Category: Donald Trump

‘Feminist’ Jessica Valenti: Vote for Biden Because ORANGE MAN BAD!

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When last we took notice of “feminist” Jessica Valenti, she was “despairing” about the failure of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign:

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Cry more, bitch. Anything that makes you unhappy is objectively good.

By the way, what’s the COVID-19 rate in your posh Brooklyn neighborhood? But never mind that, there’s your latest personal disaster:

On election night in 2016, my six-year-old daughter and I wore matching “feminist” T-shirts, ordered a pizza, and sat glued in front of the television with my mother. Assuming three generations of women were about to watch the first female president be elected, I bought a bottle of champagne. (It’s still sitting in a dusty corner of my bar.)
This November, there won’t be buzzy excitement or matching T-shirts with my daughter. On election day, my choice will be between Donald Trump, a dangerous bigot who has been credibly accused of rape, sexual assault, and harassment by more than two dozen women over a more than four-decade period, and Joe Biden, a man recently accused of sexually assaulting a Senate aide in the 1990s, and who has made fun of the women who complained about his penchant for unwanted shoulder rubs.
Biden is the better choice by a mile, and I’ll do what’s right for the country and vote for him. But I’m still furious: I can’t believe that when faced with the most dangerous president of our lifetime, Democrats are moving ahead with a nearly 80-year-old moderate who has shown himself time and again not up for the fight. I am livid that Democratic women will be called on, once again, to cast our vote in the name of reducing harm to the country rather than moving it forward.
Most of all, I’m angry that people who want Trump out are expected to just vote without airing our concerns about the man who stands between him and another four years. . . .

Joe Biden is the Democrat you deserve, Jessica. Your particular hustle — two decades of promoting a brand of “feminism” that is, in fact, nothing but partisanship aimed toward mobilizing women to vote Democrat — has finally been exposed as the shabby grift is always was. You have about as much credibility as Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson and the rest of the #NeverTrump crew, which is to say, no credibility at all.

Amazing what Trump Derangement Syndrome does to people . . .




 

‘It’s Her’: Cruz Ally Victoria Coates Identified as ‘Anonymous’ Author

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Ted Cruz campaign adviser Victoria Coates in a March 2016 TV appearance.

Oh, of course, the anti-Trump mole in the White House is a woman.

Victoria Coates, an art history Ph.D. who served as an adviser to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been identified as “Anonymous,” administration sources tell RCP reporter Paul Sperry:

Ever since a “senior official in the Trump administration” penned an anonymous 2018 New York Times column attacking President Trump as unfit for office, Washington has been engrossed in a high-stakes whodunit. After an exhaustive investigation, the White House believes it’s cracked the case, identifying Trump’s turncoat as his former deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, according to people familiar with the internal probe.
Rather than fire Coates, the White House has quietly transferred her to the Department of Energy, where she awaits special assignment in Saudi Arabia — far from the president.
Trump effectively demoted Coates just four months after promoting her last fall to the No. 2 spot on his National Security Council. The move was made amid a whisper campaign, started in January, that identified Coates as “Anonymous,” the person who wrote the Times Op-Ed and a subsequent book, “A Warning,” claiming to be part of a cabal of “fellow Republicans” resisting Trump and his policies from inside the administration. . . .

Read the whole story of how Coates was identified by a trail of clues, including her distinctive writing style. “Piss poor OpSec,” basically. Anyone familiar with the use of computer analysis knows that, if you are writing thousands upon thousands of words under a pseudonym, and you are also a published writer under your own byline, your mask of anonymity will eventually be penetrated. People who write for a living develop habits, and it turns out that using a pseudonym was one of Coates’s habits — she had written for Red State as “Academic Elephant.” As Sperry points out, former Red State editor Erick Erickson was, like Coates, a supporter of the Ted Cruz campaign, and there are many other dots like that in the pattern that identifies Coates as the “Resistance” saboteur who was embedded in the National Security Council.

Let me quote Elbert Hubbard here:

If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him, speak well of him, and stand by the institution he represents. Remember, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must growl, condemn, and eternally find fault — resign your position, and when you are outside, damn to your heart’s content — but as long as you are part of the institution, do not condemn it.

It is dishonorable to be two-faced toward your employer, to smile at your boss and then badmouth him behind his back, to collect a paycheck and then constantly demean your employer to others. This kind of gossipy, backstabbing behavior destroys the spirit of teamwork, and if you have ever been in a workplace when this vicious spirit takes hold, you know how damaging it can be to the morale necessary to successful organizations. Having witnessed such situations more than once in my career, I deplore the bitchy gossips and childish tattletales who do this stuff. It is disloyal and dishonorable, and if you ever encounter someone in your workplace acting this way, you need to shut them down.

Of course, everybody has their share of grievances to grumble about in any job, but slanderous backstabbing, such as Victoria Coates is accused of doing, ought never to be tolerated in the workplace. I have myself had to counsel people against such behavior, and let me give you a hint: If some gossip comes to you badmouthing another person, what do you think the gossip is going to say about you behind your back?

The habit of gossip is always a mark of untrustworthy character. Gossip is un-Christian, repeatedly condemned as sinful in the Bible.

Politics is a team sport, and success requires everyone on the team to be committed to victory. Sorry, Ms. Coates, you got cut from the team.

Enjoy your exile in Saudi Arabia. Bon voyage!

UPDATE: Linked by Vox Day — thanks!




 

Trump Holds Media Accountable, Media React With Childish Tantrums

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In his crucial role as Media Troll-in-Chief, our President had a memorable moment Monday, playing a brief video at his press conference contradicting the “Blame Trump” narrative that has been promoted in the media. Here’s the video, courtesy of the Telegraph:

 

Victoria Taft chronicles the reaction:

Donald Trump absolutely lit up his own Coronavirus Task Force press briefing with a more than six-minute, tour-de-force media takedown that had CNN and MSNBC sputtering and reaching for the plug.
Trump said hello and turned the media briefing over to the NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci to clarify his words uttered on CNN on shutting down the country earlier to prevent more deaths.
Then, Trump took over and it was ON. He listed the timeline of his response to the coronavirus and presented a video of incorrect statements by the press on COVID-19. . . .
MSNBC and CNN, which usually begin taking the updates only after Trump has spoken, stayed with for Fauci and, when Trump began bagging on the media, bugged out early . . .

The CNN chyrons were instant classics:

 

CNN had to claim that Trump was “angry” and “melt[ed] down,” and that the video was “propaganda,” because CNN viewers — what few of them remain — are accustomed to being sheltered from any fact that contradicts the last-place network’s anti-Trump narrative.




 

‘A Society of Emasculated Liars’

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In his 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple observed:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

One must actively resist the propaganda of political correctness or else you become complicit in it and compromised by it. This morning, I decided to turn the TV to MSNBC and watch Morning Joe, which offers an example, in the person of Joe Scarborough, of what happens to people who become part of such propaganda machines. There was a time — and it wasn’t really that long ago — when Morning Joe was not a Democratic Party propaganda operation, but the Obama years took their toll on Scarborough and he became just another operative. Something similar can be observed in the cases of Jennifer Rubin and Robert Costa at the Washington Post. There are some organizations with which no honest person would ever wish to be associated, and the Washington Post is such an organization. But I digress . . .

What called my attention to the above quote from Theodore Dalrymple was that it was quoted in the comments on my latest column:

As late as March 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio was still telling New York City residents to carry on life as normal: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” Two days earlier, Italy had announced a national lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, and cases were already beginning to appear in New York, but de Blasio did not close the city’s schools until March 15.
Now that New York City has become the epicenter of this pandemic — more than 32,000 cases as of Sunday, with nearly 700 deaths — Mayor de Blasio’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak appears astonishingly irresponsible. Jim Geraghty of National Review has compiled a timeline of how New York City officials dealt with the crisis, and their recklessness seems mind-boggling in hindsight. Early on, their main concern was that the virus might discourage city residents from attending Chinese New Year celebrations. “I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about #coronavirus,” the city’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a Feb. 9 tweet, promoting festivities in Chinatown. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.




 

Trump Was RIGHT: Chloroquine Works Against Coronavirus, Doctor Says

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An Orthodox Jewish doctor in New York has become internationally famous after announcing that the anti-malarial drug chloroquine, touted as a coronavirus treatment by President Trump, has proven effective in treating hundreds of patients. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko publicized his trial of the drug in an unusual manner — by emailing Sean Hannity.

Dr. Zelenko was interviewed on Hannity’s radio program Monday afternoon, and by Monday night, Vice President Mike Pence was on Fox News responding to what Dr. Zelenko had told Hannity:

Mr. Vice President, I’m holding up a letter. I’m going to read from it from a second, from a doctor in the New York area, and if I may read from it — he has now worked with his — his associates and he has a regimen.
Hydroxychloroquine, 200 milligrams twice a day, five days. Azithromycin, 500 milligrams once a day, five days. Zinc sulfate, 220 milligrams once a day for five days. This is what he has seen, him and his team have now treated approximately 350 patients in Kiryas Joel, it was an area of New York that was hit particularly hard and another 150 patients and other New York areas.
His results, we have had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, zero intubations, zero.

 

This is anecdotal, and Hannity’s medical experts were cautious in assessing the scientific validity of Dr. Zelenko’s claims:

 

While it would be a mistake to assume this to be a “silver bullet” based on the claims of a single physician, the combination of chloroquine and azithromycin (an antibiotic) is now being used to treat more coronavirus patients around the country. President Trump’s role in calling attention to this treatment has been controversial, but so far it appears that he has been vindicated, and lives are being saved as a result.




 

‘Chinese Bat Soup Flu’ Update

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Hat-tip to Kurt Schlicter for giving this pandemic a memorable name. It’s going to get worse — perhaps a whole lot worse — before it gets better, but in the meantime, we can figure out what went wrong, and caution about what’s still going wrong. The first and most important thing President Trump needs to do now is to halt domestic flight departures from New York City-area airports:

New Yorkers who flee to Florida during the coronavirus outbreak will have to self quarantine for two weeks when they arrive — or risk facing criminal charges, the Sunshine State’s governor said Monday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was issuing the executive order that would apply to all travelers from New York City, which, as of Monday, has recorded 12,305 cases of the virus. By comparison, Florida so far has 1,100 cases.
The order also applies to areas surrounding the Big Apple, but DeSantis didn’t specify the exact perimeter.
The Florida governor said about 100 flights from New York City and the surrounding area arrive to his state daily. He said he believes at least one person aboard each flight is infected with the illness.
DeSantis at an earlier Monday press conference said, “We are getting huge amounts of people flying in. We are looking at how to address those flights.”
“In New York (City), when they did the stay-at-home order, what did people do? A lot of people fled the city and they are going to stay with their parents or fly (out),” DeSantis said.

With a large elderly population, Florida is uniquely vulnerable, and New York is now the U.S. epicenter of the Chinese Bat Soup Flu pandemic. New York and New Jersey combined have 23,719 reported cases of the virus, which is more than half (55.6%) of all U.S. cases (42,663). It is irresponsible to allow residents of such a “red zone” to hop on a plane and fly anywhere in the country, taking the virus with them. If you have 100 people on a plane leaving LaGuardia, JFK or Newark, chances are at least one of those passengers will be infected. Do you want them flying to your state? Ground those planes, Mr. President.

To get an idea of the way these pandemics can spread, here’s a story about a bunch of people who got sick after attending a March 5 party in Connecticut, and here’s a story about how one nursing home in Washington State became a “red zone.” While I have always been an optimist about America’s ability to fight this disease — and remember, I was potentially exposed to the virus when I covered CPAC — we cannot afford the kind of stupid errors that create these “red zones.” You don’t want the job of explaining to your kids that Grandma died because you didn’t practice proper hygiene and “social distancing.”

If we can just maintain quarantine conditions another week or two, there is every reason to believe that we will be past the the worst of it:

Those of us trying to predict what direction the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic will take in the United States have been paying close attention to reports from Italy. And until Sunday, the outlook there kept going from bad to worse.
For nearly two weeks after the Italian government imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 9, the daily number of coronavirus deaths mounted rapidly. On Friday, it was reported that 627 Italians died from the disease, as the country’s cumulative death toll passed 4,000. This was shocking, but then on Saturday, Italy reported that 793 more people had died from the virus.
If, like me, you have been laser-focused on this situation for the past week, you mentally braced yourself for Italy to report an even larger number on Sunday, but then breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported that only 651 Italians died of coronavirus. This was small consolation, as Italy — a nation with a population about 60 million — has already suffered more than 6,000 dead in this pandemic, with a total of more than 60,000 coronavirus cases and thousands of new infections still being reported every day. Yet Sunday’s numbers from Italy were a much-needed cause for hope, and this was followed by a further decrease in Monday’s reported deaths — down to 602, a 24-percent decline from Saturday’s peak. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Warren Plans to Win Brokered Convention

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Delusional? Yes. Perfect from a GOP perspective? Absolutely:

Elizabeth Warren can win debates, but not states: There’s a chance she will walk away from Super Tuesday having not carried any of the first 18 contests, including her home state of Massachusetts.
Yet she, her campaign and their close allies say she’s in the race all the way to the convention, despite her latest drubbing in South Carolina on Saturday. They insist she still has a path to the nomination, narrow as it is. . . .
Warren advisers believe she can remain in the hunt by collecting a significant number of delegates on Super Tuesday and then again on March 10 — they are optimistic about California, Colorado, Texas, Michigan and Washington — even if they don’t win any states outright. Campaign manager Roger Lau said earlier this month that Warren was “poised” to finish second in eight Super Tuesday contests and in the top three in all 14.
The team is also more openly discussing what it has been talking about internally for weeks. Warren’s path to victory is likely at a contested convention and not by outright winning a majority of pledged delegates, which they believe no other candidate will achieve, either.
“[A]s the dust settles after March 3, the reality of this race will be clear: no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates needed to win an outright claim to the Democratic nomination,” Lau predicted in a memo released Sunday. “In the road to the nomination, the Wisconsin primary is halftime, and the convention in Milwaukee is the final play.”

My only question is, what can I do to encourage Warren and her advisers to double-down on this far-fetched scenario? This is every Trump supporter’s wet dream, and please forgive me for using the phrase “wet dream” in a post about Elizabeth Warren. Anything that prevents the Democratic primary campaign from becoming a head-to-head contest between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is good, in terms of helping re-elect Trump. Mike Bloomberg wasting millions of dollars to run a three-minute nationwide commercial on Sunday night? Perfect.

If Bloomberg’s campaign has any positive impact, it will be to help convince us that billionaire oligarchs like him should not exist. It’s bad enough that an oligarch can buy up airtime; to do so in order to exploit a pandemic for your presidential campaign is disgraceful.

What percentage of the Super Tuesday vote will Bloomberg get? Hopefully, enough to prevent Biden from winning several states, and thus moving Democrats closer to the brokered-convention scenario that the Warren campaign is fantasizing about. Of course, a comeback victory for Biden can’t be ruled out, but nobody on the Republican side should worry about that, either, as it has become apparent that Biden is completely senile. The best-case scenario, in terms of Trump’s re-election, is for Sanders to get this close (holding thumb and forefinger half-an-inch apart) to the nomination, only to be cheated out of it by a backroom deal at the convention. Whatever happens to the Democrats, however, the most likely scenario in November is that Trump wins:

About half an hour into his speech Saturday afternoon at the 48th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Trump spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “My friend over there — you are the greatest,” the president said, and urged the man to stand. “Look at him … Does everybody know Jeffrey? Jeffrey Lord” (38:10).
The conservative audience responded with applause for The American Spectator’s longtime contributing editor. “What a great guy,” Trump continued. “He used to defend me on CNN, and then he defended me just a little bit too much. And they said, ‘Jeffrey, get the hell out.’ And thank goodness you’re on Fox now.… Thank you for being here, too, Jeffrey.”
Trump was in a relaxed and cheerful mood when he took the stage of the Potomac Ballroom at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor. Just before helicoptering over to CPAC on Marine One, the president had joined Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci at a White House press conference on the coronavirus. As with everything else in the Trump Age, this turned into a confrontation with the “fake news” media. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

The Backlash of ‘Hate’

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For several months, here and at The American Spectator, I have occasionally addressed the theme of “hate” — how Democrats insist that racism or “white nationalism” or some other species of bigotry explains opposition to the liberal agenda in the Trump era. If you are a white male heterosexual Christian, you are are by definition guilty of “hate,” according to the Left’s intersectional logic of “social justice.”

The ordinary person’s instinctive reaction to such an accusation is to feel insulted: How dare you? If you are a decent, law-abiding citizen, intelligent and reasonably well-educated, being accused of bigotry, merely because you vote Republican, is probably going to make you angry. What are the consequences of that anger? Political analyst Jake Novak offers some insights:

For all the policy differences and political minutiae Democrats delve into when criticizing President Trump, the most enduring attacks on Trump from the Democratic establishment remain accusations that Trump is supporting white supremacy and is controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
These are over-the-top accusations, and it’s hard to accept that even most elected Democrats actually believe them. But pushing that message on America for the last three-plus years comes at a price for both sides.
For the Democrats, the price is becoming clear: it’s made moderate presidential candidates look less viable than ever.
Think about it: if you really believe the president is a traitor and supporting violent plots against non-white Americans, is this really the time to support mainstream Democrat or Republican candidates?
Sanders may be a career politician, but he’s never been a mainstream politician. His persona and political brand fits much better into the current Democratic narrative that we’re living in desperate times.
Establishment Democrats are reaping what they sowed.
As a result, it’s looking more and more like Sanders has unstoppable momentum going into the Super Tuesday primaries and beyond.

Read the whole thing. I’ve got to get packed up and head down to CPAC. Thanks to everyone who contributed to make this trip possible.