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Irritating Abuse of Language

On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.

We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do.  Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws.  The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.

A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”.  Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work.  Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing.  What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens.  Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here.  These people are the citizens of other countries.  They are not stateless people.

Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.

Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation.  The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.

So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities.  American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens.  If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.

Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.

Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded.  He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy.  Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”

I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it.  The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available.  American citizenship be damned.

Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections.  Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs.  Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members.  How does that make sense?

From now on, please clean up the language.  All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions.  The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all.  For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth.  Let’s talk like we understand the fact.

RogerG

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Hypocrisy Has Long Legs in Politics, And So Does Never Admitting a Mistake

CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 27, 2019.

Remember the cry from Republicans that “character counts” during the Clinton impeachment battle?  Now, nary a word of condemnation from them about Trump’s present public and past private (and not so private) behavior.  Don’t worry, the Dems are a mountain of hypocrisies too.  Remember Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.) and her U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform of 1994-1996?  Her restrictionist views on immigration once found a home in the Democratic Party.  If alive today, not only would she never make the stage in either of the recent Dem debates, she would be wiping spittle off her face after a visit to a local DC restaurant.

Don’t expect either party to offer a duplicity-free environment.  Maybe it has to do with life constantly throwing monkey wrenches into our preconceived notions.  What we once condemned – or loved – turns around and bites us in our posterior.

Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.)

Jordan said the following about immigration policy: “… it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”  Further, she wrote, “For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful.  There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law.  Let me be clear: that is not enough.”  From there on, she continues to sound more and more like Trump.

The hood ornament for open borders is our giddy sophomore class president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY).  Lately, she strode into the land of Nazi-shaming about our immigrant holding centers, calling them “concentration camps”.  It’s true that when a person resorts to making anything a clone of the Nazis, you’re close to admitting the sterility of your point.  Game over, Alexandria.

What does she do when confronted with her banality?  She dodges.  In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, she was questioned, “… there were also ‘concentration camps’ under Obama and under Bill Clinton…. did you call them concentration camps at the time when Obama was president?”

Her awkward response was, “Well, at the time, I was working in a restaurant.”  She tried to recover by additionally saying, “… I absolutely was outspoken against Obama’s immigration policies and the detention of families then.”  He didn’t ask her about her past opposition.  He queried her about equating our detention centers under Obama to what is colloquially understood to mean Auschwitz.  She rhetorically zigzags like an Allied troop ship in a u-boat killing zone.

Quibbling is another favorite tactic when caught tasting your feet.  She attempts to bring up a more benign and arcane definition of “concentration camp”.  The over-caffeinated Ocasio-Cortez exhibits all the signs of a zealot caught being a zealot.

Baffoonishness is now a qualification for the political limelight.

Read the story of the Tapper/Cortez interview here.

RogerG

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A Telethon in Reverse

The Democratic Party first debate, 6/26/2019.

I didn’t watch the Democrat debate last night. It’d be too painful.  Anyway, the general script for the primary has already been written.  The parade of the ambitious are functioning like the old March of Dimes telethon … in reverse.  Instead of calling in to donate money, the candidates act like the volunteers in the phone bank announcing the latest request for more of other people’s money.  It’s a marathon about how much to give away, not contribute.

Cartoon #1

In the first cartoon – “Bernie Panders” – Bernie Sanders proclaims he’ll call and raise the bids of the faux indigenous candidate (Elizabeth Warren) and our giddy sophomore class president (AOC) in their demands to write off the student loan debt of people who voluntarily stoked up their debt in their halcyon days on campus, much of it accumulated in grad school.  Now they have to pay it back with a payback schedule bent-over-backwards to make it easy.

Who’ll pay for the giveaway?  It won’t be the young scions of the upper income and upper middle income families who mostly ran up the debt.  The favorite target of our politically ambitious rabble-rousers is the rich, out of which they won’t get anywhere close to retiring the $1.4 trillion price tag.  All the while, the targets hide their money or flee the country, and the millstone around the neck of toddlers and the yet-to-be-born – called the national debt – will only get heftier. Too bad. Toddlers and the yet-to-be-born don’t vote.  Not yet anyway.

Cartoon #2

Cartoon #2 brings up another antic of the spendthrifts.  Here, the presidential wannabes magically transform an economic good/service into a “right”, resurrecting FDR’s old ploy.  FDR, great guy, but occasionally he spouted nonsense.  How do you turn something produced with limited resources into a “right”?  Answer: you can’t.  It’d be like reducing obesity by legislatively repealing gravity.  Economic behavior is as natural to us as our teeth.  The behavior can’t be repealed.

You make it a “right”, and therefore “free” to the user, and the demand floodgates are thrown open.  The concept of a checking account with limited funds has no relevance.  You want it; it’s a “right”; you get it.  The only real limit is politics, and that is based on how much the people will tolerate the declining quality, the delays, and the denial of services.  It plays out whether in the Soviet Union or the British Health Service.

It’s silly beyond belief to equate a “right” to an economic good/service to the right to free speech.  Free speech has guard rails (Schenck v. United States, 1919), like a highway, but there is no set limit to the number cars taking the route in the course of its life.  Healthcare is limited to the number of people who are capable of providing it and other resources not committed to other necessities.  Healthcare isn’t geared to be a “right”.

Don’t tell that to the politically ambitious panderers.  Also don’t tell them that “payer” in single payer means “taxpayer”, not “government”.

Cartoon #3

I heard that there was much Spanish speaking at the pander-fest in Miami.  Spanish is a beautiful language, but I suspect the display was identity pandering.  If it’s a “dog whistle” (using woke language), it’s one tuned to the ears of the multicultural barkers.  Their agenda includes the practical erasure of the border.  Thus cartoon #3.

Clause 4 of Section 8 of Article I is about to be read out of The Constitution.  Once you eliminate border enforcement by dismantling ICE and turning the rest into a construction battalion to build bridges across the Rio Grande, any person living in a dirt floor hut is a soon-to-be-an-American.  Would you ever again be able to connect the word “manage” to the word “immigration”?  Would there be relevance of “rule of law” to the subject of “immigration”?  Hardly.  Where’s the law since you trampled it into the ground?

Cartoon #4

Cartoon #4 gives a clue about the state of mind of the Democratic Party.  Gargantuan offerings of free government stuff is a certain path to ruin.  It’s a race to emulate Argentina, or maybe Venezuela, or maybe the Soviet Union.  Ruination can be a democratic choice.

RogerG

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Ho-Hum, Another Politician Slanders the Truth.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Ca.), the California presidential candidate.

Here’s something for the “Ho-hum” file.  You know that it’s campaign season when the air waves are filled with distortions, fabrications, and outright lies.  One of the more popular gimmicks is to take two contradictory claims and present them with a straight face.  Take for instance the declaration that the good times are due to your guy – in this case, Obama – and simultaneously paint a picture of bad times for the guy that you’re trying to throw out – in this case, Trump. Last year, Hillary, in her blame-everyone-else book tour, said that we can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time.  Yes, but not if the two ideas cancel each other out.  Heads explode.

A classic example of the flimflam bubbled out of the mouth of the California candidate for president, Kamala Harris.  While always expressing the saintliness of Obama, she goes on to assert, “In America right now, today, almost half of Americans are a $400 unexpected expense away from complete upheaval.”  The old socialist curmudgeon, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, desperate for news copy and air time, regurgitate the line, or some form of it.

Wait a minute.  Did that so-called disaster suddenly erupt when Trump placed his hand on the Bible on January 20, 2017?  I kinda doubt that the moment of swearing-in also coincided with the evaporation of people’s bank accounts. For that to be true, magic and the philosopher’s stone enter the realm of science.

You should know by now that when a politician starts quoting numbers logic goes out the window. Where did those numbers – “almost half” and “$400” – come from? It’s the equivalent of child abuse in the field of statistics. Partisan hacks rooting around in a Federal Reserve study found some tidbits that could be manipulated into an indictment. Wham-bam, there you have it.

What’s actually in the Fed study (“Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households”, 2018)? According to the Fed’s green eye-shades, 61% of people have $400 in CASH to pay for an emergency. In the mouths of the Dems, the 61% who “have” becomes 39% who “don’t”, and 39% stretches into “almost half”.

That’s not all of it. Left out of the demagoguery is the word “cash”. “Cash” means Benjamins and excludes many other forms of liquid assets. Also, people make choices … dah! Some prefer to spend till the well runs dry. Others prefer to maintain good credit scores and address junior’s broken leg that way. It’s not like an epidemic of root canals suddenly causes the homeless population to swell.

It’s the same old story since FDR: play class warfare. Dems need a Great Depression, always, all of the time. They can’t shake the Hoovervilles and the bread lines. For them, it’s always and forever-more 1933.

The inexorable pull of Marxian class struggle yanks the Dems further left each campaign season. Now they’re rubbing elbows with Raul Castro. Center/Left used to apply to the Dems. Well, for now, “center” is orphaned.

Read the article, “Americans May Be Strapped, But the Go-To Statistic Is False”, Michael R. Strain, Bloomberg, June 4, 2019.

RogerG

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Speaking of the Danger of Government Dependency

Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.

Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts.  He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.

The lesson is clear.  If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals.  In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.

The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe.  That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).

Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?

RogerG

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Disinformation Within Disinformation

Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.

Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”?  I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing.  Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017.  I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”.  Enough; please, enough!  Put it to bed.

The reason is obvious.  This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign.  The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.

The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”.  But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”).  It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss.  From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser.  Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.

Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates?  The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project).  It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).

Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe.  Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets.  Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.

Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us.  Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual.  Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor.  The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.

Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)

We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand.  The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous.  The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians.  Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar.  Maybe that’s true.

The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump.  But there’s a fly in the ointment.  They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins.  Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.

They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.  The winner was falsely covered in mud.  Shockingly, it happened to be Trump.  If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)

The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element.  The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner.  For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.

A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor).  The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers.  The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

John F. Kennedy

RogerG

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Bastardizing the Language

U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.

Too much heat can destroy things.  The same is true of political heat.  It wreaks havoc on the language.  For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.

I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology.  I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora.  It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore.  All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals.  It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.

Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible.  Apple and Android are riding on his back.

Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.

The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it.  Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process.  Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.

“Old” is all around us.  It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”.  Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity.  They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum.  He just found a way to use it.  Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity.  They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).

Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.

“Old” is everywhere.  If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).

“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads.  Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power.  Power to do what?  Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders.  Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy.  The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works.  That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.

Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field.  Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”.  Sounds great, and is.  The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.

The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways.  First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way.  Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley.  Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.

Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”.  What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking?  It’s balderdash.

Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”.  “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition.  Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument.  No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language.  Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.

RogerG

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California Taxes and Gas Prices, Part II

Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.

I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states.  Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices.  More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.

I. California and Blue State Taxes.

April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds.  Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations.  Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.

Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard

First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks.  Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less.  We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year.  Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.

Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch.  The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).

The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions.  Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography.  The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly.  I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs.  As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments.  How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party?  Hmmmm, I wonder.

Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help.  Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state.  It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting.  Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier.  It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law.  Why is that?  You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state.  Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover.  It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.

Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.

II. California’s Gas Prices.

Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices.  But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats.  A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for.  The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism.  Borenstein gave them one.

Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley

Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up.  Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law.  There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand.  The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.

The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country.  Such markets still have supply and demand.  It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.

A beleaguered California resident?

This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker.  The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality.  If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.

And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC.  And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas.  I guess that you get what you vote for.

RogerG

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A Little History to Soothe the Savage Beast

Jerrold Nadler (D,NY) on MSNBC, Jan. 09, 2019

The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage.  Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.

A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story.  It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power.  Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?

Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control?  If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.

Examples abound.

Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake.  For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned.  Belief cometh before proof.  So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.

But what of Eric Holder?

AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.

Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation.  17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder.  The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media.  That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes.  These aren’t “contempt of court”.  If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.

And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases.  Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.  The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).

The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends.  How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?

By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want.  But they don’t want.  They want power and that means Trump’s scalp.  This isn’t about the truth.  It’s about naked, raw power.

In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information.  Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing.  Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name.  Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters.  Go figure.

In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice.  Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life.  In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.

RogerG

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Sports is Increasingly Soiling Itself with Partisan Politics

Alex Cora speaks to the press about the boycott before Monday’s game in Baltimore.

I just learned in “Axios AM” of the Red Sox partial boycott of the traditional White House visit to celebrate their World Series championship.  Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about Trump, but admittedly even more so with the radical lefty lurch of the Democratic Party.  Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about organized partisan political acts by athletes.  Alex Cora, the manager, and some of the players say that they won’t attend.  Well, now I have another team who has muddied itself with partisan politics to avoid.  When will this stop?

Of course, Axios couldn’t help but portray the spat in skin color terms … and so do the boycotting players.  The poison of reducing moral claims to melanin counts, cultural identities, and ritual assertions of victimhood has penetrated the locker room.  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

It’s disgusting.  I’m reminded of an audience’s shout to singer James Taylor when he got political: “Shut up and sing!”  A parallel?

RogerG