Category Archives: culture

Progressive-Democrat Hysteria

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Now illustrated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA).

She says that Attorney General William Barr lied to the Senate in Wednesday’s Senate hearing because he refused to say what Progressive-Democrats want him to say.  This was emphasized by Senator Mazie Hirono (D, HI), who spent nearly all of her question-time in that hearing smearing Barr (with charges of lying) instead of asking him questions.

Pelosi also gleefully has called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) the grim reaper (following McConnell’s statement that he’d have to be the Grim Reaper if the Pelosi persisted in sending up her bad and partisan Progressive legislation).

Because not saying what Progressive-Democrats demand be said, not doing what Progressive-Democrats demand be done, is somehow dishonest.

The Progressive-Democrats’ FUD-raising behavior would be risible and worth ignoring, were it not for how dangerous Party is with its control of the House.

An All Too Common View

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In a Wall Street Journal article reporting on President Donald Trump, some of his family members, and his businesses suing a couple of banks to block Congressional subpoenas for 10 years worth of business records, a commenter in the comment thread had this to say:

The lawsuits by POTUS, et al., are an admission of domestic tax and business fraud.

This is a broadly held view by folks on the Left.  Objections of innocence are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect proprietary materials from prying eyes are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect privacy are admissions of guilt.

After all, goes their…logic…if someone hasn’t done anything wrong, if there’s nothing to hide, that person shouldn’t object to Government rummaging through his stuff.  Privacy, proprietary-ness—these aren’t things to be kept private or proprietary.  Let Government have a peek.

More dangerous than that severe danger, because it’s both more insidious and has broad-ranging implications, is the concept that if a Government issues a subpoena, it must be obeyed forthwith; it’s wrong to challenge it.  If that becomes the case, though, then the subpoena process will be reduced to a formality: everything in a man’s, or a business’, life will become free for the formal demanding by an unchallengeable Government.

That failure easily extends to the 4th Amendment: warrants will issue as easily as ever, but they cannot be challenged, either, even after the fact.  To do so would be another admission of guilt; after all, if the person or business has nothing to hide, then Government should be allowed to rifle through persons, houses, papers, and effects, only satisfying the formality of a claim of probable cause—which claim also must be beyond question.

Felons Voting

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That’s what Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) thinks ought to happen.  He couches this as all citizens having a right to vote, “even terrible people.”

Unfortunately, though, Sanders has misunderstood the nature of the social compact, and the Lockean nature of our American social compact.

Certainly, all American citizens ought to be able to vote in American elections.  However, felons, by dint of their voluntarily done criminal acts, have placed themselves outside the bounds of our social compact—they’ve made themselves outlaws in several senses of that term.  As felons under the terms of our social compact (Locke’s terms went a bit farther), these persons have surrendered a number of their citizen rights: freedom of movement, of keeping/bearing weapons, of association, of communication, and from search and seizure, among others.  Felons still can do many of these things, but they are severely restricted in the doing (and in some, completely barred) by the requirements of law and the strictures of the prison in which they’re held as those requirements are executed.

Since felons are outlaws, also, though, they’ve surrendered one more right of citizenship: the right to vote.

Censorship in the Patent and Trademark Office

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The Supreme Court has heard the oral arguments for Iancu v Brunetti, a case I wrote about a bit ago.  Hadley Arkes’ op-ed in The Wall Street Journal shed additional light on the matter, which centers on whether Iancu’s business can trademark the name of his business, Friends U Can’t Trust, with its acronym stand-in.

Certain words are fixed in the language with the moral functions of “commending” and “condemning,” and some of them have a special edge….

You bet.

However, confusing F**T with the specially edged F**K can only be done by those with potty-mouthed minds.  Ordinary people, people with the barest modicum of decorum, are not so easily misled, whether they simply choose not to see the worst in everything they encounter, or they’re mildly amused by the obvious jape.

Chief Justice John Roberts did raise a significant point:

…advertisements will be posted in malls where children can see them. Mr Brunetti is appealing to rebellious young men, “but that’s not the only audience he reaches….”

However, this isn’t the risk that Roberts thought he saw.  This is an excellent opportunity to teach those children how to recognize critical differences and to not be misled by artificial similarities.  And to teach them how not to be easily offended or cavalierly crude.

Putting potty-mouthed minds into the PTO to effect government censorship according to their base criteria should be unacceptable.

Biden Takes Obama’s Apology Tour Domestic

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Rafael Mangual wrote about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s apology tour in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Even before announcing that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden was busy apologizing. At a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mr Biden said “I haven’t always been right….”

This, in response to criticism of his role in getting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 enacted and his role in getting the preceding Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted, this one especially with the support of 16 of the then-19 members of the House Black Caucus.

And so on goes Biden.

His steady drumbeat of apology over non-offenses just shows how weak of character Biden is.

Alternatively, if his apology drumbeat is legitimate, it shows how routinely offensive Biden is.

Either way, he’d be a President very dangerous to American values and to American national security.