Tag: politics

A meme, corrected

So, not the DNC and Team Clinton, but rather, the Obama administration, with a connection to Natalia Veselnitskaya.


The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.


This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.

Megan McArdle is astonishingly stupid

I’ve never had any respect for her; as someone who understands economics considerably better than she does, reading her articles have always been painful. But this is a new nadir for the woman:

On Monday, the New York Times published a jaw-dropping story, alleging that a 2016 meeting between a Russian attorney and Donald Trump’s son and son-in-law had been arranged to discuss dirt on Hillary Clinton that a Kremlin-connected lawyer might be willing to provide to the Trump campaign. Donald Trump Jr. had been informed via email that this compromising information was part of a Russian government operation to help his father win the presidency.

Facing an accusation like that, Donald Trump Jr. obviously didn’t want to sit around while the Times dribbled out information bolstering the speculation that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. He rushed to confirm it himself, tweeting out the email chain. His response to being informed that Russia was trying to engineer the outcome of an American election, with efforts that included providing damaging information about Clinton? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Son-in-law Jared Kushner was cc’d on the email.

Is this illegal? Does getting oppo research from a foreign power count as an in-kind campaign contribution from a foreign national, one that might leave Jr. and Kushner vulnerable to criminal prosecution? I have no idea, because as we say on the interwebs, I am not a lawyer. Regardless of whether these actions turn out to be legal, it hardly ceases to be a problem if this somehow manages to squeak through some hole in our federal election laws. What they did is so obviously wrong that a 10-year-old child would know better.

Social media indicates that there are some people out there still trying to defend the Trump camp’s relationship with Russia, so it bears spelling out why this is, as the ethicists and public relations pros say, “not OK.”

Donald Trump is an American. He is an American who ran for office under a slogan of patriotic pride and love of country. People who love their country do not help rival powers intervene in their country’s elections, even if that intervention might have the lovely side effect of getting them elected. Countries gonna country, and spies gonna spy. But Americans running for American office must pick sides: the will of American voters or the influence of a foreign power. Hint: You choose your fellow Americans.

What happened at the meeting could ultimately be irrelevant. The sin to which Donald Trump Jr. has already confessed is egregious enough. A decent person would not give an audience to a foreign power promising to help tear down the opposition. A decent person certainly would not contemplate and suggest timing of any document release — which moves this revelation beyond merely “taking a meeting you shouldn’t have” and into the territory of “a presidential campaign actively coordinating with foreign agents.”

Even Trump supporters seem to be having trouble mustering much of a defense. There was a lot of irrelevant sputtering on social media this morning. One Trump apologist asked me: What about Aipac? (Unfortunately, Twitter offered no way to transmit my response: an astonished, incomprehending stare.) Others mounted standard complaints about leaks and sly implication. We are now past the point of anonymous sources and innuendo. Donald Trump Jr. showed us the primary sources, pleading guilty in the court of public opinion.

The president’s supporters have already retreated to what now looks to be their last rhetorical stand: to say that this isn’t collusion, but just politics. They get creative and postulate that this isn’t unlike what Clinton’s campaign would have done.

Here’s the reality: Once you are given the details of a Russian attempt to change the outcome of an American election, there is only one patriotic thing you can do, and that is to get on the phone to the FBI and say “I have some very disturbing news.” End of story.

Translation: Donald Trump Jr. is not a politician, did not do anything illegal, and did nothing more than what is generally known as “opposition research”. The source is totally irrelevant, as should be obvious considering the large number of US-Israeli dual nationals who would otherwise be entirely barred from any involvement in the U.S. political process.

And to claim that “Trump’s Defeated Defenders Can Only Whimper” is even more ridiculously stupid than the illogical argument she is making in the article itself. We’re not whimpering, we’re laughing at the desperation of the Never-Trumpers. Besides, we all know where tracking down the origins of this story is going to lead.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, the Daily Meme Wars is now 1,500 strong. If you want to help force-multiply the memes, sign up here.

How to keep your country

Hungary moves even further to the right:

Hundreds of Hungarian right-wing militants gathered in Budapest to launch a political movement that they hope will run in next year’s parliamentary elections on a platform that includes open racism.

Hungary’s main opposition party, Jobbik, has been moving away from its far-right roots and is staking out a more centrist position. This has created space for new hard-right initiatives.

Three groups held a rally in the suburb of Vecsés labelled “unfurling the flag of the far right”. Although attendance was limited its leaders have reached a national audience in the media and plan to take part in the 2018 elections.

The movement, to be called Force and Determination, looks more radical than any organisation targeting a serious political role since the fall of communism, and uses openly racist language to oppose liberalism and immigration.

Balázs László, one of the movement’s leaders, told the crowd of mostly black-clad muscular, tattooed men that Europe showed an ill-conceived tolerance in the face of peril from its existing minorities and the influx of millions more people. “Tens of millions are added to the ranks of the Arabs, Africans and gypsies who will show no tolerance once they realise the power that their demographic significance lends them,” he said. “Our ethnic community must come first … there is no equality.”

That symbol is more than a little reminiscent of Generation Identitaire in France. What is remarkable about this development is that Hungary is already the best-governed nation in Europe, having been on the front lines against Islamic invasion for centuries. I mean, this is how the center-moderate government governs there.

Human rights groups have heavily criticised a vote by the Hungarian parliament to force all asylum seekers into detention camps as the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, called migration “a Trojan horse for terrorism”.

The asylum seekers will be kept in converted shipping containers while they wait for their cases to be heard via video-link as part of measures Orbán said were designed to save Europe. He considers the migrants, many of whom are Muslims, as a threat to European Christian identity and culture.

The measure was fiercely opposed by civil liberties groups in the country and some socialist MPs but was nevertheless passed overwhelmingly by 138 votes to six with 22 abstentions. Support came from Orbán’s Fidesz party and the far-right Jobbik.

It’s important to keep pushing right because as the nationalist parties of the right, the mere act of governance is going to necessitate various compromises. As long as an uncompromising element remains outside of governance, there will be political force to counteract the leftward drift towards ill-conceived tolerance.

And as Hungary grows and prospers while the more tolerant nations of Europe burn and are overwhelmed by rape and violence, the appeal of the Right is only going to grow. Does this look like Germany to you?

Everyone hates liberals

The Left and the Right finally agree on something:

‘‘Liberal’’ has long been a dirty word to the American political right. It may be shortened, in the parlance of the Limbaugh Belt, to ‘‘libs,’’ or expanded to the offensive portmanteau ‘‘libtards.’’ But its target is always clear. For the people who use these epithets, liberals are, basically, everyone who leans to the left: big-spending Democrats with their unisex bathrooms and elaborate coffee. This is still how polls classify people, placing them on a neat spectrum from ‘‘extremely conservative’’ to ‘‘extremely liberal.’’

Over the last few years, though — and especially 2016 — there has been a surge of the opposite phenomenon: Now the political left is expressing its hatred of liberals, too. For the committed leftist, the ‘‘liberal’’ is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers — a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, ‘‘10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.’’ The anonymous Twitter account ‘‘liberalism.txt’’ is a relentless stream of images and retweets that supposedly illustrate this liberal vacuousness: say, the chief executive of Patagonia’s being hailed as a leader of ‘‘corporate resistance to Trump,’’ or Chelsea Clinton’s accusing Steve Bannon of ‘‘fat shaming’’ Sean Spicer.

This shift in terminology can be confusing, both politically and generationally — as when baby boomers describe fervent supporters of Bernie Sanders as ‘‘very liberal,’’ unaware that young Sanders­istas might find this vomit-inducing. It can also create common ground. Last year, the young (and left-leaning) writer Emmett Rensin published a widely read piece on Vox deriding liberals for their ‘‘smug style’’; soon enough, one longtime adept of the right, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, was expressing his partial approval, writing in Bloomberg View that what contemporary liberalism lacked most was humility. Here was a perspective common to both sides of the old spectrum: that liberals suffered from a serene, self-ratifying belief in their own reasonableness, and that it would spell their inevitable defeat.

When it comes to diagnosing liberalism, both left and right focus on this same set of debilitating traits: arrogance, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, the insulated superiority of what, in 1969, a New York mayoral candidate called the ‘‘limousine liberal.’’ In other words, the features they use to distinguish liberals aren’t policies so much as attitudes. The profane hosts of the popular podcast ‘‘Chapo Trap House,’’ prime originators of the left’s liberal-bashing, spend a good deal of airtime making fun of liberal cultural life, with one common target being fervor for the musical ‘‘Hamilton.’’ ‘‘Nothing has represented them more: a hagiographical musical where they can pretend to be intersectional and pretend to be multicultural,’’ said Felix Biederman, a co-host, on the second episode of the show. ‘‘They have no policy. They’re all cultural signifiers.’’

And now we know what to call moderates…. However, after much reflection, I think I may have finally landed upon a useful rhetorical term: spectator. Mull it over and try it out the next time you happen to have a moderate cluck-clucking and waving his finger at you.

Better than Reagan

Speaking of John C. Wright, the science fiction and fantasy grandmaster reminds us that while the God-Emperor is overturning the media’s collective apple cart with his tweets, he is also getting a great deal done:

President Trump fulfilled another campaign promise and recinded the absurdly unconstitutional Johnson Amendment, which is a Dem administration IRS regulation threatening preachers, priests and pastors with loss of their tax free status for their churches should they ever speak on political matters from the pulpit.

I had never heard any so called conservative politicians even speaking on the topic of the Johnson Amendment erenow. It has been in place for decades, an insolent, open, filthy, glaring, and obvious desecration of the central Constitutional liberty embodied in the First Amendment.

Donald Trump is already showing strong signs of being the best and most conservative President the United States has had since Calvin Coolidge. Believe it or not, he’s much, much better than Ronald Reagan ever was. I was there. I loved Reagan. And the God-Emperor is, to this point, doing much better than Reagan.

Still. Not. Tired.


On tonight’s Darkstream, I explained how Trump has gotten off to a much better start than Reagan did in 1981, and also mentioned some ideas about the possible purpose behind the God-Emperor’s meeting with Vladimir Putin this week.

Body slam!

The God-Emperor tweets himself bodyslamming Fake News CNN.

He added insult to injury by tweeting it under the hashtag #FraudNewsCNN #FNN. Needless to say, the media has gone absolutely apeshit, unable to believe that a sitting president would hammer them back rather than simply enduring the abuse in dignified silence.

As it happens, I’ve been reading Jomini recently, which tends to make it pretty clear what the God-Emperor is doing here.

The general should do every thing to electrify his own soldiers, and to empart to them the same enthusiasm which he endeavors to repress in his adversaries.

If Twitter provides us with any sound basis for judgment, Trump’s supporters are electrified and his detractors are horrified. Mission accomplished.

Everything they feared and more

The Left is freaked out by the staunch legal conservatism of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch:

On Monday, Justice Neil Gorsuch revealed himself to be everything that liberals had most feared: pro-gun, pro–travel ban, anti-gay, anti–church/state separation. He is certainly more conservative than Justice Samuel Alito and possibly to the right of Justice Clarence Thomas. He is an uncompromising reactionary and an unmitigated disaster for the progressive constitutional project. And he will likely serve on the court for at least three more decades.

Although Gorsuch has barely been on the bench for two months, he has already had an opportunity to weigh in on some of the most pressing constitutional issues of our time. In each case, he has chosen the most conservative position. On Monday, Gorsuch indicated that he opposes equal rights for same-sex couples, dissenting from a ruling that requires states to list same-sex parents on birth certificates. (Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined his dissent.) That, alone, is startling: In Obergefell v. Hodges, the court held that the Constitution compels states to grant same-sex couples “the constellation” of “rights, benefits, and responsibilities” that “the states have linked to marriage,” including “birth and death certificates.” Obergefell, then, already settled this issue. Gorsuch’s dissent suggests he may not accept Obergefell as settled law and may instead seek to undermine or reverse it.

Gorsuch also joined Thomas in dissenting from the court’s refusal to review a challenge to California’s concealed carry laws. California grants concealed carry permits for “good cause”—namely, a “particularized need, substantiated by documentary evidence, to carry a firearm for self-defense.” Gun advocates challenged this rule, alleging a violation of the Second Amendment. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the California regime, and on Monday, the court declined to reconsider its decision. Thomas and Gorsuch dissented vociferously, essentially declaring that the Second Amendment grants individuals a right to carry loaded firearms in public. Not even the archconservative Alito joined their bizarre opinion. It appears Gorsuch is eager to strike down almost any law that limits the right “to keep and bear arms” in any way. If adopted by the court, Gorsuch’s theory would effectively bar state and local governments from passing almost any kind of gun safety legislation.

Conservatives used to say that the only thing that mattered about presidential elections was the Supreme Court. Well, by that standard, the God-Emperor is already the greatest conservative president of the post-WWII era. We’ll have to see how his future appointments shake out, but at 1-0, he’s already doing better than Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush the Elder, or Bush the Younger.

The permanent opposition

Even when they’re in power. Jerry Pournelle excoriates the Senate Republicans:

The Senate is busily proving that Republicans can’t rule; they’re not even a Party. They’re a collection of losers whose jobs were safer when they were in the opposition and they could blame national misrule on someone else. They could say “We don’t control the House”. When they got that, they could say “We don’t have a majority in the Senate.” When that resulted in nothing much about slowing the train to national disaster, they could say “We don’t have the President.” When they nominated and elected a President, they could say “We don’t have enough of the Senate.” Clearly that is fudge, because the rumor is they can’t even muster a majority vote to obliterate Obamacare, a provable national disaster.

What more do they want? But we have had this problem since Lyndon Johnson and even before. Country club Republicans were satisfied to be the loyal opposition. The Democrats slyly gave them perks for being a permanent minority, and many took the bait. The only thing likely to keep these “we can’t quite do it” scoundrels in office is the – admittedly terrifying prospect – of Nanny Pelosi returning as Speaker; they’re willing to do without most of the perks of a “majority party” – which they are not – for permanent jobs on Capitol Hill. And God help us, it works: I sure don’t want to see Speaker Nancy Pelosi ever night – or even every week – on my nightly news. (I don’t want enhanced Obamacare either, or any of the other deficit enhancing free stuff entitlements the Democrats will bring“ in to assure their majority status if they ever take control. So we are obliged to work to keep this bumbling inept crew in charge.

So here we have it: the Democrats hold fewer national and state offices than ever before, but they continue to rule. And bringing them back will make things far worse; and a bloc of country club Republicans really want to become “loyal opposition with benefits” and be rid of the burden of ruling. And a business oriented unsophisticated but very rich President can’t even get confirmation of his own team with a House and Senate majority.

I hope that when I reach Jerry’s age, I’ll be as observant and perspicacious as he is. Truly a remarkable man.

Three Fake News scalps

CNN throws three employees under the bus, hopes that you’ll believe they’re totally reporting the truth now:

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday. The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

On Thursday, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a story involving an investigation into a Russian investment fund with possible ties to several Trump associates.

According to the network, an internal investigation found that “some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.”

Citing a single unnamed source, the story reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The story, which only appeared on the network’s site, was quickly disputed on Friday, as one Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci — who was mentioned in the story — pushed back on  Frank’s reporting, insisting he “did nothing wrong.”

“Once it was determined that editorial processes were not followed, CNN deleted the story from CNN.com,” the network said Friday on its site. “Soon thereafter, the story was officially retracted and replaced with an editor’s note.” The piece “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the note said. “Links to the story have been disabled.”

CNN blamed the mistake on a “breakdown in editorial workflow,” explaining that that “these types of stories” did not go through the usual departments such as fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers.

The gaffe cost three employees their jobs: Frank, who wrote the story, Eric Lichtblau, a unit editor, and the person in charge of the unit, Lex Haris.

The network’s investigative unit was told during a meeting on Monday that the retraction did not necessarily mean the facts of the story were wrong. But, rather, “the story wasn’t solid enough to publish as-is,” according CNN.com.

Haris, Lichtblau and Frank had solid reputations among their colleagues.

Frank worked as reporter for USA Today and Newsday before joining CNN. Lichtblau is a former New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. And Haris was a former executive editor of CNNMoney.

This is what happens when you put your trust in the reliability of Team NeverTrump. The problem is that if this newfound sense of journalistic integrity caused CNN to force the resignation of three employees every time they published Fake News, they’d soon have none left. Of course, they have learned nothing.

CNN boss Jeff Zucker says despite Donald Trump’s war on the network and what the president says is “fake news,” he is certain that CNN maintains the trust of its viewers, as it extends into digital brands to attract a younger audience.

Speaking at Cannes Lions, he said, “CNN has been around for 37 years, our trustworthiness today is the same as it was a year ago, before people in high offices started questioning it. We know that through our own brand research. Just because somebody says you are not trustworthy, that doesn’t mean it is so … CNN’s brand equity is built over 37 years doing hard work in very dangerous places … those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.”

CNN is dying. No one watches it. Because it is Fake News posing as real news.

Primetime viewers in millions: FNC: 2.346 | CNN: 827 | MSNBC: 1.705

Anti-white hate crime

Trump supporter stabbed nine times in California:

The pro-Trump supporter Tony Forman was right in the middle of a recent protest in Cathay where emotions ran hot over the sanctuary city controversy, but nothing like the violence that’s left Foreman now fighting for his life.

“This was politically motivated. That’s a concern because he is a good friend of mine,” Omar Navarro said. “I’m just really shocked someone would do this. What happened to free speech?”

Navarro is running to unseat the long time Democrat Maxine Waters in the 43rd District of the U.S. Congress, and there are also accusations coming from others.

The stabbing attack on Foreman is a hate crime because of his outspoken support for President Trump and the conservative agenda. “We don’t know if it is politically motivated or racially motivated, but we do know there were some racial slurs for him being white that were said to him,” Tim Gionet, a friend of Foreman, said.

Santa Monica police did not mention a politically motivated crime, only confirming they arrested  two suspects.

As I have pointed out in recent darkstreams, it is time to take your own rhetoric seriously. This is a cultural cold war that is in the process of turning hot. Prepare accordingly. If you’re going to take part in protests and public events, be equipped and prepared for the possibility of violence and don’t operate under the mistaken impression that the police are going to somehow magically protect you.