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NOVEMBER 23,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

OH NO, THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE – OVERNIGHT,   FROM FOX:    President Biden appeared to read technical instructions from his teleprompter during a Tuesday speech about rising gas prices.  "Because of the actions we've taken, things have begun to change," Biden said.  "End of quote," Biden added before moving on to his next sentence.  Biden's aside came during a speech about rising gas prices and the economy, during which he also delivered a Thanksgiving message...The Biden administration has repeatedly faced accusations that the president is not in charge of his communications. In September, the White House abruptly cut the feed of Biden's briefing on wildfires with federal and state officials in Boise, Idaho.  You know a president is in trouble when he starts reading the stage directions from his own speeches.  Next time, if he says "smile and be sincere" you'll know that things have gone from bad to worse. 

November 23, 2021       Permalink

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS STUFF? – OVERNIGHT:  Political correctness isn't getting better, it's getting worse.  Apparently anticipating major losses in next year's midterm elections, and an increasingly hostile public, the proprietors of wokeness are rushing to squeeze in every retrograde article of absurdity that they can before November of next year.  Get this one.  From College Fix: 

A pair of academics are warning against use of the term “looting” to describe recent retail thefts in San Francisco.

According to KGO, some area police departments have been using the word regarding incidents at mainly high-end outlets like Louis Vuitton and Burberry. The thefts have resulted in about $1 million in losses.

On Saturday, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said the stores had been “burglarized and looted.”
But also this past weekend, San José Police Department Public Information Officer Christian Camarillo specifically pointed out he wasn’t going to use “looting” to describe the crimes. He referred to them as “organized robbery.”

KGO Race and Social Justice Reporter Julian Glover notes the thefts technically are not “looting” according to California Penal Code. Looting entails thefts during a “state of emergency, local emergency, or evacuation order” as a result of a natural or manmade disaster.

Although no emergencies have been declared in the Bay Area, many of the recent thefts occurred after the Kyle Rittenhouse “not guilty” verdict. The University of New Haven’s Lorenzo Boyd said however that the “massive, organized smash and grabs” were happening before the Rittenhouse verdict, thus any connection to it is a “false equivalency” and an attempt to “politicize crime.”

Boyd also claimed that “looting” typically is used when “people of color or urban dwellers are doing something.”

COMMENTS:  Reminds me of the radical Obama administration's attempts to label terror attacks as "manmade disasters."  He who controls the vocabulary controls the nation.  The left has learned that lesson very well.  Propaganda classes at colleges are labeled "studies" classes.  One scholar told me that if you dropped the word "studies" from college-class descriptions, you could instantly improve the colleges.  And giving students of certain groups higher grades on tests than others are given is called "race norming."

Jesse Waters of Fox suggested, tongue in cheek, that the looters be labeled "reparation hunters."  Good choice.  And burning a city could be called "urban cleansing." 

November 23, 2021       Permalink

NOVEMBER 22,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

THE TRUTH COMES OUT – FROM BREITBART:   Darrell E. Brooks Jr., the suspect charged with five counts of homicide in Sunday’s Waukesha Christmas parade massacre, appears to have posted several politically charged songs online under the name “Mathboi Fly,” according to several reports.  Multiple outlets, including the Sun and Heavy, have connected Brooks to Mathboi Fly music videos, matching his appearance to mugshots and other social media photos of the 39-year-old Milwaukee man. The YouTube channel hosting those videos has now been deleted. A Soundcloud profile under the same artist’s name is still accessible  Brooks uploaded a song titled “X” to Soundcloud three years ago. The song opens with a quote from Malcolm X, saying, “I think it would take a whole lot of nerve for white people today to ask negros do they hate them.” The next lyric from Brooks after the Malcolm X quote is “yeah.”  The song is pinned to a Twitter account that reportedly belongs to Brooks...The first verse continues Brooks’s Anti-American tirade as he sings lyrics about “devils” trying to take him down and murdering police officers.  Oh, I'm so shocked.  Haven't we been assured by the local constabulary that there is no possibility that the massacre was a terrorist act?  I wonder where that came from?  In fact, there hasn't been a word about motive.  I guess the powers that be calculate that, since the perp isn't a white supremacist, the story will fade away after a few days.  They could easily be right.  What an outrage.

November 22, 2021       Permalink

THE DEMOCRATS' DILEMMA – OVERNIGHT:  There's an old saying in politics:  If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.  The Dems are in a hole, and they just keep digging.   They face a grim future.  From Rich Lowry at the New York Post: 

The GOP has had plenty of reason for good cheer in recent months.

Nothing can compare, though, with the glad tidings of a potential showdown between Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to be President Joe Biden’s successor in 2024 should he decide not to run for re-election.

Surely, there would be other serious candidates in that circumstance, but there is no doubt that Harris and Buttigieg would be high on the list of potential contenders, as various journalistic outfits noted last week.

As it happens, they exemplify the contemporary Democratic Party’s electoral deficiencies, while bringing their own flagrant personal political weaknesses to the equation.

If this is really the choice Democrats would face should Biden decline to run, they better hope he defies age, bounces back to robust political health and is prepared to serve again well into his 80s.

Harris flamed out in the 2020 Democratic nomination well before the Iowa caucuses, unable to settle on a message or political identity. Her staff was obsessed with the progressive hothouse of Twitter, which is a powerful device for creating a false sense of what real voters, even Democratic primary voters, care about.

As VP, she’s basically picked up where her desultory campaign left off. In the latest USA Today-Suffolk University poll, Harris had a dismal 28 percent approval rating. It’s difficult to rate that low without getting indicted or suffering some other embarrassing scandal.

Her allies, of course, complain that she’s being treated unfairly because she’s a woman of color. This fixation on race and gender plays much better with the left-wing activist class than with the public.

The simpler explanation for Harris’ woes is that she’s a below-average politician serving as an unpopular president’s VP.

Buttigieg appeals to the party’s college-educated progressive voters.

Pete Buttigieg has had a happier tenure. With his surprising success in the 2020 Democratic primary, he bootstrapped himself into a Cabinet position and now is enjoying a windfall of resources thanks to the infrastructure bill.

He embodies, to a fault, the party’s growing strength among college-educated whites. He’s smooth, credentialed, hyper-articulate and a quick study who knows enough — sometimes just enough — to charm and impress journalists and other white-collar creative types.

If a management consultant were to design a progressive white Democrat in a bottle, the result would look a lot like Buttigieg, himself a former management consultant.

It’s become increasingly clear, though, that the Democratic Party’s new base among college-educated voters is a trap if it is pursued to the exclusion of an appeal to working-class voters. The party’s poor standing with non-college-educated voters has begun to show up in eroding support among Latinos, a constituency that was presumed to be a key pillar of the Barack Obama-crafted “coalition of the ascendant.”

A successful post-Biden Democratic future is more likely to be found in the likes of New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams than Harris or Buttigieg.

He is an African-American former cop with a hard-knocks upbringing that gives him working-class street cred. He knows that woke bromides aren’t the way to appeal to African-American voters, who put him over the top in the Democratic primary.

He’s a standard progressive in many respects, but he has proved immune to fashionable left-wing causes. He not only defused a hot-button cultural issue — namely, crime — he campaigned on it and made it a strength, an ability that most national Democrats have lost as the party has moved left since 2016.

It’s far too early to know how Adams’s City Hall tenure will actually turn out, but Adams has the qualities and approach that, in theory, could be fruitful for Democrats nationally.

Meanwhile, even if the GOP is on a roll at the moment, it shouldn’t get its hopes up. At the end of the day, a 2024 Democratic primary dominated by Harris and Buttigieg is probably too good to be true.

COMMENT:  Wonderfully stated.  In fact, that's the best analysis of the Democratic Party's plight that I've read recently.  However, there is always the possibility that sensible Democrats could start exerting some effort in a drive to save their party, and avoid the formation of a new center-left party, which would be a true Democratic nightmare.   Let's enjoy our current good fortune, but not too much.

November 22, 2021       Permalink