Category: partisanship

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ideological culture partisanship

Biden’s Belief in a MAGA Republican Bloodbath

Joe Biden, propaganda, violence, threats, transfer of power, dictator, hysteria

Over the weekend, I was surprised to find Joseph R. Biden — our semi-retired, caretaker president of these United States — on CBS Sunday Morning, for his first sit-down TV interview since leaving the presidential contest.

Mr. Biden warned that former President Trump constitutes the greatest evil in the solar system, calling this “threat to democracy” an “ally” of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The most important thing . . . we must defeat Trump,” explained Biden. That’s why he let Nancy Pelosi and former President Obama (and insistent Democratic Party mega-donors) push him out of the race. 

To save the Republic . . . by not losing to Donald Trump. 

Asked if he was confident of a peaceful transfer of power should Trump be defeated, Joe said, “No, I’m not confident.”*

“He means what he says,” our nominal president offered about Mr. Trump. “All this stuff about if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, we have these stolen elections.”

Of course, “all the stuff about” Trump threatening a “bloodbath” has been conjured up in the noggin of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief. 

Trump made the “bloodbath” comment at a rally in Michigan. Speaking about the U.S. auto industry, he told the crowd that we had lost “34 percent of the automobile manufacturing business” to Mexico and promised to slap a 100 percent tariff on cars built by China in Mexico — to enthusiastic audience applause. 

“If I get elected,” conditioned Trump. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it — it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

It’s all on tape.We can decide for ourselves whether it was a threat of post-election violence or straight talk about the car business.

And, too, what it says that such dishonesty is welcome at the highest levels of government. And media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* All this talk about the transfer of power ignores a critical element: It will be Biden leaving office and either handing the keys to Kamala Harris, should she defeat Trump, or handing them to Trump, should he win. In this latter instance, I don’t see any quarrel coming from Trump. In the former, even the evilest version of Trump would still need an army to intervene.

Note: We can’t be too surprised, however, as four years ago Biden made a similar purposely “malevolent misinterpretation” of Trump’s comments about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia (Biden’s Big Lie).

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crime and punishment partisanship

Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

Tulsi Gabbard, surveillance

Former Democratic congresswoman and anti-warmonger gadfly Tulsi Gabbard is no terrorist. Yet, the government is treating her like one.

Last November, UncoverDC related the testimony of retired Air Marshal Sonya LaBosco, now executive director of the Air Marshal National Council, which works on behalf of Air Marshals.

LaBosco says that instead of tracking genuine threats, the TSA surveillance programs like Quiet Skies are focusing on political targets, such as those who entered the capitol (or just the capital) on January 6, 2021.

Air marshals are also being diverted to the southern border to perform mission-unrelated tasks like dispensing water.

LaBosco says she’s been getting nowhere with requests for explanations from Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas and others with oversight of the surveillance programs. Shocker.

Now UncoverDC reports that according to an Air Marshal whistleblower, Tulsi Gabbard has been added to the Quiet Skies program, created to “protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists.”

Listing Gabbard, who is now accompanied by Air Marshals and other TSA personnel when she flies, certainly appears politically motivated. Marshals “were first assigned to Gabbard on July 23, a day after she criticized Kamala Harris, Biden, and the National Security State in an interview with Laura Ingraham.”

Such targeting of critics is very disturbing. Thanks to UncoverDC’s reporting and LaBosco’s testimony, it does not seem as implausible as it might have been a few years ago. Years of similar opposition-targeting conduct by the Biden administration have helped us accept it, too.

Discussing the surveillance, Gabbard says: “No American deserves to live in fear of our own government.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

Unburdened by the Leftism

Kamala Harris, commie, communist, left, progressive

Democrats have effectively sidelined the biggest story of this election year — the assassination attempt upon the candidate the party has sought to destroy since 2015 — with a brazen switcheroo-coup from presidential candidate Sleepy Joe to the once-widely disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was all done unceremoniously and undemocratically in a breathtakingly daring backroom duress deal, detailed by Seymour Hersh.

Also itemized last week? The cover-up of Kamala Harris’s record. In “Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history,” Jim Bovard informs New York Post readers about the media’s memory-holing. 

“In 2019, GovTrack labeled Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator — further to the left than even Bernie Sanders — but this month deleted the webpage that said so,” explains Mr. Bovard.

So, what’s to the left of a “democratic socialist”?

Maybe the Vice President was channeling her father, a Post Keynesian (far, far left if not exactly Marxist) economist, when she pushed the progressives’ beloved “equity” theory of equality, which she explicitly construed as equality of outcomes. 

If you wonder how far to the left she has gone, consider her work to help BLM-associated rioters. “In 2020, as looters and arsonists ravaged Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, then-Sen. Harris urged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund ‘to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’” 

Bovard says this appeal “effectively exonerated anyone committing violence or other crimes, portraying them as worthy of speedy release from jail — but the bail fund paid to release rapists and child molesters and future murderers, not just looters.”

Now, fittingly, Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the man who in 2020 “allowed rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis.”

Would a Democratic president want to burn down half of America?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship

Repeal Obamacare

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, MAGA, socialism, debt, lizard

Oy vey! Given the alternative of Donald Trump on the one hand and — now that Biden has bailed — a bad-as-Biden Biden-substitute on the other, Americans must re-level their look at the lesser of two evils.

It may be difficult to resist hoping that Trump gets elected this November to allow many of the Democrats’ worst initiatives be left to die on a withering vine. (Examples of the worst: Congress-bypassing regulations designed to penalize production of gas-powered cars and outlaw certain freelance or contract work.)

Still, the candidate and his party have many flaws.

We cannot forget that. Indeed, with their abandonment of the tiniest desire to reduce the size of the federal leviathan, remembrance should be easy. 

Shrink government? Radically reduce spending? Reduce debt? No such goal was seriously pursued in the first Trump administration, and no such goal is mentioned in the twenty-point Trump-Republican Party platform.

There’s talk of tax cuts, ending inflation (somehow), diverting spending from Democratic projects. Sure. But the platform insists that Social Security and Medicare programs not be modified in any way. 

In any way!

And about Obamacare — the biggest expansion of the medical state in recent years, which Republicans had once pledged to repeal — the platform is mute.

The 2016 platform said that improving healthcare “must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare,” a declaration retained in 2020. Now it’s gone. Republicans seem to have succumbed to the strategy of turning Obamacare into yet another supposedly unassailable, supposedly inextirpable entitlement program.

Unfortunately, you don’t recover or expand liberty by accepting every expansion of serfdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies partisanship

The Governor Who Parodied Himself

Political campaigns are hard. Presidential campaigns in which your Selected Candidate is mediocre at best are harder. So wouldn’t it be good to be able to outlaw all things that highlight this mediocrity?

Things like, say, effective parody?

This seems to be the thinking — I hope I’m channeling it accurately — of the governor of California, unhappy with a popular video available at the Mr Reagan YouTube channel.

The video’s maker may have thought he was covering every base by calling it a parody in the very title, an indignity of self-labeling that Jonathan Swift would never have permitted. People consuming Swift’s satire were left to figure out for themselves that when he proposed that the children of poor people be eaten to render them “beneficial to the publick,” he was engaging in satire.

In contrast, the Kamela Harris campaign ad parody in question is called “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Parody.” Clear. Unmistakable. 

Like the content.

Still, this video has not escaped the agenda of would-be censors like Governor Gavin Newsom. The parody uses a “deepfake” AI-generated voice that sounds like Harris. It’s even got the Harris Cackle. So Newsom wants to outlaw it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he says. (Why?) “I’ll be signing a bill . . . to make sure it is.”

But as Reclaim the Net points out, California has already outlawed certain uses of deepfake media. 

These forbidden uses do not, however, include parody, which is constitutionally protected speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access election law insider corruption partisanship

Degrading Democracy, CNN-Style

watchdog, guard dog, media, press, newspapers

Everyone’s talking about last month’s CNN debate. We can’t unsee President Biden’s performance.

But something else did go unseen: candidates independent of the two dominant parties — specifically, RFK, Jr.

“CNN RULES WOULD HAVE BARRED EVERY INDEPENDENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR LAST 112 YEARS,” read this month’s Ballot Access News (BAN) cover story.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Self-deputized to supposedly defend “democracy,” CNN sponsored the recent presidential debate using criteria pointedly designed to shut out independent voices — even those polling double digits.

The main culprit was their mandate that “the candidate must [be] certified for the ballot in states with at least 270 electoral votes, by June 20.”

That doesn’t make any sense given the calendar for ballot qualification. As BAN relates, “The rule about being on the ballot was probably written by individuals who had no knowledge of the typical time-line for presidential candidates running as independents, or nominees of new parties.”

Plus, “the rule” was applied with a double standard — one for Republicans and Democrats and another for other parties and independents.

“They require certainty for the independent candidate to show ballot placement,” notes BAN, “but they only require probability for the Democratic and Republican invitees.”

Once upon a time major news outlets were seen as playing a vital watchdog role, as referees, politically. Today, CNN and its ilk require their own umpires, a whole new set of watchdogs.

We are it — all of us on X, Facebook, podcasts and the blogosphere — we are those watchdogs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Threshold Crossed

Donald Trump, indictments, convictions, law, court, judge

We’ve seen many sad days for our republic. But now the country has crossed a certain horrible threshold of banana-republic-hood.

Guided by a corrupt judge, a New York City jury has found former President Trump guilty of all 34 of the District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s bogus charges. Something or other to do with Stormy Daniels, an alleged affair, paying off an extortionist, federal election laws, and bookkeeping.

With Trump targeted by so many show trials launched solely to punish his ascendancy and prevent his reelection, chances were that at least one of these elephantine efforts would extract a conviction. Even people lousy at darts hit the dartboard sooner or later if they throw a thousand darts.

As Katie Pavlich notes, during the trial prosecutors didn’t “focus on proving the fraud charges” but on “hush-money payments” and “irrelevant salacious details of an alleged affair.” Who needs a definable crime when Being Trump is crime enough?

The verdict made one reader at Instapundit “realize just how dependent the Democrats have become on appearing legitimate. Where there is no substance, form must take precedence. [So we’re] offered oppression as ‘democracy’ and Stalinist show trials as ‘justice.’”

There are so many irregularities in the charges and the conduct of the trial that the verdict is bound to be overturned on appeal.

By some court. Somewhere. No?

But the damage has been done. The worst politicos and operators are now high-fiving each other, little caring about implications and long-range effects. As if they cannot see the next step. 

As if they cannot see they are behaving like the caciques of a banana dictatorship.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture partisanship

Krauthammer’s Law

2 Americas, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, progressives, stupid, evil

It seemed like wisdom in 2002: “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” The late Charles Krauthammer expounded this “law” in a column entitled “The central axiom of partisan politics.” 

I am no longer sure this was ever correct, and am confident it doesn’t apply to American politics now.

First off, the enemy of conservatives may have been “liberals” 150 years ago. But not now. The proper word is “progressive,” not “liberal,” and to those who follow the to and fro of substantive policies, the most classically liberal people right now are conservatives.

And “conservatives” is not the right word, either, is it? Progressives hate hate hate the dominant strain in the Republican Party, the Trumpians. Well, Trump isn’t now, nor has he ever been, a “conservative,” though some of his actions during his term in office, were more conservative than any other Republican president of our time. What Trump and his followers now oppose is the “insider-ism” of big government, with Democrats constituting the dominant force of the administrative state and, yes, the Deep State. That is the nature of Republican populism.

Another problem with Krauthammer’s Law is that progressives have always looked upon conservatives and decentralist populists in the dread Republican Party as both evil and stupid.

But it’s worse: both sides, today, look upon the other as both stupid and evil. 

The real question then, to anyone who ideologically distances himself from leaders on both sides, is to discern whether both sides are right about each other.

And, it follows, wrong about themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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So Low

Fareed, Trump

“I have to admit: none of this is playing out like I thought it would,” Fareed Zakaria told viewers of his CNN program last weekend.

“Trump is now leading in almost all the swing states,” Zakaria noted, adding that he is “someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term.”

The host’s opening monologue on Fareed Zakaria: GPS went on, complaining that, “The trials against [Trump] keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base — who see him as a martyr and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe that his prosecutors are politically motivated.”

Leave it to the Democrats to turn Mr. Trump into a sympathetic figure . . . with Zakaria then agreeing that these prosecutions are politically motivated.

“This happens to be true, in my opinion. I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.”

And Fareed is not alone, even at CNN, where Elie Honig also acknowledged that, had the prosecution been brought in a less rabidly Democrat area than New York City, “there’s no chance of a conviction.”

No statement is more compelling in a court of law than what is known as a statement against interest, the admission of facts that do not serve the person so conceding or that person’s side. That’s what we now witness . . . as even CNN commentators recognize that the former president is being politically railroaded.

No one is above the law. That phrase loses some punch, however, when “the law” sinks so low.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pander, Please

Washington Post, ethics, Democratic Party

The newspaper of record in our nation’s capital urges its much-preferred political party to “trim your principles, Democrats, and pander away.”

This is a very different media watchdog role, where instead of calling out bad behavior, The Washington Post calls for it.

Sure, some of President Biden’s policies “clearly pander to core constituencies,” acknowledges the editorial board, adding: “The problem is that some of these policies are quite bad — even dangerous.”

For the record, the editors explain that they much prefer “the kind of pandering that is less obviously dangerous but still violates common sense and principle.”

Well, on a ranking basis . . . but isn’t this all too rank? 

Proselytizing for a lack of principle, the Post posits that these “means” of pandering to voters — i.e. buying their votes — are fully justified by “the end” of winning the election against former President Donald Trump.

“The only thing worse than” Democracy [Dying] in Darkness (per the paper’s masthead) is, the editorial board concludes, “losing.”

So, go ahead and delay again the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on menthol cigarettes, which, if implemented, would undoubtedly cost Mr. Biden the votes of many black men who make up the majority of that product’s customer base. Even though it is simply a trick of timing — for after the election, the Biden boys will be back to snuff out menthols. 

Come’on, man! Who needs honesty, accountability, or fair media coverage when there’s an election to win?

Surprisingly, The New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn argues the paper should not become an “instrument of the Biden campaign,” not “stop covering those things” such as immigration and inflation “because they’re favorable to Trump,” and not “turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”

He’s not wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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