Posse Incitatus

A most consequential State of the Union

I've studiously avoided the empty pomp and ceremony of the State of the Union address for some years, but last night I made an exception.

It was a remarkable performance, arguably the best of my adult lifetime.

This was because unlike previous presidents, Donald Trump is playing for keeps.  After weeks of siege warfare, this was his chance to break out into the open field.  He embraced it with gusto.

It was a long speech, and necessarily had its sluggish parts, but it also had moments that cannot easily be forgotten, such as a joint session of Congress singing "Happy Birthday" to a Holocaust survivor.

Or Trump's pointed and necessary calling out of the Democrats for supporting the murder of infants.

Yes, border security was a major theme, but who could watch Trump win over the White Robe Caucus without laughing hysterically?  They defiantly refused to applaud for every worthy cause Trump offered up to them, including a child cancer survivor, but when he talked about female employment rising, they couldn't restrain themselves. 

The master then chided his students for their failure before giving them new cause to cheer.  As they sat down, the master showman teased them that they should remain standing for what came next, which was his tribute to Womens' Suffrage and suddenly it was The White Resistance that was dancing and shouting "U-S-A!"

Democrat Feminist Status:  Owned.

Naturally, the eunuch wing of the GOP was outraged by this vulgar display and they've been pissing about it loudly on Twitter, which perfectly symbolizes their both their hatred of any kind of GOP success as well as their irrelevance.

Ironically, Trump's triumph is getting eclipsed by the Democrat meltdown in Virginia.  It is worth pointing out yet again that the KKK was always nothing more than the militant arm of the Democrat party.  The notion that it suddenly became a GOP front organization in 1965 was always low-grade bullshit.

It's utterly unsurprising that ancestral southern Democrats would use blackface and Klan hoods as punch lines in their youth, and it never made sense that Republicans would have anything to do with these hateful symbols since one of the Klan's pastimes was lynching Republicans.

The "Solid South" was solid because dissenters could easily find themselves on the short end of a long rope.

The sexual assault charges against Lt. Gov. Fairfax are also escalating in intensity, and this in turn makes me wonder: will he be the first thrown under the bus? 

And will the black community passively watch Southern White Democrats once again throw a black man aside without due process to save their miserable hides? 

We'll find out soon enough.

New York: Our abortion laws are as close to murder as you can get; Virginia: Hold my beer

One of the features of social media that render it so toxic is the need to showcase one's virtue with ever greater levels of righteous indignation.

Thus: it wasn't enough that some high school boys might have acted poorly.  No, they my be expelled, their parents reduced to poverty and they themselves soundly beaten!  Firebomb the school, too!

All this for a lie that fell apart within 48 hours.

In the case of abortion, Democrats seem driven to ever-greater extremes.  Virginia is considering legislation that define "abortion" as being what happens when a kid is starting to be born, and maybe after.

The Quisling Never Trump-endorsed Democrat governor, Ralph Northam, tried to explain away this horrific notion by mentioning that if a child is born prematurely, the mother and doctor could then discuss whether or not to let it live.  At least that's what it sounded like he said.

The problem of course with late, late-term abortion is that it isn't really "abortion" any more.  It's murder. 

The whole judicial construct of abortion was built on a foundation of lies wrapped around the notion of "viability."  That is to say, as long as the child was entirely dependent on the mother for life, she could legally kill it without consequence.

But late-term abortions turn this concept on its head.  The womb is now a place of supreme danger for the unborn infant, and according to the Solons of New York and some in Virginia, there's nothing wrong with carrying a perfectly healthy child almost to term, feeling it kick and move and respond to sounds and movement - and then killing it.

Words fail to express the utter depravity at work here.  One can point out that using a similarly grisly procedure on cats or dogs would almost certainly result in a prison term for animal cruelty.

But to Planned Parenthood, it's just expanding their core business and seeking new organ-harvesting opportunities.

Ah, was it only a few weeks ago that I was fondly recalling when Democrats said they wanted abortion "safe, legal and rare?" 

Once you move into "up to the moment of birth" territory, you've already crossed the line into infanticide, because the few seconds that separate the two are so easily bridged with a scalpel.

New York offers to sacrifice more infants to the Democrats' infernal gods

Wow, was it just last week that I was reflecting on the complete abandonment of the Democrat Party's former principles?

Not to be outdone (and to further prove my point) the state of New York has adopted a new law to allow abortion at any time, for any reason, right up until the very moment the little sprout comes out of the womb.

But let's not call it "infanticide" or "baby killing."  No, the preferred term is "women's reproductive health," which is kind of funny because there's nothing healthy about it for anyone (other than the bank account of Planned Parenthood).

Future generations (assuming they aren't all aborted) will rightly ponder what collective madness took over the Democrats.  Why is their most absolute issue the ability of mothers to kill their children?

Before answering, let us put aside silly notions that the unborn aren't human beings.  If one wants to argue that the "clump of cells" that forms in the first few days and weeks after conception aren't worthy of protecting, fine.  You're wrong, but fine.

But no one can doubt that the kicking, moving, fully-formed child nine months in the womb is a viable human life, moments away from taking a first breath. 

Who would want to kill that child?  What kind of soul-less monster will be performing this service?

The fact that the law allows abortion up until birth gives the game away since the Gosnell case proved that the kinds of doctors that perform this grisly task won't trouble themselves with the minor details.  They'll happy kill the kid after it's born and just falsify the records.

While this bloody-minded law should outrage all people of goodwill, it's worth noting that evil often turns on itself.  Science has advanced considerably since both Roe and Casey were decided. 

The fact that the abortion lobby itself has decided to abandon a "first trimester only" approach indicates that the formerly bright line of "viability" no longer exists.  It's all or nothing.

New York's law also opens up other avenues for creative lawsuits.  Can a state that effectively legalizes premeditated murder be considered to in compliance with the Constitution?   Arbitrary death seems incompatible with a Republican form of government, let alone the 14th Amendment.

Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.

Gillette: We don't want to sell razors to men with enough testosterone to actually grow beards

I'd seen some of the buzz about the infamous Gillette commercial and figured "How bad can it be?"

The answer:  Stupid bad.

I've been a steady customer pretty much since my fast-growing beard started coming in my senior year of high school.  I don't go in for anything fancy, just the no-frills disposable model.  Two blades seem to get the job done.

But I guess that's over now.  Gillette's commercial explained to me in clear, unambiguous terms that I'm not wanted as a customer.  The notion of letting children work out things on their own is apparently verboten.  Gillette only wants to sell razors to helicopter dads who want to stunt their sons' development.

Of course, "suicide by wokeness" is nothing new.  We've watched other businesses do it.  I'm just curious as to what kind of jacked-up market analysis persuaded Gillette's management that this was a good idea.

Politically correct men come in two categories:  those without enough T to grow beards, and neckbeard-wearing noodle-arms who obviously don't buy razors.

Not a lot of growth potential in this bunch.

You know who does buy razors?  Military guys.  It's in the regs.  They have to be clean-shaven.  Oddly, they aren't a bunch of limp-wristed eunuchs who buy into feminist-ally self-loathing.

Even if they're trying to win over the Sneaky Fucker abusive-guy-pretending-to-be-a-friend-of-women market segment, Joss Whedon actually sports a beard.  Think about it.

Since I tend to buy in bulk and my stockpile is adequate, the effect of my boycott won't be felt immediately.  But that's okay.  I got plenty of shaving yet to do - without Gillette.

The Dems have betrayed just about everything they ever believed

One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."

Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.

I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed.  Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago. 

The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth.  The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.

Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them.  Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare."  Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.

But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well.  Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?

Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class.  Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it.  The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.

The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.

Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.

Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it.  The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.

Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes.  Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry.  But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.

One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism.  The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely.  At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.

I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!"  Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.

In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.

Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy."  Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism.  Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.

Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental.  Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.

 

More great moments in male feminism

I don't watch much television, so stories about various media personalities usually take a while to reach me.

Thus, the story of how Tucker Carlson's daughter was called a "cunt" and a "whore" at some ritzy country club completely passed me by.  I've seen some of Carlson's videos on youtube, but never watch him live (and I've now 'cut the cord' so I can't even if i want to).

Still, the news that the vulgarian who crudely insulted a young woman is in fact a board member for The Women's Initiative surprises me not at all.

By now it should be painfully obvious to all but the most deluded leftists that all male feminists are actually sexual predators and/or hard-core misogynists. 

Do I need to bring up Joss Whedon?  Harvey Weinstein?  Bill Clinton?  The entire staff at NBC News?

Male feminism is a means to an end.  A man who has issues with women can find easy acceptance as a male feminist ally.  In this role, he gains access to vulnerable women who are unable to process his actions or offer firm resistance.  If he's powerful enough, they will rationalize tolerating his behavior for "the cause," fearing that exposing him might hurt "the movement."

One of the reasons why the infamous "n-word" has become so toxic to white folks is the understanding that people don't blurt out bigoted words in the heat of passion unless they are accustomed to using them.

So it's telling that such a paragon of womanhood would immediately launch into what the Cool Kids call "slut-shaming" when seeking for ways to insult Carlson's daughter. 

It's not unusual, of course, for leftists to project their bigoted attitudes on their conservative opponents.  In fact, it's pretty much par for the course.  If you're a leftist in good standing, you can use whatever racial or sexist slurs you want, so long as the target is on the approved list.

Michael Savage has argued that liberalism is a mental illness, but I think he gets it backwards - mentally ill people are inherently attracted to liberalism because it allows them to freely project all of their problems onto conservatives.  If one is violent, racist, sexist or homophobic, one can use every single slur against conservatives with zero pushback.  Oh, and violence against women professors is totally allowed if they allow the wrong speaker on campus.

If you're crazy, what's not to like?

Of course, this gives the lie to the "it's never okay to -" line of reasoning, but the left has always been obsessed with the classic "who, whom?" context.

The funny thing about this is that if the Dems achieve their dream and the GOP is reduced to minority status, the number of "male ally" feminists will only multiply, until they once more find themselves being beaten and abused.  And they will have brought in it onto themselves.

The coming economic reckoning will cripple political correctness

For people of a certain age, the political behavior of businesses these days is utterly nonsensical.  Once upon a time it was understood that the point of a business was to make money.

To do this, businesses were usually utterly apolitical and insofar as their officers or owners took political positions, they were purely based on what was good for their business.

The notion of purposely striking a controversial position was simply absurd.  Whenever anti-capitalist extremists threatened a boycott, the company public relations department would usually offer a tepid response and reiterate that they sell to everyone.

All that's gone away.  Now you have major retailers falling over themselves to piss off core customers.  The whole "get woke, go broke" syndrome is an actual thing.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in entertainment. 

Hollywood has always leaned to the left, but it had enough common sense to also produce products for middle America.  For every "Murphy Brown," there were two or three detective shows, or apolitical sitcoms.

The same was true of movies.  Hollywood has always had a fetish for "niche" or "prestige" films that raked in awards and got praise from the wine and croissants crowd, but the understanding was that these were diversions.  The studios knew that they still needed mass-appeal movies to pay the bills.

No longer.  The television industry recently witnessed two otherwise inexplicable acts: the cancellation of Last Man Standing and the resurrection and immediate execution of the rebooted Roseanne.

Both of these shows performed well.  That is to say, they found an audience and made money.

And in both cases, the network executives decided they didn't want that money.

Better to take a financial loss that make a show that icky people might like.

The situation in the movie industry is even worse.  Disney paid something like four billion dollars for Star Wars and they are systematically dismantling both the franchise and its fan base.

Who does that?  Who makes a major investment and then blows it up?  It's like Gomez Addams trying (and failing) to lose money in the stock market.

Apparently the shareholders are starting to notice and while Disney and the other megacorps still have a lot of cash to burn, they're reaching the point where the bottom line is starting to be affected.

The key thing to remember in dealing with progressives is that they will never sacrifice the slightest convenience for their beliefs.  The richer they are, the more this holds true.  The saps in the aspiring middle class will put up with composting, but not the elites.  Even the fixation on fair trade, organic or whatever food is based on the fact that they can afford it.  It's just another form of conspicuous consumption.

Star Wars as a franchise is dead in the water and the executives that killed it are completely unrepentant.  It's the money men who will force the changes.

Never forget that Harvey Weinstein was above all things a guy who made money.  Hollywood is famously tolerant of pervs, but they're not going to whore their daughters out for pennies.

 

Where'd all the leftist non-violence advocates go?

I'm old enough to remember when Democrats had a "peace movement" that constantly harped on the evils of violence.

Indeed, they often talked about a "cycle of violence" where each new outrage begat an even greater one.

Then again, that was back when Dems also pretended to care about blue-collar workers and the dignity of all women.  Oh, and they wanted to keep abortion save, legal and rare.

The truth of course was the left never had a problem with violence - so long as they were the ones directing it.

Code Pink basically disappeared while Barack Obama waged wars of choice.  The same people who carried "No Blood For Oil!" signs and peace symbols are now supporting masked thugs physically beating their political opponents.

Despite it's cliche, there was some truth in the old cycle.  Escalation does occur and crises have a tendency to spin out of the control of those who try to engineer them.

Right now the Dems think Antifa is a fine thing, and if a few GOP staff or politicians get bloody noses, it's all good because they deserve it.

But in politics as in war, there is an adaptive element.  A tactic that works for one side will soon by adopted by the other. 

There's also the fact that regardless of how the midterms go, Donald Trump will still be the president.  He will have enormous power to prosecute and roll up the Antifa chapters as well as trace their funding sources.  Many on the right wonder why this hasn't happened yet.

The answer is that the process of cleaning up the FBI and DoJ is a lengthy one and we are only now seeing the fruits ripening from the effort.

The fact that we keep seeing more and more of them indicates that this hitherto modest harvest may well become a bumper crop.

To take our metaphor further, the administration is still going for the low-hanging fruit, but that's because they are just getting started.

If I'm wrong, and the government is powerless to intervene, then the left's tactics will get emulated - and the Republic will shudder closer to outright civil war.

Max Boot finds his new friends don't like him much

I'm trying to ignore the increasingly irrelevant Quisling Never Trump crowd, but I will take time to acknowledge when yet another one of my predictions has come true.

On May 18 of this year, I posted the following:

But Boot and his ilk were never really allies. They were hitchhikers and grifters, buttering us up to sell their "invade the world/invite the world" agenda.

On the critical issues of personal freedom (the right to live, the right to self-defense, limiting government power to bully us) Boot is progressive right down the line.

Good riddens. I hope he realizes that his new friends will tire of him quickly and that having ratted once, it will be much harder to re-rat in the future. [emphasis added]

Looks like that day has finally come.

The left isn't interesting in converts.  It doesn't want to convince people and more.

It wants to destroy them.

The Antifa goons in Portland aren't a debating society.  The release of personal addresses wasn't to facilitate cocktail parties.

Doorknobs like Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg are hoping that they'll be kept on as window dressings when the Dems finally gain their revolutionary victory. 

It is far more likely that they will be shot first, out of pure spite.  Indeed, they're far easier to reach than hardened targets.

If we know anything about the left, they always prey on the weak rather than the strong.  That's why Democrats like to beat up women so much, particularly liberal women.

The Never Trump soyboys are as weak as they come, and their mewling pleas for mercy are music to their tormentors' ears.

They may try to run back to our lines, but they won't get in.  They made their decision, and now they can live with it.

 

Imagining a new civil war

Today's ill-considered remarks by Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder have me reconsidering my previous thoughts about a new civil war.

I still find the left to be utterly cowardly, but those explicit calls to violence coupled with the disturbing decision of the Portland, Oregon police to simply hand over the streets to Antifa make me wonder if something at last approaching an insurgency may be on the way.

Certainly the Democrats seem willing to flirt with it, and their followers are increasingly unhinged.  As I pointed out two years ago, one way to flip control of the legislature is to simply kill your way to a majority.

This is why a second American civil war would be very unlike the first.  For one thing, there aren't homogenous geographic regions that balance each other.  Instead, we have a patchwork of polarized enclaves.  A better model would be Spain in 1936.

There are of course considerable differences between Spain's political situation and our own.  For one thing, Spain's institutions of government were far weaker than ours are now.  Spain had recent experience of a successful military coup and had gone from dictator to monarchy to republic in the space of 20 years.

Yet the political ferment is very much similar and social division every bit as profound.  One can easily see American leftist radicals happily butchering priests and desecrating churches much in the way their Spanish counterparts did.

And while our institutions are stronger, they are rapidly being eroded.  Nominally respectable political commentators are calling for the effective overthrow of the existing Constitutional order.  That's very close to what was going on in Spain.

I don't there we're there yet, but we are a lot closer than I ever thought we would get.  I really did figure that after a while, Hillary, her husband and her flying monkeys would go off into retirement - likely in a place with weak extradition treaties and permissive laws regarding child prostitution.

What I don't fully grasp is why so many on the left are determined to go down with her.  The Clintons have been a disaster for the Democrats, and Barack Obama finished their demolition job.  Even if Democrats manage to gain political control, they no longer have a governing coalition united on issues.  Instead they have a Popular Front united only by hating the same groups.

That may help hold people together, but at some point one can't paper over the inherent contradiction between - for example - demanding absolute protection of women while also demanding that they allow men in drag to enter their locker rooms and watch them shower.

The only thing that amuses me in this scenario is the likelihood that if things really do heat up, the first ones to go down will be the Quisling Never Trumpers since they will have become useless to everyone but themselves.

That also happened in Spain, with the leftist factions repeatedly turning on each other.  That in turn gave Franco the win.

Those hoping that the cold culture war gets hot ought to read up on the Spanish Civil War if they want an idea how nasty things can get.