The Other McCain

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

On Another Plane, Everyone Is High-Fiving George Orwell Over Affirmative Action

Posted on | July 6, 2013 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

Legal Insurrection points to the abject farce of Affirmative action. First, the Daily Caller:

This fall, the Supreme Court faces an even bigger test of its determination to support equality when it hears Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, a case challenging the right of a state (in this case, Michigan) to pass a constitutional ban on race preferences, or affirmative action, in its public institutions.

Professor Jacobson summarizes:

That’s right folks, the Supreme Court will decide whether prohibiting racism is, in effect, racist.
I have bemoaned the pernicious effects of race-based preferences here many times. The Schuette case demonstrates how the racial preference industry has turned everything on its head.
To be non-racist will get you accused of being racist.

Let this be a further lesson, as if one were needed: homo bureaucratus in general, and the Raaaaacism Industrial Complex in particular, are going to cling bitterly to their parasitic grip on phoney-baloney jobs. In defense of these cretins, it beats finding real work.

Just note their imperviousness to common sense, and willingness to argue that “up is the new down” rather than confess the vacuousness of their existence. After all, Affirmative Action is an importan vote-buying scheme. Why would anyone sacrifice power, even if dirty?

Orwell, you nailed it, buddy.

Category: Michigan, Racism

Are We Paranoid Enough Yet? FEMA’s Russia ‘Protocols’ Raise Serious Questions

Posted on | July 6, 2013 | 92 Comments

Oct. 8, 2012: Russia’s EMERCOM Minister Vladimir Puchkov (left)
and U.S. Deputy Administrator for National Preparedness and Protection,
Timothy Manning, sign the protocol of a bilateral meeting in Vladivostok, Russia.

Have FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security signed a deal that would permit as many as 15,000 Russian troops to be deployed in the United States to deal with an unspecified emergency?

This was not a question that I expected to be researching when I woke up today and decided to get back in the groove as Editor in Chief at ViralRead after the Fourth of July holiday. But then I checked the site stats and found that the top story and the top referrer were these items:

Obama’s DHS Requests 15,000 Russian Troops
— Lisa Jennings, ViralRead

What’s With The 15,000 Russian
Troops Requested By DHS?
— The Lonely Conservative

Well, well — what’s up with that, indeed? The most obvious explanations would seem to be either:

• One of our writers has bought into a fringe conspiracy theory;
or
• It’s time to start stockpiling ammo and freeze-dried food, before the black helicopters show up to take us to FEMA camps.

This required me to do some research, because if either of these explanations is true, there’s a problem. The credibility of ViralRead could be jeopardized if there’s nothing to a story like this, but if there is something to the story, why isn’t it being covered by mainstream news organizations? And, after doing some research, I found out that this is exactly the problem: While I cannot say for sure you shouldn’t be stockpiling ammo, neither can I cite any official source on the content of these U.S.-Russia emergency agreements, and the regular media don’t seem to have paid any attention at all to these agreements.

Let’s start with what we can learn from official sources, which frankly isn’t much. From the FEMA site, Oct. 25, 2012:

Deputy Administrator leads U.S. delegation
to annual meeting with Russia
By Jess Bratton, International Affairs Division
FEMA’s Deputy Administrator led an interagency delegation to Vladivostok, Russia, for the third annual meeting of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group on Emergency Situations and the 16th annual meeting of the Joint U.S.-Russia Committee on Cooperation in Emergency Management, Oct. 8.
Presentations were made by members of both delegations on subjects including cooperation in the forecasting and monitoring of natural hazards, the production of a Russian documentary on volunteer firefighting in the United States, exchanges and cooperation between institutions of higher education preparing students for careers in Emergency Management, and the provision of psychological support to disaster survivors.
The meetings concluded with Deputy Administrator Manning and EMERCOM Minister Vladimir Puchkov formally signing a protocol of the meeting and adopting the 2012-2014 joint work plan that detailed plans for conducting a host of cooperative activities and exchanges.
FEMA led delegation participated in the sixth meeting of the Senior Disaster Management Officials Forum of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum hosted by EMERCOM of Russia and was attended by delegations of the 21 member economies and other international organizations, Oct. 9-10. The forum concluded with an agreement to explore mechanisms for enhanced exchange of information among the emergency managers for the member economies; collaboration on monitoring and forecasting of natural hazards; strengthening the resiliency of supply chains in the region; promoting business continuity of operations; and disaster risk reduction in the Asia-Pacific region.

Thanks for that vague and bland report, Jess Bratton. (Question: What is Jess Bratton’s salary? What sort of educational requirements are necessary to get a job cranking out dull press releases like this for the FEMA Web site?) The problem here is that we have Jess Bratton’s report summarizing this Vladivostok meeting, including the news off Manning and Puchkov “formally signing a protocol,” but we do not have the text of the actually protocol itself.

Hey, Jess Bratton: Do you know how to upload a PDF document? Or is that kind of stuff above your pay-grade?

We might call this “pseudo-transparency”: The U.S.-Russia emergency preparedness meetings are not secret, but neither does the administration go out of its way to make widely available to the public the official business transacted therein. We get a bland press-release summary, but we don’t get the official document, and this not-exactly-transparent process provides the basis of suspicion.

Next official source is a press release by the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters, June 26, 2013:

Several documents signed during joint work
of Russian Emergency Ministry and FEMA
The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry and the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are going to exchange experts during joint rescue operations in major disasters. This is provided by a protocol of the fourth meeting of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group on Emergency Situations and seventeenth meeting of Joint U.S.-Russia Cooperation Committee on Emergency Situations, which took place in Washington on 25 June.
The document provides for expert cooperation in disaster response operations and to study the latest practices.
In addition, the parties approved of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this field in 2013-2014, which envisages exchange of experience including in monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, training of rescuers, development of mine-rescuing and provision of security at mass events.
At the end of the meeting the parties expressed their satisfaction with the level of cooperation between the Russian Federation and the United States in the area of emergency prevention and response and agreed to develop it in order to respond efficiently to all kinds of disasters.

Here, so far as I can tell, the “official sources” trail goes cold, because apparently Jess Bratton was on vacation or something and the FEMA Web site doesn’t say a word about this meeting. Go search their site.

From the Russian source, we have news of yet another “protocol” agreement that involves “exchang[ing] experts during joint rescue operations in major disasters” and “U.S.-Russian cooperation . . . in 2013-2014” to include “provision of security at mass events.”

Not a word in there about 15,000 Russian troops, though.

Where did that come from? So far as I can tell (and this is linked in Lisa Jennings’ ViralRead article) the earliest mention of this is at a site called the European Union Times on June 27:

An unsettling report prepared by the Emergencies Ministry (EMERCOM) circulating in the Kremlin today on the just completed talks between Russia and the United States in Washington D.C. says that the Obama regime has requested at least 15,000 Russian troops trained in disaster relief and “crowd functions” [i.e. riot control] be pre-positioned to respond to FEMA Region III during an unspecified “upcoming” disaster.
According to this report, this unprecedented request was made directly to Minister Vladimir Puchkov by US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Director Janet Napolitano who said these Russian troops would work “directly and jointly” with her Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of whose mission is to secure the continuity of the US government in the event of natural disasters or war. . . .

That article is bullshit, so far as I can tell. It links to a seemingly legitimate Russian news site’s report about the U.S.-Russian meeting, but that article says nothing at all about a report “circulating in the Kremlin” or Janet Napolitano requesting 15,000 Russian troops.  The EU Times (bullshit) article also says this:

FEMA Region III, the area Russian troops are being requested for, includes Washington D.C. and the surrounding States of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, “strongly suggesting” that the Obama regime has lost confidence in its own military being able to secure its survival should it be called upon to do so.

We have zero official sources for this, and good luck finding any mainstream news organization — Associated Press, Washington Post, Reuters, etc. — that has even taken notice of the June 25 U.S.-Russian meeting which (a) we know actually happened, based on a statement from the Russian agency, but which (b) apparently wasn’t considered important enough to merit a press release from FEMA.

By the way, how can I be so sure this EU Times story is bullshit? Because if you keep reading, it goes off into a bunch of paranoid stuff about Edward Snowden and Michael Hastings, a problem that I tried to warn people about weeks ago (see “Hope, Fear and Michael Hastings,” The American Spectator, June 21).

You’ve got emotionally disturbed hysterics like Glenn Greenwald deliberately stoking the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of paranoia — and being treated like serious journalists for so doing — yet it is impossible to say that any particular far-fetched fear is unfounded, because what we were promised would be “the most transparent administration in history” is in fact so opaque that everything they do looks like a conspiratorial cover-up.

(Incidentally, the White House press office still has not replied to my requests for information about the Benghazi attack.)

Fear and Loathing have become so pervasive, as I noted last week, that some people are starting to take Barrett Brown seriously. In this kind of paranoid environment, it becomes difficult for people to distinguish real threats from imaginary dangers. If a Web site says Janet Napolitano has requested 15,000 Russian troops to defend the D.C. region because “the Obama regime has lost confidence in its own military being able to secure its survival” — well, yeah, it sounds crazy, but how do we know it’s not actually true? Crazier things happen every day in the Obama Age.

Look, let me connect the dots here: Serious people in the world of national security suspect that the whole Benghazi charade — Susan Rice and the YouTube video cover story — was intended to conceal the ugly truth about what the U.S. did to help overthrow Gaddhafi.

There are reasons to believe that the State Department set up its own independent operation to provide U.S. arms to Libyan “rebels,” some of whom turned out to be al-Qaeda-connected Islamic extremists. It is suspected that the CIA was operating out of the Benghazi consulate in an effort either to get these weapons back, or else “neutralize” the jihadis whom the U.S. had armed. Basically, the CIA was trying to help the State Department cover its ass, and instead the terrorists decided to strike first — a knockout blow against the U.S. presence in Benghazi, crippling the attempt to disarm the “rebels.”

A lot of that is conjecture, but as I say, there are Serious People who suspect this is the true story behind the Benghazi attack and subsequent cover-up, which is otherwise utterly inexplicable. When you have an administration as shady as this one, it is not at all surprising to find that paranoia flourishes. Meanwhile . . .

Wherever the tale of Janet Napolitano and the 15,000 Russian soldiers originated, it soon started circulating around the Internet and by July 1 showed up at Alex Jones’ InfoWars site with the headline, “Russian Forces to Provide ‘Security’ At US Events.” That article didn’t mention the 15,000 number, but it apparently caused enough of a stir that FEMA actually was forced to deny it:

The top US emergency response agency moved to quell a flurry of Internet-driven speculation this week that Russian security teams could be deployed at large public events in the United States, saying the two countries will not swap security guards or soldiers under a long-running partnership agreement.
There will be “no exchange of security or military personnel” under a recently renewed partnership between the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, a FEMA spokesman told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
“The agreement continues information-sharing meetings and observation opportunities with first responders and emergency managers,” the spokesman said.

OK, so now you have an official FEMA denial, which might soothe your fears if (a) FEMA would publish the “protocols” they signed with their Russian counterparts, and (b) it weren’t for the fact that this administration constantly lies about everything.

Looking at Lisa Jennings’ article at ViralRead now, obviously it needs an update to clarify the facts, but that’s OK. There are ways to report a story like that — where the accuracy is unknown and the sources are dubious — with the appropriate skepticism. And I’ve reached out to a source on Capitol Hill to see if I can find out exactly what Congress knows about FEMA’s deal with the Russians.

This story does indeed raise serious questions: Why has FEMA allowed this practice of “pseudo-transparency” to continue to the point that it becomes necessary for the agency to officially deny Internet rumors like this? Is there any reason why FEMA could not have published the text of its protocol agreements with Russia? And if these protocols could have been published, why weren’t they? Why did it take more than two weeks after the Vladivostok meeting last October for FEMA to publish a press release about it?  And why has FEMA still not published anything on its Web site about its June 25 meeting with the Russians in Washington?

If they say “sequester,” I’m gonna punch somebody in the face.

Because I’ve just spent four hours today chasing down this crazy story, and I still haven’t heard back about Benghazi, assholes.

 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Russia

The #FreeKate Case Is Typical

Posted on | July 6, 2013 | 57 Comments

There has been further Facebook ranting by Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother Kelley Hunt Smith this past week that I haven’t had the stomach to transcribe, but part of which involves her reiteration of some of her favorite themes: She feels her daughter is being “singled out” for prosecution; this prosecution is wrong because it is a consenting “relationship,” because the girls are relatively close in age, and because the girls went to school together. At one point in her long rant, KHS wrote:

“I will continue to fight for Kate, and to change the laws to actually protect teenagers from being prosecuted as felons for doing what 99.9% of teenagers are doing all over the world.”

Uh … “99.9% percent”? Are 99.9% of teenagers having sex?

No, actually not. According to one national study, “27% of youth ages 14-17 were sexually active during the survey year.” And that data was cited in a 2005 U.S. Department of Justice study about reported cases of statutory rape, which K.J. Copp called to my attention.

The study is quite relevant because it demonstrates that Kaitlyn Hunt (the 18-year-old Florida girl charged with two felony counts for having sex with a 14-year-old) is not being “singled out.” In fact, laying aside the same-sex nature of her case, it’s actually typical.

Seventy-six percent (76%) of female victims of statutory rape are ages 13-15, with 14 being the most common victim age (31%) in the cases studied by the Justice Department. And for 14-year-old victims, offenders were most commonly (43%) ages 18-20. In reported cases of statutory rape with a female victim age 14, only 20% of offenders were 25 or older. The age difference between Kaitlyn Hunt and her victim (44 months) was typical: 50% of statutory rape cases with 14-year-old victims involved a perpetrator no more than 5 years older.

Was Kaitlyn Hunt’s “relationship” with the 14-year-old “singled out”? Was this case unusual because it involved two high school students? No, not at all: Twenty-nine percent (29%) of the statutory rape cases studied by the Justice Department classified the relationship between offender and victim as “boyfriend or girlfriend” and another 62 percent were classified as “acquaintances.” Of cases involving 14-year-old victims, as we have seen, 43% of offenders were ages 18-20 and another 16% were 17 or younger; ergo, many of the offenders were also high school-age teenagers. It is estimated that more than 15,000 statutory rape cases are reported to U.S. law enforcement agencies annually, so the prosecution of Kaitlyn Hunt isn’t really unusual in any way.

Florida law doesn’t call the crime of which Kaitlyn Hunt is accused “statutory rape,” however. Instead, it’s “lewd and lascivious battery on a child,” but this is only a difference in legal nomenclature.

What is unusual about the Kaitlyn Hunt case is that her parents made such a big deal out of it, and managed to bamboozle more than 300,000 people into signing a petition that dishonestly portrayed Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for gay rights, which she isn’t.

Kelley Hunt Smith says she wants “to change the laws to actually protect teenagers from being prosecuted as felons” for doing what her daughter did to a 14-year-old girl. However, isn’t it possible that one reason teenage sex is less common than she imagines — 27% rather than “99.9%” — is because age-of-consent laws make it a crime to have sex with younger teens?

And while 15,000 statutory rape prosecutions annually is a statistic indicating that such cases aren’t exactly rare, more cases would probably be prosecuted if not for the fact that most of the time, all the parent of a minor has to do is say, “Leave my daughter alone, you creep,” and that is enough to end the relationship.

Because it turns out there’s a reason they call it “jailbait,” after all.

 

Category: Kaitlyn Hunt

What Can Elspeth Reeve Teach Us?

Posted on | July 5, 2013 | 148 Comments

The Pervert Party: Democrats for abortion had
a Texas girl hold a sign declaring: ‘If I wanted the
government in my womb, I would f*** a Senator.’

Liberalism is like a Swiss Army knife, a versatile tool that makes it valuable as a substitute for whatever its users otherwise lack. If you are stupid, but espouse liberalism, you will be praised by liberals as intelligent merely for so doing — Joe Biden and Al Sharpton, for example. If you are immoral,  all you need to do to receive acclaim for your virtue is to become a liberal, as Ted Kennedy’s entire career attests.

This belief that every liberal is the moral and intellectual superior of others merely because he is a liberal has a profound effect not only in politics, but also within those fields of endeavor — journalism, academia and the entertainment industry — where the authority of liberalism has become hegemonic. Nothing else can possibly explain how an idiot like Chris Matthews remains on the payroll of NBC News, or why “Women’s Studies” departments stain the campuses of major universities, or why Joy Behar has a show-business career.

Liberals will themselves occasionally acknowledge this truth. When Mona Eltahawy went off on Max Blumenthal this week, she made the point that Blumenthal “does nothing but Tweet” — he is not, nor has he ever been, a prolific writer. Blumenthal certainly has never shown any merit that would recommend his work except that he is a liberal. Andrew Breitbart was right on target when he said that the only thing Blumenthal has ever done is use “Alinksy tactics” in his efforts to “destroy people” — cheap political “gotcha” journalism that serves no other purpose than to smear the Left’s chosen enemies.

In this, however, Max Blumenthal is not particularly unusual. Outfits like Think Progress and Media Matters employ scores of “journalists” who have never done any “reporting” other than to accuse conservatives of sexism, racism and/or homophobia. It’s as if they were seeking the Pulitzer Prize for finger-pointing and name-calling.

So when Mona Eltahawy denounced Max Blumenthal as a useless drone, an untalented do-nothing, that indictment encompassed many more such practitioners of progressive journalism. Max is not unique among those whose only real qualification as journalists is that they are liberals.

Conflating liberalism with virtue is an idea that has consequences, and among those consequences is the moralistic hubris of liberals. Believing that advocacy for liberal causes is synonymous with virtue, they are prone to an ends-justify-the-means rationalization of unethical tactics and even criminal violence in support of what they believe to be The Greater Good. This was how, after all, the 1960s “peace” movement gave rise to the hateful fanatical terrorism of the Weather Underground bombers — social justice as a license for murder.

And speaking of murder, why do liberals never pause to wonder how abortion became the sine qua non of their worldview?

Bela Kun and the Politics of Perversion

Ann Coulter was never more accurate than when she said in her book Godless that abortion is the sacrament of the Church of Liberalism. We beheld a bizarre testimony to this truth when pro-abortion protesters at the Texas Capitol began chanting “Hail Satan.”

What was going on was that the Texas legislature was considering a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks, a proposal that should not really be controversial. Advances in medical science have made it possible to save the lives of premature babies, so that the criterion of fetal viability would certainly justify banning the murder of babies in utero who might be able to survive if they were delivered. The vast majority of abortions (more than 95%) are performed before the 20th week of gestation, so that the Texas law would do relatively little to limit the exercise of “choice.” Yet it is on this dubious battleground that Texas Democrats have, to nationwide applause from liberals, chosen to make their stand.

No one outside Texas had ever heard of Wendy Davis until the Democrat legislator decided to filibuster this legislation, a stance so wrong and unpopular that even a liberal Democrat like Kirsten Powers was moved to remark, “It’s amazing what is considered heroism these days.” And speaking of amazing . . .

Pro-life activists who supported the bill banning late-term abortions were at the Texas Capitol in Austin and began to sing “Amazing Grace,” a timeless and much-beloved Christian hymn:

I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Let’s ask: How could anyone be offended by this? What kind of person hates God so much they would object to “Amazing Grace”?

It is one thing, after all, to say that you do not share someone else’s particular religious belief, but quite another thing to say that their expression of belief is offensive to you. I may believe that Buddhists are fools and that Scientologists are deluded devotees of a charlatan, but I don’t run around deliberately starting arguments with them. Somehow, though, liberals have decided that Bible-believing Christians are their mortal enemies, and I think Matt Ross has properly located the historical origins of this anti-Christian animosity:

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.

Through the intellectual influence of the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, et al.) this attitude has been steadily woven into the ideological tapestry of the Democrat Party over the past half-century. The hegemonic dominance of liberalism within academia, journalism and the entertainment industry means that this radicalism — the embrace of perverse licentiousness and an implacable hostility to Christian faith — has been so widely diffused throughout our society that many Americans no longer even notice it, let alone question its original motives and purpose.

No one under 40 has any memory of when the Democrat Party did not stand for abortion, sodomy and socialism (not necessarily in that order) and the advance of political correctness within our educational system has deprived the young of the historical knowledge by which they might understand or critique modern liberalism. It is therefore remarkable — although seldom remarked — that mere opposition to the Democrat Party agenda is now classified as “hate,” as if buttf–king and baby-killing were synonymous with love.

Father of Lies, Party of Death

Rather than pursue that philosophical digression further, however, let us return to the scene Tuesday at the Capitol in Austin, where pro-lifers sang their hymn, for here we find an answer to the question: Who hates God so much that they are offended by “Amazing Grace”?

One of the more bizarre tactics used by pro-abortion
activists involved chanting “Hail Satan!” to harass a
pro-life crowd as they sang “Amazing Grace.”

Abortion is wrong and its advocates are evil, and if their chants were meant in jest, there is truth in humor: Democrats want to kill babies, and thereby they make themselves servants of Satan.

We may again digress briefly to note that the process by which Democrats became The Party of Death™ was fairly rapid. In 1960, when the Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy, his Catholicism was sufficiently controversial that Kennedy had to avow that he would not be taking dictation from the Pope. Ten years after JFK’s assassination, in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling the Supreme Court manufactured a fictitious “right” to abortion, but this was not a partisan matter, and many Democrats strongly opposed it.

By 1992, however, the Democrat Party’s commitment to killing babies had become such a cornerstone of their national agenda that Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey was not permitted to speak in opposition to the party’s radical pro-abortion platform. Pro-lifers have since been purged, as Daniel McConchie explained last year:

If you tuned into the Democratic National Convention . . .  and were momentarily confused as to whether C-SPAN was actually covering a huge abortion rally, you are not alone. The high-profile roles given to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan, Sandra Fluke, and Caroline Kennedy are the capstone of a two-decade-long effort to eradicate anti-abortion Democrats from the party. It is an effort that is nearly complete. An event hosted by Democrats for Life during the convention failed to attract a single politician currently in office.

Thus, in scarcely more than 50 years, Democrat have gone from being feared as too Catholic to being The Devil’s Own Party, whose adherents cheerfully offer their praise to Satan as they stand firmly in favor of killing the innocent unborn. And as every Christian knows, Satan is the “father of lies,” which brings us to Elspeth Reeve.

Ms. Reeve first came to public notice as a handmaiden of falsehood, and it is a testimony to liberalism’s influence in the field of journalism that someone so closely connected to an infamous act of dishonesty could still be employed by any reputable publication. Her disgraceful debut involved the notorious “Baghdad Diary” episode:

On August 2, 2007, the editors of The New Republic disclosed what they had learned in their July 26 chat with Beauchamp — that the “crypt keeper” episode didn’t happen in Iraq at all. They revealed also that Beauchamp had first made contact with The New Republic through one of the magazine’s yearlong researcher-reporters, Elspeth Reeve, who happened also to be Beauchamp’s girlfriend. . . .

Reeve left The New Republic just about the time (July 2007) it became evident that Beauchamp had fictionalized his atrocity tales, and one might have thought that the shame she had helped bring upon the profession of journalism would have rendered her radioactive, permanently persona non grata, as was the case with such liberal liars as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair.

Nevertheless, The Atlantic has attempted to rehabilitate Elspeth Reeve, a fact I mentioned last year with a passing reference to her as the World’s Least Reliable Fact-Checker™ and now, in the case of the Texas abortion protests, she has disgraced herself anew.

Dishonesty, a Valuable Skill for Liberals

After video of the “Hail Satan” chant went viral Tuesday, Reeve presumed to fact-check it and generally deride conservatives who cited it “as proof of the depravity — or at least stupidity — of the pro-choice activists.” Before proceeding further with our inquiry into Elspeth Reeve’s competence as a fact-checker, let’s ask a few questions:

  • Why is it that only conservative sites oppose abortion?
  • Why do the words “liberal” or “Democrat” appear nowhere in Elspeth Reeve’s article? Is it really impossible to classify the general political orientation of those who think it necessary for abortion to be legal under all circumstances?
  • Who assigned Elspeth Reeve to patrol the Internet, presuming to “debunk” messages on conservative sites?

You perhaps see the point: Reeve is doing the same kind of Alinksyite work as Media Matters and Think Progress do every day, and she seldom does anything else, because she has no “skill” except her liberalism. And in Swiss Army knife fashion, the universal tool of liberalism is made to serve as a substitute: If you are a habitual liar, being an outspoken liberal is accepted as proof of your honesty.

Reeve labels conservatives but does not label liberals, even though everyone knows that the only kind of people so evil as to protest in favor of abortion are liberal Democrats. However, Elspeth Reeve refers to them only as “pro-choice activists,” as if their political and ideological loyalties were unknown. But we need not be so mystified: The people who want to kill Texas babies are Democrats.

There are no Democrats who oppose killing babies, because Democrats have purged everyone who disagrees with baby-killing, and  describing this policy agenda as “choice” is a purposeful deceit.

KILL BABIES! HAIL SATAN! VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Sodomy is still just an optional item on the Democrat agenda, but it’s probably only a matter of time before they make it mandatory.

Elspeth Reeve derogated conservatives for calling attention to the “pro-choice activists” who used a Satanic chant to mock pro-lifers, saying that only a handful of the “activists” took part in the chant, but one imagines that if a handful of Tea Partiers started chanting racial slurs, this would have been deemed newsworthy. Not content with dismissing the “Hail Satan” chant as trivial and insignificant, however, Elspeth Reeve then disputed the authenticity of the photo (shown at the top of this post) of bloodthirsty pro-abortion fanatics Texas Democrats having a young girl hold up a nearly pornographic protest sign:

However, it’s a fake. Or at least, it’s not from the Texas demonstrations. The photo was posted on a message board in December 2007. The anti-abortion crowd will have to stick with its five Satanists.

 Oops! The World’s Least Reliable Fact-Checker™ strikes again: The photo is legit; Elspeth Reeve had read the date wrong on the message board; and she was forced to acknowledge her error.

Did I say “error”? I meant lie, because when you are engaged in a dishonest political propaganda campaign (which is all Elspeth Reeve’s “journalism” career has ever been) and you publish falsehoods in service of your deceitful purpose, this is scarcely an accident.

Liberals lie routinely, because they know if they ever told the truth, no honest person would support their wicked agenda. And if we fail to defeat them, it is because we do not boldly speak truth, or because we have let ourselves become confused by liberal lies.

Let me close by saying that the Texas legislature will convene again on Monday, as Thomas Umstattd Jr. says:

We need reinforcements. If you have not yet come down to the capitol we need you there on Monday July 8 and Tuesday July 9.

Where are God’s soldiers? Who will volunteer in the Army of the Lord?

THE EYES OF TEXAS ARE UPON YOU!

– – –

Category: Abortion, Intellectuals, Journalism, Liberals, Texas

Southern, Conservative, American

Posted on | July 5, 2013 | 27 Comments

Yid With Lid points to a Gallup survey showing that conservatives (89%) are more proud to be American than are liberals (76%).

Interestingly, the poll also shows that Southerners (89%) are more proud of their country than people in the Northeast (81%).

Hell, yes. Freedom. ‘Murka.

Category: Polls, Yid With Lid

‘Authentic Frontier Gibberish’

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 153 Comments

The best comedy ever made? That’s a tough call, but if it’s not Animal House, then surely it must be Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles — and not just because I first saw it as a 15-year-old with my dope buddies Mike and Dave after we’d toked up some fine Colombian gold bud.

Even without the buzz, it’s one of the zaniest things ever captured on film, but that day in 1974, I quite literally fell in the floor in spasms of painfully hysterical laughter. There was no film tradition Mel Brooks did not mock, nor any taboo he did not violate. The humor was a madcap mix of everything you could possibly imagine — vaudeville innuendo, sight gags, fart jokes — perfectly aimed at an audience that had grown up reading Mad magazine and had more recently graduated to National Lampoon and George Carlin albums.

Kids who see Blazing Saddles today cannot possibly imagine how shocking it was to see it in 1974. Unfortunately, most younger people now have only seen it on cable TV, where it gets chopped to pieces, and younger viewers are jaded by having seen other comedies that followed through the gigantic holes that Mel Brooks punched through the wall of Things You Can’t Say or Do in a Movie.

One of the running gags in the movie is that everybody in the “peaceful town called Rock Ridge,” is named Johnson. After the bad guys have made their first violent raid against Rock Ridge, there is an emergency meeting at the town’s church. One of the speeches — if you can call it that — is given by Gabby Johnson, a grizzled old-timer who jabbers incomprehensibly but with much passion and angry gestures. After Gabby has finished making noises about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers, Olson Johnson then stands up to address the assembled citizenry of Rock Ridge:

“Now who can argue with that? I think we’re all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. I’m particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.”

For some reason, that came to mind today as I was reading President Obama’s statement about the military coup in Egypt. No, it’s not authentic frontier gibberish, but it is certainly as incomprehensible as anything Gabby Johnson said that day in Rock Ridge:

“Core principles . . . universal human rights . . . legitimate aspirations . . .  the democratic process . . .  we are deeply concerned . . . an inclusive and transparent process . . . Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.”

Exactly what the hell does this mean? Have the White House speech writers been replaced by a Random Platitude Generator, a computer program that automatically cranks out empty rhetoric, glittering generalities and vague diplomatic argle-bargle?

The new sheriff . . . Well, he’s failed to answer the critical question we now face in Egypt: “What are we going to do about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers?”

As for me, I say we work up a Number Six on ’em . . . .

 

 

UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

The latest news out of Egypt is . . . well, it’s not really news: The Muslim Brotherhood hates Jews,  John Kerry is a liar, and President Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf–k of a Miserable Failure.

Meanwhile, in the comments, I notice that some people are claiming Young Frankenstein is funnier than Blazing Saddles, which is proof some people smoked too much weed back in the day. You could have said Airplane or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and I’d have said, “OK, maybe.” But Young Frankenstein? No, sorry.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Egypt

Whittle On Beating The Soft, Creeping Tyranny

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

We need reform, and need to vote for reformers.

Category: Uncategorized

FLASHBACK: Breitbart to Blumenthal: ‘You’re a Despicable Human Being’

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 26 Comments

Following up on the Mona Eltahawy meltdown, Donald Douglas is celebrating the 4th of July fireworks and I promised I’d dig up video of Andrew Breitbart’s epic shaming of Max Blumenthal at CPAC. Yeah, Andrew nailed Max for all time in 2010:

“You’re ridiculous. You are a joke. You’re a despicable human being. You are the lowest life-form that I’ve ever seen.”

Makes you want to order that DVD of Hating Breitbart, doesn’t it?

“Memories light the corners of my mind . . .”

 

Category: Andrew Breitbart
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