Bookworm Room

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

The Bookworm Beat 9/15/17 — the illustrated edition and open thread

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This Bookworm Beat doesn’t have a huge collection of illustrations but what it has are damn fine. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh some more.

I’ve been paying bills and taxes, and plowing through Hillary’s What Happened? — and I’m really not sure which task is most distasteful. All I do know is that I managed to miss one of Hillary’s best moments in the early chapters of her book. You see, when she started in on literary analysis, my brain said “Academic virtue signaling,” and promptly guided my eyes to the next paragraph. Had I focused harder, I would have caught this gem of totalitarianism:

And while I’m at it, here are two more Hillary gems, followed by several other amusing and insightful posters and cartoons:

[Read more…]

Hillary Clinton’s myriad self-serving fantasies in her book, What Happened

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign retrospective, What Happened, provides an in-depth look into a selfish, self-serving, hypocritical, and morally clueless person.

Mark Simone Hillary Clinton What HappenedBelieve it or not, I have been reading Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, in which she presents her take on why she lost her campaign to become president of the United States. I didn’t spend money on it, mind you. My library had it available for download, so I downloaded it.

Having now read some 12%, I can say that the book is vintage Hillary, a toxic combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, all told with a cutesy venom that is simultaneously nauseating and boring. It’s like watching the job interview from Hell, the one in the interviewer asks the interviewee to explain some peculiarities in the resume and to answer that hated question: “What are your greatest weaknesses?”

After lying about the resume, the interviewee from Hell gets to that dreaded question. As you know, because all of you have prepped for that question, the expected answer is something along the lines of, “My greatest weakness is that I simply don’t know when to stop working. I need to remember that it’s just not fair to do the work of 12 people better and more cheaply than they could do put together.” That type of answer is Hillary all over — boastful, smarmy, and manifestly dishonest.

Oh, and there’s the hypocrisy. On the one hand, Hillary keeps attacking Trump for being divisive and presenting herself as a partisan healer. On the other hand, for Hillary, the vast right-wing conspiracy lives on. Republicans are evil, duplicitous, mean-spirited and, really, the world isn’t meant for one as beautiful as Hillary. She’s the Van Gogh of the American political scene, a visionary who inspires not only love from her enlightened (but too lazy to vote) acolytes, but the hateful derision of the deplorably evil and uninformed.

Much of the book also reads like a political speech from a 1940s Hollywood movie. You know those speeches. That was the time when Hollywood genuinely tried to appear bipartisan in order to bring in the widest paying audience possible — and in order to cement a core American identity. Hollywood writers were adept, in movies about politicians, at writing meaningless speeches with feel-good statements about American greatness, better economies, strong national security, and cute little boys and girls in their beds at night. Hillary does the same.

The book is also saggy because the reader is in the head of a women who self-consciously believes her every move and thought has relevance for the betterment of the world. She cycles endlessly between several different personas: vapid political philosopher, saccharine grandmother, poison spitting partisan and, always, a woman who’s Pollyanna optimism leads to her being used and abused by a variety of (mostly right-wing) people blind to the purity of her motives and actions.

That’s the general tone of the first 12% and I seriously doubt that the remaining 88% will offer anything different. However, since I’d just started this tome, as a read, I highlighted several passages that I thought were illuminating or amusing, so I’ll share them with you here. [Read more…]

On DACA, Marin County public schools take sides in a political fight

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With DACA going before Congress, Marin County public schools are abandoning any pretense of political neutrality and are siding with illegal immigration.

Marin County DACA

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County

Public schools are supposed to be non-partisan. All residents pay taxes towards these schools and the theory is that in return for this money, the schools teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core subjects in a politically neutral manner.

Of course, we all know that this theoretical understanding is a lie. In Blue Counties, science is taught through a filter of anthropogenic climate change; history is taught through a Howard Zinn-esque filter of American hatred; and English, social studies, and other “soft” liberal arts classes aggressively advance a social justice world view.

All of this indoctrination, however, is covert. It’s advanced as pure knowledge that just coincidentally happens to align with Progressive paradigms. With that in mind, school districts — or, at least, school districts in Marin — have stopped short of pitching themselves headlong into a truly partisan political issue. For example, teachers and schools have been mindful to avoid explicitly endorsing a particular candidate.

This simulacrum of non-partisan education in Marin changed with President Trump’s announcement that he was undoing Obama’s unconstitutional DACA power grab and returning it to Congress, where it properly belongs. Reversing a manifestly unconstitutional executive order (“the way our system works, the president doesn’t have the authority to simply ignore Congress and say, we’re not going to enforce the laws that you’ve passed”), was too much for the hard Leftists who populate Marin’s district offices.

So it was that the Tamalpais Union High School District made the following official announcement: [Read more…]

Outrageous Leftist hypocrisy about Arpaio’s pardon and DACA

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Progressives claim Trump acted “unconstitutionally” with Arpaio’s pardon, while excoriating him for reversing Obama’s unconstitutional DACA program.

Hypocrites Hypocrisy Arpaio pardon DACABack in August, when President Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, my Leftist friends were outraged. As far as they were concerned, he’d effectively pardoned the KKK’s Grand Kleagle.

You can imagine then, how thrilled they were when Project Democracy (which seems more involved in law-fare than actual democracy, you know, where the people have a voice) argued that President Trump acted unconstitutionally:

While the Constitution’s pardon power is broad, it is not unlimited. Like all provisions of the original Constitution of 1787, it is limited by later-enacted amendments, starting with the Bill of Rights. For example, were a president to announce that he planned to pardon all white defendants convicted of a certain crime but not all black defendants, that would conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Similarly, issuance of a pardon that violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is also suspect. Under the Due Process Clause, no one in the United States (citizen or otherwise) may “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But for due process and judicial review to function, courts must be able to restrain government officials. Due process requires that, when a government official is found by a court to be violating individuals’ constitutional rights, the court can issue effective relief (such as an injunction) ordering the official to cease this unconstitutional conduct. And for an injunction to be effective, there must be a penalty for violation of the injunction—principally, contempt of court.

Strip away the legalese, and they’re arguing that, because Arpaio himself violated people’s constitutional rights (which assumes that people in this country illegally are entitled to constitutional benefits), the President cannot pardon him. Doing so is unconstitutional as to all those other people Arpaio harmed in the past.

The Leftist lawyers on my Facebook page (which means all of my classmates, notwithstanding the fact that we attended a Red State law school) are very excited about this argument. Here are a couple of their comments, slightly edited to protect their privacy:

I think Project Democracy must be right, because if they’re wrong, there’s no check on the executive branch’s ability to violate the Constitution.

The President’s pardon power cannot exceed the judiciary’s contempt power. Otherwise, the President, by pardoning someone who violates a court order, interferes with the powers of a co-equal branch.

Please note the obsession with the Constitution and the fear lest the executive might be pressing his authority too far under that Constitution. Despite their efforts to appear as if they actually know and appreciate the law, they are ignoring completely the breadth of the presidential pardon. Per Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, “The President…shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” As the Heritage Foundation (no slacker when it comes to constitutional law) explains,

The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the President in the Constitution. The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases), and that they cannot affect an impeachment process. A reprieve is the commutation or lessening of a sentence already imposed; it does not affect the legal guilt of a person. A pardon, however, completely wipes out the legal effects of a conviction. A pardon can be issued from the time an offense is committed, and can even be issued after the full sentence has been served. It cannot, however, be granted before an offense has been committed, which would give the President the power to waive the laws.

The only limit on the president’s pardoning power is impeachment. That’s why rotten egg presidents tend to do offensive pardons or reprieves — e.g., Marc Rich, Bradley Manning (scourge of Twitter emojis), or Oscar López Rivera — as they’re leaving office, when it’s not worth Congress’s efforts to impeach them. [Read more…]

An illustration for Scott Adams’ point about Trump’s alleged dog whistle

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A dog whistle, by definition, can be heard only by the intended dogs. Progressives claim to hear all of Trump’s dog whistles. Hmmm….

dog whistleScott Adams feels pretty confident that the Trump haters are in the midst of a mass hysteria and that Trump himself is doing well. In the context of that second post, he makes this statement:

And what about the racist dog whistle that anti-Trumpers tell us only they and racists can hear? Is it not super-awkward that your best criticism involves hearing a secret message that only racists can detect?

I thought the statement needed a quality illustration [click on image to enlarge]:

Trump Dog Whistle

How we got here, what Trump must do, and why we forgive Trump his sins

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Although academia has been seeding American Leftism for 70 years, Trump, despite his many foibles, is the weapon that will destroy that system.

Donald Trump at CPAC 2016This is going to be a slightly more discursive post than usual, simply because I’m trying to tie together three disparate thoughts. Thought One is how we got here, by which I really mean how the Left got where it is and managed to completely cow conservatives, especially those ostensible conservatives elected to Congress. Thought Two is to remind you to read a stellar post telling Trump how to handle Mueller. And Thought Three is another stellar post explaining precisely why Trump’s support is unwavering, no matter the hue and cry from the Left.

How we got here

We got here because of academia. When Marxism first hit America, it hit at the worker and union level. In America, at least, the workers of the world really were trying to unite. Unfortunately for their initial success, their unity took forms that were antithetical to most Americans.

To begin with, many of the workers were foreign, highlighting the fact that Marxism too was foreign. To Americans who still read the Constitution, Marxism was scarily alien. It’s values were too unlike ours and they resisted it strenuously.

Another problem with early Marxism in America was that many of its early supporters openly espoused violence, which most Americans found frightening. Back in pre-WWII America, nobody on the Marxist side of the equation had the wits to come up with something called Marxophobia and then to try to make Americans feel guilty about it. Americans felt no guilt when they feared the violence and totalitarianism that Marxism promised.

Lastly, Marxists back in the day insisted on talking like Marxists, with all sorts of ridiculous words and phrases such as “dialectic” and “come the Revolution,” and an insistence on talking about the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie.” It was, quite simply, off-putting.

What the Marxists figured out during WWII, thanks in no small part to the Left’s huge push to bring America to the aid of the Soviet Union once Hitler invaded Russia, was that, while Americans were not amenable to hard Marxism, they could be totally swayed by soft Marxism. This idea landed hardest and best in America’s colleges and universities. There, mild-mannered professors in rumpled, tweedy suits carefully indoctrinated their students in a whole new way of thinking about America’s liberties.

Mostly, these academics inculcated in their middle-class students a sense of guilt about America’s bounty — never mind that the bounty resulted from hard work and innovation. To the Leftists, America’s wealth, no matter that it was earned, not inherited, was evil, and young people had to pay for their countries’ sins. Moreover, when students protested against this indoctrination (and yes, back in the day, some did), the same Marxists hid behind the Constitution’s protections.

This was a brilliant strategy. If you’ve got the college students, you’ve got the next generation of elementary and high school teachers, and the next generation of news people, and the next generation of screenwriters, and the next generation of women’s magazine writers, and the next generation of college professors. And with each iteration, with each generation that passes through, you can dig in the message harder and deeper, until you end up with the insanity of intersectionality, cultural appropriation, safe spaces, triggers, political correctness, and all the other tropes that work as vehicles for intellectual tyranny.

If you read Helen MacInnes, who wrote during the height of the Cold War, you see everything already spelled out in her books. She had the number of that first generation of indoctrinators. This is most apparent in one of her lesser known books, Neither Five Nor Three, which she published in 1951. [Read more…]

[VIDEO] “Orwellian” government is worse than authoritarian government

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Orwellian government is not just repressive government; it is a government that seeks to reprogram your brain by controlling facts and language.

George Orwell 1984 OrwellianWith Trump’s election, Progressives have suddenly rediscovered both Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, her turgid 1980s attack on the Moral Majority and George Orwell’s 1984 (Signet Classics), one of the most brilliant, powerful books ever written. As one might guess, Progressives readers of the first book misunderstand American Christianity (as well as Trump’s casual relationship with it) while readers of the second book completely misunderstand Orwell’s point.

Into that gap steps a TED-ed video, which carefully explains that “Orwellian” refers, not to physical force, but to a form of mental tyranny that effectively uses words to allow the government to invade people’s brains: [Read more…]

Here’s what’s trending at WOW! Magazine, home of the Watchers’ Council

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Don’t forget that the Watchers’ Council has transmuted into Wow! Magazine, an online magazine with articles you won’t want to miss. Here’s the latest.

Watchers' Council Wow! Magazine

Trump and how to beat him, according to the Guardian

Unprecedented Ice: I’m A Denier 

Republicans Win Georgia 6 Election 

Not Unity But Civility 

How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World

Sweden’s Clueless Government Puzzled Over ‘Rise In Islamic Extremism’  [Read more…]

Obstruction and the (near) treason of James T. Comey

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Trump did not obstruct justice. It was Comey who sought to unseat an elected president using deceit, felonious Misprision, and probable illegal leaking.

Trump Comey Loyalty

Introduction

The dictionary defines treason as “the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to . . . overthrow the government.”  In the strictest sense of the word, James Comey, in carrying out his duty as FBI director during the Trump administration, did not commit treason. His acts, however, were intensely disloyal and marked by his overarching arrogance and his contempt for the President, all to America’s detriment.  This is seen most clearly in the way Comey attempted to target President Trump for an obstruction of justice charge.

Comey served as the director of the FBI from September 2013 until President Trump fired him on May 9, 2017.  Since his firing, Comey has passive-aggressively acted to prove that Trump attempted to obstruct justice by ordering Comey to stop investigating Gen. Michael Flynn.  Comey took this claim public by leaking the contents of two private notes that he had never before shared with the Attorney General, that he now claims to have sat on for the past several months for “investigative” purposes (despite a legal duty to notify the AG immediately if he believed he witnessed a felony).

In sum, Comey took a very ambiguous event, unlawfully concealed it for months from the AG in order to prevent the President from clarifying what happened, and then stage-managed a leak to cause maximum damage to Donald Trump’s administration.  True, Comey is not directing a crowd of people with torches and pitchforks, but he has misused and manipulated our legal system to the same end.  Comey is not the hero of this story; he is the serpent.

A note about this article: At the end of this article, you will find a detailed timeline, including Comey’s own averments before Congress. In the narrative part of this essay, to support my factual statements, I will refer to this timeline with letters of the alphabet denoting specific events and Roman numerals denoting Comey’s testimony. [Read more…]

New theory: Comey a victim of Trump’s sexual predator techniques

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The Social Justice Warriors are reaching out and embracing big, powerful Comey as equivalent of a victim of Trump’s honed sexual predator techniques.

James ComeyYou just knew intersectionality had to reach out and embrace Comey’s testimony. I can already see the day when we hear how Comey, when he was forced to interact with Trump, was sharing the black experience at the hands of a slave owner. For now, though, it’s enough for us to learn that Comey — complete with his “instincts,” “concerns,” “uneasiness,” and other deeply felt emotions during his “awkward” moments in Trump’s company — is the precise equivalent of a woman suffering at the hands of a sexual predator.

Yup, you heard that right. This physically overwhelming (he is 6’8″), seasoned prosecutor, and political operative, who heads one of the most powerful agencies in the world, is a victim, folks. A victim!!

How do I know? Because a New York Times op-ed tells me so: [Read more…]

What all the Comey testimony boils down to

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Despite his self-serving, Hamlet-like presentation (all that mental anguish — sheesh!), Comey is nothing more than a malevolent anti-Trumper.

James ComeyAs best as I can tell, the following is the gist of the Comey testimony: I don’t like Trump. I tried to destroy Trump’s presidency. When I failed, I leaked a government document in the hopes that a special prosecutor who’s a friend of mine could destroy Trump. End of story.

Everything else is just window dressing — and it’s particularly nasty window dressing given that Comey was relying, not on best practices, experience, or hard facts, but on feelings, nothing more than feelings.

Comey is a very little man tucked away in a tall canister. He’s caused immeasurable harm to the American political process, starting with his willingness to whitewash Hillary Clinton. He identified her crimes, all of which constitute manifest violations of explicit laws, and then appointed himself a beneficent judge, jury, and executioner. From that start, he’s traveled a steady path downhill.

I’d actually be more forgiving of Comey if he made no bones about being a stone-cold, self-serving political operative. What’s so sickening about him is his pretense that he proceeds from patriotism and moral rectitude. It’s entirely possible that he’s even convinced himself of this lie, but his actions prove otherwise.

UPDATE: From a friend’s feed:

Trump made a perfectly reasonable request to Comey for “honest loyalty”

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On the subject of loyalty, Trump properly reminded Comey, because Trump was not being investigated, that the employee owed honest loyalty to his CEO.

Trump Comey LoyaltyI have a bias here: I think Comey is a self-serving weasel with a long history of fealty to the Clintons and the Democrat party. I also think that, if you want overall opinions about the pre-testimony statement from Comey, you should read Sean Davis or Ben Shapiro.

Here, I’m going to focus on one aspect of that testimony, which is the bit about Trump’s demand for loyalty. The following is the long version from Comey’s statement about the loyalty issue, along with my interlineations:

The President and I had dinner on Friday, January 27 at 6:30 pm in the Green Room at the White House. He had called me at lunchtime that day and invited me to dinner that night, saying he was going to invite my whole family, but decided to have just me this time, with the whole family coming the next time. It was unclear from the conversation who else would be at the dinner, although I assumed there would be others.

It turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room. Two Navy stewards waited on us, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.

Comey makes it sound as there’s something nefarious about the setting. There’s not. Comey had already assured Trump on January 6 that Trump was not the subject of an FBI investigation:

In that context, prior to the January 6 meeting, I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on President Elect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.

There was no reason, therefore, for Trump not to have a private meeting with the FBI director, whether over a meal or in someone’s office. CEO’s — and Trump is America’s CEO — often have private meetings with department heads. In this context, Comey’s role is essential head of in-house security. Also, please note that Comey could, at any time, have walked out, either by excusing himself from the meal or excusing himself from the job entirely. He did not.

The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away.

Only a government operative would find “strange” the fact that a businessman is feeling out a subordinate to ensure that he is the right person for the job. Me, personally? I happen to think it’s Comey who’s strange. You want proof? Look at this next paragraph: [Read more…]

The Paris Accord — how Trump protected us from Obama’s malice

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The Paris Accord was an exceptionally vicious attack that Barack Obama launched against the American economy. Trump saved us from economic Armageddon.

President Trump Paris AccordBecause of all the other stuff in my life, I’m now on my sixth attempt to get this post written. I did use the interstices of this randomly busy day, though, to read more about the Paris Accord, both about Trump’s decision and about the hysterics from the Left, especially the Hollywood crowd. Based on this reading, I’ve managed to draw the following conclusions:

The Agreement as to the US was and is not binding. That’s because, both because of Constitutional and international law, it was and is a Treaty — that means he needed the approval of 2/3 of Congress, which meant he needed the approval of vast swaths of the American people. Obama, knowing he could not rally either the country or Congress around him, proceeded unilaterally. Speaking facetiously, if it is binding, it’s binding only on Obama (so maybe he should stop with the huge carbon footprint houses, the private planes, and the friends’ yachts).

The Agreement imposed no meaningful constraints whatsoever on non-American parties to the treaty. A friend of mine who is a scientist went looking for raw data about the treaty. Looking at that data, he had this to say:

With all the “world-coming-to-an-end” talk following Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Accord, I thought it would be good to look at the actual commitments by countries. It was not easy to find, but here it is. The commitments are voluntary, with each country setting its own goals.

A few nuggets are China’s commitment to PEAK its Carbon emissions by 2030, and USA’s commitment to REDUCE its own emissions by 26-28% by 2025(!).  The US has peaked around 2000 according to its own submission to the UN, basically handicapping itself relative to China by 30(!) years.

The EU submission is filed under Latvia here. It is seemingly the most ambitious of the bunch (that I reviewed) setting a 40% reduction relative to 1990 levels. However, the EU’s own stats show that in 2014 the EU was already at 22% down from 1990. For the EU to go down to 26% from 2005 levels would mean 20% reduction, more than the US 25%.

In other words, Obama obligated American to make economically deleterious changes, while everyone else gets to go full speed ahead — with each country picking a baseline of its own choosing for the starting point. (Obama, incidentally, also picked a baseline, one that’s very damaging to the US economy. You can just feel the love….)

The Accord does nothing to place a meaningful limit on CO2 emissions. According to the Left, the treaty under optimal circumstances would have resulted in an 0.2% reduction in emissions. That’s a rounding error, not a reduction. Meanwhile, it would have imposed a 6% reduction in the American economy over 20 years. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a disaster.

In other words, what Obama did — unilaterally, without approval from Americans or Congress — was to sign us up for a plan that destroys our economy, while imposing no obligations whatsoever on everyone else. Trump was, as I already said, absolutely right to walk away from it.

Ignore all the screaming. It’s just noise, and stupid noise at that.

The one thing I do recommend is writing a letter to the White House letting the president know that you agree with him. Because of the media shrieks and howls, positive voices will get drowned out. Trump needs to know that those in the trenches, not in elite enclaves, are grateful for his principled stand.

Well, No, We Won’t Always Have Paris — Thank Goodness!

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President Trump lived up to his promise to walk from the Paris Climate Accord, and did so with a magnificent speech about economics and sovereignty. 

President Trump Paris AccordThe Paris Accord was a terrible agreement.  It was designed to redistribute the wealth of the West — and particularly the U.S. — to the UN and to set the stage for an international legal framework enforcing the fraudulent green agenda.  It was the nose under the tent that would, in the long run, consume our nation.  Thank you, President Trump, for today taking us out of that obscene agreement.

If you did not see Trump’s speech this afternoon announcing his decision to withdraw our nation from the Paris Accord, this is one well worth watching:

The speech begins at the 1hr 4 min mark and lasts for approximately 45 mins.

Trump justified his decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord by pointing to the long-term “draconian . . . economic and financial burden” the agreement imposed on the U.S.  The “onerous energy restrictions” alone would, Trump said, cost America 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.

Several months ago, I wrote an essay on this blog pointing out that the science being used to justify the green agenda was somewhere between problematic at best, fraudulent at worst.  And I pointed out that the Paris Accord was the nose under the tent for establishing international legal supremacy as regards all things climate change over our Constitution, for attacking capitalism, for attacking democracy, and to effect a massive transfer of wealth from this  country to those UN, academic and governmental elites driving the climate agenda.  As I wrote in that essay: [Read more…]