Tonight’s debate

The New Neo Posted on by

If anyone wants a new thread to comment on tonight’s debate, here it is.

ADDENDUM: Goodness gracious:

Former Vice President Joe Biden may have lost the second round of Democratic debates before the debate even began. When Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) came on stage, Biden said, “Go easy on me, kid.” Many liberals — including one other 2020 Democratic candidate — slammed Biden for calling the black former California attorney general a “kid.” While Biden seems to have been joking, there is a long ugly history of white Americans calling black Americans “boy.” Perhaps for that reason, liberals seem particularly outraged.

Or maybe it’s because they’re perpetually outraged and race-conscious, and Joe Biden’s not only a white guy but an old white guy, and because their reactivity lacks all sense of proportion.

The details of the immunity deals Loretta Lynch gave to Hillary Clinton’s people…

The New Neo Posted on by

…can be found here:

The ACLJ [American Center for Law and Justice] has just obtained previously unreleased documents related to the Clinton investigation and immunity agreements given to top Clinton aids. These agreements reveal that James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice (DOJ) granted immunity to Hillary Clinton’s aids and lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, from prosecution for anything found on their laptops violating multiple felony criminal statutes governing the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records, including Espionage Act provisions. Further, the DOJ and FBI also agreed to evade the statutory requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by purporting to deem the contents of the laptops as not under DOJ or FBI “custody or control.”

These laptops were critical to any meaningful investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails and records. According to the DOJ Inspector General, who identified these as the “culling laptops,” “[a]ll 62,320 emails pulled from the Clinton servers were stored at one time on these laptops.” Having taken control of these laptops, agreeing to severely limit its searches, agreeing to unlawfully shield the laptops from FOIA, then agreeing to dispose of the laptops, it appears the Comey FBI and Lynch DOJ did everything in their power to protect Clinton’s senior aids and lawyers from both criminal liability and public scrutiny.

While these immunity agreements and related news have been publicly discussed to some extent, the ACLJ has now obtained the actual documents so the public may see and judge them accordingly.

This isn’t exactly news, except for the fact that the documents themselves have now been released. But in the continuing and almost unremitting subsequent dislosures about Russiagate (or whatever name you want to give that lengthy brouhaha) in all its complexity, there has been so much to process in the two cases that I believe most people have lost the thread. But the double standard used in the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her aides versus that used in the investigation of Donald Trump and his aides has been extraordinary.

About the Democratic debate last night that I didn’t watch…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the one tonight that I won’t watch—

There are many reasons I don’t watch them.

The first you may already know if you’re a regular reader here: I hate political campaign debates. I hate them because I generally would prefer to read something rather than listen, if the “something” is serious-seeming talk that’s mostly empty blather. That’s what nearly all political debates between or among candidates seem like to me, and I’m including both parties.

Jargon and empty words at best, stupidity and lies at worst. That’s the usual, and the exceptions are somewhat rare.

Oh, and then there are the sound bites. I don’t make decisions based on sound bites, but I know other people do.

I know that debates reveal character, at least to a certain extent. Sometimes it’s a gesture—Bush senior looking at his watch, for example, widely interpreted as being uncaring and unconcerned as compared to Bill Clinton’s feeling your pain. But I don’t put so much into a single gesture, and I don’t assume I read minds.

That said, it’s impossible not to have a gut feeling about a candidate when I do watch a debate. Is he or she strong or weak? Logical or not? Up on the facts or ignorant? Calm or agitated? Combative or meek? And much more that probably occurs at a level below our conscious awareness. However, these impressions can be misleading because a candidates’ debate is an artificial format that does not resemble all that much in the real world.

I especially hate political debates featuring either party when there are a large number of contestants. That means that less and less of substance is said, and the format favors the sound bite more and more.

But I have special trouble with the Democratic debates this year. That’s because I almost literally cannot bear to listen to these particular candidates, as compared with the Democrats I remember from my youth and relative youth. This crew is so extreme they scare me—all of them except one who seems to have no chance at all (that means you, John Delaney). And even he scares me, because he’s part of the Party and the party’s agenda has become destructive.

As for Marianne Williamson, who seem people seem to find comic relief and/or inspirational—she just may scare me most of all. Her fuzzy New-Age-y approach connects with the rampant fuzzy New Age-y approach of no small number of voters, and she’s got a fair amount of charisma. Right now her stock is rising, but I don’t know if it’s just a temporary fun-and-games phenomenon. I think, though, it’s emblematic of how arid the field is, and how desperate Democrats are for someone they can feel good about.

Harold Prince, dead at 91

The New Neo Posted on by

Broadway giant Harold Prince has died:

It is impossible to speak of the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century without invoking Prince’s name. He is associated in some crucial way with a majority of the great musicals of the period, and though he did not change the face of the musical theater alone, he collaborated with such giants as George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in some of their most impressive undertakings.

Starting as a wunderkind producer with “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees” in the mid-’50s, Prince moved into directing as well, shaping intimate works like “Cabaret” and “Company” that deepened and transformed the scope of the musical. He was equally adept at spectacle, as he demonstrated with Andrew Lloyd Webber productions such as “Evita” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

I’m not keen on the later stuff, but I doubt that was Prince’s fault.

I’m actually surprised he was as young as 91, because he’d been around so very long. “Wunderkind” means “wonderchild”—that is, child prodigy—which indicates how young Prince was when he co-produced “The Pajama Game,” which became a big hit in 1954 when Prince was 26. His mentor was George Abbot, another huge Broadway force (and incidentally, even more long-lived; Abbot lived to be 107).

Found at Prince’s Wiki page, this fact increases my admiration for him: “He was offered the job of directing Cats by Lloyd Webber but turned it down.”

I would say “his death is the end of an era for the Broadway musical,” but his life spanned several eras. RIP.

Developments in Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t been covering this too closely since the Mueller testimony, but here’s a summary of what’s been going on.

My attitude at the moment is that I’m waiting for the IG report of Horowitz to be issued, as well as for more definitive developments in the investigations by U.S. attorneys Huber in Utah and Durham Connecticut, to see if any of the rumors pan out.

When truth must be denied because it’s unacceptable…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then you’re in a heap of trouble. How can a problem be solved if it can’t even be named, or described, or discussed?

This isn’t about Trump and Baltimore’s rats, although that’s one of many recent incidents that sparked the train of thought that led to this post. The furor that ensued after Trump’s rat tweet reminded me of a principle I first learned not long after 9/11, which is that PC thought leads away from the ability to deal with a problem.

Speech doesn’t solve things. But speech can make it more difficult to solve things, if a certain way of looking at something become verboten.

I’m not calling for a free-for-all of abusive speech or racist speech or hyperbole. But when (for example) the connection between extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam and terrorism could not be voiced without an answering scream of “Islamophobia,” when no black person can be criticized without the response of “Racist!” towards the one voicing the critique, when a rat-infested crime-ridden city such as Baltimore can’t be described that way because it happens to be run by Democrats and has a large black population—then we have a problem that leads us to be unable to ever go about trying to solve those problems.

But these days a truth—for example, “there are a lot of rats in Baltimore, and the city has failed to deal with the problem”—takes a back seat to the implications some people draw from that truth, although not necessarily one the speaker expresses or means to express. It is the listener who insists on hearing criticism of a black person as inevitably racist when nothing racial has been said. It is the listener who imagines that accurately describing the specific city of Baltimore and its rats negatively are speaking out against black communities in some general way.

I am reminded of a quote I’ve discussed before, written by Czech author Milan Kundera, in which he coins the phrase “imagology.” The quote is from the book Immortality, and it bears repeating:

…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

That book was written in 1988.

Sharpton: Trump tweets, the Democrats defend the indefensible

The New Neo Posted on by

I see that Al Sharpton is in the news again. Sharpton responded to Trump’s remarks about rats in Baltimore by saying, “that he would travel to Baltimore to ‘address Trump’s remarks & bi-partisan outrage in the black community’ over them.”

And Trump tweeted this back:

Al Sharpton is a peripheral figure at best in this Baltimore controversy, “just doing his thing” which is trying to get publicity over some racial issue or other. I don’t think a lot of people were paying attention to him until Trump called him a con man. Sure enough, and predictably, you have a bunch of Democrats defending Sharpton, who is undoubtedly a con man and also a long-time racemonger par excellence.

A few quotes:

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden called him a “champion in the fight for civil rights.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared he “has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all.” Sen. Kamala Harris said Sharpton “has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the abominable Sharpton’s history, please see this article I wrote for PJ Media in 2014 on Sharpton’s participation in the Tawana Brawley scam. This is not a man to be defended, and yet here the Democrats go again, doing just that. And then there’s this part of Sharpton’s résumé:

Since the 1980s, Sharpton has engineered protests, boycotts, and riots, often pitting African Americans against Jewish communities. Perhaps the most gruesome being a four-day race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after a Hasidic driver killed the child of Guyanese immigrants in a tragic car accident. Sharpton stirred up anti-Semitic protesters, shouting, “No justice, no peace!” They targeted innocent Jewish homes, breaking windows and setting cars on fire, and an angry mob murdered Jewish bystander Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton lead the mobs who chanted about killing “bloodsucking Jews” and “Jew bastards.”

According to reporter Philip Gourevitch, Sharpton used his speech at the child’s funeral to stoke anger.

“Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. … All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’,” Sharpton said.

Four years later, Sharpton was riling up protesters again, this time against Fred Harari, a Jewish subtenant who operated Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, and evicted his own subtenant, a black-owned record store. “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” Sharpton told protesters.

Here’s more about Sharpton’s role in the Crown Heights riots.

If the Democrats want to defend Sharpton against Trump, they should know what they’re getting into.

Ah, but the following is their calculus, and maybe it will even work: they are banking on the idea that most voters haven’t a clue about Sharpton’s history and that the MSM will not expose it and make them look bad. They are betting that what people will see is “Trump attacks another black man, one who has dedicated his life to the rights of black people! Trump is a RACIST!!!”

The Brawley case is 30 years old. Crown Heights is close to 30 years old. What percentage of voters have a clue what happened during either of them?

The “most gullible man in Cambridge”?

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people have asked my opinion of this article that appeared recently in New York Magazine, entitled “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?”

It’s about Bruce Hay, a Harvard Law professor who was scammed by two women in a way that’s a bit complex to describe, but it involves a paternity claim and ultimately the commandeering of his Cambridge home. It’s long, so you may not want to slog through it. Suffice to say that yes, Hay seems quite gullible, although I doubt he’s “the most gullible man in Cambridge.”

In online commentary at one site or other featuring the article, I’ve seen a lot of people mocking Hay. But I’m not joining in the mockery. One reason is that it’s easy, really really easy, to look at a con from the outside and feel superior to the mark (in this case, Hay). I would never be taken in by something so ridiculous and transparent, you say. And probably you wouldn’t. I don’t think I would.

But perhaps we both are wrong. Because con artists are clever, and they play on whatever is the weakness of the particular person with whom they are dealing at the moment. And we all have our weaknesses, although they’re not necessarily the same weaknesses as those of Bruce Hay.

What were the weaknesses that might have made him susceptible? Being middle-aged and divorced (although he lived with his ex-wife in what appears to have been an amicable arrangement for friendship and child-rearing.). Being susceptible to the come-on of an attractive young woman, and having sex with her. Being so liberal and PC that this woman and a transgender friend of hers could bully him into almost anything. Perhaps also being lonely in the emotional sense, and even (maybe) being somewhere on the spectrum and having some difficult in reading people.

And last but not least, consenting to have his private life aired in New York Magazine, with the effect of making him the object of ridicule.

Cry “racist”

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with Roger Simon:

These days one might as well call the Democratic Party The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Racism…

The conclusion we are supposed to glean from this, the rule of rules that must be obeyed at all costs, is that whites are always wrong when criticizing blacks.

Not just wrong, but racist. Always. There is literally no negative word that might be said that is not racist, and that includes numbers like statistics.

And it is racist of me to point this out, no doubt.

As far as the specific words of Trump regarding Cummings’ section of Baltimore goes, Trump’s use of the word “infested” has been criticized as inherently racist. In fact, CNN host Victor Blackwell said, “when [Trump] tweets about infestation, it’s about black and brown people.” And this despite the fact that this is the sentence in which Trump used the word, “Cummings’ district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Is Blackwell implying that black and brown people are “rats and rodents?” Or alternatively, is he implying that only areas with black people can be “rat- and rodent-infested?” If that’s not a racist comment by Blackwell, I don’t know what is.

Rats and rodents are equal-opportunity pests. They thrive, for example, where there is garbage freely available. A more likely explanation of why there are rats in that part of Baltimore is that the city garbage collection and control is poor, and that Cummings (Trump’s target) isn’t raising a commotion with the city to get it taken care of. Trump’s point is that Cummings is neglecting his own district.

What is the goal here on the part of the Democrats? It is to broaden and broaden the definition of “racist” so that it can be tactically applied to nearly anything a Republican might say. And they keep attacking Trump in particular in this manner because he is especially blunt and non-PC in his words, and in addition he takes the fight to the Democrats, hitting them where it might hurt.

Make no mistake about it—Trump’s dig at Cummings was also aimed at cutting into the black vote for Democrats. And if that tactic by Trump were ever to be successful, the Democrats would be in big, big trouble. So their cries of “racist” are meant to rally the black vote as well as the leftist SJW vote.

Will it work? I don’t know. I do know that it’s getting old for a lot of people.

As recently as April, 2019, the Baltimore Sun published an editorial entitled, “Baltimore’s perpetual trash problem.” Here’s an excerpt:

Why can’t we have a clean city? It’s a problem that has perplexed generations of mayors in Baltimore. Call it the perpetual trash nemesis…

here we are again in a mess of a city. Food containers, balled up clothes, paper, banana peels, plastic bags and tons of other pieces of litter line the shoulders of roads, pile up in alleys and are strewn across fields and yards. Not only is it unsightly and contributes to a rodent problem, but it can create a glum and gloomy feel in a time when the city is already facing self-esteem issues because of high crime and the scandal surrounding the University Maryland Medical System and Mayor Catherine Pugh, who’s now on an indefinite leave, and her Healthy Holly books. If anything, the city needs a major scrubbing to help restore some of its faith and image.

Acting Mayor Jack Young, tired of seeing people casually toss litter out of car windows or on the ground as they walk down the street, has decided to take on the issue as one of his main platforms. “A clean city is an inviting city,” he said during a recent meeting with The Sun’s editorial board. The city’s crime problem makes it hard to keep some neighborhoods clean, he said, noting that criminals don’t like “clean spaces.” They need trash piles to hide drug stashes or debris-cluttered alleys to make it difficult for police to chase them. John F. Chalmers, head of the city’s Bureau of Solid Waste, said sanitation workers will clean up trash piles only to have dealers dirty them up again. Some will threaten city employees who try to tidy up. So whatever Mr. Young has in mind, it seems solutions for the trash and crime problems will go hand-in-hand.

Catherine Pugh is black. Acting mayor Jack Young is black. John F. Chalmers is black. Apparently they all can point out the garbage and rat problem without being accused of racism. The problem is a simple statement of fact which should be valid no matter who says it. But somehow, when the evil Trump says it, it’s suddenly a racist statement.

I have already said that one of the goals here is to redefine the word “racism” to mean something very broad when a Republican or a disfavored white person says it, so that the word becomes applicable to almost any utterance of that person and thus very useful to the left. But there’s a related goal, and that is to redefine the word “racism” to mean something very narrow and perhaps even non-existent when uttered by a black person who is not on the right, or even by a white person with the correct leftist political affiliation.

And it doesn’t matter if the words are almost identical.

[ADDENDUM: Maybe they really mean that Trump is “rattist.”]