The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 08.19.17
Early Morning Weekend Edition

Posted on | August 19, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Out all day yesterday dealing with the VA and Social Security. Better late than never, right?
Also, I’m taking a break from the Book of Feces and Twatter for a month. Maybe longer.


OVER THE TRANSOM
Pagan Vigil: This Last Week In Free Speech
EBL: Is Steve Bannon Finished?
Twitchy: Charles Barkley Brings Voice Of Reason To Monument Debate
Louder With Crowder: Al Sharpton Angry Over His Taxes Going To Jefferson Monument. Yeah, About That…
According To Hoyt: No More White Knights
Vox Popoli: Unintended Consequences


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Hawt Chicks & Links – But No Nazis, also, Podcast #53 – The Charlottesville Episode
American Power: Paul Joseph Watson Demonetized At YouTube, also, Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed
American Thinker: Charlottesville And Its Aftermath – What If It Was A Setup?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Japan Resurgent Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For August 18
Bring The HEAT: And Now, Turku
Da Tech Guy: Of Gibson Guitars And A.J. Delgado, also, Wise Words From The Young
Don Surber: Change The Sheets And Kiss The Byrd Statue Goodbye, West Virginia
Dustbury: Ethical Treatment
The Geller Report: CNN Says Barcelona Jihad Attack May Be “Copycat” Of Charlottesville
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Legal LULZ Du Jour
Jammie Wearing Fools: A Warning From George Orwell On The “Monument Wars”
Joe For America: White House To Pardon Sheriff Joe?
JustOneMinute: Trump Pushes Antifa Onto The Front Page
Power Line: Apple Funds Left-Wing Hate Group, also, Statue Of Limitations (2)
Shark Tank: Why Didn’t Pelosi Take Down Confederate-Era Statues When She Was Speaker?
Shot In The Dark: Yet Another One Of Those Incidents That Never, Ever Happens
STUMP: Cook County Soda Tax – Look Who’s Come To Save The Day!
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Make History, Don’t Erase History, also, Islamic State Of Losers Attack Finland
This Ain’t Hell: Yes, They Are Paid To Protest, also, Saturday Morning Feelgood Stories
Weasel Zippers: New Orleans’ Joan of Arc Statue Vandalized, also, Montana City To Remove Confederate Monument After Native American Complaints
Megan McArdle: You Don’t Need A Thermomix, But You Should Want One
Mark Steyn: Umbrellas In The Rain, also, Dieppe 75 Years On


Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Media Blame-Game Routine

Posted on | August 19, 2017 | 2 Comments

James Alex Fields Jr., Random Idiot of the Month.

Ramming a car into a crowd of protesters is a bad idea, and I’m against it. Because I have not advocated political violence, I cannot be blamed for it, and I refuse to play along with the liberal guilt-trip game where conservatives are expected to deny, denounce and repudiate their beliefs because some random idiot did something wrong and stupid.

Da Tech Guy offers two laws of media outrage:

  1. The level of Outrage or interest of the media and their allies on the left concerning any insult or prevarication concerning a person or thing will routinely be equal to the inverse of the degree of the political distance between said media / leftists and and the target of said insult or prevarication at the time it is made.
  2. The level of acceptance of the positions and/or actions of any group or organization by the left and media is directly proportional to their current or potential value in electing liberal Democrats.

The media ignore (or in some cases, celebrate) political violence by the Left, as for example the riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte that were incited by the Black Lives Movement. Liberal journalists were OK with student radicals using violence (or the threat thereof) to disrupt or prevent campus appearances by Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and Heather Mac Donald. And whatever violence “antifa” protesters inflicted on attendees at the “Alt-Right” rally in Charlottesville is also acceptable to the mainstream media.

 

However, when the Random Idiot decided to plow his Dodge Challenger into the “antifa” mob, suddenly the media decided that political violence was a bad thing, and the Republican Party was to blame for it.

As to the “issue” that the media would have us believe that the Random Idiot’s crime symbolizes, Professor Glenn Reynolds nails it:

When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from “the Solid South,” we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.
Now the South isn’t “solid” anymore — or, more accurate, it’s becoming pretty solidly Republican — so rather than receiving cultural dispensations, it now gets targeted for cultural warfare.
That’s all that’s going on here.

“Democrat operatives with bylines,” indeed. If a majority of gay people ever started voting Republican, suddenly the liberal media would find a way to argue that homosexuality is a threat to progressive values.



 

Category: Media Bias

BANNON OUT AT WHITE HOUSE

Posted on | August 18, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

“Dance with the one that brung ya,” is always good advice in politics. Elected officials must represent the people who elected them, and the guy whose mission it was to speak for those people inside the Trump White House was Steve Bannon. It was Bannon’s self-chosen task to fight what he called “the Deep State,” the entrenched political interests in Washington opposed to any fundamental change in U.S. policy. Bannon understood, better than almost anyone in D.C., that the kind of voters who made the difference for Trump in last year’s election — swinging formerly “blue” states like Pennsylvania and Michigan into the GOP column for the first time in nearly 30 years — wanted a drastic change to the status quo. Bannon spoke of “economic nationalism” as the basis of Trump’s appeal to disaffected white working-class voters, and he understood that the liberal media — determined to defend the bipartisan globalist/welfare-state policy agenda — would wage an all-out war against the Trump administration. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that Bannon would become a casualty in that war:

Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, will leave his position at the White House after eight months on the job, the White House said on Friday.
The announcement came on his last day in the administration, the White House noted, announcing that Trump and chief of staff John Kelly had jointly arrived at the decision. They decided his last day would be today, according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Bannon’s exit will cap off a period of upheaval for the West Wing that has already seen the ouster of Trump’s chief of staff, press secretary, communications director, and several national security staffers.
As the former head of Breitbart, a fiery news outlet, Bannon had long drawn the ire of Democrats who viewed him as sympathetic to the “alt-right” movement. Calls for his resignation grew louder in the wake of racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.
Kelly, who took over from Reince Priebus last month, bristled at Bannon’s unorthodox style from the beginning, sources familiar with the situation have said. Kelly suspected Bannon was responsible for a series of negative stories about national security adviser H.R. McMaster, with whom Bannon had feuded over ideological differences.
Those sources have also said Bannon’s position as chief strategist came with an ill-defined portfolio that likely left his job duties unclear to Kelly.

Reports are that Bannon will return to Breitbart.com and “go ‘thermonuclear’ against ‘globalists’ that Bannon and his friends believe are ruining the Trump administration, and by extension, America.” This is good news, insofar as Bannon will be more effective outside the White House than inside an administration where he had reportedly been “marginalized” by his enemies, but it is a bad omen for Trump’s prospects of keeping his promise to “Make America Great Again.”

The media’s smear against Bannon as a proponent of “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” is easily refuted. David Horowitz mourned Bannon’s departure from the White House as a “sad day” and, if you know anything about Horowitz, you know how much he loathes racism.

Like Bannon, Horowitz understands that politics is a war of ideas, and only because the Democrats deliberately foment identity-group hostility do we have incidents like what happened in Charlottesville. Horowitz is correct that the Left is “the biggest hate movement in America,” and he knows that Steve Bannon understands this as well.

 

Category: Donald Trump, Politics

In The Mailbox: 08.17.17

Posted on | August 17, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.17.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Total Eclipse – Iron Maiden With Bonus Bark At The Moon
Twitchy: Glenn Beck Suggests Lefties Tear Down This Living Monument Dedicated To White Supremacy
Louder With Crowder: Antifa Vandalizes “Confederate” Monument – Actually, Statue Was About Unity


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It’s Time To Correctly Label Nazis
American Power: Barcelona Truck Jihad Massacre, also, Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
American Thinker: Take Down The Statues Of Robert Byrd
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Too Many Voters News
BattleSwarm: Another Crop Of Dan Backer Scam PACs
Bring The HEAT: USNS Puller To Be Commissioned As USS Puller
Da Tech Guy: How Weak Is Antifa’s Ideology If They Can’t Out-Argue Nazis?, also, Why Do The Media Insist On Distorting The Political Spectrum?
Don Surber: NYT Tries To Lie Its Way Out Of Libeling Palin, also, No, Civil Rights Did Not Give Republicans The South
Dustbury: In Lieu Of Actual Improvements
Fred On Everything: Heah Come Cognitive Dissonance! Run Like Hell!
The Geller Report: PayPal Cuts Ties With Anti-Semitic Groups – Well, Some Of Them
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, RICO Remnant News
Jammie Wearing Fools: Irony Alert – Charlottesville Candlelight Vigil Features Song From Racist Son Of Klansman
Joe For America: Why Was “Crowds On Demand” Recruiting In Charlotte, NC Last Week?
JustOneMinute: Why Did We Bother?, also, Civil War?
Power Line: Dana Milbank Reveals The Game, also, Statue Of Lincoln Defaced In Chicago
Shark Tank: Republican Candidates Lining Up To Take On Wasserman-Schultz
Shot In The Dark: Unclear On The Concept
STUMP: Cook County Soda Tax – Dear Lord, It’s Not Dead Yet
The Jawa Report: We’re Saved!, also, Attention Twitter Luser @NT_Sabiq
The Political Hat: Shaping The New “New Soviet” Person, Political Litmus Tests, Unlearning, And Safe Spaces Of Censorship
This Ain’t Hell: Something Stinks About Charlottesville, also, McAuliffe’s Lies
Weasel Zippers: More Arrested In Toppling Of Confederate Statue In Durham, also, Pelosi To Call For Removal Of “Reprehensible” DemocratConfederate Statues From Capitol
Megan McArdle: Trump Disgusts Republicans. What Are They Going To Do About It?
Mark Steyn: The Man Who Invented Elvis, also, Less Speech Leads To More Violence


Today’s Digital Deals
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Category: Linkagery

Top Democrat Leader’s Aide Indicted

Posted on | August 17, 2017 | Comments Off on Top Democrat Leader’s Aide Indicted

Democrat aide Imran Awan (left); Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (right).

Here’s a huge scandal that CNN will pretend doesn’t matter:

FOX News reports former IT aide for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Imran Awan, has been indicted on four counts. In July, Awan was arrested at Dulles airport while trying to flee the United States.

More details from Fox News:

Imran Awan, a former IT aide for Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was indicted Thursday on four counts including bank fraud and making false statements.
The indictment also includes his wife Hina Alvi.
The grand jury decision in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia comes roughly a month after Awan was arrested at Dulles airport in Virginia trying to board a plane to Pakistan, where his family is from.
Awan and other IT aides for House Democrats have been on investigators’ radar for months over concerns of possible double-billing, alleged equipment theft, and access to sensitive computer systems. Most lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Schultz had kept him on until his arrest in July.
The indictment itself, which merely represents formal charges and is not a finding of guilt, addresses separate allegations that Awan and his wife engaged in a conspiracy to obtain home equity lines of credit from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by giving false information about two properties — and then sending the proceeds to individuals in Pakistan.
The case has put renewed scrutiny on Wasserman Schultz for keeping Awan on the payroll for months, even after a criminal investigation was revealed and he was barred from the House IT network. 

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.) We expect CNN to blame this on Russian hackers, just as soon as they finish blaming the Barcelona attack on Confederate monuments. Must! Defend! The Narrative!



 

Category: Crime, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Democrats, Media Bias

Neo-Nazi Alt-Right Trump Supporter Commits Racist Terrorism in … SPAIN?

Posted on | August 17, 2017 | 1 Comment

Morocco native Driss Oukabir reportedly rented van used in attack.

In the wake of the pretzel-logic guilt-trip that blamed Republicans for Saturday’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, CNN will no doubt find some way to blame President Trump for the Barcelona attack:

Barcelona authorities released the identity of one of the terror suspects behind the deadly ISIS-inspired van attack. Driss Oukabir is suspected to have been involved in the attack amid reports a Spanish passport with an Arabic surname was found inside of the white van. . . .

More from the London Daily Mail:

At least 13 people have been killed and dozens injured in Barcelona after a van ploughed into pedestrians in a busy tourist street.
More than two hours after the atrocity a man was shot dead after driving through a roadblock in a Ford Focus and opening fire, injuring two police officers.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack, describing the killers as ‘soldiers of the Islamic state’. Terror police have arrested two suspects.
One of them is believed to be Driss Oukabir, a Catalan resident in his late 20s of Moroccan origin. It is unclear who the second detained suspect is, but reports in Spain have suggested Oukabir’s brother has been taken into custody.
Oukabir, who has reportedly served time in a Spanish prison, had earlier rented one of the vans used in the deadly attack. The suspect is being treated ‘as a terrorist’, police in Barcelona have confirmed.

Do they have any statues of Robert E. Lee in Barcelona? Because we’ve been informed by the media (and by every pundit on Twitter) that Confederate monuments are a major cause of terrorism.

UPDATE: The Republican Party Rush Limbaugh Sons of Confederate Veterans ISIS has now claimed responsibility for the Barcelona attack:

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack via its Amaq agency, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.
A spokesperson for the Guardia Civil, Spain’s national police force, told ABC News the man who rented the van has been identified as Driss Oukabir. It is unclear if he is connected to the attack.
An eyewitness told a Spanish television station that the suspect was running people over in his van for nearly 1,000 feet before fleeing into a nearby Turkish restaurant. . . .
According to police, a car hit a police checkpoint at Avinguda Diagonal, a popular shopping avenue in the city. The area was evacuated and police are investigating if the incident is connected to the Las Ramblas attack. Police confirmed that one person was shot and killed in that incident, but they have still not confirmed if there is any connection between this incident and the attack in Las Ramblas. Two police officers were injured in the checkpoint incident.
Las Ramblas is a popular tourist area in Spain’s second-largest city. . . .

These right-wing terrorist Trump supporters are everywhere!



 

 

Category: Islam, Terrorism

NY Times Editor Claims Incompetence Led Him to Libel Sarah Palin

Posted on | August 17, 2017 | 2 Comments

Testifying at a hearing in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, suggested that it was an accident — rhetorical clumsiness — which led him to falsely blame Palin for “political incitement” in a 2011 mass murder:

“What I wasn’t trying to say was that there was a direct causal link between this map and the shooting,” Bennet said. “What I was concerned about was the overall climate of political incitement.”
He continued: “I didn’t mean to suggest that Loughner wasn’t responsible. … I did not think that Jared Loughner was acting because of this map.”
Bennet testified that he had not, in advance of publication, read specific pieces of reporting in the Times about a potential connection between the PAC ad and the shooting, and said he did not know at the time of publication whether Loughner had seen the map. He also said that he had not personally seen the map. “I was not reporting the editorial, your honor, I was editing it,” Bennet said.

Hot Air’s John Sexton quotes the editorial in question and, even if Bennet’s testimony can protect the Times from an “actual malice” finding, he’s more or less confessed to “reckless disregard for truth.” An editor is responsible for the changes he makes to copy and, if his changes result in the publication of a factual error, the distinction between reporting and editing is of no consequence in a libel case. The New York Times cannot claim that it was impossible for Bennet to know Jared Loughner’s motive, because this subject was extensively covered — by me, in a January 2011 article for American Spectator:

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Jared Loughner wasn’t motivated by anything Sarah Palin did. Nor, contrary to James Bennet’s testimony, was the gunman motivated by an “overall climate of political incitement.” He was motivated by his own psychosis and by an anti-Christian conspiracy theory video that had no connection at all to Sarah Palin.

While I spent dozens of hours researching Zeitgeist, and the weird cult the video spawned, apparently no one at the New York Times cared enough about the truth to bother discovering Loughner’s actual motives. They’re not journalists, they are Democrat Party propagandists, which was why they published the libelous claim that the “target” map in a political ad had some connection to Loughner’s crime, six years after this propaganda claim had been conclusively proven false.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Media Bias, New York Times, Sarah Palin

Thoughts For Accusers On Twitter

Posted on | August 16, 2017 | Comments Off on Thoughts For Accusers On Twitter

by Smitty

On twitter tonight, I replied to Rick Wilson’s quotation of Robert E. Lee’s descendants, and opened the floodgates:

  • I simply muted those calling me a Nazi almost immediately.
  • Then there were those who attempted to make this about Heather Heyer, the paralegal tragically killed.
  • Then there were those attempting to shame me for having “Christian” as the first word on my profile.

What a bunch of bullies. Sure: it was overwhelming, and I stepped away from the keyboard. Leave them their tactical victory.

It makes sense to compose a blog post at a distance. It’s more satisfying to reply at length to the accusers.

There is little hope that they will read it in an open-minded way (that one might have thought a ‘liberal’ would insist upon) though. If read at all, one anticipates that this will be cherry-picked for further insult-hurling.

Nevertheless, here are some points for consideration, Ye Peanut Gallery:

  1. Jesus of Nazareth has been the meaning of life for almost 40 years now to me. He died for every human being having the 23 chromosome pairs we all do at conception, when we are uniquely ourselves.
  2. About half that time was spent in the Navy, supporting and defending the Constitution. Also, the right of people to behave as ignorantly as they wish on free services like Twitter.
  3. If you support the Bill of Rights, you should recoil at efforts to adjudicate who is permitted to speak, irrespective of the boneheaded ugliness of the speech. Let us judge our own speech, and minimize offense, while accepting the right of even the most morally polluted to spill forth their ideas, within the bounds of the law.
  4. Thus, I cannot accept the Orwellian efforts to:
    • Privilege one foul group over another. The Alt-Right and Antifa are more similar than disparate.
    • Divide humanity into racial groups for purposes of denigrating others–Jesus personally, explicitly, rejected racism.

I forgive, in advance, anybody who refuses to accept these words at face value. I expect to stand accused of:

  • Lying outright.
  • Not meaning what I say.
  • Meaning what I say, but having some unfortunate psychological impairment where things I don’t consciously mean lurk beneath my words and somehow undermine them.

Again, I forgive my accusers. Lacking the concept of objective Truth, even an imperfect attempt at communicating some Truth to the accusers is doomed. As long as you understand that the accusers themselves are not the audience (God is) then this is not a big deal.

Category: Uncategorized
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