Tidbits For Tuesday

     I’m substantially under the weather just now. In particular, I lack the energy for one of my trademarked interminable tirades. So have a few brief citations of news and opinion from (hopefully) less afflicted sources.

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1. An Elucidation.

     Like me, Ace sometimes goes on at length. I enjoy it when he does; we have a lot in common, both politically and stylistically. But we should also appreciate those instances when he performs a concise and penetrating encapsulation of a major phenomenon:

     [T]he left makes the following two demands:

1. That the left shall define what is categorically, without-exception, no-wiggle-room forbidden to say.
2. That the left shall also decide who shall have the benefit of exceptions to these rules they've imposed on all of us, which allegedly have no exceptions or wiggle-room in them.

     Your demands have been considered and your demands have been rejected.

     The significance will not be lost on any attentive observer of contemporary American culture and politics. Neither should Ace’s follow-on prescription:

     The people most responsible for imposing this Reign of Terror on the rest of us should be the first to suffer the penalties for Wrongspeech they demand in others. They should not be immune to their own fucking rules.

     Go fuck yourselves in the heart with a knife.

     Indeed. Mega-indeed.

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2. Nazis? Where?

     This recent emission from Sarah Hoyt about why the Left “needs Nazis” is an important psychological analysis of Leftist rhetoric. The bit that struck me most pungently is her climax:

     What is going on is that, taught in schools or not, the knowledge that communism/socialism is a disaster has permeated our collective subconscious. And the idiots still pushing it are bitter, horrible people who want camps and executions…for their opponents. The fact that they’re convinced there’d be paradise once we’re gone does not excuse them. A hundred million broken eggs and not a single omelet.

     So they must resurrect the ghost of the Nazis because it’s the only regime ugly enough to justify their othering of us, and their wanting to kill us.

     They look through the hatred in their eyes and see the ghosts of Nazis on our side. But it is their side that keeps those ghosts alive, as justification for what they want to do to us.

     Nazis don’t exist, except in the hearts of socialists, who need them desperately to excuse the mass murders they intend to commit.

     Remember Bill Ayres’s declaration that “the revolution” would have to kill about 25 million of us. He meant it. Never imagine that he didn’t. Indeed, he was looking forward to it. But we’re the Nazis.

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3. Need More Nazis? We’ve Got ‘Em!

     Lecturer Neema Parvini has produced a longish but excellent article that segues nicely from Sarah Hoyt’s piece above:

     Of all the stunningly awful attempts to explain away the reasons why the 2016 US Presidential election did not produce the result that the elites wanted, perhaps the worst – and certainly one of the most persistent – has been the claim that Donald J. Trump is a would-be Hitler leading his Nazi followers to power. Almost two years after Trump’s victory, plans have now been announced to once again adapt Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to the screen but this time with “Trump hanging over it.” So as well as being the embodiment of evil, does President Trump also have an Orwellian Big Brother stranglehold on the media?...

     George Orwell once said that the “English intelligentsia…can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism…So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Having experienced the reality of totalitarianism first-hand, Orwell knew all too well the ways in which people far removed from it employ “soothing phrases” to disguise more sinister ends.

     Parvini makes a devastating case that the Left’s major tactic is linguistic. His article is a gem from start to finish. Please read it all.

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4. The Height Of Hubris.

     When the Democrats are in power in Washington, they have neither time nor patience for any Republican’s ideas or observations. When the Democrats are out of power...they make “non-negotiable demands:”

     Senate Democrats told President Trump on Monday that they won’t accept a deal to lift sanctions on North Korea unless the country completely and permanently eliminates its nuclear and missile testing program.

     "Sanctions relief by the U.S. and our allies should be dependent on dismantlement and removal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. wrote in a letter to Trump. "Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal."

     They also said the deal must also result in the "complete and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea," an end to North Korea's ballistic missile tests, and "robust compliance inspections." Any deal that doesn't meet these requirements could be blocked by Congress, they warned.

     "We believe that Congress therefore has an important role to play in working with the administration to support your efforts and to shape U.S. policy toward North Korea," they wrote. "However, we also believe that Congress must act as a check on any agreement that does not live up to these principles by imposing tougher sanctions and oversight."

     Can’t you just smell the fear sweat dripping from these clowns, the sheer panic? Their beloved Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Hussein Obama produced the current situation with their unilateral concessions, their acceptance of the unacceptable, and their fiddling and faddling. Now President Trump has the North Korean bull by the horns, openly making the Democrats’ icons look like the incompetent fools they were and are, and they want a piece of his triumph! They want to be included in the photos. They can’t allow that he, the “boor businessman” who has no right to his office, has succeeded where they failed.

     If I were advising President Trump, I’d counsel him to exclude them from the affair as completely and rigidly as their zeroes heroes excluded Republican participation. And yes, Schadenfreude goes nicely with Cheerios^® and Dannon’s^® coffee yogurt.

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     That’s all for the moment, Gentle Readers. If I can get through my chores without bursting a blood vessel, I might have more later. Until then, be well.