The Gabbard Files

The big news in last ten days—I mean other than the allegation that Donald Trump wrote a raunchy birthday card (maybe) to Jeffrey Epstein once—was a newly declassified report released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that fingers former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey among others in the Obama Administration, and later in the Trump Administration, as having deliberately “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public in order to advance the hoax that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with the collusion of Donald Trump.

Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve…No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.” She said she was releasing information that showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials, including Obama.

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Addendum to “On the Damning Birthday Doodle….”

I was going to add this to the previous post, but decided that it deserved a special highlight. Red-pilled former Axis pundit Matt Taibbi is exercised over the apparent documentation showing the the whole Obama administration, including Barack, deliberately promoted the Russian collusion hoax as a way to cripple the incoming Trump Administration. That is part of an angry tweet sent his way.

Note the attempted equivalencies: on one hand we have a high level government conspiracy by Democrats to violate the Constitution while framing a President of the United States, and on the other, at worst, a raunchy gag birthday greeting from two decades ago.

This is how unhinged from reality, proportionality, sanity and common sense the American Left has become. That poor fool who tweeted Taibbi is not an isolated instance: I bet most of my Facebook friends would agree with that tweet. It really is beyond unethical to pathological.

On the Damning Birthday Doodle….

I just woke up and feel like I’m going to barf. Almost certainly this is because I knew when I finally hit the sack last night that I was going to have to write about this new low in Axis “Get Trump!” shenanigans—oh, I’m sure there will be even lower ones to come—this morning.

You see, it seems that a long time ago, eventually-to-be-President Donald Trump wrote a bawdy birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein as part of Ghislaine Maxwell’s project to create a leather notebook filled with such cards from his friends. It seems that Trump cooperated with the project, which means that he had criminal sex with under-age girls. Or it means that he would have liked to have sex with under-aged girls. Or that he’s evil and needs to be destroyed by any means necessary, of which this smoking doodle evidence is one….but the Trump Deranged lunatics who are fulminating over this “scandal” already know that, or think they do, so again we find ourselves asking, “What’s going on here?

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Citizen Free Press

“Bwaaahaha, perhaps you should have cut out the bias, bitches.”

—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.

Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.

The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.

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Another Bonkers Question To “Social Q’s”

Who are these people?

A mere summary won’t do the full craziness of this question to the NYT’s manners advice column full justice, so here’s the whole, ugly thing:

My husband’s brother, mid-60s, has always been single. Before his parents died, he lived with them. While attending a violent political rally that my husband and I opposed early in the pandemic, he contracted Covid, then infected his mother and behaved irresponsibly in managing her care. She died soon after. We have had no real relationship with him in years. Still, he emails suggestions of gifts he would like for birthdays and Christmas. We send them, and he responds with thank-you notes. When he asks what we would like, we respond that we don’t want any gifts. He sends them anyway, and we donate them to charity. We do not acknowledge them, which we normally would do. Recently, he expressed a desire for acknowledgment of his gifts. How should we handle this?

I’m not going to read columnist Phillip Galanes’s answer to this one because I declared him an irredeemable woke bigot quite a while ago. I’m insulted that he thinks any reader worthy of human association would be interested in such a family’s pathology. Shunning a family member is an extreme move that had better be justifiable; shunning him without letting him know he’s being shunned is not just cruel, it’s weird.

Considerations:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

“Bias Makes You Stupid” Crossed With “Self-Anointed Virtue”

A simple Ethics Dunce verdict doesn’t do justice to Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. There is so many things wrong with his New York Times column “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” I may not have the time and patience to list them all. Here’s a gift link so you can analyze them yourself.

The major flaw in the piece is flagged by the headline: it’s a long appeal to authority, the writer’s own, but also other “experts.” “It’s true because we say it’s true.” He holds Israel guilty of genocide because he relies on his own analysis and he’s “been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century.” He’s also been marinating in the academic community’s intersectionalism bias and growing anti-Semitism for all those years. He needs to get out more.

It’s not just him, however. “A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide,” Bartov writes. Yeah, this is how the US started freaking out about climate change, how 50 national intelligence experts proved that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and how the United States crippled its economy and the intellectual and social development of its children because experts kept lying about the Wuhan virus.

Sorry, I am no longer persuaded by “experts”; they have collectively proven incapable of objective analysis too many times. (Don’t get me started on legal ethics experts.) “So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International,” the author says, adding to his cherry-picked list of authorities who agree with him. “South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice,” Omar adds. Now there are three objective analysts!

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Smug, Self-Satisfied Progressive Asshole of the Year: David Litt

The obnoxious screed “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,” authored by an obscure writer I never heard of (three of his better-known mentors are above) and hope I never hear of again, was deemed appropriate content for New York Times readers, and not as satire either.

Litt epitomizes the type of insufferable elitist jerks that have made the modern Left the pit of despond that it has become over the last decade or so. Yuck. Was this guy ever a tolerable human being? The Times should be required to publish a full analysis of how Litt got this way as a public service, kind of like that episode of “I Love Lucy” where her book draft was sought by a publisher to use in a how-to tome to illustrate what writers shouldn’t ever do.

The column is about how Litt “felt a civic duty to be rude” to his wife’s younger brother because he hadn’t seen the light and surrendered his mind to the Woke and Wonderful. A few excerpts will tell you all you need to know about Litt, but I may add a little commentary here and there:

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Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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