Tag Archives: history

Ready-Fire-Aim! Virginia Democrats shoot themselves in the foot

Posted on by
3

The latest battle in the gerrymandering wars took place in Virginia. The Democrats in Virginia had all the guns – they control the governorship, the legislature and a majority of the voters. In a classic example of “Ready-Fire-Aim,” the Democrats promptly used those guns to shoot themselves in the foot.   

It all started a few years ago, back when Virginia was a purplish state. Voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to establish a non-partisan procedure for drawing Congressional Districts. That procedure produced Districts that resulted in a Democrat-Republican split in the elected Representatives of 5-4, which is approximately the same as the split in Virginia voters. So far, so good.

Then Virginia gradually shifted blue. Last fall, Virginia Democrats joined the gerrymandering wars. As is often the case with wars, it started with the political equivalent of stirring songs, glitzy parades, and predictions of victory in a month.

The Democrats figured that with a little creativity and an utter absence of shame – the absence of which has never been in short supply among politicians – they could gerrymander the Districts to shift the 5-4 split in their Congressional delegation to a 10-1 split.

They would be heroes! (And maybe some of them would fill those five new Democrat Congressional seats!)

Sure, it would take another amendment to the state constitution in order to nullify the one from a few years ago that established the non-partisan procedure for drawing Districts. But, as the Democrats reminded themselves, they controlled the three bodies that approve such amendments – the legislature, the governorship and the voters.

Constitutions contain procedures for amending them. The Virginia constitution stated that the legislature is supposed to approve the amendment twice. In between those two approvals, there’s supposed to be an election of the legislature. Only after those two legislative approvals and that intervening election, can the matter be put to the voters in a referendum.

There’s method behind this redundant madness. The thought is that, after the legislature approves the amendment the first time, the voters should get a chance to dis-elect the legislature that approved the amendment. And then the new legislature has to re-approve the amendment.

A constitution is a sacred thing, you see, even if it’s just a state one. Amendments to it are not to be taken lightly.

This is where the Democrats misfired. They got the requisite approval accomplished in the state legislature which they controlled, but the approval came after early voting had already begun on the requisite election of the legislature. In fact, about 40% of the votes had already been cast for that election.

After the election, they got the requisite second approval from the new legislature, and then they narrowly got the approval of voters in a referendum.

The matter went to the Virginia Supreme Court. This week, that Court held that the first approval by the legislature did not occur before the election of legislature, because at the time of that approval the election was already underway and 40% of the voters had already cast their ballots.

In effect, therefore, there was no “election day,” but rather an “election period.” The Democrats mistakenly failed to accomplish the requisite legislative approval for the amendment prior to the commencement of that election period. The result was that 40% of the voters were denied the opportunity to consider that approval in weighing their votes in what was supposed to be a subsequent election.

The matter cannot be reviewed further by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it is purely a matter of state law. The Virginia Supreme Court is the final authority on the subject. The Democrats could start again from square one in Virginia, but it’s too late for the upcoming mid-term election.

There’s a certain poetic justice in this. Democrats like loosey-goosey election procedures such as early and absentee voting for any and all. This time, it shot them in the foot and blew up in their faces. They will use this experience to advocate for gun control, no doubt.

Racial discrimination is a lousy way to overcome racism

Posted on by
4

There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination.

First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.  

America has plenty of flaws that need fixing, but, given these facts, it’s hard to make a case that one of those flaws is systemic racism. Are there a few racist people in America? Of course, everywhere has that, and most places have a lot more of them than America does.

But is America a systemically racist society? No. America is probably the least-racist place on earth.

America’s world-leading progress wasn’t enough for an alliance of well-intentioned social engineers seeking to improve us and ill-intentioned fascists seeking to end us.

They decided that our color-blind society has too little color – too few Black people – in prestige universities, company board rooms, and status professions like law and medicine, because Black presence in those fields was less than their 13% presence in the population at large.  Consistent with the pre-conceived goal of improving us (or ending us), these do-gooders (and do-baders) attributed that shortfall to our racism.

They conveniently ignored the abundance of Blacks and the paucity of whites in lucrative sports such as basketball and football in our purportedly racist nation. When facts don’t fit the narrative, these people ignore the facts.

To “remedy” the perceived “problem” that America had racially discriminated against Blacks, the social engineers and fascists schemed to discriminate in favor of them. They embarked on a campaign to correct racial discrimination by . . . racially discriminating.  

They didn’t call it racial discrimination, of course. They used euphemisms like “affirmative action.” When “affirmative action” came to be recognized as racial discrimination, they rebranded it “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now that “diversity, equity and inclusion” has likewise been recognized as racial discrimination, they are re-branding yet again.

Whatever their name, these programs were all based on the notion that Blacks should be favored in non-athletic competition that is ordinarily based on merit, in order to achieve a number of Blacks that is proportionate to their representation in society.

The degree of discrimination necessary to produce this outcome has been extreme, as shown by objective measures. The average test scores of people admitted to prestige colleges or to medical school are wildly different depending on the race of the applicant. As a matter of pure statistics, it is a simple and undeniable fact that the average Black physician would never have been admitted to med school if he’d been white.

This racial discrimination for the purpose of achieving proportionate representation was extended to every nook and cranny of American society (with that notable exception of sports). Businesses, clubs, fraternities, company board rooms, hospitals, law firms, colleges and every other group of people were pressured, coerced and often sued. They were forced to compromise merit in favor of proportionate racial representation.

Our elected leaders chose not to stand up to this. Democrats instead egged it on, because they benefited politically. Republicans just watched silently, because they were too damned cowardly to risk, ironically, being name-called “racist” for standing against racial discrimination.  

We now teeter over a racial abyss where people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. As a society, we’ve almost succeeded in snatching a racist defeat from the jaws of a colorblind victory.

But a rescue is coming from the Supreme Court. Beginning a few years ago, the Court has re-affirmed the rules against racial discrimination in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

A case issued last week (though it was apparently decided many months ago – more about that later) built on this start. The topic was the drawing of Congressional Districts by race. I’ll discuss it in my next post.

Ending racial gerrymandering ends a failed scheme where legal rights were allocated by race

Posted on by
4

Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population.

Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total.  Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.

The reason is because those four races commit murder at dramatically different rates. FBI data show that whites (if you include Latinos/Hispanics as whites) comprise 82% of the population but commit only 46% of murders. Asians comprise 7% but commit only 1% of murders. (Latinos/Hispanics apart from whites comprise 19% and commit 20% of murders.)

So, who is committing all the murders that whites, Asians and Latinos are not?

Blacks are. Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 51% of murders in the country. If you do the math, the statistical likelihood of a Black person being a murderer is quadruple the likelihood of a white person being a murderer, and roughly 22 times the likelihood of an Asian being a murderer.

A few tangential points are worth your attention. One, this high Black murder rate accounts for a large part (but not all) of the high overall murder rate in America as compared to Europe.

Two, the victims of these Black murderers are also mostly Black themselves. Black-on-Black violent crime in America is, tragically, extremely high.

Three, a few people would contend that Blacks don’t really commit murder at a high rate (though they cannot dispute that they die of murder at a high rate since, after all, there’s a Black body to prove it).

Those people would say that these statistics to the contrary are instead proof that the justice system racially discriminates against Blacks in arresting them, convicting them and sentencing them for crimes they did not commit (but, interestingly, does not discriminate against Latinos or Asians). Nobody really believes that contention – even the people saying it – so I won’t address it.

And four, an interesting tidbit is that the number of men we arrest, convict and sentence for murder is several times the number of women, even though the two sexes are about 50/50 in the population. Does anyone seriously contend that men are victims of sex discrimination in the field of murder arrests?

Back to our hypothetical. A scheme where people must be arrested, convicted and sentenced for murder in proportion to their racial representation in the population, even though murders are not committed in that same proportion, is undeniably unjust and probably criminal.

We would have to arrest many more whites and a lot of Asians for murders they didn’t commit. And we would have to leave un-arrested a lot of Blacks for murders they did commit, all to achieve our fantasy of racially proportionate representation in the law of murder.

This superficially appealing but fundamentally unfair concept of racially proportionate representation in the law brings us to another area of law – the way we elect Congress.

The country is divided into Congressional Districts of equal population – about 762,000 people each. Each district gets one representative. That amounts to the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Each district typically elects a House member of the party that controls the district. Only 10-15% of the districts are actually competitive. (That’s why members of Congress are seldom voted out of office.)

Because populations shift, the districts must be redrawn periodically. That’s done by state legislatures. In doing so, the legislatures often “gerrymander” the districts. That is, they draw weird-shaped districts in order to distribute the population such that each district has a slight majority of the party doing the drawing. In a state with a 55/45 split between the two parties, the party in power can easily achieve an 80-20 split in the House members elected from that state. There’s more about gerrymandering HERE.

Gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, overtly or covertly. It’s unseemly and might be unfair, but it’s part of our system of representative government. The Supreme Court allows it, because there’s nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.

But when the gerrymandering is done for the purpose of racial discrimination, there are special rules that have evolved and changed. For a while back in the Jim Crow days, the Democrats who controlled the South racially gerrymandered the districts in a way to prevent the election of Black representatives.

That wasn’t difficult. Even in Louisiana which is about 30% Black, they simply drew the districts such that no district had anywhere close to a majority of Black voters. Divide and conquer was the strategy. The result for many years was that there were none or very few Black members of Congress.

That changed in the last half of the 20th century with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and numerous legal challenges to districting. In fits and starts, judges gradually concluded that the VRA together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that a state’s Congressional delegation be Black in proportion to the Black population of the state. In Louisiana, that meant that two of their six representatives should be Black since about 30% of the state population was Black.

That was achieved with gerrymandering. They drew two “majority minority” districts that concentrated the 30% Black population. The resulting districts had a weird shape, but there was some assurance that two Blacks would get elected in those two mostly-Black districts.

It was something like affirmative action. When the number of Blacks qualifying for prestige colleges and jobs was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the qualifications scale. Similarly, when the number of Blacks getting elected to Congress was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the election scale. For a while, Lady Justice peeked to check which race she was judging.  

There’s an expression in law that hard facts make bad law. Imagine a case where a child is run over and crippled after darting into a passing car. The law says the driver was not at fault but our emotions want to help that child, and so we bend the law to obtain a result that’s emotionally satisfying but legally bad.

In racial gerrymandering, the hard fact was that not many Blacks were being elected to Congress despite a significant sentiment that Congress should have more. The bad law that resulted was divvying up Congressional districts by race.

Allocating representation in Congress by skin color is almost as bad as allocating arrests, convictions and sentencing in murder cases by skin color. It denies our individuality. It assumes that Blacks will and should vote only for Blacks while whites will and should vote only for whites. To the extent those assumptions are unfortunately accurate, the effect is to further drive people apart racially. It is all founded on a destructive us/them view of race.

Moreover, this racial divisiveness is self-perpetuating. Politicians become motivated to reinforce their constituents’ destructive beliefs that they can only be represented by a member of their own race, not “the other” race.

In short, racial gerrymandering is founded in racism, and it promotes more racism.

In my upcoming final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week abolishing racial gerrymandering. It’s the most boldly correct and politically consequential decision in years. And I’ll discuss the media’s disgraceful reporting on it.

On men rebranding into women and Democrats re-branding into Independents

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.

Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.

Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.  

But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.

As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.

Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.

Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.

But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.

But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.

As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.

And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”

It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)

That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.

The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.

They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.

You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).  

And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.

As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.

The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.  

And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”

Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.

It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.

I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.

This isn’t Suez in 1956 and it isn’t Vietnam in 1966; it’s Iran and it’s 2026

Posted on by
1

This war with Iran is one that had to be fought, and so we were right to fight it on our terms at a time before it became harder to win. The way Iran has lashed out at civilians everywhere, including with indiscriminate killing machines it denied having, has confirmed that.

But I recognize that there are arguments and counterarguments. Some of those are just the lame “Orange Man Bad!” or “Orange Man Good!” type, but others are more principled.

Here are two arguments – one against the war and one for it – that sound principled, even scholarly, but at the core are just sophistry.

First is the one that is against the war. It says, “Another Vietnam catastrophe!” (Yes, the argument is typically presented replete with the exclamation point, which should give you a clue that you’re about to receive more heat than light.)

But Vietnam was not really a catastrophe. It was indeed poorly conducted, but it achieved for a time its main objective: to stop the Communist advance through Southeast Asia.

The Communists eventually did get South Vietnam (and ironically have turned it into a haven of export enterprise) but we delayed that by at least 15 years.

And the Communists never did get Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. Was that worth 50-some thousand Americans? History’s jury is still out.

The point here is that Vietnam was not the debacle that kids today are taught in “schools” where they are indoctrinated by the teachers’ union arm of the Democratic National Committee – an organization sworn to pacifism except when their opponent is America.

When comparing Iran to Vietnam, here’s the bigger point. Vietnam was 60 years ago. Vietnam was literally much closer in time to World War One in the year 1918 (that’s One, not Two) than to today in the year 2026.

It should not need to be said that weapons, battlefield tactics, global economies and world alliances are vastly different now compared to 60 years ago.

We saw that in the first hours of the Iran war when the U.S. and Israel eliminated the Iranian leader and many of his subordinates. That’s the first time that’s ever happened in a modern war.

On the other side, we see the Iranians responding with inexpensive but sometimes effective missile and drone attacks throughout the Middle East, and a dramatic show of their capability of launching a missile as far as London or Berlin. (The accuracy of those missiles, and how long before their stock is depleted, are separate questions.) We also see them blocking the flow of 20% of the world’s oil supply.

In short, this is not Vietnam. This is not your dad’s war.

On the other side, supporters of the war sometimes compare it to the Suez Crisis in 1956. That’s when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, ousting the U.K. and French interests that had controlled it. The U.K. and France tried to reclaim it, but backed down in the face of international pressure. The U.S. through President Dwight Eisenhower sided against the U.K. and France.  

Since then, the U.K. and France have never held much sway in the Middle East. According to supporters of the Iran war, the lesson to be learned is “never back down in the Middle East.” Or “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

But this “lesson” forgets the broader context. The U.K. and France don’t hold much sway anywhere, not just in the Middle East. Their economies and militaries were never completely rebuilt after being ravaged in WWII.

Even more ravaged were their national psyches. The cultural collapse we’re seeing today in the U.K. and France was not triggered by Suez. Rather, Suez was triggered by their already-emerging cultural collapse.

An equally valid – or invalid – lesson might be learned from the Camp David Accords in 1979 when Jimmy Carter in probably the best feat of his Presidency (I know that’s not saying much) moderated a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. In that peace deal, both sides compromised – both sides backed down.

Of course, the Camp David Accords don’t teach us much about the Iran war, either.

The most that can be gleaned from the events of history is usually allegorical. Platitudes about history are of little use in another time under different circumstances. They are no substitute for hard analysis. In analyzing Iran, they’re about as useful as Aesop Fables.

The crux of the hard, real analysis on Iran is the point I made at the outset. Whether Donald Trump is a genius or a fool, war was inevitable. We were smart – it was the product of hard analysis – to choose the time and circumstances.

So, when should the war end? Again, it will take more than history to answer that question. Again, it will take hard analysis – of the costs, benefits, risks and rewards. Let’s have the patience and courage to undertake that analysis. Damn the Midterms.

Now that democracy has failed in America, let’s try it in Iran and Cuba!

Posted on by
3

Half a century ago, American children were taught in elementary school that “representative democracy” was the highest form of government.

Part of me wondered even then, why should everyone get an equal say in things? That wasn’t how it worked in my elementary school, I observed, even as they taught that creed. The students and the janitor didn’t get the same say as the principal and the teachers.

Some people are smarter, more diligent, better educated, work harder, and pay more taxes. Shouldn’t they get more of a say in how those taxes are spent than people who are not smart, not diligent, don’t work, aren’t educated, and don’t pay taxes?

The only plausible answer to that question as to why everyone should get an equal say, is that everyone should feel like a stakeholder in the nation.

That’s a nice sentiment, but there are several problems with it. First, allowing – nay, begging – stupid lazy people to vote is a high price to pay to make them feel like stakeholders. Second, it doesn’t work. They still don’t feel like stakeholders.

Third, if you want people who don’t pay taxes to feel like stakeholders in the nation, maybe a good first step would be to ask them to pay some of the nation’s taxes.

As it stands today, the bottom 40% of earners pay about one percent of federal income taxes. Is it any wonder that those so-called taxpayers always want to increase taxes? It’s because they themselves never pay them.

The Founders recognized this fallacy with the democratic republic they created. They recognized that at some point the lazy stupid masses might come to realize that they could vote for a “redistribution” of the wealth of the smart hardworking producers. That’s undoubtedly the reason that the Constitution originally did not allow for income taxes; it took the 16th Amendment. (Nearly all amendments after the first ten were mistakes, BTW.)

In another genius of socialist branding, the stupid lazy masses have dubbed this legalized theft “fairness.”

But let’s leave the tax tangent and get back to the broader failure of American democracy.

What we have now is mob rule. Everyone has a microphone in the form of the internet, including me. With that microphone, they can get “clicks” on what they post. Those clicks are more or less exchangeable for cash.

Human nature being what it is, many people are owned by their desire for cash, and thus many internet posters are owned by their desire for clicks. They post stuff that is designed to generate clicks and cash.

That’s why we now have horrible creatures out there like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who are willing to generate clicks/cash with blood libels of the Jews.

Barely better are the people behind “Instapundit” who post misleading headlines appealing to notions in my tribe such as all Democrats are transexuals who want to conduct “gender affirmation” surgery on children in schools while burning the flag in Satanic rituals in the playground. (I’m sure the leftist websites have similarly weird headlines about Republicans, but I don’t see them because I don’t go to those websites.)

It’s political porn; it panders to the worst instincts of political junkies; it’s addictive; and it’s destructive to them, us, and our society.

And it works – for the perpetrators anyway. Ask Tucker.

(I have a friend who says he habitually clicks into Instapundit, but only to get the links. Uh huh. And I’m sure he got Playboy just for the articles.)

Speaker of obscenity, there’s the legislative branch. That’s the branch of government where a majority of the people elected to do the voting are supposed to enact and repeal laws.

Except it takes more than a majority to do both enacting and repealing. The Senate filibuster rule (another thing not in the Founder’s Constitution, or even the current one) means that it takes 60 of the 100 Senators to enact or repeal almost any law.

That means that the minority party – the political party that the people decided should be fewer in number than the other party – has a veto over any enacting or repealing of the laws.

That’s a bit weird. The “rule” is that that majority rules, except that the minority gets a veto. Huh?

It gets worse. Not only does the minority get a veto, they can shut down the government unless the majority concedes its power to them.

The minority shut down the government for over a month last fall, demanding that the majority pretend that the minority was the majority and the majority was the minority, by repealing part of the tax bill that was passed by the majority months earlier.

Now the minority is doing the same on a narrow issue, with the result that people are waiting hours in TSA lines at the airport. (I say fire TSA anyway; it’s all theater.)

The latest is the minority’s filibustering of a law to require photo ID when you vote, just as you’re required to have photo ID when you board an airplane, borrow a book, or cash a check – a law that is supported by 80% of Americans.

Maybe the majority should formally concede that it is effectively the minority. Then they can turn the tables and demand those minority filibuster rights. At which time the minority would say, “Not so fast, we’re  the minority, so we’re in charge here!”

Yep, that’s American “democracy.” Don’t even get me started on the European kind.

And sooooo . . . .

Let’s impose this farcical system on Cuba and Iran. Given their history of ecumenical largess (I have no idea what that phrase means, but it popped into my demagogue head; help me here, Tucker) they’ll surely be every bit as successful with it as we currently are.

OK, don’t go away mad. Here’s a tidbit to brighten your day. Donald J. Trump is not a Democrat, and I’m not even sure he’s a democrat.

But bear in mind that the greatest leader of the ancient world – the one who brought the greatest good to the greatest number – was Augustus Caesar. He wasn’t either.  

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

Posted on by
1

Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Rubio/Vance vs. Harris/Newsom in 2028 – seriously?

Posted on by
7

Predictions are hazardous, especially about the future and especially about politics, but the best prediction right now is that the 2028 Republican nominee for President will be either JD Vance or Marco Rubio, and the Democrat nominee will be either Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. The ones not nominated for President will likely be nominated for Vice President.

Before we employ these people for these important jobs, let’s do what employers do: Let’s look at their resumes.

(I’ve tried to present this in a neutral manner, unlike Wikipedia which unabashedly spins the tone and even the substance of the bios to favor Harris and Newsom and to disfavor Vance and Rubio.)

JD Vance:

  • Grew up poor in Appalachia with an alcoholic and drug-abusing mother.
  • Joined the Marines.
  • Graduated Ohio State University, summa cum laude.
  • Graduated Yale Law School where he was an Editor of Yale Law Journal.
  • Clerked for a prominent federal court judge, and then worked at a prestige law firm.
  • Worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital company.
  • Wrote a NYT best-selling book about his life, later made into a hit movie directed by Ron Howard; the book sold three million copies, and the movie had over four million viewings.
  • Elected U.S. Senator for Ohio.
  • Elected Vice President of the United States.
  • Sports a lousy beard.

Kamala Harris:

  • Daughter of an Afro-Jamaican father and Indian mother.
  • Graduated Howard University (no listed honors).
  • Graduated University of California Hasting College of Law (no listed honors).
  • District Attorney for Alameda County, then appointed to state positions by an older politician she was dating, Willie Brown.
  • Elected first woman, first African-American and first South Asian-American Attorney General of California.
  • Elected Senator from California (first African-American, first South Asian-American, second Black woman).
  • Elected first woman, first African-American, first South Asian-American Vice President, and given responsibilities for discovering and remedying the “root causes” of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.
  • Defeated in 2024 election for President.

Marco Rubio:

  • Born to legal Cuban refugees in Florida.
  • Graduated University of Florida.
  • Graduated University of Miami Law School, cum laude.
  • Elected to Florida legislature, then elected first Cuban-American Speaker of the State House of Representatives.
  • Adjunct Professor at Florida International University.
  • Elected U.S. Senator from Florida and served ten years, was member of numerous committees and subcommittees.
  • Defeated in the Republican nomination for President.
  • Appointed Secretary of State by President Trump.
  • Widely considered very active as Secretary of State, with the NYT dubbing him “Secretary of Everything.”

Gavin Newsom:

  • Born into a prominent San Francisco family, where the father was close friends of the Getty oil family.
  • Played college baseball.
  • Started a successful winery with one of the Getty’s, and went on to other successful business ventures.
  • Appointed to political positions by the same mentor that Kamala Harris had (but didn’t date him).
  • Elected Mayor of San Francisco.
  • Elected Lieutenant Governor of California.
  • Elected Governor of California.
  • Had “severe dyslexia” as a child according to Wikipedia, and it’s still “pretty severe” according to Newsom.
  • Sports good hair.

So, there you have their bullet-point (can I still say that?) resumes. Which do you want to run the country?

Democrats condemn Trump’s “misogyny” for saying “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team” as well as the men’s to the SOTU

Posted on by
2

In the raucous locker room celebration of the Gold Medal win by the men’s hockey team on the final day of the Olympics – an upset win for the ages – the team received a phone call from President Trump. They put the President on the speaker.

In the course of the hilarity and fun, Trump invited the team to this week’s State of the Union Address. Almost before the invitation was out of Trump’s mouth, the team accepted. “We’re in!”

Amid the laughing, shouting and carrying on, Trump quipped, “I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that!” The team laughed and roared its approval. Trump chuckled, “I do believe I would probably be impeached” if the women (who also won gold) were not invited.

The women’s team were no-shows, citing scheduling conflicts.

The men, in contrast, were able to clear their conflicts. Chants of “U S A, U S A, U S A” predictably ensued as they entered, for which even the Democrats felt obligated to stand. Mind you, these Democrats would not even stand for:

“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.”

Over the course of the week, the Democrats found a way to be offended by the President’s locker room quip. The offense they settled on was “misogyny.”

The basis for this misogyny, apparently, was that Trump’s quip that he would “have to” invite the women to the SOTU implied that he didn’t really want the women to come, and he was inviting them only to avoid being impeached.

Trump said a lot of true things Tuesday evening – about an hour’s worth too many. None was truer than when he gestured to the silent, stony Democrats and said, “These people are crazy.”

The Left likes illegal immigration because it’s illegal

Posted on by
4

The latest rationalization from the Left for illegal immigration is that nothing is illegal in America because America itself is illegal because it’s on “stolen land.”

That’s a non sequitur. An illegal act does not become legal simply because the victim is a trespasser. If a stranger breaks into your house while you’re on vacation and illegally occupies it, it’s not legal for another stranger to enter the house to shoot the first stranger while he’s sleeping.

Besides, all nations are on “stolen land.” All of Europe, for example, is on land “stolen” from Neanderthals that “modern” humans killed or assimilated. All the land in pre-Columbia America was occupied by Native Americans who “stole” it from other Native Americans who, in turn, “stole” it from other, other Native Americans.  

History tells us that people move around. When they find a place they like, they buy it or take it. Every group of people has done this, always.

Of course, the Left cannot condemn all the buyers/takers because that would condemn all of humanity. The Left reserves its condemnation for the buyers/takers who were white European free-marketers.

Why does the left single out white European free-marketers for condemnation?

Well, it’s because they’re white, it’s because they are (or were) European, and it’s because they’re free-marketers. The Left hates those things.

The fact that the Left hates white, European free-marketers might suggest that the Left are a bunch of Black radical socialists. Think Malcolm X.

Well, they certainly are socialists, by definition. But they typically are not Blacks. Most Blacks apart from those who make a living collecting political rents aren’t socialists.

No, the socialists are typically self-loathing, guilt-ridden white women blissfully ignorant of basic principles of economics who are affluent directly (or, more often, indirectly) through the free market that they love to hate, sheep-like, with all the analytical rigor and independent thinking of Glee Club.  Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, these women are not.  

But that’s a topic for another column. Today’s topic is the Left’s fondness for illegal immigration.

It wasn’t always this way, but, then again, the Left wasn’t always so far left. Bill Clinton condemned illegal immigration. Barack Obama deported millions. Both probably reasoned, correctly, that illegal immigrants were taking jobs from poor and Black Americans who were core constituencies of the Democratic Party.

It wasn’t until President Autopen that the doors to the border were flung open and then unhinged. That’s because the people wielding the autopen of President Autopen were radical America-hating Leftists. While they wielded the pen that ran the country, the President whose name they affixed to Executive actions was asleep at the switch (and at the beach, and at the debate, and . . . you get the point – he slept a lot).

These America-hating Leftists wanted to flood the nation with poor, uneducated immigrants. If they could accomplish that in a way that flouts the nation’s laws, all the better. Not because it would be good for the immigrants, but because it would be bad for America.

The Left likes the illegal immigrants themselves well enough, but only because the illegal immigrants are the enemy of the Left’s enemy – America.

If the Left could find a way to exaggerate a disease in order to shut down America completely, they would do so, and they would very much like that disease.

Oh, wait a minute . . .

Anyway, now the entire Democratic Party is owned by these America-haters. Any Democrat who wants funding from the Soros family, or the teachers’ unions, or Hollywood – all of which have become America-hating Leftists – is required to pass an illegal immigrant litmus test.

The test goes something like this:

Do you favor immigrants coming to America illegally and staying here illegally?

Answer YES if you want political donations.

Answer NO if you don’t.