Month: September 2019

 

From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Before you spew at the screen and begin typing furiously, bear with me.

As it stands now, the election is going to be a contest with one overriding question: Do you want Trump in for another four years? Regardless how much the Democrats may beat up each other in the primaries, the signs are that the losers will suck it up and campaign vociferously for the nominee. Independents largely seem to despise Trump. Women don’t like him. For minorities, the polls are trending to the point that the margin of error about who doesn’t like Trump will encompass the unborn and the dead.

In sort, all of the other issues, such as climate change or health insurance or immigration or anything else will be shuffled off to the side. Not a lot of people will care about them.

The only way that the GOP can get the issues of the day in the minds of the voters will be to push out Trump. Pence may be a tool, and maybe someone else will be run, but they’ll at least get to fight about other issues. For much as the Democrats then may want yo yell about Trump and what he did, the GOP can say “in the final analysis, we helped get rid of him, so let’s move on.”

Trump has given the GOP a way to do that.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Evangelicals are taught that God speaks to them in a still small voice. In 1 Kings 18, the great Baptist preacher Elijah participated in a God Duel between Jehovah and Baal that was meant to prove once and for all that his God was the one true and living God. After Elijah’s God rained fire down from heaven, proving that he alone was God, Elijah had Baal’s false prophets — liberals, Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Catholics, and the like — slaughtered.

In I Kings 19, we find King Ahab telling Hillary Clinton — also known as Jezebel — “of all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets [of Baal] with the sword.” Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah with this message:

So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time.

In other words, Jezebel told Elijah: I’m coming for you hotshot, and when I find you, I am going to slit your throat from ear to ear. Elijah, being the tough Baptist preacher that he was, stood up to Jezebel and said, Bring it on, bitch. Me and my God will whip your ass, and that will be the end of you! Not really. Baptist preachers are tough guys when surrounded by fawning, adoring crowds on Sundays, but Elijah was all alone, so he did the only thing he could do — run! In fact, Elijah, the greatest Baptist pulpiteer of the ninth century BCE, was so depressed that he pleaded with God to kill him. (1 Kings 19:4) After Elijah had spent 40 days in the wilderness, the Lord — one of the Christian Gods — questioned Elijah’s commitment to the one true faith. Elijah replied:

I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

Poor Elijah.

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From The Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a shakeup that White House insiders said was a long time coming, one of the voices in Rudy Giuliani’s head has resigned.

The resignation, which was officially tendered on Saturday morning, seemed inevitable after the former New York mayor made an appearance on CNN Thursday evening in which two of the voices in his head appeared to be in open warfare with each other.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Start Impeachment Proceedings Now!

Anyone who has been paying attention has to know that Donald Trump has broken the law, and he should be impeached and removed from office. He colluded (conspired) with Russia to subvert the 2016 election, and he committed at least half a dozen acts of obstruction of justice in trying to kill the Mueller investigation. This was all after violating campaign finance law by paying off a woman he had sex with to protect his presidential candidacy.

Any of those things individually is worthy of impeachment. And I have been very disappointed in most Democratic members of the House of Representatives (including Speaker Pelosi) for their refusal to start impeachment proceedings.

I understand why the Republicans defend Trump. They put their party and their own political futures above the Constitution and their country. But Democrats are supposed to be better than that.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

It is still a little amazing to me that Saudi Arabia, whose defense spending is pretty enormous, managed to have half their petroleum capacity imperiled by a drone strike (which was temporary damage) from either the Houthis or Iran (or on behalf of the Houthis by Iran, or the Houthis with Iran’s help–whatever)–because shouldn’t they have more hardened defenses around an obvious target like that, given the length of time they have been engaging on war with Yemen? (Or was reporting on this incident a little magnified?)

I don’t know. I have a hard time understanding why Saudi Arabia is waging genocide in Yemen and why the US has continued being complicit with that, I only know that Trump used a veto to keep sending weapons to Saudi Arabia— and the reaction of Donald Trump, on a day when the talk was all about whether he tried to extort a foreign leader into investigating a potential political rival, was to announce that the US was now going to send US military personnel.

Because the oil was hurt, you guys. Thoughts and prayers for the oil.

I’m just saying that the timing is interesting, is all.

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From Renato Mariotti at POLITICO Magazine:

It’s easy to see why Trump’s alleged conduct has generated outrage and why lay people have rushed to describe it as categorically criminal. Using presidential power to withhold aid to a nation that was recently invaded by Russia unless they investigate your political rival sounds like the definition of a criminal quid pro quo. The possibility that Trump pressured another nation to interfere in the next presidential election on his behalf—not long after the completion of a multi-year investigation into interference in the 2016 election by Russia on his behalf—is jaw-dropping.

But the impulse to label this as a potential crime, as many respected former prosecutors and legal analysts have done, is flawed legally and even strategically. Even if true, this is not a case that would end up in a criminal proceeding even if Trump was no longer in office.

Let’s look at the actual law.

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• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz describes himself as a newly retired optimist who once believed in checks and balances and the capacity of people to do the right thing. Now he still has some theoretical hope of coming out of retirement and becoming an optimist again.
   
• So today’s outrage is Trump’s bullying of Ukraine to get them to smear his, at this point, likely Democratic opponent. Green Eagle goes to a bubbleheaded headline in the Washington Post to illustrate the inherent problem with mainstream campaign coverage.
   
• Tommy Christopher reacts as my President is unable to deny he spoke with the head of Ukraine and demanded an investigation into Biden, insisting It doesn’t matter what I discussed.
   
• News Corpse calls out my President for yet another lie, this one dangerous for his target, as he retweets a message accusing Representative Ilhan Omar of gleefully dancing in celebration of the anniversary of the 9/11 attack. My President includes a video of the celebration, but it turns out the dancing actually occurred on a different day for a different reason. Ilhan Omar was attending a Congressional Black Caucus event on September 13. Fox News covers the whole thing as a clash of different opinions.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger listens as President Trump complains that attacks against him are unfair, and answers with a simple quote from President Obama about attacks against him.
   
• Frances Langum watches Republican conduct during a hearing on Violent White Supremacy, as they recruit a Black conservative, Candace Owens, who explains that the entire issue is no big deal and not worth looking into. Move along, folks. No White Nationalist inspired killings worth watching here.
   
• Scotties Toy Box brings personal, very personal, testimony from victims of unanticipated medical costs. After the fact, people get horrific bills for treatment they had been led to believe was covered.
   
• Beto O’Rourke says we will take your AR-15, and assault weapons enthusiasts react, well, explosively. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged notes the unusually personal commonality of the responses. It’s almost as if they are being asked to amputate an important part of the anatomy, the intense personal nature of which would strike at the core of masculine identity, if you get my circumloquacious drift. This is a family blog, after all.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara repeats the familiar charge that a major climate change crisis is nothing more than propaganda from the collectivist left media. Joining with those damn scientists with their damn measurements. All in on the plot.
   
• Michael John Scott of MadMikesAmerica takes a close look at the blackface controversy engulfing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and suggests the man is being condemned for having fun twenty years ago.
   
• Prime Minister Boris Johnson supposedly lied to Queen Elizabeth in order to get her to dissolve Parliament. Andy Borowitz reports the Queen is preparing for the PM’s next visit to the palace by training the royal dogs to attack.
   
• Two of the most troublesome issues for thoughtful Christians, at least in my experience, are suffering and evil in the world and evil in ourselves. I have never heard, or expressed, a compelling answer to either, beyond evasion. That doesn’t keep me from my beliefs, but I feel some fidelity to truth, including that truth.
   
  In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce takes that first issue, suffering in the world, and argues eloquently against the existence of an all-powerful, beneficent God.
   
  Most of what I have learned about being human came from one individual who angrily rejected the idea of God on exactly that basis. I suppose, had he known, he would have regarded as unforgivably arrogant my private thought that God just may be holding a place of special honor and love for those who reject him out of compassion.
   
• Infidel753 argues against modern Christian reinterpretation of ancient scripture to explain away slavery, genocide, bigotry, and other horrors. The Bible means what it says and religious beliefs that flow from it should be embraced or rejected on that basis.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil goes all Dali with an acerbic headline as his own commentary on Christianity.
   
• Hamilton! finally came to a cramped, rundown theatre in Omaha. Max’s Dad came to hate and to mock in his always-entertaining style of rant. Then he stayed to love and praise in …well… an entertaining rant. I haven’t seen the play, but the review is worth the read.
   
• For what it’s worth, The Journal of Improbable Research found an actual conference on cannibalism at the University of Leeds. The schedule included an hour for lunch. No clarity on whether the irony was conscious.
   

 

From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Look Who’s Squawking

Unknown unknowns: Nothing is known about what promise Trump made, or who he made it to. (There’s so many dictators he could be betraying us to, but I’m wagering Putin, because: why the hell not?)

Known unknowns: Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson deemed the complaint to be “credible” and a matter of “urgent concern.”

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Every time you turn around, it seems that Republicans in Congress are holding another hearing on the supposed censorship of (or bias against) conservatives by big tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter. And lawsuits. Lordy, the “conservatives” who have been known to bemoan what a litigious society America has become will sue at the drop of a tin hat whenever they have a chance to advance their persecution complex and raise a few bucks from their base in the process.

In August, PragerU took Google to court (again) for restricting some of its videos on YouTube, thereby conclusively proving, in Prager’s eyes, “censorship of conservatives”. This is, Dennis Prager assures us with his typical combination of hyperbole and self-aggrandizing theatre, “THE single largest threat against free speech today.” Good grief. And not wishing to pass up an opportunity to outdo himself, he even goes full reductio ad Hitlerum:

I promise you, one day you will say, first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing, And then they came after me—and there was no one left to speak up for me.

Did we mention that one of his videos bemoans that comparisons to Nazis diminish the genuine horror over what actual Nazis did?

The layers of irony and hypocrisy are too thick to slice through with a guillotine. For starters, PragerU has more than 2.2 million subscribers and receives over a billion views a year. And wherever you turn online, it’s constantly popping up in your face — the only reason I became so aware of its extensive reach is that it kept cluttering up my Facebook feed, quite uninvited. This is censorship??? I’ll take a dozen orders of censorship on the side, please.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Trump’s ex-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wouldn’t answer legitimate questions at a hearing. There’s a word for that.

The House Judiciary Committee brought in President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on Tuesday as part of what it’s now calling an impeachment investigation. Indeed, the committee subpoenaed Lewandowski, former White House staff secretary Rob Porter and former White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn to discuss clear evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump in attempting to shut down the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian campaign interference.

Porter and Dearborn didn’t show up after the White House instructed them not to. Lewandowski did, but he refused to answer most questions under White House instructions. In each case, the White House made assertions of executive privilege that went far beyond any interpretation that’s ever been claimed. Or, as Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland put it while questioning Lewandowski, it was a “tooth fairy” privilege that doesn’t actually exist.

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