Archive for 2020
October 12, 2020
HOW HARRIS/BIDEN WILL KILL THE REPUBLIC: Issues & Insights lays it out in cold, hard detail. Pack the Court. End the Senate Filibuster. Admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. And more.
WHILE SERVING AS “MINISTER OF SOCIAL EQUALITY,” OF COURSE. TV: Gamliel upgraded to top NY hotel citing allergies, refused to repay $3K cost. “Gamliel upgraded to one of New York’s most expensive hotels at an extra cost to the public purse of thousands of dollars, claiming an allergic reaction to the hotel where she was supposed to stay; was accompanied by five members of her family on a six-day working visit to Austria in which she did relatively little official work; and has used her government car and driver to deliver her kids to school, Channel 12 reported.”
It is always thus.
GOT CAUGHT UP ON MY PAYPAL-DONATION THANK YOU NOTES, including a few that fell through the cracks before. If I somehow missed you, please accept my thanks for your support. It means a lot.
JOEL KOTKIN: Will The Cultural Revolution Be Canceled? “Political correctness—the secular religion of elite liberal society—turns out to be enormously unpopular, something President Trump has exploited politically.”
COLLUSION: RealClearInvestigations: Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike, Democrat-Connected Linchpin of Russia Probe. “The firm’s multiple conflicts of interest in the Russia investigation coincide with a series of embarrassing disclosures that call into question its technical reliability.” Its political reliability, however, is established.
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO TURNOUT: How Trump’s ‘enthusiasm factor’ could lead to another surprise win on Election Day.
MICHAEL BARONE: Lockdown backers’ risk aversion is producing a more unequal society. Funny how pretty much every “progressive” policy has this result.
PUBLIC WIFI IS CONVENIENT — AND RISKY: FBI Warns Against Using Hotel Wi-Fi for Work. “The FBI says hotels in cities across the US have lax security allowing for easy exploitation by malicious actors.”
TO BE FAIR, BASICALLY ALL OF THEM DO, HE JUST SAID IT OUT LOUD: Kansas Democrat Backs Gun Confiscation.
NYT: TRUMP HAS ONLY BROUGHT PEACE TO THE MIDEAST TO DISTRACT FROM HIS LOUSY FOREIGN POLICY RECORD! Signs Saudis are edging towards historic Israel peace.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that not only does our political class hate Trump, but it’s also not too enthusiastic about Mideast peace.
IN 2020, THERE’S NO SHAME IN GETTING A SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE, BUT THERE IS SHAME IN CATCHING CORONAVIRUS: Notre Dame’s President Faces An Angry Campus After Getting The Coronavirus.
A sensible response:
HARD FACTS ABOUT COVID DEATHS: Worldwide, we humans have killed 33 unborn boys and girls for every one Covid victim so far this year. The numbers for smoking, cancer, etc. are stark as well.
SALENA ZITO: No matter who wins, there is no exit from the roller coaster anytime soon.
Many voters going into this election next month believe if Biden wins the presidency, the constant disruption, chaos, and social unrest will recede because Trump will no longer be president. Some of them are actually hinging their vote on that. Those exasperated voters and every reporter who spins that reasoning are as wrong about that as they were in their belief that the 2016 election was all about Trump. It never was.
Trump was never the cause of the conservative populist coalition that put him in office. He was the result of it. After decades of voters’ dissatisfaction with both political parties, institutions, government, and culture, they voted for themselves and their communities over both party’s establishments. It wasn’t about voting for Trump.
A lot of very smart people keep missing that critical nuance.
Indeed. And if you don’t like Trump, you really won’t like who comes next, if you succeed in knocking him off or bottling him up.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: Mayoral Candidate in Texas Charged With Over 100 Counts of Voter Fraud. “When police arrested Zul Mirza Mohamed on suspicion of voter fraud Wednesday night, prosecutors say, the candidate for mayor in Carrollton, Texas, was stuffing envelopes with mail-in ballot applications to send to Dallas County.”
FLASHBACK: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.
Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
COLUMBUS WAS A HERO. HE DID NOTHING WRONG. AND THE PEOPLE WHO CLAIM OTHERWISE WOULD CHEER IF THE “DEPLORABLES” WERE WIPED OUT BY DISEASE AND ADDICTION. Happy Columbus Day — say it loud, say it proud.
Related (From Ed): The left created a fictional version of Christopher Columbus to erase his holiday.
AND THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T AFFORD TO SIT ON THE SIDELINES, OR VOTE THIRD PARTY, OR WHATEVER WE FEEL WE “NEED” TO DO TO MAKE OURSELVES FEEL BETTER: Progressives Prepare To Cross The Rubicon.
We can hand the left a decisive defeat and force them to spend time in the desert and reorganize away from communist fantasies. Or we can force our kids to fight their way out of communism, barefoot and starving, by candle light.
Also please remember that if freedom falls in America it falls in the world. No one will come and rescue us, and there’s nowhere left to go.
HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:
At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .
Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”
Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.
Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:
This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.
Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]
I post this every year, as it’s evergreen. The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.
TEN YEARS AGO I’D BE SHOCKED I AGREE WITH THIS, BUT SHE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW? Why you must help South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham.
DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES, WITH BYLINES: How Newspapers Lie.