The Bookworm Beat 12/15/14 — The truth and only the truth edition, and Open Thread

Woman writingI finally got my Christmas cards out, which is always such a Herculean task. It shouldn’t be, since I do the whole thing online. Moreover, I actually like sending out cards. The reason I delay is because I always hope that I’ll find that perfect picture of the children. At a certain point, though, I realize it’s not going to happen, and I just go with what I’ve got.

And speaking of what I’ve got, I’ve got links!!

The lying-est administration ever

I’ve been harping on Obama’s pathological lies since he was on the campaign trail in 2007 and 2008. Since institutions tend to rot from the top down, it shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that the entire administration is riddled with lies. Indeed, the entire Democrat party is, thanks in part to a great head start with the Clinton administration. While this rank, pervasive dishonesty is nothing new, I particularly like how Daniel Greenfield puts it:

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies.

Invite Gruber to testify about the time that he admitted that the administration had been lying and the only thing that will happen is more lies being told by a man who is there only because he lied.

Like the old lady who explained her cosmology to Bertrand Russell as being “turtles all the way down”, with modern progressives it’s lies all the way down.

[snip]

Obama doesn’t simply lie. He exists in a truth-free zone. He doesn’t stumble with any construction as clumsy as Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” He does not start with truthful facts. His starting point is in an imaginary territory. It ends in an imaginary territory. If the two imaginary territories are different, it scarcely matters because neither place was ever real.

[snip]

Bill Clinton lied. Obama tells stories. None of these stories have anything to do with reality. Lena Dunham’s biography is a peek into a disordered mind that is incapable of grasping the concept of truth. In her world there are no facts, only stories that elicit emotional reactions. Obama’s entire career rests on the same technique of telling stories for emotional effect without any regard for reality.

You should really read the whole thing. If you’ve been paying attention, what Greenfield says will resonate with you.

Three cheers for Glenn Reynolds who unabashedly calls out the campus rape lie

There’s enough data out there now for Glenn Reynolds to write a bold, straightforward USA Today article calling the “campus rape epidemic” what it is: A giant hoax.

What makes Boehner tick?

Do you recall that, when Chief Justice Roberts saved Obamacare, many people speculated that the Obama administration was blackmailing him, possibly over illegalities associated with his adopted children? It was difficult to understand otherwise how Roberts could have ridden roughshod over both law and facts.

Today, there’s speculation afoot — from Matt Drudge of all people — that the Obama administration might have something on John Boehner:

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama’s immigration executive orders.

“Obama got EVERYTHING,” Drudge tweeted Friday. “NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins.”

Glenn Reynolds sums it up perfectly (whether we’re talking suspicion or reality): “Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.”

The only thing I’ll add is that Dianne Feinstein and the other Dems who signed off on the CIA torture memo might want to make sure that their consciences and records are clean. After all, even though the CIA is supposed to limit its spying to overseas activities, I wouldn’t put it past it to have some data on people here at home.

Dick Cheney’s moral clarity

Jonathan Tobin points out something interesting about Dick Cheney: He’s not just defending what the CIA did to elicit information from the 9/11 terrorists; he’s not even embarrassed about it. It’s this last thing that’s driving the Left mad. They’re using Cheney’s refusal to buy into guilt as evidence of future wrongdoing. Tobin, though, says that the Left (as usual) has got it all wrong:

But while in private life the characteristics Cheney is exhibiting might seem egregious, they are also evidence of exactly what we need from wartime leaders.

What Cheney remembers and all of those who are carrying on about the one-sided and often misleading Senate report forget, is that the Bush administration’s primary responsibility after 9/11 was ensuring that another atrocity didn’t occur and that the U.S. didn’t lose the war that al-Qaeda was waging against it. Throughout the history of this republic, wartime leaders have always been forced to do some things that don’t look too good outside of the context of the time and the situation. As I wrote last week after the report was released, war is, at best, a morally ambiguous affair and always involves brutality and bloodshed even waged for moral causes.

Of course, if there are indeed effective and humane high-speed methods to elicit useful information when lives are on the line, then our intelligence services should use those better ways. I have to say, though, that I’m dubious about the truth of the article promising that such methods exist. Why? Because, as you will remember from the first segment in this post, the Left lies.

The most loathsome person in politics this week?

The most loathsome person in politics this week?  That would have to be British MP Gerald Kaufman (Labour), who happens to be a Jew, but whose cultural Stockholm Syndrome has made him a violent partisan for the Palestinian cause. It was this mental derangement that led him to say “You cannot appeal to the Israelis’ better nature, because they do not have one.”

There are few creatures more repugnant than a self-loathing Jew.

Are the rats at the New York Times scuttling off the Sharpton ship?

The New York Times (!), of all news outlets, did a lengthy, front-page story about Al Sharpton’s tax problems. I wonder if the Times has figured out that Sharpton’s ship of state is finally about to sink, and is making a preemptive jump for the shore.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”

The one thing that’s become manifestly clear thanks to Ferguson and Eric Garner is that we’re finally having spelled out in words of few syllables the horrible racism that permeates the Progressive party. One hundred years ago, the Progressive party was openly anti-black and put great stock in eugenics as a way to rid the world of dark-skinned “undesirables.” Today, the Progressive party is openly anti-white, yet peculiarly it still puts great stock in abortion, something that happens to be used with excessive enthusiasm amongst the same blacks that the Progressives of yore once tried to remove from existence.

Anyway, here are two examples of the revolting racism from Progressives:

College president forced to apologize after saying ‘all lives matter’

Please Stop Telling Me That All Lives Matter

Do these people really not understand that, once you start having as your motto the principle that some lives matter more than others, you’ve made your first tentative steps down the road to genocide?

The funny thing about climate change is that it’s all happened before

Huffington Post has a “Chicken Little” article about an Alaskan village that’s vanishing into the sea because anthropogenic climate change.

Reading these hysterical existential shrieks, you really wonder under what rock these climate changistas have been living. Seas rise and seas fall. That’s how we get stories about Atlantis or discover the Lighthouse of Alexandria lying on the harbor floor.

Just the other day, news came from Israel about a neolithic village, 7,500 years old, found off the shores of Haifa. It doesn’t take special intelligence to realize that the neolithic community didn’t build their village under water. Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, the water was lower:

According to Benjamin, “Israel is a great place to look at sea-level change because there are markers from 125,000 years ago on land, when sea levels were higher, but also because sea levels are constantly changing over time there are areas offshore with prehistoric coastal villages buried up to 12 meters deep, and possibly more, older material even deeper offshore.”

Those dirty, dirty electric cars

I’ve written before in these pages that I got a zippy little electric car a few months ago. My timing, as always, was upside down, because I got it just as gas prices began to fall. You can also follow the stock market by my investments: When I go in, it drops; when I get out, it rises.

Anyway, Mr. Bookworm is ignoring falling gas prices and is being buoyed along by the feeling that we’re now contributing less than before to carbon emissions (which really isn’t true, because one of the little Bookworms now drives my old gas guzzler but whatever).

Anyway, if we lived in one of the coal states, Mr. Bookworm wouldn’t even have low carbon emissions as a consolation:

People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier, worsening global warming.

The sentence immediately following that quotation reminds us that ethanol, which is required to be in all California fuels “isn’t so green, either.”

It turns out that the cleanest, greenest thing out there may just be good old . . . gasoline.

Students find the ultimate excuse for plagiarism

The New York Times has written an article excusing the plagiarism that goes on in academia today. According to the Times, the poor young things today believe that the internet is just a giant cornucopia of free information that they can use as they please.

That’s the stupidest excuse I’ve ever heard. There’s just one simple rule to follow: If you didn’t write it, you provide attribution, even if that attribution is “Anonymous at [URL].”

She walked out of the gas chamber alive

Klara Markus is celebrating her 101st birthday in Romania. That she lived past 30 is unbelievable. Her family died in the Holocaust and she actually ended up with a group of women inside one of Auschwitz’s gas chambers — only to have the Nazis discover that they’d already killed so many people that day that they’d run out of gas. Read Markus’s amazing story here.