The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Friday, August 30, 2019

Crossfire Hurricane-Part V

Over the past 30 months, I have noted on a number of occasions that Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal deserves, but will never get, a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the soft coup attempt against a duly elected president conducted by senior officials in the FBI and the CIA. Strassel is a conservative journalist, and it seems Pulitzers are reserved for the "elite" trained hamsters who do "investigative" reports that promote whatever left-wing narrative is au courant.

At the center of the coup attempt, code named "Crossfire Hurricane," were people like Comey, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe and a coterie of other Democrat sympathizers who decided that as 'elite" members of the government they could negate the will of the voters. Democratic leadership in the House and Senate and their media allies agreed and did everything possible to destabilize the new presidency.

Slowly, the truth of their lies, their manipulation, and their vicious attempts at character assassination for anyone and everyone in the new Trump administration is coming out. Former FBI elites, McCabe and Comey are the first to be disgraced. Strassel writes about the just-released FBI IG report:
Mr. Horowitz’s [the FBI Inspector General, IG] report methodically skewers Mr. Comey’s claim that his memos were “personal” and therefore his to keep and use. It notes that he interacted with Mr. Trump only in his capacity as the FBI director, in official settings. He shared the memos with senior FBI leaders. Some memos touch on official investigations, while others contain classified information, which “is never considered personal property.” The report makes clear Mr. Comey knew his claim that the memos were personal was a sham. That characterization, Mr. Horowitz writes, is “wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies defining Federal records.”

Mr. Comey’s attempt to dig himself out of his disingenuous characterization heightens its absurdity. Asked by the inspector general how a memo describing an official dinner between the FBI director and the president could be considered a “personal” document, Mr. Comey explains that he was also present in his capacity as a “human being.”

Anyone in Mr. Comey’s position would know that the memos were FBI documents and that he had no right to keep them after Mr. Trump fired him. He nonetheless gave them to his attorneys, and scanned and emailed the sensitive information on unsecure equipment. (This is the man who called Hillary Clinton ’s handling of official secrets “extremely careless.”) The inspector general found it “particularly concerning” that Mr. Comey didn’t tell the FBI he’d retained copies, even when bureau officials came to his home to inventory and remove FBI property.
The tragedy is that Comey was not indicted and will serve no jail time. Sadly, it's all about the letter of the law and Comey was devious and cunning enough to protect himself. He has done more damage to the reputation of the FBI than any other Director in history, including J. Edgar Hoover. He deserves to be punished, but that won't happen.

Strassel continues:
Mr. Comey clearly detested Mr. Trump from the start. He abused his power and used leaky, sneaky tricks to undermine the presidency. Mr. Comey told the inspector general he had to do it because it was important to “the Nation,” and “I love this country.” Mr. Horowitz has no time for such self-justification: “Comey’s own, personal conception of what was necessary was not an appropriate basis for ignoring the policies and agreements governing the use of FBI records.” The report points out that if every FBI official acted on “personal convictions,” the bureau “would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly.”

This is the real merit of the inspector general’s report—its clear, ringing reminder that the rules apply to all. Still, it should disturb Americans that a man who has now been repeatedly admonished for “acting unilaterally”—and who so dishonestly spins his actions and history—held positions of such power for so long.
This entire "Crossfire Hurricane" episode is the most serious breach of government process in my lifetime. It is the capstone scandal originating out of the Obama administration, and its perpetrators should be held to account. Yet, it looks like no one will go to jail and no one will be made to pay for is disgraceful attempt to subvert democracy. That's tragic and infuriating, but in the end, the deep state takes care of its own.

UPDATE:
-------------------

In reaction to Comey's outrageous claim that based on the IG report and the fact that he wasn't indicted, he deserves an apology from those who questioned his actions, Glen Reynolds of Instapundit pulls no punches when he writes:
[Comey's] smarmy act has failed to conceal that he’s a sanctimonious prick. Make that a sanctimonious, dishonest, basically corrupt prick, who subordinated his duty to his country to selfish and shallow political and personal motives. He is a disgrace, and it’s a disgrace that he’s so far escaped prosecution.
Couldn't have said it better myself.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Crude

Many of my progressive friends tell me that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn't derangement at all, but simply an expression of their fury directed at a president they view as a really, really bad man. After all, they argue, "When you have a racist, anti-immigrant, Russia-colluding, obstructionist politician in the White House, he must be removed from office—by any means necessary."

Like everything associated with Trump, if each of his many policies (not to mention his tweets and positions) is interpreted in the worst possible manner, the progressives' argument has merit. But considering the worst possible interpretation is something applied only to Trump while his Democrat predecessors were almost always given the benefit of the doubt. For example, Trump is no more a "racist" that any progressive who encourages the soft racism of victimhood for people of color. He's no more anti-Immigrant than previous presidents who often deported more illegal immigrants and worked to protect our borders.

In fact, when it comes right down to it, the majority of people who hate Trump despise him because they hate his bombastic, aggressive style. He's "unpresidential, an embarrassment!" state virtually every Democrat (including the Dem's trained hamsters in the media) and many of his #NeverTrump detractors among the GOP.

Victor Davis Hansen has written a compelling article on just what the Dems have to offer the country in 2020 [read the whole thing]. In that article VDH addresses Trump's conduct this way:
... we are told that the boisterous Trump, our first president without military or political experience prior to his election, has disgraced the office. In his 30 months since January 2017, how exactly has he done so, at least by the somewhat low bar of past presidential standards?

Did Trump conduct liaisons in the presidential bed or restroom or office in the manner of liberal lions such as FDR, JFK, or Bill Clinton? Did he habitually use the N-word or expose himself to staffers, as did the great civil-rights icon LBJ?

Is his terminal health condition now kept from the media in the conspiratorial fashion of Woodrow Wilson or FDR?

Is the Trump Foundation flush with infusions of hundreds of millions of dollars, as was the case with the Clinton Foundation during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state? Does President Trump have a tendency to get handsy at public events, or come up behind female teenagers or blow in their ears à la Vice President Joe Biden? Did he weaponize the IRS, the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA the way Obama-administration officials did to sabotage a political opponent’s campaign? Has Attorney General Barr surveilled the communications of Associated Press reporters in the fashion of Eric Holder?

Or perhaps Trump’s twitter crudity is shocking given the sober comportment of his current would-be presidential opponents. Has Trump, then, promised to take Joe Biden behind the gym and physically beat him up, or warned Cory Booker that in a testosterone rage he would beat him up too, as both have bragged about doing to Trump? Did he whip racial animosity in the manner of Elizabeth Warren by falsely alleging that the Ferguson shooting, thoroughly investigated by the Obama Justice Department, was murder?

... The progressive party, many past presidents, the media, and Hollywood didn’t need to be schooled by Donald Trump on the arts of crudity, unprofessionalism, and unethical behavior.
Gosh, when you look at it that way, maybe Trump isn't quite as "crude" and unpresidential as some people say he is.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Dramas

Let's conduct a thought experiment. Let's say you decide to conduct a survey of 1,000 people, all of whom watch TV regularly. You ask the people to identify two men, one an older, less-than-attractive, overweight corporate chieftain. The other is a handsome, youngish TV personality on one of the most-watched morning shows in TV history. Who do you think would be more commonly recognized and generate more public interest? My guess is the young, handsome TV star would win out over an old, fat corporate exec.

And who do you think would garner more interest if a limited TV series or feature length movie was created to detail the subject's on-going sexual harassment of his female co-workers? Again, my guess is that the more recognized, handsome, youngish TV celebrity would win out over a fat, mean and despicable denizen of the boardroom. After all, the young guy is better known, his character is more videogenic, and his flaws are shocking once revealed because he was considered to be a much-beloved, all-American guy.

The two men, corporate exec, Roger Ailes, and TV star, Matt Lauer are not good people. To put it harshly, both men are scumbags and in the era of #MeToo, both rightly lost their jobs because of their sexual depredations. Both harassed and sexually assaulted women in the workplace. In fact, Lauer had a special lock on his office door to trap a woman who entered. Think of the dramatic possibilities that could be attached to that small fact. But ... never mind.

This year, two dramas—one a limited TV series on HBO and the other a feature length film, were written about Ailes, who was justifiably vilified. I have no problem with that, Ailes' story is worth telling. But in addition to preying on women, Roger Ailes, created FoxNews, breaking a monopoly that allowed the Left to control the media narrative for well over a half century. And maybe that's why he's getting as much negative attention as he's gotten. In Hollywood, it's S.O.P. to demonize people who disagree with the industry's prevailing political philosophy. Making conservatives the bad guy fits the on-going narrative perfectly.

And speaking of narratives, I suspect that's also why there have been no TV or movie projects that focus on Lauer, or Charlie Rose, or even the despicable Harvey Weinstein or the now deceased, Jeffrey Epstein. Those men are/were all prominent supporters of the Democratic party. As a consequence, their sexual flaws must be buried, never to be presented as drama. After all, it just doesn't fit the narrative.

I've decided that I'll watch the TV series and film about Ailes when there are similar dramas produced about Lauer, or Rose, or Weinstein or Epstein. That way, I can compare and contrast.

If such a drama were to be produced, a number of questions arise. Is the political philosophy of any of the latter people emphasized in the screenplay? Are the progressive friends of any of the latter people examined to determine whether they knew what was going on? Did any of those progressive friends participate in the activities of any of the latter? Is the drama hard-hitting or is the character of someone like Lauer or Rose softened just a bit?

I suspect I'll never get answers to those questions, because it very unlikely that a TV series and film will be produced about Lauer or Rose or Weinstein or Epstein any time soon. And that means I'll probably never be able to watch the Ailes' dramas because there's nothing to provide a contrast.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Rules of Engagement

I frequently use the term "trained hamsters" to refer to the obsequious coverage mainstream journalists regularly use when covering Democrats or promoting the Democrat or progressive narrative. They rarely ask Dems or left-leaning spokespeople hard or embarrassing questions, they avoid providing context that would cause a reader or viewer to question the narrative, and they avoid suggesting that a Democrat politician is dishonest, venal, or otherwise flawed.

Yet the hamsters grow very long, very sharp teeth when they "report" on the GOP. They don't care whose life or reputation is ruined (think: the reporting on Bret Kavenaugh), they pile on to demand boycotts (think: BDS) or firings (think: demands that commentator Tucker Carlson be fired), having no concern for people's livelihoods or a company's existence. You'd think their editors would tire of the terms like "racist" or "white supremacist" but they never do. Whether it's the NYT, or WaPO or CNN or MSNBC and many others, coverage and commentary is biased and vicious. It often becomes unhinged when Donald Trump is the target.

Historically, conservatives and the GOP have accepted all of this quietly, but as a consequence of Donald Trump's 'punch back' philosophy, things have started to change. Madeline Osburn comments:
After years of doxxing innocent Americans for their political views, mainstream media journalists are now upset that their own racist and antisemitic tweets have been complied by conservative allies of President Trump.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Wright-Piersanti’s archived social media posts were part of the White House’s “aggressive operation to discredit news organizations.”

The Times report decried this tactic, arguing that targeting individuals is acceptable when journalists do it to other people, but not when other people do it to them.
The Left never, ever likes it when their own rules of engagement are used by their opponents. They whine about attacks on the media and the viciousness and incivility of it all, while encouraging viciousness and incivility as it is applied to their ideological opponents. They can't have it both ways. Osburn writes:
National media outlets have harassed countless other private individuals who support the president on social media or create memes. Yet publications such as the New York Times become outraged when conservatives point out that their own employees spew virulent, racist, and antisemitic views on social media — and remain employed.
Bullies are often shocked when their target punches back. That's what is happening, and the media hamsters don't like it one little bit.

And about this "aggressive operation to discredit news organizations." There's really no need. The news organizations are doing everything possible to discredit themselves.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Fires

When a news story can be shaped and/or exaggerated to support a prevailing narrative, the trained hamsters in the mainstream media will do so. Context? Not a chance. Accuracy? Are you kidding me? Balance? Nope. That's what is happening with widespread reports that the Brazilian rain forests are burning to the ground and as a consequence, the planet itself is at risk.

To be sure, there are fires in the Amazon region, but scientific data collected from satellite imagery indicates that the fires are no more severe than in past years. In fact, even the New York Times has had to admit that "most" of the fires are not in the rain forests themselbves but on agricultural land (farmers clear the land by setting it afire to prepare for the next planting). But that hasn't stopped the media from reporting that these fires are a calamity at a planetary level.

In any event, climate scientist, Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather blows up the notion that the planet is in peril by delineating scientifically supported sets of data that conflict with current inaccurate and hyperbolic reporting on the fires. He supports his argument with copious scientific data when he writes:
Thousands of fires are continually burning across the Earth every day of every year, and they always have ...

Yes, there are a lot of fires in South America, some of them in the Amazon rain forests, but how unusual is that? Unfortunately, it's not unusual at all ...

Wildfires aren't necessarily bad. I know, this sounds like a cut and paste excuse from environmentalist haters, but it's true. Even Smokey the Bear admits: "Fire can also be an important part of maintaining diverse and healthy ecosystems. This can trigger a rebirth of forests, helping to maintain native plant species." That said, he still doesn't want you starting them, because they could hurt people or property.

There's no [scientific] proof that more of Brazil has burned than in past years.
The bottom line is that fires are a problem (and an indirect benefit)—always have been, always will be. They have been part of the planet since before humans existed. Thay can be dangerous and distructive, but the fires in Brazil aren't unusual, nor are they a threat to the planet.

The real issue is inaccurate news coverage designed to promote a specific agenda. It's misleading and dishonest and has a 'Chicken Little' element that does a disservice to those who want to emphasize real threats and concerns.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Crossfire Hurricane - Part IV

Jerry Nadler and his pro-impeachment cohorts in the Democratically controlled House of Representatives scoot across the political landscape like demented elves, screeching "obstruction! ... racism! ... collusion! ... impeachment! ... white supremacy! ... Russia! ... " over and over in a pathetic attempt to unseat a duly elected president. Polls indicate that the public is tired of listening to their empty accusations, but Trump Derangement Syndrome is a powerful force that makes otherwise sane people take truly insane positions. Actually, there might be a bit more to it, but more on that in a moment.

The Chicago Tribune's John Kass interviewed author Andrew McCarthy who wrote a new book Ball of Collusion—not about the hoax that suggested Trump collusion with the Russkies, but rather the evidence-based collusion between Trump opponent, Hillary Clinton, her ally, Barack Obama, her party in the form of the DNC, and a variety of federal intelligence of law enforcement officials along with unnamed Russian sources. That's the "crossfire hurricane" scandal (also, here and here), and to quote a once-mentor of Barack Obama, "The chickens are coming home to roost.'

Kass writes:
... in a few weeks, sooner perhaps, the dogs will begin barking even louder upon release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on his investigation of possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI as they looked into Donald Trump and Russia ...

Citizen Barack Obama understood how federal power could be abused as he lectured on the Constitution at the University of Chicago, not too far from where Chicago plans to build him a great temple.

But did President Obama worry about this when he convened that secret White House meeting on Jan. 5, 2017, just as Trump was about to take control?

John Brennan of Obama’s CIA was at that meeting. And Vice President Joe Biden. James Comey, then of the FBI, was there, as were national security adviser Susan Rice (who lied for the Obama White House about the Benghazi disaster) and other intelligence bosses ...

The real collusion was that the Obama administration put the awesome powers of the federal government — law enforcement and intelligence — at the service of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The scheme to get Clinton elected had two parts, McCarthy argues. The first was to shield former Secretary of State Clinton from disqualifying and potentially criminal allegations that she violated federal law by having a private unsecured email server and later destroyed the evidence.

And, as an insurance policy, the other part of the scheme was to portray Trump as an agent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
These are fact-based allegations supported by communications from the perpetrators in their own words.

The Dems' trained hamsters in the media will do everything possible to downplay the Crossfire Hurricane findings by following the Treacher Rule:

But Nadler and his elves have a role to play as well. As the Crossfire Hurricane findings begin to be made public, their screeches will intensify—impeachment will become I-M-P-E-A-C-H-M-E-N-T!!!—a shiny object than will allow politically biased and corrupt media types (and that covers about 90 percent of the national media) to disregard the most significant political scandal in the history of the United States.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Hostile

A number of readers have approached me on my recent posts on the Democratic party's inexorable drift toward the Left, and as a consequence, it's connection with anti-Israel and in select instances, anti-Semitic politicians and causes. My recent post, Disloyalty, had a number of Jewish readers asking whether I was overwrought and more importantly, what the origins of the Dems' drift toward anti-Israel politics are.

Progressive writer, Liel Leibovitz, provides an answer in the left-leaning Tablet:
Shortly after Trump was elected, the left moved into resistance mode. The feelings here were entirely understandable—I myself found Trump’s election deeply worrisome. But, very quickly, the energy began to be channeled into causes and outfits with deep and clear anti-Semitic associations—including, most prominently, the Women’s March. Over the course of two years, the leaders of this organization sang hosannas to Louis Farrakahn, flagrantly used Nation of Islam as security, and used their influence to reframe Israel as the world’s biggest state criminal—quite a feat when you have such a calamity happening next door. Jews expressed their discomfort, but time and again were ignored—even told by some of their own leadership, by some of our own rabbis, that to want the people in our own spaces simply not to foment vicious hatred of us was to selfishly “center ourselves.”

After Tablet published a 10,000-word expose, revealing that the Women’s March leadership was veritably soaked in hatred for Jews and Israel, some prominent people in the Democratic Party (though not all) finally felt compelled to distance themselves from these obvious bigots.
He goes on to describe Ilhan Omar's lies as she courted Jewish voters (who, incredibly, supported her because she was a Democrat) and then more recent anti-Semitic, anti-Israel canards that have originated within the Democratic party and their trained hamsters in the media (think: the NYT and WaPo as examples). He writes:
Did prominent voices in the Democratic Party rush to defend the Jews from these obvious and dangerous canards? I wish. The Washington Post described Miftah as a nonprofit headed by “longtime peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi” and The New York Times contextualized as “a group dedicated to raising global awareness and knowledge of Palestinian realities.” Peter Beinart went on CNN to defend Ashrawi and her group as paragons of goodwill. Instead, the entity that came under fire was…you guessed it. A hailstorm of wails about the death of democratic norms ensued, all culminating in a #BoycottIsrael trend on Twitter—pushed by many of the same sort of polite people behind the last big boycott of the Jews.
In recent months, the Dems have proposed actual legislation and a number of resolutions that clearly target Israel. Again from Leibovitz
Earlier this year, Rep. Betty McCollum (D.-Minn.) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives titled “H.R. 2047—Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act.” In June, a host of high-profile Democrats co-sponsored her bill, including Seth Moulton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

The bill’s purpose is to require that “United States funds do not support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.” It then goes on to present a long list of citations from reports compiled by non-government organizations that accuse Israel of everything from applying coercive interrogation techniques against children as young as 11 to holding minors for days without a trial.

You could easily tear apart most of the bill’s cherry-picked claims by explaining, as the Israel Democracy Institute had, that Israel’s approach to underage suspects is far more complicated than the bill presents it to be. But there is an even simpler, more enlightening explanation—especially after seeing Ocasio-Cortez’s glib tweet about the bill: “I don’t believe in caging kids. Pretty straightforward value. I don’t care if it’s American kids, Mexican kids, or Palestinian kids.”

Except, of course, that the bill doesn’t apply to Mexico or Egypt or South Africa—all of which receive substantial amounts in American foreign aid.

If it had, we’d be on solid moral ground. Instead, this bill—backed by a cadre of House Democrats who abjure anti-Semitism in theory and yet astonishingly manage to “accidentally” perpetrate it over and over—tracks, in an eerily perfect way, with a long and murderous tradition: Fantasizing that Jews have a special fondness for killing, abducting, maiming, or otherwise abusing non-Jewish children, and leading mobs to attack them based on these accusations.
Sadly, the Left is ascendant in the West. It has captured most important sources of information flow—the media, academia, entertainment, public policy (in the main), major cities—and as a consequence, the anti-Israel narrative is growing in prominence within the Democratic party.

Leibovitz concludes:
Let us, then, observe these changes candidly and without succumbing to the pressures of screaming ideologues on either side. The party our parents voted for, the party we thought would be ours for eternity, appears to be well on its way to becoming something entirely hostile to Jews. The president we are told again and again is the single greatest menace to our community is many things, but certainly not that.

What you choose to do with these realities is entirely up to you.
#Walkaway.

UPDATE:
---------------------

Part of the reason that Jews maintain such a strong connection to a political party that has actively adopted a variety of policies that work against them is that those same Jews tend to get a majority of information from media sources that are closely aligned with the Left. In fact, those media sources have become propaganda arms for the Democrats to such an extent that they spin the narrative in dishonest ways. Ben Shapiro comments:
Imagine two sitting Republican congresspeople planned a trip to a foreign country in conjunction with a nongovernmental organization. Imagine that particular nongovernmental organization had a long history of Jew hatred: It had run a piece on its website quoting anti-Semitic myths about Jews imbibing Christian blood, republished a neo-Nazi article decrying the “Jew-controlled entertainment media,” and suggested that “honor” was the proper response to a terrorist who murdered 38 Israelis, including 13 children.

Imagine that these two congresspeople tweeted a cartoon from a cartoonist so anti-Semitic he won second prize at Iran’s Holocaust denial cartoon contest.

Imagine that these congresspeople had themselves engaged in anti-Semitic slurs, ranging from a suggestion that Israel supporters in America suffer from dual loyalty, to the accusation that Israel “hypnotized the world,” to the suggestion that Jewish money lies behind America’s support for Israel (“it’s all about the Benjamins”).

Imagine that these congresspeople had expressed support for terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

Imagine also that both congresspeople had a long history of associations with open anti-Semites.

Finally, imagine that both members were supporters of the anti-Semitic boycott, divest, and sanctions [BDS] movement directed against Israel—a movement so obviously anti-Semitic that a bipartisan coterie ranging from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had declared it so.

Now imagine that these two Republican congresspeople were barred from entering Israel under Israel’s law that prevents propagandizing designed to destroy the state of Israel. Would the media report on Israel’s reaction or on the Republican congresspeople’s associations, actions, and statements? Would the narrative surround Israel’s supposed free speech crackdown, or would it center on the obvious Jew hatred of the Republican congresspeople?

And yet.

Simply switch out the word “Republican” for “Democrat” and the media coverage shifts 180 degrees. Suddenly, the congresspeople become put-upon heroes, victimized by the evils of the nefarious Jewish state. Suddenly, a media blackout arises with regard to the nongovernment organization sponsoring the visit; The Washington Post calls the organization “a nonprofit organization headed by Palestinian lawmaker and longtime peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi”; The New York Times praises the group for raising “global awareness and knowledge of Palestinian realities.”
Those. Are. Lies. But when they come from NYT and WaPo there are people who swallow them as truth.

In order to get to a point where they're comfortable walking away, Jewish voters should broaden their information sources. Only then can they make intelligent judgements about the current positions adopted by the Democratic party and the politicians that populate it.


Thursday, August 22, 2019

"Disloyalty"

Say what you will about Donald Trump's in-your-face, often confrontational, sometimes bullying, and regularly petty style, he says things that many, many conservatives, more than a few independents, and even a small number of Democrats think. These voters are often cowed by political correctness, and refuse to publicly comment, but the thoughts remain. This week's latest is a comment made by Trump about American Jews who refuse to take a long, hard look at the new Democratic party. Trump tweeted:
“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge, or great disloyalty.”
The Democrats trained hamsters in the mainstream media are scared to death that Jews just might begin to #walkway from a political party that is rapidly becoming overtly anti-Israel and has a growing number of elected officials who are unquestionably anti-Semitic. Parsing Trump's words to give them the worst possible interpretation, the hamsters concluded that "disloyalty" was an anti-Semitic trope, that Trump was "Jew-baiting," and that he, not Dems like Rep. Ilhan Omar or Rep. Rashida Talib, was the TRUE anti semite. Gaslighting at its best, but necessary if the hamsters must deflect from any real examination of the Dems strange silence about the anti-Semites in their midst.

Marc Theissen comments:
How is it that [Ilhan Omar] continues to sit on the congressional committee that helps set US policy ­toward Israel? When [G.O.P.] Rep. Steve King defended white-supremacist views, the House GOP leadership stripped him of his committee ­assignments and voted 424 to 1 on a clear resolution condemning the Iowa Republican.

Yet after Omar made virulently anti-Semitic comments, Democratic leaders in the House couldn’t bring themselves to do the same. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended Omar’s “allegiance-to-a-foreign-country” remark, saying, “I don’t believe it was intended in an anti-Semitic way.” I’m sorry, what other way could she have intended it?

Like Omar, Tlaib has accused her colleagues of dual loyalty — a classic anti-Semitic trope — declaring “they forgot what country they represent.” She advocates a one-state solution, which means she opposes Israel’s existence. She wrote for Louis Farrakhan’s publication, The Final Call, which regularly publishes anti-Semitic screeds. And, according to the Anti-Defamation League, she ­invited a Palestinian activist to her swearing-in who has praised Hamas and Hezbollah and has equated Zionists with Nazis.

The two showed their true colors when they chose not to join a bipartisan congressional delegation to Israel earlier this month in favor of a trip organized by MITFAH, a rabidly anti-Semitic group that has accused Jews of using “the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover,” published neo-Nazi propaganda questioning “the Jewish ‘Holocaust’ tale” in quotes and celebrated terrorists who murder Israeli children.

And, as though to prove Israel’s point, after being denied entry, the two lawmakers shared a cartoon on Instagram by an anti-Semitic cartoonist who placed second in Iran’s 2006 Holocaust cartoon contest.

The fact that Democrats tolerate, and even embrace, Omar and Tlaib is appalling. And it points to a larger problem. There is anti-Semitism on both the right and the left. On the right, anti-Semitism manifests itself in skinheads marching in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!”

On the left, anti-Semitism manifests itself in Democratic members of Congress who compare ­Israel to Nazi Germany. But while right-wing anti-Semites remain on the political fringes, where they belong, on the left, anti-Semites have found their way into the halls of power and are being defended by the party’s leaders.
That's a reality that must never be discussed. Yet through his sometimes outrageous tweets, Trump forces the discussion, and it drives the Left into a frenzy. The last thing the Dems want is for their growing animus to our most important ally in the Middle East to become widely recognized.

At least a few Jews must be wondering why leaders of the Dems don't directly and unequivocally condemn the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements of Ihan Omar or the rantings of Islamist Rashida Talib. If that number begins to grow—and it might—#walkaway might become more than a Twitter hashtag.

UPDATE:
--------------------------------

Dominic Green nails it when he writes:
Donald Trump is the Cyrus of our era. He is the most pro-Israel president the United States has ever had. He clearly likes and admires Jews. He’s more accepting of his daughter’s faith than most non-Orthodox Jews would be if their daughter went frum.

Now, it may be that a philo-Semite is someone who got the memo but read it backwards. But after the bracing refresher course of the Obama years, I’ll take a philo-Semitic, Mar-a-Lago opening, pro-Israel, embassy-moving, Golan-annexing president any day. And so should American Jews.

‘I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,’ Trump said. He’s a studiously crude speaker and actor, and tremendously vain too, but he’s only pretending to be stupid. His allegedly outrageous comments aren’t really outrageous at all. They may be crude and vain, but they’re also highly perceptive, and largely accurate too.

It isn’t accurate to characterize the Democrats the way Trump did last March, as ‘totally anti-Israel’ and ‘anti-Jewish’. It would be more accurate to say that the Democratic left, the party of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Keith Ellison, harbors an obsessional loathing of Israel that frequently shades into anti-Semitism. It would also be accurate to say that the candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2020 are more concerned with pandering to the party’s Jew-hating left than with common decency...

Jews are supposed to be clever, but their adherence to the Democrats is dumb, a mixture of sentimentality about the party of FDR — a party that no longer exists — and fear of the Republicans as a hybrid of Cossacks, evangelical Christians and, perhaps worst of all if you want to get on and up, country-club snobs. Meanwhile, Republicans are more supportive of Israel and religious freedom than Democrats are. No wonder Trump is astounded that American Jews show no sign of reciprocating with their votes in 2020. No wonder he’s calling them ‘disloyal’ — disloyal, that is, to him, because they refuse to reciprocate his generosity, or to calibrate their votes to their economic and political interests, like sane people would. Jews in Israel, Britain and France have made that shift. But then, they’re not as complacent [or as threatened ... yet] as most American Jews are.
Since progressives are eager to interpret Trump's use of the word "disloyalty," let me give it a try. Is is possible that the "disloyalty" to which Trump alluded is disloyalty to themselves, the diaspora, and the only country on the planet that offers Jews from all other places a homeland and refuge if they need one?

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Divisive

During the first two years of his presidency, virtually all Democrats and their legions of trained hamsters in the media told the rest of us that Donald Trump was a treasonous Russian stooge. When that hoax fell apart, they tried to convince us the Trump somehow obstructed an investigation that came to the conclusion that the Democrats' allegations were untrue—a hoax precipitated by a Democrat-sponsored dossier that ironically, was prepared in collaboration with Russian sources. Because the obstruction allegation is now correctly viewed as unmitigated nonsense, the Dems have once against decided to pivot to allegations of "racism and white supremacy," suggesting that Trump is a racist and white supremacist, and in addition is purposely dividing the country along racial lines. I've written about this in an earlier post, but Heather McDonald adds some interesting commentary:
Long before the El Paso massacre, President Trump’s political opponents accused him of sowing “division” with his “racist language.” Mr. Trump “exploits race,” “uses race for his gain,” is engaged in a “racially divisive reprise” of his 2016 campaign, stokes “racial resentments,” and puts “race at the fore,” the New York Times has reported over the past several months.

Yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity.

Some examples: “As race dominates the political conversation, 10 white Democratic candidates will take the stage” (the Washington Post); Mr. Trump’s rally audiences are “overwhelmingly white” (multiple sources); your son’s “whiteness is what protects him from not [sic] being shot” by the police ( Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ); white candidates need to be conscious of “white privilege” (South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg ); “white supremacy manifests itself” in the criminal-justice, immigration and health-care systems ( Sen. Cory Booker ); “ Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” ( Sen. Elizabeth Warren ); whiteness is “the very core” of Mr. Trump’s power, whereas his “predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness” (Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic).

Liberal opinion deems such rhetoric fair comment, even obvious truth, not “racially divisive.” America’s universities deserve credit for this double standard. Identity politics dominate higher education: Administrators, students and faculty obsessively categorize themselves and each other by race. “White privilege,” often coupled with “toxic masculinity,” is the focus of freshmen orientations and an ever-growing array of courses. Any institutional action that affects a “person of color” is “about race.” If a black professor doesn’t get tenure, he’s a victim of discrimination; a white professor is presumed to be unqualified.

That interpretive framework explains asymmetries in how the political and media elites analyze the Trump phenomenon.
As I mentioned in my previous post, race is used as a force field and as a weapon. Truly woke progressives believe that everything is about race and therefore, criticism of a person-of-color for positions or views that have absolutely nothing to do with race are deemed racist. One's race provides the speaker with a 'force field' that is intended to deflect and neuter legitimate criticism. Even better, by hurling accusations of racism against anyone who criticizes a person of color, the Left has a potent weapon to shut down debate and get their way. It's insidious and effective. It's also dangerously divisive, but the Dems are way too concerned about reacquiring power to care.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Crickets

Members of The Squad are all first-term elected Democratic Congresswomen. Dedicated hardcore leftists all, two of their members (Reps. Omar and Talib) are anti-Semites and pro-Palestinian sympathizers (meaning they are rabidly anti-Israel). Other members of the Squad are less overtly anti-Semitic but never heard a tweet by Omar or Talib that they didn't support. The Squad are the darlings of the trained hamsters in the mainstream media who gush over their person-of-color status, their womanhood, their self-described victimhood, and their in-your-face responses to Donald Trump's attacks. In fact, they are often praised for their hipster vibe and their use of twitter as a weapon against the president. Trump tweets, they respond in rapid-fire fashion.

Interesting then, that a recent news story got no response from members of The Squad, rapid fire or otherwise. Tyler O'Neil writes:
Early Monday morning, The Jerusalem Post reported that the PA and Palestine Police had outlawed LGBT activity in the West Bank and threatened to arrest members of the LGBT group Al-Qaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. Al-Qaws was planning a gathering for members in Nablus at the end of the month. The group only has offices in Israel — in East Jerusalem and in Haifa.

Luay Zreikat, a spokesman for Palestine Police, said LGBT activities are "harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society." He added that Al-Qaws's activities are completely "unrelated to religions and Palestinian traditions and customs, especially in the city of Nablus."

Zreikat went on to accuse "dubious parties" of working to "create discord and harm civic peace in Palestinian society."

Palestine Police will chase those behind Al-Qaws and bring them to trial once arrested, the PA police spokesman warned. He appealed to Palestinians to report any person connected to the group to police.
And here I thought that the palestinian authority was all rainbows and lollipops. That the "beleaguered" palestinians were the ultimate victims of the "oppressor" Israel—a liberal democracy that celebrates its LGBT citizens. And even when the palestinians do not-so-nice stuff like launching rockets at Israeli schools and bombing Israeli Pizza parlors, it's all because they're oh-so "oppressed" and have no choice but to maim and murder.

But exactly how can the palestinians blame their anti-LGBT positions on Israel? And there's the rub.

You'd think that The Squad, so nimble on Twitter and oh-so active as social justice warriors would be the first to condemn the pali position on LGBT. You'd be wrong.

After all, how can the rainbows and lollipops narrative of oppressed palestinians be maintained if SJWs attack them as the bigoted extremists that they really are. Meanwhile, back at The Squad—crickets.

Diploma Debt

The current crop of Democratic contenders for the presidency are nothing if not good at pandering to their key demographic segments. In the case of people under 40, a key pander-point is what could be called 'diploma debt'—eliminating college debt by shifting the burden to taxpayers. It's very important to emphasize that diploma debt is discretionary debt, entered into willingly by the then-student. It's also worth noting that the debt was incurred as part on an investment in the future—the degree acquired should lead to a career that has a high likelihood of generating the income that would enable the debt to be repaid over time. And if that's not the case, why incur the debt in the first place?

Margot Cleveland notes that Democrats use two strategies to make their argument for diploma debt relief—"shock and sob stories." The Dems tell us that there is over $1.4 trillion in student debt—a shocking statistic. But there is over $4.29 trillion in credit card debt. Should every credit card holder get relief as well? What about auto loans, or mortgages—should they be paid for by taxpayers? And yeah, there are sob stories—marriages postponed, living arrangements altered, and nice things unavailable—sad stories, I suppose, but hardly insurmountable.

Cleveland goes on to ask a few intrusive questions:
There are many ways to counter [the Democrat's] arguments, based on both economics and equity. But it’s hard to counter soundbites with sense, so instead, here are my inquiries for these politicians, the press, and all the students demanding relief from the burdens of their debt:

Tell me your sob stories from age 12 on, not what you can’t do now, but what you couldn’t do then. Tell what you had to do then and through college to avoid what is now, to you, crushing student debt.

What time did you get up to deliver papers in junior high? How many hours a week did you work since 14 to save for college? How many toilets did you scrub? How many high school football games did you miss because you were working? What dream college did you forgo to avoid taking out student loans?

Which 8 a.m. class did you take so you could complete your major’s requirements and still work in the afternoon? Which bus line did you take to get to your job because you didn’t borrow to buy a car? What job did you work full-time while completing your MBA at night?

What did you do to afford college? What didn’t you do because of the cost of college? Were you getting tattoos and traveling your way through college? Were you pledging and partying? Did you go to your top-choice university? Maybe an out-of-state public university with higher tuition rates? Which spring break and study abroad destinations did you visit along the way?

Did you splurge on your fairytale wedding instead of paying down your student loans? What cars did you buy or lease? Where did you live? What electronics did you own? What clothing and other personal expenditures did you have? In short, show me the money and how you spent it!

None of my business? You’re right. Nor is your student debt my business or my problem.
Indeed.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Conspiracy

It was telling in its own way. Within minutes of the breaking news that Jeffrey Epstein committed "suicide" in a New York jail cell, a select group of trained hamsters in the media went to work. Not to investigate, but rather to promote the line that you are a"conspiracy theorist" if you ask obvious questions about his very questionable death, if you intimated the obvious—that Epstein was murdered or allowed to commit suicide because he was a major threat to very important people (mostly, it appears, those people were prominent Democrats). Information about the event is coming out, but there seems to be a media reticence about it all.

Peggy Noonan channels Mike McAlary (1957-98), "tabloid star and journalistic tough guy," when she writes about the trained hamsters and their toe-in-the-water approach to this story:
It’s like every great media organization is tied up in this complicated, soul-crushing, virtue-signalling fearfulness, this vast miasma of progressive political theory and ideology and correctness and “please report to HR”—and it has nothing to do with the mission. The mission is to get the story!

Reporters and editors, they’re not the fabulous old drunks and girl reporter miscreants, they’re like—like normal people! Reporters aren’t supposed to be normal! And they’re very tidy because they’re extremely important! You get the impression they became reporters to affect the discourse. “I’m going into journalism to press for cultural and political justice.” These—these deconstructionist intellectuals! These twinkies with soft hands from Phillips Exeter Andover whatever. These mere political operatives. These people with grievances, who’ve never had anything to grieve because their lives were the red satin lining of a music box.

If I was in charge I’d say, “Thank you for your boundless efforts to secure the greater progress for the polity. But I was wondering if, in your spare moments, you could be troubled to help us cover the biggest scandal of your blanking lifetimes?”

The editors don’t honor old shoe-leather ways. The owner wants you out there branding the brand on cable so the brand is being branded.

And those losers in Washington. Lemme tell you what they’re thinking. They’re thinking New York cares and L.A. cares but nobody else in America cares about this pervert and his fancy friends. They’re thinking it’s August, play it out, let the story sink in the sands of time. Because it’s a story they don’t like. My hunch, they have no real confidence in themselves or the system. They don’t think they themselves are gonna find out if Epstein was killed or committed suicide.
Not every conspiracy theory is just a "theory," sometimes the alleged conspiracy is real. We don't know that yet, and if the power elite along with their trained hamsters have their way, we never will.

The Epstein story is rich in the characteristics (sex, wealth, powerful men and women, celebrities, politics, corruption, dark activities, private "orgy" Islands, private jets, among others) that normally result in a long-lasting media frenzy. If instead it fades as the heat of August leads to the cool winds of September, that's a sign that the fix is in.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Illiberal Bigots

No doubt that progressives everywhere, along with their trained hamsters in the media, will be "outraged" that the only liberal democracy in the Middle East barred two noted anti-Semites and proponents of the despicable BDS movement, Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib, from entry to Israel. After all, I'm certain that a visit would have caused them to modify their bigoted, anti-Semitic positions, moderate their overt hatred of Jews, and change their opinion of the tiny country that will never be accepted by the majority of the 100+ million Muslims who live in the Arab crescent. NOT.

From a purely political perspective, this is undoubtedly what Omar and Talib wanted. They are experts at playing the victim and Israel's actions will give them more ammunition to do just that. After all, the social justice warrior crowd has already expressed "concern." But you know what—who cares?
BREAKING: The Associated Press reports that Talib has applied for entry to Gaza on humanitarian grounds to see her 94 year-old grandmother. That request has been granted by Israel, and we'll see whether she turns her visit into a political stunt.
But back to the earlier denial of entry for both Omar and Talib. David Harsanyi comments:
Should Israel have taken the high road and given two enemies of Israel visas for this propaganda visit? Probably. It usually does. Allowing foes to enter the country reflects the strong liberal values that make Israel a special place in Middle East.

However, the idea that impeding two anti-Semites and Hamas apologists from entering Israel is an attack on democracy, or the United States, or that such a move is accelerating the corrosion of the Democratic Party’s support for Israel, is absurd.

Sen. Bernie Sanders contends that Israel is showing “enormous disrespect to these elected leaders, to the United States Congress, and to the principles of democracy.”

What principle of democracy states that you have to issue visas for illiberal bigots who actively engage in efforts to harm your citizens? If Republican Steve King were denied an entry visa into Mexico, not a single congressperson would stand up for him, not a single presidential candidate would claim that Mexico had insulted the honor of the United States, not a single Democrat would argue that it reflected poorly on Mexican democracy, and not a single liberal pundit would contend that the Mexican-U.S. relationship was being hurt.

We don’t actually need theoretical examples. How many Democrats were insulted when the speaker of the British House of Commons told the elected president of the United States he was not welcome to address them? Would any sane person claim Britain was stifling debate by doing so?

Would any American be bothered if the State Department denied an entry visa to a foreign elected official who actively worked toward the economic destruction of the United States while being an apologist for al-Qaeda or some other anti-American terrorist group? (Well, maybe a few.)

Not even we believe people are entitled to visit simply because they demand it.
The Democratic party should be ashamed that it has not unequivocally repudiated Omar and Talib. Instead, it tries to spin their bigotry and anti-Semitism into something less noxious.

BTW, Omar and Talib had every opportunity to visit Israel along with a Congressional delegation last week. Instead they wanted a propaganda visit, and Israel refused to comply.

Harsanyi continues:
It needs to be stressed that Tlaib and Omar aren’t mere “critics” of Israel, as the media incessantly claims. Critics of Israel find fault with policies of the nation’s government — which, in Israel’s case, has oscillated from left to right, from hawkish to dovish, for more than 70 years. Critics have been traveling to Israel forever. Critics of Israel serve in the nation’s Parliament and openly and freely take positions against the ruling government.

Tlaib and Omar actively support a movement with the strategic aim of rallying the world to destroy the Jewish state economically. The boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) not only challenges Israel’s right to exist, it relies on age-old antisemitic tropes, conspiracy theories, and blood libels to propel the message. Its most famous champions in the United States are Tlaib and Omar.
After thinking about it, I'm pleased that Israel barred these two Leftists from entry. As elected officials, they are a stain on the Democratic party and an embarrassment to the people who elected them. In the words of Harsanyi, they are hardly the victims they claim to be ad nauseum, rather, they're "illiberal bigots."

UPDATE:
----------------

In a tweet yesterday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "disagreed" with Israel's decision to bar Omar and Talib:
We disagree with Reps. Omar and Tlaib’s support for the anti-Israel and anti-peace BDS movement, along with Rep. Tlaib’s calls for a one-state solution. We also believe every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand.
I wonder if AIPAC would have "disagreed" with Israel had it barred a true white supremacist who advocated the destruction of Israel and (via support for Hamas among other terror organizations) the murder of Jews. I think not. The irony is that in their own way, the Democrat Congresswomen want the same thing. Relative to Israel, they are as dangerous as any white supremacist, yet somehow, liberal Jews think they can be reasoned with. They cannot. They are NOT the friend of Israel or the Jews—never have been ... never will be.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Inflamatory Rhetoric

Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media fell all over themselves in the rush to blame Donald Trump's "inflamatory rhetoric" for the mass shooting by a right-wing lunatic in El Paso, TX (they are generally silent on the mass shooting that occurred near-simultaneously in Dayton, OH because that shooter was a Leftist and therefore doesn't easily fit the media narrative du jour). With tightly clutched pearls, they imply that were it not for Trump, the right-wing lunatic would have been all about rainbows and unicorns. They were quick to accuse Trump of supporting white supremacists, and the truly unhinged among them accused all Trump supporters of being white supremacists.

Okay then.

Did you know that over the past four weeks there have been armed attacks against ICE officers and facilities (not counting a dust-up at a protest last night in Rhode Island). It's not surpising if you didn't know becuase the hamsters have pushed to stories to page 23. In any event, Lunatic leftists decided to target federal officers who were trying to enforce existing laws that have been in place for decades. But why?

Using the same argument that the Left and their trained media hamsters apply to Donald Trump's speech, it would be clear that the ICE attacks should be blamed on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her extremist sisters in The Squad. After all, here's what AOC tweeted a while back:

Of course we have to believe the idiocy espoused by AOC—after all, she consulted "concentration camp experts." Sometimes you just have to laugh.

The editorial board at Issues and Insights comments:
But Democrats and their handmaidens in the press have been repeating ad nauseam how President Donald Trump was responsible for the El Paso, Texas, shooting because of his immigration rhetoric.

As we noted, the connection to Trump was frivolous. The alleged shooter himself said Trump had nothing to do with his attack, and much of his political views were positively leftist.

In the case of the ICE incidents, however, there’s a much more direct connection between the incendiary rhetoric coming from Democrats and the attacks on these facilities.

After all, if these ICE facilities are indeed concentration camps, then any attempt to stop such atrocities would be noble.

San Antonio Field Office Director Daniel Bible is making that connection. “Political rhetoric and misinformation that various politicians, media outlets and activist groups recklessly disseminate to the American people regarding the ICE mission only serve to further encourage these violent acts.”

Yet those on the left, including in the mainstream press, are trying to pin the blame for these events on Trump. That is, when they’re not ignoring the attacks on ICE altogether.
The double standards, hypocrisy, and dishonesty exhibited by the Dems and their media propaganda arm are not new, but these things do appear to be getting even worse and our social justice warriors try and fail to unseat an elected president.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Fan the Flames

Joe Biden stumbles through the primary season offering us gaff after gaff in a way the has any objective observer questioning his recall and his ability to process information quickly and accurately. Bernie Sanders, despite his emotional appeal for hard-core leftist positions is sinking in the Democrat polls. That leaves Liz Warren and others who are trying hard to 'out-Left' Bernie with shrill language and even crazier policy positions. Those positions are the topic for another day, but what is concerning is a number of Democrat candidates are perfectly willing to promote false information to gain leverage with their base.

Sharyl Attkisson discusses the canard that the 2014 shooting of an African American man in Ferguson, MO was an act of murder by police:
... the shooting happened on Aug. 9, 2014. A Ferguson, Mo., police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an 18-year-old unarmed suspect named Michael Brown. Brown was black, Wilson is white. Witnesses claimed that Officer Wilson had shot Brown in cold blood while Brown’s hands were raised in surrender. Though without evidence, those accounts were afforded wide credence in the media. They sparked riots. They ignited a movement called “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

If ever there were a time for responsible journalists to carefully mitigate uncorroborated and inflammatory claims, this was arguably the moment. At the time, pockets of the nation were a racial tinderbox.

The problem is, all of the racially-tinged accusations against Officer Wilson were likely false, according to the final analysis by President Obama’s Department of Justice. The report, issued in 2015, found that Officer Wilson’s accounts were corroborated. He’d acted in self-defense. Brown, the report said, had reached into the police vehicle and grabbed Officer Wilson by the neck. And Brown appeared to be lunging toward Officer Wilson when Officer Wilson shot him in self-defense.

The Obama Justice Department investigators concluded that original witness accounts claiming that Brown’s hands were up when he was shot, and other key claims, were “unreliable” and — in many instances — directly contradicted by the forensic evidence, while Officer Wilson’s story was supported by the forensics. “Hands up, don’t shoot,” the Obama Justice Department found, was contrary to reliable accounts — and likely fabricated.

The findings of this important report got nowhere near the news coverage of the original false claims. There were no apologies to Officer Wilson. His career and life were ruined by the false claims.
Apparently, all of this means nothing to the Democratic contenders for the presidency. Attkisson summarizes:
On Friday and Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, all running for their party’s nomination for president, tweeted out statements containing disproven claims or false implications about the incident.

Booker tweeted: “5 years ago, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer … I have been thinking all day about Mike and his family, and my prayers are with them … I am also thinking about the everyday citizens who stood against this police violence and racism and were tear gassed for their patriotic acts. Ferguson called to the conscience of our nation and inspired a movement that rightly continues.”

[As if on cue, Gillibrand, Ryan, DeBlasio, O'Rouke, Sanders, and Harris, echoed the same lie.]

And [Elizabeth] Warren tweeted: “5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times. I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael. We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.”
Every one of those candidates tells us that Donald Trump fans the flames of racial resentment and divides the nation. I have to wonder how their lies about an event investigated by a President and an AG from their own party is anything other than a knowing attempt to fan the flames of racial resentment and divide the nation. Disgusting.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

Suicide

Sometimes a suicide is just a suicide, but sometimes, a "suicide" is a convenient way to stage a murder. At this point, ponzi-scheme "financier" and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein's "suicide" (predicted long before the actual event by many, including yours truly) must be considered what the government claims it is, but heavy, heavy skepticism is in order. All of the obvious reasons come into play — the fact that Epstein had previous "attempted "suicide" while in custody, the fact that he was a very high profile inmate and special care should have been taken to ensure his safety, and most important, the fact that Epstein had connections to many prominent people with a strong implication that at least some of those people participated in Epstein's disgusting behavior.

There was a time that many of us would have taken government claims that Epstein offed himself at face value. Yeah, maybe there was a screw-up at the detention facility, but it was an innocent screw-up—incompetence, not malevolence. There is nothing else to see—move on.

But after observing the machinations of the deep state over the past few years, observing how the vast majority of the main stream media pick and chooses its investigations, its curiosity, it's stories, and its outrage, depending on who is involved and what political party must be protected, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that those who were threatened by Epstein's potential testimony may have concluded that they could act with impunity, that outrage over his "suicide" would be short-lived and then, like so many other scandals we've seen over the past decade, it would be buried and disappear down the memory hole.

Just over 24 hours after the event, the usual trained hamsters in the media are already suggesting that any implication that Epstein was murdered or through purposeful neglect was allowed to kill himself is part of a broad "conspiracy theory." The strategy is common, 'controversialize' those who ask legitimate questions, discouraging others from asking related question and giving the media a reason to avoid looking for the answers. Fascinating how the trained hamsters dismiss such an obvious possibility without spending the time or energy to investigate.

For example, just this morning, NBC's leading Democratic apologist and propagandist, Chuck Todd, was "outraged" that Donald Trump would join "the conspiracy theorists" and suggest that there was more to Epstein's suicide, that it might have had something to do with his connection to Bill Clinton. Are Trump's comments tacky? Yeah, but not outside the realm of possibility. Todd's focus was not the "suicide" itself or who may have benefitted as a consequence of Epstein's death. He conspicuously changed the subject to make it about Donald Trump. Early obfuscation, anyone?

It's very likely that we'll never know what actually happened. And that's the whole idea. House of Cards all the way down.

Friday, August 09, 2019

Cultural Revolution

As the Left's near-hysterical commentary on the recent mass shooting in El Paso builds toward a crescendo (somehow, Dayton is less important), we are to believe that it's all Donald Trump's fault and that his followers are complicit in the death of 22 innocent people. The trained hamsters in the main stream media echo and amplify all of this, suggesting that Trump's rhetoric is to blame—after all, he's a "white supremacist" who just happened to escape opprobrium until he defeated the Democrats in the 2016 election.

David P. Goldman tries to get past the Left's festival of blame and examine the root causes of these heinous events:
Mass shootings are a special form of suicide. The shooter never expects to survive. But the shooter combines self-hatred with group hatred. Hate becomes so melded with the shooter's identity that he determines to take as many people as he can with him. They are of the same order as the pilot who crashed a Germanwings airliner into the Alps in 2015.

Emil Durkheim's 1897 diagnosis of "anomic suicide" describes the Columbine perpetrators as well as the 2016 San Bernardino attack by Muslim fanatics, the "right-wing" shooter in El Paso and the "left-wing" shooter in Dayton. They are individuals cut off from society, destabilized by change and despairing of their own place in the world. Such monsters always have been among us. But now we are cultivating such monsters by destroying the ties that bind us to each other, to our past and to our future.
In order to replace the existing culture with the Left's utopian vision for what they believe we MUST become, they indulge in dark fantasy. They allege that the current leadership of the existing culture is a vile and reprehensible white supremacist, they argue. His followers are just as bad—they are "deplorable," using their "white privilege" to "victimize" all others. Therefore, the existing culture must be replaced by something better — oh ... that just happens to be the culture/ideology they embrace.

But Goldman examines this dark fantasy and sees it a bit differently:
The ruling liberal dogma tells us that the past was an unrelieved pageant of oppression against people of color, women, and other victims. We [the present day Left] are the first "woke" generation, and everything that preceded us is to be abominated.
I honestly do believe that many on the Left do, in fact, think the fantasy is real. That dark and malevolent forces aren't limited to fringe extremists, but instead are embodied by existing political leaders, and in the extreme, almost half of the adult population. That despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, "hate" is what America is all about. This fever swamp of emotion is disconnected from evidence or logic or common sense. It is sad and dangerous at the same time. The dark fantasy is an attempt to depict our governance, our laws, and our culture as being irreparably broken. And that demands a response—a "cultural revolution" in which the Left leads.

Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Meta-Strategy

The meta-strategy is as insidious as it is brilliant. Accuse someone of being something vile, something that is repugnant to all decent people. If that someone is a politician, then that politician's entire party along with everyone who continues to support that someone is by extension a sympathizer with and supporter of the vile and repugnant thing.

But someone else will step up and say, "Wait a minute, the accusations are hysterical, factually inaccurate, and despicable in and of themselves." The accusations are vile because they further divide an already divided country. They increase the political temperature, rather than trying to reduce it."

When that statement is made, the person who makes it is invariably accused of being whatever vile and repugnant thing the accusers' have mentioned. There is no counter-argument, only vicious epithets, now hurled at the politician and anyone who questions the motives and morality of his or her accusers. When that happens, good people begin to self-censor, to remain silent when vicious accusations are made. After all, who wants to be called something vile and repugnant. And that is the overriding goal of the meta strategy—to silence any opposition so that a preferred narrative will prevail and consequently, attain political power.

That's the strategy that's being applied by the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media—accuse an elected president of the United States of being a white supremacist. After all, they hate his position on illegal immigration; they despise his attacks on the anti-American, anti-Israel statements made by members of The Squad and other Dems; they are revolted by the man's combative style; they are incensed that he has nominated SCOTUS justices, and they recoil from the harsh reality that he beat their nominee in the 2016 election. So they call him a "white supremacist" and complement that with the implication that he is responsible for the mass casualty attacks over the past few weeks. Whether it's Beto, Biden, or Booker, the suggestion that one individual is somehow responsible for the actions of mentally unbalanced right-wing extremists has become S.O.P. for at least some prominent Democrats.

Okay, then. If that's the strategy, let's pursue it and see where it leads.

The mass shooter in Dayton seems to be getting less attention than the shooters in CA and TX. Law enforcement has noted (rather cryptically) that he pursued "violent ideologies." The trained hamsters in the main stream media seem generally uninterested in investigating those ideologies further, and the Dems are generally silent on the Dayton attack.

Andy Ngo comments:
[The Dayton shooter] had long expressed support for antifa accounts, causes and individuals. That would be the loose network of militant leftist activists who physically attack anyone to the right of Mao in the name of “anti-fascism.” In particular, [the Dayton shooter] promoted extreme hatred of American border enforcement.

“Kill every fascist,” the shooter declared in 2018 on twitter, echoing a rallying cry of antifa ideologues. Over the next year, his tweets became increasingly violent. “Nazis deserve death and nothing else,” he tweeted last October. [The Dayton shooter] frequently flung the label “Nazi” at those with whom he disagreed online.

By December, he reached out on Twitter to the Socialist Rifle ­Association, an antifa gun group, to comment about bump stocks, and the SRA responded to him. (A bump stock is an attachment for semiautomatic rifles that allow them to fire much faster.)

In the months leading to his rampage, [the Dayton shooter] expressed a longing for climactic confrontation. In ­response to an essay by Intercept writer Mehdi Hassan titled, “Yes, Let’s Defeat or Impeach Trump—but What If He Doesn’t Leave the White House?” the shooter wrote: “Arm, train, prepare.”

By June he tweeted: “I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round understanding.” Last week, he promoted posts that demonized Sens. Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy’s resolution against antifa extremism.
If the GOP were to use the same meta-strategy discussed earlier in this post, they'd try to tie the Dayton shooter's left-wing ranting along with his violent affinity to antifa to the Dems, who generally avoid any criticism of the group. To their credit, the GOP hasn't done that, although a few right -leaning commentators have noted the irony.

Violent extremism—whether extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing—is an evil that every American should condemn—without finger-pointing or efforts to gain political advantage. An explicit strategy that assesses blame for the insane actions of fringe extremists is amoral. It taps tragedy for political gain, and that's simply not right.

Monday, August 05, 2019

Mass Shootings

There have been two mass shooting with 29 people dead and many more injured in the past 48 hours. Mass shootings can occur only if an unstable and alienated murderer has gained access to guns and ammunition that allow carnage to occur in a matter of seconds. There must be serious and effective controls on these weapons and serious and effective controls that limit the ability of mentally unbalanced people from gaining access to any firearm.

Mass shooting are almost always perpetrated by a mentally unstable male who is driven by hatred and/or anger. The shooter is often (but not always) a subscriber to either an alt-Right or alt-Left ideology. Some mechanism to desensitize the shooter to the act of killing large numbers of people indiscriminately is often present. In almost every case, the shooter telegraphs his intent (albeit cryptically) and in most cases, family members or acquaintances recognize signs that the shooter is becoming increasingly unhinged. All of this creates a multi-parametric problem—one that cannot be solved by the usual mantras posed by either the Right or the Left.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment:
The problem is identifying those with mental illness who are a threat, and then allowing society to intervene to prevent violence. Overwhelming evidence suggests that the de-institutionalization of the seriously mentally ill has had tragic results. Libertarians and mental-health advocates who resist such intervention need to do some soul-searching.

The same goes for those in the gun lobby who claim that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates individual rights. So-called red-flag laws that let police or family members petition a court to remove firearms from someone who may be a threat might not have stopped the El Paso killer. But the evidence in the states is that the laws have prevented suicides and may prevent other mass shootings. Gun rights need to be protected, but the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.
On a pragmatic level, we need to get more serious about limiting access to firearms among those who have mental health problems. The problem, of course, is identifying those individuals in real time so that a firearm purchase can be stopped. The technology to accomplish this does exist, but it is opposed, as the editors of WSJ note, by privacy advocates, gun rights advocates, and advocates for the mentally ill. As with all things, it takes political will to overcome these objections and craft an approach that has some possibility of addressing this horrific problem effectively.

We need a national data base that will help identify mentally unstable people, we need universal background checks for all gun purchases tied directly into the national database, we need red flag laws in every state, we need to close gun show loop holes, we need even better surveillance of alt-Right and alt-Left websites and dark web locations, so that their denizens are identified and tracked, we need to take a hard look at first person video games (surely a mechanism that desensitizes at least some of these murders), and we do need to tone down the divisive rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum.

Sadly, I suspect none of that will happen. And even if some or all of this does happen, I'm under no illusions that these ideas would be easy to implement or that there would not be unintended side effects. I'm also fully aware that privacy rights would suffer, but our increasingly digital, interconnected world, privacy is going the way of the Dodo bird. Finally, none of this would stop the underground sale of guns to criminals by criminals.

Given the current toxic political atmosphere, each party will do what they do best—play politics, rather than attempt to solve real-world problems.

UPDATE:
----------------

Many younger readers may not know the derivation of the phrase, "going postal." It refers to a number of incidents at the USPS in the 1990s in which postal workers killed or maimed their co-workers in fits of anger. As a consequence of that violence, a bi-partisan, blue-ribbon commission proposed solutions in The Califano Report. Laurence Jarvik discusses the report and what it means to today's mass violence:
The US Postal Service set up an "Employee Assistance Program" after publication of the report, to deal with disturbed and possibly dangerous postal workers before they snapped, which proved quite successful.

By treating postal violence as a mental health problem, the USPS successfully controlled it.

The Califano Report is a good example of Washington actually working in a bipartisan manner to solve a serious problem with practical solutions.

A similar bipartisan and objectively scientific approach to mass shootings would probably work today, if permitted to realistically address the causes of massacres.

That no such study has been commissioned indicates that some politicians sadly seek to exploit violent tragedies for political advantage, rather than solve the problem ...

Psychiatrists realize that many [mentally-ill] patients simply cannot respond voluntarily to medication or psychotherapy. For them, there is no alternative but coerced treatment or institutionalization in order to protect them from themselves and society from their propensity towards violence.

In addition, extreme political causes have historically attracted the mentally disturbed. Doestoevsky described the phenomenon of nihilist "mad bombers" in his novel, The Possessed (also known as The Devils).

It is truly madness to pretend such massacres are not obviously acts of the mentally ill.

Who really believes a sane person could target innocent schoolchildren, churchgoers, nightclubbers, or Wal-Mart shoppers for mass-murder?

Not me.
Or me.

Saturday, August 03, 2019

Circle Dancing

"Neo" is a blogger whose bio indicates that she was a lifelong liberal Democrat who slowly and painfully (according to her) walked away. In a recent post she comments on "circle dancing"—the idea that all political ideologies tend to force people to hold hands and circle a central ideological construct, dancing around and around a set of core beliefs. Both progressives and conservatives do the dance, but the core of the progressive circle has a near galactic pull. After all, nearly everything that those outside the circle hear, see, and experience are part of the progressive narrative. That narrative is enforced by the media, by academics, at universities, in secondary and primary schools, by movies and television, in print, and by the arts. All of it pulls you toward the center of the progressive circle, and the pull is very hard to escape.

Writing about this, Neo draws on the words of another author:
... I will now repeat a passage that I’ve quoted before in several previous posts. For me, it never gets old. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
Don’t underestimate how profoundly difficult it can be to step outside the circle.
Those of us who refuse to dance around the progressive circle recognize that we can be drawn into another circle, but one that has a profoundly weaker pull and far fewer reinforcement mechanisms. In a way, that makes us more, not less, flexible in our world view.

What worries us about the progressive circle we refuse to join is best described by Milan Kundera when he writes about his protagonist: "... she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance."

When progressives experience the "magic" of circle dancing they ultimately get to a place where they do exactly what Madame Raphael did—they want to force the rest of us to talk and think exactly like them and become "a single body and a single soul."

No thanks.

Friday, August 02, 2019

"Crazies"

Now that the second round of Democrat "debates" is over, more than a few Dems are shaking their heads. Michael Moore, a hard-left documentarian, suggests that only Michelle Obama can save the party, given the lackluster collection of candidates. But many others observe the Democrat field and shake their heads at the hard-left direction of their party.

Conservative writer Kim Strassel does a little categorization:
The debates have highlighted important policy distinctions. But in the context of this overall leftward shift, they are rightly measured on a sliding scale from “lefty” to “absolutely nuts.” And it’s only the presence of the real radicals that allows commentators to get away with suggesting any of these policies are remotely “centrist” or “moderate.”

The crazies want to tax everyone and everything—financial transactions, carbon, bank liabilities, sales, wealth, income, families. Mr. Sanders has outright said he will raise taxes on the middle class, while Ms. Warren has all but admitted as much. The ordinary lefties merely want to raise taxes on capital, estates, businesses, payrolls and higher incomes.

The crazies would take over or kill entire sectors of the economy. Some Medicare for All proponents would immediately outlaw private insurance; others would do it over time. Fossil-fuel jobs would be abolished, while disfavored corporate executives would face “jail.” The lefties would merely regulate the hell out of the economy, dictating what types of health plans, financial products, energy, and drugs we can have, and at what price.

The crazies would pack the Supreme Court (Ms. Warren), prosecute Mr. Trump (Kamala Harris) and spend billions on slavery reparations (Marianne Williamson). The lefties would merely require two years of mandatory national service (John Delaney), ban union and nonprofit political speech (Michael Bennet) and impose sweeping new gun control (John Hickenlooper).

The Democratic Party seems to be banking that voters dislike Mr. Trump so much that they’ll accept any alternative. That’s an enormously risky bet.
The long-time party of big intrusive government (B.I.G.) is now emphasizing that the size of government matters, and the bigger the better—the more intrusive, the more effective (or so they think).

Strassel rightly notes the broad impact of Dem policy positions. But she doesn't mention the suffocating emphasis on political correctness. A once acceptable mechanism for making the broader public more tolerant has now morphed under the Dems' social justice warriors into dangerous thought control. Innocuous speech that "triggers" the SJWs is forbidden. The word "racist" is used so frequently it has lost its meaning. Opposing viewpoints are considered "hate speech." It's 1984 on steroids.

And then there's the viciousness, exemplified, but not isolated to the Kavanaugh hearings. If a person doesn't agree with your ideology, its perfectly okay to destroy them—to ruin their life and sully their family in the process. If a man you truly don't like is elected president, it's perfectly okay to create a hoax in a pathetic attempt to remove him from office and then perpetrate the hoax with lies for his entire time in office. And if a person of color, or a woman, or a gay person doesn't toe the Dem ideological line, they're not "authentic" and shouldn't be heard.

That's the Dems throughout 2016 - 2019. It will continue to be the Dems in 2020. People are noticing.

Thursday, August 01, 2019

Cities

The Democrats' trained hamsters in the main stream media have tried hard to avoid the real story in the "Baltimore" controversy, focusing obsessively on Trump's "racism" and assiduously avoiding the underlying message of the controversy. Daniel Henninger describes it this way:
After [Rev. Martin Luther] King’s assassination in 1968, horrific inner-city riots broke out in New York, Washington, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Trenton, N.J. For much of the U.S. population born since then, those events have about as much immediacy as a World War II documentary.

Still, political control of virtually all these cities has remained in the hands of the Democratic Party. Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis have had nothing but Democratic mayors since then ...

That suits the keepers of America’s sterile status quo in its most rundown neighborhoods just fine. Urban Democrats are now in a destructive co-dependent relationship with public-sector unions. Inner-city residents have become an afterthought.

Walking past a public-housing complex in lower Manhattan recently, I noticed the date on the cornerstone: 1963. That is about when these projects were erected all over the U.S. They, like so much urban infrastructure, are falling apart through neglect because city budgets are consumed by labor costs.

Public schools in every city mentioned in this column are failing to educate black American children adequately because the teachers unions won’t permit reform.

According to recent FBI data, the most violent cities in the U.S. include—still—St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif.

A 16-year-old gangbanger in Chicago today was born in 2002 or 2003, after 9/11. Stories like his, passing from innocence to ruin before reaching adulthood, have repeated themselves every 20 years in all these Democratic-controlled cities. If that’s not racism caused by political failure, the word has no meaning. Yet the press, or part of it, has been consumed the past week with Trump vs. Cummings and such irrelevant stories as “Cummings has long frustrated the president.”
Odd, isn't it, that the CNN moderators in this week's Democratic Debates didn't focus on America's inner cities with a question like this:

Cities across the United States like Baltimore have had Democratic mayors for decades—in Baltimore's case, over 5 decades, have had a Democratic city councils, have gotten hundreds of millions of of federal dollars dedicated to improve the lot of it citizens, and yet continue to struggle mightily. Is this situation a failure of Democratic leadership at the city, state and federal level, and should the citizens of these cities look elsewhere for solutions.

Nah ... a question like that won't do. It conflicts with the narrative.