The Republican National Committee (RNC) launched a new digital campaign ad and a fundraiser on Tuesday in response to CNN’s Don Lemon mocking Trump supporters during a segment on his show that went viral on Monday night. . . .
The segment featured Lemon, far-left op-ed writer Wajahat Ali, and anti-Trump establishment Republican Rick Wilson who mocked Trump supporters as being uneducated rednecks who could not read, spell, or use maps.
“CNN anchor Don Lemon, The New York Times’ Wajahat Ali and winless carnival barker and scam PAC artist Rick Wilson let everyday Americans know what the establishment thinks about them: President Trump’s supporters are just a bunch of illiterate idiots deserving of the elites’ smug derision,” RNC Spokesman Steve Guest told The Daily Wire in a statement. “In a matter of seconds, CNN summed up the elite left’s disdain for half of America.”
Guest added, “Reminder for voters: As Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders campaign across the South for your vote, Lemon, Ali, and Wilson just summarized what these candidates really think of you as they shake your hand and pose for selfies.”
CNN’S DON LEMON: Oh as I said, NPR is standing by their reporter after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused her of lying. It is the latest in a growing list of incidents involving Pompeo and journalists.
Joining me now to discuss, CNN Contributor Wajahat Ali and Rick Wilson. . . .
So, Rick, who do you think is a liar here?
RICK WILSON, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Look, Mike Pompeo has become one of the high priests of Trumpism. In the core of Trumpism is a war on the media. And so I think Mike Pompeo is trying to cast himself as this hero and to please Donald Trump. This isn’t about whether or not she could correctly identify Ukraine on a map, this is part of their performative, you know, media hatred that they engaged on the daily.
LEMON: Wajahat, I want to bring you in. Mary Louise Kelly told NPR, an NPR co-host that before ending the interview, Pompeo, quote, leaned in and glared at her and then he tried to give her a pop quiz. I mean, what is with this intimidation mode?
WAJAHAT ALI, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes, this is the pathetic insecurity of the spineless amoebas of men such as Mike Pompeo and the other men in Trump’s administration, right? . . .
WILSON: Of course. Of course. It’s — he’s just trying to demean her, and obviously it’s false. And look, he also knows deep in his heart that Donald Trump couldn’t find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter U and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. He knows that this is, you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world, and so that’s partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience, you know, credulous boomer rube demo that back Donald Trump, that wants to think that Donald Trump’s a smart one, and y’all — y’all elitists are dumb.
ALI: You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling even though —
WILSON: Your math, your reading.
ALI: Yes, your reading, you know. Your geography knowing other countries. Sipping your latte.
WILSON: All those lines on the map.
ALI: Only them elitists know where Ukraine is. . . .
The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the smug cackling, the accents.
If Donald Trump wins re-election this year, I’ll remember this brief CNN segment late one Saturday night in January as the perfect encapsulation for why it happened. pic.twitter.com/8kQ6zN9AZV
(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) Here we have “Republican strategist” Rick Wilson laughing it up with his two left-wing buddies about how only illiterate and uneducated people voted Republican in 2016. Rick and his CNN friends didn’t vote for Trump, thereby proving that they are so much smarter than the 62.9 million “credulous boomer rubes” who did.
Notice that Wajahat Ali uses the phrase “spineless amoeba” to describe Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a West Point alumnus who served five years as an Army officer in the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Oh, what excellent people “Republican strategist” Rick Wilson chooses as his friends.
We have previously discussed Lunden Alexis Roberts, the 29-year-old Arkansas woman who worked (under the stage name “Dallas”) at a D.C. strip club, where she met Joe Biden’s son, who fathered a bastard child with her. Now comes the news that Hunter Biden, 49, has agreed to pay his baby mama child support retroactive to November 2018, with monthly payments thereafter, and also to pay her court costs and attorneys’ fees. The amount of the settlement is undisclosed, but it is almost certainly a few hundred thousands dollars, lump sum, and three or four thousand a month thereafter. You might suppose that this would be considered big news, coming as it does during the impeachment trial of President Trump, whose alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” were related to his desire to have Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal with the natural gas firm Burisma.
Biden, who is a lawyer, originally denied having sex with Roberts.
But a DNA showed that the child was almost certainly his, and he stopped contesting paternity in the case.
So . . . Biden lied. He did not merely lie, but he lied to a court, and what happens to lawyers who lie in court? Isn’t disbarment appropriate? Perhaps there is some loophole for lying about sex, but whatever the case may be in terms of legal ethics, it is now established as a fact that you can never trust a Biden to tell the truth. Dishonesty is a hereditary trait, and yet every “mainstream” (i.e., liberal) news organization thinks we should just accept Joe Biden’s word that Hunter didn’t do anything wrong in accepting an $83,000-a-month “job” with Burisma:
A defense attorney for President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial slammed Hunter Biden’s employment with Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, saying the former vice president’s son lacked the experience necessary to land the job and its salary.
“Hunter Biden is paid over $83,000 a month, while the average American family of four during that time, each year, made less than $54,000, and that’s according to U.S. Census Bureau during that time,” said Pam Bondi.
Bondi, 54, submitted a list of articles she said shows Biden did not have the background required to sit on the board of Burisma. She suggested it was his connection to his father that helped secure the lucrative gig and shield him from legal and congressional inquiries.
“When speaking with ABC News about his qualifications to be on Burisma’s board, Hunter Biden didn’t point to any of the usual qualifications of a board member,” she said. “Hunter Biden had no experience in natural gas, no experience in the energy sector, no experience with Ukrainian regulatory affairs. As far as we know, he doesn’t speak Ukrainian.”
She added, “So, naturally, the media has asked questions about his board membership. Why was Hunter Biden on this board?”
But there’s no corruption worth investigating when Democrats do it. Just the cocaine-addicted son of the former vice president, impregnating strippers while on the payroll of Ukrainian kleptocrats — you’re promoting a “right-wing conspiracy theory” if you want to investigate.
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.
…..Melania and I send our warmest condolences to Vanessa and the wonderful Bryant family. May God be with you all!
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.
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?
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.
