Our Enemies – Page 60

It’s the rigid, authoritarian ideology, stupid

Posted on March 4, 2020March 4, 2020 by Mike

Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The rich are different from you or I.” To which I’ll add: so is the Third World.

As I watched my neighbor put her dog’s poop in a single-use plastic baggy, I thought about split pants in China.

When my wife and I got off the plane, 18 years ago, to adopt our first daughter, we were taken aback by the split pants. Split pants are (or at least were, back then) pants the children wear that are open in the crotch area. That allows them to urinate or defecate unobstructed, onto the street or wherever they may be. The theory is that eventually they will learn to “aim it at the toilet” or something to that effect.

Either way, I distinctly remember my brand new Nike slip-ons (probably made not far from where I was standing) sloshing into a mix of urine and who knows what else, and continuing to do so for the next three weeks.

As I started feeling the cough coming on, I remember one of the women in our group saying, at one of the airports (as she too, stepped into urine) “The people in this country probably have built up antibodies inside them our bodies have never even thought about.”
I replayed that line in my head for the next three weeks, as I descended into night sweats, fevers and a cough like I’ve never experienced.

Over the next several days and weeks, we would experience the amazing culture of China, in several different cities. But some things stood out to this germophobic American. I watched a man hock up something from his chest and spit it on the floor, right next to us, in a restaurant. No oysters for me, thanks. I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.

We visited a Hutong (inner city – where the locals live) and saw raw chickens, skinned and bleeding, just laying on the floor, waiting to be thrown on a restaurant grill…for public consumption. No FDA or USDA or food inspectors or “codes” to comply with, here. But why? This is the last purely communist country on earth. You’d think there would be red tape everywhere. What was happening here?

When I lived on East Broadway, right off of Canal Street cheek-by-jowl with Chinatown proper, I well remember walking through the area astonished and disgusted by the routine early-AM spectacle of Chinese restaurant personnel dumping great piles of raw, peeled shrimp onto the filthy sewer grates betwixt sidewalk and street, hosing them down briefly, scooping them up, and then hauling the “cleaned” shellfish back into the kitchen to be cooked and served. There was a similar scandal right here in Charlotte back in the mid-80s involving a now-defunct but once quite well-regarded and established Chinese joint caught using a similar process, with the kitchen floor-drain in place of sewer grates.

So after having to rush his young child to an equally revolting Chinese hospital, it dawned on the writer of the above excerpt that the problem he’s talking about isn’t so much a matter of Turd-World “backwardness” or even ethnicity. No, this is all due to something far more insidious and difficult to fix:

I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don’t answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don’t answer to you.

So what if you don’t like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can’t opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now “income equality.” And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn’t exist. The state provides it all. You’re stuck.

That’s the whole idea; you’re much easier to control that way, see. To rule.

He goes on to address the issues in some depth, concluding thusly:

As for me, I’ve seen what happens when the choices are taken away. And what happens ends up being a place where new viruses can spread too easily, to too many people, and aren’t contained quickly enough.

There’s been plenty of discussion concerning the difficulty of getting any reliable numbers or other information on the COVID-19 outbreak from ChiCom officialdom, which is usually attributed to the deceptive and secretive traits common to all Commie dictatorships. Okay, fair enough. But consider this as well: how likely is it that the Chinese government itself has all the facts in hand?

My guess is, not at all.

See, Communist dictatorships one and all basically run on lies. Lies are a Commie shitrapy’s bread and butter, its lifeblood, the fuel that keeps the machine struggling and staggering feebly along. Deception is by no means disseminated exclusively from the top down, only by government officials, to placate the workers. It is also disseminated from the bottom up. The factory worker responds to his immediate supervisor’s weekly query about productivity; the worker avoids punishment for failing to meet the quota handed down to from On High by exaggerating his output. His supervisor reports the bogus numbers on up the line to his own superiors, maybe inflating them a bit more so as to score a few points of his own. This process of fudging, distortion, and deceit works its way to the bureau chiefs, the directorate heads, and right on up to the top of the pyramid.

And that’s how you wind up with those cheerful state-media “journalists” enthusiastically reporting the GREAT NEWS of record-setting crop yields, glowing economic numbers, astonishing advances in science and technology, total military invincibility, and universal happiness, optimism, and patriotic fervor amongst the Proles—not a word of it true, or even close to true. It’s not so much that the government is lying; it’s that EVERYDAMNEDBODY is lying, to everybody else, and all for the same reason. Under Communism, so much bogus information gets passed around, purely as a matter of self-presevervation, that NOBODY knows what’s really going on. And there’s no way for anybody to find out.

Reality can be harsh sometimes. It can be tough to get your head around, to confront honestly, to accept gracefully. But only in Marxist hellholes is it literally hazardous to your health.

Systemic dishonesty is a bastard stepchild of rigid top-down control, a congenital defect both unavoidable and incurable. How could it be otherwise? The core of Communism itself is dishonesty (or delusion, if one wants to be overly charitable); could any Communist system ever be free of it?

Anyways, it’s a damned excellent piece, of which you should read the all.

You never make deals with Muzzrat savages

Posted on March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 by Mike

You kill them. As many as you can, as quick as you can, with extreme prejudice. Then you salt the earth, smear bacon grease on the corpses, and leave.

Nothing illustrates the folly of our 18-year-long nation-building mission in Afghanistan better than the partial peace bought by a months-long negotiation breaking down after just 72 hours.

AFP also reports, “three killed, 11 injured in blast in east Afghanistan,” so you know the Taliban wasn’t kidding around. The “operation,” as the Taliban likes to call it, or “savage terror attack,” as any honest person would call it, was in response to confusion between the Trump White House and the Afghan central government over the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

“Release” them? That’s another thing you never, ever do with Mooselimb terrorists. Then again, the first mistake there was taking live prisoners at all rather than going full Black Flag on their primitive asses. At this late date, the esteemed Miz Kelly has the right of it:

With few exceptions, America’s longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post’s explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan: Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend. The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee’s ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).

“Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience,” Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking.

The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats: Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded. Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001. And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars—an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out—spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world’s most economically and politically free countries.

“What has that $1 trillion bought us? What do we have to show for it?” Paul asked. “Did a trillion dollars make Afghanistan more stable…[or] move us one step closer to victory?”

The answer, of course, is no. Barack Obama’s 2009 troop surge didn’t work; as his vice president now campaigns for president, it’s important to remember that three-quarters of the total troop fatalities in Afghanistan occurred during the Obama presidency.

The war in Afghanistan is a catastrophic failure by every measure. It should cast a permanent shadow of shame over those who continued to promote it despite clear evidence for years that it was a disaster with no hope of a positive outcome.

Afghanistan is not worth one more life, one more grievous injury, or one more tax dollar to maintain our military’s presence there. Those who insist we remain only do so out of vanity and self-interest; to concur with Trump at this point would concede that their planning and execution have been wrong all along.

Even the peace plan’s detractors cannot come up with a compelling reason to stay other than hollow warnings about national security threats to the homeland. That claim, according to Jordan Schachtel, a D.C-based foreign policy analyst and journalist, is bunk.

“There is no threat to America from Afghanistan, a land of desolate poverty, which is occupied by subsistence farmers and families living in mud huts,” Schachtel told me by email. He thinks the peace deal is a “stall tactic” designed to fail and should have no bearing on whether the U.S. stays or leaves Afghanistan. “The best path forward does not include a deal. Just leave the country.”

A. Friggin. MEN.

“Nation-bulding” is the bunk. If you’re going to fight a war, you fight the ever-loving hell out of the damned thing. You use absolutely every weapon available to you, employing their destructive capabilities to the verymost maximum. You throw everything at the enemy you can get your hands on, without reference to the folly of gentlemanly niceties, sentimentality, or misguided “code of honor” that your enemy will never comply with himself or, in this case, even comprehend. You kill people and break things—savagely, ruthlessly, and mercilessly—until your enemy’s will to resist is irrepairably broken. You rain almighty Hell-fire and brimstone down on his head with neither pity nor surcease, until sheer terror at the merest fleeting thought of doing battle with you reduces him to a state of gibbering catatonia.

If you lack the will or the cold practicality to do all those things, you stay the fucking fuck home.

Sherman said it best: “War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” He later added: “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” Yesirreebob. All they want, plus a stiff measure more, so as to discourage future misbehavior.

Is this something?

Posted on March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 by Mike

Hmmmmm.

A federal judge Monday granted a request from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch to have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sit for a sworn deposition to answer questions about her use of a private email server to conduct government business.

Clinton has argued that she has already answered questions about this and should not have to do so again — the matter did not result in any charges for the then-presidential candidate in 2016 after a high-profile investigation — but D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in his ruling that her past responses left much to be desired.

Of course they did. What we’re talking about here is a person well known to be of extremely dubious moral character, with a sense of entitlement and privilege big as all outdoors—a narcissistic sociopath, really, one long accustomed to being able to get away with murder—literally, in this case. Whenever such a one’s self-interest isn’t served by full and frank disclosure of the truth but by obscuring it, that’s kinda what happens.

“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth said.

The judge went on to recognize that while Clinton responded to written questions in a separate case, “those responses were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best. Simply put her responses left many more questions than answers.” Lamberth said that using written questions this time “will only muddle any understanding of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind and fail to capture the full picture, thus delaying the final disposition of this case even further.”

Lamberth even gave some examples of lingering questions about Clinton’s emails, such as how did she come to believe that her private emails would be preserved under normal State Department processes, who told her this and when, at what point did she learn department records management officials did not know about the server, “[a]nd why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?”

She knew damned well it was no such thing. Her intention from jump was to flout the law so as to conceal the ongoing criminal actions of the lawless junta she was a part of. As always, she took getting away with it for granted; even if she did get nabbed, she assumed then, and assumes even now, that she’ll never face a serious reckoning. And why the hell not? So far, she’s been correct in every particular.

Given that the settlement attempts and records search took place after Clinton left office, the judge ruled that the deposition should focus on whether she intentionally tried to use her private server to evade FOIA and her understanding of the State Department’s record management requirements.

Oh, fer cripe’s sa….

DUDE, ever hear of Occam’s Razor, perchance? Because trust me, this is the pluperfect place to be applying it, which will suddenly make sorting out this whole kerfuffle a very damned simple project indeed. That’s because it IS simple, in truth, and it always was. To wit: Hillary!™ is nothing but a fucking criminal and always has been, a power-drunk reprobate who unswervingly believes herself to be above the law, wholly exempt from the trifling legalities the rest of us nobodies are held strictly accountable to. As such, she was but one of many Barrackorrhoids who felt/feel likewise, all working for a criminal junta that ditto.

Hats off and all to the judge for making this long-overdue move anyway. Still, though: amazing how hard it can be for some of us to recognize an obvious truth even when it’s staring them right in the eye, waving its arms around wildly, and yelling Hey, look, over here, over here!!, ain’t it?

Some things never change

Posted on March 2, 2020March 2, 2020 by Mike

Daniel Greenfield, as is his wont, jacks another one right out of the damned park.

The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.

That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.

The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

It was yet another Obama stay-behind, natch, one Dr William Walters—a State Dept bureau-hack who seems to be of the opinion that officeholders elected by Duh Peepul count for naught. This asshole knows where the REAL power in FederalGovCo resides. He would be correct in that odious opinion, maddeningly enough. The crux of the issue:

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of…

And who is almost impossible to fire.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.

Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.

There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.

There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.

It’s called the Constitution.

America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.

This one won’t, either. In fact, it’s entirely safe to say that it succumbed a long time ago.

Erroneous assumptions

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

It’s not that they don’t know anything. It’s just that so much of what they know isn’t so, as Reagan so memorably quipped.

Somehow this weird talking point is still seen as a mike drop by gun control nuts even as the U.S. scrambles to cut a deal to end 18 years of grueling quagmire warfare against an enemy that lives in caves and has no F-15s or Hellfire missiles. https://t.co/FxWHZeq4P4

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) February 28, 2020

Ace extols Hayward’s premise:

Great point.

The left is always claiming that we mustn’t go to war in this shithole country or that one, because peasant militias can always defeat Colonialist Invaders.

But when it comes to America, they claim that Bubba can’t do a damn thing with his AR-15.

That contradiction comes as no surprise. After all, we’re talking here about people s guns than they do about warfare, other than that they’re terrified witless of both. Ace then breaks the Tweetstorm out into manageable text for us, bless his cold, shriveled heart.

Of course it’s vapid, but it’s also vicious. They think they’re judo-flipping the rubes out in flyover country and pinning them to the mat with their reverence for the U.S. military. “You hayseeds can’t possibly think you could beat those awesome soldiers in a GUNFIGHT?”

One of the obvious problems with this “you can’t beat the U.S. military so guns are no use against the military” idiocy is that tyrants around the world very clearly DO fear the prospect of an armed populace. That’s why they always aggressively disarm their captive people.

The track record of lightly-armed insurgencies against professional military forces in the modern era is actually pretty good, even when the military forces are vastly more aggressive and willing to inflict collateral damage than the U.S. armed forces ever would be.
 To even speculate on how things would go if the U.S. armed forces became a gang of ruthless killers under some communist or fascist American tyrant is to enter the realm of science fiction. Healthy respect for the 2nd Amendment helps to ensure things never get that far.

An armed population of sovereign citizens goes a long way toward keeping tyranny from ever getting off the ground. Of course collectivist Democrats with their hive-mind thinking don’t consciously understand it, but the 2A is helping restrain their worst impulses RIGHT NOW.

They’re trying to reassure each other that THEIR power is absolute while YOU have none at all. Once they trick you into submitting to socialized medicine, forced population shifts, or one of their other doomsday schemes, you’ll be helpless. Deep down, they’re not so sure.

But long before you dip into left-wing psychosis or apocalyptic scenarios of armed revolt against a tyrant, you have the way armed citizens see themselves differently than disarmed ones. The first two amendments in the Bill of Rights profoundly shape the nature of citizenship.

The 2nd Amendment UNDERMINES tyranny long before anyone has to think about FIGHTING it. If we stand tall as sovereign citizens and cherish our rights AND responsibilities – the 2nd Amendment is where they meet! – we won’t get stuck with rulers we have to “take on.” /end

More good stuff here.

I can’t claim to be quite so sanguine and positive about all that as John seems to be, but in the main he’s correct: however lax we’ve been about vigorously defending our liberties from incremental encroachment, there’s little doubt that the Left’s tyrannical tendencies have been at least somewhat attenuated by the uncertainty an armed populace instills in them.

Some gaps have been knocked into the Constitutional fence that encircles and safeguards American rights from predation, admittedly. But the fact is that its protection, while not as sturdy and complete as it might be, has not been entirely removed even yet. And it can be repaired and made strong again, any old time we choose to take the trouble.

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.

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.

Hey, they don’t call it the Surveillance State for nothing, you know

Posted on February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 by Mike

Rand Paul has an idea for a good start.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump told Sen. Rand Paul that he does not support a clean extension of expiring surveillance authorities, throwing the future of the program into doubt ahead of a fast-approaching March 15 deadline to re-up key features of the Patriot Act.

The Kentucky Republican told reporters that Trump made the comments to him on Wednesday, just a day after Attorney General William Barr told GOP senators that Congress should extend the expiring provisions regarding roving wire taps, lone wolf actors and the most controversial provision: call data collection.

Asked about the discrepancy between his conversation with Trump and Barr’s remarks to senators, Paul said there was “misinformation that got out from some people in the administration” about the expiring surveillance authorities.

“The president was out of the country and somebody mischaracterized his positions. I’ll leave it up to y’all to figure that out,” Paul added.

Paul said Trump is “very supportive” of his amendment to prevent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from targeting Americans, a reflection of conservative unease over the way the Trump campaign was surveilled in 2016.

“FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans,” Paul said on Thursday afternoon. “Americans shouldn’t be spied on by a secret court. I think he agrees completely with that and that’s the amendment that I’m going to insist on. I’m not letting anything go easy without a vote on my amendment.”

Paul’s amendment is all well and good as far as it goes; certainly, it’s a vast improvement over the Barr proposal, which McConnell and Graham also endorse. Myself, though, I’m with Sundance all the way.

Yesterday CTH warned of a scenario where congress would attempt to slip a clean renewal authorization into the Coronavirus appropriations bill. Today, that exact scenario was being discussed on Capitol Hill.

Following the conversation with President Trump, Senator Rand Paul is planning to propose legislation that would force reform to the current FISA authorities.

While CTH disagrees with the Rand Paul proposal, and would rather see the bulk data gathering/collection and opportunities for exploitation eliminated, at least Senator Paul is attempting to stop the system from being abused against political campaigns.

Two issues…and again CTH is not attempting to dismiss the righteous effort by Senator Paul…However:

(A) Isn’t it already illegal, unlawful, unconstitutional and grossly corrupt, to use FISA as a political surveillance tool? If so, why do we need another law or rule change to make it more illegal, more unlawful and more grossly corrupt?

(B) Why do only elected officials or candidates for office get protection from having their fourth amendment rights violated by exploitation of the FISA courts? Shouldn’t the same standard of protection apply to everyone?

CTH understands what Rand Paul is attempting to do, but it’s the FISA process being used against *any* American that is the problem. No American should have their constitutional rights travel through a secret court in order to usurp them. Let FISA apply to “non Americans”; and if there is a need for surveillance or collection of information on Americans, then let the government approach regular Title-3 courts for domestic warrants.

Unfortunately, we know all too well just how likely Deep State operatives are to relinquish as powerful a tool as FISA—a grotesque affront to absolutely every principle this nation was founded upon—has turned out to be for them.

Imagine this

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

For a real change of pace, this one is perfectly easy to spot as a Bee satire.

John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ Rereleased With More Realistic Description Of Communism
UK—Have you ever tried to imagine living in a perfect world ruled by communism, but previously only received the information from catchy folk songs which praise the system? Well, lucky for you, it is now easier than ever to understand what a full-blown communist utopia actually looks like.

That’s because John Lennon’s commie classic “Imagine” has been rereleased with more realistic lyrics to reflect the harsh realities of communism. Lennon, long dead—though not by way of communism, since he was blessed to live in a capitalist country—would be proud of the change, due to its artistic value in realism.

While the classic folk song does do a fantastic job of laying out the basics of communism—no religion, no possessions, no food—it never invites the listener to imagine all the people in their true form, which is dead—usually by firing squad, but often by way of starvation as well.

The folks at the Bee are good enough to provide us with the new lyrics, which include a “re-Imagined” turnaround:

You may say I’m a commie
But I’m not the only one
And someday you will join us
Or we’ll shoot you in the face

Somehow, I just can’t quite see this more candid and factual version being sung at the next big candlelit ‘n’ teary-eyed circle jerk in the wake of yet another Islamic mass slaughter that has nothing whatever to do with Islam. Way too real for the “reality”-based creampuffs to choke down, maybe.

“The un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration”

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

Extremely apt nomenclature and some harsh reality courtesy of John Nolte.

There is no justice in this country, only them the persecutors and we the persecuted.

Democrats and their Deep State allies can lie and leak to destroy innocent people, they can destroy evidence, they can seek to manipulate and overturn democracy, and all they get are movie deals, book contracts, speaking fees, and cable news cash.

And now there’s this…

The Democrat frontrunner for the 2020 presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, was briefed last month that Russia is attempting to help him win the nomination.

Did you catch that?

Bernie.

Was.

Freakin’.

Briefed.

Briefed.

Bernie got a briefing, y’all — a heads up, a warning…

And you know what? That’s appropriate. That is exactly what should have happened. But…

If you’ll recall, that is not what happened to Donald Trump in 2016.

Nope, in 2016, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration did not offer the Trump campaign a heads up, did not give them the courtesy of a briefing over potential Russian interference.

Oh, no…

Instead, the un-American Deep State and malevolent Obama administration chose to use Russian-interference-that-didn’t-end-up-interfering-in-anything as an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign using spies, to wiretap the Trump campaign using wiretaps, to commit perjury against the Trump campaign using forged warrants filled with perjury.

And then, after Trump won in an electoral vote landslide, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration committed crime after crime (classified leaks, more perjury) to launch a coup against Trump by way of a three year drip-drip-drip investigation, even though the investigators knew the investigation was bullshit on day one.

We are second class citizens in our own country.

Sad to say, but I think most of us know that by now, or at least we should. Which makes the only pertinent question confronting us all the more unpleasant: What, if anything, are we gonna do about that? The answer:

It’s all got to come down… All of it.

Yep, ‘fraid so.

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.

Commies always lie

Posted on February 22, 2020February 23, 2020 by Mike

That steady drip, drip, drip you hear is the sound of the truth, outing.

Xi didn’t actually admit that the coronavirus now devastating large swathes of China had escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

Read that again. It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it? And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?

It turns out that in all of China there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be…the epicenter of the epidemic.

That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As if the revelations I posted on last week weren’t convincing enough for ya, we now have this too:

What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

According to the PLA Daily, Gen. Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.

Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Gen. Chen’s job is to try and put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.

It does to anybody who understands the essential truth about every Communist regime: the truth only emerges from them gradually, one halting step at a time. Not willingly do they come clean, either; the true story must always be dragged forth, as if honesty was actually a physically painful thing for them.

Which, y’know, it is.

Seems to me that, at some point, Red China’s toxic government is going to have to be taken out. Their aggression, their lawlessness, their ongoing attempts to infiltrate and manipulate other nations around the globe make for an intolerable combination. Throw in a clandestine bio-war program that has become a serious threat to the entire world because of the incompetence, deceit, and corruption that are also stock-in-trade characteristics endemic to any Commie shitrapy you care to name, and the only sane course is proactive self-defense against them.

Not that I’m advocating American boots on the ground there, mind. A double handful of well-placed tactical nukes lobbed from around FL200 or so ought to do the trick.

“Professionalizing” pr0n

Posted on February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 by Mike

Is there NOTHING they won’t try to meddle with, micromanage, and regulate unto ruination?

In a very California story, inter-union drama appears to be marring the introduction of a bill that would require porn stars to get business licenses.

On Tuesday, Assemblymembers Lorena Gonzalez (D–San Diego) and Christina Garcia (D–Bell Gardens) introduced Assembly Bill (A.B.) 2389. The bill would require adult entertainers and video performers, including webcam performers, to obtain a business license and complete a state-mandated training course before being allowed to ply their trade.

Requirements for that training would be developed by the state’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), which would, in turn, be advised by a new 10-member, governor-appointed board composed of two adult film actors, three dancers, two medical doctors, a therapist, and a money manager.

This training will be a minimum of two hours and will provide information on reporting workplace injuries, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking. Adult performers would be required to cover the cost of this training. The bill would also require that they be finger-printed.

The creation of licensure requirements gives state regulators the authority to police the behavior of participants in what is often a pretty informal industry. Reason recently covered how police in Florida have conducted sting operations on handymen as part of their enforcement of that state’s contractor licensing laws.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has covered extensively, sex workers have plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about the expansion of the regulatory state.

It’s true also that regulatory seeds, once planted, tend to grow. It’s conceivable that the bill’s current two-hour training requirement could be expanded to become more onerous over time.

“Conceivable”? You must be joking; it’s INEVITABLE. The “training requirement” will grow exponentially…as will the licensing fees, the regulations and restrictions, the taxes, the paperwork, the headaches and hassles, and of course the bureaucracy required to administer and oversee it all. It will ALL “expand”—until the point at which no one wants to be in the industry anymore because it just isn’t worth the bother is reached.

At which point a grim milestone of sorts will have been achieved in the Land of the (gag) “Free”: against all odds, Almighty Government will have effectively destroyed the porn and titty-bar industry. Whodathunkit?

Update! Anybody seeing a pattern here?

The same San Diego area assemblywoman who brought you the job-killing AB 5, which kills freelance jobs, is back to finish off the “adult” freelance industry.

The adult workers are gobsmacked that the state has involved itself in their business— and presumes to train them in order to get a license for a job they’re already doing, while being forced to pay for it all.

Then, once the goobermint has “fixed” all the problems, they can get busy “fixing” all the problems their previous “fixing” caused. Lather, rinse, repeat, forever and ever amen. Y’know, like with Obamacare.

Misfire

Posted on February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 by Mike

Hrm.

John Bolton Admits Last-Minute Impeachment Leak Was A Publicity Stunt

Curiously, the rest of the article doesn’t quite seem to support its sensational headline.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton admitted Wednesday that his testimony in President Donald Trump’s recent impeachment proceedings involving Ukraine would have had no impact on the trial’s outcome even after sections of his upcoming book leaked attempting to convict the president in its final days.

“People can argue about what I should have said and what I should have done,” Bolton said at Vanderbilt University Wednesday night during a forum with his predecessor Susan Rice, according to ABC News. “I will bet you a dollar right here and now my testimony would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome.”

“I sleep at night because I have followed my conscience,” Bolton added.

In the final days of the trial however, sections of Bolton’s upcoming book were leaked to the New York Times, featuring Bolton accusing Trump of tying the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine with politically motivated investigations as Democrats alleged. The leak happened to come on the same day the book became available for online pre-order revealing the move as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

Bold mine. Now I don’t doubt for a moment that the move WAS a publicity stunt, mind. But the above hardly amounts to Bolton himself “admitting” to any such, openly and in plain language; his “confession” in the first ‘graph is pretty specific, and obviously refers to something else altogether, albeit related.

Bolton’s acknowledgment that his testimony wouldn’t have altered the outcome of Shampeachment could be construed as kind of a left-handed, backdoor way of admitting to the leak’s publicity-stunt nature, I suppose, however great a stretch that might be. And lord knows I am not in the least bothered by our side using hyperbole and misdirection as a means of attacking our enemies, just as they’ve always done to us. But such weapons must be wielded competently, craftily, to be most effective. And they ought not be wasted on an irrelevancy, a disgruntled, treacherous non-entity whose 15 minutes of (minor) fame already ticked away.

Could be there’s a case to be made for Bolton having actually confessed to perpetrating a “publicity stunt,” somewhere, somewhen. But if there is, I can’t find it in this brief article.

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