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A recent WaPo piece exposes the rot behind the impeachment press

November 7, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

When it comes to Trump and Impeachment, with apologies to Mary McCarthy, every word the Washington Post writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

Media Washington Post ImpeachmentI. Introduction

As a lawyer, when I receive a brief that argues to the judge that my client is lying about facts central to the matter at issue, I expect the brief to contain quotations from my client’s alleged lies, along with hard evidence proving that my client’s statements were, in fact, lies. It’s obvious that the so-called journalists at the Washington Post never attended law school – or at least, that’s the only conclusion one can draw judging by the “opinion masquerading as fact” article that it took two WaPo employees (Toluse Olorunnipa and Philip Rucker) to assemble on November 6: “Trump makes falsehoods central to impeachment defense as incriminating evidence mounts.”

What makes this overtly and covertly dishonest article less funny than it ought to be is that people who vote take it seriously. I know that such is the case because my usual cadre of Leftists on Facebook was very excited about the article, with three people sharing it to the enthusiastic applause of their friends in the comments section. I therefore thought that a good fisking was in order should you come across this piece of entirely fake news.

Before I start, it’s worth noting that the WaPo brought some big guns to this faux report. Here are their bios, which the WaPo included at the bottom of the article:


[Read more…]

Filed Under: Donald Trump, Media matters Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Adam Schiff, Admiral William McRaven, Bill Clinton, Ciaramella, Franklin Roosevelt, Impeachment, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kathleen Kavalec, Lyndon Johnson, Media Bias, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, ObamaCare, Philip Rucker, Presidential Lies, quid pro quo, Robert Dallek, Sondland, Tim Scott, Toluse Olorunnipa, Trump, Ukraine, Vindman, Washington Post, whistleblower, William Taylor, Zelenskyy

President Trump, NeverTrumpers, and keeping kosher

April 24, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Regarding NeverTrumpers, are there two different kinds — the sleazy grifters and the genuinely principled people who cannot swallow the idea of Trump?

Kosher symbols Trump NeverTrumpersThe Torah (that is, the five books of Moses) imposes multiple life rules on Jews and how many of these rules a given Jew follows depends on that person’s degree of religious orthodoxy. For non-Jews, the kosher dietary laws are probably the best known commandments that religious Jews must obey.

For those Jews who keep kosher, there are myriad rules about the type of food that may be eaten, the way animals must be slaughtered, the way the food must be prepared, and the dishes on which it can be served. Keeping kosher is complicated and takes observant Jews outside of the mainstream of American eating.

For those with a deep commitment to God, however, the kosher dietary laws are simply a fact of life. Moreover, they find non-kosher food so viscerally repugnant that they wouldn’t dream of knowingly eating it.

God’s laws, though, are still subsets of an even more important principle: The Torah’s highest and most important directive is to choose life. In keeping with this directive, over the centuries the rabbis developed the doctrine of Pikuach nefesh. Per Wikipedia, which seems to be quite accurate on this point:

Pikuach nefesh (Hebrew: פיקוח נפש, IPA: [piˈkuaχ ˈnefeʃ], “saving a life”) describes the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of human life overrides virtually any other religious consideration. When the life of a specific person is in danger, almost any mitzvah lo ta’aseh (command to not do an action) of the Torah becomes inapplicable. [Hyperlinks and footnotes omitted.]

Specifically with regard to the intersection between Pikuach nefesh and kosher dietary rules, Wikipedia explains as follows:

Non-kosher food may be eaten under the following circumstances:

  • If no kosher food is available to the person, and failure to eat the non-kosher food may result in starvation.
  • If a non-kosher food product specifically is needed to cure an illness.

If necessary for recovery, a patient may eat non-kosher foods. In the Babylonian Talmud, Chapter 82a of Tractate Yoma mentions pregnancy cravings for non-kosher food (the passage discusses a pregnant woman who craves pork on Yom Kippur) as the paradigmatic example of a presumed life-threatening situation where a person is allowed to eat non-kosher food (and is permitted to eat it on Yom Kippur). [Hyperlinks omitted]

The fact that something is permitted, though, doesn’t necessarily mean someone is able to do it. I have heard stories of extremely orthodox Jews who, when rescued from Nazi concentration camps, were unable to make themselves eat if the only food available was not kosher. (This obviously doesn’t apply to quarrels about which plate to use; it applies to being offered pork or some other forbidden food to eat.) These Jews would tell their children to eat the food, but they viewed it with such revulsion — akin to your being asked to eat a piece of ancient, rotten, worm-ridden meat — that they simply couldn’t force it down. I don’t know if these stories are true, but they work nicely for my Trump analogy — or rather, for my NeverTrumpers analogy. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Donald Trump Tagged With: #NeverTrump, #NeverTrumpers, Biden, Bill Kristol, Hillary Clinton, Jennifer Rubin, John Podhoretz, Kosher, McCain, Norman Podhoretz, Pikuach nefesh, Trump, William Kristol

Progressive unanimity and breaking stride

January 27, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Progressive unanimity can seem enviable because of the strength it projects, but it can also lead the way to madness and systemic collapse.

Progressive UnanimityIf you’re old enough, you can remember back to 1981 when the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City suffered America’s deadliest, non-terrorist caused structural collapse, which killed 114 people and injured another 216. The disaster occurred when the hotel was holding a tea dance in the lobby and two walkways suspended above the lobby collapsed on the dancers.

Subsequent investigation showed that the design plan was horribly flawed and would support only 60% of the minimum load requirement under Kansas City building codes. The contractor noted the flaw . . . and proposed an alternative that was even worse because it didn’t correct the original problem but, instead, melded with and augmented it. The problem — as is the case with so many horrific disasters — was failed communications between the parties responsible.

I remember the disaster, not just because it was awful, but because it introduced me to a new concept. Before the investigation revealed the myriad engineering and communication failures, a lot of people speculated that the dancer’s feet, all tripping lightly to the beat, caused the collapse. You see, it’s long been known that, if soldiers march in step across a bridge and trigger the bridge’s natural frequency, the bridge can collapse:

In April 1831, a brigade of soldiers marched in step across England’s Broughton Suspension Bridge. According to accounts of the time, the bridge broke apart beneath the soldiers, throwing dozens of men into the water.

After this happened, the British Army reportedly sent new orders: Soldiers crossing a long bridge must “break stride,” or not march in unison, to stop such a situation from occurring again.

Structures like bridges and buildings, although they appear to be solid and immovable, have a natural frequency of vibration within them. A force that’s applied to an object at the same frequency as the object’s natural frequency will amplify the vibration of the object in an occurrence called mechanical resonance.

Sometimes your car shakes hard when you hit a certain speed, and a girl on a swing can go higher with little effort just by swinging her legs. The same principle of mechanical resonance that makes these incidents happen also works when people walk in lockstep across a bridge.

If soldiers march in unison across the structure, they apply a force at the frequency of their step.

If their frequency is closely matched to the bridge’s frequency, the soldiers’ rhythmic marching will amplify the vibrational frequency of the bridge. If the mechanical resonance is strong enough, the bridge can vibrate until it collapses from the movement.

So — I’ve now offered you a little physics and a little engineering, but what does this have to do with politics and, more specifically, with Progressives?

As I see it, we conservatives often have cause to complain about our lack of unanimity. While Leftists/Progressives will almost invariably present a united front, getting conservatives to agree on things is like herding cats. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Anti-Semitism, Border Wall, Breaking Stride, Climate change, Donald Trump, Gender, Hyatt Bridge Collapse, Islam, Progressive Unanimity, Racism, Toxic Masculinity

Bookworm Beat 12/30/18 — the “everything and the kitchen sink” edition

December 31, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

This Bookworm Beat is a true potpourri of all sorts of things I’ve noted as interesting over the past few days. Even I cannot discern a common thread.

Bookworm Beat Woman Writing American Left's FascismI didn’t anticipate that my weekend would be as busy as it’s proven to be. It’s almost ten on Sunday night, and my to-do list looks as long as it did when I started it. Sigh. Still, it’s been a good weekend, I’ve gotten a lot done, and I have a few things to offer here. Before I begin, you can see I’m trying out a slightly new format. There’s a long back story to the new format. Suffice to say this new format is easier to produce.

On immigration, do as I say, not as I do.

When it comes to hypocrisy, it’s hard to outdo a Leftist. That’s why, while I’m disgusted, I’m not shocked to learn that New York Mayor and open borders advocate Bill de Blasio has built a large privacy fence around Gracie Mansion, the home the city of New York provides for its mayors:

The new fence — constructed just inside an existing red brick wall and a wrought-iron fence ringing the historic property — was actually dubbed a “privacy fence” by de Blasio and first lady Chirlane McCray, sources told The Post.

“So much for being mayor of the people. That brick fence was good enough for Rudy Giuliani and his family, and for Ed Koch and all the mayors before him,” a law enforcement source said.

“They didn’t need a taller fence. That’s the same house where everybody else lived for years.”

Sources said the increasingly thin-skinned mayor demanded the extension because he was sick of nosy people in Carl Schurz Park peeping in while he hung out in the yard.

And just today, Trump reminded his Twitter followers that Barack and Michelle Obama are big fans of walls too – at least, when the walls are protecting them:

President and Mrs. Obama built/has a ten foot Wall around their D.C. mansion/compound. I agree, totally necessary for their safety and security. The U.S. needs the same thing, slightly larger version!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2018

Remembering that humor is a powerful weapon.

It’s always dangerous to underestimate your enemy so humor that makes people cease to take an enemy seriously can backfire badly. However, humor that exposes an enemy’s true face is very powerful.

That’s why I think this video, even though it goes on a bit too long, is a both an expose of and an attack on Islamism. It shows very clearly why Islamism is antithetical to American values:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Open Threads Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Abortion, Catholics, Chuck Schumer, Climate change, Dianne Feinstein, Immigration, Inuits, Kamala Harris, Mattis, Mazie Hirono, Media Bias, Polar Bears, Ronil Singh, Transgender, Trump, Walls

Bookworm Beat 8/13/2018 — the holding out against Leftists edition

August 13, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

This Bookworm Beat has it all: Leftist racism, Russian conspiracies, the Cold War, cops, Hercule Poirot, education insanity, crazed campus co-eds, and more.

Bookworm Beat logoThe Trump Tower set-up and other Russian collusion fantasies. You have to be a Leftist to claim that Trump’s son walking away from a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians without promising anyone is collusion, while the fact that federal law enforcement, the DNC, and Hillary’s campaign worked closely with myriad Russians close to Putin to destroy Trump is not collusion.

Lee Smith helps clarify for the confused.

And if you’re still confused, Thomas Lifson reminds us of the staggering double standard that saw the federal government and the media cover for DiFi’s grotesque carelessness with (and profiting from) the Chinese government, while those same institutions are endlessly trying to destroy Trump because . . . something, something Russians, something something:

The contrast with the treatment received by the Trump campaign when a Russian spy was merely suspected (on the basis of what appear to be ginned-up concerns over Carter Page, an FBI informant)  is so stark as to raise serious question as to the integrity of the FBI counterintelligence operation.  The NSA’s ability to monitor every form of electronic communications except ham radio [footnote omitted], was mobilized to spy on the presidential campaign of the opposition party to the Obama administration. No notification to the campaign was offered, unlike Feinstein’s treatment.

The entire incident is being presented to the public as no big deal. That is a classic example of the fake news of which President Trump so vocally complains.

Finally, VDH looks at the insane Russianism driving the Left, some of whom have become true believers, and many of whom are cynical operatives trying to protect either their power bases or their ideological hold over American institutions:

Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian collusion in the 2016 election. He was supposed to find proof that Trump campaign officials deliberately collaborated with Russian agents to subvert the election and thereby achieve through foreign subterfuge what they could not secure through votes.

Yet that mandate was jettisoned just weeks after Mueller began, apparently once his lawyers sensed what Peter Strzok (soon to be on his investigatory team) already knew when he had texted Lisa Page, “There’s no big there there” —an impression that both James Comey and James Clapper later shared when they confessed that they had no evidence of Russian collusion.

After a year and a half, Mueller so far has been reduced to indicting some Russians operatives for cyber crimes and a few former Trump officials on charges that have had nothing to do with collusion.

But out of the Mueller conundrum and congressional investigations arose damning information that Obama national-security officials illegally unmasked and leaked to the press the names of those surveilled. In addition, DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled either gullible or partisan FISA court judges to obtain surveillance warrants on American citizens, on the basis of an unverified dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Discredited FBI officials lied to federal investigators. The former FBI director leaked confidential memos written on FBI time on FBI devices, and he probably worked with CIA Director John Brennan (who had previously lied twice under oath to the United States Congress) to monitor the Trump campaign, including but not limited to implanting government informants among Trump employees.

[snip]

In sum, Russian collusion is a 2016 election construct. The hysteria over it serves a palliative for hatred of a presidency that so far cannot be stopped before 2020. Had Hillary Clinton won the election as experts assured the nation she would, there would be no Mueller investigation, either of Trump or of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Now-fired or reassigned FBI grandees like Andrew McCabe or Peter Strzok and DOJ officials such as Bruce Ohr would have thrived. If anything, embracing conflicts of interest and bias to successfully warp an election would be seen as a sacrifice to be rewarded, not culpability to be punished.

The Cold War reminds us that socialism is bad. A new poll came out showing that Democrats adore socialism, which they think is better for people than capitalism. This view, of course, means that they’re looking, not at National Socialism (aka Nazis), or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union), or the completely socialists Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).

Instead, what it means is that they’re looking at that rosy view of Western Europe from the 1960s through the 1990s. Of course, they’re totally missing the fact that Europe, despite its claim that it was “socialist,” wasn’t socialist at all.

What supported Western Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialism was America. We paid for their military costs and accepted their outrageous tariffs, all to help them to recover from WWII and to prevent them from once again falling into an apocalyptic conflagration. Europe may have art and architecture, but the 20th century proved that it had little in the way of actual civilization.

Anyway, if you know a Leftist stupid enough to think socialism is the answer, this video might (maybe, perhaps, just possibly) help you educate that person (h/t Seraphic Secret):

Big Tech is so bad, even Noam Chomsky objects. This comes from the wonderful world of “even a stopped clock is right twice a day“:

Responding from his official MIT email address, Chomsky wrote, “What I’ve seen of what he does is outrageous, but unlike many civil libertarians here and especially in other countries, I don’t think that the right way to deal with
‘hate speech’ and crazed fabrications is to ban them; rather, to confront them, and to seek and confront the reasons why anyone pays a moment’s attention to them.”

Who knew that the arch-Leftist Chomsky was a fan of the marketplace of ideas and free speech? (And no, I did not miss the fact that he accused “civil libertarians” of advocating censorship. I have no idea what he’s talking about, since the essence of libertarianism is that we don’t bring the government’s heavy hand down on things.)

Leftists hate blacks who aren’t Leftists: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Open Threads Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Agatha Christie, Antifa, Campus Rape, Chinese spying, Cold War, Conservative Blacks, Cops, Gender Studies, Hercule Poirot, Kenneth Branagh, Laffer Curve. BØRNS, Murder on the Orient Express, Noam Chomsky, Pedophiles, Racism, Russian Collusion, Social Media, Socialism, Title IX, Trump

Three videos about cataclysmic changes taking place in America

May 4, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Like it or not, we are living through cataclysmic change. These three videos highlight that — and I’ve added a few thoughts about slavery of body and mind.

Three videos will make you think about the seas changes happening before us. The first sees Thomas Sowell talk briefly about the endless dependency Democrats in America have foisted on American blacks:

“Dependence was seen as the key to holding the slaves down. It’s ironic that same principle comes up in the welfare state a hundred years later.” pic.twitter.com/bTjGBd6Ylt

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) May 4, 2018

In the second, Paul Joseph Watson exposes how and why people (read: Democrats and #NeverTrumpers) are responding in absolute horror to the fact that Kanye is challenging that dependency mindset:

Before going to the third video, I have two small points to make about Kanye’s charged statements that blacks made a choice.

First, Kanye and Paul Joseph Watson are both correct that, with the real chains of slavery and Jim Crow long gone, blacks are still standing in the dark, claiming that they are enslaved. [Read more…]

Filed Under: America Tagged With: #NeverTrump, #NeverTrumpers, African-Americans, Apocalypse, C.S. Lewis, Changes, Donald Trump, Kanye West, Narnia, Narnian Dwarfs, Paul Joseph Watson, Race Hustlers, Slave Trade, Slavery, The Last Battle, Thomas Sowell

Those dangerous “holier than thou” #NeverTrumpers

October 22, 2016 by Bookworm 12 Comments

Photo by tedeytan

Photo by tedeytan

Charles Krauthammer wrote a magnificent indictment of Hillary Clinton, only to finish up by saying, “I hate Trump too, so I’m sitting this one out.” What Dr. Krauthammer seems to have missed is that, in a world of binary choices, there is no sitting things out. If you don’t put your weight behind Choice A you’ve inevitably given more weight to those who support Choice B.

Speaking of choices, Wolf Howling has a few choice words on the subject of those “principled” #NeverTrumpers:

I am starting to become truly angry with those on the right who are staking out a purist position in the upcoming election, vowing not to vote, or to vote for someone with no chance of winning so that they can never be accused of voting for Trump. Krauthammer (see link, above) and Goldberg (G-file) are the latest today, I believe. In essence, they are ceding the field to Hillary, irrespective of the permanent, probably mortal, damage that would do to this nation.

One of the things that is becoming clearer to me is that these people are, in their own way, cowards. They want to sleep with a clear conscience rather than to deal with the world as it is. Up to this point in time, I thought that this was a characterization that defined only the progressive Left, a group that lives to claim the moral high ground, irrespective of consequence, leaving it up to the rest of us to deal with the world they leave in their wake. We’ve seen the results of that, from the destruction of African American families to a national security posture that is worse than anything we experienced since the 1930’s.

I hope these people don’t expect me to pay them any sort of respect, nor to count their opinions as of being of any value, when all of this is said and done. When they leave it to us to shoulder the burden of dealing with reality while they sleep in good conscience, they are as bad, as worthless, and as cowardly as the progressives. I hope that they are treated as such, regardless of how this plays out.

I’ll add that what makes the most prominent #NeverTrumpers’ position especially disreputable is that they live in such Blue states that their votes do not matter (e.g., New York). If you’re engaging in a purely symbolic act that has no real world consequences, you can do whatever the heck you want and justify your actions as existing on some higher moral plane.

The problem is that the #NeverTrumpers, rather than justifying their geographic ability to stand on the sidelines without getting their hands dirty, are vigorously and aggressively attempting to sway people who live in swing states, where the votes do matter. As to those voters, the outcome within their states matters greatly and is entirely binary: It’s Hillary or Donald. Or to put it another way, corrupt, incompetent, and anti-American versus vulgar, competent, and respectful of America’s virtues, strengths and traditions. Swing state voters who take these uber-moral #NeverTrumpers seriously are the ones who will propel Hillary to the White House.

Filed Under: Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Swing States

The Bookworm Beat 8/18/16 — the passing parade edition and open thread

August 21, 2016 by Bookworm 10 Comments

Woman-writing-300x265Once again that this blog’s motto is proven correct. My blog’s motto is “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” The only thing wrong with the motto is that the word “liberal” is a poor substitute for a whole category of Leftists and totalitarians of all political and religious stripes. Otherwise, it’s entirely accurate — as is beautifully shown by the story of Kasim Hafeez, who was raised on a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conclusions. These conclusions led him to being a rabid anti-Israel activist — something that changed dramatically when he read Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Confronted with actual facts, Hafeez did a volte face on his previous prejudice and now tours campuses as a pro-Israel activist.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

How hard does this media work to hide facts? This hard: Larry Correia minces no words when he describes how appalling the American media is when it comes to reporting the news. He sees them as engaged in a four step dance of information death:

First, is there anything we can milk from this story to bolster our worldview? Y/N

[snip]

Second, is there anything in this story which could potentially make democrats look bad? Y/N

[snip]

Third, is there anything in this story which will make republicans look stupid or evil? Y/N

[snip]

Fourth, does this event in some way affect us personally? Y/N

This algorithm explains why, when George Bush waited three days during Hurricane Katrina before making an official visit, so as not to disrupt rescue efforts, every outlet painted him as an out-of-touch racist. Meanwhile, when Obama refuses to leave the golf course, only to announce that, in the face of the worst Hurricane since Sandy, he’ll visit sometime next week, the media is utterly silent. Go here and read exactly how Correia’s questions play out in real time.

In the same vein, Ann Coulter details how the media relentlessly twists anything that a conservative says, throwing it before uninformed Americans as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it is more often a combination of vicious lies (often leavened by gross ignorance and staggering laziness):

Last August, Trump said the following about the way he was treated at the first GOP debate: “(Megyn Kelly) starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions, and you know, you can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever, but she was, in my opinion — she was off base.”

This was nearly identical to what Trump said about Chris Wallace a few sentences later: “There’s a big difference between Mike Wallace and Chris Wallace because I watched them last night, you know, blood pouring out of his eyes, too.”

Suddenly the words “her wherever” were being described as a clear-cut reference to Megyn’s menstrual blood! (I have it on good authority that Chris Wallace has never menstruated.)

Trump expressed shock, saying of his accusers, “They have all dirty minds — I never even thought about it … I was thinking of ears or nose.” (Accused by the same forces of something revolting, Whittaker Chambers gasped, “What kind of beasts am I dealing with?”)

The day after Trump allegedly referred to Megyn’s period, I happened to have a number of social engagements with people who hadn’t heard about the scandale. So I gave them Trump’s exact words, told them the media were in hysterics about it, and asked them to guess why.

None of them — an Obama-voter, a conservative actor and a union organizer — were able to guess the ludicrous interpretation being placed on Trump’s words. At least one was visibly angry about the accusation (probably because he was on his period). But after a few weeks of media propaganda, even he flipped and became totally convinced Trump was, in fact, referring to Megyn’s menstrual blood.

Most people are highly suggestible. That’s why companies spend billions of dollars on advertising.

It’s almost refreshing when a New York Times writer drops the charade and announces that he’s abandoned any pretense of “reporting” the news and is all in for pure advocacy aimed at destroying Donald Trump. And it’s gotten so bad that even the Rolling Stones’ hard Left partisan Matt Tabbibi is getting worried that modern American journalism is giving itself a bad name. Thus, he stops casting stones only at Fox news and starts throwing a few in the direction of his ideological fellows.

Just remember, when the Second Amendment goes, so does the First.  And you know what it’s going to look like when the First Amendment comes under the same attacks as the Second, right? It’s going to look just as it appears in Like Frank Constanza’s subtle and brilliant “We need sensible speech control.” Jonathan Swift would have appreciated satire this good.

The class divide between #NeverTrumpers and the rest of us.  On my mother’s side, both of her parents came from incredibly wealthy, upper-class European families, one Jewish, one Protestant. Although WWI and WWII destroyed the wealth, I was raised with manners that ensured I could consort with royalty, should I ever be invited to do so. On my father’s side, his mother came from a solidly upper middle class German Jewish family; his father was a charming ne’er-do-well from Romania. He always aspired to my mother’s level of class.

Put simply, I was born in a snobbish home and educated to be a snob. I was rigid, condescending, judgmental, and tied into an American class system which holds thata university degree, preferably from one of the “better” colleges , is the true measure of a person.

Real life taught me how wrong my values were. The best values are those from Judeo-Christian morality, which is not tied to wealth or education, but to a simple commitment to those values. The best people don’t come from the Ivy Leagues. Instead, they are people, no matter sex, race, religion, country of national origin, or level of education, who try to live up to Judeo-Christian morals; who are kind; who have sound common sense; who value America for her American values, rather than trying to turn her into a hierarchical European echo; and who look for those same qualities in other people — again, without regard to sex, race, religion, country of national, or level of education.

I mention all of the above because Jack Cashill nails about the class divide between those conservatives who however enthusiastically or reluctantly have come to embrace Trump and those who very enthusiastically reject him.  Of course, this doesn’t mean all Trump supporters are “good” people and all NeverTrumpers are effete snobs. It does mean, though, that if you’re going to draw a bright line between the two groups, that’s the easiest line to draw. Back in 2008, the conservative elite swallowed hard and accepted Sarah Palin. Eight years later, though, Donald Trump is a working class bridge too far (and that’s true despite his wealth and the rarefied world in which he’s always traveled).

Roger Simon expands upon one of the many reasons the mainstream media loathes Trump. The most obvious reason that the media loathes Trump, of course, is that media members, all college educated, cling to Leftist shibboleths that Trump rejects. Another reason, Simon notes, is that the Obama era has been spectacularly good for the rich (and upper echelon media figures are all rich) and spectacularly bad for the blacks and other working class, lower class and unemployed class people that the media assures us can find social and economic succor only from Democrats. Read the whole thing. It’s good.

The Black Lives Matter movement is part of a grander Leftist plan. Pastor Stephen E. Broden argues compellingly (lots of facts and analysis, the way thinking people should argue) that the Black Lives Matter is turning American blacks into pawns as part of a grand plan to turn America into a truly socialist nation. (And Venezuela’s travails tell us how that will turn out.)

This seems like an appropriate place to address something I’ve long felt about the way in which Democrats treat blacks. They encourage them in vice, not just to keep them stuck on welfare and voting Democrat. They also do it to maintain their own sense of superiority, which is the educated Leftist’s underlying justification for refusing to demand that blacks live up to the same standards of behavior as these educated, elitist Leftists do themselves.

This thought, which has been floating in my brain for awhile, crystallized when Wolf Howling reminded me of something that Martin Luther King said: “Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that.” What he was telling his audience, of course, was that they had to be self-reliant and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, because the whites were not going to help them.

What occurred to me was that whites of the time liked this crime rate, even if they complained about it. That is, they weren’t only discriminating against blacks because they felt blacks to be inferior. Instead, they were encouraging criminal behavior because it proved their thesis that blacks were indeed inferior.

Democrats haven’t changed a single bit since then. You poor African Americans, they say. What would you do without us, they ask. The only thing keeping you from complete breakdown is our policies — the very same policies that encourage the breakdown of the family, the marginalization of black fathers, and the dearth of policing. America’s Leftist elites don’t just need blacks on the welfare plantation to buy black votes; they need blacks on that plantation to reinforce the whites’ own sense of superiority.

The media is desperately afraid that Donald Trump’s speeches to black Americans are letting the cat out of the bag. Because they cannot dare address the substance of his speeches, they’re castigating them as utterly meaningless because he gave them in white enclaves, rather than a black community — as if a black community, brainwashed by the Left, would give Trump the opportunity to speak. By getting the message out however he could, though, Trump put on the airways something blacks need to hear.

And what they need to hear is that conservatives respect blacks and believe that they are capable of every damn thing conservatives live in their own lives: getting educated, holding jobs, having stable marriages with children raised by both a mom and a dad, and being law abiding. It’s only the Left that assures blacks this is impossible, and then creates the political and economic circumstances that make this assurance seem like the truth.

The SJW race war invades science fiction.  Yes, SJWs will leave no stone unturned when it comes to living in perpetual attack mode. This time the target is science fiction. Larry Correia ably fisks this nonsense. I’ll simply add that the SJWs aren’t making as much progress in the computer gaming and science fiction realms as they are in other places for two reasons:  Reason number 1 is that the young men who are seriously into gaming and science fiction (and it is usually men) tend to be remarkably single-minded and don’t care much about being called out for alleged social sins. Reason number 2 is that many of these same young men pride themselves on having logical, engineer-style brains, so they’re willing to make the effort to deconstruct the illogical nonsense that powers every SJW campaign.

SJWs make their greatest headway against the gainfully employed.  Another thing about the science fiction/gaming geeks (a term I use lovingly, not disrespectfully) is that they’re either not career oriented, or they’re working with like-minded folks, or they’re young enough not to have adult obligations (mortgages, children, etc.). The SJWs count their greatest successes amongst those who have the most to lose when they’re in the SJW crosshairs. There’s no one more vulnerable than an actual adult, with an actual job, and actual adult obligations and responsibilities. The case of Judge Ruth Neely is instructive.

More to come. My computer keeps freezing up and my family keeps calling me….

Filed Under: Islam, Open Threads Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Black Lives Matter, BLM, Donald Trump, Free speech, Kasim Hafeez, Media Bias, Racism, SJWs, Social Justice Warriors

#NeverTrumpers — we’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well

August 4, 2016 by Bookworm 38 Comments

Alec GuinnessDuring the primaries, I was a #NeverTrumper, because I preferred Ted Cruz’s more constitutionally pure political ideology. Unfortunately for me, Ted Cruz didn’t win the primary. The iconoclastic, highly eccentric, often bombastic, and really rather vulgar Donald Trump did.

What I did not do when Trump became the Republican candidate was go off in my cave and sulk because he will destroy the purity of the conservative movement. What I did, instead, was look at his political opponent and think “She cannot win.  Our constitutional republic will no longer exist after another four years of a hardcore Leftist agenda; an agenda, moreover, that willfully denies that the West is engaged in an existential battle with nihilistic fundamentalist Islamism.” I’m no longer voting for a candidate, I’m voting for my country and, by extension, for the candidate who is least likely to do irreparable harm — i.e., Donald Trump.

The #NeverTrumpers, however, aren’t looking at the bigger picture, which is the battle for America’s soul between a statist vision that sees Americans as useful cogs in a brow-beaten, self-loathing socialist nation and an individualist vision in which Americans are still masters of their own destiny in a proud country with a constitutionally inclined Supreme Court, the right to bear arms, and a military committed to America’s protection.  The #NeverTrumpers are so focused on ideological purity that nothing else matters to them. They will bow to the altar of purity even as America follows Venezuela to starvation and ruin (and that downfall, you will recall, happened with remarkable speed, clocking in at about ten years).

Not only do I not like what’s happening, I’ve seen this movie before and can tell you that it ends really badly. The movie, of course, is Bridge on the River Kwai.  The rest of this post will be spoiler city. If you don’t mind that fact, continue reading. If you hope one day to see this epic movie and still be surprised by the ending, STOP READING RIGHT NOW.

For those who have forgotten or never known the plot of Bridge on the River Kwai, here’s a summary of the salient points:

The movie begins in 1943, in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma run by the sadistic Colonel Saito. He announces to the prisoners that all of them, regardless of rank, will be working as slave labor constructing a railway bridge over the River Kwai that will connect Bangkok and Rangoon. (The movie is based upon the true story of the Burma Railway, built from 1942-1943, at the cost of 13,000 POW lives and the lives 80,000-100,000 men from all over the Malayan peninsula whom the Japanese dragooned into working on the bridge.)

The senior British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, objects that this plan violates the Geneva Conventions and is promptly tortured for his efforts by being locked in a hot box in the blazing equatorial heat. At the same time, three prisoners attempt to escape, with only Commander Shears succeeding.

Despite the terrible treatment he’s receiving, Nicholson will not compromise. The other POWs, who are already working have on the bridge, do their best to sabotage the effort.

Eventually, however, for reasons unimportant to this narrative, Colonel Saito releases Nicholson from the hot box, and Nicholson finally gets to see the bridge in progress. Perhaps a little bit unhinged by his torture, Nicholson is appalled by the shoddy Japanese plan and decides that British pride demands that he and his men build a better bridge. Over his officers’ protests, he has POWs who are engineers design a better bridge, to be built on a better site, and then begins to supervise the POWs’ work in dead earnest.

Meanwhile, the escaped Commander Shears, whose back story is also irrelevant here, ends up as part of a secret, four-man commando team that has as its mission destroying the bridge. As was true with the actual Burma Railway, in the movie preventing the Japanese from having a stable, efficient supply line is absolutely necessary to help advance the Allied efforts in the Pacific theater.

Even as the British and Americans are plotting the bridge’s destruction, Nicholson is increasingly obsessed with its completion. In his mind, a perfect bridge will prove to the Japanese how superior the British are, never mind that it will help the Japanese win the war. He is so focused on this goal that he even convinces Colonel Saito to lend him Japanese labor to make the project go faster.

The movie’s dramatic finale begins when a drop in the water level exposes the wires that the commando team used to connect the explosives to the detonator. When Colonel Nicholson notices these wires, instead of keeping silent or otherwise aiding the commando team, he promptly notifies Colonel Saito. The Japanese immediately attack the British commando squad. Although Colonel Saito dies, so do three of the four members of the commando team. Only Commander Shears remains to try to detonate the explosives. Fatally wounded, he swims across the river, dying at Colonel Nicholson’s feet before he can trigger the explosives. Nicholson realizes that Shears is his former, escaped campmate.

Only at this moment, with three commandos dead, a fourth dying, and a train full of Japanese dignitaries heading for an inaugural ride across the beautiful bridge he built, does Nicholson suddenly become aware where his obsession has led. That results to the famous close-up of a horrified Nicholson saying “What have I done?”

This being a Hollywood movie, rather than real life, the movie doesn’t end with Nicholson watching the Japanese train travel successfully across the river, knowing that he handed the Japanese a victory in an epic showdown between civilization and tyranny. Instead, he gets hit by mortar fire and, mortally wounded, stumbles towards the detonator, collapsing on top of it in time to blow up both bridge and train.

The #NeverTrumpers, of course, are Colonel Nicholson. They’re going to prove to the world how wonderful they and their ideas are, never mind that their obsessive focus on ideological purity and their unwillingness to sully themselves by associating with a man as crude and unintellectual as Trump will hand victory to an ideology that will make it impossible for their ideology to function in America again for decades, at least. Moreover, because this is not a Hollywood movie, they cannot continue to be stubborn now, knowing that there’s going to be a satisfying ending with the #NeverTrumpers, on the morning of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, suddenly having their “What Have I Done?” moment and, with their dying breaths, destroying Hillary’s presidential campaign. No. The #NeverTrumpers need to have their “What Have I Done?” moment now if we are to prevent disaster.

And make no mistake: If Hillary wins, we are looking at an epic disaster. As Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and other committed, principled, highly intelligent conservatives have realized, the time for ideological purity is over. In an existential situation, with a binary choice between bad and dead, morality demands that you choose bad.

President Hillary Clinton will:

  • Turn the Supreme Court into an activist, hard-Left engine of permanent change;
  • Narrow the First Amendment to the point of meaninglessness, giving government the final say over who gets free speech (and you can see what this will look like by visiting any college or university in America except for Hillsdale);
  • Narrow the Second Amendment to the point of meaninglessness, giving government the absolute right to seize all privately held arms;
  • Grant full amnesty and voting rights to all the illegal aliens already in America;
  • Abandon any effort at controlling our Southern border;
  • Continue to turn the American military into a vast social justice and climate change experiment;
  • Continue to destroy the American economy by (a) funding crony-style climate change initiatives and (b) making it impossible for ordinary Americans to get affordable energy from clean coal, oil, and natural gas;
  • Raise taxes to pay for her war against the climate;
  • Deny the existence of Islamic fundamentalism, something exceptionally cruel, not only to non-Muslims killed by Islamists, but to those peaceful Muslims who need someone to partner with them to help bring about an Islamic reformation;
  • Cultivate her close ties with rich, radical Islamists, aided by Huma Abedin (scion of the Muslim Brotherhood) and by all of her other long-standing Islamic funders;
  • Turn her back on Israel, a nation she’s always approached with hostility, abandoning it to the Islamic/Arab savagery that surrounds it;
  • Destroy the last remnants of a free market in America by tightening her cronyist connection to Wall Street and her regulatory control over businesses and individuals;
  • Be exceptionally vulnerable to blackmail from all those nations that are sitting on her emails, both the 30,000 she destroyed, as well as the ones already in FBI hands; and
  • Continue to divide America by focusing on victim groups in order to retain those groups’ fealty to the Democrat party.

Nothing Donald Trump does can or will be as bad. While Hillary, as the “first woman” president, will get full cooperation from all Democrats and all RINOS (which means most GOP Congress critters), Congress will rediscover the separation of powers when Donald is President, reining in his greater excesses. In addition, Donald has indicated that he will:

  • Appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court;
  • Look to conservatives for advice about his executive management;
  • Control our out-of-control bureaucracy (and his management experience indicates that he can do this);
  • Reinstate enforcement of America’s existing immigration laws and border policies;
  • Maintain Americans’ right to keep and bear arms;
  • Maintain Americans’ right to free speech;
  • Continue to chip away at the mind-control that is political correctness;
  • Stand by Israel;
  • Acknowledge that we are at war with radical Islam and turn to the best minds to help us wage that war successfully; and
  • Speak to all Americans, not just special-interest groups.

Trump will be an imperfect president, but all presidents are imperfect. Even Ronald Reagan, in his heyday, did stupid things or things that his supporters disliked. It is inconceivable, though, that Trump could ever be as destructive as Hillary most certainly will be.

Don’t be a #NeverTrumper. Don’t get so caught up in ideological purity that you forget that we’re fighting a real war of ideas with only one winner and one loser. Do not be Colonel Nicholson and focus so obsessively on your wonderfulness that you hand victory to the political enemy. This is war and we get once chance not to destroy America. Vote Trump, no matter how much you wish you didn’t have to.

Filed Under: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood Tagged With: #NeverTrumpers, Alec Guinness, Bridge Over the River Kwai, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Hillary Clinton

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