Bookworm Room

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

Dunkirk review in Marie Claire: Fatally flawed gender identity assumptions

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My friend Lulu weighs in on the fact that the Marie Claire review of the Dunkirk movie suffers from fatal hetero-normative gender identity assumptions.

Retreat at DunkirkI must take issue with Mehera Bonner of Marie Claire and her review of the World War II film Dunkirk in which she states,

. . . my main issue with Dunkirk is that it’s so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I need every movie to have “strong female leads.” Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams “men-only” — and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I’m wrong about not liking it. . . .

Honestly, how dare she? As Bonner should well know, gender is determined by a personal identification based on an internal awareness. It is what we feel inside, what we know ourselves to be. Our external parts do not always conform. How could she not know that some of those soldiers had to have been non-binary. Some were undoubtedly queer or transgender on the inside. In fact, some of those soldiers were no doubt women — despite their penises.

I would advise Bonner to remember that when she assumes that the movie is men-only and caters to pretentious man-splaining men. How wrong she is. I did not see a toxically masculine film as she did. On the contrary, I envisioned brave transgender women soldiers fighting alongside male, hetero-normative, cis-gender soldiers and proving the historicity of the struggle against restrictive gender roles. Those were our brave sisters out there too and they deserve Bonner’s respect.

On race and gender, Democrats have always embraced the Big Lie

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For 150 years, Democrats used the Big Lie about race to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and now they’re using the Big Lie technique to challenge gender norms.

Big Lie Caitlyn Jenner Transgender Gender Delusions

Ce n’est pas une femme

I want to share a thought with you that starts with slavery and ends with transsexuals. To get from one to the other, I have to start with one of the few decent classes I had when I was at UC Berkeley. That senior seminar looked at the history of race relations in America versus those in Brazil.

When I took the class, I had no interest whatsoever in the history of race relations. I was an English history major — the English isle, to be precise — and everything else was a distant second. Still, it became apparent to me very quickly that I was not alone and that I would not get into my preferred seminar. You see, back in the day, when it came time for enrollment in senior seminars, the history teachers would seat themselves at random intervals in the big lecture room at Dwinelle Hall. Students would then approach the teachers as supplicants, begging to get into this or that seminar.

As soon as I walked in the room, I saw that the professors teaching the seminars in which I was interested were besieged. I had no desire to hurl myself into that scrum. Instead, I checked out the teachers who were not surrounded by adoring students.

Only one of the other teachers caught my interest because he was so darn handsome. After I ascertained that he had openings in his seminar and that it worked for my schedule, I signed up, not even caring what he was teaching. And so it was that I ended up learning about the history race relations in the US and Brazil.

Fortunately, for me, that handsome young graduate student was an excellent teacher. It made up for the fact that he was happily married, had a baby, and would in any event not have been interested in me. It also made up for the fact that the reading materials were deadly dull.

Thirty years later, the only takeaway I had from the class is that America was rather unique in its “one drop of blood” approach to racism. In Brazil, there’s a great deal of racism, but it’s on a graduated scale. The darker you are, the more racism you face and the lower your status in society.

Meanwhile, in America, it doesn’t matter what you look like. If you’re known to have even a drop of black blood in you, you’re black. Nor is that a racial view that’s changed since both slavery and Jim Crow ended. After all, Barack Obama, half-black and half-white genetically, was our “first black president.” He wasn’t really, of course. He was our “first half-black president” — but that’s not the way things roll in America.

The stigma against that single drop of blood has been so strong in America that it made for a great subplot in Edna Ferber’s Showboat, which started as a book, made it to Broadway as a groundbreaking musical, and then got made into two Hollywood movie musicals. (The 1936 version of the movie is the one to see.)

If you’re familiar with Showboat’s plot, you know that, when the showboat passes through Mississippi, a vengeful man, furious that the beautiful Julie LaVerne has rebuffed him, reports to the authorities that she is, in fact, a black woman. Given that her husband, Steve, is a white man, they have violated Mississippi’s miscegenation laws and he demands their arrest. The couple avoids arrest when Steve cuts Julie and licks her blood, enabling his friends on the boat to state honestly that he has that “one drop of black blood” in him. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/24/17 — “watching as the Left continues circling the drain” edition

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This Bookworm Beat has all shades of Progressive insanity (fake data, attacks on free speech, Chelseamania), complete with links and my trenchant comments.

Bookworm Beat logoKeep circling that drain. Before I get into the meat of this post detailing the worst emanations from the Democrats and their fellow travelers on their Left, I want to lead off with Kurt Schlichter’s article begging the Democrats not to change their current trajectory and tactics:

Look, Democrats, speaking sincerely as your friend, understand that everyone who says you need to take a deep look at yourselves is a racist, sexist, homophobe who won’t even ask about your preferred pronoun. Whatever you do, don’t you ever change.

[snip]

The problem isn’t you. It’s those stupid idiots who won’t obey you because they’re stupid idiots. How can those idiots be so stupid?

Who knows? But what’s clear is that it’s not your fault. It’s theirs. So when the going gets tough, and you aren’t making progress – in fact, when you’re moving backwards – what’s the smart play? Double down!

Hey, the dealer’s showing an ace in a face-heavy deck and you’ve got a six, what do you do? Double down!

Can I boast? I had the pleasure of meeting Kurt a couple of weeks ago and he’s every bit as smart, funny, and personable as his writing. Lord, but I do envy a brain like that.

Statistically illiterate accusation that Trump voters are racist. You know all about American colleges and universities by now. They’re the places in which self-regard exceeds accomplishments, feelings trump rational thought, antisemitism is great than that found anywhere else in America (except, probably in Dearborn and the DNC), and the First Amendment is subordinate to students’ feelings (provided, of course, that those feelings are consistent with the Democrat Party platform).

Thomas Wood, an assistant professor at Ohio State University, has emerged from this sewer to announce that Trump voters are racists. He thought perhaps they were mere Nazi-style authoritarians but it’s worse — they’re racists. He knows this because he’s got charts.

Why are Trump voters racist? Because Wood specifically defined racism in such a way as to apply to Trump voters. That’s how they do it at universities nowadays:

To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.

In other words, if you believe that only government can save perpetually hapless and helpless minorities, you’re not a racist. However, if you believe that minorities are rational, sentient beings who respond to incentives and disincentives in the same way as everyone else, and that they therefore deserve to be respected as our equals and not demeaned as perpetual wards of state, you’re racist!

You always win the game if you get to write the rules after the play is already run. Woods is a perfect example of why I keep saying that the best way to get America back on a track dedicated to individual liberty, free enterprise, and constitutional governance is to take every bit of federal money out of American “higher” education.

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Bookworm Beat 4/18/17 — a potpourri of interesting, random stuff

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Here’s a down-and-dirty Bookworm Beat that’s still replete with things to entertain and inform.

Bookworm Beat logoI’d meant to blog more today, as well as to clean my office, but I had a sick dog and that took both my time and my attention. All is well with the dog — it’s a long term problem and we’re doing maintenance care.

And now for some quick links:

Gadzooks! It’s Gorsuch: Last week, when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed, Myron Magnet wrote a much-read article about the revolution his ascension to the Supreme Court represents:

Suppose, now that Gorsuch has been confirmed and sworn in, it understood and intended to overturn the administrative state’s usurpation of the Constitution. Suppose, moreover, that it understood the promiscuous lawlessness with which the justices have been making laws out of thin air for half a century and more—claiming some vague basis in the Bill of Rights or the Fourteenth Amendment—and resolved to end that abuse, exercising only judgment, not will. Suppose President Trump got to appoint one more justice in the Gorsuch and Scalia mold, creating an irresistible majority that upheld Madison’s original Constitution instead of Wilson’s “living” one.

Magnet’s dream may well be in the process of being realized. How do I know? Because of the manic, fevered emanations from the Left after Gorsuch’s first official appearance on the bench, all stating that Gorsuch is a mentally-disabled moron wrongfully occupying Merrick Garland’s seat. They’re terrified:

After his startlingly humiliating performance during his first day on the bench yesterday, it’s possible his earlier reticence to answer the Senators’ questions was because he didn’t understand them. As it turns out, Gorsuch is a simpleton with almost childlike understanding of the law – and the existing Justices on both sides of the spectrum already seem to have concluded he’s an idiot.

In fact, Gorsuch was pointing out that the answer lies in actually reading the statutory language — and he was embarrassing those attorneys who were trying to make things complicated in hopes of getting a ruling that allows agencies to make their own laws. (I’ve lost my link for this, but I’ll fill it in as soon as I find it.)

If Dennis Prager is happy, I’m happy. Everything Dennis Prager says about the political and moral clarity of the last two weeks . . . I agree:

2. The terrible presidency of Barack Obama is beginning to be acknowledged.

Following President Trump’s order to attack Syria about 63 hours after the Syrian regime seemingly used chemical weapons, even many in the mainstream media couldn’t help but contrast his prompt response with Obama’s nonresponse to Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013. And almost every report further noted that Obama failed to do anything after having promised that he would regard the use of chemical weapons by Assad as crossing a “red line.”

Likewise, Obama’s do-nothing policies vis-a-vis North Korea are being contrasted with Trump’s warnings to leader Kim Jung Un about further testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pressure on China’s leaders to rein in the North Korean regime.

These contrasts are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which being there is now hope that Obama’s star will dim as time goes on.

This will come as somewhat of a surprise to those on the left, but many of us who are not on the left believe that Obama did more damage to America than any previous president — economically, militarily and socially.

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Teen Vogue adds anti-Israel advocacy to its arsenal of hard-Left positions (+ bonus content)

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Teen Vogue turns against Israel with a gauzy, one-sided view of Palestinians. This sewage-like flow of Leftist ideology traces back to American academia.

Teen Vogue March 2017For those naive enough to think that Teen Vogue is a fashion magazine, please disabuse yourself of that notion as quickly as possible. It is, in fact, a hard Left propaganda vehicle that slips into people’s homes under the guise of fashion. It came into my house, for example, when my daughter got a free subscription automatically delivered to her after ordering clothes from an online site that caters to teenagers.

I’ve documented several times that the magazine’s primary purpose is to sell Leftism on every subject under the sun including, but not limited to, campus rape, Woodie Guthrie-esque communism; the entire spectrum of the LGBT social and political push against traditional Western value’, misanthropic “feminism”; and abortion. (You can see these earlier posts here, here, and here.) I was going to say of Teen Vogue that “any resemblance to an actual fashion magazine is pure coincidental,” but that’s not true. Teen Vogue’s deliberately takes on the protective coloring of a fashion magazine, but don’t be fooled: its purpose is Leftist indoctrination, pure and simple.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the magazine amped up the Leftist propaganda by advocating for the Palestinians without any recognition of Israel’s historic and legal rights to the land, or the virtue of her conduct:

[Teen Vogue’s] February 27 piece entitled “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What You Need to Know” suggests that shift also entails publishing factually shoddy commentary.

Despite the ambitious title and long length, the one-sided account omits many things that teens trying to learn about current events ought to know and instead reads like a fact sheet from the Palestinian side of the issue.

Author Emma Sarran Webster has no apparent knowledge or background on the complex issues involved, billing herself as an expert on health and beauty with a “deep love for social media and cat videos.” She relies heavily in the article on a single “expert,” University of Wisconsin professor Nadav Shelef. Shelef’s writing, which has been praised by far-left professors, focuses heavily on settlements, and as a result, Webster’s article also focuses overwhelmingly on “controversial” settlements as the central issue. This, while completely ignoring Palestinian incitement and incentivizing of violence, as well as Palestinian intransigence. In fact, Webster includes an entire four-paragraph section subtitled, “What are settlements, and why are they so controversial?”

Yet, there is no section on Palestinian cash payments to convicted terrorists or to the families of terrorists who were killed, and there is no section that discusses the glorification of violence in the Palestinian government and society.

The article also omits discussion of historical Jewish ties to Israel and, unconscionably, the repeated Palestinian rejection of extensive Israeli peace offers. Where was the section on Arafat and Abbas walking away from the creation of a Palestinian state?

In addition, the article contains several misrepresentations: it references “Palestinians” who lived a century ago, and says that in 1948 Arab nations “began fighting on behalf of Palestine.” It misrepresents UN Resolution 242 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and fails to put UN statements in the context of that body’s well-documented bias.

Please read the rest of CAMERA‘s factually-detailed critique to learn just how shoddy the article is.

CAMERA is polite in its comments and imputes the myriad omissions and errors to ignorance. I would not be so polite. I’ve been following the magazine long enough to understand that it is selling the current Progressive point of view, which is a long way from the centrism people remember from the pre-1990s Democrat party.

One of the hallmarks of the new Democrat party — a party that used to be part of America’s overall support for beleaguered Israel, a liberal democracy surrounded by genocidal tyrannies — is its hostility to Israel. You need look no further than the race for DNC chair, when Keith Ellison, a long-time purveyor of antisemitic canards and a friend of famed antisemites, came within a hairbreadth of winning.

I’m about to get on my particular monomania train here, so feel free to turn away from the article about now. My monomania is about American colleges and universities. It’s easy for conservatives (including friends of Israel) to point to the media and Hollywood as the culture infecting America’s traditional commitment to liberty at home and abroad. That’s not where the problem started, though, and that’s not where the canker of Leftism is most strong. All of America’s problems are tied to its colleges.

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The Bookworm Beat 3/8/17 — Keeping Up With The Culture Wars

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To stay ahead of the Left’s gnawing away at every underpinning of Western civilization, we need to stay updated about the culture wars. This post helps.

Culture WarsModern wars are never fought on one front. They are fought on all fronts. Obama’s minions in government are trying to bring President Trump down from the inside. And Progressives’ minions on the streets are trying to destroy America through culture wars fought in the media, in schools, and even in bathrooms. This post collects updates from the myriad fronts in the culture wars phase of the Leftist attack on Western civilization.

Stop buying their line. One of the things Progressives do well is to create fact-free tropes that quickly become conventional wisdom. One of these tropes, going back to the 1980s, is that if we’re nice to gays, they won’t need to act out their pain and rage by engaging in unsafe sex. A trio of writers from the culturally conservative Family Research Institute argue that the data shows the opposite — unbridled gay sexuality increases the rate of sexually transmitted diseases. They make this argument, moreover, with data from an unexpected place: China, a country that was once too sexually conservative even to admit that homosexuality existed. I’m neither endorsing nor denouncing the data in this article (I don’t know enough to have an opinion), but I sure thought it was interesting.

Faith should be about faith. Many people who have hit rock bottom (especially, it seems former rock stars) turn their lives around with help from a return to traditional religion. True faith builds people up. Too many millennials, however, don’t understand that first you find God and then, with God’s help, you find the strength to lift yourself out of the abyss. That’s why you find a lot of these millennials wandering into churches and synagogues looking for religion to be just another branch of the Social Justice tree under which they shelter. Rachel Lu explains that faith is not one more step in the Leftist self-help, Gaia reclamation project.

Encouraging, rather than bullying, on bathrooms. Yelp has a good idea, which is to crowd-source the location of gender neutral bathrooms so that people in need can easily find them. This is how the free market should work. Rather than using government’s overwhelming power to bully companies and schools into allowing any guy dressed as a gal into a women’s bathroom, use the marketplace to enable the minute portion of people who want gender neutral bathrooms to find them easily.

College is expensive because of Leftism. Despite college costs increasing at an exponential rate much higher than the inflation rate (and this has been true for the last thirty years), the student-teacher ratio at most colleges hasn’t changed over the decades. Students in liberal arts programs also emerge less educated, although this is due to Leftist lunacy, rather than too few teachers for too many students. The reason colleges are so expensive is because of the vast social justice infrastructure that colleges have built, all of which taxpayers and parents have to fund. God, but I loath modern academia. (And if you’re wondering, academia is the sole reason America Jews and Asians are Leftists when their interests do not lie in that direction. It’s because they are the group most likely to send their children to college, something that’s been true for decades now.)

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Only by denying science can Progressives push the transgender revolution

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Progressives pretend that their transgender politics are based on science but they’re not; it’s fantasy all the way, which is a disservice to children.

Caitlyn Jenner Transgender

Ce n’est pas une femme

The other day, NPR had a fascinating article. Because it is fascinating, allow me to quote some of the more interesting points:

Why Caitlyn Jenner can never be a woman

[snip]

The man formerly known as Bruce is still a guy with a dick, testes, and a male skeleton, trying to be one of the girls.

[snip]

Being female is a bright and shiny diamond, and here in America in the age of Hillary and Women’s Marches, everyone wants to wear it like a pussy hat on their head. The attitude, the language, the humor, the makeup, the style, all of it is covetable, and everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Madonna to Ashley Judd is trying to get high — and rich — off it.

But, like diamonds, a woman is created under extreme pressure and high temperature, deep down in the recesses of her core. It is sitting on the toilet when you’re thirteen, alternately fascinated and disgusted by the blood flowing from you for the first time. It’s watching your body going through the changes of pregnancy, everything from morning sickness, to suddenly sprouting Pamela Anderson boobs, to your blooming belly that’s periodically warped out of shape by the infant’s movements, to the pain and triumph of labor, to having your breasts go from being sex objects to being a baby’s private juice bar.

Being a woman is pre-menstrual syndrome, and menstruation, and post-menstrual syndrome. It’s hanging with your girlfriends when you’re all ugly ducklings, desperately jealous of the early bloomers, unaware that early bloom often fades quickly. It’s listening to your girlfriends’ lament, knowing that they’ll listen to you too and, even better, knowing that this is a sharing experience and that none of you will try to tell the others what to do. It’s keeping an eye on your friend who’s drinking too much, even though she promised not to, and making sure to get her safely home rather than running the risk that she’ll hook up with someone who makes her feel bad or, worse, find herself roofied and raped.

Being a women is up in the bones, the fragile bones, with their broad hips and their shoulder construction that means girls’ softball has that weird underhand pitch, instead of the overhand throw guys use.  It’s in the muscles which, even if women try to beef them up with testosterone, will never be as strong as a man’s.  It’s in the uterus and the ovaries that help create and then grow an entirely new human being, and in the breasts that produce the perfect food to sustain that human life.

And it is the ultimate in male privilege, really, for a man to see that diamond, all shiny and hard and unbreakable, and pluck it for his own, like it’s a gift from Tiffany’s, with seemingly zero regard for the pressure, the heat, the pain it went through — that we went through — to earn that shine.

That’s an amazing essay, isn’t it? Moreover, it’s one that I bet you never thought you’d read at NPR. And if you want the truth, you never will read it at NPR.

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Mack Beggs, transgender wrestler, should not eat her cake and have it

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Mack Beggs, the transgender wrestler, should not wrestle as either a boy or a girl. She made a choice, so she, not society, should accept the consequences.

Mack BeggsMack Beggs is a 17-year-old genetic female with a serious body dysmorphia problem that has never been addressed: She believes that she was meant to be male, not female. Rather than treating this psychological problem, Beggs’ parents allowed her to take heavy doses of testosterone so that she can present to the world as a boy.

Aside from the fact that testosterone is very damaging, taking it does not make Beggs male. She has two X chromosomes, two ovaries, a uterus, milk-producing mammary glands (which she’ll eventually amputate), and a female skeletal system. What the testosterone has done, however, is given her a reasonable simulacrum of a male’s musculature.

Beggs has trained as a high school wrestler in Texas. Texas has a rule that students who compete in the state championships must compete in accordance with their biological gender, not their fantasy gender. Those with XY chromosomes, penises, testes, and the male’s heavier bone structure and musculature compete in the “Boys” category. Those who are equipped, as Beggs is, with two X chromosomes, ovaries, a uterus, milk-producing mammary glands, and a female’s lighter musculoskeletal system compete in the “Girls” category.

Texas refused to waive the rules for Beggs, so her biology trumped her delusional fantasy — she ended up competing as a girl, albeit a girl who was taking steroids, something that would have been illegal in any competition that did not intersect with the Left’s gender madness. By gender madness, of course, I mean the “pro-science” Left’s insistence that gender is not a biological construct but is, instead, a matter of wishing makes it so: Gender-wise, you are what you want to be.

Needless to say, bulked up by steroids, Beggs swept the Girls’ class in the Texas state wrestling championships:

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Progressive poster accuses Republicans of practicing sharia law

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The Left cuddles up to antisemitic Muslims like Linda Sarsour, but absolves itself of sin by accusing Republicans of practicing sharia law.

Islam sharia thief hand amputationWhen you and I think of sharia law, we probably think of women lacking any legal rights, including the right to leave their homes without a male escort or the right to wear clothes that reveal more than their eyes. We might think of the fact that, if a woman is accused of adultery, she’ll be executed. Or perhaps we think of blood-thirsty, sharia-advocating Linda Sarsour, the new darling of the feminist anti-Trump movement, threatening women with whom she disagrees, with “a$$” whippings and having their vaginas removed.

Our thoughts might wander to men and boys being hanged from cranes or thrown off of buildings, only to be finished off with rocks thrown by a watching crowd, for the crime of being gay. Or we might think about people getting lashed and imprisoned for speaking freely. Perhaps we remember that the complete prohibition upon lending money for a reasonable profit means that Muslim economies, unless they’re powered by oil, cannot grow.

Some of us might have unpleasant mental images of thieves having their right hands cut off. This last is an even more heinous punishment than first appears because it means that these thieves must eat and wipe their butts with the same hand, making them social outcasts. In that regard, do keep in mind that, for the devout, sharia law mandates that the butt wiper use a hand unmediated by leaves, paper, or — Heaven forfend! — toilet paper.

We might also think of the mandates to kill Jews and enslave all non-Muslims — or, if they cannot be enslaved, to make them second class citizens subject to a high tax for the privilege of living amongst Muslims. We might think of genocidal attacks against Christians taking place all over the Muslim world today.

Regarding slaves, those same sharia mandates make it clear that female slaves are to be used for sex. Heck, any female who is not a devout Muslim (which, in the modern era, means one completely covered), can be used for sex against her will.

Other things we might think of are the mandate to expand Islam throughout the world, not through example and peaceful proselytizing, but through fire and sword. We’d certainly remember that forcibly converted people can’t back out. After all, sharia law mandates that anyone who leaves Islam has automatically subjected himself (or herself) to the death penalty. And of course, there’s the fact the government dictates every aspect of people’s lives and faith.

Well, those are some of the things I think of when I think of sharia law. This is what Progressives think of:

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Bookworm Beat 2/20/17 — fighting the self-annointed fourth branch of government

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The new phrase is “fourth branch of government,” referring to the Progressive bureaucracy fighting exile. It’s time to fight back.

CIA fourth branch governmentThe administrative state is not the fourth branch of government. When I said “interesting times,” I meant it. We all knew that our government had gotten too big and we voted for Trump believing that he would make good on his promise to shrink it.

Trump certainly has been trying to fulfill that promise, but the administrative state has been fighting back in ways we never imagined. Rather than recognizing that our Constitution makes it subordinate to the president, so that it must take its marching orders from him, the administrative state is setting itself up as a permanent government in opposition, determined to continue the policies that put Obama into office and kept Hillary out of office.

The Washington Examiner has written an excellent editorial that warns of the dangers in a self-styled fourth branch of government:

As we once noted in a different context, “civil disobedience is properly the tool of the citizenry, not of those entrusted by it to execute the law faithfully.” We also wrote that America “cannot survive every minor public official becoming a law unto himself.” This is just as true of unconstitutional actions by EPA employees as it was for the official about whom we wrote it — Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court‘s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The Examiner is not the only one sounding this warning. Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA employee and a Democrat is sounding the same warning with special emphasis on people in the intelligence community. Noting the extraordinary power they hold, he says that the only way to keep a free state is for them to keep out of politics — especially since there are constitutional actions they can take if they’re genuinely concerned about a president’s loyalty to the state. (Me, personally, I would have been concerned about Obama’s secret deals with Iran. . . .)

When you’re trained as a spy, you’re taught how to handle these kinds of situations. Upon learning the information, it gets tightly compartmented (restricted) and sent to the Department of Justice or Congress for investigation. If the evidence is found to be credible, the constitution makes clear what happens next: impeachment.

That’s how American democracy should work.

[snip]

However, some of America’s spies are deciding that that’s not enough. For reasons of misguided righteousness or partisan hatred, they’ve taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner. They have prosecuted their case in the court of public opinion, with likeminded media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post serving as court stenographers.

Elected by no one, responsible only to each other, these spies have determined that Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Will we slip so quickly into a banana republic, not because of anything Trump has done (his actions to date have been not only constitutional but consistent with prior presidents, including Obama), but because the Progressives will not give up power?

Lastly, if you want a superbly written article about the risks America faces at the hands of an unelected bureaucracy that refuses to hand over the power it accrued during the Obama era, read Matthew Continetti’s deservedly lauded essay asking who controls America.

Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

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What my Progressive Facebook friends are reading and saying

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My Progressive Facebook friends’ feeds remind me that there are two Americas: mine, which is reality-based and conservative, versus theirs, which is delusional, paranoid, angry, and threatening. I thought I’d give you a look-see at what I routinely find on my real-me Facebook feed. Here’s the detritus I picked up from a stroll down my feed:

gaining-wisdom-from-the-native-americans

This sad Native American poster is meant to show Trump supporters are hypocrites, but I think it’s very insightful: America did bad things to the Indians, we’ve repented, and now we want to make darn sure no one else does these things to us. Learning from experience sounds smart to me.

eric-trump-travels

Somehow the people complaining about this were never upset about the $85 million dollars we eventually spent on Obama family vacations, including having the kids tag along on “business” trips.

devoss-answers-to-questions

I wonder why the article doesn’t mention that Democrats asked DeVos to answer well over 1,400-1,600 questions in a matter of days. That’s an invitation to picayune errors.

resistance-advice-from-lakoff-1

You can see Lakoff’s resistance tactics below:

resistance-advice-from-lakoff-2

Doesn’t Tactic 1 make it sound as if the Democrats are confusing President Trump with Voldemort? Oh, wait, they’re not confused. They mean to do so.


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Progressive v. Conservative ideologies, not the candidates, are the real drivers in this election *UPDATED*

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Clinton and Trump photo

Photo by tedeytan

A Progressive friend is relentlessly pushing “Trump is awful” stories on me. I, a conservative, invariably counter by pointing out that Hillary’s list of sins and failures is infinitely worse.

I realized yesterday that my arguments are irrelevant. My friend will never vote for someone who is not 100% pro-abortion, pro-socialized medicine, or pro-open borders.  Given a choice between a rotting dead body that is pro-Abortion and a genuine angel from Heaven that is pro-Choice, he’d vote for the rotting body every time.

Even as we endlessly talk down the other side’s candidates (because few people are really comfortable talking their own candidate up in this bizarre election year), what really matters is the ideological divide underlying this election. The following list might help you decide on which side of that divide you live. Once you decide, do remember that you will never get people to accept your candidate, no matter how flawed their own candidate, until you get them to accept your ideology.

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The Bookworm Beat 9/6/16 — the “cough, cough, cough” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Hillary’s cough has sounded awfully familiar to me — and today I finally figured out what Hillary’s endless coughing jags bring to mind. To back up a minute, though. . . .

As anyone following the news knows, Hillary’s been coughing a lot . . . an awful lot. Just today, while campaigning in Cleveland, Hillary practically coughed a lung out. Moreover, she was rude enough to cough into her hand, which has been de trop ever since the swine floor, rather than her elbow, the more socially acceptable way to cough:

Watching Hillary hack away, I finally figured out where I’ve heard that cough before. Think back, way back, to the Ernie Kovacs Show. I’m too young to have watched it in its first iteration, but I did see it when it was replayed on PBS back in the 1970s. One of the images that stayed with me was Kovacs’ character “Eugene,” who brings sound effects to everything he does. Near the end of a sketch, he checks out the books on a shelf, with one of those books being Camille (the English translation of Alexander Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias). I’ve queued the following clip to the correct moment, but if it doesn’t start correctly, go to 9:51.

Yup. Hillary sounds exactly like the consumptive prostitute coughing in Ernie Kovacs’ comedic moment. I won’t draw any analogies, although I can’t help but add that the prostitute in Camille was surprisingly virtuous, ending any actual comparison with Hillary. What I will say is that I’m glad to have chased down the fugitive memory that was haunting me every time I heard Hillary hack.

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[MEME] Obama’s Title IX edict turns real life into a bad joke

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Creepy man in women's lockerIf I had artistic ability, I could recreate for you a cute Jewish cartoon from the 1960s that riffed on the hackneyed statement attributed to all generic, beardless 13-year-old Jewish boys who, having struggled through their bar mitzvahs, turn to the congregation and, in their squeaky, prepubescent voices, announce, “Today, I am a man!”  In that long-ago cartoon, the perspective takes us behind a bar mitzvah boy who has ripped open his coat, in the classic flasher position, and announced to the shocked congregation “Today, I am a man!”

Girls have their “transition” moment too, although I haven’t come across a cartoon portraying that agonizingly embarrassing moment in every teen girl’s life when she has her first period and her tearful mother says to her, “Oh, my baby is a woman!”  Or worse, she announces to the family at large, “Today, our daughter is a woman!”

What occurred to me today is that, thanks to Obama’s Title IX edict, those two concepts (“Today, I am a man” and “Today, I am a woman”) have finally merged:

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