The Other McCain

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

Eighteen Years Ago Today

Posted on | September 11, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

My wife woke me up and handed me the phone. My brother Kirby was calling: “Stacy, it’s terrorism. They hit the World Trade Center.”

What the hell? I was an assistant news editor at The Washington Times, and my workday didn’t usually begin this early, especially on a Monday* after I’d worked the late shift Sunday night. To be awakened so early startled me, and I began trying to process what my brother was saying.

“Stacy, turn on Fox News,” Kirby said, and I stumbled into the living room where the TV was showing the smoke billowing from one of the iconic twin towers on the New York City skyline. Terrorism? It seemed absurd to leap to such a conclusion. I recalled how a B-25 plane had accidentally hit the Empire State Building in 1945, and began to argue with Kirby that this could be a similar accident — a small plane, an inexperienced pilot perhaps — but my brother was adamant.

“No, Stacy, this is terrorism,” Kirby said. “Remember how they tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993?”

Well, we weren’t going to settle this dispute by phone, and obviously I needed to get ready for work, so I hung up the phone and got in the shower. A few minutes later, my wife came in and handed me the phone again. It was Kirby: “They hit the second tower! I told you it’s terrorists!”

Getting dressed quickly, I left for work about 9:30 with an hour’s drive to The Washington Times office, and listened to news radio in the car as events unfolded: A plane slammed into the Pentagon, then the Twin Towers collapsed — one at 9:59 and the other at 10:28.

By the time I got to my desk, the staff had already put together an extra morning “bulldog” edition of the paper, and the next few hours were a blur of activity. One thing I remember very clearly was watching an evening news broadcast on the TV in the newsroom that showed crowds dancing in the streets of Cairo and Gaza — the Islamic world was celebrating this deadly terrorist attack. My office phone rang.

“Stacy, two words — nuke Medina,” Kirby said.

My brother’s logic was obvious: Destroy the second-holiest city of Islam, with the clear implication, “Guess what’s next?”

Some people might accuse Kirby of “extremism” for this kind of cold logic, but there is beauty in simplicity, and by the night of Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear that something had to be done to send a message to those people who believed America could be attacked with impunity.

The idea of blood guilt, a collective blame that justifies unlimited reprisal, is abhorrent to the civilized mind — and that’s a problem. We are perhaps too civilized, and our barbaric enemies therefore believe that we are weak. Are they right about us? Have Americans become so decadent that we lack the will to defend our civilization? This morning, I watched the ceremonies at Ground Zero, with relatives of the 9/11 victims reading the roll of names of those killed that morning in 2001. One of those was a young girl, probably only 12 or 13, who gave a brief tribute to her uncle, who had died in the Twin Towers. I didn’t catch the name, so I don’t know whether her uncle was a businessman working in his office that day, or whether he was one of the heroic NYPD officers or FDNY firemen who died in the collapse of the towers. Yet I was struck by the idea that children who weren’t even born in 2001 have suffered losses — their uncles and aunts, their grandparents or other relatives who were among the innocent killed that day — and all of our children have inherited a world permanently changed because of the 9/11 attack.

* NOTE: After publishing this, I was informed by commenters that Sept. 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, not a Monday. Memory plays tricks, I guess.



 

Category: History, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 09.10.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | September 11, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.10.19 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: This May Be The Biggest Accounting Fraud In History
EBL: Get Girls With Garlic?
Twitchy: The Duo Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Are In Court And The Testimony Is Horrifying
Louder With Crowder: Beta O’Rourke Demonstrates His Inability To Understand How Rights & Property Work

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Abortion As Sexual Pleasure
American Greatness: How Conservatives Can Protect The Environment & Win Voters Too
American Power: Dive Boat Concepcion’s Design Scrutinized After Catastrophic Fire
American Thinker: Education Is Driven By False Premises & Practices
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Capitalism News
Babalu Blog: Three More Players From Cuba’s National Soccer Team Defect In Canada
BattleSwarm: Pat Miletich On Joe Rogan Show Talks About Clinton/McCain/ISS Funding Dirt
CDR Salamander: LCS – The Case For Skeptical Optimism
Da Tech Guy: Has Any Player Had Less Leverage With A Team Than Antonio Brown With The Patriots? also, There Will Be Math
Don Surber: Democrats Don’t Want Trump Supporters
First Street Journal: Philosophy Of Eternalism Can Help With Climate Distress Or Something
The Geller Report: New State Dept. Docs Reveal Last-Minute Efforts By Obama Appointees To Undermine President Trump, also, Burger King Thinks The “Ham” In “Hamburger” Is Offensive To Muslims
Hogewash: Forget It, Jake, It’s MoCo, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Out Magazine Complains Pennywise Isn’t Gay, Blames Trump
Joe For America: Nadler-Led Dems Seek To Seize Power Of Judicial Branch Via “Oversight”
JustOneMinute: Back To Brexit
Legal Insurrection: Leprosy The Next Infectious Disease To Plague LA? also, Oberlin College Denied New Trial In Gibson Bakery Case
The PanAm Post: Macron Uses The Amazon As A Smokescreen For Protectionism
Power Line: Ringo Gets It, also, On Bolton’s Bolt
Shark Tank: Rubio Urges Military Support For Beleaguered Bahamas
Shot In The Dark: When All You Have Is A Hammer
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Chicago Wants All The Money
The Political Hat: The EU Suggestion Box For Slaves
This Ain’t Hell: John Bolton Out As National Security Adviser, also, It’s Tanker Tuesday
Victory Girls: 9/11 – Evil is Real & So Is Courage
Volokh Conspiracy: Shouting Down A Speaker Isn’t “Lawful Activity”
Weasel Zippers: ICE Says Nearly 500 Illegal Alien Criminals Released From NC Jails Despite Detainers, also, Leftists Throw An “Impeach Trump” Event And Nobody Shows Up
Megan McArdle: Why Conservatives Feel Threatened By The Illiberal Left
Mark Steyn: Just In Time, also, The Old World & The New Colonialism

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Brain Candy

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | Comments Off on Brain Candy

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Many years ago, when I was living in Minnesota and involved in an amateur press association yclept Stipple-APA, one of the other contributors used the term “brain candy” in reference to SF that didn’t make you think too hard, but was nonetheless entertaining, and didn’t make you feel like you’d wasted your time and money.

This week’s first contender in the brain candy category is an Ace Double I picked up at a local VA clinic’s exchange table, Mack Reynolds’ The Five Way Secret Agent/Mercenary From the Future. The first is set in a future where the negative income tax provides everyone a more or less comfortable living, but private investigator Rex Bader wants something a little more…and winds up in what comes close to being a screwball spy comedy where’s he’s hired to do a little espionage for a huge multinational corporation, the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, and a group of libertarians who can’t decide whether or not they really want to be revolutionaries. “Mercenary From The Future” seems to be set in a similar future to “The Five Way Secret Agent”, except caste lines have become formal and various legal disputes are being settled by combat. The rules limit the combat to pre-1900 technology, and our hero, hard-luck Captain Joe Mauser, deliberately signs up for what looks like the losing side in a corporate battle. Joe’s got a trick up his sleeve, but will it be enough to beat the legendary commander Stonewall Cogswell?

I have very mixed feelings about the late Harlan Ellison. From personal experience and what others have said, the man was a thoroughgoing asshole, but on the other hand, there was no question that he could write, and write well. I always thought of him as a horror writer who tended to use SF tropes, but most of his stuff was marked SF, and he’s known for doing the script for one of Star Trek’s most famous episodes, City On The Edge Of Forever. While unpacking some of my all too numerous book boxes, I came across Dangerous Visions, a collection of what were considered rather provocative tales from the New Wave. It hasn’t aged well, in my opinion. Most of the thirty-two authors in the collection are old hands like Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl; none of the “new talents” except Laumer, Zelazny, and Delany are remembered at all. One can regard Dangerous Visions as a typical artifact of the New Wave – a few mediocre literary talents bulked up by works by authors that were never really part of their movement. Partners In Wonder, on the other hand, being an anthology of collaborations between Ellison and fifteen (mostly) topflight SF writers, is a much more solid work, with very few disappointments, and I would definitely recommend it over the more famous Dangerous Visions.

Larry Niven’s N-Space is an interesting combination of short stories, essays on SF and science, and novel excerpts, plus a really thorough bibliography. I don’t know for the life of me why Tor hasn’t released it as an e-book, but then Tor does a lot of stupid things. Dragon Award Winner Brad Torgerson credits it for making him the studly hard-SF author he is today, and are you going to argue with the iron-thewed, clear-eyed Powder Blue Care Bear of the Evil League of Evil? I thought not.


Did I mention I have an anthology of SF short stories out?


Category: Books

UPDATE: GOP’s Dan Bishop Wins Special Election in North Carolina’s 9th District

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | Comments Off on UPDATE: GOP’s Dan Bishop Wins Special Election in North Carolina’s 9th District

UPDATE 11:25 p.m. ET: In addition to Bishop’s win in the Ninth District, the GOP also picked up a victory in a special election in the Third District, where Republican Greg Murphy beat Democrat Allen Thomas by 19 points, 59%-40%. What went wrong for Democrats? As the Daily Caller notes: “McCready came under fire after he accused Bishop of having no faith in public schools, however, the North Carolina Democrat sends his children to an $18,000 a year private school.” Oops.

When early polls showed Bishop trailing, the media began calling the Ninth District a “bellwether” of prospects for the 2020 election, but now we can expect them to forget NC-9 ever happened. Except of course, Trump will just rubbing salt in their wounds:

UPDATE 10:20 p.m. ET: Republican Dan Bishop has apparently won the 9th District special election in North Carolina. With all but two precincts reporting, Bishop has a margin of more than 4,000 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. With 99% of precincts (208 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………. 94,984 ….. 50.81%
Dan McReady ……. 90,824 ….. 48.59%

UPDATE 10:05 p.m. ET: With 92% of precincts (193 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 89,941 ….. 50.78%%
Dan McReady ………….. 86,120 ….. 48.62%

With only 17 precincts still to be counted, and Bishop leading by nearly 4,000 votes, this is starting to look like a win for the Republican.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: With 67% of precincts (140 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 72,682 ….. 50.27%
Dan McCready ………….. 71,082 ….. 49.16%

Still too close to call, but encouraging.

UPDATE 9:15 p.m. ET: Bishop takes the lead with 58% of precincts (122 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………….. 66,956 ….. 50.05%
Dan McCready ……. 66,074 ….. 49.39%

UPDATE 9:10 p.m. ET: With 55% of precincts (115 of 210) reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 65,673 ….. 49.92%
Dan Bishop ………….. 65,138 ….. 49.51%

OK, now we have legitimate good news. McReady’s lead is now barely 500 points. Bishop might pull this out yet. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE 9 p.m. ET: With 40% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 56,921 ….. 50.39%
Dan Bishop ………….. 55,415 ….. 49.05%

You see that Bishop is closing the gap, but without knowing which precincts are still unreported, we don’t know if this trend will continue.

UPDATE 8:20 p.m. ET: With 14% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 47,439 ….. 54.15%
Dan Bishop ………….. 39,727 ….. 45.35%

I’m informed that this reflects a surge of absentee ballots being reported from precincts in urban Mecklenburg County.

UPDATE 8 p.m. ET: With 3% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……… 23,526 ….. 50.44%
Dan Bishop ………….. 22,895 ….. 49.09%

PREVIOUSLY (7:32 p.m. ET)

Polls closed at 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina’s 9th District special election, where Republican Dan Bishop is facing Democrat Dan McReady. Trump carried the district by double digits in 2016, and he held a giant rally Monday night in Fayetteville, but Republican leaders were lowering expectations today in what is regarded as a toss-up.



 

Category: Congress, Election, North Carolina

CNN Story ‘Simply False,’ CIA Says

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Never trust CNN:

The Central Intelligence Agency on Monday evening slammed what it called CNN’s “misguided” and “simply false” reporting, after the cable channel’s chief national security correspondent authored a hole-filled piece claiming that the CIA had pulled a high-level spy out of Russia because President Trump had “repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.”
The extraordinary CIA rebuke came as The New York Times published a bombshell piece late in the evening, which largely contradicted CNN’s reporting. According to the Times, CIA officials “made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia” — weeks before Trump even took office.
Concerns about media reporting on Russian election interference drove the decision, according to the Times, which described the source as “the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders” from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction,” the Times wrote.

In other words, what really endangered the source was the media asking questions about where the CIA was getting its Russia information, and let us ask, why was the media asking those questions? Could it be because Obama administration officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, were feeding the media the “Russian collusion” narrative, which naturally led reporters to try confirming the leaks from Brennan & Co.?



 

Category: CNN, Corruption, Russia

He Was the Walrus, Goo Goo Ga Joob

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

They are the egg men:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had fired national security adviser John Bolton after a string of disagreements over how the U.S. should handle North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran.
Trump announced on Twitter that he had asked for Bolton’s resignation on Monday night, saying he had “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions.”
“I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning,” Trump said on Twitter.

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who quotes J.P. Freire: “Press is about to go from ‘John Bolton is a radical warmonger who never should be permitted near the Oval Office’ to ‘This is a story of how a reasonable, respected expert was dismissed by a chaotic, megalomaniacal Administration, and whatever his critique is, we agree!’” In other words, everything Trump does is wrong, because Orange Man Bad!

Ace of Spades has a nice explanation of the staffing problems that have plagued the Trump administration:

[Trump] had to rely heavily on Establishment GOP and NeverTrumpers to serve as his top staffers, and those people then got to pick the next level of staffers and the levels after that.
These people made sure that their people — GOPe people, NeverTrump people — got in to the Trump Administration, and that the few conservatives with government experience or subject-matter expertise who were actually Trumpites were kept out.
I know a guy who had a great deal of experience in diplomacy and was a day one Trump supporter. And I mean a public supporter; he put his name to it.
He was literally told, “That’s going to count against you” when he sought a State Department posting under Trump, the man he had publicly supported.
And in fact it did; he was given the runaround in his interview process until anti-Trump forces could fill the job that Trump wanted him to have with an anti-Trumper.
So Trump doesn’t have a lot of people he can call upon to serve, and a lot of the people who he could call upon have already been frozen out by the anti-Trump political staffers he put in place because he had few other options.

In other words, because most veteran GOP operatives were anti-Trump, once these operatives established themselves within the administration, they made it impossible for Trump to hire people who might actually be loyal to him. So the President is surrounded by people who never wanted him to be President, and who are deliberately sabotaging his presidency.



 

Category: Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 09.10.19 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Stupid, It Burns
EBL: Warren & Clinton Plotting Together Against Biden?
Twitchy: Yep, She Has No Soul – Lisa Bloom Sent Harvey Weinstein Unbelievably Cruel Memo On Rose McGowan
Louder With Crowder: LGBTQ Zine Miffed That Killer Clown From IT Isn’t A Gay Ally

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Angry Spider, also, Podcast #120 – The Anglo-Saxon Female Mind Virus Episode
American Greatness: It’s Official – The Democrats Just Want You Dead
American Power: President Trump’s Assault On Free Trade
American Thinker: Did Boris Johnson Just Rope-A-Dope His Way Into A Hard Brexit?
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Sunflower Uprising – A Call For Nonviolent Protests Against The Communist Regime
BattleSwarm: MIT Media Lab Epstein Funding Scandal Prompts Director Resignation, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Sea Shepherd, Public/Private Partnership, & Protecting Our Seas With Paul Watson On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: Stop Making Excuses For Your Kids Diet, also, Missionary
Don Surber: Think Progress Wasn’t Crazy Enough For Democrats
Dustbury: Dustbury – Charles G. Hill (1953-2019)
First Street Journal: The More The Democrats Keep Talking, The More Likely It Is They’ll Lose
Fred On Everything: Unused Militaries
The Geller Report: Indicted ISIS Sniper Came To US Thanks To Visa Lottery, also, Jewish Students Violently Attacked by Muslim “Youths” In Warsaw
Hogewash: Moon Wrap, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Are You Ready For A Woke Christmas Slasher Film? also, Will Media Weaponize Jojo Rabbit Against Trump?
Joe For America: Rashida Tlaib Claims President Trump Is Afraid Of Non-White Women
JustOneMinute: Send Better Nukes!
Legal Insurrection: Trump Administration Turns Out The Light On Obama Lightbulb Rules, also, Beta Undermines Democracy – Falsely Claims Stacey Abrams Was Robbed In GA Governor Race
The PanAm Post: A Perspective From Mexico
Power Line: Montgomery County’s Disgrace, also, Flag Battles In Massachusetts
Protein Wisdom: R.I.P. Charles G. Hill, AKA Dustbury
Shark Tank: Mucarsel-Powell Admits Obamacare Unaffordable
Shot In The Dark: Since “Fake news” Is All The Rage
STUMP: Some Videos For A Sunday
The Political Hat: Climate Madness – Pandemic In The Democratic Presidential Primary
This Ain’t Hell: SEALs Behaving Badly? also, Another Six Are Home
Victory Girls: Kamala Harris – Lies, Damn Lies, & Distortions
Volokh Conspiracy: English School Mandates Trousers For All, Girls Not Having It
Weasel Zippers: “Mad Dog” Mattis Leaves Andrea Mitchell Speechless – NATO Is Stronger Under Trump, also, NYT Cheers Twelve-Year-Old Drag Queen
Mark Steyn: The Rubber Hits The Road, also, Triumph Of The Will

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

She’s Crazy and Married to a Democrat

Posted on | September 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

But I repeat myself:

Democratic congressman Joe Cunningham’s wife is furious that their taxpayer-subsidized healthcare plan declined to pay for therapy sessions, according to a rant on an insurance bill she posted on Instagram.
The South Carolina Democrat is currently serving his first term in Congress, where members are given access to Obamacare “gold” plans from Blue Cross Blue Shield and are responsible for paying about a quarter of the premiums. The plan is apparently not good enough for his wife, Amanda Cunningham, who told her Instagram followers she would be urging her husband to do something about it.
“I’m gonna have a little bit of a rant here on social media because I think this is important,” she said on her Instagram story last week. “I’ve been going over my not-a-bill bill here from Blue Cross Blue Shield, and realizing that once again, all of my mental health therapy sessions are denied, in addition to all of our marriage counseling sessions.”
“It’s just mind-blowing to me that these basic well-known needs, that mental health is health care, are still being denied, that we’re still fighting for these absolutely basic things, it’s unbelievable to me,” she said.

Wait a minute, she’s getting “mental health therapy sessions” and also “marriage counseling sessions”? Does the name Eagleton ring a bell?

Never mind the coverage gaps in your health insurance plan, lady, you’ve just told the entire world that (a) the Congressman is married to a lunatic, and (b) your marriage is circling the toilet bowl.

Yeah, I understand that mentally-ill women are a crucial part of Democrat grassroots coalition, but having the congressman’s wife babbling insane nonsense on Instagram might not be a winning strategy in South Carolina’s 1st District, which was represented by Republicans since 1981. Trump won that district by double-digits in 2016, and Cunningham is likely to be a one-term fluke, especially once voters in the district realize that he’s married to a deranged woman who demands insurance coverage for her marriage counseling sessions.

By the way, Amanda met her husband when they were both working on a luxury yacht in 2011. She’s a yoga instructor.

(Hat-tip: Rollo Tomassi on Twitter.)



 

Category: South Carolina
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