The Other McCain

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

Equality Update: Plessy and Ferguson Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 17 Comments

In Aurora, Colorado, an elementary school set up an after-school tutoring program from which white students were deliberately excluded. When the mother of a 10-year-old white girl complained, she got a phone call from Mission Viejo Elementary principal Andre Pearson explaining that the program is “focused for and designed for children of color.”

This revival of public-school segregation — unexpectedly! — caused Pete Da Tech Guy to notice that Aurora school policy sounded oddly familiar:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Of course, that’s from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld the “separate but equal” rationale of segregation Read more

Category: Colorado, Education, Liberals, Racism

Sources Tell Washington Post FBI Can’t Find Menendez’s Dominican Hookers

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 58 Comments

There’s a good news/bad news factor here. The good news is, the Washington Post can’t keep ignoring or downplaying the allegations:

A team of FBI agents has been conducting interviews in recent weeks in the Dominican Republic and the United States, looking into allegations that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) patronized prostitutes in the Caribbean nation, but has found no evidence to support the claim, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
One person said agents have asked about whether a Florida eye doctor — a close friend and major campaign donor to Menendez — provided the senator with prostitutes on vacations there. Another person said investigators are looking into allegations involving underage prostitutes and sex parties.
The two, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation, said FBI agents are following leads provided by an unknown tipster. In a series of e-mails with the FBI, the tipster alleged that the doctor, Salomon Melgen, had made prostitutes available to Menendez while he was staying at his friend’s resort home in the Dominican Republic. The tipster, in particular, mentioned young prostitutes and prostitution parties.

As I say, the mere fact that the Washington Post decided to report this aspect of the Menendez investigation is good news, and we have to be grateful for that, having previously whacked them over the head for trying to downplay the sex-scandal angle.

The bad news is that the Post’s sources are saying that the feds haven’t been able to verify these allegations, which raises a couple of questions:

  1. Who are the Post‘s sources? Are these career law-enforcement personnel at the FBI or — as I am tempted to think — are these Obama’s political appointees at the Department of Justice, who certainly have an obvious motive for wanting to throw cold water on any suspicions that a top Democrat has been banging hookers in a Caribbean island resort?
  2. Why can’t the Post be bothered to do any investigating of its own? Forget partisan bias and just think what a huge story this could be: Top senator on the Foreign Relations Committee partying down with jailbait prostitutes in the seaside resort mansion owned by his shady Florida contributor? There’s got to be at least a book contract, and maybe a major motion picture deal, for the journalist who can get the scoop on a juicy scandal like that. And if you’re a reporter for the Washington Post, would you rather be stuck inside a fluorescent-lit office in D.C., or flying off at company expense to the Dominican Republic to interview prostitutes? Did I mention prostitution is legal in the Dominican Republic?

If I were a young reporter, I’d be begging for an assignment like that. Hell, if I thought The American Spectator would foot the bill for such an expedition, I’d already be relaxing in the warm tropical sunshine, headquartered at the poolside bar of the Renaissance Hotel . . .

But no, Wlady Pleszczynski would never approve such a project, and who can blame him? I got into enough trouble just covering the presidential campaign stateside. The prospect of me running amok on some bizarre gonzo trip to Santo Domingo would be a nightmare.

So I’m going to have to take a pass on this story, but what’s stopping the Washington Post from flying a couple of would-be Woodward and Bernstein types down to the Dominican Republic?

If Bob Menendez was a Republican senator, you can damn well bet the Post would spare no expense to uncover the truth. They’d interview every call girl, street-walker and “escort” on the island before they quit. Instead, they’re willing to accept the word of a couple of Justice Department sources that there’s nothing to those allegations of Menendez cavorting with teenage hookers at Casa de Campo? Would Ben Bradlee have been satisfied with John Mitchell telling him that all this talk about Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt was mere innocent hijinks?

Times change. Back in the day, the Washington Post exposed corrupt cover-ups. Nowadays, they’re active participants in the cover-up. Meanwhile, the guy who originally broke the story, Matthew Boyle continues covering the Menendez scandal at Breitbart.com:

Well, the truth will come out eventually, and when it does, I strongly suspect some of these mainstream journalists who are still sneering at the prostitution angle in the Menendez story will owe Matthew Boyle a huge apology for doubting his reporting.

UPDATE: Suppose that you were an embattled senator trying to survive a scandal involving an FBI investigation. Wouldn’t you think it a clever move to hire Matt Miller, former spokesman for Attorney General Eric Holder to help you navigate the controversy? And if such an aforesaid embattled senator hired a guy so closely connected to the head of the Justice Department, wouldn’t a skeptical reporter be rather suspicious of being contacted by Justice Department sources eager to confide — on the basis of anonymity — that the FBI investigation of the embattled senator hadn’t turned up any real evidence?

Is the Washington Post being disingenuous here? Do they really think we’re too stupid to figure out that their “reporting” is actually part of the Menendez/Miller narrative-management strategy?

Well, the Post is probably too busy covering other scandals . . .

(Hat-tip: Roger W. King on Twitter.)

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Category: Corruption, Crime, Democrats, Dominican Republic, Media Bias, New Jersey

Politically Incorrect Questions You Can’t Ask Without Being Called a ‘Hater’

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 16 Comments

Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon describes the attempts to intimidate any reporter asking questions about Chuck Hagel and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee:

Apparently, though, and without our knowing it, you and I have passed through an inter-dimensional portal and have entered a black-is-white, up-is-down twilight zone in which asking for information pertaining to a public figure constitutes participation not only in a McCarthyite “smear machine,” but also in a “campaign, orchestrated by controversial anti-Arab figures,” with the goal of “smearing and intimidating the Arab-American community.” . . . The line separating inquiry and bigotry is, it would seem, rather thin.

Yesterday, I saw Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball rant for 10 minutes about Sen. Ted Cruz as a latter-day Joe McCarthy for having dared to ask questions about possible ties between Hagel and foreign governments. Chuck Hagel isn’t just some random citizen who has been grabbed off the street for interrogation about his loyalties.

No, Chuck Hagel is under consideration as Secretary of Defense, and the Senate therefore has every right — indeed, it has a solemn duty — to investigate his associations with groups that seem rather secretive about their funding.

The accusation that journalists or senators asking relevant questions are engaged in fomenting “hate” particularly angers Jeff Goldstein:

[W]hen “news” becomes intertwined with activism, it is no longer news.  It becomes perforce a narrative aimed at advancing a story in a particular ideological direction, and — in many cases — it uses rhetorical tricks, bias by omission and commission, and “talking point memos” or press-releases, already slanted by nature of their provenance, to stand in as supposedly reporter-produced interaction or reportage.
The disturbing fact that we continue to allow interest groups to hide behind phony and baseless charges of racism or harassment — which, when law-enforcement is introduced, is meant to create the conditions whereby reporters will hesitate to pursue a certain line of inquiry — is a national tragedy, and a direct result of the corruption of language through the twin pillars of the leftist’s structural attack on individualism and classical liberalism as born out of the (steadily deconstructed) Enlightenment: political correctness and identity politics.

It’s odd that so many liberals nowadays seem to be willing to suppress First Amendment freedoms in the name of “progress.”

Category: Media Bias

SWM, No Fatties, No Guns

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 15 Comments

Do I know why Harvard Law student Robert M. Cross (right) posted that as a profile picture on Facebook? No, I do not. And his Facebook page doesn’t list a “relationship” status, so it would be wrong to jump to any conclusions as to what the photo signifies. Two friends posing after a healthy hike in the woods? Perfectly innocent. Maybe.

What we do know about Harvard Law student Robert M. Cross — I mean, besides his impressive six-pack abs — is that he hates guns. Hates, hates, hates guns. He interned at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and took part Friday in a panel discussion chaired by Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, “Gun Violence After the Newtown Tragedy: What Can Legal, Public Health and Other Efforts Do?”

 

Thanks to Badger Pundit, who never jumps to conclusions, and also provides the full 18-minute segment featuring Robert M. Cross:

5:03: “It is so easy to save lives, and the NRA doesn’t want us to do it.”

6:28: “There’s a big problem: Brady background checks apply only to federally licensed firearms dealers. They do not apply to private sellers. . . . It is estimated that over 40 percent of gun acquistions occur in the secondary market.”

10:17: “People like Wayne LaPierre, that you see on TV, are not representing Americans. They’re not representing the NRA. They’re not representing gun owners. They’re representing the gun industry, an industry that makes money off of the blood of children.”

 Wow. So that’s something else we know about Robert M. Cross: He really hates the NRA. Hates, hates, hates ’em. Uh . . . NTTAWWT.

 


Category: Constitution, Education

A Bit Of Doggerel For Governor McDonnell On ObamaCare

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

It sounds like Governor McDonnell is going wobbly on us here in Virginia. Send him a note, Virginians, as I just did:

Rumors abound they got to you; that somehow you have flipped.
Gonna go ‘Full Arlen Specter’, or some some wag had quipped.
Let us pray the report was false, and into hyperbole dipped,
Lest roar be heard from old Mount Vernon, as, coming from his crypt,

George Washington himself surveys the mess Progressives made,
Drowning unborn generations in debt, and cold Commie kool-aid.
ObamaCare, itself, ‘twould seem were better now delayed,
Until the godless rot collapses to naught, having finally decayed.

Following Kasich’s lead in any way is a sad thing. Governor McDonnell, please just let the gubernatorial race this Fall be a referendum on ObamaCare. Let McAuliffe run as a sad little statist tool, promising Free Stuff for everyone, and let Cuccinelli run as an American, born in liberty, and intent on defending such.

How strange it is to have to plead with elected officials to do the sane thing.

Category: Virginia

‘Corrupt Democrat,’ ‘Obnoxious Feminist’ and Other Phrases to Avoid as Redundant

Posted on | February 15, 2013 | 13 Comments

In all honesty, when you hear the word “feminist,” does anyone think of adjectives like pleasant, cheerful, successful and attractive?

No, of course not. You think of adjectives like strident, angry, bitter and ugly. Also, quite often, ridiculous — as illustrated by the deranged mob of strident, angry, bitter, ugly women who showed up for a “One Billion Rising” Valentine’s Day demonstration in San Francisco.

By the same token, anyone who thinks that “honest” and “Democrat” ever belong together in the same sentence is probably suffering from some form of mental illness, and speaking of the mentally ill: Jesse Jackson Jr. will reportedly plead guilty to federal corruption charges.

 

Category: Uncategorized

Meet @BridgetteDunlap, Fordham’s Campus Commissar of ‘Human Rights’

Posted on | February 15, 2013 | 37 Comments

“Ms. Dunlap, 31 … was raised a Catholic and was educated at parochial schools”
(Photo: Michael Nagle, New York Times)

You may recall this week I wrote an item called “Why Does @BridgetteDunlap Want to Suppress the Truth About Abortion?” describing a misguided effort to intimidate those who had written about the abortion-related death of Jennifer McKenna Morbelli. I closed that post by wishing Bridgette “good luck with your career as a commissar in the Thought Police.” Little did I realize Dunlap had already established quite a name for herself in that regard.

In November, College Republicans invited Ann Coulter to speak at Fordham University, where Dunlap is “Crowley Scholar in International Human Rights at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.” Apparently, this is the kind of sinecure that entitles the “scholar” to engage in radical mau-mauing wherever her fanatical obsessions are involved.

The College Republicans caved under pressure and disinvited Coulter — thus providing Fordham CRs valuable experience in the cherished Republican tactic of caving under pressure — but the campus radicals, no more satisfied than Hitler had been with the cession of the Sudetenland, decided to take it a step further: Demanding reparations merely for the school having entertained the possibility that Coulter might be permitted to speak at Fordham:

Though the College Republicans withdrew the invitation to Ms. Coulter in light of the outcry from their peers, the problem remains that the University was willing to allocate over $10,000 to this event even while denying funding to other student and departmental initiatives featuring speakers or topics with which it disagrees. We appreciate your statement distancing the University from Ms. Coulter’s hateful rhetoric and defending free speech and academic freedom. . . .
We would like you to explain how the decision was made to allow the College Republicans to use student activity funds to pay for the Coulter event while denying the use of such funds for other purposes deemed not to be in keeping with the University’s mission. For example, we understand that student groups may not use their budgets for the productions of the Vagina Monologues mounted by Fordham undergraduates each year to raise funds to combat violence against women. Along these same lines, Fordham’s anti-abortion club receives funding while pro-choice advocacy is censored. Why are these forms of student expression and association denied support while the Coulter event was not? Is pro-choice advocacy or the Vagina Monologues more inconsistent with the University’s mission than Coulter’s hate speech you rightly decry? Are they less entitled to respect in the free exchange of ideas in the Academy? . . .

This angry manifesto was written and circulated by Fordham Law professor Tracy Higgins and — you guessed it — Bridgette Dunlap.

At the time, William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection wrote:

A group of law professors at Fordham Law School exchanged high-fives over Coulter’s departure, then quickly segued into demanding that the University fund the Vagina Monologues, pro-abortion groups, and other oppressed, um, minorities at Catholic universities on the theory that if the University was willing to fund Coulter’s “hate speech,” it should fund the feminist agenda even if contrary to Catholic teachings.

Fordham is a Catholic university and somehow, in the twisted pretzel logic of Commissar Dunlap and Comrade Higgins, permitting student funds to be used for College Republicans to invite Coulter to campus — an invitation the mau-maus forced the CRs to withdraw — means that the Jesuits are obligated to fund Eve Ensler’s obscene farce in the name of “the free exchange of ideas.”

This is a concept that a friend of mine long ago dubbed “diversity through homogenization”: Radical egalitarianism requires that all institutions be equally diverse, so that traditionally all-male institutions must be forced to accept females, each university must have a certain quota of left-handed Latina lesbians, and so forth. This rigid insistence on universal conformity to the dogma of “diversity” is the mindset that led to the death of Kara Hultgreen and the ritual humiliation of Lawrence Summers at Harvard.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Bridgette Dunlap staged a Sandra Fluke-style protest over the refusal of Fordham’s campus health center to prescribe contraceptives. Students at Catholic universities must be provided the exact same things that are provided to students at secular schools or else, to the radical egalitarian way of thinking, someone’s “rights” have been infringed.

This is a totalitarian worldview and the fact that a neo-Stalinist commissar like Bridgette Dunlap is honored with a scholarship in “human rights” at Fordham is an obvious clue as to what manner of indoctrination now prevails in American academia. 

Professor Jacobson responds to Dunlap’s threats to sue Jill Stanek and others who have reported on the Jennifer Morbelli case:

The legal accusations are frivolous.
If late-term abortion is defensible, why try to hide the reality that there are names and faces and lives destroyed [?] . . .
It’s not an esoteric law school discussion.
Defend the practice if you can, but don’t deny it. Or try to silence it.

As the Coulter controversy showed, Dunlap and her comrades are able to silence the truth at Fordham. Totalitarians are nothing if not ambitious: “Today the campus! Tomorrrow the world!”

UPDATE: How is it, Matthew Archbold of the Cardinal Newman Society wondered back in July, that Catholic schoolgirls grow up to be anti-Catholic Daily Kos contributors? Dunlap invoked her days as “a first-grader in plaid” while accusing Bishop William Lori of lying, and denouncing American bishops as “extremist, lacking in compassion and disconnected from our values.”

Clearly, Dunlap’s first-person possessive — “our values” — refers to the values of progressive feminists for Obama, i.e., MSNBC viewers.

 

Category: Abortion, Education, Legal Insurrection

Ron Paul Supporters Slam Rand After Republicans Block Hagel Nomination

Posted on | February 15, 2013 | 55 Comments

Allahpundit points out that Chuck Hagel was one vote away from passing a cloture vote to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense:

But wait — what about Rand Paul? If ever there was a SecDef nominee whom the Ron Paul paleocon fan base could sort of dig, it’s a guy known for lamenting the “Israel lobby” and opposing Iran sanctions. . . .
Philip Klein, tongue in cheek, calls him today’s neocon hero.

More roundup of Paul-on-Paul conflict at The Daily Caller. After Thursday’s vote, I was riffing on the perception:

Let’s be clear: Disagreements on U.S. foreign policy certainly are acceptable. We ought to be able to debate foreign policy openly and honestly. It is not “hate” to criticize U.S. policy in the Middle East. On the other hand, the conspiratorial insinuation — the suggestion that the U.S.-Israel alliance is solely or primarily a result of clandestine machinations by “neocons” in alliance with the “Israel lobby” — is about two clicks away on the dial from Alex Jones/M.J. Rosenberg kookery. Turn that dial another click or two, and . . .

Well, there is legitimate criticism of policy and then there is something else. Figuring out where to draw the line can be difficult. One of the genuine intellectual giants of the conservative movement, Russell Kirk, remarked in a 1988 Heritage Foundation speech:

Sometimes, true, [neoconservatives] have been rash in their schemes of action, pursuing a fanciful democratic globaIism rather that the national interest of the United States; on such occasions I have tended to side with those moderate Libertarians who set their faces against foreign entanglements. And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States — a position they will have difficulty in maintaining, as matters drift in the Levant.

Kirk’s “Tel Aviv” remark has often been cited — it was controversial at the time, and has since become rather notorious — whereas his larger critique of “fanciful democratic globalism” is generally ignored. And while the title of Kirk’s lecture was “The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species” (the text at the Heritage site appears to be an uncorrected scan), subsequent events showed that Necons enjoyed a hegemonic influence in GOP circles, so as to be able effectively to blackball certain of their persistent critics. Indeed, in 2007, one foreign policy expert at Heritage lost his job for too strenuously criticizing the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq.

It might be possible for conservatism as a movement to maintain a balance between the Paleos and Neos, were it not for the savage “war to the knife, knife to the hilt” blood-feud mentality that has gripped some of the combatants ever since Mel Bradford was rejected as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities back in 1981.

The persistence of such ugly intranecine hostilities, I would suggest, bodes ill for schemes of “fanciful democratic globalism.” If we can’t even broker a peace among Republican intellectuals, how shall we have peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Well, all of this is only indirectly relevant to the fight over the Hagel nomination. The regular inside-baseball politics of the thing is rather tedious, but Jeff Goldstein manages to find something interesting in the media’s coverage of it all.

DA JOOZZ!

 

Category: Intellectuals, Israel, Military, Senate
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