RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-insufferable-hypocrisy-of-john-kerry/

In February, Icelandic reporter Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson asked the United States climate czar, John Kerry, if he thought flying in a private jet to Reykjavik in 2019 to pick up the Arctic Circle award for climate leadership was environmentally responsible. Kerry had a dispensation, noting that flying was “the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”

This week, the Daily Mail reported that Kerry had flown in a private jet to Martha’s Vineyard — where he owns an $11 million rambler — for Obama’s 60th birthday bash. A State Department spokesperson denied the story, claiming that “Secretary Kerry lives on Martha’s Vineyard, he did not travel there for a party. He took a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, he did not fly commercial or private.” This statement means nothing. No one is accusing Kerry of flying his plane onto a runway at Obama’s compound. Whatever the case, Kerry’s carbon-spewing private jet is busy. He and his family often fly to Sun Valley (where the family has a house), D.C. (ditto), Los Angeles, and sometimes just between Martha’s Vineyard and Boston (another house) — because the Earth isn’t worth the two-and-a-half-hour drive. You can rent a similar plane for around $15,500 per hour.

I’m not much of a classist, but I get why this kind of sanctimony and hypocrisy fuels populist anger. Hundreds of well-heeled, maskless elites get to dance at Barack Obama’s birthday party while schlubs like you are still yelling into your useless masks just to be heard over the din at a supermarket — even though you’re vaccinated.

Marrying into money has its perks, and Kerry is well within his rights to enjoy the remarkable conveniences the modern world affords him. The problem is — as with Obama’s party — that the same people demand you surrender comforts and freedoms for the communal good.

I’m often told this brand of gotcha is irrelevant: Kerry’s flights are trifling in the big picture. Even if Kerry is a hypocrite, it doesn’t change the fact that climate change threatens our lives. Just today, the U.N. released a report starkly warning that climate change is now “code red for humanity,” and it is our last chance to implement policies and wide-ranging reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the first last chance to save the planet since 2019’s last chance to save the planet.) And Kerry doesn’t seem very nervous about any of it. If the climate technocrats truly believed that climate change was menacing humanity’s existence, they wouldn’t act the way they do, just as if elites truly believed the Delta variant scaremongering they engage in, they wouldn’t be participating in parties with hundreds of their closest friends.

It’s easy to find politicians saying dumb things. Television news gives them plenty of coverage. Viewers like colorful voices, which are often the most extreme. The resulting Kardashianization of politics doesn’t matter much unless these caricatures tarnish an entire political party, define its public perception, and compromise its chances of passing legislation and winning elections.

That’s the Democrats’ problem with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This problem arose again last week when squad member Cori Bush told a national TV audience how eager she is to defund the police. She said nothing to convince anyone who rejects her views. She probably made matters worse with her transparent hypocrisy, defending her right to hire expensive private security guards while advocating less police protection for everyone else.

Rep. Bush hasn’t learned the single most important lesson about being stuck in a hole: Stop digging. The St. Louis Democrat doesn’t dig with shovels, either. She bought an industrial-size excavator and went to work. The hole she’s digging is “defund the police,” and polls show she’s mining for fool’s gold. The defund movement may be popular with some wealthy (white) elites, activists on the extreme left and, at least temporarily, some African Americans in congressional districts like Bush’s, though its popularity even in those precincts will fade as violence continues to rise. Everyone else is already staunchly opposed. They fear, quite reasonably, that defunding will lead to more crime, not only because there will be fewer cops on the beat but because those who remain will limit their active policing because they lack political support.

A new poll, just completed by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll, shows that 75% of respondents want more police and only 25% want less. About the same number, 72%, oppose defunding the police. A slight majority even favors restoring “stop and frisk” policies to “deter gun crime,” something New York did under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg before ending the practice because so many young minority men were being searched.

Pollster Mark Penn, co-leader of the Harvard/Harris survey, now says rising violence is the single most important issue for the 2022 midterms. “Crime is becoming the next crisis in America,” he concluded, “with overwhelming numbers seeing an increase in crime and Americans want stricter, not looser, enforcement of laws.” There’s no question which party has the advantage on that issue. The question for Democrats is: What can they do to recover?

Of course, many voters also want to see police reforms and greater transparency. Both are being put in place across the country. Most of all, Americans want police, prosecutors, and judges to do their respective jobs and protect them from predators. That means the left’s push to slash police funding has become a major electoral liability for mainstream Democrats, both nationally and locally. One sign that the political winds have changed is that two progressive cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, which gutted their police budgets last year, now want to increase them. They are not alone.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-newsletter-on-good-people-and?token=

I reread Lolita this weekend, as I do every few years or so, usually when I’m down or uninspired or feeling like I’ve forgotten why people choose the writing life. I revere the book for a hundred reasons, most having to do with its extraordinarily savage humor, but this time around, affected by depressing thoughts I’ve had reading news of late, I found myself asking a new question: how can I like Humbert Humbert?

Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed with puzzles, tricks, and ploys. All his novels make treasure-hunts out of his effusive wordplay (“We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001”), and his fascination with chess is such an overt theme that one starts to feel the logic of the game everywhere. When protagonist Humbert incautiously dismisses the danger of recording his pedophilic fixations in a diary by saying, “Only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script,” and a short time later comes up with his too-clever-by-half plan to rape the daughter by way of marrying the mother, it hits us like revealed check when Charlotte Haze really does discover, and read, the devastating journal — the twist was sitting there all along. Humbert was a laughably clumsy criminal, but a flawless narrator whose confessional is a succession of such devious gambits and traps, in which he exults in thinking nine moves ahead of his reader-judges. Is conspiring to trick us into sympathy with the unforgivable another of his ruses?

It isn’t. In a story that piles word-games atop word-games — the whole subplot involving Humbert’s Dostoyevskian opposite Clare Quilty is a chess match, in which Humbert loses his queen — the most confounding plot device of all, the question of how we can not only tolerate but become fast friends with the book’s demonic narrator, is no manipulation. Humbert Humbert is nearly a purely evil character, who not only kidnaps and rapes his “darling” twelve year-old Lolita but conspires to have a baby with her and rape that child. His “confession” is nothing of the sort. He’s not retelling his breathless story to expiate guilt, in the Christian sense (the idea would have bored him to neuralgia). That he presents his appeal to the “winged gentlemen” of his cosmic jury as such is another of his chess-ruses, and a particularly disgusting one. He recounts the vilest scenes of his crime spree in such ecstatic slow motion that we realize he’s conned us, like a serial killer who, having led police to his burial ground, pants and grabs at himself with pleasure.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/08/09/dems-try-to-disqualify-desantis-as-rinos-disqualify-themselves-n2593748

You can feel the cold terror of the Dems as Ron DoomSantis strides across the American political stage laying waste to the puny mortals nipping at his ankles, President Asterisk among them. The doddering old pervert might have thought he was cunning when asked by a reporter about the Lord Humungous of Florida by asking back “Governor Who?” Of course, the question became whether or not that mush-junkie Matlock superfan was trying to high-hat the competition or whether he really had no idea who the reporter was talking about when DeSantis riposted, “I’m not surprised that Biden doesn’t remember me . . . The question is what else has he forgotten?” Way to turn your diss gambit into a massive self-own, Crusty.

The media is pulling out all the stops to knee-cap DeSantis before he becomes unstoppable through his combination of competence and not caring. So suddenly, according to the regime-licensed media, Florida is a smoldering wasteland of hacking, dying victims of Governor Grim Reaper. Except DeSantis has been out there pushing the vaccine – for people who want it – and the whole “DeSantis is anti-vaxx” kind of contradicts the prior narrative about how DeSantis was colluding with big donors to monopolize the vaxx to line their pockets. Pro-Tip, Lil’ Goebbels Gang – you should try to at least keep your lies consistent. After all, everyone’s not as dumb as your Democratic constituents.

Why is DeSantis invulnerable to their slings and arrows? The not caring is a big part. At some level, Trump still wants to be accepted by the elite – this is why he baffles us by still giving interviews to the shabby likes of Maggie Haberman and Bob Woodward even though they treat him like a Boy Scout trying to earn a Lincoln Project merit badge.

Not DeSantis. He doesn’t care. He’s not about mean tweets. He’s about ripping out their throats by accomplishing things that make them cry.

He’s the future, and the future will hurt, libs. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17628/andrew-cuomo-due-process

The report and its conclusions are based on a one-sided investigation that does not include cross examination or other truth-testing mechanisms that are essential to due process.

Cuomo has categorically denied all of these charges and, until the contrary is proved, he must be presumed innocent….

The third category is extremely dangerous to civil liberties and could seriously undercut the credibility of the report as a whole. It alleges that Cuomo “looked” at women in a creepy way, focusing on particular parts of their body and looking them up and down. This is neither a crime nor a tort, nor is it subject to proof or disproof. It is literally in the eye of the beholder and the beholden. It does not belong in a serious report about possible criminal and harassment behavior.

Its inclusion demonstrates potential bias by the investigators, the attorney general, and perhaps some of Cuomo’s accusers…. The government should not be telling people who or what to look at…

The rule of law requires that Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) be accorded the opportunity to challenge the serious allegations made against him in a report commissioned by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. The report and its conclusions are based on a one-sided investigation that does not include cross examination or other truth-testing mechanisms that are essential to due process.

The allegations in the report fall into three distinct, if somewhat overlapping, categories.

The first and most serious are allegations which, if true, might well warrant criminal investigation and prosecution. An anonymous accuser has alleged that Cuomo put his hand under her blouse and inappropriately cupped her breast without consent; if true, this would constitute a crime. But this serious accuser remains anonymous, and Cuomo must be presumed innocent of this charge until proven guilty in a court of law. The same is true of other serious charges of nonconsensual physical touching. Cuomo has categorically denied all of these charges and, until the contrary is proved, he must be presumed innocent of the serious charges in the first category.