The Other McCain

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

#Syria: ‘Just Thinking Out Loud’

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 35 Comments

John Kerry’s testimony today about Syria was tremendously encouraging — to the Assad regime, and to America-haters everywhere, who are certainly exultant that this idiot is now Secretary of State.

The very fact that John Kerry thinks this policy is a good idea is pretty much an ironclad guarantee that it will be a complete disaster.

“Bipartisan compromise” — another guarantee of failure.

Anyway, I had the TV on MSNBC all day, and it’s weird how these erstwhile pacifists are now raving like the neocon warhawks they warned us against. Their bellicose rhetoric was shocking — Rachel Maddow sounded like a bloodthirsty killer — and quite strange.

UPDATE: John Sexton has also noticed the weirdness at “MSNBC: The Place for War,” and Ed Driscoll has further thoughts on the hopeless failure of Democrat “smart diplomacy” foreign policy.

UPDATE II: Quite literally, I laughed out loud:

Kerry: Obama will not puts boots on the ground,
unless this mission fails, which it is expressly
designed to do, and what are the odds of that?

It would be a lot funnier, if it wasn’t so damned true.

 

Category: Syria

Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt and His Massive Mountain of Failure

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 60 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

When last we took notice of deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, Ken White at Popehat was examining the foul, offensive and, some might say, dangerously violent content of Schmalfeldt’s demented gibberish.

Gosh, it’s been nearly a month, hasn’t it?

Bill got so crazy at one point, there was concern he might need to take the short ride to Spring Grove with the nice men in white coats.

“What’s up with that weirdo?” people have occasionally asked.

Bill Schmalfeldt inserted himself into the Brett Kimberlin story on June 3, 2012, when Schmalfeldt started stalking Aaron Walker. Schmalfeldt subsequently extended his target list to include various persons who had defended Walker, particularly including Lee Stranahan, who listed several of the things Schmalfeldt did to him:

  • Made repeated, direct contact with me and members of my family via email & Twitter, demanding I answer his questions about his ‘investigation’ in me and my family
  • Continued this direct contact after being asked not to ; sometimes directed over 100 messages a day directly at us with questions for his ‘investigation’
  • Posted our personal information, including making a video of our address after a rape threat had been made by an associate of Mr. Schmalfeldt’s
  • Made constant sexual references about both my wife and I, including frequent mentions of our genitalia and fantasies about selling my wife and raping me
  • Tormented us about the death of our newborn daughter Collette
  • Posted photos of our children and contacted child protective services
  • Contacted over half a dozen law enforcement agencies when I wouldn’t answer the bizarre personal questions he would ask for his ‘investigations’
  • Attempted to get me fired, arrested & have my children taken from me
  • Contacted friends, family, business associates and even total strangers who spoke to me online

Therefore, Stranahan flew to Maryland and filed harassment charges against Schmalfeldt. The charges were, believe it or not, later dismissed. Beecause John Hoge had assisted Stranahan (by giving him a ride from the airport to the courthouse), however, Bill Schmalfeldt then turned his insane fury on Hoge. This continued until, on June 14, John Hoge won a peace order against Schmalfeldt, thus depriving Bill of his only joy in life, deranged cyberstalking.

Permit a brief digression: Bill Schmalfeldt cannot seem to distinguish between the First Amendment (your right to speak or write) and the Fifth Amendment (your right to remain silent). Deeming himself a journalist conducting an “investigation,” Schmalfeldt’s modus operandi was to make defamatory accusations in the form of questions — “Did you do heinous acts X, Y or Z?” — and then demand answers, claiming that his targets’ refusal to play along proved they were in fact guilty of X, Y and Z, insulting the person he claimed to be “investigating,” calling them cowards, etc., for not answering him. As I explained in April, “Harassment Is Not Journalism,” but I digress . . .

After Hoge won the peace order that forbade Schmalfeldt from contacting Hoge at all — not so much as a Twitter mention — Schmalfeldt’s mood seemed to oscillate wildly, alternating between depression and rage. John Hoge recounts a recent episode:

Bill Schmalfeldt seems to think that he is entitled to answers to questions that are really none of his business, and he gets all butthurt when we mere mortals don’t quickly tell him what he wants to hear.
The Cabin Boy has screwed up his pro se filings related to his appeal of the Hoge v. Schmalfeldt peace order. When this was pointed out by my lawyer in the Motion to Dismiss filed in reply to his motion for a stay, he accused her of lying in that motion. Now, he wants me to explain the whys and wherefores of the legal strategy to be employed to protect my interests against him.
No. I won’t do that. He will find that out in front of a judge, not on the Internet. Neither my counsel nor I have any obligation to help him continue to harass me. He can always ask Acme’s Legal Department for their advice.
Bill Schmalfeldt is, in my view, a criminal. He has been adjudicated a harasser, and I believe he has violated and continues to violate the peace order issued against him. That is a crime.
I don’t intend to help him. I do intend to make it through to the end of this process with my good humor intact.

Do I even need to explain this? Can’t everyone see how bizarre and persistent Bill Schmalfeldt’s obsessions are? All the court required him to do was leave John Hoge alone — and he can’t do it. Instead, Schmalfeldt violated the peace order even while attempting to pursue a legal appeal of the peace order, acting pro se (as his own attorney) believing that his right to harass Hoge was being infringed.

Bill Schmalfeldt seems to think we have forgotten why he’s doing this:

You can’t write about Brett Kimberlin, or Bill Schmalfeldt will “be investigating” you. Well, how’s that working out for you, Bill?

And while we’re at it, how’s that working out for Brett Kimberlin? Is he happy with all the services you have provided him, Bill?

My guess is that your lunatic incompetence makes you not particularly valuable, even as a deranged cyberstalker.




 

UPDATE: Oh, almost forgot to remind readers that Amazon sells popcorn — all different kinds of delicious popcorn.

Trust me, you’re going to want some tasty popcorn.

 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

DIE, HIPPIES! Instead of Bombing Syria, Why Don’t We Bomb Code Pink Instead?

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 56 Comments

First, bad arguments for bad policy:

The U.S. decision to take military action in Syria is not about President Obama’s “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, Secretary of State John Kerry told senators Tuesday.

You can never go wrong, doing the opposite of what John Kerry says. Being against this stupid policy, however, means that I’m on the same side of the issue as those wretched Code Pink hippies.

 

Category: Syria

Can We Just Have the Air Force Drop Cable TV News Anchors on Syria?

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 115 Comments

At this moment, John Kerry is on TV demanding that the United States must now involve itself in the Syrian civil war.

No sane person is in favor of this.

John McCain is in favor of this.

I rest my case.

Having made up my mind weeks ago that U.S. involvement in Syria is bad policy, I’m bored to tears by this “debate,” knowing that when this noise is over, Congress will vote against involvement.

Or maybe they’ve all gone crazy.

Cable TV news networks won’t shut up about it, so I’m obligated to blog about Syria, but no one can force me to take it seriously.

 


Category: Syria

Blogs…And Stuff Like That

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 16 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Normally after sleeping through a Live At Five, I would just hang my head in shame until it was time to do the next one, but a lot of folks sent me links over the weekend and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to those links.


First Street Journal: Sacrificing Your Children For The Greater Good, #Syria: Bashar al-Assad Crossed That Red Line In The Sand, So President Obama Is Going To Smack The Back Of His Hand, and From Around The Blogroll.
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Jody Rosen Has White Privilege All Over His Face
The Right Scoop: Run Away!


And ripped from the pages of my Feedly:
Legal Insurrection: Kafkatrapping (h/t American Power)
American Thinker: The Democrat Moral Superiority Complex
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obama’s Foreign Policy Teleprompter Bloopers, also, Obamacare Watch: Happy Labor Day 2013!
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard – Labor Day Weekend Edition
Jammie Wearing Fools: Media Sleuths Crack Mysterious Cory Booker “T-Bone” Story
JustOneMinute: Afraid To Lead – The Man Who Would Be President Present
Pat Dollard: McCain Reproaches Kilmeade, Says ‘Allahu Akbar’ Not Necessarily Terrorist Slogan: Just Like ‘A Christian Saying Thank God’
Protein Wisdom: Everything New Is Old Again, Cont.
Shot In The Dark: Our Bitchy Overlords
The Jawa Report: Get Well, Jim
The Lonely Conservative: The Chuck Norris Chickenburger
Megan McArdle: Walmart vs. Costco III -Why My Critics Are Wrong
Chicks On The Right: Everything Is A Right, Everyone Deserves Everything, And Everything Should Be Free. I Think That About Sums This Up


Official Theme Song Of The Overdue Live At Five Post


Category: Blogging
Tags:

The Proverbial Broken Clock

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 58 Comments

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is one of the worst newspaper columnists in America, or perhaps the world, and I usually try to avoid reading him, which only makes me angry. But the damned thing about Cohen is, about twice a year, he writes something sensible, and then I hate myself for agreeing with the old fool, as in his using the Steubenville sex-assault case to contextualize Miley Cyrus:

I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting the girl’s a tasteless twit — especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.

You can read the whole thing and see how Cohen manages to be annoying even when he’s right. Why invoke “the women’s movement” here?

It’s not as if, prior to the arrival of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem on the scene, American culture was all about twerking. Conservative opponents of feminism have never “celebrated . . . sexual exploitation.” You can’t blame Phyllis Schlafly for Miley Cyrus.

This is the kind of cultural confusion that makes “SlutWalk” such an exercise in feminist folly. Framing the issue in terms of “rights” and angrily demanding that the victimization of women be blamed entirely on men, the “SlutWalk” mob insists that women’s bad behavior — even prostitution — should never be seen as undermining the general dignity of women. Meanwhile, without any sense of irony, the rhetoric of “SlutWalk” tends toward the collective demonization of all men for the criminal wrongdoing of a comparative handful of thugs.

Strangely, the New Yorker magazine article about the Steubenville case that Cohen cites as context — “Trial by Twitter,” by Ariel Levy — basically vindicates Lee Stranahan’s reporting and arguing about the case: Alexandria Goddard led an online lynch mob on the basis of conspiracy claims for which there was no evidence, wrongly stigmatizing as members of a “rape crew” teenagers whose only real involvement was their presence at a party where a drunk teenage girl was certainly abused, but not actually raped. Levy writes:

One afternoon, I met Jane Hanlin in her office, around the corner from the police station, where she sat at her desk underneath a poster of Snoopy standing with an American flag. She told me that she had watched with increasing frustration as the story spun out of control. “Here comes Goddard, here come the bloggers, and we’re sitting here watching this, knowing that we can’t respond,” she said, because the case was still open. But by the norms of social media there is little difference between confidentiality and obfuscation; if something isn’t broadcast, it must be furtive. “If you do anything to say, ‘Wait until we get to the truth,’ you are ‘pro-rape’ — whatever that means,” Hanlin said. “You are part of a conspiracy, a cover-up.”

This was the basic problem: A hysterical witch-hunt fueled by Goddard’s ax-grinding and by rhetoric about “rape culture.” If you can read the entire article and still think the result was justice, you have an alarming deficiency of skepticism. Discerning the real truth of what happened that night, when everyone involved was hopelessly drunk and the victim herself had no clear memory, is perhaps ultimately impossible. But merely to admit the ambiguity of the situation is to risk the accusation of being “pro-rape,” as Hanlin said — “whatever that means.”

Some people are more interested in “winning” an argument than they are in getting the facts right. Finding myself compelled to agree with Richard Cohen isn’t as bad as rape, but it’s still pretty bad.

I’m a victim. Don’t blame the victim, haters.

UPDATE: Well, this is very interesting. Cohen’s column is now a Memeorandum thread with Gawker, among others, deliberately misrepresenting the whole point, e.g.:

Richard Cohen Thinks Miley Cyrus
Raped That Poor Girl In Steubenville

See? This is how the Left nowadays turns common sense into thoughtcrime. What Cohen was saying — perhaps not clearly enough — was that the youth culture in which Miley Cyrus ostentatiously sexualizes herself on national TV is the same youth culture in which two buddies take turns with the drunk girl at the party and her naked photos get passed around as cell-phone souvenirs.

Degradation of women transfers from pop culture to the basement of a house in Steubenville, Ohio, and the Left expects us to believe that the one phenomenon has nothing to do with the other.

God forbid anyone should express the common-sense view, but then again, the Left has also made mention of God off-limits.

 

Category: Crime, Culture

Taiwanese Animators Weigh In On #Syria

Posted on | September 2, 2013 | 33 Comments

by Smitty

They make the point that, in giving Congress time to fiddle around with a vote, the Syrians can pack up the munitions and, oh, truck them anywhere. Invites the Schrödinger’s WMD question:

If I bomb falls in the forest on a dead cat, which bounces higher?

Category: Syria

Victims of the Id: There But for the Grace of God Go … Hey, Maybe You, Not Me!

Posted on | September 2, 2013 | 86 Comments

‘I should be telling you good girls don’t . . .’

“I took a fast right on Russell, then a left onto Maryland Parkway . . . and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonymity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas . . .  no tension on these faces; I stopped at a red light and got lost, for a moment, in a sunburts of flesh in the cross-walk: fine sinewy thighs, pink mini-skirts, ripe young nipples, sleeveless blouses, long sweeps of blond hair, pink lips and blue eyes — all the hallmarks of a dangerously innocent culture.
“I was tempted to pull over and start mumbling obscene entreaties: ‘Hey, Sweetie, let’s you and me get weird. Jump into this hotdog Caddy and we’ll flash over to my suite at the Flamingo, load up on ether and behave like wild animals in my private, kidney-shaped pool . . . .’
“Sure we will, I thought. But by this time I was far down the parkway, easing into the turn lane for a left at Flamingo Road. . . .”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

You have the right to remain silent, and if any less-than-wholesome thought has ever crossed my mind, that’s between me and the Lord.

As for any depraved behaviors in which anyone might allege I ever indulged, permit me to point out that (a) heavy adolescent drug use may have rendered me temporarily insane for days or weeks at a time, (b) the statute of limitations expired long ago, (c) occasional psilocybin flashbacks cannot be ruled out, (d) some of my ex-girlfriends may have been pathological liars, (e) I used to be a Democrat, you know, and (f) I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.

God bless the Constitution, I say, and guys who think they can avail themselves of the confessional mode favored by contemporary feminists — i.e., “the personal is political” — are apt to get a rude awakening, as Hugo Schwyzer discovered to his chagrin.

My stern disapproval of fornication and other sins of the flesh should never be mistaken for self-righteousness or a lack of empathy for the perverted souls whose transgressions are exposed before the world. Please, don’t ever tell me I’m ignorant about sin, but don’t think you can impugn me as a hypocrite, either. Read more

Category: Crime, Fear. Loathing., Sex
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