Category Archives: culture

A Misapprehension

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Kimberly Strassel, of The Wall Street Journal, opened her editorial with this:

Minouche Shafik is this week’s casualty of activist protesters, although her resignation as Columbia University’s president resurrects a pressing question for Democratic leaders: how long do they think they can duck their own confrontation with their angry left?

That’s her misapprehension: that “angry left” is the center of the Progressive-Democratic Party. This is the party whose leadership—Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden and Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris—actively opposes Israel in the extermination war the terrorist entity Hamas has inflicted on it and continues to pursue.

This is the party whose Presidential candidate agreed with her fellow leftists that Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro was unfit to be her Vice President running mate because he’s a Jew, and chose instead Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Tim Walz, a man who after 24 years of honorable service in our military, chose in his moment of truth to retire from the military rather than stay with his unit while it was under a Warning Order to prepare for deployment to an actual combat zone.

This is the party that is actively pursuing the nuclear armament of Iran with its begging Iran to be allowed to reenter a JCPOA that itself (as agreed by Biden’s Party predecessor Barack Obama) codified Iran’s ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons.

This is the party that is paying only lip service to preventing Iran-backed Houthi disruption of commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

This is the party that wants to continue business as usual with the People’s Republic of China, pushing investment and associated American technology and intellectual property in that nation, never minding that that nation controls vital inputs to our economy, inputs like rare earths, lithium and processed lithium for batteries; a nation that is ramping up its threats to the Republic of China with no response by us; a nation that is rapidly expanding its military establishment, including nuclear weapons, even as Party works assiduously to reduce real spending on our own defense and to weaken through a variety of Woke policies our rump defense capability.

This is the party that is afraid to confront land-grabbing Russia, choosing instead to hamstring Ukraine in its ability to defend itself, for all that far too many Republicans support that supplication.

Domestically, this is the party that insists on increasing taxes on those of us American citizens of whom they disapprove and increasing spending on social policies that us average Americans do not want.

This is the party that demands to indoctrinate our children in its leftist ways, rather than teaching our children how to think, using our history, our language, our civics, math, and science as vehicles for that end. This is the party that opposes school choice in order to keep our children trapped in failing public schools run by Party’s indoctrination arm, the teachers unions.

As Party confronts their angry left, it is confronting itself. And agreeing with itself.

Press Arrogance Confessed

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The AP has confessed press arrogance, even though it likely didn’t intend its statement to be that. In David Bauder’s article concerning journalist efforts to downplay Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ ducking interviews at every opportunity, Brauder wrote

[F]or journalists, the larger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.

Bauder then cited Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden:

For the teams behind candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible[.]”

Of course. They’re wresting that control away from an intrinsically mendacious guild.

Gatekeepers. Because men of the journalist guild Know Better what us average Americans should know about the political doings in our nation. These Wonders presume to censor gatekeep that information, to decide for us what we should hear and how we should understand what we hear, and they’re distressed that there are so many other means through which politicians talk to us.

Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Lies of the Press

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These are lies of the Left, too, as Leftist as the press industry has gone. In their editorial regarding former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, the editors summarized some claims embedded in the NABJ‘s opening question, posed by Rachel Scott of ABC News:

“You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals…saying they were not born in the United States”; told “four Congresswomen of color…to go back to where they came from”; and “attacked black journalists”

I heard that part of the interview in its entirety; the quoted parts are incomplete, but contain enough to identify the dishonesties in Scott’s question.

Not born here: the only rival Trump said anything of the sort about was then-Presidential candidate and then-President Barack Obama (D), and it’s obvious he was using an already long-extant conspiracy theory to troll Obama and the credulous press, not making a serious argument.

[F]our Congresswomen of color…to go back to where they came from: what Rose dishonestly excluded from her claim was the context: the four Congresswomen were objecting to Trump’s characterization of the African nations of their heritage by insisting that those nations had much to teach us—and Trump—about how to do things. What Rose further excluded from her question was that Trump was not telling those Congresswomen to go back where they came from; he was telling them to go to their old nations, learn those lessons they claimed their nations had for us, and then come back and educate the rest of us.

Attacking black journalists? This is the intrinsic racism of Scott, the NABJ, and the American press at large. Trump attacks the press and nearly all journalists without regard to race or ethnicity. That includes black journalists, but it does not single them out to the exclusion of other groups of journalists.

It’s…unfortunate…that the WSJ‘s editors chose not to call out Scott for her lies about what Trump had said.

How Concerned?

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Just the News recently ran a poll of its readers—entirely unscientific, since the respondents are far from a random sample even of readers of JtN, and JtN makes no bones about this with any of its polls—that asked How concerned were you by FBI Director Wray’s testimony on attempt to assassinate Trump? regarding FBI Director Christopher Wray’s initial House testimony that he couldn’t be sure that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the recent assassination attempt, was hit by a bullet—it might have been, speculated Wray, a piece of shrapnel.

You can guess how the poll went (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two won’t count), but that’s not what’s important here.

What’s important is the speed with which “the FBI” reacted to pushback on that “uncertainty” and moved to correct/adjust Wray’s testimony to indicate that Wray was, after all, confident that Trump was hit by a bullet. The initial testimony and the clarification, especially as it was a response to the hooraw over that initial testimony, when taken together are concerning: the whipsaw change suggestd that the FBI and its Director were not thinking overmuch about what actually had happened.

What has become of the FBI’s claim to operate on facts, wherever those facts might lead? What has become of Wray’s respect for facts?