Category Archives: Media Criticism

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Happy Birthday, America!

4 Comments

It’s the 242nd anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and 155th since the victory at Gettysburg and fall of Vicksburg, sealing the ultimate fate of the Confederacy. It’s also Calvin Coolidge’s birthday (1872) and he gave a very memorable speech on the subject in 1926.

Sadly, though, the same political party that lost that war, and particularly young people whom they’ve maleducated from kindergarten through college, seems to continue to hate America.

[Afternoon update]

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a great quote from that Coolidge speech:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Yes. Collectivism is the oldest game in the book.

[Update a while later]

I just realized that he gave that speech on the sesquicentennial.

[Thursday noon update]

(Formerly Portuguese) Sara Hoyt: Conceived in liberty:

I’d worked. I’d worked at becoming an American.

Afterward came the INS crawling all over our papers and asking the strangest questions about things like the fact we had no children (despite much trying). They wanted to make sure we had a real marriage, see, not a sham to get citizenship. I’m all right with that.

Because it’s important to want to be an American. And it’s important to do it properly so you know you belong. It’s important to believe in the rights of others to their own liberty and their own property. You can be a citizen of this great country with no chicanery.

On that day I took the oath like I took my marriage vows. As words that change you inside. Afterward, we went out to lunch, then came home, and I went out to get the mail, and I felt that this was now my country — that I belonged. We all have a place in the world, and this is mine.

I’m an American. It’s an amazing thing to be, a part of a country that’s something new in the world.

You see, the natural way for humans to live is to be subjected to some tyrant, to the whims of some strong man. Some other countries, like England, have curbed (used to have curbed) the rights of those in power to mistreat them. But no country has devoted itself as fully to the cause of individual liberty as we have.

Sure, we squabble over what that means, and some of our elected officials are disgraces. Sure, we face a very difficult fight to continue existing. Yes, the socialists in the failed state to the South pose a danger, because we can’t afford Venezuela on our doorstep or the streaming hordes coming over the border to make us into copies of what they left behind. (And you thought Californians were bad.) Sure, many of our compatriots are that only in name and seem to want only to bring us low and destroy us.

What? You expected a cake walk?

We are something quite new in the world. You expected the old to accept us with applause?

Our very existence shames them and makes them feel their smallness. And of course they’ve convinced the weak-minded in our midst — many of them self-proclaimed intelligentsia — to fight on their side and against us.

No one said it would be easy. Liberty is always a generation from extinction. And that’s if we’re lucky.

This reminds me of Elon Musk’s saying that he wasn’t born in America, but he got here as soon as he could.

[Late afternoon update]

College grads feel less patriotic than non college grads. Great job, academia.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Stop Trivializing Naziism

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Thoughts from David Harsanyi:

It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.

Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Latest Bombshell

20 Comments

Well, now we know why the DoJ and FBI have been dragging their feet for so many months on those subpoenaed documents. I’m guessing we’ll soon be seeing a lot more, and worse.

And then there’s this:

[Update a while later]

What did Peter Strzok do?

Not as much as he wanted to, but he did a lot of damage.

[Afternoon update]

Just got around to reading the whole thing at the first link:

On October 30, the Department of Justice finally got in gear to get a warrant — to include everything dealing during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure with the State Department and all devices — and especially the Comey-denominated “golden emails” from the BlackBerrys and all the messages sent to Abedin to be given to Mrs. Clinton, right?

Nope.

Shocker #1: Despite everyone’s recognition of the importance of the “explosive” “bomb,” and the “golden emails” on the Weiner laptop, the FBI never even sought to review the “golden” emails. FBI General Counsel Baker pushed hard to expand the application to include those, but Strzok and DOJ prosecutors shot it down.

Shocker #2: They deliberately ignored the emails between Huma Abedin and others — despite knowing she was a proxy for the Secretary and had lied to them in her interview.

Federal investigators knew people would email Abedin, and she would print things out for Clinton. Abedin admitted it was easier for her to print things from home in Brooklyn.

Logically then, it appears it was Abedin who deliberately stripped classified markings from emails to forward the information to Mrs. Clinton so she could then deny ever receiving anything marked classified. It’s called “plausible deniability,” and it was a deliberate and illegal scheme for handling classified information.

Shocker #3: Over analysts’ objections, the FBI never reviewed the Weiner laptop to determine if it had been compromised by foreign agents despite finding that Huma Abedin had forwarded classified information to it. Those were flagrant violations of 18 U.S.C. §793.

There are important conclusions from these facts in the inspector general’s report.

This is a much bigger cover up than Watergate, by orders of magnitude.