For a party that toots its own horn about how it’s all-in for the ladies, the Democrat Party sure has a weird way of showing it. The fact is that when the check comes for its dangerous and degenerate policies, every single time the Dem dudes dine and dash and stick the chicks with the bill.
Let’s look at some of the Dem dudes who do it, starting with the aptly named Bill Clinton. Mr. Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit was all too happy to use women as his personal playthings with varying degrees of consent, ranging from none to “I always wanted to do it in the Oval Office!” And the feminists, the media and the rest of the Democrat Party adjuncts gave him a pass. Some were willing to give him even more. The message was simple: if you are called upon to be a Clinton sex toy, kneel down then shut up for the cause.
This is a Democrat tradition. JFK, when he wasn’t tapping the help he was pimping them out to his buddies in the White House pool. His dalliance with Marilyn Monroe was one thing – she was a consenting adult who could have told him to pound sand (or something else). It’s his serial preying upon the interns and secretaries and other assorted Dem doxies in his orbit that really demonstrates the essential contempt for women that drove his satyriasis – and that (which along with its traditional racism) still drives the Democrat Party.
Oh, and speaking of driving, no discussion of the chronic Democrat abuse of women would be complete without observing that the Lion of the Senate left his booty call du jour to drown in an Oldsmobile at the bottom of a pond. And the same message we hear over and over again to protect Democrat exploiters protected Teddy Kennedy – hey Mary Jo, take one for the team.
She didn’t have much choice about taking one for the team since, in those last agonizing minutes, she couldn’t take a breath.
But hey, Teddy saved abortion, and his ceaseless campaign for a perpetual open season on troublesome fetuses makes it all worthwhile. Abortion is another of those Democrat policies that women get to pay for. The idea that it is somehow empowering or liberating for women is so much garbage. It’s empowering and liberating for men who don’t want to reap the result of their sowing.
Kurt Schlichter, “Women Always Have To Pick Up The Check For Democrats”, Townhall.com, 2020-08-30.
December 3, 2020
QotD: Presidential droit du seigneur
November 20, 2020
The political danger if the “chumps” unite
In City Journal, James B. Meigs describes what he calls the “Chump Effect” in American politics:
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.
A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”
“Of course not,” Warren replied.
“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”
A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”
That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of — working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens — aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.
The word “chump” probably derives from an ancient Norse term for a stump or large chunk of wood. The modern word “blockhead” comes to mind, which — no coincidence — was Lucy’s favorite label for the too-trusting Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip. Lucy never tired of snatching away the football; Charlie fell for it every time. We all know the feeling: when you’re inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor’s child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed “learning disability”; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane’s cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an “emotional-support animal,” gets to ride on its owner’s lap for free. You didn’t know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency? What are you — a chump?
November 12, 2020
The party of the Lucky Winners
Brian Micklethwait sends some thoughts from his sick-bed on the (still in question) outcome of the US election:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Democrat electoral cheating is not a new story. I’ve been reading stuff about America and American politics all my life, off and on and mostly off, and like a thread through it all is the fact that in big cities that they run and are determined to go on running, Democrats cheat in elections. So Democrats cheating in elections this time around is not the big change.
The big change is a Republican refusing to retreat in the face of it. Why? Why is Trump being so unpresidential, so undignified, so … just so ghastly? The answer is that the big political picture has been transformed, partly by him, but partly by him responding to the fact that it has already changed so much.
Time was when Republicans were the party of the Lucky Winners. Country clubbers, corporate executives, yacht owners, owners of houses with several garages, presided over by perfectly manicured wives, in charge of several well behaved children and subservient servants. The Democrats, meanwhile, were the party of the workers, of people struggling to do work or even to get work. Any plutocrats who were attached to the Democrats, like the Kennedys or (FD) Roosevelt, were numerically insignificant oddities. (Whether that was true, I don’t know. But this was the dominant narrative, as people say now.)
But that’s all changed. The Democrats are now the party of the Lucky Winners, and also of the unlucky losers at the very bottom of the heap who can only now depend on the crumbs of comfort bestowed upon them by the Lucky Winner class. The Republicans have become the party of the workers in the middle, the middle class, as Americans accurately describe them. The Republicans are the party of the people who still struggle to work and to stay working, and who hate the whole idea of giving up and becoming dependant upon the Lucky Winners.
Not all “workers” voted for Trump. A lot of workers, especially in things like IT, are still solidly Democrat. But the heart of the Trump vote was workers of a certain sort. The heart of the Trump vote was no longer the Lucky Winners class. They have migrated over to the Democrats.
Okay, now for the key bit of what I’m saying.
In olden times, if you were a member of the Lucky Winners class, and your guy lost an election, complaining about cheating was frankly a bit, well, undignified. You and your pals controlled almost all the levers of power in society. You owned the big corporations. Your children were creaming off most of the expensive education. The world was yours. Were you going to bitch about electoral corner-cutting by a few machine politician Democrats in big cities who had enough clout to say boo to you, every once in a while? This was not a good look. And on the whole, Republicans took their defeats, and if Democrat cheating cost them a win or two, well, that was how it crumbled, cookie-wise. Legally, that may not have been the rule, but actually, that was the rule. Noblesse oblige. Let the people picked by the struggling class have their turn. Suck it up. Go play golf.
But now? Now, what is happening is that the Lucky Winners class is telling the class definitely below it in the pecking order that this subordinate class now has to just lie back and let it happen, when the electoral cheating happens all over them.
This is not a good look either, but it’s what the Lucky Winner class now think they can do, and get away with. Maybe they can, in the sense that they may well get their guy over the line this time around. But if they do, but if it then becomes clear that they did this by cheating on a large scale in this election, then the words “reap” and “whirlwind” spring to mind.
October 19, 2020
Sarah Hoyt – “… I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why she’s not expecting the US federal election next month to resolve anything, at least not in a positive way:
At this point I hold about a 10% chance the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (interchangeable now that the masks are off) don’t fraud their way into full power, pack the court and rip our system apart, to install (yet again) a form of communism. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in China’s pockets. Or rather, China has been filling their pockets for a long while. We might find ourselves working for racist, hegemonic overlords, besides suffering all the ills of a descent into communism. (By the way, they’ve already been doing this to some extent to the less fortunate countries, including most African countries. The left in the US and Europe believes this is benevolence. And that Chinese aren’t racist. I wouldn’t believe it, if it hadn’t been said to me over and over.)
There is maybe another 25% of chance we’ll find ourselves in CW II, now with even more foreign interference. What comes out of that, G-d only knows, and I’m not Him. Which is good, because I have trouble enough being me.
And there is a very strong chance that even if Trump wins the White House, besides continuing to have to drive a car where the wheel is disconnected (the extent of which I wasn’t even fully sure of until this month) he won’t do more than delay the crash.
Sometimes here, and particularly at insty, because I tend to do that really late at night when I’m exhausted and less able to control my moods, you’ll catch a hint of how hopeless I feel our situation to be.
In fact since the lockdown, I’ve been feeling we were screwed. That the lockdown was imposed all over the world on such flimsy evidence, that countries and churches, and every cultural institution not only submitted to it but kept telling the people how much it was needed sent me into a deep depression from which I haven’t fully recovered. (Again, the evidence that this virus was MAYBE as bad as the flu has been before our eyes since the beginning. You don’t need special equipment to see it. The homeless were congregating and not dying in droves. The people in slums in the third world weren’t dying at a higher rate than usual. And there were the numbers from the Diamond Princess. Which some idiot here tried to justify with “but they got the best treatment.” In a floating petri dish. With no special equipment. May G-d have mercy on the soul of every idiot who bought that bullshit.).
This last week, on the other hand, I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape.
Oh, not the massive corruption of the Biden crime family. I mean seriously. Any of you who didn’t know already that Crackhead McStripperbang wasn’t being paid for foreign countries for his services must have been living under a rock.
Not even the ridiculous, immediate coordination with which our tech overlords moved to clamp down on that information and preventing it from reaching the virgin ears of most of our willfully and willingly ignorant countrymen.
No, what discouraged me most was the “sexual preference” suddenly becoming a slur and Webster dictionary falling in line. (Seriously, guys, sexual preference goes way beyond orientation. For instance, my sexual preference is monogamous and with someone I love. If you think that there’s no preference involved, you must think people have absolutely no control over their impulses.) Because that bullshit couldn’t happen, even in the most totalitarian of conspiracies.
And that’s the terrifying thought. These people are no more conspiring than your breaklines being cut are a conspiracy not to stop the car.
They are a result of deep inlaid propaganda and misseducation which cause a lot of people to try to fall into line with the “word from above” and be “right” with those they view as the smart people and the masters of society.
August 30, 2020
Andrew Sullivan – “… let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed.”
In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan finds himself in agreement with Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.
The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it’s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels. Pence gave us a vision of America that was a souped up Disney special from the early 1960s — from Fort McHenry no less. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless “white supremacy”, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.
All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.
[…]
And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.
The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it — if only to prove them right.
A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform — all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?
June 14, 2020
The cat’s in the bag … once. Twice is a different matter altogether
David Warren discusses some specific cats and bags:
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
You can get a cat into a bag twice, as someone said (I think it was me); but the second time it has to be dead. This would be the reasoning behind my prediction that a second general lockdown will not even be attempted; but it must be qualified. For many of the people who imposed the first one were demonstrably insane, and they haven’t yet been removed from public office.
The same could be said about our impending “summer of love,” or hot season of race riots, already endured a half-century ago. That cat has been put into that bag before. This time is bound to be a different story.
It is fairly strictly a party question, now. The “theory” behind the lockdowns — to avoid overloading the hospitals in Manhattan — proved a crock, but there is a more cogent alternative theory. The Democrats in Natted States Merica guessed that destroying the “Trump economy,” and encouraging “peaceful” riots in the cities, was the only way they could defeat Trump, having tried other methods to remove him. And for a party of convinced abortionists, defeating Trump takes priority over mere human lives. We’ll see in November whether their Caracas strategy is the final winner.
To be fair, as they say at Instapundit, the Repubs have historically played along with this, and agreed to take responsibility and blame for almost purely Democrat measures. A good example is race, where the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenic birth control to reduce the black population, and Jim Crow laws, presents itself to captive media as the champion of the black man against “systemic racism”; while the party of Lincoln apologizes for itself. That the devil is at large in American politics is, to my mind, an irresistible hypothesis.
The refusal of this Trump fellow to play this game, as his predecessors did, drives Democrats berserk. He actually fights back, to their consternation. It didn’t help that they were so proximate to berserk already.
March 28, 2020
Woodrow Wilson (pt.1) | Historians Who Changed History
The Cynical Historian
Published 28 Dec 2017Time to finally tell you why I’ve used Woodrow Wilson as a bit of a rhetorical punching bag. This is part 1 of a 2 part series. This part will cover his life and scholarship before the presidency. It’s going to be quite a trip. [References on YouTube description]
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Wiki:
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American statesman and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and then ran and was elected as a progressive Democrat to the office of Governor of New Jersey. Wilson’s victory in the 1912 presidential election made him the first Southerner elected to the presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He also led the United States during World War I, establishing an activist foreign policy known as “Wilsonianism.” He was a major leader at the Paris [Versailles] Peace Conference in 1919, where he championed the proposed League of Nations. However, he was unable to obtain Senate approval for U.S. membership. After he suffered debilitating strokes in September 1919, his wife and staff members handled most of his presidential duties.
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Hashtags: #History #WoodrowWilson #LostCause #historians #Princeton #biography
March 12, 2020
Comrade Sanders
Arthur Chrenkoff points out the amazing double-standard that has helped Bernie Sanders become a major candidate for the Democratic nomination:
Imagine a credible candidate for a significant elected office – never mind the Presidency of the United States of America, the elected office in the world – who has spent his career cheering on Mussolini, Franco and assorted Latin America authoritarian strongmen, who admires Nazi Germany’s record in job creation and public infrastructure, and who, while eschewing excesses of the past, proclaims himself a proud national socialist, but to reassure all he says he is a democratic national socialist.
Now think of Bernie Sanders and you can once again understand the pervasive double standard in our politics. The hypothetical candidate from the previous paragraph – and he or she are very much hypothetical – would be considered a political and social pariah. Bernie, on the other hand, is lionised by millions and until very recently, prior to the miraculous, Dr Frankenstein-like reanimation of Joe Biden, has been considered a probable presidential candidate by a major political party (coincidentally, of which he has never been a member in his entire career).
To the best of my knowledge, Sanders has never expressed any regret, misgivings or second thoughts about a lifetime of cheerleading for virtually every socialist/communist government around the world, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam and from Cuba to, most recently, Venezuela. It is not like the true nature of these regimes has been a secret until now. Anyone with any modicum of knowledge and common sense could see all long these were all totalitarian dictatorships and mass abusers of human rights, which nationalised poverty and whatever their meager economic or social progress it has been achieved at an unacceptable cost.
[…]
That an old Chomskyite like Sanders came so close to being the Democrat presidential candidate tells of a sickness at the heart of a major political party. Democrats still staunchly believe that Donald Trump is a Russian asset but almost ended up with an actual communist sympathser in charge. History didn’t end in 1989; it repeats itself like vomit rising in your throat.
On a lighter note, Larry Correia is amused at the current top two Democratic contenders:
That is about the most pathetic match up of losers to ever occur in any political contest in the history of ever.
Sanders is a Marxist doofus. His plans are gibberish. His philosophy is bullshit, designed to appeal to wishful thinkers who can’t do math, and greedy ass mooches. But don’t worry, he’s a total squish without an ounce of fight in him, so the DNC’s just gonna roll him over to make from for their chosen one …
Joe Biden! Who is either suffering from dementia, or is just really really dumb. (insert porque no los dos? meme girl here)
They can’t let Joe speak for more than five minutes because they know he’ll go off script and start babbling incoherently. And I’m not talking Trumpian style stream of consciousness yammering, but weird ass, dog faced pony soldiers, corn pop, hairy legs, girl sniffing, finger biting, he’ll slap you, fight me IRL, you wanna step outside?
I’ve known people who worked with Joe Biden years ago, and they all said the same thing. With him, what you see is what you get. There is no act. That’s how Joe Biden is. And he was a weird scoundrel back then, but I’m pretty sure his mind is going now.
On the plus side, Jill Biden moves faster than the Secret Service, and that lady will throw hands. Respect.
All the DNC needed to do was find somebody decent and dignified to run against Trump, but oh no, they went batshit crazy instead, and their anointed one is a doddering, senile, fool, who is so corrupt his son, Crackhead McStripperbang makes millions of dollars for imaginary jobs not at all related to his dad’s position, and they don’t even try and hide it. But don’t worry, Biden’s gonna come from behind, because nothing wins swing states like threatening to slap construction workers who are suspicious that Beto O’Dork actually does want to take their AR-14s.
As somebody who would rather reach into his own chest and pluck out his heart than vote democrat, I will admit that I find it terribly amusing all the liberals I know who are weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth about Old Rich White Guys There Are No Women Or People Of Color Running … While Tulsi Gabbard is over there, like WTF?
Sorry, progs. She said hurtful things about Hillary, so the media and Google basically Thanos-snapped her into dust. Meanwhile, the right are eagerly betting on whether Nikki Haley is going to run in 2024 or not … So who are the real misogynist bigots?
March 3, 2020
Michael Bloomberg, self-appointed nanny
Via Instapundit, Karen Kataline shares a look at the things that bother Michael Bloomberg about you:
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona on 1 February, 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Take Michael Bloomberg … please! What drives this man with the freedom to enjoy his wealth in 65 billion different ways, to spend his time trying to curtail the freedoms and choices of others, even down to the size soda they drink and the amount of salt they ought to be allowed to sprinkle on their spinach?
Coloradans know all too well that the former New York Mayor and Democratic Presidential Candidate spent boatloads of cash pushing state legislators to clamp down on their God-given right to defend themselves and their families. He has pushed freedom-sucking and blatantly biased “Red Flag” bills in numerous other states around the country.
Mayor Busybody simply can’t stop telling others what to do. It seems to be an obsession with him — or maybe, a compulsion too. I gained insight into this when I returned to a New York Times article from 2009 that described Bloomberg’s eating habits.
“He dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.”
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is about control. Controlling one’s out-of-control thoughts, feelings, and behavior by attempting to control his external environment. Consciously or unconsciously, those afflicted do this in vain, to the point where they feel unable to control the compulsion as well (as in excessive hand-washing).
Most sufferers aren’t dangerous unless they have 65 billion dollars and a God-complex.
The Times went on to report this delicious insight:
“… he (Bloomberg) is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (‘Delicious,’ he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)”
Behavior like this exhibits a staggering and extreme lack of boundaries. The Times seems to only snicker at this, but it’s painfully clear that Bloomberg has great difficulty respecting the basic boundaries of civil society. No wonder it’s so easy for him to help himself to your freedoms and your choices when he can’t stop helping himself to your calamari.
February 28, 2020
Is the world ready for Trump versus Bernie?
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian considers the strong possibility that Bernie Sanders will capture the Democratic presidential nomination and face Donald Trump in the general election:
Before we get into it, can we all just pause for a second to savor the delicious irony of the Democrats suddenly discovering, after all these many many many years, that Socialism is bad? I almost feel sorry for poor ol’ Bernie. For going on four decades now, the Dems have treated him like the little kid at the grown-ups’ table. Who hasn’t been there on Thanksgiving? “Mommy, Uncle Henry’s breath smells really bad.” We’re all thinking it, kiddo, but you can’t say it. They’ve been silently agreeing with him about the need to turn America into the USSA all these years, and now they’re gonna take him behind the woodshed for it? Really?
This is point #1 in the argument, increasingly common out here in the political badlands, that Bernie Sanders is Bizarro World Donald Trump. Back in 2016, the weirdest thing for those of us not wedded to Team Republican — for that vanishingly rare breed, that is, who regard politics as politics, not sportsball in neckties — was how normal Trump sounded. This guy is supposed to be the ultimate anti-Establishment candidate, right? So why is he saying stuff that has been GOP orthodoxy since the 1970s? And why are they hammering him for it?
[…]
This is where he’s most dangerous. Like Trump was in 2016, Bernie 2020 can be seen as a pure protest candidate, a giant “fuck you” to The System. Hell, in my increasingly frequent black-pill moments, I contemplate voting for the guy — we’re not voting our way out of what’s coming, as Z Man always says, so we might as well get started. A few years of life under the Septuagenarian Stalin will give us some valuable prep for when things get really interesting under La Presidenta por Vida Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Moreover, there can be great power in being the only guy in the room who’s willing to state the obvious. In this case, it has been obvious for a long time that the Democratic Party are a bunch of godless commies. Literally commies, or at least Bolshie-curious. Obvious, but always verboten to say … until now. Sanders has a rabid base that, even if you assume the “official” numbers are all lies, can’t be much less than 20% of the entire Party. Those hardcore Bernie Bros can’t possibly have any illusions about who he is and what he wants. That’s what they want, too, and again: twenty percent. The Media paints anyone to the Right of Rachel Maddow as a “white supremacist,” but can you imagine how different American politics would be if 20% of the GOP were open, avowed Klansmen?
Those are the “positives,” for lack of a better term, of Bernie being the Democratic nominee. If this is what The People really, really want — and it’s crystal clear that a lot of them do — then we should at least have a good, long, hard “national conversation” about giving it to them. Cuba, as Bernie keeps informing us, does after all have 100% literacy and free health care, and the Chinese are great at lifting people out of poverty. Let’s talk about that, live on national television, and see where it takes us.
February 27, 2020
Tuesday night’s Democratic debacle debate
Mark Steyn reports on the casualties from the latest Democratic presidential debate:
Henry Kissinger’s famous line on the Iran/Iraq war was that it’s a shame they can’t both lose. In Tuesday night’s primary debate they somehow contrived for everyone to lose, including both the Democrat Party and the media. It reached its peak of perfection early on when all seven candidates began shrieking over each other and, as with some hideous atonal aleatoric modernist cacophonous symphony, its very unlistenability seemed an impressive feat of organization.
Five insipid moderators sat there like dowagers declining to catch the eye of the shrieking nutter on the Piccadilly Line as Elizabeth Warren ate up all the opening airtime with charges that Michael Bloomberg would make you kill your babies (she’s not concerned about the baby-killing, only that it shouldn’t be Bloomberg ordering the hit). Realizing that the show was in danger of degenerating into Screech White and the Six Dwarves, her comrades belatedly began screaming along, shredding the alleged “rules” even as the hopelessly inept moderators gamely persisted with all the usual bland over-formatted props of leaden telly debates – like making a big deal about interactively selecting random Twitter-submitted questions about the besieged Syrian city of Idlib.
Mayor Pete looked earnestly into the camera and declared, “I stand with the people of Idlib.” Which, translated out of of Demoblather, means: You guys are screwed. Still, the ability to adlib a line about Idlib is not to be disdained.
In other news, Joe Biden got tough with China: “They must play by the rules. Period. Period. Period.” Actually, I think “period period period” is an ellipsis… Which is oddly Bidenesque. But he was assessed by the experts to have delivered a killer performance – if only because he appeared to know what state he was in and which office he was running for, and did not claim to have been arrested on the streets of Soweto while trying to see a South African prisoner in a gaol cell nine hundred miles away. Great job, Joe!
On the other hand, he did assert that, thanks to Bernie’s crazy pro-gun Second Amendment absolutism, 150 million people had been killed since 2007. Which would be half the population of America. And is 149,997,230 people more than the coronavirus, and roughly a thousand times the entire population of Idlib, so you’d think somebody would have noticed it.
February 22, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the “inconvenient pioneers”
Along with a mandatory worry piece on Trump and some positive news on the British economy under Boris Johnson, Andrew Sullivan noted the dog that didn’t bark about either Republican or Democratic pioneers:
Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaking with supporters at a town hall at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, 12 January 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Every now and again, I take a moment to take stock of how deep gay integration has gotten in my adult lifetime. This past week, our politics featured two relatively young men, on both sides of the political divide, whose sexual orientation is both clear and irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg has been at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, one of seven remaining candidates, and in the circular flamethrower squad of Wednesday’s debate, he once again held his own. More than that: He was relentless in his attacks on Amy Klobuchar and more than a little blunt about Bernie Sanders’s plans to take private health insurance away from everyone (something that doesn’t even happen in socialized health care in Britain). There was not the slightest whiff of defensiveness about him.
His moderate politics (on most subjects) is filtered through a seemingly brutal, calculating Rhodes Scholar–style ambition. And why can’t gays as well as straights harbor that? It’s fantastic also that he is a man of Christian faith — like countless other gays and lesbians in America. Who would have imagined that the pioneering gay figure of 2020 would be a married Christian who got a standing ovation in a Fox News town hall? But that’s old news now.
It’s also fantastic that, for the most part, his sexual orientation is ignored. Yes, the queer left hates him — but they hate a lot of gay success in public life if it doesn’t exactly fit their ideological niche. And Rush Limbaugh indeed took a slightly homophobic dig the other day. But I doubt Trump would openly use Pete’s orientation as a way to demean him. And that’s not just because Trump is not personally homophobic but because he knows it would look ugly, and be counterproductive. That’s how far we’ve come.
Richard Grenell has not subjected himself to getting elected anywhere, but, like Buttigieg, he’s a classic careerist D.C. meritocrat (and why the fuck not?). From the heartland, he got a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and then attached himself to Republican pols — notably George Pataki and George W. Bush, who made him communications director for the U.S. seat at the U.N., a post he held for seven years. Launching his own communications shop, Grenell subsequently worked Fox News gigs even as he was a signatory to an amicus brief in defense of the right of gay couples to marry. By all accounts he has been a disaster as ambassador to Germany, trolling the E.U. and German elites, although I doubt Trump sees his regular Twitter provocations as a liability.
But check out a simple video of Grenell being sworn in for the Germany job. Mike Pence, of all people, officiates as Grenell’s longtime partner, Matt Lashey, holds the family Bible. This week his appointment as acting director of National Intelligence was widely panned — and is not expected to last long. But he nonetheless became the first-ever openly gay member of the Cabinet in U.S. history. You missed that? All the better. But for some of us, it’s a quiet landmark tarred only by the fact that most gay groups won’t even acknowledge it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Twitter feed has made no mention at all — even as they are rightly touting the first lesbian mother in Congress. Why is the first openly gay Cabinet member a nonevent? Because he’s a conservative. And to the activist left and too many of the Establishment liberals in the gay movement, that means he’s not really gay.
My politics tilt more toward Buttigieg than Grenell — but a moment like this should not be filtered entirely through ideology. History matters too. When I was a very lonely openly gay figure in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that I would live to see an openly gay and successful presidential candidate and an openly gay Cabinet member at the same time would have been preposterous. And now it’s virtually normal. I’ll take that.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida on 20 December 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Update: Inconvenient typo in the headline fixed.
February 12, 2020
QotD: Experienced political operators after an unexpected paradigm shift
Look, take a just-now thing: the DNC says that all precincts in Iowa WERE counted. The app recorded every vote, they say. They just need to tally them.
Turns out that’s probably not precisely true.
As a friend noticed, that’s not precisely a lie, that’s just “making sh*t up.”
We’re seeing that a lot from the other side of the aisle suddenly. Unbelievably stupid behavior like the sham wow impeachment.
They keep telling us “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” and being shocked and appalled when we choose our lying eyes.
[…]
And then they’re shocked, nay astonished, when these tactics don’t work. While we who are standing outside this look at them and go “Who would think that would work? Some two year old?”
I mean half of the bizarre behavior of our government and its agencies falls under that heading too. “Who could think that would work/wouldn’t be found out/made any sense?”
But the thing you have to understand is that you’re not dealing with stupid people. Not by half. You’re dealing with people who were very competent and comfortable in — for lack of a better term — the previous paradigm of politics, or publishing or whatever.
The more comfortable they were; the easier it was for them, the harder it is to accept that it’s gone and it’s not coming back
For instance, the dems could trust the media would cover for them absolutely and completely, and that their pettiness, idiocy or outright corruption would never be revealed.
They got used to it, they got comfortable. They got to believing it was their natural right. It was just the way things were. They were the good people. Their hearts were pure. No one would ever look into their behavior outside the limelight.
If some psychological tests are correct, they grew to believe they were entitled to corruption and unethical behavior for all the “good” they did, such as Clinton thinking he was entitled to all the women he wanted for “fighting for women’s rights” (Which for men like him always mean abortion, but never mind.)
They can’t adapt. They can’t believe things have changed.
Sarah Hoyt, “How Things Have Always Been”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-02-09.
February 7, 2020
Modern day Kremlinology and show trials
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why the Soviet Union’s Moscow Trials were so important well outside the borders of the USSR:
Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Moscow Trials set the course of 20th century history. If you want to be a dictator in peacetime, this is pretty much how you have to do it — see e.g. every other Communist regime ever. The downside, though, is that you cost yourself a lot of irreplaceable technical expertise. I’m not saying Hitler would’ve called Barbarossa off if Stalin hadn’t purged all his generals — Hitler was, of course, crazy — but he surely would’ve thought twice about it, the plan relying as it did on the utter incompetence of the now-leaderless Red Army.
The show trials also gave birth to “Kremlinology”, the art and science of reading Soviet tea leaves to find out who’s really in charge. Stalin didn’t invent “elimination by promotion”, but he was a master of it. In Stalin’s USSR, being “promoted” to some big, important-sounding position was an all-but-guarantee that you’re going to get shot. Seemingly minor functionaries, on the other hand, really ran things in the countryside. E.g. Khrushchev, a Red Army commissar — not an unimportant position by any means, but hardly a glory post either. Stalin’s generals knew who he was, but few outside the Red Army’s high command did. And since Stalin liked to signal major policy shifts with articles in obscure publications — he once wrote an article on lingustics that previewed some huge change — you had to be very wired in to figure out who was really a comer.
Let’s imagine, then, that somehow the Moscow Show Trials failed. That Zinoviev, say, was acquitted, because (take your pick) he’d obviously been tortured, the charges were ludicrous, there was zero hard evidence against him, or any combination of the above. Stalin staked his entire position on the outcome of the Trials. What if he’d lost? How long do you think the Boss would’ve remained Boss? A few weeks? A few days? Hours, maybe?
Nancy Pelosi is no Stalin, of course, but whoever survives November’s electoral bloodbath had better start working on Secret Speech 2.0 the very second the last vote is counted. I was doubtful about the 2020 presidential election until they actually decided to show-trial Donald Trump. Since there’s no way in hell they’re going to get a 2/3 majority to vote to convict, the whole thing looks like not just a witch hunt, but a botched witch hunt. No one, not even Koba the Dread, is politically strong enough to survive one of those.
February 4, 2020
Andrew Sullivan – “Our fate was almost certainly cast as long ago as 1964 and 1965”
In his most recent New York magazine column, Andrew Sullivan reviews two new books on the same issues from different perspectives: Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement.
… both books agree on one central thing: Our fate was almost certainly cast as long ago as 1964 and 1965. Those years, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, saw the Civil Rights Act upend the Constitution of a uniquely liberal country in order to tackle the legacy of slavery and racism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act set in motion the creation of a far more racially and ethnically diverse and integrated society than anyone in human history had previously thought possible. Still, at the time, few believed that either shift would have huge, deep consequences in the long term. They were merely a modernization of American ideals: inclusivity, expansiveness, hope.
As someone who was born just before these two changes were instigated, I regarded those tectonic shifts as simply part of the landscape — something that seemed always to have been here. And what could be questioned about either? One was reversing a profound moral evil; the other was banishing racism from the immigration laws. No-brainers. The strongest resistance to civil rights came from former segregationists or obvious racists, and there was little resistance to the Immigration Act, because most in the congressional debate seemed to think it wouldn’t change anything much at all. (The House sponsor of the Immigration Act, as Caldwell notes, promised that “quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” while Ted Kennedy insisted: “The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”) There were a few dissenters to the 1964 Act, such as Robert Bork, who identified a significant erosion in the freedom of association. And there were southern senators who worried about immigrants from the developing world. But the resisters were easily dismissed on both counts, in the wake of LBJ’s 1964 landslide.
In fact, as Klein shows, a pivotal moment had arrived. The civil-rights movement quickly broke apart the old Democratic party, which had for decades combined the interests of blacks and southern whites into a single multiracial coalition. The result was a sorting of the two political parties into much purer vessels for their diverging ideologies, and into groupings that were also increasingly racially distinct. The GOP became whiter and whiter; the Democrats more and more became the party of the marginalized nonwhites as the years rolled by. Blacks and southern whites ceased to communicate directly within a single party, where compromises could be hammered out through internal wrangling. In the aggregate this was, as Klein emphasizes, a good thing — because blacks kept coming out the losers in those intraparty conversations, and with civil rights, they had a chance of winning in a clearer, less rigged, debate.
But it was also problematic because human beings are tribal, psychologically primed to recognize in-group and out-group before the frontal cortex gets a look-in. And so the whiter the GOP became, the whiter it got, and the more diverse the Democrats got. Simultaneously, the economy took a brutal toll on the very whites who were alienated by the culture’s shift toward racial equality, and then racial equity. Klein recognizes that this racial polarization, is, objectively, a problem for liberal democracy: “Our brains reflect deep evolutionary time, while our lives, for better and worse, are lived right now, in this moment.” So he can see the depth of the problem of tribalism — and its merging with partisanship, which goes on to create a megatribalism.
If humans simply cannot help their tribal instincts, then a truly multicultural democracy has a big challenge ahead of it. The emotions triggered are so primal, that conflict, rather than any form of common ground, can spiral into a grinding cold civil war. And you can’t legislate or educate this away. One fascinating study Klein quotes found that “priming white college students to think about the concept of white privilege led them to express more racial resentment in subsequent surveys.” Anti-racist indoctrination actually feeds racism. So tribalism deepens.
Klein sees this spiral more clearly than most on the left. He acknowledges the truth that in a period of extraordinary demographic and racial change — the U.S. is the first majority-white nation that will become majority nonwhite in human history — every group begins to feel like an oppressed minority. Including whites: “To the extent that it’s true that a loss of privilege feels like oppression, that feeling needs to be taken seriously, both because it’s real, and because, left to fester, it can be weaponized by demagogues and reactionaries.” And the truth is: It was left to fester. Whenever whites resisted ever-expanding concepts of civil rights or mass illegal and legal immigration, they were cast outside the arena of permissible disagreement, deemed racists, and stigmatized. Even the GOP scorned them. Eventually, Hillary Clinton named them: the deplorables. By 2016, plenty of Americans decided to embrace the label, and voted for Trump.
