Media Malfeasance Again

At the risk of being accused of bigotry, I am willing to admit that as I was driving to work early this past Monday and heard that a mass shooting had occurred in Toronto, my first thought was: "I bet the guy's name turns out to be something like Abdul Mohammed, and that all of the early articles about him will furnish a wealth of information about his past without saying a word about his religion."

'Twas one of the easiest predictions ever. The shooter's name turned out to be Faisal Hussain, and there was neither mention nor speculation about his religion. An article about him in Tuesday's Toronto Star described him as a "quiet sibling" and "shy young man" who "had a complicated past replete with family misfortune...and mental health challenges," yet it contained nary a word about whether Hussain was Muslim or whether his "complicated past" included any time spent reading or listening to Islamist dogma.

Of course, the article did dutifully note that a friend of Hussain's "has no idea how Hussain could have gotten his hands on a gun." Meanwhile, the headline to a piece written by one of the paper's columnists, Rosie DiManno, flat out asked "is Toronto ready to take gun violence seriously?"

Why don't DiManno and her ilk ever ask about taking Islam seriously? Why do their knees always jerk toward controlling the inanimate objects that are guns, rather than jerking toward controlling or countering the murderous call of jihad -- which exhorts its followers to do violence not so much by guns, but rather by any and all means that exist (such as, you know, bombs, airplanes, trucks, etc.)?

The article linked to above, like many others, relied largely on a statement that was said to have been released by Hussain's family after he was identified as the shooter. But in reality, it was released by one Mohammed Hashid, a leftist community organizer with a history of Muslim advocacy.

When asked, Hashid declined to say if it was he who contacted Hussain's family about releasing a statement, or whether the family contacted him, and he also declined to say who in Hussain's small family had anything to do with writing it. It's worth noting that the statement (which is embedded in it entirety here and elsewhere) reads entirely like a PR clip. Which makes sense because Hashid is a PR professional. And let me reiterate that he is not just any PR professional; he is one who has an agenda.

There have been reports -- reports that are as yet unconfirmed, I must stress -- that Faisal Hussain visited ISIS websites and that he traveled to (and perhaps briefly lived in) Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. But few and far between are the mainstream media articles which mention those reports -- in contrast to almost every mainstream media article about Hussain accepting at face value Mohammed Hashim claim his family's claim that he he had a history of mental illness.

Granted, it is technically possible that it might turn out that Hussain was unfamiliar with Islam and didn't even know what a mosque is. But every sign points strongly in the opposite direction, and yet the mainstream media is not even looking in that opposite direction, either up in Canada or down here in the USA. So I have to ask: Don't you think that if Hussain attended a Baptist church, that would have been the first thing said about him? And don't you think that if his name had been something like Abraham Steinberg, we would be hearing rampant speculation about whether he was "pro-Israel" or believed in "Zionism"?

One of the things that's worst about this kind of media malfeasance -- the kind that implicitly excuses Islamist violence by refusing to talk about Islam when the violence is perpetrated -- is that it keeps most people in the Western world unaware of authentic, brave, peace-loving Muslims like Raif Badawi.

You can't write positive pieces about the Badawis of the world without acknowledging that their noteworthiness flows from how they stand in contrast to the bin Ladens and Mateens of the world. In the MSM's desire to say nothing bad about the practitioners of Islam, they routinely either downplay or completely ignore the role that Islam plays in Islamist terror attacks... and as an inevitable result, they also fail to report on Badawi and Tawakkol Karman and others like them... and as an inevitable result of that, the MSM hurts the very demographic they want to help, because the general public is left reading the names of killers and thereby concluding that those killers are Muslims, while never once hearing the name of an actual Muslim who believes in peace and tolerance.

That disconnect causes most many people in the general public to believe that real life Muslims who believe in peace and tolerance don't actually exist, but are instead a liberal fantasy that the liberal MSM talks about vaguely for the purpose of fooling everyone.

And since people do not like it when others try to fool them, they react to the disconnect in the precise way that any student of human nature would expect them to react: By disbelieving doubting MSM claims that there are any Muslims out there who are genuinely peaceful and tolerant.

That is absolutely the media's fault.

Media malfeasance indeed.

Judicial Jousting

My July 14th post included some kvetching about how liberals are not fit to be judges, particularly when it comes to the Supreme Court. Victor Davis Hanson's article yesterday in National Review is about the same topic, and contains this gem of a quote that I have to share: "For liberals, precedent means little if it was not liberal, but everything if it was."

This kind of reminds me of Dianne Feinstein's asinine proclamation last March that Roe v. Wade is "super precedent" (although at least her phrasing wasn't as cartoonish as Arlen Specter's in 2005, when he referred to Roe as one of several "super-duper precedents").

I hate to beat an imaginary horse, but since liberals insist on believing in them where courts are concerned, I feel I must: There is no such thing as either a "super precedent" or "super-duper precedent," there are only precedents. And yes they can be wrong, which means they are not holy sacraments. And when they are wrong, they should be overturned when the opportunity arises.

If not for the ability to overturn precedents, racial segregation in public facilities would still be legal, and the congressional representation of states with high black populations would be diluted because the U.S. census would still be counting each black person as only three-fifths of an individual.

When someone says you must respect Roe because it's precedent, ask if he or she will respect Citizens United v. FEC and District of Columbia v. Heller, since they too are precedent. I guarantee you they will say no, and I suspect they will say no with hostility, never mind that those precedents are landmark decisions that protect the First and Second Amendments respectively.

To wit: When liberals start preening about the sanctity of judicial precedent, they deserve to be ignored. And even mocked. Sure they have a right to state their opinions, but they do not have a right to be granted some kind of implicit seal of intellectual equivalency by everyone they flap their lips at.

If they claim they deserve such a right, you might want to ask why they believe that right is more worthy of protection than the right of a full-term baby to not be slaughtered in the womb at the behest of his or her mother. You might also want to ask why they believe their own right to "be heard" is worth more than the right of that baby's father to keep his baby from being killed.

Just don't expect a fair, logical, or constructive response. Because I am so learned watched Legally Blonde, I know that Aristotle said the law is "reason free from passion." But because I pay attention to the world, I know that for left-wingers the law is "whatever their passion of the moment happens to be, free from reason."

Will reason alone defeat passion alone when the two sides try to sway the undecided in the public square? I don't think so. We non-leftists have liberals beat in the battle of reason, but we will lose the overall war if we do not at least tie them in the battle of passion. So as the brouhaha over Kavanagh's nomination approaches, we need not neuter ourselves by giving respect that is not deserved... especially to those who treat us with contempt and whose very goal is to do away with individual rights.

That sounds bad. But it's true, no matter how much I wish it was not.

et ceteras

Litmus! Litmus! Litmus!

I was in my teens when I noticed that the only time the phrase "litmus test" gets used is when a liberal/Democrat accuses a conservative/Republican of making a judge's abortion views the determining factor on whether or not he or she will vote to approve that judge's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today is the precise midway point between my 45th and 50th birthdays, and nothing has changed.

The amusing thing is that liberals/Democrats use litmus tests all the freakin' time, for every issue under the sun, and they absolutely use 'em the most when it comes to making a judge's abortion views the determining factor on whether or not he or she will vote to approve that judge's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently their guiding "philosophy" is "litmus tests are fine for me but not for thee," if you don't mind me switching up Nat Hentoff's great book title.

Because Brett Kavanagh has been nominated to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Anthony Kennedy, and the president who did the nominating is a Republican, get ready to hear lots of shrieking by Democrat pols and liberal pundits about Kavanagh's views on abortion. Just don't forget that all that shrieking is one big fat litmus test in and of itself.


And the funny thing is...
...if a judge is a good judge, his or her views about abortion or any other issue are one hundred percent irrelevant, because judges, including Supreme Court justices, neither write laws nor pass them. They merely apply laws that have already been written by the legislative branch and signed off on by the executive. In so doing, judges are also supposed to rule on whether a particular law is allowed by the U.S. Constitution, assuming that a question regarding its constitutionality is why the case was brought to them.

Put another way, even if a judge thinks a particular law is bad or even evil, he must enforce it anyway unless it violates the Constitution. And good judges do enforce it anyway, because to do otherwise would violate their oath. In fact, history is filled with examples of so-called "conservative judges" doing exactly that, but history is not filled with examples of so-called "liberal" judges liberal judges doing exactly that, or even doing anything similar to that.

Liberal judges mistake themselves for legislators, because like all liberals, they are liberals first and everything else twentieth. Liberal judges base their rulings on liberalism instead of the law; and they base their beliefs about the Constitution on liberalism instead of the actual, you know, Constitution.

In other words, they act not like judges but like legislators, and since federal judges are not elected, liberal federal judges function as the most dangerous kind of legislators -- the kind who do not have to face the voters, and have no reason to fear recrimination and no reason to think they should compromise. In other words, they act like dictators, which, at the end of the day, is what every leftist truly is in his or her heart.

The Constitution -- which separates federal power between three distinct branches and assigns law-making powers not to judges (the judicial branch) but to legislators (the legislative branch) -- does not give liberal judges license to do what they do, even though they do what they do regardless.

What liberals refuse to abide is the idea of judges doing their actual job instead of doing what liberals prefer that job to be. Which goes to show that the following headline to a recent David Harsanyi column is absolutely correct: "Democrats Don't Fear Brett Kavanagh; They Fear The Constitution."


Mueller? Mueller?
Maybe there is something... maybe... something... to yesterday's media-ballyhooed indictments of Russian interests by the morally upright and impeccably objective (yes, I'm jesting) Robert Shawn Mueller III. But color me skeptical not only of that, but a thousand times skeptical of the bullshit notion that liberals have a problem with Mother Russia.

Did "the Russians" try to influence our election? Of course they did. Like I wrote 18 months ago: "Those who control Russia's government have been a devious and manipulative bunch for at least one full century... Ever since, oh, let's say about November of 1917, American liberals (not all of whom are/were Democrats) have been deeply in love with Russian totalitarianism, so much so that they even thought ol' Adolf Hitler was the bee's knees until he stopped being an ally of their beloved Soviet Union... In 1983, the famous Democratic Senator Teddy Chappaquidick Kennedy flat out asked the Soviets to meddle in America's 1984 election help Democrats in their efforts to defeat Ronald Reagan the following year."

I don't doubt that "the Russians" hacked members of the Clinton Campaign, Democratic National Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But I also have a brain that possesses this handy dandy thing called a memory, and I remember it previously being reported that "the Russians" tried to hack Republicans -- but failed because the Republicans were responsible enough to use strong security protection that prevented the hacking from working (and also because Republicans weren't as careless and idiotic as Clinton confidante John Podesta, who used "password" as his password and stupidly gave it to phishers).

Donald Trump has been a thousand times tougher on Russia than Hillary Clinton was as Secretary of State, and than Barack Obama was as president, and than Bill Clinton was as president, and it's not at all clear that he has been softer on Russia than George W. Bush was. If you want to convince me that Putin preferred a Trump victory to a Hillary victory, you need to give a coherent reason why he would want that when Hillary had always bowed to his wishes (see "reset button") and she was susceptible to blackmail (he had her emails) and she belonged to a party that has always genuflected to the Kremlin and wished our government was more like Russia's.


Miscellany
This being Bastille Day -- the 229th anniversary of the event that triggered the French Revolution, which Margaret Thatcher rightly denigrated -- I feel compelled to refer you to the most definitive analysis ever written of that revolution, published 18 years ago today by Jonah Goldberg.

Speaking of Goldberg, I have to mention that he (who has been frequently tarred as a "Never Trumper") recently coined an awesome new term to describe particular people: "Always Trumpers." Believe it or not, people, some of us are able to consider each of our 45th president's actions on its own merits (and in the context of his overall body of work) and offer opinions that do not amount to leaping to conclusions and marching in lockstep with people we've never met. Goldberg is a shining example of such genuine thinking.

But I am getting tired of opining about politics, so let me switch to sports by saying I am sad that Belgium defeated England in the World Cup. Not that I give a crap about soccer, which I proudly and proactively dislike. I just wanted to see the symbolic power of Brexit-era England defeating a nation whose capitol city is the seat of the EU.

Wait a minute? Did I just stick with politics while pretending to switch to sports? Damn it!

I really do want to stop opining about politics, however, so I guess I'll just stop opining altogether.

Until next time, time care!

Mankind's Greatest Hour

Today, as we fire up our grills and crack open our beers, let us remember why we even have a July 4th holiday: to commemorate the greatest act of shared, selfless courage the world has ever seen.

Everybody should know that Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Most people know the names of a handful of the 56 men who signed it, such as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and of course Jefferson himself. But few people seem to realize that when those men signed their names, they were committing what was considered an act of treason against the British crown, punishable by death. Those men were property owners who were successful in their lives and businesses. Their lives were comfortable and they stood to lose everything by signing the Declaration -- yet they chose to sign it anyway, because they knew that casting off the crown and forming a new government based on individual liberty was the right thing to do, not only for their own descendants but for all of humanity. And here is what happened to some of those men after they signed the Declaration:

Five of them became prisoners of war.

Nearly one-sixth of them died before the war ended.

British forces burned, and/or looted, the homes and properties of nearly one-third of them.

When the British did that to the property of William Floyd, he and his family fled and spent the next seven years living as refugees without income. His wife died two years before the war ended.

After being forced into the wilderness by British forces, John Hart struggled to make his way home. When he finally got there, he found that his wife was dead and his 13 children were missing. He died without ever seeing them again.

Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed and sent to prison while his property was ravaged. From the day of his release from prison until the day he died, he had to rely on charity from others to feed his family.

Francis Lewis’s wife was imprisoned and beaten. Meanwhile, his wealth was plundered. His last years were spent as a widower living in poverty.

Thomas Nelson Jr.’s home was captured and occupied by British General Cornwallis, who used it as what we would now call an operations center. Therefore, Nelson ordered his troops to destroy his own home with cannon fire during the Battle of Yorktown. To assist in funding the war, he used his own credit to borrow 2 million dollars, which today would equal more than 25 billion dollars. Repaying that debt bankrupted him, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave.

It is a safe bet that fewer than one percent of our citizens have ever heard of these people, much less know anything about the devastating sacrifices they made so that future generations could have the freedom necessary to build the kind of upwardly-mobile, always-progressing society we would come to take for granted.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed to us a wonderful gift called America, and we owe it to our children to make sure we don’t allow that gift to be destroyed. We should never hear the words “Fourth of July” without feeling a skip in our heart and a tear in our eye.

Much thanks to Jeff Jacoby, the late Paul Harvey, and all the others who have written and spoken about the fates of the signers, to keep their story alive.

et ceteras

Ten Years In

Two Fridays ago was the tenth anniversary of this little blog o' mine. I didn't post anything to commemorate the date because it was also Parker's seventh birthday, which was obviously way more important. And also because I'm not a fan of self-congratulation and self-hype.

But I still thought it would be interesting to throw up a link to my first ever post, so here is what I published back on 6/22/08. The topic was Zimbabwe; specifically, the turmoil and strife going on under dictator Robert Mugabe while Morgan Tsvangirai was trying to bring some semblance of liberty and justice to that nation.

Three months before my post, Tsvangirai had defeated Mugabe in an election for the Zimbabwean presidency -- a position the latter had wielded to orchestrate violence and larceny for 21 years -- but because neither of them received a full 50 percent of the vote, a runoff election was planned. Before the runoff came to pass, Mugabe predictably had his military and other goons embark on a campaign of butchery and murder against his opponents. It was designed to make people fearful of voting against him, and it worked.

Maybe one of these days I will do a full update on what has happened since then in Zimbabwe. Tonight I just want to mention a few things in a Reader's Digest sort of way. Tsvangirai is now dead, having succumbed to cancer this Valentine's Day at the age of 65, while Mugabe is 94, still alive, and remained in power until just seven months ago. Mugabe's recent exit from power resulted from the Zimbabwean army placing him under house arrest (if only they hadn't waited until he was in his nineties!) and describing the arrest as part of an action against criminals who were close to him (but not describing him as a criminal, no no no, and also not describing the arrest as being an action against him).

Despite that arrest and removal from office, Mugabe received a deal under which he and his family are exempt from prosecution; his business interests were declared untouchable; and he was awarded $10 million, a house, 23 staff members, numerous cars, and a newspaper.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Zimbabwe continue to live in squalor and hardship that are unimaginable to us First Worlders. And, statistically speaking, none of us notice and none of us care. We bitch about having to pay for cable TV and about incidentally seeing political shares on Facebook that we don't like. Ugh.

RIP

Charles Krauthammer died 10 days ago. He was one of my favorite writers, and reminiscing about my inaugural post reminds me of one of my favorite Krauthammer columns -- one you can read here and which, it turns out, was published less than three weeks after that first post of mine.

I remember the column partly because it mentioned Zimbabwe, but mostly because of a comment that referenced the ethnic cleansing then occurring (and maybe still occurring) in Darfur. Krauthammer wrote: "And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief. What is done to free these people? Nothing."

He then continued: "Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors of Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializing in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about -- the only solution is foreign intervention."

The "Zimbabwean opposition leader" of whom he wrote was of course Morgan Tsvangirai, and his ridicule of slothful super-rich bureaucrats pretending to agonize about human travails while consuming pricey meals in luxurious hotels was classically Krauthammerian. Hemingway said "the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector," and man oh man did Krauthammer have one. No matter how many bubbles were effervescing around something, he always blew right through them to the heart of the matter.

As a well-known pundit whose columns were syndicated nationwide and often appeared on TV, he probably earned a good sum of money over the years. But like those commercials from the 1970's and 1980's said about Smith Barney, he got money the old-fashioned way: He earned it. Krauthammer was schooled in medicine, not punditry, and while a student at Harvard Medical School he became quadriplegic when a diving accident severed his spine at the fifth cervical nerve. After spending 14 months recovering in the hospital, he returned to school, graduated, and became a psychiatrist who helped devise the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Obviously he turned to punditry, in which role he took to diagnosing problems in the collective mentality of the body politic, not "merely" in the mentality of individual humans. If you demand evidence that he eventually came to hold mostly conservative views as a result of thinking things through and weighing evidence, not as a result of reflexively believing what people suggested, you need look no further than the evolution of his own politics: Krauthammer worked in the Jimmy Carter administration and was a speechwriter for Carter's veep, Walter Mondale, during the 1980 presidential election; and as you may recall, Mondale ran against Reagan in 1984.

The above jobs are not right-wing resume boosters, but as the Democratic Party shifted leftward, Krauthammer's own analyses shifted rightward, especially where foreign policy was concerned. He became a major advocate of Reagan's peace through strength philosophy, and in fact it was Krauthammer who coined the phrase "Reagan Doctrine" to define that philosophy. He will be missed and so will his type, i.e., those who truly are independent thinkers.


The Great Crack Up
Lefties (I'm talking not about southpaws, but about Sandanista-loving pinkos) are surely experiencing molten mental meltdowns (more than they usually do, I mean) over some recent news items (if they're aware of them, that is).

As reported in this piece by Michael Goodwin, Hispanic support for Donald Trump has increased by 10 percentage points compared to one month ago. I hasten to add that this dramatic increase has occurred during the same month that lefties have been hysterically calling Trump an anti-Hispanic racist due to child-adult separations among illegal aliens.

Also, Trump's support among Democrats has increased by 4 percentage points since one month ago.

Oh, and there's this (per Pew): Nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters are either non-white and/or female and/or college-educated, while less than one-third fall into the category of "white men without college degrees" that we are always told carried him to victory.

In the wake of this, will lefties reflect on why their stale, illegitimate, anti-intellectual reliance on race-baiting emotional manipulation is no longer working? Will they look at economic gains and foreign policy advances and admit that maybe they don't know as much as they claim, or that maybe those who disagree with them might actually know what they're talking about?

Or will lefties respond by shrieking even louder in rage and doubling down on their calcifying assertion that everybody except for themselves is either irredeemably bigoted or too stupid/uneducated to know what's good for them?

Yeah, I think it's the latter too.

But I will still try to help them out by giving them this piece of advice: Stop talking about "white men without college degrees" as if that phrase is a synonym for "ignorant morons," and while you're at it, you might want to consider that non-white men without college degrees might also take umbrage at the way you navel gaze at diplomas and worship at the vulvar altar.

I have a college degree, and I'm glad you do too, but that does not make us any smarter or more capable than somebody who got their education via real world experiences rather than classroom lectures.

One of the smartest and most successful people I know is a business owner who never spent one second in a college classroom. And Steve Jobs never graduated from college, nor did Michael Dell or Paul Allen or Richard Branson or Ted Turner or Dave Thomas or David Geffen or even John D. Freakin' Rockefeller.

Basically, get over your damn selves and stop insulting everyone else's character and intelligence. Believe it or not, that attitude might drive people to vote the opposite of you. Your perpetual condescension is a very big part of the reason that Donald J. Trump now sits in the Oval Office.


And with that...
...I am going to go ahead and sign off. See you next time.