Monthly Archives: September 2018

Hatred’s Failure—and Success

Posted on by
Reply

Shelby Steele had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that discussed the reasons for today’s Left being consumed with hate.  He was generally correct until the end of his piece.

And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.

I was with Mr Steele until this point. Far from failures, however, these programs have been the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s greatest successes.  These are how the Left and the Party have kept blacks—and far too many women—trapped in the Party-built welfare cages, trapped in perpetual victimhood.

This victimhood is and always has been the font of the Left’s political power.  Keep in mind, after all, that it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government after Republicans had spent the post-Civil War years working to bring blacks into the governing fold.  It was the Progressive-Democrats who insisted that blacks needed the protection of segregation because they were inherently incapable of competing.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built on that segregationist “protection” with their soft bigotry of low expectations in making race and gender necessary deciding criteria for admission to any of their welfare programs—even to higher education.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built the welfare cliff into their programs in order to keep welfare recipients trapped in dependency on the largesse of those same Progressive-Democrats.

Ignorant Voters

Posted on by
Reply

Recall the erstwhile tax on job creation that the Seattle city government passed a while back, and then repealed.  The tax would have charged businesses making more than $20 million in annual revenue a per employee tax of $275.  Although, in response to business and public outcry, the city repealed the tax a couple months later, the commentary of the tax’s chief supporter is illuminating.  Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena González, the lead proponent of the jobs tax:

Sadly the policy is right.  Our timing, however, was off. It’ll occur but we need to socialize people to what we’ve done, what we could do, the need and the real lack of resources.
A replacement may be in the cards but not now. We need to get rid of this albatross and then quietly work to figure out what takes its place. I’m thinking this is a November 2019 strategy.

Yep.  Business owners are just being greedy when they object to being taxed for hiring people. Those people are just too ignorant to understand that having their jobs taxed out from under them is good for them; they need to be socialized.

And the Progressive-Democrats on the Seattle City Council now will work secretively to slip this…tax…by the city under cover of a noisy city election.

Truth or Consequences

Posted on by
2

Or The Politics of Destruction, as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial has it.

The Progressive-Democrats in Congress have sought out and brought up a second “witness” claiming a sexual assault by Judge and Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  This is a woman who couldn’t remember the alleged incident until six days of “recovery” with her lawyer.  This is a woman whose own requests of her friends and alleged witnesses turned up exactly no one who could corroborate her claim—to a man, and to a woman, they all said they weren’t there and had heard nothing about it.  This is a woman who confessed in her “story” that she was too drunk to know what was going on and couldn’t be sure the offending man (if he exists) was Kavanaugh.

Bork, then Thomas. Then teabaggers and astroturfers.  Then Herman Cain.  Now this.

This is the “freedom” we’ll have under [sic] a Progressive-Democrat Congress.

And an ugly unintended consequence: after Feinstein’s, Hirono’s, and Gillibrand’s shameless, artificially hysterical displays, how can any woman who claims sexual assault be believed—even if it happened?

Feinstein’s Weapons Distortion

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) isn’t only dissembling in the course of her Progressive-Democratic Party’s shambles-making of the Judge Kavanaugh Supreme Court Justice confirmation process.  She’s dissembling regarding our right to keep and bear Arms, also.  Using the hoo-raw the Party created during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings (she’s the Ranking Democrat on that committee), she had this comment in the lead up to a question she had for Kavanaugh:

I’m talking about your statement on “common use.”  Assault weapons are not in common use.

There are two cynical distortions in that claim.  One is her “assault weapons” nonsense.  There are no assault weapons available to civilians in the United States.  Assault weapons are weapons capable of fully automatic fire (some of which can be possessed, but not borne, by collectors under very narrow circumstances) and heavy weapons—antitank weapons, crew-served fully automatic weapons, and the like.  Feinstein is carefully conflating the term “assault weapons” with semi-automatic rifles, which most assuredly are in common use in our nation, as she tries to emotionalize a completely rational matter with her scary term.

The other is her business about common use.  Here’s the 2nd Amendment in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There’s nothing in there about common use.  The Supreme Court has ruled on the need for common use, but this flies in the face of that Amendment on two grounds: one is the Court’s manufactured standard—it’s law-making from its bench—of commonness of use.  The other flies in the face of history and of the environment in which We the People ratified our Amendment: a significant fraction of the cannons used by our side during our Revolutionary War were privately owned.  Plainly, given their expense in obtaining, maintaining, and operating, they were possessed only by the wealthy—they were not in “common use.”  The Court’s ruling simply wants reversal so as to bring the matter back in line with our Constitution.

That second point might be a bit obscure, but the first is blindingly obvious.  Even to a Progressive-Democrat.

Pompeo’s Correct Path

Posted on by
Reply

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had this to say in a Sunday interview about team play at State and in the other Cabinets of the Federal government.  Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Pompeo about The New York Times‘ manufactured story about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wearing a wire and moving to invoke the 25th Amendment:

I’m not going to comment on that in any way, other than to say this: I’ve been pretty clear since my beginning of service here in this administration, if you can’t be on the team, if you’re not supporting this mission, then maybe you ought to find something else to do.
I’ve told that to my senior colleagues, I’ve told it to junior folks at the CIA, and the State Department; we need everyone who’s engaged in helping achieve President Trump’s mission. And I hope that everyone in every agency: DOJ, FBI, State Department is on that mission.

It’s not the subordinate’s role to do as he wishes, or to countermand the boss’ instructions, or to run a shadow government, or to follow his bliss in his civil service—or Senate-confirmed—position.  The subordinate’s role is to give his best advice, and after the boss has made his decision, to carry it out to the best of his ability.  If the subordinate thinks—or feelz—he cannot, his only option is to resign.

Yewbetcha.