Category: Politics

George Neumayr

Nancy is just stupid. Maxine is also putrid.

You say that 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is an over-the-top expression? Well, I bid you consider the sad case of Bill Kristol and his tweeting, twittering, meltdown.

I am put in mind of the opening line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl: 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

"So sad!" as the Orange Man might say.

In this brilliant segment, 3:13 in length, Carlson 'unloads' with full justification on Bill Kristol, a man I used to read and respect.

The so-called Red Scare of the '50s and '60s was not a scare but a genuine threat. For a real red scare see my man Hanson, Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia?

The piece concludes:

So what drives this about-face?

Not the fact that Russia tried to cause chaos in 2016, as it has for many years with all Western democracies. Perhaps it is only because a supposedly unbeatable Hillary inexplicably lost to the unlikely Donald Trump — thanks to her own campaign’s incompetence rather than Russian collusion.

Had Hillary Clinton just campaigned in Wisconsin once, and more in Pennsylvania and Michigan (and less in Georgia and Arizona), President Hillary Clinton might now be lecturing us about her reset 2.0 outreach to Vladimir Putin.

Instead, a moment after her electoral demise, “the Russians did it” trope bloomed, the disseminated Steele–Fusion GPS file resurfaced to become the buzz of the properly toadyish media, and “collusion” was born — a charge that so far has not proven true, even though it has consumed thousands of hours of investigations, and millions of hours of media hysteria.

As a result of a McCarthy-like Russian-under-every-American-bed hysteria, we now have all became far less safe in an already very, very dangerous world.

David Gelernter is tops.  Excerpt:

I’d love for him [Trump] to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative intellectuals insist that Mr. Trump’s wrong policies are what they dislike. So what if he has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, re-established solid relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, led us out of the Paris climate accord, plans to increase military spending (granted, not enough), is trying to get rid of ObamaCare to the extent possible, proposed to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement? What has he done lately?

Andrew C. McCarthy:

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

[ . . .] 

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

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On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth' I wrote the following:

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-­of-­lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus!  There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them.  Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice.  Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion.  Still, it could be true.  Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence.  He pretended to know something he could not know.  Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.  

So he didn't lie.  What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them. 

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting.  He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true.  But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them.  A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.)   Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement.  Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth.  (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them:  he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure.  The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true.  He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam.  The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard.  Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

So that's what I said back in December. But now we have evidence that Trump was right:

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

Even Democrats should find this troubling; every vote cast by a noncitizen voter negates the vote of a citizen voter. It's that simple. It's time the Democratic Party started living up to its name and stop encouraging noncitizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election.

But of course the Democrats will not live up to their name, being elitists and globalists; and of course they are not troubled by the votes of non-citizens. The best proof of this is their opposition to photo ID at polling places. Their intention is transparent: to win by any means, legal or illegal.

 

The 'architecture' is laid out in convincing detail by Victor Davis Hanson in yet another piece of penetrating analysis.

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, the summer of 2017 is shaping up as the Summer of Hate.

The Left has come full circle, from (talk of) peace and love to resistance and hate.

Their resistance is tantamount to sedition. Lefties posture as like unto the brave members of the French Resistance who opposed by assassination and sabotage the Nazi occupation.  But Trump was duly elected, and to date no evidence of collusion with the Russians has emerged. The leftist posturing belongs in the Theater of the Absurd. Leftists are in effect opposing our system of government.

As for hate, prominent liberals, leftists, 'progressives,' are working to incite it. They should be held morally accountable and not allowed to hide behind the First Amendment.  Good advice from Victor Davis Hanson:

The Trump administration should insist that all universities and colleges that receive federal funds guarantee to their students First Amendment protections of free speech, due process, civil rights, and the right to assemble peacefully. If they cannot or will not comply with the Bill of Rights, then campuses should come under review of their funding from Washington.

Moreover, anyone who makes a direct threat or clear allusion to killing the president of the United States should be put on a terrorist no-fly list for six months, an act that can be done without a formal indictment and trial. If revving up a crowd in Washington by yelling out a personal wish to blow up the White House and its occupants, or holding up a facsimile of the decapitated head of the president to galvanize a video audience does not constitute enough suspicion to take a breather from flying, then nothing much else does. If Madonna had to take a slow freighter back to London, then she might curb her macabre enthusiasm at her next rally.

The only way that the Resistance can be halted is to insist that its efforts remain lawful. If they are not, perpetrators must be held accountable.

The first of Hanson's point is rock-solid. The second raises the ticklish question of when hate speech ceases to be protected speech. See first of the related articles below.

You should read the whole of Hanson's latest.

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More Liberal-Left Insanity

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The famous show about nothing finds its political equivalent in a certain investigation about nothing.

Forward: The Southern border is being secured. And this despite the obstructionism of the donkeys.

Back: U. S. Army goes 'transgender.' Here:

The Army has begun mandatory transgender sensitivity training for soldiers. The training covers everything from “transfemale” soldiers to transgender shower etiquette to dealing with a male soldier who becomes pregnant.

Interesting times, these. How could anyone be bored?

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A Checkered Past

Here