Tag: journalism

Northam Non-troversy and Abortion

The Portly Politico11 Comments

I’m going to be honest here:  I do not care about Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s old yearbook photograph, in which he’s either in blackface or wearing a Klan hood.  I don’t support or endorse doing either of those outfits, but how does a photograph of a goofy costume from over thirty years ago affect the man’s ability to do his job now?  It’s not as though he has a track record of racist remarks that might bias his enforcement of Virginia’s laws against black, Jewish, or Catholic Virginians.

The problem with progressivism is that it eats its own with gusto, as the socially-acceptable behavior of yesteryear becomes the always-forbidden “hate” of today.  It was certainly in poor taste to wear blackface in the 1980s, but, give me a break.  When does the statute of limitations on poor decisions expire?  Are we allowed to never commit a mistake if we want to serve in public office?

What demonstrates how truly evil the Left is is that they don’t care about Northam’s endorsement, just a little over a week ago, of infanticide.  When asked in a radio interview what should be down with a child born alive that the mother initially wanted aborted, Northam replied that the mother and at least two physicians should consult about the baby’s fate while the baby was “kept comfortable.”

Where are the anguished cries about that?  Northam wearing a Klan hood to a beer bash in the 80s didn’t cost any black people their jobs or their lives.  Abortion kills them by the tens of thousands every year.

Pat Buchanan—ever-brilliant, ever-prescient and -insightful—has a piece exploring the implications of the Northam non-troversy that I highly recommend you read.  A representative excerpt:

We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world.

Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them.

And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.

America will pay for its generations of infanticide if we don’t end it, and soon.  God is just, and delivers His judgment with swiftness and ferocity after long forbearance.  One reason the Philistines were destroyed was because of their worship of Baal, which required sacrificing babies.  Similarly, the Carthaginians were crushed, in part, because of their child sacrifices.

We’re sacrificing babies to the altar of progressive politics and the ethos of “if it feels good, do it—and don’t worry about the consequences.”  I can at least appreciate the hedonist who accepts the bad with the good of his lifestyle—say, the smoker who acknowledges it’s bad for him, but he enjoys doing it anyway.  But what kind of monster snuffs out a human life for convenience?

Northam needn’t resign over a picture.  But he and other Democrats should fall on their knees in repentance over their endorsement of the mass murder of innocents.

The Facts on the Border Crisis

The Portly Politico8 Comments

As I’ve learned more about immigration—and especially since reading Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West—I’ve come to believe it is the defining crisis of this moment in American history.  The debate is not, as it has been in the past, primarily around how much immigration is desirable; rather, the question has morphed beyond reason into “does a wealthy nation have the right to define and enforce its own immigration laws?”

That used to be axiomatic to what it meant to be a nation:  by definition, a nation had the right to defend its borders, and—of course!—to have them!

Now, there’s a twisted logic that, because the United States has loads of wealth (and won tons of land from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, after we soundly defeated them and captured Mexico City), we somehow have a moral obligation to surrender our sovereignty to every hard-luck case in the Western Hemisphere (and beyond).

America is a melting pot, but if you dump a bunch of salt into the soup all at once, it becomes inedible—the salt takes over.

Case in point:  the aforementioned Mexican War.  That conflict had its root in the Texas Revolution, in which the Republic of Texas gained its independence in 1836.  Texas was a province of Mexico, and the Mexican government wanted to encourage settlement, so it invited Southern yanquis to move in with their slaves.

Those American settlers had two requirements:  they had to convert to Catholicism (the official state religion of Mexico), and they had to become Mexican citizens.  A handful of token conversions later, and the Texans were in.

In 1829, Mexico abolished slavery throughout its territories.  The slaveholding Texans protested; rather than face the threat of secession of its unassimilated but wealthy minority, the Mexican government relented, granting unprecedented, asymmetrical “states’ rights” to Texas.

While Mexicans resented Texas’s special treatment, everything was fine until the military dictator General Lopez de Santa Anna rose to power.  Santa Anna vowed to end Texas’s exemption from federal law.  When he moved to enforce his decree with the Mexican Army, the Texans declared independence; after their defeat at the Alamo, American volunteers flooded in to help Texas gain its independence.

The moral of the story here is clear:  a large minority of unassimilated foreigners successfully ignored the laws of their host country, before ultimately breaking off to form a short-lived nation, before annexing into the nation of their native culture.

Mexico is playing the same playbook in reverse; indeed, some Mexican radicals call the influx of unassimilated, illegal migrants into the southwestern United States the reconquista, or “reconquest.”

Death of the West is the best feature-length discussion of that process.  For a shorter, more immediate discussion of the impact of illegal alien migration, the White House has published a page of statistics about the crisis at the border: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/crisis-southern-border-urgent-ignore/

Stop screwing around—and build the wall!

The Life of Roger Stone

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Flamboyant political trickster and Barnum-esque huckster Roger Stone was arrested last week as part of the out-of-control Mueller investigation into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.  Stone’s arrest suggests the desperation in Mueller’s witch hunt.

Stone himself is an endlessly fascinating individual, and I have a soft-spot for over-the-top confidence men, which is essentially what Stone is (or how he presents himself).  In reading some of the news coverage about his arrest, I stumbled upon a 2007 profile of the famed master of the dark arts, “Roger Stone, Political Animal.”

The author is Matt Labash, one of the best long-form writers the now-defunct The Weekly Standard ever employed.  I’ve totally written off The Weekly Standard as a pathologically anti-Trump publication, especially with Bill Kristol going off the deep end politically (and maybe psychologically), actively encouraging the FBI’s mendacious, corrupt attempts to overthrow the duly-elected President of the United States.

That said, Labash is an excellent writer.  When I taught US Government regularly, I would assign students another Labash piece, a lengthy profile of former Louisiana Governor (and convicted felon) Edwin Edwards, entitled “Conviction Politician.”  Labash wrote that profile when Edwards, then 86, was attempting to run for Congress.  Edwards would go on to lose that race—the first time he ever lost a run for office—but Labash’s profile made me want to vote for Edwards, and not because it casts the corrupt four-time governor in a positive light.  Rather, Labash possesses a knack for drawing out the humor and humanity in deeply flawed, larger-than-life characters (some great Edwards quotes:  he said the only way he’d lose an election was if he was “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy”; when discussing Klansman David Duke, Edwards said the only thing they had in common was they’re “both wizards under the sheets”).

That jeweler’s eye for humanizing moral failure is beautifully apparent in the 2007 Stone profile.  Labash is also sympathetic to his subject, without necessarily condoning his trickiness:  unlike many reporters, Labash actually likes Roger Stone.

It’s also interesting reading about politics pre-2015-2016, what we might call “B.T.”:  “Before Trump.”  That’s especially the case when Donald Trump is involved (Stone, a longtime Trump friend and ally, only half-jokingly called Trump the p-word in reference to a botched run for the Reform Party nomination early in this century).  It’s hard to conceive now, after four years of Trumpism, of a time when The Donald didn’t dominate our political discussions, when we basically debated the merits between two or more members of both parties’ elites (I don’t completely buy the “Uniparty” theory—there were clearly important philosophical differences between Romney and Obama, for example, in 2012—but I’m willing to concede that elites in both parties are two sides of the same elitist coin in terms of their interests and positions in life).

Reading about Roger Stone in a pre-Trump political age, on the cusp of the Great Recession and before even the meteoric rise of Barack Obama is fun and a bit disconcerting:  it’s hard to remember exactly what it was like back then, as we’ve gone through the looking glass into a whole new paradigm.  Such is the power of the red-pilling that came in the wake of Trump’s rise.

But this post is (ostensibly) about Stone.  I highly recommend you carve out thirty minutes to read the Labash profile in full—after all, it’s Wednesday, and all the real work for the week got done Monday or will get done hastily Friday morning, before you ease your way into the weekend.  I had a hard time finding a “representative sample” to highlight from this piece, but I settled (and not entirely to my satisfaction) on this excerpt discussing a young Stone’s possible roll in splitting the Liberal Party of New York’s vote from the Democrats, giving Ronald Reagan the edge—and New York’s electoral votes—in 1980:

Stone, who going back to his class elections in high school has been a proponent of recruiting patsy candidates to split the other guy’s support, remembers suggesting to Cohn that if they could figure out a way to make John Anderson the Liberal party nominee in New York, with Jimmy Carter picking up the Democratic nod, Reagan might win the state in a three-way race. “Roy says, ‘Let me look into it.'” Cohn then told him, “‘You need to go visit this lawyer’–a lawyer who shall remain nameless–‘and see what his number is.’ I said, ‘Roy, I don’t understand.’ Roy says, ‘How much cash he wants, dumbf–.'” Stone balked when he found out the guy wanted $125,000 in cash to grease the skids, and Cohn wanted to know what the problem was. Stone told him he didn’t have $125,000, and Cohn said, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”

Cohn sent Stone on an errand a few days later. “There’s a suitcase,” Stone says. “I don’t look in the suitcase . . . I don’t even know what was in the suitcase . . . I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

I ask him how he feels about this in retrospect. He seems to feel pretty good–now that certain statutes of limitations are up. He cites one of Stone’s Rules, by way of Malcolm X, his “brother under the skin”: “By any means necessary.” “Reagan got the electoral votes in New York State, we saved the country,” Stone says with characteristic understatement. “[More] Carter would’ve been an unmitigated disaster.”

Who knows if that story is true or not—after all, this is Roger Stone—but there’s no doubt the Liberal Party nominated Anderson, and Reagan won a plurality in the Empire State.  If it’s true, Stone might have saved the Republic.

Labash’s piece also revealed to the world “Stone’s Rules,” which Stone has compiled into a book.  From Labash:

[Stone] often sets his pronouncements off with the utterance “Stone’s Rules,” signifying listeners that one of his shot-glass commandments is coming down, a pithy dictate uttered with the unbending certitude one usually associates with the Book of Deuteronomy. Some original, some borrowed, Stone’s Rules address everything from fashion to food to how to screw people. And one of his favorite Stone’s Rules is “Unless you can fake sincerity, you’ll get nowhere in this business.” He is honest about his dishonesty. “Politics with me isn’t theater,” he admits. “It’s performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.”

The performance for the sake of itself is a recurring theme with Stone, who seems to embroil himself in controversy just for the thrill of it.  He could have had a lucrative, quiet career in political consulting, but from reading Labash’s piece—and from watching Roger Stone on television and YouTube—that doesn’t seem like a life that would appeal to him.

That, in my mind, is the appeal of Stone—like Milo Yiannopolous, he relishes the dirt and grime of the arena, and he digs into it while dressed impeccably.  He’s a despicable, perfidious, disreputable con man—and I love him for it.

Saturday Reading: SOTU and the Shutdown

The Portly Politico4 Comments

A quick post today, as I have a jam-packed Saturday (after a jam-packed week, with another busy week on the horizon—it’s the Year of the Panther, baby!):  the President has reached an agreement to reopen the government for three weeks, it seems in order to get paychecks out to Homeland Security and federal law enforcement more than anything else, with the promise (threat?) to leverage another government shutdown in February to obtain border wall funding.

This compromise feels like a loss; I can only hope President Trump has some clever scheme up his sleeve.  From what I’ve been hearing (most recently on today’s episode of Radio Derb), the polls have shown Americans steadily blaming Trump for the shutdown.  Of course, this prompts me to ask, “do they see the shutdown as positive or negative?”

Certainly there are good federal employees who need paychecks, especially border patrol agents and federal law enforcement, but how many of you actually felt the effects of the shutdown?  At the very least, let’s hope the President took Ben Boychuck’s advice, as well as the advice of his anonymous senior official, to layoff permanently some of the dead weight in the federal bureaucracy.

As Boychuck writes in the Sacramento Bee:

Everyone knows the president cannot fire career government employees willy-nilly. Our civil service laws are ironclad. But a fairly obscure rule would allow the administration to lay off certain workers if they’ve been furloughed for at least 30 days. It’s called a “reduction in force” and it’s perfectly legal as long as the White House adheres to certain criteria, accounting for an employee’s tenure, total federal and military service, and work performance.

According to Boychuck, some 350,000 federal employees are eligible for “reduction in force” according to this obscure rule.  I don’t think anyone is advocating laying off all of those people—surely some 5-10% of them perform useful functions and/or aren’t totally subvervise to the President’s agenda—but I imagine we could do without at least some of them.  Surely even a token culling of the herd would send a powerful warning to feds:  you work for the American people, not your second home.

A part of me worries that our peacocking POTUS might be reopening the government simply to give the State of the Union Address in the House chambers.  That would be a bad move.  The Constitution doesn’t specify the form or venue for the SOTU address.  In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a verbal “address” at all!

Thomas Jefferson—timid about public speaking, and fearful of the kingly connotations—stopped giving a verbal address upon taking office in 1801.  Instead, his annual message was sent to Congress and read aloud by the Speaker or another member, then published throughout the States in newspapers.  Everyone could easily read it, and this approach made perfect sense in a pre-mass-communications age.

The Jefferson approach endured until the presidency of Democrat and progressive Woodrow Wilson.  Remember, Wilson hated our Constitution (PDF), and believed it was an archaic document that did not work adequately in the dynamic, industrial world of the early twentieth century.  He idolized the British Parliament, and sought to make the presidency more akin to the position of Prime Minister—the first among equal voting members in the legislature.  He believed that approach, called fusion of powers, was more efficient and democratic (“democratic” in those days being the Left’s preferred way to advance progressive ideology and policy, though in practice that meant electing representatives who would farm out their law-making powers to unelected technocrats in the federal bureaucracy).

Regardless, the die was cast, and with the advent of television, the State of the Union Address has become a ponderous, grandiose political event that doesn’t really tell us anything useful about the state of the nation, but just how awesome whoever the current president is.  This time, those boastful claims would be mostly true, but was it worth reopening the government to do it on time?

Boychuck, among others on the Right, were calling for the President to end the modern, monarchical spectacle of the State of the Union, returning it to Jeffersonian simplicity.  As much as I don’t want to deny the president his moment in the sun, that approach seems prudent, and more in accord with the republican nature of our Constitution.

Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The Portly Politico17 Comments

The Right prides itself on its ability and willingness to police its own, and that impulse is usually healthy.  It would be inconceivable, for example, for congressional Democrats to overwhelmingly support investigation and even impeachment of a Democratic president the way congressional Republicans did with President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal (for what it’s worth, I think Nixon was railroaded—more on that another time).

That impulse, though, can easily morph into SJW-esque virtue-signalling, which is exactly what happened in response to the Covington Catholic non-troversy over the weekend.

Remember, every time there is some accusation in the news of conservatives or Trumpists behaving badly—especially if the allegations involve some form of bigotry against protected classes of the rainbow coalition—wait 24-48 hours, and it will invariably be revealed to be either a hoax or a willful misrepresentation of the facts.

There is some truly lurid stuff circulating about the high school students who were attending a pro-life march.  The iconic image is of a young man smirking as an elderly Native American war vet bangs a drum in his face.  Somehow, that smirk is a form of aggression, while an aging hippie provocatively banging a drum inches from your face is peaceful protest.

I expect swift denunciations and lengthy, navel-gazing think-pieces from Leftists about the “male gaze” and “white privilege.”  I don’t expect them from National Review (except for famed hand-wringer David French).

Of course, I should have learned by now, just as noodle-wristed neocons should have learned to wait for all the facts to come out before rendering judgment:  a substantial portion of the Right, sadly, simply seems to be “loyal opposition” to the Left.  That is, they accept the paradigm the progressive Left has foisted upon us, and instead of trying to chuck that paradigm, merely attempt to exist in a tiny corner of (barely) permitted dissent within it.

Nicholas Frankovich, a deputy managing editor at NR, wrote a piece comparing the elderly Native American man to Jesus Christ, and the pro-life Catholic students who almost literally turned the other cheek to the wicked Roman soldiers that crucified our Lord.  Never have I seen a more egregious example of virtue-signalling:  Frankovich, from the first sentence, is saying, “I’m holier than you because I take the Gospel account of the Crucifixion so seriously that I see it everywhere; the rest of you have just forgotten it.”  That pithy paraphrasing is not far from what he actually writes (from the second paragraph):

For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.

John Nolte of Breitbart gives a humorous but accurate analysis of Frankovich’s melodramatic piece, which you can read here:  https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/01/21/fake-news-never-sleeps-national-review-falls-for-more-anti-trump-media-hoaxes/

Of course, if you listened to conservative talk radio at all yesterday, all of the hosts relayed the full story (I heard, throughout the course of the day, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark “The Great One” Levin cover the events).  Here is my quick recap:

Essentially, this group of teenagers was waiting for their bus, when an extreme black nationalist fringe group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, began pelting them with obscenities.  That apparently went on for some time, before Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist and war veteran, came between the young men and the BHIs.  The boys were unsure whose “side” Phillips was on, but when he began some kind of war chant, they began to sing school songs (the source of the media’s claim that the young men were “mocking” Phillips and his Native American heritage).  Then someone snapped the picture of the young man “smirking”—and, out of context, it does look like a sh*t-eating grin—at the Native American, and the rest is revisionist history.

The truth about these events came out very quickly, to the shame of National Review and notorious Never Trumper Bill Kristol.  A member of the Polish Parliament has invited the boys to speak there in a sign of solidarity and to help get out the truth.

Sadly, rush-to-judgment virtue-signalling continues to live on.  Why play the Left’s game?  Are you that desperate to get a spot on morning talk shows?  Conservatives shouldn’t fall for it.  Ethically, we should at the very least wait for the full facts to come out about any negative story, whether it involves a conservative or a progressive.

Frankovich, Kristol, and their ilk might gain some temporary encomiums from the Left, but—as I’ve written before—their accolades will be short-lived.  The hot knife of progressive perfidy will find its way into their bent backs as soon as their political usefulness is dried up.

Fictitious Frogs and Bureaucratic Despotism

The Portly Politico20 Comments

Thanks to blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire for sharing this piece about federal overreach and Chevron deference, “The Celebrated Fake Frog that is Taking Down the Deep State” by Karin McQuillan:  https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/14/the-celebrated-fake-frog-that-is-taking-down-the-deep-state/

One of the key problems conservatives face today is the unelected, unaccountable “fourth branch” of the government, the massive federal bureaucracy.  This bureaucracy is so vast, even presidents can’t seem to rein it in (although President Trump is making an effort to drain the swamp).

The size and scope of it wouldn’t be so terrible if it weren’t so powerful.  Thanks to bad Supreme Court rulings and Congress’s willingness to give the hard task of legislating to federal agencies, bureaucrats have the power to write regulatory rules that have the force of law.  As McQuillan details in her piece, Congress passes vague, broad laws that leave politically-costly questions for the agencies to answer.  In turn, those agencies—shielded as they are from accountability to the voters—write whatever rules they wish, and the American people bear the brunt of these technocratic fiats.

That’s one source of President Trump’s woes from within the government:  there is surely an insulated, upper-crust of old Beltway hands that fully expect that they will call the shots.  McQuillan’s piece describes the absolutely wicked absurdity of this overreach, as exemplified by that most heinous of federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Seasoned conservatives are familiar with the EPA’s history of insane, downright anti-human rulings, like preventing farmers in drought-stricken California from receiving much-needed water because they sought to protect the tiny delta smelt (fun fact:  the EPA killed more delta smelt when taking samples of their population sizes than would have died had irrigation systems been activated).

McQuillan’s piece details an example of a Louisiana farmer who was unable to use his privately-held land because it was a potential habitat for species of endangered frog—except that biologists argued the land could not support the frog even if someone put it there!  The farmer won against the EPA at the Supreme Court, setting the stage for potential dismantling of some of the Deep State, and its odious grant of power from Chevron deference.

It’s no wonder that the Deep State tried so hard to oust former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and that it continues to punish President Trump with the pointless, costly, politically-motivated Mueller investigation.

As such, let’s continue to encourage President Trump—and the farmers in Louisiana, playing host to fictitious frogs on their dewy lands—to DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Saturday Reading: Communist Infiltration is Real

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Thanks to fridrix of Corporate History International for sharing this piece with me a couple of weeks ago.  Check out his excellent blog, then read the piece linked below.  Happy Saturday!

Former British radical Peter Hitchens offers a lengthy, eye-opening account of alleged Communist infiltration into the highest ranks of British academia and government.  In particular, he admonishes readers to forget about socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and instead argues that the real Marxists were New Labour Blairites.  You can read the full piece here:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6197097/amp/PETER-HITCHENS-reveals-REAL-truth-Communist-infiltration-Britain.html

Hitchens’s account is riveting for several reasons.  For one, it further confirms the fact of Marxist infiltration of the institutions.  That story is best told in Roger Kimball’s The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, which made my popular Summer Reading List in 2016.  As a reformed social justice radical of the 1960s, Hitchens knows the figures involved—and he names names in this piece.  It’s not as conclusive as the declassified Venona cables, but he demonstrates the likelihood of widespread Cultural Marxist infiltration.

For another, I was struck by how much tougher the old-school, Soviet-style Communists were.  Hitchens writes about the true-believer, 1930s Commies who were fighting in Spain against Franco, and engaging in cloak-and-dagger espionage.  Sure, they were misguided, or even willfully wicked, people, but they were men and women of action.  Contrast that with today’s generation of snowflakes and safe-space seekers, and it seems that modern-day Communists have lost some of their luster.

Finally, Hitchens details that the “Deep State” is not a uniquely American phenomenon.  In the 1990s, British intelligence destroyed most of the documentation detailing who was involved in Marxist organizations in key positions in British society and government.  He suggests this destruction was a willful act of obfuscation, undertaken in part to shield the Blair government from suspicion of Marxist ties.

I could quote many sections of this lengthy piece, but in it’s better to read through it yourself.  Hitchens writes as a journalist, with those mildly annoying one-sentence “paragraphs,” and since it’s The Daily Mail, there are YUGE pictures of 1960s radicals that load-up slower than a porn site on dial-up, but it’s worth scrolling through to get to the meat.

That said, here’s one representative excerpt among many that demonstrates the chilling nature of Communist infiltration:

‘Moscow Gold’ was never a myth. Well into modern times, Soviet Embassy officials would leave bags of used banknotes at Barons Court underground station in London, to be collected by the Communist official Reuben Falber, who stored them in the loft of his bungalow in Golders Green, North London.

At times this rather shameful secret subsidy, direct from a police state, reached £100,000 a year – in an era when that was a lot of money.

Who knows what it was used for? But the Communist Party spent a great deal on its industrial organisation, which fomented trouble in British workplaces and strove to get Communists and their sympathisers installed in important positions in British trade unions.

This enabled Moscow to wield huge, indirect influence over the Labour Party, especially on Foreign and Defence policies.

Labour’s embrace of unilateral nuclear disarmament in the middle of the Cold War, for instance, was greatly helped by the covert Communist machine in the unions.

That machine could be incredibly unscrupulous and hard to fight.

Hardly anyone, alas, now remembers the way the tough ex-Communist Frank Chapple took on, exposed and defeated blatant Communist ballot-rigging in the crucial Electrical Trades Union (ETU) between 1959 and 1961. Much more was at stake than who ran the ETU.

How deeply we were penetrated at that time we shall probably never know, and it is certain that many of those caught up in the pro-Stalin wave of the 1940s quietly peeled away after the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But 1968 did not kill off Communism.

It began a new movement – Eurocommunism, which renounced Soviet methods but kept the key aims of transforming our society.

It would seem that the European Union, rather than being a bulwark against Marxist influence, was almost deliberately conceived as a way to advance “Eurocommunism,” a means by which to foist Cultural Marxist pabulum on the peoples of a “united” Europe.  That makes Brexit all-the-more crucial.

Happy reading, and Happy Saturday!

Election Day 2018

The Portly Politico6 Comments

This blog has fallen dormant—has it often seems to do—during the height of election season.  A savvy, dedicated blogger would churn out the bulk of his content when the news comes fast and fresh, and folks are seeking out information about candidates—not during the middle of summer, the deadest time for political news, outside of some primary elections.

But, hey, that’s what makes The Portly Politico unique.

What won’t make it unique is this admonition:  VOTE.  Ideally—and if you’re a reader of this blog, this might go without saying—vote for Republicans.

I went out to vote this morning—the last time at my current precinct, as I’ve recently moved to the countryside (after two floods, it was time)—and it was hoppin’.  I arrived around 7:05 AM EST, and there was a line out the door.  I finished voting around 7:40 AM EST—that’s how many people were there to vote.

I’ve never experienced a midterm election this year.  Both sides are highly energized.  It feels like a presidential election.

I’ll refrain from offering detailed analysis at this point (I think Republicans will pick up some Senate seats, but the House is a complete toss-up), but this election—to recycle another cliché, but only because it’s true—is of the utmost importance.

If Republicans lose the House (which, I’ll confess, seems likely, albeit by a narrow margin), it will certainly stymie President Trump and the GOP’s conservative agenda.  The prospect of returning Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to the Speaker position is also terrifying.

If Republicans lose the Senate, it will be utterly catastrophic.  You can kiss conservative Supreme Court nominees goodbye.  If you’re the most anti-Trumpist #NeverTrumper neocon that ever lived, you’ve gotta hold your nose and vote Republican for that reason alone.

If we lose both… well, I shudder to contemplate the kangaroo court of baseless investigations and accusations that Democratic Congress will unleash.  Impeachment might not result in removal, but the fraying fabric of our political system would be rent asunder as Democratic knives stab any opposition.

This election is a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, yes, but it’s also a series of choices:  the Constitution, or lawlessness.  Capitalism, or communism.  Rule by the people, or rule by an entrenched, technocratic elite.

Get out there and vote, folks—especially Republicans!

Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings

The Portly Politico26 Comments

The Internet has been all atwitter with talk of the Kavanaugh hearings, particularly Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s vocal-fry inflected testimony, as well as Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s fiery, righteous outburst.

My general policy with such hot-button current events is to withhold comment until the facts are known.  That’s not a savvy move for a blogger, but it gives me time to make an informed judgment on what the Truth is likely to be.

Below are comments I posted on the Portly Politico Facebook page (which I encourage you to “like,” “follow,” and whatever else one has to do to get notifications these days) about the hearings.  What troubles me the most about the (it seems baseless) accusations against Judge Kavanaugh is the utter breakdown of logical thinking—and the utter willingness of his critics to throw due process and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” under the bus.

But, we all know it’s political theatre.  The Democrats are attempting to delay or derail the confirmation process until after the 2018 midterm elections.  They could care less about Dr. Ford’s alleged sexual assault.  I also wrote that Judge Kavanaugh would be in for a thorough Borking, so we all knew this was coming; still, I naively did not fathom the depths to which the Left would descend.

As for Dr. Ford, she could very well have suffered some trauma—or some imagined, “recovered” memory.  The old “what-does-she-have-to-gain” defense is as baseless as her claims:  $100,000 (and counting) in GoFundMe money, the kudos of the “Resistance,” probably a book deal, a political career if she wants it—she will be richly rewarded for her role in the potential takedown of an eminently qualified, eminently respectable constitutional originalist.

Submitted for your edification—and the good of the Republic and logical thinking—my reflections:

Some logic re: the Kavanaugh hearings.

1.) Women (and men) are sometimes the victims of sexual assault, rape, etc. That’s bad–evil!

2.) Brett Kavanaugh can be innocent and can still be true.

Just because evil things happen to some people doesn’t mean that Brett Kavanaugh did anything evil, or what he has been accused of doing.

Further:  I keep reading and hearing that Dr. Ford’s testimony is “credible.” Based on what evidence? As far as I can tell, there is NO evidence to support her claim, and a great deal to refute or challenge it. Being emotionally compelling is not the same thing as having substantial evidence.

Maybe something happened to her, maybe not. It’s hard to imagine someone subjecting themselves to this scrutiny for light and transient reasons. That said, the “Resistance” is real. So are recovered memories, or flawed ones.

The Democrats in the Senate don’t care (in general) about Dr. Ford’s allegations or about what’s allegedly happened to other women. They care about delaying the vote on confirmation until after the election so they can scuttle the deal. They’re using women to further their own political agenda, and as much as they’ll protest to the contrary, they know all-too-well the dangerous game they’re playing.

They’ve been running this playbook for decades. Senator Lindsey Graham’s righteous outburst demonstrates that the scales have fallen away from Establishment Republicans’ eyes–the old Marquis of Queensbury rules don’t work when the other side will destroy you when it’s politically expedient to do so.

Baseless, misdirected, and/or politically-motivated accusations don’t help anyone. They harm real victims of sexual assault and rape, as well as men who may be entirely innocent. Further, in the Kavanaugh case, they undermine the legitimacy of our already-ossified institutions.

Razorfist on InfoWars Deplatforming

The Portly Politico5 Comments

As I posted this morning, Alex Jones and InfoWars were unceremoniously deplatformed in a coordinated, cross-corporate attack that saw almost every major Silicon Valley player ban the right-wing conspiracy theorist from their respective services.  Already, YouTubers of all stripes are coming out to defend Jones—if not the substance of his content, then his right to be heard.

YouTuber Razorfist released a video last night (below; warning:  foul language) in which he argued that this attack makes Jones a martyr; all too true.  Here is the video (again, video contains foul language and may not be safe/appropriate for work):

Razor also points out that you can continue to follow InfoWars at Bitchute, and predicts that the site is going to grow rapidly with its new user on board:  https://www.bitchute.com/channel/infowars/

Follow your conscious.  You don’t have to support Alex Jones’s content just because he was deplatformed, but all conservatives should be defending his ability to put his message out there.  After all, if it’s just nutty kookery, then submitting it to the light of day will expose its cracks.