Tag Archives: politics

One-Upping Elizabeth

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Who can be more socialist than the other?  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) now has proposed

an annual wealth tax topping out at 8% for the richest Americans, offering the farthest-reaching Democratic plan to pay for expanded government programs and break up concentrated fortunes.

That’s much more than fellow Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA) now paltry 2% wealth tax.

That’s on top of the race to give the most free stuff to the most people: who’s got the more extensive Housing-for-All plan, the broader Medicare-for-All plan, the more lucrative student debt forgiveness plan, Sanders’ plan to forgive all medical debt and parent debt taken in support of students (look for Warren to come up with plans for those soon), and on and on and on.

This sort of thing can only be done through government control or outright ownership of all property, and that’s at the core of socialism.

One-upping? No, it’s who can be the more socialist.

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.

Political Tactics

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The Wall Street Journal says the “Ukraine call” will

leak eventually, so Trump might as well get it out.

No.  Telecons between American and foreign heads of state must, necessarily, remain strictly between heads of state, else it’ll be impossible for an American President to engage in “frank and open” dialog and polylog with foreign leaders or to conduct serious foreign policy in general.  No transcript should be released.

Alternatively, and in second place in the order of priorities for such things, let the leak(s) occur.  Then release the transcript and let the truth burn the leaker(s) and those who jumped onto the leak-related opprobrium bandwagon knowing they didn’t have the facts.

In the realization, something close to that second place has already happened.  In their hysteria to get President Donald Trump and to undo the outcome of an election the Progressive-Democrats consider to be their personal property stolen, the House Progressive-Democratic caucus has forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) to authorize an “impeachment investigation.”  In the immediate wake of that stampede, Trump has decided, with the permission and agreement of Ukraine’s President Volodomy Zelenskiy, to release the unredacted transcript of the call, with the so-called whistleblower’s “complaint” to be released by week’s end.

And that will be irrelevant, at least in the eyes of Progressive-Democrats: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is saying it doesn’t matter what the transcript says; Party wants to “see what happened.”  Because the transcript isn’t actually what happened.

Some Numbers

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…on President Donald Trump’s war on women.  Here they are for women-led households.  The latest Census Bureau report says

  • the share of workers in female-led households who worked full-time year-round increased by 4.2 percentage points among blacks
  • 6 percentage points among Hispanics.

Notice that.  Not 4.2 percent—4.2 percentage points.

Then there’re these numbers:

  • real median earnings for female households with no spouse present jumped 7.6% last year.
  • poverty rate among female households declined 2.7 percentage points for blacks
  • declined 4 percentage points for Hispanics
  • declined 7.1 percentage points for their children

And

  • jobless rate for black women in August fell to a historic low of 4.4%
  • jobless rate for Hispanic women was 4.2%

Trump sure is doing a lousy job in his war on women. Right up there with his poor performance as a racist.

“Trump Repeatedly Pressured Ukraine President”

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…regarding Biden’s intervention with Ukraine’s law enforcement in favor of his son.  At least that’s how The Wall Street Journal has characterized a phone call between heads of state.

Except that’s not what happened, and to call it “pressure” is to insult, grievously, the mettle and courage of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.  In that phone call, Trump did ask Zelensky to investigate Biden’s role in getting Ukraine’s Prosecutor Generall, Viktor Shokin fired in order to get a billion dollars in already promised aid to Ukraine.

No one serious, though, sees requests as pressure.  There were no or elses; not even the WSJ alleges that. Nor have the tabloids that have taken up the cry, The Washington Post or The New York Times.  Nor is there any reason to believe Zelensky is such a Milquetoast as to feel pressured because someone merely asked him to do something.  Indeed, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko was blunt and clear:

I know what the conversation was about, and I think there was no pressure.  There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.

And

President Trump is interested, his advisor, Giuliani, newspapers, Democrats, Republicans are interested in whether pressure had been put on Ukraine.  I want to say that we are an independent state, we have our own secrets.

No pressure.  Except, perhaps in the minds of Progressive-Democrats who are projecting their own responses to such questions.

Which brings me to Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Vice President (during the time of his threat vis-à-vis that Prosecutor Genera) Joe Biden and his distortion of the current situation.

He is violating every basic norm of a president. He’s using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.

Because the truth is smearing.

On the contrary, the abuse of power and the misuse of every element of the presidency is Biden’s own interference with that Ukrainian investigation into his son’s role in what the Ukrainians were investigating as an illegal, if not criminal, activity.  He demanded Shokin be fired so the investigation couldn’t go forward, or he would withhold all that foreign aid.

And then Biden bragged about his successful interference at a US Council on Foreign Relations event.

I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. … He got fired.

That’s pressure, and it was successfully applied by a badly misbehaving American Vice President.

One more thing.  Progressive-Democrats and their communications facility, the press, all have the vapors because Trump is insisting misbehavior be investigated.  As though it’s OK to misbehave, so long as it’s a Progressive-Democrat government official doing the misbehavior.  It puts me in mind of a remark reported to have been made by then-President Richard Nixon (R), that “if the President does it, that means it’s legal.”  I’ll paraphrase, slightly. It seems to be the position of the Left that “if a Progressive-Democrat mucky-muck does it, that means it’s legal.”

No.  Wrong-doing should be investigated, thoroughly, regardless of who’s suspected of doing it.  And that’s what Trump is insisting on.