Archive for 2019
August 31, 2019
JACK HACKED: Twitter Founder’s Account Posts a Series of Racist, Nazi Tweets.
As Australian author Helen Dale tweets, “Periodic reminder Twitter may be amusing from time-to-time but it’s run by people who couldn’t organise a f**k in a brothel.”
DON’T THINK WE’RE NOT KEEPING SCORE, BROTHER: Conservative education org must be blocked like porn, Google insists in court.
SOCIALISM: IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL LEAVE. More People Are Leaving NYC Daily Than Any Other U.S. City.
Billionaire libertarian and GOP supporters and should get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea, pronto.
THIS IS SATIRE, BUT IS IT REALLY? Biden Claims He Was There 3,000 Years Ago When Isildur Took The Ring And The Strength Of Men Failed.
ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: First the New York Times decides to rewrite the founding of the country to “own the cons,” as the kids say these days. And now WWII: Bret Stephens has a new column on ‘Jews as bedbugs’ and it looks like he totally effed it up. “As you can see if you click on the bottom right photo, Stephens didn’t bother reading the footnote for his quote on the burning of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, ‘The bedbugs are on fire. The Germans are doing a great job.’ You see, at the time, there really was a bedbug epidemic in Warsaw and the author of the book from where Stephens got that quote said it should be taken literally.”
Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Military History.
FAKE HISTORY: ‘After All, Didn’t America Invent Slavery?’
SAVE UP FOR CNN’S MOST FUN DAY EVER! “News item: CNN’s ratings for its ‘town hall’ meetings with Democratic candidates are in the tank… So what does CNN propose as a sequel? How about a seven-hour town hall with the Democratic candidates on—wait for it!—climate change! That’s practically a telethon!”
Sorry, it’s not a real telethon until they start importing holograms of Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin (and holographic cigarette smoke, to boot, but that might interfere with the “save the climate” spiel).
FINE BUT WHEN DOES JUPITER ALIGN WITH MARS? For the First Time in 360 Years, True and Magnetic North Will Align in the U.K.
RECESSION WATCH: Strength in U.S. Consumer Spending Drives Economy: July spending data provides reassurance that economy’s expansion continued to roll even as manufacturing cools. “U.S. households ramped up their spending in July, providing reassurance that the economy’s decadelong expansion continued to roll despite slowing factory activity and global growth.”
EVERYTHING WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: Dems To Religious Voters: Drop Dead.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ANDREW KLAVAN: ‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means.
Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him.
Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.
Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained.
This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations.
That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised—despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.
What is it Karl Marx said: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?
Read the whole thing. While the left launched Watergate to destroy Nixon, the discovery by the American people that It Didn’t Start With Watergate, as Victor Lasky accurately titled his 1977 book did much to make the distrust of government an “unexpectedly” bipartisan affair in the 1970s. Or as David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse:
Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.
Which brings us back to Andrew Klavan’s article above, in which he writes, “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce…Like the Nixon takedown, the attacks on Trump come after years of turning a blind eye to the corruption of a Democrat. Obama’s IRS campaign against the Tea Party? His lies about Benghazi? His Fast and Furious fiasco? His shutdown of a massive drug investigation to appease Iran? No big deal. Obama was, as almost every mainstream outlet has declared, ‘scandal free.’”
Read the whole thing.
NEO ON JOE’S “WORD AS A BIDEN”
Joe Biden is starting to worry the left, because it looks as though he might be nominated and would be a really bad candidate. That’s a nightmare they don’t want to relive.
And so helpful outlets such as the WaPo are pointing out some of Joe’s flaws, such as the tall tale he told on the campaign trail the other day, a war story that was “moving, but false.”
And outlets such as Esquire blame it on Trump, naturally:
The emerging consensus seems to be that Biden lied here…
This has launched some think-pieces on whether this is symptomatic of the post-truth world the current president has ushered in, where the facts and the details don’t matter much—or often, in fact, are irrelevant—when you’re in pursuit of some larger goal.
To those of us who have observed the left and the MSM for many decades, that’s pretty funny. The president has ushered in a “post-truth world”? How about—just to take one very small and relatively recent example—Rathergate?
It occurs to me that the Esquire article’s author, whose name is Jack Holmes, might—like so many others in the MSM—be very young. I don’t mean “young” in relation to me—that’s just about everyone—but I mean young in the more absolute sense. And sure enough, when I looked him up on Linked In, I discover that he graduated from college in 2014. That would make him something like 26 years old.
Thus, he’s likely not aware of the role of his fellow Esquire staffers in shaping the “post-truth world.” But then, as Obama flack Ben Rhodes of all people said of his party’s stenographers, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
