ROGER SIMON: Forget the Economy—It’s the Jihad, Stupid!
In November, we’ll be asked to make a choice — to elect a president who, whatever his flaws, understands we’re fighting vicious, determined terrorists…or a president who’s a retread from an administration who believes were fighting memes and narratives.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1229.
JUST NBC HOW RADICALLY OBAMA AND HILLARY’S FAVORITE NETWORK VIEWS PARENTING THESE DAYS. As Rod Dreher writes on his column’s homepage linking to his recent post, “The Evil That Doctors Do — Brace yourself: The monsters look at a newborn’s genitals and assign a gender to him or her!” In the post itself, he adds, “This ridiculous video presentation speaks for itself. It comes to us courtesy of NBC News, which, you will notice, is not simply explaining what ‘cisgender’ means, but is promoting gender ideology. At least the presenter has actual pearls to clutch. Seriously, though, understand that what this person teaches is exactly what public schools that embrace gender theory are teaching to kids.”
That video dovetails remarkably well with former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s thoughts on the role of parenting in a clip shot by the network in 2013 to promote itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKjwe-bMl7Y
“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities,” Harris Perry said in her 2013 clip, which is another way of saying, “It Takes a Village.” Or as my colleagues Steve Green, Scott Ott and Bill Whittle noted in their PJTV Trifecta video critiquing Harris-Perry’s Brave New Worldism, “MSNBC Fascists Want Your Kids: MSNBC Wants to Replace Parents with Government.”
As Dreher concludes, “vote Hillary, you get the process of mainstreaming this idiocy and teaching it to kids as normal and sane continuing unimpeded.” And given Hillary’s past writing, that holds true for both of NBC’s videos.
Exit Quote: “…the choice in this election is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four years of their lives.”
—Hillary, coincidentally, the day before the video atop this post went online.
As they used to say at NBC before the fundamental transformation:
WANT TO UNDERSTAND HILLARY CLINTON? READ SAUL ALINSKY, Roger Kimball advises:
The prime Alinskyite supposition is that “all life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity.” One might — in fact, one should — mouth various nostrums about the welfare of children, access to healthcare, etc.; one might rail against inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., but at the end of the day, politics was all about the acquisition of power and life was all about politics.
This seems to me to be an accurate epitome of the Clintons’ modus operandi. It is not original to Alinsky, but he gave it a distinctively American twist. In his chapter on “tactics,” he offers various practical tips that might have come straight out of the Clinton, or the Obama, playbook.
Rule No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it … All issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” So if Bill forces himself on a Gennifer or Juanita, you avail yourself of this tactic by having James Carville appear on television scoffing that if you “drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Or consider the protracted abuse figures such as Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney were subjected to.
One of Alinsky’s most potent rules is No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” That included this: “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity.” Note the diction: Alinsky, like the Clintons, assumes he is dealing not with political opponents, people of good will who disagree about some aspect of a problem, but an enemy.
You do not seek to convince or persuade enemies. You seek to destroy them.
Especially those you consider permanently “irredeemable.” And note how the “Media Hides Hillary Clinton’s Religious Urge To Exile ‘Irredeemable’ Americans,” Neil Munro adds at Breitbart.com:
“You could put half of [Donald] Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘Basket of Deplorables’ … some of those folks, they are irredeemable,” she said Sept. 9 to a laughing audience of supporters.
“Irredeemable” is a religious term, and it describes people who have died and been condemned by God to hell forever, without any hope of redemption or a return to society, said Paul Kengor, a biographer of Hillary Clinton and a professor at Grove City College, in Pennsylvania.
In secular terms, “irredeemable” is best understood as a “death penalty, not just a political death penalty, but also a social death penalty” that exiles targeted people permanently outside the pale of civilization, Kengor says. His 2007 biography of Clinton is “God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life.”
In American politics, that’s an unprecedented claim, which leaves Clinton vulnerable.
“She has called herself many times an ‘Old Fashioned Methodist,’ so she ought to know that word usually has a religious content,” Kengor said. “Religious-left Christians can be Hellfire and Brimstone, and be the most [unforgiving] judgmental people on the planet,” he said, adding “that’s what we’re seeing.”
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism – whose final drafts were edited in 2007 when it was widely assumed that Hillary would be the Democrats’ nominee the following year – Hillary’s worldview synthesizes a variety of strains of American “Progressivism.” She would do a thorough job of completing Obama’s fundamental transformation of America if elected, particularly given that she’ll have four to eight years to completely reboot the Supreme Court. Just as Obama seemed far more eager to go to war against the milquetoast American Midwest than the radical Islamic Middle East, she’ll be growing that Basket Of Irredeemable Deplorables exponentially under her watch.
OIL PRICES: NOT AS IMPORTANT AS WE THOUGHT?
As you can imagine, oil prices are thought to have a big effect on the economy. When prices rise, that tells us that oil is scarce relative to demand, and therefore that we can make and consume less stuff than we’d like to. When prices fall, we are lolling about in unexpected bounty. A new paper by economists Christiane Baumeister and Lutz Kilian attempts to estimate just how big an effect the recent sharp decline in oil prices has had on the gross domestic product of the U.S. Their answer is … none.
Um, what? Come again?
That’s right, none. There was a stimulative effect on the consumer side, but it was offset by the loss of investment in the oil sector. . . .
If you’re a consumer who felt the pain of high gas prices, and breathed a sigh of relief when they finally dropped, this may seem surprising. But on a larger scale, whether high oil prices are good or bad for your economy depends on whether it’s a net importer or a net exporter. No one finds it hard to believe that falling oil prices were bad for big oil producers like Venezuela (and they were!). Conversely, if you’re a country that uses a lot of oil, and doesn’t produce any, it’s pretty obvious that higher oil prices will hurt, and lower ones will be good. What’s interesting is that, thanks to the shale oil boom in the U.S., this paper finds those two forces roughly balancing out.
It’s also interesting to ask what this could tell us about the coming election.
You can often do a surprisingly good job at predicting the outcomes of presidential races knowing only a few simple things about the economy. And yet, the models don’t all agree. The oldest prediction model, which is based on economic as well as non-economic indicators, has Republicans taking the White House. A Moody’s economist, on the other hand, says that for its model, which shows Hillary Clinton taking 326 votes in the electoral college, “The tie-breaker as of today is really gasoline prices.”
Yet that should show up in the polls, and right now, the polls aren’t showing us a comfortably dominant Clinton lead. This Baumeister-Kilian paper might give us some clue as to why: When America was a net importer of oil, gas prices might have had a substantial effect on elections, but that changed in recent years. The shale oil boom meant that even back when a lot of households were feeling pinched by higher fuel prices, people working in the oil industry, and associated firms, were made much better off. So the effect on the economy became less clear, and so did the effect on elections.
That’s the problem with established models. They stay the same, while the world changes.
ROGER KIMBALL: Dilbert On The Great Persuader. On Hillary:
Look at the places in the world where she could be said to have had some influence: Syria? A disaster. Egypt: teetering on collapse. Libya? Even to say the name is to despair. And how about our relations with our rivals, with Russia, say, or with China or Iran? Obama may bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for those serial disasters, but she was America’s first diplomat during his entire first term.
Then there is the state of our relations with our friends: how’s that proceeded? Are relations with the UK, with Israel, with Europe better now than before Hillary was Secretary of State? To ask the question is to answer it.
But read the whole thing.
THEY GET THE VAPORS SO EASILY AT THE HUFFINGTON POST: “Cultural Appropriation, the Ultimate Sin” including — quelle horreur! — “The Foes Of Faux Pho” as explored by Dan Gainor at NewsBusters:
Bon Appétit’s readers might have noticed a recent piece that was originally called: “PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho.” The story included a video of Philadelphia’s Stock chef Tyler Akin. Stock serves Southeast Asian food and Tyler has a problem, he’s white. The video showed how he eats Pho. And that’s a no-no. The HuffPo thought police responded with, “Why The Outrage Over Bon Appétit’s Pho Article Is Completely Justified.” Not just “justified,” but “completely justified.” They proceeded to quote every idiot they could find who was angry that a white guy might be an expert in something that white people didn’t invent. One site even called it “whitesplaining.” Bon Appétit went grovelling and responded “how we screwed up and what we can do about it.” Actual quote: “While Akin mentions in the video that he’s demonstrated his personal, preferred way of consuming pho, the outlet’s packaging still positioned him as an authority.” This is America 2016. It’s controversial to have a white chef make ethnic food. But no one on the left refuses to use electricity or the telephone because scary old white men were involved in their invention.
Read the whole thing – sooner rather than later, as it’s only a matter of time before we all must don our “environmentally friendly death suit,” as spotted by Gainor at the conclusion of his look into how exponentially insane the left has become in recent years.
Related: “Seriously, we have people questioning whether it’s appropriate for white people to eat pad Thai. Turnabout, then: I guess that means that as a native of North Carolina, I can ban the Thais from eating barbecue. (I bet they’d swap.)”
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CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR: CNN Says Trump Bashing the Media Is ‘Like’ Saddam Hussein Destroying Democracy:
Banfield played a clip of Trump’s September 14 rally in New Hampshire where the GOP nominee joked that the press was stuck on a plane. From the dais Trump told the crowd, “I have really good news for you, I just heard that the press is stuck on their airplane, they can’t get here. I love it.”
Trump then informed his audience the press wanted him to delay the start of the rally so they had time to get to the venue. Naturally he refused to put off the rally just to satisfy the press.
This was all just too much to take for CNN host Ashleigh Banfield.
Sporting a look of concern, Banfield gazed into the camera and asked plaintively, “Why so much cheering?” She then said of the excited Trump supporters heard on the video clip, “Do people not realize, or are they forgetting the other critical element of it, either you have a media, or you have what I witnessed in Saddam’s era, and the Libyan’s era, where you never got to actually call yourself press or you’d go to jail for it.”
Banfield essentially insisted that if you criticize a biased press you are necessarily imposing a Saddam-like tyranny on America.
Gee, you mean the Saddam Hussein that former CNN president Eason Jordan admitted in April of 2003 that CNN was in bed with so that it could have “Live from Baghdad” appear on its Chyrons? The Saddam Hussein who when asked in 2000 if he could be described as evil, CNN founder Ted Turner replied, “I’m not sure that I know enough to be able to answer that question,” as quoted by Ken Auletta of the New Yorker?
And since when did CNN ever worry about fighting tyranny in the world, let alone America? From Saddam to Castro to Kim Jong Il, there aren’t many dictators whom CNN hasn’t gushed over.
YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD. I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS:
Shot: Obama’s Impassioned Plea to Vote: ‘Tolerance is on the Ballot.’
—The increasingly politicized Internet Movie Database, Sunday.
Chaser: Five Times Hillary Clinton Tried To ‘Other’ Barack Obama.
—Heat Street, Sunday.
Hangover: Clinton Campaign Doubles Down: Says Trump Supporters Are “Deplorable.” And as Glenn noted last week, “People are focusing on the ‘Basket Of Deplorables’ line — which is an awful line because it’s simultaneously memorable without being evocative — but the worst part of Hillary’s speech was where she called opponents ‘irredeemable’ and ‘not America.’ That’s pretty much eliminationist rhetoric, right there.”
RELAX, HILLARY. EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY.
TRUMP ONCE AGAIN MAKES HILLARY AN OFFER SHE CAN’T ACCEPT: “Speaking about the Second Amendment, he suggested that Clinton wanted to overturn the right to bear arms. ‘I think her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm immediately,’ Trump told the crowd. ‘Take their guns away, she doesn’t want guns. Take their — and let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away.’”
As Hillary’s mentor wrote, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules,” and as Roger Kimball advises in the Washington Examiner, if you want to understand Hillary, read Alinsky. It increasingly sounds like Trump – and/or his advisors – have.
OCTOBER SURPRISES: Is the Presidential Race Actually between the IRS and Wikileaks?
I hope the IRS leaks dirt on Trump and he gets elected anyway. That’s probably what it will take to see the Service punished appropriately — the GOP wasn’t willing to go to the mattresses over its mistreatment of the Tea Party because much of the GOP saw the Tea Party as a bigger enemy than the Democrats. If they leak on Trump, on the other hand, it’ll be personal.
THEY CALL IT “JOURNALISM:” Hiding the party affiliation of scandal-plagued Democrats.
I’ve found the latest example of this bias. In a horrible story about a former Ohio mayor indicted for allegedly raping a 4-year-old girl, the Washington Post waited until paragraph 12 to mention the mayor is a Democrat.
We’ve seen this done in the past. When it was revealed that then-governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was using an escort service, multiple news outlets reported the stories, but omitted his party affiliation. The New York Times even moved the party affiliation after publishing, from the third paragraph down to the 15th paragraph.
The same occurred with Anthony Weiner. ABC News mentioned the scandal, but neglected to say Weiner was a Democrat. The list goes on.
Compare this to Republican sex scandals, and everything changes. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has his party affiliation mentioned in the first sentence of this NPR report about him reporting to prison for paying hush money to cover up alleged sexual abuse.
When then-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted to an extramarital affair, his party affiliation was revealed in the third paragraph of this CNN article. The same went for David Vitter, Christopher Lee, Larry Craig and numerous other Republicans.
One could argue the former Ohio mayor’s party affiliation doesn’t matter because he is no longer in office. Neither was Hastert. Granted, Hastert was a former House Speaker, so he was a little more important. That still doesn’t excuse the mainstream media from removing the party affiliation of sitting politicians in high places of power.
They do it for the same reason a dog licks himself — because it feels good, and because they can.
HIS TIMING IS ONCE AGAIN JUST SPECTACULAR: Obama cracks jokes about ISIS on Saturday, while the terror organization takes credit for at least one of the day’s attacks. These three dueling headlines on yesterday’s London Daily Mail homepage illustrate how tone deaf our trolling semi-retired president sounds:
I realize Obama was kidding, but it’s a joke that’s not a joke, when placed into context alongside his chilling past statements on how America can always “absorb” yet another terrorist attack* and that he wanted terrorism downplayed along the lines of deaths from “handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs,” as his scribe Jeffrey Goldberg reported earlier this year. So I’m willing to take Obama at his word — the birther issue is far more important to our narcissist in chief than anything that’s killing everyday Americans’ lives.
* And we sure have “absorbed” a lot of them under his watch, huh?
THESE ABUSIVE INTERNET MONOPOLIES NEED ANTITRUST ATTENTION: Video Blogger Says YouTube Threatened Her Over EU President Interview.
A French video blogger selected to interview European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Sunday she was pressured by YouTube to ask “soft questions” during the webcast.
“I found out they expected for me to ask only very soft questions,” said Laetitia Birbes in a Facebook video about her interactions with YouTube before last week’s interview. “The whole point was to give advertisement to Juncker.”
When information monopolists play politics, it’s a serious issue.
THE WHEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE: “No American president has ever done more damage to American national security or America’s standing in the world than Barack Obama,” Scott Johnson writes at Power Line (and as someone who listened to a fair amount of Neil Young as a kid, I love his headline.) “We’ve never had a president quite like him before. I think the damage is attributable to his rabid belief in the myths of the left-wing critique of the United States. We will be living with the damage he has done for a long time to come (if we are lucky, I guess). Let us count (a few) of the ways.”
Read the whole thing.
JUST AS HOLLYWOOD HAS BECOME NOTHING BUT SEQUELS AND REBOOTS, MICHAEL BARONE DESCRIBES 2016 AS THE YEAR OF POLITICAL RE-ENACTORS.
Read the whole thing.
RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: FBI Gotcha: Hillary told State Department employees not to use personal emails.
GOVERNMENT: Amid California drought, Los Angeles water department waters fake grass. “The seemingly superfluous watering has angered neighbors who say they’ve taken pains to reduce their own water use amid the threat of citations. The DWP has stepped up its enforcement against heavy water users this year, issuing more than two dozen financial penalties to homeowners in the first four months of the year, according to reports.”
Rules are for the little people.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Trump is right about America’s rigged system: The only question is whether his potential voters care more about that or about not appearing to be bigots.
Over the past generation Democrats have become the party of the new-economy ruling class. In both the 2008 and 2012 elections, according to the Washington Post, Obama won the rich counties of America but lost the poor ones. He split the college-educated vote, but he won double-digit margins among those with graduate training. Trump is actually polling worse among whites than Romney did. The successful part of the white electorate is either not buying Trump or will not admit to doing so. This might break up the electoral map in odd ways. If Trump did poorly, he could lose old Republican states that are becoming too rich (Virginia), too Hispanic (Texas) or too black (Georgia) to vote Republican. If he did well, he could take industrial states with downwardly mobile white populations that generally vote Democratic (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania).
Trump’s voters sense the system is rigged against them. This does not mean they blame blacks for their problems. Nor do they have any language for describing themselves as victims of racism. They may be deeply hurt or embarrassed by accusations of bigotry. Perhaps that is Hillary’s thinking in calling them a ‘basket of deplorables’. In an aspirational country where much of the middle class is downwardly mobile and taking its signals from television, people are terrified of exhibiting attitudes thought of as low-class.
Democrats’ biggest worry is that the terror may be subsiding.
Plus: “Whether or not a society’s unfortunates are morally contemptible, it is certainly handy for a ruling class that is treading them down to think of them that way.”
JUST IN CASE THE “TERRORISM FREE ZONE” SIGNS SOMEHOW FAIL TO DO THEIR JOBS: French teachers given ‘alarm bracelets’ over terror fears:
Teachers in southern France’s Aix-en-Provence have been given emergency alarm bracelets through which they can alert police in a bid to improve security.
Could this be the future at all French schools?
For the past week, teachers at 74 kindergartens and primary schools in Aix-en-Provence have been armed with the latest security development—an emergency bracelet.
The bracelet, which can be worn around the neck or wrist, features a large orange button that, when pressed, will raise the alarm at local police stations and throughout the school.
You know, I can think of another thing teachers could be given that would improve security. I wonder when the idea will occur to the French as well?
(Via Kate at Small Dead Animals, who grimly quips, “How do you know when an attack is an act of terrorism? The bodies will go ‘beep! beep!’”)
BUSTED: ADAM BALDWIN NOTICES BLATANT LIE IN CHUCK TODD’S LATEST HILLARY CLINTON REPORT.
Just think of the MSM as Democrat operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
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