It’s Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017…but before we begin, we preface what follows by emphatically stating, for the record, we strenuously oppose (i.e., in no way, shape or form support) Nazis, the KKK or any other white supremacist or white separatist variant thereof; in similar fashion, we strenuously oppose (i.e., in no way, shape or form support) the Nation of Islam, the New Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter or any other black separatist or black supremacist variant thereof.

We should add we also strenuously oppose (i.e., in no way, shape or form support) Antifa, the Communist Party USA or any other anarchist or anti-American group (including the Dimocratic Party) which stands in opposition to the Constitution of the United States as set down by the Founding Fathers…racist, slaveowners though some of them might have been.

Now, a few random thoughts on the passing scene.  First, courtesy of Tom Bakke, one Charles Hugh Smith writing at Of Two Minds puts the MSM’s reaction to the Charlottesville violence into perspective:

Remember the “Russians hacked our election!” hysteria–or have you already forgotten? That entire narrative collapsed under a deluge of factual evidence that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) data release was an insider job, and a compelling lack of evidence of any other Russian hacking.

That failed narrative has now been replaced with a new mass hysteria: “a new cultural Civil War is inevitable.” In this narrative, America has succumbed to us-versus-them divisions divided by all-or-nothing ideological bright lines.

Snap out of it, America: you’re being played, just as you were played by the absurd “Russia hacked the election” mania.

Second, watching this video of the Charlottesville car attack…

…are we the only one who noticed right after the Dodge plowing into the crowd, the killer’s Challenger was immediately set upon by a mob of club-wielding counter-demonstrators the MSM continues to portray as “peaceful”?  Sorry, but “peaceful” people don’t bring baseball bats and clubs to sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya.

Third, while it’s possible, as a result of 8 years of Obama and Mabus, the crews of the McCain and Fitzgerald were so poorly trained…

…they were incapable of using the most sophisticated shipboard detection systems on the planet to avoid two lumbering merchant vessels, we find it more than passing strange in two months, two Navy surface combatants have been T-boned in Asian waters by foreign-flagged vessels.

One thing’s for certain: their navigational deficiencies notwithstanding, we’ve no doubt the crews were fully up to speed on the Navy’s Obama/Mabus-era LGBT policies.

All of which means the inevitable was going to happen, as…

U.S. Navy to Relieve Admiral of Command After Collisions

Navy tradition of public accountability calls for commanders to be dismissed when superiors lose confidence in their leadership.

…another Obama acolyte is offered up on the altar of politically-correct progress.  Funny, the real authors of these disasters…

…were never relieved.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, John Fund details how, the Boston branch of Antifa’s unambiguous statement highlighted in our Quote of the Day above notwithstanding,…

‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission refuses to condemn antifa violence.

Why aren’t Liberals required to disavow Antifa?!?

“One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks…

…On Friday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its monthly meeting in Washington. A liberal member introduced a stirring denunciation of the Nazi, KKK and white-nationalist participants in the Charlottesville rally.

But then Commission member Gail Heriot introduced an amendment that would have added the following:

Though we support peaceful protest and note that most of the counter-demonstrators were peaceful, we condemn violence by anyone, including violence by so-called antifa demonstrators.

Heriot, an independent, was supported in her amendment by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican appointee and African American from Cleveland. But they received no other support from the five commission members appointed by Democrats. (We guess because all live don’t matter…at least not to Dimocrats!) Chairwoman Catherine Lhamon complained that Heriot’s amendment would “water down” the main resolution, when all it did was make clear that the commission wished to condemn violence of any kind.

Karen Narasaki, another commission member, scoffed at Heriot’s reading of Stolberg’s New York Times observation about the antifa activists in Charlottesville. As she voted against Heriot’s amendment, she noted, “You can’t believe everything you read in the media.” Apparently, the “paper of record” for so many liberals is to be considered bird-cage lining material if it contradicts the left-wing narrative. Heriot’s amendment was voted down 6–2. The original resolution was approved unanimously, as recorded in the “Statement on Charlottesville, Virginia, that the commissioners did adopt.

It’s pathetic (like almost everything else about modern Liberalism) that the dogma of “no enemies on the left” so clouds the judgment of the commission set up to protect civil rights.

Some clear-minded experts on extremist violence harbor no such ideological blinkers. Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, categorically told CNN last week:

There is violence on the left. The anti-fascists engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation. And that is a problem. That is an extremist’s tactic. There is also bigotry on the left.

I would only add that if George Orwell were with us today, he would probably say that there is willful blindness on the left.“

As this meme forwarded by Balls Cotton notes…

In a related item brought to us by the WSJ, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wonders…

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

A handful of private companies control whether speech can appear online. That’s reason to worry.

“I helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, but since then I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision…”

…We’re going to have a long debate at Cloudflare to think these issues over. But terminating the Daily Stormer is likely to be the exception that proves the importance of content neutrality. My moral compass alone should not determine who gets to stay online.“

We’ll leave it to one of The Bob’s to suggest our response:

Fact is, Mr. Prince already knows the answer to his question, else he wouldn’t be voicing it in public.  He only need ask himself, “Have I ever similarly pulled the plug on any group affiliated with the following: Al-Queda, ISIS, Islam, Antifa or the Animal/Earth Liberation Fronts?”

If the answer is “no”…which it unquestionably is…Matthew Prince’s moral compass…along with that of The Left in its entirety…is hopelessly skewed.

Which brings us to the latest from Victor Davis Hanson writing at his Private Papers blog, as he records the dubious achievements of…

The Silliest Generation

“Every generation, in its modesty, used to think the prior one was far better. Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation” to remind Americans of what our fathers endured during the Depression and World War II—with the implicit message that we might not have been able to do what they did.

For the Roman poet Horace to be a laudator temporis acti (“a praiser of a past age”) was a natural if sometimes tiring inclination. His famous lines at the end of his Ode 3.6 on moral degeneracy run, “Worse than our grandparents’ generation, our parents’ then produced us, even worse, and soon to bear still more sinful children”—and managed in just a few words to fault four generations for continual moral decline.

Yet what is strange about the present age is that our current generation uniquely believes just the opposite. Apparently, we believe that most cadres before us were not up to our standards. Indeed, we are having to clean up their messes of racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, as well as environmental desecration and global warming.

Even their statues must fall as bothersome reminders of their moral depravity. And the way they come down would do either Hitler (who carted off to Germany the French dining car in Compiègne that had been commemorated as the site of the 1918 armistice) or Stalin (who primitively photo-shopped out each year’s new enemies of the people) proud. Usually our generation kills the dead by the mob or a frightened mayor in the dead of night—rarely by a majority vote of elected representatives, referenda, or the recommendations of local, state, and federal commissions and carried out in daytime.

Apparently, proof our generation’s genius is that no one in the past had a clue how to build an iPhone or do a Google search—or even make a good Starbucks Teavana shaken pineapple black tea infusion. Yet given our own present lack of humility and meager accomplishments, we have combined arrogance with ignorance to become the smuggest generation in memory. What good is the high-tech acceleration in delivering information if there is now precious little learning to be accelerated? Google is an impressive pump, but if there is no real water, what is the point of delivering nothing faster?

Ours is an age that passes easy judgment on prior generations by sandblasting away the mention of those deemed unsuitable in the past, often by our present and sometimes laudable standards of morality—but without much concession to the cruel physical landscapes and poverty of the past or our own shortcomings that will be all too clear to subsequent ages. Which prompts more activist outrage by Antifa—a century-old sullen statue of a beaten secessionist Robert E. Lee or the indifference shown to unchecked bloodletting and murder in the streets of Chicago?

When the street protests target Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, or Planned Parenthood, their progressive outrage at the public honoring of yesterday’s racists might gain more credibility. It is an easy moral judgement to condemn unhinged racists in vile Nazi and creepy Confederate garb, but quite another for progressives to demand that America finally stop honoring the now iconic former progressive attorney general of California who sent tens of thousands of Japanese Americans into camps or to march on Princeton to demand an end of deifying a progressive President Wilson whose animated hatred of blacks set back race relations for years.

But then again, we are an opportunistic generation who looks often at the past but rarely as a mirror of ourselves—and if we did, in a variety of areas, we might find ourselves wanting.

…Those who sit at desks all day believe nature is mastered as easily as the temperature control in their offices—without much acknowledgement that different sorts of people are pumping natural gas to heat turbines to make electricity to send it into high-rises—and it isn’t always easy or clean. Techies love four-wheel drive cars, hiking boots, and parkas, as if by being prepared to go anywhere they can feel good about going nowhere.

The more technologically sophisticated we become, the more like a Mycenaean top-heavy palace we grow vulnerable. If the grid goes down, will those in Menlo Park learn that food is not grown at Whole Foods or that there is no such thing as a raisin plant?…”

At which point, everyone on The Left becomes a food source.

Moving on to other examples of Liberalism run amok, as the AP reports, the Pope purports to believe… 

Rights of Migrants Trump National Security Concerns

“Pope Francis on Monday urged countries to greatly improve their welcome to migrants and stop collective expulsions, saying migrants’ dignity and right to protection trumps national security concerns…”

Spoken like a man who lives behind walls protected by 24/7 armed security.  We also have to love the Pope’s reference to these illegal immigrants as “migrants”, as if they’re the zebras and wildebeests following the rains in the Serengeti.

With absolutely no offense whatsoever intended towards our Christian brothers of the Roman Catholic faith, were we in your shoes…

…we’d be seriously considering a conservative branch of Protestantism.  Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows!

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to today’s walk on The Lighter Side…

Finally, we wrap up the day with The Sports Section, and more misguided idiocy on parade in the NFL, as a group of the…

Cleveland Browns Kneel, Pray During National Anthem

Seriously, talk about “settled science”: the lie behind this entire movement isn’t even subject to question!!!

It’s also worth noting while NFL Commissioner Peter Goodell won’t take action against such anti-American demonstrations, he has no problem squashing…  

…anything remotely supportive thereof.

Which is why, until something changes, we’ve watched our last broadcast of the NFL. 

Magoo