I find it instructive that the majority of the people who are now suddenly willing to accept the word of Michael Cohen after he’s been coached by Clinton stooge Lenny Davis, are almost uniformly the very same ones who were willing until very recently to take the word of Jussie Smollett as gospel.
Ya know, maybe, just maybe, what we’re dealing with here is not a search for the truth, but a search for something/anything that will serve the Democrat partys political purposes.
Then again I’ve never met a liberal that doesn’t conflate his party’s talking points with the national interest.
Over at Intellectual Takeout, Grayson Quay gives voice to something that I have been thinking for 30 years now:
What the former Beatle failed to realize is that a world with “nothing to kill or die for” is a world with nothing to live for.
He would have us subordinate our individual creeds to an amorphous “brotherhood of man,” but that concept is not as simple as it seems.
First we must ask things like, “Why is human life valuable?” and “What does human flourishing look like?” Surely these are theological questions that can only be answered by some sort of transcendent ideal—call it “heaven” if you want—that is, by definition, more valuable than any human life. A belief for which one is unwilling to either kill or die is a belief too weak to provide the vital energy necessary to sustain civilization.
One commentator insightfully calls the song “the antithesis of a call to arms.” How long does Lennon imagine his utopia would last if none of its citizens were willing to take up arms and risk their lives to defend it?
(Shrug)
I consider that Lennon, (never the brightest bulb in the circuit) never took the time to think these matters through to their logical conclusion. Instead, like most leftists of his day, and even today for that matter, he leaned most heavily on emotion not logic. Blame it on Yoko, blame it on the drugs or a combination thereof I don’t care.
There is perhaps an undercurrent in all of this that deserves mentioning. If there is no belief in the Transcendent as Lennon encouraged, nothing hard and fast in terms of the value of human life, perhaps that’s why the starry-eyed left is so ambivalent about the taking of human life in the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood?
I’ll say this right up front. I think Trump did the right thing here.
He saw the deal wasn’t materializing, and he called the little gargoyle out on hiding most of his nuclear stockpiles. Kim tried to play Trump for an idiot and Trump spanked him for it, justifiably so.
The New York Sun seems to agree:
The collapse of President Trump’s summit with the North Korean party boss, Kim Jong Un, certainly takes us back — to October 12, 1986. That’s when President Reagan stood up and walked out of the Reykjavik summit with another party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, of the Soviet Union. We can remember it like it was yesterday. The long faces, the dire predictions, the Left’s instinct to blame the Americans.
Yeah, well, what’s going to be interesting about this is watching the left telling everybody the Trump shouldn’t have backed away from these negotiations, after weeks of telling everybody that he shouldn’t have gone in the first place.
And friends, let’s remember what happened after Reagan pulled out of Reykjavik… Suitably chastened, the Soviets came back and actually came up with an acceptable deal.
That’s what’s going on here. Unlike Obama, who would sign on to any deal, regardless of the work ability of that deal, just to be able to claim he had a deal, Trump isn’t about to play that game.
Funny thing, I don’t remember any of the major news channels including Fox mentioning anything about this.
Watch:
I can’t say this any better, so I’ll just posted here…
Nobody should be shocked by this… Jim Jordan’s got it figured out..
“The first announced witness for the 116th Congress is a guy who is going to prison in two months for lying to Congress. Mr. Chairman, your chairmanship will always be identified with this hearing and we all need to understand what this is.
This is the Michael Cohen hearing presented by Lanny Davis. That’s right, Lanny Davis choreographed the whole darn thing, the Clintons’ best friend, loyalist, operative, Lanny Davis put this all together.
You know how we know? He told the committee staff. He said the hearing was his idea. He selected this committee. He had to talk Michael Cohen into coming.
“And most importantly, he had to persuade the chairman to actually have it. He told us it took two months to get that job done. But here we are. He talked him into it.
“This might be the first time someone convicted of lying to Congress has appeared again so quickly in front of Congress. Certainly it’s the first time a convicted perjurer has been brought back to be a star witness in a hearing.
“And there’s a reason this is a first, because no other committee would do it. Think about this. With Mr. Cohen here, this committee — we got lots of lawyers on this committee.
“This committee is actually encouraging a witness to violate attorney/client privilege. Mr. Chairman, when we legitimize dishonesty, we delegitimize this institution.
And, here’s another one
You know I’m seriously considering putting up a page with nothing but these
I haven’t said anything about the academy awards fiasco the other night mostly because it interests me not at all, who gets what award and so on. If they actually produced movies anybody cared about anymore, it might be different. But, no.
Let me say, the prospect of watching the unbearable posturing of the rich and privileged lecturing each other ( and by extension, us) about the evils of the rich and privileged is right up there with listening to Yoko Ono records on my list of pleasurable things to do.
That said, I must confess a certain level of satisfaction, by way of the breathless press reports coming out of that hot mess, that nothing is changed.
They are all trying to outdo each other in the currency of that realm… Which is leftist virtue signaling. that’s the lion’s share of how people are judged in Hollywood anymore. Which in turn is precisely why they haven’t made movies that are worth a crap for the last 30 years, anyway. They’ve given up any pretense of giving out awards based on artistry and talent, and focused instead on “advancing the cause”.
Actually, things have changed a little bit this year based on the breathless “reporting” I’ve seen… An increasing stridency in their virtue signaling, which I take to indicate an increased desperation. Then again, that’s the nature of trying to shout somebody down. The only way to get noticed is to get louder and in this context, more radically leftist.
So it is also with the Democrats in Congress and the Democratic presidential field.
Two years ahead of the actual election and already this thing has turned into a race to the bottom. Each of these supposedly ‘leading” candidates trying to “out leftist” the other and apparently not caring about mainstream America …or at the very least, misidentifying it, perhaps intentionally so. even their own polling data is telling them that the socialism being espoused by the FrontRunners is a non-starter with most Americans, and yes they embrace it, apparently because this is what they’ve wanted, all along.
In their desperation, they’ve been showing us clearly who they are.
And, of course…
When the home of Nikki Joly burned down in 2017, killing five pets, the FBI investigated it as a hate crime.
Uh huh.
After all, the transgender man and gay rights activist had received threats after having a banner year in this conservative town.
In the prior six months, he helped open the city’s first gay community center, organized the first gay festival and, after 18 years of failed attempts, helped lead a bruising battle for an ordinance that prohibits discrimination against gays.
For his efforts, a local paper named him the Citizen of the Year.
But, then….
Authorities later determined the fire was intentionally set, but the person they arrested came as a shock to both supporters and opponents of the gay rights movement. It was the citizen of the year — Nikki Joly.
Gee… Sound like anyone else we know of? Or actually, more like several somebody’s?
Billy Beck who was on fire today by the way asks a very pertinent question:
Why is this not certifiable pathology by now?
The answer I suspect has to do with the idea of the first it has to be declared an illness for there to be a pathology developed for it.
Which in turn of course would mean that we’d have to reverse the previous rulings that it is not a mental illness we’re dealing with here.
With a hat tip to Billy Beck for drawing it to my attention, I’ll pass along the attached from Dan Gifford. It shows quite a bit about the state of race relations today. Most of the accusations being tossed at whitey have no concept of history whatsoever, as he points out.
Spike Lee and his fellow believers need a history lesson about slavery. It’s a lesson I noticed long ago he and others needed when I played a prison guard in his film, “Malcolm X.”
Nothing has changed.
After the film he directed, The BlacKkKlansman, won Best Adapted Screenplay, Lee opened by bringing up 1619 and marking 400 years since “our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and brought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved.”
Wrong.
The Aftricans brought to Jamestown in 1619 had been saved from slavery. And they could not be made slaves in Jamestown because slavery did not yet exist.
In contrast, Virginia Governor “blackface” Northam got slammed for saying the Africans brought to the Virginia colony in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves.
Only partially right. They were made indentured servants just like the many white indentured in Virginia then.
If you missed the Northam connection that brought the subject to the fore, that started when CBS’ Gayle King pushed back on the Virginia governor a month ago when he used the term “indentured servants” as a euphemism for slavery, according to many news accounts.
No euphemism. King was blathering an oft repeated political narrative as did Spike Lee.
What really happened.
In 1619, a Dutch warship arrived at the English settlement of Jamestown with 20 or so Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship. They were left at Jamestown in return for provisions.
Since there were no slave laws in Virginia then, neither the newly arrived Africans or anyone else was a slave or could be made a slave. What Virginia had and all other colonies had was indentured servitude. That was the system whereby a poor person would agree, in a legally binding contract, to work for a specific time for the person who paid their ship passage to what became America.
So the Africans were treated as indentured servants to provide labor worth the provisions exchanged to the Dutch just like the English indentured poor. When their indenture was over, the Africans were given the same opportunities as the English. They were given what were known as “freedom dues,” which usually included a piece of land and supplies, including a gun. Black-skinned or white-skinned, they became free.
It’s important to know the first Virginia colonists did not think of themselves as “white” or use that word to describe themselves. They saw themselves as Christians or Englishmen, or in terms of their social class. They were nobility, gentry, artisans, or servants.
As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to Africans as a more profitable and renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery began.
Massachusetts was the first to legalize slavery in 1641 and Virginia in 1661.However, free blacks remained free.
An African named Anthony Johnson was one of those who had been freed from servitude and he owned land, cattle and indentured servants of his own. Ironically, when servitude gradually morphed into slavery, Johnson became the first known slave owner in what became America.
Yes, a black man was the first slave owner in the American colonies.
The 1619 myth isn’t the only one regarding slavery that persists. One of the other beliefs I suspect CBS’ King also holds is that all blacks in the ante-bellum South were slaves. Not so.
PBS’ Harvard historian Louis Gates, among others, notes there were around 500,000 free blacks who owned their own property and many of those owned slaves. In fact, one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina noted in the 1860 census was a black man named William Ellison who owned more than 30 slaves.
None of the aforementioned should be taken as my endorsement or mitigation of servitude or slavery. But I point out the above because the counter claims are persistent pieces of historical misrepresentation that are used to keep Americans at each other’s throats about race.
It’s as I’ve been saying for quite a while now and taking a lot of heat for saying it…. The only reason racism still exists in this country is there’s an awful lot of people using it for a crutch, and Spike Lee is certainly one of these.
The liberals are losing, and are losing it.
First of all let’s suggest that’s a person creating a hoax hate crime so as to make another party look bad, is actually engaging in a hate crime themselves. Here’s three examples.
So you think these three are the only ones doing hate crimes?
Not hardly.
Jonah Goldberg, yesterday:
Smollett’s hoax isn’t that unusual. I’m already running long, so I’ll spare you the data, but hoaxes happen all the time — and so do actual hate crimes. They’ve happened under Trump, and they were happening for decades before Trump. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see Al Sharpton opine on the Smollett case given that his entire career stemmed from the Tawana Brawley hoax and his role in a real hate crime that killed seven people.
I’ve been following this stuff ever since I witnessed such hoaxes as a college student. I think the first book I ever reviewed professionally was about student activism. The author, Paul Rogat Loeb, had a whole chapter about racism on college campuses. He focused on a hate crime at Emory. It was only after dozens of pages about all the wonderful consciousness-raising — and shakedowns of administrators — that resulted from the response to the atrocity that he acknowledged that the victim orchestrated the whole thing. But that was irrelevant, according to Loeb, because “other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again, at colleges nationwide.” And besides, so much consciousness was raised! I wrote at the time, “When students are taught that the coin of the realm is race and rage, invariably some will spend that currency on self-aggrandizement and controversy.
Or, to paraphrase Dale Franks at the q & o podcast on Friday, when victims are lionized, victimhood becomes the coin of the realm.
Jonah, and Dale, are both precisely correct here. Consider the nearly 700 hate crimes directed against anything to the right of Fidel Castro compiled by the Breitbart folks some Independent news sources.
Related:
Liz Sheild:
“This is shameful because it painted this city that we all love and work hard in, in a negative connotation,” Johnson said. “To insinuate and stage a hate crime of that nature when he knew that as a celebrity he’d get a lot of attention … It’s despicable. It makes you wonder what’s going through someone’s mind.”
No, Liz, it doesn’t make me wonder at all. We already know.
