posted March 23, 2017 10:14 AM            

March 23, 2017
Our New War Party
Randall Tompkins

What is transpiring now in the House of Representatives in the setting of the House Intelligence Committee is truly astounding. The Pontificatorium that is now “examining” “Russian Active Interference with the 2016 presidential election” has raised irony to the power of ten. FBI Director James Comey cautioned the members of the committee that he would be unable to comment on the details of any ongoing investigations that may involve classified material. And yet he has no problem with overstepping his self-limited description as a law enforcement official by offering astute foreign policy opinions such as “Putin hated Hillary Clinton so much.” The Intelligence Committee proceedings have descended into political theater, shamelessly top billed by Democrat Adam Schiff in his opening remarks replete with innuendo, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and “possibilities” of “coincidences” all designed to indict the Trump administration as a coconspirator with Putin's Russia in defeating Hillary Clinton.

Until 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight of corruption, terror, and the dismal failure of socialist economics, the Kremlin was the promised land of proletarian revolution. Following that demise, the American Left suffered the greatest crise de foi in its history. For decades, American “progressives” carried water for Soviet leaders from Lenin to Andropov, cynically decrying the “witch hunts” and “McCarthyism” aimed at their ranks beginning in 1919. For the Left, the Soviet Union was the standard bearer of the world's suffering Proletariat, foreign and domestic. For decades, the American Left ignored Stalin’s engineered famine, the Holodomor, in the Ukraine which murdered over five million men, women and children. For decades, the American Left ignored the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s. For decades the American Left defended Stalin and his autocratic successors both actively -- by invoking the “right-wing fear mongering” virago -- and passively -- by utterly ignoring the manifold human rights abuses of successive Soviet regimes.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the American left, its longtime ally and apologist, was left in disarray, disbelief, and in crisis. Like dinghies left alone on a rough and open sea, abandoned by their mother ship that has slipped beneath the waves, the Communist Party of the United States of America and its affiliated progressive groups became embittered, confused, and enraged.

How astounding and ironic it is that American Progressives, so long the intersectionalists with anti-American groups like The War Resisters League, The American Friends Service Committee, countless “fair play for Russia” organizations are now the saber rattlers, the “waving the bloody shirt” faction. Listening to politicians of the left like Andre Carson level the charge of “a new iron curtain” falling over Eastern Europe and Jackie Speier calling alleged Russian election interference “an act of war” goes beyond any utterances of Martin Dies or J. Parnell Thomas.

Of course, the allegations of Soviet espionage penetrating into the highest reaches of American government from the 1930s on have long been substantiated by the opening of Soviet secret archives while the current innuendos and conspiracy theories aimed at Putin remain vaporous. The allegations may yet be proven accurate, but the clear intent of progressives at the moment is to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump through raising the specter of a Tsarist revival in the form of Vladimir Putin and, if necessary, to precipitate an incredibly dangerous military response, if the rhetoric of Democrats can be believed. Exactly how should the United States respond to “an act of war?” In another era, anyone rattling this saber would have been branded an “adventurist” in the then popular "Sovietspeak." Had a Republican invoked this phrase in the 1950s in response to the actual instances of espionage that resulted in Stalin developing atomic weapons or the real, engineering of a presidential candidacy, that of Henry Wallace in 1948, led by convicted traitor, Eugene Dennis of the CPUSA, progressive cries of “witchhunt” would have been never ending.

In its deep feeling of abandonment by the Soviet Union’s demise, American progressives will stop at nothing in overturning the presidential election results -- including provoking a military confrontation with the second most powerful nuclear power in the world.

posted March 23, 2017 01:03 PM            

And accusing the "left" of defending Stalin lmao

But hey, when the President's righthand man self identifies as Leninist it goes completely ignored. Swept under the rug🤣

posted March 23, 2017 03:20 PM            

Putin enjoys about an 80% approval rating among the Russian people.

An approval rating among Russians which far eclipses the approval rating the Marxist Messiah or Hillary The Corrupt ever had.

posted March 24, 2017 10:57 AM            

So, what do you come back with?

Steve Bannon "planted" the "I'm a Leninist" quote so it would blow up in political opponent's faces?

posted March 24, 2017 11:17 AM            

The Left can’t seem to do much well anymore; not even spinning its usual narratives.

I’m considering making each entry in this space for the next several weeks a continuation of the argument that today’s modern Left and the Democrat Party it drives is a movement by and for people incapable of doing a proper job.

This wasn’t always true, mind you. Not completely. After all, it was Democrats who ran the antebellum South, and their idea of running a successful economy was forced agricultural labor to benefit a medieval-style aristocracy. (Slavery) But on the other hand, the Left demonstrated quite often in the past that it was awfully good at winning political arguments — so good, in fact, that it could win them on the basis of patent untruths.

The American Left’s myth-making and invention of useful narratives starting in the middle of the 20th century and running to about 2010 will go down as one of the more successful efforts at shaping culture, both political and otherwise, in human history. Controlling the discussion, amid abject failure in government, education, and business (Detroit, for example, or Solyndra, or what they’ve done to Yale or the motion picture industry), has been a feat defying proper explanation. They’re to be congratulated for their skill in masking, if not weaponizing, their failure through (Lying) narrative.

Democrats can’t run an inner city? Accuse everyone else of racism — including the middle class, white and black, who run screaming to the suburbs to escape the failing public schools, rampant crime, cratering infrastructure, and naked corruption.

Can’t compete in business? Inflate a “green energy” bubble by concocting the global warming crisis and demonizing fossil fuels as bringing on the apocalypse — and then pump billions of taxpayer dollars into absurdly unsustainable business models manufactured by major political donors as little more than payoffs.

American leftist education doesn’t compete globally in hard sciences and math? Create “social justice” as an imperative and inject cultural Marxist indoctrination into every subject, so that STEM subjects are stigmatized as racist and sexist.

This has gone on for decades, and it has countless examples.

But has anybody else noticed the Left isn’t as good at this stuff as they used to be? Has anybody else noticed that the latest generation of narratives and myths is beginning to fall flat?

An example: there is the “Fearless Girl” statue placed in front of the famous Wall Street bull. The statue is supposed to symbolize the bravery of the intrepid women working in high finance, but the reaction to it has been strangely mixed. Gavin McInnes brilliantly and hilariously took “Fearless Girl” apart on YouTube, which you can see here. I had a quick summary at my site…

McInnes also notes that this is a key characteristic of post-modern feminism; namely, an insistence on disregarding women’s physical limitations as merely social constructs, and then rage at the rest of the world when that insistence crashes into reality. When you declare that women are just as capable as men to be Marines or Navy SEALS, for example, and then find out that few or no women can meet the grueling training requirements for those jobs, you cannot then demand the standards be lowered to accept women while preserving your credibility. At that point you have to admit you were wrong, and move on. Which feminists won’t do, for some reason; instead, what we get is Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson beating the crap out of 250-pound men in every other movie at the theater.

He’s right. In real life it would be monstrous cruelty to put a little girl in front of a raging bull, and in real life the bull would gore the little girl and kill her in seconds. That this statue is supposed to symbolize women on Wall Street doesn’t do women on Wall Street any favors at all, which is something obvious to everyone but the incredibly dense group-thinkers on the Left.

Much more famously, there is the strangely persistent Trump And The Russians myth, which the Left has stubbornly stuck to. Just Tuesday there was the — gasp! — revelation that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had dealings with figures in the Russian oligarchy. But this had been known for almost a year, and nothing much came of it since those dealings were a decade old and Manafort was sent on his way by the campaign shortly after the convention.

The buzz surrounding that recycled story lasted only until Wednesday afternoon, when House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) surfaced to announce that he had seen several dozen transcripts of communications intercepted by the intelligence community in which Trump team members, perhaps even including the president himself, were identified as having been recorded. This is a big deal; the NSA, CIA and other agencies will sometimes catch Americans in the regular course of intercepting communications with intelligence value, but the identity of those Americans is supposed to be “masked” before those communications are circulated. That wasn’t done in this case, and in fact not only were communications involving Trump’s transition team distributed within the government they were leaked to the media — something far, far more serious than the Trump And The Russians meme. After all, the Democrats’ presidential candidate had demonstrably far more ties to Russia and much broader evidence of collusion (uranium, anyone?) with them.

The major reaction to Nunes? Outrage that he told House Speaker Paul Ryan and the White House and went public with the information before sharing it with ranking Democrat Adam Schiff, who has traded in the Russia myth with a particular McCarthyite relish. The line of people who give a fig about Schiff’s problems forms at the rear of the hall near the restroom.

Nobody other than partisan Democrats and the dead-ender Never Trump crowd really believes there is much to this Russia business, and it’s been investigated since last summer without result. Back when Democrats were good at their jobs, this myth would have taken hold universally — or at least dumped as a loser.

Were space to allow, we could point out lots of other examples, including imploding minimum wage economics, the persistent stupidity of the wage-gap sexism myth, “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!,” transgender rights, Islamophobia, or even the Trump’s Cutting Meals On Wheels hysteria of last week.

But we’ll leave you with another budding failure of leftist mythology — on Tuesday some minor profit-taking on Wall Street set the wire services off to screech about how the markets were tanking out of fears about the Trump agenda. This isn’t anything new — at the end of January the same thing was said about Trump’s immigration order, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the stock market.

Most people recognize the markets are probably overvalued and a correction of some kind seems likely, particularly since there has been a wild, almost runaway bull market since Trump’s election. And yet every day the market drops 100 points is a signal the president is about to destroy the economy.

posted March 24, 2017 07:06 PM            

Steve Bannon "planted" the "I'm a Leninist" quote so it would blow up in political opponent's faces?

Are you quite all right Lambchop? How did you get that from what i said?