Wow, what’s next: Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein all pulling out of the race simultaneously?!?
As Meghan “Broken Clock” McCain observed in one of her rare lucid moments prior to Holder’s announcement:
And his former boss would be in there with him.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the day with a confession: prior to the public and well-justified criticism of her powder-puff interview with Jussie Smollett, we’d never even heard of Robin Roberts, let alone knew she was a Black lesbian. But her “explanation” is emblematic of what’s wrong with the MSM:
“…Per The Hollywood Reporter, Roberts said Smollett’s team told her that she could challenge the “Empire” actor on what she saw as “red flags” in the alleged attack and that the 36-year-old would also give her new information he hadn’t said anywhere else.
“I’m like — as a journalist and as a news person, this is his right,” Roberts stated. “He’s going on the record for the first time. Yes, I’ll do the interview.”
…Although she didn’t know how the interview was going to go, Roberts said she worked to stay as “neutral” as possible.
“I’m a black gay woman, he’s a black gay man,” she said. “He’s saying that there’s a hate crime, so if I’m too hard, then my LGBT community is going to say, ‘You don’t believe a brother,’ if I’m too light on him, it’s like, ‘Oh, because you are in the community, you’re giving him a pass.’”
“It was a no-win situation for me,” Roberts added…”
Frankly, though we never watch it, we consider GMA as entertainment, not news. But since Ms. Roberts chooses to self-identify “as a journalist and as a news person” her statements and conduct beg the question, “Since when does what people might think or say influence a “journalist” and/or “news person” in their pursuit of theTRUTH?!?”
SPOILER ALERT: It should never…EVER!!!
In a related item courtesy of American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson details how The Left is starting to feed on its own:
“Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.
Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.
A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community. (For yet another example of such politically-correct shunning, catch the Tales From the Darkside video, accessible through link #3 at the top of the page just below our Quote of the Day.)
In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.
Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.
Now even the divine Obama is having his ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.
The new generation has forgotten that the now graying Obama once had the audacity to invite Kendrick Lamar into the White House. He also celebrated as his official portrait painter Kehinde Wiley. Remember the former was lauded for his album-cover showing a dead white judge, with eyes x-ed out, whose demise was being celebrating by toasting rappers on the White House lawn, while the latter for a while had a cachet of taking a couple of Old Master paintings of decapitations and redoing them with black decapitators and white decapitated—e.g., “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” Was that not revolutionary enough? No, no—that was yesterday.Today the revolution has passed over the once-edgy Obama (“bring a gun to a knife fight”).
Now to the Left he sounds more like a crabby Bill Cosby ranting about falling-down trousers.
…In such a revolutionary scramble to be the most diverse and hard left, the logical trajectory ends up with a race to transcend the physical limits of victimhood. Think of the devolution of French anti-monarchists to republicans to Girondists to Jacobins—and on to Napoleon. Or remember how the anti-Czarists aristocrats were overwhelmed by Mensheviks who were crushed by the Bolsheviks as Lenin radicalized everything prior and in the end his Soviet became Stalinized.
So now appears Jussie Smollett.
He is notjust left-wing, but a rabid hater of Donald Trump. And he is not just black, but gay as well. And he is not just a victim, but a hyper-victim of white bullies. And not just bullies, but bullies with MAGA hats. And he is not just a victim of white red-hats, but a victim of ski-masked racists. And not just of their blows, but of (frozen?) bleach. And not just of bleach and blows, but of lynch rope as well. And they did not just hit, but smeared and slurred. And not just MAGA sloganeering, but anti-gay, anti-black—and perhaps, worst of all, in our performance society, they slandered his “Empire” TV show!
Progressives are like a worn rope being pulling apart at both ends. At one end, there is an effort to radicalize prior radicalization, and on the other end victimhood is heading toward parody.
And what is left is the emblematic Jussie Smollett—the logical result of the revolution, who alone has staked out the only authentic and ultimate revolutionary stance: nihilism—a state where no one can possibly rival Jussie’s revolutionary grievance credentials because they cannot exist in a reality based world.
Or put another way, when no one is revolutionary enough, the revolutionary auditors end up ridiculous in their zeal for power and celebrity—sort of like Orwell’s radical pigs finally prancing about on two legs and feasting on silver, sort of like Jussie Smollett leveraging the ultimate state of victimhood for a better deal on “Empire.”“
Anyway you cut it, the inmates have taken over the asylum.
And it’s our belief, everything else being equal, between now and November 2020, a majority of Americans in enough states agree it’s time they were back in their padded cells.
Next up, writing at The New York Times, Arthur Brooks demonstrates an amazing capacity to ignore reality while trying to bring biased balance to an almost purely Progressive problem:
“…My passion is ideas, especially policy ideas. While politics is like the weather, ideas are like the climate.Climate has an impact onweather, but they’re different things. Similarly, ideas affect politics, but they aren’t the same. When done right, policy analysis, like climate science, favors nerds with Ph.D.s.And that’s me. For 20 years, I’ve been a professor of public policy and president of a think tank in Washington. (For a decade before that I made my living as a musician, but not the cool kind — I played in a symphony orchestra.)
But even a climatologist has to think about the weather when a hurricane comes ashore. And that’s what’s happening today.Political differences are ripping our country apart, swamping my big, fancy policy ideas. Political scientists have found that our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the Civil War. One in six Americans has stopped talking to a family member or close friend because of the 2016 election. Millions of people organize their social lives and their news exposure along ideological lines to avoid people with opposing viewpoints.What’s our problem?
A 2014 article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “motive attribution asymmetry” — the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate — suggests an answer. The researchers found that the average Republican and the average Democrat today suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry that is comparable with that of Palestinians and Israelis.Each side thinks it is driven by benevolence, while the other is evil and motivated by hatred — and is therefore an enemy with whom one cannot negotiate or compromise…”
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but one side is evil and motivated by hatred; and it ain’t Conservatives!!!
Allow us to offer a brief history (by no means all-inclusive!) of the seminal events which began the nation’s descent into discord and have brought us to brink of civil war:
(1). Progressivism’s pursuit of political policy via judicial fiat: Roe v. Wade, when Liberal judicial activism snatched an otherwise political issue out of the people’s hands and enshrined abortion as a non-debatable Constitutional right. [see: “warming, anthropogenic global“]
(2). The complete and wholly-concocted attack on the character and record of a decent, honorable man and brilliant legal mind: Robert Bork. All to ensure the indiscriminate slaughter of the unborn could continue behind the veil of the most factless finding in SCOTUS history, and giving rise to the term “borking”: obstruction (of someone, especially a candidate for public office) through systematic defamation or vilification.
Thus an individual expelled from Harvard for cheating…who allowed a girl to drown in his car to protect his political career and lied to both the police and the country…and who repeatedly cheated on his wife…fabricates facts about a man whose boots he’s not fit to lick, using talking points prepared by…
…America’s creepy uncle.
(3). Clarence Thomas is borked.
(4). Former Time contributor Nina Burleigh states, for the record: “I would be happy to give him [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal”…and outside the power of the people to legislatively limit.
(5). Bush II isn’t “our president”. (Though frankly, in hindsight, we too wish he hadn’t been!)
(6). “Bitter clingers”, “Elections have consequences”, “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly”, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon”, “After my election I have more flexibility” and “I’ve got a pen and a phone”.
(7). The “Russian Collusion” concoction.
(8). Antifa, and the inevitable public exhibition of violence inherent in any Socialist movement.
(9). Brett Kavanaugh gets borked.
(10). It’s not collusion, it’s his finances!
Here’s a hint:
Now, here’s the juice: with the exception of fringe-element whackos who’ve as much to do with Conservatism and the Republican Party as Malcolm X did the KKK, all of the violence…all of the anarchy…all of the divisiveness, through race, religion, class or national origin…all of the lawlessness in the name of open borders and abortion…all of the efforts to subvert unalienable individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution…all of the attempts to overturn the legal election of a President…all of it has been as a result of purposeful Progressive policies and political calculation.
So PLEASE, David Brooks:
Moving on, writing at his Best of the Web, Jim Freeman wonders…
France has contributed many cultural treasures to the world. Its corporate tax policy is not among them. But on a recent visit to Paris, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin seems to have agreed to help make it easier for tax collectors in France and many other global jurisdictions to maintain high rates on corporate income.
Last week Reuters reported:
The United States supports France’s call within the Group of Seven economic powers for a minimum level of corporate taxation, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday after meeting with the French finance minister in Paris.
France has said it will use its G7 presidency this year to push for an agreement on a minimum level of corporate taxation.
“On the minimum tax, that’s something we absolutely support, that’s something the U.S. just put into place with our tax reform,” Mnuchin told reporters.“We think it’s very important, the concept of minimum taxes, and that there isn’t a chase to the bottom on taxation,” he added.
That last line is particularly disturbing because it echoes the discredited criticism of tax reform lodged by former Obama economics adviser Larry Summers, who completelymisjudged the impactof a competitive corporate income tax rate in the United States. (Along with most every other economic reality!)Recent U.S. economic growth has proven once again that slashing corporate income tax rates represents a race to the top of global prosperity.
…Voters recognize the economic success of Mr. Trump’s tax reform. His Treasury secretary should too.“
To borrow a phrase from George Satayana, those who cannot remember the past condemn the rest of us…those who have to foot the bill…to pay for their selective amnesia.
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this string of memes forwarded by G. Trevor:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this just in from the exotic Middle East:
“An investigation was launched after a Turkish soccer player was seen allegedly injuring four other players with a “sharp object” during a match Saturday. Four members of Sakaryaspor accused midfielder Mansur Calar of Amed SFK of wounding them on the pitch during a third-tier match, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported. Calar was issued a travel ban as prosecutors investigate the incident.
Video on social media appeared to show Calar getting into multiple incidents with multiple players of Sakaryaspor and appeared to cut them using some kind of sharp object, media reports said…”
If the report proves accurate, this is truly a momentous moment; as it would mark the first time in recorded historyanyonewas actually injured…
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