The Other McCain

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

What ‘Social Justice’ Really Means

Posted on | January 5, 2022 | Comments Off on What ‘Social Justice’ Really Means

New Yorkers are about to get what they voted for, and they deserve it:

Manhattan’s new liberal district attorney sent guidance to his staff this week saying he does not intend to prosecute several offenses, suggesting that “decriminalization” will help “make us safer,” according to reports.
Alvin Bragg, who was sworn in as Manhattan district attorney on January 1, sent a memo to his office on Monday calling for the “decriminalization/non prosecution” of crimes including marijuana possession, turnstile jumping, trespassing, resisting arrest, interfering with an arrest and prostitution.
The guidance calls for downgrading felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing.
The memo says the office will “not seek carceral sentence other than for homicide” or “class B violent felony in which a deadly weapon causes serious injury, domestic violence felonies” with few exceptions.
“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on a holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victim’s input (particularly in cases of violence or trauma), and any other information available,” the memo reads.
Bragg suggested that “reserving incarceration for matters involving significant harm will make us safer.”
The office also does not plan to seek any sentences of life without parole, regardless of how heinous a crime is, and will only recommend pretrial detention in “very serious cases.”
“The data show that the overwhelming majority of those released pretrial do not commit a violent crime while at liberty,” the memo says. “Two studies show that even three days in jail can lead to a loss of housing, employment and strain family connections and increase the likelihood failure to appear in court.”
The move comes as the number of murders, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and grand larceny auto thefts surpassed 100,000 for the first time since 2016, according to data from the New York Police Department.
The New York Police Benevolent Association expressed “serious concerns” about the plan in a tweet on Tuesday.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

One must admire the blandness of that phrase, “The data show,” by which Bragg asserts that most criminal suspects released on bail “do no commit a violent crime” while awaiting trial — certainly a fact, but one which offers no comfort to the law-abiding citizens whose safety is jeopardized by the catch-and-release policy that liberals advocate.

Suppose, arguendo, that a mere 5% of suspects out on bail commit violent crimes; 95% can be fairly described as an “overwhelming majority.” But (a) this is the situation under the existing system, rather than the “progressive” policy that Bragg intends to implement, and (b) that 5% can wreak serious havoc, when you’re talking about a city like New York with a criminal population numbered in the tens of thousands. And we might furthermore add (c) that the “data” to which Bragg refers is no doubt supplied by left-wing advocacy organizations which may not be entirely scrupulous in dealing with statistics.

We do not need any research to know that Bragg’s policy will produce disastrous results — common sense tells us so and, given what we’ve seen in other cities where funding from George Soros has elected “progressive” district attorneys like Bragg, we know that life in New York City will become nightmarish. Prostitutes and drug dealers will ply their trades without fear of prosecution, carjackings and burglaries will skyrocket, and the daily death toll from drive-by shootings will shock the nation.

“Social justice” requires this. It is unfair for some people to live in safe neighborhoods with nice cars; to make things equal, every neighborhood in New York City must become as lawless and chaotic as the worst slums of the Bronx. While “social justice” will not improve the quality of life of allegedly “oppressed” minorities — indeed, black and brown people will be victimized at much higher rates — it will help accomplish Bragg’s real goal, i.e., to make life worse for white people in New York.

You’re not supposed to say this out loud, of course, but this is the ultimate meaning of all that “Critical Race Theory” noise. The problem with law enforcement, according to the CRT perspective, is not merely the “disparate impact” of locking up black criminals. No, the real problem is that keeping criminals in jail allows white people to live in nice neighborhoods. It is wrong for white people to be safe from crime.

We know for a fact that 37% of criminals released from prison are re-arrested within a year. The reality of recidivism — the fact that most crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are more or less full-time criminals — is something that “progressives” wish to ignore, or bury beneath a lot of blah blah blah about “oppression.” The fact that about half the violent crime in America is committed by young black males is another fact that “progressives” seek to conceal or obscure. When calling attention to these facts, one must point out that the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by young black males does not mean that most young black males are criminals. It is a minority of the minority, as it were, who are responsible for this misunderstanding, in the same way that a comparative handful of outspoken bigots can engender the false belief that most white people are racists. If we wish to protect the black community from stereotypes about criminality, locking up black criminals should be high on the list of priorities, since prison inmates are thereby quarantined from the public.

Instead, the “progressive” solution is to normalize criminality, to permit prostitution and drug dealing to flourish, and to effectively legalize theft (e.g., California). How can anyone possibly justify this madness? Simple — just shout “racist” at anyone who complains. One marvels at the childishness of such reasoning, but this mentality is now the dominant force in Democratic Party politics, and no one’s life or property is safe wherever Democrats are in power. Therefore, anyone who votes for Democrats — as did 78% of Manhattan voters in 2020 — is voting for violent anarchy. New York City deserves what comes next.




 

Category: Crime, Democrats, New York

Democrats Continue J6 Insanity

Posted on | January 4, 2022 | Comments Off on Democrats Continue J6 Insanity

This is Day Three of Insurrection Anniversary Week, brought to you by Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) who have latched onto the Jan. 6 Capitol riot (“J6”) as their permanent campaign strategy:

House Democrats introduced a bill to erect a permanent “Attack On The Capitol” exhibit on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
Co-sponsored by nearly 20 Democrats, the bill, dubbed the Capitol Remembrance Act, would “direct the Architect of the Capitol to design and install in the United States Capitol an exhibit that depicts the attack on the Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021.”
The bill specifies that the project must be installed in a “prominent location” and retain a “permanent” status. Property “damaged during the attack,” photographs, and a plaque honoring the “sacrifice of heroes, including United States Capitol Police Officers Brian Sicknick” are among the exhibit requirements. Officer Sicknick, however, died of natural causes according to D.C.’s Chief Medical Examiner.
“The Architect may include artwork created to depict the attack on the Capitol,” the bill adds.
The legislation adds to the Democratic party’s continued exploitation of the events on January 6th, epitomized by President Biden, who recently referred to the event as “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who professed she thought she “was going to die” when Trump supporters entered the U.S. Capitol despite the fact the congresswoman was in an entirely different building at the time of the attack.

In a related development, “Republican” Rep. Liz Cheney told CBS that “the single most important thing” about the Select House Committee investigation of J6 “is to ensure that Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and that he certainly is not anywhere close to the Oval Office ever again.” She actually said that. In an interview. On television.

Cheney probably thinks we are too stupid to notice her clumsy admission of the real purpose of Nancy Pelosi’s witch hunt “investigation.”

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Democrats have become obsessed with the “insurrection” narrative because they think it will help them win elections; therefore, it will continue until Democrats lose elections. Act accordingly.




 

Category: Congress, Democrats

We’re All Horny for AOC, Which Is Why We Vote Republican, or Something

Posted on | January 3, 2022 | Comments Off on We’re All Horny for AOC, Which Is Why We Vote Republican, or Something

It was Ace of Spades who dubbed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “donkey chompers,” and I really tried to avoid using it because making fun of someone’s appearance is cheap humor, and not political debate. But just like you can’t unsee “Brian Stelter is a potato,” so likewise with AOC as donkey chompers. Her idiocy is exceeded only by her narcissism. After pictures emerged of AOC having cocktails in Miami, while New York was experiencing a record spike of COVID-19 cases, this was how she reacted:

Is she really that stupid? What part of Steve Cortes’s tweet is indicative of “sexual frustrations”? His comment about her boyfriend wearing sandals was obviously intended to call attention to (a) how pasty white the guy is, and (b) the fact that he was wearing sandals despite not being at the beach. (Guys: It’s tacky, the sign of a slob, to wear sandals anywhere except at the beach. And do we also need to have a conversation about when shorts are appropriate?) Beyond criticizing the sartorial choices of AOC’s boyfriend, where does she get this idea that Republicans are mad they can’t date her? But then again, where does she get any her loony ideas? Her reserve supply of stupidity is apparently infinite.

But this goes back to why I try to avoid making fun of someone’s appearance in political arguments. (Unless they’re a potato, like Brian Stelter.) Whether or not a particular woman is attractive is irrelevant to validity of her opinions on public policy. Even if it is true, as Ann Coulter said of anti-Trump protesters, that “without fat girls, there would be no protests,” such a comment does nothing to advance our understanding of the relevant public policy issues. And by bringing appearance into the discussion, we invite a tu quoque reply. Of course, it is far more likely that the unhinged rage of anti-Trump protesters was rooted in “sexual frustrations” than to imagine that Steve Cortes was motivated by such frustrations. At the same time, why does it even matter?

The reason AOC became a target of criticism for her Miami trip was because it was hypocritical of her, as an advocate and defender of COVID-19 lockdown policies, to travel to the Republican state of Florida to escape those policies. And the reason why Steve Cortes mentioned how pale her boyfriend is, is because AOC routinely engages in rhetoric demonizing white males as the cause of all evil in America, i.e., more hypocrisy.

It’s not about AOC’s donkey chompers, and it’s not even about her stupidity. It’s about the fact that her rhetoric and policy positions are contradicted by her own personal choices — she does not wish to live in the world that her policies seek to bring into existence. And I think no one would wish to live in such a world, if they soberly contemplated where AOC’s policies would lead us. Sensible people will always prefer liberty — which is what Ron DeSantis’s Florida is all about — to the soul-crushing bureaucratic nightmare world of socialism. This preference for liberty, and not “sexual frustrations,” is why 74 million Americans voted to reelect Donald Trump. And we’re not going to apologize for that.




 

Category: Democrats

The Worst House Speaker, Ever

Posted on | January 3, 2022 | Comments Off on The Worst House Speaker, Ever

Good-bye and good riddance, Nancy Pelosi:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “is expected” to retire after the 2022 midterms, the Washington Post reported Monday.
While rumors have been swirling for months about Pelosi’s next moves amid projections the Republican Party is to retake the House in 2022, WaPo named several successors to replace Pelosi.
“Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) is the early favorite to become the next Democratic leader, but the maneuvering for power has just begun,” the publication reported, also mentioning as potential candidates Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC).
“I think we want leadership that bridges some of the different ideological wings of the party, that is committed to listening to all of the perspectives, that will be capable of helping move the Senate or things that have stalled in the House,” Khanna told the Post. “But whoever it is, I hope they would adopt progressive positions and also listen to the broad caucus and build consensus.”
Though more senior members of the Democrat Party may be favored to win the speakership, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who represents the Congressional Progressive Caucus as chair, may also run for the position to cement the far-left atop Democrat House leadership.
“I think there was a ‘holding of power’ model that worked very well for a long time, and I think now it is more about a recognition of different centers of focus within the Democratic caucus that have to be brought in and brought together,” Jayapal told the Post. “It takes some acceptance of more-decentralized leadership.”
Rumors of Pelosi’s retirement come as two staffers abandoned Pelosi’s office in December, a pattern that suggests Pelosi may retire after the 2022 midterms.
The Post is not the only media outlet to speculate about Pelosi’s retirement. CNN reported in November Pelosi may honor her promise and retire because of the unlikelihood of the Democrats’ ability to retain the House.
In August, Atlantic magazine reported Pelosi will resign from her leadership role. “Sometime in the not-so-distant future, probably after next year’s midterm elections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will announce that she’s stepping down” the article read.

Pelosi represents the destructive impulses of the “San Francisco Democrats,” about whom Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously said, “They always blame America first.” Pelosi and her cohorts have done everything in their power to undermine constitutional liberty and to destroy the economic and social fabric of the nation. Well might we say of her what Cromwell said to the Rump Parliament in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”




 

Category: Nancy Pelosi

Today Is the Day: Patriots Can Clinch Playoff Berth With Win Over Jaguars

Posted on | January 2, 2022 | Comments Off on Today Is the Day: Patriots Can Clinch Playoff Berth With Win Over Jaguars

Yesterday someone said, “Stacy, I gotta tell ya — I liked you a whole lot more before you became a vocal Patriots fan. Remember, most of their fans are Massachusetts communists.” OK, I admit this has become somewhat obsessive, but as I say, when they drafted Mac Jones, they recruited me as a fan. It is what it is. And now this:

New England has two simple ways it can clinch a playoff spot in Week 17. A Patriots win against the Jaguars and either a Dolphins loss to the Titans or a Raiders loss to the Colts would be enough to secure a spot.

This should be as easy as an Alabama homecoming game against Mercer. It’s a home game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are 2-13 and haven’t won on the road all year. Jacksonville needs to keep losing so they can get the No. 1 draft pick, and it would be an embarrassment for the Patriots if this game is even close. It ought to be a blowout, so if Mac throws for 300 yards and three touchdowns, that’s just expected.

There has been talk of Mac hitting “the rookie wall,” i.e., coming into the NFL, players aren’t used to the long season — they’ve played 15 games already — and so his ability to bounce back after consecutive losses to the Colts and Bills makes today’s game important, even though it should be a walkover against the Jags. It would be valuable, also, to clinch their playoff berth now, so that their final regular season game — on the road against the streaking Dolphins — isn’t all-or-nothing.

Speaking of Miami (AOC’s preferred vacation spot), Alabama alumni Tua Tagovailoa has the Dolphins cooking lately. After starting the season 1-7, Miami has now won seven games in a row, and Tagovailoa’s performance has attracted a loyal following known online by the hashtag #TuAnon.

It’s nice to see the ’Bama boys doing good, so of the two possible clinch scenarios for the Patriots today, I’d prefer to see the Colts beat the Raiders, and let Tua and the Dolphins beat the Titans — which won’t be easy, because the game’s at Nashville, but #TuAnon will not be denied.

So, the Patriots clinch today and then we go to Miami next week, where the Dolphins will be playing for their postseason lives — nice for the narrative arc. Keep in mind, the big dream is for Mac to take the Patriots all the way to the Super Bowl. We don’t deal in small dreams here.




 

Category: Football

‘A Philadelphia Gentleman’s Club’

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘A Philadelphia Gentleman’s Club’

These two Philadelphia gentlemen are suspects.

Euphemism alert:

Authorities have identified two suspects wanted in a double homicide that happened outside a Philadelphia gentlemen’s club on Tuesday.
Investigators say a 32-year-old man and a 42-year-old man suffered fatal gunshot wounds when an argument turned deadly in the parking lot of Club Risqué on Tacony Street around 2:30 a.m.

(Because where else would a Philadelphia gentleman be at 2:30 a.m.?)

Surveillance footage shared by the Philadelphia Police Department shows the suspected shooter and a female person of interest arriving at the club in a black Nissan about an hour before the shooting.

(A “female person of interest” is what they call a “lady” in Philadelphia.)

The suspect, who police say walks with a distinct limp, was wearing a blue coat and denim pants with dark-colored boots at the time of the shooting. The woman passenger labeled by police as a person of interest was wearing a white shirt with tan pants and white shoes.
Security footage from inside the vestibule of the club shows a second suspect also wearing a blue winter coat over a blue hooded sweatshirt.

These gentlemen of Philadelphia are part of a trend:

In 2014, after Philadelphia had recorded fewer than 250 homicides for the second consecutive year, then-Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey made a bold prediction.
“I don’t believe we’re as low as we can go,” he said, adding that the city might soon see fewer than 200 annual homicides.
Instead, seven years later, Philadelphia has recorded more killings than ever. The number of people slain this year — 557 as of Wednesday — has already doubled the 2014 total.
The reasons behind the surge — a spike in gun violence that began hitting historic levels last year and has also been seen in other cities — could take years to sort out, criminologists, police, and other experts say. There have been several once-in-a-lifetime events occurring simultaneously, each of which can cause the type of mass anxiety and distress behind a widespread rise in gun crime: a pandemic, economic upheaval, a nationwide reckoning over racial inequity, and social and political unrest.
The increase here has been intensely concentrated in communities of color where residents have long endured higher violence levels alongside other systemic issues, such as more poverty and lower life expectancy.

“The reasons . . . could take years to sort out,” say the experts.

Experts would not dare blame the Philadelphia gentlemen. Some may use other terms to describe the people causing this violence.




 

Category: Crime, Pennsylvania

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

Say hello to Harrison Foster of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This is a mugshot from 2008, after Foster was arrested for robbing pharmacies and the judge ordered a “mental evaluation” that sent him to “Fulton State Hospital’s maximum security lockdown.” Foster was 21 at the time, and I don’t know what the results of the “mental evaluation” were, but they didn’t keep him lockdown. Perhaps they should have, because somewhere along the line, Foster hooked up with Brittany Wilson.

The best relationships are built on common interests, and it appears that Foster and Wilson had a common interest in methamphetamine.

Which is how the couple decided to celebrate Christmas Eve:

A Missouri woman was pictured with a bright smile on her face after being charged with killing her fiance with a sword on Christmas Eve after the couple was high on meth.
Brittany Wilson, 32, was found outside the Cape Girardeau home she shared with 34-year-old Harrison Stephen Foster with blood on her clothing and a sword lying in the front yard.
Wilson had called police shortly after 11p.m. Friday to report that she had killed Foster with a sword, cops said.
She told investigators that she believed he had several other entities living in his body, and she was setting him free by stabbing him, police said
After officers arrested Wilson, they went inside the home and found Harris dead with several fresh stab wounds.
Wilson told police that she and Foster had taken methamphetamine earlier in the day at the home located about 115 miles south of St. Louis.
Officers say she claimed that Foster was harvesting body parts from individuals.
In the mug shot released Saturday, an orange jumpsuit-clad Wilson, who has two children, wore a wide smile. Foster isn’t believed to be the father of the two kids.

She seems nice. Be careful who you’re doing with meth with, and maybe it’s not a good idea to leave swords laying around while you’re out of your mind on meth. Remember: Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime, Missouri

Jonah Goldberg Blames ‘Elites,’ By Which He Means, Everyone But Himself

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Jonah Goldberg Blames ‘Elites,’ By Which He Means, Everyone But Himself

In a year-end column about the failure of “elites,” Jonah Goldberg pretends to be surprised that the Democratic Party went too far in 2021. He makes a lot of good points, e.g., that the reason the Biden administration thought they could ram “Build Back Better” through Congress was that there was no real opposition to their early COVID-19 “stimulus” bill. But there was a pent-up demand for more “stimulus” in the electorate because (in case you’ve forgotten) Democrats had blocked efforts by the Trump administration to pass a second stimulus bill before the 2020 election. They didn’t want Trump to get a boost from this popular measure, and so it was delayed until after Dementia Joe was ensconced in the White House. Biden got “the crazy idea that he could govern like he was FDR,” Goldberg says, and “spent the spring and summer gamboling along thinking he could do no wrong.” If it hadn’t been for the total botch of the Afghanistan withdrawal,which cratered Biden’s approval numbers, this “gamboling along” might have continued, but the bloom was off the rose by late August, and so here we are, with Biden a virtual lame duck after less than a year in office, and Democrats desperate to avert a bloodbath in the November midterms.

Some of this was predictable, a repeat of 2009, which was the last time Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the Speaker’s gavel with a Democrat in the White House. Nancy represents a district no less liberal than AOC’s district, really, so she sincerely believes “the American people” are down for that agenda. The alleged differences between Pelosi and AOC are not meaningful, in terms of the actual policy agenda.

Could anyone have foreseen the Afghanistan debacle? Well, we know that Biden’s military advisers pleaded with him to maintain what we might call a “foothold” force — 3,000 to 5,000 troops to keep Bagram Air Base in operation, at least — and instead Biden insisted on a complete withdrawal, regardless of the predictable consequences. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” Obama warned, and no one now doubts the accuracy of that assessment. But what about Jonah?

How can a pundit maintain credibility — and shift the blame to “elites” — when he himself was part of the failure that he criticizes? Was it not the case that Jonah and the rest of his #NeverTrump cohort did everything in their power to ensure that Joe Biden became president?

Where is Jonah’s mea culpa? Where is the introspective examination of his own failure? Because most of us (using the first-person plural to speak of Republican voters in general) saw the 2020 election as a stark choice. We knew damned well that Joe Biden is a doddering idiot and that Democrats in Congress are swine, and if we did not foresee every consequence of a Democratic victory in 2020, we all realized it would be very bad. So we stuck by Trump, whatever his faults, knowing that he was the only thing standing between us and an absolute catastrophe.

Why couldn’t Jonah Goldberg see this? Or any of the other #NeverTrump pundits, for that matter? Why couldn’t they see what was so obvious to the rest of us? Why did they allow their visceral hatred of Trump to blind them to the predictable disaster that is the Biden presidency? Perhaps they simple don’t care. Perhaps they are just so selfish — so devoted to careerist considerations of their own reputations — that it doesn’t matter to them whether America is utterly ruined by the Democrats.

It ill behooves Jonah Goldberg to point the finger of blame at “elites,” when he refuses to take responsibility for his own part in this disaster.

Having begun the Year of Our Lord 2022 by paying attention to Jonah Goldberg, I’ll now return to my habit of ignoring that ruined man.

Once they go #NeverTrump, they never go back.




 

Category: Jonah Goldberg
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