With election day looming (November 6) Trump "resistance" hysteria is at its shrieking worst. Yet again we face "the most important election of our lifetimes," or as some prefer to put it, "the second most important," the first being the election of 2016, when "deplorables" put Donald Trump in the White House. Now, say the Trump haters, these scarcely human degenerates will have a chance to redeem themselves by voting "responsibly," i.e., according to how their self-appointed betters tell them to vote. The persistence of this incredibly arrogant attitude is a good way to deliver a permanent Trump majority. Just ask Steve Bannon.
Even the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting has been made Trump's fault, though the shooter was clearly anti-Trump. (Thank God there were no mass shootings in the Obama era!) The toxic brew of Trump "xenophobia," "racism," "misogyny" and "Islamophobia" somehow made the shooter a raving anti-Semite. It couldn't
be that decades of Identarian Politics rendering "white male" a dirty word paved the way for Trump's
nationalism, could it? Of course not. It's that Trump is stained
with original sin and must be removed to make way for . . .
utopia?
In short, we are to understand that Trump-the-Monster (Trumpenstein?) single-handedly bred a political climate that produces everything bad directly out of his evil mind while exonerating establishment politicians of both parties whose political wreckage Trump only coincidentally rose out of. But it should be obvious that this makes history entirely irrelevant, since the Devil himself has triumphed. What's the point of engaging in political action at all?
Liberals and fake radicals are so triggered by Trump that they
don't even notice their descent into madness, much to the delight of
a vast swath of middle America that is willing to re-elect Trump
on that basis alone. The incredibly misguided "resistance" has somehow convinced itself that boundless indignation over Trump will lead them to victory. They do not see, apparently cannot see, that their indignation is Trump's rocket fuel: the more they hate him, the higher and farther he flies. Until they can stop being triggered by him, they have no chance of making him go away.
Investigative
journalist Allan Nairn, a longstanding critic of the Democratic party, voices the thoughts of many progressives on this election eve:
"Democrats are arguably war criminals - not as big as the war criminals on the Republican side, but still war criminals. And they belong in prison. But we are facing such a crisis in this country at this moment that you have to use your head. You have to be tactical. You have to, at this moment, vote in the warmongers who will preserve democracy to block the warmongers who would abolish it - and then, the day after the election, go back to the deeper work of creating real, better, more constructive political alternatives and also helping the base of the Democratic Party take back the party from the consultants, from the rich donors. But that's for the day after the election is completed . . . Right now, the task is to stop the incipient fascism that Trump and the rightist revolution represents. And you can't really say that you were working toward an anti-fascist goal if you're not mobilizing for the Democrats right now. That's the urgent reality that we're living."
It is sad to see
Nairn falling for the one-sided "fascist" caricature, which we hear practically every five minutes is taking over the country. Nairn's view of fascism does not include Antifa thugs beating people senseless, "social justice" crusaders rioting to shut down speaking events for views they consider heretical, Me Too rage brigades jettisoning the presumption of innocence and rules of evidence painfully acquired over centuries of struggle etc. etc. In a gesture to broad-mindedness Nairn concedes that Democrats are warmongers, but wants us to believe that fascist evil is a Republican monopoly. But it's just not so: the totalitarian impulse runs along the entire political spectrum.
Maybe Juliet Hoffman, presiding judge at the 1969 Chicago conspiracy trial, summed up this totalitarian attitude best: "The substance of the crime is a state of mind," he said. That's it. Trump's mind is criminal. Therefore, our own unethical and criminal conduct just doesn't matter, since we are acting in heroic "resistance" to evil incarnate. Nor does it matter whether Robert Mueller turns up anything impeachable, since Trump's very existence is a crime. Tens of millions of Americans are in lockstep with this view, which the late Harry Elmer Barnes would call "totalitarian liberalism."
Totalitarian liberals seem to have forgotten that we already fell prey to "fascism" under GW Bush. We heard the claim repeatedly in relation to the draconian Patriot Act, the illegal invasion of Iraq, the suspension of habeas corpus, the revival and expansion of administrative torture, and on and on. We even heard talk of American fascism when Arnold Scharzenegger
won the recall election for governor in California. (It must have been the Austrian accent.) In any event, Nairn
says nothing about the threat to democracy emanating from "resistance" mobs, screeching anti-Trump media (whose removal of Steve
Bannon was achieved via pure hysteria), or Robert Mueller's show-trial-in-the-making, if he can keep people awake long enough to make intermission.
It is ironic that Nairn urges us to be tactical and "use [our] head," since he himself fails to do so. If we continue to let Trump trigger us into thinking he is an unprecedented evil, we give power to his blue collar base, which loves to stick it to us for having forsaken their interests for so long while sneering at their "unsophisticated" ways. Using our head means recognizing that tens millions of working class Americans hate our guts, and have every reason to do so.
What's not to loathe in the political messaging on what passes for an American left? If you don't
"always believe the woman," you're a MISOGYNIST. If you have a belief in
traditional marriage, you're a HOMOPHOBE. If you think a fetus is alive
and abortion is the taking of a human life, you're waging a WAR ON
WOMEN. If you question whether an asthma inhaler can alter the world's
climate, you're a GLOBAL WARMING DENIER. If you think gender apartheid
is as bad as racial apartheid you're an ISLAMOPHOBE. If you think resources are finite and inviting tens of millions of economic and political refugees from the Third World to live here is harmful, you're a RACIST XENOPHOBE. Contrast this with Trump's changed rhetoric towards Kim Jon Un: He now says he's "in love" with the man he originally denounced as "little Rocket Man." Such an abrupt transformation is evidence not of a hate-monger, but of a salesman: his rhetoric shifts to fit an opportunistic agenda. Meanwhile, the contemptuous political commentary coming from the supposedly tolerant "left" never changes.
Nairn urges us to vote against our interests today then "go back" to
creating better, constructive political alternatives tomorrow. But
that's not how things work. Voting for our castration today so we can have great sex tomorrow cannot possibly produce healthy political offspring. We have done this election after election for decades and have only mushrooming cynicism and self-contempt to show for it. And cynical people don't act.
We're in the political dead-end we're in because of decades
of voting for a Democratic Party that eagerly collaborates with the likes of Ronald Reagan, George W.
Bush and now Donald Trump to make any renewal and expansion of still immensely popular New Deal programs impossible. In short, we have surrendered our initiative to ideological traitors, and no longer determine our politics. Why
shouldn't Trump take advantage?
By all means, go out and vote, just not for Trump's enablers in the Democratic Party. Vote instead for candidates calling for meeting the most pressing needs of working families: Medicare for all, tuition free college, higher wages, and lower housing costs.
It's not hard to understand why Malcolm X, that sly fox, always used to ask: who's the bigger fool, he who brings the noose, or the guy who sticks his head in it?
Monday, November 5, 2018
Sunday, November 4, 2018
THE TRUE HISTORY OF MILLSTONE BABIES
October 31, 2018
www.anncoulter.com
Having mastered fake news, now the media are trying out a little fake history.
In the news business, new topics are always popping up, from the Logan Act and the emoluments clause to North Korea. The all-star panels rush to Wikipedia, so they can pretend to be experts on things they knew nothing about an hour earlier.
Such is the case today with "anchor babies" and "birthright citizenship." People who know zilch about the history of the 14th Amendment are pontificating magnificently and completely falsely on the issue du jour.
If you'd like to be the smartest person at your next cocktail party by knowing the truth about the 14th Amendment, this is the column for you!
Of course, the president can end the citizenship of "anchor babies" by executive order - - for the simple reason that no Supreme Court or U.S. Congress has ever conferred such a right.
It's just something everyone believes to be true.
How could anyone - - even a not-very-bright person - - imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution?
The first question would be: Why would they do that? It's like being accused of robbing a homeless person. WHY WOULD I?
The Supreme Court has stated - - repeatedly - - that the "main object" of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment "was to settle the question . . . as to the citizenship of free negroes," making them "citizens of the United States, and of the state in which they reside."
Democrats, the entire media and House Speaker Paul Ryan seem to have forgotten the Civil War. They believe that, immediately after a war that ended slavery, Americans rose up as one and demanded that the children of illegals be granted citizenship!
You know what's really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen!
YOU MEAN THAT'S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION?
Give me a scenario - - just one scenario - - where the post-Civil War amendments would be intended to grant citizenship to the kids of Chinese ladies flying to birthing hospitals in California, or pregnant Latin Americans sneaking across the border in the back of flatbed trucks.
You can make it up. It doesn't have to be a true scenario. Any scenario.
As the court has explained again and again and again:
"(N)o one can fail to be impressed by the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have even been suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."
That's why the amendment refers to people who are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, "and of the state wherein they reside." For generations, African Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren't citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a civil war to end.
The 14th Amendment fixed that.
The amendment didn't even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.
Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law, making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It's easy to miss - - the law is titled: THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.") Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?
Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.
President Trump, unlike his critics, honors black history by recognizing that the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments was to guarantee the rights of freed slaves.
But the left has always been bored with black people. If they start gassing on about "civil rights," you can be sure it will be about transgenders, abortion ladies or illegal aliens. Liberals can never seem to remember the people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, i.e., the only reason we even have civil rights laws.
Still, it requires breathtaking audacity to use the Civil War amendments to bring in cheap foreign labor, which drives down the wages of African Americans -- the very people the amendments were written to protect!
Whether the children born to legal immigrants is controversial enough. But at least there's a Supreme Court decision claiming that they are -- U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. That's "birthright citizenship."
It's something else entirely to claim that an illegal alien, subject to deportation, can drop a baby and suddenly claim to be a parent of a "citizen."
This crackpot notion was concocted by liberal zealot Justice William Brennan and slipped into a footnote as dicta in a 1982 case. "Dicta" means it was not the ruling of the court, just a random aside, with zero legal significance.
Left wing activists seized on Brennan's aside and browbeat everyone into believing that anchor babies are part of our great constitutional heritage, emerging straight from the pen of James Madison.
No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens. No Congress has deliberated and decided to grant that right. It's a made-up right, grounded only in the smoke and mirrors around Justice Brennan's 1982 footnote.
Obviously it would be better if Congress passed a law clearly stating that children born to illegals are not citizens. (Trump won't be president forever!) But until that happens, the president of the United States is not required to continue a ridiculous practice that has absolutely no basis in law.
It's often said that journalism is the first draft of history. As we now see, fake news is the first draft of fake history.
www.anncoulter.com
Having mastered fake news, now the media are trying out a little fake history.
In the news business, new topics are always popping up, from the Logan Act and the emoluments clause to North Korea. The all-star panels rush to Wikipedia, so they can pretend to be experts on things they knew nothing about an hour earlier.
Such is the case today with "anchor babies" and "birthright citizenship." People who know zilch about the history of the 14th Amendment are pontificating magnificently and completely falsely on the issue du jour.
If you'd like to be the smartest person at your next cocktail party by knowing the truth about the 14th Amendment, this is the column for you!
Of course, the president can end the citizenship of "anchor babies" by executive order - - for the simple reason that no Supreme Court or U.S. Congress has ever conferred such a right.
It's just something everyone believes to be true.
How could anyone - - even a not-very-bright person - - imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution?
The first question would be: Why would they do that? It's like being accused of robbing a homeless person. WHY WOULD I?
The Supreme Court has stated - - repeatedly - - that the "main object" of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment "was to settle the question . . . as to the citizenship of free negroes," making them "citizens of the United States, and of the state in which they reside."
Democrats, the entire media and House Speaker Paul Ryan seem to have forgotten the Civil War. They believe that, immediately after a war that ended slavery, Americans rose up as one and demanded that the children of illegals be granted citizenship!
You know what's really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen!
YOU MEAN THAT'S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION?
Give me a scenario - - just one scenario - - where the post-Civil War amendments would be intended to grant citizenship to the kids of Chinese ladies flying to birthing hospitals in California, or pregnant Latin Americans sneaking across the border in the back of flatbed trucks.
You can make it up. It doesn't have to be a true scenario. Any scenario.
As the court has explained again and again and again:
"(N)o one can fail to be impressed by the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have even been suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."
That's why the amendment refers to people who are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, "and of the state wherein they reside." For generations, African Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren't citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a civil war to end.
The 14th Amendment fixed that.
The amendment didn't even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.
Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law, making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It's easy to miss - - the law is titled: THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.") Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?
Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.
President Trump, unlike his critics, honors black history by recognizing that the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments was to guarantee the rights of freed slaves.
But the left has always been bored with black people. If they start gassing on about "civil rights," you can be sure it will be about transgenders, abortion ladies or illegal aliens. Liberals can never seem to remember the people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, i.e., the only reason we even have civil rights laws.
Still, it requires breathtaking audacity to use the Civil War amendments to bring in cheap foreign labor, which drives down the wages of African Americans -- the very people the amendments were written to protect!
Whether the children born to legal immigrants is controversial enough. But at least there's a Supreme Court decision claiming that they are -- U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. That's "birthright citizenship."
It's something else entirely to claim that an illegal alien, subject to deportation, can drop a baby and suddenly claim to be a parent of a "citizen."
This crackpot notion was concocted by liberal zealot Justice William Brennan and slipped into a footnote as dicta in a 1982 case. "Dicta" means it was not the ruling of the court, just a random aside, with zero legal significance.
Left wing activists seized on Brennan's aside and browbeat everyone into believing that anchor babies are part of our great constitutional heritage, emerging straight from the pen of James Madison.
No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens. No Congress has deliberated and decided to grant that right. It's a made-up right, grounded only in the smoke and mirrors around Justice Brennan's 1982 footnote.
Obviously it would be better if Congress passed a law clearly stating that children born to illegals are not citizens. (Trump won't be president forever!) But until that happens, the president of the United States is not required to continue a ridiculous practice that has absolutely no basis in law.
It's often said that journalism is the first draft of history. As we now see, fake news is the first draft of fake history.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
FAKE NEWS AUTOPSY
October 17, 2018
by Ann Coulter
www.anncoulter.com
Whenever Donald Trump talks about fake news, there are howls of indignation from the establishment media. We're told that the very mention of "fake news" is a direct attack on our democracy, that the alternative is "darkness," that it led to the dismemberment and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and that, yes, every once in a while there might be a typo, but if you mean the media intentionally report false information, that is dangerous demagoguery.
I present CNN's Ana Cabrera.
On Sunday night, Cabrera launched a premeditated, vicious, racist lie about President Trump, then proceeded to discuss the false story with a black guest, primed to analyze the fake news.
We'll slow down the replay in order to follow the ball, so you can see every handoff in the creation of fake news.
A few weeks ago, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh was facing 30-year-old completely uncorroborated accusations of sexual assault based on recovered memories in order to block his Supreme Court appointment, Trump said, "It's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of."
This statement was quoted by numerous news outlets, including CNN: "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America,'" Jeremy Diamond, Oct. 2.
Cabrera rewrote the president's quote, telling CNN viewers that Trump had said: "WHITE men have a lot to fear right now."
How did "white" get slipped in there?
If this were merely a mistake, there are lots of words in the English language that might have been inserted instead of "white." Why not "radical tire"? Why not "hangnail"? Why not the words "virtuoso" or "champagne"?
Dictionaries are heavy with all of the words that might have been inserted if this were an accident. How could the world "white" inadvertently get slipped into the Trump quote?
CNN intentionally told an ugly lie about the most incendiary issue roiling the nation: race. It wasn't a lie about Trump's position on tax policy, North Korea or school vouchers. The network deliberately pushed a racism narrative calculated to incite racial hatred that could get someone killed.
Like a professional jewel thief swiping a Cartier watch so deftly that the guard doesn't notice, Cabrera launched the lie during a segment that began: "People are talking about a string of recent incidents with racial undertones."
"People are talking about" is how opinion journalism masquerades as news. What topics aren't "people talking about"?
People are talking about CNN head Jeff Zucker's split from his wife after 21 years.
People are talking about Chris Cuomo's behavior at the CNN Christmas party.
People are talking about how Ana Cabrera got her job.
Cabrera then presented two stories about white people falsely accusing black people of doing things they hadn't done - which was ironic, inasmuch as Cabrera was about to falsely accuse Trump of doing something he hadn't done.
After a brief word from a black guest, professor Marc Lamont Hill, who said our world is "still shot through with white supremacy," Cabrera told the lie about Trump:
"President Trump and his son, Don Jr., said this week, white men have a lot to fear right now."
(His son said no such thing either.)
Cabrera then ran a clip of "Saturday Night Live" comedian Michael Che's "take" on the nonexistent quote, in which he injected race into the president's remarks, calling Trump a "white dude."
Che: "Come on. Old, rich white dude telling us it's a scary time in America? That is pure comedy."
(The absence of a punchline was covered with: "That is pure comedy," meaning, "Please laugh now!")
At this point in the program, the lie about Trump transformed into actual presidential policy. Cabrera asked Hill, "Why do you think that is Trump's strategy?"
Hill went off on the fictional Trump quote, talking about the president's "racial tribalism." Again, this was about a Trump statement that had absolutely nothing to do with race - until CNN made it so.
"It stokes white fear, Hill continued, "saying that it's a scary time to be a white man because you get accused of something you didn't do.
Goebbels would be proud!
If this were an error, it would have been quickly corrected before the first commercial break. It was not corrected because it's not a mistake; it's a political strategy. CNN invents fake news to push an ugly narrative about the president's "racial tribalism."
That's why an entire news segment was prepared around the fake quote, with an invited guest asked to comment on something Trump never said.
To those of you with jobs and busy lives, clip this column and keep it in your wallet so you are prepared the next time someone scoffs at Trump's denunciation of fake news.
by Ann Coulter
www.anncoulter.com
Whenever Donald Trump talks about fake news, there are howls of indignation from the establishment media. We're told that the very mention of "fake news" is a direct attack on our democracy, that the alternative is "darkness," that it led to the dismemberment and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and that, yes, every once in a while there might be a typo, but if you mean the media intentionally report false information, that is dangerous demagoguery.
I present CNN's Ana Cabrera.
On Sunday night, Cabrera launched a premeditated, vicious, racist lie about President Trump, then proceeded to discuss the false story with a black guest, primed to analyze the fake news.
We'll slow down the replay in order to follow the ball, so you can see every handoff in the creation of fake news.
A few weeks ago, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh was facing 30-year-old completely uncorroborated accusations of sexual assault based on recovered memories in order to block his Supreme Court appointment, Trump said, "It's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of."
This statement was quoted by numerous news outlets, including CNN: "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America,'" Jeremy Diamond, Oct. 2.
Cabrera rewrote the president's quote, telling CNN viewers that Trump had said: "WHITE men have a lot to fear right now."
How did "white" get slipped in there?
If this were merely a mistake, there are lots of words in the English language that might have been inserted instead of "white." Why not "radical tire"? Why not "hangnail"? Why not the words "virtuoso" or "champagne"?
Dictionaries are heavy with all of the words that might have been inserted if this were an accident. How could the world "white" inadvertently get slipped into the Trump quote?
CNN intentionally told an ugly lie about the most incendiary issue roiling the nation: race. It wasn't a lie about Trump's position on tax policy, North Korea or school vouchers. The network deliberately pushed a racism narrative calculated to incite racial hatred that could get someone killed.
Like a professional jewel thief swiping a Cartier watch so deftly that the guard doesn't notice, Cabrera launched the lie during a segment that began: "People are talking about a string of recent incidents with racial undertones."
"People are talking about" is how opinion journalism masquerades as news. What topics aren't "people talking about"?
People are talking about CNN head Jeff Zucker's split from his wife after 21 years.
People are talking about Chris Cuomo's behavior at the CNN Christmas party.
People are talking about how Ana Cabrera got her job.
Cabrera then presented two stories about white people falsely accusing black people of doing things they hadn't done - which was ironic, inasmuch as Cabrera was about to falsely accuse Trump of doing something he hadn't done.
After a brief word from a black guest, professor Marc Lamont Hill, who said our world is "still shot through with white supremacy," Cabrera told the lie about Trump:
"President Trump and his son, Don Jr., said this week, white men have a lot to fear right now."
(His son said no such thing either.)
Cabrera then ran a clip of "Saturday Night Live" comedian Michael Che's "take" on the nonexistent quote, in which he injected race into the president's remarks, calling Trump a "white dude."
Che: "Come on. Old, rich white dude telling us it's a scary time in America? That is pure comedy."
(The absence of a punchline was covered with: "That is pure comedy," meaning, "Please laugh now!")
At this point in the program, the lie about Trump transformed into actual presidential policy. Cabrera asked Hill, "Why do you think that is Trump's strategy?"
Hill went off on the fictional Trump quote, talking about the president's "racial tribalism." Again, this was about a Trump statement that had absolutely nothing to do with race - until CNN made it so.
"It stokes white fear, Hill continued, "saying that it's a scary time to be a white man because you get accused of something you didn't do.
Goebbels would be proud!
If this were an error, it would have been quickly corrected before the first commercial break. It was not corrected because it's not a mistake; it's a political strategy. CNN invents fake news to push an ugly narrative about the president's "racial tribalism."
That's why an entire news segment was prepared around the fake quote, with an invited guest asked to comment on something Trump never said.
To those of you with jobs and busy lives, clip this column and keep it in your wallet so you are prepared the next time someone scoffs at Trump's denunciation of fake news.
Friday, October 19, 2018
OMG! OH MY GOD! OMG! etc
|
|||
| Federal prosecutors said the woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, of St.
Petersburg, was involved in an effort “to spread distrust towards
candidates for U.S. political office and the U.S. political
system.” The conspirators seized on divisions in American politics, prosecutors said, including immigration, guns, race relations, women and even the debate over the protests by National Football League players during the national anthem. No one was named in court papers besides Ms. Khusyaynova. All americans and immigrants of all minority-majority-identity-misidentified-species confused-molested by priests/rabbis/atheists/pundit-nit-wits and political leaders who have been breast fed well into middle age are strongly urged to believe this story . |
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Whatever It Takes
by Ann Coulter
www.anncoulter.com
The Democrats' current position on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh is: We cannot have someone addicted to beer on our highest court! What if a foreign power were to ply him with this nectar in a can? Talk about taking control of our government! Suppose they throw in a case of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier?
A bitter college roommate is going whole hog, wailing, He lied about being a beeraholic.
By the media's account, Kavanaugh was a bounder, a brawler and a drunk. And yet he still managed to graduate at the top of his class, go to Yale, then to Yale Law and work in the highest positions in government.
I am in awe of his manliness. Hemingway has nothing on this guy! He should be our president. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln after being told Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, let's find out what Kavanaugh drank and send a barrel of it to every college student. At least the Democrats have moved on from Crazy Ladies Who Must Be Believed.
Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, doesn't remember the time or place of the alleged high school groping, and all four witnesses she named deny any memory of such a party. (They don't deny anything; they simply don't remember the event Ford alleges occurred - ed.)
Forcing our first one-week delay, we were told that the poor lady was so traumatized by being groped in high school that she couldn't fly. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her, compelling her to do what any reasonable person would under the circumstances: Add a second front door to her house. She was supposedly terrified of small spaces, and an airplane, one of her friends told CNN, "was the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away."
Then we found out that Ford regularly jets off to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific islands and French Polynesia . . . to go surfing, one of the most terrifying activities around.
It sounded like a joke. I was so shattered and broken, I could only go rock climbing in the Grand Tetons. After that, I'd repair to my room and curl up in a fetal position. Then I'd go rock climbing again.
An ex-boyfriend has come forward to say that in six years of dating Ford, she never mentioned a sexual assault, had no fear of flying, lived comfortably in a tiny home with only one front door, once coached a friend on how to take a polygraph, contrary to her sworn testimony - and also lied about stealing $600 from him.
Kavanaugh's second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, jumped in to help, dusting off a memory of the nominee pulling a Bill Clinton on her (pulling out his penis and putting it in her face - ed.) as a freshman in college - but only after she spent a week huddled with her attorney, "assessing her memories" and calling classmates to ask if they thought it was true.
And did she have corroboration? She doesn't need any! She's a 'survivor.' Even the New York Times - the newspaper that believed the Duke lacrosse rape case until about five minutes before the prosecutor was disbarred - said Ramirez didn't have enough evidence to meet its standards.
His third accuser, our heroine Julie Swetnik, is the woman produced by porn lawyer Michael Avenatti. She claims that she repeatedly attended gang rape parties in the 1980s - and she saw Brett Kavanaugh there!
An ex-boyfriend says Swetnik once threatened to kill him and his unborn child; she had a restraining order taken out against her; was sued by an employer for engaging in 'sexually offensive conduct,' making 'false and retaliatory allegations' against co-workers and also lying about her educational background and work history.
A Democrat and Emmy-winning meteorologist wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that, soon after he met Swetnik in the 1990s, she proposed group sex to him. Some years later her own father told him to stay away, citing Swetnik's psychological problems.
She is now the Democrats' leading contender for 2020.
Poor Kate Snow of NBC News thought she had landed the interview of a lifetime with Swetnik. Within about three questions, it became clear that she was talking to a lunatic. At that point, most of Snow's energy went into hoping for a building-wide power failure to shut down the cameras.
Of the four witnesses Swetnik provided to NBC, whom she claimed would confirm her story, one denied knowing any Julie Swetnik, one was dead, and two did not respond to the network, perhaps wishing they were dead, too.
By the end of the interview, Snow's purse was missing.
But the Democrats are energetic devils. They've been poring over Kavanaugh's high school yearbook and exclaiming, He's a beeraholic!
With grim passion, they say, how dare you laugh at this? If he were a teetotaler, they'd say, We can't have someone on the court who's so nerdy. How can this weird aesthete sympathize with murderers and insider traders?
They've already won a second week's delay by having two deranged women scream at Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator.
After wetting himself, Flake insisted on a seventh FBI investigation. For weeks, the Democrats have been demanding an investigation - of an incident without witnesses, on a date unknown at a place unknown - by saying, Oh, you big babies, the FBI investigation of Anita Hill only took three days!
The FBI wrapped up its investigation of Kavanaugh in a few days and then sat around wondering how long it had to wait before producing the report. So now the "it will only take three days crowd" are saying, Keep investigating! We don't know how long the probe should be, but the minimum standards of decency require that it last at least until there's a new president.
Whatever they find, they will argue in the alternative and just keep doing it and doing it. If Kavanaugh stepped on a bug, PETA activists would be screaming at Flake in an elevator.
The Democrats have a pair of twos, but they expect Republicans to fold. Why? Because that's what Republicans always do!
Unfortunately, this time, Kavanaugh's supporters are not accepting surrender.
www.anncoulter.com
The Democrats' current position on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh is: We cannot have someone addicted to beer on our highest court! What if a foreign power were to ply him with this nectar in a can? Talk about taking control of our government! Suppose they throw in a case of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier?
A bitter college roommate is going whole hog, wailing, He lied about being a beeraholic.
By the media's account, Kavanaugh was a bounder, a brawler and a drunk. And yet he still managed to graduate at the top of his class, go to Yale, then to Yale Law and work in the highest positions in government.
I am in awe of his manliness. Hemingway has nothing on this guy! He should be our president. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln after being told Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, let's find out what Kavanaugh drank and send a barrel of it to every college student. At least the Democrats have moved on from Crazy Ladies Who Must Be Believed.
Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, doesn't remember the time or place of the alleged high school groping, and all four witnesses she named deny any memory of such a party. (They don't deny anything; they simply don't remember the event Ford alleges occurred - ed.)
Forcing our first one-week delay, we were told that the poor lady was so traumatized by being groped in high school that she couldn't fly. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her, compelling her to do what any reasonable person would under the circumstances: Add a second front door to her house. She was supposedly terrified of small spaces, and an airplane, one of her friends told CNN, "was the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away."
Then we found out that Ford regularly jets off to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific islands and French Polynesia . . . to go surfing, one of the most terrifying activities around.
It sounded like a joke. I was so shattered and broken, I could only go rock climbing in the Grand Tetons. After that, I'd repair to my room and curl up in a fetal position. Then I'd go rock climbing again.
An ex-boyfriend has come forward to say that in six years of dating Ford, she never mentioned a sexual assault, had no fear of flying, lived comfortably in a tiny home with only one front door, once coached a friend on how to take a polygraph, contrary to her sworn testimony - and also lied about stealing $600 from him.
Kavanaugh's second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, jumped in to help, dusting off a memory of the nominee pulling a Bill Clinton on her (pulling out his penis and putting it in her face - ed.) as a freshman in college - but only after she spent a week huddled with her attorney, "assessing her memories" and calling classmates to ask if they thought it was true.
And did she have corroboration? She doesn't need any! She's a 'survivor.' Even the New York Times - the newspaper that believed the Duke lacrosse rape case until about five minutes before the prosecutor was disbarred - said Ramirez didn't have enough evidence to meet its standards.
His third accuser, our heroine Julie Swetnik, is the woman produced by porn lawyer Michael Avenatti. She claims that she repeatedly attended gang rape parties in the 1980s - and she saw Brett Kavanaugh there!
An ex-boyfriend says Swetnik once threatened to kill him and his unborn child; she had a restraining order taken out against her; was sued by an employer for engaging in 'sexually offensive conduct,' making 'false and retaliatory allegations' against co-workers and also lying about her educational background and work history.
A Democrat and Emmy-winning meteorologist wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that, soon after he met Swetnik in the 1990s, she proposed group sex to him. Some years later her own father told him to stay away, citing Swetnik's psychological problems.
She is now the Democrats' leading contender for 2020.
Poor Kate Snow of NBC News thought she had landed the interview of a lifetime with Swetnik. Within about three questions, it became clear that she was talking to a lunatic. At that point, most of Snow's energy went into hoping for a building-wide power failure to shut down the cameras.
Of the four witnesses Swetnik provided to NBC, whom she claimed would confirm her story, one denied knowing any Julie Swetnik, one was dead, and two did not respond to the network, perhaps wishing they were dead, too.
By the end of the interview, Snow's purse was missing.
But the Democrats are energetic devils. They've been poring over Kavanaugh's high school yearbook and exclaiming, He's a beeraholic!
With grim passion, they say, how dare you laugh at this? If he were a teetotaler, they'd say, We can't have someone on the court who's so nerdy. How can this weird aesthete sympathize with murderers and insider traders?
They've already won a second week's delay by having two deranged women scream at Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator.
After wetting himself, Flake insisted on a seventh FBI investigation. For weeks, the Democrats have been demanding an investigation - of an incident without witnesses, on a date unknown at a place unknown - by saying, Oh, you big babies, the FBI investigation of Anita Hill only took three days!
The FBI wrapped up its investigation of Kavanaugh in a few days and then sat around wondering how long it had to wait before producing the report. So now the "it will only take three days crowd" are saying, Keep investigating! We don't know how long the probe should be, but the minimum standards of decency require that it last at least until there's a new president.
Whatever they find, they will argue in the alternative and just keep doing it and doing it. If Kavanaugh stepped on a bug, PETA activists would be screaming at Flake in an elevator.
The Democrats have a pair of twos, but they expect Republicans to fold. Why? Because that's what Republicans always do!
Unfortunately, this time, Kavanaugh's supporters are not accepting surrender.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and the Culture of Hysteria
As the establishment's coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of Donald Trump gathers momentum, readers are invited to read Ann Coulter's latest book (Resistance Is Futile: How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind), which the author says is a "self-help book for liberals," though their hysteria about Trump will insure that few of them read it.
Psychologists have been treating "Trump anxiety" for some time now, and judging by the reaction of liberals to Coulter, they may soon have to treat Trump Tantrum Disorder as well. As Coulter points out, liberals have grown furiously unhinged by isolating themselves in self-righteous bubbles of Trump haters that exchange indignant comments about his latest outrages, most of which are simply imaginary.
For example, whenever the specter of American fascism is raised (every five minutes) we are told that Trump is a virtual Hitler clone. Uh, right. We all remember from our history books how Hitler went around boasting of his opportunities to grab women by the pussy, promising to replace the Treaty of Versailles with "something terrific," and engaging in fawning adulation of anyone he hoped to get something from. As Coulter puts it, "I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, 'These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people.' And who in the WWII era would have described Hitler as Coulter describes Trump: '[He's] utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!"
The rage against Trump is proof that the election of 2016 never really ended. In her first post-election interview Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance," rather than the customary "loyal opposition." If Trump had lost and declared himself part of the anti-Clinton "resistance", Coulter notes, there would have been demands to put him in jail. "He's issuing a call to violence! 'Resistance' is a military term! It's a 'dog whistle' to the militias and the KKK!" Touché.
This attitude is simply a continuation of liberal hysteria during the campaign. Remember the Access Hollywood tape, somehow not a sleazy "October surprise" by the partisan media, which made no secret of its loathing of Trump? In spite of what was repeatedly claimed, there was no endorsement of sexual assault on the tape. Unless you are using a weapon, "they let you do it" means consent. Trump was simply uttering truisms about celebrity culture, not glorifying rape. Notes Coulter: "His whole point was to cite something axiomatically unacceptable - grabbing women by the P-word - in order to say that celebrity culture was so out of whack that a celebrity could get away with it." One could quibble with the "out of whack" part of the comment, as on the tape it appears that Trump in fact found this benefit of fame both natural and desirable. What needed to be explained was not this reaction of a life-long egomaniac, but the shocked indignation of the corporate media: after all, who knew that billionaires and other mega-stars enjoy sex on demand from beautiful women? Right, everyone. And as Coulter points out, Trump used the identical approach in saying his popularity was so great that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voter support. "That's not a confession, notes Coulter, "it's hyperbole." Nevertheless, she goes on, "Nexis can't perform a search for all the publications that have accused Trump of admitting to 'sexual assault,' because it retrieves too many documents." Long live fake news.
And while we're on the subject of fake news, how long has it been since Trump was last accused of being a racist? Five minutes? Surely we can do better than that. Don't let up for a minute on claims that he's giving aid and comfort to "white nationalists" and therefore obligated to condemn David Duke every three minutes and defend himself against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has warned of an imminent neo-Nazi-KKK take-over of the U.S. on a more or less constant basis for nearly four decades.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a year ago has been regarded as the definitive proof of Trump's racism, though a New York Times reporter tweeted direct from the melee that left-wing Antifa protestors were just as aggressively violent as the racist right. Nevertheless, Trump's observation that there was violence (and "good people") "on both sides" has been used as confirmation of his alleged white supremacist sensibilities. By now, official memory has it that Antifa violence wasn't violence, and only "Nazis" were guilty of such. In one of her book's best lines, Coulter notes, "The more the rally recedes in time, the fresher a memory it becomes," which is an excellent description of all kinds of propaganda induced "memory." With all due regret for the death of Heather Heyer, we still don't know anything about the state of mind of the man who ran over her, who may have been in fear for his life, and few "journalists" are even curious about the matter.
But on to the alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections that is the main focus of Coulter's book. The basic allegation is that Trump, according to liberals a boundlessly incompetent buffoon, somehow managed to engage in a byzantine international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. The original claim was that Russia hacked the e-mails of the DNC (after allegedly being invited to do so by Trump in a presidential debate with Clinton) and Hillary's aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks, and that this somehow predictably benefited Trump. But why the Russians would have hacked the DNC to retrieve "lost" e-mails that were no longer on their server is difficult to explain. Furthermore, how could the Russians have had any assurance that the Podesta e-mails would end up helping Trump? That leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign.
More to the point, the Russian election meddling theme is simply a joke. The U.S. meddles in elections all the time, and when that fails, overthrows unwanted governments by force, often assassinating their democratic leaders as well. At William Blum's excellent archive at www.killinghope.org, you can read until your eyes bleed about the C.I.A. undermining democratic elections around the world going back seventy years. In recent years George Soros alone has repeatedly manipulated election outcomes in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, variously called the Orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, and the Rose revolution. And while we like to wax self-righteous about Russia interfering in our elections, we tend to forget that Boris Yeltsin would not likely have become president of Russia without a major intervention by the U.S. But perhaps the most ludicrous notion of all is that a relative handful of Russian bots posting on Facebook handed the election to Trump, which is like saying that a coke poured in the water supply prevented us from curing our diabetes epidemic.
The origin of the story alone should make us extremely skeptical about any Trump-Russia collusion, even apart from the absurd pretense that the U.S. has the moral standing to accuse others of such anti-democratic practices. Hillary Clinton invented the Russian collusion story in the summer of 2016 because she needed to neutralize the DNC's e-mails having shown up on WikiLeaks. This was a classic Clinton maneuver: whenever she is caught in a scandal she diverts attention to all-pervading imaginary enemies - misogynists, unscrupulous political opponents, racists, a vast right-wing conspiracy, and now, Russia and Donald Trump.
So Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world about the Russian conspiracy on July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention. "Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites . . .. And it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by - by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." The anonymous reference to "some experts" has not been cleared up to this day.
Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to spin a web of conspiracy around Trump and ISIS or Trump and North Korea, but Trump didn't have business interests with either of them, so she revved up a new Cold War instead. She somehow managed to convince herself that the press was dead set against her and her Russia-connection conspiracy, even though only two of the fifty-nine largest newspapers in the country had failed to endorse her. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were among the few liberal skeptics of the fantastic story.
In any event, by September 2016 The New York Times conceded that the consensus among government intelligence agencies was that WikiLeaks had no ties to Russian intelligence.
Two years and dozens of breathless claims later we still have zero evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The FBI never investigated for the simple reason that the DNC wouldn't allow the Bureau to examine its computers. As Glenn Greenwald noted in The Intercept, "there is no evidence . . . just CIA assertions over and over . . . "
Initial media response found the claim of a Russian conspiracy "remarkable," and this held true until Hillary lost the election. Then it suddenly became a news story worthy of Watergate, replete with Congressional investigations, saturation media coverage, and an "independent" counsel. Obama reacted by meekly telling Putin to "cut it out," but he imposed no sanctions, issued no major rebuke, and refrained from retaliation. This for something Thomas Friedman compared to Pearl Harbor and 911. In other words, after mild initial reaction, two years of intensive searching by the nation's top investigative journalists and up to 100 FBI agents has yielded nothing like collusion.
What has passed for evidence in the case is a dossier authored by Christopher Steele, a British spy who offered Hillary Clinton and the Democratic national Committee dirt on Trump from the Russians. Did Hillary recoil in shocked outrage at this treasonous plot? Of course not. She paid Steele for the information. Yes, that's right. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to discredit Trump, but Robert Mueller isn't interested in that collusion. He's looking for collusion between Russia and the victim of the plot.
Explains Coulter: "Hillary's campaign and the DNC hired Steele, using a Seattle law firm as a cutout. The law firm hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British spy, who paid current and former Russian government officials for incriminating information on Trump."
Steele revealed his motive to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, saying he was "desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." OK, but motives aside, did he come up with anything? Not if you believe the New York Times, which says that the information in the Steele dossier "was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." And remember that The New York Times, like the press in general, loathes Trump, and would gladly have reported substantiation of the claims in the Steele dossier had they found any.
In fact, so eager was The Times to discredit Trump that it flat-out stated that his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey had "echoes of Watergate,"when in fact it did not. For Comey himself admitted under oath to Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) that the FBI hadn't been investigating Trump at the time he was fired, so Trump couldn't have been "obstructing justice" in an ongoing case against him. In point of fact, Trump fired Comey precisely because he wouldn't stop publicly insinuating that Trump was under investigation when in fact he wasn't. Meanwhile, journalists simply assumed that Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia, and that firing Comey was a transparent attempt to cover up criminal activity.
In short, the mountain keeps laboring, but brings forth but a mouse. The charges to date are a complete farce. Here's a partial list:
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: He talked to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, and then didn't disclose it on security clearance paperwork, which is not customary because such meetings are routine.
Paul Manafort - Briefly Trump's "campaign" chairman, he was originally accused of violating the same (unenforced) lobbying registration law that ensnared Michael Flynn, but has since been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which could make him guilty of practicing capitalism. In October 2017, journalist Ken Silverstein wrote that "I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke." The article in which this comment appeared was entitled, "I've Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I'm Amazed Manafort Got Busted." In any event, Manafort's guilt or innocence hasn't been demonstrated to have anything to do with Trump.
Carter Page - a non-entity whose name Trump appears to have lifted out of a hat when confronted by media claims that he didn't have any establishment certified national security advisers on his team. Page was subsequently slapped with a FISA warrant, which proves he is appallingly guilty of something. For as Ronald Reagan's former Attorney General Ed Meese memorably informed us, "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." What could be clearer?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He also met with Russian ambassador Kislyak, when he was a senator, and then didn't record the dastardly deed on security clearance forms, which the FBI doesn't want because such meetings are routine.
But wait! Didn't former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump? That's a violation of campaign finance laws! Possibly, but such violations are a dime a dozen, and if we run every politician who has paid off a mistress out of office Washington will be a ghost town.
There is much, much more in Coulter's book, but check it out of the library rather than buy it, since Coulter herself is equally prone to slipping into political hysteria when the topic is Communism or Islam. She insists, for example, that Martin Luther King was under the control of Moscow when he made his (accurate) claim that the "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world [is] my own government." And, of course, many of us remember her advice for dealing with the Islamic world following the 911 attacks, when she said, quite subtly, that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
American politics is a tale of two hysterias. Rationality has been driven from the stage.
Psychologists have been treating "Trump anxiety" for some time now, and judging by the reaction of liberals to Coulter, they may soon have to treat Trump Tantrum Disorder as well. As Coulter points out, liberals have grown furiously unhinged by isolating themselves in self-righteous bubbles of Trump haters that exchange indignant comments about his latest outrages, most of which are simply imaginary.
For example, whenever the specter of American fascism is raised (every five minutes) we are told that Trump is a virtual Hitler clone. Uh, right. We all remember from our history books how Hitler went around boasting of his opportunities to grab women by the pussy, promising to replace the Treaty of Versailles with "something terrific," and engaging in fawning adulation of anyone he hoped to get something from. As Coulter puts it, "I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, 'These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people.' And who in the WWII era would have described Hitler as Coulter describes Trump: '[He's] utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!"
The rage against Trump is proof that the election of 2016 never really ended. In her first post-election interview Hillary Clinton declared herself "part of the resistance," rather than the customary "loyal opposition." If Trump had lost and declared himself part of the anti-Clinton "resistance", Coulter notes, there would have been demands to put him in jail. "He's issuing a call to violence! 'Resistance' is a military term! It's a 'dog whistle' to the militias and the KKK!" Touché.
This attitude is simply a continuation of liberal hysteria during the campaign. Remember the Access Hollywood tape, somehow not a sleazy "October surprise" by the partisan media, which made no secret of its loathing of Trump? In spite of what was repeatedly claimed, there was no endorsement of sexual assault on the tape. Unless you are using a weapon, "they let you do it" means consent. Trump was simply uttering truisms about celebrity culture, not glorifying rape. Notes Coulter: "His whole point was to cite something axiomatically unacceptable - grabbing women by the P-word - in order to say that celebrity culture was so out of whack that a celebrity could get away with it." One could quibble with the "out of whack" part of the comment, as on the tape it appears that Trump in fact found this benefit of fame both natural and desirable. What needed to be explained was not this reaction of a life-long egomaniac, but the shocked indignation of the corporate media: after all, who knew that billionaires and other mega-stars enjoy sex on demand from beautiful women? Right, everyone. And as Coulter points out, Trump used the identical approach in saying his popularity was so great that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voter support. "That's not a confession, notes Coulter, "it's hyperbole." Nevertheless, she goes on, "Nexis can't perform a search for all the publications that have accused Trump of admitting to 'sexual assault,' because it retrieves too many documents." Long live fake news.
And while we're on the subject of fake news, how long has it been since Trump was last accused of being a racist? Five minutes? Surely we can do better than that. Don't let up for a minute on claims that he's giving aid and comfort to "white nationalists" and therefore obligated to condemn David Duke every three minutes and defend himself against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has warned of an imminent neo-Nazi-KKK take-over of the U.S. on a more or less constant basis for nearly four decades.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a year ago has been regarded as the definitive proof of Trump's racism, though a New York Times reporter tweeted direct from the melee that left-wing Antifa protestors were just as aggressively violent as the racist right. Nevertheless, Trump's observation that there was violence (and "good people") "on both sides" has been used as confirmation of his alleged white supremacist sensibilities. By now, official memory has it that Antifa violence wasn't violence, and only "Nazis" were guilty of such. In one of her book's best lines, Coulter notes, "The more the rally recedes in time, the fresher a memory it becomes," which is an excellent description of all kinds of propaganda induced "memory." With all due regret for the death of Heather Heyer, we still don't know anything about the state of mind of the man who ran over her, who may have been in fear for his life, and few "journalists" are even curious about the matter.
But on to the alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections that is the main focus of Coulter's book. The basic allegation is that Trump, according to liberals a boundlessly incompetent buffoon, somehow managed to engage in a byzantine international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. The original claim was that Russia hacked the e-mails of the DNC (after allegedly being invited to do so by Trump in a presidential debate with Clinton) and Hillary's aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks, and that this somehow predictably benefited Trump. But why the Russians would have hacked the DNC to retrieve "lost" e-mails that were no longer on their server is difficult to explain. Furthermore, how could the Russians have had any assurance that the Podesta e-mails would end up helping Trump? That leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign.
More to the point, the Russian election meddling theme is simply a joke. The U.S. meddles in elections all the time, and when that fails, overthrows unwanted governments by force, often assassinating their democratic leaders as well. At William Blum's excellent archive at www.killinghope.org, you can read until your eyes bleed about the C.I.A. undermining democratic elections around the world going back seventy years. In recent years George Soros alone has repeatedly manipulated election outcomes in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, variously called the Orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, and the Rose revolution. And while we like to wax self-righteous about Russia interfering in our elections, we tend to forget that Boris Yeltsin would not likely have become president of Russia without a major intervention by the U.S. But perhaps the most ludicrous notion of all is that a relative handful of Russian bots posting on Facebook handed the election to Trump, which is like saying that a coke poured in the water supply prevented us from curing our diabetes epidemic.
The origin of the story alone should make us extremely skeptical about any Trump-Russia collusion, even apart from the absurd pretense that the U.S. has the moral standing to accuse others of such anti-democratic practices. Hillary Clinton invented the Russian collusion story in the summer of 2016 because she needed to neutralize the DNC's e-mails having shown up on WikiLeaks. This was a classic Clinton maneuver: whenever she is caught in a scandal she diverts attention to all-pervading imaginary enemies - misogynists, unscrupulous political opponents, racists, a vast right-wing conspiracy, and now, Russia and Donald Trump.
So Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world about the Russian conspiracy on July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention. "Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites . . .. And it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by - by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." The anonymous reference to "some experts" has not been cleared up to this day.
Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to spin a web of conspiracy around Trump and ISIS or Trump and North Korea, but Trump didn't have business interests with either of them, so she revved up a new Cold War instead. She somehow managed to convince herself that the press was dead set against her and her Russia-connection conspiracy, even though only two of the fifty-nine largest newspapers in the country had failed to endorse her. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were among the few liberal skeptics of the fantastic story.
In any event, by September 2016 The New York Times conceded that the consensus among government intelligence agencies was that WikiLeaks had no ties to Russian intelligence.
Two years and dozens of breathless claims later we still have zero evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. The FBI never investigated for the simple reason that the DNC wouldn't allow the Bureau to examine its computers. As Glenn Greenwald noted in The Intercept, "there is no evidence . . . just CIA assertions over and over . . . "
Initial media response found the claim of a Russian conspiracy "remarkable," and this held true until Hillary lost the election. Then it suddenly became a news story worthy of Watergate, replete with Congressional investigations, saturation media coverage, and an "independent" counsel. Obama reacted by meekly telling Putin to "cut it out," but he imposed no sanctions, issued no major rebuke, and refrained from retaliation. This for something Thomas Friedman compared to Pearl Harbor and 911. In other words, after mild initial reaction, two years of intensive searching by the nation's top investigative journalists and up to 100 FBI agents has yielded nothing like collusion.
What has passed for evidence in the case is a dossier authored by Christopher Steele, a British spy who offered Hillary Clinton and the Democratic national Committee dirt on Trump from the Russians. Did Hillary recoil in shocked outrage at this treasonous plot? Of course not. She paid Steele for the information. Yes, that's right. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to discredit Trump, but Robert Mueller isn't interested in that collusion. He's looking for collusion between Russia and the victim of the plot.
Explains Coulter: "Hillary's campaign and the DNC hired Steele, using a Seattle law firm as a cutout. The law firm hired Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British spy, who paid current and former Russian government officials for incriminating information on Trump."
Steele revealed his motive to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, saying he was "desperate that Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." OK, but motives aside, did he come up with anything? Not if you believe the New York Times, which says that the information in the Steele dossier "was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." And remember that The New York Times, like the press in general, loathes Trump, and would gladly have reported substantiation of the claims in the Steele dossier had they found any.
In fact, so eager was The Times to discredit Trump that it flat-out stated that his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey had "echoes of Watergate,"when in fact it did not. For Comey himself admitted under oath to Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) that the FBI hadn't been investigating Trump at the time he was fired, so Trump couldn't have been "obstructing justice" in an ongoing case against him. In point of fact, Trump fired Comey precisely because he wouldn't stop publicly insinuating that Trump was under investigation when in fact he wasn't. Meanwhile, journalists simply assumed that Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia, and that firing Comey was a transparent attempt to cover up criminal activity.
In short, the mountain keeps laboring, but brings forth but a mouse. The charges to date are a complete farce. Here's a partial list:
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: He talked to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, and then didn't disclose it on security clearance paperwork, which is not customary because such meetings are routine.
Paul Manafort - Briefly Trump's "campaign" chairman, he was originally accused of violating the same (unenforced) lobbying registration law that ensnared Michael Flynn, but has since been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which could make him guilty of practicing capitalism. In October 2017, journalist Ken Silverstein wrote that "I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke." The article in which this comment appeared was entitled, "I've Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I'm Amazed Manafort Got Busted." In any event, Manafort's guilt or innocence hasn't been demonstrated to have anything to do with Trump.
Carter Page - a non-entity whose name Trump appears to have lifted out of a hat when confronted by media claims that he didn't have any establishment certified national security advisers on his team. Page was subsequently slapped with a FISA warrant, which proves he is appallingly guilty of something. For as Ronald Reagan's former Attorney General Ed Meese memorably informed us, "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." What could be clearer?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He also met with Russian ambassador Kislyak, when he was a senator, and then didn't record the dastardly deed on security clearance forms, which the FBI doesn't want because such meetings are routine.
But wait! Didn't former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump? That's a violation of campaign finance laws! Possibly, but such violations are a dime a dozen, and if we run every politician who has paid off a mistress out of office Washington will be a ghost town.
There is much, much more in Coulter's book, but check it out of the library rather than buy it, since Coulter herself is equally prone to slipping into political hysteria when the topic is Communism or Islam. She insists, for example, that Martin Luther King was under the control of Moscow when he made his (accurate) claim that the "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world [is] my own government." And, of course, many of us remember her advice for dealing with the Islamic world following the 911 attacks, when she said, quite subtly, that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
American politics is a tale of two hysterias. Rationality has been driven from the stage.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Thought Control Back in the USA: Far More Effective than Communist Censorship
"You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand, and that is by intention. The tip is public - libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military, and so on - publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don't want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship to not end up there. Then the next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy - what it is economic to write about, even if you don't include the economic factors from higher up the pyramid. Then the next layer is the prejudice of readers who only have a certain level of education, so therefore on one hand they are easy to manipulate with false information, and on the other hand you can't even tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution - for example, some people just don't have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid. . . .
"Now such censorship is deniable because it either takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, 'Don't print anything about that,' or, 'Don't print that fact.' Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interest of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you'll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don't behave then you won't. It's that simple. I'm often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West - jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes - has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy."
-----Julian Assange, Cypherpunks - Freedom and the Future of the Internet
" . . . in nations that our textbooks call totalitarian, strict controls obtain concerning press, T.V., public debate. These societies are like bad gardeners who spend whole days out in the sun pruning bushes, doing their best to cut down hopeless growths of undesired ideologies, because they do not yet have skillful means for poisoning the soil. Because they are old-fashioned, and are forced to strike with crude utensils at the full-grown foliage they did not know enough to poison in its bed, we are entitled to decree that they are brutal and undemocratic. By implication, we discern ourselves to be more civilized. The truth is that we simply know a better way to tend the garden.
"Professors at our universities, with rare exceptions, are granted the theoretical right to advocate rebellion, to develop and reflect on Marxist ideologies, to argue for an end to private ownership of land, homes, factories and means of transportation. In the same sense, editors at Newsweek or The New York Times are free to view the Cuban Revolution as a positive step forward for humanity. It is a clever North American deception to allow professor, scholar, editor alike, to say what they please when we know well that what they please is what we like. When wishes, ideas and dreams themselves can be confined like this, words can be free. The bulls, once surgically restrained, receive all barnyard privileges."
-----Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home
"Now such censorship is deniable because it either takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, 'Don't print anything about that,' or, 'Don't print that fact.' Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interest of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you'll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don't behave then you won't. It's that simple. I'm often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West - jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes - has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy."
-----Julian Assange, Cypherpunks - Freedom and the Future of the Internet
" . . . in nations that our textbooks call totalitarian, strict controls obtain concerning press, T.V., public debate. These societies are like bad gardeners who spend whole days out in the sun pruning bushes, doing their best to cut down hopeless growths of undesired ideologies, because they do not yet have skillful means for poisoning the soil. Because they are old-fashioned, and are forced to strike with crude utensils at the full-grown foliage they did not know enough to poison in its bed, we are entitled to decree that they are brutal and undemocratic. By implication, we discern ourselves to be more civilized. The truth is that we simply know a better way to tend the garden.
"Professors at our universities, with rare exceptions, are granted the theoretical right to advocate rebellion, to develop and reflect on Marxist ideologies, to argue for an end to private ownership of land, homes, factories and means of transportation. In the same sense, editors at Newsweek or The New York Times are free to view the Cuban Revolution as a positive step forward for humanity. It is a clever North American deception to allow professor, scholar, editor alike, to say what they please when we know well that what they please is what we like. When wishes, ideas and dreams themselves can be confined like this, words can be free. The bulls, once surgically restrained, receive all barnyard privileges."
-----Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home
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