Tag Archives: culture

Gullible

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That’s what NBC‘s Chuck Todd and his cronies of the NLMSM, Andrea Mitchell and Hallie Jackson, says 63 million of us Americans are because we voted for now-President Donald Trump.

I knew the gaslighting was out there. I knew it was every day.  But I think there was part of me in my head assumed people were discerning it out, knew the BS from the non-BS. So, I think what my sort of shock to the system was just sort of how gullible a big chunk of the country was to this and gullible because maybe they want to be gullible.

Oh, we recognized the gaslighting, and we did a fine job of discriminating the BS from the non-BS.

But because us irredeemably deplorable racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist religion-clinging gun-toters of flyover country were so foolish that we saw through the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton and the slanted nature of the plainly pro-Progressive-Democrat “press,” we continue to be disparaged by our Betters.  Many of us chose for Trump, many others of us chose against Clinton, and all of us chose the way we did because we saw through the press’ studied spin.  We chose not to take the NLMSM as seriously as those members of the press thought we should.

And here we are, two years on, and those persons still are attacking the man while ignoring his policies, still disparaging us for attending to his policies while not giving journalists’ weight to the superficialities of the man.

These worthies are so deeply immersed in their obsessive-compulsive neurosis that they cannot even recognize their own bias.

A Conservative’s View….

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My latest effort, a pamphlet on the American legal system (because I don’t lack for ego), A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, has been released, and it can be found on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2L4iVXx .  Links also can be found on my Books page.

Our legal system is explicitly founded on natural law through our Creator’s endowment—the origin and source of our fundamental principles.

Though government should not legislate morality beyond a very narrow arena (vis., a measure of specificity regarding types of homicide and theft; strictly limited controls on bearing false witness, etc.), with natural law as the foundation of our legal system, morality inescapably informs it.  This is so because morality flows from the Creator-endowed and individually-imbued nature of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our social compact was founded explicitly to protect these.  From that, our statutes are at their best when limited to attempts to implement and protect those foundational principles and nothing more. Any further legislation should be limited to improvements on those strictly circumscribed efforts. In particular, legislation should not be used to generate new morals.

The nature of our American judiciary and the proper role of judges in our jurisprudence has been argued throughout our history, but the argument has been especially virulent over the last dozen or so years.  The current dispute (I don’t call it a debate) centers on whether our Constitution means what it says and neither more nor less, or whether it’s a living document that should grow and adjust to meet a judge’s understanding of changing times and mores.

In this pamphlet, I lay out three key propositions.  The first is that only Congress may make law.  The second is that judges may strike a law before them as unconstitutional, but if they do not, they must apply the law as written.  The third is that the Constitution must be applied as it is written.  Alterations or updates to it are political decisions, and thus only We the People may make them.

Understand: I’m not writing about the origins of the idea of law or of systems of law.  A plethora of legal philosophers (HLA Hart, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and Gustav Radbruch to mention a few Western ones) treat these subjects should the reader wish to explore them. I begin later, with the principles underlying our American legal system.

 

Keep in mind, too, that government, per se, does not make law; the men who populate the government do.

 

Finally, Justice Antonin Scalia made this claim in his A Matter of Interpretation,

Surely this is a sad commentary: we American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most.
Even sadder, however, is the fact that the American bar and American legal education, by and large, are unconcerned with the fact that we have no intelligible theory.

I agree, and in my hubris, I offer the beginnings of such a theory here.

Pseudo-Journalism

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Terry Moran and Devin Dwyer, of ABC News, decided it would be cool, to make fun of President Donald Trump’s future funeral arrangements. In the middle of President George HW Bush’s funeral proceedings.  To draw attention away from the occasion of the death of an American President who oversaw the collapse of one of our post-war most powerful enemies.

They pretended to joke about an ego-driven funeral process.

Then there’s Don Lemon, of CNN.

I don’t think I would’ve shake hands with him. I would just—no, couldn’t do it. I’m not that big of a person. I would hope that I would be, but I don’t—I can’t fake the funk, as they say. And I’m not saying that the Obamas did that [when they shook hands with Trump at the funeral].
…
I’m not petty and small.  That’s real, brother. That’s real.

Therewith, Lemon showed himself to be every bit as small and venal as he claims Trump to be.  With that, he’s showing how basely hypocritical he is.

And neither one of these crews could stand to cover Bush’s funeral without bringing out their Trump-bashing commentary.

Together, these two examples illustrate how far what passes for modern journalism has sunk. It’s become an insult to the intelligence and the character of honest Americans throughout our great nation.

A Stiff Sentence

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Recall that Jean-Claude Arnault was convicted in a Swedish court for rape in a case that also so implicated the Nobel Prize facility that it chose not to award a Literature prize that year.  For the crime, Arnault was sentenced to jail for an interminable two years.

Now a Swedish court has convicted Arnault of a second rape.  It sentenced him, for that crime, to an additional…six months.

Sweden surely takes a dim view of rape.

Sure.

Oh, and one of the items being considered in the US Congress this week is the Violence Against Women Act, which provides funding for battered-women’s shelters and other programs to prevent domestic violence and bolster its prosecution.  Here is a chance for us to draw some contrast with that European nation—or will the Progressive-Democrats succeed in making us a bit more like them as that Party insists on lighting up the Act like a Christmas tree with add-on froo-froo having little to do with the subject matter of the bill and thereby make it impossible to pass?

Rewarding Thuggery

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Recall the rioting, looting, and graffiti-spraying—on l’Arc de Triomphe, yet—in France over the Macron government’s decision to raise fuel taxes and utility rates.  Now the government has abjectly surrendered to the rioters: it will not implement the new tax and utility rates at all (Deutsche Welle has reported that the tax is suspended for six months rather than canceled altogether).

The tax and rate hike were bad moves on principle: it’s nearly always wrong to raise taxes before cutting spending or to raise utility rates for reasons other than to cover expenses and preserve a measure of profit, but these were especially foolish: they were intended to fund the nation’s even more expensive—to the citizenry, and especially the nation’s poor and unemployed—move to a purely “green” economy.  This, though, was the wrong time to correct the error, and it’s the wrong reason to do so.

This was done, not in response to the will of the people demurring, it was in immediate, meek obedience to thugs.

And far from putting an end to the troubles, it has had the opposite—and obvious to objective outside observers—response from the thugs.

France’s Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe:

No tax is worth putting the nation’s unity in danger[.]  …  The violence must end[.]

I plead with you.

The response for his reward:

But the announcement is unlikely to put an end to the road blockades and demonstrations, with more protests possible in Paris this weekend.
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“It’s a first step, but we will not settle for a crumb,” said Benjamin Cauchy, a protest leader.

And

Segolene Royal, a former candidate for president, lauded Philippe’s decision but said the course correction on the climate change tax came too late.

And

Marine Le Pen lashed out at the decision as too little, tweeting it was “obviously not up to the expectations of the French people struggling with precarity.” … “A moratorium on taxes is being considered. But a moratorium is only a postponement.”

President Emmanuel Macron:

I will never accept violence.  No cause justifies that authorities are attacked, that businesses are plundered, that passers-by or journalists are threatened or that the Arc de Triomphe is defiled.

Tough talk for someone who has just surrendered to the thugs.  No, Macron’s government isn’t finished paying up.