Posted on November 29, 2023

 

 

Cranial Tumbleweeds

Mail-in voting, Satanists, neocons, etc.

by

Daniel Clark

 

 

* One of the most meaningless phrases in the English language is "with all due respect," since the speaker seldom indicates how much respect is due. If the person or entity being spoken of is not due any respect, then it's just a setup line, to be followed by a statement of disrespect. The meaning is no different than if the introductory clause were excluded altogether. If one means to transmit the message that Michael Moore is a lardhead, for example, one should simply say, "Michael Moore is a lardhead," not, "With all due respect to Michael Moore, he is a lardhead."

* Conservatives have been largely missing the point about mail-in balloting. Yes, it creates more vulnerabilities to voter fraud, but by far the greater threat is that of coercion. In short, we no longer have a secret ballot. Anymore, a union, church group, student group or other collective can assemble and fill out its members' ballots together, to make sure everybody is voting the "right way."

* Also, Democrats no longer need to prod people from old folks' homes, homeless shelters and asylums to actually go to the polls in person, and then hope they vote the way that they're told. Now, they can go to the facilities in which those people live, and physically assist them in casting their ballots.

* Turning an election into a high school group project is a quintessential Democrat policy, in that it perceives people only as members of groups, and not as individuals. The last thing they want is tens of millions of individuals voting independently, as if they had free will, or something.

* Naturally, mail-in voting increased turnout in demographic groups across the board, but the difference has been especially great among college students. Is it any wonder things are headed in the direction they are? Just look at what has been going on at college campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, and that is what's happening to the electorate.

* Universities flatter themselves as being bulwarks against "hate," but they only understand that term to mean bigotry against a politically protected group. When hatred is directed at an approved target, such as Southerners, suburbanites or Christians, they treat it as a virtue. In fact, it's the one thing they're most successful at teaching, even though nobody asked them to.

* That's why incompetence is no excuse for our educational system. Schools are actually very successful at teaching the things they want to teach. They want to teach that it's possible to change your gender, and the children think they can change their genders. They want to teach that carbon dioxide is destroying the earth, and the children live in fear of carbon dioxide. If they ever want to teach mathematics and grammar, nobody is stopping them.

* Better yet, they could start with science, by teaching the children that the element carbon and the compound carbon dioxide are two different substances.

* No person would consciously purchase unhappiness for tens of thousands of dollars, but countless students are unwittingly doing exactly that. They spend four years being conditioned to hate their parents, their country and God, and they come out carrying decades' worth of debt. That's no way to live.

* Before conservatives all go stampeding to the polls to return Donald Trump to the White House, we need to recognize that if he wins, he will not be able to run again after that. Assuming that he understands this, we must conclude that he will also understand that he no longer needs pro-lifers, gun owners, and conservatives in general.

* This comes with the caveat that Trump only understands what he wants to. If he orders some flunky lawyer to advise him of a secret rule allowing him to serve a third term, then he will choose not to understand the plain language of the Twenty-Second Amendment, just as he has the Twelfth.

* Jacob Chansley, a.k.a., the QAnon Shaman of Capitol Riot fame, a.k.a., the big dork who was dressed as one of the Sacred Cows from that episode of Get Smart, has filed papers to run for Congress as a member of the Libertarian Party. Just a friendly reminder of who the real RINOs are.

* New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is releasing all the footage from the Capital Riot to the public, which is a good thing, but it should not have been necessary. That's because Kevin McCarthy had previously given the video to Tucker Carlson, who was expected by many to prove that the Trumpies were framed by the Deep State, and that the entire event was an FBI false flag operation. Did the resulting anticlimactic thud suggest that Tucker is part of the conspiracy? Why not?

* Here are five words the author of this site never thought he would print: Three cheers for Piers Morgan! The toffee-nosed, royalty-obsessed, left-of-center English broadcaster interviewed social media phenomenon, former kickboxing champion and self-appointed manliness expert Andrew Tate, and actually held the big boob accountable for his refusal to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. At every evasion, Morgan put the question to him again, and asked him why he refused to give a straight answer. Hopefully, alleged conservatives and genuine Tate sycophants Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have watched it, and been duly ashamed.

* The word "sycophants" is not derived from sucking pants, but anyone who has seen the Carlson and Owens interviews with Tate could be excused for thinking it was.

* Upon receiving reports of the Hamas atrocities against the Israelis, Leftists demanded to see evidence to support the claim that babies had been beheaded. Forensic pathologists have verified that many beheaded babies were found after the raid, but that's beside the point. No honest person would have seriously doubted the claim in the first place. Those who were expressing this doubt were merely acting as defense attorneys for a bunch of genocidal terrorists.

* Ever wonder why there's never any demand to show proof of baby killing in our country? There's a simple reason for that, which is that everyone already knows it's going on. If you show a picture of a baby that was killed in an abortion to somebody who is trying to appear neutral on the issue, that person will get mad at you for showing him the picture. He will not get mad at the killers, because he already condones what they're doing.

* If it were true, as the Supreme Court claimed in Roe v. Wade, that it is not objectively known when a new human life begins, then shouldn't our legislators drop everything until they get to the bottom of that question? If our laws allow the annual killing of a million creatures that may or may not be people, what exactly is the argument in favor of allowing that to continue?

* In his 1983 essay Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation, President Reagan wrote, "The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?" Forty years later, too many pro-lifers are still exhausting a lot of energy addressing that first question, while the other side is already answering the second.

* As Billy Crystal's character says in Throw Momma From the Train, "A writer writes, always." Ronald Reagan was always writing. There is little evidence that the same is true of that esteemed presidential man of letters, Barack Obama.

* Well, there is that one letter he wrote that has been recently discovered, but do we really want to get into that?

* Obama's mother's first name was Stanley. If he were a Republican, everybody would know that.

* Reactions to the on-ice killing of hockey player Adam Johnson are a microcosm of how evil is abetted by people's refusal to recognize it. Video of the incident clearly shows that Matt Petgrave deliberately lifted his leg above shoulder level to kick Johnson with his skate blade, yet initial reports declared it to be a "freak accident," and everybody seems to agree that he cannot have possibly done it on purpose. Those reactions reflect an unwillingness to consider that one's own moral standards might not be universally held. You would never kick a man in the neck with a skate blade, so for somebody else to have done so must have been accidental.

* It is this same phenomenon that leads people to accept the excuse that Hamas must be motivated by legitimate grievances. Most people can't imagine themselves storming into people's homes and slaughtering whole families, raping teenage girls and beheading babies, so there must be some context in which to rationalize it. Either those things didn't really happen, or they were compelled by extraordinary circumstances, or else they were no worse than something the Israelis supposedly did. The obvious conclusion that one side in the conflict is evil, and its people voluntarily commit evil acts, has been preemptively excluded from the discussion.

* When Petgrave's name was announced at his team's next home game, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. This was not because the people in attendance thought Johnson's killing was a good thing. Rather, they behaved as if it were a tragic event that victimized both men equally.

* Now that Petgrave has been charged with manslaughter, we can expect there to be attempts to smear the deceased Johnson in order to maintain a moral equivalence. If Johnson ever injured an opponent while committing an interference penalty, that will be introduced in the court of public opinion as evidence that he was no better than the man who killed him.

* When people openly declare their evil intentions, it's best to believe them. When open borders advocates chant, "No borders, no wall, no USA at all," they really mean that. Ditto that for rainbow activists who say, "We're here, we're queer, we're coming for your children." Several years ago, when pro-abortion demonstrators shouted down their opponents by yelling, "Hail Satan! Hail Satan!" it was generally dismissed as sarcasm, as if they were parodying the way pro-lifers portray them. Today, New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham hosts an abortion hotline at taxpayer expense, which directs women to a clinic that is operated by the Satanic Temple. Still laughing?

* It requires willful ignorance to refer to people chanting "No justice, no peace" as peaceful demonstrators.

* The Satanic Temple is a prime example of evil exploiting people's refusal to accept it. To hear its members tell it, they don't actually believe in the so-called, quote-unquote "devil." They're just "freethinkers." According to the "about" page on its website, "The mission of the Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits." Gosh, what a blunder it was to have accidentally named themselves "Satanic," then.

* Before much longer, Satanists will have become a legitimized political constituency. Democrat pollsters will go on TV and discuss the importance of turning out the Satanist vote, and presidential candidates will speak at their events and pander for their endorsement. They already do these things with regard to Planned Parenthood. Is the Satanic Temple really much more of a stretch?

* In the 1984 Dragnet movie starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, the villains belonged to an organization called PAGAN, which stood for People Against Goodness and Normalcy. At the time, this was meant to be amusing, not prescient.

* Nikki Haley has not softened her position against abortion, but she has made the softening of her rhetoric about it a focus of her presidential campaign. Supposedly, this has helped her in the polls, but it has also made it impossible for her to adequately explain herself. While scolding her fellow Republicans for their stridency, she has repeatedly said, "We need to respect the issue." Huh? The issue is something that Haley herself recognizes as the killing of innocent people. What about that do we need to respect? She should not be allowed to get through another debate without answering that question.

* Why must Haley's rise in the polls be attributed to her moderate mushspeak on abortion, instead of what really distinguishes her from the field, which is that she is a traditional foreign policy conservative? The untold story here is that the Republican Party has been infected by a noxious strain of libertarian blame-America-first peacenikkery, but that its takeover is not a done deal.

* Haley was a great representative for us at the UN because she advocated for America in a firm and dignified manner. In her presidential campaign, she has chosen instead to play the liberal "strong woman" stereotype, meaning that she has become shrill and irrational. Her rejoinder to any rebuttal seems to be that the other person better back off or she is going to get very mad at him. Her campaign slogan might as well be "Don't Go There!"

* It is impossible to imagine Jeane Kirkpatrick or Condoleezza Rice carrying on the way Haley has during the debates. Perhaps that's why neither of them ever ran.

* During the Republican debate in Miami, Haley even called Vivek Ramaswamy "scum," which is obviously way out of bounds. A smarmy, unprincipled eel he may be, but scum?

* You never hear conservatives refer to a "strong woman," because we don't think there's anything exceptional about it. The liberal "strong woman" designation is a backhanded insult to all the women they don't place in that category, which is most of them.

* How many times does Megan Rapinoe have to go away before she goes away?

* Sports Illustrated has been caught publishing AI-generated articles, and attributing them to nonexistent authors with fake profiles. This should come as no surprise, because sports journalism has been on autopilot for decades. If you want to be a sportswriter, call the fans racists. Demand that women who play in a league that generates no revenue be paid the same as men who produce billions of dollars a year. Lie about Title IX every chance you get. Champion pointlessly bitter and hateful people like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, while shielding them from the need to ever explain themselves. Make lame excuses for the most egregious acts of unsportsmanlike conduct. Portray America as an oppressor in any feature you write about any athlete. The sports media have become such a cliche factory that their work requires no human thought process whatsoever. There's no need to pay people to write the articles, when they can simply be poured out of a can.

* The GOPeaceniks have become deeply invested in the leftist canard that the military-industrial complex is lobbying America into wars in order to enrich itself through increased weapons production. Would it not also serve these sinister forces for us to be adequately militarily equipped during peacetime? Then how come we never are?

* Donald Trump has claimed countless times to have "rebuilt the military." Does this mean that he, the grand poobah of the GOPeaceniks, is really a tool of the military-industrial complex?

* Of course he did no such thing. A rebuilt American military would not have to worry about running low on resources just because we're aiding Ukraine. If this rebuilding took place, then where's the stuff?

* President Eisenhower coined the term "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address. The way that phrase is usually employed today is the result of a wild extrapolation. Ike's brief and cryptic warning does not remotely resemble the grandiose conspiracy theory that is commonly attributed to him.

* Ike noted that prior to the Second World War, factories were repurposed for military production whenever the need arose, but that this left us undersupplied in the meantime. Even as he expressed concern about the development of full-time military contractors, he acknowledged their necessity. He did not consider them to be the enemy. Those who do are agreeing with Michael Moore the Lardhead, not Eisenhower.

* In today's political climate, any Republican who supports any American military action, or even our provision of military aid to another country, is bound to be labeled a "neocon," but this is not a dirty word. The real neocons were so named because they were former socialists from the beatnik era who had become newly conservative. They were also mostly Jewish, a detail that is not lost on many of those who use the term as if it were an expletive.

* Critics of the neocons are generally correct on the point that they are overly-interventionist. Neocons favored American involvement in the Balkans, for instance, based on their belief that we had a duty to stop the atrocities that were taking place, even though there was no American national interest. They are certainly not aggressors, however, which makes it pretty funny to hear them called "warmongers" by apologists for Vladimir Putin.

* "Neocons" is an epithet that used to be hurled by liberals against conservatives of all stripes, without concern for what the word actually meant. They were only slandering their opponents through word association. "Neo." Get it? Yes, it was that childish.

* Vivek Ramaswamy has created an infantile pledge he says that he, as president, would require his appointees to sign, which he calls the "No to Neocons Pledge."' One of the statements in it is that "war is never a preference, only a necessity." Of course, nobody ever makes the case for a war by saying it isn't necessary, but he prefers it. Nor does anyone concede the necessity of a war he opposes, no matter how compelling the case may be. If America is attacked, as it was on 9/11, is it necessary to fight back, or is it just that we prefer not to be conquered? Ramaswamy thinks we should not have responded militarily to 9/11, so his characterization of war as a necessity does not seem to reflect his true opinion.

* As long as everybody in politics is going pledge crazy, all presidential candidates should be asked to sign a pledge assuring us that they don't believe 9/11 was an inside job. If they don't think we should have responded militarily against the Taliban, that doesn't leave a lot of other possibilities. We need to know which of these candidates would be steadfast in protecting our country against foreign terrorists, and which ones would leave us vulnerable, because they're too busy pointing the finger of blame internally, at American neocon bogeymen.

* With all due respect to Vivek Ramaswamy, he is a smarmy, unprincipled eel.

 

 

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