In attacking Roy Moore, shameless liberals try to put another one over on the stupid party

Why has the Washington Post published the stories about Roy Moore? Is it because the members of the Post's editorial staff are genuinely concerned for the women he victimized? Right! Is it because they piously believe this kind of misconduct is unconscionable and needs to be discouraged in our society? Please! The Post has published these stories with one simple goal in mind: to try to ensure Roy Moore's defeat and thereby to decrease the Republican majority in the Senate to a single vote. In brief: the attacks on Roy Moore, even if they are true, are politically motivated, the height of cynical hypocrisy, and must be resisted.

If the Post had really been motivated by high moral purpose, they would not have ignored the rapist Bill Clinton and the manslaughterer Ted Kennedy for decades. When Juanita Broaddrick told her convincing story about how Bill had raped her, the Post should have hammered Bill and all the Gloria Allreds of the world should have shouted out their righteous indignation. When the money shot on Monica's dress convicted Bill beyond the shadow of a doubt of using his office to take advantage of an intern, the Post along with all good liberals should have waved their hands and pronounced: "That's it. There are some moral principles that are simply more important than politics." Then, encouraged by Post editorials, every single Democrat senator should have marched to the floor of the Senate and excoriated him and voted to convict him. When Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge in a drunken stupor and caused the death of the woman who was the object of that night's bleary sexual arousal, the Post along with other Democrats should have been the first to move for his expulsion from the Senate.

If the Post and the Democrats had done these things, then, the entire tone of American politics and of public life in general for the last several decades would have been elevated; if the Post and the Democrats had done these things, they would have earned some moral credibility and they could now reasonably expect Republicans to reciprocate by adhering to the same moral principles. But, that is not what they did. Instead they ignored Bill's crimes and even went to the wall for him and worked to exonerate "Chappaquidick" Ted, thereby establishing the rule by which the game has been played ever since, namely: even overwhelming evidence of sexual misconduct is not enough to disqualify a person from political office if it is not politically expedient to do so.

Even now, we need to ignore all the protestations from liberals that they finally believe Juanita, or that, in retrospect, they have seen the light and are reevaluating Bill's vulgar conduct. This is hypocrisy of the most vile and nauseating kind! The fact is: Ted is dead and Bill is no longer relevant, so both can now be easily and costlessly sacrificed by the Dems. But, you can be damn sure that if another prominent male member (pun intended) of their party ever turns out to be a sexual predator, Democrats will doff their temporary cloak of moral punctiliousness and shamelessly ignore his acts of sexual misconduct once again. And the Post will give them cover.

Yes, Democrats and their enablers in the press are shameless. (This is what they hate about Trump so much: he fights on the same vile, shameless level as they do.) But, those Republicans who want Roy Moore to step down are just as bad as Democrats in their own way. These Republicans claim they want to take the high ground; they want to demonstrate their moral superiority by showing that, unlike the Dems, good, country-club Republicans have moral principles that they stick to, even when it is not politically expedient to do so. In the process, these idiots are willing to endanger their majority in the Senate and derail, for example, all the outstanding work Trump has done to take back the judiciary with outstanding appointees like Neil Gorsuch.

When these Republicans withdraw their support from Roy Moore, they are not engaging in some higher moral act, but only helping to reinforce the loathsome narratives and memes disseminated by the Democrats and the liberal press for purely political purposes. And when these idiot Republicans act this way, it does not move the polarized country any closer to reconciliation, it does not engender in Democrats an impulse towards comity, awakening in them a grudging admiration of Republican moral rectitude, and thereby igniting in them a desire to reciprocate by living up to the same moral standards. No, as I wrote above: Democrats are shameless. When Republicans undermine Roy Moore, Democrats and the Post's editors merely squeal with glee that their stratagems have succeeded once again and that they have managed to put yet another one over on the stupid party.

More Trump hyperventilation on the Left

It is so entertaining to read the editorial pages of the New York Times these days. Even one year later, the mental anguish over the election of Donald Trump has not abated. Here are some excerpts from the latest fit of hyperventilation by the twit Michelle Goldberg:

In the terror-struck and vertiginous days after Donald Trump’s election a year ago, as I tried to make sense of America’s new reality, I called people who lived, or had lived, under authoritarianism to ask what to expect. ... [T]he texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge. ... What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist ... You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. ... But this nightmare year has upended assumptions about the durability of the rules, formal and informal [once again a liberal appeals to "informal rules," which, presumably, she gets to define], governing our politics. ... It was staggering when blah blah blah and even more staggering when blah blah blah ... Lately, the pace of shocks has picked up, even if our capacity to process them has not. ... How can America ever return from this level of systematic derangement and corruption? ... In moments of optimism I think that this is just a hideous interregnum, ... But in my head I hear the song that closed out Trump rallies like a satanic taunt or an epitaph for democracy: “You can’t always get what you want.”

Maybe just a bit overwrought, Michelle?

Speaking of systematic corruption, no mention of the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One?

Speaking of shock after shock, no mention of the fact that Hillary paid for the Steele dossier to be assembled from Russian sources, or the fact that even Donna Brazile now admits that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary and undermining Bernie all along?

Speaking of erratic racists, no mention of the fact that the Data Services Manager of the DNC sent out an email in which she explicitly instructed her employees not to forward to her the resumes of "cisgender straight white males" for consideration?

Your characterization of the Trump administration as a "hideous interregnum" just means that you still have not grokked the fact that you live in a pluralistic society where many of the people who live outside New York in flyover country and whom you probably categorize as mere "deplorables" are going to keep on voting for politicians like The Donald because they find the pompous moralizing of people like you insufferable.

My advice to you: get a good shrink to help you cope with your terror sweats and vertigo because the election of The Donald is not an interregnum, but the expression of a permanent bloc of American voters inimical to everything you stand for.

Ignorance times two

In a recent review of the book How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America, by Brion McClanahan, Jay Lehr writes:

[McClanahan] takes up the task of separating the myths surrounding Alexander Hamilton — including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s recent Broadway play, inserting the president into popular culture — from the truth. ... McClanahan traces how Hamilton, his Supreme Court appointees John Marshall and Joseph Story, and a more contemporary disciple of the Hamiltonian philosophy, Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugo Black — for [sic] increasing the federal government’s power at the state’s expense.

Thus, in just a couple of sentences, Lehr reveals his ignorance not only of English grammar, but also of American history: Alexander Hamilton was never president and therefore did not appoint John Marshall and Joseph Story to the Supreme Court. Of course, Real Clear Markets should also be taken to task for allowing such rubbish to be published on its website.

Unfounded paranoia on the Right

In an article entitled Tech Needs to Explain Why Its Algorithms Hate Republicans, Mytheos Holt draws some highly dubious conclusions:

[W]e can now almost conclusively say that if you search for a Republican using Google or Yahoo, you’re far more likely to find out dirt about them than if you search for a Democrat. Though, unsurprisingly, the effect is at its most dramatic when using Google.`... [S]earches for all sixteen Presidential candidates of the 2016 election turned up an average of seven positive results for Democrats, whereas Republicans only found an average of 6. Searches for Hillary Clinton produced five positive articles to only one negative, whereas searches for Donald Trump produced four positive and three negative. A search for Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, would produce nine positive stories and zero negative, whereas searches for Ted Cruz produced zero (!) positive stories. And this was during the primary, when most people regarded Cruz as further to the Right on most issues than Trump, so the message is clear: The more conservative you are, the more Google has programmed its algorithm to hate you. [emphasis added]

This is just dumb. The fact that Google searches turn up more positive results for Democrats than do searches for Republicans is likely simply a function of the fact that there exist more articles that contain positive coverage of Democrats than there are articles that contain positive coverage of Republicans. This is the result of biased media coverage, which is simply reflected by Google searches.

I have no doubt that most Google employees and managers are ardent supporters of the Democratic Party, but the claim that Google has programmed its search algorithm to hate Republicans reveals less about the political proclivities of Google's employees than it does about how little the author knows about the nature of search algorithms on the World Wide Web.