Noted presidential historian Michael Beschloss has an alarmist prediction to make
First, a little background on Beschloss. Nine books on the presidency. Graduate of Phillips Andover, Williams, and Harvard. He’s not a product of today’s “woke” education, either: he’s 66 years old. And yet this is the same man who said this right at the beginning of the Obama administration:
Another man entranced by Obama’s pants crease?
Fast forward to Beschloss speaking yesterday on MSNBC:
“[S]ix nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country. There’s signs that may happen, may God forbid, that losers will be declared winners by fraudulent election officers, or secretary of state candidates, or governors, or state legislatures…
Another pre-emptive “election denier”? Beschloss is on the left, not the right, and he seems to be saying a version of “if Republicans win it’s because they commit fraud.” And this, despite the polls showing the GOP candidates ahead.
Next:
We could be six days away from losing our rule of law, and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on. You know, those are the foundation stones of a democracy.
How many people already don’t think elections can be relied on? And many of them are Democrats. I would say, from his remarks, that Beschloss is indicating that he doesn’t think elections can be relied on – that is, unless the Democrats win despite the polls saying otherwise.
Then:
Joe Biden is saying the same thing tonight, and a historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.
As Mary Chastain writes at Legal Insurrection:
I’m shocked he didn’t say the GOP will also eat them as the parents watch. Or go all Titus Andronicus and feed the kids in a pie to their parents.
Presidential historian. This is the sort of person who writes the histories so far. Some are saying he’s gone mad, but I don’t see him as deranged at all. I see attitudes such as his quite often in people who otherwise seem quite sane, a huge pocket of over-the-top terror at the prospect of the GOP taking power, which seems to be based on nothing more than years and years and years of listening to lies and inflammatory rhetoric from the left, and believing it. I think Beschloss is actually afraid and is afraid that enough Americans don’t share his fear.
But there’s more to it than that with Beschloss. I became curious about his background, and I found this article from 2012, about his father Morris Beschloss (who appears to still be alive ten years later; at any rate, I can’t find an obituary for him):
Morris Beschloss, a longtime resident of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, is a conservative economic and political expert who at 82 writes a regular column for the Desert Sun newspaper, blogs on the paper’s website, and hosts his own television show, The World Report, on the Time Warner network.
In 1939, at the age of 9, Beschloss, a German Jew, escaped Nazi Germany with his mother and older brother. His grandmother refused to leave, and several years later she became one of the six million Jews murdered at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Morrie, as friends call him, spoke to me about his only son, Michael Beschloss. He is the Harvard educated, NBC News Presidential Historian. As the Presidential Historian, the younger Beschloss holds himself out as an unbiased, apolitical analyst of all things Presidential. Long ago, a political wedge was driven between the two, with Michael Beschloss strongly objecting to his father’s conservative politics.
Another family rift over politics.
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with Beschloss the younger, this is what his father said in 2012:
“Once you’re in bed with the devil, you begin to spout the devil’s bullshit,” he explained, when referring to what he calls NBC’s overtly liberal bias.
It seems about as good an explanation as any. But there’s more there from Morris Beschloss on his son’s wife and her leftist affiliations, as well as George Soros, whom he detests and in 2012 labeled “the most dangerous man in America.”
Michael Beschloss’ wife is Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss, whose parents were refugees from the ayatollahs of Iran after the revolution there. My guess is that she has a similar beef with her parents as her husband has with his own father. The first generation has one experience and the second another, and experience is non-transferable.
I hear another historian, Jon Meacham, helped write Biden’s Wednesday night speech, in which he claimed again that we will lose “our democracy” if Republicans win elections. That comment from the senior Bechloss about “spouting the devil’s [false rhetoric]” is right on target.
(I didn’t know if your software would let me quote exactly without going to spam purgatory.)
I neither realized he was MOT not that he was a traitor
Old Morrie got it right when he said, “Once you’re in bed with the devil, you begin to spout the devil’s bullshit.”
Another analogy would be a bacteria/virus that permanently afflicts the brain.
Kate:
I have a draft post about Meacham, too. Never quite finished it, so I never published it. Maybe I’ll do that.
On top of the fact that this election people are paying attention to drop boxes and all sorts of democrat plays. This could be a blood bath. They’ll still win Illinois and California.
and thank you Liz Cheney. The gift that keeps on giving.
Nothing to do with either, but what the heck
Tommy Bolin….guitarist/singer… enjoy……and RIP
https://youtu.be/g6NQNTSUPmM
What sane person would want to live in a democracy, representative republics have democracies beat twelve ways to Sunday, as the saying goes.
Still, for a mind that works along flawed lines, and believes you will be in charge of the mob, I guess Mob Rule would have it’s attractions.
Bechloss appears to have confused Obama with Marilyn Mach vos Savant.
Jumps the shark, Micheal B., and the other one too, speech writer for Emporer Brandon. The tandem water ski team.
It’s one thing to say such nonsense as MB does. Is it insulting to presume he actually believes it? Would that be more insulting than accusing him of lying?
The presumption of what happens after the republicans win in 2022 is so far out that a rational person can only presume MB is lying to fire up the lefty nutcases, possibly to do the violence themselves which can then be blamed on the right. See Hobbs’ office, which, conveniently, follows this article.
Richard Aubrey:
I think he believes it. I think he thinks the right are white-supremacist Nazis and they will set up death camps or killing fields or both.
Yeah, I also think these people believe this stuff. The leftist media have been repeating the “white supremacist Nazi” garbage for so many years that they think it’s actually true. Without evidence, as they like to say.
Few weeks ago finished Koba the Dread and Laughter of 20 Million, you know who did murder, imprisonment and Gulag children by the thousands?
Stalinists.
Another point in the book was charges put on some high position now turned in to be murdered was Stalin read the charges and commented it was all bullshit so take out a lot of them, he didn’t believe the rhetoric that he himself used.
My two cents: 1) Beschloss is projecting– i.e., stating what he’d like to do to us deplorables if he had the power; 2) his alarmism stems from the same anxiety that underlies Emily Oster’s plea for a “COVID amnesty.” These folks are afraid of being on the receiving end of the authority they wielded so irresponsibly since 2020.
FWIW, beschloss is the past tense of the German verb beschließen, which means “to resolve, to decide, to end, to finish off.” He does seem to have finished off whatever capacity he once may have had for rational thought.
I think there may have been a few presidents who were smarter than Obama. I’m not sure Obama was smarter than James Abram Garfield, who taught Latin and Greek and mathematics, and published an original proof of the theorem of Pythagoras. Our only ambidextrous president, it was said that you could ask him a question in English and he could simultaneously write the answer in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other, though that may have been a tall tale. Jefferson and Lincoln may also have been smarter than Obama. And a few dozen others.
boot55555 on November 3, 2022 at 4:19 pm said:
Nothing to do with either, but what the heck
Tommy Bolin….guitarist/singer… enjoy……and RIP
https://youtu.be/g6NQNTSUPmM
______________________________________________________
boot55555:
Whatever the lack of reason, I’m always happy to find someone linking to a Tommy Bolin song. One of the best guitarists of his generation, he died too soon from drugs and hedonism.
I didn’t know him at all, but I went to high school with Tommy Bolin, so my bias is longstanding. Is that a conservative defense?
It is pretty apparent that when they lose (the races they can’t mail in the marine of victory) they will unleash antifa and all the rest. This will make the Sumer of George Floyd truly look “mostly peaceful.”
bof– Can you imagine what would have happened if Obama had been the commander in charge of Operation Overlord instead of Eisenhower?
PA Cat, as to your #2, I think the Dems are really worried about Republican investigations of their behavior. I don’t, personally, think Congressional investigations amount to a hill of beans, though, with the “Justice” Department under corrupt Democrat control. But if enough information hits the legacy media, it might be enough to ensure a Republican win in 2024, and then things might get interesting.
Lot of public intellectuals are prostitutes, and they’re not found on only one side of the aisle, unfortunately…
Kate (5:18 pm) suggests that “if enough information hits the legacy media, it might be enough to ensure a Republican win in 2024, and then things might get interesting.”
If only it might, through the grace of God, come to pass. But I seriously question — not how much, but how little — of this information will ever meander its way into the legacy media. (I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.)
IQ is a tool, not a proof of the result of IQ. Just as democracy is a process whose resulting government is only legitimate if it secures the unalienable rights of man.
I don’t think we’re giving sufficient credit to the cynical depravity that progressives aspire to. Election denial of the 2020 election by conservatives is still going pretty strong. Strong emotions are a valuable lever in the campaign rhetorical arsenal – when people are stirred up, they do useful things. So: Election denial it will be!
Who cares if the claims were well-founded in 2020 (and we should know!)? The polls are terrible and we need a new distraction to explain them. Foundational stories are a minor detail the team will supply at the proper time. Now’s the time for laying the ground work with the old fear-mongering booga-booga!
Heh: Beschloss has been on the receiving end of a number of brickbats today:
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, reacted to the unhinged rant by deadpanning on Twitter, “so much for gas prices.” “The choice is now voting Democratic or lining up your children in front of a firing squad…,” Turley added on social media.
”Michael Beschloss needs to consider decaf!,” posted Rebecca Henry Hatton.
“Michael BeschLOSS,” said Tommie Huang on Twitter.
“From ‘historian’ to hack in 1 easy lesson. What a fraud!,” said Top O’ Mind.
“This rhetoric is so far over the line I’m just glad nobody’s putting him on cable tv wait what,” wrote Washington Examiner magazine executive editor Seth Mandel.
“Really curious what these guys will say in a week after the world doesn’t fall apart. How many times can you scream wolf before even MSNBC viewers stop paying attention?” asked pseudonymous Twitter critic A.G. Hamilton, who took issue with Beschloss’ apocalyptic rhetoric in the wake of attacks on Paul Pelosi and New Hampshire GOP Senate candidate Don Bolduc. . . .
Beschloss had no response to the outrage on Twitter, spending much of Thursday posting pictures of past presidents voting in elections.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/03/historian-beschloss-blasted-on-twitter-for-comments-about-biden-maga-speech/
The left institutes a racial spoils systems, then declares questions as to whether someone benefits because of the racial spoils system impermissible. They eliminate the lone voter casting a secret ballot in the privacy of voting booth after showing ID and proving citizenship, then declare questions about the accuracy of declared election outcomes impermissible.
Anyone remember that, during the 2016 campaign, gays said Trump would put them in “concentration camps”?
The fact that nothing like that ever happened doesn’t do anything to pierce the communists’ “faith.” This is a religion to them. Facts simply do not matter.
Remember: Three days ago, being an election denier was bad. Today, thanks to NBC and MB, [preemptive] election denying is good. Again, facts in no way matter.
James A Garfield was certainly very intelligent. So was John Q Adams, who routinely read texts in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and was an astronomer and mathematician of some note.
Peter Zeihan had a good video just this morning in which he posited that Obama was the third most intelligent US presidents after Jefferson then Clinton. At the same time he is high on Obama, he says Obama was a poor manager, which is what we need in a president, because he didn’t like to work with others, including his cabinet, the US Congress, or foreign leaders. Good analysis and I recommend it. No paywall.
In a previous video, Zeihan claimed G W Bush started out with an outstanding team, but did a poor job of steering them. Then 9/11 distracted him and the rest of his administration was a big nothing. Sounds about right. If I knew how to. post links I would link to today’s video, but I am technologically challenged.
Glenn Reynolds comments, “So basically MSNBC is now Infowars with a smaller audience.”
https://instapundit.com/552011/
People like Beschloss used to believe in things. They used to have principles. Or at least they used to tell themselves they did. As they’ve gotten older, however, all those pretensions have fallen away and all that’s left is the unshakeable fixation that THEY ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS.
How can Joe Rogan and his comedian buddies, who are all liberal, discuss Donald Trump more calmly and rationally than people like Beschloss. Because Rogan and his friends don’t have their egos involved. Trump’s success at politics means nothing to them, but it means the world to Beschloss and company.
Imagine you have some expertise you believe elevates you above the common rabble. Then imagine someone you consider an intellectual inferior comes along and proves he has greater expertise than you. That’s what Trump did to our political class and its hangers-on when he won the White House.
Mike
Neo to Richard Aubrey:
In my opinion, that’s a fair supposition. If so, it is rather ironic considering that his father, a decided conservative, fled Nazi Germany with his parents when he was a child.
Neo:
As her Wiki article shows that she has contributed a lot of money to Democrats, your guess sounds plausible. She doesn’t have enough of a beef with her parents to return to the Ayatollah’s Iran. Her parents, as higher-ups in the Shah’s government(president of a teacher training university), couldn’t get out of Iran for some years after 1979.
bof:
Woodrow Wilson: PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins, college professor, president of Princeton. Proving that “smart” and “wise” are not synonyms.
Beschloss has embarrassed himself but lacks the insight to realize it.
Joe,
If in reaction to massive loss, the dems do unleash antifa, they will be rioting in liberal enclaves. Karma’s a bitch.
Point on Barky, if he is so smart guess that’s why his college papers and courses are all under lock and key. It would embarrass how brilliant he is it would blind us.
Beschloss is not a real historian. His Harvard degree is an MBA (see Wikipedia). He writes popular “history” intended to decorate bookshelves in the suburban mansions of our credentialed ruling class.
Of course, it would not be surprising to hear similar looniness coming from actual historians.
By definition all Republican Presidents are stupid, at least according to those who think they are the most intelligent. I tend to gauge them by how successful their administrations were in preserving a free and prosperous republic.
I haven’t had time to read all the comments, so forgive me if someone has mentioned this already.
It’s my guess that, if there is a red wave (I I hope there will be one.), that any violence will come from Antifa and BLM thugs unleashed by their progressive masters. I hope it doesn’t happen, but I think it’s very possible that if the GOP candidates win in Washington (Smiley), Oregon (Drazan), Michigan (Tudor), and New York (Zeldin) we could see violent protests in those states – and maybe even other states as well. Since our police forces are undermanned now, this could be a a real mess after the election.
Maybe Beschloss is actually projecting what he would do – unleash the “brownshirts.”
I will actually give Beschloss some props for his prediction of violence next week. I think that’s a very viable possibility. If the Red wave happens as predicted, then Antifa will be let off their chain to wreck havoc. If the Red Wave doesn’t happen as all polls predict, then those of us on the right will assume massive fraud on an unprecedented scale and all confidence in the country will be lost. What happens then could be very ugly. This time next week I hope for a calm nation, but I doubt that will be the case.
Beschloss is insulated from what other people are experiencing at the gas pumps, in the supermarkets, on the streets, and at the border. He doesn’t understand that people are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat in this election (or that Secretary of State candidates can’t invalidate elections). Real-life experiences show people the world outside their own professional and ideological bubbles.
It’s said that intelligent and educated people are more susceptible to propaganda because they are already used to thinking in abstract terms. Intellectual and educated politicians are more susceptible to vanity, because the believe in the importance of ideas, the correctness of their own ideas, and thus their own importance. Jefferson and Wilson were both prisoners of their own vanity. Obama was not without vanity, but he wasn’t enough of an intellectual for it to be his undoing.
Arguing about the intelligence of presidents isn’t so productive, because it’s not so much the brain power of presidents that matter so much as the competence and achievements of the teams they assemble. Was Bill Clinton really smarter than Harry Truman? Clinton had college degrees and a Rhodes Scholarship, but did that really matter when it came to achievements and competence?
We know more about the world now than earlier generations did, but the world has also become more complicated. So have our role in the world and the role of government in our lives. Today’s presidents may be as well-matched or ill-matched to succeed in the world as their 19th century predecessors were.
Peter Zeihan had a good video just this morning in which he posited that Obama was the third most intelligent US presidents after Jefferson then Clinton.
I think I’d leave that sort of evaluation to (1) actual psychometricians or (2) non-professionals with a peculiar avocational interest in that, e.g. Charles Murray or Steve Sailer.
IMO, what strikes one about Obama is that he has a certain verbal fluency (when the TelePrompTer is running), but has no authentic profession because there is nothing in which he has more than a passing interest. He’s also oddly secretive and spiteful. One assessment Steve Sailer has offered is that Obama would be satisfactorily suited to work in the Foreign Service, because he can capably transmit other’s views but has no original observations of his own. Sailer also thinks BO is an introvert in a clinical sense. The number of genuine friends he has can be counted on your fingers and they’re all people introduced to him by Valerie Jarrett. At the same time, he likes hanging around celebrities, such as the guest list at his most recent Martha’s Vineyard bash (which turned out to be a COVID superspreader event).
What Abraxas said.
Beschloss is not a real historian.
He’s real enough, but he hasn’t had his work subject to years of supervision by professionally jealous people who’ve been through the paces. I’ve never looked at his bibliographies. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover they were light on archival material.
If Obama was so smart he would have released his transcripts. End of debate.
Point on Barky, if he is so smart guess that’s why his college papers and courses are all under lock and key.
They generally are. John McCain was open about having been a lousy student, but that’s atypical. The thing is, pre-Obama, the media could usually locate people with access to the information who would disgorge it on the QT. John Kerry, George W Bush, and Albert Gore Jr all had embarrassments of this sort. In Obama’s case, a senior administrator evidently signed out the microfiche and locked them in a safe in his office. I’m betting this happened in 2004 or 2005. Higher ed administrators have strange racial neuroses, and I suspect were extra careful with BO.
Also, from 1975 to 2003, Presidential candidates were transparent about their medical problems. In 1988, media demands for documentation got egregious enough that Richard Gephardt attempted to set up a cartel among presidential candidates to refuse certain inquiries. John Kerry was able to conceal some of his Navy personnel records and BO got away with concealing all of his medical records, substituting for them a one page statement from his internist. I’m going to wager what’s concealed is a history of psychiatric treatment.
If one believes that J6 was essentially a false-flag event ginned up by those who really should be upholding the law and protecting people (instead of setting them up, entrapping them and then framing them on behalf of their Democratic Party masters and/or allies)…then why shouldn’t one expect more of the same?
Especially since no real penalty has been paid by any of the perpetrators of these abominations…
What’s most disturbing is that he’s not at all worried about revealing himself as a raging hysteric.
Nor do any on his side of the political seem put out in the least.
IOW, it appears all par for the course in Democratic Party circles.
Perfectly normal.
I’ve stated before that Covid and TDS have each been major causes of insanity in varying degrees. When combined they are potentially lethal. Incendiary.
:@physicsguy : If the Red wave happens as predicted, then Antifa will be let off their chain to wreck havoc.
That would be oddly ideal: Voters en-masse pulling the levers for Red, maybe for the first time, in desperation, followed by Democrat Black Bloc loser-led violence, just to underscore it. Maybe the sentiment would be found to do something about it then, finally.
“Maybe the sentiment would be found to do something about it then, finally.”
If the GOP takes the House and Senate, it will be a significantly Trumpier party taking over. One of the things I worry about is the GOP establishment essentially aligning itself with Democrats against the populist Right. That would set off an intra-Republican battle that might take years to resolve but the party that emerges could be very ugly indeed and it would likely find itself in an America on the brink of ruin from unchecked Democrat rule.
Mike
History – something written by someone who wasn’t there about something that didn’t happen. That said, when someone threatens violence (children will be arrested and conceivably killed) … take them very seriously. Be prepared.
I wonder if they are really concerned about losing access to power. I’ve watched an analysis which locks the Senate Democrats into the minority position for the next multiple elections.
The Democrats broke their brand and the “base” is jumping ship. They lost the working class, the non college women…
A small mistake in my comment at 7:30pm. It should have been (Dixon) in Michigan Instead of (Tudor). Her name is Tudor Dixon. 🙂
Bechloss is another would-be academic with academic prejudices. He lives in a bubble where inflation and $6 gas are not factors in his life. 50 years ago, he would have been an FDR liberal but there are few of those left. Now, they are all Woodrow Wilson Progressives with their fascist beliefs intact.
Another possibility on all these frantic Democrat warnings about “losing our democracy.” Are they setting the stage for the FBI/DOJ/DHS/IRS to come after the newly elected Republicans with lawfare? Open investigations, plant evidence, make charges of various kinds, leak rumors, etc. It’s the anti-Trump playbook that they have gotten away with because the MSM carries their water and Congress has been too “gentlemanly” to try to rein it in. They have successfully criminalized their political opposition.
Anyway, I expect them to go on offense one way or another after a resounding defeat. I hope the GOP is ready.
Tucker suggests that the alarming tone from Democrats is due to an inner poverty (low self esteem?). At any rate, they are a sad bunch.
If the Democratic Party goes, so do they. The party is the only power they have. Once that party has been rejected, they will be nothing but what they already are: sad middle-aged mediocrities with tragic personal lives and nothing interesting to say…
In some cases, the unbearable sadness is palpable.
Where is the evidence that Obama is so very smart?
I think he’s an actor/marionette, like Sandy O. Cortez.
Beschloss wrote very good books up to 2002’s THE CONQUERORS, none of which were flaming liberal bigotry. Since then he’s only published two and they are flaming liberal bigotry. I think what has happened is that he has inhaled the “Presidential Historian” tag too deeply, and now is making far more money and prestige opining for liberal bigots e.g. PBS “News”Hour than he ever did writing books. So he gives them what they want. Worse, he has succumbed to liberal bigotry to the point where he gives PBS etc what HE wants. If he’s wrong, so what? The “Presidential Historian” will still have his golden chains no matter how zany he becomes so long as he continues to spout 200 proof liberal bigotry.
I’m listening to John Anderson interview political philosopher and historian Paul Rahe (Hillsdale College, and decades at the University of Tulsa) cover “American Decline and History.”
Rahe mentions that Obama (early on?) gave a speech at Georgetown on transforming American institutions.
He says something like that this text of the speech dropped (too radical) or rewritten. His point was that unlike past presidents,nObama wanted radical, revolutionary ends like destroying our system to prevail, not merely reforming it.
Obama was a milquetoast. But the nilistic goal of destruction of our institutional and Constitutional order was set, and others among Democrats heard this and ran with it — now, here we are today.
I WANT TO HUNT DOWN THIS REWRITTEN OR RETRACTED TEXT. Any body got some clues where to find it? The media was even then very effective about scrubbing anything negative in St O.
Interestingly enough, Tim Pool understood Beschloss’s remarks as a veiled reference to “Democrat” fraud and ballot stuffing, not alleged GOP fraud.
Plausible deniability? “Don’t come for me, guys, I clearly meant the other ones.”
Peter Zeihan on Obama’s majestic mind — who had his greatest book ghost written by a terrorist — whose grades are still under seal — who is the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to not publish anything — who settled for an undemanding adjunct teaching post at University of Chicago’s School of Law — and whose educational advance as a foreign student is still under wraps, too!
THAT GREAT MIND?
This goes to Zeihan’s guilded dupery — nothing more (than repeating what every body else is told they know about Zero without real accounting for the “evidence”).
Oh, and my opinion? If he’s middling among president’s, I’ll be surprised. If somewhat less, then not.
Where is the evidence that Obama is so very smart? I think he’s an actor/marionette, like Sandy O. Cortez.
The problem is not that hes ‘not smart’. The problem has been (in his case) that it doesn’t matter. His intelligence lies there unused except in the moment. You want to get under the skin of a partisan Democrat in a forum like this, a drab recitation of Obama’s employment history will do the trick; recite Mooch’s as well if you want to lay it on thick.
The Obama’s work history has some curios you see only because the non-profit sector is mad for a certain sort of trumpery (and because the function of the first lady is to launder the bribes). However, it’s usually the case that Democratic presidential candidates don’t have much history apart from their time in public office. George W. Bush was lampooned over his pratfalls in business (by people like Molly Ivins, who knew nothing of the business world). The thing is, he actually had a business career. In the last 60-odd years, the only competitive Democratic presidential candidates who had a history of making living in business were Bob Kerrey, Paul Simon, Jimmy Carter, and Stuart Symington.
who had his greatest book ghost written by a terrorist
That’s an unproven and not terribly plausible thesis. One thing BO does satisfactorily is produce verbiage.
who is the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to not publish anything
The one unsigned case note he composed has been identified. (Per Wm. Dyer (“Beldar”), that is slim for a law review editor in that era).
Hackstorian is a more accurate job description for Beschloss
Beschloss, Obama, Biden, and all the rest yelling about “losing our democracy” are most concerned that too many of their voters will stay home on election day or actually vote for Republicans. This is a get out the vote effort. They all lie so much and so often that I doubt they believe any of this crap.
Boy howdy, Neo, do ya ever get the feeling that today’s Reform Judaism is nothing more than delayed teenage rebellion.
This whole thing just steams me. They cheat, they project, so they assume (believe? hope?) that we cheat too. They call us evil to justify themselves as the “good guys” so they can do anything to us and it is justified.
After the massive cheating in 2020 I hope this all blows up. We need a national divorce.
If Obama was so smart he would have released his transcripts. End of debate.
It’s a reasonable inference he had a mediocre record in a demanding environment. Nothing new. So did Albert Gore and George W Bush. By some accounts, examinations are graded blindly at Harvard Law School, so the accolades he received there were earned (apart from being ‘President’ of the law review, which is decided at Harvard by office politics). Wm. Dyer, a very skeptical observer of BO, did say his law school record was satisfactory. The thing is, he was a student of law. He never proved himself as a practitioner or as a teacher.
He says something like that this text of the speech dropped (too radical) or rewritten. His point was that unlike past presidents,nObama wanted radical, revolutionary ends like destroying our system to prevail, not merely reforming it.
If you say so. Obama’s a gas machine. I doubt he has brass tacks preferences about much of anything, except for harassing the opposition and building patron-client relationships between politicians and constituencies. Democratic pols do that reflexively.
Another odd Obama thing — my lawyer friend tells me that as editor of “Harvard Law Review” Obama should have been a natural candidate for a Supreme Court clerk, but no one wanted him.
They must have been jealous of his IQ.
I don’t think we are taking this seriously enough — like in 2020 when we were all sneering “Look at those pathetic ten people at that Biden rally!”
I don’t know that the Dems aren’t planning a repeat of 2020, but it sure looks like it to me.
It used to be said of some people that they had come to believe their own BS. Something like that must be happening now, maybe on a wider scale, but maybe it’s just more vocal and obnoxious, like with this guy. No one who follows politics, whatever their point of view, should just abandon a healthy sense of skepticism about what they see and how it registers with them. Very interesting what Neo found out about the dad….
Historian Timothy Snyder, author of the excellent “Bloodlands,” became totally unhinged when Trump was elected, predicting that Trump would seize power and refuse to relinquish the presidency.
“George W. Bush was lampooned over his pratfalls in business“
If there has ever been a President where the lampooning of him should have been taken more seriously, it’s George W. Bush.
Back in the early 1950s leon Festinger wanted to understand how the NAZIs were able to get about 55 milllion decent Germans (and dutch & french, etc) to murder another 5 million or so decent Germans. His study of cults (1956) led to an answer (frequently mis-represented by academics – read the original, not someone else’s summary).
Festinger now would, I think, be concerned about the potential for violence by sane seeming but utterly deranged democrats next week.
For his summary and long quotations from other people’s work on this see my telearb dot net site.
Paranoia underlies the mental condition of the leftist ideology.
Buckley’s comment from 1964 – the whole comment, not just the oft-quoted part – is timeless . . .
“I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise.”
And since the university has expanded many fold since then, so has this kind of ‘knowledge’.
If the Red Wave doesn’t happen as all polls predict, then those of us on the right will assume massive fraud on an unprecedented scale and all confidence in the country will be lost.
We will not merely “assume” it. There will be massive circumstantial evidence, as there was in 2020: Vote counting suspended at 2am, subsequent counting changing the lead from R to D, thousands of suspicious mail-in votes, etc.
“But if that is true, a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.” — Beschloss
The above is from Neo’s MSNBC link. It just dawned on me today that this talk about “our democracy is at stake” (which it the talking point everywhere now) is the simplest, most brain dead form of electioneering and manipulation for Democrats.
You see, it’s in the name, … Democrat. They must be in favor of democracy with a name like that. In recent history this verbal game has been played in a very small way. Democrats often refer to themselves as “the Democratic candidate” whereas astute Republicans (as rare as they are) will point out that they are the “Democrat candidate.” Sometimes Republicans will make the distinction between small d and capital D Democrats, noting that the two are not the same.
I think Democrats like to blur the distinction between democratic action and everyman populism. And they think that they own the populism angle.
Clearly, the Democrats are desperate. But this “democracy” vs. tyranny argument also supports the potential post-election claims that the GOP stole these elections. I also agree with Nancy B. Be very afraid. If they are desperate, why wouldn’t repeat the 2020 election tactics?
The sad thing is that there are thousands of Beschloss’s permeating our entire education system. He himself is not a historian but an ideologue. The Left loves to throw the term ‘fascist’ around but fascism and Stalinism had a lot in common and todays Progressives are neo Stalinists. Obama has a mediocre brain but the media runs cover for him.
The overheated, insane rhetoric has a purpose — firing up the election stealing troops to make maximum efforts.
The survival of the nation is at stake. No fraud is too much. No theft is a bridge too far.
Whatever it takes is the moral, completely justified move to make. Charge into the mouth of the cannon. On again, on again ….
Remember the news media response to the Unabomber?
They paid lip service to the idea that murder and maiming was not appropriate, but they understood that his motivation was a worthy goal. They were sympathetic.
When/if the perps of election fraud are exposed (perhaps even arrested), the news media will be supportive. It was a good cause. It was necessary to save the nation. The real disappointment will be that they got caught. Just need to be better at hiding it next time.
He’s at odds with reality. He’s absolutely convinced of an alternate reality and actual reality is not living up to it, so instead of accepting actual reality he doubles down on his delusion. It’s like when people take their religion too literally.
“Southern California’s Coachella Valley”
In the 90s I was working there, installing a laser strain meter for Scripps Insititute of Oceanography, Insititute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Back when I was a physics undergrad at UCSD.
I recall that W Bush’s reading list was much more intellectual than Bill Clinton’s. I’m trying to remember if Obama’s reading list was released.
I’m not seeing any evidence of Obama being particularly smart. Or Bill, for that matter. They were both reasonably smart, smart enough, although Obama was thin on real accomplishments. Biden has to be one of the dumbest presidents, there is a reason he failed running for the office several times previously.
“Southern California’s Coachella Valley”
In the 90s I was working there,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOFNTfWsQrQ
It doesn’t seem to me that POTUS needs to be super smart. Good leadership is what’s required, and that does require intelligence, but other things as well. Really smart people usually are lacking in leadership skills.
Biden has to be one of the least intelligent presidents ever, but that’s not one of his primary failings.
thats why Rush snarkily compared kazynski’s writing to the unabomber, except the latter didn’t make a fortune on this scam,
it’s arguable where the near east expeditions ran aground, clinton did precious little, maybe w did too much, it was stark arrogance to think we could run countries as heterodox from our experience as afghanistan and iraq,
Beschloss and Meacham = Historians Not.
Both have now lost all credibility.
Part of the dems’ alarm is the switch of suburban white women.
I have said that pretty much all of the anti-Trump feelings from them was “mean tweets”, at least that I heard.
Just a thought: Things were going so well under Trump, and much of that, without offsets, helped suburban white women, so that there was nothing to complain about. But the good stuff…just happened. Wasn’t anybody’s doing.
Just happened.
Which left mean tweets sort of hanging there in isolation, ready for the self-righteous who had nothing else to complain about.
TJ – is it this speech?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/14/a_new_foundation_for_the_economy_obama_48911.html
Paul Rahe wrote for Powerline quite a bit early in Obama’s presidency. He had some fascinating insights about his use of gestures to insult his opponents – a series of pieces that provided a unique perspective on the man.
I have known of Beschloss, but never paid much attention. Well, this outburst caught my attention, and he showed himself to be a fool.
“He’s soooooo smart” has been dropped into so many conversations, always with the null answer to: “Really? How smart is he? What is his IQ? What is the source for your assertion?”
American Thinker has a 11-yo piece where a gentleman by the name of Dov Fischer (which apparently there are at least two of who are notable of sorts — one is an accounting chairman at Brooklyn College, and the other, who wrote the article, is clearly not the same guy: “Dov Fischer, adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School, is a columnist for several online magazines and is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County.”)
The relevance of the background is significant to the nature of the latter’s comments in the article.
This description of the author is from his byline on The Federalist:
Dov Fischer, formerly Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and an adjunct professor of law at two Southern California law schools, is Senior Contributing Editor at The American Spectator
Now, the key issue with Obama is they keep saying “he’s so smart… blah blah blah blah”, but they refuse to allow you to see his transcripts which might make a case for that being the truth. A proper skeptic then needs to wonder… is he really?
June 1, 2011
Stop It Already — He’s Not So Smart
By Dov Fischer
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/06/stop_it_already_–_hes_not_so_smart.html
Quick selection of the Meat of it:
The point is, maybe, just maybe, it’s “all fucking bullshit”?
And as an honest skeptic, one sorta-kinda needs to see some actual evidence of the claim?
Because he made a really stupid blunder with the “57 states” thing. And seriously? He did not understand how to pronounce “corpsman”?
Then add to that his rather lame head of state gifts — more than one — despite there being actual people whose JOB IT IS to pick these things out and advise on them?
And then there’s the bowing to other heads of state…
There are just soooo many things that anyone “that smart” would have picked up on during a lifetime of 45+ years of education and cultural learning.
Jus’ Sayin’… maybe we need to stop repeating what we’ve been TOLD.
}}} The first generation has one experience and the second another, and experience is non-transferable.
Not only is it non-transferable, it’s not allowed.
Remember, Neo — The Liberal Midnight Reset Button®…
The Liberal Midnight Reset Button®The Liberal Midnight Reset Button® operates to protect Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® from challenges to the latters’ “integrity”.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/09/election-2020-the-more-fuckery-update/#comment-99392
“Experience” which flies in the face of Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® is ALWAYS removed from the memory files at the end of the day.
This is the main justification I’ve made for the notion that liberals are all “widiots”:
If there was a “WQ” test to match the “IQ” test, then self-defined liberals would all consistently measure in the lower 1/3rd of the resulting Normal distribution curve. They consistently would rate out as “widiots”.
Wisdom is how you learn from experience, just as IQ is how you learn from books. And liberals never learn from experience, which explains their incessant efforts to keep pushing the same fuckwit ideas like big government, light rail, and Marxism, no matter how many times it blows up in their faces.
@ OBH > “Wisdom is how you learn from experience, just as IQ is how you learn from books. And liberals never learn from experience”
I was just thinking today about the increase in suburban women shifting to Republican candidates right now, ditto Blacks and Hispanics.
The second and third groups are, I think, seriously noting that their values and interests really are more aligned with the Right.
The first is looking around and seeing what a mess the Democrats made of their own lives and voting for Republicans to come in and fix things.
After which they will go right back to voting for the Democrats.
Much like refugees from Blue States who move to a better environment under conservative government, and promptly vote for the same party and policies that ruined the state they left.
It’s like they just can’t connect the dots.
If and when Republicans take control of Congress, and the Apocalypse does not crack the plane of existence and issue forth a flood of perdition, will any of these celebrity pseudo-intellectuals revisit their now demonstrably ludicrous electioneering hyperventilations and self-critically analyze how they worked themselves into such a state of exquisite sanctimonious hysteria? Or publicly disavow their previous comments and condemn the mob-like moral panicking engaged in by themselves and others in the gentry laptop class? Or remember how silly and unhinged their wild assertions seem in retrospect and exercise a modicum of restraint in the future? Or realize that it is they who are actually the worst purveyors of disinformation and thus that their clamoring for censorship of others is utterly hypocritical and ill-advised?
Nope.