Category: Democrats

A Seattle Lesbian Awakens From ‘Woke’

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Katie Herzog explains the catastrophic failure of the Left:

“Woke” — for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter — indicates, roughly, that one is enlightened to the social causes of the day. You believe black lives matter (or you believe it enough to put a sign in the window of the palatial $1.5 million townhouse you just built in the Central District); you unequivocally support the #MeToo movement; and you would never, ever, ever, ever vote for Donald Trump (although you might vote for Jill Stein, which is basically the same thing). “Woke” may have entered internet consciousness in the last few years, but according to the invaluable internet resource Know Your Meme, “The earliest known instance of the ‘woke’ as slang for political or social awareness comes from an article in the New York Times Magazine. On May 20, 1962, the Times published a piece on white beatniks appropriating black culture by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley entitled ‘If You’re Woke, You Dig It.’” Woke, today, is still being appropriated by white people, plenty of whom will happily tell you, if you’re not woke, you’re trash . . . .
Progressives used to be able to handle dissent. The Democrats were the party of free speech and free thought. No more. Among far too many leftists, if you disagree, you are wrong. And if you are wrong, you are bad, and if you are bad, you are trash. . . .
You don’t learn much if everyone around you believes — or professes to believe — the exact same thing as you do, and if we don’t expose ourselves to a diversity of opinions, we are never going to get out our self-imposed echo chambers. These echo chambers didn’t just bring us President Donald Trump, they brought us a liberal establishment so unable to see and believe that other people actually liked the f–ker, that we all laughed at his candidacy instead of taking it as the very real threat that it was all along.
The world is falling apart around us, and we—liberals, progressive, leftists, whatever you want to call us—are too busy fighting with each other to actually do anything concrete about it, even though we agree on most of the big, important issues.

Herzog has awakened from “woke,” as it were, because she found herself attacked by her progressive comrades for Thoughtcrime. She has disagreed with transgender activists and defended Aziz Ansari, among other examples of her political incorrectness. Independent thinking by members of official victim groups — women, racial minorities, homosexuals — is dangerous to the Left because dissent undermines the identity-politics illusion of solidarity against the white heterosexual males who allegedly oppress everyone else. In the 21st century, belief in the pervasive evil of heterosexual white men has become the organizing principle of the Democrat Party, its raison d’être. To suggest to a Democrat in 2018 that perhaps this fathomless contempt for white males is misguided, or that not every member of an official victim group is suffering from oppression, is to commit a sort of political heresy, like denying the existence of witchcraft in 17th-century Salem.

Democrats have become vendors of ethnic outrage, gender resentment and economic envy, with no other commodity to provide voters in the political marketplace. Because everyone inside the cult of social justice is fanatically devoted to this zero-sum-game mentality, there is a constant competition among Democrats to strike a “more progressive than thou” posture and, as Professor Reynolds says, “when sanctimony is your only coin, people will try to accumulate it.” Sooner or later, however, intelligent people wise up to the hustle. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, many who had cast their lot with the party of victimhood may realize how badly they have been hoodwinked and bamboozled.

 

Trump Offers Amnesty Deal; Democrats Immediately Reject ‘Hardline’ Proposal

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When the news first leaked out that President Trump was offering Democrats an immigration deal with amnesty for 1.8 million “Dreamers,” conservatives reacted with dismay, because we had once again underestimated Trump’s political genius. As Ed Driscoll has remarked, “Trump’s ability to drive his opponents round the bend is one of his best assets,” and the Democrats responded predictably:

Democrats and outside progressive groups are quickly panning an immigration framework from President Trump as a nonstarter on Capitol Hill.
The White House’s proposal would provide a pathway to citizenship for up to 1.8 million “Dreamers” in exchange for $25 billion for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and other security measures, as well as sweeping changes to the legal immigration system.
But progressive Democrats and their allies are ripping the suggested framework, arguing the administration is trying to hold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients “hostage” for changes to legal immigration.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) called the proposal a “ransom” that “doesn’t pass the laugh test.” . . .
Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, added that the White House proposal is “shameful” and using the DACA program as a “bargaining chip.”
“President Trump is not just trying to shakedown Congressional Democrats; he is trying to shakedown the American people,” she said. . . .
Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said the proposal puts a “hardline immigration agenda … on the backs of these young people.”
“Dreamers should not be held hostage to President Trump’s crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall,” he said. . . .
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) called it a “compromise between the far right and the alt-right” that is “dead on arrival.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), considered a potential 2020 White House contender, said Trump is trying to hold immigrants “hostage to Steven [sic] Miller’s anti-immigrant wish list.”
Stephen Miller, a conservative White House aide known for his hardline immigration views, has been at the center of the debate.

Notice something? Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey, Massachusetts — the Democrats complaining about this “hardline immigration agenda” are from blue states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. However, this fall’s midterm elections won’t be decided in Massachusetts or Illinois, but in Missouri, West Virginia and other states where Democrats will be defending vulnerable Senate seats while the GOP defends its House seats.

 

‘DOA’: Immigration Activists Say the Only
Ones Who Benefit From Trump’s Latest
DACA Offer Are White Supremacists

This extremist rhetoric, comparing Trump’s offer to a KKK cross-burning, shows how out-of-touch the Democrats are with the middle- and working-class white voters who rejected Hillary in the 2016 election. However much Dick Durbin’s constituents in Chicago or Elizabeth Warren’s constituents in Boston may embrace this rhetoric, it just sounds crazy to retirees in Florida or coal miners in West Virginia.

Trump makes a proposal most Americans will view as extraordinarily generous — amnesty for 1.8 million illegal immigrants is no small thing — and Democrats respond by parroting the left-wing activists who denounce this as a “white supremacist” plan? That’s perfect.

Especially after the Schumer shutdown, it’s now obvious that Democrats are the ones whose extremist agenda is preventing any resolution to the DACA controversy. Trump has shrewdly positioned himself as the reasonable proponent of compromise, and Democrats look like a bunch of radical kooks, shrieking about KKK cross-burnings.

Never underestimate the “very stable genius.”



 

 

Democrats in Disarray and Denial as Schumer Shutdown Exposes Weakness

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Rich Lowry analyzes Sen. Schumer’s miscalculations:

The press wasn’t hostile to the Democrats over the shutdown, but it wasn’t uniformly compliant, either. The Left objected to a headline on a New York Times news alert right after the shutdown vote on Friday night: “Senate Democrats blocked passage of a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.” It’s not clear how a remotely honest news writer could have described it any other way.
If the media couldn’t be counted on to be on board, neither could everyone in the party. In what is a persistent temptation for Democrats, Schumer forgot that the rest of the country doesn’t regard Trump with the deep disdain and abiding alarm of the coasts and the major metropolitan areas. The party still has senators in red states that the president won handily who can’t afford to indulge in anti-Trump flights of fancy. Five of them defected on the initial shutdown vote and more would have broken with Schumer if the shutdown had endured.

(Via Hot Air; hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Democrats are so accustomed to “uniformly compliant” media coverage that they don’t realize how little support they have outside the deep-blue zones of “deep disdain” for President Trump. As a result of Schumer’s disastrous miscalculation, conservatives now have “momentum” on immigration, and the Democrats’ failed shutdown strategy may have paved the way for the enactment of Trump’s “get-tough” border agenda.

Remember just a couple of weeks ago, a Yale University “expert” was claiming Trump was suffering from dementia, but who is really demented, Trump or the left-wing kooks who obsessively hate him? Trump has repeatedly outwitted his Democrat opponents, defeating Hillary despite all the “experts” who said he couldn’t win, producing an enormous surge in the economy (the exact opposite of what Paul Krugman predicted), pushing through tax cuts (from which more than 70% of Americans will see lower federal taxes) and now humiliating Senate Democrats over the DACA shutdown. Predictably, the losers are playing the blame game, further proving how out of touch they are:

The shutdown is over, and the consensus is emerging. The Democrats lost. They capitulated after getting little more than carefully worded promises from Mitch McConnell. The progressive blame game is under way, complete with accusations of cowardice that read very much like the recriminations following the GOP’s last shutdown in 2013. But there’s one explanation I’d like to discuss — not because it’s necessarily the consensus view but because it echoes sentiments I hear all the time. Believe it or not, there are those on the left who tell themselves that they lose because they’re just too darn nice. . . .
Progressives see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and eager to engage with critics. . . .
Yet this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture. Yes, of course there are progressives who “yearn for inclusion, civility, and dialogue,” but there are also progressives who despise conservatives, attempt to silence conservative voices, and systematically exclude conservatives from the “dialogue” they allegedly crave. . . .
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?

Democrats don’t want “dialogue.” Democrats want power. They will tell any lie necessary to obtain that power, and their constant demonization of their scapegoated enemies — “sexist! racist! homophobe!” — is just partisan propaganda. The Democrat Party’s rhetoric of deranged hatred deceives their ignorant followers, but they eventually alienate everyone honest enough to look at the actual facts, and intelligent enough to perceive the likely result of Democrat policies. Americans do not want their country to become an impoverished socialist nightmare like Venezuela. Americans can see how the Democrats have wrecked California by providing sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens. Everyone can see what Democrats want to do to the rest of America, which is why Donald Trump won by standing up to tell the Democrats, “No.”

 

 

This is what the Left cannot bring itself to admit, that they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their friends in the media are trying desperately to conceal this failure, to distract Americans from the reality of (and reasons for) the Democrats’ shutdown debacle. But dishonesty is not good policy, and denial is not wise strategy.



 

Democrats Love ‘S***hole’ Countries, and They Want America to Become One

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“This remark by the president of the United States smacks of blatant racism, the most odious and insidious racism masquerading poorly as immigration policy. And I’ll be very blunt, the president doesn’t speak for me as an American. He demeans America. He demeans and betrays American values by these kinds of remarks.”
— Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat

Our president has provoked “controversy” by speaking the brutal truth:

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.
“Why are we having all these people from sh–hole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.
Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.
“Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”
In November, the Trump administration rescinded deportation protection granted to nearly 60,000 Haitians after the 2010 earthquake and told them to return home by July 2019.

Reuters provides more information and reaction:

Trump’s remarks, made in the White House, came as Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham briefed the president on a newly drafted immigration bill being touted by a bipartisan group of senators, according to the sources, who asked not to be identified.
Other government officials were present during the conversation, the sources said.
The lawmakers were describing how certain immigration programs operate, including one to give safe haven in the United States to people from countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife. . . .
Many Democrats and some Republican lawmakers slammed the president for his remarks.
Republican U.S. Representative Mia Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, said the comments were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values” and called on Trump to apologize to the American people and to the countries he denigrated.
Another Republican Representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who was born in Cuba and whose south Florida district includes many Haitian immigrants, said: “Language like that shouldn’t be heard in locker rooms and it shouldn’t be heard in the White House.”
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a frequent Trump critic, said the president’s comment “smacks of blatant racism, the most odious and insidious racism masquerading poorly as immigration policy.”

What was being discussed, of course, was a matter of government policy. The president’s characterization of which countries are favored by current policy was crude, but essentially accurate.

If Haiti is not the all-time winner of the Worst Country in the World title, it’s certainly in contention for that prize on an annual basis, and it is not an insult to Mia Love to tell the unfortunate truth about Haiti. Her father was an enemy of the Duvalier regime in Haiti, and her parents were part of an exodus of the country’s middle class during the 1970s and ’80s. Once the most intelligent and ambitious members of Haiti’s population fled the island nation, however, who remained behind? Haiti is plagued by endemic violence and poverty. Perhaps some of President Trump’s feminist critics would find this information relevant:

Sexual violence in Haiti is a common phenomenon. . . . Reporting a rape to police in Haiti is a difficult and convoluted process, a factor that contributes to underreporting and difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics about sexual violence. Few rapists face any punishment.

Do the celebrity feminists who used the Golden Globe ceremony to decry the “rape culture” in Hollywood really want to import thousands of such people to the United States? While the president’s vulgar language is unfortunate, the underlying reality is exactly as he described it, which is highly relevant to the matter of immigration policy.

America will be coping with the consequences of decades of misguided policy (see “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Mass Immigration”) for a long, long time. Even if we could suddenly reduce immigration to zero — or perhaps, as President Trump implied, if we were henceforth to admit only Norwegians — we ought not to underestimate the difficulties of assimilating the millions of immigrants from “sh–hole” countries we have already admitted. Vox Day has described open-borders ideology as based upon the “Magic Dirt” theory, i.e., the belief that “all immigrants will magically become Real Americans . . . by virtue of geographical relocation, thereby instantly negating of all of their racial, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural traditions.” Any assertion that immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti or Somalia will automatically discard the culture of their homelands, merely because they have immigrated to the United States, is self-evidently false. It is foolish to ignore the risk that immigrants from “sh–hole” countries may bring with them the same problems that afflicted them in the failed nations they fled. Why would Democrats therefore insist that their deal with President Trump must include permanent legal residency for such immigrants, who were originally admitted on a temporary basis as “refugees”?

Because Democrats hate America, that’s why.

Democrats hate freedom. Democrats hate capitalism and Christianity and everything else that is good about America. Democrats want to turn our country into a “sh–hole” no different than the nightmare regimes of corruption, poverty and violence these “refugees” have fled. If telling this truth offends Democrats, good. They deserve to be offended.

By the way, are you aware that nearly 40 percent of sex offenders in Oregon prisons are illegal aliens? Probably from “sh–hole countries.”

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Also, as I keep saying, Hit the Freaking Tip Jar!



 

UPDATE: The Norwegians don’t get it, either:

Twitter users, some of them from Norway, quickly lashed out asking Trump: Why would Norwegians want to come to America?
‘I’m confused — why the f*** would anyone migrate to the US from Norway? Why would you give up healthcare free at the point of access, living wages and reliable public services?,’ one tweet read.
‘I live in Norway and would never move to USA. We have free health care, free higher education, 5 weeks vacation 8 hours work a day. No thanks Trump,’ another user tweeted.

Vox Day provides the clarifying facts:

There are more than 4.5 million Norwegian Americans according to the most recent U.S. census, and most live in the Upper Midwest. Norwegian Americans currently comprise the 10th largest European ancestry group in the United States.
And here is why:
The introduction of the Danish grain monopoly caused severe shortages of grain in Norway that led to famine and conflict. Crop failures led to a terrible period of famine in Norway which was followed by disease and dire poverty causing thousands of deaths. Norwegians began to look to America as an escape from the devastation, political strife and hunger.
So, devastation, political strife, and hunger is the answer.

You’re welcome, Norwegian-Americans. Now please do the rest of us a favor: Stop complaining and support our President.

 

 

Yes, $100 a Month Is ‘Real Money’

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Partisanship can make you blind to reality. Because I am a conservative and generally support Republicans, it would be easy for me to ignore any faults with the tax reform bill the GOP-controlled Senate passed over the weekend. Yet I am skeptical enough to believe that, as a matter of economic policy, the bill is neither (a) the brilliant Reaganesque triumph its supporters claim, nor (b) the unmitigated disaster its Democrat opponents claim. Probably both sides are mistaken to some degree. My hunch is that the tax bill is overall a good thing, just not as good as the GOP would have us believe. This is only a hunch, however, because I don’t bother getting down into the messy mathematical details of a mere legislative proposal; what the Senate passed will not be the actual law, as the House has yet to pass its own bill, and the two versions of tax reform must be reconciled before anything can be enacted as law.

This sort of common-sense attitude toward public policy is non-existent on the Left. They’ve gone into a full-on panic over this bill, denouncing it in hysterical terms. On Friday, Alyssa Milano tweeted a link to C-SPAN coverage of the Senate debate on the tax bill, and one of her followers went ballistic over a statement by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott:

watching…..Senator Tim Scott “$100 a month is real money” to struggling families ? Is he F**KING kidding ? HOW MUCH does $100 buy in this day ? Costs me $50 to fill my f**king gas tank FFS

This was then amplified by TV director Melissa Jo Peltier:

 

Peltier, incidentally, is a New England native who graduated from prestigious Pomona College ($67,225 a year for tuition, room and board) whereas Tim Scott graduated from a Baptist school, Charleston Southern University ($34,740 a year). Peltier challenging Scott’s qualifications to speak about the economic reality of poverty? Not smart:

 

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

The reality is this: Low-income families already pay zero federal income taxes, and the $100 a month they’ll get through the GOP Senate plan comes from an increase in existing tax credits, which are in effect an income subsidy from the government. So the Republicans are literally proposing that taxpayers give $1,200 a year to poor families, and Democrats are denouncing this free-money-for-the-poor plan. Why?

Because the GOP also wants to lower taxes on corporations — necessary because U.S. businesses currently pay higher corporate tax rates than their foreign competitors — and Democrats are agaInst anything that is good for businesses. Corporations are bad, according to Democrats who oppose any policy that would stimulate private-sector economic growth. Liberals always assume they are best qualified to decide what’s good for poor people, without regard to actual facts.

Ronald Reagan, who knew hard times growing up in small-town Illinois, once said: “I believe the best possible social program is a job.” Reagan also observed that liberal economic ideas are rooted in a misguided attitude that incites envy of the rich: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

Liberals are devoted to a concept of “equality” that leads them to believe that the best way to help the poor is by punishing the rich. The great irony is that so many liberals are quite rich themselves, while many conservatives — Tim Scott among them — are more directly familiar with poverty, and reject the attitude of self-pitying helplessness that is the basis of the Democrat Party’s economics of envy.

Of course, liberals consider themselves to have a monopoly on “caring”:

 

How ironic that Melissa Jo Peltier invokes God as her authority. If any Republican ever did this, he would be denounced as a theocrat, a threat to separation of church and state, imposing his morality on others.

By the way, I’m not exactly getting rich as a blogger, and I hope you’ll remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thank you. Merry Christmas, and may God bless you all.



 

 

Where Did Hillary Go Wrong?

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The lovely young Hillary Rodham, 1965.

This morning, the hosts of Fox & Friends were mocking the latest installment of Hillary Clinton’s “Excuse Tour,” as we might call her ongoing crusade to avoid responsibility for her own failures:

In an interview posted Wednesday with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Clinton bemoaned being seen as an extension of the Obama years.
“It is true that when you run to succeed a two-term president of your own party, you have a historical headwind blowing against you,” Clinton told Hewitt. “It’s not just this campaign can be set apart from everything that’s ever happened in our politics. It is a challenge.”
Clinton suggested her campaign suffered from mixed messaging.
“If you are both the candidate defending a lot of the areas of agreement, but also putting forth an agenda for change, which is what I tried to do, it is often difficult to get the second part of that message through.”
Not that she wanted to distance herself from Obama. “I was proud to serve in the Obama administration. I did not agree with everything that President Obama decided, but on balance, I really think he did what had to be done to rescue the economy, which as we all remember, was in desperate straits,” Clinton said.

This is not merely false, but delusional. In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush was running for Ronald Reagan’s “third term,” as it was commonly said at the time. The election that year was clearly a referendum on Reagan’s policies and, while Bush sought to distance himself somewhat from Reagan — famously promising a “kinder, gentler America” — the voters in 1988 had a clear choice: Continue the pro-business, pro-military, anti-Communist policies of Reaganism, or return to Jimmy Carterism, so to speak, in the person of Mike Dukakis.

Bush won in a landslide that year, 53% to 45%, with 426 Electoral College votes to 111 for Dukakis. This was not as impressive as Reagan’s historic landslide in 1984, yet it was still a solid victory — a wider margin than Obama won in his 2012 re-election, for example. What had happened during the 1980s was that Reagan had produced (or at least had capitalized on) a decisive shift in our nation’s’s politics. After the radical turmoil of the 1960s and the decade-long misery of the 1970s, a majority of the American electorate had rejected liberalism, and this was something that Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton recognized.

As he prepared to campaign for president in 1992, Bill Clinton knew that he would have to present himself as a different kind of Democrat (unfortunately for Ricky Ray Rector). Clinton was himself a radical at heart, but he was also “an unusually good liar,” as Bob Kerrey observed.

The Clinton campaign of 1992 was one of the most dishonest in American history, and we are still reckoning with the consequences to this day. The media went all-in for Clinton (89% of D.C. journalists voted for him) that year, and the blatant partisanship of their pro-Clinton coverage gave Democrats the idea that they were on the verge of returning to Camelot. During the 1993 inauguration festivities, Democrats danced jubilantly to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” and had no idea of how soon a Republican tomorrow would arrive. In 1994, the GOP captured control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, a testimony both to the enduring strength of the Reagan coalition and to the failure of Clinton to understand why he had won in 1992. The voters had not rejected Reaganism, they had rejected Bushism, and these are two very different animals. Bush had been elected in 1988 in the expectation that he would “stay the course” of the Reagan years, yet in many ways he departed from that path. This opened the door for Clinton (assisted by the populist third-party challenge of Ross Perot), but the Democrats failed to understand what had happened in 1992, which set the stage for the “Republican Revolution” of 1994.

Before you plan for the future, you must first understand the past.

Our political leaders, in both parties, have failed to learn the lessons of history, and this is true of the American people in general. In a representative form of government, we get the kind of leaders we deserve, and when we behold the corrupt clown show in Washington, we must admit that it is a negative verdict on ourselves. “We the People” have failed, or else we would have better leaders, and it doesn’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. If you were a better citizen — if you were more respected, so that your opinions had more influence — you would be able to persuade your fellow citizens to vote for the candidates of your choice and, once they were in office, your elected representatives would pursue the policies you recommended.

The “Never Trump” Republicans and the Bernie Sanders Democrats, who could not win their own party primaries, merely prove the old Persian adage, “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.”

So where did Hillary go wrong? I covered her on the campaign trail during the 2008 Democratic primaries, which she lost to Obama. When she spoke at Shepherdstown, West Virginia — where I had a pleasant conversation with her daughter Chelsea — I felt a certain sympathy for Mrs. Clinton. There I was, sitting on the grassy lawn of Shepherd College, scarcely 10 feet from the former First Lady, watching her being raked over the coals with hostile questions from the liberal D.C. press corps. After her defeat in the North Carolina primaries, the reporters kept asking, wasn’t it time for her to quit? Wasn’t it her duty as a Democrat to concede the race and urge her voters to support Obama?

Ah — live by the liberal media bias, die by the liberal media bias!

That’s one of the great ironies of American politics. Because the vast majority of journalists are liberals, Democrats live inside a “bubble” of favorable media propaganda, an echo chamber within which they never have to wonder if maybe their ideas are fundamentally wrong. It is quite difficult for any Republican to be as deluded by ideological hubris to such an extent as Democrats so often are. Every GOP politician is hounded by liberal reporters who are as much a part of the Democrat Party campaign operation as any paid DNC operative. To get elected as a Republican is to paint a target on your back, as far as the press corps is concerned, and there is always a swarm of penny-ante “progressive” bloggers who fancy themselves to be latter-day Woodards and Bernsteins, ready to expose the scandal that will destroy a GOP politician’s career.

Somehow, Donald Trump figured out a way to defeat the media. Whether you are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, you have to admit that the man is a master of jiu-jitsu tactics, defeating the liberal media elite by attacking them directly, taunting them and laughing at their impotence.

So, I ask again, where did Hillary go wrong? Responding to a comment on an earlier post, I offered this historic perspective:

It is important to remember that she came from a prosperous Republican family. Her father was a successful businessman and in 1964, young Hillary Rodham was a “Goldwater Girl.” Unfortunately, she was also a Methodist, and came under the influence of a church youth leader with a “social justice” outlook. She was swept along in the general leftward drift of the Methodist Church (like all WCC denominations) and also internalized the generational narcissism of the Baby Boomers.
Bright young people in the 1950s and ’60s were repeatedly told that their generation were the future leaders of America. Their heads were filled with a lot of slogans about “democracy,” “freedom” and “equality” and they weren’t taught much about skepticism and humility. It would have been better for them if they had been given more good old-fashioned Calvinism, but instead their education turned them into fools, ready to believe in a lot of utopian dreams. In a society where liberalism prevails among the academic elite, the more education you get, the more of a hopeless fool you become. By the time she went off to Wellesley, Hillary was already on the wrong path, and no one she encountered at college, or later at Yale Law, did anything to correct her path.

That’s the real problem. Hillary made a left turn in the late 1960s, and never thereafter reconsidered her devotion to the Democrat Party. At the time she drifted into student radicalism, of course, many other young people were doing the same. She followed the herd, with the ambition of becoming a leader of the herd, and failed to anticipate — even as a shadow of a doubt — that history might turn in the other direction.

“Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” but yesterday is never really gone. The past always offers lessons for the future. And young people who fail to study history will eventually regret neglecting these lessons.



 

 

 

Sex, Power, Weakness and Evil

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“I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
— Nina Burleigh, 1998

“Feminists keep trying to explain Weinstein in terms of power — he is the ‘patriarchy’ or whatever — but what this sordid scandal reveals is his weakness.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Nov. 21, 2017

When did the shift happen? Reading about the Sexual Harassment Apocalypse now destroying so many powerful men — Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) is the latest big name to be exposed — I keep returning to the question: “How did we get here?” The most obvious catalyst for this bonfire of feminist rage is the election of Donald Trump. So many feminists had gone “all-in” for Hillary Clinton last year, and believed that the Access Hollywood tape would prove fatal to Trump’s campaign, that the results of Nov. 8 inflicted an emotional trauma. As they worked through their feelings, they realized that a major cause of their defeat was the compromises they had made for the sake of Democrat Party coalition politics. One obvious reason Hillary lost was that her defense of Bill’s predatory sexual behavior exposed her as an untrustworthy hypocrite.

Yet the roots of this problem go back farther than the Lewinsky scandal. In 1969, Ted Kennedy left a woman to die in the back of a submerged Oldsmobile, but because he was a powerful Democrat, he was able to avoid vehicular manslaughter charges, retain his Senate seat and was even celebrated with a heroic defender of “women’s rights.” Guy Benson pointed out that a video tribute to Kennedy was shown at the 2012 Democratic National Convention and when Katie Pavlich objected to this during a CNN panel discussion, she was scolded for having the bad taste to mention that Ted Kennedy once killed a woman.

Ted Kennedy was a weakling, a specimen of moral cowardice. An alcoholic and a womanizer, Kennedy and his Senate colleague Chris Dodd once infamously made a “waitress sandwich” at a D.C. restaurant.

Likewise, Bill Clinton is an infamous weakling, unable to control his sexual appetites, and too foolish to avoid temptation. When Monica Lewinsky flashed her thong underwear at him, what did Bill do? If you’re the President of the United States, you have the power to enforce decorum in the workplace, to require the White House staff to comport themselves respectfully. Rather than to suppress Lewinsky’s lewd behavior, instead Clinton began pursuing sexual encounters with this emotionally unstable woman less than half his age. His misconduct (and hers) eventually came to light because one of his previous victims, Paula Jones, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Clinton. Jones’s lawyers learned of the Lewinsky affair, questioned Clinton about it during a sworn deposition, and he perjured himself by denying it. Clinton furthermore arguably obstructed justice by arranging to get Lewinsky out of Washington (getting her a job with Revlon, whose CEO was a major Democrat donor) and having his attorney Vernon Jordan get Lewinsky to sign a false affidavit denying her affair with Clinton.

In other words, Clinton used his political power to conceal his personal weakness and, in doing so, committed impeachable offenses.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” Jesus taught His disciples to pray. Knowing our own weakness — “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” — Christians ought to be humble, and to fear any situation that might tempt us to sin. Are you a stronger or more virtuous man than Bill Clinton? You ought to hesitate before answering “yes,” lest the Devil decide to prove you wrong.

Mike Pence has been derided by liberals for his “open door” rule, refusing ever to meet alone with a woman other than his wife, but the wisdom of his policy is revealed every time we see a new headline about the wicked behavior of men like Harvey Weinstein, Brett Rattner, Al Franken, Glenn Thrush, Louis C.K., James Toback, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Michael Oreskes, John Lasseter, Mark Halperin, on and on and on.

There is no doubt that the Sexual Harassment Apocalypse will also destroy some Republicans — new allegations against Roy Moore seem to emerge every day — but on balance, these exposures mainly involve liberal men in politics, journalism and Hollywood. This is deeply ironic, of course, because Democrats campaigned in 2012 on the claim that there was a Republican “War on Women,” Hillary Clinton made feminist “empowerment” a major theme of her campaign in 2016, and it was only because Hillary lost that we have now entered this climate where feminists are willing to pour gasoline all over the machinery of male Democrat power, strike a match and burn it to the ground.

You can thank the 63 million Trump voters for this “empowerment.”

Power is beneficial when used to protect the weak and helpless, but wicked people who seek power for selfish reasons will often use dishonest claims of humanitarian intentions to mask their selfishness. Only a fool could be deceived by an argument like “Vote Democrat, Because Social Justice,” yet millions of Americans are such fools. (Hillary could have called her book It Takes a Village of Idiots to Elect a Clinton.) What liberals do, in making these pseudo-humanitarian appeals, is to drape themselves in a costume of secondhand victimhood: “Elect me,” the powerful multimillionaire Hillary Clinton essentially said, “because these other women are raped and discriminated against.”

This identity-politics argument is always false: Did Stalin’s power benefit the peasants of Russia? Did Hitler’s power benefit the average German? Did the typical citizen of Arkansas benefit from Bill Clinton’s presidency? Are black people better off because John Conyers is in Congress?

Identity politics dishonestly tells us that we are “empowered” if the person in the White House is a member of own own particular tribe. There are still millions of Irish Catholics who still vote Democrat because their Irish ancestors were Democrats and John Kennedy was a Catholic. And I was a partisan Democrat, maintaining that allegiance until I was in my mid-30s, for quite similar reasons of ancestral loyalty. There used to be fewer Republicans in the South than there are in Detroit today, and if black people ever figure out that they’re being scammed (the same way white Southerners were scammed by Democrats), this might bring about a cataclysmic political shift in American politics.

What about women? For many decades, Democrats have been the party of abortion, claiming that abortion is a synonym for “women’s rights.” And guess what? Wicked men eagerly agree with that claim.

Never forget: The Clintons and Harvey Weinstein are pro-abortion, and this was all that was necessary to make them acceptable to feminists who support the Democrat Party for that reason, and that reason only. Feminists will tolerate anything, so long as you’re pro-abortion:

Feminism is a movement devoted to destroying the family. Feminist theory condemns marriage and motherhood as institutions of “male domination,” which is why taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood is sacred to feminists: The road to “equality” is paved with dead babies.

Abortion is wrong, and its supporters are evil. Bad people do bad things, and it is not really surprising that Harvey Weinstein is a monster.

Now these monsters are being hunted down by their former feminist “allies,” and all the power and money in the world cannot save them.

Karma is a bitch, they say. And what a deeply ironic bitch she is.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

The Poisonous Fruit of ‘Social Justice’

Posted on 1 Comment

 

Everyone is commenting on this New York Times column in which a black professor offers an argument that could be reduced to a syllogism:

Premise A: Donald Trump got elected.
Premise B: Donald Trump is racist;

ergo,

Conclusion: Black children can’t be friends with white children.

Really, this is the essence of his argument, a bizarre non sequitur rooted in a profound sense of racial paranoia derived from the identity-politics calculations of Democrat Party “social justice” propaganda. Although he tries to marshal evidence in support of his anti-white attitude, the entire argument of his 1,500-word screed is built upon a simple foundation: Democrats, good. Republicans, racist.

Claiming that racism is so pervasive in American society as to be ubiquitous, and then making Republicans the scapegoats for this problem, has been a basic strategy of Democrats for more than 30 years. This reached its apogee during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, simply because Democrat operatives feared that Hillary Clinton would not get the strong black support that helped Obama win two terms in office. Anyone who analyzes the 2016 election result must admit that there was good reason for Democrats to be worried about this problem, and it seems obvious that the Black Lives Matter movement (which Hillary endorsed and which George Soros funded) was part of the Democrats’ plan to motivate and mobilize black voters. In other words, it was pure, partisan power politics.

Why should anyone believe that Trump’s victory owes more to white “racism” than to other factors? It will not do to answer this with anecdotes or social-science research demonstrating the mere fact that racism exists. No one denies this. But there is no reason to believe that racism is more prevalent in 2017 than it was in 2007 or 1997 or any other previous year. So why would a law school professor decide that Trump’s election justifies abandoning all hope of racial peace in America?

Because he’s a Democrat, that’s why.

The “social justice” gospel preached by Democrats is believed with pious devotion in academia. Republicans are effectively prohibited from employment in our universities, which have been turned into cult compounds where no one is permitted to question progressive beliefs. Professor Ekow Yankah’s bizarre arguments are representative of the ideology propagated on campuses where dissent is forbidden as “hate.” What happens when these ideas are applied in the real world?

Look no further than Baltimore, where Mayor Catherine Pugh admits that violence is “out of control” since the 2015 “Black Lives Matter” anti-police riots. Michael Walsh at PJ Media comments:

In the aftermath of the Ferguson riots in Missouri and the Freddie Gray fiasco in Baltimore, the decriminalization of crime in the name of “social justice” — long a goal of the cultural-Marxist Left — got fully underway. The result was exactly what anyone not fully invested in Critical Theory would have expected. . . .
Baltimore, a city whose best years ended more than a century ago, is a prime example of what happens when citizens are categorized by skin color or cultural background, and then have differing standards of behavior applied to them by what should be an impartial justice system. Instead of “social justice,” the outcome is social disruption, mistrust, resentment, lawlessness and, if left unchecked, anarchy and civil war.

“Social justice” is an attack on society itself. It is a wholly destructive ideology that incites conflict and unleashes the very worst impulses in human beings. No one’s life and property are safe in cities like Baltimore, yet the identity-politics formula of the Democrat Party (which is taught as gospel at our universities) leads black people who suffer under these policies to blame white people — and especially Republicans — for their problems. So the worse life becomes for black people, the more militantly anti-white the Democrat rhetoric becomes. This is how you arrive at the point where a hatemonger like Ekow Yankah is employed as a university law professor, using his faculty pulpit to preach racial hostility, and the New York Times is willing to publish his work.

 

Democrats should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be Democrats, would they?