The Other McCain

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

The Basketball World Mourns ‘Mamba’

Posted on | January 27, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

It’s been years since I paid attention to the NBA, or to basketball generally. When I was a sports editor in the 1980s, of course, I followed the game, but in my mind, the Golden Age of Basketball was when Larry Bird’s Celtics battled Magic Johnson’s Lakers back in the 1980s. Still, when the news flashed Sunday that Kobe Bryant had been killed in a helicopter crash, I knew that this was a great tragedy.

The son of a former NBA player (his dad played with Dr. J), Bryant was a high-school sensation who turned down college scholarships to go directly into the NBA, and became the youngest player ever to play in a professional game. His second season with the Lakers, he became the youngest All-Star in league history, and his third season — when he was still only 20 years old — “marked Bryant’s emergence as a premier guard in the league.” Imagine being a two-time NBA All-Star before your peers have reached their senior year in college, and yet Bryant was only beginning to astonish the basketball world. In the next three seasons, the Lakers won three consecutive NBA championships, with Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant forming an indomitable scoring duo in the historic “three-peat.” Later, in 2009-2010, Bryant again led the Lakers to back-to-back titles. How many players have ever had five NBA championship rings? Nicknamed “Mamba” by fans, Kobe retired after the 2016 season with a career scoring average of 25 points per game over 20 seasons, having led the league in scoring twice and played in 12 All-Star games.

 

Bryant was married nearly 20 years to his wife Vanessa, whom he first met in 1999, and they had four daughters; the oldest — Gigi, 13 — was killed in Sunday’s helicopter crash with her father. Fans built a makeshift shrine to their hero outside the Staples Center arena in L.A.

While fans were mourning, and as President Trump was paying tribute to the NBA legend, a writer for the Washington Post had other ideas:

A Washington Post journalist has been suspended by the newspaper after she tweeted a link on Sunday to a years-old story about the Kobe Bryant rape case just hours after the basketball legend and his daughter were killed in a helicopter crash.
Felicia Sonmez, who covers national politics for the Post, took to Twitter shortly after the world learned of Bryant’s death along with eight others aboard his private helicopter which crashed outside of Los Angeles.
She posted a link to an April 2016 story from the news site The Daily Beast which carried the headline: ‘Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.’ . . .
Sonmez deleted the tweets due to the overwhelming backlash, but others on Twitter screengrabbed the posts and responded with disgust.

 

She got the ratio from hell — more than 20,000 negative reactions — on Twitter, and continued digging until she nearly lost her job. I’m sure she’ll be reinstated after her suspension, but what shall we say about this? I remember that 2003 case, and my attitude at the time was that when an NBA player invites a woman to his hotel room, she should know what her acceptance of the invitation implies. I mean, c’mon — when NBA players leave the arena after a game, they are thronged by women desperate to be their companions for the night, and Kobe was an All-Star who had just won three consecutive championships. The fact that Kobe was married, of course, should have restrained his advances, but many high-status married men (famously including former President Bill Clinton) seem to regard their marital vows as non-binding.

The story linked by the Washington Post reporter includes details that highlight the way these “he-said/she-said” incidents so often develop: Kobe was obviously a man who had seldom been rejected. She kissed him and, well, where did she expect this to lead? She’s a 19-year-old Colorado hotel clerk, and he’s a multimillionaire athletic superstar, and certainly we can imagine that Kobe thought any display of reluctance on her part was just “playing hard to get.” Also, we must factor into this equation the matter of race: His accuser was white, and while she evidently was not a racist (she told police she was initially “excited” when she learned the NBA star was staying at the hotel, and apparently didn’t mind kissing him), but what did Kobe think? Did the NBA superstar imagine that this teenage hotel clerk was rejecting his advances merely because he was black? I don’t mean to defend Kobe insofar as what happened was clearly wrong (as he himself later admitted), but rather to explain How Things Really Are, as opposed to How Some People Wish Things Were.

It’s all fine and good to avow “color-blindness,” and to denounce as racism — there are five A’s in “RAAAAACIST!” — any deviation from such an ideal, but not everyone thinks that way. Even people who disavow racism will often behave in ways that are race-conscious. This is true of people of every race, and if Kobe felt he was being disrespected because a white woman spurned his romantic advances, he would certainly not be the first black man to feel that way. What we need, as a society, is more license to discuss our feelings on such subjects without fear of being swarmed by a mob of Social Justice Warriors if we deviate from whatever the official “progressive” attitude is supposed to be.

Live long enough, and you’ll see liberals do a 180-degree turn on many issues, and the way Kobe was treated in the aftermath of that 2003 rape accusation is certainly such a case. Once upon a time, liberals would have defended a black man accused in any similar circumstance, but nowadays the feminists have decided that lynch mobs are “progressive” and defending due process of law makes you a right-wing extremist. Liberals have also done a 180-degree turn on free speech. I’m old enough to remember when liberals adamantly defended all manner of things — including Communist professors and federal grants for pornographic art — on First Amendment grounds. Today’s progressives, however, act like the Thought Police, vigilantly on the lookout for any evidence of racism, sexism or homophobia. Even I, who laugh at being hate-listed by the SPLC, must carefully weigh my words when writing about these issues, lest I offend some of my conservative friends who are eager to avoid any guilt-by-association with a Thought Criminal.

We should remember Kobe Bryant for what he accomplished as one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the game. I loathe the tendency to inject politics into every aspect of our lives, and if Felicia Sonmez learns anything from her experience, let us hope she learns that sports fans don’t want her “woke” attitude anywhere near their games.

Hey, Felicia: Why do you think we elected Donald Trump, anyway?


 

Category: Racism, Sports

Rule 5 Sunday: Ayako Kawasumi

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Much like David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, which have expanded in size and number to the point where I despair of ever catching up on all the damn books, the Fate/Stay Night franchise of games, manga, and anime has exploded all over the place and mutated in several directions, many of which aren’t available in English. Still, one can appreciate the art and the voice actresses involved in the series, most notably Ayako Kawasumi, who provides the voice for Saber, the face of the franchise. Kawasumi is a veteran voice actress, with an extensive list of credits in classic anime such as Angelic Layer, Mahoromatic, the ./Hack series, and Ai Yori Aoshi. Here she is posing as Saber, and I’ve included the actual Saber for comparison. And cuteness.

Kawasumi-san as Saber.

Saber in full fig

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #874, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Second Secession Friday and the return of the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s heifers this week include Wisconsin Cheese Babes, #TargetTori, Black Guns Matter, Coronavirus, Tulsi Vs. Hillary, Norma Gale, Bonnie McKee, Michelle Lewis, Lonia Haeger, and Corona Outbreak.

A View From The Beach presents Beach Bunny – Kara del Toro, Fish Pic Friday – Marissa Everhart, Tattoo Thursday, EPA Weighs in on Bay Striper Regs, Another Wet Shirt Wednesday, Hail to Thee Our Alma Mater – OSU Girl Goes All Pro, Skynet Just Giggled, A Muddy Monday Morning and Palm Sunday.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the Week is Janet Leigh. Don’t shower alone!

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Governor Northam Couldn’t Be Setting Up A “Reichstag Fire” Event, Could He?
Bacon Time
The Political Hat
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Monday: Stacey Dash
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

You Heard It Here First, Folks
EBL

Stoners and Stalinists: Sanders Campaign Staff Is Exactly What You’d Expect
EBL

In The Mailbox: Sunday Leftovers Edition
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Disintegration
A View From The Beach
EBL

Is Noah Berlatsky a Pedophile?
EBL

Be Careful in Richmond, Please
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.20.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

A Mass Shooting CNN Won’t Notice
357 Magnum
Bacon Time
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.21.20
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Another Crisis for the Wombat?
A View From The Beach
EBL

Impeachment Circus Update
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Eric Ciaramella Is the ‘Whistleblower’ and Other Things You’re Not Allowed to Say
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

I AM NOT WORTHY
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.22.20
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
EBL

McCain Killed in Shootout
357 Magnum
EBL

Jonathan ‘Jessica’ Yaniv in Jail?
Wizbang Blog
EBL

Hint: They’re Not ‘Supreme’
Dark Brightness
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.23.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Why Does @Victoria_Spratt Hate Men?
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.24.20
357 Magnum
A View from The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending January 24:

  1.  EBL (22)
  2.  A View From The Beach (12)
  3.  357 Magnum (9)
  4.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!

 

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Category: FMJRA Award

White Guilt at 28°F: $50,176 a Year

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Let’s begin with the obvious question: If you wanted to send your children to a not-very-prestigious private liberal arts college, why would you choose to send them to one in Moorhead, Minnesota? Concordia College doesn’t even make the top 100 list at U.S. News, and the annual cost of attendance is $50,176 including room and board. Supposing that you are an affluent parent with a kid too dumb to get into Duke or Dartmouth, but you still want to blow $200,000 on your child’s college education, why send them to a campus in Minnesota where the high temperature today will be 28°F? Aren’t there better bargains?

 

Consider, for example, Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) where, even with out-of-state tuition, the annual cost is $31,280 including room and board, and your child could spend their leisure hours under the palm trees on the beach at Sanibel. Even in late January, the high temperatures in Fort Myers are about 70°F, and I can’t imagine that a degree from Concordia has so much more prestige than an FGCU diploma that you’d spend an extra $80,000 to send your kid to frosty Minnesota where they can be lectured about their “white privilege”:

For this past Monday’s Martin Luther King Day, Minnesota’s Concordia College offered a racially segregated seminar titled “How to Embrace Your Inner Racist: A Session for White People.”
One of many “concurrent sessions” offered throughout the day, Professor Ahmed Afzaal’s “Inner Racist” discussion noted that participants would be able to “recognize and acknowledge that there is a nasty little racist inside them, and to do so without becoming angry or defensive.”
In addition, attendees would then “describe the skills of psychological flexibility that they must develop in order to make authentic choices in defiance of their racist tendencies.”
While the workshop included a special note that it was for whites only, the school wouldn’t stop “people of color from attending.” Nevertheless, non-whites needed to be aware “that their presence in the room [was] likely to interfere with the effectiveness of the session.”
Afzaal is a professor of religion at Concordia.
According to the college’s “MLK Day 2020 Theme” page,

they [sic] year 2020 marks the 401st anniversary of slavery in the US. On this day, we ask that you reflect on the progress that has and has not been made in eliminating racial and economic injustices in the U.S. We ask that we be intentional in examining 1) the social systems of race and economics, 2) the role that whiteness plays in keeping us stuck in the space of “negative peace”, and 3) the role that white moderates/Dreamers play in being “obstacles to change.”

Keynote speakers for Monday’s celebration included Ijeoma Oluo, whose writings calling for white people to “find themselves” were part of a 2018 Humboldt State racial identity workshop. Also featured was Janaya Khan, a black, queer, gender-nonconforming activist [and] staunch Afrofuturist and social-justice educator.”
In addition, a “Tunnel of Oppression” was available on January 20 and 24 which “call[ed] attention to the unarmed black and brown lives lost to police violence.” It also “highlight[ed] information about each life lost, as a way to emphasize the impact of police violence.”

Really? Does your child need this? Does anyone need this? How much of a fool do you have to be to pay more than $50,000 a year so your kid can experience the “Tunnel of Oppression” and be taught to “recognize and acknowledge that there is a nasty little racist inside them”? And you’re subjecting them to this in Moorhead, Minnesota? Nah, man — send your kids to Florida and let ’em be nasty little racists under the palm trees.

Bonus: Florida Gulf Coast University is in Lee County.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)


 

Category: Education, Racism

How Desperate Do You Have to Be?

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | Comments Off on How Desperate Do You Have to Be?

 

Even if you could get laid this way, would it be worth it?

People on OKCupid are swiping right on climate action — or something? I’ve never used a dating app.
But I do know the company has filters so you can get rid of climate deniers when you’re searching for someone, whether it’s The One or a one-night stand. In a viral tweet earlier this week, the company highlighted the feature. And it turns out a lot of people use it. Not only that, climate is becoming an increasingly popular mention in profiles, a trend that reflects broader changes in society.
In data shared with Earther, the company said there’s been a 240 percent increase in mentions of environmental terms on people’s profiles like “climate change,” “environment,” “global warming,” “Greta Thunberg” and “recycle.”
An overwhelming majority of OKCupid users also care about the climate crisis. Ninety-seven percent of them believe climate change is real, and 82 percent say they’re concerned about it. More 90 percent of users also said they’d take action to correct something they do after discovering it’s bad for the environment.

How many times do I have to repeat this? Online dating is for losers. If you’re so desperate for companionship that you’re using OKCupid, you need to contemplate how you life went wrong, reconsider your lifestyle choices, and perhaps seek professional counseling. Six weeks in a rehab center, maybe, where you go to workshops with titles like, “Stop Staring at Your Smartphone and Talk to Human Beings Occasionally, You Dork.”

Think about the type of people for whom “caring about the climate crisis” is a major life priority. Do you want to have sex with those people? If so, why? To settle a grudge, perhaps. What kind of pervert are you, having erotic fantasies about Greta Thunberg? But to continue:

“Since your match percentage with someone shows how compatible you two are, if you are a climate change activist and they think climate change is fake news, your match percentage is going to decrease,” Michael Kaye, OKCupid’s Global Communication Manager, told Earther in an email. Since most people on the platform aren’t climate deniers, that means vocally caring about the climate crisis is helping people get laid. . . .
“In my experience, people are finding that it’s really difficult to have an intimate relationship unless there’s a really deep alignment on how we’re relating to the issue,” [said] Renee Lertzman, a psychologist who specializes in the melancholic psychological responses to environmental crises . . .
“I’ve talked to a number of people who are experiencing a number of relational difficulties because of the way they respond to these issues,” she said. “People may be struggling with a lot of depression, with anxiety, with agitation, and their partner may not be equipped to handle it and might not relate to having that kind of response.”

Right — nothing like a hook-up with someone who has been overwhelmed with existential gloom ever since their seventh-grade teacher made them watch Earth in the Balance in science class. Do you need that kind of negativity in your life? If the entire planet is doomed — hopelessly and irretrievably doomed by CO2 emissions — why bother dating at all? Just reduce your carbon footprint by jumping off a bridge.

Climate-change cultists claim to worship at the altar of Science, but either they skipped the “survival of the fittest” chapter of Darwinian evolution, or else they think this principle only applied in prehistoric times.

Question: The purpose of dating is . . .?

Answer: To find a mate.

Question: The purpose of mating is . . .?

Answer: To reproduce.

Ergo, the process of mate selection (which is what dating actually is, or should be) is about evaluating potential partners in terms of their overall fitness as a future parent. What traits do you consider desirable, not just physically, but also in terms of personality? If you want your children to be, for example, tall and blue-eyed, then you would screen out the short brown-eyed people as potential partners. And if you want you children to be optimistic and cheerful, you screen out the people who are gloomy and pessimistic. This is why dating climate-change activists is a waste of time, because they are committed to an ideology of despair that views human existence, per se, as a threat to the planet.

This is what most young environmentalists simply don’t know about their own movement. It originated from the same cabal of wealthy misanthropes whose neo-Malthusian obsessions brought us eugenics and The Population Bomb: The idea that there are too many people on the planet, and that the wrong people — brown people — are having “too many” children. “Climate change” is really a euphemism for lebensraum.

So that’s two reasons not to date climate-change fanatics:

  1. They subscribe to a pessimistic and depressing worldview;
    and
  2. They are the kind of fools who are easily deceived by propaganda.

Avoid such people. Do not even bother arguing with them, because it’s a waste of time to try to deprive fools of their folly. They are like Pleistocene mammoths, destined to perish in the La Brea Tar Pits.


 

Category: Global Warming

‘Living the Dream’ With @_32baby.k9_

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Living the Dream’ With @_32baby.k9_

 

Last weekend’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day in San Antonio, Texas, featured a hiphop concert in the city’s River Walk district:

The 19-year-old accused of shooting and killing two men and injuring five others at a River Walk-area bar on Sunday appears to have been scheduled to perform at the music event where the incident took place.
An Instagram account belonging to suspect Kiernan Williams contains a photo of the flyer for “Living the Dream,” the music event hosted at Ventura Sunday night. Williams’ stage name “32Baby K9” is included on the promotional graphic. He touted the event on his Instagram account as his second show and asked his supporters to ask him for discounts on admission.
Robert Jay Martinez, 20, and Alejandro Robles, 25, were killed at the event. A woman, 46, and four male victims ranging in age from 16 to 19, are expected to survive their injuries, police said.
Williams will face two counts of capital murder and other charges, Police Chief William McManus said.
Williams was arrested Monday afternoon. After being interviewed by police, he told a scrum of reporters and cameras to “follow” him on Instagram. He also admitted to shooting the two, but he did not know them. He said the disagreement started because one of the victims was upset that Williams “bumped” into him.
“He told me because I bumped into him he was going to kill me,” Williams said while being escorted to a police vehicle in handcuffs.

 

You see that the “Dream” in the title of this event was a reference to MLK’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but I don’t recall anything about shooting a couple of Mexicans in the club in that speech. Kiernan (a/k/a “32babyK9”) claims that he was acting in self-defense:

Witnesses on scene said the shooter, later identified as 19-year-old Kiernan Christopher Williams, got into a verbal and physical confrontation with 20-year-old Robert Jay Martinez III during a concert at Ventura Bar, according to an arrest affidavit.
One witness said they had turned away from the argument when they heard the gunfire erupt, the affidavit said. Another witness said they saw Williams intentionally shoot Martinez, the document continued.
Williams then continued to fire his weapon into the crowded venue, hitting six other people, police said.
Martinez died on scene with a gunshot wound to the chest. The second victim, 25-year-old Alejandro Robles, was shot once in the back and later died at the hospital. . . .
Witnesses were able to identify Williams from a photo lineup, the affidavit said. He was arrested Monday near the 100 block of S. Zarzamora Street.
After his arrest, Williams told reporters he acted in self-defense as he was put into the back of a police vehicle.

How is it “self-defense” when you shoot seven people, including a 46-year-old woman? Even if it could be shown that Williams had reasonable grounds to believe Martinez was a threat, he’s still got to explain why he kept firing more or less randomly into the crowd. But my hunch is “32babyK9” hasn’t spent a lot of time studying Texas law, so he’s probably going to be “living the dream” in prison the rest of his life.


 

Category: Crime, Racism, Texas

False Dilemmas and Real Binaries: Patterns of Error in Logic and Rhetoric

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

In his book SJWs Always Lie, Vox Day makes the important distinction between logic (the mental process by which we seek truth) and rhetoric (the language of persuasion). Both logic and rhetoric are skills necessary to statesmanship, because the political leader must first analyze the problems of public policy (logic), then explain the problem and convince others to support his proposed solution (rhetoric). As any student of history knows, it is often the case that there are good arguments on both sides of any public-policy controversy. The classic example of this is the Athenian expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides in his famous History presents the argument made for the expedition by Alcibiades, and the opposing argument by Nicias. Alcibiades “won” the debate — in the sense that he persuaded the Athenian assembly to approve the expedition — but as the subsequent disaster proved, Nicias was entirely correct in arguing against the expedition.

This shows how persuasive rhetoric can triumph over sound logic, and one might think that statesmen would have learned something from this lesson, yet over and over, we see politicians leading their nations to disaster through similar errors. One of the most common tools of demagoguery, by which people are persuaded to support bad policy, is what students of logic recognize as the false dilemma fallacy:

A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an “either/or” situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option.

In the case of the Sicilian expedition, the debate in Athens was focused on the either/or notion that they must send military aide to their Ionian allies immediately, or else suffer the lost opportunity for what Alcibiades assured them would be an easy victory against their Spartan rivals. Yet the fact was that their allies had brought them a false report, exaggerating the situation in Sicily, and the wise thing to do would have been to send a small party to scout out the situation and report back, so that the assembly might be fully informed before undertaking such an expensive and risk endeavor. Because Alcibiades was ambitious for military glory, however, he derogated the arguments made for a cautious wait-and-see approach, and thus his demagoguery carried the debate.

Creating a sense of now-or-never urgency — “We must do something!” — when there is in fact plenty of time to examine the situation and consider alternatives to drastic action, is where deceptive rhetoric so often becomes outright propaganda. Thomas Sowell examines these propaganda methods in some detail in his excellent book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Because we associate the word “propaganda” with totalitarian regimes, there is a tendency in democratic polities to ignore the ways in which dishonest methods of persuasion are employed in our own societies. However it can be shown, for example, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932 was one of the first modern propaganda campaigns, engaging in character assassination against Herbert Hoover, demonizing him as the scapegoat to blame for the Depression (a) which was not his fault, and (b) which Hoover was doing everything he knew to relieve. Hoover was portrayed as a wicked servant of wealthy exploiters, and cruelly indifferent to the suffering of the poor. Subsequently, FDR was credited with having rescued the country from disaster, although it can be argued (as Amity Schlaes has done in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression) that Roosevelt’s New Deal programs actually impeded recovery and made the Depression worse.

The causes of the Great Depression were complex, and there were many possible ways to deal with the economic problems of the 1930s, but FDR’s 1932 campaign (which for the first time employed a full-time director for the Democratic National Committee, with an emphasis on what would now be called “messaging,” i.e., propaganda) painted the choice as a false dilemma between the alleged cruel indifference of the GOP and the determination of Democrats to do something for “the forgotten man.” And this theme, endlessly reiterated, was carried over in successive campaigns over the next two decades into the Truman era, until finally Republicans were able to win back the White House by nominating the war hero Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. To this day, however, the Democrats continue to attract voters with the same dishonest rhetoric that elected FDR in 1932: Republicans are “the party of the rich,” and the only way to help the poor is to vote Democrat.

In a two-party system, our political choices tend to be binary, but Republicans ought not allow Democrats to distort this real binary into a logically invalid false dilemma. Conservatives have duty to point out, for example, that the general pro-business policies of the GOP do not mean that poor people — especially including minorities — will suffer economic harm. This is where the use of the false dilemma fallacy feeds into the zero-sum-game mentality: Poor people are repeatedly told by Democrats that “big business” and Republicans are to blame for their suffering, and that black people especially victimized because Republicans are “racist.” This rhetoric suggests a series of either/or choices: One is either for business (Republican) or against business (Democrat); either for black people (Democrat) or against them (Republican); and so forth through a series of choices between different sides in antagonistic conflicts. Twenty or 30 years ago, for example, Democrats railed relentlessly against “the Religious Right” as the dangerous force behind the GOP. Fifteen years ago, “neoconservatives” were the great Republican enemy, and 10 years ago, it was the Koch brothers. Nowadays, we hear about “white nationalists” and the “alt-right.” Despite all these shifts in Democrat propaganda, the general base of support for the Republican Party and the GOP’s general policy direction haven’t really changed much since 1990; the shifting nature of attack rhetoric from Democrats merely shows an opportunistic search for right-wing bogeymen with which frighten the emotional masses into voting Democrat.

Which brings us, of course, to Orange Man Bad and the impeachment saga. Nancy Pelosi insisted last fall that this was an urgent matter, but after ramming through the House impeachment vote, a long holiday ensued before she was willing to bring the case to trial in the Senate. Now we have Adam Schiff and his colleagues using now-or-never rhetoric to insist that President Trump must be removed from office or else . . .

Or else what, really? We are barely nine months away from the next election and, if Democrats can win in November, a new president will be in office by this time next year. Perhaps someone who paid close attention to last week’s Senate trial — a tedious rehash of arguments Democrats have been making for the past several month — can explain to me the great menace from which Schiff & Co. propose to save us. Those of us who were not persuaded in December, when House Republicans voted as a bloc against impeachment, as not likely to be persuaded by having the same argument reiterated now. What then is the urgent crisis which prompts Democrats to insist that the Senate must either (a) vote to convict and remove the president from office or (b) allow Russia to subvert our democracy by secretly controlling our policy toward Ukraine. This either/or choice requires us to accept as a basic premise that Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin, and it also requires us to ignore the fact that four of the House impeachment managers voted against U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. If they really do care so damned much about Ukraine, why didn’t they vote that way when they had the chance?

You didn’t hear any of this pointed out last week if you were watching CNN or MSNBC or news coverage on any of the Big Three broadcast networks. Our liberal media have embraced the Democrats’ claim that anyone who argues against impeachment is an agent of Russian influence, in the same way that all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 are believed by the media to be white supremacists.

It’s always either/or with them: Unless you support Democrats, you will be demonized in some way — you’re a Religious Right homophobe, a Kremlin stooge, or whatever. And you either believe this Democrat propaganda, or you don’t. Well, then: I don’t believe it, and I don’t think anyone else should believe it, either. This is the real binary choice.

You might be surprised at how easy it is to just ignore the Democrats, ignore the media, and live your life as if you don’t care what they say.

I, for one, have long since ceased to give a damn.


 

Category: History, Intellectuals, Media Bias

Probably Not a Trump Voter

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Wild guess. Just going out on a limb here:

A man who had been watching the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on Tuesday allegedly choked and punched his girlfriend in a Pennsylvania motel room when she wanted to watch something else, according to charging documents.
Lonnie D. Clark, 53, who lives at the northern York County motel, faces charges of strangulation, simple assault and harassment.
Police responded to the Scottish Inn at about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday after Clark’s girlfriend called 911. The woman reported that Clark had assaulted her and that she had left the room, documents state.
Once Fairview Township Police officers arrived, they spoke with Clark’s girlfriend, noting that she had red marks on her neck and right cheek.
The woman told police that Clark had been drinking alcohol all day while watching the impeachment trial and “was upset,” although documents do not state what caused his anger.
When the woman told Clark she “would like to watch something else,” Clark began to curse at her and called her “dumb” and “stupid.”
She tried to talk to Clark while seated on his lap, but he began to choke her with his hands, causing her to have trouble breathing, documents state.
The woman broke free and tried to leave, but Clark punched her twice and pushed her several times. Clark grabbed her around the neck again and punched her when she attempted to leave a second time, according to documents.
She eventually was able to get to the bathroom, where she hid until Clark left. She then ran out of the room and reached the motel’s main office, where she called 911.
“She advised that she was scared to come back to the room until police arrived,” documents state. . . .
Clark was arraigned on the charges and was released on $5,000 unsecured bail. He has a preliminary hearing before District Judge Scott J. Gross scheduled for Feb. 24, according to online court dockets.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

You beat up your girlfriend because she doesn’t want to watch the impeachment hearing. Also, you’re living in a $44-a-night motel room. You might want to reconsider you life choices. Just sayin’ . . .

The ratings for the hearings have not been very impressive.


 

Category: Violence Against Women
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