Category: Democrats

A Little Salt For The Democrat Gash

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

This blog was a huge Christine O’Donnell booster, back when. No regrets. But one can’t let this fact pass un-touted, emphasis mine:

The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state. Of course she had a much more impressive resume than O’Donnell, with less witchcraft and real political experience, and in that sense she made a more credible candidate overall. (Though, ahem, O’Donnell actually outperformed Davis at the polls in the end …)

Hat tip: Instapundit

And @AlecMacGillis Misses the Bus

Posted on Comments

To quote what I said Wednesday:

The aftermath of a wave election always involves a contest by partisans and pundits to seize control of the narrative, to tell us What It Really Means, although usually the truth can only be known with the advantage of hindsight.

When Democrats sustain a world-historic ass-kicking, as they did Tuesday, a certain quality of unreality in the post-election spin is predictable. The demise of the Democrats’ moderate “Blue Dog” wing means that the party now has few if any sane adherents, and thus liberal journalists trying to explain the devastation of Democrats in the mid-terms are not apt to recognize the symptoms of madness.

Democrats Didn’t Lose Governor’s Races
Because of a GOP Wave. They Lost
Because of Bad Candidates.

So says Alec MacGillis of the New Republic, but it’s difficult to say that this is a distinction that matters, even if it were true. MacGillis talks about the Maryland governor’s race, in which Democrat Anthony Brown was defeated by Republican Larry Hogan:

[E]very single voter I spoke with Tuesday — including several who voted for Barack Obama — at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.
The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian . . .
Yet everyone I spoke with cited it as the crowning example of the nickel-and-diming taxing regime under O’Malley that also includes the $60-per-year “flush tax” to upgrade sewage treatment plants and higher taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and gas. “The rain tax was the last straw,” said Mike Eline, 64, who does pest control at the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore. “How many taxes can there possibly be?” “It seems any reason they can, they say, ‘let’s tax the people,’” said Daniel, a 63-year-old African-American warehouse worker. “What really upsets me is the rain tax. Rain is something natural that’s just given to us. Nobody has to work for it. But they say, ‘let’s tax it.’”

Permit me to say that when a black Democrat in Baltimore — a bastion of Democrat loyalism, where Nancy Pelosi’s father was once boss of the notoriously corrupt political machine — can see the problem with his party’s policies, they’ve probably pushed it too far.

How is this inconsistent with the claim of a “GOP wave”? It’s not.

In fact, it’s the key to understanding the wave that MacGillis imagines himself to be disproving. The swelling progressive momentum of the Obama Age made Democrats believe they had reached the Promised Land and could enact bad policies without political consequence. No matter how high they raised taxes, no matter how onerous the regulatory regime, no matter how extreme the Democrat Party’s policy agenda, they could never lose — and then they did.

At the national level, pundits and triumphant Republicans are pointing to Republican Larry Hogan’s win over Brown in Maryland as the ultimate evidence of the 2014 anti-Democratic wave. Not only did Republicans win Senate seats in red and purple states, the claim goes, but they won governorships in true-blue Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois as well.
I’m skeptical of that claim. No doubt, disaffection and low turnout among core Democratic voters hurt the party’s gubernatorial candidates in blue states as it did Senate candidates in red and purple ones. And anti-Washington, anti-Obama sentiment certainly played a role in the GOP’s Senate takeover. But to explain why some Democratic gubernatorial candidates lost in blue states while others (such as Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island, Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado) managed to hang on, one really needs to take into account the state and local context of the races. . . .

You can read the whole thing, and see how MacGillis is employing psychological defense mechanisms — denial, rationalization, minimizing, smokescreening — one would expect to encounter in a family therapy session where the husband has been caught in adultery but wants to avoid personal responsibility for his wrongs. That makes MacGillis the co-dependent wife who is actually enabling her husband’s wrongful behavior. “How’s that working out for ya?”

WAKE UP, LIBERAL MEDIA! You are not helping Democrats by trying to convince Democrats they don’t have a problem. You are being manipulated by a narcissistic sociopath named Barack Obama.

It was as if he didnt lose the Senate, around 14 House seats, blue State Gov races that he campaigned for, and lots of State legislatures.
Condensed version:
People want us to work together.
People want us to get stuff done.
I’ll listen to whatever ideas are out there, as long as they are in agreement with me.
Minimum wage
Greatest economy in the world
Infrastructure
Executive action on illegal immigration
Willing to improve ObamaCare, just not in ways they might want to.
Minimum wage
Illegal immigration
I increased oil production
Budget
Get stuff done
This sums it up quite nicely.

 

Racism, Classism and Catcalling (or, #Feminism Is for Rich White Lesbians)

Posted on Comments

Time for a little of what feminists call “intersectionality.” A video went viral in which a woman walking on New York City streets is catcalled or subjected to what feminists call “street harassment.”

Allahpundit analyzes both the video and the phenomenon in terms of why do men do this? Before we address the particulars of that question, however, shouldn’t we first ask, who does this?

It’s a racist production about white women
not wanting attention from black and Latino men.
“The video also unintentionally makes another point, that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, ‘The racial politics of the video are f–ked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?’” . . .
What makes these catcalls offensive isn’t that they come from men. It’s that they come from low-status men. Like an unconsented kiss from President Obama, if the catcalls came from George Clooney there’d be much less female outrage.
In fact, maybe these catcalls are a way of striking back at privilege.

One of the ways I offend people — sometimes accidentally, but usually on purpose — is by calling attention to things which are true, but which we aren’t supposed to notice. In the 21st century, it is difficult to tell where courtesy ends and political correctness begins, and there are more and more Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say.

The Left’s long-standing criticism of American culture (from the disciples of Herbert Marcuse, et al.) is that, supposedly, we are repressed, uptight and inauthentic because of our puritanical Anglo-Christian heritage. What went unexamined in the “Magic Negro” controversy (when Rush Limbaugh was excoriated as a racist for quoting a liberal commentary about Obama) was that black people have been used in popular culture as symbols of authenticity because of a sort of inferiority complex among white liberals. (Shelby Steele’s White Guilt is a useful introduction to this phenomenon.) Some WASPs grow up with the feeling that they have no real culture, or that their own culture is actually the cause of the world’s woes — the Genocidal White Capitalists Raping the Planet meme — and never recover from that deficit.

Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say: English-speaking white people are the only Americans who are denied a right to ethnic pride.

There, I said it. Sue me.

You might believe, if you were an unthinking consumer of what is taught in the government education system, that before the arrival of a wave of Irish immigrants fleeing the 19th-century Potato Famine, that the United States was a vast Evil Hate Machine. But then came the Irish (sanctified by their victimhood), followed by the wave of Ellis Island immigrants (Italians, Jews, etc.) and, through their shared experience of suffering inflicted by the Evil Hate Machine, these non-WASP Americans — with the help of their  loyal mascot-sidekicks, The Negroes — achieved the dream of A More Perfect Union.

In other words . . . VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say: What is taught as “history” in the government education system is, in fact, a propaganda narrative indistinguishable from the liberal orthodoxy of the Democrat Party.

This orthodoxy extends privilege (yeah, I speak academese quite fluently) to the descendants of Catholics, Jews and other non-WASP immigrants, a sort of “Get Out of Whiteness Free” card, so they can exonerate themselves from the genocidal atrocity narrative of the American founding: “We didn’t exterminate the Native Americans!  We did not enslave African-Americans! My great-great grandfather was [insert Immigrant Nationality here] who came here with nothing! My ancestors were victims of the Evil Hate Machine, too!”

You’re welcome, non-WASP Americans. My WASP ancestors did all that for you, so you could feel superior to me. Glad to help.

The Democrat Coalition and Its Contradictions

The Liberal Narrative of American History, you see, originated in the political rhetoric of urban Democrats in the 1920s, who  assembled a pan-ethnic coalition in places like Chicago, Boston and New York by appealing to the interests (and prejudices) of the Irish, Italians, the Jews and other immigrant groups. “Vote Democrat,” the Irish Catholic in Boston was told, “and we’ll take money and power from those rich Yankee snobs and give it to you!”

In an era when All Politics Was Local — when there was no cable TV or Internet to call attention to these narrowly tailored partisan messages — the Catholic in Boston or the Jew in New York was unaware that, simultaneously, the Ku Klux Klan was campaigning in the Midwest with a different message. “Vote Democrat,” the Indiana farmer was told, “and we’ll do something about those Jews and Catholics and Negroes who are destroying The American Way of Life!”

From that kind of dishonest two-faced hateful divisiveness, the Democrat Party constructed the Great Liberal Consensus that elected FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ. During a span of 36 years (1933-69) Democrats controlled the White House for 28 years, interrupted only by the eight-year presidency of WWII hero Dwight Eisenhower, whose liberal “Modern Republicanism” was the chief target of William F. Buckley Jr.’s ire in the 1950s. (If you’ve never read Buckley’s 1959 classic Up From Liberalism, you should buy it immediately.)

The Great Liberal Consensus was self-contradicting nonsense that produced bad policy and, when it finally unraveled during the debacle of LBJ’s doomstruck presidency, the liberal intelligentsia were thrown into a state of permanent crisis from which they have never fully recovered. Behind their facade of hubristic liberal arrogance, Our Moral Superiors (as I have dubbed this intellectual elite) are deeply afraid that, at any moment, Americans will see through the Fog of Phony Bullshit from which Democrat electoral majorities are built.

We are “anti-intellectual,” you see, if we refuse to accept at face value The Liberal Narrative of American History we have been taught by the government education system. There should be a sign in front of every public school in America: “Vote Democrat, Because the Teachers Union Needs More Money and Power.” The hypocritical self-interest of government employees supporting the Party of More Government is another one of those Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say, but if you want to know why public schools are more interested in teaching liberal attitudes than teaching facts and skills, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure it out.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

We have been indoctrinated, all of us, and recovering from that indoctrination is a process, rather than an event. Once you start noticing the Fog of Phony Bullshit, you become skeptical of the narrative, and the Democrat Party mythos of ethnos is one of the most obvious elements of that narrative: There are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!”

From that long but necessary digression, we return to the topic: A white woman targeted for “street harassment” by predominately black and Latino men on the streets of New York City.

VOTE DEMOCRAT!

C’mon, isn’t that the message of this viral video? “Vote Democrat,” the white woman is told, “and we’ll protect you from the patriarchal oppression of the objectifying Male Gaze.”

The implicit assumption of the Democrat Party’s “War on Women” meme is that the sexist misogyny by which all women are allegedly victimized is officially endorsed by The Republican Party. Never mind the fact — as the viral video ironically demonstrated — that women’s victimization is quite often perpetrated by constituencies of the Democrat Party coalition. Feminism is a left-wing political ideology that serves the partisan interests of the Democrat Party and, when feminists aren’t busy offering to provide oral sex to Democrat men, they are busy accusing Republicans of being The Party of Rape.

It does not really matter whether you are male or female, black or white, straight or gay. The only thing liberals really care about is whether you vote Democrat, because the liberal’s sense of self-esteem is dependent on his belief that, by voting Democrat and encouraging you to do likewise, he proves himself worthy as one of Our Moral Superiors. (Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed explains this brilliantly.)

Androgynous Units of the 21st Century

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my two cents on the multicultural diversity of the New York City street harassers in the viral video: Males who have not been subjected to elite indoctrination in universities, and who have no direct investment in the bureaucratic regime of the suit-and-tie office job workplace, have not learned to be ashamed of their heterosexuality.

College education and professional careers in the 21st century require men to learn that women are oppressed by male sexual interest. The anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of feminism — Fear and Loathing of the Penis — has acquired hegemonic institutional authority in the elite culture of academia. We are no longer permitted to believe that men and women are different, or that their differences have any natural function. We are all supposed to be Ungendered Androgynous Units, except insofar as males are inferior to females, and if you are a normal male who has normal attitudes toward normal females, this makes you part of the heteronormative patriarchy.

It is astonishing how deeply some men have internalized this totalitarian feminist anti-male hate propaganda. A properly indoctrinated male nowadays must believe that merely to notice female beauty, to feel sexual desire toward women in a normal way, or to praise women in their roles as wives and mothers, is to participate in misogynistic oppression. Indeed, the properly indoctrinated male feels a duty to denounce you as a sexist if you merely point out that feminism is an anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology. The belief system of lesbian Marxist baby-killers must never be questioned and, if a popular feminist celebrity is also an admitted child molester, well, how dare you call attention to that fact?

Outside the hyper-politicized precincts where feminist orthodoxy exercises hegemonic control, however, there are still males who have not yet been properly indoctrinated. They dropped out of high school or they couldn’t afford to go college. Maybe they joined the Army or got a muscle-and-sweat job where Doing the Work mattered more than Having the Correct Attitude. Or maybe, as seems to be the case of the lower-class New York City men featured in the viral video, they just accepted their liberal-endorsed status as Authentic Victims and haven’t bothered to wonder if there is anything wrong with their way of life.

One way or another, these men are not invested in the bureaucratic system within which feminist orthodoxy is uncontested. So when they see a good-looking woman, they react.

They are not repressed. They are not ashamed to be male. Their basic animal sexuality doesn’t cause them any psychic conflict.

And I can totally relate to those brothers.

Back in the day, my man Bobby “The Hamp” Shearer and I used to discuss the great social issue of our mutual interest, Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

See, Bobby played football at Homewood High and his mother was a respectable middle-class school teacher. I was the product of an at least equally respectable socioeconomic background. By the time we got to college, however, we were both renegade outlaws. Let me tell you, buddy, we were on the hunt, and in the late 1970s it was Open Season.

Bobby and I became friends as the result of an incident in a biology class our freshman year, when somebody managed to steal the teacher’s copy of the mid-term exam, so that class was adjourned and the test was delayed. At the Copper Penny pub (drinking age was 19 then in Alabama, but we all had fake IDs), Bobby told me he had been in on the test-stealing conspiracy and, as we laughed about the aftermath over beers, the topic of conversation drifted to Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

There was, at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University back in the day, a very clear social hierarchy. Atop this status pyramid were the Varsity Athletes, the Rich Frat Boys and their Hot Sorority Girlfriends. There was also the Baptist Campus Ministry — at that time, the largest student organization on campus — where Nice Boys and Nice Girls congregated and socialized. Then there was the Marching Southerners Band and its female auxiliary, the Marching Ballerinas. However, almost without exception, the Marching Ballerinas were also Hot Sorority Girlfriends, so that the ordinary male band geek had zero chance of scoring with a Marching Ballerina. (Of course, many male band geeks were gay, so the not-scoring-with-Marching-Ballerinas factor didn’t bother them.) And so it was that Bobby and I found ourselves in the situation of renegade outlaws, on the hunt, trying to figure out how to get Our Fair Share of That Action on a state university campus where a substantial majority of the target population (and nearly all the really prime commodity) was off-limits to us for one reason or another.

Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Bobby’s problem as a black guy in Alabama during the long governorship of the Honorable George Corley Wallace was obvious enough, while my situation as a skinny long-haired rock-and-roll white boy was such that Bobby the Hamp and I had a lot in common.

The Objectivity of Renegade Outlaws

We were both profoundly antisocial, you see. Did I mention I used to be a Democrat? Never mind. The point is, Bobby and I shared a disrespectful attitude toward the status quo, and this became the basis of a friendship and many deep discussions about race and culture and, of course, Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Renegade outlaws have an objectivity about the system of social status that any Ph.D. would envy. When I talk about the psychology of crime, I speak with the authority of experience, unless it behooves me to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. I was multicultural and intersectional before it was cool and it so happened that Bobby the Hamp and I had a common interest but different aptitudes.

For some reason, I attracted a certain type of girl, usually named Donna or Tammy, who liked my Bad Boy Clown persona (and my skinny ass) and who hoped that I might be harnessed into the Acceptable Boyfriend role — not that her mother would approve of me, but her mother could be required to accept me. On the other hand, Bobby had remarkable success in playing the role of Latter-Day Mandingo to certain Hot Sorority Girls who felt an occasional urge to defy (quite secretly) the regnant social expectations of northeast Alabama during the long governorship of the Honorable George Corley Wallace.

Me and the Hamp, we knew the score, see? Beneath the veneer of respectable conformity, all kinds of things were happening back in the day — Things We Weren’t Allowed to Say, but the truth was suppressed then for different reasons than it is suppressed now.

Too stubbornly proud to tug the forelock to Our Moral Superiors, I never once played the “Some of My Best Friends” card when hypocritical white liberals accused me of racism. Nor did I play the  “Some of My Best Friends” card vis-a-vis accusations of sexism and homophobia, because I was never going to let those bastards have the satisfaction of forcing me to defend myself except on my terms, as it fit my own purposes and sense of personal honor. People who actually know me, my real-life friends, know who I am and what I believe, and no self-appointed Arbiter of Political Acceptability is ever going to intimidate me into silence.

No shame in my game, see, and it isn’t my job to justify or defend how dudes in New York City play their game. Feminists can go find those guys and dox them — publish their names and home addresses, please — so we can find out whether they’re registered to vote as Democrats or Republicans, and let the chips fall where they may. What the feminists want, however, is to convince women that somehow “street harassment” is a function of the heteronormative patriarchy, and the only way to fight it is (a) vote Democrat, (b) become a lesbian, or preferably (c) become a lesbian feminist Democrat.

Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Hey, sweetheart: Don’t try to run that three-card monte game on me. Before you can demand from me a denunciation of New York City street harassers, you’ll first have to provide me with proof of your personal moral superiority, by which you claim the right to make such a demand. If it suits my interest to respond to your imperious demand, I might answer by saying that if (a) the First Amendment protects the right of Lena Dunham to show her ugly naked ass in every episode of Girls, then (b) the street harasser has a First Amendment right to express his admiration of a genuinely attractive woman. Note the “if . . . might” hypothetical structure of that sentence, darling, because if you want to have an abstract intellectual conversation, I’ll be happy to converse. However, you don’t actually want to have a conversation — certainly not an equal conversation — what you want to do is to make me into a Symbolic Scapegoat and say, “There! See? A white male heterosexual Republican said something sexist! Vote Democrat!”

What part of “fuck you” is so hard for you liberals to understand?

These hypocritical hate-hustling Democrats think they can get away with running the same hustle over and over again, because the rest of us are too dumb to figure out we’re being hustled.

Once their hustle has been busted, however, they have to move their crooked game to the other side of town and try it again. So now their familiar game — “Vote Democrat, Because Whoever You Hate, We Hate Them, Too” — is targeted at a new audience of chumps. Herman Cain once wrote a book called They Think You’re Stupid, the title of which is a perfect four-word summary of the Democrat Party’s basic strategy. And, hey, you can’t argue with success. After 214 years of lies, corruption and bad policy, Democrats are still open for business.

You want to talk about hate? When rich white lesbians start telling women to vote Democrat because of “street harassment,” while at the same time refusing to denounce a celebrity pervert like Lena Dunham for diddling her own sister, you may fairly accuse me of hating that kind of shameless hypocrisy. But unless or until these feminists prove to me that they actually are Our Moral Superiors, they have no right to make any demands of me, or you, or any ordinary law-abiding American citizen trying to get along in the real world.

Don’t let yourself get hustled. And if you’re ever in Homewood, tell Bobby “The Hamp” Shearer his old buddy Spacey Stacy says hello.





 

The Externalization of Responsibility: Monica Lewinsky’s Personal Shame

Posted on Comments

Today’s headlines via Drudge:

Monica Lewinsky: I was ‘in love’
with President Clinton
— New York Post

Monica Lewinsky: Drudge Ruined My Life
— Truth Revolt

This raises a subject long overdue for discussion. The Internet is merely a tool — a very powerful tool, but still just a tool. For Monica Lewinsky to depict herself as “Patient Zero” in an epidemic of “cyberbullying,” as she has done, inspires several questions: Was she genuinely a victim? What does the phrase “cyberbullying” mean? How innocent must a victim be, in order for their victimhood to be genuine? In the context of online disputes like #GamerGate, how do we determine who is the victim and who is the bully? Is it possible that our prejudices, including the set of prejudices we call “political correctness,” may prevent us from accurately assessing responsibility for these conflicts?

Here’s the thing: Monica Lewinsky committed perjury.

Perjury is a crime and a very harmful crime. President Clinton’s personal attorney, Vernon Jordan, prepared a perjurious affidavit, which Clinton certainly knew to be false, and Monica Lewinsky signed that affidavit knowing it to be false. The purpose of that perjured affidavit was to deny justice to Paula Jones, who had filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexually harassing her. Clinton’s harassment was a violation of Jones’s rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and Jones, as the plaintiff, was entitled to true testimony from Lewinsky, who had been subpoenaed to testify in order to establish (as courts have determined harassment plaintiffs may do) that Clinton’s behavior toward Jones was part of a pattern of behavior by the defendant.

Instead of providing truthful testimony, Monica Lewinsky lied.

She perjured herself by signing that false affidavit and, in doing so, became part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, to deny Paula Jones the remedy prescribed by law. Whatever we think about the concept of “sexual harassment” and the 1991 law that enabled Jones’s lawsuit, the law is the law. And both plaintiffs and defendants in lawsuits have a right to truthful testimony. Your sympathy for one of the parties in the suit cannot justify your lying under oath as a witness in an attempt to “help” them. Perjury is a crime, and conspiracy to obstruct justice is also a crime. It is possible that Monica Lewinsky did not understand the full legal consequences of her crimes, but (a) she damned sure knew she was lying, and (b) Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School, who was subsequently disbarred as a result of his own admitted perjury in the Jones v. Clinton case.

Because this is a very important story, it’s important to get it right.

We cannot allow the media to propagate myths about history, and Monica Lewinsky’s attempt to re-write her own part in recent history — to depict herself as a victim of cyberbullying, rather than as a criminal perjurer who attempted to deny justice to Paula Jones — should not be shrugged off or treated as one-day humorous punch line.

Because readers will want to comment on this story, I’m going to go ahead and hit “publish” and then come back to extend this little essay and aggregate reaction from other commentators.

 

 

UPDATE: How quickly we have forgotten the truth! Does anyone else remember that Clinton tried to claim that, once he became president, he could not be the defendant in a lawsuit for torts he had allegedly committed prior to taking that office? The Supreme Court ruled unanimously — 9-to-0 — in the landmark 1997 Clinton v. Jones decision that the president enjoyed no such immunity.

Also, have we forgotten how the Democrat-Media Complex, including Clinton henchman James Carville, viciously defamed Kenneth Starr, depicting that honorable man as the Torquemada of a 20th-century Inquisition simply for carrying out the duties of his office?

“[Ken Starr is] a sex-obsessed person who’s out to get the president. . . . He’s concerned about three things: sex, sex, and more sex. . . . It’s about sex. . . . [Starr] plants a story, he goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing waters of the Potomac go by, and we are going to wash all the sodomites and fornicators out of town.”
— James Carville, quoted in The Death of Outrage by Bill Bennett (1998)

Well, yes, Mr. Carville: A sexual harassment suit is necessarily “about sex,” and it was a Democrat-controlled Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, under which Paula Jones brought her federal lawsuit against the man who harassed her. Your attempt to change the subject, to portray Ken Starr as “sex-obsessed” and make him the scapegoated villain in the story, was dishonest in the extreme, sir.

You are a liar, Mr. Carville, and Bill Clinton is a liar, and if you think honest people cannot see what a reprehensibly dishonest creep you are, you have another think coming.

Everyone who assisted Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal — everyone who tried to exculpate that guilty liar — covered themselves in immortal shame. After all was said and done, and Bill Clinton settled out of court with Paula Jones, paying her $850,000, that worthless son of a bitch’s hired liars kept lying on his behalf:

Robert S. Bennett, Clinton’s chief attorney in the case, said the president still insists Jones’s allegations of a crude proposition in a Little Rock hotel suite seven years ago “are baseless” but agreed to make the payment in the interest of finally putting the matter behind him.
“The president has decided he is not prepared to spend one more hour on this matter,” Bennett said. “It is clear that the American people want their president and Congress to focus on the problems that they were elected to solve. This is a step in that direction.”

All decent and honest people must recoil in horror at the way in which Democrats and their media allies, in their politically motivated project of covering up Clinton’s guilt, relentlessly smeared Paula Jones, Ken Starr and everyone else who told the truth about Clinton.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Carville and the rest of you hired liars on Team Hillary: Do you think honest people will believe that Monica Lewinsky’s timely emergence, with this carefully scripted tale of her “victimhood,” was merely a coincidence?

Like I said, you have another think coming.

You want to try and re-write history? OK, I’m going to invite readers to study the true history of the Lewinsky scandal. OK, I’m going to direct them to Bill Bennett’s book The Death of Outrage and to the official “Starr Report” of the investigation.

What part of “fuck you” don’t you understand, Mr. Carville?

 

 

UPDATE II: Have we forgotten how “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” has become a very wealthy woman as a result of her victimhood?

Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose affair with then-President Bill Clinton paralyzed the nation, has been shopping a memoir for several weeks, and according to the New York Post, she has apparently sold it for $12 million to an unnamed publisher. . . . Lewinsky . . . already cooperated with celebrity gossipmonger Andrew Morton for a 1999 book called Monica’s Story . . .

Yeah, here’s another book you should read:

 

 

No One Left to Lie To, by the late Christopher Hitchens. Welcome to the Internet, which is the enemy of lying cocksuckers.

The phrase “lying cocksucker” applies literally to Monica Lewinsky, and also to many in the media, literally or metaphorically.

UPDATE III: Readers will please forgive my use of Anglo-Saxon words to describe these lying cocksuckers, but “mendacious fellatio performers” doesn’t have quite the same rhetorical force. There is something admirably powerful about plain English words when we are speaking the truth about a lying cocksucker like Monica Lewinsky:

Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, a 22-year-old intern in the White House — and more than averagely romantic — I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.

(The “22-year-old sort of way” that people fall in love, she wants us to know, involves [a] fellatio, and [b] mendacity.)

It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States. That probably happens less often.
Now, I deeply regret it for many reasons.

(Including the many millions of dollars in my bank account.)

Not the least of which is that people were hurt. And that’s never okay.
But back then, in 1995, we started an affair that lasted, on and off, for two years. And, at that time, it was my everything. That, I guess you could say, was the golden bubble part for me; the nice part.

(Lying and sucking cock? “The nice part”! She’s still a Democrat, you see.)

The nasty part was that it became public. Public with a vengeance.

(Because she perjured herself.)

Thanks to the internet and a website that at the time, was scarcely known outside of Washington DC but a website most of us know today called the Drudge Report.

(Reminder: Drudge got the story because Newsweek magazine spiked the story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. As a result of this — the Newsweek spike and then Drudge learning about the spiked story — there were days of media speculation until, on Jan. 21, 1998, the Washington Post finally broke the story on their front page. But yeah, Monica, you just keep on blaming it all on Drudge, you lying cocksucker. Don’t even mention Paula Jones or your own perjury.)

Within 24 hours I became a public figure, not just in the United States but around the entire globe. As far as major news stories were concerned, this was the very first time that the traditional media was usurped by the Internet.

(“Usurped” is a word that has a definition, an actual meaning. To “usurp” is to acquire authority wrongfully. What actually happened, as opposed to what the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky wants you to think happened, is that “the traditional media” had for many years been abusing their authority, so that as soon as the Internet permitted others to challenge that authority, the authority of  “the traditional media” was exposed as illegitimate. There was a revolution against “the traditional media,” which forfeited its authority by using its authority in wrongful and dishonest ways. We now return you to the self-serving victimhood mythology of the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky.)

In 1998, as you can imagine, there was a media frenzy. Even though it was pre-Google, (that’s right, pre-Google). The World Wide Web (as we called it back then) was already a big part of life.
Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero.
The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet. . . .
This is what my world looked like: I was threatened in various ways. First, with an FBI sting in a shopping mall. It was just like you see in the movies. Imagine, one minute I was waiting to meet a friend in the food court and the next I realized she had set me up, as two FBI agents flashed their badges at me.
Immediately following, in a nearby hotel room, I was threatened with up to 27 years in jail for denying the affair in an affidavit and other alleged crimes. Twenty-seven years. When you’re only 24 yourself, that’s a long time.

Dispensing with the italic fisking format — you can go read the entire dishonest transcript — let me note how Monica Lewinsky has transposed events and, in the process, shifted responsibility.

She was the one who (a) sucked the cock of the President and (b) lied about her cocksucking in a false affidavit, which was intended (c) to deny justice to Paula Jones, a previous victim of Clinton’s predatory sexual habits, and (d) secure for Monica Lewinsky the assistance of Vernon Jordan and others in providing her, the lying cocksucker, with employment in New York City. As I recall, there was both a quid (“sign this false affidavit”) and a quo (“we’ll get a job with Revlon, whose CEO is a Friend of Bill”), but as always in such situations, it was difficult to prove the “pro” part of this quid pro quo arrangement.

Without checking the timeline of the scandal, I distinctly remember (because I was involved in editing daily news coverage at that time) how the revelation of the Revlon job in New York and Vernon Jordan’s role as Clinton’s personal “fixer” brought into stark relief exactly how the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine operated.

The object of the game, in  Ms. Lewinsky’s case, was (a) to get her out of Washington, D.C., (b) to put her in a respectable job where she didn’t feel disgruntled and could tell friends it was a step up from her White House gig, and (c) thereby to provide her with a plausible pretext for claiming, in her perjurious affidavit, that her duties at her new job in New York made it impossible for her to appear and be deposed as a witness in the federal lawsuit Jones v. Clinton.

This was the game. Everyone following the story at the time could see why it had been crucial for the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine to get Monica out of D.C., because if Paula Jones’s lawyers had gotten the opportunity to depose her in person, they were prepared to confront her with sufficient evidence to force her to admit the truth about her relationship with Clinton. Remember, testimony about Clinton’s predatory sexual habits was being sought by Jones’s lawyers as evidence that what happened to her was part of his pattern of behavior, and one key element of this pattern — i.e., Clinton’s preferring to have women perform fellatio, as opposed to normal intercourse — clearly could have been confirmed by Monica, if she had been willing to tell the truth under oath. Instead, she signed that perjurious affidavit and took that cushy job at Revlon headquarters in New York. Quid pro quo.

And also quod erat demonstrandum, you lying cocksucker.

UPDATE IV: In the comments:

Sworn to secrecy, she only told 11 people (including an erstwhile squeeze, one of her high school teachers who was 33 years old and had been married right along).

People forget so much so quickly, don’t they? Bill Clinton wasn’t the first married man Monica Lewinsky had sex with and, indeed, her own narcissistic compulsion to tell people about her sexual exploits was the proximate cause of her becoming a public figure:

Monica Lewinsky’s former high school drama instructor said yesterday that he had a long-running affair with her that began in 1992 during her college years in Portland, Ore., and continued until last year, throughout much of the time she reportedly has alleged she had an intimate relationship with President Clinton.
In an account questioning Lewinsky’s credibility, Andy J. Bleiler, 32, said through an attorney that Lewinsky had called him as often as four or five times a day after coming to Washington in 1995 as a White House intern, and that she talked obsessively about sex, including boasts that she was involved in a sexual relationship with a “high ranking White House official.”
Standing beside Bleiler and his wife at a news conference outside their home in Portland, attorney Terry Giles said the Bleilers “would both describe Monica as having a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.”

So, Lewinsky’s former teacher (and former adulterous lover) says she has “a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.” Did I mention she’s a Democrat?

UPDATE V: Let’s talk more about this quote:

“I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.
It happens.”

Does anyone else notice the helpless passivity — “It happens” — with which Monica Lewinsky attempts to deny her own agency?

If you study psychology, you know that good mental health is characterized by a sense of personal agency, that is to say, a psychologically healthy person thinks of himself as the agent, the active force in his own life. He is in charge, he is “the subject of the sentence,” as it were. Even though unpleasant or unfortunate things may happen to anyone, people with healthy minds do not think of themselves as helpless, passive objects to whom things merely “happen.”

A healthy-minded person, finding himself in a predicament for which he is not responsible, immediately thinks: “What can I do? What are my options? How can I exercise agency and regain control over my own destiny, rather than to allow the continuation of this circumstance in which others are exercising control over me?”

This sense of agency requires an ability to look at your situation objectively and, if you are unable to obtain that objectivity, it impairs your ability to learn from your mistakes. Here is the thing: It is very common for people to find themselves in a situation where, in some sense, things seem to “happen” to them through no fault of their own. However, in such a case, it becomes necessary to ask yourself, “What did I do, or fail to do, which has made me vulnerable this way?”

Problem: Your job is a stress-inducing nightmare. You are underpaid and treated poorly. Your boss is a jerk, and your good work is repeatedly sabotaged by a handful of selfish, lazy and dishonest co-workers who are envious of your superior ability. No matter how hard you work, or how clearly you explain the problem to your boss, the mistreatment does not end. As a matter of fact, your assessment of the problem and attempts to rectify the situation are counted again you. You’re labeled a “troublemaker,” and the people who are actually causing the problem (who for reasons of seniority or favoritism or company policy are in some sense protected) escape the consequences of their sabotage. Never mind the harm their sabotage does to you, personally, but by impairing your ability to do your job, these selfish and dishonest co-workers are doing harm to the company’s productive efficiency.
Solution: Quit.

It’s really that simple. The only reason those sons of bitches are able to make your working life a Hell on Earth is because you let them do it.

If you’re not willing to quit — just tender your resignation and walk out the door — then you are choosing to continue the problem. There are few situations in life where we are truly helpless, except where we have put ourselves into a bad situation by our own unwise choices.

Considering the lifelong series of bad choices that preceded Monica Lewinsky’s alleged “victimhood,” she has no legitimate cause to complain. Jeff Dunetz at Truth Revolt:

Ms. Lewinsky wasn’t a victim of cyber-bullying; she was a victim of having sexual relations with a person at or near the peak of power. She became news just as Donna Rice, Elizabeth Ray, Fanne Foxe and many others had before her.
Matt Drudge didn’t ruin her life just the same way that the Miami Herald did not ruin Donna Rice’s life. Drudge simply reported a huge news story.
If she wants to place the blame for the personal attacks she received, Ms. Lewinsky would be better served to look toward the “Clinton Machine,” whose history of destroying reputations is well-documented.

You hit the nail squarely on the head, Jeff: Monica Lewinsky deliberately chose to associate herself with people who were (and still are) dangerously dishonest and cruelly unscrupulous. If you lie down with Democrats, you’ll wake up with corruption.

UPDATE VI: Because there is other news happening on which I wish to comment, I will wrap this up. Here’s the point: Monica Lewinsky was/is externalizing responsibility for her problems.

This is a classic symptom of the narcissistic personality. A narcissist will ruin his own life and, rather than recognize his own self-harm, will irrationally transfer blame to a scapegoat.

Pick up a psychology textbook and look up “defense mechanisms” or “rationalization.” Nobody likes to admit error. Nobody wants to recognize their own worst tendencies. However, if we cannot be objective about our problems, we can never solve our problems. It is difficult, and perhaps in some ways impossible, to be objective about yourself. But if you find yourself in a bad situation that seems to resemble the last bad situation you were in, and if you keep finding yourself in similar situations, you have to recognize that you are a major cause of your own problems. In other words, it’s not them, it’s you.

Earth to Monica Lewinsky: You have a wounded ego.

This is the key to understanding narcissism. Somehow, narcissists suffered an injury to their ego, so that they are unable to cope with negative feedback. They cannot accept that they are wrong, because they can’t handle the shame. By contrast, a healthy person understands the sense of shame as useful feedback. If you feel ashamed of your action, this is a clue you did the wrong thing. If you are merely feeling tempted to do the wrong thing, your sense of shame at your wrongful urge is also a good thing. The narcissist, however, cannot cope with shame because their ego is damaged. And so, in an attempt to defend itself against criticism, the narcissistic ego begins to engage in rationalization, including blameshifting, minimizing and scapegoating.

Irresponsibility and narcissism go hand in hand. So the narcissist will blame-shift (transferring agency for their wrongful action to others), the narcissist will minimize (diminishing the harmfulness of their wrongdoing) and the narcissist will scapegoat, magnifying the harm (perhaps wholly imaginary) done to them by someone (perhaps entirely innocent) in order to justify their own irrational anger.

The narcissist’s choice of scapegoat is always significant. Consider, for example, Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews. What happened to Hitler was that he applied to the academy of art in Vienna and was rejected. Hitler inarguably had some artistic talent. However, he applied to the Vienna academy at a time in the early 20th century when “Modern Art” was all the rage, and it happened that Jews (including some members of the Vienna academy) were very much involved in the Modern Art trend. Now, there was a pre-existing tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany, and there was also a pre-existing tradition of romantic nationalism in Germany. However, the crucial factor was Hitler’s damaged ego. He had apparently developed at an early age a grandiose concept of himself (a classic narcissistic overcompensation for the damaged ego), and had invested this grandiosity into his artistic ambition. Being thwarted in that ambition because of his rejection by the Vienna academy, he blamed Jews for his failure, and spent many years thereafter developing his paranoid conspiratorial anti-Semitic ideas into an all-encompassing worldview. At the root of the problem was not the Jews, of course.

The root of the problem was Hitler and his damaged ego, his inability to accept his failure. Hitler could not cope with this shame — the sense of unworthiness which his rejection by the Vienna academy caused him — and his grandiose messianic dreams of becoming a World-Historic Leader made him the most infamous case of narcissistic personality disorder in history. Hitler’s entire career from the 1920s onward could be seen as a classic revenge gesture of the thwarted narcissist who, failing to get what he wants, decides to vindicate himself by a grandiose act of destruction. This quest for vindication, you see, is necessary for the narcissist to prove to himself that he was wronged, cheated out of what was rightfully his, so as to exculpate himself for his own failure and thus purge the stigma of shame.

Obviously, Monica Lewinsky is not Hitler. But she is doing the same minimizing/scapegoating thing, trying to vindicate herself, to evade responsibility for her own disgrace, and to make Matt Drudge and the Internet the scapegoat in this mythical drama she’s scripting for herself.

It’s sad to see people do this, and it would be even sadder if, with such an example as Monica Lewinsky in front of us, we did not take the opportunity to learn the lesson of her sad fate.





 

UPDATE VII: OK, just a couple more final points:

  1. I didn’t make clear the difference between blame-shifting and scapegoating. Blame-shifting is a defensive move, to avoid responsibility for your failure by saying others are actually at fault (or, at least, more at fault than you are). Scapegoating is an offensive move, turning someone else into a target of your vindictive rage. The scapegoat becomes, in the mind of the narcissist, a hated symbol of the wrong which (in the narcissist’s unhealthy ego-damaged mind) he has suffered. Think about a guy who cheats on his girlfriend, who then breaks up with him. The guy blame-shifts (saying that the girl he cheated with was actually at fault for his cheating), but if he then becomes obsessed with the ex-girlfriend who broke up with him, she’s the scapegoat. She hasn’t done anything wrong, except in the mind of the narcissist who scapegoats her. However, in many cases, the targeted scapegoat has little or nothing to do with the narcissist’s rage. In the throes of his irrational paranoia (which is often a side-effect of narcissism out of control) the thwarted narcissist may focus his rage on utterly innocent people. Rodger Elliott’s shooting spree in Santa Barbara was such a case. The people he shot had done him no wrong, but in his twisted mind, they were symbolically to blame.
  2. Notice how Monica Lewinsky can’t distinguish between “falling in love” (i.e., a subjective emotion) and the wrongful acts of sucking the president’s cock and committing perjury? Unhealthy minds are impulsive in this way. Their actions are out of control and irrational because the damaged ego produces such strong emotion that the person feels they must act on these emotions. Monica’s fixation/obsession with “The Big He” (as she nicknamed Clinton) is a typically symptomatic trait of the damaged ego. Their emotions run out of control and become fixed on some object — a person, an idea, an ambition, an activity — and the obvious dangers of their irrational behavior are ignored.

Exit question: Why are crazy people usually Democrats?

 

#WendyDavisWontSay If She Reads TheOtherMcCain, But The Pelosi-Esque Visage Is A Probable ‘No’

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Dork-Shaming Hunter Biden After Dismissal From Navy Reserve For Blow

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Son of Uncle Choo-Choo does a fine job of covering the Administration with glory:

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.
Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.

As a retired Reservist myself, allow me to guffaw. I mean, the only more phoned-in position going today is Amateur Golfer With Occasional Presidential Cameos. This is especially true with the Biden family tradition of plagiarism. He could be a Fareed Zakaria understudy par excellence.

Mr. Biden, 44 years old, decided to pursue military service relatively late, beginning the direct-commission process to become a public-affairs officer in the Navy Reserve in 2012. Because of his age—43 when he was to be commissioned—he needed a waiver to join the Navy. He received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Military officials say such drug waivers aren’t uncommon.

So this dork gets this commission handed to him–I was retired from the Reserves by the time I was 44 (just sayin’) and he can’t even bother to put down the nose candy and take the job seriously? Why was he even wasting everyone’s time, anyway? Did he want to get some cool duds to wear when trying to impress the girls?

Mr. Biden was commissioned as an ensign on May 7, 2013, and assigned to Navy Public Affairs Support Element East in Norfolk, Va., a reserve unit, according to the Navy. In June 2013, after reporting to his unit in Norfolk, he was given a drug test, which turned up positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Biden was discharged in February, the Navy said.

I mean: dude. You couldn’t lay off the nose candy for 48 hours prior to your First. Drill. Weekend? That is precisely the sort of fine moral example needed. . .by a country that really wants to get its clock cleaned in its next military engagement. I have no experiential clue about cocaine, never having done anything heavier than get drunk (almost two decades ago) or burn a cuban while deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. But, seriously: what were you thinking?

Mr. Biden said in a statement that it was “the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

Forward to what, you schmuck? The Ukraine?

I believe that my assistance in consulting the company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.

Also: blow.
And there’s this other gig, mentioned at the bottom of the WSJ piece:

Now, Mr. Biden is a managing partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment company. He also serves as chairman of World Food Program USA, which calls itself “a humanitarian agency fighting hunger in the world today,” and he is an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University.

‘Adjunct Assistant Professor‘, eh? In just what worldly wisdom would Wankerness wallow?

MSFS-586 The Art of Advocacy Inside & Outside of Government
Spring for 2014-2015
Biden, Hunter & Norton, Robert
This course examines how advocacy influences political leaders and other stakeholders responsible for shaping international policy for managing global crisis and conflict. The course uses a case format to study examples of advocacy in five real world situations. The objective is to build a pragmatic understanding of the impact of advocacy on policy and the management of complex global problems, including famine, health pandemics war, and environmental disaster. The class will include interactive class discussions with policymakers and advocates who played principal roles in each case. The course will build practical skills, including: the ability to identify, evaluate, and formulate effective advocacy strategies and tactics; and the ability to develop common practitioner tools, such as concise briefing and messaging materials used in advocacy initiatives. Key requirements include a reading for each case, preparation of a discussion guide for one case study (to be completed in teams), a concise one page advocacy briefing memo for each case, and a short final paper.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None

According to Wikipedia, Hunter is married. So one can presume that, should he be showing up for more than collecting a paycheck, it’s not just to cruise for chicks. I’m sure he’ll swap a few anecdotes, maybe talk about the great blow you can get in various foreign lands. It’s all so 1%.

There really is only one way to “move forward” for this piece of work:

Hunter Biden 2016

All the academic chops of #OccupyResoluteDesk, but now with Military Experience. And blow! 

Texas Lesbian Democrat Reveals Her Party’s Anti-Christian Agenda

Posted on Comments

Texas Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in recent memory, and it’s becoming obvious why they have no hope in the future:

Earlier this year [Houston Mayor Annise] Parker, a Democrat, spearheaded the passage of an “Equal Rights Ordinance” (ERO) that added “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the city’s non-discrimination provision, which includes, among other things, “public accommodations” — for example, restrooms. Citizens, among them church leaders, balked. They launched a referendum petition that, with the requisite 17,269 signatures, would require the city council to repeal the ERO, or to put the measure up for a vote. They obtained 55,000 signatures. The city secretary, who has sole responsibility for certifying such petitions, signed off.
Enter Houston city attorney David Feldman, who, with no legal authority, disqualified 38,000 signatures. Names that were printed, rather than written in cursive, were discarded; names that were written in cursive were considered illegible — just enough names to get the petition below the 17,000-signature requirement, at which point the city council and Mayor Parker rejected it. And several citizens sued.
But the city’s shenanigans had only just begun. Unsatisfied with violating the rights of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the City of Houston has subpoenaed privileged communications of five pastors (none of them party to the lawsuit) who helped to organize the petition drive. Among other information, the city is requesting communications between the pastors and their attorneys pertaining to the ERO lawsuit, communications between the pastors and their congregants, and even the pastors’ sermons. . . .

You can read the whole thing and see how, in the post-Windsor era, Democrats have decided that “equality” automatically voids every right guaranteed by the First Amendment: Opposition to the radical agenda is now effectively illegal, according to the Supreme Court’s 2013 Windsor decision as interpreted by Democrats. More details:

A subpoena on Pastor Steve Riggle, senior pastor of Grace Community Church, asks for “all speeches, presentations, or sermons related to [the equal rights ordinance], the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.”
Alliance Defending Freedom, a national conservative legal group, filed a motion on Monday in Harris County district court objecting to the records request on First Amendment grounds.
“City council members are supposed to be public servants, not ‘Big Brother’ overlords who will tolerate no dissent or challenge,” ADF senior legal counsel Erik Stanley said. “In this case, they have embarked upon a witch-hunt, and we are asking the court to put a stop to it.”

This has legal ramifications far beyond Houston, and is by no means limited to the issue of same-sex marriage. What you see, if you look at this in a larger legal and cultural context, is that liberals have decided the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment trumps everything else in the Constitution or in Anglo-American common-law tradition, and that there is no protection whatsoever to those who oppose the “emerging awareness” doctrine proclaimed by the Supreme Court in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case.

Christians in Texas are not going to surrender without a fight, and every Democrat in Texas ought to be held accountable for what radical Democrats led by Annise Parker are doing in Houston. Every Democrat in the state should be publicly challenged by Republicans either to endorse Mayor Parker’s extremist agenda, or else to denounce it. And every Texas Democrat who claims to oppose Mayor Parker’s agenda should then be called upon to condemn any Texas Democrat who supports Mayor Parker’s agenda. It is high time, you see, that “moderate Democrats” stop pretending to be moderates, because the Democrat Party is not a moderate party.

Mayor Parker’s radical agenda is the agenda of the Democrat Party, not only in Houston, not only in Texas, but everywhere. The sooner Democrats are forced to admit this, the sooner the American people can decide whether they want to follow the Democrat Party down this highway to hell that Democrats are paving at taxpayer expense.

 

Obama’s Failed Presidency

Posted on Comments

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

A disaster, a catastrophe, a cataclysm:

“I want to make government cool again,” he said.
Obama believed in government, and he was confident that his election would signal that the American people were ready to believe again, too.
As we approach the sixth anniversary of his election, the Obama presidency is in tatters. Obama’s policies, foreign and domestic, are widely seen as failed or failing. His approval rating is near its lowest point. Obama’s base of support is loyal and fierce and shrinking. Much of the country sees him as incompetent or untrustworthy, and government, far from being “cool,” is a joke on good days and a threat on bad ones.

Read the rest by Stephen F. Hayes. The problem is not unique to Obama. He’s just Jimmy Carter with more charisma.

The seldom-recognized fact is, liberalism is a wholly destructive force. People who speak of liberalism’s “successes” generally refuse to acknowledge that liberalism only “succeeds” in destroying things, or by cannibalizing pre-existing assets and spending borrowed money. Take for example, Social Security. It began with a 1% employee “contribution” and a 1% payroll tax. Now the Social Security tax is seven times as much, yet the program is hurtling toward bankruptcy, an endless fiscal nightmare. “Success!”

To what shall we compare liberalism? It’s like the ne’er-do-well son who has become addicted to heroin, and America is the prosperous family home which the liberal junkie is steadily robbing blind. Dad comes home from the office and the junkie son says, “Here, Dad, I bought you some Social Security.” Dad thanks him and then says, “Hey, what happened to my big screen TV?”

The junkie shrugs. Dad’s power tools go missing, then Mom’s jewelry, but the indulgent parents don’t want to admit the problem.

Neither does America want to admit its liberalism problem. Go back and look at the LBJ administration. LBJ promised us a “Great Society,” but all he did was destroy a Pretty Good Society. Whatever was wrong with America in 1963, it certainly wasn’t as bad as the hopeless mess LBJ left it in when Richard Nixon took office in 1969.

Yet even as liberalism destroys America, it creates constituencies dependent on a continuation of this destructive process. Entire states have been bought off by the Democrats: “Outside of a handful of states–California (49/48), New York (50/47), Massachusetts (50/47), Maryland, which benefits from the D.C. boom (56/43) — the numbers are brutal. Even blue states like Minnesota (40/57) and Oregon (44/54) have had it with Obama. And in his last redoubts, California et al., Obama is not much more than breaking even.”

College kids think Obama is awesome, but they’re prone to weird beliefs.

Race riots in St. Louis? There’s your “Hope and Change”!

How do you like it now?