Posted on December
30, 2017
Cranial Tumbleweeds
Pigs for Choice, Barkley’s bull, quotables, etc.
by
Daniel
Clark
* Barack Obama is famous for rebutting arguments that
nobody has ever made in the first place, but liberals have been doing that since
long before he came onto the scene.
Take, for example, the argument so often given in opposition to capital
punishment, that killing the murderer is not going to bring his victims back. Have you ever in your life heard anyone
suggest that it would?
* In response to the recent tidal wave of sexual
misconduct accusations, both houses of Congress have passed mandatory training
classes to guard against sexual harassment.
Does anybody believe that the problem is inadequate training? Who doesn’t already know, for example, that
it’s wrong to expose oneself to a subordinate in the workplace? Presuming to teach that only gives cover to
the offenders by allowing them to plead ignorance, which is surely its whole
purpose.
* Even the most frivolous accusation of sexual
misconduct against any public figure over the past few months has been
infinitely more credible and serious than anything Anita Hill ever accused
Clarence Thomas of doing. He’s not
holding his breath waiting for any apologies, though, especially not from
whatever nincompoop awkwardly crammed that dishonest line about him into the
script of Jerry Maguire.
* As these scandals continue to ravage the news and
pop media, expect the treatment of the accusers to become more and more cynical
over time. As it becomes more apparent
that the vast majority of the alleged offenders are very, very liberal men,
news producers and editors will make the judgment that enough of them have been
sacrificed already. At some point, they
will pivot from the position that everything a female accuser says deserves to
be believed, to trashing anyone who comes forward as a slut and a loony. They’ve done it before.
* On the other hand, it is unsettling that somebody’s
reputation can be destroyed by an unverifiable accusation from three decades
ago. The immediately guilty reactions of
Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman will inevitably lead to the unjust sliming of
someone who maintains his innocence.
Having allegedly leaned against somebody in a suspicious manner 35 years
ago might now deprive a man of his career, even if it’s not indicative of a
lifelong habit, as it evidently is in the cases of those two.
* And yet, when Bill Clinton was president, feminist
leader Gloria Steinem devised what has ever since been lampooned as the “one
free grope” rule, meaning that it didn’t matter how and where he touched
Kathleen Willey, just as long as he stopped when she said no. So anything before “no” is fair game, then? That leaves a wide-open window of opportunity
for any experienced sleaze.
* You’d think that someone who was found to have
committed sexual indiscretions would make some effort to appear non-creepy in
public, but have you seen David Letterman lately? He looks like he ought to be the subject of a
class-action restraining order, forbidding him from coming into contact with
any women, children, pets or other living things, just on general principle.
* More people would believe Bill Cosby if he went into
court with a clean shave and wearing a suit.
It’s not true that justice is blind.
Justice is made up of people, who are understandably suspicious of
someone who appears before them in his “dirty old man” ensemble, and with hobo
scruff.
* If you ever want to not be believed, just say that
you “categorically deny” something. It
makes the speaker sound thoughtless about the particular matter being
discussed, in the same vein as Professor Wagstaff’s
“Whatever it is, I’m against it” number.
See all that stuff listed under Column H? I deny that, categorically! Got anything else for me to deny?
* Perhaps the most shocking news that has arisen from
this trend is that Garrison Keillor was fired for allegedly improper sexual
behavior. I mean, who knew he was
employed? Or at least that he had a show
on NPR, which is the next closest thing?
* In the past, liberals have typically gotten away
with the same kinds of sex scandals that have destroyed conservatives. The justification for this has been that the
greater offense is those conservatives’ hypocrisy for claiming to be defenders
of family values. Now that we’re seeing
a rash of scandals involving the abuse of and disrespect for women, and most of
the defendants are liberals, you’d think the hypocrisy charge would be integral
to the reporting, but it’s not.
* That’s because everyone knows that respect for women
really isn’t characteristic of liberal men.
If it were, these men’s behavior would’ve shocked the other liberals
around them, but in most cases feminist women knew what was going on and did
nothing. Katie Couric and Meredith Viera had experienced Matt Lauer’s piggishness firsthand,
and they don’t seem to have been surprised or offended by it.
* We probably don’t want to know what incident
triggered Lauer’s jihad against then-co-anchor Ann Curry, but don’t blame her
if she quietly celebrates his fall – or even if she not-so-quietly holds a Matt
Lauer firing party and posts it on YouTube.
* The big giveaway is that feminists are perfectly
aware that men who advocate abortion do so for the protection of their own scumbucketry, a fact that on these pages has gotten them
nicknamed the Pigs for Choice Club. It
has also blunted feminist opposition to pornographers like Hugh Hefner and
Larry Flynt over the years. No man who
respects women, or even likes them, would ever want a woman to have an abortion
– which is precisely why feminists don’t like men who respect women. Abortion is the one issue on which men who
hate women and women who hate men find themselves in perfect harmony, and their
devotion to the cause will always override their visceral aversion to each
other.
* No wonder comedy is dead, when the liberals who
dominate the entertainment business consider people like Al Franken and
Garrison Keillor to be “humorists,” as if there were some formula by which X times the square root of pi =
funny. If humor had a Mendoza line,
Franken would be Rafael Belliard, and Keillor has
probably eaten sardine sandwiches that were funnier than he is.
* If there’s anyone unfunnier
than John Stewart, it’s his successor on The
Daily Show, Trevor Noah. Because the
South African-born Noah never says anything funny, it begs the question whether
the only reason liberals laugh at him is his funny accent – and if it is, does
that make them racists?
* It’s not that liberals are never funny; it’s just
that they are seldom intentionally so. A
couple months ago, a group of them held an anti-Trump protest they called,
“Scream Helplessly at the Sky,” at which they did exactly that. The only thing sillier is that they probably
learned to do that in college.
* When a despotic government nationalizes property, we
easily recognize it as theft. So why is
it so different for our own federal government to assume ownership of vast
areas of property in our Western states?
Part of the answer is the way it’s reported. President Trump takes the commendable but
modest step of reducing the size of two of these territorial seizures, and
we’re told that he’s “stripped protection” from “national monuments.”
* Calling the theft of property “protection” has got
to be among the five most obscene liberal euphemisms of all time, but an even
more egregious assault on the truth is the characterization of these
territories as “monuments.” A monument
is a structure that has been erected in commemoration of something. How does that apply to tens of thousands of
square acres of land in the middle of Utah?
* Is there any chance that the outrage over that kind
of land seizure has taught President Trump a lesson about the abuse of eminent
domain? Probably not.
* Never mind why Charles Barkley was criticizing the
Trump tax cuts on Inside the NBA. We all know by now that sports programming is
just another platform for left-wing political advocacy, so the topic’s
irrelevance to pro basketball is beside the point. In order to pretend to be a good liberal,
Barkley has had to consciously forget things he seemed to know back when he was
pretending to be a conservative. About
the tax cuts, he said, “They say it’s gonna trickle
down. I’m gonna
trickle my fat [posterior] down to the jewelry store and get me a new
Rolex.” First of all, “trickle-down
economics” is a liberal propaganda point.
Ronald Reagan never called it that, nor does anyone else who understands
how it works. Furthermore, does Barkley
think he’s living in an economic vacuum?
When he buys a Rolex, does that not help the people who make, ship and
sell the Rolex?
* One difference between the mostly identical 1990 and
1993 tax increases was that the ’93 version repealed the “luxury tax” that had
been part of the ’90 bill, because it was hurting the people who produce the
so-called luxury items. Barkley used to
be able to explain things like that to people, before making a conscious
decision to become ignorant of them.
* Barkley once had designs on running for governor of
Alabama as a Republican, apparently thinking the party would support him, just
because he’d golfed with Dan Quayle.
After the Alabama Republicans refused to endorse him, he switched
parties, and immediately went from talking like Steve Forbes to talking like
Michael Moore. There’s no way that can
be an honest conversion. Barkley is
simply an opportunist, who was never really a conservative, and is probably not
now a liberal, either.
* Since switching to Democrat, Barkley has saved most of
his invective for conservative Christians, whom he probably blames for blocking
his path to the nomination, and correctly so.
Not only did they oppose him because he’s always been pro-abortion, but
he’s surely found them to be far too judgmental about things like spitting on
children, and throwing people through plate glass windows. What a bunch of squares.
* One of the most vivid examples of media and academic
liberal bias is the way that unremarkable Democrat political rhetoric is
treated as if it were imparting the wisdom of Yoda. When FDR said, “the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself,” that had nothing to do with the war. It was from the first paragraph of his first
inaugural address, and was meant to discourage any scrutiny of his domestic
agenda. When JFK said, “Ask not what
your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” he was
talking about the Peace Corps. There’s
no reason we should even remember these quotes, let alone assume there was
anything heroic about them.
* Most absurdly, in the movie Miracle, USA Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks ruminates over the
task that lies ahead while listening to Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence”
speech. Are we meant to believe it
inspired him to victory?
* Thankfully, the oratorical skills of our past two
Democrat presidents have been dramatically overrated, otherwise, we’d be having
their most mundane quotes stuck in our faces on a daily basis. The fact that Obama’s most famous quote is
“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” and
Clinton’s is, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,”
does not give the revisionists a lot to work with.
* Clinton had other classic quotes, of course. You could almost make one of those old K-Tel
record commercials out of them. “Kiss
it” comes to mind, as well as, “Don’t worry, I’m sterile,” and who could forget
the timeless classic “You know I don’t like small-breasted women.” And many, many more.
* Last month, Turner Classic Movies dedicated a great
deal of time to discussing the “blacklist era,” and highlighting movies that
featured actors, directors and writers who had been blacklisted. Have you ever noticed that, for all the
condemnation we ever hear of the “Red Scare,” the entertainment industry never
really explains it to the public in an accurate and understandable way? These are people whose profession is
storytelling, so why is it still so widely believed that there was literally a
list of hundreds of people that studios were forbidden from hiring? Why do people think the alleged victims were
jailed for their political beliefs, that the careers of all those who were
“blacklisted” were basically destroyed, that most of them were falsely accused
in the first place, and that Joseph McCarthy, a freshman senator, chaired the
House Un-American Activities Committee?
The answer is that these are the very things they want us to believe,
and that telling us the truth is not in the storytellers’ interest.
* Believe it or not, one of the Commiest
movies ever made is 1948’s aptly titled Red
River, starring John Wayne, although it would be a lot more obvious if
director Howard Hawks hadn’t changed the ending. In it, the Duke leads a daring cattle drive
with a team of cowhands who have voluntarily signed an agreement to see the job
through, but when they break their word, he’s the bad guy. They stage a mutiny and take his cattle from
him, at which point one of them says, “This herd don’t belong to you,” which of
course it does. “It belongs to every
poor hopin’ and prayin’
cattleman in the whole wide state.” In
the movie, Wayne catches up with them in the end, and after a corny resolution,
he basically gets his property back. As
originally written, the trail hands kill him and sell the cattle, dividing the
profits among themselves. The story
might as well have been subtitled, “The workers control the means of
production.”
* Liberals generally don’t like Westerns, and don’t
often watch them; otherwise someone would have remade Red River by now, with its original Bolshevik ending. If you have any trouble believing that, you
haven’t yet attempted to watch the alleged remake of The Magnificent Seven.
* Joe McCarthy lives in infamy for being overzealous
in trying to root out the Soviet agents in the executive branch of our
government. Yet somehow, it’s now
perfectly okay to demand endless hearings and investigations with the aim of
charging your political opponents with the ill-defined offense of “collusion” with
Russia.
* In 2012, when Mitt Romney identified Russia as our
number one geopolitical foe, Barack Obama said, “The 1980s are now calling to
ask for their foreign poli-suh back.” Had Romney retorted with the George Costanza “jerk store” line, he would have won the election.
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