Greetings!
Last night the New England Patriots and their habitually unethical coach and star quarterback were eliminated from the NFL play-offs in the first round by the Tennessee Titans. Good. I say this despite being from Boston, where my Dad and I once routed for the AFL Pats of Gino Capelletti, Babe Parilli, Nick Buoniconti and Jim Nance. The modern day Patriots made me embarrassed to be a New Englander, even before I realized what a sociopathic organization the NFL was.
1. Noted with amusement: A while back there was a kerfuffle over some conservative publication using a photo of Rep Elijah Cummings (D-Md) when the story was about Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga), or vice-versa. This was, of course, attributed to racism of the “all those people look the same” variety.
I pointed out that while it was of course the kind of mistake that a publication shouldn’t make, the two House members were about eh same age, both heavy-set, both African-Americans, and both hyper-partisan Democrat race-baiters whose careers rested on civil rights protest creds many decades old. Thus it was satisfying to see that “CBS Evening News” accidentally used a picture of the now deceased Rep. Elijah Cummings while reporting on Lewis’ recent cancer diagnosis.
2. Signature significance. If you want definitive proof that an elected official or a pundit is untrustworthy pond scum, mark those who claim that President Trump ordered the hit against Iranian terror master Qasem Soleimani in order to distract from Trump’s impeachment trial. The latest self-identified hack: Elizabeth Warren, who today said on CNN’s “State of the Union,”
“Next week, the President of the United States could be facing an impeachment trial in the Senate. We know he’s deeply upset about that, and I think people are reasonably asking why this moment…Why does he pick now to pick this highly inflammatory and highly dangerous action that moves us closer to war? I think people are reasonably asking about the timing, and why it is that the administration seems to have all kinds of different answers.”
This “Wag the Dog” theory made some sense when it was first applied to Bill Clinton, who launched a failed strike against Osama bin Laden in the middle of his impeachment drama, since Clinton was guilty and knew it. Trump’s impeachment has raised his poll numbers and further exposed Democrats as abusing the impeachment process: there is no reason for him to try to distract from it.
Warren’s question about timing is also absurd. Why now? Gee, do you think it might be that the murderer of many Americans who had just engineered an attack on our embassy and who was planning more deadly attacks happened to be in Iraq, where the U.S. has an approved military presence, and was virtually asking to be brought down?
Warren’s poll numbers and fundraising are sinking fast (Good!), so her demagoguery is shifting into high gear. Once again, her likely fate proves Lincoln right: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Or enough of them.
3. Here’s an excellent explanation of “why now” from someone with expertise, accumen, and political objectivity: former U.S. commander and CIA director David Petraeus, who told Foreign Policy,
It is impossible to overstate the importance of this particular action. It is more significant than the killing of Osama bin Laden or even the death of [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi. Suleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia crescent, stretching from Iran to Iraq through Syria into southern Lebanon. He is responsible for providing explosives, projectiles, and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition and Iraqi partners just in Iraq, as well as in many other countries such as Syria…
The reasoning seems to be to show in the most significant way possible that the U.S. is just not going to allow the continued violence—the rocketing of our bases, the killing of an American contractor, the attacks on shipping, on unarmed drones—without a very significant response.
Many people had rightly questioned whether American deterrence had eroded somewhat because of the relatively insignificant responses to the earlier actions. This clearly was of vastly greater importance. Of course it also, per the Defense Department statement, was a defensive action given the reported planning and contingencies that Suleimani was going to Iraq to discuss and presumably approve…Iran is in a very precarious economic situation, it is very fragile domestically—they’ve killed many, many hundreds if not thousands of Iranian citizens who were demonstrating on the streets of Iran in response to the dismal economic situation and the mismanagement and corruption. I just don’t see the Iranians as anywhere near as supportive of the regime at this point as they were decades ago during the Iran-Iraq War…Obviously all sides will suffer if this becomes a wider war, but Iran has to be very worried that—in the state of its economy, the significant popular unrest and demonstrations against the regime—that this is a real threat to the regime in a way that we have not seen prior to this…
Read it all. Then contrast his measured and informed response to the pot shots being taken at the President by Democrats and celebrities.
4. Wondering about those “antiwar protests” that suddenly sprung up yesterday? Over 70 cities across the country hosted such protests, spearheaded by the Answer Coalition, which is widely acknowledged to be a communist front organization, closely allied to The Daily Worker.
5. And not for the first time, Great Britain shows us how dependence on the State threatens individual rights and liberties.The North Bristol National Health Service Trust in Great Britain announced that hospital patients who use offensive, racist, or sexist language will have medical care withheld as soon as it is safe to end their treatment. This is the logical next step on the slippery slope the National Health Services polished when another local health committee announced it would withhold routine or non-emergency surgeries from those who smoked or who were overweight.
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Twitter link for this post that Facebook won’t reject, unlike a direct link: https://twitter.com/CaptCompliance/status/1213913996409155585
Ethics Alarms 
4. Agree, but a little overstatement. ANSWER founders were Ramsey Clark’s IAC and, among others, the Workers’ Party. Although WP is US communist, it’s a little misleading to just say “communist” although it certainly would not be a stretch to say that it is a conglomeration if far left organizations. One criticism has also been that they are “anti-Semitic” although ANSWER claims that it is only against Israeli policies that are unfair to Palestinians. As usual, some complexity but I agree with your bottom line.
I though I was safe using David Corn’s description, given that I consider him an extreme left propagandist! Oh well..thanks, VM, for the clarification.
Agreed that ANSWER claims that it is only against Israeli policies that are unfair to Palestinians would not be considered racist — barring the argument that Jews are a race, which, though partially genetically accurate (e.g. the Ashkenazi), has no more pertinence in politics than black being a race due to a prevalence of sickle cell disease. Racism or its more specific name, antisemitism – yes, Arabs are “semites” in the original ancient linguistic sense, but the word “anti-semitism” itself was coined specifically to mean hatred of Jews and that is how I use it here – is often used wrongly against those, including Jews both Israeli and American, who are against the policies of the Israeli government.
The current argument is not a matter of pro- one or the other but of whether there should be one state with equal citizenship or two states co-existing, …. which is rather like c.1884 Turks or Italians debating among themselves whether the states of the United States should be re-married or divorced, that is, after the fighting is (somehow) finished. To quote one of the recent polls (Neilsen-Scarborough): 35 percent say they want a one-state solution outright (goes up to 42% among 18-34 year olds), while 36 percent advocate a two-state solution, 11 percent support maintaining the occupation, and 8 percent back annexation without equal citizenship. Last year’s Gallup poll, more personal than political, concludes that partiality toward Israel has slipped (5 points) to 59%, while a predilection for Palestinians continues pretty much the same at 21%, with no surprise that the LibDems are the only ideology group that is not partial to Israel. The major change, however is in the “Jewish vote” itself . . . keeping in mind that Jews (using aggregated samples), although they have the highest percentage of voters in almost any election, are less than 2% of the US population . . . has escalated from 28% identified as or leaned Republican in 2016, to 36% in 2019. Defecting Democrats are coming to the right from the most unlikely places, including perhaps the WP.
5. Someone needs to inform Britain’s NHS and a lot of Americans hunting for safe spaces that “offensive” is still defined as causing someone to feel deeply hurt, upset, or angry. It doesn’t mean one has been knocked down and run over by a 400 lb. lineman. These are subjective, individual feelings that vary from person to person, particularly when one is dealing with a multi-lingual, multi-cultural society.
I may not live to see it, but Some Sunny Day (everybody sway as you hum the chorus) the sanity will be restored, everyone will open their eyes and shake their heads and go around wondering why on Earth anyone brought those inhumane rules and laws into being, why no one understood what an education was anymore, and why everyone spoke in monotone, slowly and softly to everyone else, using First Grade vocabulary with long pauses to ascertain the emotional stability of their hearer, words that signified, as one long-banned playwright put it: nothing.
1. I’m sure some intern got fired for googling Lewis and grabbing a photo of Cummings instead. There are rarely serious consequences for a lack of thoroughness in journalism.
Put both photos together and ask a high school history teacher to identify who each man is and I bet the results would surprise everyone.
Put both photos together and ask a high school history teacher to identify who each man is and I bet the results would surprise
everyone.no one.FIFY
Here is a link straight from the horse’s mouth.
http://www.nbt.nhs.uk/news-media/latest-news/north-bristol-hands-red-card-racism
Can we get these NHS people to come to the U.S. and help librarians get sleeping homeless people out of our public library reading rooms and bathing homeless people of public library rest rooms?