“Those sailors did not have the basic seamanship skills, but by God, they got their sensitivity, race relations and sexual harassment training,” said Peters, adding that sailors can’t fight without adequate navigational skills.
Plus, they may be exhausted.
Thanks, Barack!
Glenn Reynolds (and Sarah Hoyt, and others) writes that we’re living through them. Sure looks like it.
[Update a while later]
Our vague yet imminent malaise.
[Update late morning]
Speaking of Sarah Hoyt, from late last week, strange days in America.
OK, we have a regular commenter, probably the most prolific one (note that this is not a quantity with a quality all its own), who thinks that the Republicans would like to replace Trump with Hillary.
No, don’t laugh, he apparently really thinks this:
In about a femto-second the left would choose a new primary target so we could all suddenly realize how stupid and evil that person is. It would not be Pence because a tie breaking vote is not much real power. The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president so they can return to their safe space where nothing positive is actually accomplished.
So I responded:
Ken, even if that were legally possible, it would be politically impossible, and very few Republicans would have any desire to do it. That’s just stupid.
If you seriously believe that any Republican wants Hillary (as opposed to Not Trump) as president, you’re insane. The only reason any Republican supported Hillary last year was because she was the only serious alternative at the time. Every Republican would be perfectly happy to replace Trump with Pence. [Emphasis added for future reference]
Now note his response:
Many said they voted for Hillary. They could have just not voted. Bush voted for Hillary (and we wonder why the country moves left regardless of elections.)
That’s it. No recognition whatsoever of my emphasized words above. He is fantasizing that because they voted for Hillary a year ago, they want her to be president now, and would prefer that to a President Pence. He offers no sane rationale for this fantasy, but there we go.
There’s a lot more nuttiness over there if you want to wade through it, but it gets really great here:
You seem to be presuming Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary. This is you asserting your faith because there is no logic based on any fact that provably reaches that conclusion.
About the only related fact we have is that some Republicans did vote for Hillary when some conditions existed. Neither you nor I know if Pence being the alternative would not be such a condition for every Republican.
I am not presuming that Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary, and it is not necessary for me to assume that. I am assuming, because I didn’t chow down on lead paint chips when I was kid, that there is an insufficient number of Republicans who would prefer Hillary to Pence for this to occur. I think any assumption other than that is insane.
Set aside the fact that neither he, or anyone else has responded to my challenge to name a single Republican who would prefer a President Hillary to a President Pence. He doesn’t even posit a Constitutionally plausible mechanism by which this could occur, even if it had (and again, this would be insane) majority Republican support. All he says is that “The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president.” It betrays an utter ignorance of how our government works. Congress has no power to simply remove a president, bypass the existing vice president, and name someone else president.
Is he saying that they’ll impeach and remove both Trump and Pence? Really? Then Orrin HatchPaul Ryan is president. Will Orrin Hatch Paul Ryan nominate Hillary to be Vice President? Really? And a majority of the House will go along with that? Really? And then he’ll resign, or they’ll impeach and remove him so they can get their precious President Hillary? Really?
No, this is just anti-anti-Trump derangement. And I wish I didn’t have to waste time responding to blithering idiocy like this in my comments section. But I guess the only way to avoid it is to either ignore it, and let it continue to clog it up, because he clearly has no more self control than his Lord and Savior Trump to stop doing it, or to ban him.
[Late Monday-night update]
Part of the purpose of this post was to ferret out other loons in my comments section. It seems to have succeeded. Also note that Ken is now saying, “Oh, I didn’t mean it, I was just joking,” after repeated defenses of his original idiocy.
Sorry, no.
The worst thing about Trump is arguing with morons who support him, even when I compliment him on the rare good things he does, like tonight’s speech (which obviously someone else wrote, but with his input, to make sure he had the right 3rd-grade words in it, like “horrible”).
[Monday-afternoon update]
OK, so there are still some people operating under the delusion that there exist Republicans today, who would, if they could, remove Trump and replace him with Hillary, in preference to Mike Pence.
The “logic” (such as it is, but it isn’t) seems to be:
a) Some Republicans voted for Hillary over Trump last year
b) Republicans cannot be trustedTherefore, they will replace him with her at the first opportunity.
Folks, this is what is called a “broken syllogism.” It has two premises, both of which are true, and yet the conclusion in no way follows from them. It is a leap of logic that puts Evil Knievel’s attempted jump of the Snake River Canyon to shame. It makes as much (and as little) sense as “Roses are red, violets are blue, and therefore my chicken is unable to lay eggs.”
I personally know some conservatives who voted for Hillary. For instance, I’m pretty sure that Bob Zubrin did. They were (and in some cases remain) “Never Trumpers.”
Why did they do this? Was it because they preferred her policy positions? Or her picks for the Supreme Court? Or that they didn’t believe all the stories about how corrupt she was?
No.
They did it because, as awful a president as they expected her to be, they thought that Trump would be even worse. They did it not as an affirmative vote for Hillary, but as the only effective way to vote against Trump. Ken wrote “they could have not voted.” Yes, they could. They could have also howled at the moon. But neither of those things would have done anything to reduce the chances of a Trump presidency in the way that voting for Hillary Clinton would.
Now you can disagree with their assessment, and in fact I do. I felt physically relieved that she lost, but I recognize that the last election presented us with the most awful presidential choice in our lifetime, and I’m not going criticize them for that decision at that time.
But the other thing I’m not going to do (unlike, apparently some here) is to fantasize that they’re idiotic enough to actively want Hillary to be president, either then or now (as opposed to Trump not being president). They weren’t voting for Hillary, they were voting for the only Not Trump available at the time. That was then, this is now, and the best Not Trump option is Mike Pence. The second, third, fourth, fifth…ten millionth next best option is any (actual, as opposed to Trump) Republican. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that I preferred him over her, because he was potentially removable, and she never would have been. As I’ve repeatedly said, the notion that there are any prominent Republicans, let alone a significantly large number of them that would, if they could, replace him with her today, is utterly deranged.
But my challenge stands. Name one.
Let’s do a crowdsourcing review of it.
How about doing that with the racist Democrat Party?
The Democratic Party historically is the party of slavery. The Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow laws. The Democratic Party fought civil rights for a century.
And so by rights — or at least by the standards established by the Cultural Revolutionaries of today’s American left — we should ban the Democratic Party.
Not only get rid of it in the present, but strike its very name from the history books, and topple all Democratic statues of leaders who benefited, prospered and became wealthy by cleaving to the party. And shame Democrats until they confess the truth of it.
The Democratic Party’s military arm in the South was the KKK. The Democratic Party opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, making the former slaves citizens of the United States and giving them the vote.
If the new Cultural Revolution was serious, wouldn’t it also demand that the Democratic Party be put in a museum somewhere, away from decent people, along with those Confederate statues?
We could put Democrats in exhibits, behind glass, watching white political bosses chomp cigars and pass out goodies for votes, as minorities were relegated, as they are today, to failing schools and lost educational opportunity and neighborhoods that have become killing fields for the young and old.
And in great museums, the Democrats could be studied, safely, without endangering the sensibilities of the children.
We might even peer down on an animatronic Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, once a leader of the KKK. And with him, prominent animatronic Democrats who, just a few short years ago, said wonderful, moving things about Byrd after his funeral.
I remember a quarter of a century ago, in more hopeful times, after the fall of the Soviet Union, having a conversation with a friend about how we might want to preserve socialism in a museum somewhere, so that people wouldn’t forget. Unfortunately, it’s not necessary, because bad ideas never die.
My position on the monuments is that a) it’s none of the federal government’s business and b) the best way to deal with them is to leave them in place, but put beside them a plaque explaining who put them up, and when, and why. Including the fact that they were all, to a man and woman, Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
Black Americans, the organized Left’s expendable shock troops. The real racism has always lied on the collectist Left.
A great idea from Katherine Mangu-Ward: Let’s hand out DNA testing kits at the next neo-Nazi rally.
…has reviewed Nina Teichholz’s book
Many readers will be incensed by this book. If you think saturated fats and cholesterol are bad for you, you’ll be incensed. If you think the fat story is exaggerated, you’ll be incensed. If you trust in the objectivity of science to inform health policy, you’ll be incensed. Stories of shocking scientific corruption and culpability by government agencies are all to be found in Nina Teicholz’s bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. This is a disquieting book about scientific incompetence, evangelical ambition, and ruthless silencing of dissent that has shaped our lives for decades.
Good for her.
Why are they named after confederate generals?
As Austin Bay notes, the author doesn’t mention that this was done during the time of racist (and first fascist president) Woodrow Wilson, by him and other Democrats.
…says Trump will resign by the end of the year.
I hope he’s right. Regardless of what happens, he could just say “Mission accomplished, I’ll let Pence sweep up.” That would be the cleanest way to end this mess. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
So why — beyond the traditional Trump bashing — are such liberal-lefties, or whatever you want to call them at CNN and elsewhere, so determined to make such an equivalency? Why do they want to magnify the existence and importance of neo-Nazis and Klan members in our society when their numbers are minuscule?
We could call this a kind of nostalgia for Nazism, the yearning for a simpler time when the source of all evil was so clearly evident and so directly confronted. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a nostalgia for when all evil was supposedly on the right, even though the Nazis, so many conveniently forget, were the National Socialist Party. At least the right could be blamed. And is.
It is also a yearning for a time when the source of evil was not so treacherous and complicated. No one knows how many Islamic radicals there are or where they are, although there are apparently a lot of them, probably vastly more than there ever were Nazis, possibly in the hundreds of millions if you add up the results of this Pew poll of eleven Muslim countries. (It may even be understated, given the reluctance to answer such incriminating questions.)
Not only that, a significant percentage of the left evinces sympathy for Islamic radicals, identifying with them and justifying their cause, despite the obvious misogyny and homophobia, through such latter-day crypto-fascist inventions as “intersectionality.” The Antifa movement, in the forefront of that nauseating sympathy for Islamism, is far more prevalent and dangerous in U.S. society than those few pathetic remaining losers in the KKK and similar neo-Nazi groups. The Antifa thugs are seemingly everywhere, smashing windows and making life Hell for weak-willed university administrators across the country.
I've been making this point all week. Stalin fought Nazis, too. Opposing Nazis is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to be good guys. https://t.co/tGaAZcRkxp
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 18, 2017
[Update a couple minutes later]
Let’s not talk about Islam:
They discussed the popularity of La Rambla as a tourist destination, and went into some detail about the nationalities of vacationers currently thronging the city. They noted that La Rambla is Barcelona’s chief tourist street, essentially its counterpart to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kufürstendamm in Berlin, Fifth Avenue in New York – and, perhaps most significantly, La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, where, in July of last year, eighty-six people were killed in a similar jihadist atrocity.
They pondered the apparent lack of sophistication of this particular crime, the biographical background of the truck driver, the timeline of the atrocity, the apparent speed and weight of the truck itself, and so on. They talked about the wounded, about the degree to which they had been wounded, about how many had been sent to hospitals.
But they didn’t talk about Islam. They didn’t talk about jihad.
They used words like assassin, murderer, criminal. Even terrorist. But I didn’t hear the word jihadist. If they said it, I missed it. And except when they were forced to mention that, for example, the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack, I didn’t hear the word Islam.
They’d rather talk about Nazis.
[Noon update]
A point I’ve been making all week (e.g., the above tweet). Jonah Goldberg: No, Antifa, fighting Nazis doesn’t make you the good guys:
There’s a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because they’re opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many — indeed, most — of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.”
Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples.
The young Communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today.
Stalinists, and defenders of communism in general, like to play up the trivial differences with the Nazis, while ignoring the much greater similarities.
And then there’s this:
This history is relevant today because of the depressingly idiotic argument about whether it’s OK to equate “antifa” — left-wing radicals — with the neo-Nazi and white supremacist rabble that recently descended on Charlottesville, Va. The president claims there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest and that the “anti-fascist” radicals are equally blameworthy. He borrowed from Fox News’ Sean Hannity the bogus term “alt-left” to describe the antifa radicals.
The term is bogus because, unlike the alt-right, nobody calls themselves “the alt-left.” That’s too bad. One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional right with their racial hogwash.
Sean Hannity is an idiot, and so is Donald Trump for paying any attention to him.