Problems of the affluent

Take vocabulary. Your typical middle-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit Harvard, you’ll find plenty of rich 19-year-olds who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is “I was educated at a top college.” Consider the Veblen quote, “Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

A tweet is intimidating? Give me a break!

This is absolutely ridiculous talk.

Poor Ambassador Yovanovitch. Such trauma! Let's just hope she doesn't have to add a second front door to her house.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 16, 2019

Fox News host Bret Baier says Trump tweet added an article of impeachment in real time https://t.co/J0Npy9ob6j pic.twitter.com/pT5739YHNp

— The Hill (@thehill) November 15, 2019

“Participation Trophy” Crisis

It occurs to me that out of all the sources of misery we experience lately, there is a pattern of surprise, of lots of build-up before a payoff that falls short, and then a frenzy of scapegoating afterward. And this is all done by creative persons and creative groups who didn’t expect the disappointment, in fact who apparently hadn’t even factored in failure as a possibility. They weren’t particularly stupid or incompetent — they just never seriously considered that their delivery could bomb. That they’d ever be sent back to the drawing board. That there’d ever be a moment of judging or assessment at all. Their attitude seems to be “I worked really hard on this, so, ya know…uh, here. Now where’s my bonus?”

Adam Schiff Says He Doesn’t Know Whistleblower Identity

Liar ... and bug-eyed, pencil-necked clown who's afraid of women.

The Democrats want to define Trump being president as a high crime and misdemeanor

That pretty much sums it up.

I think the outrage the left feels towards Trump boils down to two main issues. The first is that he’s president at all, and does what presidents do with all the attendant powers of a president. The second is that he is not afraid to use those powers in ways that stand to harm the Democrats and their interests and/or the Deep State and its interests.

They find this state of affairs unconscionable. So they redefine whatever Trump does that they don’t like and/or that may harm them politically as unacceptable, unprecedented, offensive, and even at times criminal.

And always, always impeachable.

This is a picture of the future. Be afraid; be very afraid.

Here's the story.

These are the young people at Northwestern University who edit the student newspaper. They first published an article about an event at Northwestern. And when they got some negative response to actual, truthful, reporting, they apologized for the truth.

Remember seeing Mao’s “Red Guards” during the Cultural Revolution parading teachers who dissented from Communist orthodoxy in the street with dunce caps on their heads. Who then beat them and made them “confess” their heresies? It’s not Mao’s China anymore. It’s right here in the heartland, in Evanston, Illinois. The Red Guards are here.

What are you going to do when they come for you?

Impeachment Hearings: New Whine in an Old Battle

The Diplomad

You saw Ambassador Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary Kent all in a knot because the President had an "irregular" channel he used to conduct foreign policy in Ukraine. Wow! I didn't realize that we had elected Taylor and Kent!

Let me put it in nice simple terms so that the Swamp Beings will understand: The President sets and conducts foreign policy, not State, not the NSC, not the DOD, not any other alphabet agency. He does not have to go through State or NSC to conduct said policy; he does not have to consult with Kent or Taylor or anybody else on Ukraine or any other aspect of foreign policy.

All Presidents have used "irregular" channels going back at least to Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House. All have used messengers and negotiators outside the established bureaucracy for different diplomatic missions. There is nothing unusual or illegal or impeachable for doing this. The bureaucracy doesn't like it, so what?

The real Ukraine controversy: an activist U.S. embassy and its adherence to the Geneva Convention

John Solomon:

The first time I ever heard the name of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was in early March of this year. It did not come from a Ukrainian or an ally of President Trump. It came from a career diplomat I was interviewing on background on a different story.

The diplomat, as I recall, suggested that Yovanovitch had just caused a commotion in Ukraine a few weeks before that country’s presidential election by calling for the firing of one of the prosecutors aligned with the incumbent president.

The diplomat related that a more senior State official, David Hale, was about to travel to Ukraine and was prepping to be confronted about Yovanovitch’s comments. I remember the diplomat joking something to the effect of, “we always say that the Geneva Convention is optional for our Kiev staff.”

The Geneva Convention is the UN-backed pact enacted during the Cold War that governs the conduct of foreign diplomats in host countries and protects them against retribution. But it strictly mandates that foreign diplomats “have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State” that hosts them. You can read the convention’s rules here.

I dutifully checked out my source’s story. And sure as day, Yovanovitch did give a speech on March 5, 2019 calling for Ukraine’s special anticorruption prosecutor to be removed. You can read that here.

Read the whole thing.

Quick, Don’t Think of a Black Elephant

Vanderleun and the "N" word:

The new racism in America stinks. The whole revolting social media rapping and raping has filled me with a new found revulsion for our politics. I’d thought that in the last year I had seen the raw and rotten bottom of our politics. I forgot that for the progressives bent on the destruction of freedom there really is no bottom. And hence I am compelled to commit the following thoughtcrime.

My crime is this: by writing out the following word, “nigger,” I have just committed a social crime more heinous than smoking a cigarette within three miles of a day-care center. I have committed thoughtcrime with no crimestop. But what is done, sigh, is done.

I’ve done many thing in my life that have made me potentially unelectable to any office in the United States.

I’ve had points of view that were out when conservatism was in, and points of view that were out when liberalism was in. I’ve started magazines and worked for magazines that printed pictures of naked women and letters that began “I never thought I’d be writing this to a magazine, but….”

Trump commercial

The Violence of California Streets

I’ve never heard of anything as gross as this: A homeless man dumped a bucket of hot diarrhea on a woman getting into her car. I’m finishing up an @NBCLA I-Team report airing tonight at 11 about the rising number of violent and bizarre crimes involving the homeless. pic.twitter.com/xO6Nyh42ew

— Joel Grover (@JoelNBCLA) November 11, 2019

The Condescension of Philosophers

Baby Trump Balloon-Slasher Says He’s Never Seen Liberals ‘Mad About Chopping Up A Baby’

"It comes a point when you gotta take a stand," Hoyt Hutchinson, the man who stabbed the baby Trump balloon in Tuscaloosa Saturday, said. "We don’t have two parties anymore. We have good vs. evil."
https://t.co/NHmnU6eWtf

— Reckon (@reckonalabama) November 11, 2019

The Impeachment Hearings Are the Beginning of the End

Never count your chickens before they hatch, but this sounds right.

When all of this impeachment hysteria has at last come to a close, when the last gasps of 2016 denial have finally subsided, Adam Schiff and the Democrats can attempt to answer the next great question: What have you been doing for the past three years? The impeachment distraction has provided a rather tenuous excuse for doing nothing else. Nothing in terms of working with the president. Prescription drugs, USMCA, and illegal immigration have sat undisturbed on the sidelines while they have recklessly pursued an undemocratic fantasy. The kickoff to an election season is probably the single worst time to have to answer for that. Beginning with the impeachment hearings the Democrats are in serious trouble, but they’re too deeply invested to turn back now. Any way forward, they lose.

We don’t mind corrupt politicians, if they’re one of us

Why Joe Biden will be Dems nominee.

His lack of clarity, about anything, foreign and domestic, will not deter them, and after all is considered, he is all they’ve got.

About enriching his son while he was vice-president under Obama, selling his office, in other words – they figure, so what? He is a politician, and crookedness is to be expected.

Besides, he is a Democrat, and among Democrats, all is forgotten and forgiven. The Party comes first.

Democrats, or mostly Democrats, are elaborately generous and forgiving when it comes to one of their own, misdeeds be damned.

Maybe it’s a “Godfather” thing. It is all about FAMILY. Here is Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) scolding brother Fredo: “Don’t ever take sides against the family, ever.”

Ever!

Rules to live by, for Democrats, as found in Virginia, where Governor Ralph Northam was caught red-handed partying in blackface, as a younger man, and he is still the governor. Sure, when the news broke there were howls for him to step down, immediately. He simply outwaited the tempest.

He knew something. That it would pass. Because he is a Democrat, and Democrats stick together, and never take sides against the family.

Likewise, Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Same blackface story, and same demands that he resign and quit running for re-election.

He begged to be forgiven. He promised to be good, good and true to his Liberal values…which, for some reason, among Liberals, includes this urge to poke fun at minorities. Yes, blackface.

Megyn Kelly, by the way, got fired from her morning gig at NBC-TV for never endorsing such behavior, but only mentioning that it’s what some people did in the past.

That got her canned…but not Trudeau. He got re-elected.

Ted Kennedy got re-elected to the Senate over and over again after drowning a woman in a car and going to sleep in his hotel room while she was still fighting for air.

For a while, he thought about running for president, but changed his mind, since in a general election Republicans also get a chance to vote. (He served 47 years as “Lion of the Senate.”)

But in Massachusetts, it’s mostly Democrats, and every time he ran, they forgave him, and forgot Mary Jo Kopechne.

So whether it is Biden, or maybe Warren, or maybe even Hillary again, no worries. You can do no wrong. You are family.

Oh, Oh

Quid Pro Quo

The Federalist: "Donald Trump Versus ‘The Interagency Consensus’"

It's becoming clearer every day that the government bureaucracy don't believe in elections or representative government. They are determined to hold and seize power and do so more and more openly.

Working for Government Doesn’t Make You Above Elections.

Recall the IRS scandal from the Obama administration. One of the ways the scandal was repeatedly downplayed was with the claim there was no involvement from the White House. As far as we know, that’s true. But tell me, what scenario scares you more: The president allegedly uses his power to instigate the investigation of a political opponent and immediately gets confronted by whistleblowers from within the government?

Or is it when federal employees with the power to ruin your life launch a broad-based attack on thousands of ordinary participants in the political process who not-at-all-coincidentally happen to be small government advocates, and they do this of their own initiative without having to be told what to do by the president because everyone is marching in ideological lockstep? And they further do this secure in the knowledge the president will defend what they’ve done as “not a smidgen of corruption” and that when they destroy tens of thousands of potentially incriminating emails under congressional subpoena there’s not a thing their victims can do about it?
Working for Government Doesn’t Make You Above Elections

Indeed, at every turn opponents of Trump within the government have been defended, often not because what they’ve done is defensible, but because of the false belief that service in the federal government is automatically ennobling and ipso facto makes someone trustworthy. Indeed, the desperate need to defend an administrative state reads at times like fan fiction....

it’s also clear that Trump was elected in no small part because tens of millions of Americans do not approve of business as usual in Washington, and specifically the lack of democratic accountability that can be brought to bear on the status quo. And Trump is enough of a natural disruptor that he threatens that status quo in both good and questionable ways. In response, lots of people in D.C. are willing to bend the rules to stop him.

Bill Clinton: Epstein's Cause Of Death Depends On What Your Definition Of 'Suicide' Is

It's the Babylon Bee, much more truthful than the Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR ...

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Speaking to a packed 30-seat arena, Bill Clinton remarked on Jeffrey Epstein's recent passing, saying that Epstein's cause of death "really depends on what your definition of 'suicide' is."

"Did Epstein commit suicide?" asked an attendee at the event.

A wide-eyed Clinton shrugged his shoulders. "I mean, it really depends on what your definition of suicide is, heh."

An awkward silence ensued. Bill turned to look at Hillary for support, but she just glared at him and ran her finger across her throat, a metaphor that means "death."

He went on, "Heh, I mean, well, we've got to define terms here, alright? If you mean, 'Did he hang himself without any outside assistance?' then I'd say that does not fall under the definition of what may or may not have occurred."

Baton attack during June protests in downtown Portland lands man in prison for nearly 6 years

Finally, some justice ....

The victim.

 

The convicted criminal.