The Other McCain

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

Liberal Feature; Conservative Bug

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

Asymmetries seem to abound these days:

Already Walker has been dogged by alleged improprieties regarding campaign finance laws during the recall campaign and a lack of transparency as county executive
“This is a guy who has literally been in elective office his entire adult life,” said a strategist for one rival campaign. “He has made his living off the government sector, the taxpayer. He has never really, to my knowledge, had any kind of serious existence outside of the public sector.”

Are you also old enough to remember when, say, Her Majesty’s existence as either a public creature or a lawyer was totally a feature? Demoness you know, and all.

Thought experiment: make a reality show where serious candidates have to demonstrate actual problem solving skills. I want to see candidates demonstrate actual:

  • literacy
  • imagination
  • general knowledge
  • leadership
  • stamina
  • stewardship
  • wisdom

The more I think about it, the more some kind of a “Survivor”-style winnowing seems like it could be useful. Not that there is any hope of improvement over the current morass.

The concern about Walker peaking early is well-founded, but I think it’s a feature to get him out there in an early sprint, identify some areas to polish, and see if he is serious about the marathon. Sad to say it, for a variety of reasons, Sarah Palin does not seems to have had the needed  endurance.

Of course, these are only issues for a conservative. At the worse-is-better end of the spectrum, the liberals seem to come up with new to paganisms. On the one hand, I hope somebody duped Her Majesty’s email queue. On the other hand, finding out just how criminal she really was is likely to be TMI by half. I love my country, and finding out about new whoredoms isn’t to be relished.

via HotAir

Category: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Scott Walker

Server, Serve Her: Clinton Crumbling

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 29 Comments

EmailGate is reminding Americans of the scandalous Clintonian habit of deception and corruption. Ed Morrissey scoffs:

Hillary Clinton violated the Federal Records Act for four years, hid all of her e-mails as Secretary of State for nearly six years, and only began giving some of those communications to State a couple of months ago. Now that the FOIA dodge has been exposed, Hillary wants everyone to believe that she’s a paragon of transparency.
No one’s buying this, are they?

No, Ed. Nobody ever expects the truth from a Clinton. The question is whether she can get away with this particular lie:

Democrats and outside allies of the Clintons read that as an invitation to deride the investigation. Media Matters and Correct the Record, two of David Brock’s organizations—one that occasionally defends Hillary Clinton, and the other that does nothing but—have repeatedly called the e-mails story “false” and an extension of the “Benghazi hoax.”

Right: This is the familiar Vast Right Wing Conspiracy defense, wherein the question is not whether Clinton broke the law, but whether defeating Clinton’s enemies is of greater value to Democrats than enforcing the law. Every Democrat is expected to become a Clinton co-conspirator, so that the core principle of the party becomes Getting Away With It.

Is it time for Democrats to start hedging their bets?

Democratic primary voters are about to be reminded on a semiweekly basis of what left a lot of them so ambivalent about Hillary in 2008 — namely, the perception that the Clintons are like an unregulated industry within the party, impervious to scrutiny and contemptuous of anyone who would get in their way.
And this is why, if I were Joe Biden, and if I still harbored designs on the Oval Office down the hall, I’d be inclined to ignore what the insiders were saying. I’d run, and I’d run now.

You know the Democrats must be in a pretty desperate bind when they’re counting on Joe Biden to rescue their party.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 


 

Category: Corruption, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Scandal

Sympathy For The Prodigal Chief Justice

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

That leaves Chief Justice John Roberts, who was uncharacteristically quiet. If I had to guess, Roberts is less than pleased to find this political hot potato back in the lap of a court he devoutly wants the public to see as nonpartisan. Further, having been identified, and assailed by conservatives, as the late-deciding fifth vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act last time around, Roberts wanted to avoid any soupçon of hand-tipping.

Dude, as long as Progress has wrought Politics in Everything, having the SCOTUS reduced to Colonel Nathan Jessup meets a Commie babysitter seems mostly inevitable.

Is JohnnyRob going to find a way to reject what his lyin’ eyes tell him? Will the Lefty bimbo squad on the Court get him to do some more mental gymnastics? Can he find some way to legislate creatively again? Did the last election have consequences, but not “consequences” consequences? Has this godforsaken ObamaCare farce not gone on long enough?

One hopes Roberts takes this opportunity to un-soil himself.

Prediction: no matter what the verdict, the ObamaCare zombie is still going to be staggering about, groaning for “Brainz”. It’s time for actual, no-kidding, voter-mandated reform.

via HotAir headlines

Category: Health Care, Progressivism, Republicans, Supreme Court

The Flap Over EmailGate Makes No Sense

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 33 Comments

by Smitty

Her Majesty wasn’t any more cavalier in offering a Bronx cheer to the spirit and letter of the law concerning official business than she has been at any point in her Hillustrious career. The only surprise is that any peasant scum out there on the plantation are surprised.


No.

Update, as Jazz put it:

I agree with Allahpundit, at least in as far as saying that the Clintons don’t *think* they are above the law. They know it. And as long as the public is willing to look the other way and conclude that anything bad said about Hillary is a media mountain created out of a molehill, they’re not going to change their vote. In order to make this stick in a meaningful way which might result in Hillary either dropping out or losing the election, she would need to be personally brought up on charges. And really… who can be bothered to do that?

The legal system is impotent in the face of this. The only place to do anything about it is the court of public opinion. The only time is 2016. The plaintiffs are the voters.

Category: Hillary Clinton

Bad Christianity, Worse Atheism

Posted on | March 4, 2015 | 174 Comments

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

“Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”
— Romans 1:29-32 (KJV)

It bothers me only a little to admit that a lot of modern Christian writing is wretched and unhelpful when it comes to relationships. The Gospel of Niceness, as I call it, tends to produce a saccharine G-rated rhetoric that isn’t much help to people dealing with the unmitigated horrors of modern life. There are people out there traumatized by what they’ve lived through and terrified by the world around them, and the saccharine G-rated Gospel of Niceness does not speak in a language that all these hopelessly broken people can understand.

What happens, not surprisingly, is that these broken people reject Christianity because (a) the church isn’t talking to them in a language that helps, and (b) the sin-filled world talks to them in a language they understand, even if it doesn’t actually help. All of this is preamble to one of the most Satanic tales I’ve encountered during my research into radical feminism. (You have bought a copy of my book, right?) What happened was that I was searching for “heteronormativity” and found “When heteronormativity means there are no other options”:

When you’re growing up in conservative Christian purity culture, your relationship options are limited. True, there are a variety of beliefs on the rules for relationships; some communities reinforce courtship, others have very stringent rules about what is acceptable behavior at different stages of relationships. But within those muddy waters of relationship rules, purity culture has the same constant: save sex for your heterosexual marriage, and marry for life.
The ideal relationship is something you’re supposed to strive for. The image of a beautiful heterosexual couple, smiling and in love, telling their story of first romance, first kisses till death do they part, is a powerful one. That’s the success story. If you can find romance once, only “give your heart away” once, and for a lifetime, you have won the game.
And while this idealized image doesn’t have the same high standards in the rest of American culture, it still exists: heterosexual marriage, for life, is one of the marks of adulthood, of success and maturity. …
When I was a Christian, I was the kind of repressed queer person that didn’t allow myself any other options. . . .

Hmmm. Check the sidebar profile:

This blog has a generalized trigger warning for discussions of sexual, physical, mental, and spiritual abuse.
Tor is a queer apostate survivor of abuse.
Pronouns are “they/them”
They live in Oregon, and are currently working on a book about their experiences with abuse, Christianity, and their dealings with trauma.

“They” is actually a she, but this is a minor quibble, because up there on the top bar of her blog is “My Story,” and a thoroughly horrifying story it is. “Generalized trigger warning,” indeed. There is just no way the G-rated saccharine Gospel of Niceness can address Tor’s life experience.

She describes being raped at age 9 by her brother who was then 15. This brother subsequently was prosecuted for another sex crime (he is a registered sex offender) and, because of the hostility between Tor and her brother, Tor is alienated from her family, to say nothing of Tor’s queer apostasy. Here, go read this part of Tor’s story. (“Generalized trigger warning.”) You’re going to need something a whole lot stronger than the Gospel of Niceness to help somebody like Tor.

The passage from Paul’s epistle to the Romans quoted at the top of this post is part of a longer sequence that is most famous for verses 26-27, but I like the way it concludes in verses 29-32 because there, tucked away amid that grocery list of heinous evil is “disobedient to parents.” Sometimes I point that out to my kids, when I need to remind them that they are also Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

The Gospel of Niceness too seldom reminds kids of that, as if kids are too stupid to look around them and notice the evil that other kids do. Or to look in the mirror and recognize that, yes, they are sinners, too. Because I was a notoriously bad kid — in the old days, before “self-esteem,” teachers didn’t mince words about bad kids like me — I was never under any illusion about my sinful condition. I was a natural-born “behavior problem” if ever there was one. Thank God they hadn’t come up with the diagnosis ADHD back then, or I’d have been doped up on Ritalin by age 4. As it was, paddling was the main form of “therapy” administered by the education system, and I know I thoroughly deserved every one.

Anyway, I was reading another post of Tor’s called “The demon of demon paranoia,” in which she scornfully dismisses a pastor:

I define my childhood religion as a bit of Baptist legalism, mixed with Penecostal Holy Spiritism, a smattering of evangelical culture, all under the belief that God is some kind of magical genie who directs and takes care of every little thing we do.
When we moved up to the area we live now, we started attending a nearby Foursquare church. The pastor was an arrogant, hard preacher . . .
His biggest hang up was demons. I first heard of Frank Peretti’s book This Present Darkness from him, and he considered the book Biblical. He had pamphlets on the demonic in the church office; he spoke out against the evils of Halloween and trick-or-treating. My mom already had some fear of demons being everywhere, had already stopped letting my brothers go trick-or-treating the year I was two, and she very easily was sucked into this pastor’s paranoia.

Evil is real, Tor. You might not like the way this “arrogant, hard preacher” dwelled on the subject of demons, but certainly you cannot deny that evil is real. And ask yourself this: Considering what you went through in your childhood, was your mother’s “fear of demons being everywhere” irrational? Was it not the case that there was evil in your home? And isn’t it possible that, providentially, God sent this preacher to your community to warn about demons that were actually there?

People laugh at me for believing in the reality of evil, but I’ve seen evil with my own eyes. Sure, maybe you don’t believe that evil is supernatural. Maybe you can explain all the evil in the world according to “science so called,” but am I the only one who notices that certain biblical prophecies about the proliferation of evil seem to be coming true in the 21st century? There are no accidents, Tor. It wasn’t an accident that I found your blog, and read your description of your condition:

You know what? I am a sexual abuse victim. Of course things suck. Of course everything is hard, and nothing is right.  . . .
But you know what? I don’t owe the world my healing. I don’t owe it to anyone to make them feel better about what happened to me. . . .
I’m fucked up. I’m self-destructive, I’m fearful . . .On the days when God still gets back into my head I look at how perfectly everything lined up for my destruction and think God wants me to die. I’m fucked up to a level I don’t even talk about. I have coping mechanisms I have never heard anyone ever talk about. And maybe they’re like me; too shameful to talk about. Or maybe it’s me; alone in this sea of oh my god how fucked up am I.

No, you’re not alone, but God doesn’t want you to die, either. While it would be presumptuous for me to claim to know what God wants for your life, the fact that you wrote that in 2011 and are still alive today tells me that you are alive for a reason. There are no accidents, Tor. Whom God would destroy, no man can save; whom God would save, no man can destroy. Therefore, your existence — even as a self-declared “queer apostate” — must serve some purpose in the divine plan, if only to wake up those Christians who think the Gospel of Niceness is sufficient to help someone who is “fucked up to a level I don’t even talk about.”

When you notice the trackback to your blog and read what I’ve written, you’ll probably hate me, Tor, and that’s OK. But let me ask you, what do you think the odds were that (a) I’d be crazy enough to write a book on radical feminism, (b) that this research would lead me to your blog by searching for “heteronormativity” and (c) rather than dismissing you as just another crazy feminist, I’d actually take time to read your story and recognize your unique value? The odds against this sequence of events have got to be a million-to-one, but it happened.

There are no accidents, God exists and, yes, evil is very real. Here’s the end of your post about demons:

I still am afraid of mirrors (mostly when it’s dark), I still see silhouettes when my sleep schedule gets too erratic. I still have nights where I’m awake for hours with the most horrible sense of my own guilt, afraid that demons have taken hold of me, and God hates me, and I am the worst sinner in the world. Fear pervades my life, I live under the weight of nightmares, flashbacks, and body memories, and a constant sense of foreboding, all because of this. Those are my “demons” now.

Let me repeat something I wrote in January:

Satan is the Father of Lies (John 8:43-45). Satan is the false accuser (Revelation 12:9-11). Satan constantly tells us lies about ourselves and lies about God. If you listen to that satanic voice, you will drive yourself crazy, because the lies are contradictory. Satan will tell you whatever you want to believe, whatever it takes to destroy you. Satan will tell you that your sins are so wicked that God cannot possibly love you. Then Satan will tell you there is no such thing as sin. Satan will tell you that good is evil, and evil is good, and that you should do evil because that will make you happier than doing good. Most of all, Satan tells us to reject God’s law, to instead make our own judgment of right and wrong.
This was the original lie of history: “Ye shall be as gods!”

Satan hasn’t changed at all. It’s still the same old lies — the demonic voice of the false accuser who wants to destroy us.

You survived, Tor. You survived for a reason. The voice in your head telling you that God hates you? Don’t listen to that voice.

 

Category: Religion, Sex Trouble

Welfare for Terrorists

Posted on | March 4, 2015 | 25 Comments

He repaid British taxpayers by becoming an ISIS killer:

Jihadi John and his asylum-seeking family have milked the British benefits system for 20 years, the Mail can reveal today.
Housing the Islamic State executioner and his relatives in affluent parts of London has cost taxpayers up to £400,000.
One landlord said Mohammed Emwazi’s family were ‘parasites’ and ‘tenants from hell’. . . .
Emwazi’s father Jasem, who has six children, is back in his native Kuwait — the country he claimed he fled fearing for his life.
Westminster City Council is still paying the rent on the family’s £600,000 flat even though the rules say housing benefit should normally be stopped after 13 weeks.
MPs said they were horrified that the child of a family given refugee status, citizenship and benefits had returned the favour by orchestrating the murder of two of its citizens.

Via Memeorandum.

 

Category: Great Britain, Terrorism

Police Charge Ohio Democrat With Faking His Own Kidnapping

Posted on | March 4, 2015 | 32 Comments

Some media are calling Adam Hoover a “gay rights activist,” which is really just a clever way of saying “Ohio Democrat”:

A suburban Cincinnati gay rights activist was charged with a misdemeanor early Tuesday after police say he falsely claimed online that he was kidnapped and thrown in the trunk of his car, NBC affiliate WLWT reported. In a post on Facebook and Twitter just before 12:30 a.m. ET, Adam Hoover alerted his friends and followers that he was in danger. He said he was using social media instead of dialing 911 because he didn’t want to be heard.
“Please help me I’m in the trunk of my ford escort red 2000 gbh 2812,” the 20-year-old wrote. “They said they are going to kill my family please call 911 I don’t want them to hear me.” He included his mother’s phone number and his family’s address. “Please please call. I don’t want to die,” he added.
The plea for help spread quickly on social media and sparked an immediate search in the Cincinnati area. But after investigating, Green Township police and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office believe the kidnapping was a hoax. Authorities discovered Hoover’s car abandoned on a highway near the Ohio-Indiana border, WLWT reported. He was seen coming out of a nearby home with police and was unharmed, according to the station. Police didn’t immediately release a motive for why Hoover allegedly faked his own abduction

Hillary Clinton supporters don’t need a motive to lie. They’re Democrats. It’s who they are. it’s what they do.

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Gays, Hillary Clinton, Ohio

Not Making This Up

Posted on | March 4, 2015 | 16 Comments

Child killer Polly Chowdhury (left) and her lesbian lover Kiki Muddar (right)

A crime story that has everything:

A Muslim lesbian was today found guilty of torturing her eight-year-old daughter to death with the help of her vampire-obsessed lover.
Polly Chowdhury, 35, became convinced Ayesha Ali was ‘possessed’ and that she needed to be ‘punished’ because of a fantasy world created on Facebook by her twisted girlfriend.
Chowdhury was ‘groomed’ by 43-year-old Kiki Muddar, who invented 15 fictional characters, including a Muslim spirit called Skyman and a paranormal lover called ‘Jimmy’, to control her partner.
She had seduced neighbour Chowdhury and split up her marriage, before sending thousands of messages from alter egos to convince her lover to play out sexual fantasies and torture Ayesha.
Muddar was also obsessed with vampires and Ayesha’s mother agreed to bite her daughter’s back as part of the depraved attacks that led to her death in Chadwell Heath, Essex, in August 2013. . . .
Afsal Ali described his former spouse as ‘the perfect mother’ who had a ‘good heart’ and ‘put other people before herself’.
Muddar would cause arguments in the family home and his wife became ‘completely unrecognisable.’
Soon no family decisions could be made without Chowdury consulting Muddar, who had become her love.
‘It was like she was possessed,’ her husband said.

Somewhere, a Women’s Studies major is trying to figure out how to blame this crime on the heteronormative patriarchy.

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Islam
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin