Tag: hypocrisy

Maxed Out

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When I think about all the absurdities of the present political situation, I think the most striking is the degree to which the Left blames Donald Trump with all the crimes and intentions that they themselves are already guilty of.  They say he will be a dictator, lawlessly striking out against innocent people.  And simultaneously they have imprisoned old women and harmless men for protesting on January 6th.  They claim insurrection against these people who wandered around the Capitol building without weapons.  And yet they incited and abetted the George Floyd riots that destroyed thousands of businesses and even killed a number of people.

They say that Trump will destroy democracy but they allowed election laws to be trampled on during the COVID panic they manufactured.  They say he will start World War III and yet during his presidency there were no wars.  But under the neo-cons we’re currently playing brinksmanship with both the Russians and the Chinese while simultaneously enraging both the Israelis and the Arabs by vacillating over the Gaza War.

I ask myself what is it that offends me the most?  Is it the hypocrisy or the fact that the American people don’t rise up and tar and feather these people for their mendacity.  Am I angrier with the American people than I am with the Left’s leadership?  So, it comes back to the Evil and the Stupid.  And since I’ve been a charter member of the Stupid, I guess I’m mad at myself.  I’m mad because we’ve always allowed ourselves to be shamed over supposed pieties.  We don’t want to seem selfish.  But we should.

So maybe the correct way to think about any political situation is by ignoring questions of morality and weighing its results according to how they affect me directly.  And that’s how we should talk about them too.  If Joe Biden tells me he wants to give Ukraine another hundred billion dollars, I should ask him what I get out of it.  And if he tells me, it will mean another victory for democracy, I’ll ask him who’s going to pay for the two hundred billion we spent on it and who is going to pay the interest on it too?  And if he doesn’t have an answer that means I’m paying for it and my answer, is I don’t want to give them anything.  And I don’t want to pay for any windmills or solar panels or upgrades to the grid to power electric cars for the same reason.  I don’t want to pay for them because they’re stupid and all the money they take from me to pay for these things is basically flushed down the drain (and simultaneously stolen by Obama cronies).

The same thing can be said about illegal aliens and legalized drugs and homeless encampments and defunding the police.  All of these things are harmful policies that cost me untold billions of dollars and make my life worse.  So, no matter how much they tell me these are the “moral and the smart” things to do, I weigh the cost and find them wanting.  So, it’s nothing personal.  I’m just applying the rules of identity politics and identifying as one of the people who get hurt by all of these policies.  My lived experience tells me that I will be the disadvantaged by all of these actions.  So why would I ever want to go against my own interests?

Now they’ll say all kinds of things about diversity, equity and inclusion.  And I’ll say fine, let the people who think these things are just and fair pay for them personally.  Let Barack Obama take in all the migrants from Haiti, Somalia and Guatemala that he cares to and let him cloth, feed, house, educate and employ all of them.  And let all of the other members of the Left who wants these policies pick up the tab.  But since they won’t, my answer is no.  And if all the Republican politicians were as forthright as this, it would cut through all the nonsense and eliminate the hypocrisy.

Why do we have to pretend we care about pieties that we don’t really believe in?  Why do I have to care if there are more boys in STEM fields than girls?  And why do I have to pay for forcing more girls in than currently want to be?  Because rigging employment fields costs me money too.  Quota hires like women in STEM cause all kinds of damage and inefficiency.  And that goes for quota hires of all sorts.  Affirmative action is one of the worst policies for efficiency and we all pay the cost.  If a company wants to hire more women engineers, let them.  But don’t force everyone else to have to employ them too.

So, I’ll say to Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, “It’s nothing personal but I don’t want to pay for your problems.  Why don’t you find all your friends who believe what you do and pass the hat around.  Just don’t charge it on the government credit card.  It’s maxed out.”

Partisan Point of View

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Today was a classic, perfect July day.  Sunny, high 80’s, 5-10 mph breeze, wonderful.  We had the younger grandchildren over to swim in the pool along with their mothers.  Camera Girl and I presided over the jubilant aquatic marauders and after the swimming and lunch I played a spirited game of billiards with the older of the two boys.  And maybe saying it was billiards is stretching the definition.  A purist would have noted a number of scratches that weren’t penalized.  But to me every game of pool is a chance to bond with the younger generation and discuss semi-elastic Newtonian physics in an enjoyable venue.

But after the kids left for home, I managed to read some of the news.  There was an article by a Leftist in a leftist magazine that I thought captured the delusional aspect of the progressive viewpoint.

Apparently, the Supreme Court recognizing that the Constitution doesn’t bless abortion and leaving it to the voters of each state to decide if they’ll sanction it, is madness.  So, actual democracy is beyond the pale.  Alito wanting to allowing the voters and their representatives to decide on abortion is equivalent to Robespierre unleashing Madame Guillotine on the unsuspecting populace.

 

I’ve selected some of my favorite quotes from this masterpiece:

“Similarly, when asked on a conference call with reporters this week what Biden could be doing differently to respond to the ruling, Sarah Lipton-Lubet, the executive director of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, a group advocating for expanding the Supreme Court, told me he should “stop treating the Supreme Court like it’s some untouchable panel of demigods. This Court is brazenly political, and we have to stop pretending otherwise.” That sentiment among Democrats escalated further today, when the Court capped its term by hobbling the federal government’s ability to regulate the carbon emissions that cause climate change.”

“As concerned as many Democrats are about Biden’s advanced age and his diminished approval ratings, the persistent chatter among them about whether he should run again in 2024 centers as much on the fear that he’s a man out of time. Many activists express a similar frustration with the party’s politburo of aging congressional leaders. “It’s not necessarily only an age thing, but I do think the younger crop of leaders have cut their teeth during times when they never really believed our institutions were legitimate,” Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate leadership aide and a co-founder of Battle Born Collective, a liberal advocacy group, told me. “They don’t have this nostalgia for a [prior] set of norms and principles, because they never experienced them.””

“They feel the system is fundamentally corrupted; they are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy in our institutions,” he said—and they want the party to “craft a message around that. The failure to do that explains where we are right now.” Indeed, polling released this week by a coalition of liberal groups led by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee found strong agreement among Democrats, and even many swing voters, for the argument that the Supreme Court is “broken” and “facing a legitimacy crisis.”

 

So, you see, if the government is doing what they want, then the progressives have the highest respect for institutions.  But if our system disagrees with their priorities then burn it down!

 

There was also a bunch of screeching interlaced with their call to action.  I really liked these so I’ll share a few:

“Compounding those anxieties, Undem said, is “almost despair” among left-leaning voters that Democratic leaders seemingly have no plan for how to respond to this multipronged offensive. Jentleson likewise said that Biden has created an “enormous disconnect” and “feeling of powerlessness” among Democrats by failing to make a broader case against structural problems such as the Senate’s small-state bias or the skewing of the Supreme Court bench that the GOP may exploit for sustained minority rule.”

“Biden’s Democratic critics express more fear of demoralizing their own voters. For them, last week’s Supreme Court decision put an exclamation point on the feeling that Republicans are driving the national agenda even though Democrats nominally hold unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.”

 

So, there we have it.  The progs want to nuke the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court.  Isn’t that special!  They forgot what happened when they nuked the lower court filibuster.  It blew up in their faces.  Now what happens when the Republicans remember their words and decide to nuke the filibuster altogether and really go to town when we control the trifecta in 2024.  Well, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

Poetic Social Justice

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Recently Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida threatened to take all the illegal aliens that the feds let into Florida and bus them to Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware.  This week Governor Greg Abbott of Texas took a page from the DeSantis playbook and started bussing his illegals to Washington D.C.

These are very good ideas.  But I think I have a better bus stop for these lucky illegals.  I think they should be shipped to that famous resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.  That’s right.  Let them share the sun and surf with the likes of Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Also David Letterman, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, Larry David and a host of other hyper-woke lefties.  They need to share their island paradise with the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and defecate on Larry David’s front porch.

And I don’t think I’m being spiteful.  These are the people who push open borders with every tweet and election rally.  They need to embrace the wonderful, smelly reality of flooding someone’s country with millions of desperate poor people.  In fact, they need to take the lead.  They must become the vanguard of overwhelmed American locales.  Watching Martha’s Vineyard becoming a northern latitude Haiti is right on so many levels.

I’m sure Massachusetts can legislate the construction of five or ten thousand Section Eight Housing units.  This would strike the correct balance between opulence and squalor.  There should probably be some kind of Critical Race Theory indoctrination center.  That way the children of the very rich and famous can discover how they are responsible for the poverty of their lice-infested neighbors.  And there can be mandatory struggle sessions.  Here these privileged youngsters can trade their money and possessions for some kind of atheist version of medieval indulgences.

I’d especially hope that the Obamas would open their hearts and their property to these prospective Americans.  And share their food, spare rooms and bathroom facilities during the summer season.  While they’re at it the wealthy denizens of the island can learn about the delightful and colorful sexual practices of these vibrant visitors.  Probably during the frequent home invasions that will be the talk of the summer season at this premiere vacation paradise.

You probably think I’m kidding.  I’m certainly not.  Disturbing the fabulously wealthy Left should be a focus of how politicians on the Right spend their time.  We could lavish a few tens of thousands of illegals each on Boston Massachusetts, Chappaqua and Sagaponack in New York, Beverly Hills, Montecito, Santa Monica and Los Altos in California and several other zip codes infested with the rich and woke.  I think if we were diligent enough it might start to sink into their heads that we’re onto their game of turning America into a banana republic while they live fat, dumb and happy in their segregated enclaves.

Think of the great publicity pictures that could be had by Project Veritas of poor destitute third world families being rounded up and removed from the Obama or Clinton oceanfront properties.  Poor little children evicted by Hillary or the Light Worker.  Very sad.  So, wake up red state governors.  Embrace creative destruction or political jiu jitsu or whatever you want to call it.  Make the Left own their positions and watch them sweat.  It’s going to be a long hot summer.

More Motes and Oxen

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I was on a zoom call with a couple of friends who live in central Massachusetts and they were telling me that the pot business is a howling success.  There are billboards on all the state highways.  The “dispensaries” as the pot shops are known are doing a land office business.  And we discussed how exactly the “growers” managed to protect their crop.  The theory was that although there were probably some crops outdoors, hidden from the view of the populace, mostly the stuff is being grown in locked greenhouses.  And we assumed this means that the “farmers” must have fairly robust security and probably a few guns thrown in for good measure.  One of the guys said that the biggest problem that’s become apparent is that the stuff being sold today is many times more potent than the stuff that used to be sold before legalization.  He mentioned THC levels that were near 90%.  And the upshot of this is psychological symptoms among the users are much worse and much more prevalent than in the past.  Anxiety and paranoia manifest at levels that render the users incapable of normal life.  They can’t keep a job or maintain relationships.

And it just struck me that here is a blue state policy to contrast with their alleged commitment to safety on the COVID front.  They’ll force you to be vaccinated and wear a mask against your will supposedly for your own good but they’ll allow a practice that they know is a mental and physical health threat and also a public safety hazard from the consideration of people driving under the influence and walking among us in a mentally unbalanced state.  In addition, since the FDA still considers marijuana illegal, they won’t get involved in regulating the safety of the pot that’s being sold and so any terrible mistake involving pesticides or other toxins finding its way into the drug cannot be prevented or adjudicated.

So here is the double standard.  They get to decide when freedom is important and when it’s not.  Freedom for me but not for thee.  But this definitely opens up the model for how the red states can change things in their favor.  Pick and choose the places where they will obey or defy federal law.  As an example, Texas needs to close their border with Mexico.  They should build their own wall a mile inside the federal wall.  They should arrest all illegal aliens and jail them until they agree to leave the country and if they come back make their next stay in jail very uncomfortable.  They should force all employers to obey immigration laws under the penalty of massive fines.  If the federal government squawks flip them the bird and continue on with real life.  And there are other things that make sense.  Welfare needs to be tightened up to the point where those who refuse to work should be so hard-up that they decide to leave and go to a blue state like California on their own.  Hell, that could be part of the policy to offer them bus or plane tickets to the blue state of their choice.

So that was what I was thinking about today.  Instead of freedom for thee but not for me let’s make it you live your life your way and I’ll live my life mine.

Harvey Weinstein’s Compassion

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Back in 2009 when attempts were underway to extradite Roman Polansky to the US to try him for the rape of a 13-year-old girl, Harvey Weinstein defended the morality of Hollywood’s support of Polansky with the following quote “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.”  Well, it starts to make sense that Weinstein has compassion for a rapist.  I guess he’s hoping the favor will be returned by his community.  I don’t mean the community of rapists.  That’s too small a group to help him.  I think he’s hoping the Hollywood community will show him compassion.  But it doesn’t look like he’s going to get a pass.  A whole troop of former ingenues and struggling starlets are coming forward with staggering tales of a disgusting pig trading on his influence in a seedy industry to pressure young women into having sex with him.  Now the fact that Harvey is a repulsively fat and ugly creature only makes the act grotesque.  But even if he looked like Brad Pitt the cruelty and immorality of what he did is undeniable.  So, he’s going to be roasted over the coals.  And based on the latest reports he may also be liable for criminal charges.  Apparently three women are now claiming actual rape.  You know Whoopi?  Rape, rape?

Poor Harvey, things aren’t looking so good.  All his friends have deserted him.  What’s a rapist to do?  Where is his Polansky exception?  After all he’s a rich liberal donor.  Where’s the gratitude?  Where are the Clintons and Obamas when they’re needed?  People are saying it’s because times are changing and women won’t put up with abuse anymore.

Maybe.

But maybe it’s just Hollywood deciding that Harvey’s power and influence is slipping.  Maybe this is payback from some other power broker that Harvey rubbed the wrong way.  Maybe even the Clintons.  I read that the Clintons didn’t think Harvey was supportive enough.  Maybe this is more Arkansas Revenge.  Considering Bill’s proclivities, it would be ironic indeed if it came from him.  But regardless of the actual cause of the downfall the real question is where was the compassion for his victims?

Meryl Streep was a great friend of Harvey Weinstein.  She worked with him and gushed about his abilities.  But she still maintains that she knew nothing of his casting couch.  Apparently, she’s the only one in Hollywood who didn’t.  Unless she’s a moron, she’s lying.  And as much as I’d love to call her a moron I’m gonna have to go with liar.  And so, the question is, where was Meryl’s compassion for his victims?

And how about all the other actors and actresses and other studio types who helped Harvey procure his victims or else just kept quiet about their existence?  Where was all this great compassion?  What about the much-vaunted moral compass?  Did it merely point to fortune and fame?  These are the people who go on endlessly about gay rights and trans-rights and animal rights and veganism and climate change.  And these are the people who went insane because a woman didn’t get to be President of the United States.  And these are the people who marched through the streets with stupid pink hats on because a rich guy admitted “off the record” the deep dark secret that some women are greedy enough to let a lout have his way with them just because he’s rich.

Well, doesn’t that make them hypocrites and cowards?  If they really care about women’s welfare so highly then aren’t they therefore nothing but greedy cowards if they put their own monetary considerations ahead of these young people being victimized?  Seems so to me.  Sorry Meryl.  You stand convicted of being a greedy coward.  The only compassion you had was for yourself.  Same as Harvey.  Same as Polansky.  So maybe the Polansky defenders can explain why they have compassion for their sister actresses now finally after all these years of Weinstein’s harassment but not before.  And maybe they can explain why they still have no compassion for the 13-year-old girl that was abused all those years ago.  Isn’t she a woman too?