THAT’S BECAUSE HE’S NOT A WUSSY: ‘No It Didn’t’: Trump Still Supports Right to Bear the AR-15 After the Assassination Attempt.
Archive for 2024
August 9, 2024
LIKE THE KAMALA BUZZ IT WAS MEMOREX: Tim Walz Buzz Fading Fast,
DO OUR IDIOTS REALIZE WE ARE BETTER ARMED THAN THE BRITISH? UK Authorities Monitoring Social Media, Arresting People for Misinformation.
August 8, 2024
I PRONOUNCE THIS LEGAL UNDER ARTICLE 51 OF THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER.
Chaser:
Taylor Swift Jet Launches Retaliatory Strike On ISIS Stronghold https://t.co/xkoPD9ecig pic.twitter.com/zzOjnZqC4Q
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 8, 2024
OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.
I VIEW THIS DEVELOPMENT WITH SERENITY: Firefly signs multi-launch agreement with L3Harris.
I DO WONDER IF LEGENDS OF “LITTLE PEOPLE,” TROLLS, ETC. ARE BASED ON HISTORY: The Real-Life “Hobbits” of Flores: Smallest Arm Bone in Human History Sheds Light on Mysterious Hominin Species.
ED MORRISSEY: The Silence of the Kams, or Where’s the Beef — And the Press? “In fact, there’s no evidence anywhere of Kamala Harris’ post-nomination agenda or policy positions. Nominally, everyone assumes that Harris will incorporate the previous Biden agenda and positions, but that’s only an assumption. If voters go to Harris’ campaign website, they’ll find plenty of ways to send cash to the Harris-Walz effort … and no reason why they should. . . . As it turns out, there’s a reason why the media hasn’t made a stink about the Silence of the Kams. At least for now, they’re in on it. . . . This is almost worse than ‘fake news.’ It’s a complete sell-out by institutional media to sitting public officials and also candidates for higher office. We often talk about the coming crisis in media, but baby, it has arrived.”
Related:
James Carville (the last genuine Democrat) discussing how Kamala Harris' background is 'not all-American', and how she grew up affluent:
"Her bio is not all-American. Both of her parents were professors at Berkeley. She doesn't have a 'up by the bootstraps' story.
She grew up… pic.twitter.com/QoMOE9s2UF— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 7, 2024
BE PREPARED: Coleman Triton+ 2-Burner Propane Camping Stove. #CommissionEarned
WOULD YOU BUY IT FOR A DOLLAR? Dodge Charger Daytona EV’s Fratzonic ‘Exhaust’ Sounds Convincing: The Charger Daytona is taking the iconic muscle car electric, but the EV will preserve the rowdy Dodge spirit with synthetic sounds that mimic a V-8.
Catching up to the 6000SUX.
IF A DRONE ISN’T CHEAP AND CAN’T BE BUILT QUICKLY AND IN GREAT NUMBERS, I’M NOT SURE IT’S WORTH IT ANYMORE: General Atomics Reveals New Carrier-Capable Drone.
MORE THAN JUST TRUE, IT WAS NOBLE: Trump Just Said Out Loud What Everybody in Washington Is Afraid To.
RICK BEATO INTERVIEWS ALAN PARSONS (Video):
MAKE THEM JUMP HIGHER: Gun sales jump in response to Trump shooting and Harris nomination. “July marks 60 consecutive months – or five years – of more than 1 million monthly NSSF-Adjusted FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications for the sale of a firearm at retail.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Tim Walz is Bizarro JD Vance.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Our Crisis of Institutional Competence: Why things don’t work anymore.
WATERGATE? AS ZHOU ENLAI NEVER SAID ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, “TOO EARLY TO SAY:” Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned.
What have I learned in the 50 years since? Although we are a long way from the summer of 1974, the Watergate pieties haven’t changed, and the media retrospectives this week will likely be repeating all the clichés about saving America: “The system worked.” “No man is above the law.” But a genuine retrospective of Nixon and Watergate needs to be shorn of cant and caricatures, unburdened by the clockwork bromides of “crook” or “resigned in disgrace.”
I hope new generations are open to some different thinking—or at least a balanced treatment that goes beyond the story of bungling burglars and political damage control. It must include how the “Watergate affair” was also the culmination of Nixon’s political opponents’ long-yearned-for goal of destroying him. Nixon had a political target on his back from his congressional days of vanquishing the communist Alger Hiss, a favorite of Washington’s intellectual left. Through his entire presidency, Congress was controlled by opposition Democrats, with confrontation aggravated further by Nixon’s determination to end the Vietnam War he had inherited from the Kennedy and Johnson administration planners at the State and Defense departments.
Sen. Edward Kennedy set up the Senate Watergate Committee. Three months later John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign director of opposition research against Nixon, Archibald Cox, was hired as Watergate special prosecutor with a staff seeded from the ranks of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. The subsequent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, expressed concern in an internal memorandum that his chief deputy reflected “an attitude I discussed with you before—the subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost.”
Watergate scholar Geoff Shepard has unearthed further damning evidence that the special prosecutors had several unethical private meetings with Judge John Sirica in the absence of attorneys for Nixon and Watergate defendants—each violating the most basic legal protections. Nixon’s adversaries weren’t looking only for the truth. They were looking for a scalp.
As Glenn wrote last year, “Recent events have made me doubt the entire Watergate story.” Much more on that topic from him here: Nixon’s Revenge.
UPDATE: “Reconsidering United States v. Nixon,” from Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy.
RICHARD GOLDBERG: “Let’s have an honest conversation about what happened last night in Michigan and what’s going on right now with the @VP team’s clean-up attempt:”
She was not on a teleprompter. She was not hiding behind a press release or a surrogate. It was Harris being confronted by a radical pro-Hamas group asking her to consider an arms embargo on Israel. When confronted with radicals in her face, she said she’s open to it.
This is not the first time this has happened. Flashback: September 2021. Harris visits a school, and a kid goes off about Israel. Her response? “Your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.”
* * * * * * * *
They were her words — not a carefully crafted statement or post on X by a surrogate. It has happened before. They reinforce what we’ve seen for months as Harris became much more publicly hostile to Israel than Biden.
Only Kamala Harris can speak to what she said. Not Phil Gordon. Not a Jewish liaison. Not a communications director. Kamala Harris. Until she stands for a press conference and takes questions on it, her words in Michigan stand — no one else’s.
It’s impossible to imagine this headline from CNN if the parties were reversed:
Buried lede: Replacement for Democrat presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews yet another presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews!
And as Jim Treacher has said:
UPDATE: Note that Harris’s strategy is working for her so far. Philip Klein writes that “The Coddling of Kamala Is Taking Left-Wing Bias to a New Stratosphere,” adding that “I was a conservative journalist during the Obama era, and I have to say, even he had periods of negative coverage. I cannot recall anything like what we are now witnessing:”
Politico’s Playbook has a story out today, titled “Why Harris Isn’t Taking Questions,” that once again is a meta-analysis of how amazing her campaign is and how there’s no sense in messing with a winning streak. It notes that she has been informally chatting with reporters on her plane off the record, which, Dave Weigel surmises, is why we haven’t been hearing more complaints about access. This makes campaign reporters look even worse. Essentially, it means that access is all about their own insecurities rather than about actually doing their jobs and informing the public by asking a candidate for the presidency to answer challenging questions about her positions on important issues.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the media comes from the Harris campaign itself.
“What is the incentive for her [to take more questions]?” Politico quotes somebody close to the campaign as saying. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out.”
Exactly. If you can get away with scripted events and the media are happily behaving as a mere extension of your public-relations team, why bother?
As Treacher wrote today, the MSM side of the DNC-MSM are happy to go along with their folie à deux. “Nobody wants to be the reporter who gave us more President Trump. That’s all it is. They don’t care that we know they’re lying. Some of them, I suspect, actually enjoy that part. Anything that makes your enemy angry is good, and lying to them works every time.”
‘GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA’ SHUTS DOWN DAYS AFTER LAWSUIT FILED BY X, RUMBLE. Wow, what a super “responsible” move. Super happy that these were the folks policing what I could read.
Beware, though: it likely just means that they have already started a successor effort to hammer people/organizations who countenance badthink.