Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.

Public broadcaster SVT said it had counted all court convictions to present a complete picture in Sweden.

But Sweden had thousands more reported rapes, and there is no ethnic breakdown for those.

Immigration and crime are major issues in Sweden’s general election campaign. The vote is on 9 September.

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats hope to make significant ground, although they have slipped to third place in the latest opinion poll.

The Mission Investigation programme, due to be broadcast on Wednesday by SVT, said the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan.

The report clearly shows a pattern of cover-up by the Church, even detailing the precise methods the archdioceses used to avoid prosecution. Of this, there can be no doubt that the scope of the abuse was known by the Church, and that it sometimes took extraordinary measures to bury evidence and deny facts.

Over 1,000 individual victims are identified, but the report acknowledges that many of them came forward only as news spread that the report was being compiled. The writers of the report are aware that public release of this report may result in thousands more victims coming forward. An interesting facet of mass-child-abuse cases is that many victims keep silent for decades assuming no one will believe them; however, when seeing that “Rev. Joe Smith” has been identified doing X, the victims often realize “Hey, he did that to me, too” and then realize they were not alone, and are now credible.

More interestingly, the report acknowledges the cooperation of the Church in its compilation. Even though the report lambasts current Church leaders, the report acknowledges the various archdioceses of Pennsylvania (with the exception of Philadelphia, which is still preparing information) were readily assisting with producing evidence: letters, memoranda, reports, and more were promptly turned over, and Church officials almost seem to be eager to get this information public. The report even stipulates that, for the first time, there is reason to be optimistic the Catholic Church is cleaning house at last.

(Hat tip: Borepatch.)

None of this would be happening, of course, but for Bob Mueller’s effort to drive President Trump from office on behalf of his de facto client, the Democratic Party. In a nauseating bit of hypocrisy, Deputy U.S. attorney Robert Khuzami said today that “The essence of what this case is about is justice, and that is an equal playing field for all persons in the eyes of the law….” Equal justice has nothing to do with this prosecution. Michael Cohen was targeted solely because he was Trump’s personal lawyer, and enforcement of campaign finance law is anything but equal. Just ask Dinesh D’Souza.

As we and others have said many times, what is going on in the courts is mostly theater–unless, of course, you are Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen. President Trump can’t be indicted, so legal niceties are not very material. The Mueller Switch Project has three objectives: 1) furnish House Democrats (assuming they take the majority in November) with ammunition to impeach the President; 2) help the Democrats to win the midterm elections; and 3) make President Trump’s re-election less likely in 2020.

Today’s legal developments unquestionably represent a step forward for the Democrats on all three fronts. But in principle, there is no reason why they should change the landscape. Manafort’s conviction has nothing to do with Trump. And no matter how Mueller may try to dress it up with talk about campaign finance–which voters don’t care about, anyway–the Cohen plea simply confirms what we already knew–that Trump tried to keep Stephanie Clifford quiet. That may be a big deal to Melania, I can’t speak for her. But I doubt that it is a big deal to a significant number of voters, and I doubt that tomorrow’s headlines will move the needle on the midterm election.

Bill [Kristol] and his fellow travelers such as Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Max Boot, and George Will, among other NeverTrumps and their allies, are telling each other, and anyone who will listen, that Trump is not only far worse than the Democrats in Congress, but solely responsible for the combative state of American politics.

Trump’s unexpected and overwhelming success as an amateur politician is a clear and present danger to the Professional Conservative Class, as he does not and will not listen to them. This cabal is used to being feted by the mainstream media as setting the tone for the conservative movement, which more often than not includes being obsequious toward the dominant movers and shakers in Washington: the Democrats and the media.

Therefore, the radicalization and absolutism of the Democratic Party that have been evolving over the past two decades are subsumed by the greater threat of Donald Trump. To listen to the NeverTrump crowd, had he not won the presidency, the country would be far better off, civility would reign supreme, and Democrats and housebroken Republicans would hold hands as they cheerfully do the bidding of them who must be obeyed: the American Ruling Class.

Snip.

Ted Cruz represents an existential threat to the Democratic Party. He is Cuban-American and thus would be the first Hispanic nominated to run for president by either major party. The Democrats and the left view the 57 million Hispanic Americans and 38 million black Americans as the unquestioned property of Democratic Party, thus they are not allowed to wander off the plantation. Any threat to that hegemony must be met, and has been met, with unrestrained ferocity.

Therefore, the foundational strategy the Democrats and Hillary Clinton decided to deploy against Cruz, if he won the nomination, was to portray him as an out-of-control and dangerous extremist – so vile and fanatical that his own party could not stomach him – thus an out-of-touch and faux Hispanic.

To augment this strategy, Cruz would have been vilified as a virulent Islamophobe, an anti-immigration bigot, a Bible-toting intolerant Christian Evangelical, someone in favor of draconian spending cuts, and a toady of the far-right…and he was born in Canada.

Further, as this same cabal went to great lengths and expense to produce and use a phony dossier regarding Donald Trump, it would be safe to assume that they would have done the same with Ted Cruz, particularly in light of a fictitious story about a number of alleged extramarital affairs planted in the National Enquirer in March of 2016. There would have been incessant leaks to the media that would have mirrored what they did to Trump.

There is a certain amount of truth in this, but there is something about Trump, just like there was something about Sarah Palin, that needles our self-anointed overclass at a subconscious, visceral level. The idea that this obvious social inferior gnaws at them and makes them irrational in a way that I suspect a Ted Cruz presidency would not.