Time for some new messaging: the polls must be really really bad for the Democrats
Hey, it’s cleanup time! For example:
San Francisco Democrat Mayor London Breed launched a crackdown on crime on Tuesday as the city grapples with a plague of rampant lawlessness exacerbated by soft-on-crime city leaders.
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end,” Breed declared. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement … and less tolerant of all the bullsh-t that has destroyed our city.”
The mayor’s plan includes a series of initiatives to implement a 180-degree reversal from blind compassion to “tough love.” Outlined in a Medium post, Breed’s proposals take aim at illegal drug sales and restore funding for police with targeted resources dedicated to the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood. The mayor calls for:
Executing an Emergency Intervention Plan in the Tenderloin neighborhood
Securing emergency police funding to ensure we have the resources to combat major safety problems over the next several months
Amending our surveillance ordinance so law enforcement can prevent and interrupt crime in real time — something they’re effectively barred from doing now — to better protect our homes and businesses
Disrupting the illegal street sales of stolen goods that have become a clear public safety issue and are contributing to retail theft
So it’s “time” now? Why wasn’t it “time” before all the destruction had been accomplished? The results of the soft-on-crime program were easy to predict. This is not rocket science. And of course, Breed doesn’t seem to be acknowledging that it was Breed herself who was in charge of the decline:
Just 18 months ago, Breed diverted $120 million in law enforcement funding to minority welfare programs. Coupled with a district attorney refusing to prosecute crime, the results have been devastating.
Duh.
Breed has been the city’s mayor since a special election held in July of 2018 and was acting major already in December 2017 (after her predecessor died). She was re-elected in November of 2019, for a four-year term.
I think the word has gone out to all Democrats: time to regroup and pretend we’re not responsible for the implosion of our cities into chaos and crime. Whether the person is up for re-election next November or (like Breed) not until the next year, it’s time for some “let’s fool the public into thinking we are not responsible for the mess America’s in.”
You see it almost everywhere, and it includes a group of sudden statements that the COVID pandemic is over, or at least somewhat over, or at least not needing the Draconian measures on which the Democrats have insisted for two years.
“The depths of human depravity are bottomless”
One of the hallmarks of the character Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello” is that his evil is left somewhat unexplained. Unlike most people who do evil, he seems to have no clear motive for his actions other than to do evil (although some people have come up with a few). You might say that Iago represents a pure evil impulse:
He remains famously reticent when pressed for an explanation of his actions before he is arrested: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”…
Shakespearean critic A. C. Bradley said that “evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago”, and also states that he “stands supreme among Shakespeare’s evil characters because the greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone into his making.” The mystery surrounding Iago’s actual motives continues to intrigue readers and fuel scholarly debate.
You might say that Iago was a psychopath, but giving it a name doesn’t really explain much. Suffice to say that certain evildoers seem to be like that.
Which brings us to commenter John Tyler’s observation:
The Russians wanted the Czars gone; they got their wish and in came Lenin and Stalin. The latter being the worst mass murderer in world history (up until Mao of China came along.) Note that the body count of Stalin’s murderous policies did NOT deter USA born / raised and highly educated Americans from spying FOR Stalin.
The depths of human depravity are literally bottomless; and here I am referring to the Americans who spied for Stalin.
But was this actually depravity on their part, or just hideously poor judgment and then subsequent rationalization and denial? You may ask what difference it makes, and I agree that in the practical sense it makes no difference at all. They enabled, aided, and abetted evil. But in the philosophical/psychological sense – and that’s the sense I’m discussing here – it seems to me that “depravity” isn’t really what many of them were about. They believed they were doing good in the end.
That they were incredibly wrong, almost indescribably wrong, is also the case. But one of the strengths of evil, and one of the reasons it can take hold in an entire country like the USSR, is not only that “good men do nothing” but that some otherwise “good” mean and women convince themselves that some bad things must be done in order to finally emerge into the Utopian light.
Of course, one thing of which people should be aware is that any belief in Utopia is a danger sign that evil lurks under sheep’s clothing. But that takes more wisdom than most people have.
This is a version of an argument we’ve had on this blog many times before. I expect a lot of people will disagree with me. But if evil regimes depended solely on supporters who were evil and wished to do evil, they would never acquire the power they do. Sayings such as “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” exist for a reason.
Open thread 12/15/21
How did I first come across this piece of music? When I was a child I saw “The Moor’s Pavane” by modern dance choreographer Jose Limon, and the music got my attention perhaps more than the choreography. It was a puzzling dance piece for a child – a spare and mime-like re-enactment of “Othello,” a play with a plot I didn’t know. But Limon, who danced the part of Othello, had undeniable power and menace in his movements and even his stillness.
Fortunately, YouTube has an old film of the work with Limon in it. I’ve excepted the part that corresponds to the musical movement I’ve featured above, with a few introductory bars in which Iago tries to influence Othello:
A look back: on desperately wanting to elect Joe Biden
Yesterday I happened across this article by Alex Wagner that appeared on March 24, 2020 in The Atlantic. It’s entitled “Stay Alive, Joe Biden,” and the subtitle is this revealing sentiment: “Democrats need little from the front-runner beyond his corporeal presence.”
Think about that – the idea of a figurehead president was fully envisioned and fully accepted, right around the time that Biden was finally seeming to be the nomination frontrunner. Nothing more was necessary; certainly not that certain something known as “leadership.” It was okay that Biden do nothing and be unable to do anything competently. The idea was apparently that (a) getting rid of Trump at the helm would magically solve all problems; and (b) the country could just about run itself after that, as long as Democrats were in control.
That’s not just hubris, that’s hubris squared.
Here are a few excerpts from Ms. Wagner’s piece:
Voters seem to have coalesced around Biden for his past—who they have known him to be for the past four decades in American politics—rather than for anything in his present. It’s as if Biden exists primarily as an idea, rather than an actual candidate.
That certainly was true, as far as it went. I think it’s dangerous; Wagner thought it just fine, as long as the idea contained the words “not Trump.”
More:
if you were on the campaign trail for the past three months, what struck you was not Biden’s organization (there was little), or his resources (there were few), or even the campaign messaging (Joe Biden has been—and forever will be—Joe Biden). What was striking was the sense of anguish and urgency articulated by everyone, everywhere, all the time. And that was before the pandemic.
The “anguish and urgency” was indeed felt by most of the Democrats I know. Trump was so obviously terrible, so profoundly and distressingly evil and destructive, that anyone who could replace him was perfectly fine with them. Where did this anguish come from? Not from anything that was actually happening as a result of Trump – unless they bought the bizarre and evidence-free idea that if only Trump had not been president COVID wouldn’t have taken hold (obviously, since it took hold in most of the Western world, that could not possibly be true – and as Wagner rightly observes, this attitude of sheer desperation predated COVID).
The anguish was purposely drummed up by a combination of the MSM and the Democrats, and was fed and watered by a series of their egregious lies. During Trump’s presidency, it was so obvious to me that things were going relatively well – much better than I had expected – that for a while I actually entertained the thought that even some Trump-hating Democrats might notice and be glad. That was obviously an error, one that became apparent fairly quickly.
More from Wagner:
There were the Bernie Sanders supporters on the campus of Florida International University who told me, however reluctantly, that they would vote for Biden because Donald Trump had to be stopped. There were the soccer moms canvassing for Amy Klobuchar in Johnson, Iowa, who made clear that their primary concern (more than Amy’s chances) was whether Trump was going to get reelected. There were the Culinary Workers Union members in Las Vegas who hadn’t been fired up by any candidate in particular, but who told me they felt as if they faced an existential threat from the Trump administration—and that was enough to drive them to the voting booth and pull the lever. There were the older black voters in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who woke up at 7 a.m. to check out Michael Bloomberg, mostly because they were worried that Biden was slipping, and Trump had to be removed—and if Joe couldn’t do it, they said, then they had to find someone else who would.
I wonder how the Las Vegas Culinary Union members are doing these days. I assume they still exist, and so the “existential threat” they faced from Trump’s continued presidency has been averted.
Now comes the heart of the matter as far as Wagner and all the others were concerned. As usual for this sort of list, no examples are given for each of these Trumpian traits. They are considered so obvious, so well-understood and repeatedly proven to the satisfaction of anyone with a functioning brain and moral sense, that no examples were needed:
Ending the Trump presidency — because of the lies, the cruelty, the indignities, the misogyny, the incompetence, the fraudulence, the corruption, the clownishness, the recklessness, the lawlessness, the selfishness, oh, the list went on — that was something that united men and women across the United States and left them in a state of anguish…
…Democrats—some independents, and some Republicans too—were terrified and furious at the prospect of another four years of Donald J. Trump.
That carefully-cultivated “state of anguish” – a sort of delusional hysteria – was not just important to a 2020 victory for the Democrats; it was necessary, and they knew it. For the rest of us, on the outside looking in, it was a lesson in how Orwell wasn’t far off when he described the Two Minutes Hate and its unifying effects, and how something somewhat similar could be employed to influence and guide a modern voting public, and people who consider themselves intelligent and sophisticated.
Whether or not you think Biden won fair and square in 2020 or because of fraud, it hardly matters to the point I’m attempting to make. The reality is that many millions of people, close to half the country if not over half the country, voted for a man who was clearly not up to the task, and rejected the man who was and who had been doing a rather good job by the usual objective measures.
One of the reasons they talked themselves into doing this was that they did not think it necessary to have any skills in order to be president – and by “skills” I mean any record of having made good decisions in forty or so years of public service. They seem to have thought that a country such as the US was on some sort of automatic pilot and would fly quite nicely without much guidance – again, as long as Democrats were in charge.
And indeed, those Democrats didn’t have to be chosen for skills or track records, either. They could all be chosen because they were “progressive” and checked certain demographic boxes. Kamala Harris would be a good example, but so could most of Biden’s Cabinet.
I can’t find anything recent that Alex Wagner has written about Biden. But his plummeting polls – even among Democrats – indicate that at least some people have finally noticed that more than a mere
“corporeal presence” might be necessary to steer the ship of state. Unfortunately, a great deal of damage has already been done, with no end in sight.
Dr. Scott Atlas wants you to know
Sounds like an interesting book:
In his latest book, “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” Atlas wrote, “The American people need to know the level of incompetence, the lack of rigor, the lack of critical thinking. I was stunned at what I saw. We had bureaucrats in charge of the policy and that policy was the restrictions and lockdowns. And it failed.”…
…”But it also inflicted massive harm because you have to remember, we shut down a lot of medical care. It wasn’t just cosmetic surgery or something like that that was shut down. We had 650,000 people with cancer on chemotherapy. Half of them skipped their chemo just during the spring of 2020 out of fear. We had 85% of living organ transplants did not get done compared to the previous year. We had two-thirds of cancer screenings did not get done. These people still have cancer.”
All of this became obvious within a couple of months of the first shutdown. But how many people are really aware of it, even now? And why did they buy the idea that Joe Biden, of all people, could “shut down the virus”? Delusional, magical thinking, of a type fostered by the left and the MSM, and cynically exploited.
How left do America’s law schools lean?
The National Association of Scholars has long tried to call attention to the rather shocking under-representation of Republicans at America’s law schools and the fact that actual conservatives were purged long ago. Democrats outnumber Republicans on faculty at a ratio of about 50 to 1, for example, and law professor political donations skew almost exclusively to progressive candidates. Law school publications routinely advocate not just abortion and euthanasia but gender ideology, illegal immigration, and every other pet cause of the political left. All this is said to be legal “scholarship” and is subsidized at state schools by tax dollars and at private schools by federal student loans, among other public subsidies, including Justice Department grants.
This is not the least bit surprising. I went to law school a long time ago, and it was already starting to be a trend although my guess is that things were roughly equal back then. My alma mater continues to send me its publication, and for years I’ve tracked the ever-leftward drift of its articles, until in recent years it’s become an utterly woke and worthless publication.
This absolutely has repercussions. Lawyers and lawsuits help form public policy, and in particular there’s a recent trend for the production of leftist election lawyers. Election law was something nearly unheard of when I was in law school – although obviously it existed, it just wasn’t on most people’s radar screens. Now it’s a big and influential business, as we learned in the 2020 election and its aftermath, and the right is trying to play belated catch-up.
Open thread 12/14/21
Watching TV news and newscasters
I am also pleased to reflect that I took the measure of Chris Wallace some time back. To be honest, I find it hard of late to listen to any of the pontificators–most of whom I call Yappers. Even those that I admire, like Levin.
You mean Old Yeller?
It is almost impossible to listen to the shouting Levin, even when he’s saying something that’s correct – which is often. But for me, this un-listenability is an old old story, and not one limited to Levin by any means.
In fact, for whatever reason, I’ve never been much of a consumer of television news. Even before cable came into being, I was somewhat dyslexic for the networks. Who was the main guy on each station? Which did I listen to, NBC or CBS or ABC? I couldn’t tell you and I could barely tell them apart, except to say that I didn’t voluntarily listen to any of them. Why would I, when I could read the news in less time and more depth and on my own schedule?
And so please forgive me if I have relatively little to say about Chris Wallace’s move from Fox to CNN. Didn’t watch him on Fox. Don’t plan to watch him on CNN.
MSM coverage of the Wallace move seems to follow a fairly predictable pattern. His decision is “susprising” (not to the right, it’s not) and/or “abrupt” (not to the right, it’s not), and it will hurt Fox’s reputation (not with the right, it won’t). It is presented as the triumph of the crazy alt-right Tucker Carlson over the sober, objective Wallace.
Blah blah blah.
When does naivete segue into stupidity? The case of Peggy Noonan
I don’t know the exact point at which naivete segues into stupidity, but Peggy Noonan crossed it long ago.
So why would I pay any attention to her? Well, she still has a WSJ column, for some reason. Plus, her latest piece is a good example of a relatively common genre of stupid columns (not just with Noonan), which I’ll call “advice to people who are completely and constitutionally unable to take it,” or “let’s pretend the person I’m addressing is a different person than that person has long proven him or herself to be.”
I’m speaking of Noonan’s most recent column of advice to Kamala Harris. A sampler [my emphasis]:
[Harris] could lend what skills she has to the public presentation of the administration’s stands. Mr. Biden isn’t strong there; he’s uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.
To do this Ms. Harris would have to decide to become serious — to inform and immerse herself, meet with party thinkers, study her briefing books. Her current strategy, to the extent it exists, appears to rely on her sense of her own personal charisma — delighted laughter, attempts to connect personally, to convey zest.
She should speak instead with sincerity and depth. She shouldn’t confuse Happy Warrior with Hungry Operative.
Ms. Harris has never seemed especially earnest. This would be a good time for earnestness.
In what universe would this be possible? In the same universe in which Noonan originally praised Obama this way (in 2008):
[Obama] has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.
Noonan praised Kamala Harris in August of 2020, and in a piece Johnson wrote in September of 2021 he made this prediction at the conclusion:
Noonan hasn’t yet turned on Harris based on her patent idiocy or her actual performance as vice president, but I am quite certain we can look forward to the column in which Noonan turns on her without mention of her previous adulation.
Bingo! That’s where Noonan’s most recent column comes in.
For a long time, Noonan has been trading on the Reagan speechwriting gig that initially brought her fame. But although, much like Andrew Sullivan, she’s still right every now and then – and a bit more often than a stopped watch, but just a bit – those times are few and far between. When she’s wrong, she’s wrong in a particular way: juvenile, lightweight, naive, and conventional.
A person in the UK is reported to have died with the Omicron variant of COVID
As usual, we are given virtually no context by which to understand the meaning of the news. And that is obviously by design, since authorities must have more details than the bare bones they’re giving out, details they could release without compromising the person’s identity or privacy.
Like for example: age? Reason for admission to the hospital? Comorbidities? Exactly what vaccines did the person have, and when (for example, since this is the UK, it might have been the relatively ineffective AstraZeneca)?
At least one person in the UK has died with the Omicron coronavirus variant, the prime minister has said.
Boris Johnson said the new variant was also resulting in hospital admissions, and the “best thing” people could do was get their booster jab.
Note the use of the word “with” in that first sentence. Note also the immediate pushing of the booster. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’ve had a booster and I did it unhesitatingly. But that was my decision. I made it for a number of what I consider good reasons, and I trust other people to make their own decisions.
And that’s about it for what we know about this person, except that in another article (I can’t rmember where I read it) I noticed that they were saying that this person who died with Omicron was diagnosed with it in the hospital. That could mean that this person’s admission was for something entirely different, and that he or she was only found to have COVID through routine testing as part of the admission protocol.