Archive for 2020
December 21, 2020
AMERICA SAVED: Robert E. Lee Statue Removed from Capitol Building.
Like the old saying goes: “Those who cannot remember the past… will be just fine, probably. Whew!”
As you may recall, but The Hill doesn’t mention, Ralph Northam is the guy who just last year was forced to explain why his college yearbook contained a photo of him in a Klan outfit. Or possibly in blackface, he says he can’t really remember. Either way, his explanation consisted of not much more than a shrug. And yet he kept his job, because he’s a Democrat and the only viable replacement at the time was a Republican. (The next two guys in the line of succession were another accused racist and an accused rapist. Good going, Virginia!). Power won, because power always wins. Even when it means proving that the Democrats don’t actually care about fighting racism.
It’s Jim Treacher, so read the whole thing.
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR MY LEG OF LAMB RECIPE, and the old link isn’t working. We had a problem with some of the old links after the last big site move, but I thought it was fixed. I’ll tell the tech guys, but in the mean time here’s the archived version.
ROGER SIMON: Robby Starbuck–A New Kind of Republican Candidate.
Just the other day, The Epoch Times published a column of mine—“‘The Deplorables’ Must Cement Control of the Republican Party”— in which I wrote:
“New leadership must be found and, in the tradition of Trump, we should be free to look outside the political class, just as our founders hoped.
“In fact, that should be a hallmark of this renewed Republican Party, bringing forth candidates from all contributing walks of American life.
“New perspectives will work to the benefit of all. In actuality, conservatives are the more natural innovators—as Trump demonstrated in the Middle East, for example—liberals and progressives the conformists.”
Little did I know… well, to be honest, I kind of suspected it… that the very next day I would be sitting having lunch in the picture-perfect town of Franklin, Tennessee with just such a person.
Robby Starbuck is pretty close to a paradigm of what I think this new Republican candidate should be.
He’s young (31) and comes not from the conventional political world—yet another lawyer who did two years in the Beltway but now claims to abhor the Deep State, at least until the next job—but from the area that has been most shunned (stupidly) by Republicans… the culture.
Robby Starbuck has been a very successful director and producer of music videos, working with groups like Metric, Natalie Portman, and The Smashing Pumpkins, the latter on the sound track of a well-received short he wrote and directed, as well as some rappers.
More of that in a moment, but when I wrote “stupidly” above, of course I was echoing Andrew Breitbart’s famous remark that “Politics is downstream of culture.”
And obviously it is, although that concept seems lost on Republican fat cats who rarely, if ever, invest in it, unless it’s to get their names on a philharmonic plaque next to Beethoven, who, at this point, scarcely needs any help.
Contemporary culture, the kind young people actually watch, is abjured. And you wonder why it’s all “woke” drivel?
Republican financiers also donate scads of cash to think tanks that—apologies to my friends who work for them—produce little in the end that motivates real change, certainly not the way some movies of television shows might.
Starbuck and I spent time bemoaning all that, so it should be clear to you that he is not, like so many of his profession, some useful idiot drunk on critical race theory and waiting for his/her opportunity to appear on “The View,” but the reverse— an extremely knowledgeable conservative.
The video director knew his onions, as they say, on everything from possible congressional Nashville redistricting details—he’s planning to run for Congress hereabouts—to foreign policy.
He shared my fears about what an Iran-leaning Biden administration might do to undermine Trump’s extraordinary gains in the Middle East as well as the powerful threat to our nation and the world emanating from that putative new administration’s invidious connections to communist China.
That Starbuck would despise the CCP should be no surprise since he is a Cuban-American (sorry for the hyphenate, he probably wouldn’t like it either) and is from a family that fled Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship.
Too bad he is not running for Senate from Georgia at this moment. He would have the right authenticity to tell Raphael Warnock—the ultra-left Democrat com-simp candidate who, ignorant or not, called Fidel Castro not evil but “complex”—to buzz off.
Castro, for the record, was a despot who murdered his former revolutionary buddies with firing squads, put homosexuals in prisons (there’s an excellent film starring Javier Bardem), impoverished, tortured, and spied on his people for decades and ended up himself a near-billionaire. (“Complex”? Well, maybe to Michael Moore.)
But back to what Starbuck is planning.
Though redistricting may change things, at the moment it looks as if he will be running against Jim Cooper, the long-serving Democrat congressman from the Tennessee 5th, nearly synonymous with Nashville, since 2003. As if that weren’t enough, this Cooper also represented Tennessee’s 4th from 1983 to 1995.
That’s a total of 29 years!
When I say this Cooper, Jim Cooper is the son of former Tennessee governor Prentice Cooper and the grandson of former Tennessee Speaker of the House William Prentice Cooper. (How do you spell dynasty?)
His brother is John Cooper, Nashville’s current mayor, termed by country star John Rich the “De Blasio of the South.”
This is in part because Mayor Cooper and Rich, also several other local music celebrities including Kid Rock, are at loggerheads over the COVID restrictions placed by John Cooper on the honky tonks that make Nashville, well, Nashville.
Incidentally, Cooper (Jim) ran unopposed in the last election, the Nashville Republican Party, in a red state, no less, having been basically sound asleep.
Robby Starbuck is taking on a lot.
Follow Starbuck on Twitter here.
SO JUST LIKE THEIR BOSS, IN OTHER WORDS: Biden’s Cabinet Nominees Are Weak on China.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Gets Vaccine, but Does He Understand It?
Yet despite his own vaccination experience, Mr. Biden is still talking as if there’s a huge problem he will be called upon to solve. According to a Bloomberg report on Washington’s latest massive goring of taxpayers, Mr. Biden seems to think there’s much more Covid spending to come:
Biden on Sunday said he applauds Congress’s bipartisan agreement, but he described the package as providing “temporary relief.”
“This action in the lame duck session is just the beginning. Our work is far from over,” Biden said in a statement including other actions his administration plans to take. “Immediately, starting in the new year, Congress will need to get to work on support for our COVID-19 plan, for support to struggling families, and investments in jobs and economic recovery.”The economy is awash in money; politicians just need to let people use it. Americans suffering economically are suffering from shutdowns, which never worked as intended, inflicted enormous collateral damage and are now becoming untenable with the arrival of vaccines. Washington’s work is over.
“Mr. Biden is still talking as if there’s a huge problem he will be called upon to solve,” is consistent with the attitude of Joe’s former boss. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2014
Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.
* * * * * * * *
Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.
VDH’s article was headlined, “Welcome to Fantasy Island.” Mr. Roarke’s white linen suit is being re-tailored even as we speak to be a perfect fit for Joe (and can always be taken in for Kamala if need be).
SO JUST TO BE CLEAR, IF THE CDC FOLLOWS THE “RACIAL EQUITY” ADVICE OVER VACCINATING OLD PEOPLE FIRST, PEOPLE WILL DIE.
IN RED STATES TOO: Anti-racism training comes to Louisiana State U.
SURE, WHY NOT? Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes ‘next level’ battery technology.
How many of the components will be built in China? Apple, like Coca-Cola and Nike, is lobbying against China forced-labor bill in Congress.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Roger Kimball on Dalton.
Do you live in New York City?
If not, congratulations. You may have been spared preposterous virtue-signaling petri dishes like The Dalton School, an “elite”school on Manhattan’s upper east side where for a mere $54,000 per annum young Stephanie or Dylan can spend their days on Zoom because the school, unlike almost every other New York private school, refuses to open because of lazy teachers claiming to be terrified of our latest Chinese import, the CCP Virus.
“Go Forth Unfraid®” is Dalton’s official motto, but that is obviously a misnomer.
The school is terrified of life and exists solely to cater to the wounded “amour propre” of its self-absorbed faculty and the roughly 1300 K-12 students whose parents desperately hope that Dalton will be their child’s magic ticket to the advanced indoctrination and higher fatuousness of the Ivy League.
It is a pathetic ambition, more so every year as the moral bankruptcy of America’s higher educational establishment declares itself in ever more putrid profusion, like gangrenous suppurations of the Emperor Galerius on his death bed.
Even the things you think might be candid in Dalton’s PR turn out to be lies.
Consider, for example, its much ballyhooed “Commitment to Anti-Racism.” (Surgeon General’s Warning: have some Dramamine or an air-sickness bag handy.)
This desideratum is plastered all over Dalton’s web site.
But a closer look shows that it is really just code for the more insidious racism of the woke and malignant charlatans who view every aspect of life through the distorting prism of race.
They believe they declare their election by broadcasting their obsession with race.
In fact, they merely underscore their rejection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a world in which people are judged by the “content of their character” not the color of their skin.
Dalton has always been a faintly preposterous leftwing redoubt for the self-absorbed and over-privileged.
But it has lately, under pressure from the very public exhibitions of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other anti-American racialist thugs, turned the corner from progressive fatuousness to preposterous insanity.
The whole sorry story of Dalton’s terminal decline was laid out by the novelist Scott Johnston in a couple of blog posts last week. (By the way, I recommend Johnston’s novel “Campusland”: it’s both funny and true.)
Johnston reports on an eight-page faculty memo, signed by all or nearly all of the faculty and added to by some black students, listing a series of demands that are, as Johnston notes “breathtaking in their wokeness.”
The demands begin with the assertion—de rigueur in any academic communication today, much like PBUH after any mention of Mohammed by devout Muslims—that Dalton is guilty of “systemic racism.”
Then come the demands. Here is a précis compiled by Johnston:
“Here is just a sample of the demands:
- The hiring of twelve (!) full time diversity officers
- An additional full time employee whose “entire role is to support Black students who come forward with complaints.”
- Hiring of multiple psychologists with “specialization on the psychological issues affecting ethnic minority populations.”
- Pay off student debt of incoming black faculty. (!!)
- Re-route 50 percent of all donations to NYC public schools. (Hello?)
- Elimination of AP courses if black students don’t score as high as white.
- Required courses on “Black liberation.”
- Reduced tuition for black students whose photographs appear in school promotional materials.
- Public “anti-racism” statements required from all employees.
- Mandatory “Community and Diversity Days” to be held “throughout the year.”
- Required anti-bias training to be conducted every year for all staff and parent volunteers.
- Mandatory minority representation in (otherwise elective) student leadership roles.
- Mandatory diversity plot lines in school plays.
- Overhaul of entire curriculum to reflect diversity narratives.”
Some of these proposals are illegal, since the require treating students differently solely on the basis of race; nearly all are explicitly racist, for the same reason; and some would be financially ruinous if implemented.
Just for fun, I’d like to be in on the meeting when a Dalton development officer explains to his well-heeled mark, er, I mean his well-heeled prospect that the $5 million he is asking for will be split with New York City Public Schools.
That would be a fun meeting, unless, of course, you weren’t counting on getting the money.
The sad irony is (though not so sad as to escape the delectation of Schadenfreude) that the pursuit of such “progressive” insanity will doom Dalton.
The Revolution always turns on its own. As Johnston puts it, “When progressive institutions embrace revolutionary ideologies, as Dalton has done, they fail to appreciate that the revolution comes for them first. The scaffolding is being built on East 89th Street.”
Wannabe “Intellectuals” always picture themselves at the vanguard of the revolution, not heading towards the inevitable gallows and gulags that follow.
WHEN FORMATTING FAILS: On the Bing Science News page:
MORE THAN YOU THINK: Do I know you? Researchers evaluate how masks disrupt facial perception.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Overdose deaths far outpace COVID-19 deaths in San Francisco.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
WELL, IT’S INSURANCE: No Big Car Insurance Refund during COVID-19? You Aren’t Alone.
APPETITE FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION: 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones picks a fight over Frederick Douglass and gets TKO’d.
In his best-selling 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks wrote:
To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers co rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity. Yale professor Paul Kennedy had a distinguished but unglamorous career under his belt when he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, predicting American decline. He was wrong, and hundreds of other commentators rose to say so, thus making him famous and turning his book into a bestseller. Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay called “The End of History,” which seemed wrong to people who read only the title. Thousands of essayists wrote pieces pointing out that history had not ended, and Fukuyama became a global sensation.
Hannah-Jones seems determined to take her fellow Timesperson’s advice to spectacular heights.
ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THAT THIS WAS UN-POSSIBLE: Immigrant Neighborhoods Shifted Red as the Country Chose Blue.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Election Fraud Update for December 21, 2020.