VIDEO: Now, more than ever, the USA is full of shit

Walt cannot ignore the questions any longer. Readers, and even some of my agents, want to know when I'm going to say something (profound or otherwise) about:

• Michael Flynn's plea of guilty to lying to the FBI
• Hellery Clinton's not having been charged with lying to the FBI
• Judge Roy Moore being accused of chasing after jailbait, decades ago
• (((Harvey Weinstein))) (and 100s of (((Weinstein))) wannabes) grabbing 1000s of T&A
• Billy Bush saying Donald Trump really did talk about grabbing women by the pussy
• Rumours that Rex Tillerson will be dumped from his position as Secretary of State
• White House denials that Rex Tillerson will be dumped
• Brian Ross's fake news that POTUS knew Michael Flynn lied to the FBI
• Joy Behar declaring (anent the above) that she was "guilty of premature evaluation", but anyway, Mr Ross just made a mistake
• Etc etc and so forth

One reason why I haven't written much on these subjects is that I've been waiting for the other shoe(s) to drop. One day the truth will out... or so the old saying goes. The other, more cogent reason, is that I just don't care, and neither does anyone else outside of the Excited States of America.

Do you know that the Russians, the French and even the Canucks just laugh at these examples of "American exceptionalism"? Where on earth, other than the USA, would a rich and powerful older man -- an old pervert, if you like -- trying to get his hands on a hot piece of teen talent make National Headline News? As for lying to the FBI, where on earth, other than the USA, is it a criminal offence to lie to the cops who are out to get you? And about the fake news... how much of the "news" that we're exposed to every day -- "news" about the Kardashians, for example, or Bruce/Caitlin/Whoever Jenner -- do you think is real?

Dear reader, 99% of what is passed off by our lamestream media as "news" is the veriest bullshit! And that's not my original thought. In his very readable autobiography, Last Words (Free Press, 2009) George Carlin wrote: "Bullshit is the glue of America!" He said the same thing -- much more eloquently -- as part of a stand-up routine. Check out this short video.



According to Mr Carlin, he got his BD detection sense genetically, from his father Patrick Carlin Sr. In his later years, Carlin père had a job at radio station WATN (the voice of Watertown NY), where he devised a station sign-off he said he'd like to deliver some day: "I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America and all the political crap for which they stand. Big dough shall be divisible with union dues for all." That was amidst all the patriotic fervor of World War II. Has anything changed? You be the judge.

UPDATED 19/6: What's wrong with this picture?

Walt has been trying desperately to ignore this "story", as well as that of the Dirty Duggar, because to me, these things are not "news", not of the slightest importance to the future of our country, our world or anything else that really matters. They are yet another example of the lamestream media's pandering to the bizarre American fascination with "celebrities" -- people like the Kardashians who are famous for being famous.

Yet I keep seeing "stories" and even op-ed pieces with titles like "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and deserves to be described as such" (posted by the Groan and Wail's Pubic Editor). This, we're told, is the most important and newsworthy issue of a week in which more 1000s of "refugees" crossed the Med in leaky boats, Russia threatened war against the Ukraine, and [Ed., please fill in some more news stories here.]

Because I refuse to read or listen to any of this rubbish about the poster-boy -- poster-girl? -- for the sex-change-is-normal movement, I don't know if Bruce or Caitlyn has actually had the operation, or is still in the pre-op stage which we used to call cross-dressing. And you know what? I don't care! Really!!!

The point is argued by Andrew O'Hehir in "The Duggars and Caitlyn Jenner are the “real news”: The reality that the Hillary Clinton media spectacle wishes desperately that you’d ignore", from which the photo above was ripped. He writes:

Caitlyn Jenner and the Duggar family speak to America’s changing sense of itself, and to the shifting fronts in the “cultural war” that Pat Buchanan invoked in his famous speech in the Houston Astrodome, 23 years ago. They are in fact the substance of our national conversation, the central narrative of American political and cultural life in our time. What happens inside the Beltway is a footnote, if that.

If Mr. O'Hehir is right, as I fear, God save the United States of America!

Final word to Mark Steyn: "In the future there will be no men whatsoever. There will be girls with vaginas and girls with penises."

Footnote and book recommendation: If you're not sure what Pat Buchanan said at the Republican convention in Houston and why it shifted the focus of American conservatism from economics and finance (where it belongs) to the culture wars, read David Frum's Dead Right, "a witty and opinionated tour through the chaos of post-Reagan conservatism".

UPDATE: Further reading: "Race and gender: I feel therefore I am", by one of Walt's favourites, Margaret Wente, in the Globe and Mail 19/6/2015.

"If ignorance is catching, it's time to quarantine the USA"

Ed. here (again) with an absolute must-read for you! "America dumbs down" is from the current edition of Maclean's magazine, a Canadian publication. I can already hear some of our American readers whining (again) that Walt seems to give a lot of space to Canadians mocking America and Americans. This article, by Jonathon Gatehouse, is not mockery. Rather, the author describes the "advance of ignorance and irrationalism in the USA".

Dear American friends, Gatehouse is just holding up a mirror, so you can see what your country looks like these days. "The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking," he writes. "Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?" If foreigners are distressed about what the USA is becoming, you should be even more so!

"The term 'elitist' has become one of the most used, and feared, insults in American life," Gatehouse writes, as a preface to this quote from Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique "There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization.... We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs."

And who's to blame? The baby boomers -- "so triumphalist in promoting pop culture and demoting the canon", according to Liu -- and the lamestream media and politicians who pander to them. And the Internet -- the lamest medium of all -- just makes it worse!

Gatehouse argues that "The digital revolution, which has brought boundless access to information and entertainment choices, has somehow only enhanced the lowest common denominators—LOL cat videos and the Kardashians. Instead of educating themselves via the Internet, most people simply use it to validate what they already suspect, wish or believe to be true."

Another scathing critique of the deep and abiding stupidity into which the West has fallen. Read it. You're welcome.