Snark of the Day: Kurt Schlichter

The Snark of the Day, from Kurt Schlichter, Townhall:

Does anyone think Bill Clinton is going to be able to keep it in his pants just because Hillary’s in the White House?

The Clinton’s have long maintained that with a vote for one Clinton, you get two. In this case I agree with Bubba.

You are free to argue that B.J.’s sex life is own private business.   Alas, you would be wrong.   As, neither Clinton would want B.J.’s peccadilloes to become public knowledge, it leaves the Clinton open to foreign government blackmail.   Think about this, why did the Clinton’s allow Janet Reno, the Butcher of Waco to  serve two terms as attorney general?

A few thoughts on Hillary Cltinon’s emails.

First, it strikes me that when you’re talking about at E-mail system, you’re talking about messages that go out from that system to other systems. Other people. It is a communications device that sends from that system to other systems and other people.

Now, that may seems a bit obvious, but perhaps the implications of that simple fact may not be to some. Let’s consider them. Those facts mean…

* If there are any instances of Hillary Clinton doing government business from her private server, say, sending mail to any government servers, other workers at State, for example, or the White House, that evidence is available on the archives from the receiving system.

*It would also stand to reason that the humans running that system, receiving email on that system, would know it was sent from a private server, thus raising the question of an even wider cover-up.

* It  seems impossible to believe that she mail to the White House,  or to State,  or any other government agency, so the conclusion to be \\drawn is that the Obama administration in its entirety has always known about Hillary Clinton’s private server.

For a long time now, I have had issues with extreme libertarians on the issue of the role of government. Extreme libertarians as a rule generally want government removed. Period.

I’m with the founders… I think government has a place, but needs to be severely restricted, which is something that the Constitution has sought to do. The trouble is we let government for too long get away with bypassing the Constitution, most recently in the person of Barack Hussein Obama.

A discussion I had recently with one extreme libertarian, exemplifies the difference is I’m talking about. He had just come off of a rather lengthy diatribe about the left and its efforts to eliminate guns by means of law.

Leaving aside for the moment the idea that such restrictions fly in the face of the Second Amendment, I engaged the gent on the following ground… And please understand I’m paraphrasing here for the sake of both brevity and privacy…

“One of your arguments against the banning of certain weapons is that they are merely tools. You rightly suggest that it’s how the tool gets used that makes the difference. I find that a compelling argument.”

“OK…”

“The leftists among us will tell you that guns are inherently evil, and should be banned outright. Personally I find that an extraordinarily stupid argument. You and I have discussed in the past the reasons for that. And, I expect we agree.”

“Yes, we do.”

” Certainly, guns can be used to evil effect. But like any other tool, they can be used for good, as well. For example, defense. Including defense from a hostile government.”

“Correct.”

“Would you consider guns to be a necessary evil?”

“I’d consider that a fair statement, though I don’t know that  I’d word it precisely that way.”

“Banning, or banishing something because it can be used for evil, negates the good that it can do as well. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t government a tool?”

(Confused silence)

“Wasn’t Thomas Paine the one who told us that government as a necessary evil?”

(More confused silence.)
…

Now, before you start tuning up, I’m not playing the card that Obama played about making government cool again. Nor am i moving away from Reagan’s axiom that government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.

But again, I hold with the founders.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, 

We in these United States have been the beneficiaries of that wisdom. I think there is no argument against the idea that as established these United States grew to be the best example of freedom operating in the history of this world.

That said, there is also no argument against the idea that we have failed this experiment in freedom by allowing government to grow beyond its purview, from both an ideological and constitutional perspective. That, too, is a point to which the founders spoke rather eloquently.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by Government abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such , and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Unfortunately, we here in America find ourselves in just that situation. It’s our own fault, having let government get outside of its purview as I say. In my judgment our founders would be long since shooting.

And yes, that eventuality is exactly what the 2nd amendment was designed for.

But how have we come to this stage? How did we get here?
To answer that question, let’s refer back to something I posted in these spaces a little over a decade ago….

1: Who invented the concept of government?

2: What purpose would that entity have had in such creation?

One way we can answer those two questions at once, would be to look at what existed as the most powerful force before government was invented, and therefore what was the most likely inventor of government: CULTURE.

If we make the logical assumption that governments were originally created by the individual cultures, then it follows that each culture constructed their respective governments in their own image… governments that best reflected and advanced each culture’s interests.

The original purpose of government, therefore, is to protect, nurture and defend, and if possible expand the influence of, the culture that gave it life. As such, to the greatest of degrees possible, each government’s laws, on the whole, were the culture, codified. It follows, then, that any government holding to the original purpose of government will perform this task.

Now, notice I said to the greatest degree possible. I freely admit… Trumpet, even, that there are no perfect governments, no perfect laws. No law, or government can ever capture in amber, a culture. Cultures are far more complex than any law, however written, can encompass. So it is that laws cannot be the end-call and be-all to a culture, or to a country. Laws when taken too literally and made to apply to all events uniformly, can instead of being just, will instead dispense injustice. It is said that in hell, there will be law and policy and little else. Yet, this imperfect tool did at least manage to provide a mechanism toward the intended purpose… The furtherance of the culture that founded said government. This understanding that there is imperfection in government implies that other values should supersede governmental power when the tool of government doesn’t fit the task at hand well. I submit the highest value applied here should be the values of the culture, not that of the law.

(Which, I would argue is why there are judges which read not only the wording of the laws but then intent of them.)

Now, I hear some of you balking at this, suggesting the right of the individual are paramount; a noble sentiment. But consider this immovable fact:

Rights are not universal.

Yep. That’s what I said…Read it again, just to be sure.

Rights are not universal.

Clearly, this will raise many questions on the part of some. This should answer most;

When Jefferson wrote that “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” he was not speaking a universal truth at all. The operative word in that phrase is “WE”.

Rather than talking about a universal point of view, a universal truth, if you will, he was instead talking about the point of view of WE the new American culture. With this angle, many of the long-held myths about rights tend to disappear.

Consider; if it was in fact a universal truth that all men were created equal, it wouldn’t have been such a radical idea, for the time, much less then to now. Last I checked, it is quite true that a vast majority still do not consider these as any kind of truth, universal or otherwise; they consider them to be anything BUT self-evident. Royalty still exists, as do class structures, and slavery, as well.

Again, I say…Jefferson was speaking of the point of view of OUR culture, not that of others.

The fact of the matter is that RIGHTS ARE A CULTURAL CONCEPT, and are nigh on meaningless outside that construct. Once the culture is allowed to fall to the law, even in an attempt to impose rights where they do not exist, what happens to real rights, which are a cultural concept?

When one says “freedom”, the question should be ‘freedom from what’? The answers that come back will invariably be cultural in nature. They do not make any sense outside that environment.

As I’ve said, the law and government has been abused by some, it has moved away from that intended purpose of supporting the existing culture. They are in fact being used by the left to alter that morality, to alter that culture, and when that happens, the fall of the government cannot be far behind… and the fall of the culture itself beyond that, becomes a larger possibility. Often as not, the downfall of that culture is what they have in mind.

I submit what we have here, today, is the reversal of roles. Governments thinks itself the arbiter of the culture, not the servant of it. The US has the culture dramatically changed, and with it the concept of Rights. What is a right and what is not.

So the question becomes, what to do about all this.

First of all, we need to put government back inside of its constitutional box, and get it out of the business of being the arbiter of culture. That means among other things, getting it out of the education business, getting it out of the medicine business, getting it out of regulation of food, closing down the EPA,, and all that just for openers.

Now obviously, all that’s not going to happen instantaneously. It took us a hundred years of government sneaking out side of its boundaries, from Woodrow Wilson forward. That stuff’s not going to be cured in a day. And it may not be cured in a hundred years. But our survival depends on walking in that direction.

As to those who figure in the elimination of government all together is the best path, perhaps a lesson from history is worth having.

The history of revolutions, specifically revolutions intended to overthrow a given government, with the exception of the American Revolution, have not fared very well. Consider the socialist state that is now France, for example. Or, England for that matter. The idea of the constitutional republic as set up by our founders, is as I say the best example of freedom the world has come up with yet. I submit that moving toward that end is the best path forward. Get government back inside that constitutional box.

Jazz Shaw, Hot Air,  asks:

Are conservatives missing something on “black lives matter” here?

Well black lives do matter in two ways.  One they needed to keep the democrat party criminal enterprise in power and two they exist to be slaughtered for profit by Planned Parenthood, from Black Genocide:

 “Several years ago, when 17,000 aborted babies were found in a dumpster outside a pathology laboratory in Los, Angeles, California, some 12-15,000 were observed to be black.”
–Erma Clardy Craven (deceased) Social Worker and Civil Rights Leader

And from Breitbart:

“In 2013, Planned Parenthood upped the number of abortions they performed to 327,653,” Dannenfelser noted. “Meanwhile, their already limited cancer screenings, prenatal services, adoption referrals – and even contraception services – continue to drop. Planned Parenthood claims to be an altruistic health care provider for women and girls but their bottom line is all about abortion.”

Even if ever police on black homicide was unjustified, the number blacks killed by police is dwarfed by the number butchered by Planned Parenthood.

The libtarded politicians of Seattle believe they can solve problems by giving away other people’s money.  Well in the real world, labor is a commodity and no sane person would buy a commodity on which he can not make money, from Darleen Click, Protein Wisdom:

Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law goes into effect on April 1, 2015. As that date approaches, restaurant across the city are making the financial decision to close shop. The Washington Policy Center writes that “closings have occurred across the city, from Grub in the upscale Queen Anne Hill neighborhood, to Little Uncle in gritty Pioneer Square, to the Boat Street Cafe on Western Avenue near the waterfront.”

In order to run a successful business, you need to be able to make the math work.   In politics, not so much.

Mrs. Clinton was required to sign form OF-109 before she left the State Department.  That was two years ago.  Today, the State Department can not, or will not, say if Mrs. Clinton signed the form, video:

Mrs. Clinton was required to turn over all State Department documents before she left office, not two years after.

If you damned if you do and damned if you don’t, you might as well pick the option that gives the most pleasure. with that the Snark of the Day, from McGehee, gleamed from the comments on Darleen Click post, on Protein Wisdom:

Somebody tell those researchers I’m still waiting for my sandwich.

Mother Nature, is sexist.  Accept it.

This is the same John Kerry who traveled to Paris to conduct his own private negotiations with the North Vietnamese during a time  of war:

Washington (CNN)—Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday slammed a letter 47 Republican senators recently wrote to Iran’s leaders.

Kerry, who served for nearly three decades as a senator, told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that he greeted the letter with “utter disbelief,” calling it a breach of “more than two centuries of precedent” and factually incorrect.

Kerry was drummed out of the Navy for conducting is own private negotiations with the North Vietnamese.  Lurch never changes:

At the hearing on Wednesday, Kerry insisted that Cotton’s letter stemmed from the false premise that any agreement brokered with Iran would be legally binding, though the letter doesn’t use that language.

“We’re not negotiating a legally binding plan,” Kerry said, pointing out that an eventual agreement would have the same power as the “thousands” of executive agreements between the U.S. and foreign countries that Congress has not approved.

Lurch slammed the GOP letter for what it did not say, and apparently for revealing the truth of regime’s plan to surrender to Ayatollah’s without creating any binding obligation on the part of Iran to do anything.  Kerry, once a traitor, always a traitor.

No sane person wants to see Iran go nuclear, or apparently is allowed a position of power in the regime’s foreign policy apparatus.

Ok, the Old Biddy, Mrs. Clinton, was born in 1947, well before her vice president invented the Internet. But still, with all the old recycled Clintonistas on payroll like Lanny Davis and James Carville, you’d think the old biddy could have hired at least one competent tech geek. Evidently not.   Then, when you tell as many lies as the Clinton’s do it hard to keep them straight.

Kimberlee Kaye, Legal Insurrection has nailed three lies.:

One, two weeks ago the old biddy bragged about using, having four, electronic devices.   Today, she says she can  only handle one.     The old biddy says she used her personal email account because she did not want to carry two devices.   Yet her account was hosted a Clintonemail on the World Web Web.   Any device capable of connecting to the Internet could have accessed her personal email, and likely did.

Two,  the old biddy says she emailed with her hubby.   Yet B.J. says he has only sent two emails, and neither of them to his wife.

Three, the old biddy says her email server was secure because is was in a house guarded by the Secret Service.  Does she think that Edward Snowden had to pilfer actual hard drives in order to national security secrets?

Memo to Trey Gowdy, if you want all of  Mrs. Clinton’s emails, maybe you should ask the KGB or whatever they call it nowadays in Moscow.

And to think the press mocked Forty One for not being familiar with a bar code scanner.

It not that I don’t care.  It is that seen this all before.  Yet another unarmed black teenager has been shot and killed by police, and again we have another public outcry. Yet like, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the outraged public is overlooking the character, or lack thereof same, of the decedents.

(CNN)—On the surface, the situation seems too familiar: Police kill an unarmed black man. Community members rally. They chant in unison and grief: “Black lives matter.”

But the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Tony Robinson has its own unique set of circumstances.

The deadly confrontation has made Madison, Wisconsin, the latest epicenter of protests. Demonstrators plan to rally there at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Monday morning, and students say they will stage a walkout at the city’s East High School after classes.

Andrew Branca, Legal Insurrection:

Step 2: Watch the False Narrative Implode

Curiously, the NBC piece on Robinson’s shooting managed to leave out a considerable amount of context, context that any reasonably person would likely find relevant to understanding the truth of what happened.

Fortunately, The Smoking Gun blog was helpful enough to provide us with this relevant context: Wisconsin Shooting Victim, 19, Was Convicted Last Year For Role In Armed Home Invasion.

It is notable how different this headline is than that offered by the NBC piece, which you’ll recall was: Black Teen Tony Robinson Shot Dead by Cop in Madison, Wisconsin, Was Unarmed.

Also notable is that The Smoking Gun piece was published on Saturday, March 7, the day after the shooting-whereas the NBC piece appears, from indications on the post’s page, to have been published in the early morning hours of Sunday, March 8-after the publication of the The Smoking Gun post. Yet the NBC post contains little of the relevant information contained in The Smoking Gun’s post.

So pardon me if having seen this movie before, I forgo the opportunity to buy a ticket.

Mrs. Clinton loves to give advice and boosts of making “hard decision.”  Shame she never decided to heed her own advice.

Saul D. Alinsky, via Wikipedia:

“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Originally published Saturday, August 22, 1998, by Rex Murphy, Globe and Mail’s Focus:,

Remember when the famous novelist remarked of another famous novelist: “Every word she writes is a lie — including “and” and “the.” Except with Bill Clinton and his brigade of semantic prostitutes, we would say every word including “and” and “the” and the spaces between the words. People have lied before, sure. Politicians have lied, sure. And there have been moral cold spells in Washington before. But with the arrival of Bill Clinton, Pinocchio Priapus on the Potomac, this is the Ice Age of Mendacity. Miles deep and glacially thick, the place is rigid with duplicity.

They lie so much, they lie so often, they lie so vigorously — I (furrow the brow) did not have (grit teeth, don’t bite lip) sexual relations (is this going to work?) with that woman (oops!) Ms. Lewinsky — and they lie so fully and so well that you are sometimes brought to wonder, truly and anxiously wonder, did we get it all wrong when we were young, or have we been so wrong ever since, that lying in itself, just plain lying, is hardly ever right? And were we also wrong to hold that public men and women, lying in public, to the public, were practicing the most corrosive kind of lying?

video:

Hat tip and reax, Kimberlee Kaye, Legal Insurrection.

February 15, 2011, then Secretary Clinton spoke about Internet Freedom at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 2011 Hillary made a great case for why 2015 Hillary should disclose her emails to the public.

As MOTUS would say, “Alinsky works for us now.” Mrs. Clinton preaches great standards. We should hold her to them.

Jay Carney going to Amazon when he clearly has no talent to bring to the table whatsoever for that company, strikes me as the surest sign yet that the new cronyism is in place…. Except for perhaps the prosecution of Bob Menendez.

The difference of treatment of these two by the administration is striking. The message, given the actions of each as regards this administration cannot be more clear. Carney lied…repeatedly, daily, for Obama. Menendez opposed him.

I suggested a short time ago that Bill Cosby and the treatment he’s receiving lately is an example of what happens when one opposes what has become black street culture. To that point I hold.

But the pattern is beginning to emerge showing  Cosby is no isolated incident in the exercise of control. Does anyone doubt “net neutrality” is more of the same?

I tell you, in my heart I can feel it. All these issues are related to the strings being pulled from this White House. And, beyond.

When I say beyond, I’m considering the reports we see these days of the 33 million dollars that George Soros invested in the protests in Ferguson Missouri.

Putting this all together, I wonder if we can survive this level of corruption, as a country, as a culture, as a people. It seems an open question to me.

afterthought… if you’d like an example of criminal prosecution blatantly not being done, to someone who truly deserves it, considerable Sharpton. Are we really do believe that Bob Menendez is worse than Al Sharpton? Sorry, no sale.

Hands up, don’t shoot, the political lie of last year.  There was never credible evidence that Ferguson Police Officer Darrin Wilson shot Micheal Brown while the latter had his hands raised in the air.  Yet  this false meme became a left stream media tenet of faith and was repeated on the floor of Congress by our elected representatives, from Andrew Branca, Legal Insurrection:

Perhaps the single most potent piece of political theatre to emerge from the Ferguson MO shooting of Mike Brown by Police Officer Darren Wilson was the meme of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme was based on the false claim by Dorian Johnson that Brown had his hands raised in surrender when Wilson shot him. A handful of other purported witnesses-none of whom were ultimately deemed sufficiently credible to warrant either criminal or civil rights charges against Wilson-soon parroted the claim.

Protestors were quick to adopt the meme en masse, gesticulating with their hands above their shoulders while chanting the phrase. Even US Congressmen speaking in the House chamber prominently mimicked the same motions:

Eric Holder’s Department of [In]justice could find no problems with the actions of Officer Wilson.

Hat tip: Mad Magazine

Good news for the grandmother of the country, Mrs. Clinton’s will not have rearrange her baby sitting schedule for her granddaughter to attend those pesty cabinet meetings.  Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the White House has reached room temperature, from Fox News:

Fox News has exclusively obtained an internal 2011 State Department cable that shows Secretary of State Clinton’s office told employees not to use personal email for security reasons, while at the same time, HRC conducted all government business on a private account.

Mrs. Clinton’s State Department prohibited the use of personal email accounts for security reason, yet Mrs. Clinton only used her personal email account for State Department business. Mrs. Clinton apparently failed to read her own memo.

The Clinton’s,  B.J. and Mrs., are national security risks.  Their habitual practice of engaging in activities they wish to hid from the voters makes the susceptible for foreign blackmail.

Says Reynolds….

 COLLEGE EDUCATION IS NO GUARANTEE AGAINST COMMITTING ATROCITIES; IF ANYTHING, IT’S THE REVERSE: “Many were shocked that the apparent executioner in videos made by the Islamic State, or ISIS, was an educated, middle-class metropolitan.” “In fact, academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.” Like communists, they thrive in institutions that fundamentally see themselves as in opposition to the society that hosts them.

Of course interestingly enough, that’s where a good chunk of American leftists come from as well. Obama voters. Which, in turn, explain this myth that what the Islamist nuts need to get them to stop beheading people and bombing people, and burning people alive, and so on is jobs.

Of course, just now, that same left, including our own administration and state departments, are doing their deer in the headlights routine, having had this fallacy exposed by the existence of Jihadi John.
Of course, I think I should point out that this was also true of bin Laden. Educated, rich, and yet….

Observe again the last line in the Reynolds quote.

Like communists, they thrive in institutions that fundamentally see themselves as in opposition to the society that hosts them

That’s our colleges and universities that he’s talking about. In short, since our government has taken over the responsibility of administering such places, what we have is a government forcing us to pay for and support an educational system that is devoted to the proposition that our society needs to be torn down. Is it any wonder that our enemies smell weakness?