Bookworm Beat 9/5/2018 — the insane Leftists edition and open thread

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There’s no doubt about it: the dominant thread in this round-up is insane Leftists who are unmoored from reality and want America to fall with them.

Bookworm Beat logo Brennan double standards insane leftistsBefore I begin, I want to remind you about What Business Thinks, a website that tracks the way businesses today, watching a divided America, are selling ideology, rather than their goods and services. On the main page, you’ll find a searchable database. There’s also a new, but growing blog that tracks daily news stories about businesses staking out ideological positions (both accidentally and on purpose).

Okay, with that out of the way, it’s time for the round-up:

Sasse’s extraordinary primer on the separation of powers. Ben Sasse used the occasion of the Kavanaugh hearings to deliver a short, superb lecture about the separation of powers and a scathing indictment against Congress for its laziness. America would be a better place if more people watched his statement (which begins about five minutes into the video):

In the same vein, I recommend Jonathan Turley’s essay about the dangers lurking behind the trend to turn Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a celebrity. While I disagree with Turley’s kind words about her jurisprudence (I’ve always found her to be opaque, intellectually dishonest, and often completely wrong, a fact that helped my journey from Democrat to conservative), I agree with his premise, which he develops with deserved digs at such conservative luminaries as Scalia and Thomas too:

Whether it is the commercials for the film “RBG” over the last year or the nonstop CNN ads for the network premiere of the documentary Monday night, the airways are full of all things Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was recently shown to be the best known of the Supreme Court justices and, at this rate, she could end up bigger than The Supremes. She even has her own action figure. To someone like me, who has long praised Ginsburg and considers her to be one of the strongest intellects on the bench in the last century, the saturation coverage might seem welcome. After all, why not pay homage to a jurist instead of a reality television star?

The answer is we should not and, before you burn me in effigy for such sacrilege, allow me to explain. For years, I have criticized what I call “the rise of the celebrity justice.” Justices once avoided public speeches beyond the most mundane graduation or dedication events. Justices believed they should speak through their judicial opinions and avoid even the appearance of seeking popular or political following. This tradition developed after early years of partisan figures on the courts.

The real meaning behind yesterday’s Kavanaugh theater. Michael Goodwin looks at what went on yesterday in the Senate and it’s not pretty. I recommend the entire article, but I especially liked this point:

Because the actual hearing eventually got underway and Republicans look to have the votes for confirmation, it’s easy to dismiss the theatrical hijacking as nothing more than politics as usual. But that would be a mistake because, with apologies to Shakespeare, in this case the sound and fury signify something.

It marked the moment when there was no longer a meaningful difference between the aim of elected Democrats and their unelected supporters in the audience. They were united in their determination to shut down the process because they both believe that if they can’t win, the game should be canceled.

Trump has forced modern Democrats to show themselves for what they really are. It’s never been about constitutional governance; it’s always been about raw power.

Stripping Leftist tech giants of their raw power. The tech giants, all hard-Left products of America’s colleges and universities, are busy doing everything they can to silence the opposition. The best response I’ve seen to this is to declare that, to the extent they are busy editing content, they are publishers, not open platforms. And the best explanation I’ve seen about why this matters is Tom Trinko’s discussion.

Alternatively, as someone else commented (I can’t remember where), we conservatives don’t want the government to step in and run these tech giants. (God forbid.) We simply want them to play by the same rules as other utilities: PG&E doesn’t get to cut off my electricity because it disagrees with my values.

Vote as if your future depends on it. Because it does, of course. I mention this because a new poll claims that socialist Andrew Gillum has a lead over Republican Ron DeSantis in the Florida governor’s race.

We know from 2016 that polling accuracy is dubious at best, especially when a poll is shaped, not to reflect public opinion, but to drive it. Nevertheless, if there’s any merit to this poll, the only defense to those who do not wish to see Florida become Chicago or California, is (a) to do boots on the ground work for DeSantis and (b) to vote.

By the way, for those blacks locked into inner city hellholes, there is another way:

Two hot takes on the idiocy that characterizes most of Chelsea Clinton’s utterances:

The Catholic Church needs an intervention. There are no words:

Miami Beach police arrested two Chicago-area priests Monday for allegedly performing sexual acts on one another in a car in full view of the public.

Authorities found Diego Berrio and Edwin Giraldo Cortez of Arlington Heights, Illinois, allegedly engaged in oral sex in the front seat of a car at 3:20 p.m. The car, which did not have tinted windows, was parked on the side of a Miami Beach street so that anyone walking down the sidewalk or passing down the street could clearly see the two men.

Both men identified themselves as priests from the Mission of San Juan Diego parish in Arlington Heights.

Pope Francis has made it clear that he has no interest in bringing the church back to its Christian moral roots. He has embraced Leftist economics, a Gaia-ist approach to the climate (complete with its boiling earth eschatology), and a Roman approach to sexual libertinism. It’s time for a schism or a housecleaning — and that’s up to today’s Catholics to decide.

ISNA dehumanizes Jews. My most recent blog entry at What Business Thinks is about a Houston Starbucks that barred from entry Ex-Muslims who had been handing out flyers at the annual Islamic Society of the United States convention. I wonder how that Starbucks would feel if it knew what Linda Sarsour was saying inside that convention:

Worse still, “if you’re on the side of the oppressor, or you’re defending the oppressor, or you’re actually trying to humanize the oppressor,” she said, “then that’s a problem sisters and brothers, and we got to be able to say: that is not the position of the Muslim American community.”

That seems like a slap at Muslim activists who have engaged in dialogue with Zionists and Israelis, and even traveled to Israel under a program financed by the Shalom Hartman Institute. Wajahat Ali, for example, was disinvited from speaking at this weekend’s convention for failing to make the Palestinian cause his paramount issue as a Muslim.

Daniel Greenfield explains the deeper meaning behind Sarsour’s words:

If you’re going to kill Jews, you have to dehumanize them.

And “resistance” is all about killing Jews. ISNA is part of a continuum of organizations that support Islamic terror against Israel.

Sarsour is consolidating that opposition by warning that any attempt at dialogue, any view of Israelis as human beings, rather than faceless things to be destroyed, is “not the position of the Muslim-American community.”

Keep in mind, too, that Sarsour is completely consistent with the openly expressed antisemitism coming from the Democratic Socialists of America — and that Tom Perez has said that these young, antisemitic DSA candidates are the future of the Democrat party.

A good suggestion for Nike. By embracing America-hating, police-hating Kaepernick, Nike is definitely taking a stand (probably to gain more market shares with inner city blacks who keep going back to the Democrat plantation no matter how badly it treats them). One man has a good idea for Nike if it really wants to make a difference:

Incidentally, Nike’s pretense at liberalism, when it’s actually Leftist, seems like a good introduction to Dennis Prager’s most recent PragerU video:

Prager really does have a knack of distilling important subjects to their essence. No wonder his videos are viewed billions of times and no wonder the tech giants are desperate to squelch them.

Socialist Venezuela sinks ever deeper into its own Dark Ages. People in Venezuela, having put their faith in socialist government, have watched their oil fields become useless, the funds from those former oil fields dry up, food vanish, diapers vanish, liberty vanish and, now, water vanish. It turns out that socialism is, among other things, smelly.

Remember, no matter the promises, once Leftists run out of other people’s money, all that people are left with is tyranny, starvation, fear, and dirt. The pretty, shiny new socialist candidates in America want that end for you. They’re in denial about it, of course, but you needn’t be. Vote in November as if your life depends on it . . . because it does.

Social media and the mob. I use social media to advance ideas in which I believe and to get ideas and information for my blog and my What Business Thinks project. For me, it’s a tool. Nevertheless, I recognize the dangers inherent in it and am incredibly grateful that both my children had such solid real friendships that they never got into the social media insanity.

As a reminder about how scary the mob behind social media is though (and, somehow, it’s almost invariably a Left-wing, SJW mob), I recommend reading John Hawkins’ Seven People Whose Lives Were Ruined by Social Media.

Here’s a moral dilemma for the Left. We all know you’re copacetic when police officers are killed, but what if the dogs assisting police officers are the ones who get killed?

That’s what happened in Texas when two tracking dogs, routinely used for finding lost children or Alzheimers’ adults, helped track illegal aliens who had crossed the border. The illegal aliens then murdered these gentle, helpful animals. That’s who Democrats want to have come into our country: Dog murderers!

I, being a conservative, have consistent values on this one: I hate illegal immigration, I hate cop killers, and I hate dog murderers.

John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive. It must have been at least five years ago that I read that John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States (1841-1845), still has living grandsons. That was a surprise. What’s even more of a surprise is that those grandsons are still with us lo these many years later. I find that quite amazing.

It’s scary when the Babylon Bee sounds like real news. Having watched the Kavanaugh hearings, the brilliant minds at the Babylon Bee (a satire site) came up with this one:

As the confirmation hearings for President Trump’s SCOTUS pick Brett Kavanaugh began Tuesday, the leaders of the Democratic Party immediately turned up the heat on the nominee.

While several Democrats have simply questioned Kavanagh’s prior political opinions, a growing contingent within the Party is demanding that the nominee submit to a DNA test in order to prove that he’s not literally Adolf Hitler.

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