Category Archives: culture

Mao and Xi

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Deutsche Welle reported on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s visit last Friday with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang in the PRC.  A couple of things jumped out at me that are separate from the emphasis the article put on the visit and the aid the PRC has promised Maduro.  Maduro tweeted

We began our state visit to the People’s Republic of China, paying tribute to its founder, the Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung.  His example and revolutionary struggle marked the twentieth century.

That was in connection with this:

At the start of his state visit, Maduro bowed three times to honor Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Xi happily went along with that.  He is, indeed, bringing back Mao’s policies and ruling techniques.

Shades

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US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has new ambassadorial digs, and those digs have new curtains.  The rent for the digs is 58 large each month, and the curtains were almost $53k.  If you think those numbers are outlandish for some office space and window coverings, you’re right.

Then we get The New York Times castigating her for spending that kind of taxpayer money.  Never mind that the NYT carefully buried some key facts regarding these expenses.  Facts like it being the Obama administration that committed to the rent and that bought the curtains; Haley had no say in the matter. Facts like the rent in particular, to Obama’s credit, being much lower than other administrations have spent on their UN ambassador’s digs.

Jeez.  At least the NYT‘s sister tabloids, National Enquirer, Globe, Star, et al., have some entertainment value.

Jumped the Shark

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The Progressive-Democratic Senator from San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein, has done it.  The Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has “released a memo” purported to cast doubt on Judge and Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s character.

This is a memo, too, that she’s been sitting on for the last couple of months, waiting for just the right time to “release” it.  Its source is secret, though, and its contents are not to be revealed to the public.  Her cronies at The New York Times, never fear, claim to have the…skinny…on the content: in a textbook example of projection, that outlet hints that the “memo” is all about sexual misbehavior.

Sadly, Feinstein has only shown her truth with this.  And it’s entirely consistent with her handling of her fellow Committee member Kamala Harris’ outright lie about a thing she claims Kavanaugh said.  She’s chosen to do nothing about that lie, even though she is Harris’ Ranking Member.  She’s also chosen to do nothing about fellow Committee member Corey Booker’s willfully unethical, if not illegal, behavior with Committee documents.  Of course, she’s on less firm ground there, since she earlier unethically released Committee documents (and then claimed that “cold medicine” made her do it).

Unable to disagree with him on his fitness to be a Justice of the Supreme Court, Progressive-Democrats are stooped to trying to smear his good name.

Go figure.

Book or Smear?

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Bob Woodward wrote a book about President Donald Trump, and his “on-the-record” sources are coming out of the…woodwork…to deny they said the things Woodward claims they said or that they were misrepresented in misleading ways (redundancy deliberate).

I have to ask: does Woodward have any “on the record” sources about whom he hasn’t seemed to have lied? He claims to have tapes and transcripts of those conversations and of his claimed conversations with anonymous “sources.”

Regarding the latter, he should explain why we should believe anonymous sources who’ve demonstrated their dishonesty by speaking against their terms of employment if not their oaths of office.

Publish the tapes and transcripts, or there’s no reason to believe they exist.  If they don’t exist, there’s no reason to believe those “on the record” sources were honestly cited or that those anonymous “sources” actually exist.

Sadly, even the Wall Street Journal‘s author of the piece at the link, Rebecca Ballhaus, has chosen to go along with Woodward’s game.  Citing a statement by Rob Porter in which he said he was struck by the selective and often misleading portrait in the book, she wrote,

Mr Porter didn’t dispute any specific elements….

Gary Cohn said in a separate statement that that the book does not accurate[ly] portray my experience at the White House.  Ballhaus again:

He, too, didn’t dispute any specific anecdotes.

This is a cynically misleading over-parsing of their statements, carefully designed to leave the impression that Woodward’s claims are true, just because the two men chose not to enumerate and explicitly deny every jot and tittle of Woodward’s missive.

Timidity

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Sadanand Dhume had an opinion piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal decrying Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ decision to cancel a contest through which ” participants were invited to lampoon the prophet Muhammad.”  Wilders pleaded “security concerns” because of some protests in Pakistan.

On the whole, I agree with Dhume.  However, I’m less concerned with Pakistani whinings than I am with the cowardice displayed by Wilders and his cronies in canceling their contest.

A few short years ago, a similar “Draw Muhammad” contest was held in Dallas. The terrorists who tried to disrupt that contest were stopped in their tracks by ordinary American citizens.  The Dutch are not Danes, but I wouldn’t have thought them this timid.