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Can you get more mainstream than Bernie?
“…To celebrate a “Decade of Dialogue” in its annual diversity conference, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences invited a straight white man to give the keynote lecture.
But not just any straight white man.
Tim Wise, an “anti-racism writer, educator and activist,” has denigrated Christians as “Jeezoids” and fascists and called Pope Francis evil. He has tweeted that “people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.”…”
BRENDAN O’NEILL:
“…Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.
It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving…”
Shot: No one is too old to be president.
—Headline, the Washington Post, yesterday.
Chaser: McCain’s Brain — How might the senator’s mind deteriorate over the next eight years? John McCain is old and, as several news outlets have reported, he’s only getting older.
—Headline, subhead and lede, Slate, then-owned by the Washington Post, June 11, 2008.
Hangover: “The big question he bumps into wherever he goes is his age. Reagan will be 69 in 1980 a year older than William Henry Harrison the country’s oldest president who died a month after his inauguration in 1841.”
—The Washington Post, September 24, 1978.
Typing “John McCain is too old to be president” into Google and setting the date range to cut off at January 1, 2009 brings up just about every major DNC-MSM news site grousing about McCain’s age when the 2008 DNC candidate was the much younger Barack Obama. Now that their leading candidates include Biden, Bernie, and Warren, the media aren’t interested in exploring that topic. Unexpectedly.
Ed Driscoll strung this together
Conrad Black:
“…It is illustrative of how completely invested they were in the hare-brained fraud of Russian collusion, that they are having such a crisis of separation from the subject. They are not the only losers in this fiasco, though they are the biggest losers.
They are left trying to pretend that they have an invitation to impeach from special counsel Robert Mueller, but that is not correct. In his and his Trump-hating investigative staff’s desperation to attack the president, Mueller engaged in the wholly unprofessional practice of acknowledging that he could not claim there was adequate evidence to prosecute or impeach the president, but could not exonerate him, either. It was up to the House of Representatives to determine if there were grounds to impeach.
Ahead of last week’s release of the redacted Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr in his summary explained the criteria for a charge of obstruction. Those criteria include evidence of a corrupt act with corrupt intent in contemplation of a legal proceeding. The attorney general, the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, a favorite of congressional Democrats who was supposedly considering recording Trump two years ago to canvass the cabinet to see if he was mentally unfit to be president, and the special counsel all agreed that none of the necessary ingredients for the president to be guilty of obstruction was present.
The extravagant, knife-edge judgment call the House of Representatives Democrats have been pretending to be considering about whether to impeach or not is bunk—self-improvised therapy to cushion their psychological plunge from confidence they could take down the president, to the grim awakening to the legal vulnerabilities of the Obama Administration and the Clinton campaign in confecting this monstrous fraud of Trump-Russian collusion. It is like a retreating army, led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) insisting that impeachment won’t succeed, then a less defeatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saying of the president that “he’s not worth it,” (as if there were a chance of impeaching him), followed by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D.-Calif.) intoning that impeachment can’t be done without some Republican support…”