This is the only public forum in which I discuss my politics.
Over on the faceboob, I give an occasional like to right-wing things that crop up, but I don't say anything political there. When asked in meatspace by someone I don't know and trust, I say, "right of center".
Which is true: I'm just not saying how far right of center I am. Which is basically far enough that Mitt Romney is no longer visible. But I am a kinder, gentler, left-wing pansy-ass compared to some of the people I read.
So, to the article:
A lot of people—especially in the press—misunderstand support for President Trump as some sort of national fascist movement. The reality is that the GOP jumped the shark with Mitt Romney in 2012,...The GOP jumped the shark long before Mitt Romney came on the scene. The election of George W. Bush was when the GOP jumped the shark; absent 9/11 Bush would have served one term, like his father did. He championed and signed the single largest expansion of federal education spending since Jimmy Carter invented the Department of Education, basically taking over stewardship of a bill written by Teddy Kennedy. (Who, after it was signed, said, "This is good but it doesn't do enough....")
The "conservative" Bush administration spent money as only government can. It's not an exaggeration to say that the deficit got quite large under Bush; it's just that the Bush deficits were dwarfed by the Obama deficits. The GOP became "Democrat Lite" quite rapidly during the Bush administration, and then during the Obama years they started to show us what that meant. "We don't have enough votes to overturn this," they told us in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, "but if you elect more of us, we will, and then we can finally shut it down!" Only they never had enough, not even after the GOP took control of both the House and Senate. And every time, it was a technicality, a pretext, which kept them from overturning the thing that GOP voters wanted overturned. In the 2014 elections, Republicans won back control of both houses, yet in 2015 they did nothing other than "business as usual." They wouldn't fight; they wouldn't even try. And every time push came to shove, they rolled over and let the Democrats get what they wanted. EVERY TIME.
I was sick of it before Romney came on the scene, and declared in the 2012 election season that I would not vote for him. And I didn't--I voted libertarian--and people like me are why Romney lost the election. The only functional difference between Romney and Obama was skin color, and the result would have been the same.
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I do not bother with televised media any longer, and this kind of thing is why. Tucker Carlson isn't a real right-winger; he plays one on TV. He's a serious version (as in, "not doing it to get laughs") of Steven Colbert, is all.
His man of the people act is just that, an act. Carlson is super-wealthy. If he walked away from his job, his grandchildren would never have to work a day in their life. If he gets fired, it means fly fishing in Maine and ski trips to Aspen.The thing that I find so hilarious about leftists who rail against "Faux News" is how utterly not right-wing Fox News actually is. If I watch TV news, I watch Fox not because they're right-wing but because they are the least observably left-wing TV news channel there is.
It's like the difference between Josef Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev. They're both still hard-line leftists, but only one of them will have you shot for laughing at the old joke about Lavrenti Beria being caught with a cucumber in the sauna.
(There is no "old joke" that I know of. That was merely an example.)
"Fair and balanced" is a joke. They're not; they're left-wing. But at least they are still pretending in a world where the others are not.
Case in point, a Fox News reporter "fact-checked" Donald Trump:
Social media is abuzz over the release of a clip of President Trump's interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace, where the Fox News host "fact-checked" Trump's claim that Joe Biden wants to defund the police.Except, there is one little problem with that statement:
"It's gotten totally out of control and it's really because they want to defund the police, and Biden wants to defund the police," Trump said in the clip.
"Sir, he does not," Wallace shot back.
Joe Biden said in an interview Wednesday that some funding should "absolutely" be redirected from police, amid calls from some in his party to "defund the police" in the wake of the protests across the country.Taking money away from the police is "defunding", whether you do it partly or entirely.
The only way I can give Wallace the benefit of the doubt there is to concede that since Joe Biden has, unfortunately, advanced senile dementia, it is very likely that Biden himself doesn't want to defund the police, but merely to have a pudding cup before going back to bed.
But, for certain, it is not the role of an interviewer to step into an interview by taking sides against the President, and thus, doing the bidding of the Biden campaign. Of course Biden was using weasel words, words that are slightly ambiguous, the better to allow his shills in the media to rush forward to defend him.And that's Fox News doing it.
It's yet another embarrassing moment for the not-so-mainstream media.
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By the way, from the link before that last one:
In the end, this revolution will end up where all revolutions end. Everyone will be forced to choose sides and give over their life to the cause they choose. The people living in mansions will find the choice easy. Every day they are reminded of how well the revolution is treating them. For everyone else, it is more difficult, but eventually, everyone will have to become a partisan for their own cause.In the French Revolution, lots of the people in the mansions ended up going to the guillotine, en masse. That's also something to consider.
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How communist China treats Uiqhers.
Yes, it looks like Nazi Germany. That's because China is Nazi Germany.
Do you not understand? This is what leftism is. It doesn't matter what labels you apply, what colors you drape it in, how you camouflage it. Leftism is always rounding up "undesirables", herding them into cattle cars, and doing everything possible to exterminate them.
You can call it national socialism, marxist socialism, democratic socialism, or whatever the hell you want to, but in the end the adjective doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the noun, "socialism".
It always leads to horror and death, in industrial quantities, because it cannot be otherwise.
China murdered sixty million of its own citizens in the twentieth century, an order of magnitude more than Hitler did. Why do you think they would stop? No one has given them any reason to.
Remember that idiotic book that the leftists all lauded a couple of years ago? What was it called, something like "The Underground Airline" or something like that? It was about a United States which never abolished slavery, and in the story, the "civilized" nations of the world wouldn't do business with the US because slavery was still legal.
Now, look at China and tell me how plausible that actually is. Our elites love to excoriate Hitler for rounding up Jews and gypsies and gays and the handicapped and shipping them off to death camps, but they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say to China for doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING. The same left-wing asshats who berate us for "islamophobia" after every terrorist atrocity won't lift a finger to sanction China for committing an actual genocidal action against muslims.
Because they love socialism.
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I agree: Let Portland burn itself to the ground.
Pull all federal personnel out of the city. If there are federal functions that are needed, too bad; maybe go to a city that cares about maintaining law and order.
Clearly the Left wants the riots in Portland. I have no idea why, but they do.Because what will happen? As the article attests, sooner or later the left eats itself.
You cannot protect people from themselves. That is a losing proposition.
It is for this reason that I believe that Trump should pull all federal law enforcement, federal judges, federal attornies, essentially all federal employees out of Portland.
So many people have used the French Revolution as an example, but that's because that's how this shit always goes. The Jacobins eventually begin to accuse each other of not being "revolutionary" enough and then its a power struggle to see who comes out on top. Robespierre was in charge of the damn thing and even he got himself shortened.
Pull the feds out entirely, because there will come a point at which Portland will get down on its lousy, stinking, purulent knees and beg the feds to come back and fix it.
Pull all the feds out--not just law enforcement but all of them.
Trump should pull all federal law enforcement out of Oregon. Every last one.And they will. They can't help themselves; it's built into their ideology. They are utterly incapable of self-moderation.
Then state that they will only come in at the explicit request of local leaders, e.g., mayors, county commissioners, governor.
Lastly, like he did in Minnesota, reject federal financial assistance to any location that doesn't get shit under control. I'd add in that the federal government will sue localities for damages to repair federal property damaged or destroyed by rioters.
When the fascists call you fascist, just walk away.
It's not worth the fight at this point. Antifa has to be let go to go so over-the-top that it's indefensible for even CNN.
I figure that is about the time that Antifa is shooting Obama and Hillary voters for insufficient groveling to BLM, calling them white supremacists.
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Masks for antifa terrorists good, masks for federal law enforcement bad. Of course, hypocrisy is an essential component of leftism.
The thing is, the feds don't fuck around, not like municipal police. That is why all the leftists are so unhappy about this. Those people, being arrested by the feds, aren't going to get off with a little slap on the wrist.
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And here we go again with the leftists claiming that the right-wingers have a stake in helping them.
All those years GOPers claimed they wanted personal arsenals in case of tyranny, like feds violating posse comitatus. They claimed they weren't stockpiling the guns so the South could Rise Again or anything. But we don't see them defending Portland.My response to that steaming pile is, "GO FUCK YOURSELF."
I want to see those left-wing terrorists get arrested by the feds. They aren't rioting and looting for freedom; they're trying to enslave the country, to make us marxist shithole. They're not advocating anything noble; they want to destroy the United States. They are against freedom in any form, and support only total government control of the people.
No matter how these communist assholes screech "brown shirts!" or squawl about the "violation of posse comitatus" I would bet every cent in my checking account that these federal agents are following the law in every respect, and that these arrests are not only legal but justified.
I am not going to rise up against my government in support of lawless communists. And so, I say it again: GO FUCK YOURSELF.
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Heat index, 109°. Me: at computer. Pool: full.
*sigh*
Tomorrow is supposed to be marginally cooler, so that will probably be a better day to cut grass than today is.
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Somehow, suddenly it's almost four PM. WTF? Did I spend that long on blogging? I got up at noon!