I’M SO, SO, SO SORRY: A Baby Boomer apologizes on behalf of his generation.
This is in the New York Daily News. Didn’t Pinch Sulzberger issue his own boomer apology a decade ago?
Archive for 2019
March 10, 2019
IT’S NOT THE VOTE THAT COUNTS; IT’S WHO MANUFACTURES THE VOTES: Don’t take my Constitutional republic away from me.
ROD DREHER: Beating The Cultural Revolution. “What the former anti-communist dissidents among us are recognizing is the totalitarianism inherent in a new Cultural Revolution, the contours of which we are only just now beginning to discern.”
The thing to remember about the original Cultural Revolution is that it wasn’t some sort of authentic grassroots phenomenon. It came from the top. It was astroturf, with blood.
Betsy Woodruff of the Daily Beast had this big scoop this weekend, “It Exists: DOJ Finds Letter Ordering Scrutiny of Uranium One, Hillary Clinton.”
The bureaucracy had denied the letter existed. She found her. Give her a cookie and a pat on the head.
The real story is overlooked. As attorney general, Jeff Sessions set in motion an investigation that could next year explode on Democrats.
Her story said, “The existence of a letter documenting Sessions’ directive that the DOJ revisit probes of Trump’s top political foe is a surprise because a department lawyer said in court last year that senior officials insisted it didn’t exist. The liberal nonprofit American Oversight obtained the letter through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request they filed on Nov. 22, 2017 –– the same day Whitaker emailed Sessions’ letter to Huber.”
This story is what Washingtonians call inside baseball, but really these stories are Democrat Straw Grasping.
What the letter says is the story. That was why the tax-exempt American Oversight group wanted the letter.
Sessions had assigned U.S. Attorney John Huber in Utah to investigate the findings of the Department of Justice’s inspector general, a man whom the Obama administration abused as it looked the other way at Hillary’s many criminal enterprises while secretary of state.
Those crimes include accepting bribes from foreign governments to her Fake Charity, using her private computer to send classified information to others (possibly her donor foreign governments), and colluding to give Russian oligarchs control of one-fifth of America’s Uranium One.
But Woodruff’s story cast Sessions’s tenure in a new light that vindicates him.
Hmm.
WHAT IF WE ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW, WANTED TO IMPROVE TRANSPORTATION? Welcome to the No Green New Deal Future.
The GND would make transportation worse but would cost lots of money. Let’s not do that.
OPEN THREAD: Finish up the weekend.
WHY BROOKLYN’S TRENDY BRAND OF ‘SOCIALISM’ IS ULTIMATELY DOOMED:
The article is by Brown graduate Simon van Zuylen-Wood, who somewhat sheepishly admits running into an awful lot of other Brown graduates while researching his tale of adorable young Marxists dreaming of class war while sipping (I am not making this up) frozé in (I am not making this up) Bushwick. He focuses on the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA, we are told, is both a rising political force and also has one-fifth the membership of the Rotary Club. Anyone who thinks the Rotary Club is powerful also probably thinks “I Love Lucy” is the hottest thing on television, but picture something one-fifth as powerful as that.
The Rotary Club, you say? Some original “Progressives” absolutely convinced themselves that the Rotarians were plotting coups and takeovers in the night (or at least at lunch), as Fried Siegel wrote in 2014:
In his new book, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel looks back at Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 book, It Can’t Happen Here, which posited that the Rotary Club(!) was poised to seize American power:
The heart of It Can’t Happen Here is laid out in the opening chapter, which presents the local Rotary Club, with its Veterans of Foreign Wars tub-thumping patriotism and prohibitionist moralism, as comparable, on a small scale, to the mass movements that brought Fascism to Europe. Later in the novel, he has a character explain, half-satirically and half-seriously, “This is Revolution in terms of Rotary.” In other words, Lewis’s imagined fascism is little more than Main Street writ political. When he wants to mock Windrip, he describes him as a “professional common man” who is “chummy with all waitresses at . . . lunch rooms.” For Lewis, fascism is the product of backslapping Rotarians, Elks, and Masons, as well as various and sundry other versions of joiners that Tocqueville had once celebrated as the basis of American self-government. There is more than a hint of snobbery in all this. The book’s local incarnation of evil is Jessup’s shiftless, resentful handyman Shad Ledue, who was a member of the “Odd Fellows and the Ancient and Independent Order of Rams.” Ledue uses Windrip’s ascension to rise above himself and displace Jessup from his rightful place in the local hierarchy of power.
If the book were merely an indictment of red-state nativist intolerance, there would be little to distinguish it from numerous other novels and plays of the 1920s that were part of “the revolt against the village.” Lewis was hardly the only writer of the period to, Mencken-like, describe the average American as a “boob” or “peasant.” What made It Can’t Happen Here compelling was that it showed the boobs working through a familiar institution, the local Rotary, to become a menace to the Republic.
As Siegel goes on to note, as late as the 1960s, prominent leftist American intellectual Dwight Macdonald was muttering, “Europe has its Hitlers, but we have our Rotarians.” My dad was president of a local suburban chapter for a year in the mid-1970s; I had no idea until recently what a hard core violent revolutionary in Florsheim wingtips he was!
(Just a reminder that today’s “Progressives” and socialists come from a long line of lefty insanity.)
SOCIALISM AS DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION:
It took me a while to see that when you point out to a liberal that a higher minimum wage has the effect of reducing the hours and income of low-skill workers especially at fast-food restaurants, this is regarded by the liberals as a feature rather than a bug. Liberals hate fast food, with many liberals openly pining to have it destroyed or regulated (such as mandating the Michelle diet or something). If a higher minimum wage sets back the viability of fast-food, so much the better!
This perception came into focus while reading Section V of Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism about how socialism is a purely destructive ideology by necessity.
Related! Ocasio-Cortez: Be ‘Excited’ About ‘Being Automated Out Of Work,’ Tax Corporations At 90%.
AOC was speaking at South by Southwest in Austin, TX. As Iowahawk noted:
IT’S A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA: Why was Rashida Tlaib following an anti-Semitic Instagram account?
AT AMAZON, save in Sports Nutrition.
INFORMATION BLACKOUT: Internet Collapses in Venezuela with 80% Offline; Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud Blocked.
OUT: NO ONE IS TAKING YOUR GUNS. In: “No one is taking your hamburgers.”
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA IS AT A POLITICAL CHANGE CROSSROADS, WHETHER SHE REALIZES IT OR NOT:
You can feel her confusion and hesitation; it’s real and it’s painful. It’s somewhat like what #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka said in the video where he told his change story. At the beginning of Straka’s voicing of a single mild non-PC possibility, he wondered something like why are my friends treating me like that? I thought they were my friends. Why are my enemies treating me nicely? Does that mean I’ve gone over to the Dark Side?
Or maybe it’s not the Dark Side?
Navratilova does have one advantage in making her decisions going forward: as a former citizen of communist Czechoslovakia, she’s seen plenty of leftist gaslighting before. Or as Rod Dreher writes in a post titled “Beating The Cultural Revolution,” “A friend in DC told me this week that he was recently at a dinner party where one of the other guests said to him, ‘Growing up in the Soviet Union, my parents taught me never to believe a thing I heard in the media, and to be very careful what I say out loud. Now I find myself telling my children the same thing.’… Those people know how to live. They have wisdom for us. So do others who came through communism. They can help us beat the Cultural Revolution.”
WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Is the truth out there? New paper proposes solution to the Fermi paradox.
CLOWARD-PIVEN OR AND BUST! New York City is edging toward financial disaster, experts warn.
(Classical reference in headline.)
KAMALA HARRIS: “It is a fact that we can change human behaviors without much change to our lifestyle and we can save the future generations of our country and this world.”
I always get very nervous when leftists discuss “changing human behaviors.” What could go wrong?
(MOVED TO TOP to note that two days after this post first appeared, the Times’s story is still up, without even a correction posted. “Fake news,” anyone?)
NEW YORK TIMES EXPOSE ON AIPAC RELIES ON “AIPAC ACTIVIST” WHO HASN’T BEEN A MEMBER OF AIPAC FOR SEVERAL YEARS: You can’t make this stuff up.
Fiske’s role as the chairman of a pro-Israel political action committee — unaffiliated with AIPAC, which is not a PAC — was the centerpiece of The Times article…. AIPAC would not comment for the story, but I heard from insiders that Fiske has not been associated with the lobby for five years. In a telephone interview Fiske, a South Florida realtor, told me it was more like three or four years, but confirmed that he is no longer a member.
Read the whole thing.
WE HAVE THE WORST POLITICAL CLASS IN OUR HISTORY: The 2020 Democratic Field Is a Clown-Car Show. Not least of which is Robert “Beto” O’Rourke. As Jim Geraghty writes, “Throw in the 2003 video of him playing guitar onstage in a onesie and a sheep mask, the much more recent videos of him skateboarding in the Whataburger parking lot, the meager record of legislative accomplishments, the oddly under-prosecuted serious DUI at age 26 — it wouldn’t take that much effort to paint the baby-faced O’Rourke as an overgrown teenager. Republicans can accurately joke that he’s the kind of slacker ne’er-do-well that Kamala Harris would have put away for a long time in her days as a district attorney.”
Heh, indeed.™
AT AMAZON, save in Arts Crafts and Sewing.
‘TRANSGENDER WOMAN’ ARRESTED BY NYPD FOR HATE CRIMES FOLLOWING STRING OF ATTACKS: “One of those victims was Joshua Smith, who spoke with NBC 4 New York. He said that the suspect sprayed him directly in the eyes from short range as he tried to board a train at the station.‘She held the mace directly to my eye and sprayed it right into my eye. She walked up to me and maced me and then kept walking… It lights your whole face on fire. Your sinuses, your throat feels like it is closing up. It’s rough,’ Smith told reporters at the scene.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Beware of drowsy driving as Daylight Saving Time begins.
ILHAN OMAR WITHDRAWS SUPPORT FROM BILL TO SAVE THE EARTH AFTER LEARNING THAT’S WHERE ISRAEL IS.
Important note to “fact checking” Website Snopes.com: the Babylon Bee is satire.