The Other McCain

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

Bad Causes Attract Bad People: On the ‘Dirtbag Left’ of Chapo Trap House

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Perhaps the easiest (if not the most accurate) way to explain my politics is to call me a straight-up partisan: Whatever inflicts the maximum damage on the Democratic Party is what I want to happen. A more nuanced explanation is possible, but not necessary to understanding why I’m totally cheerleading the Bernie Bros in their kamikaze mission against the “moderate” Democratic Party establishment. Even though, as a conservative, I should probably want Democrats to be more moderate (i.e., amenable to compromising with Republicans on policy issues), the fact is that Democrats have a way of using “moderate” candidates to win majorities with which they then implement radical far-left policies. By contrast, when Democrats campaign openly as radicals, they lose elections and then Republicans have an opportunity to ram a right-wing agenda down their throats. So, yeah, go Bernie Bros, go!

Purging “moderates” from the Democratic Party helps to clarify the policy differences, and is therefore good, but this does not mean that the enemy of my enemy is actually my friend. Many of the Bernie Bros are the most selfish, scummy, irresponsible, amoral nihilst you could imagine, and this brings us to the subject of Chapo Trap House, a Bernie Bro podcast that is popular because its hosts defy “woke” political correctness and engage in vulgar mockery of establishment Democrats. It’s socialism for the Millennial hipster crew — and the New York Times is on it:

The fivesome of “Chapo Trap House” are not the only bards of the new American left . . . but they have led the way for a movement that together generates millions of dollars a year. They are on their way to becoming the socialist’s answer to right-wing shock jock radio. . . .
In blurring occasionally violent humor, jovial community meetups and radical politics, they are the Tea Party reborn for progressives, and for their fans the appeal is in a bawdy offensive balance to cautious mainstream liberal politics.

(Notice the comparison here — “right-wing shock jock radio” and “the Tea Party reborn for progressives” — even though the most popular talk-radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, never engage in obscenity, and the Tea Party movement was always family-friendly, attracting middle-class suburbanites. But continue . . .)

They are known collectively as the Dirtbag Left, a shorthand they embrace that winkingly dispenses with any notion of liberal purity or inclusion, a defense mechanism that doubles as a nickname. . . .
“Chapo Trap House,” which started in 2016, typically runs between 60 and 90 minutes. Two episodes are released every week, one for free and one for the nearly 38,000 people who pay $5 a month through the crowdfunding site Patreon. It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone. . . .
The Chapo co-host Virgil Texas (he lives and works under that pseudonym) went to a nearby bar for a beer.
“It’s a common experience to be someone with a crappy job who does not have an outlet for your set of beliefs and you feel insane because you’re surrounded by liberals or Evangelicals or whatever stultifying milieu,” he said. “And one day you find a piece of media with some folks who are articulating what you always believed: You’re not crazy, you’re right, this is exactly how the world works, and you’re getting screwed.” . . .
“Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”
He is a good example of his own target audience: He graduated with $100,000 of debt from Cornell and after college took freelance gigs from Craigslist, hoping to write.
While the Chapo hosts rail against the media establishment, they are also deeply entwined with it and largely beloved by it. ([co-host Will] Menaker, for example, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of a New York Times editor and a New Yorker editor.)

Nobody forced you to go to Cornell, sir.

There are many excellent public universities in America which, if you had the grades and SAT scores to get into Cornell, would certainly have given you an academic scholarship, and yet you borrowed $100,000 to attend an Ivy League school, so you could be . . . a freelance writer?

As for Will Menaker, his grandfather was a Stalinist agent who may have been an accomplice to the assassination of Leon Trotsky, so I suppose he gets his Communist anti-American belief system honestly.

The fact that feminists (including Amanda Marcotte) hate the Chapo Trap House crew would normally be a recommendation in their favor, but what they are trying to do — what the whole Bernie Bro phenomenon is about — is to sell a brand of “progressivism” that white males can believe in. And that’s precisely what’s wrong with Chapo Trap House: Democrats have sold their soul for identity politics which is anti-white and anti-male, and they should be allowed to suffer the consequences. Why is Donald Trump president, after all? Have we forgotten Hillary Clinton’s shout-out to #BlackLivesMatter, endorsing the cop-hating race mobs that considered “social justice” a license for arson and looting? Have we forgotten the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria that inspired false accusations while depriving college boys of due-process rights?

Democrats have sown the wind and deserve to reap the whirlwind, and these hipsters trying to make socialism cool, to recruit young white guys to the Sanders campaign, are an obstacle to the kind of brutal electoral payback we need to collect from Democrats in November.

The Thrill of Playing Political ‘Bad Boy’

A Philadelphia feminist did a long Twitter takedown on Chapo Trap House, connecting the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon to the 2011 “Occupy” movement, and pointing out this curious coincidence: “Weev of Daily Stormer was an Occupier. Jason Kessler, the organizer of Unite the Right, traces his organizing career back to Occupy.” Some of the despicable radical scum of “Occupy” eventually became neo-Nazis, and it makes sense, really. Angry protest movements attract angry people, and ideological consistency is scarcely to be expected. Recall that Benito Mussolini had been the most prominent Communist in Italy before he created Fascism. What the radical wants (Ludwig von Mises explained this) is destruction — he despises the existing social order, asserting that nothing could be worse than a continuation of the hated status quo. The radical craves excitement, and wishes to possess greater influence than he can obtain within the existing bourgeois society, and his advocacy of revolution gives him, at the very least, the thrill of an outlaw identity.

The deliberate vulgarity of the Chapo Trap House crew can be viewed, from a psychological perspective, as part of an adolescent “bad boy” posture expressing the antisocial outlaw impulse of the would-be revolutionary. The Bernie Bros are disrespectful of what is considered “acceptable” norms of behavior within the milieu of college-educated liberals. Not everybody who mocks feminism does so for the right reasons, just as not everybody who rejects liberal ideology about “diversity” and “inclusion” does so for the right reasons. Honestly, I was shocked to discover that former Daily Caller staffer Katie McHugh had become part of a neo-Nazi subculture within the “alt right,” where some young people were cosplaying Norse paganism (“Wolves of Vinland”) and generally pursuing dangerous extremism. Anyone who has spent time among young political activists can recognize the tendency involved in that subculture, the effort to obtain status by being “more conservative than thou.” Follow that tendency far enough and pretty soon you’ll find yourself hanging out with people who speak of “ZOG,” at which point you ought to sit down and contemplate where you went wrong.

Now, I am deeply sympathetic to those who despise “Conservatism, Inc.,” the establishmentarian tendencies which my paleoconservative comrades have long criticized. As someone who counted myself a friend of the late Sam Francis, and who has been hate-listed by the SPLC, I cannot be accused of being afraid of political incorrectness. It has taken a lot of behind-the-scenes effort by a lot of people to move the Overton Window far enough that the Republican Party has a chance to escape the orbit of the corporate open-borders lobby. Some of the people who helped make this populist (or perhaps nationalist) shift possible could fairly be called “alt right,” in the sinister sense of that phrase, and this somewhat concerns me. Yet when we behold the legacy of Bushism — Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, John Weaver, Max Boot, and the rest of the #NeverTrump crowd — we realize the conservative movement has jettisoned useless ballast that hindered its effectiveness. But I digress . . .

‘It Is History That Teaches Us to Hope’

There is no shortcut to an ideal society, whatever our ideals might be. Within a democratic polity, we are forced to work within the limits of the political system, to suffer setbacks and betrayals, and are apt to become discouraged whenever we contemplate the distance between what we have actually achieved and what we ideally would wish. It is from a mood of despair that radicalism arises, and we should never despair.

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

So wrote Robert E. Lee, in an 1870 letter to his former aide, Col. Charles Marshall, and if Lee could see hope even amid the wreckage of all his dreams, why should we today despair of the future?

Yet this is what drives the socialists of the “Dirtbag Left.” Things are so bad, they insist, that our existing civilization must be destroyed in order to create a socialist future. The observable fact that socialism only leads to tyranny and suffering is dismissed by the Left, which can always find some circumstance in the status quo — racist police, predatory lending, environmental damage, etc. — which they claim justifies their destructive agenda, no matter the historical proof of the evils of socialism. Consider this observation made by Ludwig von Mises nearly a century ago:

Socialism derives its strength from two different sources. On the one hand it is an ethical, political, and economico-political challenge. The socialist order of society, fulfilling the claims of higher morality, is to replace the “immoral” capitalist economy; the “economic rule” of the few over the many is to give way to a co-operative order which alone can make true democracy possible; planned economy, the only rational system working according to uniform principles, is to sweep away the irrational private economic order, the anarchical production for profit. Socialism thus appears as a goal towards which we ought to strive because it is morally and rationally desirable. The task therefore of men of good will is to defeat the resistance to it which is inspired by misunderstanding and prejudice. This is the basic idea of that Socialism which Marx and his school call Utopian.
On the other hand, however, Socialism is made to appear as the inevitable goal and end of historical evolution. An obscure force from which we cannot escape leads humanity step by step to higher planes of social and moral being. History is a progressive process of purification, with perfection, in the form of Socialism, at the end. This train of thought does not run counter to the ideas of Utopian Socialism. Rather it includes them, for it presupposes, as obviously self-evident, that the socialist condition would be better, nobler, and more beautiful than the non-socialist. But it goes farther; it sees the change to Socialism — envisioned as progress, an evolution to a higher stage — as something independent of human will. A necessity of Nature, Socialism is the inevitable outcome of the forces underlying social life: this is the fundamental idea of evolutionary socialism, which, in its Marxist form, has taken the proud name of “Scientific” Socialism.

Argued both as “higher morality” and as the “inevitable goal” of historical evolution, socialism is a nearly irresistible temptation, and the only argument against it is, it won’t work. After the Communists had spent a couple of decades proving Mises right (and after totalitarian parties had seized power in Italy and Germany), the defenders of socialism argued that what went wrong with the Bolshevik “experiment” was that the wrong people were in charge. This argument was debunked by Mises’ protégé Friedrich Hayek in a chapter of The Road to Serfdom entitled “Why the Worst Get on Top”:

There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. . . .
The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous.
Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Italian or Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through positions like these that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads.

As I have said in other contexts, bad causes attract bad people. If you join a political movement and notice that you are surrounded by degenerates and hoodlums, you have joined a bad movement.

If the Bernie Bros manage to wreck the Democratic Party, this is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean the Bernie Bros are good people.




 

#MeToo Takes Out Chris Matthews

Posted on | March 2, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

As a journalist, Chris Matthews has always been a joke. His only qualification is that he’s a Democrat who used to work for Tip O’Neill. That partisan credential was not enough to save him:

Longtime “Hardball” host Chris Matthews resigned from his post at MSNBC on Monday night. Matthews’s sudden exit was reported by the New York Times.
As the Times noted, Matthews “faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.”
Over the weekend, GQ published a story by freelance journalist Laura Bassett, who accused Matthews of making several sexually charged comments to her behind-the-scenes of his show. Bassett reported her allegations without naming Matthews in a 2017 essay for HuffPost.
In his retirement announcement on air Monday night, Matthews said young people are improving standards in the work place, and about “how we talk to each other.”
“Compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK, were never OK,” he said. “Not then and certainly not today, and for making such comments in the past, I’m sorry.”

Notice how the weasel implicates “some men” in his personal scandal. Where was this male solidarity from Matthews when Stormy Daniels was making the rounds with her smears against President Trump? Live by the #MeToo scandal, die by the #MeToo scandal, I suppose, and Matthews quit because the heat was about to get turned up:

It’s never one accusation. A guy like Matthews gets away with this stuff for years (he was reportedly reprimanded for some bad behavior in the late 1990s) and so, when one woman finally calls him out publicly, a dozen more will come out of the woodwork. Nobody will actually miss Chris Matthews, because nobody ever actually liked him.




 

In The Mailbox: 03.02.20

Posted on | March 2, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

Remember, if you don’t share this post on Twitter, the Commie #NeverTrump Terrorists and Ana Navarro (but I repeat myself) will have won. Two days left in my Twitter suspension.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Red Pilled Jew: F*cking Jewcidal Morons – Bend The Arc’s New Video
357 Magnum: Everything Needs Maintenance – The Morandi Bridge Collapse
EBL: Joe Coulombe, RIP, also, Stop Sticking Potatoes Up Your Butt
Twitchy: Bernie Bros Reportedly Booing Press At Rallies; Ilhan Omar Decries #FakeNews About Him
Louder With Crowder: Nick Sandmann Not Done Suing The Media Yet

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Virus Free Edition, also, Podcast #137 – The Nationalist Episode
American Conservative: What We’ve Lost In Afghanistan
American Greatness: America Has A Con Woman In Congress – Where’s The Law? also, New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama
American Thinker: Coronavirus – When All Else Fails, Try Reason, also, So God Sent Us A Salesman
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Miami Anti-Communism Caravan Calls For Freedom In Cuba, also, For Some, Elian Gonzalez Being Sent Back To Cuba At Gunpoint Wasn’t A Bad Thing
Baldilocks: February 2020 Post Digest For Da Tech Guy Blog
BattleSwarm: The Hoax Hoax, also, The Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Cafe Hayek: Some Links, also, Don’t Keep The Faith
Camp Of The Saints: On Gramsci, Father & Son Buttigieg
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, It’s Always About More Than The Pilots
Da Tech Guy: They Tell No Tales, also, Jussie Smollett’s Protector Kim Foxx Faces Cook County Voters In Two Weeks
Don Surber: The Left Is Purging Comrade Matthews, also, A Coronavirus Recession Won’t Stop Trump
First Street Journal: The Ridiculous Anti-Lynching Bill, also, Joe Biden Wins One And The Bernie Bros Wax Wroth
The Geller Report: A Letter To Michelle Malkin, also, Muslim “Migrants” Attack Greek Border, Army Deployed
Hogewash: Meeting People At CPAC, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Socialist Steve Earle Says Stop Demonizing Trump Supporters, also, Come As You Are – More Than Your Average Road Trip Comedy
JustOneMinute: NYT Science Writer Defends Trump’s China Travel Restrictions
Legal Insurrection: “Walk Toward The Fire” – Andrew Breitbart Died Eight Years Ago, also, Netanyahu Projected As Winner Of Israeli Election
Megan McArdle: Think About Who You’d Rather Have In Charge Of A Coronavirus Pandemic
Michelle Malkin: AFPAC Speech – The Charge Of The America First Brigade
The PanAm Post: Cuban Refugees Protest Against Communism In Chile
Power Line: Biden Lives To Gaffe Another Day, also, The Democratic Panic Deepens
Shark Tank: Wassermann-Schultz Endorses Biden
Shot In The Dark: Tuesday Night Plans
STUMP: Presidential Mortality – Evaluating A Biden-Sanders Ticket
The Political Hat: The Ultimate Defense Against Rapists – Song & Dance?
This Ain’t Hell: US & Taliban Sign Peace Deal, also, Paul Kilbourn, Phony SEAL & “The Devil Of Afghanistan”
Victory Girls: Sammy’s Mexican Grill Targeted By Hateful Left For Supporting Trump
Volokh Conspiracy: District Court Judge Rules Cuccinelli’s Appointment As Acting USCIS Director Unlawful
Weasel Zippers: Biden Tries To Quote Declaration Of Independence, Fails Miserably, also, CNN’s Keith Boykin Smears Black Trump Supporters As “Uncle Toms”
Mark Steyn: When The System Infects You, also, Bridge Over Troubled Waters

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FMJRA 2.0 Chicanery

Posted on | March 2, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Creep Linked to Sleazy Democrat Katie Hill Hacked Rival Campaign’s Web Site
EBL

CPAC Emergency Tip-Jar Rattle
EBL

Police: Couple Terrorized Teen Boys Over Trump Flags, Posted Video to Snapchat
EBL

A Failed State: California Admits It Can’t Teach Black Children How to Read
EBL

Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucus; MSNBC, #NeverTrump Hardest Hit
Randall’s BPU
EBL

Bernie Praises Castro, Snubs AIPAC
357 Magnum
EBL

Incest in Missouri: 11-Year-Old Girl Gives Birth to Her 17-Year-Old Brother’s Son
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.24.20
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Monday: Annabella Sciorra
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL

College Students Who Can’t Think
EBL

AOC: Girl-Crush of the Bernie Bros
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.25.2020
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

Democrats Engage in Angry Shouting Match in Charleston, South Carolina
EBL

The Backlash of ‘Hate’
EBL

Elizabeth Warren Is Doomed, and Feminists Can’t Understand Why (And a BONUS Bidenfreude Update)
EBL

Mike Bloomberg Is ‘RAAAAACIST!’ (But Actual Racists Still Won’t Vote for Him)
EBL

CPAC: We Are Here
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.26.20
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

CPAC: VodkaPundit Is Not Worried
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.27.20
EBL

CPAC: Fighting for Israel
357 Magnum
EBL

CPAC: Still Not Worried
357 Magnum
EBL
Pushing Rubber Downhill

In The Mailbox: 02.28.20
A View From The Beach
EBL

CPAC: Not Worried at All
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending February 28:

  1.  EBL (25)
  2.  (tied) 357 Magnum & A View From The Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Warren Plans to Win Brokered Convention

Posted on | March 2, 2020 | 4 Comments

 

Delusional? Yes. Perfect from a GOP perspective? Absolutely:

Elizabeth Warren can win debates, but not states: There’s a chance she will walk away from Super Tuesday having not carried any of the first 18 contests, including her home state of Massachusetts.
Yet she, her campaign and their close allies say she’s in the race all the way to the convention, despite her latest drubbing in South Carolina on Saturday. They insist she still has a path to the nomination, narrow as it is. . . .
Warren advisers believe she can remain in the hunt by collecting a significant number of delegates on Super Tuesday and then again on March 10 — they are optimistic about California, Colorado, Texas, Michigan and Washington — even if they don’t win any states outright. Campaign manager Roger Lau said earlier this month that Warren was “poised” to finish second in eight Super Tuesday contests and in the top three in all 14.
The team is also more openly discussing what it has been talking about internally for weeks. Warren’s path to victory is likely at a contested convention and not by outright winning a majority of pledged delegates, which they believe no other candidate will achieve, either.
“[A]s the dust settles after March 3, the reality of this race will be clear: no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates needed to win an outright claim to the Democratic nomination,” Lau predicted in a memo released Sunday. “In the road to the nomination, the Wisconsin primary is halftime, and the convention in Milwaukee is the final play.”

My only question is, what can I do to encourage Warren and her advisers to double-down on this far-fetched scenario? This is every Trump supporter’s wet dream, and please forgive me for using the phrase “wet dream” in a post about Elizabeth Warren. Anything that prevents the Democratic primary campaign from becoming a head-to-head contest between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is good, in terms of helping re-elect Trump. Mike Bloomberg wasting millions of dollars to run a three-minute nationwide commercial on Sunday night? Perfect.

If Bloomberg’s campaign has any positive impact, it will be to help convince us that billionaire oligarchs like him should not exist. It’s bad enough that an oligarch can buy up airtime; to do so in order to exploit a pandemic for your presidential campaign is disgraceful.

What percentage of the Super Tuesday vote will Bloomberg get? Hopefully, enough to prevent Biden from winning several states, and thus moving Democrats closer to the brokered-convention scenario that the Warren campaign is fantasizing about. Of course, a comeback victory for Biden can’t be ruled out, but nobody on the Republican side should worry about that, either, as it has become apparent that Biden is completely senile. The best-case scenario, in terms of Trump’s re-election, is for Sanders to get this close (holding thumb and forefinger half-an-inch apart) to the nomination, only to be cheated out of it by a backroom deal at the convention. Whatever happens to the Democrats, however, the most likely scenario in November is that Trump wins:

About half an hour into his speech Saturday afternoon at the 48th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Trump spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “My friend over there — you are the greatest,” the president said, and urged the man to stand. “Look at him … Does everybody know Jeffrey? Jeffrey Lord” (38:10).
The conservative audience responded with applause for The American Spectator’s longtime contributing editor. “What a great guy,” Trump continued. “He used to defend me on CNN, and then he defended me just a little bit too much. And they said, ‘Jeffrey, get the hell out.’ And thank goodness you’re on Fox now.… Thank you for being here, too, Jeffrey.”
Trump was in a relaxed and cheerful mood when he took the stage of the Potomac Ballroom at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor. Just before helicoptering over to CPAC on Marine One, the president had joined Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci at a White House press conference on the coronavirus. As with everything else in the Trump Age, this turned into a confrontation with the “fake news” media. . . .

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




 

Steyer, Buttigieg Finally Admit Failure

Posted on | March 1, 2020 | Comments Off on Steyer, Buttigieg Finally Admit Failure

The latest quitter in the Democratic primary campaign:

Pete Buttigieg, who rose from relative obscurity as an Indiana mayor to a barrier-breaking, top-tier candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, ended his campaign on Sunday.
The decision by the first openly gay candidate to seriously contend for the presidency — and among the youngest ever — came just a day after a leading rival, Joe Biden, scored a resounding victory in South Carolina. That sparked new pressure on the party’s moderate wing to coalesce behind the former vice president.
“The truth is the path has narrowed to a close for our candidacy if not for our cause,” Buttigieg, 38, told supporters in South Bend, Indiana. “We must recognize that at this point in the race, the best way to keep faith with those goals and ideals is to step aside and help bring our party and country together.”
He didn’t endorse any of his former rivals, though he and Biden traded voicemails on Sunday. Buttigieg has spent the past several weeks warning that nominating progressive leader Bernie Sanders to take on President Donald Trump would be risky.
Buttigieg on Sunday called on supporters to ensure that a Democrat wins the White House in November and that the party’s success carries over to down-ballot races for House and Senate. During previous debates, Buttigieg said Sanders could threaten Democratic seats in Congress.

Through the end of January, Buttigieg’s campaign had collected nearly $83 million in donations, and he got a total of 28 delegates, so he paid roughly $3 million per delegate. As pathetic as that is, however, it’s not nearly as pathetic as billionaire Tom Steyer’s campaign:

With the results in from South Carolina, a strong case can be made that Tom Steyer has just concluded the worst campaign in the history of presidential politics.
Steyer, the California-based founder of Farallon Capital and the co-founder of Onecalifornia Bank and Beneficial State Bank, became a household name — at least among those households with MSNBC — by being the single largest funder of efforts to impeach President Trump. After telling reporters in January 2019 that he would not seek the presidency, Steyer exercised his prerogative to change his mind and declared his candidacy in July.
According to the FEC, Steyer has spent $253,718,074 through January 31, 2020. All but $3,555,597 was from his own pocket. Pre-Bloomberg, a quarter billion dollars for the first four primaries is a staggering amount. But the incredible lack of return on that investment is even more eye-popping, especially for someone whose campaign’s sole justification was his supposed business acumen. . . .
Since the Steyer campaign spent $253 million through January, it’s safe to assume another $30 or so million for February, when television buys were at their highest, so let’s call it $280 million.
His seventh-place finish in Iowa netted him 3,061 votes on the first alignment and zero delegates.
His sixth-place finish in New Hampshire netted him 10,727 votes and zero delegates.
In Nevada, Steyer spent $13.55 million on television ads — more than twice as much as the other five candidates combined. His 9,503 first-alignment votes were sixth most and again failed to capture a single delegate.
When the Leap Day primary in South Carolina finally arrived, it looked like Steyer’s last chance to eke out a return on his huge investment.
With 99% of the total counted, Steyer will finish in third place with 59,814 votes, less than a quarter as many as the state’s winner, Joe Biden. At 11.4% of the statewide vote, he will leave South Carolina — and the presidential campaign — without a single delegate. In South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District, he came a couple hundred votes short of the 15% threshold required to earn a delegate, finishing with 14.55%.
So $280 million for 83,000 votes comes to an astonishing $3,373 per vote. His $280 million for zero delegates is without precedent.

And these people thought they were qualified to run the country.




 

Rule 5 Sunday: Mapy Cortes

Posted on | March 1, 2020 | 2 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

This week, we have a blast from the past: Maria del Pilar Cordero, better known under her stage name Mapy Cordero, was a Puerto Rican actress who made it big in Mexican movies of the 1940s and 1950s, becoming one of the most beloved stars of the 1940s. Later, she would star in a couple of comedies that helped launch the Telemundo network.

Mapy Cortes, 1910-1998

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #909, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule 5 Golden Years Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd this week includes Miranda LambertVenice Coronavirus Carnival, Trump In India, Weinstein Convicted Of Rape, Hunters, Rosario Dawson, Dar Williams, Mimi Haley, Wash Your Hands, Leap Year, and Rhonda Fleming.

A View From The Beach brings us Kristin KreukKiller TitsFish Pic Friday – Brittany TarecoMDDNR Wants Congress’s Help With Blue CatfishThursday TanlinesPatuxent River Gets an Unusual VisitorAnother Wet Shirt WednesdayTuesday TatsAnother Muddy Monday and A Low Brow Post.

Red Pilled Jew closes out this Sunday with Rule Five – Long Term, The Car Is Cheaper.

Thanks to everyone for their luscious linkagery!

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CPAC: Not Worried at All

Posted on | February 29, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia
We’ll be checking out of here early this morning, relocating to the Gaylord, where my podcasting partner John Hoge will have a room for us to do tonight’s special 2-hour episode of The Other Podcast.

Friday was kind of my “chill” day at CPAC because, unlike Wednesday and Thursday, I didn’t have a midnight deadline for The American Spectator, and thus could relax and socialize more freely. My brother Kirby spent the afternoon roaming around with his camera, getting some great candid shots of the CPAC scene. (Click to enlarge.)

 

 

About 3 o’clock, I had an interview on Radio Row with Blanquita Cullum.

 

After that ended, we convened in the lobby bar, where Smitty showed up after a while and reminded me that he’d gotten me on the guest list for a Townhall VIP reception at 5 p.m. As we walked over that way, we encountered a somewhat confused Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. “Where’s this thing at?” Ed asked, and we led him over there. Everybody from PJ Media was there, as was Kurt Schlicter and this person you may recognize.

 

“Katie, I hate to act like a fan boy, but my sister-in-law is a big fan of yours, and I just have to get the picture for her.”

After a while, I went outside to have a smoke and found myself in the smoking area talking to a kid from Hampden-Sydney College. Took an instant liking to the kid and said, “Son, it’s time you learn the valuable skill of crashing a CPAC party.” So we went back up to the Townhall reception, sailing past the lady who was keeping the invitation list who recognized me — it’s the hat — and didn’t seem to notice I’d brought along a guest. Inside, he got free beer and free food, I introduced him to everybody and he got along splendidly. Thanks to Townhall for letting me infringe their hospitality. It seemed like the benevolent thing to do.




 

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