The Other McCain

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

A War Against Human Nature

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | 1 Comment

Dana Pico calls attention to a recent exercise in anti-male hatred at a Maryland high school, amplified by the liberal media. Male students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School circulated a list rating their female classmates’ attractiveness. Some tattletale turned the boys in. “Dozens of girls decided to speak out, demanding a conversation with their male classmates about toxic masculinity,” the Washington Post reported.

Apparently, male admiration of female beauty is now considered “toxic,” you see. It is “objectifying” for teenage boys to take an interest in the physical attractiveness of teenage girls. This incident at a suburban high school was sufficiently newsworthy — “toxic masculinity”! — that the Washington Post published not one, but two articles about it, because there’s nothing else important going on in D.C., I guess. Dana comments:

Teenaged boys, reaching those years when they notice that teenaged girls are different from boys in some ways that are not quite as icky as they previously thought, have been forming opinions on which teenaged girls are more or less attractive to them. That’s how human sexual interaction begins, with one person finding another attractive in some way, and hoping that that other person feels the same about the first. This is simply normal, and a biological imperative; the human race would die out without it. . . .
In the end, one male student received an in-school detention, and one male student stood up in an long school assembly and was forced to made an apology.
And I’m sure that he learned his lesson! The lesson was: don’t put that kind of stuff on paper, where you can get caught for it.
But the male students will continue to judge the female students on their attractiveness, and the female students will continue to judge the male students on their looks, because that’s simply human nature.

You cannot eradicate human nature. You cannot compel people to conform to your ideological abstractions of “equality.” What you can do — if you bombard young people with propaganda and punish dissent — is permanently warp the personalities of a generation of youth.

And that’s what the radical feminist ideologues who control our educational system are doing. By punishing heterosexual boys for being heterosexual boys, in effect teaching them that it is wrong for them to be attracted to girls, they are destroying the character of these boys. Furthermore, by encouraging girls to celebrate the public humiliation of these boys, they are teaching girls to take pleasure in sadistic revenge.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party operatives running the public education system, this is excellent — these are the values and beliefs necessary to being a mindless progressive automaton. They are indoctrinating a generation of monstrous SJW zombies.

 

‘A Painful Gut Punch’ for MSNBC

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘A Painful Gut Punch’ for MSNBC

 

For 675 days of the Mueller investigation, Rachel Maddow enjoyed her best-ever ratings, promising her audience of angry Democrats that the special counsel would soon rid America of the unwelcome presidency of Donald J. Trump. For MSNBC viewers, the result was a catastrophe:

Last Friday, Robert Mueller turned over the results of his titanic Trump investigation to Attorney General William Barr, and on Sunday, Barr released a summary of the report that was a painful gut punch to a vast swath of MSNBC’s liberal audience. The key sentence: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” . . .
In the face of this near-catastrophic setback, the MSNBC resistance bravely soldiered on. On the air that night, Ari Melber engaged in a spirited grilling of Trump attorney Jay Sekulow. Legal analyst Neal Katyal cautioned Chris Hayes not to view Barr as the final word on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice. Lawrence O’Donnell emphasized that “no one in the news media . . . has read a single sentence of the Mueller report.” Rachel Maddow, hands down one of the Mueller saga’s most voracious and detail-oriented chroniclers, kicked off her show with a monologue diving into 15 questions the Barr report left her with. “You knew it was gonna be this kind of night, didn’t you?” she began. . . .
“There was an omnipresent awareness that this was, strategically, a very important story for us,” one source said. “There was no market for skepticism about it. As a business model, they see the ratings, and we were getting rewarded for this every day. When we had a slow day, it was kind of like: when in doubt, call the lawyers on; call the F.B.I. people.” . . .
For MSNBC, what next? “There are shows that built their identity around this,” a journalist there told me. “Where does that go?”

One night in a casino in Wheeling, West Virginia, I shoved all-in on a full house. How could I lose? Then the other guy turned over four of a kind.

Disappointment is too mild a word for what that felt like. Of all the times I’ve ever busted out of a poker game, I’d never lost on a full house, and how often do you see quads in Texas Hold ’Em? Probably that’s what Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC gang felt when Mueller wrapped up his investigation without any further indictments and without finding any evidence of “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign.

They had bought into the bogus narrative, sold to them by Clinton cronies like Sidney Blumenthal, that Trump’s election was inherently illegitimate, that various Russian shenanigans in the campaign (e.g., the hacking of DNC emails) had cheated Hillary out of her victory. Having assumed this as fact, and equally certain that various shady people associated with Trump must have been in on this Russian meddling, it seemed obvious to MSNBC viewers that Mueller would find proof of Trump’s guilt and then — poof!Orange Man Bad would be gone. Anyone who expressed doubt about this narrative was dismissed as a right-wing stooge of the evil Trump regime, and this cult mentality (to call it what it was, and is) made it possible to ignore all the evidence that contradicted the narrative.

The weird provenance of the Steele dossier? The damning text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? The fact that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the central figure in the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, was evidently in cahoots with Fusion GPS, the Clinton-connected firm which commissioned the dossier? There was something distinctly fishy about all this, and I was not the first to discern that the Mueller investigation looked suspiciously like a cover-up, intended to conceal, obscure and/or distract from what looked very much like a scheme by the Clinton campaign, assisted by Obama administration officials, to entrap Trump campaign officials in a phony scandal. If the “Russian collusion” narrative was actually a Democrat false-flag operation, and Mueller’s investigation was actually intended to bury evidence of that scheme, then there never was any real “collusion” and, ergo, it would be impossible to produce evidence of a conspiracy that never existed.

All such doubts about the Mueller probe, however obvious they might have been to anyone who paid attention and was willing to consider the possibility that Trump was innocent of “collusion,” were forbidden within the ideological bubble where Rachel Maddow and other MSNBC personnel have been operating in isolation the past two years. Certainty of Trump’s guilt was mandatory among Democrats, and trying to talk sense to them was like trying to explain to Stalin-era commissars that Lysenkoism was scientifically invalid. So they shoved all-in on Mueller, the way I once bet my stack on a full house, and now they’re flat busted.

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi collects their chips:

Members of the media like [MSNBC’s Chris] Matthews spent two years speaking of Mueller in mythical tones, hyping him as the savior who was pushing those “walls” that were forever said to be “closing in” on Trump. Mueller, it was repeatedly said, was helping bring about “the beginning of the end.”
Over and over, audiences were told the investigation had hit a “turning point,” after which Trump would either resign or be impeached, because as Brian Williams put it, summarizing a guest’s take, “Donald Trump is done.”
This manipulative brand of news programming preyed upon the emotional devastation of liberal audiences, particularly the older people who watch cable. It told them the horror they felt over Trump’s election would be alleviated in short order. The median age of the CNN viewer is 60 and MSNBC’s is 65, and these people were urged for years to place their trust in [Mueller], who knew all and whose investigation would surely lead to impeachment and “the end.”
All you had to do was keep tuning in, because the good news could come any minute now! The bombshell is coming! Never mind that this is causing our profits to soar. Don’t wonder about our motives, even though outlets like MSNBC saw a 62 percent bump in viewership in the first full year of Russiagate coverage. Just keep tuning in. The walls are closing in!

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) It’s kind of weird to see someone like Taibbi, who spent years in the left-wing swamp of Bush-era moonbattery, be the one to call out his fellow leftists on this. I suppose that, like conservatives chastened by the blunders in Iraq, Taibbi understands how important it is to call out the Elmer Gantry charlatans who’ve led the flock astray. Just as no conservative can ever trust Max Boot again, so also has Maddow blown her credibility on the Left by wagering everything on “Russia! Russia! Russia!” But I suppose most leftists are too stupid to understand how they’ve been hustled. After all, if they weren’t stupid, they never would have voted for Hillary, would they? Selah.



 

Never Date a Kardashian

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Never Date a Kardashian

 

How lucky can a guy be? Kris Humphries is 6-foot-9, a 13-season NBA veteran with the good looks of a male model, a successful businessman who owns multiple restaurant franchises. By all rights, Humphries should be a role model, the object of universal admiration, and yet he will never live down the one mistake in his life — he dated Kim Kardashian.

Humphries not only dated her, he married her in a two-part reality-TV episode, a 2011 marriage that last less than three months before Kardashian filed for divorce and started dating Kanye West a few months later. Tabloid reports claimed that the Humphries-Kardashian wedding was merely a publicity stunt staged by Kris Jenner to promote the Kardashian “brand,” and the damage this catastrophe inflicted on Humphries’ reputation left him with deep psychological scars:

Look, I should have known what I was getting into. I was definitely naive about how much my life was going to change. But the one thing that really bothers me is whenever people say that my marriage was fake.
There’s definitely a lot about that world that is not entirely real. But our actual relationship was 100% real. When it was clear that it wasn’t working … what can I say? It sucked. It’s never easy to go through the embarrassment of something like that — with your friends, with your family…. But when it plays out so publicly, in front of the world, it’s a whole other level. It was brutal.
I didn’t know how to handle it, because I never thought I was going to be famous in that way. . . .
I’ll be honest, I dealt with a lot of anxiety, especially in crowds. There was about a year where I was in a dark place. I didn’t want to leave my home. You feel like … I don’t know … the whole world hates you, but they don’t even know why. They don’t even know you at all. They just recognize your face, and they’re on you.
There were so many times when I was in a gas station just buying a water or something, and the cashier would give me a look, and I could just feel it coming.
“Hey, are you … That Guy?”

What happened to Chris Humphries could happen to any guy who, through overconfidence, mistakenly imagines it can’t happen to him. Humphries failed to ask: “Am I about to marry a narcissistic sociopath? Have I stumbled into a scam? Is this all a set-up? Am I a chump?”

The key to spotting a hustle is to remember this rule: If something seems too good to be true, it’s probably neither true nor actually good.

A good-looking woman can con a guy who would never let himself get conned in any other situation. Remember the old Johnny Rivers lyric:

Beware of pretty faces that you find.
A pretty face can hide an evil mind.

As hard as it may be to walk away from that kind of honey trap, you risk complete destruction if you don’t stop, step back and think about it.

Young men need to beware. It’s a dangerous world out there, and America’s parents must warn our sons: Never date a Kardashian.



 

Texts Show Michelle Obama Aide Intervened in Jussie Smollett Case

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | 1 Comment

Former Obama aide Tina Tchen (left); Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx (right).

The stench of corruption in Chicago surrounding the Jussie Smollett fake “hate crime” case has enraged the police chief, the mayor and everybody else with a sense of justice and propriety. Suspicions have focused on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who exchanged text messages with former Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen shortly after Smollett perpetrated his clumsy hoax:

Just days after Jussie Smollett told Chicago police he had fought off a pair of attackers who targeted him in an apparent hate crime, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx tried to persuade Police Supt. Eddie Johnson to turn the investigation over to the FBI.
Foxx’s call to Johnson came after an influential supporter of the “Empire” actor reached out to Foxx personally: Tina Tchen, a Chicago attorney and former chief of staff for former First Lady Michelle Obama, according to emails and text messages provided by Foxx to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to a public records request.
Tchen passed Foxx’s number to a relative of the actor, and the ensuing conversations with the family member were cited by Foxx last month as the reason she recused herself from Smollett’s prosecution . . .
Text messages show Tchen contacted Foxx on Feb. 1, three days after Smollett said he was jumped by two men as he walked home from a sandwich shop near his Streeterville home. Tchen texted Foxx to set up an early morning phone call.
“I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation,” Tchen wrote in a text sent before 5 a.m., seeking to set up a call with Foxx before Tchen left on an 8 a.m. flight to New York.
A few hours later, Foxx received a text from a relative of Smollett, who said she’d received the number from Tchen.
In an interview with the Sun-Times this week, Foxx said that the family member expressed concerns about leaked information about the investigation — information that media outlets attributed to “police sources.”
“They had no doubt about the quality of the investigation, but believed that the FBI would have a tighter lid on the information,” said Foxx, adding that Johnson initially seemed receptive to the idea of turning the case over to the FBI.

People are angry about this gross miscarriage of justice:

 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his city’s police force Tuesday afternoon, denouncing prosecutors for dropping charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett and slamming the episode as a “whitewash of justice.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Emanuel said they were not only furious with the outcome of Tuesday’s surprise hearing but also blindsided by the decision itself, with the officials only learning Smollett wouldn’t face charges for allegedly faking a hate crime at the same time the public found out.
“Where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have – because of a person’s position – one set of rules applies to them and another set of rules apply to everyone else,” Emanuel said. “Our officers did hard work day in and day out, countless hours working to unwind what actually happened that night. The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud…It’s not just the officers’ work, but the work of the grand jury that made a decision based on only a sliver of the evidence [presented]. Because of the judge’s decision, none of that evidence will ever be made public.” . . .
Emanuel also said: “[This case] sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power you’ll be treated one way and if you’re not you’ll be treated another way.”
Johnson blasted the prosecution for not consulting with cops and hinted the episode could further strain the relationship between the department and prosecutors.
“I don’t know what’s unusual for the state’s attorney but we found out about when you all did,” Johnson said. “Prosecutors have their discretion of course, we still have to work with the state’s attorneys office — We’ll have conversations after this.”
But Johnson made sure to add, unequivocally: “At the end of the day it was Smollett who committed this hoax.”

Let’s not mince words, eh? Somebody got bought off here, and there needs to be a FBI investigation of the corruption in Cook County, starting with Kim Foxx. Furthermore, federal prosecutors need to pursue charges against Smollett for the hoax “white powder” letters:

Although the state-level criminal charges were reportedly dropped against actor Jussie Smollett, it remains unclear whether the federal government is still investigating whether he was involved in sending a death threat to himself at “Empire’s” Chicago studio.
Before Smollett claimed two men attacked him with a chemical substance, the studio received a letter addressed to the actor containing a white powder, which turned out to be aspirin. A lawyer and a former police superintendent said the mailing the letter could be considered a terroristic hoax under federal law.
The letter used similar language to the supposed physical attack. Its return address said “MAGA,” and it said “You will die black fag” using letters cut out of magazines.
When Smollett’s alleged accomplices in faking the assault were arrested, police took a magazine and a book of stamps from their home.
A source told CBS2 that the letter was at the root of the better-publicized physical attack, saying “When the letter didn’t get enough attention, he concocted the staged attack.”
Two federal officials told ABC News in February that the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service were investigating whether he was involved in sending the letter. One said the letter was being analyzed in the FBI’s crime lab.
A lawyer told CWB Chicago: “If they have Smollett on the letter, he’ll be facing ‘terroristic hoax’ charges, a felony. There may be federal obstruction charges as well. If they want to bury him, they can.”
CWB also reported that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service was working with the FBI on the mail case and quoted a police officer saying that criminal investigators with the postal unit can be aggressive and deploys sophisticated techniques. “Those postal guys are the real deal,” he said. “They can do amazing things and aren’t afraid of the work.”

My hunch is that Attorney General William Barr’s going to be under pressure from You Know Who to make something happen in Chicago.



 

Jim, Jim and John Get Zany Mail

Posted on | March 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Jim, Jim and John Get Zany Mail

by Smitty

In The Mailbox: 03.26.19

Posted on | March 26, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.26.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Leftist Media is Screaming About The Upcoming Recession
EBL: Spinach Appreciation Day
Twitchy: Chicago PD Reportedly Furious With State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (Who Recused Herself) For Dropping Charges Against Jussie Smollett
Louder With Crowder: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Trolls Media With “Mueller Madness” Russian Bracket

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Democrats’ Russia Collusion Hoax Was Just Another Elite Lie, also, Ben Shapiro Pounces On Democrat Reactions To Mueller Report
American Thinker: America’s 233-Year-Old Shock At Jihad
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Tales of Two Cities News
Babalu Blog: The Socialists Endorse Bernie SandersWho Supports Dictatorships In Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, And Venezuela
BattleSwarm:  Creepy Porn Lawyer Avenatti Indicted On Felony Charges
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: The Ballistic Missile Calculus Changes
Da Tech Guy: Lenten Reflections – Redemption, also, Five Brief #Mueller Madness Thoughts Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Two Scoops Of Trumpenfreude For Creepy Porn Lawyer
Dustbury: A Formidable Scrabble Player
First Street Journal: The Democrats Want To Do Nothing For The Next Two Years
The Geller Report: WSJ Calls For Obama Administration To Be Held To Account For “Historic Abuse Of Government Surveillance Powers”, also, MN Senate Bans Use of Cellphones While Driving – Except For Hijabi-Wearing Muslimas
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Meanwhile At The Supreme Court
Hollywood In Toto: Colbert Rushes To Defend Occasional Cortex From…Herself
Joe For America: Rep. Nunes Says House Intel Will Make Criminal Referrals To AG Barr On FBI, DOJ Officials Who “Perpetrated The Hoax”
JustOneMinute: The Hits Keep Coming!
Legal Insurrection: Pentagon Authorizes $1 Billion To Begin Border Wall Construction, also, Dem Rep Al Green – “I Will Continue To Seek” President Trump’s Impeachment
The PanAm Post: Democrats’ Coup Attempt Fails As Mueller Investigation Implodes
Power Line: Will There Be An Accounting? also, My Day With Snopes
Shot In The Dark: From Now On, You Will Pronounce My Name In My Ancestral Norwegian, To My Satisfaction, Or Be Called A Bigot
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Flee South, Old Folks!
The Political Hat: The Question of Nationalism – The Common Vs. The Collective
This Ain’t Hell: Jussie Smollett Charges Dropped, Record To Be Expunged
Victory Girls: The Media Will Never Apologize For Their Russia Collusion Narrative
Volokh Conspiracy: Baltimore Tries To Use Eminent Domain To Condemn The Preakness Stakes Horse Race
Weasel Zippers: John Brennan Does 180 On Russia Collusion, also, Weird World Of Vegan YouTube Stars Imploding
Mark Steyn: Creepy Porn Soon-To-Be-Disbarred Lawyer


H&R Block Deluxe Tax Software With Refund Bonus
Amazon Warehouse Deals

‘Creepy Porn Lawyer’ Michael Avenatti Arrested by Feds in Extortion Scheme

Posted on | March 26, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Creepy Porn Lawyer’ Michael Avenatti Arrested by Feds in Extortion Scheme

 

It this the best week ever, or what?

The arrest Monday of Michael Avenatti in an extortion case reportedly linked to fellow celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos sparked trouble for two men who recently had been fixtures on cable news, especially CNN.
Avenatti, the pugnacious attorney best known for representing adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Trump, was arrested on charges that included trying to shake down Nike for as much as $25 million with a co-conspirator by threatening the company with bad publicity. The attorney, who also was accused of embezzling a client’s money to pay his own expenses, was charged with extortion and bank and wire fraud in separate cases in New York and California. He was arrested in New York.
The suspected co-conspirator was identified by The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal as Geragos, a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer also known for his work with celebrities. CNN, which had hired him as a contributor, cut ties with him Monday.
In a span of just over two months last year, Avenatti appeared 108 times on just two cable news outlets combined: CNN and MSNBC, as the Washington Free Beacon reported. He showed up on CNN 65 times and on MSNBC 43 times between March 7 and May 10 [2018] . . .
He also made headlines when he briefly explored the idea of a presidential bid last year.
In fact, CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter told Avenatti last year: “One reason I’m taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.”

Media exposure has cash value: “Free Beacon estimated Avenatti earned around $175 million in free media from the news networks.”

 

Since 2016, an anti-Trump industry has sprung up, with CNN and MSNBC as major components of that machinery, cranking out hour after hour of fear and loathing of the president. Michael Avenatti was among those who cashed in by supplying raw material for the cable-news Trump-haters, and the media vendors of this product bear responsibility for elevating the “Creepy Porn Lawyer” to nationwide celebrity status.

Ace: “Come on — aren’t you getting a little tired of #Winning?”



 

SPLC Meltdown Continues

Posted on | March 26, 2019 | Comments Off on SPLC Meltdown Continues

After the Southern Poverty Law Center fired co-founder Morris Dees, the resignation of SPLC president Richard Cohen soon followed, and now a third senior official of the anti-“hate” group is gone:

The shakeup of senior leadership at the Southern Poverty Law Center continued this week with the resignation of the center’s legal director, Rhonda Brownstein.
A source with knowledge of the matter confirmed the resignation to AL.com, but declined to speak publicly about the specifics of individual personnel decisions. Efforts to reach Brownstein have been unsuccessful.
Brownstein’s resignation [Sunday] comes two days after longtime SPLC President Richard Cohen resigned for undisclosed reasons, and a week after co-founder Morris Dees was fired amid questions about sexual harassment, gender and racial discrimination at the nonprofit organization.

Remember that the SPLC became a $400-milllion left-wing hate machine by “exposing” alleged Thought Crimes by others, and is now the target of at least three different lawsuits — one by Baltimore lawyer Glen Keith Allen, another by the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and a third by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. The mounting problems at the “Poverty Palace” in Montgomery were compounded when a former SPLC official wrote about the “hate” scam in the New Yorker, as Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner explains:

The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it’s an earnest effort to combat bigotry. . . .
“Outside of work,” author Bob Moser recalls of his days working for the supposed anti-hate group, “we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about … the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. ‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say.”
“[I]t was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam,” he adds.
The way Moser tells it, the center’s chief founder, Morris Dees, who was dismissed unceremoniously last week for unspecified reasons, discovered early on that he could rake in boatloads of cash by convincing “gullible Northern liberals” that his group is doing the hard work of fighting “hate.” . . .
“[T]he center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention,” he writes adding the group’s “central strategy” involves “taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.”
Moser adds there is an inescapable sense of “guilt” that comes with thinking about “the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”

No intelligent person ever believed the SPLC’s “hate” hype, but there are many liberals with more money than sense, and Morris Dees figured out a lucrative sure-fire way to take advantage of them.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)



 

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