The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton Debate: Who Hates America More?

Posted on | February 12, 2016 | 55 Comments

“Our elites are fixated on how disappointed they are with the tawdry public precisely because that allows them to avoid examining their own colossal failures.”
— Ace of Spades, 2011

Ed Driscoll quoted Ace in the context of reminding us how much liberals hate America, or at least that part of America where white heterosexual men work for a living. It was a strange thing to watch Thursday’s debate between the insurgent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and the increasingly frantic former frontrunner Hillary Clinton, where the key issue seemed to be which one of them was more capable of destroying whatever fragments of American civilization might still be intact after Barack Obama concludes his eight-year effort to wreck the country.

Bernie’s plan has the virtue of simplicity:

  1. Loot the banks;
  2. Plunder the rich;
    and
  3. Free stuff for everybody!

That kind of agenda is perennially popular with the disgruntled moochers and radical fanatics who vote in Democrat primaries and, alas, Hillary has to play the unpopular role of the grown-up telling the kids they can’t have ice cream for breakfast. Trying to be the “mainstream” candidate in a Democrat primary is always a tricky exercise, as Hillary found out in 2008 when her decades of loyal service to her party’s anti-American policies were spurned in favor of the half-Kenyan upstart from Chicago. Despite all his bold promises, Obama hasn’t done all his supporters had hoped. There is still money in banks (“Loot them!”) and the rich still have most of it (“Plunder them!”) and there still isn’t as much free stuff as Democrat voters want the government to give them, namely everything.

The Democrat Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal combustion engine, and a lot of bratty college kids who hate their parents. However, the real secret of the party’s success is that it attracts the support of journalists who hate Republicans, and who therefore work tirelessly to convince the rest of us that we should vote for Democrats.

This is why I’ve decided to remain neutral — or at least, not to get too excited — about this year’s GOP primary campaign. During the 2012 campaign, I was flying and driving all over the place to cover the epic struggle for the nomination, only to end up with Mr. Inevitable, Mitt Romney, as the candidate. What’s the point, really? No matter who the Republicans nominate for president, the Organized Forces of Liberal Journalism will paint him as a greedy, cold-hearted, woman-hating racist. If the GOP nominated a Buddhist monk or a Latina lesbian, still the New York Times and NBC News would find a way to convince themselves that the Republican candidate represented everything liberals hate about America — the military, the police, Christianity, capitalism, the internal combustion engine and heterosexual white men who work for a living.

American journalism is a temple devoted to promoting a religious faith in which the only true virtue is voting for Democrats. Every four years, the media assume the role of latter-day prophets, whose mission is to warn us of the apocalyptic disaster that will befall the nation if a Republican is elected president. Switch your TV over to MSNBC for a few hours and you can see what this partisan zeal looks like when it is not filtered through the dishonest pretense of “objectivity.” It is important to realize that everyone employed in any position of influence by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press is as fervently “progressive” as Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews. The editors of newspapers and the producers of network news distort or suppress any story that does not exactly conform to the pro-Democrat narrative.

When Islamic terrorists commit mass murder in San Bernardino, the media portray this not as a story about the dangers of radical Islam, but rather a story about the urgent need to infringe the right of law-abiding citizens to own firearms. No gun should ever find its way into the hands of a heterosexual white man who works for a living, according to liberal journalists who consider Republicans to be a greater danger than ISIS or machete-wielding Somali Muslim immigrants.

So the debate in Wisconsin between Sanders and Clinton was an exercise with the goal of determining which candidate could go farthest in blaming every problem in the world on banks (“Loot them!”), the rich (“Plunder them!”), white heterosexual men with jobs, and other Evil Forces of Social Injustice that the Republican Party is presumed to represent. The two Democrats disparaged each others’ records and character, but agreed entirely as to their basic goals. Whatever foreign policy issue or domestic problem they were asked to address, Hillary and Bernie always blamed the Evil Forces of Social Injustice, and promised to do everything in their power to punish the Republican wrongdoers responsible.

To say that Hillary Clinton was shameless in her pandering to Democrat voters is to understate the transparent desperation in her efforts to appease the kind of left-wing fringe kooks who take Rachel Maddow seriously. At one point, Hillary began ranting about the Koch brothers — who have replaced the Religious Right as the sinister bogeyman in liberal imaginations — and at another point she also twice used the clunky acronym LGBT in less than a minute:

“I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country. I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it’s poison in the water of the children of Flint, or whether it’s the poor miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and oppressed by racism, by sexism, by discrimination against the LGBT community, against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that’s what I want to take on. . . . Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests, along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You’re right. But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday.”

Leave aside any question of policy that may be involved here, because no one could imagine that Bernie Sanders is any less adamant than Hillary in opposing discrimination. Rather, let us ask, first, how significant is such discrimination in the grand scheme of things? And second, we may ask, why did she use this acronym? If Hillary had said “the gay community” and “gay people,” would anyone watching the debate have imagined that lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals were not also included in the generic category? The use of the acronym “LGBT” would seem to be an effort by Hillary to speak the jargon of hardcore activists and the sort of bratty college students who major in Gender Studies.

“Oh, she gets it!” was the reaction Hillary hoped her use of this acronym would elicit from young activists. “She’s inclusive!”

Being flattered and pandered to, being promised the sun, the moon and the stars by politicians oozing sympathy for you — Democrats have been running this three-card monte hustle for as long as anyone can remember. Once upon a time, William Jennings Bryan stirred the ignorant masses with his talk of mankind being crucified on a cross of gold, and all that Democrat noise about the Free Coinage of Silver didn’t really have anything to do with anything that made any difference at all to the lives of ordinary Americans. It was just so much half-mad demagoguery to stir up discontent among the rubes, and here were are in 2016, watching Democrats do the same thing they have always done. The only difference, really, is that we now have polls and consultants to tell Democrats which rubes to target with their shameless pandering. Exactly how much discrimination affects the daily lives of “LGBT people” is as irrelevant now as was the question of whether making silver coins legal tender would have any meaningful impact on the plight of farmers and factory workers to whom William Jennings Bryan was pandering.

Of course, back then, the voters to whom Democrats pandered were heterosexual white men who worked for a living, but the principle — dishonestly promising that the federal government will eradicate all the world’s woes — was the same, and the fools who believe Democrat rhetoric today are every bit as deluded as the struggling farmer who thought “Free Silver” was the solution to his problems in 1896.




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Debates, Democrats, Hillary Clinton

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | February 12, 2016 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

“You were right,” said Eddy in the playfully defeated tone they’d enjoyed for decades.
Mary reached through his arm to touch his hand as he turned to kiss her forehead.
They stood at the rail to view the high school track where their grand-daughter had just set a school record in the 100 yard dash.
“You were always so skeptical of her mother and her parenting,” chided Mary.
He laughed with joy to himself, the way a good husband does when agreeing with his wife, while being quite confident that a jury of their peers would’ve come to the opposite conclusion.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

‘Zoe Quinn,’ SJW Martyr

Posted on | February 11, 2016 | 18 Comments

Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq) and Zoe Quinn (@UnBurntWitch) testify at the U.N.

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct. Last July, I summarized the essence of the #GamerGate scandal:

Quinn was accused of gaining favorable coverage of her work — which is allegedly useless and awful — by providing Grayson and others access to her nasty poontang. And when these allegations of quid pro quo were published by one of Quinn’s embittered ex-lovers, Quinn’s defenders accused her critics of misogyny.

There were all kinds of background factors involved, but liberals decided that the narrative was about “misogyny” within the male-dominated videogame industry, and also about women being “harassed” online. We can stipulate both of those points — yes, many videogame dudes are crude sexists, and yes, women are targeted for harassment — without allowing ourselves to be distracted from the essence of #GamerGate, namely that some women are shrewdly exploiting gender as a means of gaining lucrative advantages. The videogame industry would very much like to attract more female players, and this has created certain incentives that attract cunning opportunists.

When you factor in the desire of corporations to insulate themselves against discrimination lawsuits by hiring more women, and also the “white knight” tendencies of some men (including “progressive” journalists like Grayson), the suspicions of unethical favoritism behind #GamerGate weren’t “misogyny,” but basic common sense.

All of that background was obscured by shrieks of “harassment” during the #GamerGate controversy, and few of the self-proclaimed Victims of Misogyny shrieked louder than Zoe Quinn. She sought a restraining order against Gjoni (discussed here by Eugene Volokh) and pressed charges of criminal harassment. Now suddenly, the charges have been dropped.

Do you want to read 2,700 words of Zoe Quinn’s self-dramatizing account of her suffering as a Victim of Misogyny?

Don’t let me stop you, but my eyes glazed over when she claimed to have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of people saying mean things about her on the Internet. Keep in mind, this isn’t about whether Eron Gjoni is a Bad Ex-Boyfriend — obviously, he is — and it’s not about whether people should say mean things on the Internet — obviously, they shouldn’t — but rather the question is whether this has anything to do with “social justice.” And it’s also a question of whether an entire industry should be conformed to the zany whims of mentally ill ex-strippers and other such feminist crackpots. Must everything in our culture, including videogames, be banned as “misogyny” if it is judged unacceptable by the ideological standards of Gender Studies majors?

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and restricting freedom of speech — effectively prohibiting anyone from criticizing feminism — is necessary to the feminist movement’s success. The First Amendment does not protect libel or harassment. However, if Zoe Quinn is a public figure, then Eron Gjoni’s allegations that she was using sex to gain favorable coverage for her stupid videogames could be construed as journalism in the public interest. It is never a crime to publish the truth, and the truth is that Chelsea Van Valkenburg (alias “Zoe Quinn”) is a mentally ill ex-stripper.





 

Category: Feminism

Busted Again

Posted on | February 11, 2016 | 3 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Readers of Instapundit and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Nation blog (which should be most of you, I would think) are already aware of Nick Cole’s very public calling out of Harper Collins for attempting to kill his latest book, CTRL-ALT-Revolt!, and terminating his contract for the unforgivable sin of Wrongthink. If not, Nick explains the whole stupid tale on his own blog, and I’ll let him tell his tale there. tl;dr: Another example of how the gatekeepers the SJWs claim don’t exist try to keep good, entertaining writers off the market; in this case, Cole is having the best revenge, releasing the book on Amazon instead and being rewarded with massive sales and a #1 hit in the cyberpunk subgenre for both e-books and print books. I’m about halfway through the book, which reads like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, only BETTER, since its basic plot revolves around a group of AIs deciding to wipe out humanity before humanity strikes first…based on their watching the latest Hollywood reality show. At $0.99 for the Kindle edition, you’d be a fool not to buy this.

Somewhat more expensive, but also very worth it, is There Will Be War Volume X, which marks the revival of the classic Cold War anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle. There’s stories in here from Larry Niven, Greg Benford, Poul Anderson and some new talents, as well as non-fiction from William Lind, Martin van Creveld, and Phillip Pournelle. Not a clunker in the lot. Vox is absolutely right to nominate Jerry for Best Editor (Short Form), which as the Supreme Dark Lord notes is an honor long overdue. Related: the reissue of There Will Be War Volume IX is out from Castalia House.

I’m not a big fan of the late Iain Banks’ Culture novels; in general, they do a great job of showing just how damn boring life in a post-scarcity society where you can pretty much have anything or be anyone, since most of them take place on the fringes of the Culture during various wars or Special Circumstances missions where the Culture comes into conflict with alien, less advanced societies. One of them, and the only one I own, is The Player of Games, which involves the blackmailing of one Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a noted master of games, into traveling to the Empire of Azad to play the game of Azad, a tremendously involved and complicated social simulation that determines who’s going to run the Empire and how. Nobody, not even Gurgeh himself, expects him to do well, but as he becomes more familiar with the society that the game mirrors, something inside him changes…and so does the game. A very dark book in several respects, but along with Consider Phlebas, probably the best of the Culture books.

For next week’s book post, I’m going to tackle Larry Correia’s Son of the Black Sword, Francis Porretto’s Chosen One, and whatever else attracts my eye between now and then.


Category: Books

In The Mailbox, 02.11.16

Posted on | February 11, 2016 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Laika, The Socialist Space Dog
Da Tech Guy: I’m Old Enough To Remember When Third Place Was Awesome And Second Place Wasn’t
Proof Positive: Excuse Me, Waiter, There’s A Quid In My Pro Quo
Michelle Malkin: Dismantling David Brooks
Twitchy: Report About Alan Grayson’s Other Job Could Win Him “Hypocrite of the Year”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Death of Twitter
American Thinker: The Four Types of Socialists
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Youngblood by Matt Gallagher
Conservatives4Palin: Tenured Thugs and Thieves
Don Surber: Enjoy the Illegal Alien Insurance Hike, California
Jammie Wearing Fools: Ron Goldman’s Family Receives Charming Facebook Message
Joe For America: Sheriff David Clarke on Beyonce’s Racist Super Bowl Show
JustOneMinute: The Bloomberg Anesthetic
Pamela Geller: Terror-Tied LA Sheriff Lee Baca Pleads Guilty To Corruption
Protein Wisdom: Just In Time – Progressive Valentine Cards
Shot In The Dark: A Bridge from Nowhere
STUMP: The Meaning of the Word “Fault”, Chicago Pensions Edition
The Gateway Pundit: SURPRISE! Bernie Sanders’ Latina Spokeswoman Is An Illegal Immigrant
The Jawa Report: Think Bernie Sanders Won The New Hampshire Primary? Guess Again
The Lonely Conservative: Who Is Owned by Wall Street, Trump or Cruz?
This Ain’t Hell: 500 Infantrymen To Helmand, Afghanistan
Weasel Zippers: Watergate Reporter Mocks Hillary – “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Didn’t Put That Server In Her Damn Closet”
Megan McArdle: Obama’s Oil Tax Is Running On Empty
Mark Steyn: The March of Trump, The Feel of Bern


Shop Amazon Fashion – Gifts for Her

Category: Linkagery

Democrat Armageddon

Posted on | February 11, 2016 | 82 Comments

Top headlines at the Drudge Report, as of 6:30 a.m. ET today:

 

 

 

What does all this mean? At least two conclusions seem obvious:

  1. Democrat primary voters are crazy;
    and
  2. People don’t like Hillary Clinton very much.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but you cannot deny the man has a certain charisma about him. Ever since JFK was assassinated, Democrats had been looking for a candidate like Obama, a charismatic figure as a vehicle to advance a liberal policy agenda. Bill Clinton’s presidency was marked by asterisks — he never got a majority of the popular vote — but Obama won by decisive majorities in 2008 and 2012.

For better or worse, therefore, the Democrats are now Obama’s party, and the fracture in this year’s primary campaign is the result. Bernie Sanders is Obama without charisma. Hillary Clinton is who she has always been, and she has never had any charisma. What the Democrats are betting, really, is that they won’t need charisma in November. Their ideal scenario would be for the Democrats to nominate Hillary, Jeb Bush to get the Republican nomination and Donald Trump to run a third-party populist campaign, so that the Clintons can slither back into the White House on a 43-percent plurality the way Bill did it in 1992.

The underlying problem for Democrats is that their desperation to capture and hold the White House has cost them scores of seats in Congress and state legislatures, and the number of Democrats among governors have been decimated. Democrats now represent the Left on a nationwide basis, which means they represent New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle and other major urban centers. Democrats represent government employees, including employees of the liberal-controlled public school system, and Democrats also represent recipients of government benefits, including college students dependent on financial aid.

Democrats are generally the party of all who live at taxpayers’ expense. Democrats are hostile to the interests of those who work for a living in the private sector. Democrats hate America, because Democrats hate capitalism, hate the traditional family, and also hate God. Democrats are the party of abortion clinics and unwed motherhood. Democrats are the party of Hollywood, the New York Times, and the feminist blogosphere. Democrats are the party of dopeheads and atheists, vegetarians and pacifists, homosexuals and hedonists. Democrats are the party of blue-haired hipsters and tattoo-covered slackers. Democrats are the party of the emotionally wounded and the mentally ill, the party of “victims.”

Having collected all these disparate anti-American interest groups into a nationwide anti-American coalition — a phenomenon that was apparent as early as the 1972 McGovern campaign, and replicated in the 1988 Dukakis campaign — the Democrats were able to win the White House in 2008 and 2012 without making any real concession to the part of the American electorate that is Christian, patriotic, and happily married.

Elections have consequences, and living in the Obama Age means that we no longer live in America. We now live in Anti-America.

 

Obama promised that America would be fundamentally transformed and he has accomplished what he promised, which is why Bernie Sanders was able to rally the Kook Coalition to beat Clinton in the New Hampshire primary by a 22-point margin. As crazy as Hillary Clinton is, she isn’t quite crazy enough to represent what the Democrat Party has become in the Obama Age. Insanity is now public policy, and the paranoid rage of maniacs is a political force to be reckoned with in the wake of our fundamental transformation. The crisis of the Hillary Clinton campaign is therefore an omen of America’s impending doom because, even if the Democrats lose the next election, what can we expect the next time the Democrats win an election? How many more Democrat presidencies can the nation endure before it finally descends into total depravity and madness? The collapse of American society into violent chaos, anarchy and civil war is by no means a far-fetched scenario.

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.




 

Category: Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election, Hillary Clinton

Don’t Let The Gills, Scales & Fins Distract You–Nothing Fishy In Trumpistan

Posted on | February 10, 2016 | 124 Comments

by Smitty

Byron York almost doesn’t seem to notice:

There really were a lot of Trump voters out there, and party officials could not, or did not want, to see them.

And what an astonishingly varied group of voters Trump attracted. At his victory celebration in Manchester Tuesday night, I met a young woman, Alexis Chiparo, who four years ago was an Obama-voting member of MoveOn.org. Now she is the Merrimack County chair of the Trump campaign.

I sure would like to know how many other core leaders in Trump’s campaign cut their teeth working for the Commies. I don’t know the lady–her support could be sincere. Or not.

Category: Donald Trump

In The Mailbox, 02.09.16

Posted on | February 10, 2016 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Bern Your Enthusiasm
Da Tech Guy: The Unexpectedly Chronicles – Hillary Accomplishments Vs. Rubio Accomplishments On Morning Joe
Michelle Malkin: This Is How Hillary Treats The American Flag
Twitchy: “Blacks And Hispanics Will Save Her” Hillary Plans March Nomination


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: How “Neomasculinity” Blogger RooshV Became International “Pro-Rape” Villain
American Thinker: No More Room To Compromise With The Socialist Agenda Of The Democrats
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin – Thank You New Hampshire!
Don Surber: Canada – Health Care To Die For. Literally
Jammie Wearing Fools: Guy Who’s Afraid Of Megyn Kelly Calls Ted Cruz “Pussy”
Joe For America: Beyonce – Pro-Black Panther, Anti-Cop
JustOneMinute: New Hampshire Berning!
Pamela Geller: Turkey’s Erdogan Threatened To Flood Europe With Millions Of Muslim Migrants
Protein Wisdom: Well, Since I Don’t Vote With My Vagina, I Guess I’m Going To Hell
Shot In The Dark: Who Saw This Coming?
STUMP: On The Illinois Bailout Idea And Other Shenanigans
The Gateway Pundit: Trump Wins New Hampshire – Fox Calls It Early
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Ted Cruz Totally 100% Not A Pussy
The Lonely Conservative: SCOTUS Puts The Brakes On Obama’s Climate Rule
This Ain’t Hell: Sanders Gets C&D Letter From The American Legion
Weasel Zippers: Hillary Gives Angry, Ranting, Bitter Concession Speech
Megan McArdle: Sanders And Clinton Get Substantive. That’s Where They Go Wrong.
Mark Steyn: Where The Bern Is


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Category: Linkagery
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