An Apology from a Soccer Player

Domagoj Vida, a starter for Croatia’s World Cup soccer team, after Croatia beat Russia to make it into the Cup finals, posted a collection of videos in which he said “glory to Ukraine.”

Then he apologized.

I know I made a mistake and I would like to apologize again to Russian people.

I’m sorry. That’s life. You have to learn from your mistakes[.]

FIFA, which runs the World Cup, issued a warning (which has implications concerning Vida’s ability to play the next several games after an additional warning, should one be issued) to Vida because with those videos, he’d violated a FIFA rule regarding maintaining political neutrality.

And that gets to my problem with Vida’s apology.

Apologize to FIFA, sure—he broke their rule.

Apologize to Russia?  No, that was wrong.  Russia has no business partitioning and occupying Ukraine.

Reactionary Ideologue

President Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, of the DC Circuit, to the Supreme Court, and “within seconds” Democracy for America called him a reactionary ideologue.

DfA, without correction from the Progressive-Democrats of Congress, or anyone else on the left, also has foretold Kavanaugh’s confirmation would

directly lead to the deaths of countless women with the dismantling of abortion rights.

Even taking the manufactured hysteria seriously, it’s instructive here as an aside (of no small size) to consider that the Left worries about the risks to grown, adult women who make the conscious choice to run a risk, but they care not a red sou for the deaths of countless babies who cannot speak for themselves and for whom the Left insists no one should so speak.

That the Progressive-Democrats’ opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination has nothing to do with principled disagreement with how the man might adjudicate cases and everything to do with naked politics is further illustrated by a fund-raising email House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) sent Monday.  In it she wrote that [emphasis added]

she is “determined to avenge President Obama if it’s the last thing I do” by preemptively opposing President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee….

All of this is confirmation of the Progressive-Democrats’ view of the Constitution.  That core of our nationhood is just something to be modified at will by unelected judges—so long as they’re properly selected by Progressive-Democrats.  It’s Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “living” constitution.

Or, as a journolist put it more bluntly,

[The constitution] has no binding power on anything.  …the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago….

Never mind that there’s nothing at all reactionary in a judge upholding the Constitution.  That’s what his oath of office enjoins him to do.  On the other hand, a judge modifying the Constitution to fit a personal view of social justice is rank judicial activism—and a violation of his oath of office.

Gun Control

done right.

A disgruntled customer in a George Webb restaurant took his anger out on one of the women employees, going behind the counter to physically attack her.

He didn’t get far: a fellow employee, another woman, drew her pistol and drove the thug off.  It seems that she has a concealed carry permit to go with her weapon, and George Webb allows its employees to carry on the premises.  With good reason, it seems.

But those on the Left would rather have the good guys—and girls—unarmed, so thugs like this can have their way.  Talk about a war on women.  Geez.

Hysteria

Is the Left, in its hysteria, turning more violent?  And I don’t mean just Antifa or BLM.  Or last year’s attempt by a Leftist kook to murder Republican Congressmen.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was threatened by a group of “protestors” as he left a restaurant last Saturday.  One of them shouted

We know where you live, Mitch. We know where you live.

As McConnell left in his car, another of the “protestors” was self-congratulatory:

We did good, fellow citizens.

It’s not just kooks, anymore; these threats of violence and the potential for violence, is going mainstream, as Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) actively eggs them on, and “mainstream” Progressive-Democrats remain silent beyond a few vapid words on the Senate floor.

This is the level of freedom toward which we can look, if we’re not careful this fall.

Facebook Strikes Again

Facebook, for a while, decided that our Declaration of Independence was filled with hate speech.  In particular, Facebook decided that

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions[]

which closed the list of Facts our nascent nation submitted to a candid world

goes against our [Facebook’s] standards on hate speech.

Facebook then threatened The Washington Times, which had been posting to its Facebook account successive parts of our Declaration leading up to our Independence Day celebration—which was to have included that hateful passage—with the loss of its Facebook account.

Facebook’s algorithm did it.  That’s the company’s story, and apparently they’re sticking to it.

It’s true enough that Facebook later reposted the censored passage and…apologized…for the “error.”

That, though, does not alter the simple fact that Zuckerberg’s minions, hiding behind that algorithm—which Zuckerberg’s IT experts had carefully programmed—had committed this act of censorship of our Declaration of Independence.

Nor does it alter the simple fact that Zuckerberg and his minions waited to restore the censored passage until after they’d been publicly called on their misbehavior.  They did not proactively, on their own initiative, undo their misbehavior.

This is free speech, Left style.  Not even our founding documents can be posted without a struggle today.  Just like when they first were published.