Category: Vanuatu

A Dark Day for Democracy

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Jan. 10, 2020, will forever be known as Black Friday — a day that will live in infamy — when the Democratic Party lost its last hope:

Author Marianne Williamson ended her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign on Friday after failing to gain traction in a crowded Democratic field.
“I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible opportunity to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now,” Williamson wrote in a message to supporters.
“The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them,” Williamson continued.
Williamson pledged to fully support the Democratic nominee.
Williamson had not qualified for the Democratic debate next week. The spiritual author had laid off her campaign staff nationally, a former staffer confirmed to CNN last week.
After launching her campaign in January 2019, Williamson told CNN she was running to bring a “moral and spiritual awakening” for America.
“Nothing short of that is adequate to fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction,” Williamson told CNN’s John Berman at the time.
Williamson’s campaign has been little-noticed in recent months, as focus shifted to the Democratic contenders who were meeting the party’s fundraising and polling thresholds to qualify for debates and Williamson repeatedly missed the cut.

Of course, you know what this means — my plans to become U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu have suffered yet another setback.



 

NY Times Reporter and Senate Staffer Caught in Sex-for-Leaks Scandal

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Ali Watkins worked for Politico before joining the New York Times.

The former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee has been arrested after lying to the FBI about illegally leaking classified information to a young reporter he dated for three years. The arrest exposed James A. Wolfe as the source of multiple leaks of sensitive national security information — including details of the investigation of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page — to New York Times reporter Ali Watkins. Wolfe, 57, had been in a sexual relationship with Watkins, a 2014 Temple University graduate who previously worked for BuzzFeed and Politico before joining the Times late last year.

And after writing that lead paragraph in the Official Neutral Objective Journalism Style, now permit me to add: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Don’t ever lecture me about “journalism ethics,” you bastards.

All that “full disclosure” business about “conflicts of interest”? Trying to guilt-trip an honest man about a few free beers with Republican operatives who just happened to be useful sources? Not me, baby. I was never ashamed of smoking cigarettes with Herman Cain’s campaign director Mark Block or having beers and pizza with Rick Santorum and his finance director the weekend before the Iowa caucuses. You do whatever it takes to get the story, and there’s no shame in that. The whole point of Gonzo is to be more or less blatant about your biases, as if any reader of Hunter S. Thompson could be mistaken about his opinion of Hubert Humphrey, “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”

So, no “ethics” lectures from you thieving bastards at the New York Times, or Politico, or BuzzFeed, or whoever is currently employing Dave Weigel and his various friends in Neutral Objective Journalism. Look, Dave’s a friend of mine, and I would never burn a friend. Good relationships are based on reciprocity and trust, and I owe Dave a few favors, so I would certainly never do anything to hurt my friend Dave.

Never mind all that. Veiled threats were never my style, but I know a thing or two about the behavioral patterns of herd animals, and the universal contempt for Our President among the left-wing hacks of the D.C. press corps is hardly a secret, unlike the classified information that James Wolfe was handing over to Ali Watkins in exchange for sucking his middle-aged penis. Heckuva job there, Miss Watkins.

You do whatever it takes to get the story, but none of my sources ever expected that from me, at least not in a literal sense. Yeah, I’ve written a few paragraphs of journalistic fellatio in my time, providing favorable coverage in an effort to butter up a source, but that’s the minor currency of informational commerce in Washington, D.C.

All I ever wanted out of this miserable racket was an appointment as the first U.S. ambassador to Vanuatu, an honorable ambition. A six-figure salary from the American taxpayers as a reward for my long years toiling in the field of Neutral Objective Journalism, and why should this diplomatic post in the South Pacific go to some deep-pocket GOP campaign donor, huh? Why not give it to the man with the keen political insight that enabled him to see that, once Herman Cain got taken out by his enemies, the man to beat as the “Anyone But Mitt” candidate was a former Pennsylvania Senator then languishing at sixth place in the polls? The Santorum Surge in late 2011 didn’t just happen by coincidence, my friends. No, there was a telephone conversation, where Santorum was in the Fort Worth airport between flights, and he promised me that gig in Vanuatu. If he tells you he didn’t, he’s lying, and my close personal friend Rick is a pious Catholic, so he would never lie. Whether he actually would have delivered me that coveted ambassadorship, had he won the White House in 2012, is another question altogether. But I digress . . .

My old friend Hogan Gidley‘s working at the White House now, and he’s not the only one of my buddies who’s moved up the political food chain since I left the campaign trail after the 2012 catastrophe. Now that I’ve finally got my driver’s license back, I could conceivably return to that miserable swamp in D.C. to do some shoe-leather work, maybe reporting on how this Wolfe-Watkins connection exposes the collusion, you might say, between the “fake news” media and the corrupt “Deep State.”

All I need now is a vehicle. Just a couple thousand dollars in the tip jar ought to be enough to get my hands on an old secondhand car.

Let me make a few phone calls, and we’ll see what happens. Just crowdfund me — $5 or $10, whatever you can afford — and in a week or two, I might take my old fedora off the rack and hit the road. Selah.



 

 

Fear and Loathing: Three Days, $900, and It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again

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“How long, O Lord, how long? Where will it end?
“All I ever wanted out of this campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squalor in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach, with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and no neighbors. . . .
“What worries me now . . . is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as Governor of American Samoa.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Somewhere in the South Pacific, there is an island nation in need of an American ambassador, and who knows what might be possible? But that’s borrowing tomorrow’s trouble, and right now, I’ve got a more immediate need: $900 for a road trip to an undisclosed location.

Is there an explanation? Sure, and I’ll be glad to provide it, but first let me share a conversation that took place in the comments of Monday night’s post. Daniel Freeman offered this gloomy assessment:

Diversity + Proximity = War. The details vary throughout history; in our case, it turns out that all non-whites are tribal, so we can’t afford not to be.
Even when they aren’t violently racist, mere tribalistic nepotism is a powerful competitive advantage, to the point where our choices are to copy them, die out or kick them out.

War? Is America doomed to be destroyed by ethnic violence? Or is there still hope for our nation? This was my reply to Mr. Freeman:

It is still possible, I hope, for the American people to step back from the brink of the abyss toward which the past eight years have led us.
“It is history that teaches us to hope,” a great man once said.
“Never take counsel of your fears,” another great man said.
Strange as it seems, our new president may be the man who can heal the wounds our nation has recently suffered. The opportunity is there, and I dare to hope Mr. Trump will make the most of it.

Readers are free to Google those quotes and find the names of the great men who said them. Did I mention I’m trying to rattle the tip jar to raise $900 for a road trip? My wife and I will be heading south, the first time our three youngest children have gone on a long road trip with us, and I hope there will be time during this trip to visit the cemeteries in Randolph County, Alabama, where my family’s ancestors are buried. One of those ancestors, Winston Wood Bolt, was an illiterate farmboy who served in the 13th Alabama Infantry until he was captured in the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg when Archer’s Brigade was outflanked by the Iron Brigade.

 

Well, no need to dwell on the past, I suppose, when in the near future — by Monday, at the latest — Mrs. McCain expects me to have that $900 so we can visit our oldest daughter’s home for Thanksgiving. Our daughter and her husband live 1,100 miles away, near a Gulf Coast beach in a state that Donald Trump carried by a margin of 120,00 votes. Continue reading Fear and Loathing: Three Days, $900, and It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again →

Rick Santorum on Tolerance

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He spoke Monday at George Washington University:

“The only sensitivity training we need is to respect every person. . . . Tolerance is the most misused word in the English language. . . . Should a gay or lesbian-owned printshop have to print signs for the Westboro Baptists that say ‘God hates fags’? . . . Should a Jewish printshop have to make signs for the KKK? Should a kosher deli have to serve non-kosher food? It’s a two-way street. Tolerance is a two-way street. If you’re saying that ‘your religious liberties are not as important as my fill in the blank,’ then I’ve got a problem with that.”

During CPAC, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Rick’s supporters. He’s spent the past three years turning his group Patriot Voices into a solid grassroots organization. He has a dedicated base of small donors — thousands of folks he can count on for $25 or $50 contributions when he needs it — and has committed activists on the ground in all the key early primary and caucus states.

Even after his strong showing in 2012, when he finished second to Mitt Romney in the final delegate count, a lot of people still underestimate Santorum, but he works hard and doesn’t quit. He has experience and an awful lot of sincere Christians praying for his campaign. He could win it all, and don’t let the pundits, the media spinners or the early polls deceive you into thinking otherwise.

The Islamic terrorist group ISIS named Santorum as an enemy, citing his warning about the group’s growing menace. Asked about this on Fox News today, Santorum quipped:

“Well the difference is ISIS actually quoted me accurately compared to the New York Times, which is sort of a remarkable comment on the state of the media today.”

ZING!

 

Nickel-and-Dime Ukraine Scandal: Foreigners Bought Bloggers Cheap

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It’s MalaysiaGate all over again:

Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.
The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

(Whatever the talking points were, I didn’t repeat them. The only foreign country I really care about is Vanuatu.)

The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.

(A “front group in Belgium”? The Flemish Menace!)

The model resembles a recent stealth campaign in which bloggers were paid by the Malaysian government to write favorable stories, though the Ukraine campaign appears to have involved smaller sums of money.

(Yeah, I was all over the Malaysia scandal, another one of those blogola deals where nobody offered me a cent, dammit.)

One of the writers who participated in the campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and because of lingering qualms about the arrangement, they said, described being offered $500 for a blog post praising Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions.

What? You sold out to foreigners for a measly $500? Hell, that won’t even buy you a round-trip ticket to beautiful Vanuatu, the sunny Pacific island paradise where the Grand Hotel and Casino offers spectacular views of the harbor at Porta Vila . . .

Donald Douglas has more at American Power.

Apparently those cheapskate Ukrainian bastards didn’t hire Donald, either. But don’t worry: If there is ever a “high-stakes election” in Vanuatu, we’re gonna be rolling in the blog-o-bucks, baby.

 

It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again

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“How long, O Lord, how long? Where will it end?
“All I ever wanted out of this campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squalor in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach, with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and no neighbors. . . .
“What worries me now . . . is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as Governor of American Samoa.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Savor the moment. I’ve been up all night doing the Snoopy dance in the Gloat Zone. Ace says we should worry: The MSM’s already preparing the “Obama Comeback” narrative.

But I’m too grateful and happy to worry now. There is deliciousness everywhere this morning. Byron York serves it up:

Just seconds after the presidential debate ended here at the University of Denver Wednesday night, Mitt Romney’s advisers and surrogates rushed to the press room to take reporters’ questions and tout their man’s performance. They were eager, happy, and ready to talk because they believed their man scored a clear win in his first face-off with President Obama.
After a few minutes of interviews, and the arrival of still more Romney surrogates, some reporters looked around and asked: Are there any Democrats here? Where are the Obama advisers and surrogates eager to speak for the president?
It took a while for them to show up. And when they arrived, they were on the defensive from the get-go about the president’s performance. . . .

Read the whole thing. Last time I saw Byron was in Toledo, when the polls had Obama up 10 points in Ohio and everybody was on the verge of abandoning hope. This evening, I expect to see him in Fisherville, Virginia — 6 p.m., doors open at 4 p.m. — and imagine what a complete change in mood we’ll see! Imagine how everybody will be laughing about how Chris Matthews melted down:

Nobody — and I mean, nobody — expected such a one-sided ass-whupping. And let’s sober up enough to say, “Answered prayer”:

Really, when you see this kind of unanticipated miracle, it’s necessary to consider the possibility that this was not coincidental. With 33 days to go until Nov. 6, suddenly the sun is shining. My American Spectator column today:

How decisively did Mitt Romney win Wednesday night’s debate? All you had to do was watch the most pro-Obama network to see it. “I personally do not know who won this debate,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said as soon as the debate ended. She was obviously the only one who didn’t know.
When Maddow brought on her colleague Ed Schultz, he moaned that President Obama “created a problem for himself tonight on Social Security. He agreed with Mitt Romney.… I thought he was off his game.” Nor did the president’s performance send a thrill up the leg of Chris Matthews. “I don’t know what he was doing out there,” Matthews complained. “He had his head down. He was enduring the debate rather than fighting it.”
If ever there were a night when conservatives wanted to watch MSNBC, this was it — an all-you-can-eat buffet of schadenfreude, as one after another of the liberal network’s personalities tried to come to grips with what was perhaps the most one-sided presidential debate since JFK beat a shifty-looking Richard Nixon in 1960. “In terms of debate tactics, Romney was on the offense most of the night,” a glum Howard Fineman acknowledged, while a shell-shocked Chuck Todd admitted that the result “automatically elevates Romney as a credible alternative” and later added, in reference to the Obama camp’s post-debate mood: “They know they lost tonight.”
Everybody knew it. . . .

Please read the whole thing — and hit the freaking tip jar!

 





 

UPDATE: “Ride right through them, they’re demoralized as hell!”

 


Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Time to Quit Whining and Get to Work

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This will be brief, but expect additions to follow in updates. Rick Santorum is now urging his supporters to get behind Mitt Romney:

Rick Santorum has officially endorsed Mitt Romney, and notified his supporters in an email sent Monday night.
In the email, the former presidential candidate cited his Friday meeting with Romney in his hometown of Pittsburgh as a reason he finally got behind the presumptive GOP nominee.
“On Friday, Governor Romney came to Pittsburgh for an over-hour long one-on-one meeting,” Santorum said in the email. “The conversation was candid, collegial and focused on the issues that you helped me give voice to during our campaign; because I believe they are essential ingredients to not only winning this fall, but turning our country around.” . . .
In the lengthy email, Santorum encouraged Romney to “add more conservative leaders as an integral part of his team.”
“And you can be sure that I will work with the governor to help him in this task to ensure he has a strong team that will support him in his conservative policy initiatives,” Santorum said. . . .
“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” the letter read. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

More at Memeorandum. As I say, this initial memo will be brief. If you supported Santorum, you must now respect his judgment that getting on board with the Romney campaign — “all hands on deck,” as Santorum says — is a vital obligation for all conservatives.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Santorum is scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno this evening, and ABC’s Shushannah Walshe says that Santorum was expected to make a commitment at that time.  Santorum apparently decided to announce the endorsement as soon as he made the decision.  That may take a little of the drama out of tonight’s appearance, but it also may draw more interest as people tune in to hear Santorum’s explanation of the endorsement.

Here’s the thing I want to get across to our readers: Whenever Republicans lose a presidential election, the first thing the GOP Establishment does is to focus blame on conservatives. This is why Sarah Palin was scapegoated for the 2008 defeat, because treacherous swine like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, who get paid to win elections, don’t want to accept responsibility for their own failures.

It is therefore an urgent necessity — however painfully ironic — that hard-core grassroots conservatives give their maximum effort to help Romney defeat Barack Obama, because if Team Mitt loses this election, you will be blamed. Your honor as a conservative, to say nothing of the future of our Republic, thus requires from you even greater labors than you would have made if Rick Santorum had won the nomination.

Like I said, “painfully ironic.”

UPDATE II: In case you don’t understand how the GOP Establishment’s blame-shifting apparatus works, Tony Lee explains it at Big Journalism. Here’s the thing: When Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace backstabbed Palin and threw her under their RINO careerism bus, they thought their vicious treachery would never be discovered, because they’re so much smarter than everybody in the conservative grassroots.

UPDATE III: As I say, however, this isn’t the time to be nursing old grudges. We’ve got find a way to win, or else expect to be blamed for the defeat. Bridget Johnson at PJM notes that Santorum’s e-mail “stressed his differences with Mitt Romney and therefore gave the need to beat President Obama as the key reason to vote for the former Massachusetts governor.” Well, of course that’s what Santorum did.

If he hadn’t been honest about the differences, his endorsement wouldn’t have persuaded anyone. Here’s the crucial word from Lisa Graas:

Since May [2011], I have been 100% behind Rick Santorum because I trust him to do what is right for America. If Rick Santorum believes that Mitt Romney will defend life and marriage, then that is good enough for me. I also now endorse Mitt Romney for President and look forward to being a part of Rick Santorum’s grassroots volunteer team to continue the fight for conservatism in America.

One of the key topics at the Mitt/Rick meeting? Vanuatu.

UPDATE IV: Readers will recall that yesterday I said it is important to let Team Mitt do their job. That is to say, we shouldn’t be disgruntled, sitting around second-guessing them and bitch, bitch, bitching for the next six months. That ain’t gonna beat Obama, OK?

Our confidence in Team Mitt should prevent us from being distracted by certain people (not on the campaign) whining because they didn’t think Santorum’s endorsement was sufficiently sycophantic.

Hey, whiners: Kissing ass is your job, not Rick’s.

UPDATE V: Robert Costa at National Review talks about Team Mitt’s new hires, including former Santorum campaign director, Mike Biundo.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been biting my tongue about this, which got linked here, and to which I obliquely replied Sunday night. Because we are now in what Ace likes to call “game faces” mode, some insults must be ignored and some injuries suffered in silence.

Our personal interests or narrow ambitions should never be confused with “the conservative movement,” which is larger than any one person. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and owe an obligation to those who suffered and sacrificed to build this movement, and who are no longer here to aid us in our struggle. Humble service is our duty, and the scrupulous fulfillment of that duty is a matter of honor.

Note, please, that this mild acknowledgement has been included in the fifth update, three hours after the original post went online. That is to say, I’ve put it where it will attract little public notice, merely so that it may be known to friends that I am fully aware.

 


Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Foreboding Gloom Pervades Vanuatu

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“After having destroyed every conservative that came on the scene, you can’t say ‘You have to line up behind me.’ No, no, no. Conservatives are not going to jump until they hear where Governor Romney wants to take everybody.”
— Richard Viguerie, veteran conservative leader

“I still think Mitt’s electability is a myth and a lot of conservatives are going to have to sell their souls to support Mitt (More than a few of them have already gotten started). There are a lot of conservatives who’ve put their reputations on the line to assure everyone that Mitt is actually very conservative — and extremely electable. Of course, some of those same people started doing CYA-backpedaling when it looked like Romney almost had the nomination locked up, which begs the question: If you don’t think Mitt is going to win, why were you working so hard to undermine all the other candidates and push Mitt in the first place?”
— John Hawkins, Right Wing News

“Wednesday April 11th is day one of the general election. But there are things I’m seeing that tell me that Mitt Romney is kicking off the campaign in a telling defensive posture.”
— Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

“You go to war with the Mitt you have.”
— William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection

My ambition to abandon the drudgery of journalism for an exciting new career in diplomacy as the Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu suffered a major setback Tuesday. When Rick Santorum promised me that ambassadorship in December — in a telephone interview, while he was still in sixth place in the Iowa polls, waiting to catch a plane during his layover in Fort Worth on the cheapest available flight from Des Moines to D.C. —  I made sure I saved the recording.

Because I knew, when the miraculous Iowa victory came through, Santorum’s political advisors would try to talk him out of it.

So I was prepared to hold him accountable to that promise, and he not only won Iowa, he won 10 other states. Santorum raised $9 million in February, beat Newt Gingrich in Southern states like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana — oh, it was so close, I could taste it. And I had the digital audio of that ironclad promise, the Word of Honor of a Christian Gentleman that next year I’d be jetting off to Porta Vila to begin my new career in South Pacific diplomacy.

Dreams die hard and, despite the professional requirements of Neutral Objective Journalism, my friends, I dared to dream.

When I’m feeling this low, it’s nice to know I’m not suffering alone: I’m not depressed; the world objectively sucks.

Yesterday, after Rick Santorum quit, my 13-year-old son Jefferson asked, “Does this mean I have to stop bad-mouthing Mitt Romney?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you have to start good-mouthing him, but you have to stop bad-mouthing him.”

Then I went on to explain that, having been saddled with a nominee whom we had opposed with all our might, we cannot be held responsible for the inevitable disaster. Therefore, on Wednesday, Nov. 7, we will be ready to demand an accounting from those responsible. Continue reading Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Foreboding Gloom Pervades Vanuatu →