Long late summer days of clamor and boasting 72

Among the most likely Democratic (Socialist) Party nominees for the 2020 presidential election, are Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

What sort of people they are was revealed under bright lights during the recent, days-long, televised interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh to confirm his appointment by President Trump to the Supreme Court.

So what sort of people are they? Well, they’re both black. That’s a chief qualification in the eyes of the racist Left. And one of them is a woman. Double points.

But what of their ideas, their competence, their characters?

Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall:

Despite the Senate Judiciary Committee’s being the most politically polarized committee in Congress, there’s still usually a sense of seriousness during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Not this time.

Over the four days of hearings – two of which Judge Kavanaugh went well into the night answering Senators’ questions – there were well over a hundred interruptions by protesters.

And when Democratic Senators did ask questions, they did their image no good whatsoever.

For his part, Kavanaugh was masterful in fielding every question, befitting a confident 12-year veteran of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals bench, the second most important court in the country. The American people saw a judge’s judge – he will fairly apply the law, he will honor the Constitution, he won’t make up law … or impose any kind of agenda from the bench. It’s clear, as with Neil Gorsuch, President Trump had hit another home run with a man who’ll be another great justice.

Leading the [Democratic] parade were two committee members who’ve made it no secret they’re running for president in 2020

For Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the hearings were their own little “Kavanaugh Primary” within the primary contest for the Democratic nomination. They were expected to try and outdo each other in appealing to their party’s base, but what happened instead was a literal comedy of errors

During his first opportunity to question Kavanaugh, Booker tried to ambush the judge with emails from the time he served in the George W. Bush White House as an associate counsel and later as staff secretary. Kavanaugh calmly kept asking Booker if he could please see a copy of the emails to which the Senator was referring – so he could accurately answer his question. But they were not provided. 

Early the next morning Booker pronounced he was releasing documents, including the emails to which he had referred the day before, in what he believed to be a brazen display of flouting Senate rules for the public good. He said he was releasing confidential documents that were being withheld by the committee so the public could see them, and he would accept the consequences. He even proclaimed: “This is the closest I’ll ever get in my life to an “I am Spartacus” moment.”

A brave leader of an uprising of the oppressed against a tyranny. Easy heroism. Booker was, figuratively speaking, banging his chest as he boasted that he was taking an enormous risk, but would accept any consequences fearlessly.

In harsh reality he was making a fool of himself.

But it turned out Senate Democrats had gotten clearance to release them [the emails] several hours prior.

Spartacus had lied to us.

A presidential candidate?

Let’s look at the other one.

Not to be outdone, Harris tried to ambush Judge Kavanaugh as well.

It was late Wednesday night, she was one of the last Senators to question Kavanaugh during what had been a long, grueling day. She glared at him, knowing the cameras were capturing every moment, and sprang her gotcha question: “Have you discussed [Special Counsel] Mueller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson and Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer. … Be sure about your answer, sir.”

Kavanaugh couldn’t recall any such conversation but, as he told Harris, he was happy to have his memory refreshed if she was aware of anything. She played coy. Her staff told reporters throughout the night and into the next day of the hearings that she had it on good information such discussions had taken place.

“Good information”. How good?

Surely she had him, she had damning information about Kavanaugh inappropriately discussing the Mueller investigation with the president’s personal law firm, and he was the president’s pick for the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court could well hear arguments in the Mueller investigation. Game over, right?

Wrong.

When she asked him the same question directly the next night he flatly said, “no.”

And then she … moved on. It was all made up, nothing to see here. Fishing expedition comes up empty.

It’s a sobering thought that there are millions of people who might vote for Booker or Harris to be president.

Posted under cartoons, Law, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, September 8, 2018

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Because the Democrats cannot bear the democratic choice 9

Senator Ted Cruz makes it clear that the Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court being confirmed because they want to “re-litigate the 2016 presidential election”.

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, September 6, 2018

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Under a lidless gaze from high dark towers 185

Is the American Left totalitarian in its ideology, policies, inclination?

Victor Davis Hanson thinks it is. He writes (in part) at National Review:

A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.

At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness.

Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite — exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence — to mandate an equality of result.

We expect their 24/7 political messaging on cable-channel news networks, talk radio, or print and online media. And we concede that long ago an NPR, CNN, MSNBC, or New York Times ceased being journalistic entities as much as obsequious megaphones of the progressive itinerary.

But increasingly we cannot escape anywhere the lidless gaze of our progressive lords, all-seeing, all-knowing from high up in their dark towers.

When there is a Republican president, a Republican Congress, a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, and a majority of the states (33 of the 50) have Republican governors, does the Left have the power to inflict its “political agendas and social-justice messaging” on America?

The answer is yes. The faithful do it from inside government agencies.

The Peter Strzok–Lisa Page texts, along with the careers of former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, reveal a politicized and in some sense rotten FBI hierarchy, beholden far more to its own exalted sense of a progressive self than merely to investigating crimes against the people.

Lois Lerner was a clumsy reflection of how the IRS long ago became weaponized in service to auditing deplorables. Former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used their supposedly nonpartisan positions to further political agendas. That each in his own way is clownish does not mitigate their rank efforts to graft intelligence agencies onto political causes.

The same deterioration is true of many in the Department of Justice, who, along with the FBI, misled FISA-court justices, as if that were the only, or perhaps the easiest, way to obtain politically driven surveillance on U.S. citizens. Americans now are woke to the reality that straying too much into the forbidden zone guarantees that their communications can be monitored on the pretense that they’re colluding with some nefarious power. Yet if foreigners are the menace, why did our proverbial best and brightest traffic with a paid foreign spy at election time to sabotage a political campaign, then trump even the improper use of electronic surveillance with the insertion of paid informants?

They do it through the social media companies.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are facing accusations of censoring social-media accounts and massaging Internet searches according to their progressive political agendas. The masters of the universe have given us the stereotype of 20- and 30-something social-warrior geeks, fiddling with their algorithms to virtue-signal their left-wing fides to a global audience. …

First-time congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, a conservative from central California, found her video ad blocked on Facebook and Twitter. Apparently, her description of the Cambodian holocaust that her parents fled was too graphic or politically incorrect, or both. But then again, in California, everything is politicized, from plastic straws to single-user restrooms, in an Orwellian effort to distract us from the fact that we do not have enough water, usable roads, or workable public schools to remain a civilized state.

They do it through the news media and the institutions of education. They do it through”newspeak” – the control of vocabulary.

Language is especially enlisted to disguise bothersome reality. During the Obama administration, no one would ever have known from “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster”, “workplace disasters”, and “holy struggles” that radical Islamic terrorists were seeking to kill Westerners from San Bernardino to Paris. As in the case of illegal aliens, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, immigrants migrants, the progressive rationale is that anyone killed or harmed by a terrorist or migrant is usually a nobody and so an acceptable casualty in the greater war against incorrect speech and attitude.

When our public colleges now find that an increasing number of newly admitted students cannot do college-level work when they begin their courses, administrators drop the old idea of catch-up “remedial” classes or compensatory “remediation” courses. The new language conveys that students are now suddenly qualified, or at least it virtue-signals the university’s effort to be suitably sensitive to the fact that in California nearly half of those entering the CSU system cannot read or compute at what previously had been thought to be a college level.

And since the Left is now dedicated to the destruction of “white privilege” and the demotion of the white race, Whites on the Left announce from their dark towers that they are not white:

Our very names and identities have become politicized. Desperate to highlight their progressive purity (or to enhance careers), politicians sometimes reinvent their nomenclatures and ancestries to suggest solidarity with those deemed racially, ethnically, or economically oppressed. … [Is] their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?

Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed falsely — albeit not quite in the clumsy fashion of left-wing political activist and professor Ward Churchill — that she was part Native American. Socialist New York state senate candidate Julia Salazar recently and falsely rebranded herself as a virtual foreign-born immigrant. Was their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?

White-male aspirant for a Texas Senate seat Patrick Francis O’Rourke has used the Latino nickname “Beto,” probably on the assumption that “Beto O’Rourke” might ensure a little more street cred among Texas’s Latino voters. I suppose “Pat O’Lopez” would be too shameless? But then again, California Senate candidate Kevin de León has added both a “de” and an accent to remind voters that he is not just an Anglicized Kevin Leon who could be mistaken for a third-generation Portuguese American.

Americans have long accepted that Hollywood movies no longer seek just to entertain or inform, but to indoctrinate audiences by pushing progressive agendas. That commandment also demands that America be portrayed negatively — or better yet simply written out of history. Take the new film First Man, about the first moon landing. Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became famous when he emerged from The Eagle, the two-man lunar module, and planted an American flag on the moon’s surface. Yet that iconic act disappears from the movie version. (At least Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, does not walk out of the space capsule to string up a U.N. banner.)

Gosling claimed that the moon landing should not be seen as an American effort. Instead, he advised, it should be “widely regarded as a human achievement” — as if any nation’s efforts or the work of the United Nations in 1969 could have pulled off such an astounding and dangerous enterprise.  …

Julia Salazar, whom Hanson refers to, is a “Democratic Socialist” running for a Democratic Party seat in the New York State Senate. She claimed for unexplained reasons to be a Jewish immigrant from Colombia, though she was born to a Catholic family in Miami and is intensely anti-Semitic. When the Jewish periodical The Tablet exposed her lies, “the response from Salazar and her supporters was to accuse the Jewish community of racism”. They – 

” … insisted that as a ‘woman of color’, she was a victim of Jewish racism. The Democratic Socialists of America backed their candidate and repeated her anti-Jewish slurs.”

– So writes Daniel Greenfield at Front Page. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another “Democratic Socialist”, is a rich man’s daughter who pretends to be a low-waged resident of the Bronx, where she has won the Democratic primary and  will be elected to Congress in November.

So our betters who claim the moral high ground and know what’s best for us, are liars, slanderers, poseurs, hypocrites, illiterates, and subversives. 

And they are would-be totalitarians, those up there in the dark towers.

A new sun rising? 113

Many young voters, it seems, believe they really can have free education, free health care, free housing, and a guaranteed job at a sweet wage. “If that’s what Socialism will bring us, then let’s have it,” many of them are saying.

It is the responsibility of the conservative Right to impress on them that Socialism has never worked, that it cannot work, that under no circumstances and under no guiding hands can it ever possibly work. Far from landing them on rock-candy mountain with impressive degrees, strong bodies, neat houses, and a life of security and luxury, it will dump them in a bog of poverty, stagnation, sorrow, and serfdom.

Free goodies. That’s what the now-far-left Democratic Party is offering them. It is all the Democrats have to offer: a lie. And if the electorate is conned by it into putting them in power, its the steep way down to Venezuela for all of us.

If they are defeated in the November 2018 elections – ideally overwhelmingly defeated – a terrible fate will be avoided, and, in splendid addition, the Left may wither away and the advance of Islam may be stopped.

One way or another, we are entering a different world.

We select some passages from an article by Virgil at Breitbart about the passing of a man and an era:

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the week-long media extravaganza over John McCain’s death came on September 1, when Meghan McCain, daughter of the late senator, chose to use her “eulogy” to rip into Donald Trump.

Here’s how The Washington Post set the scene:

Trump was absent and his name never invoked, but the entire service was animated by a sustained rebellion against the president’s worldview and his singular brand of politics.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” she said, gritting her teeth through the tears. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Okay, we get it: Ms. McCain hates Trump so much that she has to grit her teeth when she talks about him.  Trump and his supporters already knew that, of course. …

She is an expert in telling the Establishment what it wants to hear — and the Establishment will hugely reward her for her “courage”. Once again, the Post, that reliable reflector of Beltway conventional wisdom, sets the scene:

When she fiercely declared that “the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” the generals, senators, former presidents and other world leaders who filled the pews burst into applause.

We might linger over those last words: “burst into applause”.  It’s worth recalling that this was supposed to be a funeral service, and yet Ms. McCain turned it into a kind of political rally for the Establishment and for what it sees as the “good old days”.  Ah, for the good old days of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and … John McCain.  The days when the Establishment, for sure, was great — or at least greatly in charge.

Yes, in the Establishment’s collective mentality, the good old days were the time when the U.S. border was open, when trade deals were easy, and foreign wars were being fought.

The Establishment, of course, never cared that, as a result, social chaos was increasing, wages were declining,  regions were de-industrializing, and young Heartlanders — not Establishmentarians, of course — were getting killed and maimed overseas.  So when Meghan McCain defined those days as “greatness”, well, that was what the Establishmentarians came to hear.   She was patting the big shots on the back, and they were glad for the pat.  And John McCain, of course, was the champion of that sort of Beltway bonhomie — and, especially, the bipartisan “fun” of foreign wars.

Except when he was running for re-election in Arizona, McCain made no apologies for any of his views, even as they ultimately drove down his approval rating, among Arizona Republicans, to just 20 percent — with a whopping 68 percent disapproving.  Indeed, according to another poll, McCain was the third-most unpopular Senator in the nation.

Yet to the Establishment, such unpopularity is a badge of honor; that is, if a political figure is willing to “stand up” to the dopey masses, well, that’s a good thing.  So it’s little wonder that John McCain received the John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage” award, that annual liberal smug-fest.  And now, maybe Meghan McCain will win it, too.

Indeed, Ms. McCain won extra points with the Establishment by snubbing Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor had been John McCain’s running mate in 2008, and had delivered what’s commonly regarded as the greatest vice presidential acceptance speech in modern memory. So if the McCain-Palin ticket lost in ’08, it certainly wasn’t her fault.

And yet to the Establishment — including the many McCain campaign staffers who now make their living on MSNBC — Palin was hopelessly deplorable. She was too much the populist and no kind of elitist. So by not inviting Palin to the service, the McCains made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the Deplorables, now and forever. Thus we see that class warfare is alive and well within the Republican Party — assuming, that is, that the McCains still think of themselves as Republicans at all. …

The Establishment will cheer for Meghan McCain, and its handmaidens in the MSM were happy to make the whole of last week into a McCain Mediathon.  And yet at the same time, the Establishment is deathly afraid that it can’t put the old humpty-dumpty back together. … John McCain really is gone.

The American Establishment might know, down deep, that it has screwed up in its hubris — although, of course, that can never be admitted publicly. Can’t show weakness to the proles!

Nevertheless, the Establishment is visibly growing nervous. In its jitteriness, it is clapping wildly, and inappropriately, for those who still hold to the fading faith — such as the McCain family.

… The Establishment is raging against the dying of the light. … The elites know that this is their political twilight and that dusk is giving way to nightfall.

Establishmentarians fear, most of all, that a new and different sun is rising.

Will it go on rising? Will it be a new day?

Or will the Left win and bring down a very long night?

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, September 3, 2018

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Toxic schooling 4

Tucker Carlson of Fox News interviews Professor Jordan Peterson on the subject of “toxic masculinity” – an undefined term, as the professor points out.

He makes it plain: the ideology preaching that men have been oppressing women throughout the history of the human race is absurd and wrong – and tragically destructive.

One of the conclusions to the discussion: better that all schools close than that they continue to indoctrinate this ideology. 

Posted under education by Jillian Becker on Sunday, September 2, 2018

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The illiberal Left 12

Pat Condell talks about the intolerant religion of Marxism/Progressivism.

 

Many of our Pat Condell videos have been removed by YouTube.

We wait to see how long this one, in which the good, brave, atheist conservative praises the truly liberal values of the Enlightenment and condemns the intolerance of the now extremely illiberal Left, will be allowed to stay.

Posted under Leftism, Marxism, Progressivism by Jillian Becker on Saturday, September 1, 2018

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