Category Archives: Uncategorized

Good Reporting?

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That’s Howard Kurtz’ claim.  In his piece about the NLMSM, Michael Flynn, and the “leak” that led to his resignation as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, Kurtz said that The Washington Post story that began the thing was “good reporting.”

Then Kurtz said this:

[T]he Post story would not have been possible without the cooperation of nine unnamed senior officials who furnished the leaked information.

The Post story was built entirely on those unnamed persons.  Unnamed.  We don’t know there were nine.  We don’t know they were senior or even officials.  We don’t even know they exist.  I have to ask: what part of “unnamed” is unclear to Kurtz?

The Post didn’t provide a single bit of corroborating evidence; The Post didn’t name a single source who would corroborate the claims of the leaker or leakers.  The only corroboration in this whole sad affair is the lack of denial from the White House.  This is damning, certainly, but it’s hardly dispositive.

Kurtz added this:

But it must be said that the leakers’ information was right on target.

Based on what?  Kurtz, along with his confreres in the NLMSM, have chosen to not publish the leaked transcripts to which the NLMSM claims to have access.

When did rumor-mongering become good reporting?

More Fake News

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This time, courtesy of the Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Congressman Elijah Cummings (D, MD), as part of their whining about the Republican majority in the House

…cited a tweet purportedly from [ex-National Security Advisor Michael (Lt Gen, USA, Ret)] Flynn that said, “I feel it is unfair that I have been made the sole scapegoat for what happened.”

Which Cummings proceeded to emphasize, with Pelosi chiming in.

CUMMINGS: Madam Leader, just this morning, Flynn tweeted, and this is a quote, “scapegoat,” end of quote. Scapegoat. He basically described himself as a scapegoat.

PELOSI: I have a tweet, I’m going to make, I’m telling my staff right now—it’s not scapegoat, it’s stonewall, and that’s exactly what the Republicans in Congress are doing.

Except the tweet being so enthusiastically touted was a fake.  There followed, then, this:

Both offices later acknowledged the mistake. Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill acknowledged that Pelosi inadvertently cited tweets from a fake account. Cummings issued his correction on Twitter: “Yes, sorry, to correct the record—just learned like many others that the Flynn tweet this morning was fake.”

Notice that.  Pelosi didn’t apologize for her smear; she didn’t do anything.  She hid behind her spokesman, who did nothing more than acknowledge a “mistake.”  Cummings had the integrity to speak for himself, but he didn’t apologize for his role in the smear, either.  He just expressed regret for needing to “correct the record.”  Not a syllable of apology.

Insulting?

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Army Colonel Jeffery Nance, the presiding judge in the Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl desertion case has some concerns, officially because Bergdahl’s lawyers has them; unfortunately, Nance has his own, and they’re misplaced.

The judge…called video of [President Donald] Trump repeatedly calling Bergdahl a traitor during campaign speeches “disturbing” at a pre-trial hearing Monday.

He went further:

He also asked prosecutors pointed questions about whether Trump’s criticism has already created a public perception that Bergdahl won’t be treated fairly.

Nance exposed his own prejudgment with his characterization of a politician’s—a businessman as political tyro’s—campaign rhetoric as disturbing as though such blather might prejudice Bergdahl’s case.  Nance then deepened his failure with his implication that the trial participants—judge, lawyers, jury—might be influenced by doings from outside the courtroom.

It got worse.  Nance asked the prosecution lawyers,

You’re not at all concerned about the statement he made, “If I get in we will review his case”…after ranting and raving about no jail time?

Ranting?  More importantly, though, is Nance’s slur here against officers and NCOs in the United States Army—that they’re such cowards they’ll be swayed from their duty as jurors by campaign commentary.

The trial needs to go forward.  The Army and Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers deserve justice.  Bergdahl deserves justice: if the charges are dropped by this judge, Bergdahl can never be viewed as anything other than a deserter, even if he were not.  A fair trial—juried by officers and NCOs who aren’t the timid Milquetoasts Nance thinks they are—will determine Bergdahl’s guilt or innocence; ducking away from the trial cannot.

Moral Contextualizing

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Moral contextualizing is the Saul Alinsky-esque technique of applying a context to behaviors in order to assess their morality—in particular, to assess the behaviors of men in the past within the context of today’s views of morality rather than the views extant at the time.

Paul Isaac had some thoughts on the matter in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal:

The real issue is “contextualization” per se, which seems to be an aggressive technique to create false dialectics against historical straw men and to demand an implicit intellectual monopoly of the would-be contextualizers’ perspective on the defined hobbyhorse as the moral alternative, thereby defining other perspectives as both outdated and immoral.

That’s a big part of it.  Another part of the thing is the hypocrisy of the moral equivalence that these contextualizers assert in order to claim the holy superiority of their chosen, and debate-forbidden, positions.

Loosening Financial Regulations

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Felix Hufeld, President of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, is worried about an outcome of Donald Trump’s election.  He’s concerned that financial regulations laid on in the aftermath of the Panic of 2008, regulations that expanded the reach of Government into men’s financial lives, will begin to be loosened during a Trump administration.

Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation.

And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder.  That is not without risk.

To live life is to live with risk.  The thing about risk, though, is that the more Government tries to mandate rules against it, the more Government increases the risks that ordinary folks must live with.

Hufeld has this much right, though:

The [financial] industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity—not regulatory volatility[.]

Indeed.  Regulations need to be vastly reduced, Government gotten out of the way of free markets and the free citizens operating in them.  And then politicians and regulators need to leave the remainder alone and stable and not constantly be adding regulations and “tweaking” others.

The problem Hufeld and other bureaucrats of the Left—both in Europe and in the US—have is that they can’t conceive the idea the ordinary citizens are fully capable of making their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or these bureaucrats worry about their own loss of power were ordinary folks freed to make their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or both.