“…The violations stem from a pair of appearances, one on CNN’s New Day and another on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, in which Conway disparaged Democratic Alabama senate candidate Doug Jones. “Folks, don’t be fooled. He’ll be a vote against tax cuts. He’s weak on crime, weak on borders. He’s strong on raising your taxes. He’s terrible for property owners,” Conway said of Jones after she was introduced as a “counselor to President Trump.”
The OSC report claims Conway “impermissibly mixed official government business with political views about candidates in the Alabama special election.” “While the Hatch Act allows federal employees to express their views about candidates and political issues as private citizens, it restricts employees from using their official government positions for partisan political purposes, including by trying to influence partisan elections,” the report reads…”
No, seriously: criticizing a Dimocratic Senate candidate has been conclusively identified as a breach of federal law…while at the same time Hillary & Bill Clinton, John Koskinen, Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, Jim Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Barack Hussein Obama (just to name a few) continue to freely walk the streets of America, enjoying fat, taxpayer-funded pensions?!?
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing at Townhall.com, Kurt Schlichter is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take this any more, as he’s, quite justifiably,…
“…Civility is a component of a system of reasoned debate, not its end product. Civility is necessary in a system where people reason in good faith in order to come to the best solution to the policy challenges facing them. Civility lubricates that process, and allows people of good faith to disagree without engendering unnecessary and destructive discord.
People of good faith. See, that’s key. The problem is that progressives are not people of good faith.
They are not trying to reason. They are not trying to compromise. They do not accept the basic concept that all American citizens have inalienable rights and that the law must apply equally to everyone. (The very point of our Kellyanne Conway comparison.)They hate us.
We are sub-human, unworthy of courtesy or respect. We have no rights; they might allow us some control over our personal lives, for now, but we exist at their sufferance. That’s their view. That’s their basic premise – and if you ever go on social media they will tell you. So it’s no wonder that they feel no need to be civil.
Wake up. The truth is ugly, but it’s still the truth.
The hallmark of adulthood is putting away childish things, like the Pollyanna view that others must always be acting in good faith because we really, really want that to be true. Luckily, many of us have rejected the illusions and embraced the truth.And truth is more important than civility. (See Jesus cleansing the temple.)
The rational system that incorporated civility as a central component no longer exists.(By the way, Teddy Kennedy started the process when he invented “borking”…though both Bill Clinton and he probably thought the term meant drunken sex with an Icelandic singer!) Why should we preserve that one aspect of the whole when the other side has gleefully tossed the rest into the bonfire? Because it’s nice? We’re not interested in nice.We’re interested in not having our rights stolen from us.
Time to accept reality. We don’t share a common foundation of beliefs with our enemies – yeah, feel free to explode in a fussy fireball of fauxtrage because I call the people who constantly wish for my death on social media “enemies.”You can’t have a discussion or a conversation with people whose bottom line position is that you must be gone, or at least stripped of anything like your rights and sovereignty.
All you can do is fight them.
The problem is not that we Normals are not nice. The problem is that we were nice for far too long.The hate and contempt of the left for Normal Americans grew and grew without any challenge, with any cost, without any pushback, such that it was able to take root and become progressivism’s central premise.
They never paid a price for their hate, not until now (Hi Delta!). They don’t like it, either – that’s why you see liberals constantly trying to use guilt and shame to get you to start playing by the old rules again. Notice how they never, ever prescribe that remedy to themselves?
And the Fredocons?
They’re as obedient as always to their class masters. They never, ever attack the left, but should you dare push back there’s not a pearl they’ll leave unclutched.
This country is in grave danger of real chaosas the Normals confront an elite that seeks to rule it without accountability or challenge. Will the country split apart? Will there be armed conflict? The chances of those awful possibilities coming true are much, much greaterif we give the other side the false impression that we are not deadly serious about defending our Constitutional rights to the death, if necessary. Hell, many of us are already sworn to.
Civility is not a sign of weakness when a system of reasoned debate is in effect. But it is a sign of weakness, and will be taken as such by our enemies, when we cling to civility because we are too weak and afraid to admit the awful truth, that we are no longer a society ruled by reason but by power.
You want a civil society again? Good – so do I. But the way to get it is not to surrender. It is to defeat those who want to crush you with lawless rulings by leftist judges, with economic warfare launched by woke corporations, and by the steady erosion of the rights your Creator granted you.
If civility means submission, the hell with it.“
Kurt’s candor in no way detracts from the accuracy of his observations. Call it “Conan civility”:
And remember, The Left has dictated the rules…
…or, more accurately, the absolute absence thereof!
In a related item, Virginia state delegate Nick Freitas, who’s opposing Tim Kaine, known throughout the Commonwealth as the…
…for his seat in the Senate, makes a point similar to Schlichter’s:
Nick’s refusal to play by The Left’s rules is grounded not only in their continued insistence on characterizing any dissent as both offensive and (take your pick) either racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transgender-phobic, arachnophobic or not caring about the children, but owing to the fact their arguments are totally devoid of same, as Alex Tabarrok details at the WSJ:
“School shootings are actually down since the 1990s (with a lot of variability). Fewer students are carrying weapons to school and fewer students report having easy access to guns…
It’s been said that we live in an increasingly divided media universe but on many issues I think we live in an increasingly uniform media universe.Social media is so ubiquitous and the same things sell so widely that I suspect the collective consciousness is less fragmentary than in the past. Does anyone not know about Parkland?Contrary to common wisdom, mass shootings also occur in European countries. I suspect, however, that the Finnish media don’t cover German shootings as frequently as shootings in Florida are covered in Nebraska—as a result the larger the media-market the greater the extent of availability bias.In other words, the larger the media market the greater the over-estimation of rare but vivid events.“
An inconvenient truth which won’t be reported on social media…or the MSM, for that matter!
More importantly, as Ann Coulter noted in a recent column, here’s another little factoid which has curiously remained unreported by either social media or the 4th Estate: Broward County’s inexplicable, inexcusable…
School-to-Mass-Murder Pipeline
“Nikolas Cruz’s psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to.
School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothingbecause of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.
If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other “red flags.”
Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz’s terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, “security specialist,” and Peter Mahmood, head of JROTC.At least three students showed school administrators Cruz’s near-constant messages threatening to kill them — e.g., “I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass,” “Im going to watch ypu bleed,” “iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.
Threatening to kill someone is a felony. In addition to locking Cruz away for a while, having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun.
All the school had to do was risk Cruz not going to college, and depriving Yale University of a Latino class member, by reporting a few of his felonies — and there would have been no mass shooting. But Cruz was never arrested. He wasn’t referred to law enforcement. He wasn’t even expelled.
Instead, Cruz was just moved around from school to school — six transfers in three years. But he was always sent back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in order to mainstream him, so that he could get a good job someday!
The moronic idea behind the “school-to-prison pipeline” is that the only reason so many “black and brown bodies” are in prison is because they were disciplined in high school, diminishing their opportunities. End the discipline and…problem solved!
It’s like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse. The Wizard told the Scarecrow: You don’t need an education, you just need a diploma! The school-to-prison pipeline idiocy tells students: You don’t need to behave in high school, you just need to leave with no criminal record!
Of course, killjoys will say that removing the consequences of bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior.But that’s not the view of Learned Professionals, who took summer courses at Michigan State Ed School. In a stroke of genius, they realized that the only problem criminals have is that people keep lists of their criminal activities. It’s the list that prevents them from getting into M.I.T. and designing space stations on Mars. Where they will cure cancer.
This primitive, stone-age thinking was made official Broward County policy in a Nov. 5, 2013, agreement titled “Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline.” The first “whereas” clause of the agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.”
Get it? It’s the arrest — not the behavior that led to the arrest — that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life. (For example, just look at how much the district’s refusal to arrest Nikolas Cruz helped him!)
The agreement’s third “whereas” clause specifically cites “students of color” as victims of the old, racist policy of treating criminal behavior criminally. Say, in the middle of a drive to cut back on the arrest or expulsion of “students of color,” how do you suppose the school dealt with a kid named “Nikolas Cruz”? Might there be some connection between his Hispanic last name and the school’s abject refusal to do anything about Cruz’s repeated criminal behavior?
Just a few months ago, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert W. Runcie, was actually bragging about how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership. When he took over in 2011, the district had “the highest number of school-related arrests in the state.” But today, he boasted, Broward has “one of the lowest rates of arrest in the state.” By the simple expedient of ignoring criminal behavior, student arrests had declined by a whopping 78 percent. (This was Martin O’Malley’s solution to Baltimore’s crime and school performance problems while mayor: he lowered the passing grade to 50% and stopped reporting most violent felonies. In the best tradition of The Bob’s…
FOOTBALL COACH: “When I took over this team a year ago, we were last in the league in pass defense. Today, we no longer keep that statistic!”
When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail.In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.
These were the parties to the Nov. 5, 2013, agreement that ensured Cruz would be out on the street with full access to firearms:
Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools
Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit
Michael J. Satz, State Attorney
Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender
Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff
Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department
Wansley Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice
Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board
Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too.They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands.“
For those in a complete state of either disbelief or denial, you can access the actual document here. Hat tip to G. Trevor for calling our attention to yet another sterling example of a completely counter-productive Progressive policy which could only have been engineered by educated idiots.
Next up, writing at NRO, Kevin Williamsonoffers criticism of a sitting President you NEVER heard from a Liberal “journalist” during The Obamao’s tenure:
“About the fact that the current president of the United States of America is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public, there is no debate — how could there be? The debate on the right is mainly between Trump partisans who believe, or at least claim they believe, that President Trump is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public as part of a grand political scheme (twelve-dimensional chess!) and those who believe that President Trump is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public because…of the more straightforward reason.
Jamie Kirchick of the Brookings Institution wryly observes: “Everything Trump says makes sense when you just preface it with, ‘Donald from Queens, you’re on the air.’” I do not know if Kirchick intended his remark this way, but his joke actually splits the difference between the grand-design explanation of Trump’s ridiculousness and the he’s-just-an-ordinary-fool explanation. There’s a reason Trump sounds like your chemtrail-obsessed uncle or that guy at work who’s always going on about Q-Anon, trafficking in a poisonous mix of conspiracy theories, scapegoating, and resentment-driven politics.
The formal term for what’s at the root of all this is “rational ignorance.” Many of you will have experienced the phenomenon of the very smart person who has very dumb ideas about politics — and who, if challenged, will immediately retreat into the vaguest of generalities, and often ends up displaying surprising ignorance about the most basic public-policy questions. These are the people who believe that you can walk into Walmart and buy a machine gun, that foreign aid represents half of federal spending, that the CIA introduced crack into inner-city neighborhoods, etc., and who tend not to know things like who their representative in Congress is or how our tax system works.Why are these smart and often very successful people so ignorant about politics? Because they’ve spent their lives getting really smart about a different subject and achieving their success in a field in which political knowledge isn’t very important.This is why Albert Einstein had such batty ideas about politics.
…At the moment, our politics is marked by a kind of inverse partisanship: It isn’t that Trump partisans think the Republican party is so great — they just think those other guys are so awful that any alternative is acceptable. That’s the “But Hillary” defense, a moral get-out-of-jail-free card for right-wing talk-radio hosts and their listeners. Democrats have their own version of that, which is why they don’t argue that Republicans are wrong about tax policy or abortion but that they are racists, misogynists, homophobes, captive to corporate greed, etc. We end up with a political discourse in which both sides are, at their broadest points, heavily invested in their insistence that there is no good-faith disagreement about policy — there is only the eternal conflict between the guys in the white hats and the guys in the black hats. (Though in this case, we would adamantly maintain Black is the new Progressive!)
Acknowledging good-faith disagreement inevitably would highlight the basic political ignorance of the general electorate (including the cable-news-watching and talk-radio-listening sub-electorate), and people find it very disagreeable to confess their ignorance about these issues, even as they are entirely comfortable admitting that they do not know very much about diesel engines or blood disorders or the internal politics of Tuvalu.
Donald Trump is clearly a creature of ignorance.No other sort of man would be capable of writing these sentences: “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore — we win big. It’s easy!” There isn’t a serious economist or businessman in these United States who really believes that.But it may sound good on talk radio and social media, and Trump is at the very least clever enough to understand that his core partisans are ignorant enough about the underlying issues that their sense of tribal loyalty is almost certain to overwhelm whatever critical thinking they may bring to the question.
Trump doesn’t know much, but he knows enough to know that that doesn’t much matter, at least as a question of the crude calculation of his own self-interest — the only subject to which he gives serious thought.
Call it rational ignorance with a vengeance, rational ignorance with malice aforethought.“
And we for one, being a Conservative who confesses not only to having voted for The Donald, but admitting we would gladly vote for him again under similar circumstances, are all too willing to admit what’s glaringly obvious about his behavior.
Since we’re on the subject of The Donald, his earlier promises upon the heels of the NRA’s endorsement…
“Let me make a simple promise to every one of the freedom-loving Americans in the audience today: As your President, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.Never ever.“
…notwithstanding, as Jim Geraghty recently noted as his Morning Jolt…
Which brings, appropriately enough to The Lighter Side:
Finally, in News of the Bizarre, we present an item detailing behavior on a commercial aircraft we previously thought limited to Bill Clinton’s junkets on Air Epstein:
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.