The Other McCain

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

Mister Popularity, Edward Snowden

Posted on | January 17, 2014 | 69 Comments

Benny Johnson reports at BuzzFeed:

As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.” . . .
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

What Snowden did is no less criminal than what Bradley Manning did, and Manning’s serving 35 years in federal prison.

 

Category: Crime

Their Propaganda, and Ours

Posted on | January 17, 2014 | 8 Comments

Michael Moynihan has a splendid piece at the Daily Beast:

In the bad old days of the Cold War, those Americans sympathetic to Moscow could purchase clumsy Kremlin propaganda at various radical bookstores, stocked with glossy magazines and turgid tracts about collective farms and Stakhanovite iron output. . . . But the spread of capitalist technology has greatly benefited state-run propaganda, allowing them to reach the stupid and credulous with much greater efficiency, but with a predictable lack of nuance.
And there is something addictive about television stations like RT, the Kremlin-owned conspiracy mill that has collected 1.2 billion YouTube clicks, and PressTV, the Iranian-government sponsored television network that investigates Jewish conspiracies. . . .

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, from the Daily Beast’s “Women in the World” page, here is some feminist propaganda:

One would assume that greater visibility of female political leaders would encourage women to run for office. But given the added — and many times uncalled-for — media scrutiny female political leaders face, women often see them as examples of why not to seek candidacy. A recent survey conducted by the University of Adelaide and YWCA reveals that Australian women are more hesitant to run for office after Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s run-ins with bad press. According to the survey, 8 out of 10 women over the age of 31 are less likely to pursue a career in politics while 57 percent of women between 18 and 21 years old felt discouraged by the press surrounding Ms. Gillard.

Julia Gillard had “run-ins with bad press”? And this is different from male politicians . . . how? For that matter, Margaret Thatcher was thoroughly hated by the left-wing press in her day and, more recently, Sarah Palin was savaged by the press.

If you want to know when things went wrong for Gillard, look back to October 2012. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, called for the ouster of the Speaker, Peter Slipper, after the latter — a Gillard ally — had gotten tangled up in a sexual harassment scandal. This would further erode the thin margin of Gillard’s parliamentary majority, and Gillard responded with what became known as The Misogyny Speech, arguing that Abbott’s own history of sexism disqualified him to criticize Slipper. Her speech was widely celebrated by feminists, but Gillard looked both desperate and hypocritical:

“The moment Gillard rose to defend Slipper and keep him in office, she chose to defend the indefensible, to excuse the inexcusable. The government had spent a month vilifying Tony Abbott for having ‘a problem with women’. But when one of the bulwarks of the government was exposed as having a problem with women, it was suddenly acceptable.”

Gillard never recovered from that, and Abbott became Prime Minister when his party scored a decisive victory last September. From this, the lesson feminists want to teach is that Gillard “had run-ins with bad press” and “media scrutiny” is bad for women?

It’s not just Russia and Iran that peddle conspiratorial propaganda. Our own media are crammed full of the stuff.

 

Category: Australia, Feminism, Media Bias

News from South Africa

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 16 Comments

And by “news,” of course I mean, horror stories:

In 2004 when Mali was 12 years old, she was raped for the first time by an elderly man that her mother brought home from church. He raped Pearl in her own bedroom, which he did daily until she was 16. “My mother didn’t want me to be gay, so she asked him to move in and be my husband. She hoped it would change me,” she said. . . .
After Ntshangan’s cousin discovered she was a lesbian, he raped her each time he saw her. She had his daughter in 2000. “He never approved of me being a lesbian. He always wanted me to be a girl,” she said. . . .
One night in March 2007, Anelisa was raped by a male friend of her girlfriend. She said: “He took me into an alleyway and said, ‘Listen here. I am going to show you that you are not man. You are not going to date a woman while there are men, and you are a girl.’ ” Anelisa became pregnant from the attack. Her child is 5 years old.

Did I mention that South Africa is the Rape Capital of the World?

 

Category: Foreigners

‘Blood Bath’ at O.C. Register

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 5 Comments

Two newspapers in Southern California owned by Aaron Kushner’s Freedom Communications, the Orange County Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, laid off about 70 editors and reporters Thursday. For the past 18 months, Kushner had been aggressively expanding his operation, but suddenly — whack! whack! whack!

“It’s a blood bath at OCR. Nearly every top manager replaced.”

This was perhaps predictable. Kushner spent a lot of money and expanded staff at a time when everybody else in the business is counting pennies and getting by with skeleton news operations.

Meanwhile, in the allegedly prosperous world of digital media, the Daily Beast has formally named John Avlon editor-in-chief and hired Noah Schactman as executive editor. In case you missed it, founding editor Tina Brown exited the Daily Beast last fall in typical fashion. Three years after talking Barry Diller into buying Newsweek for her, having squandered tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money on a web site less influential than either BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, the imperious Brown announced that she would pursue the business of organizing her Women in the World conferences.

One former Newsweek staffer described the reaction:  “At rows of desks, reporters and editors pretend to stare at screens, while fighting the urge to jump and start dancing and cheering.”

The post-Brown editors of the Daily Beast probably won’t be flying Robin Givhan to Paris to track down the editor of Vogue.

 

Category: Journalism

Ed Gillespie? A Button Marked ‘Crap’ Would Be An Improvement Over Warner

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 9 Comments

by Smitty (h/t Bearing Drift)

A polished ad from the former RNC chief: While I still think Howie Lind and Shak Hill are great guys (the former, a retired squid has my nod for large, haze gray reasons) we’re talking about going after an entrenched, useless tool of an incumbent.

Maybe if Governor. . .um. . .didn’t a Republican win in 2009 in Virginia? While the ethics charges never seemed to stick against Governor BuM, the prime argument against McAuliffe, that of being the Clinton’s bagman, was essentially removed from play. Among other reasons, this neither helped Cuccinelli, nor paved the way for a GOP wave that could have bolstered a first-timer like Lind or Hill. Thus, opting for a solid, politically savvy candidate with some DC experience would seem prudent, if an occasion for accusations of selling out to the GOP elite. Guilty as charged.

In other Virginia news, Jim Geraghty points to Micah Edmond. Not merely a pretty face, he’s got Congressional staffer experience:

Most recently, I served as the senior national security advisor for two of the most influential, bi-partisan government initiatives to solve our fiscal deficit and debt issues – Congress’ Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction in 2011 and President Obama’s Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010. Although I worked tirelessly for two years to help generate the tough choices necessary to produce a comprehensive long-term budget plan that would solve our current fiscal crisis, both efforts failed because members of Congress chose to represent the status quo rather than the interests of their constituents. Congress’ continued lack of action forces us to navigate from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis without a long-term comprehensive budget plan and it is undermining our economic growth and national security.

It seems only fair that, after sending a useless tool who jacked up the national debt for 20+ years, VA-8 elect someone with real insight into means of walking that debt back.

Category: Republicans, Uncategorized, Virginia

Word of the Day: ‘Transmisogyny’

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 125 Comments

Transgender feminist @papierhache reacted to yesterday’s notice exactly as predicted, by claiming victimhood, denouncing me as a bully “with sycophant minions” (that would be you, dear readers), and generally lecturing that I am the pluperfect example of how “people … use social media to orchestrate abusive behavior.”

Remember: @papierhache jumped into my timeline in response to incitement by a troll trying to stir up trouble because I’d used the common slang “shemale” in promoting a post about conflicts between transgender activists and radical lesbian feminists. And after sending me multiple messages condemning me as a terrible hater — because slang is the New Fascism — @papierhache evidently thought she would evade further criticism for her moralistic posturing.

Think again, sweetheart.

Criticism is “abuse,” disagreement is “harassment,” and contradictory facts are “hate” in the Orwellian lexicon of the Left.

Should we ignore these phony victimhood claims or laugh them off as trivial? No, because the Left is attempting to silence their critics by categorizing dissent as hate speech — exactly the point that originally called my attention to this bizarre conflict:

RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym. . . .
At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.”

That was a blue-on-blue conflict between two competing tribes of far-left fringe extremists, but as such it was a classic example of the tactics of thought control the Left finds acceptable. Strange as it is to say, in this example, I agree with the radical feminists. If they wish to restrict their gathering to “cis females” (genetic women), the “trans women” have no right to demand inclusion.

For transgender activists to seek to shut down a radical feminist conference because it violates a “diversity policy” is a profound irony. The Competitive Victimhood Derby, as I have called it, is ultimately a zero-sum game, and you can scarcely blame lesbian feminists for complaining when they find people who were born male trying to co-opt the feminist brand. But this is what transgender feminism is, and one of Kat Hache’s transcomrades has a column at Feministing that includes this:

When I wrote a rebuttal to the flagrant transmisogyny evinced by Julie Burchill in her now-infamous Observer editorial, I was careful to keep the focus on what she said while also ensuring that her fundamental humanity remained in the frame of my criticism. I spared her no critique, but I targeted what was fair game: the written record of her words and ideas, the very things she had submitted to a public forum. To tell her to kill herself or worse, as some did, was unaccountably out of bounds.

“Flagrant transmisogyny”? Julie Burchill? That rang a bell:

Transsexual Bullies Successfully Censor
Feminist Writers Who Criticized Them

Have you forgotten? Suzanne Moore, a columnist for the British New Statesman, complained about beauty standards which present “the ideal body shape” for women as “that of a Brazilian transsexual.” Moore was inundated with criticism, and one of her feminist allies, Julie Burchill, derided Moore’s antagonists as “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing” and “bed-wetters in bad wigs.”

Strange as it may seem, the feminists were completely routed by the transgender community in that conflict, demonstrating who now possesses the superior claim of victimhood, so that feminists are now riding in the back of their own bus, so to speak.

The transgender activists who silenced their feminist critics — the Guardian actually unpublished one of Burchill’s columns — nevertheless claim they are the ones at risk of being silenced:

I shall continue to write in spite of having been threatened with rape, in spite of having been told that I’m a “shemale feminazi with too much sand in her fake vagina,” in spite of having been called every misogynist, transmisogynist, and transphobic slur in the book many times over, and in spite of having been accused of “man-hating, race-baiting, white-hating,” and the utterly unreal crime of “misandry.” In spite of being called too loud, too shrill, too whiny, too sexist (against men, of course), and “heterophobic.” In spite of being told I should avoid graduate school unless I had a “rich boyfriend.” In spite of all that, I speak.

Katherine Cross, formerly a man, is now a better feminist than you, Julie Burchill, and she expects to be celebrated for her courage. Meanwhile, “bullying the marginalized” . . .

Yes, of course! The courageous Kat Heche, barely 12 hours after taunting me as “emasculated” (!) now decides that her critics are engaged in “textbook psychological projection.”

Oh, what delicious layers and layers of irony . . .

 

Category: Feminism, Gays

‘I Didn’t Want to Seem Crazy’

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 15 Comments

A year before he killed 26 people, Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza called into an anarchist talk show broadcast on an Oregon university radio station and compared Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to a chimpanzee named Travis that had turned on its human captor. After the broadcast, using his online pseudonym “Smiggles,” went into an Internet forum and evaluated his radio appearance:

“It didn’t go as horribly as I anticipated. I wish that I hadn’t spoken nonstop about Travis for so long, but I didn’t want to seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee for unknown reasons.”

Didn’t want to seem crazy. Killed 26 people.

 


Category: Crime

32 GOP Presidential Choices? Nuts!

Posted on | January 16, 2014 | 146 Comments

by Smitty

Via the Examiner comes the news of 32 possibilities in a GOP.com straw poll.
(a) The next election is in 9 1/2 months, dudes. It’s both more important to focus on the next election, and to understand that how this November goes will inform what happens in 2016 in a major way.

(b) 32 names? Let’s bin them.

Yes:
– Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas
– Nikki Haley, South Carolina governor
– Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor
– Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor
– Mike Pence, Indiana governor
– Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky
– Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor
– Former Rep. Allen West, of Florida
– Rick Santorum, former Pennsylvania senator

Maybe:
– John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations
– Ben Carson, author and neurosurgeon
– Rick Perry, Texas governor
– Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state
– Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida
– Sen. Rob Portman, of Ohio
– Sen. Tim Scott, of South Carolina

No:
– Sen. Kelly Ayotte, of New Hampshire
– Haley Barbour, former Mississippi governor
– Chris Christie, New Jersey governor
– Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor
– Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor
– Susana Martinez, New Mexico governor
– John Kasich, Ohio governor
– Former Rep. Ron Paul, of Texas
– Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor
– Brian Sandoval, Nevada governor
– Sen. John Thune, of South Dakota

I will vote Libertarian:
– Jeb Bush, former Florida governor
– Rep. Peter King, of New York

Special mentions:
– Herman Cain, a radio host–Health concerns
– Newt Gingrich, former House speaker–Be an advisor, sir.
– Rep. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin–You soiled yourself on the budget deal.

Category: GOP
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