I THOUGHT “FOR-GAINST IT” WAS KERRY’S TERRITORY: From ‘Don’t go’ to ‘Go’: Joe Biden has told opposite stories about his advice on Osama bin Laden raid.
Archive for 2019
June 23, 2019
KEVIN WILLIAMSON ON “JOE AND THE SEGS:”
Democrats do not much care for being reminded of their party’s history of frank and energetic racism. They insist that that was, in fact, another party, and that the Democrats and Republicans “changed places” on the matter of civil rights for African Americans. Professor Kevin Kruse of Princeton, a reliable peddler of this kind of thing, offered the usual dodge:
That is, of course, false. Conservatives largely opposed the New Deal, while segregationist Democrats were critical to making it happen. Most of the segregationist Democrats of the FDR–LBJ era were committed New Dealers and, by most criteria, progressives. They largely supported welfare spending, public-works programs, the creation of the major entitlement programs, and, to a lesser extent, labor reform. They did work to ensure that African Americans were effectively excluded from many of the benefits of these programs, but they provided much of the political horsepower that carried forward the progressive project from the Great Depression on. This should not be terribly surprising: Many of the Democrats who were instrumental in the reforms of the Wilson years, the golden age of American progressivism, were virulent racists, prominent among them Woodrow Wilson himself. Given such figures as Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, one might as easily write that progressives of both parties were racists.
Plus a cameo appearance by “my former Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates on the curious case of Theodore Bilbo.”
Read the whole thing.
ALL THE BEST PEOPLE ASSURED ME THAT VOTER FRAUD DIDN’T EXIST: 19 Arrests Later, a Texas Town Is Torn Apart Over Voter Fraud.
June 22, 2019
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THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Transgender Colorado STEM Shooter Motivated by Revenge Over Pronouns. “Kendrick Castillo, the one casualty, was a member of the Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic charity that has been demonized by Democrats.”
OPEN THREAD: Where better to spend your Saturday night?
ONLY THE GOVERNMENT CAN BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS: ATF Caught w/ Pants Down, Scrambling to Find Thousands of Firearms Stolen from Facility.
OLD AND BUSTED: Giant lizard stomps Tokyo.
The new hotness? Rogue slug blamed for Japanese railway chaos.
OH, DARN: Hollywood Faces “Devastating” Costs From California Bill Targeting Gig Economy. “A doomsday scenario for Hollywood would look like this: A law is enacted with no exemption for entertainment workers; companies opt to treat everyone as employees for all purposes to avoid complications; and loan-outs are effectively dead in the water. The last bit would be especially painful because 2017’s Trump tax cuts killed business deductions for employees.”
HUFFPOST GETS SHAMED FOR PEDDLING ANTI-VAXX HYSTERIA:
Insider.com did a deep dive into one of the largest purveyors of anti-vaxxer conspiracies — the Huffington Post — and discovered that it may have been a primary driver in the early days of vaccine paranoia:
Under Huffington’s leadership in the 2000s, the site was one of the largest platforms for the then-novel allegation that vaccines, or certain ingredients used in vaccines, could trigger autism in young children. It was in part through their frequent posts on the site, then known as the Huffington Post, that McCarthy and Kennedy became so publicly associated with the discredited theory. But it wasn’t just by virtue of HuffPost’s status as an open platform for celebrities that the conspiracy theory took hold there; INSIDER has learned that Huffington actively recruited at least one writer who questioned the safety of vaccines to air his views on her site.
Arianna Huffington was making the transition from conservative-ish to liberal back then and, like all libs, was enamored of anything celebrities had to say. That’s how a former Playboy Playmate became the well-publicized spokesperson for a nascent movement of anti-science zealots.
All is proceeding as Andrew Breitbart foresaw.
HMM: Processed foods may lead to autism, study says. “Researchers found large amounts of propionic acid used to produce processed foods can damage brain cells in a fetus, which may lead to autism, according to a study published Wednesday in Scientific Reports.”
Plus, interesting effects on gut bacteria.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Bananas: After slamming Biden for civility towards segregationists, Booker says he … won’t rule out meeting Louis Farrakhan.
QUESTION ASKED: Human nature: is it good or is it bad?
I’m wondering where the stupid idea that people are inherently good got started. Until fairly (in historical terms) recently, everyone understood that the basic rule of human conduct was, as Thucydides put it, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Was it Rosseau? Marx? And why would anyone believe humans were inherently good when all of human history shows the opposite?
In 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote:
A few years ago I chatted with a taxi driver in Atlanta who told me he had just gotten out of prison, where he served time for peddling dope. Happily he had undergone “therapy.” I asked him what kind. He responded, “All kinds— depth-psychology, transactional analysis, but what I liked best was Gestalt.” Some of the German ideas did not even require English words to become the language of the people. What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets. It indeed had its effect on this taxi driver. He said that he had found his identity and learned to like himself. A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner. The problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.
Or as a legendary community organizer said to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter covering religion-themed topics when asked “What is sin?” in 2004, “Being out of alignment with my values.”
BRET STEPHENS: Histrionics, Hysteria and Joe Biden. Will the Democratic Party banish its democratic instincts?
The same people who think it’s a good idea to maintain an open line to foreign enemies apparently now believe it’s appalling for Biden to have observed collegial norms with fellow Democrats. The author Ta-Nehisi Coates went so far as to call it “a secondary endorsement, as crazy as it sounds, of Jim Crow,” on the theory that Biden’s civility meant making his peace with a racist system.
In fact, Biden made no such peace; all the landmark civil-rights legislation was passed well before he arrived in the Senate in 1973. He simply dealt with the Congress as he found it and looked for opportunities to be constructive and consequential rather than destructive and obnoxious. That is now his brand as a presidential candidate, and it’s what his critics find so objectionable: How dare he try to work with his opponents instead of seeking to shun or annihilate them?
These same critics have also ripped Biden for saying a kind word about Mike Pence and Michigan Republican Fred Upton (the latter for advancing legislation for treatment of pediatric cancer). The goal isn’t simply to discredit Biden as generationally out-of-touch or too politically clubby or insufficiently transformational or otherwise gaffe-prone. It’s to rid the party of compromisers of any sort — that is, to purge the Democratic Party of its democratic instincts.
All of this is evidence of what psychologist Pamela Paresky calls the “apocalyptic” approach to politics that increasingly typifies today’s progressivism. “It is an apocalyptic view, not a liberal one, that rejects redemption and forgiveness in favor of condemnation and excommunication,” she writes in Psychology Today. “It is an apocalyptic perspective, not a liberal one, that sees the world as needing to be destroyed and replaced rather than improved and perfected.”
Stephens discovered that apocalyptic approach to politics first-hand when he joined the Times in 2017: Times Columnist Blasted By “Nasty Left” For Climate Change Piece.
“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” Stephens tweeted Friday afternoon, as the hateful messages kept rolling in.
“Go eat dog d—s,” fumed one Twitter user.
“When is the Times going to get rid of you?” another asked.
Stephens even managed to tick off fellow journalists.
“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.
“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.
“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.
In the column, Stephens never states that he believes climate change is a farce. He simply asserts that people should look at claims from both supporters and deniers, in the attempt to get all the facts.
But the exposure to the social media equivalent of the Maoist struggle session may have changed Stephens’ mind on at least one topic dear to the left, causing one of the Times’ token faux-cons to go from supporting concealed carry in 2016 when he was still with the Wall Street Journal, to writing the following year, “Repeal the Second Amendment. I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.”
G.K. Chesterton has a fence he’d like to show Stephens.
I KNEW THERE WAS A REASON I LIKE THE USA MORE THAN I LIKE BELGIUM: “Prosecutors Call for an End to Jury Trials [in Serious Criminal Cases in Belgium]”
WELL, AFTER THE POLITICIANS STOLE THEIR SHARE, THERE WASN’T ENOUGH MONEY LEFT TO ACTUALLY FIX THE ROADS: Michigan Roads Declined Even As Funding Rose Sharply.
IF YOU GO CARRYING PICTURES OF CHAIRMAN MAO, YOU AIN’T GONNA MAKE IT WITH ANYONE, ANYHOW: John Lennon’s Son Denounces Political Correctness, Says Leftist Intellectuals Have Become Pathetic.
Dad eventually may have figured that out also, in his last days, before his life was tragically cut short. His personal assistant from 1979 until his death late the following year has said, “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on Jimmy Carter.”
Because of Lennon’s murder, and because so much footage exists of him recording the Imagine album in 1971, his radical chic image has become freeze-dried. But it was simply another phase for Lennon, in-between the psychedelia of the mid-‘60s, the booze-fueled “lost weekend” of the mid-‘70s, his house husband phase raising Sean few years later, and his return to recording near the end of the ‘70s.
As Lennon himself said in one his last interviews, “I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”
YELLING “FIRE” IN A CROWDED RIVER: The Cuyahoga Story at 50.
By 1969 local efforts to improve water quality in Cleveland were starting to make headway but were ironically impeded by bureaucratic red tape. As [Jonathan Adler, law professor at Case Western Reserve University] explained:
Cleveland had embarked on a long and costly cleanup effort before the Cuyahoga became a national symbol. Subsequent federal efforts received more attention – and far more credit– but it appears the tide was turning well before Congress enacted the 1972 Clean Water Act. One problem Cleveland faced was that the Cuyahoga was treated as an industrial stream, and state permits inhibited local clean up efforts. Public nuisance actions and enforcement of local pollution ordinances, in particular, were precluded by state regulation, while federal laws protecting commercially navigable waterways went largely unenforced.”
On this day in 2004, Adler noted that “The 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga was a relatively minor story in Cleveland at the time. Although reportedly intense, the fire lasted less than 30 minutes. It was so quick that the flames were out before local photographers arrived. All the local papers could show was a fireboat spraying down a railroad trestle after the fire was under control. Time magazine ran a striking photo of the river ablaze–no doubt the photograph Carol Browner remembers–but this picture was not of the June 1969 fire. It was an old photo of an earlier, more serious, fire from 1952,” as Time eventually confirmed.
DISPATCHES FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: Roger Waters Sings Maduro’s Praises While Venezuela Burns.
Presumably, former bandmate David Gilmour approves of Maduro’s spectacular achievement in flat-lining Venezuela’s carbon footprint.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Fight-Ready Fitness: Staying in Shape for Self-Defense. The main point about staying fit is right, the training advice is so-so.
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