The Other McCain

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

The Catastrophe at Evergreen State

Posted on | June 23, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

A state college has surrendered to the totalitarian mob:

Students at Evergreen State College are doubling down on their effort to silence speech that, in their view, endangers the lives of “black, trans, fems, and [other] students on this campus.”
The students, some of whom have actively demanded the ousting of biology professor Bret Weinstein after he questioned the propriety of asking white students and faculty to leave campus for a “Day of Absence,” accused the educator of “validating” white supremacists and Nazis.
“Although Bret has not personally said, you know, ‘go out and attack the students,’ that has been the result of his actions,” Hadley, a student at the college, proclaimed in an interview with Vice News. “He has incited white supremacists and he has validated white supremacists and Nazis in our community and in the nation. And I don’t think that should be protected by free speech.” . . .
“So at this point, we would like Bret to be fired. But that isn’t happening…I don’t care what happens to Bret anymore,” Hadley declared. “He can go and be racist and be a piece of sh– wherever he wants to do that. Hopefully, long-term, we can just weed out people like Bret.”

As has been pointed out, Professor Weinstein “supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement” and calls himself “deeply progressive,” but that’s not enough for the thugs at Evergreen.

 

Watching that 7-minute video report by Michael Moynihan, you get a very clear idea of what kind of “students” are now effectively running Evergreen College in the absence of real leadership by the college’s administration and faculty. “Social justice” is the province of a bunch of spoiled-rotten brats with the emotional maturity of 4-year-olds.

Enrollment at Evergreen has been sagging in recent years because of the school’s left-wing reputation. The environment on the campus in Olympia is perceived as “too weird and freaky for people who want a normal education,” one student said in 2014. Certainly the anti-Weinstein protests have done nothing to repair Evergreen’s bad reputation, and it is likely enrollment will decline even further. Can any parent imagine sending their child to such a lunatic asylum? If the object of a college education is to prepare students for careers, what sort of careers are Evergreen students being prepared for? Do you think major corporations are eager to hire young people who are in the habit of slinging accusations of “white supremacy” at anyone who disagrees with them?

As Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out, liberals are arguing that “Weinstein should have just kept his mouth shut and suffered in silence.” Why is this faculty silence necessary? Because when the general public becomes aware of the totalitarian climate on college campuses, they don’t like it, and public reaction has a negative impact on enrollment and budgets:

Enrollment on the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus is expected to decline more than 7 percent in the fall and budget cuts will require the elimination of up to 400 jobs, interim Chancellor Garnett Stokes said [May 15] at a budget forum.
The enrollment decline estimate is the first provided by MU officials for overall fall numbers. The university has already said it expects first-time freshman enrollment to decline by almost 18 percent.
For the school year that ended last week, enrollment at MU was 33,266, down 6.1 percent from the previous year’s record. If Stokes’ projection of a 7.4 percent decline is accurate, enrollment in the fall will be about 30,800, the lowest in nine years. . . .
Overall, the university is planning to cut 12 percent from the academic and administrative operations budget, or about $55 million. . . .

Why is this happening? Why has enrollment declined at the University of Missouri? Because in 2015, the faculty and administration allowed the campus to be taken over by Black Lives Matter protesters. The University of Missouri became a national symbol of this anti-white hate movement and threats from the angry black mobs “left many students, faculty, and parents feeling fearful of violence and concerned about their safety.”

We might reasonably expect enrollment at Evergreen State to decline sharply in the fall, and the impact on the school’s budget will probably be quite shocking to radical students who think they can intimidate anyone who disagrees with them. The progressive thug mob at Evergreen State needs to be reminded that parents have a choice about what kind of education they provide their children, and you can’t expect parents to pay money to send their kids to a lunatic asylum like Evergreen State.



 

Category: Education, Racism

Deranged Feminist Attacks Church, Police, ‘Patriarchy’ in Florida

Posted on | June 23, 2017 | Comments Off on Deranged Feminist Attacks Church, Police, ‘Patriarchy’ in Florida

Barbara J. Phillips was arrested in Gainesville.

A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against “patriarchy.”

Barbara J. Phillips, 40, was charged with charged with stalking, criminal mischief and damaging church property, the Gainesville Sun reported June 19. An arrest report listed Phillips as homeless and said she “appears to be suffering from some mental health problems”:

On June 13, a Gainesville Police Department officer reported his patrol car had a broken passenger mirror and a flat tire, after nails had been placed around the car overnight. His air-conditioning unit was broken and a welcome post from his yard flung into the street, the report said.
About the same time, St. Andrews Church’s leader and his wife reported two similar acts of vandalism, including their power being turned off and nails — that appeared to match the ones placed near the officer’s car — being placed around one of their cars, according to the Alachua County sheriff’s office.
On June 12, two people arrived at the church at 2715 NW 39th Ave., and found feces in front of its front door and smeared on door handles, what appeared to be glue dripping from keyholes, and a number of windows, all cracked in the bottom left corner. They initially saw a gray Prius, later determined to belong to Phillips, in front of the church, driven away as they arrived.
The air-conditioning unit had been tampered with, and nonsensical writings were made in permanent marker on church pillars and doors, which the report described as “rants” about “patriarchy,” “misogyny and sexism” and “bad spirits toward me.”
Phillips . . . had attended some church gatherings at the home of Rev. Ronald Kuykendall, who leads St. Andrew’s Church, he told police.
Phillips told police she believes the reverend had been “attacking her mind” via “the spirit realm,” the report said.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

Category: Crime, Florida, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.22.17

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.22.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Rebecca Burger, RIP
Twitchy: Ben Shapiro Uses Nancy Pelosi’s Own Whiny #HealthcareBill Tweet Against Her
Louder With Crowder: Sussex Police Brag About Facebook “Hate Speech” Arrest As Terrorists Continue To Run Free


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australia Is Still My Country
American Power: Time For Nancy Pelosi To Step Down?, also, Bryan Burrough, Days Of Rage
American Thinker: The Forgotten War That Changed American History
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Nork Nutbar News
BattleSwarm: Waco Biker Shootout Update
Da Tech Guy: Democrats In GA-06 – Mission Accomplished
Don Surber: Judge Boots Saint Preet
Dustbury: Always Be Closing
Fred On Everything: GIGO And The Intelligence of Countries – Disordered Thoughts
The Geller Report: Minneapolis Installs Sharia Hotlines For Muslims To Report “Islamophobia”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Hillary Told Then-FBI Director Mueller To Deliver Uranium To Russians In 2009 Tarmac Meeting
JustOneMinute: They All Died Serving Their Country, Even The White Ones
Power Line: Harvard’s “Black Only” Commencement, also, Senator Cotton Does The Times In Ten Tweets
Shot In The Dark: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Mental Illness And You, also, Sandcrawler PSA – Helicopter Parenting Is Fascist
The Political Hat: The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed
This Ain’t Hell: Cameo Williams Convicted Of Defrauding VA, also, Canadian Sniper’s Longest Shot
Weasel Zippers: Study Supports Trump – 5.7 Million Illegals May Have Voted, also, Congressional Black Caucus Refuses To Meet With Trump Because Omarosa Invited Them
Megan McArdle: Uber Had The CEO It Needed
Mark Steyn: Fifteen Lawyers In Search Of A Crime


Today’s Digital Deals
Kindle Daily Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Further Thoughts on ‘The Big Short’

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | Comments Off on Further Thoughts on ‘The Big Short’

My reference to The Big Short and the housing bubble in my post about Tuesday’s special election prompted an email from a reader:

I was reading your discussion of the Big Short and you are exactly right about the people who got mortgages they could not pay being just as “guilty”, however you define it, as the people who gave them the mortgages. There are two things that infuriate me about the housing bubble. First, once people start getting loans they can’t pay back and don’t figure they ever will, they will always outbid honest people or if they don’t force honest people to pay more than they should have had to for a home. If I go out and get a loan I can afford to pay back, I can’t outbid the jackass who will borrow anything on the bet that he can flip the house. And that sucks. And as someone who was unable to buy a house during the boom, I resent the hell out of those people. The second thing about the situation is when those bets were paying off and people were flipping houses and making money, no one gave me any of that money. Those were their gains, not mine. But when the whole thing went tits up, I was supposed to feel sorry for them and view their having to give the house back to the bank and rent, something I had done my entire adult life as some kind of tragedy worthy of my aid. Yeah well screw them. Bubbles and speculation happen. But so do contractions. The fact that I ended up paying taxes to bail out a bunch of people who basically got rich at my expense is something I will never forgive.

Government intervention in the economy hurts real people in real ways. Democrats always talk of the way these interventions “help” people, but there is always a cost to be offset for every benefit. The costs in the case of subsidized cheap mortgages — including the notorious NINJA (“no income, no job”) mortgages that emerged during the housing bubble — included artificially bidding up home prices, in such a way that the honest would-be buyer was often priced out of the market. This also created an incentive for developers to build grotesque McMansions rather than more affordable family homes. Insofar as subsidizing mortgages function, as do most subsidies, as a form of deliberate economic redistribution, these programs amount to government picking winners and losers in the economy, which tends to create resentments and conflicts. The losers in such a redistribution scheme may not be correct in their choice of scapegoats to blame for their misfortune, but they are certainly justified in their belief that they’re getting screwed over.

Why do you think Hillary lost the election, huh? Here was a wealthy insider telling the “little people” about what she was going to do to “help” them, and the little people took a look at all those millions in the Clinton Foundation and realized that she really only cares about helping herself.

In 2014 Peter Wallison’s book Hidden in Plain Sight examined the role of “nontraditional mortgages” in causing the housing bubble. Here’s a US News & World Report article about the book:

Two decades ago, the major lenders employed mortgage underwriting requirements for collateral, capacity and credit history – the three Cs. Collateral meant that the home buyer made a down payment, preferably of 20 percent or more of the value of the house, never less than 10 percent. Capacity referred to the maximum share of a borrower’s income that could be devoted to mortgage payments and other debt service. Credit history meant that the borrower demonstrated an ability to manage credit responsibly, an ability which has come to be summarized in a credit score.
Nontraditional mortgages are those in which the lender deliberately waives one or more of the three Cs. Over a very short span of time, beginning in the late 1990s and culminating in 2007, the U.S. housing market came to be dominated by such mortgages. . . .
Government encouraged the growth in nontraditional mortgages. In the decades leading up to the crisis, government officials produced reports and statements criticizing lenders for sticking to the three Cs. They issued lending quotas to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and large commercial banks. To meet those quotas, those lenders had to turn to nontraditional mortgages.
The high volume and low quality of nontraditional mortgages was never disclosed properly. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac instead reported that their portfolios included only one or two percent of “subprime” loans. . . .

People who want to blame “Wall Street” for what went wrong are simply ignoring the role played by government in causing the crisis.



 

 

Category: Economics

Feminist Professor: ‘Trumpism’ Is About ‘Discourses of Masculinized Dominance’

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | 1 Comment

University of Oregon Professor C.J. Pascoe

You may think that elections are decided over issues of public policy, but that’s only because you’re a stupid Republican who doesn’t have a Ph.D. in sociology like Professor C.J. Pascoe:

The rise of Trumpism exemplifies a contest over masculinity, over who qualifies as a “real man.” . . . Both the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist movements exemplify similar discourses of masculinized dominance in which social actors claim masculinity through discourses and symbols of “compulsive heterosexuality” and divest others of it through the emasculating practices of a “fag discourse.” . . .
The election of President Trump is, in many ways, the story of American white, heterosexual masculinity, of a particularly noxious combination of racism, sexism and nationalism. Definitions of masculinity are culturally bound and “lives of particular groups of men are shaped by globally acting economic and political forces.” (Connell, 2011, p. 9). As global economic relations are reordered, so are masculinities (Salzinger, 2016). This means that the trend of western economic and social decline increasingly noted by scholars (Hoang, 2015; Carlson, 2015) has specific ramifications for white western men and definitions of masculinity. This decline is a particularly masculinized one, both in effects and response. . . .
Not surprisingly, given the association of American masculinity with workplace success, whiteness, heterosexuality and social and economic self-sufficiency, this decline has been particularly felt by working class white men who have responded with both rage and mourning . . .
Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” was in many ways a promise to “Make men ‘great again’ too, both fist-pounding, gun-toting guy-guys and high-flying entrepreneurs. To white, native born, heterosexual men he offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the ‘left-behinds’ of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities” (Hochschild 2016, p. 229). . . .
The story of Trumpism and movements against it is an example of the tenacity of inequality in gendered discourses. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you’re into brain-numbing gender-theory explanations, complete with citations to such radical feminist sources as Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Angela Davis, Catharine MacKinnon, Alison Jaggar, and Sheila Jeffreys. This is the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology I expose in my book Sex Trouble, and this ideology is now taught as gospel in university Women’s Studies programs everywhere.

The fact that the American education system is controlled by Democrats, employed at taxpayer expense to indoctrinate students with “progressive” ideology, is one of those public-policy issues that Professor Pascoe doesn’t consider as relevant to Trump’s election as her explanations about “definitions of masculinity” and “gendered discourses.” However, our universities are being funded by a massive bubble of student-loan debt — “$1.3 trillion in federal student debt owed by 42.4 million Americans,” and a recent study found that “millions of people had not made a payment on $137 billion in federal student loans for at least nine months in 2016, a 14 percent increase in defaults from a year earlier.”

What Professor Glenn Reynolds calls The Higher Education Bubble is a major public issue. When you see academic careerists like Professor Pascoe attacking “Trumpism,” you have to realize it’s because Trump represents a threat to their interests. Academia is failing, and the professors responsible for this failure want a student-loan bailout, to keep the federal subsidies rolling in to continue paying for their failures.



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

‘Lone Wolf’ Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Stabbing Police Officer in Flint Airport

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | Comments Off on ‘Lone Wolf’ Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Stabbing Police Officer in Flint Airport

 

Just another random coincidence:

Amor Ftouhi, a Canadian citizen originally from Tunisia, was identified as the “lone wolf” suspect accused of shouting “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing a police officer multiple times at an airport in Flint, Michigan.
The FBI is leading the incident into the attack that wounded police Lt. Jeff Neville. Neville is now in stable condition, although he initially in critical condition after the attack.
Ftouhi, 49, was identified at an early evening press conference. He is being charged with committing an act of violence at an airport, said David Lemisch, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. . . .
Ftouhi legally entered the United States through New York on June 16, the Detroit Free Press reports. . . .
Due in part to the suspect’s alleged utterance, the attack on Neville is being investigated as a possible terrorist attack. FBI officials called Ftouhi a “lone wolf attacker” during a news conference.
“The stabbing of a police officer at a Michigan airport on Wednesday is being investigated by the FBI as a possible terror attack,” Fox News reported.
The June 21 attack remains under investigation.
According to the criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the suspect, Amor Ftouhi, was also yelling about Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan during the attack. At one point he said, “you have killed people in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and we are all going to die.”

Notice the collective blame mentality by which Ftouhi justified his attack, so that Americans generally are blamed for deaths of people in foreign countries — none of which, incidentally, is Ftouhi’s home country of Tunis — and therefore he, in his own mind, is authorized to commit violence against any American as retaliation. This tribal worldview is the essence of Islamic terrorism. All Muslims everywhere are encouraged by radicals to view themselves as engaged in a global jihad against the unbelievers of the West, most particularly the United States. Radical Islam promotes an identity based upon a sense of collective victimhood, which fosters a paranoid hostility toward all non-Muslims, a sense of permanent grievance that justifies violence as revenge.

This hateful ideology has been growing among Muslims for decades. I think back to the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis as the real starting point of radical Islam, when defiant denunciations of America as “the Great Satan” characterized Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideology. The Ayatollah exploited a crude anti-American sentiment and his rhetoric tied together his regime with the anti-Israel hatred common among Muslims in the Middle East. Israel was the “Little Satan,” protected by the United States as the “Great Satan,” the Ayatollah preached, and so all of Israel’s enemies must also be enemies of the United States. While radical Islam has older historic roots than this (the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928), it is from the era of the Iranian revolution that we can trace the explosive rise of anti-Americanism as a core element of a worldwide Muslim movement, even before the emergence of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the 1990s. This is how you get to the situation of a Tunisian immigrating to Canada, and then traveling to Flint, Michigan, to stab a policeman in the neck because of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What does an airport cop in Michigan have to do with Syria, and why should a Tunisian care anyway? Only an ideology of collective blame and collective victimhood can serve to rationalize such madness.

Sing this to the tune of “Old McDonald”:

Old Mohammad had a war, E-I-E-I-O!
And in this war he had a wolf, E-I-E-I-O!
With a lone wolf here
And a lone wolf there,
Here a wolf, there a wolf, everywhere a lone wolf.
Old Mohammad had a war, E-I-E-I-O!

To dismiss such attackers as “lone wolves” ignores the fact that they see themselves as soldiers in a worldwide Islamic army, attacking Americans in retaliation for grievances of all Muslims everywhere. These “lone wolves” have declared war against America, a war waged because the Koran commands them to fight the unbeliever. The only thing Americans can do to stop “lone wolves” from killing us is to stop letting them hide among us while they wait for the opportunity to strike. It is not “Islamophobia” to take this threat seriously. It is not paranoia (or racism) to notice the pattern of radical Islamic terrorism, and to wonder how many “lone wolves” are just biding their time in anticipation of the next shooting, the next stabbing, the next vehicular homicide rampage.



 

Category: Islam, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 06.21.17

Posted on | June 21, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Alyssa Milano’s Sad Summer Day
Michelle Malkin: The Double Murder of Otto Warmbier
Twitchy: NRCC’s Video Summary of Brutal Day For Dems is “Glorious”
Louder With Crowder: Ted Cruz Slams Wimpy College Students Trying To Shut Down Free Speech


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I’ve Broken The Law And Now I’m On The Run
American Power: Jill Stein Isn’t Sorry, also, Frank Dikoetter, Mao’s Great Famine
American Thinker: The Progressive Tea Party That Never Was
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Ossoff Defeat Reaction Roundup
BLACKFIVE: Lee Child (ed.) MatchUP
Bring The HEAT: Splodey!
Da Tech Guy: Ten Thoughts Under My Fedora, also, Jon Fournier – When All Else Fails There’s Amateur Radio
Don Surber: Democrats Hold Referendums On Trump, Lose Twice, also, Eleven Reasons To Pull CNN’s Credentials
Dustbury: By Almost Any Other Name
The Geller Report: Muslim Shouts “Allahu Akbar” While Stabbing Cop In Neck At Flint Airport
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Cabin Boy Comments
Jammie Wearing Fools: Deep Bench – Disgraced Eric Holder Mulling 2020 Run
Joe For America: OSSOFF LOSES! California, New York Throw $25 Million Into Georgia Dumpster Fire
JustOneMinute: Baseload Power And The Death Of A Green Fantasy
Power Line: After Last Night
Shark Tank: Rubio, Ivanka Trump Clown #FakeNews Media
Shot In The Dark: Lest I Forget
STUMP: Pennsylvania Pensions – Liability Trends
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Stress Is Bad, MMMKay?, also, Today’s Islamic Contribution To Our Culture
The Political Hat: Buggy-Whips Of Reason
This Ain’t Hell: Georgia Can’t Be Bought – A Sweet, Sweet Victory, also, Classified Military Records
Weasel Zippers: Sanders Continues To Not Pay Interns A Living Wage, also, Congress Wants Universal Concealed Carry – Not For You
Mark Steyn: One-Way Multiculturalism, also, Deep-State Dinner Theatre

Today’s Digital Deals
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Category: Linkagery

GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble

Posted on | June 21, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Tuesday night, I monitored election results from Georgia’s 6th District special election on my phone (via AoSHQ Decision Desk) while finishing up a day mowing lawns for my son’s contracting business. We were leaning on the truck and enjoying cold beverages while Jim chatted with his business partner when the Decision Desk called it for Republican Karen Handel — a sweet moment. Democrats had poured an estimated $30 million into “Pajamaboy Carpetbagger” Jon Osoff’s doomed campaign and came away with another “L,” their fourth consecutive special-election defeat since Trump’s election.

Democrats’ hope of returning to power by riding a wave of anti-Trump “backlash” has been exposed as a delusion based on denial. Along with their media allies, Democrats simply refuse to accept the reality that American voters have rejected them. Democrats are the ex-boyfriend who refuses to move on, and voters are the girl getting stalked on Facebook by an obsessed loser who can’t take a hint. It’s creepy.

The now iconic image of the CNN crew at 9:43 pm ET Tuesday is a perfect distillation of a problem we can call the Establishment Media Bubble.

Those pictured were CNN’s political director David Chalian, CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger, CNN’s executive director of Political Programming/Sr. Political Analyst Mark Preston, and Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash.

The pretense of journalistic objectivity, which is the Establishment Media’s stock in trade, has become so transparently implausible that no intelligent viewer could be deceived by it. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, the media’s pretense of political expertise was even more brutally exposed as a fraud — a hoax as bogus as “Haven Monahan.”

If Mark Preston is such an insightful political analyst, why couldn’t CNN accurately predict the outcome of this election? For the same reason that CNN was so disastrously wrong in 2016: They are no longer a news organization, but instead are a Democrat propaganda operation. Mark Preston is a partisan Democrat who, as a University of Massachusetts student, worked in Ted Kennedy’s office. Ask yourself this question: In his role as a CNN executive, would Mark Preston ever hire a reporter who had worked for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Answer: Fuck no.

CNN, like every other Establishment Media organization, actively discriminates against Republicans in its hiring decisions. Mark Preston’s network is a sort of political cult that only employs True Believers. The organization’s journalistic standards are subordinated to its political mission, which is to persuade viewers to vote Democrat. Period.

 

* * * * *

 

When my son had finished up talking with his business partner Tuesday night, we went to my son’s house and watched The Big Short on Netflix. My son had already seen the movie twice, but I never had, and I kept trying to shush him and my brother, who were talking during most of the show. Because a lot of my son’s business involves “repo flips” — rehabbing properties that have been repossessed, so that they can be resold — he has a direct familiarity with how the housing market operates at the practical level. And he’s been doing this kind of work since he was a teenager, during the final years of the bubble, so he can tell you what it was like from the ant’s-eye view. The Big Short is a fascinating movie, but the “moral of the story” at the end of the film is badly flawed. The filmmakers want to sell the audience an “Occupy Wall Street”/Bernie Sanders left-populist myth, that the subprime mortgage industry was a result of deregulation and/or Bush-era Republican corruption.

“Stop the movie!” I shouted at Jim, when we got to that payoff scene, after Mark Baum (who in real life is actually Steve Eisman) has made the final decision to sell his short options. “The people who got those mortgages were as guilty as the people who gave them the mortgages!”

If you were buying a $400,000 home with a zero-down ARM for which you could not qualify under any normal standards of credit worthiness, you weren’t the victim of a fraud, you were an active accomplice. People who “bought” homes with so-called NINJA (no income, no job) loans were engaged in an immoral enterprise, and it is wrong to exempt them from blame for doing something they must have known was wrong.

To repeat what I’ve said before: If something seems too good to be true, it is either (a) not really true, or (b) not really good. The notion that any random loser could (and should) become a homeowner was always dubious, and government policies intended to promote minority home ownership By Any Means Necessary played a huge role in the housing bubble, a crucial factor that The Big Short does not acknowledge. The filmmakers want to exempt from blame the people who became “homeowners” by getting ARM mortgages they knew (or should have known) they would not be able to pay back. If you want to blame “greed” for the housing bubble, isn’t it true that the people who bought homes with NINJA loans were as greedy, in their own way, as the bond hustlers whose collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) financed those loans?

Well, what does this have to do with CNN’s pathetic excuse for political journalism? It’s this — the people who watch CNN are as much a part of the problems as the people who run CNN. Just as the housing bubble could never have happened, had there not been so many uncreditworthy borrowers willing to buy homes with no-money-down ARMs, there could be no Establishment Media Bubble, if there weren’t so many people willing to consume the blatantly biased “journalism” produced by CNN (and NBC, and the New York Times, etc.). You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of Democrat voters, and the Establishment Media’s business is based on exploiting this stupidity.

The Democrat viewers who let CNN convince them that Jon Osoff was going to win GA-6, and thereby vindicate the anti-Trump #Resistance, learned nothing from Tuesday night’s results. Those viewers woke up this morning and turned on their TVs to watch the “experts” on CNN explain to them what went wrong and what this means for the future. But why should anyone believe the Establishment Media’s explanations for another Democrat defeat, when the Establishment Media failed to predict this defeat, in the same way they failed to predict Hillary’s defeat?

 

Mark Preston is not an omniscient political genius. He is not really that much smarter than the average Democrat, or else he wouldn’t have been sitting there Tuesday night on the CNN set looking like a guy who just got home from Vegas and has to tell his wife how much money he lost.

Stephen Miller at Heat Street summarizes the result:

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

Category: CNN, Democrats, Election, Media Bias
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