The Other McCain

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

Army Update: Good News, Bad News

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 40 Comments

Today, I received a letter from Recruit McCain, who reports that he tied for first in his platoon in marksmanship scores and, in a surprise phone call, he also reported that he got to throw a live hand grenade in training today. His physical fitness score is now 250, with 300 being perfect. Recruit McCain further reports that he ran a 13:12 two-mile.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, the Army has’t put Bradley Manning in front of a firing squad yet:

FORT MEADE, Md. — Pfc. Bradley Manning on Thursday confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, saying that he released the information to help enlighten the public about “what happens and why it happens” and to “spark a debate about foreign policy.” . . .
Before reading the statement, Private Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the huge amount of material he leaked . . .
The guilty pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against Private Manning . . . is not over. The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offenses, including aiding the enemy, and multiple counts of violating federal statutes, including the Espionage Act. Prosecutors now have the option of pressing forward with proving the remaining elements of those charges.

Guilty, guilty, guilty — just shoot the traitorous weasel.

Recall that, on the day my son reported for swearing-in at Fort Meade, parents of recruits were lectured about “operational security” — I haven’t said where my son is training — even while Fort Meade was under extra security precautions because of the Manning trial.

Why should taxpayers provide three hots and a cot — even in Fort Leavenworth — for such traitorous scum as Bradley Manning, when the Uniform Code of Military Justice authorizes death by firing squad? The Army hasn’t had a firing squad since 1945, and they haven’t hanged anyone since 1955, which rather undermines the deterrent effect.

Did I mention my son was tops in marksmanship?

Just sayin’ . . .

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

 


Category: Military

Bill Schmalfeldt Praises Kimberlin for ‘Social Justice,’ Then Deletes Tweet

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 7 Comments

Today there was a peace order hearing in Maryland in the matter of Bill Schmalfeldt v. John Hoge, which Aaron Walker describes briefly, with the interesting news that Brett Kimberlin showed up for the hearing.

Schmalfeldt gushed on Twitter that the “high point” of his day was meeting Kimberlin: “I don’t care what he did in the past. He is redeeming himself every day by trying to bring social justice to the world.” Schmalfeldt deleted that Tweet, but Lee Stranahan has the screen-caps.

Schmalfeldt’s concept of political redemption is, of course, the same hustle that Kimberlin has been selling for years. Kimberlin has been called a “world-class liar” and a “top-flight con man” and over the years he has managed to dupe many people smarter than Bill Schmalfeldt.

As for what Kimberlin “did in the past,” read “When ‘Jessica’ Was 10, 11, 12” and see if you think Kimberlin, who served 17 years of a 50-year-federal sentence, can ever bring enough “social justice” to make anyone forget his career as the “Speedway Bomber,” a crime spree for which Kimberlin has never even admitted his guilt, much less apologized.

Admitting his guilt for the bombings of which he was convicted, you see, might require Kimberlin to address his motives for those crimes and . . . well, maybe you ought to read that article to understand the problem there.

The profound irony of Bill Schmalfeldt being indifferent to Brett Kimberlin’s crimes, of course, is that Schmalfeldt has harassed Lee Stranahan (and Stranahan’s defenders) in part on the basis of Stranahan having once shot some “erotic photography,” which Schmalfeldt tries to depict as evidence of moral turpitude and even criminality.

All of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies are very bad people, Bill Schmalfeldt would have you believe, whereas Kimberlin is a saintly instrument of “social justice.”

UPDATE: To show Schmalfeldt’s bully-boy modus operandi, check out this account by his erstwhile Public Enemy Number One, defenders of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In order to get the “information” he wanted, Schmalfeldt contacted a woman and, in quite vulgar terms, warned of the evil that would befall her if she didn’t “start telling the truth and telling it real quick.” Consider the consequences Schmalfeldt threatened:

“Now, do you wanna play dumb and lose your kids? Or do you wanna play smart and keep what you got?”

A real sweetheart, that Bill. And if he thinks it is protected First Amendment speech — much less journalism — to send people messages like that, he will probably have another think coming, sooner or later.

 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make Whose Idea The Sequester Was?

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Oh, the high-minded tones of the apologists, e.g. Mataconis:

Therefore, President Obama is incorrect to attempt to place sole responsibility for the sequester on the Republicans. At the same time, though, it’s true that the negotiations that led to the sequester would not have been necessary if Republicans had not insisted in the summer of 2011 that any deal to raise the debt ceiling including spending cuts. It’s also true that the Budget Control Act passed both the House and the Senate with majority Republican support. Therefore, it’s incorrect for Republicans to claim that the sequester, which they now want to see go through, was the President’s idea entirely. As with most of the bad things that come out of Washington, the sequester is one that both parties are equally responsible for.

I confess I get a kick out of Mataconis on Twitter. Follow the guy. He badly wants to make 10K followers. His tweet stream, which manages to combine a fine abstract libertarianism with a strong devotion to the status quo within the beltway, remain a thing of beauty.

Look, Doug, this is a question of leadership, that commodity in such scarce supply in our age of homo bureaucratus. If President Obama gets the credit for delivering his speeches, or bagging Osama, then the flip side is that he owns the sequester. I realize that, as a lawyer, attempts at blame spreading are what you do on defense. Conservatives do it, too, pointing out that the Democrats retook Congress in 2006, in an attempt to mitigate Bush’s folly, as spoofed immortally in this (NSFW) SNL bit from 2006:

Don’t laugh. If the GOP keeps tubing it, the Congressional S&M dungeon could make a comeback.

Back on topic, though, sequestration is an important part of the demolition of our constitutional order. Rather than lead any sort of sober reform, the Obama Administration continues to place legislative Improvised ‘Explosive’ Devices (IEDs) along the road, with the apparent goal of eliminating the opposition. Moving the foe off the map is a strategy for unifying the remainder, I suppose.

And, sure, we can criticize the GOP for failing to come up with anything bolder than Ryan’s budget, which basically pets the malignant tumor of entitlements as though they were a cat. And then there is the Senate, which hasn’t passed new budget legislation in four years. Elections have consequences, as we have learned. The GOP wants to hold the Progressive course, and expects that trotting out the patriot drum for elections is going to help Republicans re-take the helm. Maybe, maybe not. Progress is dying, and Obama is the captain, and he receives all the blame/credit that implies.

Category: Bill Clinton, Congress

Shorter Wonkette: Butt-Sex Jokes Are Only Funny When Liberals Tell Them

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 14 Comments

“The daughter of liberal academics from Lincoln, Neb., Ms. Cox moved to Washington from New York in May 2000 with her husband, Chris Lehmann, an editor at The Washington Post Book World. She was writing her own satirical blog, theanticmuse.com, after bouncing from editing jobs at The Chronicle of Higher Education, America Online and National Geographic. She was fired from The American Prospect magazine after six weeks (during which she playfully called its co-editor, Robert Kuttner, ‘Crazy Bob’ behind his back) and was required to sign a confidentiality agreement about the terms of her dismissal.”
— New York Times, April 18, 2004

“Now I just wait, wait, wait for that crazy blog-money to start rolling in.”
— Ace of Spades, May 25, 2004

Younger readers, or those older readers who have only recently discovered this “blogging” thing, may not remember the Wild West era of the blogosphere, when the prevailing formula seemed to be to write something so outrageous that people couldn’t possibly ignore it.

Before corporate suits and political power brokers took over — before AOL was willing to pay $315 million for HuffPost — no one expected bloggers to strive for respectability. Or accuracy, even.

As recently as 2006, for example, a liberal blogger might gain fame for “reporting” as fact that a federal grand jury had indicted Karl Rove and, when this dubious “news” turned out to be false, cover his tracks by spinning a conspiracy theory about a White House cover-up of Rove’s alleged crimes.

Those of us who remember those pioneer days of the digital frontier will, of course, remember that Wonkette used to do a lot of butt-sex jokes, which was no hindrance to her being named Washington editor of Time online. It is odd, therefore, to find Ana Marie Butt-Sex lecturing the world about the evils of “Jackass journalism” as practiced by Michael Goldfarb, Ben Shapiro, Jason Mattera and others whom she labels “minions” of the late Andrew Breitbart. This irony is not lost on Matt Vespa:

Ana Marie Cox built her career on blogging jokes about anal sex at the reprehensible guttersnipe site Wonkette. She presented herself as a rambunctious youngster, but it turned out she was already pushing 30 and just naturally behaves like a annoying, hyperactive juvenile. Both Time and later the Guardian hired her in full knowledge of this colorful journalistic career.

Damn it, Vespa, get your facts straight: By the time Ms. Cox started blogging as Wonkette, she wasn’t just “pushing 30,” she was already at least 31 years old.

What this story is actually about, however, is the Left’s continued struggle to maintain narrative control. If irreverent humor or inaccurate reporting help advance legislation, policy and candidates favored by the Left, then such things are not only permitted, but encouraged. However, any errors of fact or lapses of decorum by the Left’s antagonists are portrayed as entirely and permanently discrediting: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Truth is whatever the Left says it is. Anything that contradicts this Truth must be destroyed By Any Means Necessary. Everything you ever needed to know about the Left’s moral relativism was explained in 1965:

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

How convenient, you see, that there is a vast machinery devoted to destroying anyone who questions the Left’s hegemonic claim to Truth, so that every error made by any of Breitbart’s “minions” becomes a permanent stain that discredits not only the erroneous article, but also the entire alternative media enterprise of the Right.

We are supposed to accept this kind of criticism from Ms. Cox without thinking “butt-sex jokes.” Good luck with that.

And if Ace ever got “that crazy blog-money” for writing about butt-sex, he’s been awful quiet about it. Uh . . . sources say.

Category: Blogging

Miserable Joke Of A Senate That Can’t Pass A Budget Can Pass A Tax Increase

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly opposes the motion to proceed to S. 388, the “American Family Economic Protection Act.” This legislation would fail to address the federal government’s spending problems and would, instead, replace spending cuts with tax increases.
The Chamber has long stated that the sequester is bad public policy and should be replaced with prioritized spending cuts. But, this legislation would be worse than even the sequester. It would not prioritize less spending; rather, it would impose new taxes on businesses in specific industries. Like the sequester, this approach is not the answer.
S. 388 employs political rhetoric rather than seeking to implement good policy. It would increase taxes on some of the same successful small businesses that, just six weeks ago, were dealt a massive tax hike as a result of the fiscal cliff legislation. It also contains provisions that target American worldwide companies, moving the Code further from the territorial tax system we need to make American businesses more competitive in a global marketplace.

Read the whole thing. The deadbeat Senate wants some more tax money? Can we at least get an explanation of why the Senate can’t perform its budgeting task? My suspicion is that the fat baseline increases in the last approved budget are more dripping with pork fat than anything Reid could hope to pass in the current situation.

Then again, maybe Dingy Harry is just in total despair. Congress has to overcome the last four years of idiocy and do something in roughly the next fortnight to stave off a shutdown:

The only good drilling direction for Congress is vertically. That is, it mainly screws up.

via Sean Hackbarth and letsjustwin1

Category: Democrats

The Sexualization of Journalism

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 23 Comments

Marin Cogan complains in The New Republic that some people don’t know where to draw the line:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.”

What? You’re going to give up your best source because he made an off-color joke? Geez. Cogan’s story continues:

Sometimes they reach the level of stalking: One colleague had a high-profile member of Congress go out of his way to track down her cell-phone number, call and text repeatedly to tell her she was beautiful, offer to take her parents on a tour of the Capitol, and even invite her to go boating back home in his district.
“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

“Managing old men who have no game”? Care to name names, Garance? Or are you unwilling to burn a source? Can we just assume this is a reference to Harry Reid?

Never mind. The problem is that this is learned behavior. If powerful men in D.C. weren’t accustomed to scoring with young women who hope to sleep their way to the top of the ziggurat of ambition, this kind of misconduct would not be so common as to be nearly ubiquitous.

We have certainly seen that “a high-profile member of Congress” can cross the line, but ask yourself: Where do these guys get the idea that they are hot commodities? Why do they expect women to be flattered by their interest? In a sexualized society, the lines become blurred because, every once in a while, one thing leads to the other:

The month after her White House internship began, Ms. Lewinsky and the President began what she characterized as “intense flirting.” At departure ceremonies and other events, she made eye contact with him, shook hands, and introduced herself. When she ran into the President in the West Wing basement and introduced herself again, according to Ms. Lewinsky, he responded that he already knew who she was. Ms. Lewinsky told her aunt that the President “seemed attracted to her or interested in her or something,” and told a visiting friend that “she was attracted to [President Clinton], she had a big crush on him, and I think she told me she at some point had gotten his attention, that there was some mutual eye contact and recognition, mutual acknowledgment.” . . .
According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President made eye contact when he came to the West Wing to see Mr. Panetta and Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, then again later at an informal birthday party for Jennifer Palmieri, Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff. At one point, Ms. Lewinsky and the President talked alone in the Chief of Staff’s office. In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants.

How often does that kind of thing happen in Washington? Often enough, we may suppose, that “old men with no game” get the mistaken idea that female reporters angling for an exclusive may be interested in more than a scoop.

UPDATE: Maureen O’Connor wonders why female reporters don’t “out” congressmen who “creep” on them. Excuse me for suspecting that (a) most female reporters are liberal and (b) most of the congressmen hitting on them are Democrats, and therefore (c) keeping hush about it amounts to “taking one for the team.” I mean, Ted Kennedy’s drunken womanizing was never a secret in Washington, and yet he was supposedly a hero of women’s rights.

Oh, I almost forgot this quote from Marin Cogan’s story:

One Washington climate reporter remembers an environmentalist stroking her leg at one such outing and noting, disapprovingly, that she hadn’t shaved.

Environmentalists are all creeps. But that’s not “news.”

 

Category: Journalism, Sex

Narrative Control: Woodward Gets a Warning from Gene Sperling

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 24 Comments

“Woodward, I think, leans to the left, but he is unafraid to call out the President of the United States when he’s lied to.”
— Stephen Dethrage, University of Alabama

Obama has been lying about the sequester, and when famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward blew the whistle, this made Woodward the demonized enemy. Anyone who disputes the Obama-approved narrative must be discredited, by any means necessary. Ben Smith at BuzzFeed reports:

The White House official whom Bob Woodward charged had crosssed a line by saying he would “regret” printing his version of a set of Washington negotiations was Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council, a source familiar with the exchange told BuzzFeed Wednesday.
The email from Sperling to Woodward, which Woodward read to Politico Wednesday, has transfixed Washington, with Republicans and some in the press charging that it embodies a White House lording it over a cowed press corps.
Woodward, Politico reported, called the top official — identified to BuzzFeed as Sperling — to tell him that he would question Obama’s account of negotiations leading to the “sequester” — automatic cuts set to take effect next month.
The aide “yelled at me for about a half hour,” Woodward said, and then sent a follow-up email that read, in part: “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Instead of defending Woodward, other journalists are volunteering their assistance in attempting to discredit him, as Aleister at American Glob shows the shrieking reaction from Obama’s media sycophants.  This is shameful, and we should not be surprised that this beatdown on Woodward appears to have been orchestrated by Media Matters chief bully, Eric Boehlert:

Boehlert’s tactics are obvious. He wants to marginalize Woodward and his reporting out of the fear that Obama might actually be held responsible for a law he proposed, got passed, and signed into law.

Boehlert and his fellow thugs don’t care about truth. They care about partisan conformity and subservience. Becca J. Lower noticed that at least one young journalist still prefers the old-fashioned truth.

Category: Budget, Media Bias

Preach It, Sessions

Posted on | February 28, 2013 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

What should Republicans be saying, more or less daily? Things like this:

During my remarks today I have exhaustively documented the case against the confirmation of Mr. Lew. I have detailed his disastrous budget plans, rebuked by editorial boards across the country and unanimously rejected by Congress.
I have discussed his repeated, knowing, and deliberately false statements about those budget plans–most notoriously his claim that “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”
As I close my remarks, I would appeal to my colleagues to oppose Mr. Lew. Read more

Category: Budget
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