Archive for 2019

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: What’s the matter with Joe Biden?

Related: Is Biden apologizing his way out of the nomination?

As  Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, “A normal person would flatly deny the allegation if he didn’t believe it. If he did believe it, he would either deny the allegation anyway or apologize…Unfortunately, the modern Democratic party is post-normal. Biden, for his part, is hiding behind postmodernism under which truth is just a construct and people are entitled to their own reality. Biden’s reality is that he didn’t inappropriately touch Flores, her reality is different, and far be it for Biden to impose his reality (as opposed to his hands and face) on her.”

On Friday, Jim Geraghty wrote, “You think the 2016 Democratic primary fight between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got rough? The 2020 primary is going to look like Mad Max’s ‘Fury Road.’ The great irony is that this long process may eventually undermine the power of identity politics, as the surviving Democratic nominee will probably have been accused of racism, sexism, etcetera in the process of winning the primary.”

I don’t think he expected the first shots to be fired immediately afterwards, however.

HARMEET DHILLON straightens out the confusion at NPR. “The NPR baloney meets the grinder of a most capable advocate in this all too brief interview. You can almost hear the NPR interviewer begging ‘no más.’ Instead she just summarily wraps it up.” Audio at the link; transcript here.

THE PIKETON FAMILY MURDERS: I was interviewed for the Oxygen channel special on this case that airs tonight, Sunday, March 31st at 7 p.m. eastern. My appearance starts about 35 minutes in for those who are interested. The schedule is here.

A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK REALLY LIKED this Kevin Williamson essay on Trump and nationalism, but I was unimpressed. Okay, it has one truly brilliant line:

The Capitol dome is a great dome, but I know who’s in there.

But it rambles on and on and misses the obvious source of Trump’s nationalism talk and why it resonates. For 50-plus years, the academic and political classes have been telling people that America isn’t great, and often that it’s uniquely evil, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a loser. This is pushback against that attitude. It’s working-class defiance in the face of the political/academic elite. Remember: In America, culture war is generally just a disguise for class war.

You can’t understand what’s going on in America today without understanding that and Williamson doesn’t seem to understand that. Which is weird, because in 2015 he wrote this: “Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, déclassé, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers. Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations.” Strange that he should miss the point now, when he correctly identified our political class as a bunch of Holden Caulfields then.

Related: “Listening to Trump’s pitch, I felt it was so upbeat, so admiring and praising of people who usually hear that they’re washed up and pathetic.” These days, even from Kevin Williamson.