It’s Friday, March 31st, 2017…but before we begin, we stand in awe of The Donald’s concept of the art of the deal:
“This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.” – Steve Bannon “selling” Trumpcare.
“You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.” – Unidentified congressman not buying what Trump believed to be a deal the Freedom Caucus couldn’t refuse.
Yeah…that oughta work!
Oh, and if more proof were ever needed The Left is never satisfied with anything short of a whole loaf…
…there you have it; a Democratic Governor cuts a deal with his Republican-dominated legislature…and that’s not good enough.
Face it folks; when it comes to their single-minded mission to undermine the morals of America, Progressives are the political embodiment of the Terminator. So we’d do well to…
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, a headline which simply screams a pair of orthodox Progressives running for political cover:
“Just so we understand this, Chuckie: we’re free to back Gorsuch as long as our votes don’t matter?!?”
This wouldn’t be happening if Chuck Schumer had a prayer of preventing Gorsuch’s confirmation, filibuster or no. Stay tuned as other vulnerable Senate Dimocrats get their Minority Leader’s permission not to walk the plank.
Next up, courtesy of Tom Bakke, Chris Wilson and the New York Post., Bob McManus records how the forces of political correctness have so thoroughly infiltrated a once-noble institution so as to permit the…
Jim Webb knows fighting, which is what the US Naval Academy is supposed to be about. But perhaps no longer. Webb, a member of the Annapolis class of ’68, brought a Navy Cross, a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts home with him from Vietnam, among other decorations. That was just the beginning.
His Marine Corps career cut short by war wounds, Webb continued his service to America both as secretary of the Navy and as US senator from Virginia. And he authored 10 books — among them a riveting novel of combat in Southeast Asia and a history of the enduringly pugnacious Scots-Irish in America, “Born Fighting.”
Webb, himself Scots-Irish, has been a fighter all his life. But this week, he took a knee — understandably but regrettably (No, not understandably, but certainly regrettably.) surrendering to the know-nothingism that has been choking off reasoned political discourse on college campuses and elsewhere across the country for far too long.
Think of it as Jim Webb vs. the hecklers’ veto — and the hecklers won. (No, Webb LET them win!)
Webb was to have been honored Friday as a “distinguished graduate” by the Naval Academy Alumni Association, but withdrew Tuesday evening: “I am being told that my presence at the ceremony would likely mar the otherwise celebratory nature of that special day. As a consequence, I find it necessary to decline the award.”
Better he should have spit in somebody’s eye — but once an officer and a gentleman, always an officer and a gentleman, one supposes.
At issue was a paper he wrote in 1979objecting to the admission of women to the nation’s military academies on the even-then-unfashionable, but still-not-unreasonable, grounds that assignment of women to frontline combat roles is at best disruptive, and at worst dangerous. Perhaps lethally so.
Webb could have been dead wrong about all of it, of course, even if 40 years of experience with gender integration strongly indicates otherwise.The Navy’s ongoing shipboard pregnancy epidemic and the difficulty most women have coping with traditional infantry-training standards suggests that the debate is far from settled. (Though the “science” most definitively IS!!!)
Unless dissent can be beaten into the ground, of course — along with those who refuse to accept that political equity can trump basic biology without serious consequences. Webb demurred early on, and it’s hard to imagine someone with greater personal standing to do so. Now he’s paying a price, if a small one — another plaque for the wall — and certainly he’ll survive.
But it’s not clear that such can be said with certainty about honorable military service in defense of fundamental principles.Not over the long haul.
If graduates of the Naval Academy are prepared to behave like Middlebury College undergrads over a 38-year-old theoretical text — over an idea! — what is there to be said of the individual military officer’s solemn pledge to preserve and protect the Constitution?
And if the Naval Academy itself acquiesces in a heckler’s veto — actively or inferentially — then what is to be said of the institution’s own commitment to the high standards it claims to demand of its students? Plenty — but nothing good.
More officers will take the oath seriously than not, of course. That the women-in-combat discussion has persisted for decades is testimony to the fact that principled officers continue to resist endangering young soldiers, sailors and Marines in pursuit of politically driven social goals.
And to be clear, women have served with honor and distinction for decades, sometimes with grievous personal consequences. The nation needs to recognize that without caveat or qualification.
But, again, what happened to Jim Webb is not about women in the military. It’s about whether the virus that has swept America’s campuses — political activism of the sort meant to disrupt and coerce — is now working its way into the armed forces. This would be no small thing.
Anyway, somebody needs to apologize to Jim Webb. If anyone ever earned the right to be wrong, it’s him.And the thing is, he may have been right. Let the discussion continue.
More to the fact, he WAS right.
Look, we lived this…up close and personal. As a member of the USNA Class of 1977, we were part of the Plebe Summer training for the first female midshipmen, and thus bore witness to the special accommodations showered upon the women to ensure their success. From the lowering of physical standards (Surprise: given their lack of upper-body strength, women can’t do pull-ups!) to the institution of special diet tables (Surprise: women consuming the high-starch Naval Academy diet tend to put on the pounds!), the fix was clearly in.
And it’s been in ever since. After all, political correctness has been all the rage…stylish as it were; and combat effectiveness be damned!
But as Harry Callahan noted in The Enforcer…
…death and defeat is a helluva price to pay for bein’ stylish!
Again, we don’t object to women in the Military; only women in roles, combat or otherwise, where their inferior physical abilities adversely impact combat effectiveness and unit integrity. A standard, by the way, which equally applies to physically inferior males!
Since we’re on the subject of prices being paid by those actually footing the bill, courtesy of NRO, in a commentary which deserves to be presented in full, Ian Tuttle details [Trigger warning: what follows is a graphic, accurate depiction of legalized murder]:
California’s Moral Atrocity
The state’s attorney general is going after, not people who confessed on camera to murders, but the investigative reporters who uncovered the crimes.
In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:
“I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,” [says O’Donnell’s coworker]. So I’m over here, and . . . the moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she is, like, “Okay, I want to show you something.” So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.
O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.
Was ist befehl ist befehl; sorta déjà vu all over again!
It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.”Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.
Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.
Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood.At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.” (Oh,…and they’re both going straight to Hell!)
There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms.This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)
But what links media hypocrisy with partisan hypocrisy, and what is at the heart of this shameful affair, is conscience twisted beyond recognition.The Center for Medical Progress revealed Planned Parenthood’s trade in fetal parts and its winking attitude toward the law.But it also revealed the sheer moral rot that consumes the abortion industry from top to bottom.Hidden from everyday view are those who, over appetizers and wine, talk about “crushing” babies to death, or joke about how an abortionist worth her salt will “hit the gym” because it requires “biceps” to dismember a baby!And there are others, such as Becerra and Harris, who may not handle the scissors, but who agree that snuffing out the life of a child on a table should be celebrated, and that those who would expose those activities should be locked up. This is the barbarism of “progressive” consensus.
On Wednesday morning, undeterred by the California Department of Justice, the Center for Medical Progress released a new video, in which an undercover Daleiden discusses abortion procedures with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona, and the founder of her own abortion clinic in Phoenix. Taylor notes: “In Arizona, if the fetus comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it. To the hospital.” Asked if there is any standard procedure for “verifying life,” she replies: “Well, the thing is, I mean the key is, you need to pay attention to who’s in the room, right?”
There is a famous line in Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The lie has come into the world, but not through David Daleiden.
If this story makes you a little sick to your stomach, it should; and you’re not alone.
“Remember when Obama and Hillary cozied up to Putin? And recall when the media rejoiced at surveillance leaks about Team Trump?
The American Left used to lecture the nation about its supposedly paranoid suspicions of Russia. The World War II alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had led many leftists to envision a continuing post-war friendship with Russia.
During the subsequent Cold War, American liberals felt that the Right had unnecessarily become paranoid about Soviet Russia, logically culminating in the career of the demagogic Senator Joe McCarthy. Later, in movies such as Seven Days in May, Doctor Strangelove, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Hollywood focused on American neuroses as much as Russian hostility for strained relations.
In the great chess rivalry of 1972 known as “The Match of the Century,” American liberals favored Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky over fellow countryman Bobby Fischer, who embarrassed them by winning.
In the same manner, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was often portrayed in the media as the urbane, suave, and reasonable conciliator, while President Ronald Reagan was depicted as the uncouth disrupter of what could have been improved Russian–American relations.
Talk about provocative and threatening!
Senator Ted Kennedy reportedly reached out(Not “reportedly”; DID!)to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1984 to gain his help in denying Reagan his reelection.
In sum, the American Left always felt that Russia was unduly demonized by the American Right and was a natural friend, if not potential ally, of the United States. That tradition no doubt influenced the decision of the incoming Obama administration to immediately reach out to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite is recent aggressions in Georgia and steady crackdown on internal dissent, and despite Russia’s estrangement from the prior Bush administration.
In March 2012, in a meeting with President Dimitri Medvedev of Russia, President Barack Obama thought his microphone was either off or could not pick up the eerie assurances that he gave the Russian president:
“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”
Medvedev answered: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . . ”
Obama agreed and elaborated, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Medvedev finished the hot-mic conversation with, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”
A fair interpretation of this stealthy conversation would run as follows:
Barack Obama naturally wanted to continue a fourth year of his reset and outreach to Vladimir Putin, the same way that he was reaching out to other former American enemies such as the Iranians and the Cubans. Yet Obama was uneasy that his opponent, Mitt Romney, might attack him during his reelection campaign as an appeaser of Putin. Thus, to preempt any such attack, Obama might be forced to appear less flexible (offer less “space”) toward Putin than he otherwise would be in a non-election year. In other words, he couldn’t publicly assure Putin that he would be “flexible” about implementing missile defense in Eastern Europe (“all these issues”) until after he was reelected.
An apprehensive Obama, in his hot-mic moment, was signaling that after his anticipated victory, he would revert to his earlier reset with Putin. And most significantly, Obama wished Putin to appreciate in advance the motives for Obama’s campaign-year behavior. Or he at least hoped that Putin would not embarrass him by making international moves that would reflect poorly on Obama’s reset policy.
Furthermore, Obama did not want his implicit quid pro quo proposal to become part of the public record.Had it been public, it might have been interpreted as a message to Putin that he should empathize with Obama’s plight — and that he should interfere with the American election by behaving in a way that would empower Obama’s candidacy rather than detract from it.
In the present hysterical climate, substitute the name Trump for Obama, and we would be hearing Democratic demands for impeachment on grounds that Trump was caught secretly whispering to the Russians about compromising vital national-security issues in a quid pro quo meant to affect the outcome of the 2012 election…”
To borrow a line from the immortal Winston Churchill…whose bust The Dear Misleader purposefully had removed from the Offal Office…never has so much been reported by so many who knew so little.
Turning now to the Follow-up Segment, we learn the…
“The father of an 18-year-old Rockville High School student who has been accused of raping a 14-year-old female classmate has been arrested for being in the United States illegally, according to Fox News.
Adolfo Sanchez-Reyes was arrested last Friday “after a review of his immigration history revealed he was unlawfully present in the United States” from Guatemala a spokeswoman from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Illegal aliens Jose Montano and Henry Sanchez, 17 and 18 years of age, are both being held in detention centers without bond for the rape of the Maryland teen…”
This is the same father Henry Sanchez was released to join after being detained at the border. If the immigration system is in fact “broken“, it’s only because Progressives have purposefully pulverized it beyond repair.
Which brings us to the Environmental Moment, where The Washington Times informs us, in the best tradition of Marxist militia…
“Environmental activists vowed over the weekend to fight the Keystone XL oil pipeline to the bitter end, insisting the Trump administration’s approval of the long-delayed project will not be the final word.
Powerful green groups are launching a two-pronged strategy to block the pipeline in the streets and in the courts. First, they intend to use a state review process in Nebraska — where Keystone still does not have a legal route, despite federal approval of the project — to delay any movement forward. Nebraska state officials charged with approving the pipeline’s path say a decision shouldn’t be expected until September at the earliest, and environmentalists could drag that process out even longer.
The second piece of their plan centers on the kind of guerrilla warfare tactics seen throughout last year during the fight over the Dakota Access pipeline. Activists say they’ll organize protests and even set up camps along Keystone’s proposed route, potentially blocking construction of the project if and when it’s set to begin…”
Which puts their opposition on a par with that of Delta house, as Otter and Brother Bluto so eloquently observed:
Speaking of really futile and stupid gestures being done on somebody’s part, FOX News in Denver presents a perfect example of the modern non-story:
United Airlines came under fire Sunday(“under fire” from whom?!?) after two teenage girls were barred by a gate attendant from boarding a flight from Denver to Minneapolis because they were wearing leggings.The girls, whose ages were not specified, were not allowed onto the morning flight because they were traveling under an employee travel pass that includes a specific dress code, airline spokesman Jonathan Guerin said.
The dress code bars pass travelers from wearing spandex or Lycra pants such as leggings. The teenagers agreed to change their clothing and take a later flight, Guerin said, but the airline’s actions sparked a quick backlash on Twitter.
Activist Shannon Watts of Denver tweeted that she witnessed Sunday’s events and questioned United’s decision to police women’s clothing.
Anti-gun activist Shannon Watts, who like most Libtards, is an expert on anything and everything, including sexism and corporate dress codes.
Watts said the girl’s father was allowed to board while wearing shorts and called the airline’s policy sexist. Regularly ticketed passengers are not subject to the same dress code and can wear leggings, Guerin said.
The airline doubled down on its dress code policy in a statement later Sunday, according to Fox 31 Denver.
“When taking advantage of this benefit, all employees and pass riders are considered representatives of United,” the airline said. “And like most companies, we have a dress code that we ask employees and pass riders to follow. The passengers this morning were United pass riders and not in compliance with our dress code for company benefit travel.We regularly remind our employees that when they place a family member or friend on a flight for free as a standby passenger, they need to follow our dress code.”
The airline added, “to our regular customers, your leggings are welcome.”
Good for United…and good for the girls who agreed to abide by the long-established, evenly-enforced policies regulating their free travel.
As for “activist” Shannon Watts…
…and please, keep your prominent proboscis out of other people’s business.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
Turning now to News of the Bizarre, in another example of egregious government overreach, it appears…
“A Canadian provincial government has withdrawn a man’s eponymous personalized vehicle license plate, saying Lorne Grabher’s surname is offensive to women when viewed on his car bumper.
Grabher said Friday that he put his last name on the license plate decades ago as a gift for his late father’s birthday, and says the province’s refusal to renew the plate late last year is unfair. Grabher says the Nova Scotia government is discriminating against his name…”
Finally, we’ll call it a month with this titillating tale from the Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder segment, where we learn…
“Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said Tuesday he was distracted by Rep. Maxine Waters’ hair, comparing it to a “James Brown wig.” During Fox & Friends, O’Reilly watched a clip of Waters, a black Democrat from California, saying on the House floor that criticism of the president was patriotic.
…O’Reilly was asked for his thoughts on Waters’ comments. He instead discussed her appearance. “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig,” he said, referencing the late soul singer.
While two of the Fox & Friends cohosts joined in on O’Reilly’s comments, Ainsley Earnhardt cut in to say she had to defend Waters. “You can’t go after a woman’s looks,” she said. “I think she’s very attractive.” O’Reilly replied, “I didn’t say she wasn’t attractive…I love James Brown, but it’s the same hair.”“
“Attractive”; seriously?!? Are we talking about the same…
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.