The Other McCain

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

The Christie GWB Scandal Bubble

Posted on | January 11, 2014 | 21 Comments

You could tell the mainstream media had already decided on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as the “designated loser” Republican presidential nominee for 2016 by the way they reacted to the George Washington Bridge scandal. To give you an idea of the saturation coverage, here’s the top of Memeorandum as of noon ET today:

Now, to an extent, this reflects the New York-centric bias of the media. If you think back to 2007-2008, the media gave excessive coverage to the GOP presidential campaign of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, even though everyone who knew anything about the primary process knew that Giuliani was hopelessly doomed. Ditto, Governor Fatso, but because (a) the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge were local news in the NYC media market and (b) liberal idiots think Governor Fatso is a frontrunner for the 2016 GOP nomination, the coverage of this scandal has been completely over-the-top. Here’s what the top of Memeorandum looked like as of 12:35 p.m. ET Friday:

Keep in mind, we’re still 10 months away from the 2014 mid-term elections, where Republicans will be trying to capture the Senate and strengthen their House majority, so that this early 2016 talk is just a distraction from more urgent political news. But the mindless fascination with the quadrennial “Road the White House” overwhelms everything, with Salon.com’s eminent idiot Joan Walsh volunteering to lead the lemming parade:

Christie proudly admitted Thursday that courting Democratic officeholders and winning their endorsement was part of his plan to “run up the score” and win a resounding bipartisan mandate in his race against Barbara Buono. He clearly planned to ride that reputation for crossing party lines and getting things done into the White House in 2016.
And, to be fair, there are shades of that guy, like the Christie who just backed in-state college tuition for some undocumented high school graduates. But most of the time, Christie is a teacher-shaming, Planned Parenthood defunding, crony-hiring, Koch brother-admiring right-winger. He is also a bully, despite claiming otherwise at his two-hour pity party.
Now, with reporters combing over every detail that could explain why the governor’s top aides rained vengeance down on Fort Lee, they will . . . encounter many stories that deserve a full airing. In the best-case scenario for Christie, in which nothing comes out to show he either ordered Fort Lee’s four-day traffic plague or knew about it, he will still endure national exposure as a fiercely partisan bestower of patronage and punishment. It will scare off some donors and, maybe more important, embolden rivals for the GOP establishment’s blessing — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, or Ohio’s John Kasich, or even Jeb Bush — to enter the ring.

Idiot. News flash for Joan Walsh: Scott Walker is almost certainly a “go” for the 2016 campaign, although he first must win re-election this November. As to whether he has “the GOP establishment’s blessing,” I can’t say, but Walker is a hero to many Tea Party activists who rallied to his support during the brutal 2011-2012 Wisconsin recall election fight.

The key for Walker, I believe, will be whether he can articulate a conservative position on immigration. To win over the grassroots in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, Walker must strongly oppose the “comprehensive” amnesty plans currently being discussed by Republican leadership in Washington.

Conservatives remember the way Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s 2012 campaign melted down after his infamous “you don’t have a heart” remark in the Orlando debate. Scott Walker must avoid any confusion as to his opposition to amnesty if he wants to win in Iowa and beyond. Basically, I’d say, Walker should vet his immigration policy with Michelle Malkin and Iowa Rep. Steve King, and mark a clear line between himself and the Wall Street Journal/Chamber of Commerce open-borders lobby.

But talk about 2016 is premature. First we must fight the 2014 mid-terms, no matter what idiots like Joan Walsh say.

 


Category: Chris Christie, New Jersey, Scott Walker

R.I.P. Ariel Sharon, a Tough Jew

Posted on | January 11, 2014 | 9 Comments

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, the endless nightmare of the Vietnam War was the nightly news. And it was therefore an astonishing thing to see the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel decisively defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Six years later, at a time when the U.S. was withdrawing from Vietnam, Israel again decisively defeated the Soviet-armed Arab powers in the Yom Kippur War.

Ariel Sharon was a top commander in decisive battles of both wars and was justly regarded as an Israeli hero long before he became prime minister in 2001, amid Yasser Arafat’s Al-Aqsa Intifada, the deadliest terror campaign in memory. The Jerusalem Post:

Sharon was one of Israel’s legendary politicians and military leaders. He played an instrumental role in IDF victories in the Sinai desert in both the 1967 Six Day War and in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. His victories on the battlefield, immortalized by the image of him in an IDF uniform with a white bandage wrapped around his wounded forehead, earned him the title, “Arik, King of Israel.”
He was equally fearless in the political arena, where he was the father of two parties, Likud and Kadima. As defense minister in 1982, he oversaw the Lebanon War before he was ousted from office in 1983 as a result of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre for which the Kahn Commission of Inquiry found him indirectly responsible.
But he returned to politics. As construction and housing minister from 1990 to 1992, he was responsible for a massive building effort of 144,000 apartments to house the flood of Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union bloc. As the father of the settlement movement, he was also instrumental in building thousands of homes in Judea and Samaria and is famous for urging right-wing activists “to run for the hilltops.”

The anti-Israel voices will of course have terrible things to say about Sharon, but we who remember what he symbolized — in those Cold War days when Israel’s enemies were armed with Soviet weapons — will have reason to be grateful for that tough Jew.

 

Category: Israel

‘Mister, You Are a Two-Bit Hoodlum’

Posted on | January 11, 2014 | 4 Comments

Over the holidays, Bob Belvedere posted a series of videos of America’s Greatest Cop, Joe Friday. This one’s good:

 

What made Joe Friday angry was the disrespect inherent in the behavior of criminals. Here’s another one who gets a few words:

 

And, finally, Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon have a few words with the ultimate punk:

 

Category: Camp of the Saints

Happy Birthday to My Sexy Wife

Posted on | January 11, 2014 | 32 Comments

Everyone knows that my beautiful wife was the original inspiration for Rule 5 (“Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl”) and because today is her birthday — she just turned 29, again — it’s a good time to remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language.

“Hit the freaking tip jar!”





 

Category: Rule 5

Joblessness at Record Levels; So Why Does @BDayspring Still Have a Job?

Posted on | January 10, 2014 | 32 Comments

People Not In Labor Force Soar
To Record 91.8 Million; Participation
Rate Plunges To 1978 Levels
— Zero Hedge

U.S. job growth weakest in three years
— Reuters

With such grim economic news in the headlines, you might think that Brad Dayspring, communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, would try to avoid doing things as monumentally stupid as lying about Mark Levin:

Brad Dayspring, the communications director Levin described as an “idiot” and NRSC “hit man,” had earlier tweeted, “Fishy: Senate Conservatives Fund spent hundreds of thousands of donor dollars to make Mark Levin’s book a bestseller.” Dayspring’s assertion was completely false because he was referring to a paperback version of a book, published five years ago, that the Senate Conservatives Fund was merely offering to the group’s donors.
As Levin noted in a Facebook post in response to Dayspring’s smears, Liberty and Tyranny “is nearly 5 years old, sold nearly 1.3 million copies, and was on the New York Times best-seller list for half a year during 2009,” and “the Senate Conservative Fund (SCF) has been using the paperback version of the book in recent months to encourage donations in support of conservative candidates.” . . .
“Mitch McConnell’s National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) hit man, some idiot named Brad Dayspring, does not intimidate me and will not silence me with his sleazy inside-the-beltway tactics,” Levin wrote. “In fact, I am more fired up than ever.” . . .
“My opposition to McConnell’s re-election is underscored by pathetic behavior like this,” he continued. “Conservatives should not give a dime to the NRSC, money which is used to pay the salaries of these hit men and empower McConnell, et al.”

This circular firing squad behavior is profoundly discouraging, and is entirely the fault of the Senate GOP leadership.

My position on such matters has always been quite clear: The national party committees — NRSC, NRCC, RNC — should stay the hell out of contested primaries, period. If an incumbent Republican has a primary challenger, that’s his problem, and of no concern to the national committee, whose funds (and personnel) should be focused completely on defeating Democrats.

Deviation from that rule is tantamount to the national leadership controlling the party from the top down, which has the effect of discouraging grassroots involvement. And there is no good reason to believe that Senate GOP leaders know what they hell they’re doing when it comes to picking winners and losers in primaries. This problem with the NRSCC goes back at least to May 2009:

We were standing outside the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va., while the young Republican operative explained it to me.
“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there,” said the operative. “They don’t want to spend any money, so they were looking for a self-funder.”
“They” are Republican senators, and what my friend was explaining was the otherwise inexplicable decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to endorse Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race — 15 months before the primary!

The NRSC’s meddling in the Florida GOP primary was a typical Establishment move, and resulted in the typical failure. I’ve tried to ignore the NRSC’s clueless blundering in recent months, but it’s 2014 now, the primaries are rapidly approaching, and if GOP geniuses like Brad Dayspring think they’re going to help their cause by picking a fight with Mark Levin, they’d better think again.

You Can Click Here and Donate to the
SENATE CONSERVATIVE FUND

You Can Click Here and Donate to
MATT BEVIN FOR U.S. SENATE

 And when you’re finished doing that, you could post a link to this item on your Facebook page or send it out via Twitter or e-mail.

If you haven’t been raising hell, now would be a good time to start.

 


Category: Election, Mark Levin, Mitch McConnell, Republicans, Senate

Radical Despair

Posted on | January 10, 2014 | 56 Comments

My young Nietzschean friend Richard Spencer was at Duke University during the lacrosse debacle, and it is therefore easy to understand why he long ago abandoned hope in Politics As We Know It.

Spencer founded the Alternative Right in 2010, and there are a few other familiar names — Vox Day, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire — in a chart illustrating the “Dark Enlightenment” movement in a recent trend-feature article by Matt Sigl:

Blossoming on the Internet like a fetid rose, a mysterious new political movement has generated a serious and not un-terrifying critique of modern society. Its members are loud and growing in number, and they demand nothing less than the elimination of the democratic system. Mostly white, male and angry, they lie in wait for the imminent collapse of civilization.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dark Enlightenment. The Empire is striking back. . . .

Don’t be so tediously alarmist, Matt. The best descriptor of this “Dark Enlightenment” movement might be neo-paleoconservative, with an edge of philosophical radicalism among those who have forsaken hope of reversing modern decadence. They are mostly Young Paleocons of one sort or another. As radical as their ideas may be, they are intellectuals, not advocates of violence. Social criticism is ultimately just social criticism, and if the “Dark Enlightenment” perspective seems unmoored by any inclination to defer to popular opinion or political correctness, this is because it exists outside politics.

If your idea of politics begins and ends with the Official Conservative Movement, if you are gripped with concern about Chris Christie and the Great Bridge Controversy, this “Dark Enlightenment” thing is going to be entirely alien to your worldview.

Basically, they begin with the premise that we’re doomed, and proceed thence to contemplate the consequences of doom:

According to [Nick] Land and Moldbug [the alias of Curtis Yarvin], the Cathedral is a complex ideology network built atop the university system, the media (run and operated by graduates of the former) and employees of the bureaucracy, all of whom grow ever more dependent on the perpetuation of the Cathedral. The leveling mechanisms of democracy — with its race-to-the-bottom vote begging (buying) and illusions of social empowerment — remove any possibility of inventive political solutions, or, eventually, rational analysis. Inside the Cathedral, any questioning of democracy’s legitimacy is sacrilege. Before long, apostates will find penance by buying indulgences (like, say, Obamacare), whether they like it or not.

What this mainly is, of course, is James Burnham’s critique of the managerial elite, with a good bit of Richard Weaver and Oswald Spengler thrown in for good measure. And then there’s this:

Human biodiversity is the rejection of the “blank state” of human nature. Creepily obsessed with statistics that demonstrate IQ differences between the races, the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA. . . .
Cue the adherents of The Bell Curve, eugenics enthusiasts, believers in white supremacy and sympathizers of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t since before World War II.

Meh. Again with the alarmism, Matt? It’s important to remind the reader that as radical as these people are in their ideas, there is nothing like an actual political movement involved. There is no legion of brownshirts marching to overthrow democracy and replace it with the Charismatic Leader’s blood-and-soil regime.

What we are looking at is a lot of bright young men who contemplate the cultural status quo and reject it as unworthy. They are temperamentally averse to compromise, and thus ill-suited for the game of politics. As such, they are marginalized, existing within an obscure fringe that neither influences nor intersects with Politics As We Know It.

They are deliberately aloof, and who can blame them? If being “political” in 2014 means caring about Fat Boy’s Bridge Scandal, then I guess I’m pretty apolitical, too.

Mortimer e-mailed me Sigl’s article and I don’t know if this is the reaction he expected. While I certainly understand the fundamental pessimism — you’d have to be a blind fool to be an optimist nowadays — my preference is for human-sized solutions. Instead of trying to reorganize the cosmos, just do your best to fix what is within reach, and let the universe take care of itself.

 


Category: Culture

Thank You, Lena Dunham

Posted on | January 10, 2014 | 46 Comments

by Smitty

Via Drudge comes this outburst of brilliance, emphasis mine, in response to the question “I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity on the show. . .”:

In the moment, Dunham herself spoke clearly about her position on the nudity [in Girls], saying it is “a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive. But I totally get it. If you’re not into me, that’s your problem and you’re going to have to work that out with professionals,” she retorted. And later, fellow EP Jenni Konner interrupted her response to another question to add, “I literally was spacing out because I’m in such a rage spiral about that guy,” she said pointing to the question-asker. “I was just looking at him looking at him and going into this rage [over] this idea that you would talk to a woman like that and accuse a woman of showing her body too much. The idea it just makes me sort of sick.”

Maybe I’m too dead to figure out if I’ve got HBO amidst the 14k channels of dreck on the TV to choose from*. Were I to have an outburst of un-death, perhaps Lena could instruct me on this ‘life’ thingy, could I but find it in the cable bundle.  ‘Life’ appears to involve having more ink than a copy of the New York Times, or something**.  The wife and I found A&E for a couple of pleasant Duck Dynasty episodes the other weekend.  Relaxing.

But now, who are these ‘professionals’, and what’s all that powdered sugar around their noses? They must love them some Dunkin’ Donuts. Would my wife approve of the workout? I’ll venture a ‘no’ on that.

Lena, Lena, Lena: your show is pure vanity, in the truest Ecclesiastes sense of the word. While falling short of waxing moralistic, can we just get to some honesty about your cheap show? It’s a cheap show, cheaply exposing  cheap flesh for a cheap audience. You’ve got more “cheap” than an aviary. Be honest about that. Just admit “Yeah, I’m getting my nudist on for the eyeballs.” I’m not saying it makes you any more or less evil than anyone else. I’m saying that your insistence that flashing boobies is some kind of “expression of what it’s like to be alive” is a risible pile of bollocks.

I suppose you could probably do a meta-comedy about a semi-nudist bimbo actress who pretentiously refers to her dirty diaper of a show as some kind of highbrow art. That kind of elevated slop (done correctly) is what makes this French & Saunders musical sketch so funny:

Maybe the bimbo in your hypothetical show goes to an acting school, develops some no-kidding skill, keeps her clothes on, and carries a show on merit, as opposed to skin. An absolutely freakish thought, I know. Probably easier to stick to the more childish stuff.

*To paraphrase Roger Waters.
**Confession: I do have a tattoo. Left scapula. Youthful indiscretion.

Category: Culture

Elegant Reporting in Appalachia

Posted on | January 10, 2014 | 29 Comments

Kevin D. Williamson of National Review traveled to Appalachia — his dateline is Owsley County, Ky. — to write about the kind of poverty no liberal ever describes as “social injustice”:

If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.

Williamson’s article is not merely good reporting, but it is also mighty fine writing. There is too little of this kind of work by conservative journalists. The quick stuff that gets Drudge hits and “moves the needle” politics-wise is the commodity most in demand, along with ponderous punditry and nerdy policy-wonk stuff. We get much less really high-quality writing on the Right because, when you get down to it, there simply is no incentive for it. The Koch brothers aren’t making grants for this kind of stuff:

Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.

This is a highly readable way of explaining a highly relevant point that occurs to any intelligent observer who has visited the forlorn and forgotten towns of the American heartland. Entire regions of this country have been undergoing a quiet demographic decline for five decades. Part of the problem — although no one ever dares mention it — is that the advent of the Pill, and with it the onset of the Contraceptive Culture, has deprived small towns and rural farms of their traditional source of vitality. It was always true that the ambitious and aspiring offspring of the heartland were attracted to the big cities. Prior to the 1960s, however, the folks left behind continued to breed large families and thus replenish the basic stock of human resources. And before the arrival of television, the people of the heartland also preserved their own distinct culture, the loss of which Williamson obliquely observes:

Appalachian places have evocative and unsentimental names denoting deep roots: Little Barren River, Coal Pit Road. The name “Cumberland” blankets Appalachian geography — the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, several Cumberland counties — in tribute to the Duke of Cumberland, who along with the Ulster Scots ancestors of the Appalachian settlers crushed the Young Pretender at the Battle of Culloden.

Culloden! Damn, how many school children in Appalachia know anything at all about Culloden, or even realize that their ancestors were those stout-hearted people, the Scots-Irish?

Politically correct noise about “multiculturalism” has been nothing but an excuse for pandering to politically preferred minorities. Descendants of the Ulster Scots — and for that matter, the descendants of German immigrants — are never given the kind of ethnic cheerleading that our allegedly “diverse” curricula reserve exclusively for non-whites. This was something I noticed nearly 20 years ago when, after researching the National Standards for U.S. History, I remarked that academics proposed to teach Georgia’s children everything about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and nothing about the Battle of Chickamauga.

Stripped of any understanding of their own cultural heritage, poor whites are doubly impoverished, and a sort of decadent shame takes hold of them, the moral analogue of the “economic death spiral” Williamson observes in Appalachia. What too often emerges to take the place of an intelligent and decent pride is an ignorant and utterly indecent hate.

This is something I also noticed 20 years ago as a newspaper reporter in north Georgia. If our academic superiors think they will eradicate racism through “enlightened” education, they haven’t paid much attention to the attitudes of young people, many of whom harbor an intensity of racial resentment that would astonish their departed forebears.

What is being lost, really, is the sensibility of bourgeois virtue, and Kevin Williamson captures that decline with lively eloquence:

“Well, you try paying that much for a case of pop,” says the irritated proprietor of a nearby café, who is curt with whoever is on the other end of the telephone but greets customers with the perfect manners that small-town restaurateurs reliably develop. I don’t think much of that overheard remark at the time, but it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.
It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum — are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases– reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices. . . .

Fascinating stuff, brilliantly written — read the whole thing.

 

Category: Culture, History, Journalism
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