The Other McCain

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

Democrats ‘Careening from Impeachment Theory to Impeachment Theory’

Posted on | September 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrats ‘Careening from Impeachment Theory to Impeachment Theory’

House Republican Conference chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming:

“We have watched now, ever since President Trump was elected, the House Democrats have been careening from impeachment theory to impeachment theory. They’ve careened from target to target for a while,” Cheney said. “Ten days or so ago they were focused on impeaching [Supreme Court Justice Brett] Kavanaugh. Now they’re back to focusing on President Trump.”
“What we see repeatedly is a complete lack of focus on [and] concern about evidence and facts,” she continued. “What Speaker Pelosi did yesterday really was the worst we’ve seen yet, where she announced an impeachment inquiry without any evidence, without seeing the transcript of the phone call at issue, without seeing any details from the supposed whistleblower.”
“When you think about what that does, both from the perspective of our constitutional obligation and from the perspective of our national security, it ought to give every American grave concerns that they are dealing with this in a way that is absolutely such a flagrant disregard of their constitutional responsibility,” Cheney added.

 

A key point in the transcript of the call was that President Trump was urging the Ukrainian president to investigate the role played by the firm Crowdstrike in the 2016 election campaign:

After the Department of Justice released the call transcript between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday morning, officials also reconfirmed U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into Ukraine’s role and potential interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating,” DOJ Spokesperson Kerri Kopek released in a statement.
According to the transcript, President Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s role and asked Zelensky to get to the bottom of what happened.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation,” Trump said on the call. “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”

Crowdstrike is the company Democrats brought in to investigate the hacking of their servers, and the company has a Ukrainian connection. John Solomon reported in The Hill four months ago:

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country’s president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

Now, from the Observer in January 2017:

In addition to the Chalupas [Alexandra and her sister Andrea], the co-founder and CTO of Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm that the DNC hired to investigate the alleged hacks, Dmitri Alperovitch, also serves as a senior fellow to the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, which is an openly anti-Russian organization partly . The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who also happens to be one of the most prolific donors to the Clinton Foundation. The DNC denied multiple requests from the FBI to access their servers, effectively forcing the FBI to rely on CrowdStrike’s assessment of the hacks.

Lots of dots here worth connecting, you see.



 

Category: Congress, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Ukraine

In The Mailbox: 09.25.19

Posted on | September 25, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.25.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #754
357 Magnum: Is Generation Z This Stupid?
EBL: So Who’s Behind The Kneecapping Of Joe Biden?
Twitchy: Russian Asset/2020 Hopeful Tulsi Gabbard Sees No “Compelling Case” In Call Transcript
Louder With Crowder: Man Raises $1 Million For Charity, Des Moines Register Ruins It Over Old Tweets

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Bring Out Your NPCs
American Greatness: If You Can’t Sell Your Hysteria To Adults, Try The Kids
American Power: The Unbearable Whiteness Of Climate Protest
American Thinker: The Realities Of Impeachment
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Trump Blasts Socialism At The UN, Calls Maduro A Cuban Puppet
BattleSwarm: Democrats Get Ready To Throw Br’er Trump In The Briar Patch
Camp of the Saints: Who Really Won WW2? also, Hunter Is Not The Hunted, Joe Is
Cafe Hayek: Scales On My Eyes?
Da Tech Guy: Nancy’s Charge, or, The “It’s Our Last Shot For 2020” Impeachment Inquiry
Don Surber: Ukraine Is Another Sharpiegate
The Geller Report: Democrats Wrote To Ukraine In May 2018 Demanding It Investigate Trump, also, Pakistani Government, Clerics Make Burkas Mandatory For Schoolgirls Because So Many Are Raped
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Everything Is Proceeding As I Have Foreseen
Hollywood In Toto: How CBS’ Evil Rights A Spiritual TV Wrong
Joe For America: Massive Food Stamp Fraud Operation Smashed By “Operation Stampede”
JustOneMinute: Hey Dude, Where’s My Formal Impeachment Inquiry?
Legal Insurrection: Flashback – Biden Brags About Getting Ukrainian Prosecutor Investigating Son Hunter Fired, also, Judge Nixes Oberlin College’s Request To Go Fishing In Gibson Bakery Clerk’s Facebook Account
Michelle Malkin: Impeach Amnesty Ana, TV’s Foulest Open Borders Windbag
The PanAm Post: Maduro’s Regime Establishes Itself As A Cocaine Producer
Power Line: Transcript Shows No Wrongdoing By President Trump, also, Bernie Sanders Unplugged
Shark Tank: House Democrats Including Wassermann Schultz Call For Impeachment
Shot In The Dark: Kudos
The Political Hat: Human-Primate Chimerae – The First Step Toward Immanentizing Catgirls
This Ain’t Hell: FL Lawmakers Seek To Expand Stolen Valor Laws, also, Feds Nab Fugitive In $1 Billion Ponzi Scheme Targeting Vets
Victory Girls: Comrade Bernie’s United Socialist States Of America
Volokh Conspiracy: Trump, Ukraine, And Congress’ Power Of The Purse
Weasel Zippers: Dems Did What They’re Accusing Trump Of, also, After Trump Calls Their Bluff On Ukraine Transcript, Leftists Rush To Move Goalposts
Megan McArdle: The Irony In Democrats’ Impeachment Position
Mark Steyn: Mark On The Ann & Phelim Scoop

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Category: Linkagery

Evil Monsters Dox Bill Pulte

Posted on | September 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Evil Monsters Dox Bill Pulte

 

If you don’t know who Bill Pulte is, he’s the Michigan businessman who has become famous for promoting charitable causes on Twitter, often giving thousands of dollars of his own money to help people in need, as in the case of Lena Ramon, an Iraq war veteran and mother of two who got a $20,000 new car and $10,000 in cash from Pulte:

 

Why would anyone hate Bill Pulte or wish him harm? One word: Politics.

Because President Trump re-tweeted Pulte, and because Pulte praised the President on “Fox and Friends,” the Left decided that Pulte is a bad guy, and Trump-haters began harassing him online. Yesterday, Pulte and his wife got “doxed” — there private information was published online by left-wing hackers, resulting in the kind of threats and other mischief that victims of doxing typically suffer. (In 2013, I got doxed and SWATted by a man who was subsequently sentenced to federal prison.)

Law enforcement has been notified, and let’s hope that the perpetrators are soon in custody. The lesson here is that good people often suffer more on account of their virtues than bad people suffer for their vices. If you are doing the right thing, often it will inspire envy and hatred from others, and you will find yourself targeted by wicked people who cannot stand to see good people doing the right thing.

God bless Bill Pulte, and please remember him in your prayers.

P.S.: If you read this, Mr. Pulte, my brother Kirby could use some help.



 

Category: Culture

Impeachment Madness

Posted on | September 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

Democrats surrender to their Crazy Caucus:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on Tuesday, yielding to mounting pressure from fellow Democrats and plunging a deeply divided nation into an election-year clash between Congress and the commander in chief.
The probe focuses partly on whether Trump abused his presidential powers and sought help from a foreign government to undermine Democratic foe Joe Biden and help his own reelection. Pelosi said such actions would mark a “betrayal of his oath of office” and declared, “No one is above the law.”
The impeachment inquiry, after months of investigations by House Democrats of the Trump administration, sets up the party’s most direct and consequential confrontation with the president, injects deep uncertainty into the 2020 election campaign and tests anew the nation’s constitutional system of checks and balances.
Trump, who thrives on combat, has all but dared Democrats to take this step, confident that the specter of impeachment led by the opposition party will bolster rather than diminish his political support.
Meeting with world leaders at the United Nations, he previewed his defense in an all-caps tweet: “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”

Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post supplies useful context:

It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
And then there is Joe Biden. In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.” The Post reports that it is “unclear how seriously Shokin — who was under fire by U.S. and European officials for not taking a more aggressive posture toward corruption overall — was scrutinizing Burisma when he was forced out.” But what is clear is that Biden bragged about getting him fired, declaring last year: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b–. He got fired.”
This weekend, Biden told reporters, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” That is flatly untrue. Hunter admitted in an interview with the New Yorker that his father expressed concern about the Burisma post at least once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Moreover, the New Yorker reports that, “In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden.” That same month, the New York Times published an article about how Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine undermined the vice president’s anti-corruption message, which quoted a Biden spokesman saying it had no impact.
So, Biden was fully aware of his son’s involvement with Burisma when he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor in 2016.

In other words, Democrats think the president should be impeached for doing something in Ukraine that’s OK when Democrats do it? I can’t imagine that Americans are too stupid to see this, but then again, I couldn’t imagine 65 million people voting for Hillary, either.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Donald Trump

Queer Theory Pedophilia Jeopardy

Posted on | September 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Queer Theory Pedophilia Jeopardy

One of the points I’ve repeatedly made about Third Wave feminism over the past five years is about Judith Butler’s role in popularizing a particular view of “gender.” In doing so, I dug deeply into the sources cited in Butler’s Gender Trouble, which is almost universally assigned as a required text in university Women’s Studies programs. Butler’s opaque academic jargon serves to conceal her authorial purpose, but when you start investigating her sources, you recognize that she is advocating extreme perversion. As I pointed out just the other day, for example, Michel Foucault advocated the abolition of age-of-consent laws. Another of Butler’s key sources was Gayle Rubin, who favorably cited the pedophile group NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) in opposition to laws against child pornography. Once you recognize this, the Third Wave feminist academic project of “Queer Theory” takes on a sinister significance, and for years, I’ve felt like I was shouting into the void on this subject. Does nobody else get it? Does no one care?

Say hello to Derrick Jensen, radical environmentalist and founding member of Deep Green Resistance (DGR). Part of DGR’s ideology is radical feminism of the Second Wave variety (e.g., Andrea Dworkin) and so it is that Jensen is an outspoken critic of Queer Theory. Here he is speaking at an event in Oregon in March 2018, when he begins citing the connections between Queer Theory and pedophilia.

 

This is remarkable — Jensen, indisputably a man of the Left, taking direct aim at one of the academic Left’s pet ideologies. And perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that Jensen’s book Anarchism and the Politics of Violation, which had been slated for publication last fall, got cancelled because he “dared to critique queer theory.”

(Hat-tip: Greg Tolan on Twitter.)



 

Category: Gays, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 09.24.19

Posted on | September 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Welcome To The Panopticon
Locomotive Breath: Michael Knowles Is Right – Greta Thunberg Is A Mentally Ill Child
EBL: Leftist Fantasy Time
Twitchy: Nothing To See Here? Lawyer Representing Whistleblower Has Some Interesting Stuff On His Resume
Louder With Crowder: Barstool Sports Founder Destroys NBC News Over Hit Piece

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Peterson’s Lunacy Reflects On Those Who Blindly Followed Him
American Greatness: Trouble In Government-Funded Paradise
American Power: The Golden Age Of Television?
American Thinker: Do Democratic Loyalists Really Know Their Party?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Functional Retard News
Babalu Blog: Greta Thunberg Glorified By Media In Communist Cuba
BattleSwarm: The Decline & Fall of Yale, also, The Twitter Primary For September 2019
Camp of the Saints: Ken Burns’ #CountryMusicPBS Part I Review
Cafe Hayek: Making The Case For a Policy Of Unilateral Free Trade (Again)
CDR Salamander: The Slow Way Is The Best Way For Venezuela
Da Tech Guy: Battles Seen & Unseen, also, FINALLY Free Of GoDaddy!
Don Surber: Tariffs Mean 2.4 Million Jobs, also, Media Goes Kamikaze On Trump
First Street Journal: The Democrats And Their Zero-Emission Vehicle Plans
The Geller Report: Military-Aged Somali Muslim Migrant Arrested For Attacking 21 People, also, Trump Tells UN “Stop The Crimes Against People Of Faith”
Hogewash: Black Hole Tourism
Hollywood In Toto: The Real Reason Critics Hate Rambo – Last Blood, also, Samantha Bee – Anatomy of A Kavanaugh Smear
Joe For America: Stanislav Petrov Saved The World From Nuclear War In 1983
JustOneMinute: I Can’t Take Any More
Legal Insurrection: Pelosi Caves, Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry Into Trump, also, Left-Wing Georgetown Students Repeatedly Disrupt College Republican Climate Change Event
The PanAm Post: The Butterfly Effect – The UN Can’t Just Stand On The Sidelines In Venezuela
Power Line: Stand By Your Sham – Ilhan Omer Plays The Star Tribune, also, Impeachment Is On
Shark Tank: Rick Scott – “Stop Buying Chinese Products, Buy American”
Shot In The Dark: Clap For Service
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – CT Lawmakers Don’t Like To Be Blamed For Taxes
The Political Hat: The Sympathetic Magic Of Australia
This Ain’t Hell: In Regard To Tarawa, also, Happy 100th, Mrs. Gay
Victory Girls: Empty Stadiums – Has The “Woke” Media Killed The Entertainment Industry?
Volokh Conspiracy: We Have Now Entered The Twilight Zone
Weasel Zippers: Forget Biden’s Son, Now It’s Fauxcahontas’ Daughter Who’s Raising Eyebrows, also, American Woman Lectures Hong Kong Protesters Against Fighting Chicom Regime
Mark Steyn: Prince JT, Yes It Is He, JT Of Ottawa

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Category: Linkagery

Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!

Posted on | September 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

The media-generated anti-Trump hysteria never ends:

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff announced Tuesday that the whistleblower who filed a mysterious complaint, which includes allegations about President Donald Trump’s conduct, would like to speak to the committee.
The whistleblower has requested guidance from acting DNI Joseph Maguire on how to do so, Schiff said.
“We have been informed by the whistleblower’s counsel that their client would like to speak to our committee and has requested guidance from the Acting DNI as to how to do so,” Schiff tweeted.
“We’re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower’s testimony as soon as this week,” he added.
The whisteblower’s legal counsel did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
That news came shortly after Trump said Tuesday he will release the “unredacted transcript” of his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — a call which has been scrutinized in the wake of the whistleblower complaint and Trump’s admission that he pushed Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the conversation.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.
“I am currently at the United Nations representing our Country, but have authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine,” Trump tweeted while attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Everybody needs to calm the hell down. My expectation is that this latest “scandal” will prove to be nothing, and that it will end up hurting Democrats more than it hurts Trump. Be patient.



 

Category: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Ukraine

Trump Country

Posted on | September 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Trump Country

 

In 2016, Donald Trump got 84% of the vote in Johnson County, Kentucky. And you may ask, “Why does this matter?” Because there’s a tiny community in Johnson County called Butcher Hollow, which is the birthplace of Loretta Lynn, the First Lady of Country Music. If you start looking up the hometowns of Grand Ole Opry legends, you’ll find that practically all of them come from places that voted for Trump, including Merle Haggard, who was born in Kern County, California, which went for Trump by a 13-point margin. The political geography of country music might tell us more about America than just about any other metric:

Dwight Yoakam had me in tears Sunday night. I was watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary series about the history of country music, and Yoakam quoted a Merle Haggard song, “Holding Things Together,” which is about a man trying to raise his children after his wife has left the family. When Yoakam sang the verse about a heartbroken father attempting to comfort his daughter on her birthday, he choked up, and suddenly the tears were streaming from my eyes, too.
They just don’t write ’em like that anymore, not even in Nashville. Those old songs about hard times and broken hearts, crying in your beer over a cheating woman — you can literally feel the pain in the twanging voices and the whining steel guitars. And the men and women who sang those songs knew a thing or two about hard times, having come from backgrounds of poverty that few Americans in the 21st century can imagine.
Give credit to Burns for this: His eight-part series reminds us that what our contemporary progressives denounce as “white privilege” has never been universal in America, and it certainly didn’t typify the backgrounds of the folks who made Nashville famous as “Music City, U.S.A.” Haggard, for example, was born in Kern County, California, in 1937, the youngest of three children in a family that had left a farm in Oklahoma after their barn burned down. The Haggards were “Okies,” characters right out of a Steinbeck novel, at the bottom of the heap in one of the worst economic eras in American history. . . .

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



 

Category: American Spectator, Music
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