Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

September 16, 2024

THE STORY BEHIND TRUMP’S SECOND ASSASSIN TOOK A STRANGE TURN…and It Involves the Media:

Ryan Wesley Routh has a criminal record that spans the Himalayas. We’re waiting to see if he was on the radar for any federal law enforcement agencies vis-à-vis recent threats: the FBI has a terrible track record of being ‘in the know’ concerning future perpetrators of firearm-related crimes nowadays. Yet, in an odd turn, the media had this joker on their radar. They interviewed him. When his name was released, The New York Times must’ve checked their clips because there he was. The publication interviewed him about the ongoing war in Ukraine—Routh appears to have been obsessed with the subject:

To invert Trotsky, you may be interested in Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean that Ukraine will be interested in you: ‘Full of s—’ suspected Trump gunman was rejected by Ukraine army.

There were many such cranks in Kyiv at the time, latching on to the war to pose as international men of action, and boasting of high-level contacts in the Pentagon or CIA.

Regular Legionnaires did their best to avoid them, referring to them variously as “Call of Duty Warriors”, “Volun-tourists” and “Screamers” (the latter a reference to their reaction if coming under fire).

But there was little to stop them promoting themselves on social media, as Mr Routh did prolifically, claiming to be an active recruiter for the Legion ranks.

“Any gender, any age, any skill level to no skill level,” he claimed to Newsweek in 2022. “Yeah, if you wanna fight, come and see me and I’ll put you in a unit so you can go fight.”

Mr Routh, who claims to have had contacts in the Middle East, caused the Legion particular problems by attempting to recruit volunteer soldiers from Afghanistan and Syria, who’d be unlikely to be admitted to Ukraine because of security concerns.

“He was never in Ukraine in any official capacity, he simply decided that he was going to come here and save the day himself,” a Ukrainian military source told The Telegraph.

“I was in contact with him multiple times to request to him that he stop his activities, most of which were bizarre and alarming.”

You don’t say.

UPDATE: Are there any DNC-MSM journalists that Routh didn’t have on speed dial?

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 16th, 2024

PRESIDENT BIDEN SAYS ‘THANK GOD’ TRUMP IS OK AFTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT:

President Biden departing the White House commented on the second assassination attempt made on Donald Trump.

Before departing on Marine One, Biden said ‘thank god the president is ok.’

He also said the one thing he wants to make clear is ‘the Secret Service needs more help’ and he thinks ‘Congress should respond to their needs.’

The buck never stops with Sundown Joe, despite the fact, as Jeffrey Blehar writes at the Corner: Everybody Is Terrified of Where This Is Headed and Nobody Will Say It.

I won’t get into the vulgar politics of it all yet — though it would be patrician folly to pretend they’re irrelevant (hey, imagine how Volodymyr Zelensky feels this morning) — because I care far more about the bottom line: This is now the second time in the late stages of this campaign that someone has tried to murder Trump. Give him presidential level Secret Service coverage, now. Screw the regulations. Joe Biden loves giving unlawful executive orders to spend a ton of money — I know this because he forgave $20,000 of my student loans without me even wanting him to — so break the damn bank if you must. Change the rules on the fly, and let someone file a lawsuit if they have to.

But you don’t want a dead presidential candidate on your hands. And if what Richard Blumenthal recently said about the as-yet-unrevealed systemic collapse of the Secret Service is true? (“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former President.”) Then you have no idea how deeply any subsequent attack is going to shake the foundation of our entire civil society if it comes to pass. It clearly can now. Get him more coverage, today.

The fact that Joe (or whoever is actually running the country at the moment) is slow-walking this, just as he (they?) slow-walked extra protection for RFK Jr. speaks volumes about what the administration actually thinks about Trump, despite all of the “thank God he’s ok” rhetoric:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 16th, 2024

VILE: NBC, ABC Tie Second Trump Assassination Attempt to ‘Rhetoric’, and ‘Dogs and Cats.’

NBC’s Lester Holt goes a step further, directly tying the failed shooting attempt to Springfield:

LESTER HOLT: Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town. Our Maggie Vespa is in Columbus, Ohio with more.

MAGGIE VESPA: Lester, simply put: Springfield, Ohio has been inundated by threats. over the last several days, closing government buildings, schools, hospitals. Today, effectively closing a local university campus after administrators said someone threatened a mass shooting targeting Haitians. This in light of, officials say, a false online conspiracy theory alleging Haitian immigrants in that city are eating people’s pets.

NBC and the Regime Media waste no time in imputing the shooting to “rhetoric” and attempting to blame Trump for the latest, albeit failed, attempt on his life. Once the shooter’s motives become clear, how soon before the Regime Media retract? If they ever do at all?

I wouldn’t hold my breath. Incidentally, NBC cared so little about this latest assassination attempt on Trump that, as Scott Johnson writes, “I learned of the second attempt on Trump’s life yesterday afternoon while watching the 49ers/Vikings game on television and scrolling through X. We have apparently become so habituated to the Trump assassination scenarios that NBC did not see fit to interrupt the proceedings with a breaking news alert. Insofar as the possible murder of Trump is concerned, complacency seems to be the order of the day.”

One assumes that Holt would have been in full mock-Cronkite mode had Routh succeeded, albeit with plenty of references to Trump’s rhetoric. (But with none regarding Biden and Harris’s.)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 16th, 2024

JAMES LILEKS: Username: Mattress / PW: Under.

The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one:  It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.

I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.

I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.

Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.

Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 16th, 2024

MARK STEYN: They Want Him Dead.

My own line on failed assassinations is that of the IRA taunting Mrs Thatcher after the Brighton bombing: You have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once.

In the last two months, Trump has been lucky twice. There are another two months to go: can he be lucky thrice? Four times?

If I were Trump I wouldn’t want these guys anywhere near me – the official government protection, that is. The law-&-order types on the right have been ballyhooing the quick thinking of one individual agent on the ground – which is fine and dandy, but conveniently absolves the “bureaucracy” of its failure to provide sufficient protection, even after he’s already been shot and an American citizen has died. Trump is one of the comparatively few presidents who has taken a bullet for his country, which is more than even Tim Walz can claim, but nobody who matters is interested. The court eunuchs at ABC News couldn’t be bothered with a question on this summer’s near-assassination, but they did make room for a question about the rental practices of Donald Trump’s father over half-a-century ago.

As for this latest incident, the wife of the Hero of Impeachment One and sister-in-law of a Virginia congressional candidate sums up the general attitude of the Dems:

No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.

— Rachel Vindman 🇺🇸🦅🌻 (@natsechobbyist) September 15, 2024

As Hugh Hewitt responded, “The family of Corey Comperatore would like a word with Rachel Vindman.”

In the old days, I would have cited Ian Fleming in Goldfinger:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.

But I think my longtime Rush colleague Diana Allocco is closer to the mark:

This is like the plane flying into the second tower. The situation is suddenly totally clear. We are under attack.

— Diana Allocco (@dianamee) September 15, 2024

Just so. When I heard that an airplane had hit the north tower, I spent the next fifteen minutes going about as usual on the assumption that some twin-prop had had an accident. Then the radio announced that another ‘plane had hit the south tower. The Secret Service failures in Florida are as crude and obvious as they were in Pennsylvania which means that, in the words of my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver, this is happening because they want it to happen. They want Trump to die, and they are willing to create the necessary conditions.

At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney asks, “Will the Left drop their awful ‘stochastic terrorism’ talk now?”

Well, no, not just yet:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 16th, 2024

September 15, 2024

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST BOTCHED JOKES: In the Wake of Second Attempted Trump Shooting, a Video Emerges of Kamala Making a Sick Joke.

Flashback:

Olbermann was discussing the election with Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman, a frequent guest. They topic was, how can a winner finally be determined in this never-ending Democratic race for the nomination? Of course, the assumption was that it was Clinton that should be shown the door (despite clearly still earning her spot in the race thanks to, um, voters). Fineman said that, all the delegate math aside, ultimately it was going to take “some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this.”

Said Olbermann: “Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”

—“Keith Olbermann’s Idea For Beating Hillary: Literally Beating Hillary,” The Huffington Post, May 2nd, 2008.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

REPORT: Shots fired near Donald Trump as he leaves his Florida golf club.

UPDATE: An account bearing the name of Ryan Routh was suspended early this evening by Twitter, but note this tweet from March 4th, 2020:

Routh’s Facebook page was scrubbed as well.

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

MORE: “The Hawaii man suspected in former President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Sunday is a long-time Democrat, donating exclusively to the party’s candidates 19 times since 2019, records show. Between September 2019 and March 2020, Ryan Routh contributed more than $140 on the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show.”

Posted at 8:51 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

MATT VESPA: The Left Is Powerless in Stopping the Haitians Eating Pets Story…And It’s Amazing to Watch.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, though in this instance, it’s not a statement regarding some appalling examples of liberal media bias. For the Ohio Haitians ‘eating the pets’ story, it’s pure entertainment, maybe a touch of schadenfreude: the liberal media is being tortured in their attempt to neutralize the story. Contrary to the establishment press, this story hasn’t been debunked. There’s no way within 48-72 hours that authorities can verify dogs and cats are not being eaten by the tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.

As for the local birdlife, geese and ducks are being eaten, with police reports to corroborate the allegations. Even a fact check done by local media on that story’s angle hasn’t negated it. If anything, it might have shined a light that this problem has expanded. I’m talking about the viral picture of the migrant holding a dead goose—that was not in Springfield but nearby Columbus.

The inability of the media to suffocate this story alluded to the industry’s appalling lack of trust. No one believes them, no matter how hard they try. It only seems to further entrench people’s belief that Haitian migrants are running wild in Springfield. The consumption of pets needs to be verified, but many corroborating eyewitness accounts exist. Geese and ducks are being taken, driving out of control in the town. It’s led to fatalities.

Christopher Rufo goes in search of: The Cat Eaters of Ohio.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm the particularities of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

Related: Trump Promises Mass Deportation of Springfield, Ohio Immigrants If Elected.

And from the Power Line Week in Pictures:

UPDATE: Rufo responds to a CBS hit on his “Cat Eaters of Ohio” article with a very lengthy rebuttal on Twitter:

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Can’t stop the signal.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

THIS IS CNN: Dana Bash Auditions for Spot on the Harris-Walz Team As She Berates JD Vance During a Very Ugly Interview. “This was a very ugly interview with Bash refusing to act like a journalist in any way. She refused to let Vance answer questions, she pushed Democrat talking points continuously, and what is worse, she has not been to Springfield, OH, and couldn’t find anything more substantial than comments by people who don’t live in the affected area that the incidents did not happen. To Vance’s credit, he revealed Bash as the partisan midwit we always assumed her to be.”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

YOU CAN’T MOCK THEM ENOUGH:

Robin DiAngelo is a grifter who has made millions off a hateful book titled White Fragility. She is one of the left-wing “anti-racists” who were interviewed by Matt Walsh in the Daily Wire film Am I Racist?, which opened yesterday and which I reviewed at the link.

Walsh’s interview of DiAngelo is one of the film’s highlights. She has no idea who Walsh is, and he introduces himself as “Matt.” You can’t be too careful these days, she says. The high point of the interview is when they talk about reparations, which DiAngelo favors. It happens that a member of the film crew named Ben is black. Walsh calls him on camera and gives him $20 (I’m going from memory here) as his own personal reparations. He then asks DiAngelo whether she will do the same.

By this point, DiAngelo is visibly uncomfortable, but her ideology gives her no easy out. So she digs in her purse, finds $30, and gives the $30 to Ben. DiAngelo (like the other “anti-racists” who agreed to appear in the documentary) got paid–in her case, $15,000 for what couldn’t have been more than an hour or so of her time. Talk about price gouging!

During each of the interviews of “anti-racists,” the amount that the production company paid the interviewee is shown on the upper left of the screen. When DiAngelo gives Ben–who manages to keep a straight face–her $30, the amount on the screen ticks down to $14,970. It is a hilarious moment.

When word of DiAngelo’s humiliation began to spread, she deleted her social media accounts. Then she issued a statement about her experience.

In a note on her website titled “About That Film,” the “White Fragility” author says the “sequence of events” that ended with her taking $30 out of her purse to pay reparations to a black producer on set was “unsettling,” and that she figured out she “had been played” before the trailer for the film was released in July.

“After reviewing the sequence of events and discussing it with colleagues, I realized that they had lied about their agenda and I had been played,” DiAngelo says.

But what was the lie? DiAngelo doesn’t say. In fact, there was no lie: DiAngelo was asked whether she would appear in a documentary on anti-racism, and she said she would do so for $15,000. What she means, apparently, is that she is too fragile to be interviewed by anyone but a fellow left-winger.

Exit question: How did Robin DiAngelo get away with it for so long? “This is the irony of the white shame that is so à la mode in cultural circles: it hides a new species of white pride, where educated whites fancy themselves as morally superior to both unlearned white people and pained black people. The former they must enlighten, the latter they must repair.”

Related: The ‘conservative Michael Moore’ taking on the ‘crazy’ diversity industry. “Matt Walsh has been described as the Right-wing Michael Moore, a satirical filmmaker who invites people to walk into a trap of their own construction.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

A SULZBERGER ELEGY: We Don’t Hate the Liberal Media Nearly Enough.

It’s been “a DNC proxy outlet” for quite some time — the last Republican the New York Times endorsed for the White House was Eisenhower in ’56. But Democrats have been comparing Republican presidents and presidential candidates to National Socialists since over a decade prior to that, all the way to the Gray Lady’s latest reactionary gesture.

Related: Fatality! JD Vance Takes Zero Prisoners Owning Dana Bash During Back and Forth on Springfield, OH (Watch).

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. The debate last week on ABC was, from one point of view, a dog’s breakfast, but, from another, it was a mesmerizing exercise in vertiginous, pseudo-Nietzschean legerdemain.

As has become widely recognized, the debate was really a sort of ambush in which the execrable immoderators blatantly took sides, constantly “fact-checking” Trump with erroneous objections while letting Harris slide with a steady stream of lies emitted according to the fixed convention of Democratic talking points.  As I said at the time, the real loser in that exchange was ABC News, whose credibility is now in the gutter.

Various public-spirited people, from media stars like Laura Ingraham to ordinary citizens with an X account, have come forward to provide inventories of Harris’s—and the moderators’—lies.  One of the most complete was provided by @BelannF, who posted this useful inventory in paratactic summary:

Project 2025 – Lie

National abortion ban – Lie

“Very fine people” hoax – Lie

Will be a Dictator – Lie

Blaming Trump for Afghanistan- Lie

Racism and division by Trump – Lie

Never said she will ban fracking – Lie

Rally goers leaving early – Lie

“I will go over my plan” – Lie

Police died on Jan 6th – Lie

“Bloodbath” comment – Lie

Trumps stance on IVF – Lie

Won’t take guns – Lie

Trump weak on foreign policy – Lie

Trump friends with Putin, Un – Lie

Trump inciting Jan 6. – Lie

No military in combat zones – Lie*

She provides no sources for these assertions, but you can look them up in a nonce. I’ll go first with three to get you started. Early on in the evening, Harris angrily recycled one of the most thoroughly “debunked” (i.e., refuted) claims: that Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides at the neo-Nazi demonstration at Charlottesville.  Here’s a video clip of his remarks. Far from describing the thugs as “very fine people,” he castigated them in the strongest terms.  Then why is this lie so frequently recycled?  Perhaps it is a political application of the old adage repititio mater memoriae: “Repetition is the mother of memory.”  If you repeat a lie often enough people come to believe it, or half believe, or at least wonder about the veracity of its contrary.

Harris also claimed that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he were not elected.  But what he actually said was that the auto industry would face a financial bloodbath if the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies were enacted.  And so they would.

Perhaps my favorite lie was her claim that there were no active-duty American military personnel in a war zone at present. Anyone who reads the news knows that is not true, as these American soldiers testified with refreshing candor.

What has been fascinating to watch is how the post-debate consensus has evolved.

Read the whole thing.

* Watch: The Best Fact-Check of Kamala Harris in History, and You’ll Never Guess How It Ends (language alert):

Related: ABC News Is Perplexed: Why Isn’t Kamala Harris Getting a Post-Debate Bounce? The Answer Is…

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

HEY, SPEAKING OF CRAZY CAT LADIES: Kamala Harris’ new climate director said she is hesitant to have children because of climate change threats.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign hired a new climate director who has frequently said the effects of climate change are part of what’s stopping her from having children.

Camila Thorndike, who previously worked in the Senate managing the climate portfolio of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was given the title of climate engagement director for the Harris for President campaign in September 2024, according to her LinkedIn page.

Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Thorndike said on several occasions that she considers climate change a factor when deciding whether to have kids.

“I was 15 when I first saw the climate ‘hockey stick’ graph. I realized that this skyrocketing arrow of temperature would take place in my lifetime. All of the big milestones of life that I was looking forward to would be in the context of this big global crisis. It led to the question of whether or not to have kids – which is still a big question for me – where I would put down roots, what my family would do,” Thorndike said in 2018 when she was the D.C. campaign director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Again in November 2019, Thorndike described it as an “ethical question that keeps me up at night.”

“I have always been someone who enjoys children and loves the idea of a family, and that’s why I have wrestled with this, because my logical mind and the facts of the future I can see bearing down on us are not supportive of the life I would want for them,” she told Yahoo News at the time.

Curiously, this doomsday loop has been around since 1970 (1968, if you include Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb into the equation, and you should), and yet somehow, the Final Countdown never quite arrives:

You should see how the media went out of its way to terrify people during the previous decade (when global cooling was all the rage):

As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2018 on the Blueanon left comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.

Eventually, the doomsday mindset started to have a result among the true believers, as I wrote in a post at EdDriscoll.com in 2011 headlined “In Search of the Missing Frisco Families.” San Francisco, on its way to becoming Detroit by the Bay, was concurrently “becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines,” as a headline at the San Francisco Examiner noted in 2011. Three years prior, in an effort to save the planet, the puritans at the San Francisco Chronicle explored how readers could throw “less-is-more birthday parties:”

Forget the twisty straws, Tootsie rolls and Dora the Explorer plates with matching cups, hats and tablecloth. There are signs that more parents would like to.

Anxious about the economy, global warming and our national image as people who would rent a limo for a kid’s party while a polar bear’s ice floe melts, many are toning down the trappings of that classic annual ritual, the blowout birthday party. They are saying no to plastic toys and water bottles, paper plates, gift wrap and new toys. There is even a modest backlash against the goody bag, the sack of candy and plastic knickknacks usually thrust into each sticky hand at the end of parties.

* * *

“There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” said Sarah Lane, a founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values. “You should see what gets thrown away. It’s disgusting.”

Trust me, there are numerous things more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party in San Francisco.

On the flipside, the Politico warned its readers in April about — I hope you’re sitting down for this! — The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.

This just in: religious people seek to make babies!

UPDATE: In addition to everything else going wrong in the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy spent his timeout as Spock absolutely terrifying the nation:

UPDATE (9/15/24): The enviro-leftists at the L.A. Times have a similar mindset:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2024

September 14, 2024

JANE’S ADDICTION MORPHED INTO THE WWE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Perry Farrell’s wife Etty Lau breaks her silence to reveal the REAL reason lead singer of Jane’s Addiction punched guitarist Dave Navarro on stage.

Related: “Dave Grohl Proves Rock Ain’t Dead,” Jim Treacher writes. “I know I’m jaded and probably more than a little evil, but I ain’t mad at Dave Grohl. It’s amusing to me. I just hope his new kid is worth giving up half of everything he owns in the divorce. Long live rock & roll!”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024

WATCH: The Best Fact-Check of Kamala Harris in History, and You’ll Never Guess How It Ends.

Is this my most clickbaity headline in a long time? Probably. Am I about to deliver on every promise it makes? Absolutely.

The setup happened during the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and the topic centered on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. When pressed on the matter, Harris tried to pivot by claiming that there is not a single American service member currently serving in a combat zone.

HARRIS: As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.

That’s a bold proclamation, but is it true? That’s where this epic fact-check comes in, and be sure to watch the video so you can see the twist at the end. Be warned that while hilarious, there is some salty language used.

Exit quote: “Harris doesn’t care about military members. That’s made clear by her choosing to cast them aside for political gain. For her, they are just obstacles on her way to the White House. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Democrat.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024

THAT’LL RUIN YOUR DAY: Moment freight train smashes into stranded 18-wheeler carrying military howitzer in ‘devastating’ collision.

This is the shocking moment a freight train smashed into a stranded vehicle carrying a military howitzer in South Carolina.

The crash happened at a railroad crossing near Highway 52 in Goose Creek yesterday afternoon.

Debris can be seen flying into the air as the train collides with the 18-wheeled tractor-trailer as it tries to cross the tracks.

The crossing was also destroyed in the crash and the road was closed by police.

Cops from the Goose Creek Police Department said they received a call about the collision at around 12.30pm on Thursday.

Police said the trailer, which was carrying a military vehicle, got struck while driving over the train crossing.

There were no reports of any injuries and the driver refused treatment.

The military vehicle on the trailer has been described as a M109 Paladin Howitzer.

This being 2024, the crash can be observed from multiple angles:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024

STEVE HAYWARD: Republicans for Suicide.

The case of Dick Cheney is even more curious than most never Trumpers because his claim that Trump represents the most serious threat to the Constitution ever raises a question: What is the premise of that hyperbole? Is it that the executive branch has grown too powerful? Well yes—heartily agree. Yet the paradox here is that Trump in his first term kept trying to get Congress to step up and assert its constitutional powers to solve some of our major problems, rather than using executive ukase as Obama and Biden liked to do (and no doubt Harris will too, if she wins). And Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court have struck the most serious blows against executive power, especially in striking down the Chevron Doctrine.

I wonder if Cheney agrees with that decision. If the executive branch is too powerful to be trusted in the hands of Donald Trump, maybe Cheney ought to look in the mirror a bit longer. After all, as both a congressman in the 1980s, and then as vice president, Cheney was one of the leading champions of maximum executive power, and produced serious work in support of the “unitary executive” idea.

In the past, all Republican presidents or presidential candidates were called Hitler by Democratic politicians and their operatives with bylines while they ran or were in office, and then rehabilitated as thoughtful elder statesmen once there was a new Hitler who needed attacking. But now that we have former Republicans endorsing the current Democratic presidential candidate, it places their opponents’ past rhetoric in sharp perspective. Why should we believe their crazy rantings now, knowing that they’ll find astonishing levels of Strange New Respect™ a few years later?

Or as the Hill exclaimed on Tuesday: How the GOP’s Darth Vader turned into Luke Skywalker.

Incidentally, as the Spectator’s “Cockburn” asked in February of 2020: Why do NeverTrumpers think they can run the Democratic party? The arrogance follows wherever they go.

UPDATE: Everything seemingly is spinning out of control!* AP is quick to provide redemption to Cheney:

Meanwhile, from America’s Newspaper of Record:

* Classical reference.

Posted at 12:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Roland Emmerich Is Ready To Shop Lawrence In Arabia.

The filmmaker has long dreamed of playing in the world of the classic 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole, and in the coming weeks, he and Bohemian Rhapsody writer Anthony McCarten will take it out to potential partners. The duo envision this as a three-season prestige series, and McCarten hopes to write the entire first season.

Emmerich calls it “In Arabia,” rather than “of Arabia,” because as he says, “it has a little bit more characters” than the original movie.

In 1983, executives at NBC thought, “Yes! Let’s turn the beloved 1943 movie Casablanca into a TV series. And let’s get David Soul out of Starsky and Hutch to play Rick, the iconic character played by the legendary Humphrey Bogart. It’ll be brilliant!”

It wasn’t. And Roland Emmerich’s TV series version of one of the greatest films ever made will likely be worse.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024

MARK JUDGE: BlueAnon: Liberalism’s tragic descent into paranoia and conspiracy theories.

[David Harsanyi’s] The Rise of BlueAnon is one of the most important political books of the decade. It’s also one of the saddest, exploring how a once-great Democratic Party has become infected with paranoia and conspiracy theories. Harsanyi, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, calls these new liberal crazies “BlueAnon.” They are the left-wing version of QAnon, the crazy far-right conspiracy nuts. Thus, there’s no real difference between conspiracy guy Alex Jones and Russiagate hoaxer Rachel Maddow.

Harsanyi argues that while QAnon is a fringe phenomenon, BlueAnon has entered the mainstream of American culture through media, universities, and the internet. It has also become a dangerous threat to the future of American democracy.

“Over the past decades,” Harsanyi observes, “the American left and its institutions have mainstreamed a unique brand of political paranoia. The modern Democratic Party’s policy prescriptions—even what it views as our most pressing societal problems—are increasingly tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies.

Exit quote: “The biggest difference between Alex Jones and Rachel Maddow is the haircut.”

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 14th, 2024
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