The Battlefield, July 29, 2016 – A Merciful End To Two Weeks Of Hell

First there was a Republican convention in Cleveland at which modern conservatism was all but exiled from its political home. And then came a Democrat convention marred by the cruel revelation that its insiders are the worst of the worst in American politics, with the proceedings on the stage and in the hall doing nothing to dispel that revelation.

Finally, the 2016 conventions are over. Finally.

What we know now is both parties have fully become the caricature that they’ve accused each other of. Donald Trump’s ascension creates the GOP as the Party Of Angry White Guys, rapacious capitalists with little sense of justice or mercy and a blind thrashing about for power without principle. And the return of the Clintons atop the Democrat Party exposes it as a noxious fraud, claiming unearned moral superiority and advertising a big tent without any respect for the freedom of independent thought, and a calculated and ruthless drive for power without principle.

To have stood by and watched both spectacles back to back has us in fear for the country’s future that such people are in competition to provide it leadership.

Has it ever been this bad? Has it been continually true that both parties were so bereft of principle? If so, we confess to an insufficient understanding of American history.

Since the founding of the country, one or both of the major political parties has been possessed with a Big Idea which overrode every other issue. Initially it was the acquisition of land, from the Louisiana Purchase to the Manifest Destiny, to stretch the US of A from sea to shining sea. There was the abolition of slavery, the spread of the Industrial Revolution, the building of the railroads, the settling of the frontier, the growth of capitalism, the spread of technology to light up the night, beating back Nazism and Japanese imperialism, winning the Cold War, the space race, civil rights… we’ve always been enmeshed in the Big Idea, and delivering it into reality.

What is our current Big Idea?

The Left can give you a host of them, but the rest of the country – to be kind – is less than interested in trannies in the bathroom, political correctness, Black Lives Matter, gun control and restricting political speech. Socialized medicine has been shot for and to date is largely a fizzle. Open-borders immigration chaos has America’s working class, and perhaps most of the country, ready to throw the bums out. Global warming is a joke, and it’s a joke increasingly on those who agitate about it.

The Right can’t even galvanize around any Big Ideas anymore. Trump won’t even present regulatory reform, a modernization of the welfare state, the tax revolution the economy so badly needs, or a plan to turn around our increasingly hollowed-out inner cities.

And the one Big Idea which must be engaged in, the existential conflict between Western Civilization and jihadist Islam, sends the entire political class running for the hills. Americans don’t want to do what it takes to win that conflict – which has been going on for 1400 years and will continue to exist until either Western Civilization or jihadist Islam are snuffed out – and because of that fact the Left wants to pretend the whole thing is Bush’s fault and the Right thinks befriending the right people and bombing the wrong people will keep it at bay. Meanwhile the jihad grows and metastasizes, and jihadists populate our midst. They make themselves known at times of their choosing – massacred nightclub-goers in Orlando and Paris, train bombings in Munich, a truck rampage in Nice. The infrastructure which produces them remains.

It’s a leadership vacuum greater than this country has ever seen, or at least greater than at any time since the 1850’s. And we know how that turned out.

The likely winner of this fall’s election gave her acceptance speech last night. It was a dreadful hour filled with trite banalities and abject lies. From the column I wrote for the American Spectator this morning

Hillary Clinton had very little to offer the American people we haven’t already seen from her in the 25-odd years she has been in national politics, and that’s a problem for her — because we know her, and we don’t like her. We don’t like the lies, we can’t take the incompetence and failure, we don’t care for the corruption and we have no use for the insincerity. Hillary’s husband, the aging satyr and serial abuser of female subordinates who spent eight years in the office at which she has grasped for a decade, could at least satisfy the old political chestnut that if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made.

But Hillary can’t fake sincerity, or much else. When polls say 55 percent of the country wants her indicted and 68 percent of the country calls her dishonest, there’s a word for it — she’s a failure.

And her acceptance speech proved it.

This was a speech seemingly designed to ward off the Clinton campaign’s worst fear — namely, that the Sanders supporters in the hall would boo her off the stage. That’s why right at the beginning she pandered to him in the most obsequious fashion possible, claiming that his campaign “inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary” and congratulating him for having “put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong.”

That’s why it was devoid of specifics; Clinton made Trump’s somewhat gassy speech look like a policy lecture at the Heritage Foundation. And it’s also why she took pains to praise both the Black Lives Matter people and the police, and why not long after claiming that she would be a president for Republicans and Independents, she unleashed one of the most blatant panders possible to those who hate the First Amendment by promising a constitutional amendment, if necessary, to overturn the Citizens United case.

It won’t likely escape notice that what was at issue in Citizens United was the freedom to make, in the year of an election, a film uncomplimentary of Hillary Clinton. So much for the respect for things like free speech among the country’s founding principles, but given the shambles she made of that early history when paying it the short shrift she did one shouldn’t be surprised.

The speech was one of the most dishonest in the history of party conventions, but what is most significant was how little outrage that dishonesty will have rendered on the public. And not because nine out of 10 of us won’t have watched it; that’s merely a symptom of what we already know. Namely, that an honest speech is beyond the capability of either Hillary or her party.

We know these people are brazen liars, and we know that Michael Walsh was completely correct when he called the Democrats a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. The revelations from WikiLeaks’ docu-dump of the DNC e-mails show quite clearly how rotten they are, and how they’ve proven themselves to be poseurs as to the virtues they claim — anti-racist, egalitarian, for fair play.

If you think that’s just one man’s opinion, you’re correct.

Maybe it’s this man’s opinion…

suffering bill

We’re of the opinion that the destruction and realignment of both political parties would be a blessed event. But while it appeared the GOP was first on the way out last week, the one which really needs to go is the Democrats. Here’s hoping the Bernie Sanders crowd, who was repeatedly shouted down by organized goons supporting Hillary last night and which all but deserted the hall (they were replaced, believe it or not, by paid actors), rip that party asunder in this and future elections.

 

Simplistic-Weapon-12-Battle-Axes-in-Saltire – Things aren’t any better in Germany, where the Big Idea mentioned above is making itself increasingly difficult to avoid

The disturbing confrontation unfolded just days after an 18-year-old German-Iranian manopened fire in a crowded Munich shopping mall and a nearby McDonald’s.

The attack, which sent shockwaves throughout Germany, left nine people dead and wounded 16 others.

While the country, still shaken by the attack, attempts to reinstate order, a disturbance caught on camera at the makeshift memorial for the shooting saw the mourners dramatically turn on each other.

The video exposes the tensions running high throughout the country as both Germany and France have been hit by several attacks in recent weeks.

During the incident, a group of Muslim men arrived at the memorial and disrupted silent mourners who had gathered together at the scene to pay their respects to the dead.

They repeatedly chanted  “Allahu Akbar!”, an Islamic phrase that translates to “God is the greatest.”

The Italian news outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano released the footage of the confrontation which took place on Sunday evening.

The young man can be heard screaming: “Open up your eyes, the world is not that perfect, open up your eyes.”

The man is then hugged by a bystander, but others reacted aggressively to his subsequent chant of Allahu Akbar.

Some of the crowd can be heard complaining to the police for standing by during the tense ordeal.

One man said: “Shut up with that Allahu Akbar s***, f*** you motherf*****. Shut your mouth.”

Another person even claimed the men were making “Islamic State hand signs”.

But the Muslim man replied back: “Have respect, it’s a commemoration. We have lost our countrymen here.”

At the end of the video, the police form a line between the two sides to prevent any escalation or physical violence.

While some online have commented that Allahu Akbar is a phrase commonly used in mourning, some criticised its use during the solemn, quiet atmosphere at the memorial.

The video isn’t all that much to look at, and Muslims will tell you that Allahu Akbar is more or less a universal thing they’ll say on any occasion, but perhaps that’s a culture in need of an expansion of its vocabulary. Allahu Akbar, after all, is what the jihadist nut who shot all those people was yelling when he did his deed.

Europe is nearly at the breaking point, and none among its “acceptable” political class are willing to address the problems of public safety that runaway migration from the Islamic world have brought on.

The fact that Clinton expressly joined the European elite in burying her head in the sand on this issue makes her completely unacceptable as president – which is not to say that her dishonesty, corruption and leftism with respect to other issues aren’t similarly disqualifying.

 

Simplistic-Weapon-12-Battle-Axes-in-Saltire – Defiance and stupidity make for high-stakes failure.

You probably heard that all six Baltimore police officers prosecuted in the Freddie Gray case were exonerated, either by juries or by the prosecutors themselves who refused to move forward with their cases. That was a major blow to the career of that city’s D.A., an execrable harpy named Marilyn Mosby who sought, in a style reminiscent of Mike Nifong of Duke lacross case fame, to climb aboard those cops’ backs and ride to political relevance.

Mosby, whose city council member husband played a significant role in ginning up the riots that followed Gray’s death (he killed himself in the back of a police van by throwing himself against the walls in an effort to sustain an injury he could sue with, and ended up more successful than he expected since the city of Baltimore paid out a wrongful death settlement of more than $5 million before the criminal cases against the cops were even adjudicated), had publicly demagogued the cases in a manner it was thought would poison the jury pool. But it turned out her case was so weak it wasn’t even possible to get convictions.

And with her failure laid bare, this…

Like we said, defiance and stupidity make for high-stakes failure. Now the policemen are going on offense

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby is going from prosecutor to civil defendant in connection with the case of the death of Freddie Gray.

On Wednesday, Mosby announced that charges against three officers still facing trial were being dropped. Mosby gave only a statement, but had to leave without taking questions because five of the officers in the case have filed lawsuits against her.

Officers Garrett Miller, Edward Nero and William Porter as well as Sgt. Alicia White and Lt. Brian Rice are suing Mosby and Maj. Samuel Cogen of the Baltimore Sheriff’s Office. Cogen was the law enforcement officer who filed charging documents against the officers.

The lawsuits allege false arrest, false imprisonment, defamation or false light, and other assertions. They were filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland in 2015 in late April and early May around the time the officers were arrested.

We’d like to propose a settlement of this case. Perhaps she doesn’t have to pay anybody, if she agrees to resign and never appear on television again.

Simplistic-Weapon-12-Battle-Axes-in-Saltire – How about a Today’s Last Thing? How about a movie review?

You can’t get any better than Gavin McInnes reviewing the new Ghostbusters movie…

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