Tag: politics

Presidential prosecutorial discretion

Obama leads the way in developing a useful tool. Republicans, take note:

President Obama completely fumbles when George Stephanopolous asks him how he’d respond if a future president takes the same action on taxes that Obama has taken on immigration. Incredibly, Obama responds as if he’d never heard or thought of this argument before, stumbling blindly along immigration talking points without answering the actual question.

Stephanopolous asked: “How do you respond to the argument, a future president comes in and wants lower taxes. Doesn’t happen. Congress won’t do it; so he says ‘I’m not going to prosecute those who don’t pay capital gains tax.’”

“The truth of the matter is George,” said the President, haltingly, “The reason that we, have to do.. uhm prosecutorial discretion in immigration, is that we know, that we – are not even close to being able to deal with the folks who have been here a long time…” Obama then pivoted to immigration talking points, without addressing the original question.

“The vast majority of folks understand that they need to pay taxes, and when we conduct an audit, for example, we are selecting those folks who are most likely to be cheating,” said Obama. “We’re not going after millions and millions of people who everybody knows are here and were taking advantage of low wages as they’re mowing lawns or cleaning out bedpans, and looking the other way.”

“So you don’t think it’d be legitimate for a future president to make that argument?” Stephanopoulos said.

Obama: “With respect to taxes? Absolutely not.”

Now that the President of the United States of America has declared prosecutorial discretion in immigration to be an executive power, it is obvious that any future president will possess similar prosecutorial discretion in taxation. This is a weapon that any small government party should be able to wield with a considerable degree of effectiveness.

If it is genuinely a small government party…. The Republicans certainly can’t pretend they don’t have the power to starve the beast anymore, not once they reclaim the White House.

It’s always fascinating to see how SJWs have absolutely no ability to grasp logical consequences. Which tends to demonstrate the fundamental illogic of their thinking. It reminds me of the gay “marriage” proponents who genuinely couldn’t figure out how redefining the legal nature of marriage once would likely lead to future legal redefinitions of marriage.

Casualty in the Cabinet

Obama fires his Secretary of Defense:

Chuck Hagel has been fired as defense secretary. We were critical of his appointment, and opposed his confirmation by the Senate. But let’s be clear: Hagel has done what he was asked and what was expected of him at the Pentagon. To the degree he has deviated from the Obama White House line, he’s been more right than wrong (e.g., on the threat the Islamic State poses).

So why has he been fired? Because the Obama White House needs a scapegoat. President George W, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld in connection with a change in strategy (the surge) and to bring in someone of independent stature. That’s not the case today. President Obama continues to want a Pentagon with weak leadership and little independence. There’s therefore no reason to expect the next two years of Obama foreign and defense policy to be any better than the past two.

He’s fired an awful lot of generals too, come to think of it. I don’t know if there have any bigger purges among the brass since pre-WWII Stalin.

Why Obama is pushing amnesty through

This not-entirely-coincidental article in the New York Times is so timely that one has to suspect it was published yesterday in order to try to mollify Democrats who are little more enthusiastic than Republicans about the prospect of Obama magically converting millions of illegal aliens into citizens with the same rights and privileges they possess through unConstitutional executive action.

This region has become so solidly Republican, particularly since President Obama was elected, that there isn’t much left there for the Democratic Party to defend or salvage. For instance, prior to the 2010 midterms there were 54 Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. In the outgoing Congress, there are only 19 left, including eight from the South.

And Republican gerrymandering has further weakened Democratic power, even when Democrats vote in high numbers. As Lee Fang wrote this month at Republic Report, “Republican gerrymandering means Democratic voters are packed tightly into single districts, while Republicans are spread out in such a way to translate into the most congressional seats for the G.O.P.”

After the midterms, The Associated Press provided this tally:

“In January, the G.O.P. will control every governor’s office, two U.S. Senate seats, nearly every majority-white congressional district and both state legislative chambers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas.”

It is important and relevant that The Associated Press pointed out the racial dichotomy because, in the South, ideology and racial identity are nearly inseparable.

Obama and the Democratic Party leadership are desperate to boost the non-white portion of the population because they understand that what has happened in the South, where there is a White Party and an Anti-White Party, is going to gradually spread to the West, East, and Mid-West. That division will probably occur last in the Mid-West for the counterintuitive reason that there are more whites there, so they will be the last to abandon multicultural ideology for pure racial power politics.

But this amnesty is about nothing but trying to create more Anti-White voters. The problem the Anti-White party faces, of course, is that La Raza hates blacks far more than whites do and considerably more than they hate whites. And while La Raza is socialist and likes big government as well as the largesse it produces, they aren’t particularly keen on most Democratic social causes. Still, what choice do the Democrats have? The only non-whites to whom they can turn are the very people who are in the process of ethnically cleansing southern California.

As I’ve previously noted, we will know that the transformation of America from a freedom-oriented white Christian European representative democracy to a conventional post-ideological ethnically divided state where rival groups scrabble for power is complete when SJWs like John Scalzi turn in their SJW cards and flee for the perceived safety of the White Party they have excoriated for years.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

Leaving Leftism

A onetime red-diaper baby, Danusah Goska, lists ten reasons for abandoning the Left:

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.

The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.

This is all very well and good. But I note, with mingled amusement and contempt, that of these 10 reasons, only Nos. 2 and 3 have much to do with the only thing that should matter from the dialetical perspective: “It doesn’t work.  Other approaches work better.” 

So what does this tell us? Nothing that Aristotle didn’t already inform us more than 2,400 years ago. For most people, dialectal reasoning is only ever going to be part of the holistic super-rational process that wins people over to the truth. Rhetorical factors that appeal to people’s emotions on some level are usually going to be more important. This is a hard lesson for some of us to learn, a hard reality for those who pride themselves on their logic and clear-sightedness to accept.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for pure dialectic. But so long as men are not creatures of pure energy and reason, rhetoric will be the more powerful tool for reaching them and convincing them. That is where the Left, despite its irrationality and logical incoherence, has an advantage. Being limited to the rhetorical level, it should be no surprise that they are generally more comfortable operating on the only level they know, whereas due to the Left’s limitations, the finest minds of the Right are forced to engage on ground that is not of their choosing and where they are often distinctly uncomfortable.

And yet, once the necessity of operating on the rhetorical level is fully understood, the Right has an advantage because dialectic ultimately trumps rhetoric, which is precisely why the Left so often, and so dishonestly, rhetorically proclaims its dialectic superiority while voicing its pseudo-dialectic. Dialectic is supremely useful in puncturing and exposing false dialectic, but it must be understood that this is primarily a rhetorical device and is best exploited on a rhetorical level.

The Great Partition has begun

As it is said, the value of any predictive model can only be found in its ability to correctly anticipate the future. So, you may recall that my expectations of the U.S. electorate are that it would increasingly consist of a white ethnic vote against a multi-colored alliance of non-white ethnics combined with an increasingly small number of left-wing white quislings. With the most recent election, we are now beginning to see that happen with the coalescing of the white vote.

Exit polling shows racial polarization of the electorate has begun to cross party lines, with whites less likely to back Democratic candidates than they have been in the past. Across 21 states where Senate races were exit polled, whites broke for the Republican by a significant margin in all but four – Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. None of those four states has backed a GOP candidate for president in the post-Reagan era except when New Hampshire went for George W. Bush by 1 point in 2000.

The Senate seats on the ballot this year were last up for re-election in 2008, a presidential year. Democrats typically rely on greater turnout among their core voters when the presidential race tops the ticket. But still, Democratic Senate candidates lost ground among white voters by an average of 10 points compared with 2008. White voters abandoned Democrats in droves in places with heated contests as well as those without much action. The exceptions were Minnesota and Oregon – where Democratic incumbents improved their overall support across the board – and Mississippi – where Travis Childers managed to grow the Democratic share of the white vote from 8 percent to 16 percent.

The shift is particularly acute in the South, where some of the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives lost their seats on Tuesday.

  • In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan carried just 33 percent of the white vote, down from 39 percent in 2008. White voters under age 30 backed Hagan decisively in 2008, 60 percent for her to 36 percent for her opponent, as they helped to sweep Barack Obama into office. But this year, younger white voters who cast ballots in North Carolina broke just as decisively for Thom Tillis, with 56 percent to 32 percent for Hagan. Twelve percent backed Sean Haugh, the Libertarian.
  •  In Louisiana, Mary Landrieu captured just 18 percent of the white vote, a sharp decline from the 33 percent she garnered in 2008. Younger whites there broke for her Republican opponent in 2008, 68 percent to 30 percent, and they were even more likely to back one of her GOP opponents this time around – 22 percent voted for Landrieu while 74 percent went for Bill Cassidy or Rob Maness.
  • In one surprisingly competitive Senate race Tuesday, whites in Virginia voted 37 percent for Mark Warner, 60 percent for Ed Gillespie. In 2008, Warner won the votes of 56 percent of whites. Younger whites broke heavily this year for Ed Gillespie in Virginia, 57 percent to 31 percent for Warner. In 2008, Warner carried 59 percent among this group.
  • Even winning Democrats aren’t immune to the drop-off in white support: Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin captured 43 percent of the white vote in his successful bid for re-election, that’s down 18 points from his support among whites in 2008.

FEW REPUBLICANS HAVE REACHED BEYOND WHITE VOTERS

But Republicans haven’t minimized racial polarization in the other direction either. The coalition behind Republican Senate candidates was predominantly white, 90 percent across all 21 states with Senate races that were exit polled, ranging from 79 percent white Alaska to 98 percent white in West Virginia. Dan Sullivan in Alaska managed to pool the most diverse electorate with a strong showing among Alaska natives, and more than 10 percent of those backing both John Cornyn in Texas and Cory Gardner in Colorado were Hispanic.

Those three – Sullivan, Cornyn and Gardner – were the only Republicans to assemble a coalition that was less white than Mitt Romney’s in the 2012 presidential election.

Notice this phrase in particular: “the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives”. Notice also the four outlying states where whites did not overwhelmingly favor Republicans: Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. Notice anything they have in common? 78.9, 85.3, 93.2.83.6. In other words, all of them are a) traditionally left-leaning, and b) considerably whiter than the national average of 72.4 percent. Call it the Scalzi effect, in which a white left-liberal, through ideology, hypocrisy or sheer ignorance, supports diversity and other left-wing policies that work to the detriment of his own race because he is geographically removed from experiencing the consequences of those policies… for the moment. Both traditionally right-leaning states and less white states are moving rapidly towards White Identity politics, as has been inevitable since the successful 1965 assault on the traditional U.S. ethnic identity.

This means the Great Partition has officially begun. Most people don’t realize it yet, even as they are beginning to take unconscious part in it. Republican and Democrat are no longer pure political identities, but are increasingly markers of ethno-cultural loyalties. It will, of course, end in bloodshed. Considerable bloodshed. When will the violent phase begin? You’ll know it when the Scalzi effectors belatedly attempt to join the side that doesn’t hate them for their genetic privilege. Which is to say, when John Scalzi and his wretched kind first stop openly supporting the Democratic Party, which will soon be followed by their open endorsement of the Republican Party.

You may or may not be pleased by this development, but how you feel about it is absolutely and utterly irrelevant. America is not special. This time is not different. And history is absolutely eloquent concerning the eventual fate of multi-ethnic states. If you’re having trouble understanding this, here is a useful question to ask yourself: how do all of these ethnically homogenous states throughout history keep magically coming into being?

That’s what you call a predictive model

The Anonymous Conservative wrote on November 5th:

While it is not clear why Lena Dunham canceled her book tour dates, it would not surprise me to find out that she is presently in bad shape health-wise – nauseous, headachy, weak, and probably fighting off some head-bug. One of the biggest things which will strike you about amygdala deficiency is how it will create physical illness from amygdala activation in those afflicted.

They really do live awful lives of horror.

That was followed the next day by this announcement concerning The Dunham Horror:

Lena Dunham postpones European book tour with ill health following claims she ‘sexually abused’ sister. Girls creator Lena Dunham has postponed two scheduled appearances on her European book tour until December citing ill health.

Considering the degree to which this lumpenrabbit is being subjected to widespread rejection, even by some inhabitants of the global warren, we should probably start a pool concerning the date of her upcoming “suicide attempt”.

Gridlock is not the problem

Rush is concerned, rightly, at the noises that are coming out of the Republican hierarchy concerning the need to “work with the President”. That’s not what they were elected to do:

What I want to do here is cut to the chase. The result yesterday is exactly what I said it would be. The Republican Party now has one of the most important and unquestionable mandates a political party has ever had at its junction with American history, especially a political party which did not run on a national agenda. The Republican Party purposely stood mute nationally.

Now, if you go into the races, the House and Senate raises all over the country, you will find that many Republican candidates ran specifically against Obamacare, and that is an important note to make and an important thing for you to remember. Individual Republican candidates won, and they won big. They won in a wave landslide running against Obamacare. The national Republican brand or image didn’t say a word, which makes the mandate that they have all the more incredible.

It is rare that a political party running for office in a midterm election not standing for anything ends up with a mandate, and they have one, and it is the biggest and perhaps the most important mandate a political party has had in the recent era, and it is very simple what that mandate is. It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrats. There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday. Republicans were not elected to govern.

If the Republicans go along with amnesty for supposed fear of gridlock, they will throw away everything they have gained here. Which is why it would probably be the safe bet that the Republican leadership will try to do it, thereby sparking a revolt among House Republicans. We’re already hearing a lot of “the adults are in charge now” talk, which in Washington terms means “go along to get along”.

Rush added: “As I listen to the wizards of smart — all the analysts of both parties,
all movements on TV last night and today — the thing I’m hearing from
everybody is that what the voters want is for Washington to compromise
and people to work together.”

That is nothing more than an attempt to spin the narrative, to rewrite history and recreate reality. Don’t put ANY credence in anyone, left or right, you hear saying it.

Republican House, Republican Senate

It would be nice if the Republicans would attempt to do more with their newly won Congressional power than they did the last time they held both House and Senate, but given their objectives, I have no expectation whatsoever that they’ll even do something as trivial as overturn Obamacare. Indeed, I rather expect them to dig the hole deeper. Consider the words of the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell:

“This experiment in big government has lasted long enough. It’s time to go in a new direction,” McConnell boomed to supporters in his victory speech. But he sounded a conciliatory note as well, adding that while he and the president rarely see eye to eye, “we do have an obligation to work together on issues where we can agree.”

“It’s time for government to start getting results and implementing
solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our
still-struggling economy,” [House Majority Leader] Boehner added.

Translation: immigration amnesty and free trade. From the same article:

While Republicans are likely to cooperate on issues like tax reform, the
party will seek to breathe life into their stalled jobs bills, to gain
approval of the delayed Keystone XL pipeline, roll back some carbon
emission regulations and tweak Obamacare.

Well, that’s certainly an ambitious program that is all but guaranteed to completely turn things around, isn’t it? It’s fascinating how they’ve managed to completely evade addressing every single aspect of American decline.

And on a blog note, I can only observe that we need some saner trolls. It appears Ann Morgan is even less connected to objective reality than one would have assumed: “Hahahaha. Total democrat victory tonight proves my point is correct.”

Yeah, so, about that…. The constant laughter of the SJW isn’t, as they think it to be, the confident amusement of the superior being at the antics of his lessers. It’s the cackling of unhinged madness.