Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

[MUST-SEE VIDEO] Gen. John Kelly’s press briefing is essential viewing

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Gen. Kelly’s press conference about military phone calls is breathtaking, moving, informative, and devastating to the Progressive chattering classes.

Gen. Kelly doesn’t waste a single word. Everything he says is powerful and true. Please watch the whole video. When Gen. Kelly gets near the end of his briefing, his indictment of a culture that has lost its way, and parasitical politicians who take advantage of that fact is incredible.

UPDATE: If you don’t want to or can’t watch the video, here’s the transcript: [Read more…]

The New Yorker magazine proudly sponsors Bradley Manning

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Showing its anti-Americanism, The New Yorker celebrates the treasonous Bradley Manning as a mover and shaker who was more sinned against than sinning.

Bradley Manning Chelsea Manning Transgender Mental IllnessMr. Bookworm has a subscription to print version of The New Yorker. Most of the time I ignore this weekly magazine, finding it alternately banal, pompous, and boring. My time on this earth is finite and I have better things to do with that time than struggle through The New Yorker’s smug self-righteousness.

Occasionally, though, when I can’t get my hands on anything else to read, I’ll glance through its pages. That’s how I found myself yesterday riffling through the most recent edition, where I learned about the upcoming “New Yorker Festival.” Here are the pages boasting about this apparently epic event:

For one weekend only [October 6-8], in New York City, the artists, authors, thinkers, and personalities shaping the world today will take the stage with The New Yorker’s celebrated writers and editors, in an open exchange of ideas and insights bound to make news.

With a come-on like that, I simply had to turn the page and learn about these “artists, authors, thinkers, and personalities shaping the world today.” I mean, my God. The future is here! The future is now! The future is at The New Yorker.

For the most part, the list of people “shaping the world today” is a line-up of the usual Progressive suspects. Here are some of the names The New Yorker feels are important enough to put on the home page within the magazine promoting its upcoming festival (with all of the people attending to be found here):

  • James R. Clapper, former National Intelligence director, Trump hater, and the man who lied to Congress about spying on Americans.
  • Andy Borowitz, alleged comic writer and known Trump and conservative hater.
  • Jessi Klein, a “comedian” who writes for the almost staggeringly unfunny Amy Schumer (who is related to Chuck Schumer), whose sex jokes would have earned her a place in Minsky’s Burlesque. She’s also a Trumper hater and, to judge by this tweet, in which she castigates Trump, whose favorite daughter is Jewish, as anti-Jewish, an idiot.
  • Al Franken, about whom I need say nothing, as you already know what I’d say.
  • Naomi Klein, a hard-Left Canadian activist believes socialism will prevent global warming, and who appears to “discuss life and resistance in the Trump era.” She seems to be clueless about the fact that, even as the Western world had the wealth in the 1970s to start fighting pollution, the communist bloc continued to befoul all the land under its control, from Russia to China, and all lands surrounding and in between.
  • Rob Reiner, who made charming films in the 1980s, and is now reduced intelligent political commentary that sees him calling Trump “insane” and “utterly garbage.”
  • Colm Tóibín, Irish writer who writes about gays, gay activist, and Trump hater.
  • Robert Caro, wrote massive LBJ biography and Trump hater, who can admire LBJ and still call Trump a “demagogue.”
  • Rachel Weisz, an actress who hates Trump and Brexit. For me, she’ll always be the gal who starred in the painfully stupid anti-corporate movie, The Constant Gardener, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that a big corporation made and profited from that movie.
  • Tracee Ellis Ross, a barely-black actress who hates Trump.
  • Reverend William J. Barber II, a hard-core, Democrat party, political black preacher, who also “speaks truth to power.”
  • Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor, who also “speaks truth to power.” This “truth” involved going after journalist Dinesh d’Souza in an unprecendent manner for the latter’s small-dollar campaign funds violation, an abuse of power that seemed more closely tied to d’Souza’s bestselling books aimed at Obama and Democrats than at d’Souza’s legal infractions.

and… [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 9/8/17 — the Hurricanes Are Normal edition

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Hurricanes are normal, but Trump Derangement Syndrome obscures that fact. Of course, those subject to TDS are deranged in other ways as well. Just look….

Hurricanes are normal

Hurricanes are normal. It’s just bad luck this year that they’re making landfall in heavily populated areas of the U.S.

Before I get to the meat of this post — or, because it’s a round-up, the various meats of this post — I want to remind everyone that America has always been subject to ferocious hurricanes. They just seem worse today because we have more population in a hurricane’s path, especially when it’s an Irma-like hurricane, and because we have a 24 hour media that makes everything seem local.

In other ways, though, we’re better off when faced with hurricanes because we can prepare. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, residents did not see their Cat 4 hurricane coming. It killed 6,000 – 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. For a list of other major hurricanes in the last 400 years, the bulk of which predate “climate change” and struck out-of-the-blue, go here. You’ll see that America was especially hard hit in the 1700s, long before CO2 was an issue.

Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay our two latest hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, both of which are or will be responsible for staggering property damage and, always, the loss of too many lives. I just want to amp down the usual climate change hysteria that’s accompanying this latest display of Nature’s normal.

And with that, let me turn my attention to all the other interesting things I’ve gathered, many of which reflect poorly on those most deeply lost to TDS.

Hillary admits her incompetence. Hillary has been on the warpath with her new book, blaming everything and everybody for her loss. She’s also admitted that she was incapable of speech on election eve because she was so devastated and that it was male advisers who caused her to react less strongly to both Trump and Bernie than she thinks in retrospect that she ought to have done. (Oh, and Trump “creeped” her out.)

So Hillary has just admitted that she’s incompetent in a crisis and incapable of standing up to men. Most of Hillary’s opponents at home and abroad would have been men, men like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, or Bashir al-Assad. Her latest book is just another reminder that we dodged a serious bullet when Trump won.

Europe’s Muslim future. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, sees which way the wind is blowing and he understands that, not only is Eurabia fast approaching, but that Western Europe leaders are hastening its inevitability:

Europe’s leaders seem to have neither the will nor the means to oppose the incoming waves of millions of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. They know that terrorists are hiding among the migrants, but still do not vet them. Instead, they resort to subterfuges and lies. They create “deradicalization” programs that do not work: the “radicals,” it seems, do not want to be “deradicalized.”

Europe’s leaders try to define “radicalization” as a symptom of “mental illness”; they consider asking psychiatrists to solve the mess. Then, they talk about creating a “European Islam“, totally different from the Islam elsewhere on Earth. They take on haughty postures to create the illusion of moral superiority, as Ada Colau and Carles Puigdemont did in Barcelona: they say they have high principles; that Barcelona will remain “open” to immigrants. Angela Merkel refuses to face the consequences of her policy to import countless migrants. She chastises countries in Central Europe that refuse to adopt her policies.

European leaders can see that a demographic disaster is taking place. They know that in two or three decades, Europe will be ruled by Islam. They try to anesthetize non-Muslim populations with dreams about an idyllic future that will never exist. They say that Europe will have to learn to live with terrorism, that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Pat Condell is another prophet who is being ignored:

Meanwhile, Britain prepares its citizens for dhimmitude. Several of my gay Leftist Facebook friends proudly posted a WaPo op-ed announcing that all the grim prophecies preceding legalizing gay marriage failed to come true. It is true that heterosexual marriage is cratering at pretty much the same rate as before, so one can’t say that same-sex marriage killed it. The article also essentially claims that America is better than ever because Christian bakers are being put out of business.

It’s that last point, of course, that’s the giveaway about the real target of gay marriage. Gay marriage, as I’ve said over and over, was never about competing with straight marriage and it was unlikely to affect straight marriage. What it was about was undercutting traditional values, especially if those values came from the church. Kill the traditional church (and the synagogue) and you kill the West. It’s heart goes out of it.

(Before I go further, let me say again, that I have no trouble whatsoever with same-sex civil unions. If states want to legalize same sex partnerships, that’s fine with me. I support people who enter into stable relationships. It’s the way the whole issue was framed as gay “marriage” that disturbs me deeply. Doing that made these unions the basis for a concerted attack against traditional Western values as a whole.)

If you really want to see where gay marriage leads, check out this Australian Spectator article detailing the way in which gay marriage has been used to attack core Western values, not to mention to destroy the integrity of our biological selves. I’ll focus on the gender and children sections, but you should read the whole thing: [Read more…]

Is our US Navy incompetent or did Obama seriously undermine it?

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The US Navy has been in the news lately for crashes and corruption. Is this the reasonable follow-up to 8 years of Obama’s approach to the military?

NavyA few days ago, word came down that the Navy relieved of duty the U.S.S. Fitzgerald’s commanding officer, executive officer and senior enlisted sailor. They suffered this fate because, on June 17, on their watch, a Philippine merchant ship crashed into the Fitzgerald, killing seven American sailors.

Also a few days ago, ten sailors were reported missing and presumed dead after the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker near Singapore. The media, of course, has tried to make this about Trump, because he responded to a question about the crash before being briefed about the resulting deaths. His response, therefore, appeared cavalier when it was not.

This is not about Trump, however. Losing seventeen American lives in two separate peace-time incidents hints that there is something rotten going on in America’s Navy. If our ships can’t even survive commercial traffic, what the fugue can we expect of them should they have to answer a true call to arms?

Superficially, it appears that the Navy is having a competence problem. It’s equally likely, though, that we’re seeing a reflection of a very serious morale problem. Eight years of Obama attacks on the military may be taking their toll. Here are two things to keep in mind as you think about that theory. First, during the Obama years, the Pentagon engaged in a massive purge of officer ranks across the services. A list compiled in 2014, while the purges were still ongoing, gives an idea of the purge’s scope.

It’s entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they were calcified, ineffective holdovers from a previous era who were damaging military effectiveness. It’s also entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they believe that the military exists to defend America against her enemies, rather than to serve as a social justice experiment for people with gender body dysmorphia or to be a leader in the fight against “climate change.”

People like that would not have been welcome in Obama’s military. When these officers left, they took with them knowledge and experience, leaving in their wake a blow to morale.

And second, there’s the corruption problem, especially in the Navy. I don’t know how many of you followed the story when it broke, but it turned out that military officers were absolute whores when it came to accepting bribes from a macher in Malaysia: [Read more…]

“The Princess and the Frog” shows that military and transgender don’t mix

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A few striking visuals in a charming Disney movie perfectly illustrate the Big Lie hiding behind the transgender movement.

Transgender Military Bradley Manning Chelsea ManningBefore anyone asks, there is no actual transgender content in Disney’s delightful The Princess And The Frog, a movie I praised lavishly here. Nevertheless, after reading about the travails of a woman who identifies herself as a “transgender man” (meaning that she is a biological woman who believes she’s a man), but still has periods, I was irresistibly reminded of a scene in that movie.

Let me start with that poor woman who thinks she’s a man. Writing at a blog called Everyday Feminism, she explains that she suffered a lapse in her hormone therapy because her “government insurance” prevented her from finding a doctor with expertise on all things transgender. This hormonal lapse caused her to have periods again. Because the writer believes herself to be a man, she had to come up with creative ways to pretend that periods don’t mean what nature says they mean; namely, that she is not a transgender man but is, instead, a woman. The following paragraphs describe her hormonal travails:

You see, I decided I wanted to switch from needles to cream. No medical reason, I just wanted to. I’m not wild about needles, and successfully sticking myself an estimated 150+ times was enough adventure for me, thankyouverymuch.

But the fact nonetheless remains that, unbeknownst to me, my doctor decided to start me on a cream dose so low that it would’ve created virtually no effect on the raging estrogen of my body, now super-pissed because I’d caged it for so long.

And so, after so many blissful years of being blood-free, my cycle returned with a vengeance.

And because my doctor had flubbed as hard as she flubbed and I didn’t find out until significantly later – there was a fantastic while there where I was convinced something was seriously wrong with my body until she admitted that I had, in verbatim, been her guinea pig – the war is still waging as she ever-so-slowly ups my dosage back to cis levels.

Because—you know—no rush, right?

Suffice it to say that she never got how mentally debilitating man-struation is to me. No matter how much I tried to explain it to her. I can handle quite a bit in life – trans or otherwise – but I always stumble when I try to handle this.

If it were me, I’d work with this troubled woman to help reconcile her to her own body. However, we live in a different time, and instead we slice and dice her, pour potent chemical cocktails into her body, and pretend that her reasoning is sound, and that she really is transgender — meaning one who has successfully crossed the gender barrier.

No matter what modern medicine and magical thinking do, though, this woman’s body knows the truth. And that’s where The Princess And The Frog comes in. [Read more…]

Best visual commentary ever on transgenders in the military?

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It’s quite possible that this is the best poster yet made to comment on the whole transgenders in the military debacle — a debacle predicated on a lie.

And if you want the proper commentary to go with that poster, I highly recommend Brendan O’Neill’s brutal honesty about the Orwellian thinking that is being pushed on ordinary people. His starting point is the Tory proposal that people can edit their birth certificates at will to state their preferred gender (of the moment):

It’s madness. And most people know it’s madness. Ask any normal, decent member of the public if Dave, 32, born a boy, still in possession of a penis, and a five o’clock shadow on a rough weekend, is a man or a woman, and I bet you they will say: ‘Man.’ Not because they are prejudiced or ‘transphobic’ – the latest phobia slur designed to pathologise dissent – but because they understand reality. And truth. And biology and experience. They know that in order to be a woman, you first have to have been a girl. They know womanhood is not a pose one strikes in front of the mirror but is biological, relational, cultural and social. They know the man who wears a dress is a man who wears a dress. Which is cool, and his choice, and he must have the right to wear that dress. But he isn’t a woman. We know this. At some level he knows this. Why won’t more people say it?

Because it has become the great unsayable. To say there are two sexes – leaving aside that infinitesimally small number of nature’s hiccups that are intersex people – has become tantamount to a speechcrime. To say a man cannot become a woman – no matter how many hormones he takes or operations he undergoes – is now next to blasphemy. Even if you fully accept that these people are trans-women, and that they should enjoy exactly the same rights as every other person, from the right to speak to the right to work, you will still be hounded and harassed if you dare say, ‘They aren’t women, though’. As trans-sceptical feminists have discovered, the utterance ‘Men cannot become women’ is to the early 21st century what ‘Jesus is not the Christ’ was to the 15th. We must accept that the person with a penis and a birth certificate that says ‘Boy’ is a woman. We must accept the lie. Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, beavering away at the past-altering Ministry of Truth, we are made to lie. Trans agitators’ greatest accomplishment has been the institutionalisation of lying.

There’s no right to military service; the military’s job is fighting, not ego stroking

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When it comes to military service, the military routinely discriminates in order to ensure the most effective fighting machine possible.

Nobody has right to serve in military military service transgender

(I did not compose the above. I found it on Facebook. Please let me know if you know its attribution.)

The gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. Does that affect military service?

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A question that no one is asking, but someone should, is whether the peculiar excesses of the gay lifestyle affect the military’s readiness to serve.

Gay Lifestyle Gays in the Military[Content warning: Of necessity, this post talks about sex, especially gay sex. Some of it is graphic, some not.]

It seems, lately, as if the only news that the media sees fit to print has to do with people on the alt-sexuality spectrum. The latest outrage amongst Progressives is Trump order barring transgenders from serving in the military. This outrage, of course, is a bait-and-switch. You see, to this day, transgender troops are officially barred from the military.

Throughout the entirety of Obama’s presidency, transgender troops were officially barred. Then, in July 2016, Obama signed an order changing the policy. But he didn’t change it instantly. Instead, he ordered that the change be implemented one year from his order, so that it would happen on his successor’s watch. In other words, all the screaming and shouting and anger is because Trump has announced he’s going to retain the Obama era status quo. See? Bait-and-switch.

Obama’s transgender decision followed on the heels of his overnight conversion, once elected, to the belief that gay people ought to be able to serve openly in the military. I was opposed to allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Despite my opposition, I don’t think I’m a homophobe. Instead, I believe that openly gay relationships, especially in frontline service, are dangerous for unit cohesion. I’m blindingly aware of the fact that the military exists to take young people who are physically and mentally fit and then to prepare them to fight. If two men in a combat unit are in an open relationship, that puts at issue the question of whether their loyalty is to each other or their unit.

Incidentally, I don’t believe women and men should be serving together when that service involves close quarters. Someone once described Navy ships as floating brothels. I know that’s an exaggeration, but the fact is that sexual relationships on ships are a huge problem:

Unintended pregnancy is a significant problem across the general population, but the Navy’s rate is higher.

In 2006, about 49 percent of all pregnancies in the United States were classified as unplanned, according to 2011 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Up to 65 percent of pregnancies in the military are self-reported as unplanned, according to a December report by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women.

Nearly three-fourths of all Navy pregnancies were unplanned, according to a recent parenthood survey conducted by the service. Of those, only 31 percent of the couples were using birth control at the time they conceived. With pregnancies involving enlisted servicewomen, 70 percent of the fathers were also in the military.

Youth, proximity, and stress = bad sexual decisions. And when life and death are at stake, the last thing you need is the volatility of sexual relationships, especially foolish ones.

My other problem is that the gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. It’s a different kind of unhealthy from that associated with transgenderism. The latter sees extraordinarily high suicide rates, staggeringly expensive surgical procedures, and a lifetime commitment to dangerous hormonal medications. Take away the magic word “transgender,” and no person with these physical requirements would ever be a candidate for service in the military. An actively lived homosexual lifestyle has a different kind of unhealthiness, one that may also be antithetical to creating a tip-top fighting machine.

Since Obama’s executive order about openly gay service, both the military and the media have been mum about whether that policy has affected the military and, if so, what the effect is. One of the things that I’ve especially wondered is whether the excess that typically characterizes gay men’s sex has made an appearance in the military. [Read more…]

Transgender folks in the military — this is what the slippery slope looks like

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Obama planted a poison pill when he put transgender folks in the military. Republicans should discharge them, instead of quibbling about surgery.

Two interesting headlines about transgender people in the military. The first comes from Gateway Pundit:

Transgender military

The second is at Truth Revolt:

Transgender military

Here’s the short story: Republicans tried to stop forcing taxpayers to provide the money so that mentally ill service members who reject their body’s sex and, instead, believe they belong to the opposite sex, can have their external sexual organs sliced off and be given hormones that can cause cancer and other nasty things. Twenty-four RINO’s sided with Democrats to continue federal funding for this surgery.

The problem the Republicans who oppose funding have is that the Obama Pentagon officially declared that thinking you’re really a member of the opposite sex is not a mental illness. If it’s not an illness, but is merely a problem with ones body, why in the world should service members with hernia’s or dislocated shoulders get free medical care while people suffering from excess penises or breasts are denied?

The issue, then, isn’t the funding question, it’s the “who let mentally ill people openly service in the military to begin with?” question. That’s the problem.

In terms of the mental illness known as body dysmorphia, all of the following people suffering from exactly the same problem: [Read more…]

National Review cruise — Hillary’s America, the military, and abortion

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img_1903That title is correct: I’ll give you a brief rundown of Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America, an abortion panel, and a military panel. Things happen quickly on a National Review cruise and if I miss a bit of blogging, I’m seriously behind the eight ball.

Hillary’s America. Because Hillary’s America showed only briefly in Marin, I missed it. Fortunately for me, the movie’s two writers and producers were on the cruise and hosted a special showing yesterday.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite a good movie, as it is well-researched, well-written, and very professional produced. The movie begins with Dinesh’s sentencing for a campaign donation crime that, when it is a small, first-time infraction, as was the case with Dinesh, is invariably treated with fines and other minimal punishments.

Dinesh was special, however, for at the time the Justice Department got him in its sights, he was the writer and producer of the scathing (and prescient) Obama’s America, a documentary that ranks immediately behind Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine when it comes to popularity and revenue. Not only was Dinesh prosecuted with the full force of federal law, he had the misfortune to appear before a Democrat-appointed judge who sentenced him to time-served, plus two years of sleeping in a supervised facility, five years probation, mandatory public service, and court supervised therapy.

The first four items were the normal punitive stuff one would expect from a corrupt government. The last punishment was purely Orwellian punishment for “wrong thinking.”

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 9/15/16 — the “polls they are a’changin'” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265If Bill Clinton and Al Gore couldn’t do it, then no one can. A Leftist Facebook friend posted an article from The Hill with a lede saying that Donald Trump “floats rolling back food safety regulations.” The implication, obviously, is that in Trump’s America, we’re all going to die from salmonella and e. Coli. Read through to the end, though, and you discover that Trump is instead making a remarkably sensible suggestion:

Trump’s economic policy plan also calls for “an immediate halt to new federal regulations and a very thorough agency-level review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.”

Agencies would be required to list all regulations and rank them in terms of their contribution to growth, health and safety. The goal, Trump said, would be to strengthen the rules that are useful and reduce the rules that harm the economy.

One of my Leftist Facebook friends stopped with the lede, of course, and envisioned our nation drowning in fecal matter emanating from food-poisoned Americans. In a comment, I quoted the above language and suggested that it was a good idea to control regulations, which are so big no one can know them, are often non-effective, are frequently inconsistent with each other, and are too often quasi-legislation.

To seal it for this Leftist, I reminded him that Bill Clinton had assigned Al Gore this very task of cutting back on America’s burgeoning regulations, although it never came to anything. And that’s when my Facebook friend essentially said “Well, if Al Gore and Bill Clinton couldn’t do it, then no one can. After all, Trump has never been a politician, and he’s really stupid, so what does he know?”

My reply was that voters may be hoping that it’s an advantage that Trump hasn’t been a politician. He may have out-of-the-box (i.e., out-of-D.C.) ideas that actually work. The response? A reiteration that Trump is stupid. (Has there ever been a Republican candidate, no matter how successful and brilliant, whom the Left hasn’t called stupid? I don’t think so. It’s a tired idea.)

Agencies must be reined in. Exhibit A in the “agencies need to be cut back and God willing Trump is the man to do it” category is the fact that the FBI thinks it is more important than Congress is. So it was that Jason Chaffetz had to explain to the acting FBI chair that, no, Congress gets to have all of the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview — and then serves him, then and there, with a subpoena.

The funny thing about the WaPo’s indictment of Trump as a scam artist.  The Washington Post is beside itself with excitement that ardent Hillary supporter, and pay for play attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is starting an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. I got three paragraphs into the WaPo editorial supporting this investigation and castigating Trump before I broke into uncontrollable laughter:

[Read more…]

[VIDEO] Basic training is not what it used to be (NSFW — obscenities)

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The army isn't what it used to beI have a friend who went to college on a ROTC scholarship and has been an active duty officer for the past thirty-three years. When we last spoke, he told me that, while the new generation of enlistees has great potential, basic training has changed substantially. I forget his exact words, but they were something along the line of “we have to handle them with kid gloves, or we get in trouble.” This funny video would seem to support his sense of a drastically changed military:

The Bookworm Beat 7/27/16 — the “random stuff” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Everything that’s wrong with the Left in one website. At City Journal, Oren Cass has written a short article that looks at modern Progressivism through the filter of Hillary’s campaign website. In some ways, the article says something we all know, which is that the modern Democrat party is not concerned about America’s well-being but, instead, is concerned only about its only survival, something it achieves by getting special interest groups to vote for it:

Framing issues as who instead of what leads to a governing model that would divide society by race, gender, sexuality, profession, and location, targeting policies to each defined demographic. A divide-and-conquer strategy may achieve electoral success, but it is toxic to good government. When politicians treat elections as exercises in log-rolling, each policy becomes tailored toward the special interest that cares about it most. Thus Clinton’s crime policy emphasizes a friendlier attitude toward criminals. Her immigration policy concerns itself primarily with helping those who have violated immigration law. Her education policy explicitly endorses the status quo for most students but promises to “listen to teachers.”

In a world of fixed resources, such a model inevitably undermines the idea of equal protection under the law, pits groups against one another, and leaves some explicitly favored by government as winners. It also normalizes subjective standards for government action. Clinton promises to extend President Obama’s executive actions on immigration to “additional persons with sympathetic cases.” Whatever one thinks of our immigration policies, tilting them toward “persons with sympathetic cases” does not suggest rigorous application of the law.

When it comes to blacks, which are the group most harmed by the Progressives’ “divide and control” strategy, Thomas Sowell has the right of it:

Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry, and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians.

Racial polarization makes both the black population and the white population worse off, but it makes politicians who depend on black votes better off.

Hillary Clinton desperately needs black votes in this year’s close election. Promoting fear, anger, and resentment among blacks — and, if possible, paranoia — serves her political interest. Barack Obama has mastered the art of keeping black voters aroused while keeping white voters soothed — thanks in part to the gullibility of much of the public, who mistake geniality and glib rhetoric for honesty and good will.

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Room 7/17/16 — the “I’m all riled up” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Blacks and Muslims should be angry at their criminal cohorts, not at us. In the context of an article about political correctness, Andrew Klavan said something I’ve been struggling to say for some time. He acknowledges that blacks are on the receiving end of much more police activity, something frustrating and insulting to law-abiding blacks, but that’s because the black community’s bad eggs commit a disproportionate amount of American crime. Likewise, because children have big mouths, perfectly nice Muslim kids in school find themselves being called terrorists, reflecting the fact that acts of mass violence all over the world come primarily from their co-religionists. That’s certainly not nice, but Klavan says that law-abiding blacks and Muslims are putting blame in the wrong place:

It seems to me if you are an innocent black person being troubled by the cops, if you are an innocent Muslim under suspicion from your neighbors, the people you should be angry at, the people to blame, are not the people acting on rational suspicion. The people at fault are the bad guys who have drawn that suspicion unfairly onto you.

A black man targeted by the police shouldn’t be angry at the police. He should be angry at the thugs and criminals who look like him and make his race a target. And before Muslims blame non-Muslims for the prejudice against them, maybe they ought to look to — and openly condemn — those Muslims who have given their religion a very bad name indeed.

The problem is prejudice, yes. But it’s the tribal prejudice that says we should blame others before we blame “our own.” “Our own” are the good guys, no matter what race or religion we are.

Someone should read those words out loud at the Republican Party Convention. They’re very important.

[Read more…]