Posts Tagged ‘Maureen Dowd’

LinkSwarm for November 12, 2021

Friday, November 12th, 2021

Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!


  • As if high inflation, high unemployment, rising crime, parental unrest over failing schools and a new ABBA album weren’t enough to evoke the late 1970s, now Iranian-backed militias have stormed an American embassy in the Middle East and taken hostages:

    A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.

    The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.

    Next up: Pet Rocks and auras.

  • Today’s columnist decrying wokeness among Democrats is…Maureen Dowd in the New York Times?

    For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.

    The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?

    There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”

    There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

    Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.

    It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…

  • Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”

    he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.

    As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.

    Republican, bad.

    Democrat, good.

    Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.

    This, you should read the whole thing…

  • Another Virginia post-mortem:

    There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.

    There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.

    Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.

    “It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.

    And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.

  • This is really bad news: “Metallurgist admits faking steel-test results for Navy subs.”

    A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.

    Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.

    From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.

    Snip.

    “Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”

    So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…

  • Legal Insurrection continues to keep track of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

    Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.

    And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.

    The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.

    Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).

    Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.

  • One person waking up: Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian.

    Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.

    “I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”

  • Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:

  • “The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.”
  • Democrats might do better electorally if they weren’t so rabidly hostile to the Second Amendment.

    Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.

    Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”

    Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.

    Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.

    While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.

    Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.

  • What. The. Hell. “Police Visited a Person Who Criticized AOC on Twitter.”
  • Problem: Too many minority students fail tests. California solution: Toss aside objective standards and eliminate tests. That’s like this solution:

  • “Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • MIT caves to wokeness.

    The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.

    We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”

    Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)

    We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.

  • The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.

    The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.

    The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.

    The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.

    Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:

  • General Electric is splitting into three companies, “aviation, healthcare and energy.”
  • Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
  • YouTube disables dislike button because they don’t approve of you being able to dislike things they don’t want you to dislike.
  • F. W. de Klerk, the South African leader who freed Mandela and ended Apartheid, dead at 85.
  • What happens when you apply pitch correction to Robert Plant? Abomination.
  • Cloudflare lava lamps.
  • Library addition: A new book on the Tiger tank.
    

  • “I shall call him Mini-Me!”

  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 16, 2019

    Monday, September 16th, 2019

    Biden threatens a black man with a chain, Beto wants to take your guns, and Democrats don’t want to govern America, they want to punish it. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls
    All these date from before the debates:

  • Economist/YouGov (page 97): Biden 24, Warren 24, Sanders 17, Harris 6, Buttigieg 5, Yang 2, Williamson 2, Booker 2, Castro 2, Bennet 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Bullock 12, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Ryan 1.
  • The Hill/Harris X: Biden 27, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Harris 7, Yang 5, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2. Large gap between this poll and YouGov for Warren; suspect the small sample (454) and methodology differences may be at play. But 5 points for Yang is his best showing, and means he gets to play Ted Cruz in basketball (see below).
  • Reuters/IPSOS: Biden 22, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 4, Harris 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1. No cross-tabs or sample size.
  • Quinnipac (Texas): Biden 28, Warren 18, Sanders 12, O’Rourke 12, Harris 5, Castro 3, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 2, Delaney 1, Yang 1. Sample size of 456 Democratic-leaning voters out of 1,410 registered voters.
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 21, Warren 16, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Bennet 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • LA Times/USC: Biden 28, Sanders 13, Warren 11. Harris 8, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • “Democrats onstage in Houston aspire not so much to govern America as to punish it.”

    Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke called racism not only “endemic” to America but “foundational.” He explained, “We can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage and as a slave built the greatness, and the success, and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to participate in or enjoy.”

    The villains in the Democratic Party story of America do not remain hundreds of years beyond our reach. Cops, gun owners, factory farmers, employees of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street speculators, the oil industry, Republicans, and so many others who, together, constitute the majority of the nation: our Houston Dems do not look to them as fellow countrymen but as impediments, evil impediments in some cases, to realizing their ideological vision. And if that message did not come across in English, several candidates speaking Spanish not comprehended by most viewers nevertheless did not get lost in translation.

    That ideological vision includes a doubly unconstitutional confiscation of weapons through executive fiat endorsed by Sen. Kamala Harris and O’Rourke (“Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”), abolition of private health insurance in a bill sponsored by Sens. Sanders and Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden’s insistence that “nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime,” reparations for slavery supported by O’Rourke, a wealth tax proposed by Warren, Sen. Cory Booker’s call to “create an office in the White House to deal with the problem of white supremacy and hate crimes,” Harris demanding that government “de-incarcerate women and children” (even ones who murder?), Andrew Yang wanting to “give every American 100 democracy dollars that you only give to candidates and causes you like,” and the entire stage endorsing open borders, if in muted terms during this debate, and amnesty for illegal immigrants.

  • “What If the Only Democrat Who Isn’t Too Radical to Win Is Too Old?”

    Here is a science-fiction scenario: Imagine a strange new virus that incapacitates everybody below the age of 75. The virus wipes out the entire political leadership, except one old man, who has survived on account of his age, but may also be too old to handle the awesome task before him.

    Now suppose — and I am not certain this is the case, but just suppose — that this is happening to the Democratic presidential campaign. The virus is Twitter, and the old man is (duh) Joe Biden.

    In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, an exotic political theory promoted by the party’s most left-wing flank suddenly gained wide circulation. The appeal of Bernie Sanders proved Democrats were ready to embrace socialism, or at least something close to it; and Donald Trump’s election proved a nominee with extreme positions could still win. These two conclusions, in combination, suggested the party would move as far left as activists preferred at no political cost.

    Neither of these conclusions was actually correct. The Bernie Sanders vote encompassed voters who opposed Hillary Clinton for a wide array of reasons — including that she was too liberal — and were overall slightly to the right of Clinton voters. And political-science findings that general election voters tend to punish more ideologically extreme candidates remain very much intact. (Trump benefited greatly by distancing himself rhetorically from his party’s unpopular small-government positions, and voters saw him as more moderate than previous Republican nominees, even though he predictably reverted to partisan form once in office.)

    And yet, this analysis seemed to race unchallenged through the Democratic Party from about 2016 — it seemed to influence Clinton, who declined the traditional lurch toward the center after vanquishing Sanders — through this year. Through sheer force of repetition, it achieved the status of a kind of self-evident truth.

  • Lots of wonky analysis and charts from 528 of the Houston debate. Once again, Andrew Yang spoke the least, but at least it was closer.
  • Fact-checking Democratic candidate debate claims. Some salt may apply.
  • Ann Althouse has impressions from the debate:

    2. Joe Biden did look old — especially when I switched from the downstairs TV to the newer upstairs TV. The sharper image of him is a little disturbing — I can see that his hair is a strange illusion — but the sharpness of his mind is what matters. He seemed ready to fight, and his idea was he identified with Barack Obama and he offers to make the country into where it would go if we still had Barack Obama. Make America Barack-Obama-Style Again. MABOSA!

    3. Bernie was awful. His voice had acquired a new raspiness that made his angry, yelling style outright ugly. I couldn’t believe I needed to listen to him. I cried out in outrage and pain. The stabbing hand gestures — ugh! This is the Democrats second-most-popular candidate? I loved Bernie when he challenged Hillary 4 years ago. The anger was a fascinating mix of comedy and righteousness. But the act is old, and the socialism — did Joe call him a “socialist” more than once? — is scary. We can’t be having a raving crank throwing radical change in our face.

    4. Elizabeth Warren was there on the other side of Biden. She and Bernie were double-teaming Joe, and that worked… for Joe. He linked Warren to Bernie: She’s for Bernie/I’m for Barack. I remember Warren reacting to every question with “Listen…” Like we’re the slow students in her class and we haven’t been paying attention and she’s getting tired of us. We should already know what she’s been saying on whatever the question happens to be. She was sunny and bright with enthusiasm when she talked about her early career as a school teacher and how when she was a child she lined up her “dollies” for a lesson. She was, she said, “tough but fair.” I love whatever love there is for tough but fair teachers. Maybe more of that, but we’re not in her class, and our responsibilities are to people and things in our own lives, not in keeping track of whatever her various policies and positions are. Warren seems to have the most potential, but she got yoked to Bernie, and the impression from a distance is: 2 radicals who want to make America unrecognizably different. MAUD!

  • The indignities of being a longshot in Iowa:

    Dozens of reporters and photographers descended on the Hawkeye Downs speedway, all waiting for one man to appear at a local Labor Day picnic.

    That man was not Michael Bennet.

    “We’re having a great Labor Day in Iowa,” said Mr. Bennet, the Colorado senator and still a presidential candidate, showing up suddenly to address the scrum that gathered 20 minutes earlier for the arrival of Joseph R. Biden Jr. “And here comes the vice president! So let me get out of his way.”

    Life isn’t easy these days for bottom-tier Democratic presidential candidates. Not many people know who they are. Fewer come to their events. No reporters cover them regularly.

    The indignities don’t stop there. On Saturday, an Iowa Democrat approached a Wall Street Journal reporter and asked if he was Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana. “I don’t even have cowboy boots on,” the reporter, John McCormick, wrote on Twitter about the encounter. Mr. Bullock’s campaign didn’t have yard signs for a house party on Sunday, so it borrowed signs used by Andy McGuire in Iowa’s 2018 primary for governor and taped “Bullock” placards on them. (Ms. McGuire, who placed fourth in the primary, has endorsed Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota for president.)

    The real problem with obscurity, though, is not securing enough donors, or high enough poll numbers, to make the debates. And it becomes something of a vicious cycle: Democratic voters and activists tend to see debate qualification as a litmus test of viability, but candidates can’t increase their viability unless they make the debate in the first place.

  • Maureen Dowd thinks Trump has changed the game:

    There were a lot of good politicians on the debate stage in Houston. But the night rang hollow as they clung to the old conventions — the overcoached performances, the canned lines, the pandering, the well-worn childhood anecdotes meant to project “relatability.”
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    Tactics superseded passion and vision. Everyone seemed one tick off. Unlike with Barack Obama in 2008, none made you feel like you wanted to pump your fist in the air and march into the future behind them.

    “Being a good politician doesn’t matter anymore,” lamented one freaked-out congressional Democrat afterward. “It’s like being a great used car salesman. We need a Holden Caulfield to call out all the phonies.”

    It’s a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron about a moron: Trump’s faux-thenticity somehow makes the Democratic candidates seem more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak.

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Made his first campaign ad buy in Iowa.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden or Bust:

    Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough presidential tone, and unconventional political tactics. Trump is a renegade. Biden remains what he always was—a deep state fixture. And his brand is mainstream Democrat left-liberal orthodoxy, which supposedly does not include weird and wild La La Land pronouncements.

    Snip.

    Biden’s fantasies, however, are quite different: 1) total memory losses and brain freezes—in which he has forgotten in what state he is, when he was vice president, or for whom he once served in that office; 2) mythography in which Joe Biden becomes an epic hero of every fiction he relates, as he stitches together half-true and quarter-true memories into mythical proportions, and 3) his race and gender hang-ups, in which he says something the Left would normally categorize as racist (e.g., “clean” and “articulate” blacks) or he breathes onto, touches, grabs, and hugs too long and too closely unsuspecting girls and women in the no margin-of-error #MeToo era, and 4) promises that he never intends to keep, such as embracing the suicidal Green New Deal.

    As far as the diagnosis of the Biden gaffe machine, the only debate is whether Biden at 76 is addled and suffering early signs of dementia—that is, hardly the sharp and energetic septuagenarian that Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Elizabeth Warren seem to be. Or, in fact, is he just now back in the spotlight and thus resuming his forty years of characteristic embarrassments, some of which blew up his prior two presidential bids.

    Is Biden in fact not any more unhinged than he was at 40—the difference now being only that what was seen as eccentric and obnoxious then is now recalibrated as demented due to his advanced age?

    After all, we remember a much younger Biden’s lies about his college résumé, his plagiarism in law school, his decades of creepy hugs and breathing into the ears and curls of prepubescent girls, his intellectual theft of British Labourite Neil Kinnock’s stump speech and padding it with family distortions, his trademark appropriation of the ideas and buzzwords of others, his racialist commentary (e.g., Barack Obama is our first “clean” and “articulate” major black presidential candidate, Delaware donut shops are all stuffed with Indian immigrants, Mitt Romney would put blacks “back in chains”) and on and on.

    Whether one thinks that Biden is just continuing where he left off in 2008, or that his capacities have slipped considerably since that failed bid matters not. The key is the current prognosis: can the present Biden possibly survive the rigors of 14 more months of campaigning, some 10 or more primary debates, countless fundraisers and one-on-one televised interviews, nearly 50 state primaries, the convention melodramas, and likely three more debates with Donald Trump without every 24 hours sounding either crazy or incomprehensible or offering medical warning signals, in a fashion that confirms he is living in an alternate universe?

    Biden says he once took a chain to a black gang leader named “Corn Pop” on the mean streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The weirdest thing about the story: It might actually be true. New York Times columnist Charles Blow says Biden isn’t woke enough:

    Biden’s positioning on racial issues has been problematic.

    This issue exposed itself again Thursday during the presidential debate in Houston. Moderator Linsey Davis put a question to Biden:

    “Mr. Vice President, I want to come to you and talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.’

    You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

    Biden could have taken responsibility for his comments and addressed the question directly, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave a rambling, nonsensical answer that included a reference to a record player. But, the response ended in yet another racial offense in which he seemed to suggest that black people lack the natural capacity to be good parents:

    We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

    His language belies a particular mind-set, one of a liberal of a particular vintage. On the issue of race, it is paternalistic and it pities, it sees deficiency in much the same way that the conservative does, but it responds as savior rather than with savagery. Better the former than the latter, surely, but the sensibility underlying the two positions is shockingly similar. It underscores that liberalism does not perfectly align with racial egalitarianism, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary.

    The only surprising thing about the “not woke enough on race” attack is that we’re seeing it after Kamala Harris crashed and burned. So who does branding Biden as a racist benefit now? Liawatha? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post wants him to drop out. Fat chance. Grandpa Simpson is with the field until the bitter end.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker dismisses polls showing him behind. He does that a lot…
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last governor standing:

    Of all the Presidential hopefuls who have promised to oust Donald Trump in 2020, Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has perhaps the most compelling electoral record. In 2016, he was the only Democratic governor to be reëlected in a red state, winning by four points among Montanans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Trump. His bid is centered on a pledge to reform campaign finance, and, at stops in Iowa, he routinely touts his history of working with a Rebublican-led legislature in his home state to curb dark-money contributions. And yet, Bullock, the last governor left in the race, failed to secure the necessary number of individual donors to qualify for Thursday’s Democratic debate. Like a number of his fellow-candidates, he has criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria, which, for at least a night, winnowed the Democratic field to ten. Last month, the billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars of his own money on advertisements, announced that he had received enough individual donations to qualify for the next round of Democratic debates, in October. A number of candidates expressed dismay, but the most vocal was Bullock, who appeared on television to criticize the lingering influence of money in politics. He conceded that the D.N.C.’s rule was well intentioned, but, he added, “what it really has done is allow a billionaire to buy a spot on the debate stage.”

    On Thursday night, as his fellow-candidates stood behind their lecterns in Houston, Texas, Bullock sat at the corner of a glossy wooden bar at the Continental Lounge, a gastropub in Des Moines. The governor was in good spirits, hunched over a glass of Coke, with his right sleeve rolled up and his cowboy boots planted on the base of his stool. “I’d rather be on the debate stage,” he told me. “But I don’t think being on the debate stage is going to define what the first week of February looks like.” Earlier that day, in Clive, Bullock had attended a meet-and-greet hosted by the wife of Iowa’s former governor, Tom Vilsack. By his side at the Continental sat Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa and an old friend, who endorsed Bullock in May. (Miller, Bullock also noted, was one of the first state officials outside of Illinois to back Barack Obama in 2007.) They both ordered bacon cheeseburger flatbreads, which arrived, garnished with pickles, on marbled slabs of wood. Bullock, who had also ordered a refill of soda, looked surprised when the bartender arrived bearing tumblers of Bulleit bourbon.

    “This is brought to you by the Gillibrand team,” the bartender said, gesturing to his left. A few former staffers of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, who withdrew her candidacy last week, waved.

    “I guess we have to drink, then,” Bullock said, raising his glass.

    She’s out of the race, and we’re still hearing about Gillibrand and booze…

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Don’t know much about history. Calls out O’Rourke’s “we’re gonna grab your guns” outburst as an obstacle to Buttigieg’s less ambitious gun-grabbing ambitions. Millennials are, like, totally not into him. The Babylon Bee: “Many conservative ‘Christians’ have bought into this lie that life begins at conception…This flies in the face of basic biology, which teaches us that life begins when you register as a Democrat.”
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ouch: “Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro lost one of his congressional endorsements Sunday, with Texas Rep. Vicente González switching to support former Vice President Joe Biden.” What does it tell you about the doomed nature of Castro’s campaign that even fellow Hispanic Texas democrats are abandoning it? On Fox, both Lisa Boothe and Juan Williams think Castro was Julian Castro the biggest debate loser for going after Biden.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another everyone hates him so why is he still running piece.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ten questions from TechCrunch. He also got a Cheddar interview. The website, not the cheese, as one must assume that being interviewed by a block of cheese would bring ever-so-slightly lower ratings…
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gabbard supports limits on third trimester abortions. That bit of sanity should further enrage the hard left that already hate her. She sued Google over suspending her ads.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ann Althouse notes that New York Times finally mentions the fact that she was Willie Brown’s mistress: “”He appointed her to two well-compensated state posts. He gave her a BMW. He introduced her to people worth knowing…. Ms. Harris’s allies have bristled at any suggestion that Mr. Brown powered her ascent, dismissing the charge as sexist and making clear that she was plenty capable of impressing on her own.” Let ye who has never gifted a BMW to a political protege cast the first stone. Don’t distract me with details: “Kamala Harris Does Not Understand Why the Constitution Should Get in the Way of Her Gun Control Agenda.” Big money donors aren’t opening their pocketbooks to her campaign. That’s what happens when you become a falling star…
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unlike Harris and Castro, Klobuchar isn’t participating in the impeach Kavanaugh pantomime. Her net worth: “The financial disclosure form also indicates that she and her husband have assets between $736,025 and $1.99 million.”
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While it’s still early in the presidential race, one thing is clear: Wayne Messam is no Pete Buttigieg.” It’s largely a rehash of last week’s Buzzfeed piece, but that’s the only Messam news this week…
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. He went full gun grabber in the debates. But he was singing a different song when he ran for the Senate:

    In the process, O’Rourke ruined 30 years of Democratic obfuscation on the real aims of gun control:

    At the Democratic-primary debate in Houston last night, Beto O’Rourke formally killed off one of the gun-control movement’s favorite taunts: The famous “Nobody is coming for your guns, wingnut.” Asked bluntly whether he was proposing confiscation, O’Rourke abandoned the disingenuous euphemisms that have hitherto marked his descent into extremism, and confirmed as plainly as can be that he was. “Hell yes,” he said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”

    O’Rourke’s plan has been endorsed in full by Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, and is now insinuating its way into the manifestos of gun-control groups nationwide. Presumably, this was O’Rourke’s intention. But he — and his party — would do well to remember that there is a vast gap between the one-upmanship and playacting that is de rigueur during primary season, and the harsh reality on the ground. Prohibition has never been well received in America, and guns have proven no exception to that rule. In New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, attempts at the confiscation of “high capacity” magazines and the registration of “assault weapons” have both fallen embarrassingly flat — to the point that the police have simply refused to aid enforcement or to prosecute the dissenters. Does Beto, who must know this, expect the result to be different in Texas, Wyoming, or Florida? Earlier this week, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives was unable to marshal enough votes to pass a ban on the sale of “assault weapons” — let alone to mount a confiscation drive. Sorry, Robert Francis. That dog ain’t gonna hunt.

    And nor should it, for O’Rourke’s policy is spectacularly unconstitutional. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America by a considerable margin, and is therefore clearly protected by the “in common use” standard that was laid out in D.C. v. Heller. Put as baldly as possible, confiscation is not a program that the federal government is permitted to adopt.

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Won’t back off his “Biden declining” comment.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hmmmm:

    Sen. Bernie Sanders has replaced the New Hampshire state director of his presidential campaign after growing indignation from his fiercest supporters that their concerns about losing the first-in-the-nation primary states were being ignored.

    More than 50 members from Sanders’ state steering committee applauded on Sunday afternoon when they heard that Joe Caiazzo had been reassigned to Massachusetts, according to those in the room. The news was delivered by the new state director, Shannon Jackson, who ran Sanders’ Senate reelection in 2018.

    “The people who helped Bernie win here last time knew and felt intimately that something was very different and not for the best,” said a steering committee member who was at the meeting. “We know our state, we know our counties and we see what other campaigns on the ground are doing. We weren’t happy with what we were seeing.”

    Maybe Bernie could ask Trump’s advice on the best way to fire underperforming underlings. “Senator Bernie Sanders’s announced last week that Palestinian-American activist and Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour would be joining his presidential campaign as an official surrogate.” Just how big is the radical antisemitic faction in the Democratic Party these days? This is a move that could really blow up a synagogue in his face. Flashback: “Bernie Sanders Was Asked to Leave Hippie Commune for Shirking.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Can Joe Sestak go from an Econo Lodge in Iowa to the White House?” Spoiler: No.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the October debate. Which was mentioned last week, but if not for that, the only Steyer news appears to be from Salon, and there are things even I won’t do…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “How Elizabeth Warren Raised Big Money Before She Denounced Big Money“:

    On the highest floor of the tallest building in Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren was busy collecting big checks from some of the city’s politically connected insiders. It was April 2018 and Ms. Warren, up for re-election, was at a breakfast fund-raiser hosted for her by John M. Connors Jr., one of the old-guard power brokers of Massachusetts.

    Soon after, Ms. Warren was in Manhattan doing the same. There would be trips to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia — all with fund-raisers on the agenda. She collected campaign funds at the private home of at least one California megadonor, and was hosted by another in Florida. She held finance events until two weeks before her all-but-assured re-election last November.

    Then, early this year, Ms. Warren made a bold bet that would delight the left: She announced she was quitting this big-money circuit in the 2020 presidential primary, vowing not to attend private fund-raisers or dial up rich donors anymore. Admirers and activists praised her stand — but few noted the fact that she had built a financial cushion by pocketing big checks the years before.

    The open secret of Ms. Warren’s campaign is that her big-money fund-raising through 2018 helped lay the foundation for her anti-big-money run for the presidency. Last winter and spring, she transferred $10.4 million in leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against.

    As Ms. Warren has risen in the polls on her populist and anti-corruption message, some donors and, privately, opponents are chafing at her campaign’s purity claims of being “100 percent grass-roots funded.” Several donors now hosting events for her rivals organized fund-raisers for her last year.

    “Can you spell hypocrite?” said former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who contributed $4,000 to Ms. Warren in 2018 and is now supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

    Mr. Rendell said he had recruited donors to attend an intimate fund-raising dinner for Ms. Warren last year at Barclay Prime, a Philadelphia steakhouse where the famed cheesesteak goes for $120. (The dish includes Wagyu rib-eye, foie gras, truffled cheese whiz and a half-bottle of champagne.) He said he received a “glowing thank-you letter” from Ms. Warren afterward.

    But when Mr. Rendell co-hosted Mr. Biden’s first fund-raiser this spring, Ms. Warren’s campaign sent brickbats, deriding the affair as “a swanky private fund-raiser for wealthy donors,” the likes of which she now shuns.

    “She didn’t have any trouble taking our money the year before,” Mr. Rendell said. “All of a sudden, we were bad guys and power brokers and influence-peddlers. In 2018, we were wonderful.”

    “While Warren won reelection easily in 2018, Biden’s backers point to her performance among independent and blue-collar voters as evidence she’ll fail to appeal to similar voters in the Rust Belt — just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.” She wants to go after banks and big tech just as both are doing gangbusters. “Who would want to weaken America’s strong global leadership in technology? It would undoubtedly lead to mass layoffs and definitely destroy future investment and wreck the economy.”

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She says conservatives are nicer to her than those on the left. Sort of a repeat from last week. “Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson heaped criticism on the fourth Democratic debate, saying President Trump will be reelected if the Democratic Party continues to use the same tactics against him.” She ain’t wrong…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. By promising to give away $1,000 a month to 10 people, Yang may have committed a campaign financing violation. “Andrew Yang and Donald Trump get more support than Joe Biden from Big Tech workers.” “Andrew Yang denounces new ‘SNL’ cast member’s racist comments but says he shouldn’t be fired.” I find this controversy too stupid to research. Yang challenged Ted Cruz to a basketball game. Cruz said Yang had to get to 5% in the polls first. Then came that Hill/Harris X poll. So the basketball game is on. That piece says Friday, but I see no evidence the game happened then, so I assume it’s still forthcoming. Remember that Cruz beat Jimmy Kimmel at hoops.
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    AOC Immanentizes The Eschaton

    Sunday, July 14th, 2019

    New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, deeply enmeshed in her “politics is personality” worldview, awakens from her slumbers to notice that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez threatens the very core of the Democratic Party:

    Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.

    That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.

    A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.

    Why on earth would she do that? For years, if not decades, accusing random people of racism has been the social justice warrior finishing move for every occasion, the magic incantation that makes people back down and give in. Every person and problem in the world is a nail, and accusations of racism (or sexism, or gay bashing, or Islamophobia, or whateverphobia) is the hammer to be used on everything. You expect her to stop now, just because her far left lunacy is endangering the key hold on power absolutely vital to keeping the insane and corrupt wings of the Democratic Party together?

    And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.

    But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.

    The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.

    You mean they consider their opponents deplorable? Or irredeemable?

    Wow, are you just now noticing this trend, Ms. Dowd? Just now? Social justice warriors have been dragging opponents for decades with false accusations of racism for daring to depart from the victimhood identity politics line, but it’s just now, just now that it’s aimed at the sacred Democratic Party institution of Nancy Pelosi that you finally deign to notice? That’s like living in the penthouse of a 20 story building, watching a raging fire consume the first 18 floors, and then, only when it’s reached the 19th floor, do you finally perceive that the building is on fire. Not in the 1980s, when people first started to use the phrase “political correctness,” not the thousands of false accusations of racism hurled against decent, non-racist people who happened to be Republicans over the decades, no it’s just now that you finally recognize the viper Democrats have clasped to their bosom all these years.

    And it’s only just now that you recognize the horrific threat it holds to Democrats clinging to any sort of nationwide political power.

    She goes on to quote Rahm Emanuel:

    We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”

    I think Emanuel’s wrong, I think they have decided. To the hard left, gaining control of the party levers of power is far more important than winning elections. It is moderate Democrats who must be defeated, as they’re the ones preventing the SJW ranks of the righteous from immanentizing the eschaton. We saw this in Texas, where the hard left pushed moderates out of the state Democratic Party as means of seizing control, with the result that they haven’t elected a statewide office-holder since 1994.

    The SJW left didn’t undertake their long march through the Democratic Party merely to bow to moderates from unfashionable hinterlands like Georgia and Kentucky, no matter how necessary they might be to forge an actual House majority. Without those moderates, 2006 doesn’t happen and 2018 doesn’t happen, and Pelosi is never Speaker. AOC’s cadres don’t care. Pelosi is just another obstacle that stands between them and control of the party. And if you disagree with them, if you stand in their way, you are a racist, QED.

    Compounding the problem for Pelosi and Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has become the face of the Democratic Party for independents, and they don’t like what they see:

    Top Democrats are circulating a poll showing that one of the House’s most progressive members — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has become a definitional face for the party with a crucial group of swing voters.

  • Why it matters: These Democrats are sounding the alarm that swing voters know and dislike socialism, warning it could cost them the House and the presidency. The poll is making the rounds of some of the most influential Democrats in America.
  • “If all voters hear about is AOC, it could put the [House] majority at risk,” said a top Democrat who is involved in 2020 congressional races. “[S]he’s getting all the news and defining everyone else’s races.”
  • The poll — taken in May, before Speaker Pelosi’s latest run-in with AOC and the three other liberal House freshmen known as “The Squad” — included 1,003 likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education.

  • These are the “white, non-college voters” who embraced Donald Trump in 2016 but are needed by Democrats in swing House districts.
  • The group that took the poll shared the results with Axios on the condition that it not be named, because the group has to work with all parts of the party.
  • The findings:

  • Ocasio-Cortez was recognized by 74% of voters in the poll; 22% had a favorable view.
  • Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view.
  • Socialism was viewed favorably by 18% of the voters and unfavorably by 69%.

  • Capitalism was 56% favorable; 32% unfavorable.
  • “Socialism is toxic to these voters,” said the top Democrat.
  • The genius of Trump is that his unorthodox, street-brawler style has goaded Democratic activists into letting their masks of moderation slip. They seem to believe that a majority of Americans share their absolute instinctual aesthetic loathing of Trump, and this delusion has lead them into foolishly telling Americans what they actually want: completely socialize medicine, open borders for a new flood of illegal aliens, transsexuals as the latest unchallenged victim class, etc. Trapped in their self-enforced media bubble, they don’t see how ordinary Americans recoil in horror at their vision, and AOC’s hardcore activists don’t care.

    Who worries about the petty concerns of the racist petite bourgeoisie when there’s a revolution to conduct?

    Maureen Dowd Talks About Maureen Dowd (And A Little About George H. W. Bush)

    Monday, December 3rd, 2018

    If you want to know why the rise of Donald Trump (or someone like him) was all-but-inevitable, this Maureen Dowd piece about how Maureen Dowd was so very, very chummy with George H. W. Bush provides several clues. On the surface its a lighthearted memoir about how a Republican President and a New York Times reporter were fond of each other and stayed in touch even after Bush41 was out of office. But what it’s really about is how both came out of a stratified eastern coastal elite where everyone’s brother knew someone else’s cousin at Yale or Harvard, and everyone knew their place.

    And, being a Maureen Dowd piece, it’s mostly about Maureen Dowd.

    Note how Dowd’s memoir is filled with praise for the same Bush patrician qualities the media so savagely attacked when actual elections were on the line. “The most polite man who ever lived” of Dowd’s gauzy memories is the one the media dubbed “wimp” and “waffle” back before he was safely out of office.

    There’s really only one quality our Democrat Media Complex really respects in any Republicans: Being a gracious loser.

    LinkSwarm for February 17, 2016

    Wednesday, February 17th, 2016

    Early voting started in Texas Monday, which means I’m way behind on covering state and local races. Oh well, maybe later this week…

  • Hillary Clinton didn’t do as badly as expected in New Hampshire. She did worse.

    Sanders’s margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn’t a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was at 9 percent and Clinton held a 46-point advantage. And Sanders overperformed the polls. Only 1 of the last 15 polls had him above 60 percent; the Real Clear Politics average in New Hampshire had him at 54.5 percent going into the vote.

    Then there are the crosstabs. The exit polling for Clinton was brutal. Sanders won men by 35 points; he won women by 11. He won voters under the age of 30 by 67 points. People expect that of Sanders and his children’s crusade. Clinton took home senior citizens, 54 percent to 45 percent. People expect that of Clinton’s boomers. But in the big band of middle-aged Democrats, ages 45 to 64 (who made up 42 percent of the electorate), Sanders beat Clinton 54 percent to 45 percent. He beat her among Democrats with a high school diploma or less; he beat her among Democrats with postgraduate degrees. Among people who’d voted in a Democratic primary before, Sanders won by 16 points; among first-time voters, he won by 57. He won self-identified “moderate” voters by 20 points.

    Clinton made gun control a substantial part of her pitch in New Hampshire. Sanders won voters who own guns by 40 points. But he won voters who don’t own guns by 14. He even won voters who said that terrorism was their number one concern.

    The biggest problem for Clinton, however, came in the candidate-perception categories. The second-most important quality voters said they wanted in a candidate was someone who “cares.” Sanders won these voters by 65 points. The most important quality people said they wanted was “honesty.” Sanders took those people home 92 to 6. Look at that again. When asked “Is Clinton honest and trustworthy?” 53 percent of all voters — not just Sanders voters, but everyone casting a Democratic ballot — said “no.”

  • Bernie Sanders has more than ten times the number of staffers on the ground in South Carolina than Clinton does.
  • Lefty at The Nation: “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”
  • The topic is the Clintons, so it’s time for another glimpse of Good Maureen Dowd: “It turned out that female voters seem to be looking at Hillary as a candidate rather than as a historical imperative. And she’s coming up drastically short on trustworthiness.”
  • Ted Cruz is very electable. “Cruz is electable because he’s the real thing.” (Hat tip: Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz.)
  • People who were actually paying attention during the Gang of 8 fight scoff at Marco Rubio’s assertion Cruz favored amnesty. (Hat tip: Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz.)
  • Only top Obama Administration officials with high security clearances knew about Hillary’s secret email server. And LinkedIn.
  • The NRA is saying gun-indifferent Sanders beat hoplophobe Hillary. Hmmm…
  • Remember how the Obama Administration swore up and down ObamaCare wouldn’t go to illegal aliens? Guess what?
  • I think this is quite an effective Donald Trump ad, targeting how black Americans have been hurt by illegal alien crime. Rick Perry did quite well with an ad highlighting an illegal alien who murdered a Houston police officer in his race against Bill White in 2010. Too bad too many gutless Republicans have been hesitant about running such ads for fear of being branded racists, xenophobes, etc. by the media.
  • Muslim immigrants are killing Sweden.
  • Germany to take in a half million more Islamic “refugees” in 2016. It’s like Merkel wants to destroy her own party… (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Police in the UK arrest man for criticizing Syrian “refugees” in a Facebook post. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Boom! Headshot! (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Current law prohibits transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the U.S., and the military won’t do so until the law is changed, no matter what Obama may want.
  • “Scalia was not only finest writer ever to sit on the Court, he was one of the best rhetoricians in history.”
  • Dear naive young voters: socialism sucks in real life.
  • Behold the ideal government worker under socialism! Every bureaucrat his own Wally….
  • A look at China’s new stealth fighters.
  • China is also deploying missiles on a disputed island in the South China Sea.
  • Huge explosion at a military barracks in Turkey. Just occurred before I posted this, so details are scant.
  • The ACLU continues its long retreat from defending free speech. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Talk like Reagan.
  • Venezuela’s socialist government appears to have authorized the military to form an oil company.
  • Notes on the collapse of a tech startup. More than a grain of truth here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • The Coen Brothers aren’t fans of cramming diversity for the sake of diversity into individual movies. “Not in the least!” Ethan answered. “It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity—or it might not.”
  • Science fiction writer has book rejected by Harper Voyager because robot characters dared to voice non-PC thoughts.
  • Because driving I-35 just didn’t suck enough already, enjoy being attacked by thrown rocks.
  • Maureen Dowd Smacks Hillary

    Sunday, March 15th, 2015

    Maureen Dowd, a deeply uneven writer, is never more interesting than when she’s taking down hubris-swollen Democrats, especially if their last names happen to be Clinton.

    This is manifestly true of her most recent column, an open letter to Hillary.

    It has come to our attention while observing your machinations during your attempted restoration that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our democracy: The importance of preserving historical records and the ill-advised gluttony of an American feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states’ payola.

    Snip.

    Instead of raising us up by behaving like exemplary, sterling people, you bring us down to your own level, a place of blurred lines and fungible ethics and sleazy associates. Your family’s foundation gobbles tens of millions from Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes, whose unspoken message is: “We’re going to give you money to go improve the world. Now leave us alone to go persecute women.”

    Dowd is, as usual, strongest on the foibles and hubris of the Overclass, and weakest on people living outside that bubble and anything to do with policy. But if there’s one thing Dowd knows (and owes her reputation and Pulitzer to), it’s the Clintons.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    LinkSwarm for August 22, 2014

    Friday, August 22nd, 2014

    Just making it to Friday coming back from vacation to Texas in the middle of August seems like it’s own victory condition…

  • The Great Obama Meltdown.
  • Ferguson is the Great Society writ large because the Great Society convinced, and then reassured, black people that they were victims, taught them that being a victim and playing a victim was the way to go always and forever.”
  • Maureen Dowd is never so readable as when she’s slamming Democrats for their personal failures. This week: Obama:

    His bored-bird-in-a-gilded-cage attitude, the article said, “has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.”

    (snip)

    The extraordinary candidate turns out to be the most ordinary of men, frittering away precious time on the links. Unlike L.B.J., who devoured problems as though he were being chased by demons, Obama’s main galvanizing impulse was to get himself elected.

    (snip)

    The sad part is that this is an ugly, confusing and frightening time at home and abroad, and the country needs its president to illuminate and lead, not sink into some petulant expression of his aloofness, where he regards himself as a party of his own and a victim of petty, needy, bickering egomaniacs.

  • Russia is very upset street artists are turning Bulgarian monuments to the Soviet Union into American superheroes.
  • Enlightened, peaceful members of Temple University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine call a Jewish student a “kike” and punch him in the face.
  • Convicted felon Brett Kimberlin bitchslapped by the court to the tune of $600 a week.
  • “Every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalization of sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership.”
  • Washington Post: “Libertarians silent on Mo. shooting.” Except for all the ones who weren’t.
  • Rick Perry grand juror was an active Democratic Party delegate during indictment proceedings.
  • Mike Ditka stands up to the PC police.
  • Saturday Night Live announcer Don Pardo has died.
  • A tiny bit about Robin Williams.
  • LinkSwarm for July 25, 2014

    Friday, July 25th, 2014

    Time for another random roundup of news and links:

  • Jimmy Carter looks like frickin’ Bismark next to the feckless dorm-room intellectual currently haunting the golf courses of the greater DC area.”
  • Even Thomas “What’s The Matter With Kansas” Frank calls Obama “ineffective and gutless.” (Warning: Salon Liberal Whining Ahead.)
  • Liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe thinks that ObamaCare is probably doomed due to the Halbig decision. “I cannot see how this Court could do anything other than decide the same way as the DC Circuit did. The statue is clear on its face.”
  • Even “ObamaCare Architect” MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber said the same thing back in 2012: “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”
  • Mark Steyn on the Halbig ruling:

    As to Mr Earnest’s point on “what Congress intended”, who can say? No Congressman who voted for the bill read it. Presumably, some legislator’s staffer wrote that actual line about “established by the State”. If we could locate him among the vast entourages of the Emirs of Incumbistan, we could ask him what his “intention” was. Until then, calibrating the competing degrees of deference to a corrupt bureaucracy, a contemptuous executive, a politicized judiciary and a feckless hack legislature brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s line about arguing the precedence of a louse and a flea, with a tick and a cockroach thrown in.

  • Missing from my Gaza roundup: “Shalom, motherf****r.” “I will not apologize for surviving.” (Hat tip: Josh Perry.)
  • Bill Whittle makes the case for Israel:

  • Obama won’t help arm Ukraine because he had a key role in disarming them.
  • Democrats plans for November: All race card, all the time.
  • 50 years of Democratic rule and now Detroit is cutting off people’s water. “Just goes to show that nothing is so expensive as when it is ‘free.'”
  • “That’s not funny.”
  • Republicans should stand firm and let the Export/Import Bank corporate welfare boondoggle expire. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Che Guevara, racist:

  • Maureen Dowd is never so readable as when she’s slamming the Clintons.
  • “Canadian Candidate Drops Out After Masturbation Video Surfaces.”

  • Sarah Palin endorses Joe Carr against Lamar Alexander in Tennessee senate primary. I don’t think anyone who watched Alexander’s “Lamar!” flannel flameout in the 1996 Presidential race has ever really trusted him since…
  • A New York City cupcake truck seems a little unclear on who their clientele might be. (They’ve since deleted both this tweet and the one where they implored people not to “snitch” to cops when they see crimes committed…)
  • Evidently nobody is actually reading Thomas Piketty’s book.
  • In praise of Power Girl’s boob window.
  • Democrats: Start Your Freak Out!

    Tuesday, March 18th, 2014

    There’s a lot of time before November, but Democrats are freaking out early and often:

    National Democrats are in a near panic — if the media’s highly-attuned panic detectors are any indicator — with a “poisonous” president unable to use his popularity to sway voters, a “screaming siren” warning about mid-term turnout, and Republicans on the offensive on Obamacare. There are a long eight months until November, but Democrats seem unlikely to get much sleep over the interim.

    Maureen Dowd expands on the theme:

    So now Democratic panic has set in.

    With the health care sign-up period coming to an end this month, Democrats in Congress are looking over at the White House and realizing that the president is not only incapable of saving them, but he looks like a big anchor tied around their necks.

    That may be why incumbent Senator Kay Hagan is running from answering questions.

    You tears, E. J. Dionne! Let me taste them! “Obama and his party are in danger of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the 2014 elections.” Along with the usual Dionnean mush about Republicans are uniquely negative, evil, etc. He and Dowd both push the “It’s the evil Koch brothers! Evil I tells ya!” Meme of the Week. He also says to embrace ObamaCare.

    That same “embrace Obamacare” advice is also offered up by Bob Shrum, and who are we to gainsay the keen tactical insight garnered from working on eight losing Presidential campaigns?

    Columnist Eugene Robinson also says to defend ObamaCare. Hmmmmmm.

    No wonder Democrats are freaking out. The tanks are converging on their position, crushing all before them, and their commander is telling them to be calm and fire back with their rifle. Those with even half a brain (asking a lot, I know) should remember back to 2010, where supporting Obamacare cost incumbent Democrats an average of 5.2% of the vote. The result was Democrats lost 63 seats in the House. This time it looks like Democrats’ embrace of ObamaCare will cost them the Senate.

    Who can blame them for freaking out?

    And what better music for a freakout than Austin’s own psychedelic pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators?

    LinkSwarm for June 18, 2013

    Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

    Too much going on, so here’s a LinkSwarm to start your day:

  • Why the IRS scandal is worse than the others.
  • Snowden: Obama made all NSA abuses worse. Well, making things worse is Obama’s magic touch…
  • The NSA confirms it can listen to domestic phone calls without a court order. Or so Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said a few days ago, but now he’s trying to walk his statement back.
  • Even Al Gore is shocked at the NSA’s sweeping domestic surveillance. Hey Al: That’s just what happens when you have no controlling legal authority.
  • Don’t tell the liberals, but conservatives actually won the Arizona voting rights case.
  • Erdogan cracks down in Turkey. (Hat tip: Claire Berlinski’s Twitter feed.)
  • Q: What do Democrats call illegal aliens who have beaten women and children? A: Evidently future Democratic voters, since they refuse to amend the Gang of 8 illegal alien amnesty bill to exclude them.
  • A rundown on Texas gun laws signed into law from the most recent session. (Previously.)
  • Democratic Rep. John Larson (D–Con) whines that it’s so very, very unfair that ObamaCare applies to congress. Hold on, Rep. Larson. When I can get some time on a scanning-tunneling microscope, I’ll see if I can find an appropriately sized violin.
  • Maureen Dowd slams Obama some more: “When the man who polled where to take his summer vacation and whether to tell the truth about his affair with Monica Lewinsky tells you you’re a captive of polls, you’d better listen up.” Bonus: Description of the NSA program as “No Call Left Behind.”
  • A new crime control initiative in Houston: arm the law-abiding. More on the Armed Citizen Project here.
  • Second Amendment activists gather twice the necessary number for signatures to force a recall election for Colorado Senate President John Morse.
  • Animal Rights activists get Obama Administration to end testing on chimps. So much for liberals being part of the “science-based community.”
  • SooperMexican makes brutal fun of the SNAP Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of the SNAP challenge, it’s another variant on the “Any time conservatives cut a dime of government funding, 10 million children starve!” argument.)
  • Scientists invent a robotic cat. Evidently it has the “massive indifference to your presence” and “not coming when you call it” parts of a cat’s personality down pat…