Snowflake Insult

A pressman, CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent Scott MacFarlane, is crying that he has PTSD as a result of the crowd’s real-time reaction to the attempted murder of then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America. And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck [Todd on The Chuck Todd Cast podcast]. This was—I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.
They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!

This is disgusting and despicable even for a member of the journalism guild. No one was coming for MacFarlane or any other member of the press present during that rally and shooting. Any diagnosis of PTSD for a journalist in that environment is almost tautologically erroneous.

Worse, MacFarlane’s crying and PTSD diagnosis are insults to our soldiers who have been injured, traumatized, and suffer from actual PTSD. They’re insults to all of our firemen, policemen, and EMTs who have been injured or traumatized in the course of their life-threatening duties or, in the particular case of EMTs, the horrific abuses they’ve seen and treated in the course of their duties.

MacFarlane is a Snowflake Poster Boy for why journalist guildsmen and -women are viewed with such utter distrust and contempt by us average Americans.

Mistake

In their piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the editors wrote about President Donald Trump’s decision to continue sending weapons to Ukraine because [t]hey have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard.

Unfortunately, the editors wrote this near the end of their bit:

What matters is giving Ukraine enough firepower to change Mr Putin’s cost-benefit calculation about continuing the war.

This isn’t just wrong; it’s deeply immoral. Arming Ukraine enough to change the barbarian’s cost-benefit calculation is just a means to keep Ukrainian soldiers in the field fighting, being maimed, and dying and to keep Ukrainian women and children available as targets for the barbarian.

Putin has already made his cost-benefit calculation: he doesn’t care about the cost, even having decided that his soldiers are nothing more than consumables on a par with fuel and ammunition. No amount of continued Ukrainian resistance, no matter how effective and costly (in the editors’ eyes) the war continues to be for Putin, he sees the benefit—conquering and occupying Ukraine, erasing it from the list of sovereign nations—as well worth the expenditure, whatever its size.

It isn’t enough to arm Ukraine enough that it can continue the war. Ukraine must win the war outright. That requires sending it the offensive and defensive weapons systems the UA needs in the numbers and in the timing that the UA needs them. Naysayers in government and Timid Tesses like these editors and their brethren elsewhere in the news media gallery need to get out of the way of that.

Trump and Ukraine

President Donald Trump (R) says he’s “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the latest telecon between the two. Even, I don’t think he’s looking to stop his war. NSS.

Mr Putin added an exclamation point by hitting Kyiv with one of the biggest drone and missile attacks of the war the same night as his conversation with Mr Trump.

Putin has followed prior telecons with Trump with heavy drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and residences.

Even so, Trump continues to dither regarding serious responses to Putin’s barbarism.

One possibility is that Trump is giving Putin every diplomatic opportunity to call off his barbaric invasion and war against Ukraine before Trump takes concrete action in Ukraine’s favor: serious sanctions against Russia and those persons, businesses, and nations that do business of any sort with Russia, coupled with unfettered arms deliveries to Ukraine in the amounts and times the UA says they need them.

That time is long past, though; Putin has responded militarily overtly negatively to those opportunities. It’s time to act.

The WSJ editors closed their piece with this:

Mr Putin thinks he can make President Trump look plaintive and weak, and then get away with it as Russia swallows Ukraine. If the Russian is right, much of the US deterrence benefit of the Iran strike will vanish.

That misstates the case. If Putin succeeds, all of our deterrence will disappear. And more: we’ll be actively inviting further moves by our enemies.

Yet More Disingenuousity

This time, it’s at the State level of education. As usual, the sham bellyaching comes from the Left. In a Just the News piece regarding the slowdown in dismantling the US Department of Education related to DoEd wins in a variety of education and court milieus, we got this from Leslie Babinski, Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy:

We’re looking at 7.4 million students with disabilities who could potentially be impacted by changes with funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act[.]
There are 9.8 million students in rural schools who depend on federal support for bridge funding in communities with more limited local tax bases.

This is hysteria hyping in education. Funding needn’t be impacted at all by anything DoEd does, including being disbanded altogether. That includes those rural school students. Education is, by design and overwhelmingly correctly so, local. The Federal government has no business being involved except at a top level—through Title IX’s protection of girls and women in sports and the elimination of DEI bigotry from school curricula.

Local means local, and the top of local in our federal construction is the States. Students with disabilities need extra funding, no doubt, and rural schools with limited local tax funds available also need extra funding. That funding, though, should—must—come from the States. They have no excuse for leaning on [in both sense of that phrase] the Federal government for those tax dollars remitted to the Federal government from other States. States need to do—and all they need to do, regardless of how hard State government politicians think it is politically—is to reallocate their existing spending to better treat their own schools.

That folks like Babinski don’t think of things like this is why politically oriented experts who are not actual politicians cannot be taken seriously.

Politicians in the Federal and State governments, on the other hand, who claim that State level spending reallocations are too hard to do are doing nothing more than holding our children hostage against those politicians’ personal spending wishes. That’s as disgusting as it is immoral.

Right On

Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson, of AQR Capital Management, wrote in the Saturday Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section decrying Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement that we “shouldn’t have billionaires.”

The money part of their letter, though, is their closer:

We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.

Right on.