Is it racist to expect people who provide communications-related services in the US. to speak competent and understandable English? We have been harassed in recent weeks by one unsolicited phone call after another offering guidance on health insurance matters during the current enrollment period. A particularly incomprehensible barely English-speaking agent called my wife today, who had to keep asking her to repeat what the woman was trying to say. She finally said that she was “a socialist.” We presume she meant a “social worker.” Grace replied, tartly, that she might want to look up “socialist” before she told any other people that’s what she was. Then she said, “good-bye.”

1. Desperation Journal: On MSNBC, historian Michael Beschloss once again hopelessly beclowned himself and his thoroughly corrupted field by saying, after Joe Biden’s absurd speech last night,

“[A] historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

What happened to this guy? He really used to be a respectable Presidential historian; I’ve read, and enjoyed, some of his books, like “Eisenhower: A Centennial Life” (1990) and “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963” (1991). Then somewhere before 2016 he snapped like Larry Tribe, or bias made him stupid, or something. He was the “expert” who said Hillary lost to Trump because parties almost never hold the White House three terms in a row, which is non-historical offal more worthy of an uneducated dolt like Bette Midler. His statement from last night is even worse, and an abuse of his reputation and position. No one can trust the analysis of a historian who defaults to partisan hysteria. As Thomas More might say, “But Michael, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul… but for MSNBC?”

Here’s proof on how far Beschloss has sunk: He essentially channeled Rob Reiner:

To that, Federalist editor Molly Hemingway replied, “This type of rhetoric seems more like an IQ test than political persuasion. Like, how stupid does a grown adult have to be to find this type of argument compelling?” Well, as stupid as an acclaimed Presidential scholar, I guess… [Pointer: Chris Marschner] Continue reading →

Oh, gee, I guess by using the old folk song “If I had a hammer” to suggest that the Democrats are wildly and absurdly exploiting a lunatic’s one-off hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a life-preserver while a metaphoric drowning in a red sea next week looms, I have joined a “brutal mob.”

That’s the sentiment of The Atlantic, which bloviates, “Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.” Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, mockery of the Democrats’ obsession with the attack as if it has any larger significance at all (the party hacks surely aren’t interested in the crime-ridden cesspool their policies have created in San Francisco, where mentally ill vagrants like Pelosi’s attacker roam and play like the deer and the antelope), means I am simpatico with Republicans “who conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.”

Wow. That accusation takes a lot of chutzpah after six years of daily “meanspirited, inflammatory or false” attacks on Donald Trump, his wife, his children, his staff and his supporters, culminating in a “democratic norm” shattering prime-time TV speech by a Democratic President labeling Trump’s supporters as clear and present dangers to democracy,

“Inflammatory attack? What inflammatory attack?”

They can all bite me. I’m not accepting any part of such criticism from Democrats and their mainstream media mouthpieces for calling their framing of the weird Pelosi episode exactly what it is: cynical, dishonest, and frantic. That was the point, a fair and valid one, of my use of the song. (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was runner-up), The Left’s silly game is to force everyone to express horror and condemnation over this episode, while thousands of attacks on Americans take place every day. They think such compelled groveling will symbolize acceptance of their ludicrous theory that harsh (but deserved) criticism of Pelosi’s wife caused the attack, so such criticism itself must cease. I see that my friend U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger felt he had to issue a statement toeing that line. Well, Tom works for Pelosi, I don’t, and I also don’t tolerate double standards and narratives that require me to hammer my own brain into submission. I’m on to this desperation ruse—not that it’s hard to figure out—and I refuse to treat it with respect when ridicule is what it warrants.

1. When in doubt, lie, I guess. I don’t get to vote in the newly drawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia, but if I were voting in the close race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger and her Republican challenger Yesli Vega, the most recent Spanberger attack ad would settle the issue. A spokesperson for Spanberger who says he is a veteran cop says he is disgusted that Vega has “defended criminals,” meaning the January 6 rioters, and goes on to say that 140 officers were injured in the riot—he gets a point or two for not saying “insurrection”—and “five died.” That statement is an outright lie, and one that has been debunked over and over again. No officers died during the riot. Five died in the days and months after the riot, but none of the deaths were connected with injuries sustained on January 6. This is a particularly egregious Big Lie, one that has been advanced in part by President Biden among others. The Democratic Party’s super-PAC, House Majority Pac, is responsible for the ad.

Continue reading →