Alex Cora speaks to the press about the boycott before Monday’s game in Baltimore.
I just learned in “Axios AM” of the Red Sox partial boycott of the traditional White House visit to celebrate their World Series championship. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about Trump, but admittedly even more so with the radical lefty lurch of the Democratic Party. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about organized partisan political acts by athletes. Alex Cora, the manager, and some of the players say that they won’t attend. Well, now I have another team who has muddied itself with partisan politics to avoid. When will this stop?
Of course, Axios couldn’t help but portray the spat in skin color terms … and so do the boycotting players. The poison of reducing moral claims to melanin counts, cultural identities, and ritual assertions of victimhood has penetrated the locker room. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
It’s disgusting. I’m reminded of an audience’s shout to singer James Taylor when he got political: “Shut up and sing!” A parallel?
Attorney General Barr at press conference annoucing the release of the Mueller Report, April 18, 2019.
The Mueller Report is out. Does it really matter? No. Partisans with no “reasonable cause” will still invent cause to pursue their political opponent. They’ll grasp at any straw to continue the inquisition. Burden of proof be damned. The entire course of western civilization is to be turned upside down to get Trump. That’s it in a nutshell.
There’s a reason for those with the power to take your life or freedom to meet the decency of a burden of proof when they make claims against a person. Yet, political and media partisans hang their hat on minor and loosely related evidence and even the absence of evidence.
That’s right, the absence of evidence. The “We cannot reach conclusions” or “We cannot charge” is morphed into “cause” by political partisans to pursue the accused that can’t be accused. Read the last bit of that sentence again. This is ludicrous.
In other words, “innocent till proven guilty” means something … or is supposed to. If you can’t prove a charge, then the actions at the root of the accusation are treated as if they didn’t happen. It’s up to the authorities to prove their case, not the accused to prove they didn’t do it.
The citizen’s right to silence is related. The target of the charge doesn’t have to say anything. He or she can just sit there quiet as the people doing the accusing are expected to make the case. If they can’t, then nothing happened regarding the accused.
That’s our law, and keeps us from exercising Stalin’s show-trial style of justice. It’s how we avoid the last moments of Bukharin, Kamanev, and Zinoviev beginning with a long walk down a lonely basement corridor and ending with a bullet to the back of the head.
I know. I know. The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory. Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world. In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes. The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.
The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing. Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”. How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly? We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.
Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein. The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive. If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing? Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind. If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?
The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics. The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price. They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment. They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive. “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example. “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate. Either they recommend charges or they don’t. To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.
Adam Schiff and Andy Kaufman. Any similarities?
In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing. It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.
Chico Marx as Chicolini in disguise with Harpo from “Duck Soup”.
“Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”, Chico Marx as the character of Chicolini in 1933’s “Duck Soup”. Don’t worry, it’s relevant.
It should never amaze anyone when a politician says something out of sheer spite or plain stupidity, like the folderol on the border wall (fence, barrier, whatever). The donkey party doesn’t want a wall so a fraction of the federal government is shut down. The party mouthpieces say walls don’t work – the perps will just add a few more rungs to the ladder, they squawk – while claiming sole proprietorship of the entire “expert” demographic. But “experts” can be purchased like a pair of shoes. Look into any courtroom. Remember, “experts” helped get OJ off.
Well, don’t limit yourself to courtrooms. Cruise the environs of the rich-and-beautiful-and-mighty if you want to see walls. Try to get near their doorbell to evangelize. Walls, people with guns, security cameras, gates, singular road access to the neighborhood, if not ocean bordering 2 or more sides, and a government-imposed DMZ of zoning for the rich makes sure nobody disturbs their tranquility.
The home in Malibu for Babs (Streisand). Notice the oceans. It provides more than a great view. Also, zoning and the byzantine array of permits helps keep the hoi polloi at bay.Entering Oprah’s digs in Montecito, Ca., will be no easy task. It’s a veritable feudal castle.The Kirkeby estate, Beverly Hills. It’s famous for being the fictional home of Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies.
Funny, many of the rich-and-famous overwhelmingly vote Democrat and, ipso facto, don’t like walls … if they are on the border. They bankroll the heavy-weight Democrats in trolling Trump for pushing for a wall to protect Americans. But they, personally, love walls. I would think that the gazillions spent on them means that they work … or our Gatsbies might be admitting that they blew a lot of dough to simply look high and mighty.
Typical gates and walls of homes in Medina, Washington, on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, Seattle. Its an exclusive ‘burb for the well-heeled like Bill Gates.Mark Zuckerberg’s plush hangout in Hawaii is dutifully surrounded by walls, some 6 feet high.Zuckerberg has extended the concept to encompass his entire estate, to the displeasure of his neighbors.The concept of safety and security is becoming quite popular. Here we have a Miami condo complex within the protective womb of gates and wrought iron fences.Walls aren’t the end of it. Manpower is hired.The patron saint of today’s left, Barack Obama, was protected as president, and rightly so, behind multiple barriers and a praetorian guard.Israel’s border wall on the West Bank. Terror bombings of weddings and pizzerias has ended. Terrorists have had to resort to flying missiles over the barrier, not adding more rungs to their ladders.A portion of Greece’s wall on its border with Turkey.A portion of the barrier between Pakistan and India.
So, to paraphrase Chico Marx, “Who ya gonna believe, them or your own eyes?”
Use your lyin’ eyes to view the pics of the homes of the rich and famous, and the walls of other countries worried about who enters. If “experts” on Dem retainer say walls don’t work, check the hot shot’s shoes to see if they’ve been chasing ambulances with the lawyers.
Joseph Nye Welch, general counsel for the US Army, at the McCarthy Hearings, June 9, 1954.
I can think of no better response to the shameful display of Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings than the one given by Joseph Nye Welch, general counsel of the US Army, to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Senator.”
No, few Dems in the US Senate have any sense of decency. Following the Lenin/Alinski playbook of the ends always justifying the means, they have championed baseless charges against Kavanaugh. Their goal is to stop the nomination at all costs, even if it means destroying people’s lives.
Blasey-Ford isn’t any help. Still, she can find no one to validate her story other than her personal feelings. Others mentioned in her story deny it. That’s not validation, Christine; it’s therapy.
If anyone thinks that there is any credibility to these wild claims, that person should stay away from the Kool-Aid punch bowl being served at MSNBC. In summary, there is no corroboration for any of it. And if there is no corroboration, there’s no there there. The whole thing is reminiscent of the child sex-abuse hysteria of the 80’s and 90’s and false accusations of campus rape by Mattress Girl, and those directed at a UV fraternity and the Duke lacrosse team. All won $$$$ in settlements for false charges and slander.
The Dems are playing the more-investigation card. Cut the crap. Translation: delay the nomination … forever. Their modus operandi involves making a baseless allegation no matter how wild, call for an investigation by anyone and everyone, gin up more baseless allegations, ad infinitum, till the Republicans or the nominee withdraws the nomination.
The problem for the more-investigations crowd: there’s no limiting principle. Easily conjured and baseless charges can be cooked up at any moment. There’s no end to it, particularly if you’re a conservative and Republican.
These claims would not be the stuff of investigation by a detective division or DA for long. There’s no corroboration and plenty of counter evidence. A statement would be taken and then the person would be shown the door. End of story. And that’s how real justice works.
Make no bones about it. From the gitgo, this is an attempt to prevent the president from exercising his Article II duty. And no concession is to be made for honor and decency.
Don’t conflate the Merrick Garland case with Kavanaugh. Garland’s nomination was treated according to the Biden Rule: no SC nomination approvals during a presidential election year. Sen. Biden (D, Delaware) stated it; the Republicans were faithful to it.
I’ve been watching the trade war talk heat up as our president pursues something mystically called “fair” trade. I’m all in favor of free and fair trade. Furthermore, I agree with the president that trade deals should be “reciprocal”. But, in a sense, on trade, Trump gets it and doesn’t get it.
Certainly, the broad general benefits of our free trade agreements are real. Yet, those very real gains aren’t evenly distributed. The negative repercussions seem to be concentrated in the industrial middle part of the country. Even though, to be honest, the problem had been building long before NAFTA and WTO. It’s the coastal urban financial centers, though, who have garnered most of the dough. That’s the “gets it” part, if we can construe his comments to be some roundabout recognition of free trade’s spotty effects.
FILE – In this Dec. 11, 2008 file photo, pedestrians walk by the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. Dominic Cristini, who claims ownership of the Packard plant through Bioresource Inc., is awaiting demolition permits. He says he wants to start demolition within a month. He estimates it will cost $6 million to raze the plant. The plant closed in the mid 1950s. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
As for the “doesn’t get it” part, he talks about $500 billion trade deficits as if the money is lost from our country. Really? No, it isn’t lost. For instance, China gets dollars for its exports to us. What are they going to do with the dollars? They can’t use them as currency in China or any other foreign country for that matter. They have to either spend them in the US or park the dollars in US financial assets. I suppose that they could hunt around on the international money markets to unload them but that just shifts the problem to somebody else. No, Mr. President, the money isn’t lost from us. Really, the things never left.
Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Most of the dollars end up in our financial centers. Read: mostly our coastal urban cores and Chicago. This does much to explain the bull market in California coastal real estate despite its Venezuela-type government. Trendy blue dots, with their lefty culture in tow, prosper.
Trendy Laguna Beach, Ca.
Ironically, as recent events will attest, free international markets end up feeding the places that are busy destroying them. The dem-socialist darling of the Dem Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could only get elected in one of those pampered locales.
She’s proof that an economics degree did her no more good than Trump’s self-taught trade “wisdom” did for him. It’s the age of gibberish.
Trump and Putin at press conference in Helsinki, 7/16/18.Neville Chamberlain (center) and Hitler at Munich Conference, 1938.
Our president’s statements after his meeting with Putin were appalling. He went further than Neville Chamberlain’s famous “Peace for our time” announcement after Munich, 1938. Trump also sounded like a 60’s teenage anti-war activist blathering moral equivalence. Remember the shouts from the time – we are just as bad as Ho, comrade Brezhnev, and the Belgians in the Congo? Chamberlain, though, to his credit would have recoiled at such rubbish. Nevertheless, Trump and Chamberlain end up at the same place: appeasement.
The radical anti-war left: National council meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Bloomington, Ind., 1963. Tom Hayden is at the far left.
How can a Republican president, knowingly or unknowingly, sound like the radical SDS of yore? The mind-set could be the outcome of a pinched view of life solely reliant on personal experience. Like Chamberlain, domestic matters framed the near totality of knowledge and interest for our fumbling president. Lifetime efforts to go beyond through study and thought are absent, leaving behind only interests and knowledge accrued through business and relationships within an arm’s reach. Everything outside this box is given the first-thought-that-comes-to-mind treatment. This mental reflex makes it easy to be fooled by thugs whose rise up the “greasy pole” resembled the career pathway of a mafia don.
Business and politics in a developed country is decidedly different from the rabid dog approach to power and fame in many other countries, à la Stalin. People with a business background are disarmed when dealing with people who’ll coolly instigate a “Night of the Long Knives” (Hitler’s slaughter of Ernst Röhm and the SA in 1934) or “Great Purge” (Stalin’s massacre of party and military leadership of 1936-38). The Kim sadism and Putin gangsterism are modern versions of the same phenomena. Sitting down with them isn’t quite the same as haggling with planning commissions and union bosses. If you think otherwise, you are proving that you haven’t done much in your life beyond a momentary Google search.
Stalin in 1937 during the Great Purge, 1936-38.NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) execution.
Jonah Goldberg in his column of 7/18 makes much of the self-centeredness of Trump to explain Trump’s blarney after the Putin summit, and there’s much to the charge. But we Americans are particularly adept at choosing the naïve and ill-prepared when dealing with the key part of the president’s Constitutional job description: foreign affairs and national security. Woodrow Wilson was convinced his oratory would win over the Allies and Germany to his lofty moral internationalism; FDR thought he could charm the 500,000-corpses-per-year Stalin right up to his last breath; JFK was bitch-slapped by Khrushchev in Vienna; W was romanced by Putin’s eyes; and Obama pledged to be “flexible” if he succeeded in fooling the American electorate into giving him another 4-year lease on the White House (which he did). The pizzazz fizzled into the rise of fascism, the Iron Curtain and Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Russian military adventurism. Naivete fueled by ignorance has dark consequences.
Much of the world is a political cesspool, a far cry from having to deal with corrupt local politicos, mudslinging, and trumped up (pun not intended) oppo research. Compare that to group garroting and a bullet to the head down a lonely basement corridor — by the thousands. Vice-President Cheney had it right when asked about what he saw in Putin’s eyes. He saw a “KGB colonel”. An educated realism has been chronically missing from the résumé of many of our most recent chief executives, including this one. A sobering thought.
The following is my comment to Jonah Goldberg’s “Bonfire of the Straw Men” column in National Review Online for July 11, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/michael-doran-strawman-response/.
Why do we have to portray our leaders as saints or devils, with those unable to accept the starkness facing excommunication or worse? Some traditionally on the right have embraced the hodge-podge that is Trump-thought as the closest thing to scripture. While on the left, many are careening off the cliff of outright socialism and boosterism for an end to the rule of law. It’s madness.
The madness is an international phenomena. Here we have a Norwegian protester screaming after comments by a government minister.
Trump is still a buffoon and the Dems have finally shed any semblance of reasonableness in the exposure of their socialist and anti-western inner selves. What we have remaining is a chaotic and impulse-driven Trump as the Dems go batty.
It’s not that I’m not thankful for a right-leaning Congress, SCOTUS, and the occasional winners coming out of a ping-pong ball presidential mind. Restrained judges, tax cuts, reigning in the administrative state, a no-nonsense use of military might, and controlling the immigration tsunami are greatly appreciated. But, please, let’s stop the sycophancy on the right and the mob-like Jacobanism on the left. In today’s politics, is there a zone of serenity and rationality somewhere between Sean Hannity and Maxine Waters?
Maxine Waters (D, Calif.) living up to her reputation.
I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.
The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.
No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.
The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.
Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.
Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.
US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?
Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?
Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.
History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)
RogerG
* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/
