Having learned nothing from the failure of polling in 2016, Democrats are once again mistaking their inordinate domination of major news outlets with a groundswell of support for gun control.
With various polls and liberal-packed CNN town halls theoretically showing gun control to display an overwhelming popularity that it’s never evidenced at the ballot box, Democrats are poised to make the same mistake they have every previous time this topic came up: They’re getting high on their own supply.
Let’s remember what senate seats are up for reelection in 2018:
Which of those Republican seats do you think are going to be enthused for gun bans? Tennessee? Mississippi? Texas?
Conversely, which Democrat-held senate seats in states Trump won are more likely to remain blue thanks to gun control? Montana? North Dakota? Missouri? Michigan?
I’m sure Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the state that gave all of 26% of it’s vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, is just dying to run on gun control.
Months after the click-bait articles and breathless “blood on your hands” accusations have faded, gun owners will be going to the polls, and they’ll remember the politicians who promised to disarm them if ever given the chance…
Once again we have a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that’s beyond parody, this time from “conservative” Max Boot:
Imagine if, after 9/11, the president saw the attack as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. That’s roughly where we stand after the 2nd-worst foreign attack on America in recent decades. Me: https://t.co/MatJYEJO9g
If you find yourselves comparing a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 people with thirteen trolls stirring up trouble online, maybe it’s time to step away from the Internet…
Hey @winemind17 using a convention picture in a political ad is NOT ALLOWED‼️ That implies endorsement which never will happen. Please remove my photo and destroy all copies of whatever this is immediately. Am I clear? 🙄 @TX_Ethicshttps://t.co/TVdAtOKJUU
@KenPaxtonTX does the @TXAG look into political brochures that use a person’s image as implied endorsements without permission? This person took a convention photo with me & is now using it in her campaign ads as if I know her & endorsing her. I never gave permission for its use. pic.twitter.com/j4nivxjIeI
Please don’t play stupid. It’s beneath you and an insult to your possible future constituents. I want the photo removed immediately and to attempt to shame me: https://t.co/u3xvRlkwEJ is really low. Are you going to remove my image? https://t.co/qxcXCa4lCm
Anytime there’s a shooting incident in the U.S., liberals reenact their sacred knee-jerk kabuki theater:
“We must now have national conversation on guns! And by conversation, I mean you gun-toting redneck freaks of JesusLand shut up while we tell you how evil you are!”
“My righteous anger trumps your constitutional rights!”
“The way to prevent the criminal and insane from shooting people is to completely disarm the sane and law-abiding!”
“This easily debunked statistic from Handgun Control Inc./Brady Campaign/Mayors Against Illegal Guns/Mom’s Demand/Everytown proves I’m right!”
“The NRA has blood on its hands!” (Yet, somehow, Fast and Furious never left blood on the Obama Administration’s hands. Curious.)
“Ban all guns!” One week later: “No one is trying to take your guns!”
Etc.
There can be no honest debate about gun control because the left’s real goal (expressed every time a shooting happens) is complete civilian disarmament.
Now some tweets:
Republicans said "Okay lets talk about bump stocks.." and then Democrats said "Great! Oh and also suppressors and magazines" proving the right's entire point about the gun control debate. That's what killed it. https://t.co/GettorB1XI
So media running with the "Trump caused this shooting because of the obama rule regarding mentally-ill and guns" are now going to explain if a 19 year old kid was collecting social security benefits, right?
Hear me out on this people – all we need to do is issue 70 or 80 million search warrants, hire 2-3 million fanatically anti-gun SWAT teams with tanks, and I guess some lunch boxes from Jimmy John'shttps://t.co/RjZYlImALf
And those liberal who boldly declare “If complete civilian disarmament were passed, you gun owners would have to give up or the cops/troops would kill you!”, I suggest you read this.
This has probably been my busiest February on record. Enjoy a complimentary Friday LinkSwarm, try the waitress and tip the veal:
“It’s doubtful you can find a more succinct example of TDS than a seemingly inebriated Democrat Senator asking the aggregate intelligence apparatus, during a public session of congress, to give specific details of U.S. covert intelligence efforts to thwart Russian, Chinese and North Korean cyber-warfare.” Democratic Senator Jack Reed continues to long, proud tradition of questionable Rhode Island political figures…
Asian student at Harvard discovers that identity politics is a dead end.
“Stop Trying To Shove Women Into STEM.” “There’s this big push to get girls into STEM — while there’s no commensurate push to get women into oil rig work, no complaints that there aren’t enough women hanging off the back of garbage trucks.” Also:
We’ve recently found that countries renowned for gender equality show some of the largest sex differences in interest in and pursuit of STEM degrees, which is not only inconsistent with an oppression narrative, it is positive evidence against it. Consider that Finland excels in gender equality, its adolescent girls outperform boys in science, and it ranks near the top in European educational performance. With these high levels of educational performance and overall gender equality, Finland is poised to close the sex differences gap in STEM. Yet, Finland has one of the world’s largest sex differences in college degrees in STEM fields. Norway and Sweden, also leading in gender equality rankings, are not far behind. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as this general pattern of increasing sex differences with national increases in gender equality is found throughout the world.
It’s one of those “too much to write about and not enough time to do it” weeks. So instead of a scanty Clinton Corruption update, here instead is an interesting piece on the meaning of Patty Hearst. It covers a lot of the social context for those those who were not around (or too young at the time) to appreciate.
The thing you have to understand about Patty Hearst, the reason that her fantastically sui generis story resonated so deeply within so many millions of ordinary American households, is that back then a lot of girls like her were disappearing. They were not California publishing heiresses, certainly; nor was the agency of their disappearance abduction at gunpoint. But disappear they did. One moment their lives could be summed up in a series of photographs not so different from the ones flashed on the nightly news over and over again: Patty in a first-communion dress at age 8; smiling with her gaggle of glossy-haired sisters as a young adolescent; sitting quietly—dreamily, inwardly—on the floor beside her mother’s chair as a teenager, staring off into the mists of girl land. And the next moment—gone.
One day my older sister—the smart and dutiful one, the daughter everyone had placed their bets on—was helping my mother pin McCall’s patterns to paisley linen, and the next she had crammed a sleeping bag and a passport into a rucksack and made her way to San Francisco International Airport with just enough money for a Eurail Pass, and although she did come back from Europe, she never really came back home. One of my friends had a glamorous older sister who fed the seals at Fairyland—she was long-legged and pretty, and she’d stand in her red miniskirt on a platform, tossing the fish—but then something happened; she went to live down in the flats, and her mother didn’t want to see her anymore. There were boyfriends who brazenly took girls out of their houses without chatting up the fathers; there were blue jeans (it is hard to convey the chagrin that middle-class mothers once felt at seeing their daughters in the loathed and stigmatized garment of their own Depression-era childhoods, instead of skirts and ironed dresses and lightweight cardigans). And most of all, underneath it all, there was the line connecting the dots of the Eurail Passes and the screaming matches and even the blue jeans: sex.
Also this:
“The SLA was probably the first band of revolutionaries to marry a commitment to radical feminism with the use of systematic rape as a means of recruitment.”
Few people today realize just how violent American leftwing radicals like the SLA and the Weathermen were in the late 60s and early 70s…
An American drone destroyed a Russian-made T-72 battle tank operating in eastern Syria on Saturday, according to the U.S. military’s command unit responsible for forces in the Middle East — which added the strike was in “self defense.”
No U.S or allied troops were hurt in the incident, but three people inside the tank were killed by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone, a defense official told Fox News on Tuesday.
The strike was the second by the U.S. against “pro-regime” forces since Wednesday, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command.
The U.S. airstrike took place the same day an Iranian drone was shot down over Israel on Saturday, prompting a counter-attack by the Israeli Air Force into Syria against Iranian and regime targets. An Israeli F-16 was shot down during that mission, and it crash landed inside Israeli territory.
The T-72 tank came from the “same hostile forces” which attacked U.S. special operations troops and allied Syrian fighters last Wednesday in eastern Syria, officials said.
“The tank had been maneuvering with coordinated indirect fire on a defensive position occupied by Syrian Democratic Forces and Coalition advisers,” U.S. Central Command said in the statement. “The defensive position was within effective range of the tank’s weapon system. Coalition officials maintained regular contact with Russian counterparts via established de-confliction lines to avoid misperceptions and miscalculations that could endanger each other’s forces.”
The latest U.S. airstrike came less than a week after a massive strike killed 100 “pro-regime” forces, including what defense officials told Fox News were Russian contractors.
That suggests it was a Russian-made tank, rather than a Russian army tank. The T-72 was (and probably still is) used extensively by both the Iraqi and Syrian army, and the Islamic State captured some.
There were reports of Russian ground troops in Syria back in 2015, but I don’t see many reference to Russian regulars (as opposed to special forces) in combat in Syria.
The strike appears to have occurred near Khusham, east of Deir ez-Zor, indicated by the blue circles.
It seems unlikely that Russian army troops attacked American troops and got their asses kicked. But if that did happen, they’ll think twice before trying it again…
Here’s a story you may have missed (I certainly did) over the weekend.
In summary:
Iran sends drone from base in Syria through Jordan and into Israeli airspace.
Israeli Apache helicopter shoots down drone.
Israel launches surgical strike against drone base of origin near Homs, Syria.
Syrians manage to shoot down Israeli F-16 (pilots successfully eject and land in Israel), evidently the first successful enemy downing of an Israeli aircraft since 2006.
“Israel carried out a large-scale attack against 12 targets in Syria, including three Syrian SA-5 and SA-17 air defense batteries and four other Iranian military targets.”
The New York Timeshas a piece up discussing the situation that runs the gamut from “commonplace” to “tendentious” to “wrong.” In particular, the assertion that Israel can’t prevent Iran from establishing a conventional force presence in Syria is probably wrong; I suspect Israel can more easily pay for and replace expended material than Iran can, especially with the latter beset by extended domestic unrest. Even more unsupported is the assertion that Russia must “pick a side” in the conflict. I’m pretty sure the Russians have no desire to tangle militarily with another highly-trained nuclear power in a peripheral theater of conflict in a move that would doubtlessly provoke an American response, and Assad has no leverage by which to compel Russia to do any more for him than they’re already doing against the remnants of the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic State. “Shoot down some Israeli planes, or I won’t let you fight for me anymore!”
Iran is establishing bases in Syria for essentially irrational dick-measuring reasons, i.e. to be able to say it’s doing more to oppose “the Zionist Entity” than any other country in the Muslim ummah, as well as support Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria, two of it’s most important clients/allies in the Shia/Sunni civil war.
Iran would not be so bold had it’s sugar daddy Obama not lifted sanctions and showered it with cash for a meaningless agreement. The world will be living with the baleful consequences of the Obama administration’s feckless policies for a long time to come.
