Bookworm Beat 8/29/2018 — the “bitch is back” edition

I’m in a snarky mood today and this Bookworm Beat  has a lot to snark about, from McCain’s funeral, to Hillary’s server, to Pontiff scandals, and much more.

Bookworm Beat Woman WritingAgain, my apologies for the delay in getting this post up. Aside from catching up on things that fell behind during my travels, I was also updating What Business Thinks. Please remember to check it out — and let me know if you find the companion blog helpful. Oh! One more thing. If you like the site, please share it with your friends.

And now, back to our irregularly scheduled Bookworm Beat blogging….

John McCain — brave warrior and a-hole. Not only did McCain destroy our one shot to rid ourselves entirely of Obamacare and then use his last breath to attack Trump, he barred the President from his funeral, invited his hard-Leftist opponent Obama to give an oration . . . and excluded Sarah Palin, his loyal running mate.

Props to McCain for bravery in Vietnam, but he’s pretty much been a disgraceful, self-centered weasel since then. Bravery and moral indecency are not mutually exclusively. McCain’s passing is therefore no loss to the American political scene — and I devoutly hope that Arizona’s governor doesn’t yielded to Democrat demands and appoint either his unqualified wife or equally unqualified daughter to fill his seat.

Robert Reich has the intelligence of a garden gnome. Speaking as a seriously height impaired person myself, I feel comfortable saying that, in Robert Reich’s case, his garden gnome stature is commensurate with his intellectual limitations. How else to explain the idiocy behind his demand that we “annul” the 2016 election? My friend Mike McDaniel breaks it down:

Ah, so that’s what Reich is saying!  We’ll just declare Trump’s election legally invalid or void.  We’ll make it ineffective or inoperative!  That should be easy, right?  We’ll just refer to the Constitution, Article II, Section 5, which says:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on annulment upon the desires of former minor cabinet officers that worked for the Clintons, because Trump.

That seems pretty clear…what’s that?  There is no Section 5 in Article II of the Constitution?  Well, what’s that got to do with anything? I mean Robert Reich wants to annul Trump, and he’s a past semi-famous Democrat, so what does the Constitution have to do with it?

Read the rest here.

(And no, you’re not imagining it. I am in a bitchy mood. I only had three hours of sleep last night, having arrived home late and been awakened early, and that definitely strips away the Pollyanna gloss I often try to project and leaves the real me, red of tooth and claw.)

But . . . but CNN assures us there’s no Google bias. Donald Trump posted a little video that hints that maybe, just maybe, Google is working hard to control what Americans see and think:

What’s the Pontiff smoking? I haven’t blogged about the turmoil in the Catholic Church. One of the reasons is that I’ve been fruitlessly trying to track down data I found long ago claiming that communists in the 1960s deliberately advanced pedophilia within the church as a way to destroy it. I find whispers of conspiracy theories about it across the internet, but I’m pretty sure that, about a decade ago, I came across more scholarly material about this deliberate sabotage, especially in Belgium.

Because of this memory, whether it’s real or imagined, I’m not surprised by the current scandal. Moreover, because I’ve said since Day One that Pope Francis is a communist, it makes perfect sense to me that this Pope is aligned with forces that seek to undermine, rather than strengthen, the Catholic Church.

It’s in this mental landscape that I present to you a video show people attending Wednesday’s public mass in St. Peter’s, with some chanting “Viganò,” the name of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the man who accuse Francis, not only of covering up pedophilia, but advancing the career of a Cardinal whom Benedict had sidelined completely because of his promotion and cover-up of pedophilia in the American Church.

Again, given my long-time dismay with the current Pontiff, that Pope Francis would not only engage in a cover-up, but would actively promote pedophilia does not surprise me. What does surprise me a bit is that in this video Frances appears either stoned or very ill. Aside from the hard-Left Liberation theology that drives Frances, watching this video I see a man who’s either quite sick or who is operating under the influence of hardcore drugs or alcohol. There is something deeply wrong here:

Also, check out Ace’s take-down of the New York Times’ grotesque coverage about the scandal and Pope Francis’s response.

Lies, damn lies, and government statistics about guns. NPR, of all outlets, practiced some actual journalism and discovered that the federal government’s data about school shootings is completely inaccurate and grossly overstated:

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

The reality is that, barring the few horrific cases about which the media reports endlessly, thereby encouraging a handful of mentally insane, narcissistic, medicated young man to seek fame in a welter of blood, our schools are pretty darn safe. (Check out Thomas Wictor’s thread on the subject of maladjusted white male shooters.) Wait. I take that back. American schools are pretty safe . . . except for schools in inner city slums, inhabited by blacks, governed by Democrats, and filled with illegal guns, since law-abiding citizens are disarmed.

By the way, would you be surprised to learn that the same South African government that announced that it would seize without compensation land from white farmers, and that has presided over a culture in which white farmers are routinely murdered, raped, and tortured, has now announced that it intends to disarm the farmers? That should end well . . . NOT.

About that Obama economy. Democrats are arguing long and hard that Trump is a beneficiary of the Obama economy, which magically took off the moment Trump was elected. However, Richard Epstein compellingly argues that, if you believe that free markets promote economic growth, everything that Obama did stultified that growth.

Even the AP has had to concede that things are going well now:

The New York Times doubles down on its secular religion. The fact that Leftists are not traditional Judeo-Christian monotheists doesn’t mean that they aren’t deeply religious. Liel Leibovitz makes the wonderful argument that the New York Times exemplifies the Leftist faith, which he calls “Wokenism”:

It’s the sort of doctrinaire approach that appoints a gender editor and celebrates her struggles against “Mantteruptions” online, while assuming, in a thundering editorial, that evangelical women, the overwhelming majority of whom voted for Donald Trump, are trapped in some ghastly bubble of false consciousness, too silly or too sullied by their bitter religious ideology to see the perils of supporting the commander in chief of the war against women. If this faith bothers with, say, Southern Baptists—the denomination of some 15 million Americans—it’s solely in the context of the Baptists’ failure to be sufficiently feminist or sufficiently committed to social justice. No attempt is made to understand the world outside the classrooms and the boardrooms and the newsrooms where fellow Wokens congregate. And yet, ask the Wokens and they’ll tell you that their banners are unfettered debate, rational thought, scientific inquiry, and other enlightened values. The most zealous of all believers, the Wokens will never admit that they’re believers at all; instead, they’ll do their best to portray their opponents as oppressive brutes while blocking any avenue that may lead anywhere but the predetermined corners of political correctness.

Hillary’s private server may have been deadly. It was always obvious that Hillary’s server had been compromised. Anything unguarded in the internet is compromised and hers was the ultimate honey pot. I assume that the Russians got her emails, but we now know that the Chinese definitely got her emails — and that may well have proved deadly:

China killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012, hobbling U.S. spying operations in a massive intelligence breach whose origin has not been identified, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Investigators remain divided over whether there was a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency who betrayed the sources or whether the Chinese hacked the CIA’s covert communications system, the newspaper reported, citing current and former U.S. officials.

The Chinese killed at least a dozen people providing information to the CIA from 2010 through 2012, dismantling a network that was years in the making, the newspaper reported.

What a “coincidence” that all these poor people died when Hillary’s server was an open sewer.

Kurt Schlichter’s latest article points to the travesty that is our modern “rule of law.” Under the rules now in effect, if you’re a Democrat, you’re untouchable; if you’re a conservative, you’re a target if you ever came within 50 paces of (or actually are) Donald Trump:

Except the “rule of law” is a lie and a scam and we Normals are woke to the grift and we’re not falling for it. Not anymore.

Sure, the rule of law is terrific in concept, and it would sure be nice to give it another whirl here in America, but we aren’t blind or stupid. We see what the “law” is and how it’s applied – there’s one law for the elite (that’s the one that never gets applied) and one for us Normals that’s designed to keep us in line with our mouths shut.

Today, the “law” is a weapon wielded by the establishment to cement its grip on its power and position. That’s why Democrats are so eager to repeal Citizens United and pass all sorts of new laws restricting election campaigning. They know they will be able to violate those laws with impunity while using them to jam up their conservative opponents.

Justice? That’s a laugh. And all the fake posturing and posing, both by the Democrats and by the conservaquisling crew, is not going to change our minds and make us unsee what is right before our eyes.

This is a tragedy of epic proportions, because the Rule of Law truly is the line between a free society and a tyranny. If we don’t reinstate some balance, there is no direction but down.

The Iran deal was every bit as bad as you thought it was. Ami Horowitz gives an overview:

The new accent in Birmingham… is Pakistani. Daniel Greenfield reports on how this old English town, one that had a famously hard-to-understand English accent, is now the center of hardcore Islam with a Pakistani accent.

72% of polled Californians prove that they are dumber than rocks because they enthusiastically support a recently-passed California bill that mandates that California must be emissions-free by 2045 — something that’s almost certainly an impossibility unless nuclear fission is a reality by then. I bet this same 72% also enthusiastically supports Gavin Newsom’s plan to have California taxpayers provide free medical care to all 3,000,000 or so illegal aliens in the state.