Nothing burger? No, pretext

This story in the New York Post gets something wrong and it illustrates the problem conservatives have in framing the Russia-gate story. The Post states that the collusion story was a "nothing burger" but kept the story alive anyway. This frames the escapade as a well intentioned endeavor that was kept alive perhaps by mistake, but with good intentions. 

It was, in fact, a malicious endeavor that was kept alive through an excess of enthusiasm. It was not a 'nothing burger', it was a deliberate fabrication. The FBI didn't become aware of it, it started it. The FBI were not bunglers, they were manipulators.  It is like saying the Watergate burglars just found themselves in the Democratic National Head quarters and, finding themselves there, decided to leave a listening device. The FBI started with the intention of destroying Trump and looked for a means and a means was found. 'Nothing burger' turns the criminal conspiracy into a case of credulity over indulged. 

"Nothing burger" refers to something that looks like something from the outside but, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be of no significance. But if the nothing burger of the Russia hoax ever appeared to be something it is only because of the FBI's manipulations (and the Press' receptivity to those manipulations). 

The con man doesn't fall for his own cover story. He knows it is a story. So did the FBI. 

Racists

We have always had racists, except now we call them woke.

I believe Chesterton said something like, "I am not concerned about censorship of the press as I am about censorship by the press." 

I am not so much concerned about censorship of this of that person or statement as I am about the censorship of entire fact patterns or subjects. 

To see what I mean, consider the coverage of hurricane Camille. I lived in Mississippi when it hit in, I believe, 2005. It was by some measures the strongest hurricane in history and at the time all the new media had on experts telling how this marked the beginning of more extreme hurricanes due to global warming. Then, nothing. For the next ten years no hurricane made landfall. It was remarkable. The longest period without a hurricane on record, I believe. You would think that some would note that fact. 

But no, once there was another hurricane the fact that the previous 10 years had not seen a single one was never mentioned and the new global-warming caused spate of hurricanes was predicted as if the previous 10 years hadn't happened. 

This is dishonest. If you are going to note evidence that supports your theory you have to note evidence that does not support it. Maybe there is an explanation for the lack of hurricanes that is consistent with the global warming hypothesis. Maybe the unusual dearth of hurricanes can be put down to global warming. Maybe the effect of humans putting CO2 in the are is unusual variability--fewer as well as more frequent hurricanes--in established weather patterns. But what is not legitimate is to totally ignore the issue. That is dishonesty. 

The Woke as the Church Lady or Dwight Schrurte

Conservatives should treat the woke as the new Church Lady or Dwight Schrute. They should be made fun of or, better yet, condescendingly humored. They are not to be feared but ridiculed. 

You know how whatever subject came up the Church Lady (Dana Carvey of SNL) would steer it into a rhetorical question of who could be behind it, Satan?!!!! Substitute "Racism" and you could capture the contemporary woke rhetorical stance perfectly. 

Who Asked You?

The thing that is odd about Mueller's statement is that when he says, "If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime we would have said so," he is not only answering a question that no one has asked, he is answering a different question. 

In the first place, no one cares if you 'have confidence' that someone didn't commit a crime. You either think someone committed a crime and press charges, or you don't. Having suspicions or lacking confidence in someone's innocence is not something that lawyers get to talk about. Representatives of the state get to accuse or not accuse, they don't get to assign innocence ratings on a scale from 1 to 10. No one asked what you think of him as a person. They asked if he committed a crime. If you don't have the evidence to say 'yes' then you say nothing.

Mueller also makes it sound like there is some question about the president's actions. But what the president did is not really in question. We know what he did, he tried to have Mueller fired. It is what constitutes the crime of obstruction of justice that is in question. The president's actions are not in question, the law is in question. So Trump tried to have Mueller fired as he did have Comey fired. That is one of the bases of the obstruction charges. Note that the actions aren't really in question, it is the law. The law in question is so amorphous and vague that it could be made to apply to anything. 

It is an inquisition instead of an investigation. In an investigation you look for who committed the crime. In an inquisition you look for crimes the target committed. In one you start with the crime, in the other you start with the target. 

And so the liberties of us all are endangered. Remember this, if Trump with all his vast resources--personal and those of the Presidency--can be put in peril for his liberty, what chance has an ordinary citizen when he finds himself the target of Federal Prosecutors. We get so caught up and become willing to continence all these perversions of the common law to enable our brave prosecutors to vanquish the malefactor of the day that we give the prosecutors tools that will remain in their hands long after the present monster is slain or departed. 

And who do you think those tools, once fashioned and delivered up, will next be used on?

One thing that strikes me as strange about the Biden touching scandal is that the incidents all took place in public. These inappropriate touchings were all out there for everyone to see. There is not even for the most part a he said she said, it is a plain we saw.

Now at the very least this means that something the public saw and let pass without comment at the time is now considered scandalous.

The retroactive application of new standards to old behavior is problematic for a number of reasons.

Cultures change over time. Standards evolve. The standard for what is considered appropriate touching are cultural standards. We would have no trouble with the notion that the boundaries of personal space, the rules about where you can place your hands on another, the degree of deference owed to women and what is considered appropriate affection can differ from one country to another. Different countries, different cultures. What is normal in Italy, say, may be considered an assault in Norway. The same may be said of different parts of the same country. What my be considered appropriate in the North may not be in the South and so on.

The past is like a different country. Just as it can be unfair to apply the standards of one country to another, it can be unfair to apply the standards of one time to another.

Democrats Angered that Russian Meddling Exposes Democrat Meddling

So we are supposed to lecture the Russians about meddling in our elections, but that meddling was publicizing emails from Hillary's campaign that exposed the DNC's meddling in the primaries to sabotage Bernie Sanders and the media's (particularly CNN's) efforts to meddle in the Election Debates on behalf of Hillary. How dare your meddling expose our meddling! Imagine if the Russians were funneling money illegally to the Hillary campaign as the DNC was exposed doing in the DNC emails.

Trump is accused of going too easy on the Russians. He is being harder on them than Obama after the 'meddling' was exposed but before the election results were in. Before the election Obama dismissed it as amateurish hacking, afterwards, the same acts were an act of war?

From Andrew McCarthy at National Review:

to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration — which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country’s government was not really “war” anyway) — had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi’s military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438605/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-benghazi-scandal-arm-syrian-rebels-al-qaeda-isis-libya-turkey

This is one of the over looked drawbacks to the reliance on international law in international relations. It forces nations to be dishonest about what they are doing and so do it less well. Part of the reason that there was no plan for what came after Qaddafi was that to make a plan for what came after we over threw Qaddafi would have been to admit that we were over throwing Qaddafi. The Obama administration combines an insolent contempt for our domestic constitution and a slavish adherence to the forms of International institutions. The Libyans are still paying the cost. 

The Establishment Defends Its Own

Hillary Exonerated

One of the things that has bothered me about Republican response to Hillary's exoneration is the focus on whether the 'fix' was in. This is the concern behind the attention given to the meeting between Clinton and the AG and the focus on the question of whether there was some sort of specific quid pro quo with any official.

I think this is a mistake.

What we are dealing with is not so much a contest between parties but a contest between classes, in this case, the ruling class and the rest of us. It is less a narrow party machine and more a class or quasi aristocracy. The thing about a ruling class is that there does not have to be message or specific instruction. It is a good ol' boys club. You know what you are supposed to do. You know there are some people you are not supposed to touch.

The email server was known to be insecure by anyone that got an email from Hillary. Everyone could see there was a private server as the address rather than the .gov address that all other government officials used, but no one said anything. They knew they were supposed to keep their mouths shut, that there are certain people that you cannot tell to follow the rules.

By they way, when is someone going to ask how much money was spent on this two year investigation employing so many attorneys/agents? Shouldn't the Democrats be out there complaining about the time wasted on this investigation when no one ever believed that Hillary actually wanted to reveal secrets to America's adversaries? Since no one ever suggested that she wanted the Chinese or the Russian to be able to read her emails and the fact that it was not an intentional betrayal of the US why was there an investigation at all? 

Less is More Proven with....Bacon!!!

Less is more proved in one picture

From this

To this

"... a punk, trying to sew discord."

"a punk, trying to sew discord."

Attorney General Holder called the person that tried to assassinate two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, "a punk, trying to sew discord."

The description could apply to the Attorney General himself. The Justice Department's own report on the Brown shooting shows the narrative of events behind the Ferguson protests to have been false: Brown attacked the officer, was not surrendering but charging the police officer, and that his body was left on the ground for four hours not because of racist indifference, but because the protesters and thugs kept the detectives from doing their job. And yet, the President and the Administration withheld these facts and even encouraged the protesters through months of chaos culminating in the destruction, at the hands of these same protesters, of a large part of the town.

We have witnessed something like a legal assault on a city. The President meets with the ring-leader of the protests--Al Sharpton--in the White House who then goes out and whips up more protests based on claims that the Administration itself knows are false. It is an Alinsky-ite dream. And when, finally, the career officials' report comes out potentially exposing the whole scam, you put out a parallel 'report' claiming 'systemic' racism, meaning a grab-bag of policies that great and the good do not like and the consequences of which fall more heavily on black people.

Of course, what really falls more heavily on black people are the consequences of the Administration's and Al Sharpton's thuggery. The burned out neighborhoods produced by the 'protesters' (punks and thieves would be more appropriate) will be destroying lives long after the rabble-rousers of the community organizer White House have moved on. 

Its almost like they are unpatriotic or something

British human rights lawyers knowingly pursue false accusations of human rights abuses against their own countrymen. It is not so much that the accusations turned out to be untrue, what is telling is that the lawyers wanted them to be true. That is what is unpatriotic.

Untrue Truisms in the War on Terror | Works and Days

Untrue Truisms in the War on Terror | Works and Days: Why aren't the cartoons in the Congressional Record? If we are going to take a stand why doesn't the Federal Government take the lead?

Paramount Bans Showing ‘Team America’ - The Daily Beast

OK, how can a company ban a movie theater showing its film? If I buy the print why can't I show it? Can they ban me watching it at home? Just a legal question. I am sure there is an answer. 

But what is really interesting is that the article mentions how the Czechs dealt with threats from the North Koreans over that same film over a decade ago: 

“Obviously, it’s absurd to demand that in a democratic country,” a spokesman for the Czech foreign ministry said at the time.

The new Europe is ahead of Old Europe and the New World. 

North Korea deep into cyber warfare, defector says - CNN.com

I think that two things are being missed in this controversy. First, the role of China. Some of the attacks are executed through China and the North Korean regime is only able to stay afloat because the Chinese Communists bank role them.



The other culprits that are getting away unscathed are lawyers and our legal liability system. It is probably correct that the theaters had no choice given our liability laws but to cancel the showings of the movie, but that is the problem. We have a system that does not allow free born citizens to make their own decisions. Our own legal system is a threat to our freedoms as is terrorism.

Lefty Hate | Simple Justice

Hypocrisy on the Left in Academia:



"That Mahmood was met with the whine of the tenderhearted, his satire created a hostile environment at his other paper, was par for the silliness course.

And until recently, he enjoyed writing for both of the campus’s newspapers: the institutional, liberal paper, The Michigan Daily, and the conservative alternative paper, The Michigan Review.

After penning a satirical op-ed for The Review that mocked political correctness and trigger warnings, The Daily ordered him to apologize to an anonymous staffer who was offended and felt “threatened” by him. He refused and was fired."

The saddest thing about all this is that the one place where you should be freest to speak your mind is the one place where that is the most dangerous. The anonymous denunciation is a particularly nice touch. No confronting your accusers here, comrade.

Killing The Interview Opens Studios to Terrorist Manipulation | The Informer | Los Angeles | Los Angeles News and Events | LA Weekly

Killing The Interview Opens Studios to Terrorist Manipulation | The Informer | Los Angeles | Los Angeles News and Events | LA Weekly:



"Emily Carman, assistant professor of film and media arts at Chapman University, says Hollywood received pressure from the Chinese government in 1932 and 1933 with the releases of Shanghai Express and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, respectively.

The films featured white actors in yellowface as well as interracial relationships.



"It was a racist, Eurocentric view of China," Carman said.

Leaders threatened to block film distribution in China, but Hollywood did not back down, she said.



The Interview also hits a familiar note of insensitivity toward an Asian nation. Before that, in 2001, the Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander featured a plot about a fashion model recruited to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia. That nation and neighboring Singapore banned its exhibition.



 "Can you imagine the outcry if North Korean released, Get Obama, about the assassination of a sitting president," asks Douglas Thomas, associate professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.



"It's amazing that this even got green-lit," Carman adds. "Wow, nothing's really changed. This is still a white male, Western-centric view of a small Asian nation."
"



Let me say that I think these points are wrong in every particular.



The movies from the 1930's were not racist, the characters were fully developed human beings on both sides of the racial divide. That is what made them compelling movies.



And no, I can't imagine the outcry if North Korea released a movie about the assassination of a sitting president because Hollywood itself has released precisely such a movie--not a comedy--where the assassination of a sitting president is envisaged and actually viewed approvingly. Of course, in that case the sitting president was a Republican, so it was ok.



The movie treats the assassination of the leader of a "small Asian nation" as something to laugh about not because of the color of the leader's skin but because of the monstrous nature of his regime. It is a measure of the absurd fetishization of race by our intellectuals that the salient feature of the controversy is not the totalitarian regime the monster runs but the color of the monster's skin.



The battle for freedom of thought and speech must be won in the hearts of the people if it is to survive in government. Sadly, it has already been lost among our tenured intellectual class.

JustOneMinute: Raaaacism!

Michelle Obama tells of how she was mistaken for a Target employee and interprets it as racist. But a year or two before she told the same story on Letterman as just being asked for help because she was tall and related it as a happy memory.



There is no reason to think she is lying, though, given what we know about memory. People reinterpret when they remember and she may very well now remember it as being tinged with racism.

Australia vows to unearth why 'sick' extremist was at large - Yahoo News

Everyone seems to be outraged that he was 'on the street'. Maybe they should be outraged that he was in the country. You can let fanatics in your country and then try to follow them around 24 hours a day to make sure they don't do anything crazy or you can just not let them in in the first place. You end up transforming your country in either case.



It is not that he was allowed on the street, it is that he was allowed to vote. You let him transform your laws by voting and transform your law enforcement by creating a new class of citizens that are to be 'free but followed'? Why not just keep them out in the first place?

Eric Garner, criminalized to death - The Washington Post

I disagree with Will (and apparently just about everyone else on the planet). I think the Grand Jury in the Garner case was right. His death was a crime, but the crime was not committed by the police but by the state. He was not the victim of rogue cops but of a rogue law.