Category Archives: Media

You just can’t make some people happy no matter what you do

Posted on by
Reply

You won’t believe it when you read it but this is a criticism of PDT and a lament over what he has achieved. From The Huffington Post, bless ’em.

Trump is winning. In the brief space of a week, he won a brief court fight to shove Mick Mulvaney to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney wasted no time in unhinging a spate of consumer protection rulings, regulations, and personnel hires made during the Obama years.

His SCOTUS pick, Neil Gorsuch, eagerly cast a vote to impose the Muslim travel ban. His EPA head, Scott Pruitt, delivered a couple million acres of public monument land in the West to oil, gas, and coal industry developers. Trump busily continues to pack the federal judiciary with a parade of ultra-conservative, strict, constructionist Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia clones.

He switched gears and backed alleged pedophile Alabama judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, who almost certainly will win. The Republican National Committee, which had practically declared Moore a pariah, quickly jumped in and said it would back him. He got another sweet perk when Senate Democrats turned with a vengeance on Minnesota Senator Al Franken and virtually ordered him out of office. His subsequent resignation got rid of a pesky thorn for Trump. Franken had a big voice, lots of name recognition and popularity, and was not afraid to take shots at Trump.

He pooh-poohed the guilty plea of his former National Security Advisor Mike T. Flynn as no big deal while shouting “no collusion, no collusion” and got away with it.

He got his tax heist for the rich and corporations through the Senate, and as an extra bonus, brought his long-held dream of dumping the Affordable Care Act closer to reality when the Senate tacked on a provision to the bill wiping out the mandate requirement. When the markets took another tick up he crowed even louder that he was the man who brought the good times rolling to America. As always, he did all this with the sheepish connivance of much of the mainstream media, which is always off to the races in giving round-the-clock coverage to his self-serving, vapid tweets as if they were the word from the Mount.

Trump’s biggest win, though, has come on three fronts. One is the GOP. It can rail and curse at him publicly and privately, but it needs Trump. He is more than the titular head of the GOP. He is the point man for GOP policy and issues and, in a perverse way, the spur to get action on them.

The second front he’s winning on is the continuing love fest that his devout base has with him. While polls show that his overall approval ratings consistently wallow under forty percent, buried in the polling fine print is the numbers that mean the most to him and the GOP. That’s Republican voters. The overwhelming majority of whom back him. Even though his approval rating has dropped among white males without a college degree and Christian evangelicals, polls show that he still gets majority approval from them. These are the voters that the GOP will need Trump to rev up in the key swing districts in 2018. They’ll look to him to do just that. This is the voter loyalty that buys a lot of support from the GOP establishment even as they flail him or shake their head in disgust at his antics.

The third winning front for Trump is his perennial ace in the hole: the media. He remains a ratings cash cow for the networks and makes stunning copy for the print media. He knew that from day one of his presidential bid and he knows it even more now. He will continue to suck the media air out of everything that the Democrats do and try to do. Take his phony war with the NFL owners over the national anthem protest by a handful of Black players. A couple of tweets from him knocking the owners for alleging caving into the players was more than enough to distract from his bumbling, inept, and dangerous handling of the North Korea nuclear threat, and his clueless saber rattle of Iran over the nuclear curtailment pact with the U.S.

This has been his patent ploy, distract and deflect. The public and networks take the bait every time. Other than in the New York Times and other liberal print publications, there is no real sobering, in-depth discussion of the dangerous and destructive consequences of his administration’s policies. But those publications are anathema to Trump devotees in the heartland and the south anyway. So the withering criticism of Trump in these publications is tantamount to a wolf howling in the wind.

During the campaign, Trump loved to shout to his adoring throngs that, with him in the Oval Office, they’d win so much they’d get tired of winning. The giveaways to the rich, the gutting of Obamacare and the coming whittling away of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security is hardly winning for many of his backers. They benefit from these programs and won’t get a dime’s more relief in their tax bill. But for Trump so far this has been a win-win.

You would almost think he’s a Trump supporter but the first words of the post are “This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write and admit” and the last words are “for Trump so far this has been a win-win, and a sad one to admit”. And the longer it lasts, the better it will get. The strangest part is that these types pretend that all those Democrat programs are for the lower half of the income distribution but those who actually live there know it is absolutely untrue.

Via Instapundit

PDT slurs speech and the left goes wild

Posted on by
Reply

You have to see the Youtube reaction in full to appreciate how depraved the left have become. Hillary collapses as she gets into her limousine and there is nothing to see. This instead fills the left and the media (same thing, I know) with delight.

But while you are listening for the slurring of his words, you might also wish to listen to his words as well. What must truly rile his enemies is the amount of good President Trump is doing, both domestically and across the world. Peace in the Middle East is impossible, but it would not be the first impossibility he has pulled off.

For myself, I wish him long life and do worry about his health and well being because of how irreplaceable he is.

Not in the news: the attempted assassination of the British PM and North Korea

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s what’s not in the news: Islamist suicide plot to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May foiled. This is hardly any longer worth even discussing:

“It is in essence an extreme Islamist suicide plot against Downing Street. Essentially police believe that the plan was to launch some sort of improvised explosive device at Downing Street and in the ensuing chaos attack and kill Theresa May.

Here’s more not worth your time thinking about:

On Tuesday, MI5 revealed that it had prevented nine terror attacks in the UK in the past year, but several attackers have still got through.

In March, Khalid Masood drove a car at pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed a policeman guarding Parliament. Five people died in the attack.

In May, 22 people died when suicide bomber Salman Ramadan Abed targeted concert-goers at Manchester Arena. An official report into the attack released on Tuesday found opportunities to thwart it had been missed.

Eleven people died when terrorists used vehicles and knives to attack people at London Bridge in June.

A man died in a terrorist incident at Finsbury Park mosque in north London in the same month – and, in September, an attempt to bomb a Tube train at Parsons Green station failed.

Meanwhile in North Korea, also no longer in the news: US perceives Kim Jong-un as dangerous but rational.

Well that is certainly comforting. To say he’s rational means you must know what he is trying to achieve. But if you don’t, then you cannot infer anything at all from what he does since you don’t know what he wants. Rational refers to means, not ends. If Kim is really a suicide bomber at heart, you cannot know when he will do what he is aiming to do, but at some stage he will and to bad for those who are at the other end of the ICBM he sends.

Stumblebum leftist jerks

Posted on by
Reply

Via Instapundit.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Deserve Our Respect or Our Trust. “The mainstream liberal media is primarily composed of stumblebum leftist jerks who want all the glory and respect due a caste of objective, moral truth-seekers, yet who don’t want to do the hard work of actually being objective or moral or seeking the truth. . . . You have Matt Lauer, probably America’s most highly-paid journalist, who “everyone” knew was a skeevy weirdo who’d probably creep out Woody Allen. Well, everyone did know, except us, the media’s audience. Our media overlords didn’t think we needed to know that little bit of information. Some obscure Texas congressmen sends texts of his ancient junk to a girlfriend and, after he dumps her, she gets mad and puts them up on the web? Oh, that’s news – America must know that vital info. But when the flagship anchor of the flagship show on the flagship broadcast network uses his powers to basically build a sex dungeon in 30 Rock – nope, not news.”

Journalists, like intellectuals, write about things they know virtually nothing about pretending to be experts. But fools are people who take the opinions they read in the papers as if they actually represent anything more than the views of the shallowest of partisan hacks.

Speaking of which, this is from the Instapundit comments:

If there is irony and exaggeration found in any of it, it has gone by me completely. And then there was this, also in the comments.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Which leads to this final comment which makes no end of sense: “My new policy is to vote for people who have the right enemies.” Everything then becomes crystal clear as long as they also have the right friends.

Media misrepresentation and PDT

Posted on by
Reply

Elizabeth Warren pretended to have Native American bloodlines which has turned out to be absolutely untrue. A liar, but what else is new. Cultural Marxists see absolutely no scandals on the left. All this is discussed in The Oz: Donald Trump in ‘Pocahontas’ race slur. One might be described as a racist for saying something about someone else’s racial background, but cannot be a racist by making fun of someone who describes themselves as a Native American who is not in fact a Native American. And to add to the pile-on, there is then this which has just come up: Elizabeth Warren ancestors rounded up Cherokee people for trail of tears. But that is just background to this:

As sexual misconduct allegations widen in the US congress [no details since they all involve Democrats], the President has broken with leading Republicans [Republicans! whose side are they on?] in effectively backing the conservative former judge accused of unwanted sexual advances towards teenage girls [forty years ago].

While warning that a Democratic victory would be a disaster for Alabama and the US Senate, Mr Trump has stressed that Mr Moore denied all the allegations [not to mention the absence of evidence aside from a single signature in a high school yearbook which is fake, fake fake].

Mr Moore, a populist fundamentalist Christian [and therefor obviously unfit to sit in the Senate], unveiled a campaign ad that claims he is the victim of “false allegations” in a “scheme by liberal elites and the Republican establishment” [where would he get such a notion not to mention what a really really strange pairing it is]. . . .

Meanwhile, Mr Trump badly needs a Moore victory to maintain the Senate’s 52-48 Republican majority [and why don’t the Republicans in general need this victory as well?]. A loss in Alabama would make it even more difficult to muster the votes to pass his tax, infrastructure and welfare reforms [don’t the Republicans want tax, infrastructure and welfare reforms?].

Critics speculate that his support for Mr Moore’s candidacy is partly influenced by Mr Trump’s own experience in facing sexual harassment allegations from several women before last year’s election. Mr Trump denied the claims [for which, surprisingly, there was also no evidence].

The allegations against the President followed the release of the “Access Hollywood tapes” in which Mr Trump made disparaging comments about women. The New York Times has reported that the President has privately denied the tapes were genuine, despite admitting last year to making the comments. But the White House said yesterday Mr Trump’s position on the tapes had not changed.

Democrat senator Al Franken, who has been accused by four women of inappropriate touching or groping, returned to Washington yesterday saying he was shocked and embarrassed [what about the pictures??? – without the pics he would have admitted nothing].

“I have been trying to take responsibility by apologising and by apologising to the people I let down. I’m going to work to regain their trust. I am going to be accountable, [whatever that means, which for a Democrat and media enablers is literally nothing]” Senator Franken said.

He refused to resign [among the great surprises of our time] and has pledged to co-operate with the Senate ethics committee. “I know that I have let a lot of people down. People of Minnesota and my colleagues, my staff, my supporters and everyone who has counted on me to be a champion for women [what a champ!]. To all of you I just wanted to say again I am sorry,” he said. [This wouldn’t be a different standard for Democrats, would it?]

Long-serving Democrat congressman John Conyers has stepped down from his position on the House Judiciary Committee after being accused of using taxpayer dollars to settle an unfair dismissal claim made by a former staffer who accused him of sexual harassment [he paid out money to settle the claim; now that is what I call evidence but he has not resigned from Congress].

And that’s The Oz although what difference does it at this stage really make? Will add a couple of comments from the story.

Mr Stewart lets give the real story. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic congresswomen, told a bald faced lie when she stated that she had a native American heritage to gain benefits from the government.The press named her Pocahontas as a joke. Trump, as he does, picked up on it, and he is not above name calling as we all know. What a breath of fresh air for someone to call it like it is. And yes, the last of the Navajo code talkers from WW2 are the real Hero’s and REAL native Americans who did not need to lie to serve their country or make a fraudulently claim.

Should have called her by her original nickname Fauxohontas, more accurate than Pocohontas and is a fairer description of her deceit. Like all Leftists they will do whatever it takes to advance themselves and then the media criticises the critics who call it out. Strange days indeed.

Agit prop and the agent provocateur

Posted on by
Reply

The one blessing about being brought up in a communist household is that you understand the left a good deal better than most. It also brings an added measure of concern when I see how easily a public unused to lying as a tactic is influenced by these manoeuvres which are standard practice on the left. My Dad was an expert in agit prop and I grew up understanding the role of the agent provocateur only too well. These are not well-meaning individuals who wish to investigate the truth. They are individuals whose only interest is to disrupt the communications among those on the other side through whatever lies they might find convenient and they hope persuasive.

There are a few I feel I have spotted over the years coming to this site, but I will only focus on one since I find the comments by BorisG particularly instructive. And the example I am going to use are the comments made on my post Remember Michelle Fields? It is simply undeniable that Fields told a story that was intended to harm Donald Trump’s run for president but was thoroughly discredited by the videos that showed everything she said, and the Washington Post initially said, were lies. The point of the post was to remind us that the media will lie without any hesitation if they can see some political advantage for the left’s political agenda. That is the message of this post, and it is one that can never be repeated often enough. You will be lied to by the left to the furthest extent they believe they can get away with. That there is not an instantaneous scepticism amongst us on this side of politics from any unverified political story carried by a mainstream media organisation fills me with dread since most of us are so middle class that we find it hard to believe others will lie, distort, or withhold relevant information without the slightest hesitation if it serves their ends. The attitude you need to take when reading anything from an MSM report is the same attitude you might take when buying a used car. Do not trust a thing you are told and make sure you verify everything you can from a separate source.

So let me take you to BorisG’s comments on Michelle Field’s post. And the first one he wrote was also the first one on the thread since one of the basic aims is to structure the subsequent discussion in a different direction. Below are all of his posts in sequence without the comments from other commenters. We will see if we can find a pattern of wilful obtuseness.

BorisG
#2564074, posted on November 24, 2017 at 1:16 am (Edit)
Steve is an amazing partisan hack. Even Trump initially said that the allegations against Moore if true, are deeply troubling. No one knows if they are true but the fact that 30 people gave information to the Post about it suggest that they are likely true. Papers can be sued for big bucks and won’t publish such things without good research.

BorisG
#2564091, posted on November 24, 2017 at 2:54 am (Edit)

Moore is going to win bigly

Ok but according to Steve

The great uncertainty I have is who will be elected to the Senate from Alabama in December.

Who is right ?

BorisG
#2564101, posted on November 24, 2017 at 3:14 am (Edit)
Seven middle aged women not known to each other made allegations and gave their names. Sorry it is hard to imagine they are all lying.

Maybe you also believe the women who accused Trump also lied.

BorisG
#2564363, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:13 am (Edit)

Boris there is no more leftist communist partisan blogger here than you.

Even though I says the same things about Moore and clinton?

Anyway I see there are enough sane people still left here.

Just a coupe of points
1) it is not accurate to claim that the media only targets the right. The media is busy reporting allegations against all sides, including media itself. Including NPR.
2) I am myself troubled by lack of due process. How do you defend yourself against trial by media? The only way is to sue them but this just reverses the burden of proof, and that is not fair. But no one suggests Moore should be jailed. The people of Alabama will decide in this case.

BorisG
#2564393, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:33 am (Edit)
And Ivanka Trump. Is she a Democrat? If she was she would probably have distanced herself from her father. Or trump would distance himself from her.

BorisG
#2564398, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:36 am (Edit)

you think if Moore had an ongoing interest in teens given his profile something would have emerged in the last 40 years,

Yes. But he wasn’t ongoing and he wasn’t a national figure.

BorisG
#2564404, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:39 am (Edit)
Spacey has had a couple of ‘incidents’

Unfortunately many incidents. Hollywood knew about it. We didn’t.

Let’s face it, politicians will always be held to much higher standard than actors.

BorisG
#2564413, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:40 am (Edit)
And this thread is a good example the far right are enraged when someone disagrees with them. Good example of tolerance and Christian ethics they pretend to adhere to.

BorisG
#2564439, posted on November 24, 2017 at 11:53 am (Edit)

The entire story was a fabrication,

It is amazing what for Steve and co passes for evidence.

You can take him and others of his kind as just stirrers or contrarians. BorisG is deadly earnest in everything he says without the slightest indication he is interested in an actual debate or in discovering the truth. Fascinating to watch and there is much to learn from what he and others of his kind do. Dishonesty is the trade mark of the left, not that they have a monopoly, but it is a specific tactic aimed at the fair minded who are seldom as aware as they need to be of the practice, and seldom think of the need to guard against the premeditated lies told by the left. Boris G would have to be pretty thick not to know that Michelle Fields was a liar and that her aim was deliberate and strictly political. The interesting part is that for the left to succeed, they can only achieve their ends by lying. For the right, what you hear people say is almost invariably what they believe. The left often mimics the same concerns but it is tactical and never substantive unless for a change good policy overlaps what they see as tactical advantage.

The one valuable part of being on this side of the fence is that with so many out there on the left who will swarm around any genuine falsehood stated by someone on the right, the standard of probity is higher. This is part of the reason why sex scandals, to just name the issue in relation to Roy Moore, are not as common on the right as on the left. Except that when they are caught out – such as with Bill Clinton – it is no longer a scandal and is put to bed as soon as it is practical to do so. They never mean it. It is not hypocrisy, it is a policy of deceit. They are perfectly aware they are lying and just take the rest of us for fools.

Even the NeverTrumpers are coming around

Posted on by
Reply

It’s from Instapundit

IN NATIONAL REVIEW, OF ALL PLACES: This Thanksgiving, Thank Donald Trump:

This Thanksgiving, Americans in general — and free-market conservatives in particular — have plenty for which to be grateful. And much of it would be absent had the White House’s current occupant not become president on November 8, 2016. The day after Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman called Trump’s victory “the mother of all adverse effects.” He predicted “very probably . . . a global recession, with no end in sight.” • The Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 all hit record highs on Tuesday. The Wilshire 5000 Index calculates that some $3.4 trillion in new wealth has been created since President Trump’s inauguration and $5.4 trillion since his election. Fueled by the reality of deregulation, expectations of lower taxes, and a new tone in Washington that applauds free enterprise rather than excoriate it, the economy is on fire. • Atop the second quarter’s 3.1 percent increase in real GDP, and 3.0 in 3Q, the New York Federal Reserve Bank predicts that 4Q output will expand by 3.8 percent. This far outpaces the feeble average-annual GDP growth rate of 1.5 percent on President Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, the IMF expects global GDP to rise by 3.5 percent this year. So much for a Trump-inspired “global recession.”

Unemployment is at 4.1 percent, a 17-year low. New unemployment claims in September were at their most modest since 1974. Goldman Sachs on November 20 “lowered our unemployment rate forecast to 3.7 percent by end-2018 and 3.5 percent by end-2019.” According to the Wall Street powerhouse’s chief economist Jan Hatzius, “Such a scenario would take the U.S. labor market into territory almost never seen outside of a major wartime mobilization.” . . .

• For every new regulation that Trump has imposed, 16 have been erased.

• The FCC has begun to dismantle Obama’s “Net Neutrality” takeover of the Internet, which functioned marvelously, thank you, before his needless e-power-grab.

• Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is on the bench, along with 13 constitutionalist lower-court judges. At this stage in Obama’s presidency, the Senate had confirmed just seven of his district- and circuit-court nominees.

Much more at the link, concluding with this: “The Never Trump faction still claims that the president of the United States ‘is no conservative.’ And yet, with rare deviations (such as free trade), he spends nearly every day implementing the conservative agenda. Ideas that center-Right activists have demanded for decades are becoming public policy, one after another — to the pleasant surprise of even some of Donald J. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.”

Did I mention this was in National Review, of all places?

101Posted at 10:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds
.

Remember Michelle Fields?

Posted on by
Reply

What’s your view on whether Michelle Field was pulled to the ground by Trump’s Chief of Staff?

This is the truth. The entire story was a fabrication, a complete and absolute lie wholly made up with malicious intent. It was not an error nor an exaggeration. It was not a mis-recollection of the facts nor a misperception of an event. It was a premeditated and calculated lie told repeatedly by both Democrats and Republicans, inside the media and out, with no other intention than to manufacture a scandal around Donald Trump to prevent him from becoming president. And it would have gone on and on, and you would be hearing about it to this day, except there were videos taken and so the lie was revealed and could no longer serve the purpose it was designed to serve. And when the facts came out, they did not apologise, nor show contrition, nor exhibit the slightest remorse. They just shut up about this and went and found other lies that were not as obvious and blatant and as easy to expose. They have no conscience or moral scruples or give the slightest indication of wishing to deal fairly and honestly. They will do whatever it takes and count on the deceit and connivance of everyone on their side, along with the stone cold imbecility and ridiculous naivete of so many, too many, on the side of the Republicans.

Which brings me to: President Donald Trump all but endorsed embattled Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore on Tuesday.

Trump didn’t explicitly say he was endorsing Moore, but he said with emphasis, “We don’t need a liberal person in there. … We don’t need somebody who’s soft on crime like Jones.”

He also noted that the allegations came from behavior alleged to have happened decades ago.

“Forty years is a long time,” Trump said, questioning why it took so long for Moore’s accusers to come forward.

That is, if this had happened why has she never mentioned it before to anyone at any time during the seven previous times Moore had run for office? Why did the forged signature carry the intials “DA” which did not mean “District Attorney” but were the initials of his assistant who wrote her initials next to the stamped signature of her boss on this very woman’s divorce decree which Moore presided over without her saying a word or asking for a different judge. But senior Republicans, including his daughter, have ended up in the ads being run by the Democrat.

Jones began airing a new ad Monday that features statements made by Sessions, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby and first daughter Ivanka Trump responding to the allegations against Moore.

Shelby, a fellow Republican, said he will “absolutely not” vote for Moore. Ivanka Trump said there’s “a special place in hell” for people who prey on children.

“I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” Ivanka Trump told the AP last week.

The one certainty I have that in six months time, Al Franken will still be the Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The great uncertainty I have is who will be elected to the Senate from Alabama in December.

It really is a swamp. How Trump remains so sure-footed in amongst it is one of the political wonders of the age. PDT must despair at the people who surround him and on whose support he depends.

The National Security Editor at The Oz speaks out

Posted on by
Reply

There are times when I think newspapers are inhabited by clueless clowns and then there are times when I think things are even worse. This is written by the person The Australian has designated as its “National Security Editor”: Tony Abbott’s vacillations leave him at risk of permanent irrelevance. I realise the difficulties of a cabinet government, in which his cabinet contained Malcolm, Julie and Christopher, and the intractability of a hostile Senate, which made impossible passing some of the things the Libs wished to do, are beyond the comprehension of some people, but here we are.

Having presided over the most brutal emasculation of the Westminster system since Federation, Tony Abbott is now busy singing the praises of Western civilisation. . . .

It was Abbott, who along with other conservative MPs, foisted the same-sex marriage plebiscite on this country. Plebiscites are grimy, divisive affairs, beloved by tyrants as a means of mobilising one group in society against another. They are kryptonite to a Westminster democracy, which holds the parliament as the supreme source of moral authority. . . .

Wasn’t it Abbott who fought to the wire for the right of priests and celebrants to refuse to solemnise gay marriages? Indeed it was. But where was Abbott when Pauline Hanson walked into the Senate chamber in a full length burqa? . . .

As for free speech, the sine qua non of all democratic life, Abbott’s record is none too flash. He flirted with the idea of banning Hizb ut Tahrir, a militant Islamic group whose anti-Western bluster is offensive, but otherwise harmless. . . .

He has since called for the entire abolition of the Human Rights Commission, a consequence-free act of political posturing that does nothing to remove one of the country’s most illiberal laws, one his government left encoded in our statutes.

Etc, etc. I’ll pick a couple from the comments. If there was one that supported what he wrote I completely missed it.

An amazing blend of Abbott hatred, SSM enthusiasm and a wilful blindness to the dangers posed to western society by the likes of Hizb ut Tahrir. Gee I am glad you write about security and do not have the job of maintaining it.

I for one support Tony in this. Christianity is a core element of the Western tradition, not Islam. Islam is in fact against the Western tradition in many of its practices. How can the author be so selective in this aspect. It is an Abbott bashing exercise first and foremost and expects us to overlook the disingenuous and fallacious arguments that he cobbles together in a lame attempt to convince the reader that this is more than just a hate-filled diatribe against TA.

Buying the OZ is like voting for the Libs. You wouldn’t do it except that all of the others are worse. Not much worse as this shows, but still worse.

You wouldn’t want to be distracted, would you?

Posted on by
Reply

There’s this.

Eight women say Charlie Rose sexually harassed them — with nudity, groping and lewd calls

THE WOMEN: MEDIA IGNORED CLINTON ACCUSERS…
FOUR MORE?
What if Ken Starr Was Right?

ANOTHER woman accuses Franken of grabbing…
SILENCE OF THE DEMS…
WHISPERS: NO RESIGNATION, NO OUSTER CALLS COMING…

NYT WHITE HOUSE REPORTER SUSPENDED AFTER SEX HARASSMENT CLAIMS…

And then there’s this.

GREAT AGAIN: USA Growth Forecasts on Rise… 

UNEMPLOYMENT AT 4.1%, lowest since December, 2000.

And not that it matters but there is also this.

UPDATE: Roy Moore Jumps to 15 POINT LEAD in PredictIt Market as Accuser Accusations Fall Apart

For the Dems, on the other hand, the accusations seem to flower and persist.