The Circus Comes to Town

Mark Wilson | Getty Images

So, everybody is talking about the Kavanaugh confirmation circus hearing, so I might as well chime in as well.

William Murchison in The American Spectator is on point.

[W]hat’s the point, really? Beyond political theater, that is.

The Kavanaugh smearing — I mean, for political science purposes, hearing — has naught to do with Senate inquiry into the fitness of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for service on the nation’s highest court.

The death of Sen. John McCain, rest his valiant soul, provides Republicans the security blanket his absence for health reasons might have denied them, given the partisan line-up: 50 Republicans, 49 Democrats.

Assuming all the Republicans show up and vote to confirm, that’s the ball game, regardless of whether red-state Democrats such as Heidi Heitkamp play to the home folks by supporting Kavanaugh.

What’s the point, really — the point of the shouts and protests and bad behavior in the hearing room? And of abrasive Democratic demands to adjourn the hearings then and there? What’s the point of Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar’s positing of vague, nameless threats to “Foundational elements of our government, including the rule of law…”? And, yes — may we know the point of Democratic yearnings for a chance to find a government document somewhere (out of thousands hitherto turned over) that might hold the decisive clue to Kavanaugh’s character?

As near as I can tell, there is no point, none at all, other to than to appease the base, and perhaps for some, to position themselves to run for president in 2020, which unless the bottom drops out, is likely a fool’s errand itself. And as for those documents, does anybody really think these cretins, who announced their opposition before Kavanaugh was nominated, have even looked at them? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Threats, what threats? A key to all the posturing — not all of it senatorial — over the Kavanaugh nomination is abortion. It’s conventional to depict Kavanaugh as the fifth, and essential, vote to reverse Roe v. Wade and thus crumple up the charter of the pro-choice movement. Where people get this stuff isn’t clear: not from anything Kavanaugh has ever said; not from any realistic appraisal of how the court would get such a thing done without touching off another civil war. […]

So what goes on here? Nearly all Democrats depend for political sustenance on the money and votes of the anti-right to life cause. That’s what goes on here. When Planned Parenthood, and related activists, especially of feminist vintage, say, “Jump!,” you say, “How high?” That is, if you’re a Democratic senator. You don’t care about Judge Kavanaugh’s credentials. You care about the assorted activists, and their encouragers in the media, who glower over your shoulder: with you likely agree anyway, or you wouldn’t be a Democratic senator.

And there you have, at least a goodly share of it: Follow the money. The Democratic Party is owned, nearly lock, stock, and barrel by the abortion industry. And even the merest whiff of a threat to that funding sets off the crazies.

To a point, it’s bipartisan, there are groups that own the GOPe as well, like the defense contractors, and the Chamber of Commerce, which is why Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and immigration, which could actually make things better, encounters such resistance. c.f. John McCain.

Neither group has any interest in the people of the United States, other than in their tax money to fund their fantasies.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine has another connecting thought.

What are they up to? What are the stakes? If you stuck around for their statements, you could probably puzzle it out.

They want to shut us down. They want to control our thought. They want to muzzle our speech. They demand that we treat abortion as a sacrament. They want to shove their upside down view of the world down our throats. They seek to force their hands into our pockets and keep them there. They foment hatred and stigmatize us as racists — because we believe in equal treatment without regard to race. When it comes to limited government, they’d rather not. They promise an Orwellian future.

Yup, as always the left wants the people to shut up and do what they are told. Get back to work you serfs, if we want you to have something we’ll give it to you. What effrontery thinking you have rights, and opinions, anything at all to say about anything.

For his unusual understatement, President Trump gets the last word.

The Brett Kavanaugh hearings for the future Justice of the Supreme Court are truly a display of how mean, angry, and despicable the other side is. They will say anything, and are only looking to inflict pain and embarrassment to one of the most highly renowned jurists to ever appear before Congress. So sad to see!

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Sunday, Again

Sunday, again. And the silliness goes on.

People Eating Tasty Animals get owned -again

One of my favourite things ever is the 300 year gap in Irish inventions after whiskey was invented pic.twitter.com/PL3TV1O9OL

— Mark Hayes (@trickaduu) August 6, 2018

Check the time/date stamps on these!

Profits, most Likely!

More Fake News!

And, of course,

Mostly from PowerLine, as usual, and PA Pundits, Moe Lane, and Ace,.

The Ancien Régime

From David Catron in The American Spectator yesterday. Do read it all.

The Mueller probe, with its indictments of Trump associates for offenses unrelated to its ostensible mandate, combined with mendacious media coverage of President Trump, is an obvious attempt to restore the old order that the electorate rejected in 2016. It seeks to annul the will of the voters and return us to the incipient authoritarianism that germinated during the Obama era, and which the ruling class expected to blossom under Clinton. The bureaucrats who support the restoration of Beltway despotism call themselves public servants, yet despise the public. The politicians who support it call themselves Democrats, yet despise democracy.

The most important fact to absorb about all this is counterintuitive: The primary target isn’t really the President. Mueller and his apologists know Trump is the voice of a nationwide rebellion against their authority, and realize that the threat can’t be neutralized until he is silenced. The end game is to crush what they see as a peasant’s revolt. Mueller’s function is to provide a legal pretext for removing the President from office. The role of the media is to misrepresent everything he does in order to trick independent voters into giving the Democrats a majority in the House. This will prevent Trump from continuing to act on his 2016 mandate.

You know this, I know this, Trump is in himself unimportant, what is important is what he is doing. The Old Order is fully aware that if they happened to remove Trump, they get Pence. But it would be a rather defenestrated Pence, as Gerald Ford was when he succeeded Nixon.

If the voters are crazy enough to give the Democrats a majority in the House, they will (for the third time) begin drawing up articles of impeachment. The most recent impeachment bill, introduced at the end of last year and voted on in January, received only 66 Democratic votes. Because it’s an election year and impeachment is not popular among the voters who are likely to show up in November, the rest of the Democrats stayed well away from the C-Span cameras. Those poltroons will quickly come out of the closet on November 7th if the midterms produce a Democratic majority in the House. As Roger Kimball points out in that other Spectator across the pond:

It is a foregone conclusion, at any rate, that should the Democrats take the House by more than a narrow margin, Donald Trump will be impeached. He would not, I am convinced, be convicted by the Senate, but the impeachment itself would be messy.

I’m pretty sure the voters are not that crazy, but I do worry that they are complacent and lazy. I dislike quoting Sean Hannity, but he is entirely right when he says that this is the most important mid-term election in our lifetimes. It’s easy to stay home, especially in November, for many of us it’s cold and sometimes snowy, much easier to stay by the fire. I’ve done it many times, too. Not this time, if I need the dog sledge, I’ll be there. Actually, in Nebraska, I’m not all that worried, although we throw up idiots like Sasse on occasion, but it is not a time to take chances.

Lose now, and we lose for a generation, and perhaps for all time.

All of which brings us back to the point of the collusion between Mueller, the Media, and the Democrats. They are out to get Trump only because they want to crush the populist revolt and restore the Ancien Régime. They have no respect for democracy and even less for the voters. They want to disenfranchise 63 million “deplorable” Trump supporters and go back to business as usual — fundamentally transforming the U.S. into a Venezuela. There’s only one way to stop these creeps from impeaching the President and ruining the country. Every Trump voter who came out in 2016 must to go to the polls on November 6 and drown the Democrats in a red wave.

He is exactly correct, we are winning, but if we fail to stay the course, we will lose, and so will America.

And, maybe if November brings a ‘Red Tide’ instead of a ‘Blue Wave’ a bit of the noise might get turned down to eleventy (at least). And if it doesn’t, I fear the chocks are out.

Second City Blues

Most of you know, I grew up around Chicago, and of all the big cities, it is by far my favorite. It’s always been a rough, can-do sort of place, not exactly incorrupt, but a place where needful things got done. Well, that’s nostalgia for you. It’s not like that anymore, it’s become a war zone. Why? Here’s Jack Dunphy to tell you.

It is an accepted but lamented fact of life among police officers that in order to rise on the promotional ladder, one must endorse the political fashions currently in favor among the city’s politicians. And the higher one ascends on that ladder, the more convincingly one must do so. As a consequence, reflecting the governing principles of almost any city you can name, most police chiefs are liberals, or at least pretend to be with a passing level of feigned sincerity.

As a result of this, the upper levels of most police departments, most certainly those in large cities, become clogged with men and women who can recite leftist pieties as confidently as any MSNBC host, the better to curry favor with politicians whose sponsorship is essential to further promotion. All of these men and women believe themselves qualified to be the next police chief, but the one selected will have proved himself to be the most proficient panderer.

But this creates a problem within a police department, to wit, a division in the rank structure between those at or near the top who adopt the leftist nostrums of the politicians, and those at the bottom who must go out onto the streets each day and confront the very real problems engendered by those very same leftist nostrums.

There exists no more vivid example of this than the city of Chicago, where Hillary Clinton received 84 percent of the 2016 presidential vote, and where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since 1931. Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, 74 people were shot in the city,12 of them fatally. In one seven-hour span, from about midnight Saturday to about 7:00 a.m. Sunday, 41 people were shot, five of whom died.

These spasms of violence are sadly characteristic of Chicago, or at least parts of it. And equally as routine as the weekend violence are the Monday press conferences at which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson put on their angry (or sad) faces and denounce the perpetrators and talk about how the mayhem is “unacceptable.” “What happened this weekend did not happen in every neighborhood in Chicago,” said Emanuel, “but it is unacceptable [that] it happened in any neighborhood in Chicago.”

A question for the mayor: If it really is unacceptable, why do you continue to accept it?

Read the whole thing at The Real Reasons for Chicago’s Deadly Crime Wave, with a hat tip to Second City Cop, whose comments are as always critically important.

After years of reading Second City Cop and other blogs about the Chicago police, I say Jack is completely on point here, especially in this paragraph:

But  If you were somehow to identify and arrest every single one of the shooters involved in the weekend violence, you would no doubt discover that nearly all of them came from homes with absent fathers, and that nearly all of them had been previously arrested for violent crime. (They won’t come close to arresting all of the shooters, or even a quarter of them; the website Heyjackass.com reports Chicago P.D.’s murder clearance rate for 2018 so far is 14.6 percent.)

It’s come to head faster and harder in Chicago, but it’s not a Chicago problem. Baltimore, St Louis, San Francisco, and yes, London, and many others as well all face the same problem, for the same reason and are showing the same lack of courage in addressing it. So are a large part of the national (and state) governments.

Daily, I read about kids who have murdered gang rivals (or often, innocent bystanders) whose rap sheets are dozens of pages long, and then a day or two later, I’m reading about how they are out on bond, sometimes with the joke of an ankle bracelet, which supposedly will require them to stay home.

Unless the people vote for real leadership, and unless some is offered to them, it will never change. These cities will become at least as bad as any third world country, and essentially no-go zones for ordinary decent citizens.

I’m reminded of whatever movie it was a few years (or maybe decades) ago that took as it’s premise that Manhattan Island itself had been declared a maximum security prison. It was dystopian then, now it is beginning to appear to be a viable solution.

The first steps are simple, the courts must be reformed so that they give meaningful custodial sentences for serious (especially violent) crime, the police need real leadership, not Democratic politicians, especially not the corrupt ones they have now. After a few years, perhaps one can start to address the reasons (and they are obvious) why so many young men are fatherless.

See, the solution is simple. Sadly implementing it, unless the population itself decides to; is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

The Saturday Roundup

There is so much floating around out there, that one can barely do it justice. It really hit me yesterday, I ran across three articles in a row that I wanted to feature here. That’s good – right? Sort of, what about the ones that I already have, or will show up tomorrow? Which they always do.

So something today that I used to do once in a while. A paragraph more or less from several articles and their links, and perhaps a sentence (or less) from me.

It is normal for people to have a little resentment at those who have/had more than they do/did. Everyone feels this.

Envy and jealousy are routine, even daily foibles.

What is abnormal — or rather, has become the New, Awful Normal — is for them to publicly shriek about it.

To, as David Niven once wryly put it, put their shortcomings on public exhibition.

We used to learn, as children, to restrain our pettier, nastier, more childlike emotional outbursts.

From Ace’s An Observance of the Decay of Learned Restraint

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Yet in the end, Gilder makes a compelling case that the information revolution is moving into an age of decentralization and greater freedom both for entrepreneurs and for those of us who just want to use information technology to make our jobs and lives easier or better. In Gilderian oracular fashion, he calls this process “The Great Unravelling.”

About the end of the age of ‘Big Tech’ from The Federalist’s Review: Big Tech Is Sowing The Seeds Of Its Own Destruction

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[A]t this moment, Ohio Democrats and their Beltway masters are diligently working to steal the state’s 12th Congressional District from Republican Troy Balderson. Balderson’s Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor, refused to concede after narrowly losing the special election and a few hours later — the county where he works — miraculously “discovered” 588 uncounted votes in a “routine audit.” When they were counted, Balderson’s lead shrank by 190. Similar skullduggery will accompany the count of provisional and absentee ballots, which will inevitably lead to an automatic recount, which will ultimately lead to an O’Connor “victory.”

What does this have to do with conservative confusion?

From An Ohio reminder: The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat.In the American Spectator.

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Ever since Trump’s election, the increase in deplorable whites identifying with the GOP is frequently denounced as tribalism by pundits, such as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, who, ironically, tend to be “Members of the Tribe.”

For instance, Brooks ended his fourth of a series of columns lamenting your “tribal emotions” by admitting that he, personally, was totally stoked to find out from a genetics testgiven by a Jewish magazine that he was closely related to the brilliant cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.

From Steve Sailer’s A Half Century of Amnesia in Taki’s Magazine via a review in The American Spectator, itself a valuable article.

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Any or all open for discussion

Those Crazy Democrats

Daniel Greenfield explains in Frontpage Magazine.

The socialists are having a moment. At least if you believe the media

But if the socialists were really having a moment, their big show wouldn’t be a 28-year-old birdbrain whose big achievement was beating a boring white guy in a Hispanic district he didn’t even live in.

If you’re going to take over the Democrats, you need something more to show for it than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or a senile socialist who came in number 2 in the primaries and then again in the DNC.

The Democrats are adopting socialist ideas wholesale. The 2020 Dem nominee will run on a guaranteed minimum income or ‘Welfare for All”. Along with free health care, free college and free copies of Das Kapital. And socialism polls brilliantly with the four core Dem bases of angry government workers, angry college students, angry welfare recipients and San Francisco eco-billionaires who keep all their money in Caribbean banks. But that’s because the Democrats have no ideas except hating Trump and Republicans.

And never, ever, works, but you knew that

Trump’s victory tore the mask from the Democrats leaving them nothing but rage. Formerly mainstream Democrats are quick to embrace every insane lefty position from abolishing borders to supporting Hamas, not because they understand or believe in them, but because they’re “resisting” Trump.

The socialists think they’re winning. But they’re just the guys shouting things at a crazy mob. And the mob is not really for anything, it’s just enraged. It doesn’t want to build, it wants to tear down.

Tweak a normal person’s sense of outrage and they’re moved. Keep doing it a bunch of times and you can enlist them in a movement. Do it every 5 seconds and you drive them as crazy as rats in a Skinner Box. And if you want to see a sample of the Dem Skinner Box, here are a few Nancy Pelosi emails.

“A matter of life or death,” “I’m so furious I can barely write this email,” “As if it couldn’t get worse today,” EVISCERATED,” “I’m scared”, and “DOOMED”.

Peak Outrage induces feelings of frustrations, fury, helplessness and despair.

Remember how we felt on November 7, 2012? I do, I wrote about it. But later in the day, we got tired of crying in our beer, and got on with life, and working to make things better, and the result was Trump. But the Dems aren’t doing that, they’re wallowing in their self-pity, blaming all the world for their shortcomings, and they’ve driven themselves crazy.

The ultimate beneficiaries of Peak Outrage won’t be the socialists. Crazy people who have been mainlining hate and fear for a decade aren’t really interested in nationalizing health care. They’ll cheer socialism if there’s nothing else on the table and convince themselves briefly that they care. But what they really want is someone to liberate them from their rage and helplessness by destroying the two sources of those emotions, the reviled Republicans and their own failed Democrat leaders.

They don’t want Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez. They want to be freed of their sense of helplessness.

The Russia narrative, the accusations of treason and the daily promises that Mueller will lead Trump in chains to the guillotine, are far more seductive than collectivized farming or abolishing borders.

The Democrats have become a mob looking for a leader who will make them feel strong and sure. That leader wasn’t Hillary Clinton. But it won’t be the socialist opposition either. Antifa or Black Lives Matter may be more like it. Hitting the outrage button is also all they know, but they offer a better release for that helplessness and rage than making campaign contributions to lefty candidates through ActBlue.

Democrats have embraced eliminationist rhetoric toward Republicans that teases the desires of the base, but is incapable of satisfying them short of a socialist revolution with firing squads and gulags.

And so on, do read his article at the link. But it is true, the only thing they seem to care about is Trump, and the fear that he might succeed, and the Normals with him.

I don’t know the answer for the Democrats, but I know this, they are becoming more dangerous than a rabid dog, and this incarnation of them needs to be put down. Because if it isn’t, eventually there will be blood in the streets.

America is a different sort of country, far from all of that blood will be from the guillotine, and then there will be peace.