Bookworm Beat 11/12/18 — the post-election counting edition and open thread

It’s not losing seats that bothers me, it’s the fact that post-election counts and recounts invariably favor Democrats, which is banana republic stuff.

Mob Illustrated edition post-election countingPost-election recounts and miscounts and discounts and God alone knows what else. I’m not actually going to blog too much about post-election recounts, despite using them as part of my post title today. The topic is just too depressing. You can kid yourself as much as you want about living in a constitutionally guided democratic republic, but if 27 of the last post-election counts and recounts miraculously favored the Democrats, if Democrats are openly registering illegal aliens, if Democrats coincidentally win in regions with more voters than residents, if the dead are walking and voting, and if many “voters” were alive during the Spanish-American War, you don’t have a constitutionally guided democratic republic; you simply have a banana republic with nice cars and XBoxes.

Look at Arizona: Either there’s voter fraud going on there or Arizona citizens willingly elected a woman who loathes them. Blech! Having said that, Ron Coleman points out that it might not have been a Democrat win so much as a shameless and unnecessary Republican loss:

Can American Jews be more stupid? When I grew up, my parents were so proud of Jewish brains. Einstein? Jewish. Hedy Lamar? Not only a Jewish brain, but gorgeous. A disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences? Jewish. Kissinger? Even if you didn’t like him, he was one smart Jew. Israel? A whole nation that’s smart and Jewish.

I attended an academic high school and, while Asian students were quickly becoming dominant in the school, we still had enough smart Jews for a joke: “If Chinese New Year and Yom Kippur fell on the same day, they’d have to close the school.”

This year, though, as in years past, Jews voted disproportionately for Democrats — 75% is what I heard. If you ask these Jews about their unswerving loyalty to the Democrat party, they’d give two reasons. First, Republicans are evil and Democrats are the party of kindness, empathy, and the lack of all nasty -isms (racism, sexism, etc.). That last, of course, would lead to the second, core Jewish vote issue: Jews insist that Republicans are the party of antisemitism and Democrats are not.

To believe that, Jews have to be stupid. Really, really stupid.

The Republicans are the pro-Israel party. The Republican president’s most beloved child is Jewish, as are her children, and she’s married to one of his chief campaign advisors. One of his closet friends is Jewish and is now ambassador to Israel. Israelis who aren’t marinated in Leftism view him as one of the most pro-Israel politicians ever. Heck, Trump finally acted on past presidents’ promises and moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.

If you’re scanning the heart of the conservative/Republican party, there is only philosemitism. Yes, there are antisemites who identify as Republicans, but they exist on the furthest edges of the Republican party and are routinely disavowed and castigated by those central to the Republican party: the leaders, writers, thinkers, and politicians.

What my fellow Jews, 75% of whom are clearly more stupid than I could ever be, refuse to acknowledge is that antisemitism lives at the heart of the Democrat party. It lives in its hostility to Israel and its endless support for the genocidal Palestinians and Iranian government. It lives in Keith Ellison, who was at the heart of the Democrat Party and is now Minnesota’s Attorney General. It lives in Barack Obama, whose very first instinct, before he cleaned up his act, was to refer to the Jews deliberately slaughtered in a kosher market in Paris as “a bunch of folks.” It lives in such feted Democrat luminaries as Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. It lives in new House members Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. And it lives in the fact that the Women’s March has been entirely taken over by radically antisemitic women, led by Linda Sarsour (a very clever woman who repeatedly states that she rejects antisemitism, even as she endlessly foments it).

And most recently, it lives in Leftists’ sour, tacky, ugly attacks against actor Gerard Butler, who lost his home to California’s wildfires:

Actor Gerard Butler lost his Malibu home in a raging wildfire last weekend, but leftists are having a tough time empathizing with the “300” star because he’s an unabashed supporter of the State of Israel.

[snip]

But his tweet, which thanked first responders for doing the best they could to save his home and for evacuating his neighborhood, wasn’t met with the typical outpouring of support seen for celebrity victims of national tragedies. Instead, leftists and anti-Semites responded to Butler’s tweet with a barrage of hate, all because the actor has given money to support the Israeli Defense Forces.

Jews are antisemitic because they, more than any other people in America, insist on sending all of their children to college. So it is that, for the past 50 years, generations of Jews have been marinating in the antisemitism that has been a dominant feature of socialism since Marx himself. Gawd, but my fellow Jews are stupid.

That caravan is rife with child abductors. I’m sure you remember the Leftist hysteria when someone noticed that, just as Obama did, Trump segregated illegal immigrant children from illegal immigrant adults. “The children!” Leftists shrieked. “The children! They’ll die.”

Funnily enough, though, in their rush to defend the onrushing caravans as collections of the meekest, most law-abiding citizens outside of the heart of the Mormon Tabernacle itself, Leftists have been remarkably silent about the children who have simply vanished, the victims of . . . well, who knows? Human traffickers? Pedophiles? Murderers?

Back near the Guatemalan border end of the journey back in late October, at least one migrant kid was kidnapped right there. Now a hundred migrants have disappeared from this caravan. Apparently someone rolled a truck up, told the migrants they were getting a free ride, lured them in, and nobody’s seen them since. Their crying kids should be fine fodder on the hip of some trafficker as he seeks to get in as a “family unit” claiming asylum and benefits from “catch and release.” The women may end up in border brothels. The men may end up as drug mules or in mass graves. The perverse incentive to kidnap is already there, and sure enough, some criminal likely embedded in the group started harvesting.

Nor are these kids the first to vanish:

The group, called the Caravan of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants, says there are tens of thousands of people who have gone missing while traveling toward Mexico and the United States over the past 10 years, according to NBC News.

Leftists don’t care about children (something made clear in this creepy pro-abortion video). Children are simply props for propaganda. Once Leftists achieve their social or political goals, those poor children can go to Leftist Hell.

Media lies about fake news and Trump calls them on it. Jim Acosta was hogging a microphone at a press conference, which was disrespectful to the president and his fellow members of the press. When he refused to yield, a White House intern attempted to take the mic from him. Acosta, whose immaturity is really spectacular, acted as any 15-year-old boy would when his sister tries to recover from him the Barbie or iPhone or anything else of hers he grabbed — he physically blocked her with a downward chop to the arm. The goal wasn’t to hurt her; it was simply so that he could continue to have his way.

The whole thing was caught on video, of course, so Paul Joseph Watson made a gif with a close-up of Acosta’s teenage boy maneuver. The close-up was damning, so much so that, when Sarah Sanders tweeted it out as part of revoking Acosta’s white house press pass, the media had to react. In an alternative universe, they might have reacted by saying, “Well, damn, Acosta really is a rude, selfish, immature bastard.”

God, I make myself laugh when I even posit something like that. The media would never have done something thoughtful, mature, and self-evaluating. Instead, the fake news collective mounted a concerted attack against both Sanders and Watson, claiming that the gif was “fake.” It took Buzzfeed (!) to correct the record.

And then it took Trump to broadcast just how faked the media’s fake attack against allegedly fake news really was:

Trump fights simply be refusing to accept the Left’s narrative. Don’t ask Trump “are you still beating your wife?” unless you want to get your mic shredded.

Can you help a friend? One of the best writers in the blogosphere, both in terms of intelligent content and beautiful writing, is Gerard van der Leun at American Digest. Up until a few days ago, he lived a peaceful life in Paradise, California. But Paradise is no more, having burned to the ground. Gerard lost everything. There’s nothing we can do to replace the objects that resonated emotionally — the pictures, family heirlooms, etc. — but we can help him rebuild his wardrobe, buy dishes, and generally pull together the basics for a home. If you’re willing, you can donate here.

It’s impossible with a mass disaster to make everyone whole again. Sometimes the best you can do is to give to a friend.

The day of spilled fast food is finally over. The glory of being alive in today’s world is that you live and learn something new every day:

Oooh! I want one. I am not generally an acquisitive person. Give me a computer, internet access, lots of things to read, a dog, and a few other of life’s necessities and I’m a happy person. I find possessions burdensome. But then I saw this video and realized that there are some things that are soul food for the mind:

Fortunately, in addition to being someone who wants fewer possessions, not more, I am unbelievably cheap. (Hey, old age is staring me down and I hate cat food.) If you are less cheap than I am, though, you can get your own Trumpy Bear for less than $60.00 (not including shipping and handling).

Made me laugh. It’s not funny that an imbecile like Alexandria Occasional-Cortex is going to get a seat in the United States House of Representatives. However, that doesn’t mean one can’t make jokes about her:

We’ll end with class, humor, and style. This is Reagan, two months after having been shot, when a balloon popped during a speech:

I’ve got to make dinner. It says something about my state of mind that I’d rather cook than blog.