I actually like this quote a great deal, and think the Times, for once, is spot on…

“Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.”

—-The New York Times in a piece called “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”

The Democratic Party, in addition to being exposed as a the real foe of democracy domestically, advocates for open borders, puppet Presidencies, using the justice system as a political weapon, cheating in women’s sports, racial discrimination in hiring and, lately, communism, also has revealed itself as a party of abject cowards. Its latest favorite tactic is walking out of Congress when they don’t like what the majority is likely to do, but what the Times describes is astoundingly craven. The party’s analysis of why it lost the White House in 2024 is going to avoid what everyone knows are the reasons it lost

That, my friend, is a cover-up, but it is even worse than that. It is signature significance for an organizational culture that is so infected with “It isn’t what it is” reactions to unpleasant reality that it is even incapable of honestly addressing its own problems. How can anyone trust a party so self-hobbled to manage anything, lead anywhere, accomplish any goal or mission? Why would anyone trust such a party? How can you justify belonging to a party—believing in a party—that even lies to itself?

From the article:

Continue reading →

Nobody else has to write about this asshole here—it is an open forum, after all—but I want to get my ethics call on the announcement that CBS is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” out of the way lest it fester and turn into a fatal brain tumor.

That ethics call is “GOOD! It’s about damn time!” Never mind that I don’t find Colbert funny and never have; my opinion of his smug style of humor is irrelevant. But he has been for more than a decade a divisive force in American culture, exacerbating political divisions and intolerance, misleading people foolish enough to take his partisan talking points as fact, and one of many Axis of Unethical Conduct allies who have been deliberately ripping at the connective tissue that holds the nation together. He’s an ethics villain.

Naturally, the Axis is upset and, as usual, lying. “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump — a deal that looks like bribery,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on social media from her tee-pee. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” It was cancelled because CBS decided that a an expensive late night TV show with pretty miserable ratings that was dedicated to insulting and denigrating half of the country was probably not a smart investment, and was never an ethical one. Warren, a lawyer, former professor and U.S. Senator apparently doesn’t even know what “bribe” means. No, come to think of it, she’s just calculating that enough citizens don’t know what the word means to mislead them.

Continue reading →

…to which the total and irrefutable rebuttal is…

Observations:

• Incredible.
• If someone believes this, then they are by definition too inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest of stupid to have what they write published in the New York Times.
• Not only does bias make you stupid, it makes you willing to display to the whole world how biased and stupid you are.
• Why would anyone trust the Times after this, or any paper that published such an undeniable attempt to erase not just history, but recent history?
• The headline is pure gaslighting. A reader who hasn’t had her brain wiped like in “Paycheck” will think, “Wait…did I imagine the entire campaign against Trump for at least two years before the election being based on his being a fascist, Hitler II? I must have…the Times says that Trump vilifying political opponents is unique and unprecedented.
• How long does the mainstream media think it can keep doing this before virtually no one takes them seriously at all?

One of the most important and brave missions of the second Trump administration is its determination to root out the “Deep State,” or to be less portentious about it, to eliminate as many entrenched lifetime partisans, almost all progressive, Democrat and left-leaning, as possible.

What we witnessed in Trump’s first term was a literal sabotaging of democracy and the Constitution by furious partisan hacks and activists who were just certain that they knew what was best for the country, and if they had to accomplish it by cheating, manufacturing fake scandals and obstructing the President by any means necessary, so be it. Having succeed, as demonstrated by the dubious election of 2020, these nascent totalitarians were further emboldened. Next we got the passionate, Soviet-style effort to lock Trump up before he could be re-elected, the excessive political prosecutions of the J-6 idiots, the further weaponizing of the Justice Department to intimidate dissenters (as in threatening parents who dared to challenge woke school boards), and the Puppet Presidency. Who knows what would have been in store if the Left’s babbling, DEI, empty pants suit Presidential candidate with her anti-free speech knucklehead running mate had squeaked into the White House? Perish the thought.

Continue reading →

Wait, what? If this is accurate, and I hope it’s not, someone has gone loco at the State Department. Reports say that the State Department, presumably with the assent or at the behest of President Trump, has sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine.  This freezes any assets Albanese has in the US and restricts her travel to the U.S.

As justification for the sanctions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

Albanese is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University and teaches a course on “humanitarian, legal and political responses to the Palestinian forced displacement” as a non-resident professor at a number of foreign universities. Albanese worked for  two years at the UN Development Programme in Morocco as well as four years in Geneva as a human rights officer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Outside of the UN, she provides research and legal assistance on migration and asylum seekers for the think tank called “Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development,” and co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine, a group of experts and scholars engaged in the issue of Israel and Palestine.

Continue reading →

Is it the most unpresidential and stupid outburst by any President ever?

There is no excuse for this. I guarantee the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed will be wetting themselves over this. It’s proof that Trump is senile! It shows that he’s insane! It proves he’s Hitler! No, it only proves once again that Trump has a flat learning curve and no self-restraint, that he’s his own worst enemy, that he’s petty and foolish and can’t resist demonstrating just how petty and foolish when it suits his mood.

The nation doesn’t have time for his silly feuds. He doesn’t have political capital to throw away like this, either. That post isn’t just punching down, it’s punching WAY down: Rosie O’Donnell is nobody, a has-been, washed up, irrelevant. And she’s in Ireland! Trump gives her the publicity she craves by pretending that she’s significant: surely he understands the Streisand Effect by now.

Trump can’t take away anyone’s citizenship on a whim; he sounds like an idiot when he announces fantasies like this. Ann Althouse writes, “If it’s a joke, he shouldn’t be making that joke. He has too much power. If it’s not a joke, it’s terrible. I know he’s much more confident — to the point of overreaching as political theater — the second time around and after his 4 years in the wilderness, but he needs to channel himself toward true greatness, not get entangled in this kind of smallness.”

Yeah, that too.

Embarrassing and hyper-partisan as it was, Senator Whitehouse’s rant on the Senate floor last week was not entirely without its valid points. He is right that the U.S. Supreme Court has been having too many ethics breakdowns (the leaking of Justice Alito’s draft of the Dobbs opinion was one of them) and as I noted in the EA piece, (AGAIN) there is no defending Clarence Thomas. He is not, however, the only Justice with some ‘splainin’ to do, as Ricky so often said to Lucy.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson published a memoir shortly after being placed on the Supreme Court as a DEI coup, though she hadn’t really done anything to justify such an ego trip. “Lovely One” is now going for half-price on Amazon, but Jackson received a $893,750 advance for the book reported $2 million in profits last year. Since there is no indication that the memoir is flying off the shelves, the numbers are puzzling. Penguin Random House will soon be publishing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book and it paid her a $2 million advance. Why? The majority of the country can’t name a single Supreme Court justice, but the ones who are willing to cash in are receiving celebrity level book advances. [Full disclosure: the book I co-authored with Ed Larson was also published by Random House, in 2007. We received approximately $6.78 each as our advance…okay, a bit more than that.]

Continue reading →