The Other McCain

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

The Lewinsky Scandal and Media Bias

Posted on | December 19, 2020 | 1 Comment

My American Spectator colleague Melissa Mackenzie provides a walk down memory lane exposing the media’s partisan double standard:

For a damaging story about a Democrat to be true, DNA must be found on a blue dress. There must be Blue Dress Proof™. It’s not enough to have a witness and a victim. It’s not enough to have a computer, a cache of validated emails, thousands of affadavits signed under the threat of perjury. There must be actual DNA, videotaped evidence. If the bad guy is a Democrat, there must be Blue Dress Proof.
For a damaging story about a Republican to be true, nothing has to be true at all. Third-hand hearsay about hookers and pee, a smile on a face, or a sarcastic tweet or phrase taken out of context can make even the most absurd conclusion be portrayed as fact and conveyed as truth in perpetuity. If the bad guy is a Republican, no proof is needed. . . .

Read the whole thing. The Lewinsky scandal erupted two months after I arrived in D.C. as an assistant editor at The Washington Times, and I have vivid memories of how that went down. What happened was that Clinton’s first finger-wagging denial — “I did not have sex with that woman” — was a tactic used to buy time while his spin doctors went to work devising a message that could enable him to survive the scandal when, inevitably, it was revealed that Clinton was guilty as hell.

A basic element of the Team Clinton strategy was to confuse the issue, to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that the scandal was “just about sex,” to distract from the obstruction-of-justice claim related to the Paula Jones civil-rights lawsuit. Whatever your opinion about Paula Jones, or the wisdom of the Supreme Court decision allowing her lawsuit against Clinton to go forward, once Clinton decided to litigate the case (rather than to pay Jones a settlement), the plaintiff had a right to truthful testimony in the case. Lawyers for Jones, tipped off by Linda Tripp about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, subpoenaed Lewinsky’s testimony. Team Clinton then (a) arranged through one of Clinton’s donors for Lewinsky to get hired at the New York offices of Revlon, and (b) dispatched Clinton’s lawyer Vernon Jordan to have Lewinsky sign a false affidavit, denying any sexual activity with the president and saying she couldn’t attend a deposition because she had moved to New York.

This was straight-up obstruction of justice and suborning perjury and, among other things, Bill Clinton was disbarred as a result. But because of Team Clinton’s media spin — “It’s just about sex! Everybody lies about sex!” — most Americans never understood the real issue.

A series of court decisions had determined that plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases could use evidence that a “hostile work environment” existed because of a pattern of harassing behavior. Paula Jones, as an employee of the state of Arkansas, had been subjected to sexual advances from Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and suffered retaliation when she refused those advances. The reason Monica Lewinsky mattered was that the Jones lawyers were seeking to demonstrate that Bill Clinton made a routine practice of engaging in sexual affairs with female employees or with women he met as a result of his political position.

Personally, I take a dim view of the whole field of “sexual harassment” law. My essentially libertarian position is that employment is a matter of mutual agreement, and if an employee does not like workplace conditions — for whatever reason — the thing to do is to quit. Tell the boss “take this job and shove it,” and walk out the door. If you are a woman and your boss is a creepy womanizer (like Bill Clinton), there are many ways to deal with that problem without filing a lawsuit. Democrats, however, have embraced a theory of “employment rights” that turns practically every workplace grievance into a potential lawsuit, and “sexual harassment” cases like Jones v. Clinton have proliferated as a result.

Bill Clinton was elected with the avid support of feminists who had weaponized “sexual harassment” accusations in the 1991 Tailhook scandal, which wrecked the careers of several Navy officers, and certainly the Commander-in-Chief could not be exempted from this standard. The reason why Republicans repeatedly invoked “the rule of law” in the Lewinsky scandal was that Clinton was claiming that his obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case — a crime which would have subjected any other citizen to imprisonment — did not “rise to the level of impeachment,” in the phrase popularized by Clinton’s surrogates.

Many of the same Democrats who supported impeaching President Trump over a phone call to the newly elected president of Ukraine claimed that Clinton was above the law when it came to obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case. Why? Because “everybody lies about sex.”

Had it not been for the media furiously spinning in Clinton’s defense in 1998, he would have been forced to resign, because responsible journalists would have made clear what was at stake in this case. Professor Glenn Reynolds comments about the Lewinsky scandal:

“I think the Clinton/Lewinsky affair was a real turning point with the press. When it first broke, I remember Sam Donaldson saying that if it was true, obviously Clinton would have to resign. But within a few days the Democrats, very much including the press, had circled the wagons around Clinton and were willing to recycle any pro-Clinton talking point, and scoff at anything that hurt Clinton, in a way that was, at the time, unprecedentedly brazen.”

Indeed. And we are still paying the price.



 

Category: Bill Clinton, Scandal

British Court Rules It’s OK to Call ‘Stephanie Hayden’ a ‘Pig in a Wig’

Posted on | December 19, 2020 | 1 Comment

Not a woman: Anthony Halliday (left) as ‘Stephanie Hayden’ (right).

Last year I described this menace to society:

Anthony Halliday changed his name to “Stephanie Hayden” and became a transgender activist in England who “regularly threatens gender identity disbelievers with civil or criminal lawsuits, or attempts to have them ousted from their careers.”

Now a British appeals court has ruled against Halliday/“Hayden”:

Judges have insisted that freedom of speech includes the ‘right to offend’ in a landmark ruling which could help to turn the tide on ‘woke’ intolerance after a feminist who called a transgender woman a ‘pig in a wig’ and a ‘man’ was cleared.
Presiding over a case in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Warby said: ‘Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.’
They added that ‘free speech encompasses the right to offend, and indeed to abuse another’. The judgment from two senior members of the judiciary will set a precedent for future cases involving freedom of speech.
The ruling has emerged only now, but came in the successful appeal decided last week in favour of mother-of-two Kate Scottow, from Hitchin in Hertfordshire, after she had been found guilty under the 2003 Communications Act earlier in the year.
Miss Scottow told The Daily Telegraph: ‘It was necessary to enshrine one of the most fundamental rights of every living being in a democratic society – the right to freedom of speech that is now routinely attacked…’ But Miss Hayden said: ‘This is… a kick in the teeth to the entire LGBT community.’

(You know what, “Miss Hayden”? Maybe “a kick in the teeth” was long overdue to stop transgender bullies like you.)

Miss Scottow was arrested in 2018 and taken from her children and into custody after referring to trans woman Stefanie Hayden as a man, a ‘racist’ and a ‘pig in the wig’. Miss Hayden, 47, reported the online remarks to police.
[Scottow] had been arrested by three police officers in 2019 at her home in Pirton near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in front of her daughter, 10, and son, 20 months. Boris Johnson later called it an abuse of power.
In February this year radical feminist Miss Scottow, 40, was handed a two-year conditional discharge, and ordered to pay £1,000 compensation, with district judge Margaret Dodds telling her: ‘Your comments contributed nothing to a debate. We teach children to be kind to each other and not to call each other names in the playground.’
But, overturning the decision, Mr Justice Warby explained that the relevant parts of the Communications Act ‘were not intended by Parliament to criminalise forms of expression, the content of which is no worse than annoying or inconvenient in nature’.
Mr Justice Warby also suggested that the prosecution had been an ‘unjustified state interference with free speech’.

Well, a small victory for free speech, but I’d still be happier if “Stephanie Hayden” got a kick in the teeth, literally. In America, we can say that.



 

Category: Great Britain, The Transgender Cult

Celebrate the Joyous Occasion of the Return of the Big Yellow Button

Posted on | December 18, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Occasionally, when the need arises to rattle the tip jar, I supersize the PayPal contribution button, and today is such an occasion.

My family and I will be traveling today to a Midwestern state where our youngest son will be marrying his beloved Jasmine.

Having a wedding in the middle of a pandemic requires careful planning which, thankfully, has been attended to by the bride’s family. We may hope that one day our son will be telling our grandchildren how we managed appropriate social distancing on this happy occasion.

We can happily imagine the grandkids wondering about what grandpa did in “the old days” of 2020. “Dad, what’s a ‘blogger’?” And that’s when my son will explain to them how their grandfather reminded readers of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Family, Shoe Leather Fund

In The Mailbox: 12.17.20

Posted on | December 18, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Words to the wise.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Stalker Ex-Boyfriend Killed In Self-Defense
Red Pilled Jew: Wednesday Whittle
EBL: Awesome Way To Enjoy The Driving Range
Twitchy: To Some, Despite Her Disabilities, Helen Keller Was Just Another Privileged White Person
Louder With Crowder: Trump Cuts California Health Funds Over Abortion
Vox Popoli: Unrestricted War In Action, also, The Narrative Shifts

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Conviction & Heroism Of William Barr
American Greatness: Data Scientists Claim Arizona Certified Fraudulent Votes, also, Peter Navarro’s Report Detailing Election Irregularities In Six States Suggests Coordinated Strategy To Steal Election
American Power: Hunter Biden Asked The Chicoms For $10 Million To Help “The Biden Family”
American Thinker: Oblivious Biden, also, What The American Aristocracy Has Wrought
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Urban Flight News
Babalu Blog: Cuba’s Communist Regime To Jack Up Electricity Prices 500% In 2021
BattleSwarm: Everybody In California Is Moving To Texas
Cafe Hayek: COVID-19 Is Indeed Relatively Harmless For Younger Adults
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Iran Redux, also, McConnell Tells GA Voters To Stay Home And Other Weirdness Under The Fedora
Don Surber: U.S. Intelligence Says Trump Won In A Landslide, also, Pardon Obama
First Street Journal: Some Good News From SCOTUS On Freedom Of Religion, also, Well, Wahhh!
The Geller Report: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Being Sued For Enabling Election Fraud In Key States, also, DNI Ratcliffe – There Was Red Chinese Interference In The 2020 Election
Hogewash: Part Of The New Normal, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: MessingGate Reveals Not One, But Two Hypocrisies, also, I’m Your Woman Packs Thrills, Not Lectures
JustOneMinute: FDA Panel Approves Moderna Vaccine
The Lid: Liberal Democrats Want Colleagues Disarmed On Capitol Hill
Legal Insurrection: Calls Begin For Kamala Harris To Have A More Important Job Than Just Vice President, also, U. Oregon Students Want College Republicans Removed From Campus For Attending “Stop The Steal” Rally
Nebraska Energy Observer: Tis The Season
Power Line: Are Shutdowns Leading To Youth Suicide? also, 9th Circuit Tells Nevada It Can’t Treat Churches Worse Than Casinos
Shark Tank: House Democrat Wants Gov. DeSantis Investigated Over COVID Death Rate Reporting
Shot In The Dark: Orwell Overestimated Minneapolis DFLers
The Political Hat: Critical Election Theory, also, Anti-Racism Infects The AMA
This Ain’t Hell: Seattle Politician Who Defunded Police Calls 911 For Crime She Wants To Legalize, also, Pushing The Envelope
Victory Girls: Rocky Road Ahead – Biden Detours Off Easy Street
Volokh Conspiracy: Chief Justice Roberts Has Fallen Into A “Truly Bottomless Pit From Which There Is Simply No Extracting [Himself]”
Weasel Zippers: Dominion Whistleblower Says CEO Lied During Testimony, also, UMC Nevada Shows Video Of Doctor Getting COVID Vaccine – But The Syringe Was Empty
The Federalist: Rand Paul Calls For President Trump To Pardon Edward Snowden, also, New Texts Show FBI Spied On Fox News
Mark Steyn: When Sieges End, also, Links & Latkes

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Category: Linkagery

Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?

Posted on | December 17, 2020 | Comments Off on Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?

Having endeavored to read the dissertation for which the wife of the alleged President-elect received a Doctorate of Education, Kyle Smith tries to explain how awful it is: “To call Jill Biden’s dissertation thin gruel is an insult to gruel. . . . The dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, shimmers with the wan, term-papery feel of middle school, although in defense of today’s middle schoolers, they at least know how to use spell-checking software, unlike Mrs. Biden.” The dissertation, Smith tells us, includes “meaningless prattle,” “awkwardly phrased banalities . . . and childlike repetition”:

Biden’s style is atrocious, her research is comical, her reasoning is muddled, and as one finishes the final vacuous line of this student-newspaper-style exercise (“A student retention plan requires diligence and effort — but most of all, leadership”), it is impossible not to be reminded that the University of Delaware, which granted Mrs. Biden an Ed.D. in 2007, is deeply connected to her husband. A more exacting, or even minimally self-respecting, university would have directed Mrs. Biden’s paper to the nearest trash receptacle. Jill Biden looks like yet another member of the Biden family who successfully leveraged the family name to obtain things of value that otherwise would have lain far beyond the reach of someone of such meager talents.

A typical member of the Democratic Party “elite,” in other words.

Tucker Carlson ripped it to shreds Wednesday night:




 

Category: Democrats, Education

Mom Blames Atlanta Police for Her Son Getting Beaten in Massive Brawl

Posted on | December 17, 2020 | Comments Off on Mom Blames Atlanta Police for Her Son Getting Beaten in Massive Brawl

An interesting development on the “social justice” front:

A woman whose 13-year-old son was badly beaten after a massive brawl at Atlantic Station last month has filed a complaint against a group of Atlanta police officers who she says did nothing to stop the attack.
Iresha Ridley said she has formally asked APD’s office of professional standards to investigate why none of its officers intervened while a crowd beat her son.
Prior to that attack, another teenager was beaten and punched until he lost consciousness in a different location, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. A 15-year-old was charged with aggravated assault in that case.
Javon Ridley was attacked Nov. 28 as officers were working to disperse the crowd after the brawl that involved as many as 300 teenagers. In a news conference Wednesday, the Ridleys and their attorney said they believe as many as 10 officers were present at the time.
“The officers have to be held accountable for not intervening when it was their duty to protect (Javon),” attorney Mawuli Mel Davis said.
Atlanta police confirmed that Iresha Ridley had been in touch with an investigator regarding the complaint and that “an investigation into the matter is open and active.”
“We are deeply concerned over this event and we understand and share the frustrations of Mr. Ridley and his family,” an Atlanta police spokesman said in an emailed statement to the AJC. “This incident should never have occurred and I believe it provides a glimpse into some of the challenges faced by the Atlanta Police Department and our officers. Maintaining order over hundreds of juveniles in a situation like this is nearly impossible.”
Hundreds of teens were gathered near the dining and shopping destination’s bowling alley about 5:30 p.m., and many were engaged in fights, according to an incident report obtained by the AJC.
When officers tried to disperse the clusters of teens, several “became defiant and more disorderly, engaging in more fistfights,” the incident report said. One teen was severely beaten and repeatedly punched, police confirmed. When he fell to the ground, another teen repeatedly stomped on his head, the report said. . . .
According to Davis, Javon Ridley was dropped off at Atlantic Station by his mother more than two hours later. The teen, who was unaware of the brawl, had planned to meet his uncle about 8 p.m., Davis said.
“His uncle was there and waiting for him at the bowling alley,” Davis said. “When he attempted to get out of the car to go to the bowling alley, unfortunately, Atlanta police turned him away.”
Due to the violence that had erupted just hours earlier, Atlanta police told Javon and other teens to stand on the 17th Street bridge, which is just outside of Atlantic Station and about a five-minute walk from the bowling alley.
That’s where a large group of people descended on the 5-foot-3, 104-pound teen, Davis said.
Passersby captured the attack with cellphone cameras and posted the videos to social media. In one video, shared with the AJC by Davis, a crowd is seen throwing blows on one person. Davis said as many as 20 people took turns punching and kicking Javon. It is not clear why he was attacked.
“While he was being attacked, obviously, you can see videos where there are Atlanta patrol cars that are occupied by Atlanta police officers who did nothing to render aid,” Davis said, “and that, for us, is a miscarriage of justice.”
Iresha Ridley said she was “devastated” by her son’s attack. “Unfortunately, I was not there to protect him,” she said.
But Atlanta police officers were, and they did nothing to intervene, Ridley said.
“This is my only child,” she said. “He could have been killed.”

While I don’t know if the Atlanta police did everything right in this situation, it seems absurd to scapegoat them for not intervening while, at the same time, police get accused of “systemic racism” every time they do intervene. People with the “social justice” mentality always want to blame police no matter what happens. Watch this video:

 

What was happening in Atlanta that night was chaos — anarchy, the collapse of public order — and whose fault was that? Why blame the police because Atlanta is descending into savagery? As Hobbes said, this was bellum omnium contra omnes, “the war of all against all” which subjects its victims to “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” rendering life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

But just take down some more Confederate statues and maybe rename a few high schools, and I’m sure everything will work out just fine.




 

Category: Crime, Georgia

In The Mailbox: 12.16.20

Posted on | December 16, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.16.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Song of the day.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Armed Gunman Shot By Police – His Mother Blames The Cops
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1203
EBL: Frankie & Dino – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Twitchy: Mollie Hemingway Nukes NYT WH Reporter & The Rest of The MSM With Truth Bomb
Louder With Crowder: Mike Rowe Harshly Opposes Student Loan Forgiveness
Vox Popoli: Massive Wikileaks Drop, also, If Google Wants To Dance

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Local Sheriffs Pushing Back On Lockdowns, also, Spain’s New Cold Warrior
American Greatness: Sen. Johnson (R-WI) Blasts Sen. Peters (D-MI) During Election Integrity Hearing – “You Lied Repeatedly!”
American Power: Joe Biden’s Unsolvable Identity Politics Problem
American Thinker: Trump’s Endgame, also, The Fraudulent 2020 Election Is History Unfolding Before Our Eyes
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Cuban State Security Arrests Luis Manuel Alcantara & Other Artists From The San Isidro Movement
BattleSwarm: Remember Boko Haram? also, Jimmy Flannigan Goes Down In Flames
Cafe Hayek: An Open Letter To Tyler Cowen
CDR Salamander: What Taiwan Can Learn, also, DG-26 Guam Killer
Da Tech Guy: #Unexpectedly – MI AG & SecState Act Like Conspiracists, also, Report From Louisiana – Church
Don Surber: Keep Texas Red
First Street Journal: Rights Delayed Are Rights Denied, also, Using Freedom Of Speech & The Press To Condemn Other Peoples’ Free Speech
The Geller Report: Sen. Rand Paul May Join Rep. Mo Brooks To File Objection To Electoral Votes During January 6 Joint Session, also, PA Republicans Ask SCOTUS To Review Election Lawsuit
Hogewash: I’m Not Making this Up, You Know, also, While Drinking My Third Cup Of Coffee
Hollywood In Toto: Good Place Star Suggests Rowling Is Evil, Claims Author Did “Irrevocable Harm”, also, The Very Best TV Shows of 2020
JustOneMinute: Something Must Be Happening
The Lid: “Squad” Member Cori Bush Wants To Make Americans Vulnerable Again
Legal Insurrection: San Fransisco Renaming Abraham Lincoln HS Because Black & Native Lives Didn’t Matter To Him, also, Oracle Flees California For Texas, Founder Larry Ellison Heads To Hawaii
Nebraska Energy Observer: A Harlot’s Way  – 4 Bethany
Power Line: And Now, The Dan Rather Medals, also, Rebellion Brewing
Shark Tank: President Trump – “Fox Is Dead”
Shot In The Dark: Adding Insult To Injury
The Political Hat: Mandatory Anti-Racism In College – Anti-Racist Training, Anti-Racist Goals, & Anti-Racist Litmus Tests, also, Vulva Owners & The De-Gendering Of Biology
This Ain’t Hell: Army CID Burned Out & Mismanaged By MP Leadership, Special Agents Say, also, Russia Ups Their ASAT Game
Victory Girls: Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) Says Looking Into Election Is Dangerous
Volokh Conspiracy: First Amendment Generally Protects Secret Recording Of Police In Public Places
Weasel Zippers: AMA Quietly Reversed Their Opposition To Hydroxychloroquine In October, also, 42,000 People Voted Twice In Nevada – 20,000 Voted Who Don’t Even Live There
The Federalist: Biden’s Deputy Chief Of Staff Preaches Unity While Calling GOP Lawmakers “F**kers”, also, New Documents Show Hunter Biden Asking Red Chinese For $10 Million On behalf Of “Entire Biden Family”
Mark Steyn: Do You Hear what I Hear? also, Time’s Basement Dweller of The Year

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Category: Linkagery

Mathematical Analysis Documents ‘Strange Voting Patterns’ in Election

Posted on | December 16, 2020 | Comments Off on Mathematical Analysis Documents ‘Strange Voting Patterns’ in Election

If you’re smart enough to understand all the statistical stuff in this lengthy report, perhaps you can explain it in the comments. Quickly skimming it, I understood that what they are saying is that, compared to expected results — based on previous elections, voter demographics, etc. — the reported results are significantly anomalous in five states that Joe Biden allegedly won. “[T]he model’s predictions match the reported results in all other states, i.e. states where no fraud has been alleged, but predicts Trump won majorities in five disputed states (AZ, GA, NV, PA and WI) and 49.68% of the vote in the sixth (MI).”

What does this mean? Well, it means that if you believe Democrats stole the election, your belief is not irrational. There is actual evidence, which may not be accepted as legal proof, but it’s still evidence.

The real question is what, if anything, can be done about this? If we are victims of a massive fraud, to whom do we turn for justice? I don’t have answers to those question. Heck, I don’t even understand the math.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Category: Election
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