Category Archives: Politics on the left

The Kluka Klan

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This is Rush Limbaugh going after those who perpetrated the home invasions in the name of the law in Wisconsin in 2013. He wishes to ensure their names are known to one and all, and I am happy to assist. At the centre of it was “the judge, without whom this case could not have happened, Barbara Kluka, K-l-u-k-a“.

She came along in the second John Doe investigation, and she approved every petition, every subpoena, every search warrant in the whole case in less than one day’s work. She enabled law enforcement to raid these innocent citizens’ homes. She’s since recused herself from this, but not before she enabled all of this to happen in the second phase of the John Doe 2 case here.

In the second John Doe case, the DA, John Chisholm, had no real evidence of wrongdoing by anybody. It didn’t stop him. Conservative groups were active in issue advocacy, which is protected by the First Amendment. It didn’t violate any campaign finance laws. Issue advocacy is politics 101. These people were targeted because they’re conservatives and liberals. As I say, what happened here in not only the treatment Scott Walker got, but everybody else, this is liberalism run amok without any checks, without any opposition, without anybody pushing back, and in its own way California is the same example.

Despite the fact that there were no violations of the law in any away, the DA, Chisholm, convinced “prosecutors in four other counties to launch their own John Does, with Judge Kluka overseeing all of them. Empowered by a rubber-stamp judge, partisan investigators ran amok. They subpoenaed and obtained (without the conservative targets’ knowledge) massive amounts of electronic data, including virtually all the targets’ personal e-mails and other electronic messages from outside e-mail vendors and communications companies. The investigations exploded into the open with a coordinated series of raids on October 3, 2013. These were home invasions,” including the ones that I have detailed previously in this half hour.

They are true fascists and totalitarians, in the exact mould of people who think of themselves as good and decent. Instead they are vicious cowards who use force to terrorise those whom they cannot convince by their words and argument. The totalitarian temptation is ever-present and is almost invariably associated with the left.

The obliteration of inconvenient fact by the media-academic complex

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This shouldn’t be one of those facts that only a handful of people know but there you are. Today is “Jackie Robinson Day”, the anniversary of the day that Jackie Robinson, the first black athlete to play major league baseball in modern times, played his first major league game. There is therefore this story mentioned naturally in only one place that has been put out today: On Jackie Robinson Day, Let’s Remember When He Was Fired From the New York Post for Being Too Republican. Well yes, let us. I encourage you to read the whole article since it takes you back to a world that has gone down the memory hole. Telling you how it ends gives away nothing but sums things up quite well:

Jackie’s retort [on being fired], published at his new home in the New York Amsterdam News in January 1962, is filled with some classic Robinsonian acid:

No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner. I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed. There is a peculiar parallel between some of our great Northern “liberals” and some of our outstanding Southern liberals.

Some of the people in both classes share the deep-seated convictions that only their convictions can possibly be the right ones. They both inevitably say the same thing: “We know the Negro and what is best for him.”

I care less about the hypocrisy of the left in this instance than I do about how we are now so used to the obliteration of the truth by the media-academic complex that we merely look at such things as just how it is without a sense of real outrage.

I might also mention that I am amazed at how little coverage there is of Lincoln’s assassination on the 150th anniversary of his tragic death.

An Eloi Manifesto

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green policy uk

This is from Tim Blair and I cannot tell if this is a parody or something taken directly from a Green election pamphlet somewhere. Reads straight out of the 1930s so I opt for parody but who can be sure?

Going to the original Tim links to, the comments thread is hilarious. I guess I prefer the Greens to ISIS, but with the Greens in charge, ISIS will not be far behind.

I’VE NOW GONE AND LOOKED: It really is there, page 77, just like it says. There are no words for such people, but the Morlocks will come and get them sooner than they think.

And I have to say, this elois and morlocks thing has a kind of modern day significance I will have to dwell on further.

The Alinski metaphor

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Saul Alinski is the author of Rules for Radicals, a manual filled with guerrilla tactics for the left. It is based on the assumption that power is almost entirely in the hands of the capitalist class and is projected on behalf of middle class values. The left, therefore, can use only a hit-and-run approach if it is to have any effect at all.

McCarthyism is the use of slander and fabricated evidence to take down an opponent. That there really were communists in the State Department, just as McCarthy said, is neither here nor there. That he was himself the victim of the tactics he never used but which have been associated with his name is one of history’s great ironies. The name is used by everyone, shamefully even by those on the conservative side of politics.

But as some kind of vengeance, “Alinski” is now becoming a term of abuse in the same way as “McCarthy”. This is from Steve Hayward at Powerline, The Alinksy Way of Governing. There he wrote:

My School of Public Policy colleague (and top statewide GOP vote-getter in California last November) Pete Peterson has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on “The Alinsky Way of Governing” that details the degrading effect Alinskyist politics is having on today’s generation of liberals. (Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on the greatness of Alinsky.)

The article at the WSJ is indeed called “The Alinsky Way of Governing” [reprinted here]. In the article he specifically recognises the crucial difference between the original and our perceptions today.

This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger.

The argument Peterson makes is that where the left is in a position of power, it should foresake the use of Alinsky tactics, which I’m afraid, is about as absurd as anything I have ever heard said. No one will ever give up what works. This is his final para:

What has happened is that a generation of American politicians who came of age during Saul Alinsky’s lifetime has moved into positions of institutional power that he so often derided as “the enemy.” They are showing an inability to leave behind Alinsky’s tactics that were intended for the weak against the strong. Civil discourse and academic freedom suffer while the “Prince” becomes more powerful.

It is indescribable how ridiculous I think this is. But what I do find encouraging is the metaphor that has now been exposed. Alinskyite tactics now have a meaning, not entirely in keeping with Alinsky’s own views, but very definite all the same.

Alinsky tactics were designed most importantly to make bourgeois society live up to its core values. This it could do because conservatives actually do have values. The left, however, has none, only tactics. The left stands for no specific moral virtues which are based on self-restraint and personal responsibility. Nothing the left ever seeks can be found, for example, in The Ten Commandments. Charity is a Judeo-Christian virtue, not a socialist virtue. Socialism seeks redistribution instead, which is theft and plunder, but pretends it is doing so in the name of equity and justice. It has no clue how to create value, nor does it have a set of values to base one’s life.

An Alinsky tactic is to lie on behalf of some socialist enterprise. The left should have this meaning of Alinsky tied to every pore of its misbegotten philosophy of hatred and destruction.

What exactly is Dick Cheney getting at here?

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You know that thing about if it walks like a duck. This is Dick Cheney discussing Obama:

If you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing.

But still no one comes right out and says what everyone thinks.

And here is Hugh Hewitt’s full interview with Dick and Liz Cheney in which the above quote appears. The whole thing is short and should be

“There’s no reason for anyone to believe a word he says about anything ever again”

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Mark Steyn:

Last June I said of Bowe Bergdahl that he was “a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator”. It took officialdom another ten months to conclude he was a deserter; now they’re figuring it’s time to reveal that he was an enemy collaborator:

A 2009 NCIS investigation into Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s activities while in Afghanistan reveal that there is clear evidence Bergdahl was “going over to the other side with a deliberate plan,” Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” Monday night.

So the Government of the United States had reason to believe six years ago that Bergdahl was a traitor. As I asked last year and again only two weeks ago, why, knowing what he knew, did Obama stage that Rose Garden ceremony? Why did Susan Rice tell the American people that Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction”? Why did Obama put his hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness?

Setting aside the propriety of trading five Taliban A-listers for a traitor, it’s impossible to look at that Rose Garden theatre as anything other than a conscious deception of the American people by the President. Why would he do that?

Launching his presidential campaign by channeling Ronald Reagan, Senator Rand Paul called for “strong verification measures” with the Government of Iran. Yeah, that’s a great idea. And if the “strong verification measures” work with the Government of Iran, maybe we could try putting them into place with the Government of the United States. Until President Obama explains the fraudulent ceremony he staged for Bergdahl, there’s no reason for anyone to believe a word he says about anything ever again.

Reading Mark Steyn Online should be compulsory although what you get for it, other than being sick to death of the dishonesty and corruption, I cannot honestly say.

Mass hysteria and the American left

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The article I am quoting from is about “mass hysteria” which, the author argues, “has been a feature of American life since at least the time of the infamous witch trials in Salem.” He doesn’t think it’s quite the right word for what he has in mind, but you be the judge. But it’s not quite America, I think, but the American left, the kinds of people who reliably vote Democrat, who are typically the crazies he describes. This story is one of the most grotesque tales I know about social insanity. I remember it well since my wife was working in childcare at the time. It is a story worth remembering whenever you hear about Democrats, or the American left in general, running off on some incomprehensible tangent that could happen in no other country on earth.

Anxiety about wayward adolescents is eternal. But widespread anxiety about toddlers was, at the time, a relatively new phenomenon, the tykes of Generation X having been the first generation of Americans to have been entrusted to professional daycare services in such large numbers.

Music had Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, and daycares had the Little Rascals case and a few others like it. The criminal cases brought against those accused of carrying out theatrical episodes of ritualized sexual abuse within the walls of American daycares look absolutely unbelievable in retrospect [!!!!!].

The phenomenon of “recovered memories” that drove many of these cases is pseudoscientific poppycock, and the details of the abuse suffered by the children in these cases is obviously [!!!] the result of adult anxiety filtered through the juvenile mind: Little girls insisted, for example, that they had been sexually violated with butchers’ knives, while others told of being buried alive, being flushed down toilets, etc.

There was no physical evidence that any of this happened, of course — and even in the happy era before toilet capacity became a federal obsession, flushing an entire child down the commode was a physical impossibility — but that did not seem to matter very much. The nation was convinced — not in its mind, but in its always-unreliable heart — that there were monsters afoot, that somebody, somewhere, was doing terrible things to our teenagers and children. . . .

My Hillsdale students [to whom he was relating this story] were by turns horrified and amused by the lurid and not coincidentally cinematic tales of improbably theatrical abuse in the Little Rascals case — children claimed, among other things, to have been thrown into tanks of sharks and to have been spirited away via hot-air balloon, but there were (and this detail seems to matter more than a little) no sharks or balloons to be found. My students laughed at how odd and unlikely it all sounded, because they are too young to know what the outcome of that case was.

Everybody was convicted.

Robert Kelly Jr., the principal defendant in the Little Rascals case, was convicted on 99 out of 100 charges of abusing children, and received twelve consecutive life sentences. There were 143 witnesses at his trial, including a number of little children, whom the jury found quite convincing.

Dawn Wilson, who rejected a plea bargain, was sentenced to life in prison. Betsy Kelly, after being imprisoned for two years awaiting trial, entered a no-contest plea and accepted an additional seven-year sentence.

Eventually, the courts threw all that out, but not before a half dozen people had spent years in prison, some of them without ever having had a day in court. Such was the moral panic inspired by the case that bonds were set as high as $1.5 million, which used to be real money. So all but one defendant remained incarcerated until the criminal-justice system — hampered though it was by the dishonorable actions of prosecutors in the case — finally got around to exonerating the accused. [My bolding]

I cannot believe how he plays this down as a form of social madness. This was by no means the only instance and these people spent years in jail and have never been compensated even though they have been released. He almost makes it seem that the story is one that Americans can be proud of:

Even when American justice miscarries, as it did in the daycare cases, the appeals process generally provides an opportunity for evidence to be properly examined, for all accounts to be heard and evaluated, and for the rights of the accused to be considered.

I suppose if you are prone to believe anything, no matter how farfetched, you can end up believing in socialism or vote for Obama. He specifically describes this approach to politics as a Democrat strategy.

There are the usual grotesque opportunists who attempt to profit from these things: Tipper Gore began her activism in earnest just after the 1984 presidential election in which Ronald Reagan won a 49-state landslide; the Gores calculated, not incorrectly, that a Democrat who could maintain the loyalty of traditional left-wing constituencies while not bleeding to death among more conservative middle-class whites would have a pretty good chance against what looked, at the time, like a pretty solid Republican coalition.

But this is merely a cautionary tale. What practical lessons you can draw are hard to know.

Is he malevolent or just stupid?

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I have my own answer to this. What I cannot work out is why anyone has a different one. From Daniel Pipes on The Obama Doctrine:

Is this a random series of errors by an incompetent leadership or does some grand, if misconceived, idea stand behind the pattern? To an extent, it’s ineptitude, as when Obama bowed to the Saudi king, threatened Syria’s government over chemical weapons before changing his mind, and now sends the U.S. military to aid Tehran in Iraq and fight it in Yemen.

But there also is a grand idea and it calls for explanation. As a man of the left, Obama sees the United States historically having exerted a malign influence on the outside world. Greedy corporations, an overly-powerful military-industrial complex, a yahoo nationalism, engrained racism, and cultural imperialism combined to render America, on balance, a force for evil.

Being a student of community organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama did not overtly proclaim this view but passed himself off as a patriot, though he (and his charming wife) did offer occasional hints of their radical views about “fundamentally transforming the United States.” On ascending to the presidency, Obama moved slowly, uneager to spread alarm and wanting to be reelected. By now, however, after six full years and only his legacy to worry about, the full-blown Obama is emerging.

The Obama Doctrine is simple and universal: Warm relations with adversaries and cool them with friends.

Picked up at Powerline, under the heading, DANIEL PIPES: THE OBAMA DOCTRINE SERVES UP ONE DISASTER AFTER ANOTHER.

All quiet on the Iranian front

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There are other news stories, of course, but the virtually instant disappearance of the negotiations between Obama (not America) and Iran as worth even a mention is astonishing. The majority of the American media, who are as inane as they are ignorant, care about no issue other than whatever it takes to keep a Democrat in the White House. Still, you would think there would be ongoing interest in the terms of the deal and what might be the consequences. It is some consolation that there are people who remain concerned. While Drudge and Instapundit, for example, have gone virtually silent, Powerline and Lucianne continue to treeat this like a story worth examining. Added to the honour role is The Australian today, which carried a front-page story from Greg Sheridan, Obama’s Iranian nuke deal a dismal outcome for the world. I would only differ with Sheridan in that I don’t think Obama was out-negotiated. I think Obama got everything he set out to achieve.

US President Barack Obama has now effectively guaranteed that Iran will eventually acquire ­nuclear weapons, in what will be a black day for the hopes of peace and stability for anyone in the world.

The Iranian government has out-negotiated Obama completely. They showed more ­resolve, more cunning and greater strategic patience.

Obama took a strong hand and played it very badly.

The Iranians played a weak hand to perfection. They were forced into negotiations by the overall weakness of their position but have emerged with all the main elements of their nuclear program intact. In time, they will acquire nuclear weapons. Obama will go down in history as the president who made this possible.

The framework that was announced in Lausanne is a most peculiar document. It is unsigned and interpreted differently in Iran, from in the US. It contains very few details. A great deal of the­ ­substance of any agreement remains to be negotiated by June 30. However, as Obama, his Secretary of State, John Kerry, and other senior officials constantly claim that the only alternative to this deal is war, they have effectively given away the last shreds of American leverage.

The Iranians know the Obama administration is absolutely desperate to conclude a deal.

All the leverage now rests with the Iranians.

Even the broad terms of the framework as announced contain all manner of key concessions the Americans not so long ago said they would never make.

Among these, Iran gets to keep nuclear facilities, such as its underground Fordow plant, which it developed illegally, in secret, in defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Similarly, it gets to keep its heavy water reactor at Arak, although it will convert it to a facility that for the moment cannot produce plutonium.

It gets to keep 6000 centr­i­fuges to enrich uranium of which 5000 will remain operational. There is no purpose in having these centrifuges other than to eventually produce material for nuclear weapons. It will also be ­allowed to undertake intensive ­research on building more ­advanced centrifuges that can enrich more uranium more quickly. It will not have to export its enriched uranium but merely convert it into a more benign form in a process that can be reversed. And almost all the notional restrictions on Iran run out in 10 years.

There was actually nothing to negotiate. They just had to say, there are sanctions in place, and if you don’t come to the party and stop your nuclear program, they will get even tougher than they already are. Obama’s problem was not how to get the Iranians to dismantle their nuclear program. It was how to remove the sanctions without having the American political system explode around his head. That he most comprehensively has now done. If you think of Obama as an agent of the Iranians, everything becomes perfectly clear.

ROGER SIMON ADDS: I lack sufficient political imagination to follow the non-Iranian pro-Obama perspective. The agreement with Iran cannot possibly be to anyone’s good.

What we have here is not “a failure to communicate,” but Obama’s moral narcissism gone berserk. Forget his former proclaimed views on Iran. Driven by his need for legacy and his conviction that “he knows best” about world peace, the future, whatever, he has reversed course and powered through to what he thinks, or wants us to think, is the framework for a deal that would prevent Iran from fabricating nuclear weapons. Only — as in Gertrude Stein’s Oakland and Amir Taheri’s translations — there’s no there there.

But never mind. His troops seem to be rallying. Democrats who were initially skeptical are apparently folding in and Senator Menendez, Obama’s greatest thorn on the Democratic side, is currently and conveniently being hounded out of office and possibly into prison.

Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein — whose greatest worry is making sure her and her husband’s hundreds of millions are kept legally separate — is telling Benjamin Netanyahu — whose greatest worry is a second Holocaust – to “contain himself.” (Anyone who thinks a new Holocaust unlikely should read Howard Jacobson’s magnificent new J: A Novel).

And Iran, the mending of whose evil ways was never addressed by the negotiators, is up to its usual mischief, not just expanding across the Middle East from Iraq to Syria to Yemen (we know that), but now — at the same time Obama has told his lap dog Thomas Friedman that America “has Israel’s back” — is making a new alliance with Hamas:

Iran has sent Hamas’s military wing tens of millions of dollars to help it rebuild the network of tunnels in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s invasion last summer, intelligence sources have told The Sunday Telegraph.

It is also funding new missile supplies to replenish stocks used to bombard residential neighbourhoods in Israel during the war, code-named Operation Protective Edge by Israel.

There was a time that in most ways those on the left had a positive view of the world and held an optimistic view of life’s possibilities. The left has now become a collective of the miserable, the self-hating and the angry. They are no longer looking for a better future and a kinder world. They have only destruction in their hearts. ISIS represents the left as it now is and the bitterness so many feel about the world. The harm they do is not accidental. It is their actual intent.

Lies, damned lies and politics

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The interviewer is Dana Bash. The interviewee is Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader in the United States. During the election in 2012, he helped lie Obama back into the White House by stating that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. And so, the other day this is what he said:

BASH: So no regrets about Mitt Romney, about the Koch Brothers. Some people have even called it McCarthyite.

REID: Well… [shrug] … they can call it whatever they want. Um … Romney didn’t win, did he?

This is how it works on the left in politics everywhere. There are the “intellectuals”, academics and journalists. And there are those who are on the receiving end of a pipeline of government money, some rich (crony capitalists and all) and most not so rich. Good governance is the farthest thing from their minds. With the media as slanted to the left as Pravda in the days of the Soviet Union, it is a generally winning combination. That the US is now a mess, and becoming less consequential every day, is no concern of theirs. Harry Reid speaks for them all. Admits he lied, but so what. Obama won and Romney didn’t.

And in Australia. You have the same combination of the left intellectual “elite”, who generally are anti-market, and the ALP/Green support base, who have little clue where the good things in life come from, other than knowing they aren’t getting their fair share. What’s cheaper electricity and a more reliable supply got to do with anything? If you can make ownership of poles and wires work for you, you can win government. Everybody at the top of the Labor Party knew Martin Ferguson was right. But had it not been for him and a few others, Labor might have won the election, just as Obama did in 2012.

In Australia, our media is not as slanted. You do get to hear both sides on most issues – although the ABC, being a public broadcaster and the most far left of the lot is a major distortion in our news and information flow. Under the Harry Reid Principle (or lack of principle), Martin Ferguson is being forced out of the Labor Party for telling an inconvenient truth. Truth in politics is what you can get away with.

Victoria’s union chiefs have unanimously called on Labor to expel Rudd-Gillard frontbencher Martin Ferguson from the party as anger rises over recent comments savaging the ALP and the trade union movement.

Mr Ferguson, a former ACTU president and federal resources minister, describes himself as “Labor to the bootstraps” despite now working as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and representing companies including Shell, Exxon Mobil, Woodside and BHP.

But a slew of recent political attacks by Mr Ferguson have sparked frustration and a strong push to turf out the former Labor heavyweight from the party.

Tensions spilled over this week, with Mr Ferguson publicly supporting the reinstatement of the hardline Australian Building and Construction Commission, claiming the militant construction union must be “brought to heel”.

He also accused NSW Labor leader Luke Foley of “rank opportunism” and “blatant scaremongering” in the run-up to Saturday’s state election. Mr Ferguson became the face of a NSW Liberal Party campaign ad, where he expresses disgust over his party’s anti-privatisation campaign. [Bolding added]

And where are we now? Labor might well have won had Ferguson not said what he said as publicly as he did. The entire east coast would have then had the same junk governments, and Tony Abbott would have had to go. An informed electorate is one thing; a perpetually deceitful and ignorant media class is quite another.

And I draw your attention to the implicit bias in the story which clearly implies that working for the resources sector and trying to control rogue unions is somehow against the Labor Party ethos. It may well be so, but it is not a winning combination for the long-term prosperity of this country.