The Other McCain

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

Quote Of The Half-Decade @TedNugent

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

Bad Ted; bad (emphasis mine):

“I do apologize – not necessarily to the President – but on behalf of much better men than myself, like the best governor in America, Gov. Rick Perry, [and] the best attorney general in America, Greg Abbott [of Texas],” Nugent said.

“I apologize for using the street fighter terminology, like ‘subhuman mongrel,’ instead of just using more understandable language such as ‘violator of his oath to the Constitution,’” Nugent continued. “I apologize for using the term. I will try to elevate my vernacular to the level of those great men that I’m learning from in the world of politics.”

Category: Barack Obama, Celebrities

Joseph Ellis Underscores The Need For The Convention Of States

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 54 Comments

by Smitty

Ellis at the L.A. Times serves a moot point as though it were wisdom:

But, seriously, a second Constitutional Convention? It could never succeed, chiefly because the secrecy, elitism and the rest of 1787 reality could never be duplicated in our time. (And ought not be.) Besides — and here I feel an obligation to defend the legacy of the founders — the current gridlock in Congress is not a function of anything in the language of the Constitution.

Gerrymandering and primary election politicking are surely part of the problem. So too is the plutocratic character of our political culture in what has become, in effect, a second Gilded Age. But the core problem in getting legislation through the House and the Senate are procedural rules adopted by both bodies over the last century.

In the Senate, the culprit is the filibuster. Its history is long and labyrinthian, but, in the form it has assumed over the last 30 years or so, a supermajority of 60 votes is required for passage of any and all legislation. (The “nuclear option” weakened the filibuster when applied to some presidential appointments, but not to legislation.)

I think these are tangential points, at best.

  • The House has been frozen in size since 1910; it is relatively less representative.
  • The States as such have had no voice in DC since 1913 and the 17th Amendment. Senators are far more beholden to their party than their state, and generally rich enough to ignore the peasantry back home.
  • The beloved IRS has had eminent domain over the American wallet since 1913 and the 16th Amendment. Recently it has been an iron rod in the service of the White House.
  • The Federal Reserve has successfully demolished the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913.

In response to this, Michael Farris is offering the sort of leadership that the GOP would, were the Republican elite not a pack of anemic, spavined, emasculated examples of the species homo bureaucratus. John McCain, you broken down old tool, I mean you.

An Article V convention, properly controlled and pondered for years beforehand to get it right, (in other words, the precise opposite of ObamaCare), is Exactly. What. We. Need.

We’re going to recover this country from Progressive collapse, Ellis. Do try to keep up.

via HotAir headlines

Category: Constitution

Blame Bush!

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 32 Comments

Or, maybe, blame Karl Rove for the dumbed-down culture of the Republican Party that leads to stupid and unnecessary defeats. Everybody today is talking about Alex Roarty’s National Journal article, “The GOP’s Talent Gap,” which echoes a lot of the complaints one hears from Republican tech consultants and operatives:

The turnout experts, TV whizzes, and all-around gurus of the Grand Old Party have been outnumbered and outsmarted by their adversaries, who have spent a decade retrofitting their entire political infrastructure. The result is a dizzying talent gap between the two parties’ political classes, one that shows few signs of closing as the 2014 midterms begin. In some ways, the GOP is years behind on solving a problem that has no quick fixes.
The chasm is widest in technology, an area where Democrats have innovated heavily while Republican tactics ossified. But the data and digital divide, while getting most of the attention, is only a symptom of a larger problem that cuts fundamentally to how the Republican Party operates — not just at a tactical level but also a philosophical one. The well-worn pathways of the party’s operatives, in which every low-level staffer commits his or her career to becoming a well-paid TV specialist, must change. . . .
A party that celebrates individual achievement must learn to better share information and work together to form a new way of politicking—a practice Democrats have emphasized for years. For conservatives, that will smack of a collectivist mind-set they detest as a matter of public policy. But a top-to-bottom change in how the GOP’s political leadership thinks is exactly what many of its own strategists argue is necessary to catch up to Democrats.
“If you think [the] reason you lost to Obama is because you didn’t have a database, that’s just a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Patrick Ruffini, one of the party’s foremost digital consultants. “The problem lies not so much in not having those specific things. The problem lies in a culture.”
Tech-savvy consultants use the word “culture” a lot as they try to convince party leaders that closing the gap isn’t about finding the next technological widget. It’s about transforming how the party conducts its campaigns, from operations that rely heavily on TV and conventional wisdom to data-driven efforts that reach across all media. Most important, it requires that staffers on those campaigns, from campaign manager to rank-and-file workers, overhaul not just what they do but how they think.

You can read the whole thing. I’d add a couple of caveats:

  1. Good candidates win, bad candidates lose. Politics is really a lot more simple than the gurus and wizards would have you believe. Despite what anyone tells you about high tech, running a campaign is not rocket science, and a successful campaign requires a good candidate — or, at least, a candidate who is not so bad that he’s doomed to defeat from the outset. Barack Obama is a very bad president, but he was a very good candidate, and his success has a way of making Democrat strategists look a lot smarter than they actually are. A party that nominates a guaranteed loser like John McCain for president cannot blame the campaign staff for the inevitable defeat.
  2. Greed and egomania are killing the GOP — Yes, I’m talking about Karl Rove, who has been cashing in on his dubious reputation as “The Architect” for years, and whose American Crossroads super-PAC is a ginormous black hole where stupid rich Republican donors have thrown away millions of dollars for nothing. Rove has become a sort of role model for up-and-coming operatives who play by the same rules: It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, as long as you maintain a reputation as a genius so that people keep paying you the big bucks.
  3. Stupid money buys stupid results — Ultimately, the blame for the Republican Party’s systemic problems can be traced to the mega-donors like Sheldon Adelson, who think they understand politics as well as they understand whatever business they made their money in. They don’t, of course, and so the mega-donors are the pawns of whatever “expert” advisers they listen to.
  4. Media bias still matters — It is important, in considering the relative fortunes of the two major parties, to keep in mind that about 90% of America’s journalists vote Democrat. The GOP is always doomed to be sailing into gale-force headwinds of hostile media coverage, and whatever strategy the “experts” have offered to combat that prejudicial disadvantage, it ain’t working.

Ultimately, however, I blame Bush. Fairly or not, Bush’s reputation as a dimwit — his drawling malapropisms, etc. — alienated an entire generation of smart young kids who weren’t really excited about the American Conquest of Mesopotamia. The catastrophic disaster of the Iraq War permanently tainted the GOP among intellectuals, and the Republican Party hasn’t come to grips with that “brand damage” issue, primarily because the people running the GOP are unwilling to admit that the Bush presidency was a failure.

 

Category: Politics

How to Hate Your Parents

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 16 Comments

Too many people go through life in a search for scapegoats, seeking someone to blame for their unhappiness, so as to avoid having to confront the fact that they are responsible for their own problems. Whatever their problem is, someone must be blamed, and that someone cannot be themselves, because if they ever were to accept responsibility for their disappointments and misfortunes, their entitled worldview — their status as Special Snowflakes™ — would crumble into dust. Therefore the Great Scapegoat Hunt continues, and some of this blame-shifting is perversely marketed as “self-help.”

Now, I love Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, and so I don’t want this to be misinterpreted as criticism of her, but she tweeted out an article by one of her podcast guests that struck a nerve with me.

Peg Streep’s article “Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds” may be helpful to some women seeking to understand their troubled relationships with their mothers, and learning how to deal with the consequences of these relationships. But it also resembles the kind of gooey feel-good psychobabble approach to life that is at the heart of so much modern emotional misery.

In a way, you can blame Sigmund Freud for this trend.

The Viennese quack’s psychoanalytic theories located the sources of all unhappiness in early childhood, and every neurotic hypochondriac was encouraged to think that their problems were rooted in various unresolved “conflicts,” with the result that the family was depicted as a nightmare incubator of mental trauma.

We are a few decades past the Freudian heyday of the 1950s and ’60s, and the neuroscientists have long since dethroned the psychoanalysts as the chief “experts” in the mental health field, but the legacy of Freud lives on in the nervous sense of parental incompetence in which parents are afraid that their child will be permanently warped if they are not raised in the expert-approved way. And the Freudian legacy also endures in the way unhappy people tend to blame their unhappiness on childhood misfortunes, for which they ultimately blame their parents. If kids called you “fatso,” or you didn’t make the cut for varsity cheerleader, somehow this explains your adult problems and, if you follow the psychoanalytic method, it all goes back to Mom and Dad.

This is a dead-end trip, the negation of personal agency.

Good mental health does not begin with a resentful backward glance at our unhappy past. It begins in the here and now, with the idea that we are ultimately authors of our own destinies.

Nobody has perfect parents and a perfect childhood, and contemplating the variation of imperfections can be enlightening. But chances are your parents were more or less average, and your childhood was not much more unfortunate than the average. In fact, in my experience, the people most prone to resenting their parents are actually quite fortunate — they come from middle-class or upper-middle class backgrounds and are themselves usually well-educated and affluent. However, their comparatively privileged backgrounds often equip them with a sense of entitlement, and when their expectations are not met, they seek scapegoats. This is where Special Snowflakes™ Syndrome kicks in.

What is lacking — what we as a society have lost in the century or so since Doctor Freud taught us to second-guess our “impulses” and blame our problems on “complexes” — is the Stoic sensibility, the idea that enduring hardship without complaint is a virtue.

Our 19th-century ancestors — my Alabama dirt-farm forebears, for example — did not have the luxury of sitting around wondering why they weren’t happy. They had to work from dawn to sundown just to put food on the table, and the Culture of Complaint was alien to their worldview. Toiling at hard physical labor simply to avoid starvation has a way of making “happiness” more tangible, less a matter of abstract and transient emotion. It is only in the comfortable affluence of middle-class life that people care about “self-esteem” and other such psychobabble nonsense. When survival is taken for granted, ironically, “happiness” becomes harder to obtain.

OK, so that’s my rant about that. You can now go listen to Amy Alkon’s podcast interview with Peggy Streep about her book, Mastering the Art of Quitting — which is actually a good idea for a lot of people. My decision to quit the Washington Times in 2008 proved in hindsight to be a genius move. After I left, the place went to hell, and most of the people who stayed under the new management (people who thought I was crazy for quitting when I did) were laid off over the course of the next two years.

Sometimes you find yourself in untenable situation, where you feel trapped, and the tendency is to blame others for the situation. Regardless of whose fault the situation is, however, the only person you can control is yourself, and taking responsibility for your life sometimes requires you to sing that old Johnny Paycheck song, “Take This Job and Shove It.”

 

Category: Intellectuals

If Breitbart Had Managed To Get An Ambassador Snuffed, Maybe Andrew’s Wife Would Be Left Alone

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Stacy isn’t the only one living in legally exciting times. Pigford, of course, is one of the relatively minor vote-buying schemes afoot these days. Her sorely missed husband’s involvement continues to haunt Andrew Breitbart’s widow:

When fuller context for Sherrod’s remarks emerged, the administration offered to return her to her job, which she declined. In 2011, she sued Breitbart and his employee Larry O’Connor for defamation. Breitbart died unexpectedly in 2012, but his wife was substituted as a defendant in the suit.

At the outset of Thursday’s hearing, Leon lit into Glass for filing a 21-page statement outlining the government’s position—a filing submitted electronically just after midnight Thursday along with a stack of nine exhibits. The judge called it “a self-serving pleading, not requested by anyone” and repeatedly suggested it was filed for “public relations” reasons rather than because it might be useful to the court.

The case has drawn attention because of the subject matter and, more recently, because of indications that the Obama White House might assert executive privilege to block some of the parties’ demands for information.

This country needs thorough, top-down reform so badly that it hurts.

Category: Andrew Breitbart

Brett Kimberlin’s ‘Evidence’

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 37 Comments

Brett Kimberlin could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison.

Brett Kimberlin’s Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., is a nuisance and a distraction, and it angers me that I should be required to prove a fact that is abundantly self-evident to anyone who cares to investigate: Brett Kimberlin is a liar.

So if Brett Kimberlin files a lawsuit claiming I have defamed him, harassed him, stalked him, etc. — “Mopery With Intent to Lurk” — common sense suggests that the judge would take one look at his lawsuit and say, “Oh, this is Brett Kimberlin, the guy convicted of perjury in 1973, ‘a man whose idea of the truth is utterly malleable,’ ‘the convicted bomber, habitual liar and all-around sociopath‘ — that Brett Kimberlin? Yeah, he’s full of it. Case dismissed.”

Unfortunately, the legal system doesn’t operate on the basis of common sense,  which is why we need lawyers to prove the obvious, that I am innocent and Brett Kimberlin is a liar:

Plaintiff’s motion includes 38 pages of attachments in supposed support of his request. Yet those attachments do nothing to support Plaintiff’s request for so drastic an action as removing and suppressing the reportings and opinions of Mr. McCain. In particular, the motion and accompanying exhibits do not include even one example of a defamatory posting by Mr. McCain …
Plaintiff’s Exhibit D is supposed to provide examples of how Mr. McCain (and the other defendants) “dramatically title their posts and fill them with highly charged accusations such as rape, pedophilia, sex slave, domestic abuse … See, e.g., Exhibit D.”
As part of Plaintiff’s Exhibit D, Plaintiff includes a single blog posting by Mr. McCain. The “dramatic” title of Mr. McCain’s blog post is “Motions, Motions, Motions — Judge Grants Brett Kimberlin a Delay.” Mr. McCain is therein reporting on a ruling (in Plaintiff’s favor) in a federal lawsuit initiated by Plaintiff against Mr. McCain and a host of others. That same posting goes on to report and opine on other aspects of that case. Notably, the following words and phrases are never once used: “rape,” “pedophilia,” “sex slave” and “domestic abuse.”

And the “dramatic” title of that document is “Defendant McCain’s Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction.”

Kimberlin v. Walker – McCain – Opposition to Preliminary Injunction by Robert Stacy McCain

This goes to show the fundamental problem we’ve been dealing with: Kimberlin merely alleges this, that and the other, but the way civil court procedure works is, he doesn’t actually have to prove that I wrote anything defamatory — and of course, he can’t, because I didn’t — in order to drag me through all this preliminary bullshit. Hell, his complaint didn’t include a single example of anything I wrote that could even plausibly be construed as defamatory, yet still the judge let the case go forward because (and I quote from memory, but I’m pretty sure these are her exact words), “there’s enough alleged here.”

It’s like the Supreme Court abolished common sense or something.

 

BOMBER SUES BLOGGERS




 

 


Category: The Kimberlin Files

If #ObamaCare Helps At Least One Person, Other Human Wreckage Is OK

Posted on | February 20, 2014 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Barack Obama will take many things; your life, your liberty, your pursuit of happiness: but he will never take responsibility. That’s on you:

Julie, her husband, and four children were covered by a medical plan they liked, and had been promised they could keep by President Obama. But like so many others in this country, her family’s private health care policy was cancelled because of the Affordable Care Act. So my sister and her family struggled through the expensive and incompetently designed Obamacare website to find a new policy. Unfortunately, while they waited for their new Obama-approved healthcare plan to finally kick in, my little sister fell ill. She couldn’t keep down solid food. She should have gone to a doctor. But she toughed it out, as many people do, until her new coverage would kick in on February 2. She and her husband didn’t have a lot of money, so she didn’t want to incur what she thought were avoidable medical expenses.

But she didn’t make it. It turns out that, unbeknownst to her, she wasn’t suffering from an upset stomach or food poisoning, but a badly blocked gall bladder that had become highly infected. Her body went into septic shock just two days before her Obamacare policy would have kicked in.

It’s not clear in what state this tragedy occurred. But if it was here in Virginia, here is one creep whose precious political career can be buried with his victim:
Everybody with a Democrat up for sacrifice in November should do a post and embed the other 59 loser that unleashed this wrecking ball on our country.

via Erick Erickson

Category: Health Care

‘The Second Time as Farce’: @sandraylk’s Recycled Marcusean Marxism

Posted on | February 20, 2014 | 61 Comments

Sandra Korn: Feminist socialist lesbian — but I repeat myself.

“If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’?
“Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of ‘academic justice.’ When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.”
— Sandra Y.L. Korn, Harvard University senior

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

Most of us who lived through the 1960s and ’70s have no desire for a repetition of that carnival of radical errors. Unfortunately, many of those who do remember that era fondly are leftist academics who have turned American university campuses into cauldrons of radicalism, where they inculcate in their young protégés a misplaced nostalgia for an idealized make-believe version of the Sixties. Brainy youth at elite institutions are therefore filled with an obsolete revolutionary zeal to “smash the system,” as if the Establishment today were as oppressive as the administration of Clark Kerr, the hapless liberal whose misfortune it was to be president of the University of California when the Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” erupted.

Because today’s radical youth do not know the actual history of the Sixties, but only what they have been taught about the Sixties by leftist academics, the students are ill-equipped to avoid the typical errors of radicalism, and seem not to realize how stale and predictable their supposedly “innovative” ideas actually are.

And so we come to Harvard senior Sandra Korn’s celebration of the hippie student mau-maus who protested psychology professor Richard Herrnstein’s research about heredity influence on IQ:

When he returned to campus for fall semester 1971, Herrnstein was met by angry student activists. Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society protested his introductory psychology class with a bullhorn and leaflets. They tied up Herrnstein’s lectures with pointed questions about scientific racism. SDS even called for Harvard to fire Herrnstein, along with another of his colleagues, sociologist Christopher Jencks.

This SDS protest at Harvard was after national SDS had already imploded under the pressure of increasing extremism among its leadership clique, an implosion that resulted in the formation of the Weather Underground terrorism cult. The grievances cited by Korn — “a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator” — include the predictable feminist recitation of disagreement as victimhood:

Does Government Professor Harvey Mansfield have the legal right to publish a book in which he claims that “to resist rape a woman needs … a certain ladylike modesty?” Probably. Do I think he should do that? No, and I would happily organize with other feminists on campus to stop him from publishing further sexist commentary under the authority of a Harvard faculty position. “Academic freedom” might permit such an offensive view of rape to be published; academic justice would not.

Is “ladylike modesty” an effective means of averting rape? One expects Professor Mansfield would find many who disagree with that view, but what Korn is saying is that “academic justice” would prohibit anyone at the university from disagreeing with feminist ideology about rape, so that in fact “justice” becomes an Orwellian synonym for the silencing of dissent. (Has she read Animal Farm? Nineteen Eighty-Four?)

Korn’s call for neo-Stalinism on campus — one imagines Harvey Mansfield being airbrushed out of old photos and dying with a feminist assassin’s ice-ax buried in his skull — is only shocking to those who have not followed recent trends in academia.

During the early years of the Cold War, as William F. Buckley Jr. documented in God and Man at Yale (1951), elite universities used the “superstition” of academic freedom to protect faculty who, if not objectively pro-Soviet, at least were decidedly biased against Christianity, economic freedom and American patriotism.

Mid-20th-century liberals were willing to defend anti-American faculty, but the anti-American student Left of the 1960s was unwilling to accept liberal toleration and instead staged a series of sit-in protests to impose radical demands on university administrations. Within a couple of decades — by the early 1990s — “political correctness” had become an intimidating force on many American campuses, and another two decades later, the Left now demands even sterner measures to suppress criticism and dissent. Those who witnessed the feminist jihad against Larry Summers at Harvard saw the omens of this totalitarian turn.

No one will be surprised that Sandra Korn is a Marxist lesbian whose activities include the “Student Labor Action Movement,” who names among her interests “socialism, the labor movement … being angry about gender … occupying things,” and who describes the topic of her thesis as “how biologists have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking ‘science.'” She is a cartoon, a stereotype, a cliché of 21st-century student radicalism. Of course, she’s a member of BAGELS (“Harvard’s Queer Jewish Organization“) and, of course, she is an extreme anti-Zionist who is all about “Palestinian solidarity.”

If you accept the premises of the Left’s argument, the syllogism inevitably concludes this way. The triumph of the Left in academia was assured from the moment radicals realized that education could be transformed from a process of teaching facts and skills into a process of indoctrinating the young with certain attitudes. This transformation has been the project of the academic Left for at least the past hundred years, and the beliefs of Sandra Korn — that the “university community” exists primarily for the purpose of opposing “racism, sexism, and heterosexism” — are now so pervasive in the intelligentsia that almost no one at Harvard even questions such an attitude. Never mind teaching history, language, science, or any other actual knowledge. We shall not measure Harvard’s success by how much Latin or Greek their students learn. Rather, Harvard’s success is to be measured by how avidly its students embrace the desired progressive attitudinal orientation.

So thoroughgoing has been this transformation of elite education that there is likely not a single Harvard undergraduate who possesses the necessary knowledge — much less the inclination — to interrogate and critique Sandra Korn’s worldview.

An entire generation of America’s brightest youth have been deliberately and systematically miseducated, so that if there were any Harvard students who disagreed with Sandra Korn — one gets the impression that homosexuality and socialism are now more or less compulsory in Cambridge — none of those dissenters have the intellectual wherewithal to articulate their disagreement.

Sandra Korn’s ignorant emulation of Sixties radicalism is only possible because none of her equally ignorant peers are able to inform her why she is wrong. Is there no one at Harvard who could hand her a copy of Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation, Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed or Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left?

What Sandra Korn proposes as “academic justice,” echoing the totalitarian ethos of Marcuse, is really just advocating as official policy what has long been unofficial practice at Harvard, where veritas has not been welcome for many, many years.

 

 

ADDENDUM: The caption under Ms. Korn’s photo — “Feminist socialist lesbian — but I repeat myself” — is perhaps in some sense humorous, but is not actually a joke, and should not be misunderstood by any naive Harvardians. As I have explained elsewhere (e.g., “Taking Feminism Seriously”), I’ve read more feminist literature than has the average Gender Studies major, and I agree with the pioneering leaders of the Women’s Liberation Movement: To be a feminist, one must be a lesbian socialist. Of course, there are socialists who are heterosexuals, and lesbians who are not socialists, but any woman who presumes to call herself a “feminist” must denounce capitalism and renounce the penis.

“Heterosexual feminist” is a mythical paradox and “moderate feminist” is an oxymoron. All real feminists are radical feminists, and all radical feminists are socialist lesbians. Quod erat demonstrandum.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Intellectuals
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