Category Archives: culture

A Couple of Idle Thoughts

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…triggered by a Wall Street Journal article about Michelle Obama’s expected commentary at the Democratic Party Convention.

Democrats have drafted a platform that makes race a key issue, calling for a “societal transformation to make it clear that black lives matter” and saying racial income and wealth gaps “are the result of policies that discriminate against people of color.”

But not all lives, as the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear.

Never mind that those discriminatory policies—minimum wage law positions, for instance—target people of color in particular and that they’re universally and long-standing Democrat policies.

Never mind, either, that the welfare cliff that traps people of color, along with all of America’s poor, in poverty and government dependence are the result of long-standing Democrat policies.

Never mind, either, that the Democratic Party still can’t say “blacks” or “black Americans,” much less “Americans who happen to be black or brown;” they continue to hide behind arch euphemisms.

Mrs Obama could also nod to the subject of gender. Mrs Clinton in her 2008 concession speech called capturing the White House the highest “glass ceiling” for women, but she also said that thanks to the number of primary voters who had backed her, the ceiling had “about 18 million cracks in it.”

And, eight years later, Clinton has, not no record, but an active record of failure and deceit.  All she’s got to favorably recommend her is her gender card.

Democratic Party Lawfare

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The Missouri state legislature has a supermajority of Republicans in the House.  And legislator, of any party, can require a bill to be read aloud on the House floor prior to the House’s final vote on it.  Last spring, Democratic Party legislators initiated a filibuster by requiring each bill being brought up for its final vote to be read aloud.  So far, so good.  The Republican Speaker one-upped the Democrats by having the bills read by computer with the speed control dialed up.  Again, so far, so good.

But, since the Democrats lost their dispute from within the House, they’ve sued in open court.  They know they have no case, but they didn’t get their way, so they’re trying to go around the House rules—rules to which both parties agreed when the rules were developed and then adopted—to impose their way.

They have no case?  They have no case because legislatures set their own rules for how they’ll conduct their legislative business; courts have no jurisdiction here.  Even the Missouri Supreme Court seems to be recognizing that.

The court said weeks ago that justices…will quiz attorneys about how the Legislature conducts its own business, and they will consider whether the judicial branch has any say in settling a dispute among lawmakers.

This is what we can look forward to in the Federal government, too, as demonstrated by the recent Democratic Party’s calculated cancelation of democracy in the Federal House of Representatives by preventing the people’s business from being done in the People’s House because they couldn’t get their way.  This was demonstrated earlier, too, as Democrats left Wisconsin and Indiana explicitly to prevent those legislatures from conducting the people’s business because the Democrats couldn’t impose their will.  It’ll only get worse under a third Democratic Party-controlled White House and Democratic Party-controlled Congress.

If we Democrats can’t get our way, there’ll be no democracy for you.

Why is this even a Question?

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Republicans officially petitioned the administration Thursday to deny Hillary Clinton access to secret information as Democrats’ presidential nominee, and some GOP lawmakers said if the intelligence community won’t do it, they’ll pass a bill to do it themselves.

Oh, wait—it’s a question because

The White House has said it won’t deny Mrs Clinton access….

On the excuse of tradition, don’t you know.

Never mind the tradition, and the requirement in most serious security régimes—like in a government—of revoking existing security clearances and denying further access to those who’ve committed security violations as egregious as even FBI Director James Comey has documented Clinton having done.

Some rules, some traditions, just don’t apply.  Not when they’re inconvenient.

A Liberal Justice Talked out of Turn

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now is in the business of publicly bashing politicians who don’t think like she does.

I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.  For the country, it could be four years.  For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.

We can also turn her remarks around.

I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Hillary Clinton as our president.  For the country, it could be four years—or a dozen, with her insistence on extending Obama even further, and even farther left.  For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.

And Ginsburg had these gems:

I don’t expect that we’re going to see another affirmative action case [regarding Fisher v University of Texas, wherein Justice Anthony Kennedy gutted his own prior ruling in the case].  I think [Justice Kennedy] comes out as the great hero of this term.

And

It would be an impossible dream.  But I’d love to see Citizens United overruled[.]

The problem here isn’t that she’s engaging in political speech, though.  It’s that her political speech, because of her position and role in our Federal government—a Supreme Court Justice—means that whatever she says in the political arena can only prejudice all of her subsequent rulings.  With such political bashing, she’s predetermining her position on any case that comes before the Court, and not only those that might be brought under or by a Trump administration.

On the other hand, it’s good to know her prejudices—as well as those pre-written opinions on cases yet to come—beforehand, rather than discovering them in her opinions after the rulings have been announced.  Which emphasizes the importance of a question asked by a tweeter and quoted in The Washington Post piece at the first link above:

If there’s a redo of Bush v Gore, how does Ginsburg not recuse herself, given her Trump comments?

How, indeed?  Worse, how could we expect her to?

Leadership

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That’s the subject of a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar name.  The piece recounted the recent history of anti-cop violence and murders of cops in the performance of their duties—including protecting an hours-long anti-cop protest by the Black Lives Matter movement in Dallas, for which the police were rewarded with the murder of five of their own and the wounding of several more.

The WSJ also decried, correctly, the lack of support our police get from our political leadership from the President on down—until after those cops have been wounded or murdered, and then official condolences flow like snake oil from a salesman.

President Barack Obama (D) was cited as saying that it’s possible to decry the abuses of our justice system while expressing support for the police, and he’s right.  But Obama has demonstrated his stout belief in the sewage of moral relativism, in the wake of the Dallas police murders, by spouting carefully unbalanced statistics—unbalanced because Obama chose not to mention things like black on black murder statistics—and by carefully ignoring the racism of the Black Lives Movement and the self-serving racism of the Al Sharptons of the nation who aren’t even sincere in their racism but spout it only for their personal aggrandizement.

The piece also quoted Minnesota’s Democrat Governor Mark Dayton saying this about the shooting of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis:

Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white? I don’t think it would have.

That this is a deliberately racist statement made solely for Dayton’s personal political gain is demonstrated by his careful elision of the fact the cop involved was…brown.

These things illustrate a part of what lies beneath Obama’s and his party’s divisiveness over the last few years: they’ve cynically played the race card in order to increase their political power.

Democrats represent the ideology of victimhood with Democrats as the Protectors.  And this only traps Democrat protectees in dependency on their protectors.  Liberals know this full well.