JD Vance deletes things from his past, which is . . . troubling

For example, that he voted for Evan McMuffinhead in 2016, that he thought Trump was reprehensible, and now . . . pro-life sections of his Senate campaign website.

 

deleted sometime on July 15 or July 16, 2024

We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done

 Josh Hammer, here:

The imperative of this late hour of the American republic, in order to even attempt to rebalance our wildly off-balance pendulum, is to respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies -- to reward our side's forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side's forces of civilizational arson -- within the broad confines of the rule of law.

If we want to get back to "neutrality," at this perilous point, it's going to first take bloodying up some noses. That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.

Above all, it is imperative that the Right not bat an eyelash. Do not be intimidated by this blatant show of crass thuggery masquerading as a legal proceeding. It's now full steam ahead through November. We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.

Frankly, sympathetic as I am, I don't see how that will change anything. It will simply validate lawfare, the weaponizing of the legal system for political ends.

Democrats have crossed the Rubicon.

Escalation seems inevitable, but then there will be more escalation after that, and more after that.

That's what this means.

There has to be a better way.

 

Why I won't be patronizing Oppenheimer by seeing it: He was a Stalinist and a traitor

 Daniel J. Flynn, here:

As described in this column previously, Pavel Sudoplatov, so high-ranking that the Soviets placed him in charge of murdering Leon Trotsky, maintained in his autobiography that “Oppenheimer supplied … the Soviet Union with crucial information for it to successfully test its own atomic bomb in 1949.” He details Oppenheimer’s role, “which included allowing moles access to secret data to copy it, and describes him as ‘knowingly part of the scheme.’”

Material from the files of both Soviet and U.S. intelligence supports Sudoplatov’s claim: “An Oct. 2, 1944, memo from the Soviet archives, signed in receipt by chief of secret police Lavrentiy Beria, identifies Oppenheimer as a ‘member of the apparatus of Comrade [Earl] Browder’ who ‘provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of [the Communist Party USA leader].’”

Venona project decrypts refer to Oppenheimer under a codename, monikers in most but not all circumstances reserved for Soviet assets. A decoded March 1945 intercept “instructs Soviet agents to ‘re-establish contact with “Veskel” … as soon as possible.’ Veskel, the National Security Administration determined conclusively, referred to Oppenheimer.”

In The Venona Secrets, late authors Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel wrote: “In May [of 1945] the Rezidentura sent Moscow another report from [Theodore] Hall on atom bomb research. It revealed the locations of work being done and the names of the heads of each research group. All of the names were clearly written out except one, that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was listed as ‘Veskel,’ the head of Los Alamos.”

Oppenheimer’s critics lacked this information in 1954, so one better understands their restrained classification of him as merely a security risk rather than charging that he lacked, in the words of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, a “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” What’s the excuse of the NBC News Studios documentary airing on MSNBC for omitting so much information from credible sources in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. intelligence apparatus painting a grim picture of Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness? ...

Oppenheimer donated large sums to Communist causes, subscribed to Communist publications, and married a Communist. Other associates in the party included his brother, sister-in-law, landlady, the girlfriend who later became his mistress, and numerous students. He attended secret meetings of Communist professors while teaching at Berkeley.

 Most damning of all, Haakon Chevalier, a friend and professor at Berkeley, approached Oppenheimer with the idea of passing on Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer did not report this event to his superiors for many months and, when he did, described the events dishonestly, i.e., by omitting both himself and Chevalier from the story. Rather than steer clear of someone petitioning him to commit espionage, Oppenheimer continued to see Chevalier socially for years.

Biden barely remembers major events in his political career and personal life, yet easily recalls things that never occurred

 

Biden has never been an honest man, but his inability to tell fact from fiction puts the nation at risk. 

 

Read it all here.

Trump failed to deliver in 2018 and 2020, now his party fails to deliver in 2022

Maybe America Hasn't Suffered Enough

 

Scott McKay, The American Spectator

This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer. ... Trump didn’t play the net positive role he should have, and that might be the real takeaway. ... Objectively, it’s clear that DeSantis is the future of the GOP.

LOL, Ben Stein, cheerleader for "corporations are people", has decided that America has only just now become a fascist state

Now, in the year 2021, the iron curtain has come down hard. With Big Internet Tech and the White House now admittedly colluding to identify and suppress dissidents, even completely nonviolent dissidents, we no longer have a Constitution.

There is just one big corporate–government–IngSoc superstate running everything. Goodbye, America. The GOP, with 50 senators, does nothing. The state legislatures, by far a majority GOP, and the spineless Supreme Court do nothing. And so goodbye to the greatest experiment in the history of the world.

More.

Gee, what's the problem, Ben?

“Liberals don’t understand that corporations are people,” columnist Ben Stein wrote back in 1974. “They are the people who work for the corporation, buy its products, and own its stock. There is no mechanical person who is benefited if corporations make a good profit. Real people benefit, just as real people lose when corporations lose money.” True enough. But it is also true that corporations have as much of a vested interest in the political system (if not more) . . ..

Here.

The corporation in America was the creation of the King of England. Virginia was but one example of thirteen. The damn things rebelled. Samuel Johnson tried to explain it to us, but it, shall we say, kinda went over our heads, and where it didn't was met with what they would come to call a generous demonstration of disapprobation.

And so, what goes around comes around. Or as Reverend Wright would put it, "America's chickens . . . have come home . . . to roost!"

Taxation No Tyranny

 

 

Jack Cashill calls them the Pontius Pilate Republicans, which is kinda unfair to Pilate

Why Has the Right Let the Floyd Cops Fry?

Feeling they had to say something about the Derek Chauvin verdict, the Republicans in Congress seemed to take their cues from Pontius Pilate. “I think the jury did its job,” said Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst all too typically, “and I would – I did not follow, of course, all the parts of the trial, but I would say that given the information they received, they did their job, and I guess I’m in agreement.” The sound of hands being washed echoed throughout Capitol Hill.

I find in him no fault at all. -- John 18:38

Know that I find no fault in him. -- John 19:4

I find no fault in him. -- John 19:6

From thenceforth Pilate sought to release him. -- John 19:12

Justice Anthony Kennedy is to blame for much of the polarization now evident everywhere in America

From Paul Kengor's Anthony Kennedy: Reagan’s Worst Mistake:

The Kennedy pick was supposed to calm the waters after the storm generated by the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg nominations. ... His subsequent 30 years of judicial decisions literally redefined things as basic as life and marriage. His calamitous three decades on the court will be followed by an endless maze of legal-cultural wars and church-state battles dealing with the disastrous dust-up of what he unleashed. ... Kennedy led the majority with one of the most breathtakingly outrageous statements in the history of jurisprudence: “At the heart of liberty,” averred Kennedy, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

In short, Anthony Kennedy spearheaded America's turn into the Libertarian Party in convention, but where no one can agree about anything.

H. W. Crocker III is very confused, and his editor ought to be horse-whipped

In America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last for The American Spectator, which by the way never says that, H. W. Crocker III says many wonderful things but ends up making a hash of it.

He rightly concludes that the left's hysteria is a "destructive fire that will not be easily quenched, and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument."

But then immediately he advocates for just that, rational argument:

"[I]t seems to me that we can at least be as understanding of our own history [as President William McKinley]."

And also:

"[B]ut the point is to regain a rational, even if nostalgic, perspective on our past by eliciting laughter."

And finally:

"If America is to come together again, it will do so only through the restoration of what Lincoln called our mystic chords of memory, a common culture that emerges from a shared and sympathetic understanding of our past."

Well said, but by his own admission Crocker admits the North and South already had these things:

"North and South venerated the Founders. They shared the same language, the same religion, and, in large part, the same general stock. Most of all, they shared what Jeff Sessions was recently rebuked for calling an “Anglo-American heritage” of liberty under law, stretching from the mists of medieval England — even before Magna Carta — to our own Bill of Rights."

Just so. And still they went to war.

How much more we, whose "Anglo-Americans" can't even agree among themselves to stem the tide of the replacement of "the general stock" through immigration?

Such self-understanding demands what must be done for self-preservation: a halt to immigration, revaluation of citizenship, enforcement of assimilationist policies, and prioritization of family formation.

Without these things more leisure to ruminate about history won't even be possible. We'll be too busy watching our backs.

The American Spectator singles out Michigan for its $16 billion in corporate welfare, but the cronyism trend is up 39% just in the top 10 states since 2015

The story is here, and is more than correct to state:

Unfortunately, crony capitalism is something both parties are willing to get behind. Part of the problem is that voters often approve of these subsidies when the phrase “bringing jobs to the state” is uttered.

We're more like China than we'd like to admit, where state-owned enterprise is the rule. We simply practice state-capitalism-lite.

The data is tracked comprehensively here, updated it appears through 2015. The last time I reported on this in 2015 the top ten crony states alone were up to $96 billion in corporate welfare handouts. Three years later the top 10's cronyism has grown to $133 billion, an increase of nearly 39%.

Free market capitalism this is not.

R. Emmett Tyrell of The American Spectator comes out . . . for Trump

Here:

'I am for the candidate with a sense of humor, of showmanship, and a proven record for getting things done. Now on the “Today Show” this week Donald Rumsfeld, a veteran conservative, has come forward and said that Trump has “caused people to respond in a way that most politicians have not been able to do.” Rumsfeld is no vulgarian.

'I agree with him. Trump is a new and promising participant in American politics, and he is on the conservatives’ side. Here is history in the making.'

FBI will recommend criminal charges against Hillary et al. to Obama's Justice Dept. before the end of winter

So says R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. here.

The kinder, friendlier boltneck may get another whack at the presidency yet.

Carly Fiorina was against the bailouts in 2009 after the wind changed, but was for them in 2008 with John McCain

Against.

For.

Just like Sarah Palin.

Conservatives are prisoners of the '3 million Republicans stayed home in 2012' meme

The meme began with Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator, here, whose real motive was to beat up the party for nominating another moderate:

"On Tuesday night, it comes clear, as this is written using the latest Fox News figures, Mitt Romney lost to President Obama by 2,819,339 votes. And the news ekes out that Moderate Nominee Number 10 Romney received some 3 million Republican votes less than Moderate Nominee Number 9 -- John McCain in 2008."

Blurted out as it was on November 8, 2012, no one could possibly have known that to be true at the time or trust it, but it has been accepted and remains endlessly repeated as the truth, mostly by the likes of Rush Limbaugh who uses it to browbeat his audience whenever someone spills some lemonade on the still open wound of the Romney defeat. The Republican base was at fault for not showing up, we are told, and Rush is never going to let you forget it. He's as angry at the right as John McCain is, but the meme just reverberates down through the conservative food chain through every microphone until you just want to scream out loud because it simply isn't true.

This is demoralizing for everyone and needed to stop long ago. But why it hasn't stopped has more to do with conservatives' penchant for self-flagellation for their failure to find a new Reagan than with anything else. What they should be doing is trying to learn something from the episode so that they do win next time, but you get the feeling that they don't do that because they really don't believe that they can win next time. Republicans want a Saviour to do the job for them, instead of doing it themselves.

I know why this is, and so do you.

Conservatives have become prisoners of a utopian dream. They keep thinking that if the right guy or gal comes along in the mold of the Gipper, we'll finally, finally, be able to take over the government and show everybody how it's supposed to be done once again, and all will be right with the world.

This is crazy.

The fact is there were just eight states lost by Romney to Obama in 2012 where McCain did better. Here they are, showing how many more votes McCain got than Romney:

Ohio: 16,383

New Mexico: 11,044

California: 171,823

New Jersey: 134,458

New York: 262,275

Maine: 2,997

Vermont: 6,276

Rhode Island: 8,187

Total votes by which McCain did better than Romney, but still lost: 613,443 . . . nowhere near 3 million.

Keep in mind that Romney garnered a net 984,084 more votes nationwide than McCain did in 2008, despite that under-performance in eight states detailed above, and despite what Jeffrey Lord told you in the wake of the election and people like Rush Limbaugh have endlessly repeated ever since. On top of that net better performance, Romney also won North Carolina and Indiana, both of which McCain had lost in bitterly narrow outcomes in 2008. Romney ended up winning 24 states vs. only 22 for McCain. You don't do that with 3 million Republicans staying home in 2012 who didn't in 2008.

To think so now at this late date is a form of mental illness.

Romney's better performance than McCain overall was despite two important factors working against Romney: a lower turnout nationwide in 2012 by 1.6% overall compared to 2008 (2.2 million); and a suppressed voter turnout in New Jersey and New York because of Hurricane Sandy right before the election, which makes McCain's better performance than Romney in those two liberal states in 2008 look questionable, quite apart from being inconsequential.

In New Jersey and New York in 2012 5.9% and 7.3% fewer votes respectively were cast than in 2008, alone totaling a whopping 789,000 votes. Based on Romney's performance in those two states in 2012, as many as 288,000 of those votes could have been his but were not, due to weather related impacts on the election. But they hardly mattered except to show that McCain's so-called out-performance was nothing of the kind.

The only state of the above eight which really mattered for Romney in the 2012 calculus to win was Ohio, where Romney lost by 2.98 points, or 166,272 votes.

Turnout in Ohio was also down in 2012, by 2.3% or 131,000, a rate of no-showing almost 44% higher than in the country as a whole (Just where was Gov. John Kasich when we needed him, hm?). With third party voting in Ohio turning out the same percentage in 2012 as it had in 2008, you have to reckon with the fact that Ohio's 101,788 third party votes in 2012 had a greater impact on the outcome in the lower turnout environment of 2012, and they did.

49,493 of those third party votes in Ohio went to the self-described Republican spoiler from the Libertarian Party, the Republican Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who was just coming off being snubbed by the Republican Party in the presidential debates of late 2011. Another 33,722 votes in Ohio went to assorted libertarian and right of center fruits, nuts and flakes. Then add in the known 16,383 who voted for McCain in 2008 but not for Romney in 2012 and you're up to 99,598 of the 166,272 Romney lost by in Ohio in 2012. That leaves 66,674 additional votes Romney lost to account for, which as luck would have it is about 51% of the total reduced turnout, closely enough mirroring the 47.6% by which Romney ended up losing in Ohio to satisfy the equation's solution. The point is there was nothing terribly unusual about this outcome which couldn't have been remedied by a better boots on the ground operation than Romney fielded, outnumbered as it was by Obama by 10 to 1. Romney's failure in Ohio was remediable.

One gets the feeling from that that Romney too was looking for a Saviour when he should have been working harder. Only after the election was it confirmed by his family that he really didn't have the fire in the belly. We should have known. "ObamaCare's not worth getting angry about". "I'm not going to light my hair on fire".

Ohio, plus New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida in the east together would have given Romney the 270 electoral votes he needed instead of the 206 he actually received. Romney lost those four states, and the presidency, by just 429,522 votes.

Not.3.million.

New book details liberal disdain for the middle class

From Tom Bethell's review of it here:

Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses was published in 1930, but don’t be misled—its author was hostile to the masses. They had attained “complete social power,” and he resented that. The masses “neither should nor can direct their own personal existence.”

Fred Siegel’s Revolt Against the Masses (Encounter Books) takes issue with Ortega and can be seen as a belated corrective. A bracing, well-written reinterpretation of liberalism, Siegel’s new book identifies a political trend that has been in place for decades, yet is rarely noticed or mentioned.

It is subtitled “How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” Siegel calls them gentry liberals—our equivalent of old-fashioned Tories and every bit as class-conscious. In the 1960s they took up “the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights.”

His message, says Michael Barone, co-author The Almanac of American Politics, is that “the roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery.” 

Colorado Democrat Faces Recall After Narrow Victory Courtesy Of Libertarian Spoiler

Ross Kaminsky has the story in The American Spectator, here:

Forty-five miles north, Senate President John Morse is in even bigger trouble. Although his senate district includes the quirky (and liberal) town of Manitou Springs, John Morse won his 2010 election by only 252 votes in a race in which a Libertarian candidate won five times that number. In other words, if not for the presence of a third party candidate, Mr. Morse would likely have lost; this is not a safe “blue” seat, despite redistricting since 2010 having made the district lean slightly more Democratic than its prior configuration. ... [P]erhaps most galling, even to Morse’s liberal constituents, were comments he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show in which he proudly said (while claiming the mantle of Abraham Lincoln) that he counseled fellow Democrat senators to avoid reading e-mails from constituents. To be fair, Morse probably assumed that nobody was watching the show.

Jeffrey Lord Doubts This Race Is Close

In The American Spectator, here:

After the election, Ed Rollins ran into the Washington Post's blunt-speaking editor Ben Bradlee and "harassed" Bradlee "about his paper's lousy polling methodology."

Bradlee's "unrepentant" response?

"Tough sh…t, Rollins, I'm glad it cost you plenty. It's my in-kind contribution to the Mondale campaign."

Got that? ...

How does one explain a president who, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, is increasingly seen as a disaster in both economic and foreign policy? How does a President Obama, with a Gallup job approval rating currently at 49% -- down a full 20% from 2009 -- mysteriously win the day in all these polls?

How does this happen?

Can you say "in-kind contribution"?

George Neumayr: Romney And His Republicans Are Not Authentic Conservatives

So says George Neumayr for The American Spectator, here, and so do I:

An authentically conservative party would find Romney's unprincipled position far more chilling than Akin's gaffe. If unborn children gain or lose their right to life depending upon the circumstances of their conception, then the party has already conceded that that right doesn't exist. Ronald Reagan understood the implications of that concession and never wavered in his defense of the right to life of all unborn children, not just some of them. ... For all the talk about "pragmatism" and "diplomacy" this week from country club Republicans, they didn't display any towards a candidate who won a primary fair and square.

Welfare Practised Through The Tax Code Is Liberalism, Not Conservatism

This is why those who call Ronald Reagan a conservative are wrong, because the intent of his tax policies has been all along to practise welfare through the tax code and thereby create a whole class of people at the bottom half in the country who are dependent on the federal government on April 15th, have no stake in policy and thus in politics because they do not pay for it, and are as a result ungrateful, unmotivated to climb higher, and are increasingly a nation apart from the Americans who do pay for it:

"Reagan and succeeding Republicans abolished federal income taxes on the working poor and on what the Left calls the working class, and they almost abolished them on the middle class.

"It began with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which grew out of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's famous testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1972. Reagan proposed exempting the working poor from all Social Security and income taxes as an alternative to welfare, with the credit serving as a way to offset payroll taxes for low-income workers. ...

"[B]y 2007, after 25 years of Reaganomics and before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of earners, on net and as a group, paid less than 0 percent of federal income taxes, according to official IRS data, as reported recently by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of paying at least some income taxes to help support the federal government, the federal government paid them cash through the income tax code. That same year, the middle 20 percent, the true middle class, paid less than 5 percent of all federal income taxes."

So Peter Ferrara now, here, defending Romney's tax plan as more of the same.

These policies, now accepted by both Democrats and Republicans alike, have turned Social Security into pure welfare because a large majority of the people eventually receiving it will have effectively received refunds of everything they've put into it long before they start drawing it. Temporary reductions of contributions to Social Security during the recent financial crisis, advocated by Democrats in complete control of the government, have only underscored the point.

If nothing else it is another flip for Romney, who famously characterized himself as an independent and not in the mold of Reagan-Bush during his race for Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts in 1994.

"Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Who knows, maybe the flipper will flop after he's elected. Stranger things have happened. After all, many of us on the right feared Obama in 2008 because we thought he was a commie. Little did we know he was a fascist.

Methodism Remains A Grandmother Of Bolshevism

Jewish Lutheran Atheist

Mark Tooley says as much here for The American Spectator:

Methodism, rather than stepping back to reflect on its 30 year initially successful but ultimately failed Prohibition crusade, instead accelerated its political activism. The Methodism Building became the headquarters of America's Religious Left in Washington, D.C., housing radicals of every cause especially from the 1960s onward. It still clung to an uncompromising perfectionism that insisted evil could be banished, and the New Jerusalem established, with the passage of just a few more laws.

Of course, presidents and congressmen no longer "tremble and gobble" before Methodism and its lobbyists, who are largely ignored. Banning handguns, even after 40 years of endorsement by Methodism, will never happen. But maybe other uncompromising idealists and utopians, who believe human nature can be transformed at the stroke of a pen, will heed the lessons of Methodism and Prohibition.