Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Crazy Democrats

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GQ can’t find any, but Kyle Smith has no problem:

[Sanders] said the VA provides “very high quality health care, period” and that the shocking scandals surrounding it were traceable to “a concerted effort to undermine the VA” led by the “Koch Brothers and others, who want to radically change the nature of society.” So that’s why the Koches are funding all those hospitals! It’s really a roundabout way of making the VA look bad.

Yes, that’s it.

And how could he miss this guy?

U.S. Rep. David Wu’s behavior grew so erratic in the final weeks before his re-election last November that the Oregon Democrat’s closest political advisers staged two of what some of them termed “interventions” to urge him to seek psychiatric help, WW has learned.

Though I guess he hasn’t been in the news lately.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Makin’ Mock Of Cops

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Some thoughts on unrealistic expectations:

Essentially, the Left places an inhuman burden of patience and tolerance for risk on police officers, then jumps on the inevitable failure to achieve an impossible standard as proof of police corruption and violence. They do the same thing to soldiers in combat conditions, imposing on them restrictions that defy reason and human nature, then decry alleged “abuses” as creating moral equivalence between Americans and their enemies.

…The best way to lower the temperature in a neighborhood — to decrease the chances for the kinds of encounters that result in unarmed civilians dying to police gunfire — is to continue to engage in the law-enforcement and criminal-justice practices that we know can and do dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. And that means focusing on getting violent criminals off the streets. I strongly recommend Kevin Williamson’s piece on this point. Who commits murders? People with prior, violent criminal records. And so long as violent criminals are on the streets, police on those streets — who are properly and naturally more aggressive than civilians — will make exactly the kinds of decisions in the “fog of war” that cause anti-police radicals to chant for their deaths. It’s inevitable.

It’s all part of the Left’s war on human nature.

History, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Weird

The War On Mammals

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…in New Zealand:

I’d come to watch the Adsheads poke at decaying stoats because they are nature lovers. So are most New Zealanders. Indeed, on a per-capita basis, New Zealand may be the most nature-loving nation on the planet. With a population of just four and a half million, the country has some four thousand conservation groups. But theirs is, to borrow E. O. Wilson’s term, a bloody, bloody biophilia. The sort of amateur naturalist who in Oregon or Oklahoma might track butterflies or band birds will, in Otorohanga, poison possums and crush the heads of hedgehogs. As the coördinator of one volunteer group put it to me, “We always say that, for us, conservation is all about killing things.”

It’s a bizarre story.

[Wednesday-morning update]

A number of commenters are wondering why I think this is bizarre. I guess it’s just because the notion of living in a place with no mammals whatsoever (other than humans) seems very weird to me. I understand that they’re not native, but I’ve lived with them all my life, and have trouble imagining their total absence. Would I even be allowed to keep a dog? Or a cat?

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Inherent Violence Of The Left

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It’s no surprise that when you have an ideology that denies human nature, it can only be imposed by threats and force:

…(barely) deniable violence for purposes of intimidation is all part of the scheme. That’s what “no justice, no peace” means. As Richard Fernandez has written: “It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.” That’s why they don’t want you to own guns, and that’s why they’re so panicked at groups, like the Tea Party, that aren’t intimidated.

Yup.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

“Icky” Conservative Groups

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…were targeted by the IRS.

But remember, it’s a “phony” scandal.

[Update a while later]

More from the Tax Prof:

Here are six major takeaways from the report:

  1. The IRS admitted that the front office was “spinning” about the targeting rumors as early as 2012, after IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman denied the tea party targeting to Congress. …
  2. Then-IRS commissioner Steven T. Miller almost broke down and told the truth about the tea party targeting at a July 2012 hearing, but Lerner’s sidekick Nikole Flax told him not to. …
  3. The IRS definitely treated tea party applications by a different standard than applications from other (c)(4) groups. …
  4. Lois Lerner expressed her frustration about having to potentially approve a lot of groups, and her colleagues in the agency assured her that she wouldn’t have to. …
  5. So the IRS reached out to outside advisers to help come up with ways to deny tax-exempt status to “icky” organizations. …
  6. A May 2011 email from a lawyer in the IRS chief counsel’s office made clear that the agency sought to use a new “gift tax” to target donors to nonprofit political groups.

Move along, nothing to see here.

[Afternoon update]

The IRS was “fundamentally transformed” and “totally politicized” by ObamaCare and IRS targeting of Tea Party:

The transformation has produced “an IRS responsive to the partisan policy objectives of the White House and an IRS leadership that coordinates with political appointees of the Obama Administration.”

The inability of tax agency officials “to keep politics out of objective decisions about interpretation of the tax code damaged its primary function: an apolitical tax collector that Americans can trust to treat them fairly.”

“Not only did IRS employees allow politics to seep into their work from February 2010 to May 2012, but even after agency officials learned of misconduct, the response from senior agency officials was to manage the fallout rather than quickly expose and correct the misconduct,” the House investigators said.

And it continues to this day.