to Tweeting again, and just won the Innarnets for the day with this one.

Where are the San Francisco police? Can’t they see the plastic straw on the sidewalk? pic.twitter.com/SxIrlOto9X

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 13, 2020

Some of the follow-on Tweets are pretty funny too.

Virginia is just the beginning

Posted on February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 by Mike

None of this is random. The enemy thinks long, and is working a plan.

They’re coming for you next: Much has been made of the onerousness gun control laws passed by the Democrats in the Virginia state legislature this past week.

When it became clear that the Democrats were going to pass such laws, having gained control of both the legislature and the governorship, 95 counties and cities in the state made it publicly clear they would not enforce these laws, announcing that they were now second amendment sanctuary counties. Then, more than 22,000 Virginians gathered in protest at the statehouse, peacefully but forcefully declaring their opposition to these proposed laws.

None of that mattered to the modern Democrats now in charge in Virginia. They passed the laws, one of which gives the state “the authority to confiscate certain types of magazines that are considered ‘high capacity.’” I don’t know how they think they will enforce that confiscation right, but since they think it appropriate and just, don’t be surprised if they impose new laws to strengthen their ability to do so, including the right to do house-to-house searches.

Most of the the discussion about this story has been focused on the opposition to the laws themselves. I want to focus on what it tells us about the modern Democratic Party. You see, these fascist actions — which do nothing to reduce violence or crime while making law-abiding citizens criminals — are being planned by practically every local Democratic Party operation across the nation. All they require to make them law is to obtain power, as they have in Virginia.

My proof?

He has plenty, all of which you should read. But it all boils down to the simple fact stated in the headline: “Democrats in VA and AZ issue a warning: “We will oppress you if you elect us!” They most certainly will, just like every other Marxist dictatorship throughout history has; as the scorpion told the frog, it’s what they are, it’s what they do. No Democrat-Socialist candidate, for ANY office, should be able to garner even a single damned vote from anyone not already a dyed-in-the-wool fellow traveler living in one of America’s Democrat Urban Blight zones.

And yet.

(Via Sefton)

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