Category Archives: culture

Robert Francis O’Rourke Strikes (Out) Again

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The Wall Street Journal has noticed the opening shambles of O’l Beto’s campaign for President, summing up his mess with its subheadline:

The identity left is carving him up like a Texas steak before he gets to Donald Trump.

But it’s not just about the identity politics segregationists of the Left. It’s also about Beto himself and his opponents in the current Progressive-Democratic Party primary campaign for the Party nomination.

A joke about a husband’s participation in raising kids is offensive only to those looking for excuses to be offended and to those using manufactured offense for personal gain. It’s the same with the other foolishnesses of a 15-yr-old that Beto seems to have grown up and out of—manufactured offenses by those looking to promote themselves at others’ expense rather than on their own merits. And yet Beto ducks into apology.  At least Howard Dean had a primal scream.  This is a primal squeak.

Beto O’Rourke, gamma male. That’s what we need for President. Yeah.

The other Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidates demonstrate their incapacity for independent thought with their artificial offense-taking from their rival’s childhood activities. We need one of those in the White House, all right.  Sure.

The Nature of an Enemy

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This is the nature of the People’s Republic of China which the Left—our own and Europe’s in particular—pooh-pooh as not actually utterly antithetical to our values, our liberties, even our independence from PRC domination.

After locking up as many as a million people in camps in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are destroying Uighur neighborhoods and purging the region’s culture. They say they’re fighting terrorism. Their aim: to engineer a society loyal to Beijing.

The rationalization for this purge comes from Shohrat Zakir, Chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Communist Party of China’s Deputy Party Committee Secretary for Xinjiang:

Ethnic unity is the lifeline of all ethnic groups in China and the foundation of economic progress in Xinjiang[.]

And that unity must be a Sinicized unity. This is the lesson the men of the People’s Republic of China government think they’ve learned from the Jinjiang and Mongol conquering of China.

That Sinicization requirement is illustrated by this:

“We can’t have a culture anymore,” said a Uighur resident of Urumqi who works at a state-owned resources company. He said he stopped visiting his local mosque after officials came to his house to confiscate his Quran. “No one goes any more. It’s too dangerous,” he said.

Anything other is evil and must be stamped out.

It’s a long article, but RTWT.

Biden Wants Abrams?

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Is Progressive-Democratic Party primary candidate wannabe for President—and the most Progressive candidate in (or almost in) the Party primaries—really thinking about asking Stacey Abrams, ex-Minority Leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives and late of the race for Georgia governor, to be his Vice President candidate in his campaign?

That brings up a question of what he really thinks of Abrams:

I mean, you got the…African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking [woman]. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

Or is he simply that desperately pandering?

An Arrogant Pope

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Recall that French (should be ex-)Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was convicted of covering up the child sexual abuses inflicted by his priests.  Pursuant to that conviction, Barbarin tendered his resignation as Cardinal to Pope Francis.

Amazingly, the Pope refused the resignation.

“Monday morning, I handed over my mission to the Holy Father. He spoke of the presumption of innocence and did not accept this resignation,” Barbarin said in a statement.

Being convicted of a crime in a petty secular court apparently doesn’t satisfy the Pope’s definition of guilt.

Of course, the Pope also could have been operating off the French court’s sentence for Barbarin’s barbarity.  The court sentenced Barbarin to all of six months in jail. And then suspended even that. If the French don’t care about Barbarin’s terrible actions, there wouldn’t seem much reason for the Pope to, either.  Maybe not so arrogant.

Journalistic Dishonesty

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It turns out that a major player in the NLMSM, Reuters, had some dirt on Robert Francis O’Rourke a year before his Progressive-Democratic Party campaign for Senator in Texas in the 2018 season—and spiked the story rather than publishing it in real time, or during the campaign, because the information, in Reuters‘ view, could have hurt O’Rourke.

It seems that a teenaged Ol’ Beto was a member of the

“Cult of the Dead Cow,” a famous group of hackers credited with inventing the term “hacktivism….”
The group is responsible for a variety of shady activit[ies] like stealing credit card numbers to pay for long-distance telephone service, violating copyright laws, and hacking into computers, according to [Reuters], which stressed that O’Rourke himself never “engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity.”

What’s of import today is not that misspent youth—Ol’ Beto isn’t the first misbehaving teenager who subsequently grew up—but the fact that this news outlet spiked a story because exposing the information might hurt their Chosen One.  This is the rationalization of Joe Menn, the “journalist” who hid the information with Reuters‘ approval [emphasis added]

“While he was on leave from Reuters and writing a book on the Cult of the Dead Cow, Joe Menn made an agreement regarding the embargo date of his interview with Beto O’Rourke. This is a common arrangement between journalists and sources, which we described in detail in a Reuters Backstory article on Friday,” a Reuters spokesperson told Fox News.

That just shows how pervasive and long-standing the dishonesty in what passes for today’s journalism is.  It’s OK to spike an unfriendly story, and it’s equally OK to go in real time with no hard facts on a story that destroys the lives of other teenagers—Catholic high school students, for instance.

These guys aren’t even capable of recognizing dishonesty any more.