Motus Mentis

33 Comments

1. Whitewall says

   The Hillary campaign and organization are Stalinist felons. The Left-Totalitarian, and the rank and file Democrats of today? Supremacists…the adjective, not the noun. Yet.

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 8:08 am | Permalink
2. JK says

   https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 10:13 am | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   JK,

   I would rather they make these donations, and get their cards on the table. The idea of journalistic impartiality is a fiction, and their naked partisanship during this election, together with the action of Wikileaks and others, has made this obvious to all.

   Let them donate, then, and let the rest of us consume their “product” with a clearer understanding of what it really is.

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
4. the one eyed man says

   James O’Keefe? You’re kidding me, right? Was Alex Jones unavailable?

   Here in the reality-based community, we rely on “facts” and “evidence” to create reasoned argument. In the la-la land of the right wing bubble — where global warming stopped back in the 1990’s, the President is not an American, and non-existent Muslims celebrated 9/11 — facts and evidence are in short supply, so the work of convicted fraudsters like O’Keefe will have to do.

   Trump’s claims of a rigged election are horseshit. The fact that an election which hasn’t occurred cannot possibly have been rigged, combined with his complete lack of evidence, does not deter the credulous Trumpen proletariat from insisting on absurdities which no thinking person would dare conceive.

   Trump is groping for a solution to his dismal and disgusting campaign, and has gone full Breitbart with lurid tales of international conspiracies and heinous plots. Those who view O’Keefe, Daily Caller, and Drudge as credible sources of news will swallow this whole. Those who are capable of observation and ratiocination recognize it for what it is: the whiny excuses of a small man who knows he is heading for a crushing defeat. To a girl, no less.

   Trump is a wounded tiger, delusional and dangerous, and he doesn’t care if he burns the house down in his never-ending race to the bottom. The editors of the Economist suggest that the debasement which Trump has brought will have a lasting effect on the polity.

   http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21708723-healthy-democracies-depend-unwritten-rules-republican-nominee-has-trampled-all-over

   One hopes that after Trump gets thumped, America will continue to laugh at this con man and his loyal fanboys, and things will get back to normal. Given the unprecedented level of vitriol, bigotry, and fabulism coming from this vile man, I’m not so sure. George Orwell predicted many things, and his reference to those whose pronouncements are “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” accurately predicted Donald Trump.

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 12:48 pm | Permalink
5. Whitewall says

   Rigging an election is different from rigging the voting. The first makes the second less necessary. As far as what Orwell predicted in his writing, this need not be limited to now and going forward. His writing needs to be seen as the “how to” of the last seven years. You are late OEM with the newly useful Orwell.

   After the last seven years of gangster government, deliberately failed foreign policy, cronyism and betrayal of the Presidential Oath of office…What shred of “normal” do you find available to pervert?

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 1:09 pm | Permalink
6. Malcolm says

   Peter, we already know what you think of Donald Trump. What do you think you are accomplishing with these comments?

   As for the O’Keefe video: as you are fond of saying, res ipsa loquitur. (Ad-hominem “arguments”, as a man with your education ought to know, only shame those who make them.) It doesn’t matter whether the video was filmed by James O’Keefe or NBC News or Steven Spielberg or Jesus Christ. What matters is what it reveals.

   “Lack of evidence”? Every day, proof of the foul corruption of the Clintons and their political machine piles higher and higher (as it has for decades, but faster and faster now). In aggregate it now comprises a Matterhorn of malfeasance, a Denali of deceit, a Kangchenjunga of kakistocracy, that in any lawful society would dominate the political landscape, and present an insurmountable barrier to the Clintons’ campaign. To believe it all to be false — as, incredibly, you seem to — requires, then, a truly astonishing degree of cognitive dissonance and canine partisanship. To those of us not afflicted by whatever memetic infection has reduced your faculties of independent thought to this pitiable condition, it is a sorry thing to behold.

   It is one thing to prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump despite knowing that she and her husband are among the most thoroughly corrupt politicians ever to hold high public office in modern American history. (That, at least, is a choice that I could imagine someone making on purely ideological and partisan grounds.) But to deny the corruption itself is something else altogether, and even among those who will be voting for Mrs. Clinton in November (which includes many of my friends), it marks you as an outlier, an extremist.

   Finally: you speak, with blithe and casually dismissive contempt (and it is this very blitheness that makes it so infuriating to so many millions of us), of getting back to “normal” once Mr. Trump has been defeated. This will not happen, for the reason that the mortiferous social and political pathology that has become “normal” in America (and the rest of the West) is what gave rise to Trump’s candidacy in the first place. If he in fact loses, the pressure will only increase — and the explosion, when it finally comes, will be all the more destructive. You cannot make scores of millions of aroused American patriots disappear simply by dismissing them as “irredeemable” — and you and your ilk, who depend upon these ordinary (and, unashamedly, traditionally minded) American citizens for your security and survival while being yourselves utterly incapable of the practical things they do to support this nation’s existence, anathematize and unchurch them at your own, and the nation’s, peril. You and your candidate are playing a very dangerous game.

   Readers: I will ask you not to sneer and mock (it would accomplish nothing), but rather, with my assurance that this commenter is actually an intelligent and decent man, to reflect instead on the frailty of the human psyche, and the power of social conditioning.
   

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 2:23 pm | Permalink
7. JK says

   Hey.

   That was a squirrel wasn’t it? Some kind of rodent anyway.

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 7:27 pm | Permalink
8. Troy says

   with my assurance that this commenter is actually an intelligent and decent man

   The evidence says otherwise Malcolm. But I will heed your request and not take the bait.

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 8:34 pm | Permalink
9. TheBigHenry says

   What Troy said …

   Posted October 18, 2016 at 10:03 pm | Permalink
10. Melchizidek says

    “The fact that an election which hasn’t occurred cannot possibly have been rigged”

    http://www.autismspeaks.org

    Posted October 18, 2016 at 11:05 pm | Permalink
11. libertybelle says

    Wrote a long comment a couple hours ago, but it disappeared.

    Posted October 18, 2016 at 11:36 pm | Permalink
12. Melchizidek says

    Okay. I see your plea to eschew mocking, Malcolm. So let me redemptively append this to my prior jocose retort:

    I implore thee, Peter, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you are mistaken.

    Give but a moments honest thought to how someone could indeed plausibly refer to an election as rigged that had not yet occurred. Really, now. It’s not that difficult. You are being perverse.

    I resist even calling it extending intellectual charity to see this is so. It’s no more than a commonense construal of the phrase.

    A state of affairs — like a ship’s rigging–can be rigged in anticipation of an event, like an election. If a poker game is rigged, you know very well that can obtain before the conclusion of the game. And to say something is rigged need not even necessarily entail a definite outcome; it merely means that the odds have been decisively stacked against you.

    You’re a bright fellow, and what’s more, there are valid criticisms of Trump, but you mustn’t let your passionate distaste yield to Trump derangement syndrome. The halo of negativity surrounding his name and movement has clearly impaired your verbal faculties to the extent you can’t even interpret ordinary English phrases in plausible ways.

    This isn’t even proper prolepsis, mate; it shouldn’t take some extraordinary application of your mental faculties to understand.

    Is “…while yon slow oxen turn the furrowed plain” a bald non sequitur to you?

    Previously, every time you heard someone say “Dead man walking”, did you come down with idiomatic autism and declare, “Buuuut he’s not dead yet! That doesn’t make any sense!”

    No, of course not. Because you weren’t engaged in political discourse about Trump. And thus you hadn’t shut off your brain and committed to interpreting things in the only the most outlandish, uncharitable ways.

    If you stubbornly desire to find Trump/ism not only unintelligent, but intelligible, you will surely succeed. Your are smart enough to fool yourself, to concoct rationalizations to continue down this path of self-delusion and confirmation bias.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 12:09 am | Permalink
13. Malcolm says

    Well struck, Melchizidek. But as for your plea: would you have him to be a skeptic in his religion?

    I’m afraid the Scots didn’t budge, and neither will our Peter.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 12:29 am | Permalink
14. TheBigHenry says

    “…, and neither will our Peter.” [my emphasis]

    I renounce any implied association with this scoundrel.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 1:02 am | Permalink
15. the one eyed man says

    @ Malcolm, by paragraph:

    #1: I don’t expect to accomplish anything at all. Some things are so repugnant that they must be spoken out against, even when it falls on deaf ears. Besides, my girlfriend likes it when I post here. So there’s that.

    #2: The fact that something is on video is meaningless. O’Keefe’s first video showed ACORN workers making seemingly incriminating remarks, but excluded those statements which were exculpatory. Another fraudster did the same thing to Planned Parenthood. A video editor can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. He will control the horizontal. He will control the vertical. Sit quietly and he will control all that you see and hear. We have a word for filming under cover of fraudulent impersonation, and then editing the footage to deceptively support a false narrative: propaganda.

    #3 and #4: I think the case against Clinton is vastly overblown. Let’s unpack the big three: emails, Clinton Foundation, integrity.

    Clinton’s use of private email was careless and wrong, but no different than what her predecessors at State did, or others in government also did (those who yawned when the Bush administration kept five million emails on RNC servers, and then deleted them to avoid prosecution for Hatch Act violations, are in hysterics when Clinton keeps far less correspondence hidden). No national security secrets were compromised, and there were no actual consequences to her email arrangement. A black mark, but not a disqualifying one (and not nearly as black as, for example, directing your sales staff to advise students to your scam university to load up credit card debt for a worthless degree).

    Part of the case against the Clinton Foundation is based on flat-out lies (e.g., the meme that only 15% of revenue goes to charity, when in reality 89% is used to fund its mission). The larger case is that taking Saudi money (for example) is pay-to-play. However, there is not a single government action which was taken because someone gave money to the Foundation (the one example often cited is of the Russian acquisition of a Canadian uranium company, which was also approved by eight other US agencies and the Canadian government). Corruption is defined as a quid pro quo. There is no quo here. If the Saudis, or anyone else, wants to give money to fight AIDS or construct water treatment plants in Africa: mazel tov. If anything, the Clintons can be faulted for not having considered how an eleemosynary institution could be turned into a partisan attack line, before spending so much time and energy trying to alleviate Third World poverty and disease.

    Show me a man who says he never lies, and I’ll show you a liar. Most of Clinton’s alleged lies are defensible on an if-you-squint-hard-enough basis. She is lawyerly and evasive. (Shockingly, we have never had lawyerly and evasive politicians before.) Some are based on disputed events (e.g., a Benghazi parent says she blamed the video; she denies it; it is assumed as an a priori fact that the grieving parent is correct). Her alleged dishonesty is within the normal range for politicians. By contrast, Trump’s lies are so far off the radar screen — he makes up the most absurd things ex nihilo, and then doubles down when proven wrong — that there is no comparison.

    #5: Normalcy is Bush, McCain, or Romney. Unlike Trump, none of them pose an existential threat; none of them are vastly ignorant about the most basic facts of governance (judges “sign bills?” huh?); none of them resorted to childish name calling, or speculating that an opponent’s father was with Oswald in Dallas; none of them questioned the integrity of the voting system; none of them gave credence to the racist lie that Obama is not American; and none of them grossly violated the norms of American politics, as Trump has done repeatedly. When Trump is defeated, I certainly hope that this normalcy returns, even if its standard bearer is someone like Ryan, Cruz, or Rubio.

    I’m contemptuous of those Trump supporters who have sucker-punched protestors at rallies, flooded Twitter with anti-Semitic and racist tweets, intimidated the press, chanted “lock her up,” have led to a rise in anti-Muslim violence since Trump started to campaign, and so forth. For them, “irredeemable” is le mot juste.

    I am certainly not contemptuous of those who feel left behind. Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back. I got that. However, Trump has nothing to offer to these people except bravado. His programs — to the extent that he has them — are a joke. Neither he, nor anyone else, can stop automation or compete with workers in Bengladesh making fifty cents an hour. His plan for punitive tariffs would start a trade war, and his plans to renege on trade agreements will crush exporters. I am angry at Trump for cynically taking advantage of popular discontent with simplistic and counter-productive “solutions.” He is the con and they are the marks.

    Others are angry because ordering chicken at a Roy Rogers on the turnpike is frustrating when the counterman lacks English skills (although — who knows? — he could be the Syrian refugee whose son starts Apple Computer). Some people are simply averse to change, and prefer the world of Donna Reed domesticity and Maynard G. Krebs goofiness. I get that, too. I disagree with it, but I get it. And while there may be “millions of aroused American patriots” enraged at social change, there are millions more American patriots who believe in diversity, inclusiveness, Obamacare, a return to balance on the Supreme Court after thirty years of right wing control, and the other things which will drive Clinton voters to the polls. That’s why we have elections.

    #6: I appreciate your warning to the commentariat, but please don’t do it for my sake. I just scroll through the mouth foamers. If you want to maintain a certain level of comity, then I’m all for that. Just advise your students that there will only be civil discourse in discourse.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 11:45 am | Permalink
16. the one eyed man says

    @ Melchizidek: The election will have been rigged if the vote count does not accurately reflect the voters’ elections. The votes haven’t been counted, and therefore the election could not possibly have been rigged. Moreover, the notion is absurd: votes are counted by tens of thousands of localities, and overseen by fifty Secretaries of State (most of whom are Republican).

    If you want to argue that there are rigged elections in places like Texas (where gun licenses are acceptable proof of identity, but not student ID’s) or Ohio (where the urban Democratic locations have long lines due to fewer voting machines than suburban Republican districts), then I won’t quibble. Or perhaps you are referring to gerrymandered Congressional districts which are designed to reduce black representation “with surgical precision,” so a state like NC votes 40% D for Congress and gets 20% of the seats. But I doubt it.

    Or perhaps you are referring to the enormous advantage which Donald Trump has in this election. Hillary Clinton has been the most heavily scrutinized woman in the world for 25 years, and every blemish is caught on video for perpetuity. As Senator, she has cast votes, and as SoS, she has made decisions. When you are forced to commit yourself to something, you have a record which you can be held accountable for. Not everyone will be happy with every decision, but that goes with exercising power. Many of those who criticize what she has done (e.g., becoming involved in Libya) were demanding she do exactly what she did, before immediately criticizing her for doing it (I’m looking at you, Newt!). Hillary Clinton can be fairly judged on her record. Trump not only has no record to be judged on, but he keeps his tax returns and business hidden from public view, and over one thousand civil suits against him are protected by non-disclosure clauses.

    Maybe you’re thinking of how Trump’s allies vastly exceed Clinton’s. Trump has the Russian government and Julian Assange on his side. He has taxpayer funded oppo research — sorry, congressional investigations with subpoena power — which have conducted nine investigations into Benghazi (oddly, only one emasculated inquiry into why we invaded and occupied Iraq). Congress, along with Judicial Watch and Russian hackers, is able to put tens of thousands of pages of private correspondence on the Internet. When tens of thousands of pages of anyone’s emails are exposed, adversaries can always find something to cherry pick and blow out of proportion. As a private citizen, Trump’s past is concealed from view, and no foreign governments are striving to reveal it.

    Or you might be referring to the timorous press, which posits false equivalencies and — as we’ve seen from Matt Lauer and Lester Holt — lets obvious lies go unchallenged. Media bias is always an eye-of-the-beholder thing, but my view is Hillary Clinton’s scrutiny by the media — now or over the past 25 years — far exceeds that of Donald Trump, and (more importantly) there is a false standard by which Clinton’s actions are portrayed much more harshly than similar actions taken by others.

    So if you want to make the case that the election is rigged because Congress, Russia, voter suppression, nuisance lawsuits from Judicial Watch, and media laziness all conspire to rig the election for Trump: I won’t complain. However, I’m grown-up to know that life is not always fair, and so I would never make that claim. We’ll win even with the deck stacked against us.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 11:49 am | Permalink
17. JK says

    Well One-Eyed, why in the heck didn’t you put it like that six months ago?

    You’ve convinced me! Two for the price of one.

    Where can I get me a Hillary yard sign? I’ll even pin kit to the ground with hawthorn nails. Big ones.

    Thanks. I see the light.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 12:29 pm | Permalink
18. TheBigHenry says

    [img]http://momastery.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/whack-a-mole2.jpg[/img]

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 12:40 pm | Permalink
19. libertybelle says

    “Here in the reality-based community, we rely on “facts” and “evidence” to create reasoned argument.”

    Therein lies the problem in America’s post-factual age. Due to the extreme partisanship and decades of conditioning by rabid partisan factions and totally corrupt media, there is no accepted definition of “facts” or what constitutes “evidence”.

    This condition took decades of mainstream media collusion with Leftist pols to sell the Leftist agenda and that “liberal media” perception fueled the emergence of a far-right media, where promoting a hard line Right agenda takes precedence over reporting facts.

    In one-eyed’s world, no matter what facts emerge, everything is a “vast, right-wing witch hunt,” out to destroy Hillary. His refusal to even consider some sources or even more importantly, the automatic dismissal of any negative information on Hillary, coupled with the automatic buy-in on any excuse offered by the Clinton spokespeople, mark him as an extreme Leftist partisan.

    There are people on the Right like this and in this election cycle you might consider them the Hannity Horde or as I refer to them, 5th Avenue Loyalists, where no matter what evidence is presented and no matter the source, they discount it as just more “unfair” attacks on Trump.

    With the Clinton/media collusion to bury Trump in the general election with dirt, well, the “unfairness” has been extreme – CNN doctored photos on more than one occasion to help Hillary and hurt Trump, but even more obvious is the mainstream media dumping all this dirt now, when they knew most of this stuff last year, during the GOP primary and held it. During the primary, these same news outlets were selling Trump as the “GOP Insurgent” and gave him BILLIONS of dollars in free media. All of these groping women stories are many years old. The Washington Post skips over the Clinton Foundation pay-to-play and has one reporter devoting every minute to dissecting the Trump Foundation, which on the corruption scale is small fries compared to the millions that poured into the Clinton Foundation. The truth is BOTH should be thoroughly investigated.

    This campaign has brought to the fore, that Americans’ ability to analyze information veered off the partisan cliff long ago. I’ve been reading all sorts of sources always, in fact, I used to read Pravda and many other foreign news often, to try and get a feel for what information (and propaganda) they publish.

    Partisan politics aside, the media’s willingness to sell Clinton “SPIN” cycle information warfare, followed by Clinton scorched earth impeachment information warfare strategy, followed by 8 years of GWB derangement “Bush lied, people died” information warfare, followed by 8 years of Obama “narratives” information warfare have left the mainstream media adrift in a moral morass, but worse left way too many Americans distrustful of believing anything their government or the media reports. This distrust has fed the emergence of right-wing “alternative” news sites, where even InfoWars is now accepted by many right-wing partisans as a legitimate news source. The mainstream media’s corruption, as nothing more than Leftist shills colluding with Democratic policies and pols, created this dynamic.

    The Obama/Clinton tactic of screaming about Wikileaks being a Russian operation (which I believe it is) doesn’t in any way diminish that so far the Clintons, the DNC or Obama have not refuted the veracity of a single email, by coming forward and saying, “that email was doctored.” Instead, they did exactly what one-eyed did – tried to discredit the information by saying the source isn’t up to par or untrustworthy. Yet, the facts themselves have not been refuted or discredited in any way. The Trump horde does this too, because assuredly the groped women coming forward are an orchestrated Clinton hit, but I watched the women and believe most of them are credible.

    One-eyed, just like Trump’s 5th Avenue Loyalists, judges information based on the politics of the messenger… Sadly, I think most Americans, left and right, do that too and that’s destroying America.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 12:43 pm | Permalink
20. Malcolm says

    Peter,

    I am too busy today to respond point-by-point to your comments. I could have a field-day with it all, as it is what’s called a “target-rich environment”, but frankly the game hardly seems worth the candle. (Readers are welcome to weigh in, of course; in accordance with Peter’s request, I waive all restrictions, save that of civility.)

    But, just to be clear: what you are saying is that thirty years of Clintonism — from Whitewater to the email scandal, Rose Law to Lewinsky to Haiti to Foval — all amounts to nothing: just business as usual. Even in its towering aggregate — a column of smoke dark and wide enough to blot out the sky, for decades on end — there’s never been any fire at all, just a vast right-wing conspiracy.

    And yes, there is bias in the media, but it’s tilted against electing Hillary Clinton.

    And no, nothing’s been rigged — despite, for example, everything that’s come out over how the DNC dealt with Bernie Sanders. The Foval videos, which clearly show admission of various electoral perfidies, must be assumed to contain “exculpatory” statements (though it’s hard to conceive of what form they could possibly take, given what’s in plain view on the screen). And so on.

    Again: it would be one thing to give the benefit of the doubt to these people over one exposÁ©, or two, or ten. (As I said above, that is something I could imagine someone doing on purely ideological and partisan grounds.) But to maintain your faith against the sheer mass of it all, piling up decade after decade — to believe that every revelation of Clinton corruption has been a lie, and every Clinton lie a truth, over more than thirty years of nearly constant revelations, and lie after lie after lie after lie — now that is something else altogether. I don’t know how you do it. More to the point, it baffles me why you do it. If the Clintons were conservatives, or Republicans, I have no doubt whatsoever that you would be attacking them every bit as passionately as you now defend them, on the same evidence.

    How to account for it? Even you acknowledge the effort it takes:

    Most of Clinton’s alleged lies are defensible on an if-you-squint-hard-enough basis.

    Quite a sentence, that! (Roll it around in your mind, readers.) I’ll say this: that to achieve the effect you want, one must usually squint so hard that no light comes in at all. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing, and for such nasty people? To keep that up for such a long time takes considerable muscular effort, and by now your eyes must be getting very tired indeed. Open them. What you’ll see isn’t pretty, but at least it’s real.

    You are deeply opposed to nearly everything we on the Right believe is good and true, and conducive to genuine human flourishing, and necessary for the survival of the West. I get that. (It grieves me, but I get it.) But can’t you at least find a better champion than these awful people? Aren’t you tired of the squinting?

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
21. TheBigHenry says

    “Aren’t you tired of the squinting?”

    I suspect his answer will be “Hell, no!” But he will “embellish” such a direct response with 7 or 8 paragraphs of boilerplate Leftist drivel.

    The show must go on. Pass the popcorn, please.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 2:01 pm | Permalink
22. JK says

    http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/10/trumps_invisible_shield.html

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 2:40 pm | Permalink
23. TheBigHenry says

    Malcolm,

    #6: I appreciate your warning to the commentariat, but please don’t do it for my sake. I just scroll through the mouth-foamers. If you want to maintain a certain level of comity, then I’m all for that. Just advise your students that there will only be civil discourse in discourse. [emphasis added]

    I strive for brevity in my comments, but it may be too difficult this time.

    Please note the mendacity-loaded OEM remarks (#6). First of all, “scroll through” is belied by his typically verbose reply @ 11:49 am. Next, his offer of “comity” is risible, considering his ad-hominem usage of “commentariat”, “mouth-foamers”, and “students”.

    Finally, his idea of “civil discourse” includes incivilities such as bombast, sarcasm, pomposity, dismissiveness, and insults. In other words, he is the prototypical hypocrite.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 2:59 pm | Permalink
24. TheBigHenry says

    JK,

    I read and appreciated the article you linked. It was written by a white Jewish-woman living in the Bay area, who supports the Donald!

    Who would’ve thunk it possible?

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 3:53 pm | Permalink
25. JK says

    TBH,

    I don’t know about you but, the gal had me at “perseverating.”

    (Paragraph 14, sentence 1.)

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 4:19 pm | Permalink
26. TheBigHenry says

    JK,

    She had me at “bacon” :)

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 5:15 pm | Permalink
27. Loki says

    I’m contemptuous of those Trump supporters who have sucker-punched protestors at rallies…

    Maybe you’re thinking of that fellow who “assaulted” the women with the oxygen tank. Which turned out to be a Foval operation.

    No national security secrets were compromised, and there were no actual consequences to her email arrangement…

    Even if that were true, which it almost certainly isn’t, her behavior both in operating that server and covering it up, deleting emails after they were already under subpoena, letting staffers and lawyers decide what to produce, and all the rest of it was obviously felonious. To you that she wasn’t put in jail shows that she did not break the law. To the rest of us it shows all too obviously that the rule of law itself is broken.

    You’re right about one thing. No “actual consequences” for the Clintons. As always.

    We are sick and tired of this. It’s going to change. One way or another. You say “this is why we have elections”, but at some point “we win, you lose” is just not going to be acceptable for either side. The divisions are now too deep. No matter who wins this time round, the losers are not going to lie down quietly. I really think we have passed the tipping point.

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 6:27 pm | Permalink
28. Whitewall says

    Angelo Codevilla “After The Republic”:

    “We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation.”

    Posted October 19, 2016 at 7:52 pm | Permalink
29. Horace Jeffery Hodges says

    Speaking of Orwell on language, what would he think of this:

    “Trump is a wounded tiger, delusional and dangerous, and he doesn’t care if he burns the house down in his never-ending race to the bottom.”

    I’ll grant that a wounded tiger is dangerous, but is it delusional? Well, maybe, if it has blood poisoning from its wounds. Okay, I’ll grant that, too. But where did this blood-poisoned, delusional tiger obtain the fire – and how does it carry this fire – that might burn down the house, though the tiger doesn’t care one way or the other about that? Moreover, this blood-poisoned, delusional, indifferent tiger is in a never-ending race to an apparently bottomless bottom?

    In short, we’ve got this blood-poisoned, delusional, fire-bearing, house-bound, indifferent, racing-to-a-bottomless-bottom tiger that poses a danger to its own house.

    Orwell would agree that these mixed – and even mixed-up – metaphors clearly reveal much to worry about.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

    Posted October 21, 2016 at 4:30 am | Permalink
30. antiquarian says

    OEM, it’s a very good thing that all this is happening at once in multiple nations, because nothing else could possibly convince someone like you that the elite no longer command trust, and until the elite change their beliefs– until they realize the extent to which old power bases and old understandings no longer hold sway– there is no “normal” any more.

    Why have Bernie and Trump gotten as far as they have? Set aside the many real flaws of their opponent. I would argue it’s because the Overton Window has been shattered. People have finally realized the degree to which the elite of both parties have been steering them and trying to set boundaries on acceptable opinion, and Left or Right, they’re not going back to that situation. There are lots of people who find Trump appalling and who will not vote for him who nevertheless agree with a lot of what his supporters want. Polls suggest that people decouple Trump from the Republican party as a whole. (Admittedly, polls aren’t nearly as accurate as they used to be. Still, that comports with what I’ve been seeing.) You would be wise not to be too complacent.

    More broadly, I would argue that what has been shattered is not merely the Overton Window. Somebody-or-other theorized some years back that the ending of the filibuster on nominations by Democrats broke the steady march leftward that has been the case during the past half century. I would argue that a different force broke the “liberal ratchet”, as they called it, even further. Politics is downstream of culture, they say. The democratization of communication and distribution by globalization and the Internet broke the Left’s cultural hegemony. Movies are aimed at a global market which doesn’t care about American philosophical differences, and television and internet videos are now a vast world of choice that forms too weak a power base for anyone to push social change from. Things will not change rapidly, but the lack of their previous foundations means that they will change.

    So…”normal”? Apart from the volumes that your desire for it speaks about which side’s benefit it ran to, what “normal” do you think there is to return to?

    Posted October 22, 2016 at 3:16 pm | Permalink
31. TheBigHenry says

    antiquarian,

    You are not likely to corner the OEM into giving you an honest response. He is allergic to ingenuousness.

    On the other hand, his passion for all things Leftist may only be exceeded by his passion for proving someone like me wrong.

    It will be interesting to see whether his allergies or his passions will overwhelm him this time.

    Posted October 22, 2016 at 5:38 pm | Permalink
32. antiquarian says

    Henry, it’s true that deep partisans tend to make their intellect serve their emotions with rationalization, and that nothing I can say will change OEM’s emotions (an inability vis-Á -vis their opponents that I wish were generally accepted on the Left). Still, I can always hope for better.

    Posted October 23, 2016 at 10:48 am | Permalink
33. TheBigHenry says

    antiquarian,

    Your desire for ingenuous discourse is exemplary. I completely agree with such intentions.

    There has been a years-long history of animosity between the OEM and me in these pages, which sometimes gets in the way of my better judgment.

    Posted October 23, 2016 at 2:44 pm | Permalink