Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt and His Massive Mountain of Failure

Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

When last we took notice of deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, Ken White at Popehat was examining the foul, offensive and, some might say, dangerously violent content of Schmalfeldt’s demented gibberish.

Gosh, it’s been nearly a month, hasn’t it?

Bill got so crazy at one point, there was concern he might need to take the short ride to Spring Grove with the nice men in white coats.

“What’s up with that weirdo?” people have occasionally asked.

Bill Schmalfeldt inserted himself into the Brett Kimberlin story on June 3, 2012, when Schmalfeldt started stalking Aaron Walker. Schmalfeldt subsequently extended his target list to include various persons who had defended Walker, particularly including Lee Stranahan, who listed several of the things Schmalfeldt did to him:

  • Made repeated, direct contact with me and members of my family via email & Twitter, demanding I answer his questions about his ‘investigation’ in me and my family
  • Continued this direct contact after being asked not to ; sometimes directed over 100 messages a day directly at us with questions for his ‘investigation’
  • Posted our personal information, including making a video of our address after a rape threat had been made by an associate of Mr. Schmalfeldt’s
  • Made constant sexual references about both my wife and I, including frequent mentions of our genitalia and fantasies about selling my wife and raping me
  • Tormented us about the death of our newborn daughter Collette
  • Posted photos of our children and contacted child protective services
  • Contacted over half a dozen law enforcement agencies when I wouldn’t answer the bizarre personal questions he would ask for his ‘investigations’
  • Attempted to get me fired, arrested & have my children taken from me
  • Contacted friends, family, business associates and even total strangers who spoke to me online

Therefore, Stranahan flew to Maryland and filed harassment charges against Schmalfeldt. The charges were, believe it or not, later dismissed. Beecause John Hoge had assisted Stranahan (by giving him a ride from the airport to the courthouse), however, Bill Schmalfeldt then turned his insane fury on Hoge. This continued until, on June 14, John Hoge won a peace order against Schmalfeldt, thus depriving Bill of his only joy in life, deranged cyberstalking.

Permit a brief digression: Bill Schmalfeldt cannot seem to distinguish between the First Amendment (your right to speak or write) and the Fifth Amendment (your right to remain silent). Deeming himself a journalist conducting an “investigation,” Schmalfeldt’s modus operandi was to make defamatory accusations in the form of questions — “Did you do heinous acts X, Y or Z?” — and then demand answers, claiming that his targets’ refusal to play along proved they were in fact guilty of X, Y and Z, insulting the person he claimed to be “investigating,” calling them cowards, etc., for not answering him. As I explained in April, “Harassment Is Not Journalism,” but I digress . . .

After Hoge won the peace order that forbade Schmalfeldt from contacting Hoge at all — not so much as a Twitter mention — Schmalfeldt’s mood seemed to oscillate wildly, alternating between depression and rage. John Hoge recounts a recent episode:

Bill Schmalfeldt seems to think that he is entitled to answers to questions that are really none of his business, and he gets all butthurt when we mere mortals don’t quickly tell him what he wants to hear.
The Cabin Boy has screwed up his pro se filings related to his appeal of the Hoge v. Schmalfeldt peace order. When this was pointed out by my lawyer in the Motion to Dismiss filed in reply to his motion for a stay, he accused her of lying in that motion. Now, he wants me to explain the whys and wherefores of the legal strategy to be employed to protect my interests against him.
No. I won’t do that. He will find that out in front of a judge, not on the Internet. Neither my counsel nor I have any obligation to help him continue to harass me. He can always ask Acme’s Legal Department for their advice.
Bill Schmalfeldt is, in my view, a criminal. He has been adjudicated a harasser, and I believe he has violated and continues to violate the peace order issued against him. That is a crime.
I don’t intend to help him. I do intend to make it through to the end of this process with my good humor intact.

Do I even need to explain this? Can’t everyone see how bizarre and persistent Bill Schmalfeldt’s obsessions are? All the court required him to do was leave John Hoge alone — and he can’t do it. Instead, Schmalfeldt violated the peace order even while attempting to pursue a legal appeal of the peace order, acting pro se (as his own attorney) believing that his right to harass Hoge was being infringed.

Bill Schmalfeldt seems to think we have forgotten why he’s doing this:

You can’t write about Brett Kimberlin, or Bill Schmalfeldt will “be investigating” you. Well, how’s that working out for you, Bill?

And while we’re at it, how’s that working out for Brett Kimberlin? Is he happy with all the services you have provided him, Bill?

My guess is that your lunatic incompetence makes you not particularly valuable, even as a deranged cyberstalker.




 

UPDATE: Oh, almost forgot to remind readers that Amazon sells popcorn — all different kinds of delicious popcorn.

Trust me, you’re going to want some tasty popcorn.

 

Blogs…And Stuff Like That

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Normally after sleeping through a Live At Five, I would just hang my head in shame until it was time to do the next one, but a lot of folks sent me links over the weekend and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to those links.


First Street Journal: Sacrificing Your Children For The Greater Good, #Syria: Bashar al-Assad Crossed That Red Line In The Sand, So President Obama Is Going To Smack The Back Of His Hand, and From Around The Blogroll.
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Jody Rosen Has White Privilege All Over His Face
The Right Scoop: Run Away!


And ripped from the pages of my Feedly:
Legal Insurrection: Kafkatrapping (h/t American Power)
American Thinker: The Democrat Moral Superiority Complex
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obama’s Foreign Policy Teleprompter Bloopers, also, Obamacare Watch: Happy Labor Day 2013!
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard – Labor Day Weekend Edition
Jammie Wearing Fools: Media Sleuths Crack Mysterious Cory Booker “T-Bone” Story
JustOneMinute: Afraid To Lead – The Man Who Would Be President Present
Pat Dollard: McCain Reproaches Kilmeade, Says ‘Allahu Akbar’ Not Necessarily Terrorist Slogan: Just Like ‘A Christian Saying Thank God’
Protein Wisdom: Everything New Is Old Again, Cont.
Shot In The Dark: Our Bitchy Overlords
The Jawa Report: Get Well, Jim
The Lonely Conservative: The Chuck Norris Chickenburger
Megan McArdle: Walmart vs. Costco III -Why My Critics Are Wrong
Chicks On The Right: Everything Is A Right, Everyone Deserves Everything, And Everything Should Be Free. I Think That About Sums This Up


Official Theme Song Of The Overdue Live At Five Post


A Few Words About Moderation And The Banhammer

— Wombat-socho

I’m going to keep this short, because there really isn’t much to be said, but it does need saying, especially after the messes some people made in the comments yesterday. First of all, much like Anonymous or /b/, I am not your private army. Don’t expect me to blacklist someone just on your say-so. There is exactly one person who gets to tell me who to whack and when, one R. Stacy McCain, owner and proprietor of this here blog. Secondly, I am not going to ban people for disagreeing with a post. We tolerate all sorts here, whether they are social conservatives, libertarians, godless Commies, pinko fellow travellers & “useful fools”, or just confused. Heck, even Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John is welcome to comment here. However, keep in mind that this blog is like Stacy’s living room, and it’s not okay to come in and take a dump on the carpet.

It’s also not okay to use foul language. I realize that some of the trolls are horrible people, who can barely string two words together without using obscenities, but this is no reason for you to descend to their level. If you’re that angry, maybe you need to get up from the keyboard, go have a beer (or six), and calm down. Because if you go over the line, I may extend you the courtesy of a warning – or not. Longevity in the commentariat is no defense. We used to have a guy named Knapp who would drop by and dispense pearls of libertarian wisdom before us religiously inclined swine, and one day I guess he got up on the wrong side of the bed and said some things he shouldn’t have in the comments. Now we don’t have Thomas Knapp to kick around any more. Would you like to be the next Thomas Knapp? I’m certainly willing to accommodate you, regardless of your political and religious inclinations. Are you listening, Mr. Finrod?

We do get people in here that don’t agree with Stacy, or me, or you. Sometimes they’re just trolls. Sometimes, like Amber, they seem to be sincere people that really don’t understand where we’re coming from. Be patient. Engage these people. Who knows, you might just talk one around to seeing the light. You’re sure not going to accomplish that by calling them a**holes and dykes. Rather, emulate Da Tech Guy, a true Christian, who reached out to andria_xx and offered some advice in the hope of redeeming that poor lost soul. Be like Pete.

 

 

ADDENDUM (by RSM): Ace of Spades did a long explanation about his own reasons for banning a certain “Billy Bob,” which boils down to this: Don’t disrespect your host’s hospitality. I had not been aware that Thomas Knapp got himself banned and, as I was offline Sunday attending my wife’s family reunion, I don’t know exactly why Wombat is brandishing the banhammer in the direction of Finrod.

My advice is, everybody should just chill the hell out.

 

Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite

Few are willing to admit the truth, namely that our cultural elite have abandoned the truth — but that is putting it too mildly.

Our cultural elite, of which the editors of the Washington Post and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are members, have not only abandoned the truth, but have declared war on truth, and have dedicated themselves to the advancement of falsehood.

People saw this coming and sounded a warning. Judith Reisman was one of them, and Robert Knight was another. In 2000, Knight published The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture, addressing the philosophical roots of our current mess. You should also read Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education by Philip E. Johnson.

Whether or not you follow my reading recommendations, the bottom line is this: Good luck with this “secular conservatism” thing.

It ain’t gonna work, and if the history of the past 10 years or so haven’t convinced you that embracing secularism is doom for conservatism — and, ultimately, for the American republic — I’m sure the next 10 years will, but by then there will be nothing left worth conserving. And we’re probably doomed already.

Paul Weyrich — he totally saw it. A nation that would let President Clinton lie his way through the Lewinsky scandal, and accept all those flimsy rationalizations in his defense . . . Doomed.

There was a sort of post-9/11 bubble of Republican popularity that lasted four or five years, but by 2006, that was completely gone. Then in 2008 somehow, that backstabbing crapweasel John McCain got the Republican nomination and . . . Doomed.

Well, the Tea Party uprising of 2009-2010 was encouraging, but then 2012 came along and, once again . . . Doomed.

How are you feeling about 2014, Republicans? What about 2016?

Exactly: Doomed.

Basically, the enemy got inside the perimeter. The bombardment of liberal propaganda convinced both the Republican Party elite and leading figures of the conservative intelligentsia that all those hillbilly Bible-thumpers were, on balance, a detriment to the GOP’s political prospects, so shut up, Sarah Palin, shut up Michele Bachmann, shut up Rick Santorum and anyone else who doesn’t applaud gay marriage as  enthusiastically as Rachel Maddow and Andrew Sullivan.

Way to go, Republican elite! You saved your reputation as sophisticated, tolerant, enlightened intellectuals and you are . . . Doomed.

The revolutionary turning point is now in your rear-view mirror, and you’re all Vichy Republicans, negotiating with the radical Left the terms of your collaboration with their progressive agenda. In November 2008, I explained where we were heading:

The Lawrence ruling was the culmination of what Justice Antonin Scalia called “a 17-year crusade” to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy statute) and, as Scalia noted in his dissent, the Court’s “emerging awareness” argument was a disingenuous way to avoid actually declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy. The legal effect was the same, however, and Lawrence was repeatedly cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision five months later mandating the legalization of gay marriage in that state. . . .
Gay activists do not construe their “rights” in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to — entirely analogous to and fungible with — traditional marriage.
Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists’ indignant demand for equality. . . .

You could read the whole thing — if you’re an ignorant hillbilly Bible-thumper like Justice Antonin Scalia. Perhaps you could also confront the reality that we have weighed anchor, sailed off into uncharted waters without a compass, and are now badly adrift in those regions of the ancient maps marked “Here Be Dragons.”

 

The Lawrence decision stopped just short of declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy, but they might as well have gone all the way (if you’ll pardon the phrase) because we see how Justice Kennedy struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act as though no law prior to the “emerging awareness” had any validity at all. In 2003, the Supreme Court decreed that Texas had no authority to prohibit sodomy. Ten years later, the Supreme Court decreed that Congress itself could not deny recognition to same-sex marriage, and anyone shocked by the hasty destruction of what Chief Justice Warren Burger called “millennia of moral teaching” — well, shut up, haters.

Family Terrorized as Michigan Teachers
Support Colleague Who Molested Boy

 

Girl Commits Suicide; Rapist
Teacher Gets Just 30 Days in Jail

Only one of these stories was important enough to gain national attention outside of the right-wing media. Why? Because in the Michigan case, the teacher molested a boy. It was a gay thing, and only Bible-thumping hillbillies are against male teachers having gay sex with 14-year-old boys. By contrast, the other case involved a man having sex with a 14-year-old girl, so feminists were upset.

Heard any feminist upset about Kaitlyn Hunt dildoing a 14-year-old? Of course not: Feminists are all about supporting teenage lesbians, and to hell with those hateful puritanical age-of-consent laws.

“It was a quiet ceremony. Elizabeth Miklosovic had an outdoor wedding in June 2004 in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, where the couple lit candles and exchanged vows. Miklosovic’s marriage lasted only a few months, however. Later that year, the mother of the bride found out that her daughter had, at age 13, become the lesbian ‘wife’ of Miklosovic, who had been the girl’s language arts teacher at Baseline Middle School in South Haven, Michigan. For some reason, state law did not recognize the legitimacy of Miklosovic’s pagan lesbian marriage, and she was convicted of felony sex offenses and sentenced to prison.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Sexual Anarchy: Progress, Perversion and the ‘Emerging Awareness’ Doctrine,” The American Spectator, June 26

Who knows whither the “emerging awareness” shall henceforth emerge? Certainly I can make no predictions, and it’s hard to imagine the series of court rulings or legislative action by which lesbian child brides could become a legal “right.” On the other hand, a lot of things that once were hard to imagine are happening every day of the week now. The Washington Post column defending student-teacher sex for instance, seemed like a tasteless joke:

All my current friends are 14-year-old girls. We have pool parties and sometimes we massage each other. . . .
Me and my 14-year-old jailbait posse are sick of society looking askance at our Forbidden Love.

No, that’s not from a Washington Post column, that’s Ace of Spades brutally mocking the column, which is funny as hell — the mockery, I mean, not the column itself, which is scary as hell, because editors had to approve that column, edit it, add a headline and put it on the page. And at no point during this process did any employee of the Washington Post look at that column and say, “Hey, wait a minute. This is not just badly written and badly argued, but it’s also grossly offensive and even arguably perverted.” Quoting myself again:

The world is full of idiots with bad ideas and the editors of the Washington Post are obligated to publish only the very worst of them. One cannot reform such institutions as the Washington Post and the New York Times, but can only pray for their well-deserved destruction, because their wicked depravity is not accidental.
The publishers are amoral monsters, their editors are active agents of evil, and their deliberate policy is to employ no honest or decent person. Nor could any honest or decent person ever wish to be associated with publications whose daily business is the destruction of Western civilization. A Christian would no more desire to be published by the Washington Post than to work in an abortion clinic or a bordello. It is a disgraceful stain on the conscience of our nation.

Of course, the editors of the Washington Post are totally pro-abortion — and probably also pro-prostitution, if the truth were known — so exactly why should they be offended by an argument in defense of teachers having sex with their 14-year-old students?

Sure, let’s make fun of the Washington Post, but their editors seriously believe that a woman’s most important “right” is killing her own babies, and if people can believe that, what immoral monstrosity won’t they endorse? At some point, Republicans must either summon the courage to speak the truth — sorry, we’re not going to call you “Chelsea Manning,” you despicable traitor — or else stop pretending that they have any actual disagreements with Democrats.

Do Reince Priebus or John Boehner or Mitch McConnell have any plan at all to halt this headlong descent into lawless perversion?

“Children are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with adults. Pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society. Sex with kids is tainted by a “cultural baggage of wrongfulness.”

People need to wake the hell up.

This Weimar decadence is very bad. What comes after the decadence is likely to be worse, and if you listen closely you can almost hear the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Weird to get a ‘lanche four years after I published this, but today I searched for when I first used the sentence, “People need to wake the hell up,” and here were are, eh? The election of Donald Trump, the recent street violence involving white supremacists and left-wing “antifa” radicals — yes, it seems my prophetic warnings from 2013 are being fulfilled.

A nation that has abandoned religion and morality (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”) must sooner or later pay the price for its decadence, although it’s difficult to predict what form the consequences might take. For example, why should sexual deviance give rise to racial hostility? This connection doesn’t seem obvious, but nevertheless the perversity that flourished in Weimar Germany was followed by the ascent of a Nazi regime that murdered not only Jews, but also Poles, gypsies and other “untermenschen.” While it seems unlikely that any such thing could happen in America, who can predict the future? Just a few years ago, did anyone expect we’d be confronted in 2017 with transgenderism as a “mainstream” issue? When you’re off the map and deep into the “Here Be Dragons” territory, it’s hard to know what to expect next.



 

Studying the Master: @AceOfSpadesHQ Brings His Blogging A-Game, Again

Aficionados of Blog-Fu will some day recall Thursday’s AOSHQ beatdown of Slate the way boxing fans remember Clay-Liston:

Slate, the Amateur Online Webzine
Specializing in Hit-Trolling and
Outrage-Fishing: First of a Series

 

Slate, the Group Blog That
Troll-Baits With Provocative Stupidity:
Second in a Series

 

Slate, The Blog That Trolls Its
Own Readers, Last in a Series

What he’s pointing out is that the “counterintuitive”-style article, or the rant that deliberately takes aim at conventional sensibilities in a cheeky pseudo-iconoclastic fashion, is just trolling for reaction, rather than doing anything intellectually valid or useful.

This has become as cliché as the BuzzFeed cute-kitty slideshow or the Think Progress look-at-this-stupid-thing-a-Republican-said outrage piece. (Partisan oppo-research as “investigative journalism.”)

Producers of this assembly-line erzatz intellectualism know their intended readership, and there is a certain art to producing their stuff, in the same way that Brill Building songwriters required skill to crank out a reliable commercial product. But it’s lightweight, and any pretension to seriousness is like the Monkees when they tried to rebel against Don Kirschner and prove that they were a “real” band.

Uh, no. No, not really. No, not at all.

Slate has not yet descended to the level of Salon.com, but it has definitely begun slouching toward Middlebrow, except that one could make a (counterintuitive!) defense of 20th-century Middlebrow literature as something better than any of the cheap dreck being cranked out by Matthew Yglesias, et al., in the Obama era.

Notice how Ace goes from calling Slate an “Amateur Online Webzine” to calling it a “Group Blog,” then just “Blog,” because this is what the folks who market Slate don’t want to admit: This low-investment, don’t-have-to-pick-up-the-phone, just-pull-it-out-of-my-ass stuff isn’t any more legitimate as capital-J Journalism than anything published by scores of people who are Just Bloggers.

Publishing blogs under a “magazine” banner doesn’t make you any better than anybody else, and if institutions of capital-J Journalism can’t do any better than this lame crap, they deserve to fail.

Where Ace really nails it is deep into the third post, where he describes Slate as “something that once sort of tried to pretend to be a ‘smart’ alternative to real media.” DING! DING! DING!

Maybe our nostalgic fondness for Michael Kinsley-era Slate is like most other nostalgic fondness for things that always seem better in memory than they actual were at the time. Counter-intuitively, however, I want to claim that the decline of Slate is quite real.

These kids are just so lazy or, in the case of Allison Benedikt, so hopelessly ignorant that they are incapable of good writing.

Also, it’s much more Team Player these days, isn’t it? Grant that Slate has always been a liberal publication, but hyper-partisanship — by God, epistemic closure! — has warped the whole project. Maybe the tedious predictability of Slate’s political slant is a marketing strategy, but this is now an editorial team so completely trapped inside such an ideological bubble that it’s not even interesting liberalism.

Maybe they know what they’re doing, in terms of a business model, and are satisfied with their readership trends. Whatever.

Not a damned thing Slate has published in recent memory, however, is as good as Ace’s thermonuclear destruction of Allison Benedikt.

A true classic, Ace. Integrity like Paul Fucking Anka.

 


Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That.

OK, so a Puerto Rican guy kidnapped and raped girls in Cleveland and everybody reported about that case, and not once do I remember anyone arguing that Ariel Castro’s crimes, or the reporting about his crimes, had any specifically racial context. Everybody was just horrified by it, and nobody said either (a) that Puerto Rican guys are particularly prone to chaining up kidnapped girls in their rape dungeons, or (b) that reporting about Ariel Castro was motivated by deliberate racist fearmongering to demonize Puerto Ricans.

Why, then, is there some kind of score-keeping about crime involving blacks and whites? Why can’t we all just get along — and worry about those crazy Puerto Rican rapist kidnappers?

Also, dildo-wielding lesbian cheerleaders, but I digress . . .

Brian Beutler’s shoddy assertion that he knows the Secret Motives of those who have reported about black-on-white crime — and these are, of course, evil racist right-wing motives — mistakes the reaction for the action. That is to say, if there is some kind of backlash going on here, to what is it a backlash, and is it justified? And if Beutler would care to explain why the original action (i.e., relentless wall-to-wall media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case) was justified, he’ll find himself hard-pressed to refute those who argue that a reaction is equally justified, if not more so, by quite similar arguments. This is not an argument about race. It’s an argument about media bias.

The correct conservative argument is that liberal media hyped up and deliberately distorted the Trayvon Martin case because it was an election year and an apparently juicy story about racism and gun control was a nice way to exploit black grievances against whitey. Let’s be honest: If you’re a black person who thinks The Man is keepin’ you down, you’re not going to vote for Mitt Romney, and so Trayvon Martin became a Democrat Party voter-turnout poster child.

There, I said it: This was just Democrats playing ugly partisan politics.

Democrats have never recognized any standard of decorum, civility, decency or honesty in political rhetoric, and the fact that they would exploit a shooting in Florida this way surprises no one who has paid attention to American politics.  (Fact: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was, “He Kept Us Out of War”; less than a year after he was re-elected, America went to war.)

Democrats are just goddamned liars. The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.

When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.

All of this was motivated by James Taranto’s defense of colorblindness, including a strategic disagreement with Ann Althouse:

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts “to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case” by “looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions.”
She thinks this is a terrible mistake . . .

Althouse’s argument includes the assertion that reporting about black crime “gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.”

Whoa! Hold on there, Professor: Are you saying you know such people? Have you reported these dangerous haters to the Department of Homeland Security? Oh, wait, never mind . . .

Here’s Professor Althouse’s headline: “The conservatives’ high ground on race is colorblindness, and they’d be fools to abandon it.”

And who can argue with that?

Yet the fact remains that Democrats mopped the floor with the GOP last year by exploiting all manner of transparently false appeals (“War on Women,” anybody?) aimed at special-interest groups that compose the Democrat constituency. Because the liberal media enthusiastically promote the Democrat Party’s agitprop campaigns, however, it is very difficult to persuade the targets of such appeals that these partisan lies are not simply “the news.”

For crying out loud, no Republican could get elected in the South for an entire century because Democrats had folks convinced that voting Republican would be a disgrace to the Heroic Cause of the Glorious Dead. (BTW, “Confederate” is the new talking point.)

Go ask any Democrat voter — black, white, male, female, whatever — why they voted to re-elect Obama. And good luck getting any rational explanation of how voting Democrat has actually made life better for themselves or their community.

(Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?)

It is an undeniable fact of American political life that any precinct that votes overwhelmingly Democrat is typically composed of either (a) affluent white elites, or (b) the most wretchedly poor minority populations in the nation. Somebody’s getting screwed over in that deal, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t the rich white folks.

Whatever your problem is, “vote Democrat” is never the solution.

If you suffer from such low self-esteem that it makes you feel better to have a bunch of rich white liberals throw a year-round pity party for you, you’re going to get just about as much actual help as you deserve, which is to say, none at all.

So I’ll leave Professor Althouse to worry about whether those white supremacists are getting “air” from the daily news. Instead I’m going to focus on the goddamned Democrats and their hired liars in the media who have never said an honest word in their lives.

 

Your Semi-Official Obama vs. Syria Armageddon Predictions Thread

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

We’re supposed to start bombing the crap out of Damascus sometime soon, because President Obama has managed to make this imperative to U.S. credibility, and you know Dear Leader has gotten himself into a bad spot when Alan Colmes goes on Fox News and denounces the president in such strong terms that if any Republican had said it, they’d be the subject of a special alert from Media Matters.

 

Does anybody remember “The War of Monica’s Thong“?

In 1999, a few weeks after the Senate voted to acquit President Clinton for “high crimes and misdemeanors” — of which he was clearly guilty — Clinton suddenly decided that he’d had it up to here with Slobodan Milosevich. So NATO started bombing the crap out of the Serbs.

This was arguably the worst use of U.S. military force since the Spanish-American War, with “genocide” replacing “Remember the Maine” as the battle cry. Of course, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia had been raging for years, Milosevich’s brutality wasn’t exactly a recent development and we were, objectively, fighting in defense of a Muslim insurgency, with the Kosovo Liberation Army as al-Qaeda’s Balkan front. Because the Serbs had traditionally been Russia’s allies, the bombing campaign against Belgrade also had the effect of alienating Russia, which had been a potential ally in the post-Soviet era.

Our involvement was directly contrary to our own national interest, but because Clinton was eager to regain the prestige he had lost in the year-long Lewinsky ordeal, this “humanitarian” intervention was suddenly deemed necessary by the Commander-in-Chief.

Bad wars fought by bad presidents for bad reasons are not exactly a novelty in American history, and the long-term consequences of these spasms of politically motivated militarism are never good. While Clinton was bombing Serbs on behalf of Kosovar Muslims, their terrorist allies were already planning what became 9/11, but good luck getting Alan Colmes to admit that Clinton’s “Wag the Dog” distractions and other errors made America vulnerable to al-Qaeda.

However, Alan Colmes has had the wisdom to condemn the upcoming Syrian intervention in advance, and we should be grateful for that, rather than complaining about past errors.

The Assad regime is a murderous totalitarian nightmare, supported openly by Iran and supported tacitly by Russia and China. However, the Assad regime’s insurgent enemies are Islamic extremists with connections to al-Qaeda, and if these Syrian insurgents aren’t committing genocide, it’s only because they’re too busy trying to overthrow the current genocidal regime. Does any honest person doubt that Assad’s enemies would be as bad as (or worse than) Assad if they were to succeed in overthrowing him? Which is not to say anything in favor of a dictator using nerve gas against civilians, but at least now we know what happened to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, eh?

Still, enlisting the United States as al-Qaeda’s de facto air force is bad policy, and it will predictably have bad consequences.

The specific consequences may be impossible to predict, but we know for sure the consequences will be bad.

My hunch is that Iran will respond to U.S. attacks on Syria by launching its own attacks against Israel. Probably rocket attacks from Gaza, but maybe also a wave of suicide bombings. Israel will feel the need to retaliate, so I’ll go out on a limb here and bet that the IDF decides it’s finally time to destroy the Iranian nuclear threat.

Remember, our president is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which means World War III is always a distinct possibility.

Place your bets, gentlemen. My money’s on “Biblical Apocalypse.”

 

FAQ You, Seriously

— Wombat-socho

1. Where did all these book posts start coming from?

We’ve had them here at The Other McCain for a while, as you can see by clicking on the “Books” tag at the bottom of this post. Stacy reads a lot, I read a lot, and Smitty likewise is a big fan of the printed word. Every so often we run across something we think you ought to read or might like to read, and a book post results.

2. How come you’re reviewing all this Buck Rogers stuff?

To paraphrase Gahan Wilson, I review what I read, and most of what I read these days is science fiction because to be honest, most mainstream fiction is depressing crap written to please the leftist mandarins of the New York publishing houses. Also, as a number of folks have pointed out, if you want to avoid socialist/multiculti/prognazi crap, your best option is to read science fiction, especially if it’s published by a certain publishing house. Also also, judging from all the comments, people seem to like it. Finally, in case you hadn’t noticed, science fiction, comic book and fantasy fans won the culture wars back in the 1980s. Suck it up, buttercup.

3. Why didn’t you include [insert book title and/or author here] in your post?

There may be a couple of reasons. I may not have read the book (or the author), and in that case I’m not going to write about it since I’d rather be silent than pop off with something that makes it obvious I have no idea what I’m talking about. I may not have included it because it’s not pertinent to the week’s topic. (All you people who complained that Starship Troopers wasn’t mentioned in “Space Opera”, I’m looking at you.) Finally, I may simply have forgotten, as was the case with A. Bertram Chandler’s most excellent John Grimes stories. Here, try To the Galactic Rim.

4. But you left out [award-winning book/author]!

Again, I may not have read it. It’s also possible that I read it and thought it was crap, and since I’m talking about books I liked that I think you might like, I’m going to leave it out. If you liked it, great. Blogs are free; go write your own book post on one.

5. Hi, I’m J. Random Scrivener, Esq., and I just wrote my first self-published SF novel. Would you review it?

Why not? Send me a copy and we’ll see if I like it. After reading these weekly book posts for the last month or so, you should have some idea of what my tastes run to, so if your debut novel is trying to do for Star Trek what Fifty Shades of Grey did for Twilight , then please spare both of us the embarrassment.

6. I can’t believe you included [book title] in that post. That book was awful!

Sorry you didn’t like it. Here, I have some more books you probably won’t like either.

7. I can’t believe you included [author] in that post. He’s an awful, chigger-hating, faggot-burning, gun-fondling, heterosexist Neanderthal!

Yes. That’s part of the reason I find him entertaining and follow him on Facebook. Are you sure you’re at the right blog?

8. I like what you’re doing with these book posts, and want to encourage you to continue your fine work.

Thank you, it’s good to hear that. You can provide encouragement (and help support my addictions to protein bars, SF novels and Chick-Fil-A) by buying stuff through the Amazon links scattered throughout these posts. You’re already going to buy the stuff, why not do it here and give me a taste in the process? I’d be much obliged.

And that’s about all the questions I thought needed answering. Now, we have some books that people mentioned in the comments to last week’s post. Mind you, I haven’t read these myself, but most of the readers here at The Other McCain are sensible folk with good taste, so the odds are good you’re not going to be stuck reading some horrendous piece of krep.

Lots of folks waxed enthusiastic about Peter F. Hamilton, especially his Night’s Dawn Trilogy and Confederation Saga. Here’s The Reality Dysfunction from the former and Pandora’s Star from the latter. Also mentioned in this connection was Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space.

Other series mentioned were David Feintuch’s Seafort Saga (starting with Midshipman’s Hope), David Drake’s RCN novels (With the Lightnings – free on the Kindle!), Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (Heir to the Empire). John Ringo’s Live Free or Die got a mention, and since who says A must say B, we also need to mention Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness. Also also, Star Trek: The Complete Original Series, Babylon 5: The Complete Seasons, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Complete Series


There’ll probably be another book post later in the week, when I figure out what I want to do it on.