Admissions

Closing yesterday’s “Hockey Central” broadcast on Toronto radio, host Jeff Marek stated, “My preseason predictions: I should be fired.”

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I'm a glum one

It's explainable

I met someone

Unattainable

Life's a bore

The world is my oyster no more

All the papers

Where I led the news

With my capers

Now will spread the news

"Superman

Turns Out to Be Flash in the Pan!”

Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin, “I Can’t Get Started”

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“When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,” I find that almost all those remembrances are negative: mistakes, errors, assumptions jumped to, enthusiasms uncurbed, passive aggressions, insults received and delivered, and on and on. I look in the mirror and proclaim: “You big dummy!”

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How could you believe me when I said I love you

When you know I've been a liar all my life

Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner

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Without a doubt the most astonishing admission of the past week was delivered by Sidney Powell, a lawyer in the forefront of efforts to negate the results of the election for president of the United States, in order to keep Donald Trump in that office. She asserted in her work for Trump that she would “release the Kraken,” supposedly killer evidence of illegal behavior and fraud in the voting and the counting of ballots. Among her numerous outrageous claims,* aspersions against the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems have led to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against her.

Now, in the shadow of Dominion’s lawsuit, Powell’s lawyers released an alleged defense of her many claims about fraud and other misdeeds—asserting that “[n]o reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”** 

The mind boggles.

You go on television, you hold press conferences, and, most importantly, you argue before courts of law—and now you try to get off the hook by claiming that all of your “evidence,” your “truths,” were complete bullshit, and on that basis you should be let off the hook for the damage that you have done. After all, you claim, reasonable people weren’t going to buy what you were selling. And what of all the unreasonable people. . . ?

I have to lie down. 

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*  Too numerous to list here. Wikipedia has a compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell

**  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims

La Même Chose

There is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

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Three years ago I wrote a marvelous blog post called “Before You Wrap the Leftovers,” which, according to Google’s view counter, apparently got sucked into a black hole, and almost nobody read. I humbly ask that you read that post before we carry on. (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/01/before-you-wrap-leftovers.html)

Welcome back.

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Nothing New 1

Last month Stewart-Allen Clark, a pastor of a General Baptist denomination church (distinguished easily enough by insiders, one imagines, from a Lieutenant-Colonel or Sergeant-Major Baptist congregation), 

drew scorn for a sermon offering advice to wives he said would stop their husbands becoming "distracted" by other women, (1)

scorn he probably could have avoided simply by cranking up the old gramophone and spinning “Wives and Lovers.” After all, he could have protested, “Jack Jones won a Grammy for that!”

According to the BBC story, Pastor Clark told his congregation that it’s “‘really important’” for men to have a beautiful woman on their arm,” and he asks, "Why is it so many times that women, after they get married, let themselves go?” And then—what I really love—like so many clergymen, he looks into the mind of God and proclaims:

“Don't ever forget this, God made [men] to look and you want them to look at you - not some hottie out there or someone on a computer screen.”

And also don’t forget, as “Wives and Lovers” reminds women, there are all those barracudas in the office.

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Nothing New 2   

For this “Nothing New” I could have gone anywhere, but this NPR report about last year’s Republican national convention makes the point very compactly:

"Biden, Harris and their socialist comrades will fundamentally change this nation," Trump campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle warned.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asserted that Biden would be taking orders from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the four congresswomen known as the "Squad."

"Their vision for America is socialism," Haley said. "And we know that socialism has failed everywhere."

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said, "Democrats have chosen to go down the road to socialism.” (2)

As we all know in the 1948 presidential election the Democratic incumbent, Harry S Truman, prevailed over the supposed favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman laughingly held up the headline of the rightwing Chicago Tribune:

One person who wasn’t laughing was the bilious rightwing crank Westbrook Pegler. As reported by A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker (Nov. 20, 1948), Pegler exclaimed under the headline “ELECTION RESULTS CALLED END OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC” :

(I guess it's a little late in the day to point out to the long-gone Pegler that the brown shirts were the Nazis, not the socialists.)

Liebling commented:

I imagine Pegler will presently be shopping for a country with a future.

Apparently, Guilfoyle, Haley, McDaniel, and the rest of the GOPers who have been  crying out in the wilderness about the Democrats’ alleged determination to bring “socialism” (3)  into the good ole US of A have overlooked what Pegler discovered in 1948—we already have socialism thanks to Harry Truman. 

Wait—or is it that we don’t have socialism and the Republicans are just doing what they’ve been doing since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, waving a bloody red rag to distract us from their own failures?

Plus ça change . . .

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(1)   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56312443

(2)   https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905895428/republicans-blast-democrats-as-socialists-heres-what-socialism-is

(3)   “Pinning down a precise definition of socialism is a question that entire forests’ worth of books and articles have given their lives to answer, largely in vain.”

         Jonathan Chait

T'ain't funny, McGee!

In 2009, I wrote a post entitled “De Mortuis . . .,” (1) which was inspired by the death of a conservative columnist whom I refused to even name. One of his claims to fame—such as it was—was the coining of mindless alliterative quips for the later-disgraced Spiro Agnew. 

Another celebrated Republican quipster—at least celebrated amongst that tribe as a latter-day Oscar Wilde—was Saint Ronald Reagan. His most famous mot, still lovingly repeated by his acolytes, is: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” I always wondered if anybody with half a brain would accept the opposite statement: “I’m from the government, but I don’t give a damn.” 

Well, this week we learned of one Republican—obviously without half a brain—Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, who believes that the role of government in a time of crisis is to do nothing except to espouse a brand of Social Darwinism. (2)

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About half a century ago during an energy crisis, bumper stickers in petroleum-rich Texas read, “Let New England freeze in the dark.” Today, Yankees of the nicer sort are not affixing “Let Texas freeze in the dark” stickers on their vehicles.

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To return to the swampland of conservative quipsters, are you willing to say nothing but good about Rush Limbaugh, the loud-mouthed racist and misogynist who kicked off the other day? De mortuis be damned! He was another of those personages who passed for wits among the right-wing tribe. But as Conor  Friedersdorf of The Atlantic notes, “[N]o Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.” (3)

Perhaps Limbaugh’s most famous coinage was “feminazi,” which is a locution that really gets up my gourd. Whatever distaste one might have with feminists (I don’t have any) the attempt to equate what they are about with the murderers of the Third Reich is beyond disgusting. Some early feminists might have burned a bra or two, but they did not gas millions of Jews or start a horrific world war. Limbaugh was worse than a Holocaust denier; he was a Holocaust trivializer. The ashes of Auschwitz served only to soil the proponents of equal rights.

Friedersdorf ends his article on Limbaugh saying, “May he rest in peace.”

Conor is a much nicer person than me. I say, “May he rot in hell!”

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(1)   https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2009/10/de-mortuis_09.html

(2)   https://news.yahoo.com/texas-mayor-says-government-utility-001034037.html

Thankfully for the residents of Colorado City, Boyd has since resigned.

(3)   https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/rush-limbaughs-rise-and-conservatisms-fall/618058/

 

Duck Soup

Recently, I posted in this blog about RINOs, the alleged Republicans In Name Only; that is, GOPers who haven’t swallowed the Trumpian Kool-Aid. (1) Apparently there are other INOs roaming the wilds of America, for I learned the other day of a tribe of JINOs—Jews In Name Only. They were discovered in the jungle of American politics by Ben Shapiro, described as “a conservative commentator and columnist.” (2) These JINOs are Jews who performed an unkosher act: They voted for Barack Obama. (I assume that Shapiro proclaimed his excommunication of thousands of once fellow Yids after consulting holy texts at the Jared Kushner School of Talmudic Studies.) Now, considering the fact that in 2008 79% of Jewish voters cast a ballot for Obama, (3) it does seem to be a bit presumptuous for Shapiro to declare that his rump group of Hebrews are the true bearers of the flame. In any case, how can a religious declaration be determined by a political test? 

As I pointed out in the earlier post cited above, this INO business is akin to the No-True-Scotsman fallacy. (In Shapiro’s case I guess we can call it the No-True-Yid fallacy.) 

This fallacy is an attempt to maintain the fiction of the purity of one’s cohort. Slice away the murderous Glaswegian from the group—and, voila, “true” Scotland remains pure. 

What may be considered a cousin of the NTS fallacy is the number-one defensive claim issued by those whose actions or words have been condemned as racist, sexist, misogynistic, etc.: “That’s not who I am/who we are.” Well, all I can say is, if that wasn’t you who said/did that, then you must be hosting a dybbuk that speaks or acts separate from your own will. (That is in opposition to the dictum that says, “If it looks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s a duck!”) 

One of the more recent examples of this NTS cousin was encountered in the case of country singer Morgan Wallen, who was accused of using a racial slur in a video. (4) Two country artists, Kelsea Ballerini and Cassadee Pope, came to the defense not of Wallen, but of country music, claiming that Wallen “does not represent” it. However, Andrea Williams, a Black journalist and author based in Nashville, disputed that defense of the country music scene:

That’s more hurtful than people who didn’t say anything because you’re diminishing the very real experiences of people who know for a fact this is actually indicative of the way this entire industry works.

In other words, it is what it is. It quacks like a duck.

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(1)   https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2021/01/on-brink-of-extinction.html

(2)   https://news.yahoo.com/capitol-riot-revealed-political-chasm-174301809.html

(3)  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections

(4)  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/arts/music/country-music-racism-social-media.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

On the Couch

The FBI has been scouring the land to find and arrest the insurrectionists who invaded the United States Capitol building on January 6. As news media report the apprehending of each miscreant, I find reading the brief backgrounds of each one instructive. The most salient feature I have noticed is that many of the would-be shtarkers live with their mothers. (And many of whom brought their mothers along to the riot.) 

Calling Dr. Freud!

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In interviews, several of the idiots claimed to be acting like the citizens in Ukraine or Belarus who flocked to the streets to protest fraudulent elections. But their heads were so screwed on backwards that they couldn’t even get the analogy correct.

Consider: Those Eastern European protesters were opponents of the government, who saw the ins using their political power—control of the right to be on the ballot, control over the handling of the voting, control of the counting of the votes cast, etc.—to steal the election.* The opposition had no way to subvert the election—they had no power to do so, even if they wanted to.

Now consider the situation in the US: The party in power was claiming that the election was stolen by those who had no power to do so. But the outs don’t control how ballots may be cast (in person, by mail, etc.), or where drop boxes will be placed for the collection of ballots not cast on election day or mailed,** or how and when ballots are counted, or what forms of ID are necessary to cast one’s ballot, or the reporting of the results, etc. That is all under the control of the ruling party. In other words, only the ins have the means and power to steal an election. 

Thankfully, election officials—both Republican and Democratic—did not bow to pressure to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Indeed, some of the state officials who came under the most pressure to act fraudulently—those in Arizona and Georgia—were Republicans. When Trump called the Republican Georgia election official and asked him to find 11,780 votes, that was a prime example of how an in party attempts to steal an election. He wanted an in-power official to commit fraud. No out-of-power person could even attempt such an act.

The ins steal elections, because, unfortunately, they can.

So “Stop the Steal” as a slogan was a correct one. Except it was aimed at the wrong party.

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* As proof of what an in party can do, here is what happened in Tanzania this past October:

https://apnews.com/article/tanzania-elections-kenya-voting-fraud-and-irregularities-presidential-elections-e4df247054dd2ce39412ec660357f80e

**  In Texas, the Republican governor decreed that only one drop box would be placed in each county. Harris County, which contains the city of Houston, has 4.7 million people!

On the Brink of Extinction?

The New York Times Magazine has just printed a long article (1) on the fate of the Northern White Rhinoceros. There are only two of them left—Najin and Fatu—both females. Thus, sometime in the near future, there will no longer be any Northern White Rhinos.

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In the United States we have male and female RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), derisively called that by many right-wing members of that political party. Here are two entries on Google:

The latter attack on RINOs is especially suspect, as Trump, after registering as a Republican in 1987, subsequently changed his party affiliation five times:

In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to "no party affiliation” (Independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party. (2)

One’s suspicion must be that Trump is hardly a person to adhere to a rigorously-held ideological position.

Yet Trump and his minions have been quick to tar other members of the GOP (many of them past leaders and standard bearers who have espoused long-held Republican policies) as traitors to the party. 

Now if you were good boys and girls and read the previous post on this blog—“See Who Salutes” (3)—you should be able to identify what we have here. That’s right, a classic case of “No-True-Scotsman.”

Labeling those they disagree with as RINOs (read “Traitors”) is an attempt by fanatics to exclude others from the ranks of the party by means of re-definition and, thereby, presumably to purify its soul. The RINOs are not true Republicans, according to the fanatics. Only those who blindly follow Trump down every manhole and through every sewer (4) are true members of the GOP, they scream. 

Since Hamlet’s original quotation has often been misinterpreted, I will offer a paraphrase:

It is more honorable not to follow the Trumpian mishegas than to observe it. 

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(1)  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/magazine/the-last-two-northern-white-rhinos-on-earth.html?searchResultPosition=6

(2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Donald_Trump#:~:text=Trump%20registered%20as%20a%20Republican,his%20party%20affiliation%20five%20times.

(3)

https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2021/01/see-who-salutes.html

(4)

The GOP nominating convention didn’t publish a party platform. How the RINOs can be ideologically impure when there is no ideology—just the whims of DJT—is a conundrum I leave to others to deal with.

See Who Salutes

I logged into Amazon last night. I was looking to purchase some false flags. It turned out, however, that when I typed in “false flags” what popped up was about a score of books with that term (singular or plural) in the title. Nothing to run up a flagpole to see if anyone saluted.

I was motivated in my search by the claims of numerous Republican/conservative/rightwing/batshit crazies that the storming of the United States Capitol building was not perpetrated by their swamp creatures but was a “false flag” operation. As Rolling Stone noted:

One of the most prominent figures to publicly promote this claim has been Rep. Matt Gaetz, a far-right politician and conspiracy theorist, who claimed on the House floor on Wednesday night that some of the rioters had been antifa plants. “Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa,” he alleged, without any basis in reality. (1)

That is just one of many reports on the false “false flag” accusations.

The best response (as the riot was happening) was by Mark Leibovich, Chief National Correspondent of the New York Times:

When the president’s defenders keep saying “we don’t know who these people are” and “this is not who we are,” it might be more convincing if they weren’t all wearing MAGA gear.

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Thinking over the nature of “false flag” accusations, I have concluded that they are a sub-category of the “No-True-Scotsman” fallacy. I wrote about “No-True-Scotsman” back in 2011, (2) but here, briefly, is what it is:

Hamish MacTavish of Aberdeen is reading his newspaper at breakfast. He reads a story about a brutal murder in Manchester, and proclaims, “Och, no Scotsman would do that!”

 

Two days later, reading his paper at breakfast, he reads about another brutal murder, this one in Glasgow. “Och,” he announces, “no true Scotsman would do that!”

The fallacy is an attempt to immunize one’s cohort from blame—slicing away the negative elements from the group by narrowing the definition of the group. “That is not who we are” is a paler version of the fallacy.

At heart these attempts to cast the blame elsewhere and to display one’s own clean hands are cowardice in action. It is a refusal to accept responsibility and to examine the dirty secrets of one’s own identity—and of the flag that one has chosen to march behind.

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In the case of the Capitol rioters, the false-flaggers were repudiated by another set of crazies who glorified what they did. Here’s one example:

[A]s the protesters swarmed the Capitol, “Stop the Steal” national organizer Ali Alexander posted a video of himself overlooking a sea descending onto the nation's capital saying, "I don't disavow this. I do not denounce this.” (3)

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And it’s nice to see that Trump got ahead of the postal crush by sending his Valentine’s Day message to the rioters 39 days early:

 “We love you, you're very special.”

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P.S.: I sense a business opportunity. Anyone else want to go into the manufacture and sale of false flags?

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(1)  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/antifa-false-flag-maga-riot-1110941/

(2)  https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2011/06/drop-puck.html

 (3) https://www.yahoo.com/gma/trump-allies-helped-plan-promote-234801490.html