Archive for 2019
June 2, 2019
ON THE MCCAIN FAUXMENT: The irony is amazing. The same John McCain who political media ass-raped in 2008. “He can’t lift his arms to use a computer!” they mocked. (His P.O.W. injuries were never mentioned in that story.) “He had an affair with Vicky Iseman!” they bellowed. (They later “clarified” the story claiming when they said he had an affair they “didn’t really mean to imply” an affair. (The Times has since vaporized the internet archive) When on the campaign trail a woman referred to nominee Barack Obama as “an Arab,” to which John McCain responded, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, a citizen.” This press slurred him “by suggesting that being Arab is at odds with being a “decent family man,” McCain made a comment that was patently Islamophobic.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting to see a huge Twitter war between Trump and David Duke, just so I can read The Times tell us what a great guy David Duke is.
FLASHBACK: I talk about education in The Atlantic.
SHOW ME THE MAN AND I’LL SHOW YOU THE CRIME: House Majority Whip James Clyburn Says Democrats Will Impeach Trump ‘At Some Point.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Declining fertility led to Neanderthal extinction, new model suggests.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON ‘THE LAST LONGEST DAY:’
Emmanuel Macron will not attend the 75th anniversary of D-Day, “saying that French presidents only lead international D-Day ceremonies on round-number anniversaries such as the 60th or 70th. … critics argue that he should make an exception this year as it is likely to be the last major D-Day anniversary while veterans are still alive.”
To Macron, who was born in 1977, D-Day must seem like ancient history. The French president is currently more interested in preserving his alliance with Berlin than in commemorating the reopening of the Second Front against Hitler a full three generations ago.
Meanwhile in England: “Donald Trump is like a 20th-century fascist, says Sadiq Khan,” a Grauniad headline screams, both living out George Orwell’s postwar observation that “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”
AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT THEY WERE PRETTY VICIOUS: Saber-Toothed Cats Were Even More Vicious Than We Thought.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Veterans Walk Out of Meeting With Ocasio-Cortez After She Bashes U.S. and Trump.
Related: It appears “that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e., Facebook used its own internal data to help publicly identify a private citizen. That’s extremely troubling.”
As Ed Morrissey warned last year, “When the service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. If you don’t want to be the product, don’t sign up in the first place.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Federal Rats Are Fleeing the Sinking Collusion Ship.
IN THE MAIL: From Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor accused of ‘hostile learning environment’ for assigning male authors.
ROGER KIMBALL: Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle.
Some of Sohrab’s critics seem to think that such passages indicated that he was advocating a new theocracy. I think he is advocating realism when it comes to our opponents in the culture war. What they want is not tolerance but full-throated approbation, whether the issue is bringing children to public libraries to be indoctrinated by sexual freaks, unlimited abortion, radical environmentalism, or the smorgasbord of toxins populating the ideology of identity politics. What they offer is not tolerance, not debate, but an invitation to submit to their view of the world.
In such situations, dissent cannot succeed if it proceeds piecemeal. It must recognize that what is at stake is, in the deepest sense, an anthropology, a view of what man is. We are living among the fragments of a shattered inheritance, morally and socially as well as politically. The so-called liberals (so-called because no one is more illiberal) are bent on scattering those fragments and trampling underfoot the values they represent.
Sohrab Ahmari’s essay is certainly not the last word in how to respond to this onslaught. But it has the inestimable virtue of understanding that this battle is not fodder for a debating club but an existential struggle.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I THOUGHT TURKEYS COULD FLY: Business Insider’s Global Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson Learns How the House Works.
Marketing guru and veteran public speaker Dan Kennedy once wrote, “In 1978, when I started my career as a professional speaker and seminar leader, one of the venerable deans of public speaking, Cavett Robert, sagely cautioned: ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.’” Bragging about your ignorance on Twitter speeds that rate up rather exponentially.
Related Flashback: Business Insider surrenders to the social-justice warriors.