It’s Monday, October 3rd, 2022…but before we begin, a brief response to a position posited by the first clueless Black lesbian woman White House Press Secretary:
Uhhh…
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, view this video…
…then consider what NRO‘s Charlie Cooke presents as…
“…Many Americans were shocked when they learned the details of last week’s extraordinarily disproportionate raid against a pro-life activist in Pennsylvania. They shouldn’t have been. The FBI thrives on disproportionality — which, when things go wrong, it habitually supplements with innuendo. As Stephens correctly noted, “We tend to err the most when we assume the worst about the people we like the least.” One doesn’t have to admire Randy Weaver to see that the murders at Ruby Ridge could have been avoided if the FBI hadn’t elected to entrap him in the first place. One doesn’t have to admire David Koresh to grasp that the bloodshed at Waco could have been avoided if the FBI had picked him up in town, instead of going in all guns blazing in an attempt to impress Washington, D.C.
Does the FBI care? Has it ever? No. Since 1935 — and, indeed, even before that, back when it was just the Bureau of Investigation — it has been a violent, expansionist, self-aggrandizing, and careless outfit, which sits awkwardly within the American constitutional order and seems almost proud of that regrettable fact. Apologists for the agency like to insist that it has “changed” since its “bad old days.” But change requires contrition, and none of any significance has been forthcoming. It has been decades since the United States learned who J. Edgar Hoover really was, and his name still proudly adorns the FBI’s headquarters. It is what it is.
…It is possible, in theory, to construct an earnest brief in favor of an FBI-style police outfit that deals with matters of exclusive federal concern. But, in practice, that case doesn’t amount to a defense of thisFBI. Bit by bit, year by year, case by case, the FBI has turned itself into a sort of unmoored Super Police Force, which, despite being nominally accountable to the executive branch, is “independent” from political control. In essence, the FBI’s pernicious tendency toward empire-building is of a piece with that exhibited by the rest of the modern federal government — which, on paper, is tasked with executing a limited and discrete set of national functions, but which has come instead to act as if it represented a better, more moral, more legitimate version of its equivalents in the states. Can that be fixed? Has it ever been before?
The result of this trend has been disastrous. In the heart of its capital city, the United States now has a bureau that intervenes with impunity in our ideological and partisan disputes; that has developed a massive, statutorily unwarranted intelligence-collection wing; and that has never managed to escape the paranoia and corruption of its execrable, tyrannical founder. Americans who are tired of it all ought to insist that it be dismantled wholesale, and that any replacement be approved only after a long, meaningful, sanctimony-free debate about the role of the government — and its enforcers — in our lives.“
In a related item also courtesy of NRO, Andy McCarthy offers a different view. For the record, we’re with Charlie on this one, a position other items will reinforce.
Next, we’re elated Best of the Web reports there’s…
“This column is still waiting for someone to name a great civilization built by progressive leftists. But just because the wokesters don’t create anything of enduring value, that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly competent when it comes to transmitting their grievances via modern media. In fact, so successful have they been in promoting the false idea that America is an unjust society that these days one can feel almost subversive expressing unapologetically patriotic views.
So it’s nice to get a regular reality check. The latest to arrive is a Wall Street Journal poll showing a solid majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents who understand that we live in an exceptional meritocracy. Yes, it’s important to note the usual caveat that polling is not an exact science, if it’s even a science. But these results appear to be well outside the margin of error.
Specifically,survey foundthat a full 74% of participants agreed with the following statement:
America is the greatest country in the world.
Not just above average, not just great, but the greatest.
According to the WSJ survey results, nearly as many people also think that the right to rise is alive and well in the U.S. A sturdy 68% of respondents agreed with the following statement:
If people work hard, they are likely to get ahead in America.
Some readers may be distressed that the number isn’t even higher. Still, given the number of voluble politicos and pundits who’ve spent so much of the last several years claiming that U.S. society is rigged and racist, it’s notable how decisively they have failed to persuade. The logical conclusion is that the progressive left’s critique of the free society doesn’t square with the experience of people who live in it.
Perhaps patriotic Americans are just too numerous to cancel!“
In a related item, Jim Freeman goes on to accurately aver…
“Just because Americans live in the greatest country in the world doesn’t mean its governing institutions don’t need reform. Michael Finnegan reports in the Los Angeles Times:
…FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills.
They rummaged through personal belongings of a jazz saxophone player, an interior designer, a retired doctor, a flooring contractor, two Century City lawyers and hundreds of others.
Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show. In one box, agents found cremated human remains.
Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.
They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.“
It’s worth noting this gross abuse of power was not committed under the auspices of the utterly corrupt, thoroughly discredited foreign counterintelligence branch of the Bureau.
Here’s the juice: The entire organization must be dismantled, branch by branch, agent by agent, and the entire organization rebuilt from scratch.
Moving on, in an absolute must-read commentary which deserves inclusion in full, the great Victor Davis Hanson portrays how Progressives continue to chip away at…
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home – only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival. Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.
So, the great achievement of Western civilization – consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit – was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature. But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright. As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded – as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis. We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age – as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.
But meanwhile Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.
Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal. What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.
The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels. When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared. The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.
The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals. It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force. The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.
At home, the Biden Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries. Utter chaos followed.Three million migrants (Correction, VDH: ILLEGAL aliens!!!) have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high-school diplomas, or capital.
The streets of our cities are anarchical – and by intent. Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent. America is racing backwards into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.
Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call. But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support – as green nihilists are attempting – and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.
Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.
So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed and sheltered America. Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite – terrified of what they have wrought – selfishly retreat to their private keeps. But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.
As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization. When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.
Here’s a second shot of the juice: It’s as the incomparable Oswald Chambers noted in his classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest:
“…I am likely to come to a place where I find with a shuddering awakening that what Jesus Christ said is true, and I shall be appalled at the possibility of evil and wrong in me. As long a I remain under the refuge of innocence I am living in a fool’s paradise. If I have never been a blackguard, the reason is a mixture of cowardice and the protection of civilized life.”
Absent either, we’re living Lord of the Flies, and the British Navy won’t be on hand to save us. And this at a time when Progressives are dedicated to encouraging lawlessness while undercutting the rule of law.
Then there’s this nonet of items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(3). Were we a Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, immediately upon hearing Planned Parenthood Dr. Bhavik Kumar claim, “Men can have pregnancies, especially trans men”, we’d have walked out of the room.
(9). Speaking of the Nord Stream pipelines, photographic evidence has surfaced which may aid in identifying their saboteur.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Ed Hickey…
…James Patrick…
…and The Boss…
…along with five more from The Patriot Post:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with a reminder our October is booked solid, with a golf trip to Oakmont this week, our youngest son’s wedding next week, our 45th Naval Academy reunion the week after that and our niece’s nuptials at the end of the month. All of which means, though we won’t be radio silent, our transmissions will definitely be sporadic.
Magoo
Video of the Day
As Laura Ingraham details, America’s Dimocratic-induced decline isn’t a defect, it’s their decidedly deliberate endgame.
Tales of The Darkside
As John Stossel records, students and parents interested in an education rather than indoctrination are finally beginning to win the fight.
On the Lighter Side
Australia’s SkyNews notes the truths America’s MSM refuses to report.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.