Monthly Archives: October 2019

A Senate Impeachment Trial

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Against the possibility that articles of impeachment might pass out of the Progressive-Democrat House, The Wall Street Journal wondered whether the Senate should—or could, given a handful of Republican Senators’ misgivings over the Trump-Zelenskiy telecon—simply vote to dismiss the articles “without a trial.”

The path to a successful dismissal vote is uncertain but eminently possible, even somewhat more likely than not.  I’m not convinced, though, that a successful vote to dismiss actually would be a success: dismissing the articles out of hand would do nothing but feed the Progressive-Democrats’ and the NLMSM’s conspiracy theories.

No, the Senate with (especially with) its Republican majority, should hold the trial. That way they can examine the Progressive-Democrats’ witnesses and call their own, which would let the Progressive-Democrats examine those witnesses in their turn.

Such an obviously balanced approach, which I believe would lead to a bipartisan acquittal on all articles (not all of the Senate Progressive-Democrats are in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hip pocket), would greatly mitigate the Progressive-Democrats’ and NLMSM’s efforts to delegitimize the 2016 election and to interfere with the 2020 elections up and down the ballot.

That last, after all, is the real purpose of the House Progressive-Democrat caucus. That’s why Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is refusing to put the question of a formal impeachment proceeding to a House floor vote and why the chairmen of the three Committees are holding, instead, their secret inquisitions in their separate Star Chamber hearings.  The Star Chambers and the’ selective leaks emitted by them are solely intended to keep the smear going in a naked attempt to prejudice those irredeemably deplorable and amazingly ignorant Americans who will be voting.

On acquittal, the remaining objectors, and there will be some both in Party and in NLMSM, would be (further) exposed for the TDS-ridden personages that they are, to the politicians’ detriment in a few months.  Ordinary Americans, in the end, aren’t what Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM project onto them.

First, They Came for our Guns

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Then they came for our freedom of speech.  Now they’re after our freedom of religion.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke has made the attack on the core of our Bill of Rights open and explicit.  After having promised to take our guns (and his Bestie, Eric Swalwell (D, CA) presaged him by threatening to nuke us if we didn’t give up our guns), and after Party has pressured social media to censor speech of which Party disapproves, we get this from O’Rourke at the CNN town hall meeting which it held with a number of Party Presidential candidates last Thursday:

…religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us,” the former Texas congressman said at CNN‘s Equality Town Hall in Los Angeles.
He added: “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Never mind the human rights of believers.  Religious institutions will be punished by the state if they don’t destroy their religions by violating their religions’ fundamental tenets in favor of state diktats.  Our religious institutions must surrender themselves into instruments of the state.

The 1st Amendment, along with the 2nd, have no place in the lives of modern Americans.

The Constitution, having been written more than 100 years ago isn’t, as that sage philosopher Ezra Klein has said, binding on anything.

After all, no less a light than Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement and the first Progressive-Democrat President, said this of our Constitution:

This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

We the People—us ignorant voter-citizens—have no role in the life of our Constitution; Article V is just a bunch of pretty words.  No, our Constitution, the very fabric of our nation, is to be modified at will according to whatever our Progressive-Democrat Betters determine to be the relevant pressures of life.

Keep this in mind in the summer and fall of 2020.

Threat

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Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is telling us and Europe to sit down and shut up about his invasion of Kurdish Syria, or he’ll loose millions of Syrian refugees on Europe. He especially objects to the way the EU is characterization his invasion:

Hey EU, get your act together. If you try to describe our current operation as an occupation, our task will be simple. We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.

The irony here is simple. If Europe actually respected Union and national borders, this would be a toothless threat.

Of course, the irony will be lost on our Progressive-Democrats.

Courage Under Fire

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Republic of China’s President Tsai Ing-wen, against the background of the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s abuse of Hong Kong citizens through his Hong Kong police, his functional abrogation of the solemnly agreed treaty with Great Britain governing the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC, and his parallel functional reneging on his government’s “one country, two systems” pretense vis-à-vis that city, has spoken against the PRC’s pretense of that toward her nation.

That framework, she noted, has brought Hong Kong to the brink of disorder.

Speaking from the presidential office building in the center of Taipei, Tsai accused China of using that same program to threaten Taiwan’s “regional peace and stability.”

Tsai went on:

We must stand up in defense. Rejection of “one country, two systems” is the biggest consensus among Taiwan’s 23 million people across parties and positions.
Over 70 years, we’ve endured all sorts of severe challenges, and not only do none of these challenges knock us down, they make us stronger and more resolute. One offensive after another, they’ve not made Taiwanese people yield.

This comes in the face of increasing international isolation inflicted on the RoC by the PRC.

Would that some American athletes and athletic associations had the same courage, especially given their far greater relative power and their complete safety from PRC actions.

First-Name Interactions

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The familiarity of business’ personnel charged with interacting with members of the public conducting those interactions on a first-name basis is unwarranted and unwanted.  Those business personnel don’t know me (for instance) well enough for the uninvited closeness.

Tunku Varadarajan touched on that in his recent Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, which centered on a different subject. In response to that peripheral matter, a letter writer to a subsequent WSJ Letters column described an incident involving his and a judge’s interaction with a hospital clerk wherein the clerk addressed each of these, in their separate interactions, by their first name, strangers to the clerk though they were:

“Puzzled by the first name?” I asked [the judge]. “Now that you mention it, yes I am.” “HIPAA” I explained, which we both knew as the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
So you see, Mr Theroux, what you observed wasn’t youth obsession at all. It was your government protecting your privacy.

Really? HIPAA applies to my interactions with my cable provider? My cell phone company? My interactions with the grocer’s checkout clerk? My calls to tech support? The teller at the bank (which already keeps the line separate from the teller-customer interaction)?

Wow. What an amusing thought.