It’s Monday, March 4th, 2019…but before we begin, pulling together material for today’s edition, we were struck by another Obama-era incongruity.
Osama bin Laden’s body was buried at sea within 24 hours of his death in strict compliance with Islamic law, with John “I’ve lost count of how many times I lied to Congress” Brennan going so far as to say “We early on made provisions for that type of burial and we wanted to make sure that it was going to be done, again, in strictest conformance.”
Yet The Great Prevaricator, who so infamously stated…
…repeatedly dissociated Muslim terrorists from Islam: “There is no doubt, and I’ve said repeatedly, where we see terrorist organizations like al Qaeda or ISIL — They have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death.”
So why not just dump the barbarous bastage’s body off the fantail with the rest of the garbage? Why go to all the planning and trouble of preparing an Islamic funeral for an apostate who perverted the prophet’s pronouncements?
Just sayin’.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, consider this segment from Tucker Carlson, paying particular attention to the utter disingenuousness of the Progressive’s position expressed at around the 3:44 mark:
So, if we have this right, “bipartisanship” means the Dimocrats propose enacting single-payer healthcare for all (including illegal aliens currently in-country and every other citizen of Central America who wants to join the party), a ban on private transactions with between individual citizens and their doctors and federally-funded infanticide, before birth…
FYI, THIS is the type of abuse and usurpation which justifies revolution.
…or after. Republicans should then enthusiastically respond, “Eliminate taxpayer support for the slaughter of innocents and we’ll vote for your otherwise-unreasonable plan for granting government control over the nation’s entire healthcare system!” Hey, what could go wrong?!?
This is the Liberal concept of compromise: they propose an incredibly radical Socialist policy; the GOP objects to one point, and then, in the spirit of comity and cooperation, surrenders on everything else.
We’re more than a little surprised Tucker didn’t pick up on this and hammer his hide to the wall.
Speaking of hammering hides to the wall, as Jack Crowe reports at NRO…
“…Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is embarrassed, to the extent that she is capable of being embarrassed, by the fact that Republicans pulled a humorous little switcheroo on her. House Democrats were on the verge of passing a bill that would require you to get clearance from the federal government before selling your old deer rifle to your brother-in-law for 50 bucks, and Republicans got a couple dozen Democrats to join them in support of a last-minute amendment that would have required alerting immigration authorities when those mandatory background checks turned up illegal immigrants, who are not permitted to buy firearms.
Keep in mind that this was a symbolic flip of the bird to a piece of legislation that itself is a symbolic flip of the bird: Senator Mitch McConnell isn’t going to be letting any Democratic gun-grabbing legislation come to a vote in the Senate. So it’s symbolism about symbolism about symbolism, but Madame Speaker flipped her wig, anyway. She called those moderate Democrats, many of whom represent districts carried by Donald Trump, in to a meeting to berate them. Never mind the quality of the legislation, this is about party discipline: “Vote no, just vote no, because the fact is a vote yes is to give leverage to the other side.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, is a self-proclaimed socialist who apparently is ready to move straight into the Stalinist phase of her political career, promising to organize purges against Democrats who don’t do as she says. She’s even calling herself a “boss” these days. No doubt she’s already looking for her Trotsky.
Writing in Jacobin, a socialist magazine (100 million dead in the 20th century, but socialism never loses its appeal to the worst), James Muldoon of the University of Exeter works to revive the thinking of the Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky, particularly the idea that “democracy must extend beyond the state level itself.” To extend the reach of “democracy” beyond the public sector and into the private sector amounts to the abolition of private life entirely, putting formerly private affairs (by no means limited to economic organization) under political discipline. That is something close to a working textbook definition of totalitarianism.
The purges that Representative Ocasio-Cortez envisions for the Democratic party already are a part of ordinary life thanks to the efforts of progressives. If it should happen that you have a child who was once photographed standing in proximity to another child who had a look on his face that someone with political power disapproved of, there will be an organized effort to have you deprived of employment and ruined economically and otherwise by whatever means are available, as happened in the Covington affair. The rule of absolute conformity is by no means limited to elected members of the Democratic party answerable to partisan leadership: “Democracy,” as they like to call it (it is more ochlocracy), is to be extended into every aspect of life.That is the vision of the Left in 2019: Mob rule under a dollop of ideological frosting.
That a liberal political culture cannot survive enforced homogeneity is obvious enough. The assault on free speech already is well under way, and the Democrats are poised to impose sweeping restrictions on political communication and organizing as soon as they have the votes.
“The personal is the political,” they used to say. The slogan is intellectually flaccid but no less authoritarian and totalitarian for that. Progressives, once the partisans of “diversity,” “tolerance,” and social liberalism, have become the partisans of absolutism, conformism, and moral hysteria. Part of that is cynical politics: It was predictable that the same people who championed toleration when they were a relatively powerless minority would discover the attractions of homogeneity as soon as they got a taste of political power. But there is more to this than cheap opportunism: The emerging left-wing fanaticism gives every appearance of being mostly genuine. Genuinely asinine, genuinely dangerous, but genuine.
Poor dopey gawping old Joe Biden apparently thinks he’s going to get out in front of that parade, and that the red banners will be furled on his say-so. He is in for a shock.So are the rest of us. “Voting in lockstep” isn’t going to be enough for these new totalitarians. What they have in mind is living in lockstep.“
Since we’re on the subject of America’s equivalent of Zaphod…
“U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded Saturday night after a published report excoriated the freshman congresswoman for pushing her Green New Deal initiative while still traveling on airplanes and using ridesharing services — instead [of] greener travel methods such as public transportation.
The piece mentioned the New York Democrat’s call in January for more sustainable energy solutions: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she said at the time.
“But the woman who boasts of a “razor-sharp BS detector” seems to have trouble sniffing out her own,” the New York Post reported. “Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst [Queens] campaign office. She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.”
Instead of embracing cheaper, less green travel methods, Ocasio-Cortez logged 66 airline transactions during her 2018 campaign while only using Amtrak 18 times, according to thePost.
Cortez responded on Twitter, arguing that…
What we found of greater interest than AOC’s inability to recognize either the irony or hypocrisy or her position was the hopelessly inaccurate assertions offered by author Louis Casiano just a few paragraphs down:
“The Green New Deal is an economic stimulus package designed to address income inequality, health care and climate change. The concept – modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal package through public works programs – could be funded through a 70 percent tax on America’s top earners.“
“Designed to address income equality, health care and climate change“?!? Make that, “Designed to to transform America into another Workers’ Paradise where one particular animal…
…is far more equal than others.”
As to the “could be funded” comment, yeah, “could be funded”: when unicorns…
…start farting rainbows!
But if you thought The Donald and The Obamao were hypersensitive to criticism, AOC’s skin may be even thinner:
What if we don’t believe there’s a global climate crisis to combat?
Then again, were we occupying her position, possessed of her ignorance, we might be a little testy too.
Which brings us to another Kevin Williamson feature at NRO, where he wonders…
“Senator Kamala Harris, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Robert Reich — Democrats are truly testing our prowess in 2019’s championship round of that peerless political parlor game, “Dumb or Dishonest?”
We don’t play that game when it comes to the great blithering demos at the center of our democracy, because we already know the answer: stone-cold stupid. The American voter bears out the wisdom of the managerial proverb: “None of us is as dumb as all of us.” At the moment, voters are cheesed off because they got a tax cut and because the federal government acted, for once, with uncharacteristic directness and speed.
When the Republican tax bill lowered taxes for the great majority of taxpayers — all but about 4 million, as the hilariously named Government Accountability Office runs the numbers — the IRS got a move on and changed the withholding schedules. As a result of which, the people who got a tax cut got a tax cut right then, their paychecks getting a little bigger as Uncle Stupid skimmed off a little less.
You can see where this is going.
At the end of the year, people who had had less money withheld in taxes faced a terrible new reality: They had had less money withheld in taxes! They owed less, and they paid less, and, because the government did a surprisingly effective job of matching up what was withheld to what was owed, taxpayers got smaller returns. Which is to say, they got their money right away rather than having to wait for a tax refund after making the government an interest-free loan.
Getting paid, more or less in full, right now instead of waiting months and months: Naturally, taxpayers are enraged…”
And naturally, Kamala “Homewrecker” Harris, Alexandria “Economically Illiterate” Ocasio Cortez and Robert “Bantam” Reich are trying to make hay on the Lowing Herd’s ignorance of how withholding works.
Dumb or dishonest; we’re going with “both“!
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these memes forwarded by Jimmy Crilley:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and a couple of very rotten apples which didn’t fall far from a very twisted tree:
“The state of Texas has executed one of its oldest death row inmates. Billie Wayne Coble, 70, of Waco was put to death with a lethal injection of Pentobarbital on Thursday evening at the Huntsville “Walls” Unit, approximately 30 years after slaying the brother and parents of his estranged wife.
…However, soon after his eyes closed, the process took a spin. Coble’s son Gordon, overcome with emotion, banged on the protective glass separating inmate witnesses from the death chamber. Gordon and another family member, Dalton Coble, were drug out of the witness room by authorities and placed under arrest. They are currently being held at the Walker County Jail on charges of resisting arrest.
“This is bull****, you just killed my father,” Gordon said as he was being drug out of the witness room.
“Why are y’all dragging them? They’re upset,” said Nelley Coble, who was also escorted from the witness room. “You killed their father and this is how you’re treating them.”
Whoa, Nelley: their father sealed his own fate. And frankly, were the science of Minority Report reality, we’ve no doubt Gordon, Dalton and Nelley Coble might well already have been eliminated along with Billie Wayne. Let’s review the crimes for which Coble was executed:
“Coble was convicted of capital murder in the 1989 slayings of his estranged wife’s parents and brother near Waco, court records show. He had been married to his wife, Karen, for a little over a year when she told him she wanted a divorce. They lived in the small town of Axtell, just across the street from her parents, Robert and Zelda Vicha, and down the road from her brother, Bobby.
Court testimony shows that Coble kidnapped Karen as a further effort to dissuade her from divorcing him by hiding in the trunk of her car while she was at a bar with a girlfriend. When Karen started to drive home, Coble folded down the back seat and “popped out of the trunk with a knife.” Records state that he jumped over the console, halfway into the front seat and struck the victim with the knife against her ribs.
“Coble stated that if he couldn’t have her, then no one else could,” testimony shows.
Nine days after Coble was released from jail on bond, he returned to Karen’s house where he handcuffed her three children, tied up their feet and taped their mouths closed. He then left to shoot Karen’s father, mother and brother as each of them came home.
Records state that Coble returned to Karen’s house after the triple homicide and waited for his wife to come home from work. He told the children, “I wish I had blown you away like I intended to.” When Karen arrived, Coble came out of a bedroom with a gun and said, “Karen, I’ve killed your momma and your daddy and your brother, and they are all dead and nobody is going to come help you now.”
Coble would leave the house with Karen and flee to a deserted field in nearby Bosque County, where he threatened to rape her. However, shortly after dark, Coble drove passed a sheriff’s patrol car, which turned around and followed them, leading to a crash.“
Yup: confirmed chips off an old and demented block.
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