The Other McCain

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

Joe Biden’s Partisan Media Protection Bubble Has Finally Begun Collapsing

Posted on | April 30, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Let’s be clear what’s going on here: If the liberal media really believed that Joe Biden could beat Trump in November, they would have stonewalled Tara Reade’s accusations forever. But as partisan as they are, they are not blind, and anyone who watched Biden stumbling in every media appearance the past two months can see he’s hopelessly addled. The man cannot speak a coherent sentence, and would self-destruct in the fall debates, so the Democrats won’t really be sacrificing anything if this sexual assault accusation takes Joe down. All of that is preamble to what Chris Hayes did on MSNBC Wednesday night:

Is the dam breaking on the Joe Biden sexual assault case? . . . On Wednesday night, liberal host Chris Hayes featured the story in depth for over eight minutes. . . .
Hayes admitted that during #MeToo there have been moments “when we have heard about accusations against someone that we find ourselves desperately wanting not to believe.” Like, presumably, the Tara Reade case. The host struggled and stammered in parts of the segment, but he admitted that the credibility of Reade is “rising” . . .

One of the things that happened in #MeToo, and a piece of evidence that has risen in how I evaluate these stories is a somewhat contemporaneous disclosure to a trusted person who then tells a reporter about it. That is what has happened here. And to me, that has been, in terms of what the evidentiary record is, has raised it a bit in terms of my own view of this. . . .

Hayes began the segment by essentially admitting that liberals are struggling in how this brewing controversy impacts their “side”:

Throughout the entire #metoo era there have been moments I think for many of us, all of us, when we have heard about accusations against someone that we find ourselves desperately wanting not to believe, whether that is because we have some personal admiration for the individual or their work, or political admiration, someone on our quote, unquote “side.”

He added, “Part of the difficult lesson of the #metoo era is not that every accusation is true, and everything should be believed on its face, but that you do have to fight yourself when you feel that impulse. And that is the case with the accusations by a woman named Tara Reade against Joe Biden.”

 

Of course, no one wants to believe someone on “our side” is guilty of scandalous wrongdoing. Politics is a team sport that way. Conservatives who care about “family values” have had to grit our teeth and endure embarrassing revelations about people on “our side,” which always makes me angry because, hey, how hard is it to keep your zipper zipped? Like, you get elected to Congress — a pretty damned important job — and you’re going to mess that up by chasing a piece of side action? That’s childish and irresponsible, and you never should have run for public office if you wanted to behave that way. Of course, in this case, Biden is accused not merely of adultery — Democrats don’t give a damn about that — but rather of non-consensual sexual aggression. And the question is not so much about guilt or innocence — because who can say with any degree of certainty what happened in 1993? — but rather about whether Democrats are willing to judge Biden by the standard they applied to Brett Kavanaugh. If the rather flimsy claims of Christine Blasey Ford were enough to justify the public smearing of Kavanaugh, then how can Democrats defend Biden against Tara Reade’s accusation, which is infinitely more plausible? Keep in mind that no one, not even Ford’s own friend, could so much as verify that the party she described had happened. Even if you were willing to believe Ford’s account, this was when Kavanaugh was teenager in high school, whereas Biden in 1993 was chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.

As I say, it will be easier for Democrats to throw Biden under the wheels of their #MeToo bus because he’s doomed anyway.

“My son’s business dealings were not anything where everybody that he’s talking about, not even remotely, number one.”

That is an actual sentence from a Biden interview this week. It’s incoherent gibberish, as is practically everything coming out of Biden’s mouth nowadays. The man is non compos mentis.

Does anyone want to bet me? I’ve got $20 that says Biden will not be on the ballot in November, but I doubt anyone would take that wager.




 

Category: Joe Biden, MSNBC

‘They Always Blame America First’

Posted on | April 30, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘They Always Blame America First’

 

One of the decisive moments of the Cold War, in my opinion, was Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention. In the post-Vietnam era, Democrats had adopted a “human rights” approach to foreign policy that tended toward a stance of moral relativism between Soviet-sponsored Marxist-Leninist regimes and their opponents. A sort of guilt complex about American influence — internalizing Communist propaganda claims about capitalist “imperialism” — had become part of Democrat foreign policy, and Kirkpatrick nailed it perfectly:

They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do — they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians — they blamed the United States instead.
But then, somehow, they always blame America first.
When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the “blame America first crowd” didn’t blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.
But then, they always blame America first.
The American people know better.

Kirkpatrick’s speech put the choice in foreign policy in the clearest possible terms, and when Reagan won in a historic landslide, this mandate empowered him to confront Soviet power worldwide. One might have hoped that the lesson would have been clear, and yet, to this day, liberals still have not gotten the memo:

Bill Weir hates Jesus, America, and the internal combustion engine — not necessarily in that order. His job as Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN gives Weir ample opportunity to express his hatred of America’s petroleum-consuming habits, but it was not until recently that Weir explained how he blames Christianity for the world’s problems.
In a bizarre online essay entitled “To my son, born in the time of coronavirus and climate change,” Weir implies that the pandemic is somehow related to global warming, connected by “stories in a very old book” (i.e., the Bible) to explain why “we burned gasoline for no good reason.” Does that make sense? No, not logically, but Weir’s emotional gestalt pattern connects these dots without regard to logic. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: CNN, Media Bias

The Case of the COVID-19 ‘Black Widow’: Police Are Investigating Wanda Lenius

Posted on | April 29, 2020 | Comments Off on The Case of the COVID-19 ‘Black Widow’: Police Are Investigating Wanda Lenius

 

Last month, I told you about how Wanda poisoned her husband Gary in Arizona — allegedly, I hasten to add, because certainly I myself have no direct knowledge of the matter and wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of a libel suit. I’m just repeating what Ace said, a defense that would probably stand up in court, because if a genuine blogging legend says it was murder, you can take that to the bank, buddy.

Police in Arizona seem to agree:

The Mesa City Police Department’s homicide division is investigating the death of Gary Lenius, the Arizona man whose wife served him soda mixed with fish tank cleaner in what she claimed was a bid to fend off the coronavirus. A detective handling the case confirmed the investigation to the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday after requesting a recording of the Free Beacon’s interviews with Lenius’s wife, Wanda.
Gary Lenius, 68, died on March 22. Wanda, 61, told several news outlets last month that both she and her husband had ingested a substance used to clean aquariums after hearing President Donald Trump tout one of its ingredients, chloroquine phosphate, from the White House briefing room.
Detective Teresa Van Galder, the homicide detective handling the case for the Mesa City Police Department, confirmed that the investigation is ongoing but declined to provide additional details.
“As this is an active investigation, I cannot go into any details at this time regarding the case,” Van Galder said. The Free Beacon provided a recording of its interview last month with Wanda Lenius.
News of the police probe comes after a series of Free Beacon stories raised questions about the portrayal of the couple in the initial NBC News report that vaulted the story onto the national stage.
Though that report and others suggested the couple mindlessly followed the president’s medical advice to disastrous results, friends of Gary Lenius told the Free Beacon they were skeptical he would knowingly ingest fish tank treatment.

A police spokesman said this is just “normal protocol.”

Routine investigation. Nothing suspicious at all. Nudge, nudge.




 

Category: Arizona, Crime

More Evidence That Lockdown Orders Are the Wrong Approach to COVID-19

Posted on | April 28, 2020 | 2 Comments

Somewhere between 20% and 50% of all deaths from the coronavirus pandemic have been elderly residents of nursing homes. We knew, at the very outset, that the elderly were at highest risk from this disease, and one would think that measures to protect them would have been a high priority. Yet as Daniel Greenfield explains, such measures were not taken, in the very same “blue” states where Democratic governors have enforced the most stringent lockdown orders. (Hat-tip: CBD at AOSHQ.)

If the elderly and other people with health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to this disease could be protected, there would be no need for the economically damaging lockdown orders, once we had clearly avoided the worst-case “surge” scenarios that had been projected. Most of the country went into lockdown mode in mid-March and, by the first week in April, we had passed the crisis point without crashing the health-care system — the “apex” of the “curve” never reached the level where hospitals ran out of ICU beds, etc. The daily number of COVID-19 deaths in New York, for example, peaked at 799 on April 9, and as of yesterday was down to 337, a 58% decline in less than three weeks.

We now know that the number of people infected with the virus greatly exceeds the number of known cases of the disease, which is to say that most people exposed to the virus are either asymptomatic or never become sick enough to seek treatment. The virus did not overwhelm the health-care system in its first “surge,” and it is highly unlikely that lifting the lockdown orders now would result in any system-crashing surge because (a) substantial “herd immunity” has already been reached, and (b) the risk to the elderly is now sufficiently understood that the most vulnerable segment of the population will be protected.

Let’s add this: Nobody is proposing to force anyone to go to a restaurant, or attend a baseball game, or otherwise expose themselves to situations where there is an elevated risk of exposure to the virus. If you want to err on the side of caution, and continue hiding out at home, nobody is going to stop you. But we are clearly past the point where governments should be mandating closure of “non-essential” businesses, or arresting people for going for a walk in the park. As long as vulnerable elderly people are being protected, or acting responsibly to protect themselves, the rest of America can go back to business. Stifle your inner “Karen”:

A math teacher at Steinert High School [in Hamilton, N.J.] was caught on video this week shouting at a group of teenagers playing football in the park that they should “die a long, painful death” from the coronavirus.
The teacher was identified by multiple sources as Nicole Griggs, who has been a township teacher for the last 15 years and also taught middle school, according to the district website.
One of the teenagers, a freshman at Steinert, told The Trentonian that he and a group of school friends were playing football Thursday at the former Homedell School, on the 500 block of East Franklin Street, when Griggs stopped to admonish them from behind a chain-link fence. . . .
At first, Griggs, who appears to be wearing a gray sweatshirt and walking her dog, seems to be looking out for the teens by telling them the parks are closed because of the virus outbreak.
She asks them if they need her to scream the warning “loud enough so you can hear me over your music. Parks closed. You will get arrested if the cops come.”
She soon melts down when one of the teens asks, “Wait, can we go over there?”
The teacher goes so far as to tell the teens she doesn’t care if they put her on blast online.
“Parks closed. The whole area,” Griggs says. “Get it through your thick head. You are the reason we are in this situation. You are the problem, not the solution. Go ahead keep recording. Who are you going to show it to? Post me on social media. You’re the idiot doing the wrong thing. I’m just trying to save your ass and save your life. But die, OK. I hope both of you get the coronavirus. I hope you both die a long, painful death.”

Kids throwing a football around in a park are not “the reason we are in this situation,” but the lockdown mentality appeals to the Karens of the world, who can’t stand to see anyone having fun.

(The “Karen” meme explained.)




 

Category: Health Care

‘Nice Guys Finish Last’: Red Pill Truth About a Tennessee Murder Case

Posted on | April 28, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’: Red Pill Truth About a Tennessee Murder Case

Abusive people tend to have keen sense of who will tolerate their abuse, and will not associate with anyone who stands up to them. Having extensive experience of dealing with sociopaths, my observations on this subject ought to carry some weight, and my advice to anyone would be: Avoid them, if possible, but never back down from them.

Never show weakness. Never be deceived. Don’t be played for a chump.

Sociopaths are selfish, dishonest and cruel. They take sadistic pleasure in inflicting harm on others, and congratulate themselves in getting away with it. Success in manipulating others — gaming the system to their advantage — is a source of self-esteem to the sociopath. They escape consequences by exploiting the desire of decent people to avoid unnecessary conflict. Sociopaths are very clever when it comes to enlisting others to be unwitting accomplices in their malevolent schemes.

If you are insufficiently “street smart,” you may not notice the telltale evidence that you’re dealing with a sociopath, and you won’t realize that the only safe move, in regard to such people, is avoidance.

Did I mention that sociopaths are often charming, attractive people?

 

Chandra Beth Williams was a “single mom” when she met Bryan Lawson, and that should have been a red flag warning to avoid her. Am I being too harsh here? Perhaps, but there has to be a reason — a backstory — to explain why a pretty blue-eyed blonde finds herself in that situation.

Good-looking young people are seldom single. The more attractive a person is, the more likely they are to be in a relationship. Young men have to learn this common-sense principle and act accordingly. If you meet a pretty blue-eyed blonde, just assume she already has a boyfriend or husband, because otherwise you’re likely to get in trouble. However, should you discover such a woman is single, be suspicious.

What’s the backstory? “A pretty face can hide an evil mind,” to quote an old Johnny Rivers hit, and what can you deduce from the fact that an unusually attractive woman is single? Is there something wrong with her personality? Is she on the wrong side of The Hot/Crazy Matrix?

Look, I understand that bad things sometimes happen to good people, through no real fault of their own. There are innocent victims in the world, and perhaps the good-looking single mom is one of them. But a naïve young man, dazzled by her beauty, is unlikely to be sufficiently skeptical to investigate such a woman’s character, to look before he leaps. That’s the short story of what happened to Bryan Lawson.

 

Bryan married Chandra and became a good stepfather to her son. Both he and Chandra developed substance-abuse problems, becoming addicted to opioids, but when Chandra gave birth to their son, Bryan quit the drugs. Chandra’s behavior became increasingly more abusive. After a burglary, the couple had installed a video surveillance system in their apartment, and the camera caught the last confrontation between Chandra and Bryan. She threatened him with a baseball bat, and he shot her to death.

A few hours after Bryan was arrested, a man called the sheriff’s office to report a relevant fact: Chandra’s son was not Bryan’s son.

She had cheated on Bryan. He had been cuckolded. It was not until after Chandra was dead that this truth was discovered by a DNA test.

Bryan Lawson had been the victim of a sociopath and, given the video evidence of Chandra’s abusive violence, his lawyers believed that Bryan might be acquitted by a jury, having shot her in self-defense.

As revealed in A&E’s documentary series Accused, however, Bryan Lawson ultimately decided to accept a plea bargain, being sentenced to 15 years in prison, although he’ll likely be paroled after three years.

Perhaps nothing could have saved Bryan Lawson from his fate. Some guys are just natural-born chumps, and the sociopath in search of a victim will always find such people, as if guided by radar. We could examine the Bryan Lawson case to see what factors made him uniquely vulnerable to a monster like Chandra, but that misses the point.

Anyone might be deceived by a sociopath, if we were not warned to recognize and avoid them. The danger posed by the sociopath’s warped character — dishonest, selfish and cruel — is seldom apparent when first meeting such people who, as I say, are often attractive and charming. When we look at someone like NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, for example, it’s easy to dismiss his victims as gullible fools, but that overlooks Raniere’s charismatic qualities, and the sociopathic cunning by which he attracted naïve spiritual “seekers” to himself.

One of the basic methods by which sociopaths engage their victims is called “mirroring,” reflecting back at us an image calculated to gain our trust and sympathy. Victims of this tactic will often speak of having felt an instant emotional “connection” the first time they met the sociopath.

Sociopaths have no conscience, they are incapable of empathy, and yet they are very good at faking these qualities, because they know that this charade — creating an image of themselves as sensitive and caring — will cause their victims to consider them trustworthy. And while it is possible that anyone might be deceived by the sociopath, becoming the victim of a sociopath is not entirely random.

“Nice guys finish last,” Leo Durocher once famously said, which doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be nice. Rather, the problem is that if you prioritize being “nice” as a core principle of your life, you are apt to become a victim of those who are willing to cheat to get their way.

Bryan Lawson was a textbook case of Nice Guy Syndrome, willing to play “white knight” for the single mother Chandra Williams, and patiently enduring her abusive behavior until, at last, he was forced to kill her in a desperate act of self-defense. The fact that Chandra cuckolded Bryan, deceiving him into believing he was the father of the child she conceived in adultery, is scarcely surprising under these circumstances.

You should read The Rational Male, and follow Rollo on Twitter. People don’t want to see the cold, hard truth about situations like what happened to Bryan Lawson. The Red Pill is not a pleasant taste, but the medicine is necessary if you want to avoid becoming a chump.

UPDATE: I shared this post with Rollo, who responded by referring me to his 2012 post, “Single + Hot = Crazy.” The common-sense point is this: An unusually attractive woman can have her choice of partners, so if you meet such a woman who is single, the obvious question is: Why?

Whatever the answer is, the wise man must evaluate this explanation in terms of how it reflects on the woman’s personality and habits. If a guy is just looking for a fling, he might be less scrupulous in this regard, but if he’s looking for Wife Material, it behooves him to be cautious.

If it seems too good to be true, it is probably neither good nor true.




 

Category: Crime

SHOTS FIRED: Feminist Jessica Valenti Supports Biden Accuser Tara Reade

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | 2 Comments

Karma is one cold-hearted bitch. It was inevitable that Joe Biden would someday pay a price for his role in the smearing of Clarence Thomas.

Oh, you think we forgot about that? No, baby, and we haven’t forgot Joe Biden’s role in the “campus rape epidemic” witch-hunt, either. All those college boys denied due process and expelled over some drunken hook-up? Yeah, if you’re going to be the lead stone-thrower in that kind of operation, you better be sure you’re not living in a glass house, and the Tara Reade accusation against Biden is sufficiently credible that not even a staunch Democrat like Jessica Valenti can ignore it anymore.

Less than two weeks ago, mind you, Valenti was reluctantly on Team Joe, because she’s a partisan loyalist and ORANGE MAN BAD! Since then, however, it has become apparent that Biden is so feeble-minded he couldn’t possibly handle a face-to-face debate with Trump, and now Tara Reade’s accusation has been corroborated pretty well. Valenti, who was deeply hurt by primary voters’ rejection of her darling Elizabeth Warren, is now evidently willing to dump Joe and deal with whatever the consequences may be. Maybe a brokered convention? Anything is better, from Valenti’s point of view, than watching the party establishment shove Biden forward to predictable November doom. Selah.




 

Category: Joe Biden

COVID-19: Numbers That Really Matter

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | 1 Comment

Among the dishonest games that the media have played with coronavirus is their habit of reporting cumulative totals of reported cases and deaths as if this is the only metric of the pandemic. Anyone with a functional brain, however, must realize that this is misleading and nearly useless in terms of understanding how the outbreak is actually progressing. The cumulative total always goes up, and periodically crosses certain thresholds which can be treated as “news,” for example when the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 passed 2,996, the death toll of the 9/11 attacks: DISEASE KILLS MORE THAN AL-QAEDA!

This is a game, I say, and a dishonest one, because this disease is a worldwide pandemic, and not an isolated event. What matters, if our goal is to comprehend the disease as a public health concern, is whether it’s getting worse or better, and how rapidly this change is happening. As I mentioned in my column today, epidemics tend to follow a certain bell-curve pattern, ascending to a peak and then declining. If we can accurately track new cases and deaths on a daily basis, these numbers will give us an idea of which direction we’re heading and how fast we’re going. Without that kind of measurement, we’re lost, and merely reporting cumulative totals doesn’t help us. So why is the media addicted to this? Because the useless number is effective as anti-Trump propaganda, especially when presented without appropriate perspective.

Consider, for example, that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is, as far as we know (because China is lying) the largest in the world. Yes, but our population (about 327 million) is much larger than any European country. America has more people than the combined total population of Germany (81 million), France (66 million), the United Kingdom (65 million), Italy (61 million) and Spain (46 million). Calculating COVID-19 statistics on a per-capita basis is the only reasonable measurement. Here are the 10 countries with the highest coronavirus death rates, expressed in deaths per million population, with the number in parenthesis showing the “confirmed case fatality rate”:

Belgium ………………………. 631.0 (15.44%)
Spain ………………………….. 503.4 (10.25%)
Italy ……………………………. 446.4 (13.53%)
France …………………………. 341.2 (14.10%)
United Kingdom …………… 311.8 (13.56%)
Netherlands …………………. 262.2 (11.81%)
Ireland ………………………… 227.1 (5.61%)
Sweden ………………………. 223.3 (12.02%)
Switzerland …………………. 192.6 (5.62%)
United States ………………. 171.6 (5.62%)

You see that in terms of the per-capita death rate, nine European countries are worse than the United States, with four countries at least twice as bad as us, and yet our media won’t mention this, because all they care about is blaming Trump. What has Trump done that was worse than what has been done by the leaders of Belgium, Spain, etc?

The people at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and other major media establishments don’t want Americans to ponder that question, because these “news” organizations are actually political organizations, devoted to a partisan project of electing Democrats and enacting a liberal agenda.

Another question the media don’t want Americans to think about: Exactly how dangerous is COVID-19? You might think, given that more than 50,000 Americans are already reported to have died from this disease, that the answer to that question is self-evident. But if we don’t know how many people are actually infected with this virus — and we don’t, because many infected people are asymptomatic — then we don’t know what percentage of those infected eventually die from the disease.

This is important, because our economy has been devastated by lockdown orders which are continuing because it is feared that easing restrictions on business activity would result in untold thousands of unnecessary deaths. We cannot even begin to estimate the risk, however, if we don’t know how deadly the virus really is, as a percentage of all infections. Five physicians, led by Tennessee anesthesiologist Dr. Jonathan Geach, have written an article about this problem and you should read it.




 

Category: Health Care, Media Bias, Science

New York’s ‘Curve’ Has Been Bent

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | Comments Off on New York’s ‘Curve’ Has Been Bent

 

Look very closely at that image from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing Sunday. The daily peak of new COVID-19 hospitalizations — 3,177, based on three-day rolling averages — was three weeks ago. The latest number, 1,087 on Saturday, represents a 66% reduction.

Think about this, and remember that the whole point of stay-at-home orders and “social distancing” was to “bend the curve,” to avoid a “surge” of hospitalizations that would overwhelm the health-care system. As hard-hit as New York has been, they avoided that crisis, and the “curve” has long since been bent. A two-thirds reduction in new hospitalizations, sustained over the course of three weeks, is an undeniable victory.

Yet the governor, while showing that data, laid out a plan to “re-open” his state that would not return New York to normal before mid-June:

Every day, cable-news channels provide live coverage of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s briefings about his state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. What has happened in New York is not merely the worst COVID-19 outbreak in America, but possibly the worst in the entire world. Such are the biases of our news media, however, that no one ever suggests Cuomo is responsible for the deadly toll of this disease in his state. Instead, the Democratic governor is treated with deference by the press corps, which instead — and rather illogically — focuses the blame on President Trump.
Watching Cuomo’s press briefings is to behold the work of a master in the rhetorical arts of pretended expertise and straw-man arguments against imaginary antagonists who, in opposing the governor’s orders, are irresponsible and unscientific. Cuomo employs a vocabulary (e.g., “evidence,” “research,” “transmission rate”) that conveys an advanced knowledge of epidemiological science which, of course, he does not possess. His audience is expected to forget that, just a few weeks ago, the governor was warning of a shortage of health-care resources based upon computer-modeled projections which proved to be grossly exaggerated . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Health Care, New York
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