I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Will Trump Have His Altamont? In an atmosphere of fast and loose, things have a way of getting out of hand.
Yeah, I get Donald Trump and Mick Jagger mixed up all the time, too. But then, everything you likely know about Altamont is wrong.
REPORT: Obama to announce Supreme Court nominee at 11 a.m. If Mitch McConnell keeps his promise, it won’t matter.
OH, THAT RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: “What will happen now if someone sees a man enter a woman’s restroom, and alerts the cops? Could the would-be rapist claim that he actually identifies as a woman, and demand that the officers leave him alone? It appears that, under de Blasio’s new regulation in New York, he can do just that,” as “The Left reaps the whirlwind with its transgender bathroom fixation.”
AND WE LET ‘EM OFF THE HOOK! The Millennials Are Who We Thought They Were.
OF COURSE THEY ARE: Ashe Schow: ‘Victim-centered’ sex assault investigations designed to railroad accused.
A new “victim-centered, trauma-informed” approach to handling campus sexual assault appears at first glance to be an improvement on the current model of allowing campus administrators to play police, judge, jury and executioner. But look deeper into the new guidelines and one will see that this is far from an improvement and more an attempt to railroad accused students while looking impartial.
The new blueprint, produced for the University of Texas System, will be used to train campus law enforcement officers how to adequately respond to accusations of sexual assault. This would give the investigations an appearance of legitimacy. But as I’ll show, the training provided to these officers will make the investigations even less legitimate.
For starters, the blueprint identifies accusers as “victims” throughout, pre-supposing the truthfulness of their claims. It also includes a section claiming unfounded and false allegations are rare (the implication being that accusers should automatically be believed). I’ve detailed before how the “rare” statistics are faulty, but beyond that, fact finders are not to predetermine the outcome at the beginning of a case.
But the most egregious demand in the blueprint, noted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Samantha Harris, is the requirement that police officers — who are supposed to be “neutral fact finders” — actively work to “anticipate” and “counter” defense strategies.
It seems to me that the mere existence of such policies, coupled with an overwhelming imbalance in the gender of accused vs. accusers despite social science evidence to the contrary, is prima facie proof that a campus is a gender-based hostile educational environment for male students.
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE DON:
A similar thing nearly happened in 2003, when the left tried its damnedest to convince California voters that Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hitler incarnate. The mainstream press portrayed Ah-nuld as a Nazi-loving rapist whose election would lead to Mexicans being sent to death camps as Einsatzgruppen squads turned Home Depot parking lots into killing fields of machine-gunned drywallers. But the right didn’t bite, and neither did Schwarzenegger, who watched his words, made few if any campaign missteps, and generally ran a clean, G-rated, inoffensive campaign, in which he pledged to be one of those jolly, likable, fiscally frugal Eisenhower Republicans that everyone can feel comfortable with.
And California ended up with one of its worst governors ever—a weak, deceitful, corrupt man of no principles who buckled at the first sign of defeat, freed Latino murderers in exchange for political favors, and left the state in economic shambles. A big-borrowing big spender who, after leaving office, straight-out admitted that his candidacy was a “joke” intended to “freak people out,” and that he ran for office with no idea what he would do if he actually won.
Make no mistake, that would most likely be Trump’s trajectory, too. Like the Austrian bodybuilder, Trump is a wealthy, high-profile loudmouth with no plan to govern and no principles to guide him. The major difference between the campaigns of the two egotistical publicity whores is that in 2003, leftist cries of “he’s a racist Nazi fascist” were met with a resounding “no he isn’t” from Schwarzenegger supporters. Today, those same charges are met by Trump fans with “so what if he is?” I’m not defending that response, but I’ll freely admit I find it fascinating. I chalk it up to fatigue. Too many people on the right are sick and tired of being policed on the issue of race, by the mainstream media, by SJWs in every corner of society, and by the brand protectors in their own party.
Or as Kathy Shaidle quipped at the start of the month, “Hitler? Be more worried that Trump will turn out to be like that other Austrian…”
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: FBI investigating alleged ISIL ‘kill list’ for Minnesota law enforcement.
SUSPECT IN CANADIAN FORCES RECRUITING CENTER ATTACK SAID ‘ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.’
Meanwhile, right on cue: Police chief calls for no ‘Islamophobia nonsense’ following knife attack on recruitment center.
Or as Mark Steyn put into wide circulation nearly a decade ago, quoting one of Tim Blair’s commenters, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
WHEN IT COMES TO THE MSM, TRUMP IS JUST FOLLOWING THE PLAYBOOK THE LEFT ESTABLISHED LONG AGO:
Shot: “Trump Campaign Continues Heavy-Handed Approach to Critical Media.”
— Stephen Kruiser, PJ Media.
Chaser: “How can it be unprecedented Hillary already did the same thing?”
— Sean Davis, The Federalist, tweeting a link to a June 2015 Boston Globe article titled, “Clinton campaign bans national pool reporter from N.H. events.”
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Obama Gratuitously Damages American Alliances.
WHERE WAS MARCO? Tim Alberta dissects a campaign that never got off the ground:
In one of 2016’s great unsolved mysteries, he spent much of the summer avoiding voters, so conspicuously absent that opposing campaign officials would ask reporters about his whereabouts. Officially, Rubio aides often claimed that he was on private fundraising swings. And yet for the entire third quarter of 2015, spanning from July through September, Rubio raised less than $6 million — a haul dwarfed by those of Bush, Cruz, and Ben Carson. Even Carly Fiorina raised more.
At the same time, news clips piled up detailing Rubio’s poor attendance record in the Senate. Stories alleged he’d missed half of his committee meetings; others claimed he had the Senate’s worst voting record. It was enough to prompt multiple Florida newspapers to pen editorials demanding his resignation. The “truant senator” narrative, on top of his absences from the trail and his lackluster fundraising, gave pause to Rubio’s friends and foes alike. “He’s not visiting the early states and organizing. He’s not raising money. And he’s got the worst Senate voting record,” Rick Tyler, the Cruz campaign’s former national spokesman, recalls thinking during that period. “So then people began to wonder: What exactly is he doing?”
Read the whole thing.
THE STORY OF THEIR MARRIAGE: The Clintons Can’t Make Their Mind Up on Johnson Controls.
JUSTICE IN THE HERMIT KINGDOM: U.S. student gets 15 years in N. Korea prison.
A University of Virginia student has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea for trying to steal a propaganda banner from a hotel. Twenty-one-year-old Otto Warmbier was given the sentence today by North Korea’s highest court.
He may be lucky just to survive 15 years in one of North Korea’s notorious labor camps.
COLION NOIR: Scotland: Where Nightmares Are Reality. And he’s not talking about the food. . . .
ISN’T EVERYTHING? Sumo Wrestling Fat Suit Declared ‘White Supremacist Racism’ at UC–Davis.
Geez — Hercule Poirot could kick these kids’ asses six ways to Belgium, and not even get a stain on his spats.
Perhaps a nice, relaxing facial would calm the hair-trigger nerves of the average screaming campus garbage baby* on either side of the Atlantic. Oh wait – “U. Wisconsin chancellor mistakes skincare masks for blackface, rips students for ‘racist’ photo.”
Fortunately though, one former college administrator has finally found peace in her safe space – and vice-versa: “Mizzou rejects fired Prof. Melissa Click’s appeal.”
To be fair, her appeal has become awfully selective these days, as Spinal Tap’s manager Ian Faith would say.
THIS IS BIPOLAR CNN: Back in January of 2011, “CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term ‘crosshairs’ during a segment: ‘We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language,’” as NewsBusters noted during that brief period of magical thinking when the DNC-MSM convinced themselves of the awesome talismanic powers of Sarah Palin’s clip-art and the media’s own gun-related metaphors.
But whatever dalliances with that form of politically correct Orwellian self-censorship, CNN has since thrown all caution to the wind: “CNN gives platform to maniac who tried to rush Trump; what were they thinking?”
“Trump is awful,” Iowahawk tweets, “but not nearly as awful as a media that is now almost literally encouraging his assassination.”
Funny, when Paddy Chayefsky wrote the script for Network in the mid-1970s, I don’t think he had intended it to be a how-to guide for programming 24-hour cable news in the 21st century.
SHOT: How Democrats abandoned the working class and spurred rise of Donald Trump.
—Kyle Smith, the New York Post.
Chaser: The Resentment Powering Trump.
—Molly Ball, the Atlantic.
Of course, it’s not like, in their manic quest for Internet clicks, the Atlantic fueled that resentment by surreptitiously comparing Bush to Hitler in 2007, then relentlessly attacking Sarah Palin and utterly fixating on the notion that Trig Palin wasn’t her son the following year, and then comparing milquetoast John Boehner to an Irish Republican terrorist in 2013, or anything.
Oh wait.
Related: What Trump’s Insults Tell Us About American Democracy: Welcome to “a future where politics and entertainment are finally, completely unified, to the detriment of both, and of everyone subjected to them.” In other words, Trump is Godzilla, spawned by the radioactive DNC-MSM overculture of the past quarter century.
THE GRAFT AWAKENS: “Hardball host Chris Matthews twice promoted Star Wars on his show two months after The Force Awakens director J. J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, donated to Kathleen Matthews’ congressional campaign, something Chris Matthews never disclosed. The MSNBC anchor is currently facing calls to suspend his show after it was revealed that 48 of Matthews’ guests on Hardball had donated $79,050 to his wife’s campaign, sometimes just before or after appearing on the show.”
HER HUSBAND’S TROUSERS AND HUMIDOR COULD NOT REACHED FOR COMMENT: Hillary says US needs president that doesn’t embarrass the country.
NARRATIVE BUILDING: SECRET SERVICE AGENT THROWS MEDIA PHOTOGRAPHER TO THE GROUND AT TRUMP EVENT. “Secret Service agents aren’t trained by Trump. Neither do they take their tactical orders from Trump. Yes, this happened at a Trump rally — but what the hell does it have to do with Trump?”
Read the whole thing.
FAILED COMMUNITY ORGANIZER SAYS WHAT?
Shot: “Obama dismayed by vulgarity, violence of campaign.”
—AP, yesterday.
Chaser: “Argue with neighbors, get in their faces… If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard… I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry…If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”
—A sampling of Obama’s violent vulgar rhetoric, 2008-2009.
INTO THEIR IMAGINATIONS? Harvard tells its women: Go where the rapes are.
IT’S ALL THE LEFT HAS: On the homeless, de Blasio’s moved from denial to magic thinking.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE, MARCO AND SOME OF US WILL REMEMBER: Marco Rubio drops out of presidential race.
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