RIP: Farewell to Craig Breedlove, America’s King of Speed. “He was our earthbound Neil Armstrong. Craig Breedlove took giant leaps for us into the ethereal unknown on the salt flats of Bonneville, strapping inside handmade rockets that emerged from his mind, making history as the first human to fire past the 400-mph mark on land. Eclipsing 500 mph was next. And then it was flirting with the sound barrier as hurtling past 600 mph was achieved by this son of Southern California. Born in 1937 in Los Angeles, Breedlove—Land Speed Record racing’s biggest and most enduring star—died this week at the age of 86, bringing an end to one of the sport’s most celebrated chapters.”
I wonder how long it took them to come up with that. After all, describing the multiple-day terrorization of a city by mobs, the burning down, vandalization, and utter destruction of local businesses. The violence and terror.
It’s hard to find a nice way to describe a building being gutted by fire without SOME reference to the events which, literally, sparked it.
But they did. They found a way.
It was “the 2020 fires.” As if Mrs. O’Leary’s cow just happened to bump over a kerosene lamp and “poof,” up went Minneapolis.
“Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery.
“The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery.
“The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.
“We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.
“Pan Macmillan believes changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety.
“This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used.”
To be fair though, the publisher adding a trigger warning preamble is definitely the lesser of two evils, compared to having “sensitivity readers” going full Winston Smith on dead authors.
When I heard about this I immediately wondered what the local District Attorney had to say.
Brooke Jenkins turned out to have a faster response time than the emergency services, jumping onto social media and other platforms to extend “sympathies” to the family of Mr. Lee and writing, “We do not tolerate these horrific acts of violence in San Francisco.”
It immediately put me in mind of the pronouncements of another DA and other officials a day earlier here in New York.
Because on Monday, ahead of the arraignment of Donald Trump, Mayor Adams and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell had made their own public pronouncements to the people of New York.
Like DA Bragg, they talked as though Donald Trump and his supporters were the major threat to the life of New Yorkers. They told us to take the subway but otherwise try to go about our daily business while the media and political circus was in town.
But the standout comment was from Sewell who warned Trump supporters, “Violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression, and it will never be tolerated in our city.”
“WORKPLACE VIOLENCE” FLASHBACK: Fort Hood Mass Murderer Appeals His Death Sentence. “On Nov. 5, 2009, Hasan entered Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ — ‘God is greatest’ in Arabic — and fired 214 rounds in a fast-paced attack inside and outside the center. Witnesses said he tended to target soldiers over civilians in the largest mass shooting on a military installation in U.S. history.”
Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz, the self-described “most online reporter that you can find” said Thursday in a discussion hosted by the libertarian magazine Reason that she doesn’t know where TikTok is headquartered or that a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member holds an executive position with the tech company’s parent, ByteDance.
“I actually don’t know where TikTok is based,” she said. “Umm. The CEO was in Singapore. Umm. So he’s there and then it’s [sic] the U.S. it’s sort of run regionally around the world.”
The former New York Times reporter also questioned whether it was “true” that a CCP official serves in a senior position at ByteDance. “Is that true? Is that true? Is that true?” Lorenz said. (Zhang Fuping, who serves as ByteDance’s editor in chief, is a Chinese Community Party secretary.)
To be fair, it can be difficult for the elderly to learn new technologies.
It’s true that all communities experience drug overdoses or deaths and inflation puts pressure on all households while the dollar weakens and prices rise. But particularly when it comes to crime, America’s cities have taken a far more radical downward turn than the suburban and rural areas such as the one my wife and I are blessed to live in. The county where we live recorded only one murder in all of 2022. You would be hard-pressed to find a single day last year when nobody was killed in Baltimore or Chicago.
The current situation in America’s urban centers is not sustainable. And for some reason, nearly all of the larger cities are controlled by liberal Democrats who impose the insane policies that allow this mayhem to flourish. Even Austin, in the heart of the red state of Texas, has a municipal government that is hiring wolves to guard the henhouse. And the recent election in Chicago suggests that there is no path back from the brink for many of our formerly-great cities. You simply cannot help those who refuse to help themselves.
As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 wrote in 2010 when the failed city of Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”
I know a lot of people who are doing that on a personal level. I don’t think, by the way, that actual secession is a good idea, or would work.
GOOD: Cornell University President’s and Provost’s Statement Rejecting Student Assembly Call for Trigger Warning Mandate. “Academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it, provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence, and do not introduce controversial matters unrelated to the subject of their course.”
In the fifty years since the Paris Peace Accords ended our military involvement in Vietnam, a consensus has long been locked in place about America’s war in southeast Asia. The effort to defend democratic(-ish) South Vietnam was an imperialist folly and an immoral war of choice using the Vietnamese as proxies. We never had a chance to win the war, and efforts to do so only strengthened our enemies.
But is that what actually happened? I sat down for a lengthy conversation with Mark Moyar, the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and author of Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968. In the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast, we discuss how the narrative of futility formed during the war and dominated the discussion for decades afterward.
“Almost none of it is right,” Moyar declares, “and that’s why I’ve spent so much time writing Vietnam books.” The American veterans of the war as well as the people of former South Vietnam deserve an honest accounting of what actually happened, not the all-too-easy gloss that we walked away from a war we couldn’t win. In fact, Moyar argues based on new access to Vietnamese records, we largely had the war won by the time Richard Nixon got elected — and slowly let it slip away from us.
Well, slowly, and then suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway on bankruptcy. The so-called “Watergate Congress” of Democrats elected in 1974 pulled the plug on funding for our defense of South Vietnam the following year. But prior to their election, as Lewis Sorley quoted counter-insurgency expert Sir. Robert Thompson in his 1999 book, A Better War:
Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks. They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam. When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi. For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North. For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table. Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:
In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war. It was over.
At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War. Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way. Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.
During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.
According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.
But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.
Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:
Even if the judge ignores the glaring legal problems with this flawed indictment, he must decide where a trial should be held. The correct answer should be “Anywhere but Manhattan.” However, the judge is likely to deny that change of venue motion, and a denial would say a great deal about this case.
Bragg’s cavalier attitude only magnifies the view that Manhattan is the wrong place for this trial.
It is not simply that the district attorney ran on a pledge to indict this defendant. The problem is that he was elected on that pledge by the citizens of this district — the same citizens who would comprise the jury pool in Trump’s case.
When Bragg was elected, he reviewed the theories being advanced by an attorney brought into the office for the purpose of nailing Trump. Yet Bragg and some of his team reportedly balked at the efforts of fellow attorneys Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne; Bragg halted the case, and Pomerantz and Dunne resigned. Their resignation letter was mysteriously leaked to the media and became part of a public pressure campaign; Pomerantz then wrote a tell-all book that many legal observers considered to be an outrageous, unprofessional effort to push for Trump’s indictment.
Bragg faced an outcry from constituents who called on him to make good on this election promise.
So, now we have a case brought by a prosecutor who campaigned on bagging Trump, to be tried before a jury selected from a district that elected Bragg in part for that reason — a district that also voted against Trump, 84.5 percent to 14.5 percent, in the 2020 presidential election.
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Luckily for him, he only has to beat the Republicans. Luckily for the Republicans, they only have to beat the Democrats. That’s the only thing giving either a fighting chance . . . .
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