The Other McCain

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

Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | Comments Off on Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

 

Early last year, Lawrence Person dubbed the Democratic presidential campaign a “clown car,” and by summer 2019, there were so many candidates it was difficult for the DNC to narrow the TV debate field down to 20. Does anyone remember anything Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper or John Delaney said during their brief sojourns on the campaign trail? At least my favorite candidate, Marianne Williamson, had a memorable message. Crazy? Perhaps, but memorable.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and when Michael Bloomberg dropped out Wednesday morning, endorsing Joe Biden, the prospects of a “brokered convention” (which pundits had been jabbering about for the past month) dwindled to nearly zero. Jim Treacher mourns:

Bloomberg spent all that money to upend the establishment, more dough than most of us would ever see in a hundred lifetimes, and now he ends up standing on his tippy-toes to kiss the establishment’s butt. It really is terrific to watch. . . .
Mike Bloomberg provided a lot of high-paying jobs to soulless, unprincipled campaign hacks. So that’s not nothing. Unscrupulous drones need to put food on the table too.

As recently as Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren was saying she was still “in this fight,” but by Wednesday afternoon she was reportedly under pressure to drop out and support Bernie Sanders. Warren “had a plan for everything — except winning,” and even Ilhan Omar stuck the knife in her back:

Moral of the story? Never turn your back on Ilhan Omar.

Now that Creepy Uncle Joe appears to have the nomination within his grasp, we have passed a crucial phase of the election campaign:

After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.” . . .

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




 

Category: Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 03.04.20

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho


Six more hours until I can freely Tweet again. If you don’t share this on Twitter, that pinche gordita Ana Navarro will have won.


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #915
357 Magnum: Just So You Know Where You Stand
Ammo.com: How The BATF Became Corrupt & Abusive
EBL: Joementum Is Happening – Sanders Gets Schlonged
Twitchy: Nation Correpsondent Tries To “But Trump!” Chief Justice Roberts After Statement On Chuck U. Schumer, Takes Rake To The Face Instead
Louder With Crowder: TYT’s Cenk Uygur Loses His Mind Over Biden’s Super Tuesday Victory

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It Turns Out That Women Can Have It All
American Conservative: How Trump Could Still Lose
American Greatness: Sen. Schumer Threatens Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch & Kavanaugh, also, Man Released Under Chicago’s “Sanctuary City” Rules Attempts To Rape Three-Year-Old
American Thinker: The Canadian Health Care Myth
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Sanders Picks Up Another Prominent Endorsement  – Venezuelan Dictator Maduro
BattleSwarm: Super Tuesday Results – Two And A Half Men
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
Camp Of The Saints: Election 2020 – And The Plot Twisted From Side To Side
Da Tech Guy: Da Tech Guy’s Midnight Court Podcast Is Back – Mondays & Fridays 12:35 AM EST
Don Surber: Barbra Streisand’s Trump Obsession
The Geller Report: Mother Of San Bernardino Terrorist Pleads Guilty To Destroying Evidence, also, DOD Linguist Charged With Passing Highly Classified Intel To Hezbollah Operative
Hogewash: The Fireworks Galaxy, also, The Morning After Stupor Tuesday
Hollywood In Toto: Blacklist 2.0 – Hollywood Cancels Pro-Trump Sabato
JustOneMinute: Mulligan!
Legal Insurrection: Schumer Goes To War With SCOTUS Over Abortion, also, Warren’s Embarrassing Loss Exposes Her Fawning Media Fans
Megan McArdle: Elizabeth Warren Focused On Her Core Voters; There Weren’t Enough Of Them
Power Line: After Last Night, also, Chief Justice Roberts Throws Down On Chuck Schumer
Shark Tank: SolarTogether Gets Green Light In Florida, also, Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Scalped, Canoe Sinks
Shot In The Dark: “So What, Precisely, Is 2+2?”
STUMP: Pandemic – Current Stats On COVID-19, Spanish Flu, & WASH YOUR HANDS
The Political Hat: All The News That Fits For Justin Trudeau
This Ain’t Hell: News From the Nork Missile Range, also, Gladys Mae West & The GPS
Victory Girls: Mike Bloomberg Finds Out He Can’t Buy The Presidency
Volokh Conspiracy: The CFPB Needed Better Friends
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Shocked To Find Support For Trump Among California Latinos, also, Dem Rep Tammy Duckworth Claims VP Pence Will “Just Pray” About Coronavirus
Mark Steyn: The Plugs Are On But Nobody’s Home

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Category: Linkagery

Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | Comments Off on Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

 

As of 8 a.m., Maine remains “too close to call” — Joe Biden leads by about 2,200 votes with 83% of precincts reporting — but what matters more is the delegate count, and it will take another day or two before we have a complete total from Super Tuesday. Biden won 9 of 15 contests, including two states (Minnesota and Massachusetts) that had been considered a lock for Bernie Sanders, so you could say the “Joementum” is real:

Get ready for a long and grueling road ahead as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in a race that could possibly result in the country’s first contested major-party nominating convention in well over a half-century.
The former vice president, surging to victory in the five southern Super Tuesday states and beyond, crowed to supporters at a primary celebration speech in Los Angeles after most of the results were in.
“I’m here to report that we are very much alive,” Biden told a cheering crowd. “This campaign is taking off.”
Hours later, the Associated Press projected Biden the winner in Texas – which had the second-largest cache of delegates on Super Tuesday.
But Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont who’s making his second straight White House run, won California — the biggest prize on a day when one-third of all Democratic presidential convention delegates were up for grabs.
“Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence we’re going to win the Democratic nomination,” Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist lawmaker, predicted as he spoke to supporters in his home state of Vermont. . . .
Biden . . . was wounded after a lackluster fourth-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses and a disappointing fifth-place showing in New Hampshire’s primary. But a slight rebound in Nevada’s caucuses — where he came in a distant second to Sanders — was followed this past weekend with a landslide victory in South Carolina’s primary. . . .
Fox News contributor and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile termed Biden’s comeback “the most impressive 72 hours I’ve ever seen in U.S. politics.”
That comeback was fuled by a tidal wave of establishment consolidation behind Biden over the past three days, which included rival moderate candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropping out of the race and endorsing the former vice president.

On MSNBC last night, James Carville credited Rep. James Clyburn — the black South Carolina Democrat who gave an emotional endorsement to Biden last week — with saving the Democratic Party. This salvation is purely for the party establishment, and anyone who’s seen Biden’s public appearances lately knows that the doddering old fool is unlikely to be a formidable opponent to Trump in November.

We may not have seen the last plot twist in this story. What happened so far? Until Feb. 3, the campaign was about fundraising, TV debates and polls. Then you had the disastrous clusterfark of the Iowa caucus and eight days later, Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire. So by Feb. 12, everything that the pundits had been telling America during the debates-and-polls phase of the campaign was wiped out by the actual results. A three-week scramble ensued — “The Great Liberal Freakout” — during which there were two more debates, Feb. 19 in Las Vegas and Feb. 26 in Charleston, the first of which saw Mike Bloomberg get destroyed as an establishment alternative, and the second of which was a gang beatdown of Sanders. The next debate is March 15 in Phoenix, but by then we will have had another round of primaries (Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Washington State, and the North Dakota caucus) on March 10.

The next big prizes are Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Arizona on March 17, with a total of 577 delegates at stake. The questions are whether Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren will stay in the race. Bloomberg’s team said they would “reassess” after Tuesday, when the billionaire’s big spending netted him 46 delegates. As long as a brokered convention scenario is possible, Bloomberg will probably decide to stay in it, but what about Warren? So far she’s done no better than third place in any state, and how much money does she have left? There’s no way she can compete statewide in big states like Florida or Ohio, so her only real incentive for continuing her campaign is the prospect that she could struggle on, gather a comparative handful of delegates (maybe 200 total by June) and have some influence in a brokered convention.

UPDATE: Feminists are butt-hurt:

(Hat-tip: Boris Badenoff on Twitter.)




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 03.03.20

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho


One day left in the Twitter GULAG. You know what you must do.


OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Leniency Leads To Crime Spree
EBL: SOOPER DOOPER TUESDAY
Twitchy: Ben Rhodes Lectures Dems About What Really Matters, Totally Pisses Off Bernie Bros
Louder With Crowder: Mike Bloomberg Gets Called Out For Anti-Gun Hypocrisy

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It’s Not Economically Viable For Them To Protect Your Lives
American Conservative: The Census & Facebook, Working Hand In Hand To Censor The Internet
American Greatness: San Francisco Goes Viral – Coronavirus & Chaos
American Power: The Nation Endorses “Democratic Socialist” Bernie Sanders
American Thinker: The Only Thing Dems Have To Offer Is Fear Itself
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Fauxcahontas News
Babalu Blog: For Cubans Who Realized The Dream Of Freedom In America, Bernie Sanders Is A Nightmare
BattleSwarm: Texas Reminder – Vote Today!
Cafe Hayek: Creating Prosperity
Camp Of The Saints: Coronavirus Update
CDR Salamander: Airships, Now & Forever
Da Tech Guy: Five One-Liners Under The Fedora, also, The Socialist Republic Of Philadelphia
Don Surber: Does It Come In Mustang Size?
First Street Journal: Elizabeth Warren Tilts At Windmills
The Geller Report: Muslim Uber Driver Refuses To Give Blind Man With Guide Dog A Ride, also, Muslim Arrested For Running Over Four Youngsters In California
Hogewash: What’s Up For March 2020, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: CNN Says Friends Reunion Must Apologize For Problematic Jokes, also, Variety “Debunks #GetWokeGoBroke – Not So Fast
JustOneMinute: Wut Happened?
Legal Insurrection: Wuhan Virus Watch, also, Judge Demands Hillary Deposition On Emails, Private Server
Megan McArdle: The Government Should Cover Coronavirus Testing, And Conservatives Should Support It
Power Line: Coronavirus Has A Silver Lining, also, Abdi Nur Pleads For Help
Shark Tank: FL Braces For Potential Coronavirus Outbreak
Shot In The Dark: Be A Pain To Fight Pain
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – New York Is Still #1!
The Political Hat: The Battle For Super Tuesday
This Ain’t Hell: Beta O’Rourke To Head Biden’s Gun Control Effort, also, Veterans Affairs Facing Increasing Number Of Elderly Veterans
Victory Girls: Donna Brazile Curses GOP Chairwoman On Fox
Volokh Conspiracy: Obamacare Returns To The Supreme Court – Yet Again
Weasel Zippers: LA DA’s Husband Pulls Gun On BLM Protesters On His Porch At 5 AM, also, Democrat Denver City Councilwoman Cheers Speading Coronavirus To Trump Supporters
Mark Steyn: The Geezer Apocalypse, also, Clifford The Big Red Dog’s Lesbian Neighbors

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Category: Linkagery

SUPER TUESDAY: Joe Biden Sweeps the South, Bernie Sanders Wins VT, CO, UT

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | Comments Off on SUPER TUESDAY: Joe Biden Sweeps the South, Bernie Sanders Wins VT, CO, UT

UPDATE 11:45 p.m. ET: OK, so far in California — about 15% of precincts reporting — it’s Sanders at 27%, Bloomberg 20%, Biden 18%, Buttigieg 12% and Warren 11%. You might say, “But I thought Buttigieg dropped out?” Yes, but early voting (an idea I’ve always opposed) means that many thousands of ballots were already cast before Buttigieg quit. Both Texas and Maine are still too close to call, but the “win” doesn’t really matter. What matters is the delegate count, and “too close to call” means that Biden and Bernie will more or less evenly split a majority of the delegates in those states. If Bernie manages to hang on for a win California, that will offset his losses elsewhere, and so the total delegate count should be nearly a dead-heat.

Still, tonight will be counted as a comeback victory for Joe Biden, whose campaign was written off for dead before he won South Carolina, and now he’s got momentum in a field that has swiftly shrunk from seven candidates to four. Warren has vowed to remain in the race, and Bloomberg’s campaign staff says they will “reassess” their situation tomorrow. My guess is that both of them hang around at least for the next debate on March 15, but that’s just a guess.

It was pointed out on MSNBC tonight that Biden won states where he never campaigned, ran no ads, and didn’t even have any staff or offices in the state. So a lot of inconceivable things have already happened, and I’m going to bed. We’ll sort it all out in the morning.

UPDATE 11:20 p.m. ET: Sanders wins Utah and leads by about 4 points in Texas, but it’s still too close to call there. Biden wins Massachusetts, where Warren placed third in her home state.

UPDATE 10:40 p.m. ET: Biden has won Minnesota and Arkansas, while Texas and Maine remain too close to call. Polls close in California at 11 p.m. ET.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: Tennessee has just been called for Joe Biden, adding to Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma for the former vice president, while Bernie Sanders has added a win in Colorado to his previously announced victory in his home state of Vermont.

* * * PREVIOUSLY * * *

It’s 7 p.m. ET, and polls just closed in Virginia — which has already been called for Joe Biden — and in Vermont, where I’d say Bernie Sanders is the heavy favorite. A week ago, it looked like Biden was doomed, but he won big Saturday in South Carolina, forcing Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to quit the campaign. Buttigieg and Klobuchar both endorsed Biden, and so that leaves Biden, Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren as the only real candidates left. My hunch is that Bloomberg is going to get completely wrecked tonight. He’s spent something around $500 million in a huge bet on Super Tuesday, and I doubt he’ll clear 10% in any of the 14 states voting today. We shall see.

UPDATE 7:15 p.m. ET: Yeah, this was an easy call:

What really counts, of course, is not who “wins” each state, but rather the total delegate haul for each candidate. Keep an eye on that.

UPDATE 7:35 p.m. ET: Fox News just called North Carolina for Biden.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: Damn those Samoans! I just lost a bet!

That’s six more delegates than I thought he’d get. I’m shocked to learn that if you throw around a few million bucks in Samoa, you get results.

UPDATE 8:05 p.m. ET: The Biden juggernaut rolls on:




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

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.




 

Category: Democrats

#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.




 

Category: MSNBC

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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