Monthly Archives: March 2017

It’s Time Once More

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Some humor after a poet/playwright of some years past.  Bonus points if you can identify the person.

A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.

His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.

I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands.

More of your conversation would infect my brain.

Thine face is not worth sunburning.

Regarding a letter:

By my life, this is my lady’s hand these be her
very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her
great P’s.

Regarding the location of a certain…gentleman:

First Man. Now, Second Man, where’s Third Man?
Second Man. At supper.
First Man. At supper! Where?
Second Man. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten….
First Man. Where is Third Man?
Second Man. In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ the other place yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.

 

OK, and from a ringer:

Money can’t buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

Satisfaction

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No, this isn’t a Rolling Stones reference.  It’s a reference to Kevin Williamson’s opening line in his National Review piece, On the Outside, Looking Out.

This is the great paradox of our time: in 2017, it has never been easier for us to satisfy our wants, but we seldom have been more dissatisfied.

Indeed.  Perhaps because our wants being so easily satisfied, there’s no satisfaction in their satisfaction.

Perhaps because our wants being so easily satisfied, so many of them are so trivial.

Perhaps both.

Perhaps it’s time to refocus on what’s truly important.

A Plan for Rigorous Enforcement

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Mark Dubowitz, Chief Eecutive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,  writing in The Wall Street Journal, had some thoughts regarding strict enforcement of the Iran nuclear weapons agreement and some thoughts on an alternative path for dealing with Iran and its nuclear weapons.  I’m focusing on the latter.

First, Mr Trump must address the Iranian threat the way Ronald Reagan treated the Soviet one. … The Trump NSC needs a similar plan, one that uses both covert and overt economic, financial, political, diplomatic, cyber, and military power to subvert and roll back the Iranian threat.

Second, the Trump administration, with an assist from Congress, needs to reinvigorate the sanctions regime aimed at Iran’s support for terrorism, ballistic-missile development, human-rights abuses, war crimes, and destabilizing activities in the Middle East.

The Trump administration also needs to put Iran on notice that the US will use force to counter Iranian aggression. Sanctions without the credible threat of military action will always be insufficient to change the regime’s calculus.

With regard to that last, “notice” by itself is just talk.  President Donald Trump will need to act, as well—having the Navy sink Iran’s fast boats that charge in provocatively and too close or other Iranian naval shipping that fire live weapons from too close will be necessary to give force to the rhetoric as well as to the sanctions.

My questions are these.  Do the Republicans in Congress have the stomach for this?  Do the Democrats in Congress have the integrity?

Now It’s Overt

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The Left has, for quite a number of years, quietly harbored contempt for those who disagree with them, believing those on the center-right and points further to be stupid, narrow, and venal, constantly voting as those unfortunates do, against their self-interest (which is to so not voting for those things the Left deems appropriate).

It’s no longer quiet or sub rosa.

This mad-as-hell view has been galvanized by reports that many Trump voters may lose their health insurance if the House version of ObamaCare repeal passes. The liberal gloaters say it serves them right.

From this perspective, those voters are too dumb to vote in their own economic self-interest and they’re probably gone for good. So it’s better to energize the Bernie Sanders base than to struggle to understand why many blue-collar Americans feel alienated from the Obama/Clinton party.

And from Frank Rich, of New York Magazine,  as cited by Howard Kurtz at the above link:

Rather than feeling everyone’s pain, “might the time have at last come for Democrats to weaponize their anger instead of swallowing it?

“…a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.”

This is nothing but the Progressive’s long-standing contempt for their fellow Americans, made as plain today as their BFF Herb Croly had it 100 years ago.

Inadvertent Tapping and Leaks

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As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R, CA) revealed the other day enroute to the White House, intelligence community personnel, in the course of surveilling the communications and other activities of foreign nationals (vis., Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak), also surveilled incidentally members of then-President-Elect Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams, and perhaps Trump himself.  Wire tapping, indeed, if loosely and metaphorically.

Of larger import, though, is this, also from Nunes.

…the intelligence “ended up in reporting channels and was widely disseminated.”

It was previously reported that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was “unmasked” in this way; however, Nunes said “additional names” were unmasked as well.

Why was this classified material leaked to the press, and who leaked it?

Of nearly as large importance, too, is this: why is the NLMSM focusing on the admittedly unusual procedure of briefing the press, the President, and then the Intelligence Committee, in that order, instead of focusing on this cynical leak of classified information?