Archive for 2017

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A CROOK TO BE NEW YORK’S ATTORNEY GENERAL. BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO NOT BE A CROOK, EITHER. Schneiderman Used a Secret Alternate Email Address While Pursuing #ExxonKnew Crusade. “All of this occurred after Schneiderman’s office claimed that a search for personal email addresses was not necessary because their office has a policy that personal email is ‘prohibited.'”

Rules are for the little people.

WITH MY BROTHER BRAD AND MY DAD, on a Father’s Day several years ago.

READ THE NEW NATHAN LOWELL BOOK. It’s good. He gets more mileage out of ordinary stuff than just about any writer I know — I think it was Quarter Share where I realized I’d been rapt for 100 pages over basically preparing some meals for the ship’s crew and selling some stuff at a flea market — but in this new book stuff actually happens.

SO TRUE FEMINISTS HANKER AFTER NOT DRIVING; BEING HONOR KILLED AND LIVING IN A MULTI-WIFE  HOUSEHOLD?  GOOD TO KNOW: Muslims Are the True Feminists. Leftists and Stockholm Syndrome.  It’s a thing.

READY FOR NEHEMIAH SCUDDER: Breatharians .

MICHAEL BARONE: The Violent Political Left.

Unfortunately, it’s not hard to find left-wing tweets advocating violence against President Trump and Republicans. And the “arts” community contributes its share. Comedian Kathy Griffin posted a picture of her holding a bloody severed head of the president. In New York Shakespeare in the Park is staging “Julius Caesar” with an orange-haired Caesar being stabbed to death by political rivals.

And there have been multiple violent threats and some actual violence against Republican House members. Virginia’s Tom Garrett canceled town halls in response to a message that “we’re going to kill your wife.” The message to Upstate New York’s Claudia Tenney was, “One down, 216 to go.”

A Tucson school official was arrested for making threats that Arizona’s Martha McSally’s “days were numbered.” A woman was charged with felony reckless endangerment for trying to drive Tennessee’s David Kustoff’s car off the road.

Read the whole thing.

Related: The Deeper Problem With the NYT’s Editorial Blaming Republicans for Political Violence: It raises questions about why they didn’t uphold basic standards of veracity and decency.

POPEHAT: Free Speech, The Goose, And The Gander.

And yet, the “we’re just applying their rules to them” theory has some heft. It’s not because of the nasty, disruptive little totalitarians themselves. Antifa scum and pseudo-educated campus thugs are not legitimate foundation for any adult’s philosophy. No, the bit of plausibility comes from the reaction of people in authority, people who ought to know better, people whose conduct is somewhat more fairly attributed to a larger political groups. A few hysterically censorious kids screaming for a professor’s termination for crimethink do not threaten the foundations of free speech, but Yale lauding them does. Relatively few thugs disrupting a speech and even physically assaulting a professor don’t call into question the culture’s support for free speech, but Middlebury offering weak slaps on the wrist and shrugs for that violent behavior does. A violent mob in Berkeley does not undermine the legitimacy of free speech doctrine — a mob is a mob — but Berkeley’s timorousness or indifference in the face of violent censorship does. Students furious at a professor disagreeing with them don’t call into question the nation’s commitment to freedom, but state officials refusing to guarantee a professor’s safety do. In short: the regrettable behavior of officials who have failed to stand up to disruption of speech are the people most responsible for legitimizing further disruptions of speech, whoever commits them.

But we can, and should, do better.

But sometimes, to get people to stand behind a norm, you have to focus their mind on the consequences of losing it. It’s extremely sad that we’ve reached this point, but this is what happens when the people who are supposed to maintain the norms and institutions of liberal democracy in some sort of principled fashion decide that they’d rather be culture warriors instead.

And as IowaHawk notes, sometimes you need a coupon war to get people’s attention.

IT’S WEIRD BECAUSE ALL THE LEFTY TWEETS I’VE SEEN ON THIS SUGGEST THAT TRUMP MUST HAVE HATED IT:

To realize that the “gay rights” crowd is really just a bunch of Democrat shock troops, all you have to do is look at how badly they’ve treated the most pro-gay president ever elected.