The Democrats’ Reade dilemma

The New Neo Posted on by

Tara Reade’s accusations against Biden have presented the Democrats with a serious dilemma when they can least afford one. At first glance, it seems that if they wish to be consistent they must choose either a “believe all women” position – which would mean they have to jettison Biden – or a “due process” position, which would mean they have to disavow their dreadful treatment of Kavanaugh. Of course, they wish to do neither, and yet they probably don’t want to risk being exposed as principle-discarding hypocrites, especially with the potentially angry MeToo crowd.

That letter to the editor from Martin Tolchin that I wrote about the other day offers a third way, and the Times spread the word by publishing his letter. Tolchin’s letter cuts the Gordian knot and proudly embraces the contradiction through claiming allegiance to the highest principle of all in the minds of the left: getting rid of the enemy Trump. His message is the necessity of discarding abstract principles, because the only allegiance is to victory at any cost.

And to Tolchin, that is true no matter what Biden’s shortcomings or even crimes may be. Biden’s not Trump, and if that’s good enough for a formerly-respected journalist such as Tolchin, the Times is letting its readers know that it should be good enough for them, too.

That approach is mostly a suggestion to voters; it would be harder for Democratic politicians to fess up to the need to discard whatever principles they pretend to have. They’re in a hard place no matter what, but with the protection of the MSM – which will either make excuses for them or pretend there’s no contradiction – they forge ahead. One example of this is long-time Senator Dianne Feinstein, whom you may recall was instrumental in the Democrats’ Kavanaugh caper:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), however, is traveling on a different path in all this. Manu Raju, in a rare act of actual journalism for a CNN reporter, got the longtime Senator and prominent Biden supporter/booster to go on the record Thursday with her thoughts on Reade’s allegations. And boy, were they something.

Here’s the Twitter thread Raju posted:

Adam Schiff and the art of lying

The New Neo Posted on by

How do you know Adam Schiff is lying? His lips are moving.

Schiff’s lies have been obvious for a long long time. But although the evidence was both clear and stark – the Schiff memo vs. the Nunes memo, just to take a single example – it hasn’t really seemed to hurt him, except on the right.

It’s depressing even now to look back at it, and I’m not going to do so in any depth, but you can do a search yourself for “Nunes memo vs. Schiff memo” and follow it from the early MSM reports praising Schiff to the skies and excoriating Nunes, to the IG report exposing Schiff’s as being full of lies and Nunes’ as being accurate, to the spin by the MSM that tries to cover up or minimize those findings. If you want one article summarizing the whole thing, I refer you to this by Mollie Hemingway.

Then of course there was Schiff’s performance at the impeachment, complete with fake paraphrasing of the famous phone call. More recently, we have the fact that Schiff has been suppressing the transcripts of the hearings his committee held in 2017-18 into supposed Russia election interference, and then the threat to Schiff by Director of National Intelligence Grenell that if Schiff didn’t release them Grenell would, which has somehow convinced Schiff to do so at long last.

Fancy that.

And fancy this: those transcripts reveal a pack of lies and liars, such a disparity between their public statements and their long-secret congressional testimony (under oath and threat of perjury) that one is tempted to go around, like Diogenes, carrying a lamp looking for an honest man – or woman, in this case. It’ll be a long search, in terms of the cast of characters trying to sink the Trump administration.

Ace details (here, here, and here) just three of these people (or entities, in the case of Crowdstrike) and the difference between their public statements and their testimony before Congress. Funny thing, the pattern is the same for all: public accusations, private disavowals.

For example:

Or this:

The gist of it all is this:

The transcripts, which were released by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., revealed top Obama officials were questioned over whether they had or had seen evidence of such collusion, coordination or conspiracy — the issue that drove the FBI’s initial case and later the special counsel probe.

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified in 2017. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, according to the transcript of her interview, was asked about the same issue. Power replied: “I am not in possession of anything—I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came from out of the intelligence community.”

When asked again, she said: “I am not.”

Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice was asked the same question.

“To the best of my recollection, there wasn’t anything smoking, but there were some things that gave me pause,” she said, according to her transcribed interview, in response to whether she had any evidence of conspiracy. “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect that I saw…conspiracy prior to my departure.”

When asked whether she had any evidence of “coordination,” Rice replied: “I don’t recall any intelligence or evidence to that effect.”

When asked about collusion, Rice replied: “Same answer.”

Former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was asked the same question during his House Intelligence interview.

It goes on that way: Ben Rhodes, Loretta Lynch, and so forth. And that article I linked, from which the quotes come, also contains Schiff’s response. It’s as you might imagine: twist, turn, spin, repeat.

However, I am pretty sure that were I to bring this matter up with my Democratic-voting friends and family, they would all react to the news with one or more of these responses:

(1) I haven’t followed it.
(2) Well, there’s plenty of other evidence (and then quoting Schiff, or someone else’s statement that’s been debunked)
(3) That’s just Fox’s take on it, so it’s not true.
(4) I hate Trump anyway and want him gone.

One can’t get too cynical in these matters, unfortunately. Many years ago I had an assumption that revelations such as these would change the minds of most people. But in the last twenty years or so I’ve learned that’s very rare, although it does happen. It is especially unlikely in the current climate – a climate that became especially apparent during the Obama years – in which the MSM will do anything and say anything to protect the left no matter what they do.

And of course Adam Schiff is well aware of that. That is what gives him the arrogance to lie and lie and lie and consider himself untouchable. If only the likes of Fox and the NY Post and the Federalist and Jonathan Turley call him out on it, he knows the vast constituency on which he depends will never read it, and if they do they will apply the time-tested arguments trotted out by him, the NY Times, the WaPo, and the rest. It is a phalanx, an army of liars who present a united front against their common enemy, which is the right.

ADDENDUM: Kayleigh’s on the case:

So, how are all those New York stay-at-homes getting infected?

The New Neo Posted on by

Governor Cuomo of New York has announced the following, and asks some questions I’d like answered:

With everything we’ve done – closed schools, closed businesses, everybody shelter at home, all the precautions about where a mask, where gloves, etc. – you still had 600 new cases that walked in the door yesterday,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “Where are those new cases still coming from, because we’ve done everything we have to close down? How are you still generating 600 new cases every day?”

In trying to answer why patients keep being brought in and what their backgrounds are, a stunning finding jumped out. That shocking detail: Of all the places patients come from, like nursing homes and so on, most – 66% – were said to be social distancing at home…

“Eighty four percent were at home, literally. Were they working? No. They were retired or they were unemployed,” Cuomo said.

When you take away the percentages of those not working or retired you are left with just 17%, including essential workers in close contact with the public…

He said the finding shows the importance of following basic precautions.

That last sentence is a complete puzzlement. The finding shows no such thing. The finding shows our utter puzzlement about what’s actually going on here – or at least, what’s going on in New York City, whose metro area has half the US cases.

These statistics aren’t about cases as a whole in NY, either; they’re about hospitalized cases. They probably were skewed towards older patients, but still, how are these people getting infected if they really are staying home?

I don’t have an answer. Unless these people are using buses or the subway and hiding that fact, that means the mechanism for infection isn’t the public transit system, as so often thought. Are they seeing friends who do use those services? Family? Is it the grocery stores? Or, as some have suggested, is it something about apartment living: walking the halls, riding the elevators, picking up their mail in the lobby, or even the air circulation system?

I find these remote causes somewhat hard to believe, but they’re possible. Any better ideas out there, folks?

[NOTE: About half of these patients are either black or Hispanic. But that doesn’t really say all that much, because those two populations added together represent slightly more than half of all New Yorkers anyway.]

DOJ has MAJOR announcement: Flynn a free man

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of us who’ve followed Flynn’s persecution/prosecution from the start concluded years ago that Flynn was railroaded. But in the last few days we really know, because incontrovertible evidence came out – so much evidence that even the few honest people left who had previously doubted it could doubt it no more. For example, CNN analyst James Gagliano wrote a piece on May 4th that said:

…[F]urther irrefutable proof emerges that a small cabal of FBI headquarters decision-makers was hellbent on undoing a presidency.

I know it sounds strange to hear me make such an accusation. I’m the guy who long attempted to thread the needle, accounting for honest human frailties, trusting that mistakes should not always be chalked up to malice or sinister intent. Cautious skepticism was a default mindset that served me well across a quarter century as an FBI investigator. That condition failed me here because one thing is clear.

Michael Flynn got railroaded.

And the DOJ has heartily concurred:

The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for the president and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.

The action was a stunning reversal for one of the signature cases brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. It comes even though prosecutors for the past three years have maintained that Flynn lied to the FBI in a January 2017 interview about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

That’s the AP story, trying desperately to make it seem as though Flynn is somehow guilty, because “prosecutors maintained” for three years that he lied. I could go on and fisk the whole article, which is an exercise in typical “Republicans pounce” crapola and manages to postpone and mostly avoid talking about the overwhelming evidence that the entire thing was a perjury trap set with malice aforethought and knowledge by the FBI and Obama’s DOJ that there was no wrongdoing at all. But why should I bother? We know the drill; the press will do what the press will do.

Meanwhile, Flynn, Trump, and Sidney Powell – Flynn’s most recent lawyer, who is a veritable bulldog – get to celebrate.

And I hope that Flynn’s prosecutors, his former defense lawyers, and everyone in the FBI and DOJ responsible for the travesty of justice and attempted coup that the Flynn entrapment represented, is shaking in their boots right now. Although I doubt it.

Kaleigh McEnany is a word warrior

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have seen the clip elsewhere already, because it’s all around the right side of the blogosphere. But here are the closing moments from new WH press secretary Kaleigh McEnany’s press conference yesterday:

“Prepared” doesn’t even begin to describe it. And she’s beautiful, composed, and sharp as she uses a jujutsu move to attack the reporters and the networks by using their own words against them. Note how nearly as soon as the question begins, she is already looking at her notes to quickly locate the correct passage, and is ready before he’s even finished asking the question.

You know those films where the heroine suddenly flips a couple of men around because she’s so strong, even though it’s obvious it’s a fiction because the actress playing said heroine couldn’t do any such thing in real life? A lot of recent action films adore that scenario. But this is its equivalent in the cerebral action film known as the political news world. It’s a passage that’s incredibly satisfying to watch, and it’s not fiction.

[NOTE: McEnany is 32 years old, and was an early Trump supporter. She’s married to Sean Gilmartin, who’s a major league pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays, and they have a baby only about six months old. Busy lady. Somehow I get the feeling she gets by on about three hours of sleep, although she doesn’t look it.]

Governor Abbott of Texas bans jail for business openers…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and frees Shelley Luther.

NOTE: This is almost completely irrelevant, but I keep being struck by their names. With a slight change in spelling: “Abbot frees Luther.” It has a certain ring, doesn’t it?

I don’t know whether…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this is the feel-good story of the day, the most terrifying story of the day, the funniest story of the day, or the most audacious story of the day.

Maybe all of the above.

Oh, and a lot of people in the comments to the photo there mention that they think the kid was way older than 5, because he seems big. I’ve seen a lot of big 5-year-olds, though. And this particular 5-year-old had big plans and expensive tastes.

[NOTE: Much much more here.]

Dennis Prager thinks the worldwide lockdown may have been the biggest mistake in history

The New Neo Posted on by

I sometimes agree with Prager, but not here:

But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made. And for those intellectually challenged by the English language and/or logic, “mistake” and “evil” are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.

The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year’s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).

That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Much more at the link.

It’s not that I disagree with the idea that the lockdown was a mistake. I think it almost certainly was, although we don’t have an alternate earth where we can test out that hypothesis. It’s also not that I disagree with the idea that the economic and even some of the health consequences are vast and very serious. But I can think of a lot of worse mistakes in history, right off the top of my head.

The first that comes to mind is the aged and worn-out von Hindenberg’s appointment of Hitler to the post of chancellor of Germany. Many people believe erroneously that Hitler was elected to the post, and later he was, but only after the Nazis had obtained complete control through naked power plays and intimidation and violence against all rivals. Initially, Hitler was not elected chancellor – and in fact, the Nazis had been losing power at the time rather than gaining it. Hitler came to power as the result of an error of judgment by von Hinderberg:

Hindenburg, intimidated by Hitler’s growing popularity and the thuggish nature of his cadre of supporters, the SA (or Brownshirts), initially refused to make him chancellor. Instead, he appointed General Kurt von Schleicher, who attempted to steal Hitler’s thunder by negotiating with a dissident Nazi faction led by Gregor Strasser. At the next round of elections in November, the Nazis lost ground—but the Communists gained it, a paradoxical effect of Schleicher’s efforts that made right-wing forces in Germany even more determined to get Hitler into power. In a series of complicated negotiations, ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, backed by prominent German businessmen and the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, with the understanding that von Papen as vice-chancellor and other non-Nazis in key government positions would contain and temper Hitler’s more brutal tendencies.

Hitler’s emergence as chancellor on January 30, 1933, marked a crucial turning point for Germany and, ultimately, for the world. His plan, embraced by much of the German population, was to do away with politics and make Germany a powerful, unified one-party state. He began immediately, ordering a rapid expansion of the state police, the Gestapo, and putting Hermann Goering in charge of a new security force, composed entirely of Nazis and dedicated to stamping out whatever opposition to his party might arise. From that moment on, Nazi Germany was off and running, and there was little Hindenburg or von Papen—or anyone—could do to stop it.

That’s a mere summary of a much more complex process; you can read the details on many sites. They are heartbreaking as well as frustrating and infuriating. The gist of it is that some people thought they could tame, contain, and control Hitler, and in the process they made the enormous error of judgment of elevating him to a position of power it seems he would not have attained otherwise. This certainly would qualify as one of the biggest mistakes in history – the consequences of which, in terms of human suffering, dwarf what we are likely to experience from the lockdown.

In sum: Hitler was evil, but he came to power through a mistake, one of the biggest mistakes in history if not the biggest. There are other historical errors I can think of, one being the calculation made by various European powers that WWI wouldn’t last all that long and wouldn’t be all that difficult to win.

I am sure there are many more errors of great magnitude of which I’m not even aware. But I don’t think the lockdown will be quite in that particular league. At least, I hope not. I think that, if the lockdown ends soon, the world can recover – not overnight, but in a few years – fairly well.

I also think the lockdown has had some good consequences, or at least potentially good consequences. I’ve heard of some families with children realizing that they need to slow down more and spend more time together as a family, and I hope that will continue post-lockdown. I think that, at least for a while, people will feel appreciative of things they may have previously taken for granted – friends, the ability to go to concerts and sports events, restaurants, parties, and a host of others. I think more people have come to realize how easy it is for people to become cowed by petty tyrants of the Whitmer variety, and perhaps they’ll be more cautious about electing such people in the future. Perhaps. And I think more people have been made aware of the grave danger represented by China, and of the need to free ourselves from dependence on it as soon as possible. And I think we may – accent on the “may” – be more hesitant in the future to issue such extreme measures on the basis of shakily-based computer models for things about which we lack important information.

Texas AG: Free Shelley Luther!

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has called for the “immediate release” of a Dallas salon owner who was arrested and sent to jail for opening her business in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home orders…

“I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge, in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19, would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family’s table,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelley Luther. His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion, which seems like another political stunt in Dallas. He should release Ms. Luther immediately.”

I certainly can’t argue with that. The rush to lock up people like Luther (interesting name, no?) and to release actual criminals is not an accident. Texas is one of the states the Democrats hope to turn blue. The state edges closer and closer, but has so far resisted. However, it has some deeply liberal/left pockets such as Austin and other cities.

Here’s a map of Texas voting from 2016. I can’t copy it, so you’ll have to look at it at the link. But it makes the urban/rural situation quite clear, as well as the Democratic dominance in the most southern portion of the state, the section that borders Mexico.

De Blasio: NYC may still send COVID patients back to nursing homes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to believe New Yorkers not only elected, but re-elected, this man:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said some hospitalized patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus should still return to their nursing homes — even though they risk exposing other elderly residents to the deadly bug.

“If the better care in that individual case is the hospital, of course that’s a go-to option, but there’s going to be a time when a nursing home could be the better care if it’s set up that way,” de Blasio insisted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday.

MSNBC host Willie Geist had asked de Blasio if the order issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to allow patients with coronavirus to leave hospitals and go back into nursing homes was a mistake, given that the death toll at nursing homes surged to 4,813 earlier this week — nearly a quarter of all fatalities in the state.

“The whole question is always where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care, and sometimes that is of course a hospital and sometimes that is a place where they are known and where they can be supported by people who actually have a relationship with them,” de Blasio answered.

Actually no; the whole question with COVID is not “where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care.” Another consideration is where that person can heal without putting other extremely vulnerable people at high risk. But that has been ignored by both de Blasio and Cuomo where nursing homes in their state are concerned.

It was known early on that the very elderly are at far more serious risk of dying from COVID than the rest of the population, and that is even more true of the already-debilitated elderly who are nursing home residents. This is also true, by the way, of nearly any flu or pneumonia. The toll in nursing homes can be exceptionally high.

But as time has gone on, we’ve learned that the percentage of nursing home deaths compared to total deaths from COVID is even higher than previously thought. In some states it’s over half, even well over half. And yet de Blasio, mayor of a city whose metropolitan area has had about half the COVID deaths in the entire US, seems to hardly have a clue what to do about it. It’s almost as though he’s just learned these facts that have been apparent for quite some time.

The toll in one NYC nursing home is 98 deaths so far and counting. That’s about one in every seven residents at that facility. De Blasio had this to say in response to that:

“The one thing we now know about the nursing homes is the status quo cannot continue to say the least,” de Blasio said. “Something very different has to happen.”

Oh, really? And what “very different” thing is actually going to happen? This should have been tackled long ago. It is hard to believe that a mayor of a city so hard hit would not be asking to learn the nursing home statistics on a daily basis, but his excuse is that the figures weren’t reported properly. That could also be true – there’s plenty of confusion and incompetence to go around. But we’ve all known for a long time that New York has been hard hit, and that nursing homes in general are nearly always very hard hit. Special attention should have been paid from the start, and it really appears as though that was not the case. In some ways, au contraire.

Ah, but here’s another thing de Blasio has to say about nursing homes. When in doubt, blame the kulak capitalists:

The mask of objectivity is torn off and the naked bias revealed

The New Neo Posted on by

This is stunning – not the sentiment itself, but the proud and unabashed expression of it for all to see.

At first I thought it was a hoax. Why would someone in the press – or formerly in the press – admit publicly to this way of thinking? But apparently the Times checks to make sure the person who supposedly has written the letter is in fact that person who actually wrote the letter, and in this case it’s a person they know quite well.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

A piece from the New York Times published Monday showed published letters to the editor regarding a May 2 piece from the editorial board titled “Investigate Tara Reade’s Allegations.” Reade has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her while she worked as a Senate staffer in the early 1990’s.

Martin Tolchin, a co-founder of Politico and The Hill as well as a former member of The Times’ Washington bureau, wrote in and admitted that he didn’t want an investigation into the allegation.

Here’s the content of the letter:

This is Trump Derangement Syndrome of an intense variety, and an “end justifies the means” philosophy that is popular on the left. The fact that a journalist who has been in the business for over half a century will now admit publicly to advocating this line is a symptom of how far it’s gone and how popular such a sentiment is. He is, IMHO, virtue-signaling, or at least he thinks he is. He believes most thinking and decent people share his opinion and will applaud it.

Here is Tolchin’s bio, from an article in The Hill written last December and promoting a book of his:

A veteran journalist — who counts The Hill among the news organizations he helped found — has some advice for today’s reporters: “Be courageous.”

Martin Tolchin worked his way up from a copy boy making $41.50 a week at The New York Times to a 40-year career at the Gray Lady. After founding The Hill in 1994 with Jerry Finkelstein, he helped launch Politico.

Now, at 91, he’s adding to his résumé yet again, with a new book called “Politics, Journalism and the Way Things Were: My Life at the Times, The Hill and Politico.”

In the memoir, which Tolchin says his daughter urged him to write for his 10-year-old grandson, he details his decades-long experience in journalism, how the industry has changed and laughs and memorable moments from along the way.

So the guy’s 91 years old. Perhaps age has made him somewhat dotty, like Biden. Perhaps it has lowered his usual inhibitions. Or perhaps he considers his current stance “courageous.” Also from that December interview:

President Trump, Tolchin says, has inspired some “very good reporting.”

“There’s nothing like adversity to get fearless,” Tolchin says of how reporting has changed in the Trump age, “and Trump has done that.”

It certainly has been a revealing experience.

[ADDENDUM: I want to re-emphasize the opening sentence: “This is stunning – not the sentiment itself, but the proud and unabashed expression of it for all to see.” And I want to add that the Times seems to have thought there was nothing there that shouldn’t be revealed in a former longtime and highly-respected reporter of theirs. They are not ashamed. Sometimes The Resistance/Press has to do dirty things to get Trump/Hitler.]