First Greg Gutfeld
And then Mark Steyn with Tucker Carlson
Of course, there is then this
In the meantime
Oprah for President!
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Category Archives: Politics on the left
“Lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist”
The desperation of the left in trying to find something, anything, to pin on PDT has reached a new level of intensity with the release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Based on the tried and true process, now being perfected across the media, of all the news I can make up that fits the narrative, we have even among the least credible statements ever made, that PDT didn’t really want to win the White House at all. Since the book is policy free from what I have read so far, nothing in it is likely to affect Trump’s electability. It will be the same empty heads on the left who think Obama was just peachy versus those who would like to see the American Republic continue on into the future. This is PDT’s response in the story about the book from The Oz.
“I authorised Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist,” Mr Trump tweeted on Thursday.
But Wolff countered: “I absolutely spoke to the President. Whether he realised it was an interview or not. I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record.”
“Lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.” Sounds like everything else you find out about PDT in the media. There is such a hunger for anything that attempts to damage The President among the left that if anyone can be thought of as deranged it is his enemies. For a different view, you might try this: The Great Experiment by Victor Davis Hanson. First there were eight years of a far-left “progressive” agenda to be followed by four or even eight years of conservative governance. That is the experiment.
Whatever Donald J. Trump’s political past and vociferous present, his first year of governance is most certainly as hard conservative as Barack Obama’s eight years were hard progressive. We are watching a rare experiment in political governance play out, as we go, in back-to-back fashion, from one pole to its opposite.
Among Obama’s signature foreign policies were “lead from behind” in Libya; quietude during the Iranian anti-theocratic protests; strategic patience with North Korea; the multifaceted and often clandestine efforts to swing the Iran deal; the Russian “reset”; realignment away from Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies; and rapprochement with Cuba, Venezuela, and the South American Communist and socialist states. . . .
[Domestically] identity politics, progressive policing of ideas on campus, an end to campus free expression that only empowered hate speech, the politicization and expansion of the deep state, along with open borders and new laxities governing citizenship and voting would usher in new, kinder and gentler race, ethnicity, and gender agendas. A single EPA director, one high IRS commissioner, or a federal-appeals-court justice would now exercise far more political power than any congressional committee. The “law” — in the sense of customary non-surveillance of American citizens, disinterested attorneys general, or a nonpartisan bureaucracy — was redefined as whatever would best serve social justice and equality.
On the economic side, more regulations, larger government, more entitlements, higher taxes, zero interest rates, and doubling the national debt were designed to redistribute income and “spread the wealth.” The idea that the stock market could get much higher, that GDP could ever hit 3 percent or above, or that industry and manufacturing would return to the U.S. was caricatured as the ossified pipe dreams of discredited supply-siders.
And in contrast we now have and can look forward to more of this:
Free-market economics, deterrent foreign policies, and conservative cultural reform that are championed in the abstract in think tanks, on radio and television by conservative pundits, and in magazines and journals by conservative intellectuals are currently being put to work concretely in the real world, a rare occurrence. Or they’re being implemented as least as much as possible with a president and a Congress of the same party behind them and within a set tenure.
All sounds good to me. What I can’t work out is why it doesn’t all sound good to them.
If their presenters are this stupid what must the people who watch be like?
From Twitchy: CNN busts fake news: Trump doesn’t REALLY have a big NUKE button on his desk. Be sure you read the final bit of this post just to see where we are at.
An actual nuclear blast would feel like a bit of an understatement at this point now that we’ve felt the shockwaves of President Trump’s tweet Tuesday night reverberate through social media and the press. In case you missed it, here it is again, currently hovering just above 420,000 likes:
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
Sure, CNN thought it was breaking news and wondered if threatening a nuclear strike violated Twitter’s terms of service. Check out this clip of Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld busting a gut over it:
Clip: @greggutfeld zings @brianstelter on today’s @TheFive w/ @DanaPerino
Perhaps in a bid to calm the country’s nerves a bit, CNN’s Chris Cillizza did a bit of fact-checking Wednesday, revealing that President Trump doesn’t actually have a big button on his desk that launches nuclear missiles at North Korea.
No, Trump doesn’t have a big nuclear button on his desk | Analysis by @CillizzaCNN http://cnn.it/2DZHvEj
Practically speaking, it makes lots and lots of sense that there is no nuclear button on the president’s desk. As a clumsy person myself, I can imagine a president accidentally bumping into it — or tripping and landing a hand on it. Not good.
Now, that said: The power to launch a nuclear strike does rest entirely in the hands of Trump. Or, more accurately, in the hands of a small rotating group of military personnel who carry a briefcase that contains the nuclear codes.
Yeah, we know … remember the time Vice President Joe Biden in a speech pointed out the military aide who travels with him carrying the nuclear launch codes? CNN didn’t seem flustered about that, though.
Is everyone a little calmer now, or was that piece written just to soothe Brian Stetler and Anderson Cooper?
Of course, this story might be compared with this from Instapundit right now.
BUT TRUMP IS UNPRECEDENTLY INCOMPETENT: Bill Clinton once lost the nuclear codes for months, and a ‘comedy of errors’ kept anyone from finding out.
What really is there to say after that? There is no irony deep enough to cover this. We are far out and beyond even the wildest extension of Muggridge’s Law anyone could possibly imagine.
Shameless lying because that is what their readers demand
The first few comments at Instapundit in response to calling out another fabulist on the left:
MICHAEL WOLFF SAYS THAT TRUMP IS A BIG FAT IDIOT WHO DIDN’T EVEN WANT TO WIN. I’m not a fan of Wolff’s, and frankly doubt his story. But if it’s true, how humiliating is it for Hillary and the Democrats, to lose to a big fat idiot who didn’t even want to win?
These are from the comments thread, and there are many more just like them.
Socialist realism
From Steve Hayward’s The Year in Pictures.
Calculate your privilege
Just in case you cannot tell, its a joke.
From Small Dead Animals where Robert writes:
Here’s an Internet meme I first learned of in a Free Speech group I belong to. I imagine it was created by a horde of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) with an especially strong dose of Permanent Victim Syndrome (PVS). One wonders what percentage of Western society reads this chart and thinks it speaks some semblance of truth.
It’s exactly how they think.
Scandal fatigue
There are so many scandals associated with the Democrats and Barack Obama it is wearying to try to keep up. This is yet another, taken from Instapundit.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: A deafening media silence on the Obama-Hezbollah scandal.
Politico published a jaw-dropping, meticulously sourced investigative piece this week detailing how the Obama administration had secretly undermined US law-enforcement agency efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah. The effort was part of a wider push by the administration to placate Iran and ensure the signing of the nuclear deal.
Now swap out “Trump” for “Obama” and “Russia” for “Iran” and imagine the eruption these revelations would generate. Because, by any conceivable journalistic standard, this scandal should’ve triggered widespread coverage and been plastered on front pages across the country. By any historic standard, the scandal should elicit outrage regarding the corrosion of governing norms from pundits and editorial boards.
Yet, as it turns out, there’s an exceptionally good chance most of your neighbors and colleagues haven’t heard anything about it.
Days after the news broke, in fact, neither NBC News, ABC News nor CBS News — whose shows can boast a collective 20 million viewers — had been able to find the time to relay the story to its sizeable audiences. Other than Fox News, cable news largely ignored the revelations, as well.
Most major newspapers, which have been sanctimoniously patting themselves on the back for the past year, couldn’t shoehorn into their pages a story about potential collusion between the former president and a terror-supporting state.
Democracy dies in darkness.
It is almost as wearying to deal with all the leftists one knows and discusses politics with who have never heard of any of the stories we are all perfectly aware of. This is not that they discount them, but that they have never heard of almost any of them at all.
You just can’t make some people happy no matter what you do
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
I can see the costs easy enough but what are the benefits?
Here’s something you don’t see mentioned very often: The Costs of Ethnic Diversity. A surprisingly long and detailed article and even comes with a podcast.
Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity.
Lots of evidence that another among the common core views of the left is wrong which is possibly the least surprising result of all.
Mark Steyn on and Jordan Peterson with Lindsay Shepherd
Satire is no longer possible against the humourless and the stupid. When all is said and done, you are no longer entitled to your own opinion.
“Why were you thinking this might be sufficiently dangerous that you would need taped evidence?”
At the end, my impression is that Lindsay Shepherd fundamentally disagrees with Peterson. She is learning but is more millennial than not. But she is getting there and can only hope she brings many others along.
Law of Markets 