How Trump's Lawyer Should Have Reacted to Fani Willis's Eruption, "I’m not going to emasculate a black man!"

At one point, right after trying to pull heart strings by stating that Nathan Wade "had a form of cancer" (so "that makes your allegations somewhat ridiculous"), Fani Willis erupted, "I’m not going to emasculate a black man!" 

At another point in the trial, Fani Willis went ballistic again: "These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020!" When Judge Scott McAfee stated that "Your interests are opposed to" those of Trump lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, the Fulton County District Attorney retorted that "Ms. Merchant's interests are contrary to democracy, your Honor, not to mine," Willis responded.

In the second case, one of the Trump lawyers should have interjected, 

"How about Stacy Abrams? Are you going to defend democracy by indicting her for challenging the results of the governor's race?"

More importantly, regarding the first case, the dialogue went as follows:

• Steve Sadow (ironical): "I do appreciate the characterization"
• Fani Willis: "I’m not going to emasculate a black man, but I, I'm just telling you that—
• Steve Sadow: "I'm sorry, what?!"
• Fani Willis: "I’m not going to emasculate [pause for effect] a black man! Did you understand that?!”

The only thing that Donald Trump's other lawyer should have responded at that point is this: 

"Are we to understand that you are willing (perhaps even eager) to emasculate a white man?" 

Or, rather, a Republican (irrespective of sex and skin color). In fact, it would have been even better had Donald Trump in person been in the Georgia courthouse and interrupted the proceedings with his deadpan sotto voce deliverance, "It's only white men that she likes to emasculate…" 

Oh, if Trump had responded that way, we would have seen the Fulton County District Attorney go totally berserk! (Wouldn't have been worth the rebuke — even an ouster? — that Trump would have gotten for his interruption?)

The Genocide Charge Against Israel: What Is the Difference Between War and Genocide in the First Place?

In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced 

writes Bret Stephens in a New York Times column entitled The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity:

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.

But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.

It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?

Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually come to mean almost nothing at all — a victory for future génocidaires who’d like the world to think there’s no moral or legal difference between one kind of killing and another.

It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” 

 … If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.

It’s obscene because it puts the wrong party in the dock. Hamas is a genocidal organization by conviction and design. Its founding charter calls for Israel to be “obliterated” and for Muslims to kill Jews as they “hide behind stones and trees.” On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered, mutilated, tortured, incinerated, raped or kidnapped everyone it could. Had it not been stopped it would not have stopped. One of its leaders has since vowed to do it “a second, a third, a fourth” time.

It’s Hamas, not Israel, that started the war, keeps it going, and would resume it the moment it has the arsenal and the opportunity.

It’s obscene because it validates Hamas’s illegal and barbaric strategy of hiding between, behind and beneath Palestinian civilians. From the beginning of the war, Hamas has had a double aim: to kill as many Jews as possible, and to incur Palestinian fatalities to gain international sympathy and diplomatic leverage.

 … It’s obscene because it’s historically hypocritical. The United States, Britain and other allied nations killed a staggering number of German and Japanese civilians on the path to defeating the regimes that had started World War II — often known as the Good War. Events such as the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo, to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were tragic and far more indiscriminate than anything Israel stands accused of doing. But no serious person holds Franklin Roosevelt to be on a moral par with Adolf Hitler. What the Allies did were acts of war in the service of a lasting peace, not genocide in the service of a fanatical aim.

The difference? In war, the killing ends when one side stops fighting. In a genocide, that’s when the killing begins.

Related — To Peacenik Protesters Everywhere (Pro-Palestinian or Other): The People that Hamas Slaughtered Mercilessly at Israel's Rave — They Are YOU!
Bret Stephens has also penned Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency
and, on a more personal note, Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7.

Democrats Get Their Political Playbook From Lenin, Communism's First Dictator and Mass Murderer

As Ron Hart points out (spasibo to Tovarich Glenn Reynolds), Democrats Got Their Political Playbook From Lenin:

When you have bad policies and cannot sustain your authority based on quantifiable results, you do what Democrats have done these last few years: you weaponize the government against your enemies.

It is not a novel construct. In 1918 the oppressive Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin (the 100th anniversary of whose death was on Jan. 21) laid out his plan to keep the communists in power with his infamous “Hanging Order.” This was an order he sent to his Bolshevik leaders in his government (his Deep State) …

The comparison between Lenin's four or five “Hanging Order” points and the modus operandi of America's Democrat Party is a must-read. 

Number 1. “Hang in full view of the people,” resembles the multiple, frivolous impeachment attempts against Trump by Democrats. You would have to surrender your reason to Woke-DNC dogma not to conclude that the Deep Blue “Deep Staters” are not targeting Trump. A 76-year-old man, never arrested, rings up 90 felonies these past 12 months as he runs against a sitting president. Really? Maybe he’s just a late bloomer?

 … Number 2. “Publish their names.” Clearly the “doxing and swatting” of GOP leaders, from Lois Lerner to the IRS agent who turned over the tax returns of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to The New York Times, fit this category. 

Number 3. “Seize their grain.” It is what NY Attorney General Letitia James is doing to Trump by using some novel legal theory which has neither victim nor crime to take Trump’s properties away from him. 

Number 4. “Designate Hostages — in a fashion people see and tremble.” If this is not the essence of the vast prosecutorial overreaction to Jan. 6, then just arrest me. A few hundred men who looked like the cast of Duck Dynasty on a confusing day walked through our Capitol (“The People’s House”) and monkeyed with Nancy Pelosi’s podium. Now many of them sit in solitary confinement, perhaps for up to 20 years. For trespassing.

Ilya Somin goes on to pen Remembering Lenin—the First Great Communist Mass Murderer (spasibo to Comrade Ed Driscoll) in the form of a quiz:

Let's take a little history quiz. Which of the following features of the Soviet state were first introduced under Lenin, and which by Stalin:

1. The Gulag system of slave labor camps

2. The Cheka (secret police agency eventually known as the KGB)

3. Collectivization of agriculture leading to mass famines

4. Mass executions with little or no due process

5. A one-party state, with bans on all opposition parties (including socialist ones)

6. Suppression of freedom of speech and religion

7. Confiscation of private businesses, including even small businesses

8. Invading other nations in order to spread communism there

9. State control of the media for purposes of promoting regime propaganda, and preventing distribution of opposition speech

If you answered Lenin, you were correct in every case! And virtually every one of these measures was also supported by Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Bolshevik leaders whom some Western leftists like to trumpet as potentially superior alternatives to Stalin. Had Trotsky rather than Stalin come to power after Lenin's death, he would have happily continued all of the above, and in some cases doubled down on it.

Tovarich Ed Driscoll goes on to link to his post on Tom Wolfe's Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America from 1976:

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

 … Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. … And the literary world in general ignored him completely.

From there, Comrade Instapunditski links to the Daily Mail's Tony Rennell asking “Why does the gullible Left still lionize Lenin as a benign intellectual and the acceptable face of Communism when he ruthlessly murdered his opponents in their thousands, starved two million Russians to death and wrote the playbook for Stalin?” 

There are those who will point to [Lenin’s] successor, Stalin, as the real devil in Russia’s 20th Century history, and there is no doubt that the repression, the violence, show trials, gulags and butchery of that monster’s 30 years as the dictator of the Soviet Union far exceeded Lenin’s – nastier, more brutal, insanely contemptuous of human life, totally beyond rational understanding. In his paranoia, he murdered friend and foe alike. And yet the truth – however much it may offend those who regard Lenin’s as the acceptable face of Communism – is that Stalin was Lenin’s protege and took his lead from him.

Finally, Tovarich Ed Driscoll takes it a step further by linking to James Bartholomew's Why Isn’t Lenin As Condemned As Hitler?

It is a curious phenomenon that Lenin is acceptable and even approved of whereas Hitler is beyond the pale. It is not exactly a secret that Lenin started off seventy years of communist rule in Russia which included two major famines, the Red Terror, the Great Terror and continuing poverty. The death toll of Soviet communism was in the order of twenty million. So how do people manage to think favorably of him?

 … the Bolsheviks lost [the 1917 elections to the constituent assembly]. But Lenin did not care. Rather like Hitler, whose party incidentally got a higher percentage of the vote in Germany than the Bolsheviks did in Russia, he closed the constituent assembly and deployed armed soldiers to prevent anyone reopening it. The lie Lenin fans choose to believe is that if only Lenin had lived, communist rule would have succeeded. Lenin’s replacement by Stalin ruined it all.

But Lenin did all the things that Stalin did. Lenin began government control of agriculture, setting a fixed price that the government would pay for corn and other grains. The price was absurdly low because of the high rate of inflation. A shortage of food ensued. Lenin then requisitioned grain from peasants at gunpoint. These disastrous policies contributed heavily to death by starvation of at least three million people in 1920-21. Lenin implicitly recognized the part his policies had played by reversing them in 1921.

 … Lenin created the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. His on-the-record instructions to kill include this written order following a revolt in Penza province: “Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than 100 known kulaks [peasants owning a little land], filthy rich men, bloodsuckers.” Lenin did not engage in class war. He engaged in class murder.

Lenin set up the concentration camps which eventually became the Gulag. He issued a decree in 1918 stating that it was “imperative to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” Every provincial city was ordered to create one and by the end of 1920 there were 107 of them. Lenin authorized the use of poison gas in 1921 to kill peasants in the Tambov uprising. Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Soviet politician under both Lenin and Stalin, remarked that both leaders were “hard men… harsh and stern. But without a doubt Lenin was harsher.”

Lenin did not engage in class war. He engaged in class murder

Again and again the records show Lenin urging his colleagues to be more ruthless and to kill. Against all this, the defense is sometimes: “Well it was a time of civil war, so extreme measures were necessary.” But why was there a civil war? Only because Lenin had mounted a coup that was contrary to the expressed views of the Russian people. Supporters of Lenin argue that he did some wonderful things. He issued a decree that women should have equal rights in 1917. But it was the provisional government that had already given women the vote, and it is not as if the Soviet Union was unique in conferring increasing rights to women during the 20th century. It was happening throughout Europe.

Related: • Some Mind-Boggling Revelations About Stalin, World War II, and a Century of Russian History
• For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction.

If more is needed about Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, look at this blog's excerpts from Paul Johnson's Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) dealing with the dictator of Germany: 

•  "Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square, 

The post, which has been updated, also has a number of revelations about the dictator of Russia, mainly from chapters 1 and 2 of the Paul Johnson book… Here are three of those excerpts:

 … [When] Lenin had his first stroke … his work was already complete.  He had systematically constructed, in all its essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had ever seen.  In the old world, personal autocracies, except perhaps for brief periods, had been limited, or at least qualified, by other forces in society:  a church, an aristocracy, an urban bourgeoisie, ancient charters and courts and assemblies.  And there was, too, the notion of an external, restraining force, in the idea of a Deity, or Natural Law, or some absolute system of morality.  Lenin's new despotic utopia had no such counterweights or inhibitions.  Church, aristocracy, bourgeoisie had all been swept away.  Everything that was left was owned or controlled by the state.  All rights whatsoever were vested in the state.  And, within that state, enormous and ever-growing as it was, every single filament of power could be traced back to the hands of a minute group of men — ultimately to one man 

… Lenin hated the essence of democracy, and he regarded its forms merely as a means to legitimize violence and oppression … an unrestricted license for terror

 … Lenin's legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins

Victor Davis Hanson … says that nihilism is the root of modern leftism, writes J. Robert Smith (spasibo to Comrade Ed Driscoll).

Nihilism is a school of thought – often expressed in political and social terms – holding that traditional values are worthless and empty due to the meaninglessness of existence. The sole stance of nihilism is defiance; the sole goal is the destruction of all that stands.

 … Marxism, throughout its history, has been a refuge for the resentful, for those who nurse grudges, for those who project their hurts, failures, and unfairness done them -- real or imagined -- on the societies in which they live and on others: rich men and the bourgeoisie earlier and now Whites, who are accused of inherent racism. And to a slightly lesser degree, Asians resented for their successes, academically and professionally. Jews are back in vogue as hate targets, too. Leftists need villains to justify ruin.

[Like Hitler,] Lenin loathed Christianity. He loathed traditional Russian society. His animus ventured well beyond a reaction to perceived systemic unfairness toward Russia’s peasantry. Unlike Scrooge, but like a good Marxist, Lenin chose not to exploit existing society but to destroy it -- or he began the process; Stalin eagerly continued the project. Destruction was a prerequisite to a new, bright communist society, went the rationale.

In practice, Russian society became a countrywide gulag. Tens of millions died. The human spirit was trampled. Bleakness was unremitting. Lenin, an unwitting existentialist, and his spawn imposed a horrid meaning on their meaningless world: totalitarianism and the cruel iron boot that came with it. In fact, they chose evil.

When the transnational left regurgitates that Trump threatens “democracy,” they are not speaking of true democracy, but of “their own democracy”, i.e., their dictatorship

Germany’s Der Spiegel is a shameful example of European leftism

writes Evelyne Joslain at the American Thinker (thanks for the Instalink, Sarah).

As early as February 2017, after Trump had just been inaugurated, the magazine’s editorial team published an infamous cover showing the Republican brandishing the severed head of the Statue of Liberty, dripping with blood, to make it clear that Trump was going to guillotine the US democracy, no less.

On January 20, 2024, the rag was at it again! Trump has not yet been re-elected, but the narrative of the transnational left is that the head of the MAGA movement is going to be a dictator. On the cover, there’s a photograph of a martial, presidential Trump, who is respectfully saluting the troops (a magnificent Trump, actually). On the lower left, though, is this enormous wart for a title: “DIKTATOR TRUMP! Ein Szenario” (“Dictator Trump! A Scenario”).

 … When the transnational left, running the whole gamut from the extremely wealthy elites with undue powers down to pathetic journalists in search of fame, regurgitates to us ad nauseam that Trump threatens “democracy,” as do all those who dare to have a skeptical opinion of the imposed narrative, we must understand that they are not speaking of true democracy, where the most diverse opinions can be expressed, but of “their own democracy.” That is to say, they fear the very opposite; namely, preserving their own interests through dictatorship. It’s just that they lack the courage to name the goals for what they are while having the nerve to accuse their opponents of their sins.

Related — Also at The American Thinker: Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism

Denmark: "Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II Has Abdicated, Long Live His Majesty King Frederik X"

The Daily Mail presents over 70 photgraphs and videos of the crowning in Denmark, as Queen Margrethe II abdicates in Copenhagen's Christianborg Castle, and a visibly emotional Crown Prince Frederik Becomes King Frederik X.
Ten years ago, together with comic artist Thierry Capezzone at the Cobolt publishing house, I authored a graphic novel biography of Margrethe's early years as a princess.

"Frederik kunne være blevet en Christian"
af Erik Svane
Villabyerne vol 119 # 1,
3. januar 2024 s 10

En outre, Visit Denmark présente les lieux les plus importants et emblématiques de la famille royale danoise

Insurrection and Treason: What Did the Words of the 14th Amendment Mean in the 1860s? + FREE JANUARY 6 DOCUMENTARY Today Only

Are these dozens of Capitol policemen lying dead or wounded
in the aftermath of the January 6th "insurrection",
or is it a scene from a Victor Fleming film?

The way the January 6 protests at the Capitol have been described by the usual Drama Queens, you would think that you are in Georgia when Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are galloping through the flames devouring Atlanta and that, in the aftermath, dozens of Capitol policemen are lying dead or wounded like in the harrowing outdoors hospital scene of Gone with the Wind. 

As the Supreme Court agrees to decide on the issue of Donald Trump's eligibility on a state's ballot, a central question arises: What did insurrection and treason mean to the authors of the 14th Amendment as well as to the rest of the population, i.e., in the 1860s? 

Before you read read any further, here is an aside: know that until the end of the day you can watch Epoch's documentary on January 6th, The Real Story of Jan. 6, for free at the Epoch Times (merci à Paul Reen). 

Related: • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
Insurrection and treason meant raising armies, equipping them with uniforms, firearms, and artillery, and going to war and to the battlefield — resulting in a number of American deaths in four short years in the middle of the 19th century greater than that of all America's wars of the 20th Century (including World Wars I and II) combined. (Thanks for the Instalink, Ed.)

Are these a mob of violent MAGA nuts, deranged Tea Partiers, and other
treacherous  "insurrectionists" on January 6, or are they extras in a Hollywood movie?

During the administration of James Buchanan (the 15th president preceding Abraham Lincoln), his secretary of war stealthily gathered large stores of government arms and sent them to federal arsenals in the South, effectively anticipating the outbreak of civil war.

After the conflict of 1861-1865, Ulysses S Grant wrote in his memoirs that John B Floyd, the Secretary of War, 

scattered the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should commence, and distributed the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.

The name of John Floyd's predecessor as Secretary of War was Jefferson Davis, and when first seven, then 11, states attempted to secede over the winter of 1860-1861 (related: During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder?), he would duly become president of the newly-formed Confederate States of America

So there you have it: To the people in the 1860s, to the writers of the 14th Amendment, insurrection and treason meant months and years of preparations, hoarding weapons, both light and heavy, raising armies, and engaging in warfare against the central government and the mother nation, leading not to thousands upon thousands of deaths, but to hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Who in their right mind — besides the usual gang of Drama Queens, that is — could in any way reasonably compare January 6 to the Civil War or, for that matter, to 9-11 or to Pearl Harbor?

Indeed, only one words fits that comparison.

That word is: Preposterous.

CAPTION: Clark (Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn) Gable to Vivian Leigh,
sounding like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden: "With them [the
retreating USA-hating CSA rebel soldiers] goes the last semblance of law and order"

Related (Civil War era): • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

To end this post, let us quote, approvingly, from (believe it or not) the New York Times. After spending half his column considering a counterfactual in The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump, Ross Douthat gets to the main point:

Had [Hillary] Clinton explicitly tried to induce Congress to overturn the result of the 2016 race and had a left-wing protest on her behalf turned into a certification-disrupting riot, almost none of the people currently insisting that we need to take the challenge to Trump’s ballot access very seriously would be saying the same about a challenge to her eligibility. Instead, they would be accusing that challenge of being incipiently authoritarian, a right-wing attack on our sacred democracy.

And they would have a point. Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot, indeed, a candidate currently leading in some polling averages (pending the economic boom of 2024 that we can all hope is coming), through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act. It is more antidemocratic than impeachment, because the impeachers and convicters, representatives and senators, are themselves democratically elected and subject to swift democratic punishment. It is more antidemocratic than putting an opposition politician on trial, because the voters who regard that trial as illegitimate are still allowed to vote for an indicted or convicted politician, as almost a million Americans did for Eugene V. Debs while he languished in prison in 1920.

Sometimes the rules of a republic require doing antidemocratic things. But if the rule you claim to be invoking treats Jan. 6 as the same kind of event as the secession of the Confederacy, consider the possibility that you have taken the tropes of anti-Trump punditry too literally.

The term “insurrection,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote on Wednesday, is “a defensible shorthand for Jan. 6.” But it’s not “the most precise” term, because while “Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”

This concession prompted howls of online derision from his left-wing critics, but Chait is obviously, crashingly correct. There are arguments about precedent and implementation that tell against the case for Trump’s ineligibility and prudential arguments about the wisdom of suppressing populist fervor by judicial fiat. But the most important point is that there are many things a politician can do to subvert a democratic outcome, all of them impeachable and some of them potentially illegal, that are simply not equivalent to military rebellion, even if a bunch of protesters and rioters get involved.

To insist otherwise, in the supposed service of the Constitution, is to demonstrate yet again that too many would-be saviors of our Republic would cut a great road through reason and good sense if they could only be assured of finally getting rid of Donald Trump.

Related (January 6): • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
• The Central Absurd Inconsistency of the Ray Epps Conundrum Described in Two Sentences
• Kabuki Theater: the "top 12 strange, stand-out moments" of the January 6th Committee's interview with Ray Epps
• Only about 1% of the January 6 protesters actually entered the Capitol (often at the invitation of the Speaker's Capitol Police); In fact, it was the 99% who stayed out of the Capitol who heeded Trump's words
• Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Banana Republic of Biden: No, the Democrats did not run better campaigns in 2022; they cheated, as usual
• Isn’t it strange that in Florida, with all those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? The Democrats have again fixed, rigged, and stolen an election
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud; Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough
• What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost
• Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
• Joe Biden, Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country? And You, Barack Obama: Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent?
• 2020: an almost totalitarian effort by the national political and social media to suppress and ridicule any doubt of the accuracy of the election result
The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”
• "I believed a farrago of lies" Writes VIP Whose Leftist Half of the American Electorate was "Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda" Regarding the Jan. 6 (Non-)Riots
• Our élites constantly lecture everyone about "disinformation," about "big lies", etc; They're the biggest liars of all, with zero accountability
• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"
• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State

The stars up in heaven They are lookin' kindly down Upon the grave of Joe Noussair

Joe Noussair would have turned 56 years old today, but alas, he left us all too early…

In the 20 years I knew him, we shared many a conversation, a drink, and an adventure, notably with road trips in his Mini to Civil War battlefields in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.

The No Pasarán blog's obituary of Joe Noussair (Beirut, Jan. 3, 1968—DC, April 7, 2023) originally appeared one day after his passing in April, but in the meantime, more photos from the past two decades have been unearthed…

Joe Noussair
Omni Shoreham Hotel
Washington D.C. Feb 9 2008

Harpers Ferry, site of John Brown's raid:
The stars up in heaven
They are lookin' kindly down (3x)
Upon the grave of ol' John Brown

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, December 9 2006

Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac
and Shenandoah rivers meet

You needed to understand German to
figure out Joe Noussair's vanity plate
BSP8R = Bis Später
December 6 2006

How likely is that?! Finding two red minis (one of them Joe's)
parked side by side in a car garage Feb 11 2008

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: With Da Tech Guy's Peter Ingemi in the background at
CPAC Feb 20 2010, Joe jokes around with Smitty, the sidekick of the Other McCain

During the presidential campaign of 2004, ca. eight months
after this blog had started, I was contacted by some reader in DC
asking if he could come spend a weekend with me in my Paris apartment;
I hesitated, wondering if this guy was some kind of nutcase

Joe Noussair flew over the Atlantic in the Fall of 2004 to join
in crashing a US expats' John Kerry event next to the Eiffel Tower
— in my Paris apartment, we made (bilingual) signs based on
the Protest Warrior movement's tongue-in-cheek signs —
and after 2 or 3 days he flew back to DC again

Sporting a Protest Warrior T-shirt, Joe crosses le Pont d'Iéna to join in
crashing a John Kerry event organized by US expats next to the Eiffel Tower

Joe Noussair at Suresnes'
American Cemetery and Memorial
October 14, 2006

Joe Noussair at Suresnes'
American Cemetery and Memorial
October 14, 2006

From the No Pasarán blog's obituary:

My first meeting with Joe was when this avid but otherwise unknown No Pasarán reader (by then, the blog had barely existed for some eight months) wrote or called (I forget which) from Washington in the Fall of 2004 and asked if he could come spend a weekend with me in my Paris apartment. Who on earth is this nut?! was my immediate thought. 

But I had blogged that I was preparing a Protest Warrior-type infiltration of a rally for John Kerry under the Eiffel Tower during the 2004 election while asking for volunteers, and Joe said that he would take a flight across the Atlantic (yes—really!) for the sole reason of wanting to join in the fun. He brought with him a lot of ammo, in the form of a number of Protest Warrior T-shirts and, as the good handyman he was (more about Joe's job below), he bought the material for our signs and put them together…

In general, this reader commented — at length — on so many posts, and with such knowledge and passion, that U*2 and I eventually said that we might as well invite Joe N to join the blog.

Operation Rooster Crow: Infiltrating the Pro-Kerry Rally Under the Eiffel Tower 

Bis später, Joe; bis später…

AMERICAN THINKER: Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism

 

It is easier for the world to accept
a simple lie than a complex truth
— Alexis de Tocqueville

After almost three years — and as Democrats in Colorado and Maine ban Donald Trump from the Centennial State's ballot — it is beyond time for the media to stop "reporting" that "Trump tried to overturn a presidential election" and to quit referring matter-of-factly: to "the election that Trump lost"; to "Trump's defeat" and his "baseless" "false claims"; and to "Trump is challenging the results" of "Biden's victory (in, say, Georgia)" and to "swing the election in his favor". 

It is equally time for news organizations to stop "reporting" that the four (who's counting?) indictments are nothing more than valid or understandable (if ill-timed) reactions to punish Trump for his ("criminal") attempts to "disenfranchise voters" and thus "subvert democracy."

This is not a neutral, objective, and non-partisan view of of the facts of the 2020 election. Far from it. No. It is the (self-serving) DNC version. It is akin to asking "When did you stop beating your wife?" 

Phrases like “baseless fraud claims”, “sham election investigations”, and “false claims of election fraud” come straight from the Democratic Party. At a minimum, readers and viewers are used to circumspect "allegedlys," to prudent "reportedlys," and to cautious "accused ofs". What happened to them?

At this point, a crucial question arises: What is Donald Trump's version of the 2020 election?

Remember that his whole message — as was that of the protestors on January 6, 2021 (not a single one of them, to my recollection, brandishing weapons other than cel phone cameras for selfies) — is exactly, or almost exactly, the same — i.e., that it was the Democrats who tried to overturn (and, indeed, who succeeded in overturning) the 2020 election and thus democracy (hence his, and the protesters', far from unreasonable anger). 

We could even use similar wordings: "the election that Biden lost", "Joe's defeat" and "false claims", and "the Democrats tried to change/challenge (and succeeded in changing/challenging) the results". Indeed, the 45th President called it "stealing the election" and thus… if anyone disenfranchised voters and undermined democracy, it was the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

Given that the charges are basically the same, shouldn't a media that was neutral, objective, and independent — instead of acting like the purveyors of (to use Trump's expression) fake news — give equal space to both charges?

…/…

Read the whole article over at American Thinker (thanks for the Instapundit links, Sarah_…

Soviet machinations benefited from the same mixture of philo-communism among New Deal liberals and outright Soviet espionage that shaped Oppenheimer’s milieu

 … a movie like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” doubles as an encouragement to read more deeply into the history it portrays

writes Ross Douthat in a New York Times piece, ‘Oppenheimer’ and the Shadow of Stalin, that echoes three of my own posts:
• The 2 Authors of the Book Behind the Movie Were Both Editors and Writers at "The Nation";
• Some Mind-Boggling Revelations About Stalin, World War II, and a Century of Russian History (which likewise references Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin); and
• For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction.

My [Ross Douthat's] newsroom colleague Amanda Taub offered a reading list recently, starting with the movie’s source material, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus”

 … … But I have a different suggested reading, focusing on one of the figures whose offstage malevolence shapes the events of “Oppenheimer”: not Adolf Hitler, the threat so often cited to justify the pursuit of awful weapons, but Joseph Stalin, the man who had spies inside the Manhattan Project and who, unlike Hitler, soon had an A-bomb of his own.

The book is “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II,” by Sean McMeekin of Bard College. The subtitle is slightly misleading: It’s less a history of the conflict than a narrowly, even polemically focused portrait of the Soviet dictator’s decisions and depredations in the war, in the service of an argument that we should see Stalin, as much or even more than Hitler, as the central figure in the global conflagration, an instigator and manipulator and ultimate victor.

The reason to read McMeekin after watching “Oppenheimer” is that his book provides a corrective to the movie’s final act, in which the spirit of a simplifying anti-anti-communism prevails over the political complexity that Nolan carries off for most of the film. (Mild historical spoilers to follow.)

Having developed the bomb, the movie’s Oppenheimer tries to prevent a nuclear arms race and tangles with Cold Warriors who make hay out of his ties to communists and fellow travelers. Then, out of a combination of political and personal resentments, one of those Cold Warriors, Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, manages to get Oppenheimer’s security clearance revoked in a kangaroo-court proceeding.

I have conservative friends, loyal to Nolan’s image as a Tory filmmaker, who think that the movie isn’t simply on Oppenheimer’s side in this controversy, that it lets both Oppenheimer’s own actions and Strauss’s arguments make the case that he really was vainglorious, politically naïve, hopelessly blithe about the communist infiltration of his project and more.

I agree with them that the movie gives the historically informed viewer plenty of material that points to this more nuanced conclusion. But as a straightforward text, “Oppenheimer” sheds a lot of that complexity as it builds to its ending, becoming more and more a story of simple martyrdom — in which a flawed genius is unjustly persecuted by “know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues,” as Bird, the Oppenheimer co-biographer, wrote for Times Opinion earlier this summer.

So the point of reading McMeekin’s book is to give early Cold War anti-communism its due. What were all those hawks on about, with their fears about Soviet espionage and the influence of communist sympathizers, their desire to have the bomb as a potential weapon against our then-ally Stalin, their dismissive attitude toward Oppenheimer’s vision of nuclear power as something shared and tamed by international cooperation?

Just this, “Stalin’s War” suggests: They saw Stalin clearly. The Soviet leader had always been as predatory as Hitler, invading the same number of countries as Nazi Germany in 1939 and 1940, encouraging fascist aggression against the Western democracies while building his own brutal empire under the cover of neutrality. (That encouragement extended to Japanese as well as German aggression: McMeekin argues that Stalin’s diplomacy with Tokyo in 1941 helped pushed Japan toward its war in the Pacific.)

Nor was Stalin any kind of naïve, unsuspecting victim of Hitler’s Barbarossa onslaught, as some historical clichés would have it. McMeekin makes an extended case that Stalin was preparing to attack Nazi Germany when Hitler attacked him, that the two dictators were basically in a race to see who could mobilize to betray the other first — and that the initial Soviet debacle in 1941 happened in part because Stalin was also pushing his military toward an offensive alignment, and they were caught in a “mid-mobilization limbo.”

Once the German invasion made him an ally first of Britain and then of the United States, the book argues, Stalin consistently had his way with a naïve Franklin Roosevelt and a frustrated but weakened Winston Churchill in their negotiations over military strategy and postwar dispositions. And these Soviet machinations benefited from the same mixture of philo-communism among New Deal liberals and outright Soviet espionage that shaped Oppenheimer’s milieu. The result was a postwar arrangement that gave communism a vast new empire in Eastern Europe and soon enough East Asia, all undergirded by a deep, rapacious cynicism that made the Cold War inevitable.

As I said, McMeekin’s account is polemical, written as a corrective to other histories and open to counterarguments in turn. I don’t think he quite succeeds in displacing Hitler’s pride of place as the evil protagonist of 1939-45, and many of the choices that Western nations made in temporarily allying with Stalin seem retrospectively inevitable. It’s not surprising that the British and the French in 1939 would fear the dictator with troops on the French border more than the dictator poised to swallow the Baltic States, or that America would prefer a resilient Soviet Union to an all-conquering Nazi Germany in 1941.

McMeekin has a fascinating argument that the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 opened the possibility of a war of the liberal West against both totalitarianisms, with Britain and an as-yet-unconquered France bombing the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Union and thereby undermining both the Soviet and Nazi war machines. I’m not persuaded, however, that this counterfactual would have ended well for the democracies.

But the necessity of an alignment with Stalin against Hitler, like the necessity of hiring a bunch of scientists with communist connections in the same period — if that’s what it took to forge atomic weapons in a short span of time — has to coexist with a recognition that the world looked quite different as the German and then Japanese defeats became inevitable. By war’s end, our pivot toward an intense suspicion of everything that Stalin touched was both imperative and arguably (and I do think McMeekin makes a strong argument) insufficient, coming later than it should have for both American interests and for Stalin’s conquered peoples.

The necessity of that pivot doesn’t prove that Oppenheimer the man was treated justly. But what happened to him happened for reasons distinct from simple yahoo-ism and xenophobia. And any viewer of “Oppenheimer” the movie would be wise to hold the malignancy of Stalin, the scale of his success at both conquest and manipulation, in mind while watching its complex hero’s complex fate unfold.

"Lovely weather for killing Germans": Today Marks the Beginning, 79 Years Ago, of the Greatest Battle in History Involving U.S. Troops

Today marks the beginning of the largest battle that American soldiers ever fought in, as well as, writes Antony Beevor, the greatest battle of World War II in western Europe. 

When I was a kid in Brussels, my elderly teacher was from the town of Bastogne, and had lived as a little girl through the encirclement of the town during the freezing Christmas with the troops of General "Nuts!" McAuliffe to whom the inhabitants handed out their sheets to serve as winter camouflage.  Madame Cop loved my mother and often invited my parents to her home for dinner and our family did likewise. If you showed any sort of anti-Americanism in the presence of this li'l ol' Babuschka-type grand-mother, you would soon regret it.

Here is the summary of Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944 (Hitler's Last Gamble):

On 16 December, 1944, Hitler launched his ‘last gamble’ in the snow-covered forests and gorges of the Ardennes. He believed he could split the Allies by driving all the way to Antwerp, then force the Canadians and the British out of the war. Although his generals were doubtful of success, younger officers and NCOs were desperate to believe that their homes and families could be saved from the vengeful Red Army approaching from the east. Many were exultant at the prospect of striking back.

The Ardennes offensive, with more than a million men involved, became the greatest battle of the war in western Europe. American troops, taken by surprise, found themselves fighting two panzer armies. Belgian civilians fled, justifiably afraid of German revenge. Panic spread even to Paris. While many American soldiers fled or surrendered, others held on heroically, creating breakwaters which slowed the German advance.

The harsh winter conditions and the savagery of the battle became comparable to the eastern front. And after massacres by the Waffen-SS, even American generals approved when their men shot down surrendering Germans. The Ardennes was the battle which finally broke the back of the Wehrmacht.

And here are some excerpts from Antony Beevor's Bastogne chapter in his general volume of The Second World War, which doubles with information from Greece, where fighting was taking place at the same time.

 … once [the German artillery bombardment] ended, [the Americans] saw an eerie light.  This false dawn was in fact 'artificial moonlight', with German searchlights behind the front lines bouncing their beams off the cloud.  The German infantry in snow camouflage advancing through freezing mist and and the tall trees of the Ardennes forest looked like ghosts

… Patton [remarked that] "We should open up and let them get all the way to Paris.  Then we'll saw 'em off at the base."

 … The Ardennes offensive certainly proved to be [Eisenhower's] finest hour as supreme commander      

 … For Patton, it was an exquisite moment … "lovely weather for killing Germans"

 … The 30th Division had [again] been attacked by its own aircraft, and GIs even started to refer to the Ninth [Tactical Air Command] as 'the American Luftwaffe'.  This rather underlined the German army joke that "if it's British [planes], we duck; if it's American everybody ducks; and if its the Luftwaffe nobody ducks"

 … Greece was another example of the Second World War merging into a latent third world war

And if you're wondering why even add the Greek part of the chapter to this post, it's because the book contains these nuggets about the (commie-lovin'?) mainstream media of the 1940s:

 … The American press began to condemn British policy in strong terms. With an often naive belief that resistance fighters against the Germans must be freedom-loving, it turned a blind eye to Tito's murderous repression in Yugoslavia and also to Stalin's violence against the Polish Home Army.  American journalists began to attack Churchill as an imperialist who ignored the Atlantic Charter on self-determination

 … The Greek Civil War, with all its cruelties on both sides, would continue in one form or another until 1949.  But Churchill's obstinate intervention at least saved the country from the fate of its northern neighbors which suffered more than four decades of Communist tyranny

 … Behind the Allied lines, Belgium too underwent severe unrest

 … German troops looted without compunction, but Allied troops were little better

 … While the suffering of Belgian civilians was great, the majority of the Dutch fared far worse.  Even those behind Allied lines were starving

 … After Greece, Holland was the most comprehensively looted country in western Europe

 … The Americans were scornful of the British reluctance to take casualties, while the British, like the Germans, criticized the Americans for refusing to undertake any attack without a huge expenditure of shells first.  But British infantry were also unwilling to advance without heavy gunfire in support.  In fact all the Allies, both in the west and in the east, had developed a "psychological dependence upon artillery and air power" the longer the war went on

Update: Thanks for the Instapundit post, Ed Driscoll, with comments from 366 readers so far:

My title is allegedely wrong, notes Instareader Buck Ofama, who notes that "The final US offensive in the Meuse-Argonne in September 1918 involved 1.2 million American soldiers, and is listed by some historians as the largest U.S. battle ever", something with which Wikipedia agrees. However, the battle with the most United States military fatalities of all time was the Battle of Elsenborn Ridge (the northernmost German attacks during the Battle of the Bulge).

To those who retort that Stalingrad and "Kursk broke the back of the Wehrmacht", God Empress Lune III points out that "The Russians wouldn't have won Kursk without Oldsmobile and Bell" while I have posted this lengthier response (excerpt):

 …/… in The Second World War, Antony Beevor points out that …/…

“Soviet Lend-Lease …/… in scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge). Apart from high-quality steel, anti-aircraft guns, aircraft, and huge consignments of food which saved the Soviet Union from famine in the winter of 1942-3, the greatest contribution was to the mobility of the Red Army. Its dramatic advances later in the war were possible thanks only to American Jeeps and trucks.

“… [The] greatest problem [of Zhukov's armies] was not German resistance but the difficulties of their supply service, desperately trying to keep up with them on bad winter roads and without any rail line functioning. Had it not been for the American trucks provided under Lend-lease, the Red Army would never have made it to Berlin before the Americans.”