Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
As a community college student back in the day, my college’s football team (Bakersfield College) would host a team from the LA area. LA team supporters would chant “sooie” while amply spicing their outbursts with “redneck” and “hayseed” and cow bells. I didn’t think much of it because our team frequently sent them packing soundly defeated, but the incident came to mind as I listened to Michael Bloomberg’s denigration of farmers. Cosmopolitanism is classically meant to indicate a broad exposure leading to refinement. No more. It’s a synonym for narrow-mindedness. Bigotry can be found not only under Klan robes but also in faculty lounges, corporate boardrooms, and Manhattan penthouses.
Bloomberg has as much familiarity with agriculture as the Peter Sellers character, Chance, in the movie “Being There”, did with modernity. For Chance, spending his entire life in the mansion and educated by tv, he was mentally out of place with the outside world as Bloomberg is in flyover country or among anybody who makes a living with their hands.
Chance (Peter Sellers) as his benefactor lays dying.
Bloomberg was raised and continued to live in an urban cocoon. Born in a Boston neighborhood, raised in Medford, Mass., and afterward attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Bloomberg went into high finance at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street before he founded Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City. It’s safe to say that not much dirt ever got under his fingernails. Yet, he confidently pontificates on the alleged superiority of air-conditioned office occupants over the millions of hard workers in pickup trucks travelling the fields of the American heartland. Similarly, another Dem huckster, Joe Biden, with a wave of the hand, condemned the fossil fuel industry and totalitarianly announced that all its workers would be transformed into coders. Frankly, it’s nauseating.
Check out this interview with Victor Davis Hanson on this subject and others (click on the Hanson picture below). I don’t agree with Hanson on everything, but I think he hits the mark here.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) on The View, Feb. 19, 2020.
The old term “yellow dog districts” needs an update. If you’ve forgotten, there really were districts in the Jim Crow South filled with white people who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act began the process of sending them into extinction, and rightly so. Though, that hasn’t stopped the rise of village idiot districts. These are districts filled with people who would sooner vote for a village idiot than a Republican. In this case, it’s more than a caricature. They actually do vote them into office.
Granted, idiocy crosses the partisan divide; however, it’s a special kind of idiocy that runs deep in today’s Democratic Party. The lunacy stems from the mental maturity of a toddler and extends into a person’s 30’s, and maybe beyond. These are adults who espouse tooth-fairy economics for example. Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provide proof of the existence of the “village idiot district”.
Many things stand out as I watch her performances. One thing is her glibness and confidence as she spouts nonsense. When pressed on how she’ll pay for her list of freebies, for instance, she mentions such things as a “transaction tax” on securities trades to pay for the scheme. She has no concept of the impact of her tax on behavior. Her notion of economics has much in common with a slave economy. Slave economics functions on the principle that you can whip and chain people with taxes and regulation and they will continue to perform as before. In other words, she is a college economics major without a high-schooler’s understanding of incentives and disincentives. You punish people in a free economy and they will seek to avoid the lash. Welcome, Alexandria, to Reality 101.
So, two things will happen under the tutelage of the Democrats’ dominatrix: (1) businesses find it harder to get capital, and therefore fewer businesses, usually startups – something not totally unwelcome to a socialist – and (2) she ends up with less dough for her cockamamie handouts. Welcome, Alexandria, to lecture #2 of Reality 101.
She reminds me of the high school sophomore who goes home after History class to tell dad of the Battle of Khe Sanh, of which he participated and said nothing. She looks and speaks with the self-assurance of an oracle while taxing the patience of dear old dad. The only problem on The View is that she is sitting with 3 other self-assured sophomores; McCain deserves to be excluded.
Kids say the darndest things, and so do some adults who think like kids.
The miscreant in camo and flack jacket.The miscreant arrested.The 17 victims.
People distant from an event have a tendency to nationalize it. The occurrence is shoe-horned into some broader issue, or, better yet for activists, a politically opportune crisis. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman High School would descend into the gutter of national gun-control politics. The most impactful circumstances surrounding the shooter are glazed over in the pursuit of a hot-button issue. Useful lessons are avoided as the coffers fill with contributions from any number of frightened citizens and well-heeled political exploiters (Michael Bloomberg, et al).
The most relevant facts, though, are those that directly relate to the cultprit. Right there, we find a convoluted and perplexing school discipline policy – the Promise program – in the school district, all meant to dilute the reality of bad behavior in the classroom, no matter the violator’s background. The result is a discipline system that few can understand, including the miscreant. The old rule of investing applies: if you don’t understand it, don’t do it.
The second factor to come out of the horrid affair is the insipid reactions of our public employees up and down the federal system. Take district superintendent Runcie and his use of gross and misleading numbers to defend his discipline system that in reality can’t and won’t remove real threats. Disgusting. Or the behavior of local law enforcement to refuse to enter the building to stop the shooter. Or the school’s security personnel who saw the guy coming and did nothing to stop him. Appalling. Or the warnings coming from citizens over a number of years to authorities about the shooter’s disturbing behavior. Warnings were plenty, and unheeded.
This only proves that real public safety begins with personal responsibility of the individual citizen. That’s the reason for the Second Amendment. Gun-free zones are in practice safe zones for killers.
Crass language would refer to the Parkland incident as one huge government “cluster #$&?@”. Either way you cut it, it was an entirely avoidable disaster … if government worked as designed in its flow chart. Fact is, it seldom does.
Instead, we get the parade of demagogues who promise a more centralized and bureaucratized version of the same. A good place to find them was on the stage Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.
The lineup of demagogues in Las Vegas, Feb. 19, 2020.
Yes, Mike Bloomberg, the Democratically Party is a crazy-left snake pit. Many people commenting on last night’s Democratic debate dwelled on Warren’s takedown of Bloomberg and the knife fight between Klobuchar and Buttigieg. I saw it differently. It was a brawl over who is most crazy-left. Combine the back-and-forth with the looney-left audience and you have a debate in an antifa bubble. Mike, face it, you have no place in that cuckoo’s nest.
Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren at the Las Vegas debate.
Ironically and sporadically, the only one to approach sanity on the stage was Bloomberg. Yes, he’s crazy about goofy gun control, he’s a living insult to agriculture, and he’s got a Leninesque streak to control what’s on our kitchen tables. But on some matters – government-run health care, the absurdity of socialism, recognition of the basic responsibility for law enforcement – he was speaking truth to the power of the mob. On those occasions, he was the adult in the room.
Take Elizabeth’s Warren’s play to Bolshevik feminism at Bloomberg’s expense. True, Bloomberg may have been a pig in the workplace (NDA’s anyone?) but she plays up to it to support the aggrandizement of state power to manage more of the intimate details of our lives. I don’t know what’s worse: a male chauvinist or a hyper-left commissar of all interpersonal relations.
The Buttigieg/Klobuchar spat contained some real whoppers. For instance, Buttigieg assailed Klobuchar for voting to confirm Trump’s director of ICE. In that exchange, Buttigieg stepped all over his tongue in claiming that it was only Trump and this official who separated families. No, Pete, when illegal border-crossers with children were taken into custody, the children were separated – under Obama too. You can read about it here.
It became a burgeoning problem when Obama sent signals in thought and action, like DACA, that children can be a transit ticket into the US. Trump became saddled with a growing number of illegals who grabbed a kid, or parents who had one or more at hand, to illegally enter our country. Families became an increasing feature of illegal immigration at the start of the Trump presidency. But don’t interrupt Mayor Pete with facts as he jumps on the party’s train to no borders.
Mike, do you really belong in a party reeking with no-borders socialism and its inevitable cousin of central planning? I would think that last night’s snake pit would be enough for anyone to seek safer political environs. Sorry Mike, your indulgences in money to the party, gun grabs, and your conversion to climate change hysteria apparently aren’t enough to excuse the fact that you’re a rich white guy who can’t quite buy into the socialist fantasies. I don’t know where you belong, unless you’re a fetishistic masochist.
Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.
In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.
For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.
2016 election results by county.
Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.
Andrew C. McCarthy
The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.
Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.
That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.
All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?
William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.
“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week. If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation. The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.
George Templeton Strong
Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860. Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions. “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1. This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery. Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law. Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Hurray, it’s finally on!
The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996. Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations. One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC. He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”
McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism). Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.
If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness. Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment? The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges. Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything. Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar. The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists. And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.
Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)
The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”. Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers. Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility. But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference? Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law? Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome? In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government. Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.
In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize. They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them. The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.
Segregationists of the old South would be proud. No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed. The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information. It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds. Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders strides to the podium to announce his victory in the New Hampshire Democrat primary, 2/11/2020. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe)
The red/blue assignment on our election maps is wrong. The Democrats should be red, like the Labor Party in Britain. Now, anywhere from 25% to 35% of Democrat voters favor an avowed socialist. With Sanders’s narrow plurality in New Hampshire, to go along with his plurality in Iowa, he is in the hunt to win the nomination if not earn the moniker of “front runner”. In the past, the Dems got away with it through advocacy of slow-motion socialism – espousing socialism with plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability was accomplished by flippant self-identification as a “capitalist” – Warren’s trick. Capitalist or no, the Dems have pressed closer and closer to more and more government control of the economy and much of everything else. Socialism should be defined as “control” of the economy and not limited to “ownership”. Control is achieved with or without ownership.
Elizabeth on the campaign trail, 2019. (photo: Ethan Miller)
Sorry, Elizabeth Warren, you ought not get way with denying your true self. Sanders is more honest than you are.
Last night’s results removed the mask. To be a Democrat, you have just painted yourself one of the many shades of red … along with the espousal of taxpayer-funded abortion from conception to the drive home from the hospital – another kind of red.
The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
Elizabeth Warren is trying to right her sinking ship of a presidential campaign by appealing to the crazy left base of the Democratic Party with more and more outrageous utterances. Last Thursday (Jan. 30), she submitted a question in the impeachment trial by attacking the character of the Chief Justice, the presiding officer in the Senate trial. She basically accused him of being a shill for the president and Republicans. Watch the Chief Justice in a multi-second stare at the senator.
This not the way to “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936) . She would do well to get the book and read it. Under “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People”: #1, “Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.”
Previously, she belittled the office of Secretary of Education by notifying the world that a “trans” child would make the choice if she wins the presidency. What?! Is she showing how far she will go to shamelessly humiliate herself at the altar of woke patronization. At what point is the word “despicable” appropriate in describing a politician?
