I Don’t WANT To Be ANTIFA

The Steal, in progress, November 3, 2020:

Liz Cheney, no doubt surprised that her colleagues are so upset with her “there was no voting fraud” stance that they’re actually going to remove her from her leadership position, fired off a 6 minute speech from the House floor last night. The media termed it  “scathing” and  “fiery,” the rest of us viewed it as contemptuous and self-serving.

"Today, we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol, in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him," she said Tuesday. "He risks inciting further violence. Millions of Americans have been misled by the former president, they have heard only his words, but not the truth. As he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all."

Voter fraud: to Democrats it’s just part of infrastructure.

As an aside, I have added Liz Cheney to the long and growing list of politicians who are dead to me due to the breadth of their betrayal of principle. If you are a long time reader you know that my fundamental belief is that sooner or later all politicians disappoint, for one reason or another. Some such disappointments are indicative of such deep dishonesty they are unforgivable. Lesser disappointments of the “we all have clay feet’ variety I will deal with, as we must.

Otherwise we’re all ANTIFA.

I don't want to be ANTIFA.

I’d Rather Make America Great Again

America is in a funk, Gallup tells us. I can’t think why, let’s see if we can puzzle it out together:

Hyperinflation headed our way, check.

Joey and Janet managing the money supply might explain why cryptocurrencies are so hot right now.

High unemployment, check.

Because paying people not to work never fails to deliver.

Gas lines forming to the right, check.

And we didn’t even need any hostages this time to do it! Except us of course.

Higher taxes headed our way, check. But not on you! Only on rich people. And corporations.

How is this so hard for people to grasp?

Looking like a ninny to the rest of the world? Check.

Who is that masked man?

Throw in a world-wide pandemic, even if it is on the wane, and you’ve got yourself a first class case of good old fashioned malaise, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter’s days. Lawdy, lawdy, lawdy. Whose fault is this anyway? I mean in addition to Trump.

In his infamous Malaise speech Jimmy Carter blamed everybody else, accusing his fellow citizens of worshipping “self-indulgence and consumption” – like staying warm in the dead of winter - and for their “fragmentation and self-interest.”

“It is a crisis of confidence. … We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” – Jimmy Carter, 1979

Joey appears to be following his lead, blaming all non-POC in this country of “systemic racism” as well as “Neanderthal thinking” for not wearing face masks in Zoom meetings. Because otherwise we’re all gonna die!

“We remain in a once-in-a-century public health crisis that’s led to the most unequal job and economic crisis in modern history. And the crisis is only deepening. It’s not getting better; it’s deepening.”

Well, there’s only one way out of this Great American Malaise: tax and spend. And has Joey ever got a plan for that!  His $2.3 trillion "infrastructure" plan and the $2 trillion Family Plan will fix things right up.

Honestly, this show was bad enough first time around, I don’t think America needs another season of it.

 

I’d really rather Make America Great Again.

Where There Be Dead Fisheyes There Be Kahlusion

Hillary, original author of the ‘Russian Kahlusion (10 parts Kahlua, 10 parts Stoli) cost me the election’ theory, is still at it.

Five years later and she’s still whining about the Russia backed Macedonian content farmers who stole the election from her; further proof that you can always rely on Democrats accusing their opponents of doing exactly what they do themselves.

But this time, to prove how dreadful Russia is, she blamed them for the Brexit vote as well. You can watch it here if you wish but to spare you from having to actually listen to the bitter old hag rag on, this is essentially what she said during a British think tank discussion about the ‘future of liberal democracies’.

…Clinton once again resurrected the Russian boogeyman, and suggested that: ‘I think there was also significant evidence of Russian involvement, if not influence or interference, in Brexit.’

Of course she hasn’t a wit of proof to back her claim, but that’s scarcely a requirement in today’s arena of ideas. One could argue that her old boss, Obama, ran more demonstrable interference on the Brexit vote than Russia even thought of.

Still, it’s good to see that Hillary’s got that old bounce back in her step. And I see that she’s resurrected that youthful Benghazi-gate era hairstyle that was always so attractive. You know, the thin, flat, stringy and lifeless style that serves as such a good metaphor for her Russia-interference-cost-me-the-election-theory.

Yeah, that’s a good look on a stupid old broad. The pearls are a nice touch.

Is it just me or does her lack of facial symmetry bother anyone else? Does it grow with age like noses and ears or does it require cosmetic fillers and copious doses of duplicity to achieve? In any event I think it goes well with the dead fisheyes.

But I digress: my original intent was to ask if you think Wretchard doesn’t have a point here:

Nah, that’s probably not it.

I’ll take Chinese Collusion for $2 billion

Because Life Doesn’t Come With a Guidebook, It Comes With A Mom

Some version of this has become my perennial Mother’s Day Post.

Can you believe it…it’s Mother’s Day already! Even during stressful times like these the years  tick by at an alarming rate. I can’t say for sure whether the universe is expanding but I can verify the fact that time is accelerating. My Mom has been gone for 12 years already this month, which doesn’t even seem possible, sometimes it seems she was here just yesterday. Mom: ever a part of you, always with you, even when she isn’t.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

 

To celebrate mothers is to celebrate life itself. Like virtually everything else in life there are exceptions but for the most part mothers are indeed exceptional in their unconditional love and devotion. At a Mother’s Day gathering in 2017 Melania Trump explained it this way:

“Mother is a title that claims your heart and changes your life forever. In fact, it has been said that having a child means allowing your heart to walk around outside of your body.”

So if you’re lucky enough to still have your mom around, grab some flowers and thank the woman who let her heart walk around independent of her body.

Give her a big hug (assuming neither of you have the Wuhan cooties of course). If she’s no longer with you, honor her memory by recalling the good times you had when you were both impossibly young.

For time is indeed a most fleeting commodity.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there – and to everyone else who has, or ever had, a Mom.

Moms:because life doesn’t come with guidebook, it comes with a mom

No. Mean. Tweets!

I was going to write about the “unexpectedly” bad JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! report (which was off by a mere 74% from expectations) but Neo has already written the definitive post on this: The economy surprises the “experts” – again:

It happens nearly every time, almost like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. Why are they called “experts”? Well, they’re expert at predicting what the left wishes will happen, and then they’re expert at being perpetually astonished at what actually does happen:

The April jobs report showed the U.S. added only 266,000 jobs during the month and the unemployment ticked up to 6.1%.

Economists are usually off the mark, but holy cow. They predicted 978,000 job growth and unemployment of 5.8%. I have never seen such a huge difference between prediction and numbers.

Miserable considering the U.S. started to see some growth at the end of former President Donald Trump’s term.

And the NY Times, for example, headlines an article about the report this way: “The Jobs Report: The Boom That Wasn’t/April’s anemic job creation was so out of line with what other indicators have suggested that it will take some time to unravel the mystery.”

Might I suggest that if it takes you more than 2 seconds to ‘unravel the mystery’ of there being 7.4 million job openings but only 266,000 people getting one of those jobs perhaps you ought not try to walk and chew gum at the same time.

As usual the Left won’t let facts get in the way of what they want – which is always more sugar!

Biden said the jobs figures actually show “more help is needed” via his $4 trillion infrastructure and “families” proposals and denied the slowdown is because of the subsidy that he signed into law in March.

Specifically, another round of stimulus checks, $15 minimum wage and universal childcare. There’s nothing wrong here that a little more “Keynesian fairy dust” can’t fix.

One thing we know for sure, the Left will continue to deny that there is any relation between people refusing to go back to work and the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit currently available. They seem genetically incapable of grasping the fact that if you pay people not to work many will do just that.

But hey, as long as we’re not getting any more of those mean tweets everything’s ok, right?

      

History: Some Re-assembly Required

History only provides lessons when it is taught straight up, without a chaser.

When that’s no longer done all the old ‘isms’ tend to repeat themselves, often re-branded and decked out in the most au courant finery, but always the same old utopian ideology at the core. And unless thwarted early-on always, always with the same ending: genocide followed by dystopia.

On it’s face it it would seem infeasible for history to be so systematically erased while at the same time being simultaneously repeated: in fact it is not a coincidence, it is a necessity. History must be obscured if you wish to lead people down the same well-worn path.

Don’t ever delude yourselves with the naïve belief that it could never happen here, of course it can. History does not just repeat, it travels. As Roger Simon notes in We Live in the Era of the New Conformists 

“…the left and the semi-left, progressives and liberals, masses of them in our country from the corporate world to the media to the academy to entertainment, are the New Conformists.”

And there is nothing an authoritarian regime needs more than a herd of conformists.

“Italian novelist Alberto Moravia tried to explain why so many of his countrymen became Fascists under Mussolini. It was because of their desire to fit in, to seem normal, to follow the crowd. He called the novel ‘The Conformist’.”

Simon quotes from a 1976 Tom Wolfe article about how shocking Solzhenitsyn’s expose of the Soviet’s Gulag was:

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

All that’s necessary to fall headlong into the abyss is to let socialist experts call the shots.  Which of course the conformists seem hell-bent on doing.

Consider the way many western countries mistakenly concluded last year that strict Chinese-style lockdowns were the right way to cope with COVID, not realizing that no free society could possibly tolerate restrictions as draconian as the ones imposed all over China from late January last year…  Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist, who was influential in the UK’s decision to lock down, has been quite open about his inspiration. ‘If China had not done it, the year would have been very different,’ he admitted in an interview in December. ‘“It’s a communist one-party state,” we said. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe,” we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.’

History: some re-assembly required:

“Why are we surprised that the socialists running the increasingly corporatist business world take their cues from — and overlook the myriad horrors of — socialism done by today’s experts?”

No, YOU Shut Up!

The current cultural miasma we find ourselves in might lead you to ask “where did we go wrong?” To which I reply “what do you mean ‘we’ Kemosabe?

It certainly wasn’t us who determined language had to evolve to the point of meaninglessness in order to accommodate the sensitivities of the loonies amongst us.

Nor was it us who determined that our elections needed to be “fortified” to ensure victory to the cabal.

“Saved” – I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Time

The simple term “rigged” was so old school, and had so many negative connotations.

Time has published an explainer piece offering a fascinating insight into how the presidential election was won. It’s titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”

The fascinating part is what it tells us about the brazenness of the left in general and the corrupt, mendacious MSM in particular: they are now heavy-hinting that they cheated but want you to know that it’s all OK because they were doing it to not to destroy democracy but to preserve and enhance it.

Do you see what they just did there?

The Democrats (and their sympathisers) didn’t rig the election. They just fortified it by taking care to ensure the right guy won rather than the wrong guy won, regardless of what those pesky voters might misguidedly have wanted.

The next thing you know the same cabal will be normalizing this type of “election” forevermore, whereas it’s for the “good of the people” and therefore perfectly justifiable.

This is where we are headed now with the”‘stolen” election. Columnists who blithely assured us that the election was above board may now begin to finesse their position.

“OK, so maybe it was rigged,” they will start to concede. ‘But isn’t that always the case with elections? And anyway it’s a done deal now.”

So if you’re still wondering how we got here wonder no more. We arrived by caving to the demands of the cabal who took it upon themselves to set the new standards, define all the terms and tell you the appropriate way to think, act…and vote. For the longest time all they required was for you to just SHUT UP!

Don’t do that.

Simply refuse to do that.

Newest Member of the Better Mistakes Tomorrow Club

Not since “New Coke” has Coca-Cola insisted on being so wrongheaded.

“New” Coke lasted just 79 days before Coke customers rebelled and the company was forced to revert to the original recipe.

"The simple fact is that all of the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on a new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the depth and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people." Donald R. Keough, then Coca-Cola President.

The embarrassing flop went on to replace Ford’s Edsel as the #1 marketing blunder of the ages. Just 6 years ago, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fiasco, Coke again acknowledged it’s mistake and claimed to have learned a forever lesson.

“Thirty years ago, we introduced New Coke with no shortage of hype and fanfare. And it did succeed in shaking up the market. But not in the way it was intended. When we look back, this was the pivotal moment when we learned that fiercely loyal consumers -- not the Company -- own Coca-Cola and all of our brands. It is a lesson that we take seriously and one that becomes clearer and more obvious with each passing anniversary."

Until, that is, they entered the enlightened age of Woke Coke. In their wokeness the company introduced first an illegal policy of hiring only law firms that pass its quota test for diversity. Simultaneously they implemented a mandatory employee “training” program to pass that diversity along to a workforce that they apparently considered “too white.”

Alas, it seems “Woke Coke” is nearly as big a hit as “New Coke.”

‘Woke’ Coke Pauses Diversity Plan After ‘Intense Backlash,’ Plan Author Suddenly Resigns…

I here-by award to the Coca-Cola Company the esteemed Obama-era prize:

Today’s post proudly sponsored by the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum twins: