Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, American Thinker, Fox News and numerous other print, radio and television outlets.
Child rapist Joseph Rosenbaum, who was shot and killed by Kyle Rittenhouse
Some 20,000 sex criminals in Colorado get “treatment” from the state Sex Offender Management Board, or “SOMB.” It’s a big bureaucracy with layers of committees and “work groups.”
Rapists treated by the SOMB are of course not called “rapists.” In fact, that term appears nowhere on the big SOMB website. It was banned years ago because it became associated with criminals who coercively, forcibly and sometimes violently prey sexually upon others – persons who commit what we used to call “rape.”
Stated another way, the term “rapist” came to connote persons who rape. Such a connotation offended such persons and the bureaucracy that caters to them. Hence the modern non-judgmental and non-insulting term, “sex offender.”
Screen shot form drone video showing Rittenhouse being chased just before turning and opening fire
Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people. The first two died. It’s interesting to see who they were. The backgrounds of these guys is not determinative of Rittenhouse’s guilt or innocence – there’s no open season on creeps – but it’s relevant in piecing together the story of that deadly night.
The first who was shot served 14 years in prison for raping a child and then for dozens of in-prison disciplinary violations. He was a registered sex offender and was found guilty of assault, arson and narcotics crimes. He was wanted at the time of the shooting for bail-jumping and domestic abuse, and had been released from a hospital for a suicide attempt a few hours before the shooting. He was chasing Rittenhouse when Rittenhouse turned around and shot him.
“Woke” was coined by the left some years ago to describe a person who had become sensitive to the left’s pet issues, especially racial and “social justice” ones. It implied that a person disagreeing with the left about those issues was not just wrong, but unconscious. Becoming woke was unintentionally analogous to the Christian concept of being born again — which is appropriate since leftism is the left’s religion.
This catchy term was initially successful. But the left never succeeds at success. That’s because what’s important to them is not being successful in resolving grievances, but parading those grievances as evidence of their victimhood.
Victim status is more important to the left than winning – and easier too. If the left were a sports team, they’d be lazy and winless but they would always say, gleefully, that it’s because the referees robbed them.
The ACLU sued the United States for money on behalf of illegal immigrants for being separated from their children when they were caught and detained at the border. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that the Department of Justice was considering settling the case for about $450,000 per individual – a settlement amounting to over a million dollars in the case of a family of three and over two million for a family of five.
The basis for the ACLU’s lawsuit on behalf of the immigrants is not clear. Most legal experts agree that whatever the morality of putting children into shelters, it is lawful. That’s what happens when parents commit a crime and are incarcerated. The lawsuit appears designed to establish new judge-made law to the effect that when the crime is illegal immigration, the children must be incarcerated with the parents (who may or may not actually be their parents) in an adult prison.
Traffic accidents illustrate the phenomenon. It was widely assumed that traffic deaths would decline during the pandemic because fewer miles were being driven.
These grim figures correlate with declining use of seatbelts, more drunk driving and more speeding. COVID effectively suspended the rules of the road.
That’s not all. Drivers are not just aggressively trying to get somewhere in a hurry; they’re looking for a fight. They hop in their car and drive around looking for prey.
COVID suspended the whole rulebook of civilized behavior. It’s like a children’s game where the rules are suspended for a few moments, except the few moments have dragged on for about 20 months now.
We see the same effect everywhere. People were told they don’t have to work, so they stopped working. Or they were told that they could pretend to work from home, so they pretended to work from home.
People were told that the police are bad and should be starved of the funds necessary for them to do their jobs. So policemen and women are quitting. Unsurprisingly, that adversely affects law enforcement.
People were told that it’s OK – even noble! – to loot department stores, or at least that they could shoplift with impunity. So they did.
People were told that lives don’t matter unless they’re black ones, so the murder rate is up 30%. That’s the biggest one-year jump in history.
People were told that government handouts are not limited by the amount of taxes the government collects from the people. Instead, the government has as much money as it wishes to print, so it can give unlimited quantities to the people. Money grows on trees, except you don’t even need a tree.
People with all this free money – and free time since they aren’t working – can then go buy things, if only there were people still working to make those things.
Children were told that they didn’t have to go to school. So they didn’t. And they didn’t seriously replace their truancy with online learning. We lost at least a year of education – of children who were already being educated badly.
With the guard rails removed, civilization crashed like a garbage truck driven by perfidious pants-pooping drunk vagrants colliding with a dumpster fire.
The left likes all this de-civilizing because they dislike civilization. Civilization involves qualities like merit, morality, honesty, logic, justice other than the social kind, intellectualism and consequences. The left finds such things an obstacle to the utopia they plan to establish and rule.
As for me, I’m done pandemic-izing. Let’s have rules again. I want my world back.
Kamala Harris told us before this week’s election that, “What happens in Virginia will in large part determine what happens in 2022, 2024 and on.”
OK, let’s run with that. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points in 2020. This week, his surrogate in the governor’s race for whom he, Harris and other Dem poobahs personally campaigned lost by two. That’s a 12-point swing.
I applied that 12-point swing to the 2020 midterm elections for the House of Representatives to get a feel for the 2022 elections. In other words, to graft this week’s result onto the 2022 midterms, I subtracted six points from the vote share of each Democrat in 2020 and added those six points to each Republican. The result was a 46-seat swing to the GOP.
Joe Biden visited the Pope. Politicians do this. The meetings are of course carefully scripted so that nothing controversial occurs, such as the Pope reminding the visitor that according to Church doctrine and scientific opinion a fetus is a living creature and the species is homo sapiens.
It’s not really a meeting; it’s a show. The president tries not to say something stupid while the Pope intimidates him with his Pope getup complete with the lamp shade hat.
This show is traditionally broadcast live. Just a few days before this one, however, the White House announced that it would not be. Because reasons. Unspecified ones.
We were told afterward by persons in whose interest it would be to tell us this, that the meeting went very well. In particular, the Commie Pope Pope Francis told Biden that he should continue to receive communion. Aborted fetuses don’t vote, don’t fill the offering plate and don’t tell tales.
All good and well and and predictable.
But a side story developed. According to the resistance, rumors circulated in Rome like a swirly in an overflowing toilet that the big meeting required an intermission due to, um, a bathroom incident. More specifically, an incident that is supposed to occur in a bathroom but didn’t. It seems in the course of meeting the Pope, the President pooped his pants.
the Aspen beat 