Quote of the week

Via Sean Collins at Spiked, a great summary of what is going on leading up to the 2024 election:

The first of Donald Trump’s criminal trials kicked off in earnest this week in New York. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felony counts, alleging that he falsified records to cover up a ‘hush money’ payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

It’s an unprecedented case. Never before has a former US president, or a leading candidate for an upcoming presidential election, faced criminal charges. There’s a good reason why America hasn’t had such a case before: seeking to jail your political opponent is generally understood to be something only banana republics do.

It’s also an absurd and unjust case, involving novel legal theories and obvious political intent. No one other than Donald Trump would be subject to such charges.

The Manhattan trial is part of the ‘lawfare’ offensive that is currently being waged by President Joe Biden and the Democrats against Trump. It is one of four criminal cases that Trump faces. He also has two federal cases, related to his handling of classified documents and to the ‘January 6’ riots, and one in Georgia, alleging that he subverted the 2020 election. These other cases are delayed, so the Manhattan case may be the only one to be tried before the November presidential election. Democrats have even tried to knock Trump off the ballot in multiple states, an anti-democratic scheme that was stymied by the Supreme Court last month.

Quote of the Week

Rich Lowry writes in the New York Post, on the Left's blaming the Constitution for SCOTUS Justice Kavanaugh:

It’s certainly true that the Senate is not fully democratic and gives an outsized role to small states, since this was the price they exacted for signing on to the Constitution. This arrangement isn’t a conspiracy against the left.

The Constitution is doing what it was designed to do, prevent majority tyranny. The structure of the senate is one of the checks built into the Constitution to prevent.  It's not minority tyranny, it's minority protection, plain and simple. Not only was it a compromise designed to sew the country together, it was brilliant and needed idea to prevent mob rule.

Lowry continues:

The design of the Senate recognizes the status of the states as real governing entities with their own prerogatives under the Constitution. Like the equally hated Electoral College, the Senate ensures that flyover country isn’t ignored. It reflects the dizzying geographic diversity of a continental nation and promotes national cohesion by giving every corner of it a voice.

The Senate is also meant to be a check on the unbridled public will. Its members are elected in staggered six-year terms and, originally, they were selected by state legislatures, not in a direct vote.

The House is the more democratic body. California has 53 representatives; Wyoming has one. Yet, Democrats don’t control the House, either.

These are things leftists are willing to overlook in their greed for power. Lowry sets them straight on why they are wrong again.

Pat Bucahnan nails Trump's comments on Germany

Here I was naively expecting a great quote from the Strzok hearings at Congress which turned out to be a shout-fest and a for the most part a missed opportunity for the Republicans (save a few worthy moments, especially from Trey Gowdy). But this quote from Pat Buchanan has to be the quote of the week as it sums up perfectly the reason president Trump unloaded on a freeloading Germany this week.

The president unapologetically dressed-down German leadership for it's shameless self-serving deal with Russia.

The media was apoplectic; You can't say things like that!

First, here's the set-up of the circumstances leading up to the dressing-down. Germany spends considerably less than the NATO mandated 2% of GDP on defense.  And while NATO was created as a common defense against the former Soviet Union, Germany has reached a self-serving deal to get more cheap natural gas from Russia, which is fine in a vacuum if Russia were not a bad actor on the world stage and Germany wasn't defaulting on it's NATO obligation and indeed putting it's own security at risk. And, as Buchanan puts it:

Germany spends 1.2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, while the U.S. spends 3.5 percent. Why? Why -- nearly three decades after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the crackup of the Soviet Union and the overthrow of the Communist dictatorship in Moscow -- are we still defending European nations that collectively have 10 times the GDP of Vladimir Putin's Russia?

Indeed, "Why?" Buchanan has nailed it.  It's not just Germany undercutting it's NATO partners in a self-serving way, it is doing so for it's own financial wealth when Germany is far richer than Russia and far richer than Germany was at the formation of NATO. The president was right.  Pat Buchanan is right. Done.

Quote of the Week

At Gateway Pundit, Wayne Allyn Root encapsulates the notion of putting your own house in order first as it applies to immigration, in one and a half succinct paragraphs:

Why on earth would we allow the world’s poor, unskilled, desperate and dependent masses to come into our country, while we’re $20 trillion in debt? Those days are over. It’s time to be picky and choosy.

We don’t have enough jobs for middle class Americans. We don’t have enough money for poor Americans. We have no obligation or need to let in more people who desperately need to use up our resources and our hard-earned taxpayer money. It’s time for “America First.” It’s time for extreme vetting. It’s time to cut off “Visa lotteries.” It’s time to let in skilled craftsman from Norway, and business owners from China, and doctors from Israel.

It's hard to argue against that logic.  The notion of putting your own house in order usually applies to criticizing others when your own affairs are a mess.  In this case it's more about getting things working properly before inviting or allowing more people inside. But the fact remains, America needs fixing and that has to be a priority.

When you fly on an airline, they instruct parents that in the event of an emergency they are to put their own oxygen masks on first before helping their children.  It's the same principle. And no, it's not a paternalistic condescending analogy, it's just an analogy - you have to be able to function properly before you can help anyone else. 

It's just common sense.

Anti-Quote of the Week - Morrissey

As soon as I see a good quote from an iconic singer, I immediately notice that Ed Morrissey points out that Morrissey isn't all smiles and sunshine for conservatives.

The British singer Morrissey defended both Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein in an interview this weekend, claiming their alleged victims knew “exactly” what was going on — and chose to “play along.”

“Afterward, they feel embarrassed, or they do not like it,” Morrissey said while speaking to the German news outlet Der Spiegel.

“And then they turn it around and say: I was attacked, I was surprised, I was dragged into the room.” …

“People know exactly what’s going on,” Morrissey reportedly said after being asked about the movie producer. “And they play along…But if everything went well, and if it had given them a great career, they would not talk about it.”

Oof. Sexual harassment  is never good. Apologizing for it is not good either.  That said, if someone is proclaiming their innocence like Roy Moore is in Alabama for example, they deserve the benefit of the doubt; innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  If guilt is established we are into new territory.  

Morrissey seems to be taking a different tack though  he seems to be defining the incidents as consensual, which is difficult to justify when you are dealing with someone who was 14 at the time.

Quote of the week - Morrissey

The week is still young but this is powerful enough to stand for another 5 days.  Former front man of iconic 80's band The Smiths, as well as solo performer Morrissey had this to say in his calling out German Chancellor Angel Merkel on her immigration policies:

“If you try to make everything multicultural, you will not have any culture in the end.

He goes on to say:

“All European countries have fought for their identity for many, many years.

“And now they just throw it away. I think that’s sad.”

You can read more here.

Quote of the week

Honors go to James Heilman (@jkheilman) retweeted by Allahpundit at Hot Air for this buried treasure:

The great irony is if people like Olbermann hadn’t been so over the top about GWB, McCain and Romney, Trump probably would not have happened https://t.co/c7VpIS5Bl2

— James Heilman (@jkheilman) November 3, 2017

That is bang on. Over-the-topism comes with it's own set of pitfalls. Choke on it progressives. Or should I say, continue to choke on it.

Quote of the week - runner up

CNN is busy covering up Antifa violence*

Another great take on the recent Antifa vs. neo-Nazi brouhaha comes from American Greatness, and Robert Kimball's take is equally brilliant;

Trump was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-nazis, “white supremacists,” and Ku Kluxers, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers, on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis—the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s—are scary. But American “neo-nazis”? They are tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a murderous Democratic terrorist group in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch (the Anti-Defamation League says it has 5,000-8,000 members) of impotent malcontents.

Antifa has brought its racialist brand of violent protest to campuses and demonstrations around the country: smashing heads as well as property. I suspect that paid-up, full-time members of the group are few, but the ideology of identity politics that they feed upon is a gruesome specialité de la maison of the higher education establishment today.

I also thought that Trump was right to ask where the erasure of history would end. This week it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. But why stop there? Why not pronounce a damnatio memoriae on the entire history of the Confederacy? There are apparently some 1,500 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States. Some of them were erected during the Jim Crow era, something else that was brought to you courtesy of the Democratic Party.

A few quick points - Nazis are socialists, not capitalists. All of the original African American congressmen after reconstruction were Republicans. Maybe we should ask the conniving Democrats if they'd rather erect statues to those men. I can guess what their answer would be.

*Via Daily Wire

Quote of the week

FYI - American government was designed to prevent mob rule.

Wall Street Journal writer Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. nails it with this quote;

Well, that was a bit embarrassing. Antifascist liberals mounted thousand-strong counter-rallies all weekend against a Nazi threat that proved nonexistent or thin on the ground. Leftists imagined themselves to be modern-day versions of the Czech resistance or the Warsaw uprising, but it turns out they were the majoritarian mob shouting down a handful of losers who’ve been an execrable but small part of the American pageant for as long as most of us can remember.

We don’t know what speakers at Saturday’s “free speech” rally in Boston might have said. It was organized, according to the local papers, by libertarians protesting campus speech codes, though they opened their platform to anybody, left and right. The meeting ended early; the speakers were all drowned out. Nazis and white supremacists, if any were present, were shown to be vastly outnumbered by Americans who reject such doctrines.

To state another obvious point, our civil liberties are meaningless if they don’t protect unpopular views. It’s not the mob but the mob’s targets that need protection.

...More relevant is the principle that large mobs are more dangerous than small mobs, and likely to harbor more psychopaths. Apparently running out of Nazis to resist, Boston protesters threw rocks and urine-filled bottles at police.

Self-reflection is in order on the left.  So too on the right, where there appears to be a disconnect between voters and Republicans they have elected.  But that's another story.

The American system of government was designed to prevent oppression - from government and mob rule (or majority tyranny).  The leftist progressives made their names protecting the downtrodden. Now that they are the establishment, and they believe they are the real majority, they like the idea of majority tyranny.  From the notion of removing the electoral college to the daily browbeating of the president and his supporters by the mainstream media  they are demanding the acquiescence of the American people. If you support that, you are supporting tyranny, plain and simple. 

Quote of the week

I'm going to go ahead and give the Quote of the Week to Robert Tracinski at The Federalist, even though the week has basically just started.

NPR, for example, accused Pruitt of questioning “basic facts about climate change.” But the problem with global warming alarmists getting on their science high horse is that they don’t really know the science all that well, or how to talk about it.

For example, NPR goes on to say: “The view that CO2 is a major heat-trapping gas is supported by reams of data, including data collected by government agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” Er, which data would that be? Carbon dioxide is certainly known to be a greenhouse gas, but nobody needed NASA or NOAA to tell them that. (More on this in a moment.) Presumably NPR thinks there is data which shows that carbon dioxide is primarily responsible for recent increases in global temperatures. But “data” can’t show that. Any assertion of cause and effect in a complex system like the climate, where there are hundreds of competing variables, is someone’s interpretation of the data.

So true.  The progressive left  take a fact, skip over any links and leap straight to a conclusion - the conclusion they want.  By glossing over the middle part they hope you'll be dazzled by the conclusion and just agree with their wizardry.

I urge you to read the entire article.  It's a sobering read for those imbued with the gospel of Global Warming alarmism and for the rest of us, a smart argument to echo.

Quote of the Week

Sen. Bob Kerrey, Democrat, on the partisan nature of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report that kneecaps the CIA and does not serve America:

I do not need to read the report to know that the Democratic staff alone wrote it. The Republicans checked out early when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it....

The worse consequence of a partisan report can be seen in this disturbing fact: It contains no recommendations. This is perhaps the most significant missed opportunity, because no one would claim the program was perfect or without its problems. But equally, no one with real experience would claim it was the completely ineffective and superfluous effort this report alleges.

A few Democrats seem to have come down with a case of candor.