Tag Archives: culture

Politicizing Tragedy

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Recall a mass shooting in 2018 at a Thousand Oaks, CA, bar in which 13 were killed and a dozen injured.  Recall further that Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus was killed as he moved to stop the killer from doing more.

Various charity activities since had raised thousands of dollars for the families of other police officers who’d also died in the course of their several duties, and

The Blue Bowl, a charity flag football game, was intended to raise money for the family of fallen Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus as well as [those] other officers killed in the line of duty….

However, Thousand Oaks Police Chief Tim Hagel has pulled his department out of the event, leading to its cancelation, and all that money already raised for those other officers’ families is

now being returned to donors….

All, and solely, because Trump supporters would be speaking at the event.

Mike Randall, Fallen Officers Foundation Vice President:

He [Hagel] basically said over and over in the conversation, “This is not Trump country, that slogan ‘Make America Great’ is not favorable, popular, within 1,200 square miles,” that we don’t want Republicans here. I could not believe it[.]
“The only thing,” and I quote, “the only thing you [could have done to make] this worse, Mike, was to invite Dick Cheney and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”

Now, no one will get any aid. Never mind that the collected speakers would have been an ecumenical group: Governor Gavin Newsom’s public safety liaison, Trump supporter and Hollywood icon Scott Baio—a fellow congregant of Helus’ at church—Trump-supporting singer Joy Villa, and others.

Hagel didn’t approve, so everyone gets cut off.  No one gets needed financial assistance.

This stinks.  But more dangerous than just the odor of this move, Hagel has shown that he doesn’t “serve and protect” all the citizens of Thousand Oaks.  Only those of whom he personally approves.

A Parallel

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The Progressive-Democrats are pretending to hold “‘official’ impeachment inquiries” against President Donald Trump.  It’s a pretense because were they serious, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) would put the matter to a House floor vote and put all Representatives—Republican and Progressive-Democrats alike—on the public record as being for or against an actual impeachment inquiry, as the House, under majorities of both parties, has done for past impeachment moves.  Instead, she has not; the Progressive-Democrats intend only to keep the smear going for the next 14, or so, months in a naked attempt to control the next election.

It’s a dangerous move, though: ordinary Americans, the object of so much contempt from the Left and from Party, aren’t stupid, and they can see clearly what’s happening.  Further, such moves have backfired in those past, legitimately serious (because deeply bipartisan) impeachment efforts: the minority party made equally serious gains in the subsequent elections.

There’s a parallel situation currently unfolding in Austria.

In 2017, Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was filmed offering to facilitate the purchase of the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest tabloid newspaper, if the purchaser would commit to editorial support for Strache once she gained control.

The filming turned out to be a setup to entrap Strache (the purchaser turned out to be a woman pretending, for the sake of the sting, to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch), but by whom?

Even today, there are few details about who organized the trap or why they waited two years to release the footage….

Even so, the government fell.  Like Bill Clinton, Stache seemed and seems guilty as hell.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called a snap election the day after Strache resigned but by the end of the month, Kurz himself had been ousted by a no-confidence motion and replaced by an interim chancellor.

However, today we’re four months later, the new elections were yesterday, and as of Friday,

The party [Freedom Party, Strache’s party] quickly re-calibrated after Strache’s resignation; portraying themselves as victims in a shadowy sting operation.
“The FPÖ came out as heroes—as martyrs—they rephrased the situation,” says Paul Schmidt, Secretary General of the the Austrian Society for European Politics, an NGO in Vienna.

And

The polls indicate Kurz will be re-elected chancellor and he has not ruled out renewing his old coalition with the Freedom Party.

Indeed, early returns indicate Kurz’ party (not directly involved in the scandal) looks to gain seats.  Like ordinary Americans, ordinary Austrians are not stupid, and they don’t like cheap shots—that setup run by who knows whom—or politicians and seeming self-important activists making serious, purely political moves out of relatively minor business.  Clinton’s misuse of a young intern was certainly serious business for his intern and for him, but the impeachment effort was strictly politically done by a party that simply didn’t like the man.

The Progressive-Democrats’ present effort fits the latter.  Trump is atypical for holders of political office, being routinely bluntly- and occasionally crudely-spoken and prone to acting rather than talking.  He’s very much hated by professional politicians for that atypicality, and especially by Progressive-Democrats, who consider election outcomes their personal property and Trump an unauthorized squatter.  They want their property cleared out, and they’re going to do whatever they think they must to reclaim their property in 2020.

Update: Based on exit polling, it looks like Kurz’ ÖVP will gain 37% of the vote, up sharply from the 31% his party got in the prior election.  Only the FPÖ was damaged by Strache’s misbehavior, falling to 16%, and a renewed governing coalition between ÖVP and FPÖ seems unlikely.  Kurz, though, still needs a coalition in order to form a governing majority.

A Chinese Firewall

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…erected by the European Court of Justice.  The ruling is a partial victory for Alphabet’s Google subsidiary in a “right to be forgotten” case brought by Google as it appealed a fine imposed by the French watchdog, the National Commission for Computing and Liberties, which wanted Google to delete all references worldwide to personal data an EU citizen wanted “forgotten.”

The ECJ ruled that the EU’s “right” applied only within the EU—the partial victory.  However, it added that

search engine operators such as Google must put in place measures to discourage internet users from going beyond European borders to obtain information.
Dereferencing must “if necessary, be accompanied by measures that effectively prevent or, at the very least, seriously discourage Internet users” from accessing “via a version of this engine and outside the EU, the links that are the subject of the request,” the court added.

And so it begins in Europe, too.

More on “Pressure”

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The whistleblower’s stuff has been released, and his cover letter and the complaint itself can be read in their entirety here.

A couple things jump out at me right from the start.

One that’s readily apparent in the cover letter is that the whistleblower repeatedly makes clear he has no knowledge of the events about which he claims such concern—it’s all related to him by carefully unnamed source—often “multiple” sources.  He does cite, in attempts to corroborate, remarks publicly made Rudy Giuliani, President Trump, and selected Ukrainian officials, but those remarks are removed from the context in which they were made and given only the context of the whistleblower’s complaint.  Beyond that, he cites claims made by an organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.  This is an organization comprised of Eastern European, Caucasus, Central Asian, and Central American “media and journalists” and unknown personnel represented to be from unidentified “investigative centers.”  The claims made by OCCRP are unsubstantiated in the whistleblower’s cite, yet he presents them seriously and expects those to whom he’s complaining—outside of channels, mind you—to take them at face value.

And this lead paragraph from the whistleblower’s cover letter (right-click and select from the popup menu to get a bigger image):

As we know from the released telecon transcript, no such pressure was applied, nor did Giuliani or Barr play any sort of central role in this non-existent letter, being mentioned on as points of contact in Ukraine’s investigations of corruption.  We also know more generally, from Wednesday’s press conference, that Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskiy said bluntly that he felt no pressure to do anything.

One last thing, an apparently small item, but it illustrates the general level of…sloppiness…with which the “complaint” was prepared. The whistleblower wrote, in the 3rd paragraph of page 3 of his missive that a “readout” of the telecon posted on “the website of the Ukrainian President” was translated “from the original Russian.” The Ukrainian and Russian languages are similar, but they are distinct from each other. Any translation here would have been from Ukrainian.

Wow.

A couple things appear, also, from the ICIG’s (Michael Atkinson) transmittal letter to Acting DNI Director Joseph Maguire.

One concerns the whistleblower’s characterization of Trump’s 25 July telecon with Zelenskiy. Atkinson, in his own words, says that “the ICIG did not request access to records” pertaining to that telecon. The ICIG made no attempt to corroborate or refute the whistleblower’s characterization. Atkinson’s rationale for that decision boils down to his finding such an attempt “too hard, so don’t bother.”  Never mind that Trump, with Zelenskiy’s agreement, released that transcript in a timely manner.

There’s also no indication that Atkinson made any effort to talk with any of the whistleblower’s “multiple US government officials” sources or even any of his named sources—Giuliani and Barr, for instance—to see if they agreed or disagreed with any of the whistleblowers claims of what they said.

That’s not much of a “preliminary review.”

Again, wow.

Many in Congress complain about Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in the Federal government….

Dishonest Journalism

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Kyle Smith is too polite to call it that, but he comes very close in his National Review piece about an interview Robin Pogrebin gave to WMAL back on the 17th.

Some excerpts:

[Pogrebin’s and Kelly’s story [sic]] failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL.

“Behavior” that has already been shown nonexistent, repeatedly.  Of what piece, exactly?  And what incident? The principle doesn’t remember it, and the principle witness refused to be interviewed.

Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the [New York] Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy?

Not when she needs to be outed in order to tell a tale.

[Emphasis in the original]:

Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. … She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion.

And [emphasis in the original]:

If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter—the woman in question at the Yale party—in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.

And the kicker:

Of the woman at the party, she says, “Remember that she was incredibly drunk at that party as was everyone. And so I think we’re talking about memory here as really kind of a questionable issue. There are plenty of things that are conceivable that could happen when people are too drunk to remember them.” So the standard here is not whether something is true, it’s whether it’s “conceivable.” If a story is “of a piece with a kind of behavior,” even if such behavior is itself not established, and if a story is “conceivable” when filtered through that confirmation bias, and even if it’s undercut by the person the story supposedly happened to, and even if the person telling the story was “incredibly drunk,” you just go with it anyway.

That’s not gross journalistic malpractice, as Smith put it.  That’s blatantly, deliberately dishonest reporting.

RTWT.