The definition of a “smirk”, I see as I peruse several dictionary definitions, is a condescending, smug, conceited or silly smile, universally regarded as obnoxious, rude and annoying. Thus the expression caught in an instant on the face of a teenage Catholic school student as a Native American activist intentionally confronted him, blocked his way and banged his drum within inches of his face was deemed by multiple commentators and pundits from progressive news organizations—that is to say, news organizations—to make the kid’s face “punchable.”
Examination of the video revealed that Nick Sandmann was not, in fact, smirking at all, but smiling awkwardly because human beings don’t have appropriate expressions pre-programmed for “old Indian jerk starts chanting and beating a drum in your face without any discernible reason when you have no clear avenue of escape.”
1 As predicted, the police shooting of a black teenager with a semi-automatic weapon resulted in a new round of riots, this time in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin because the officer involved was not indicted for 1) being a police officer, and 2) having to shoot a an African American who 3) resisted arrest. Of course.
Riots are unethical. Demonstrating against responsible and fact-based law-enforcement decisions whether to prosecute is unethical. Creating a culture in which it is presumed that enforcing the law against a particular race is racist is unethical. This is all what one political party, just one of two, is supporting, rather than clearly condemning. That too is unethical.
And supporting such a party is unethical, as well is ignorant.
While I was typing this, an ad, not “approved by Donald Trump,” featured a woman being terrorized in her car by a mob, and noted that the Biden-Harris ticket would try to disarm citizens while “defunding the police.” “Vote Against Biden-Harris to keep safe” the ad concluded.
I think that’s entirely fair.
2. I did not watch the Pence-Harris debate, and I may not even review the video or the transcript. There should be nothing left to learn about Harris at this point, after watching her giggling, incompetent performances in the Democratic candidates’ debates. I assume she made numerous counter-factual assertions, and I assume the best she could do was to level pre-scripted ad hominem attacks on the President to pander to the Trump Deranged Democratic base. I assume no one asked her about the apparent hypocrisy of her enthusiastic alliance with a serial sexual harasser and the object of a rape accusation when she savaged a nominated Supreme Court Justice based on far less. I assume no one will ask how she defends the open decision to base the critical choice of who stands “a heartbeat from the Presidency” on nothing, literally nothing, but skin color and gender, resulting in Harris being chosen despite no relevant experience and clear rejection by voters in the primaries. And I assume the Vice-President was stolid, professional and boring, as he always is, thus sparking comparisons with the President’s uncivil, un-Presidential but wholly Trump-like performance in the first Presidential debate.
I locked it down so securely that it took until Tuesday to open it…
1. Does the Democratic Party’s 2020 ticket constitute the most irresponsible nominations for President and Vice-President in U.S. history? I think a strong case can be made that it is. The patriotic duty of a political party is to give the American people the best possible choices of competent and trustworthy leaders to cast their votes for. In 2020, the nominee for President is mentally declining into incompetence, and the nominee for Vice-President appears to have no genuine objectives other than her own voracious ambition, and will say anything to achieve that. Recent evidence:
It was missed at the time, and the 77-year-old Biden had more marbles left then, but during a town hall event last October before the South Carolina Democratic primary, video shows Biden claiming, “I got started out of a HBCU, Delaware State,” he told pupils at Wilson High School in Florence, founded in 1866 by the Freedmen’s Bureau for black children seeking an education. Delaware State is a traditional black college. Yesterday, Delaware State University confirmed that Joe Biden was never a student there.
Did Joe really misremember where he went to college? Does he think he’s black? Was he lying? Who knows?
Kamala Harris appeared at the virtual NAACP convention last week, and, CNN commentator Angela Rye asked Harris who was the best rapper alive. “Tupac!” she answered.
Tupac Shakur has been dead since 1996. Harris, as is her habit, tried to giggle the gaffe away, and then was given another chance. “There’s so many, you know?” she huminahumina-ed. “There’s some I would not mention right now because they should stay in their lane.”
Sure. You know, I have never listened to a rap station or to a single rap song all the way through, and I can name at least six. Heck, just add almost any adjective to “Ice” and you’ll probably name one by accident. And I’m not even sort-of black.
It’s not that Harris is faking it all the time, it’s that she’s not smart enough to do a convincing job faking it.
2. Wait, another CNN reporter refuses to let a Democrat get away with spouting nonsense?Continue reading →
At 8:30 am, I took my car to the dealer for a 5000 mile servicing. I had asked if I could get a loaner, and was told I could. But I’d have my car back in an hour, I was told, so I passed.
Then I found all the doors at the place locked until 9 am. I decided to walk several blocks to get a fast breakfast, but Popeye’s doesn’t have breakfast, and MacDonald’s doesn’t allow you to use the tables. This was a huge McDonald’s: 20 people could eat there and not be closer than ten feet. But Virginia, in the throes of Blue Madness, is catering to hysterics. I ate my sausage biscuit and hash browns and drank my coffee sitting on a curb, like a vagrant.
When I returned, I could get into the showroom to sit, but my glasses kept fogging up with the %$#@%!! mask, so I kept going in and out. My car wasn’t ready at 9:30. It wasn’t ready at 10, or 10:30. They had me, as Beldar Conehead memorably said, “by the base of my snarglies.”
I also couldn’t complain, because they had assigned the servicing to my son, who works there.
I got home at 11:46 am, the morning effectively shot to hell.
1. The fascinating memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower will be dedicated this week:
Ike was one of my father’s heroes, and the first President I can remember. On a popular Boston kids’ show called “The Big Brother Show,” the host, Bob Emory, would call upon us to get a glass of milk and toast a photo of President Eisenhower as “Hail to the Chief” played. Because, you know, you were supposed to respect the Office of the President. The New York Times couldn’t even write about a memorial to a Fifties era POTUS without making veiled insults to President Trump:
He was a leader who sought to work across lines toward a common purpose, driven by duty and pragmatism rather than ideology and divisiveness. He steered his Republican Party away from isolationism toward a bipartisan internationalism that prevailed until recent years. He sent troops into the South not to crack down on demonstrations for racial justice but to enforce the desegregation of schools. He ended the Korean War and balanced the budget, presiding over nearly eight years of peace and prosperity. And he pushed through an infrastructure bill that built the interstate highway system.
He also presided over a remarkably homogeneous society, was opposed by a Democratic Party with many selfless statesmen that was barely distinguishable from the GOP (Ike could have been the nominee of either party), and he still was covered by a news media that mostly held to traditional journalism standards.
Ike would have been called a racist and a fascist in 2020. Continue reading →
1. I worry about sounding like Andy Rooney or George Costanza’s father, but I have a lot of problems with these people!
One of our medical insurance carriers who is paid automatically from our account sold its customers to another company. It didn’t tell us, didn’t write us, didn’t alert us at all. The new company wrote a letter, which got tossed because we assumed it was junk mail. Of course, the new company wasn’t getting the automatic payment, so after three months, it cancelled the coverage. I learned about this when a drug that typically cost three bucks for 90 pills was suddenly 12 times that when I went to the pharmacy to pick it up.
A certain bar association that will not be mentioned alerted me to a dues issue and some missing information. The letter said, “Do not hesitate to call [this number].” When I called that number, I got a message that said that the office was temporarily closed “due to Covid 19” —I guess they meant the Wuhan virus—and there was no opportunity to leave a message.
Having switched to Comcast from AT&T, I have discovered that when you call Comcast information at 411 and ask for “Comcast customer service,” the computer says that there is no record of that number.
2. Admittedly, pointing out that Kamala Harris is shockingly dim is like shooting fish in a barrel, but her comments about the Jacob Blake shooting are so frighteningly unethical—incompetent, irresponsible.
First, she said in a CNN interview that based on the video of Jacob Blake’s shooting, the white police officer who shot him should be charged, insisting that it was “very clear” that the charges should be “considered in a very serious way and that there should be accountability and consequence.” (And why does she talk like that?) First, as we have discussed here regarding episodes like Barack Obama impugning George Zimmerman before the facts were known and the various officials pronouncing Officer Chauvin guilty, as well as Wisconsin’s Governor and Lt. Governor doing the same regarding Blake’s shooters, this kind of mouthing off by elected officials robs defendants of the right to a fair trial. When President Nixon said, in 1970, that Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason,” Manson’s attorneys immediately demanded a mistrial, saying Nixon had irredeemably tainted the jury pool. It was just moral luck that the motion failed.
Then Harris decided to visit Blake’s family with Blake himself participating by phone, and gushed, “I mean, they’re an incredible family.And what they’ve endured, and they just do it with such dignity and grace. And you know, they’re carrying the weight of a lot of voices on their shoulders.”
Blake broke into the home of his ex-girlfriend in May, allegedly raped her, stole her car keys and debit card and fled the scene. Wisconsin issued an open warrant for Blake’s arrest for third-degree sexual assault and a restraining order which Blake violated, thus prompting the fateful police confrontation, where he resisted arrest and placed one officer in a headlock.
Here’s a sequence from yesterday’s news conference:
Watch it, please. Here’s a summary of what transpires:
Step 1.: A reporter asks the President about his thoughts on the theory floated by a Constitutional law professor in Newsweek that Kamala Harris shouldn’t be considered a ‘natural born citizen” and thus technically isn’t eligible to be Vice-President or President.
Step 2: The President offers no opinion on it whatsoever, and makes it clear he didn’t read the article (who reads Newsweek?). He says 1) he heard about it 2) it is his understanding that the author is a genuine authority 3) he doesn’t know what the guy actually argued (Trump asks the reporter if the problem is that Harris “wasn’t born” in the U.S.)
Step 3.The reporter quickly summarizes the professor’s point.
Step 4. The President says, first, that he has no idea if the professor’s claims are right, and concludes by saying he “doesn’t know about it” that he “just heard about it” and will “take a look.”
And Step 5?
CNN headlines, “Trump promotes another birther lie, this time about Kamala Harris”
” President Donald Trump spent years pushing lies about the birthplace and presidential eligibility of President Barack Obama, the first Black president. On Thursday, he started floating a new birther lie about Sen. Kamala Harris, who, if elected, would be the first Black and Asian American vice president. Trump’s incendiary nonsense about Harris was part of a Thursday self-described “news conference” he largely used to campaign against his Democratic election opponents…”
Three reporters wrote this completely false story, and CNN published it!
(That’s the late, great Professor Irwin Corey, a famous walking, double-talking comedy spoof of professors. His theories are approximately as valuable as the topic of this post.)
Chapman University constitutional law professor John Eastman has a controversial essay in Newsweek analyzing whether Sen. Kamala Harris is eligible to become Vice president (or <cough> President) since her parents may not have been U.S. citizens when she was born.
Eastman’s theory is that the Twelfth Amendment’s language saying “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States” combined with Article II of the Constitution’s requirement that “[n]o person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President” raises legitimate questions about Harris’ eligibility.
Harris’s father and mother were born outside of the United States and neither was a naturalized citizen at the time of Harris’s birth in Oakland, California. (I did not know that! Did you know that Pat Venditte was the first Major League pitcher who regularly throws both right-handed and left-handed? ) If, Eastman, claims, Harris’s parents were not lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth, then she isn’t a natural born citizen. Along with a minority among constitutional scholars, Eastman believes the 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that ‘[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ are citizens. Just because one is born in the United States, these contrarians argue, doesn’t mean that individual has ‘subjected’ himself ‘to the jurisdiction’ of the United States. Under this theory, the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens are not “natural born” citizens.
What an interesting theory! And, like so many things academics and scholars put into print to gain fame, notoriety, and publishing deals, it is one that is completely pointless at this time in history. Eastman’s theory has not been adopted by the United States or used to determine citizenship, so the current interpretation that if you are born here, you’re a “natural born” citizen, is the law by tradition and practice. Nevertheless, conservative media is having a ball with this foolishness. “Kamala Harris was an Anchor Baby” says a headline I saw today. So WHAT??? There is so much wrong with Kamala Harris, and she is such an awful candidate for so many other reasons, why is anyone focusing on a dead letter technicality?
There is nothing wrong with a scholar claiming that we’ve been doing it wrong all this time, but there is a lot wrong with making that argument in the middle of a Presidential campaign. I get it: the presence of Harris on the Democratic ticket makes an arcane legal theory suddenly newsworthy, Chapman, however, is chasing personal fame at the cost of promoting needless distrust and uncertainty into a national election, as if we didn’t have too much of both already. Continue reading →
Shaun King is a social justice warrior star and a Black Lives Matter shill. As far as I can determine, King is black the way Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee. Never mind: he has built his career on identifying as a victimized person of color because, he says, his mother told him his father wasn’t the white man on his birth certificate, but a light-skinned black man. For many, many reasons, I wouldn’t trust anything Shaun King says or writes, nor would I trust him to mail my water bill. One litmus test for me: he still claims Mike Brown was murdered by a racist cop. He is the very model of a modern major advocate of “Facts Don’t Matter.”
Here, next to King’s tweet about Biden and Harris from two years ago, is his tweet yesterday celebrating Super-Hypocrite Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate.
I always thought Glenn Yarbrough was the B version of Gene Pitney, who was better. Did you know that Gene Pitney wrote “Hello, Mary Lou (Goodby Heart)” and “He’s a Rebel”? He’s a singer we don’t usually think of as a songwriter, but like the great Bobby Darin, he was a prolific and a successful one who is in the American Songwriters Hall of Fame. Unlike Darin, however, Pitney didn’t record his own songs, saying in one interview that as odd as it sounds, his best songs were not ideal for his own voice and style.
The melody of “Baby the Rain Must Fall” was the creation of Elmer Bernstein, the acclaimed composer of so many classic film scores, like “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape.”
And thus endeth the pop culture sermon for the day….
More on the scary-horrible Kamala Harris…
1. Well that didn’t take long! Already the narrative is starting that criticism of Kamala Harris is based on racism and sexism, and not her dreadful personality, sketchy past, and career baggage. Wholly predictable, and designed to keep the public just getting to know Harris from really learning about her by stifling critics. Journalists, of course, can be counted on to stifle themselves when a Democrat has a problematical record.
2. More spin...Dumped “Meet the Press” host David Gregory actually went on the air this morning to say Harris was “the safe choice.” Biden had no safe choices once he was trapped into naming a check-box candidate. What Gregory meant, I assume, was that she was the least risky in a slate of horrible options. That is true.
3. “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?“…I neglected, in last night’s post, to recall this example of Harris’ hypocrisy, from April 2019, when Harris was widely regarded as a frontrunner for the Presidential nomination:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that she believes women who say they felt uncomfortable after receiving unwanted touching from former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris said at a presidential campaign event in Nevada.
Then, after Harris’s run for the White House flopped and she began stalking the Vice-Presidency, Harris supported Biden and dismissed the accusations of Tara Reade, though she had savaged Brett Kavanaugh based on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s far more dubious accusations. I can’t wait to hear how feminists explain that one.
I wonder: Who has the greater integrity vacuum, Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris?
Luckily for Harris, if you are “of color,” you can’t be a hypocrite, or at least no white critic can point out you’re one. Those are the rules… Continue reading →
1. Ethics Alarms readers called it! Among those who were willing to choose the least bad of the three choices remaining to Biden, given his mandate to choose a black woman, Harris was the winner.
2. How objectively awful is Kamala Harris? This is the woman Joe Biden placed a heartbeat from the presidency, from the post here of December 3, 2019:
Let us stipulate: the failure of Kamala Harris to thrive in the race for the Democratic nomination for President was not because Democratic voters are racist or sexist. It is because she was a lousy candidate from the beginning. Checking off boxes is never enough, thank heaven. She is a woman, “of color,” a lawyer and a Senator from a large and powerful state. To top it all off, Harris is relatively young, and attractive. Perfect!
Except it was easy to see that she was an empty suit with a penchant for saying stupid things, often things she couldn’t possibly believe and that contradicted her record as a prosecutor. She saidthat it was “outrageous” that the Trump administration wanted to deport illegal immigrants who had committed crimes. [Me: “It is not and cannot be “outrageous” to say that any illegal immigrant, criminal or not, qualifies for deportation. To maintain otherwise is to say that the United States cannot enforce its immigration laws, and not only that, it is “outrageous” to enforce the laws. Is that the position of the Democratic Party? “] She said that she supported legalizing pot because it brought people “joy.” You know, like heroin, rape, and child molesting. She said, when Joe Biden correctly pointed out that a President could not ban “assault weapons” by executive order, she responded, “Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.” Horrified when she saw the exchange,, law prof Ann Althouse wrote, “The transcript cannot convey the feeling and expression in Kamala Harris’s [ response]. It is so awful, so lightweight and dismissive of constitutional law (and without any of the dignity of constitutional critique.”
There are plenty more cataloguedhere,and it is hardly exhaustive. Harris flopped because she proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was unqualified to be a Senator, much less a President. As if that wasn’t enough, she couldn’t manage her campaign, which had disintegrated into finger-pointing and defections. When Barack Obama was challenged in 2008 over his lack of leadership experience, he cited the success of his campaign. Slim indeed, but Harris couldn’t even say that.
As the writing on the wall began to be undeniable, Harris stooped to race- and gender baiting, expressing doubtsas to whether a “woman of color” could be elected President (in such a racist, sexist nation, she implied.) No, Senator it’s just that you can’t be elected.
