Formerly prominent rat deserts sinking Democratic Party ship

You remember Karine Jean-Pierre, don'tcha? I must admit that when she started appearing on the idiot's lantern I got her confused with a popular character from British children's literature when I was a kid [before the earth's crust cooled. Ed.]

The character, known as a "golliwog", is on the left. That's Ms Jean-Pierre, the first black openly gay person to hold the post of White House Press Secretary, on the right.

Ms Jean-Pierre was an obvious DEI hire, which the Dimocrats can admit now that she's long gone. According to Axios, they have now "gone scorched earth" on the lady (?) who played Edgar Bergen to Senile Joe's Charlie McCarthy.

One former White House official who worked closely with Jean-Pierre told Axios that she "was one of the most ineffectual and unprepared people I've ever worked with.... She had meltdowns after any interview that asked about a topic not sent over by producers.... She didn't know how to manage a team, didn't know how to shape or deliver a message, and often created more problems than she solved." 

A former Biden communications official threw more wood on the fire: "The hubris of thinking you can position yourself as an outsider when you not only have enjoyed the perks of extreme proximity to power — which ... bestows the name recognition needed to sell books off your name — but have actively wielded it from the biggest pulpit there is, is as breathtaking as it is desperate ... It's difficult to see how this is anything but a bizarre cash grab." 

Another former White House official familiar with the dynamics told Axios: "The amount of time that was spent coddling [Jean-Pierre] and appeasing her was astronomical compared to our attention on actual matters of substance." 

What's all this about a new book (Walt hears you ask)? Does it have anything to do with Ms Jean-Pierre's decision, announced yesterday, to tear up her Democratic Party card and become a registered Independent?

Why yes, it does! In her book Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, due for release in October, the formerly loyal Dumbocrat tells anyone who cares to read the eye-splitter "why Americans must step beyond party lines to embrace life as Independents," Cazart! Who could have seen that coming?

In a summary of the book released yesterday, publisher Hachette Book Group says "Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly.... She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision."

Don't rush right out to get your copy. The book is slated for release on October 21st, and should be available in remainder bins across the country by October 23rd.

Book Review: "Listen. Liberal!" by Thomas Franks

"Modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representative of one class of humanity [the elites] ritually forgive the sins of another class [the rest of us], all of it conened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertised propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunately object of their high and noble compassion sink slowloy back into a preindustrial state." 

Except for Walt's interpolations, that was written in "Listen, Liberal!" by Thomas Franks, a certified liberal who used to write for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's. After almost eight year's of the Obama presidensity, Mr Franks gave up on the Prez's "politics of hope".

He discovered that the US of A was being run, not by classical liberals fighting for the betterment of the common man, but by a class of progessional elites and technocratic experts, who have what Mr Franks calls "social authority". 

"Although we [the 'common' people] are the subjects are the subjects of ptheir[ diagnoses and prescriptions," he writes, "the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers.... They listen mainly to one another. The professions are autonomous; they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise."

Mr Franks points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals. They occupied the White house for 16 of the 24 years (to 2015, the date of his writing), and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Corpoorate and cultural elitism eclipsed the Democrats' supposed middle-class commitment. 

That's why, in "Listen, Liberal!", he calls the Democrats back to their historic goals, and predicts that unless they returned to the politics of the man in the street, they would lose the 2016 election. Which they did. And because they learned no lessons from their defeat, they would have lost the 2020 election had it not been rigged in the greatest political theft in American history.

But the Dimocrats didn't learn anything from their stolen victory. If anything, their policies got worse under the Prez's hand-picked and ill-fated successor. Elitism morphed into wokeism, leaving ordinary Americans in last place behind not just the elites but all the special interest groups the Dims pandered to in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, hoping that the DEI types would keep them in power. 

The party of Mr and Mrs Clintons, Mr and Mrs Obama, Mr and "Dr" Biden, and Ms Harris and some white man, is now agonizing over its dim (geddit?) prospects for the future. Those who take helm of the presently rudderless ship would do well to read "Listen, Liberal!"... twice! And repeat if necessary.

Note to Canadian Liberals: The same happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, in spades, under the leadership of Blackie McBlackface, the heroic advocate of wokeism who is due to resign this month to avoid having the imprint of a big real Canadian boot etched permanently on his derrière. 

Only a fool... or a Trudeau Liberal... could fail to see the parallels with the fate of Obama, who, by the way, publicly endorsed Trudeau in the greatest liberal bromance of recent years.

Walt's one-and-only copy of this excellent book, gently used, autographed on request, is available on eBid.

VIDEO: J.D. Vance: from rags to next Vice-President of the USA!

As expected, Donald J. Trump, once and future President of the United States, has selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate in the 2024 election. I can't think of a more worthy candidate -- a real person, not a political hack. Senator Vance has pulled himself up by the bootstraps, rising out of the grinding poverty of Appalachia to the heights of power and responsibility. Only in America!

Senator Vance tells his own story (up to his graduation from Yale Law School) in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper Press, 2016), which I read, even before Mr Vance entered the political arena, for its sociological value. It's a memoir about the Appalachian values of Mr Vance's Kentucky family and the social and socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young. 

In 2020, Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. The synopsis: An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown, where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future. We have a trailer for you.

 

The film got mixed reviews. Even though it was directed by a leading Hollywood progressive, the liberals and their lickspittle media dumped on it for its super-realistic depiction of poor whites and its "far right" overtones. This was in 2020, remember, the year the Democrats stole the election.

The acting by Glenn Close and Amy Adams is excellent, but Hillbilly Elegy is a hard movie to watch -- hard because it's honest. Like The Grapes of Wrath, it's a depiction a struggle many poor American families experience. Liberals like to call these people hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. Although those words are pejorative, the people are not all bad. Some, like Mr Vance's mother and mamaw persevere against all odds. Some, like Mr Vance, can rise far above their "station in life" by sticking to the values that once made America great.

American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy, saying that the author "draws conclusions... that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won."

A key reason for the book's widespread popularity following its publication in 2016 was its role in explaining Donald Trump's rise to the top of the Republican Party. In particular, it purported to explain why white working class voters became attracted to Mr Trump as a political leader. Although the book doesn't mention Mr Trump by name, the author later commented that it provides perspective on why a voter from the "hillbilly demographic" would support the former POTUS.

Both the book and the movie raise questions about the responsibility of Mr Vance's family and people for their misfortune. He blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. He suggests that economic insecurity plays a lesser role. As proof, the author relies on personal experience.

As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones, although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behaviour while he struggled, combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic to strong Republican.

This week, Senator Vance will share the platform with President Trump. Read the book and see the movie and be assured that if (God forbid) some terrorist, domestic or foreign, should take out President Trump, Vice-President Vance will be a worthy and capable successor. President Trump couldn't have picked a better running mate, not just to win the election, but to Make America Great Again!

Worth reading! "American Nations" by Colin Woodard

Way back in 2011 -- note the date carefully -- Colin Woodard, a writer/historian/journalist from Maine, wrote American Nations -- A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking). Part history, part sociology and part ethnography, the book traces the formation of Yankeedom, the Deep South, the Left Coast, etc from the 17th century to the early 21st century.

Since the cultural revolution of the hippy-dippy 60s, the fault lines between North America's regional interests have been growing ever wider, resulting in the division of America into left and right, blue and red, and urban and rural "nations". In the decade since the book was published, the split has been almost 50-50, as witness the elections that brought President Trump and Crooked Joe Biden to power. What happens next?

In the Epilogue, Mr Woodard reveals his liberal bias. He wants to see the US of A held together as a "liberal democracy". But he wonders if that's possible. Here are two key excerpts, with Walt's contrarian comments.

At this writing [2011... and things have gotten much worse since then!], the United States...has been exhibiting the classic symptoms of an empire in decline.... Like its superpower predecessors, the United States has built up a staggering external trade deficit and sovereign debt while overreaching itself militarily and greatly increasing both the share of financial services in national output and the role of religious extremists in national political life.

Once the great exporter of innovations, products, and financial capital, the United States is now deeply indebted to China, on which it relies for much of what its people consume and, increasingly, for the scientists and engineers needed by research and development firms and institutions.

Its citizenry is deeply divided along regional lines, with some in the "Tea Party" movement adopting the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Yankee minutemen, only with the British Parliament replaced by the federal Congress, and George III by their duly elected president. Its military has been mired in expensive and frustrating counterinsurgency wars in Mesopotamia and Central Asia, while barbarians have stormed the gates of its political and financial capitals, killing thousands in the surprise attaches of September 2001.

Add in the damage to public confidence in the electoral system caused by the 2000 election [the 2016 and 2020 elections were even worse!], the near-total meltdown of the financial sector in 2008 [and the near panic of last month!], and extreme political dysfunction in the Capitol [and that was in the Prez's first term!], and it's clear the United States has not started the century auspiciously....

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example [Eh? Trudeau's Canada?] and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other.

The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders and Left Coasters simple aren't going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or non-existent social, labor, or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics.

Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular schools; tuition-free public universities where science--not the King James Bible--guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation; high-speed railroad networks; and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws. [This prescription for a better America might have been written by Bernie Sanders!] 

Instead, the "red" and "blue" nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the "purple" ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the First Continental Congress.

Another outside possibility is that, faced with a major crisis, the federation's leaders will betray their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the primary adhesive holding the union together. In the midst of, say, a deadly pandemic outbreak [Written in 2001. How did he know?!] or the destruction of several cities by terrorists, a fearful public might condone the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress, or the incarceration of Supreme Court justices.

One can easily imagine circumstances in which some nations are happy with the new order and other deeply opposed to it. With the Constitution abandoned, the federation could well disintegrate, forming one or more confederations of like-minded regions.

Chances are these new sovereign entities would be based on state boundaries, because state governors and legislators would be the most politically legitimate actors in such a scenario. Sates dominated by the three Northern alliance nations--New York, New Jersey, and the New England, Great Lakes, and Pacific Northwest States might form one or more confederations. States controlled by the Deep South -- South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana -- might form another. The mountain and High Plains states of the Far West would constitute an obvious third.

The situation might be more complicated within often-divided Greater Appalachia or the "nationally mixed" states of Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona. It's not impossible to imagine some of the resulting coalitions extending into Canada, or, in the case of El Norte, Mexico.

If this extreme scenario were to come to pass, North America would likely be a far more dangerous, volatile, and unstable place, inviting meddling from imperial powers overseas. If this scenario of crisis and breakup seems far-fetched, consider the fact that, forty years ago, the leaders of the Soviet Union would have thought the same thing about their continent-spanning federation. 

Mr Woodard's preferred scenario is clear enough, but is that how things will play out, or is the US of A headed for another civil war? Stay tuned.

Everything happened at once, Part 3

21 years ago today

Yes, I am well aware that this is the 21st anniversary of 9/11. And I know the topic of who dunnit and what happened after that has been done to death. But I think it's worth revisiting as Americans ask themselves which is the right party to entrust with national security in these ever more troubled times.

Recommended reading: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Penguin Press, 2006. As you would expect, considering who Mr Rich worked for, the book is an attack on President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Republican Party. 

But... in revealing how the American people were suckered into supporting an unprovoked war on Iraq (and later Afghanistan), Mr Rich reveals how Deep State, which is non-partisan, co-opted his newspaper and the rest of the lickspittle media. 21 years later, the same mass media are conspiring, at the behest of Deep State and the WTF giants who fund them, to gull you into believing that you should overlook the disastrous failures of the Biden administration and leave them in control of Congress. "Don't worry folks, everything's gonna be OK. Trust us (again)!"

When the Islamic extremists -- the jihadis -- attacked the US of A on 9/11, Americans almost unanimously rallied behind its new, untested president. The papers, notably but not only the NYT and WAPO, and the TV networks, particularly CNN, organized the cheerleading, which went on 24/7 until years after the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq had been passed.

That there was no basis whatever for the claims that the Iraqis had, or were about to have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, was ignored or suppressed, just as all those stories about the nefarious dealings of Son Hunter are being suppressed today. 

One is reminded of the story of the famous American painter, Frederic Remington, who was sent by William Randolph Hearst, the master of yellow journalism, to cover the incipient Spanish-American war. When he reported from Havana that there was nothing going on, Mr Hearst allegedly replied, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war."

So it was after 9/11. The priority of the Deep State behind Dubya was not to vanquish Al-Qaeda but to consolidate its own power at any cost. It was a mission that could be accomplished only by a propaganda presidency in which reality was steadily replaced by a scenario of the White House's own invention. Thus it was that America was led for a second time to intervene in the Muslim civil wars, and attack a small and impotent country which had never attacked it.

The Republicans and the lickspittle media intimidated the Democrats into incoherence and impotence, and turned the presidential election of 2004 into an irrelevant referendum on macho imagery and same-sex marriage. Mr Rich's book shows, with a day-by-day timeline, how the institutions that should have exposed these fictions -- the mainstream news media -- were too often left powerless by the administration's relentless attack machine and their own unquestioning political correctness. 

Nothing has changed. If anything, the situation has worsened. The Biden administration controls the media. Deep State controls the administration. Are Americans going to be fooled again?!

One final thought. Among the political leaders who rallied behind the Bush War effor was none other than Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.  During the run-up to the last election campaign, Demented Joe claimed that despite voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, he opposed the Iraq war from "the moment" it began. That's a lie. Read "Biden's Record on Iraq War", FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center), 10/9/19. What follows are excerpted from the article.

Biden never outright opposed military action in Iraq in the immediate days after the start of the invasion, as he claimed. He now admits his recent comments went too far. During the second Democratic primary debate on July 31, Biden said his “bad judgment” in voting to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq in 2002 was “trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in.” 

In a speech days before the 2002 vote, Bush did say approving the resolution “does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable,” but he also laid out in detail why military action “may” be needed. And on the day the war broke out, Biden acknowledged, “We voted to give him the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive.” 

It wasn’t until Nov. 27, 2005, that Biden acknowledged on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his 2002 vote authorizing force in Iraq was “a mistake.” “It was a mistake,” Biden said. “It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly. … We gave the president the authority to unite the world to isolate Saddam. And the fact of the matter is, we went too soon. We went without sufficient force. And we went without a plan.”

Right now, the Democrats and their propaganda machine are manufacturing -- just as in 2001 -- "threats to national security", which they are trying to lay at the feet of President Trump. Don't listen to them. Listen to me! The greatest threat to the safety, security and well-being of America and Americans does not come from within Mar-a-Lago, but from within the White House. Keep that in mind when you vote in November.

VIDEO: Must-read books for freedom-loving Canucks (and Americans)

Back in February [How quickly we forget! Ed.], as he scurried to hide, Biden-like, in a cottage in the Laurentians, Just In Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canuckistan, said that the 1000s of people heading in convoy for the World's Second-Coldest Capital City, represented only a "fringe minority" or Canadians with "unacceptable views".

All the same, Mr Socks mobilized all the forces his nanny state could muster -- including weaponizing Canada's banks to seize the accounts of the protesters -- to silence the voices of dissent. Now the lickspittle media (Hello, CBC*!) are crowing that last week's re-election of Doug Ford, the cuckservative premier of Ontario, proves there's no room for "extremism" in Canada. The truckers have gone home, they say, and all is well in the Not-so-great No-longer-white North. 

Is the Canadian fight for freedom from the dictates of the woke Liberals over? Apparently not, as witness stats released by Amazon Canada yesterday showing that the best-selling book on their charts is  How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom.

Written by Derek Smith and illustrated by Kaede Knipe, the book is a parody, in the style of the Dr Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It tells the tale of a prime minister, with a strong resemblance to Blackie McBlackface -- "his brain was three sizes too small" -- who is must deal with a convoy of freedom-loving truckers invading his capital city. 

Emperor Trudeau is never mentioned by name, probably for legal reasons, and a disclaimer makes it clear that there's no connection with Dr Seuss, but a litany of Trudeau references is presented in the good doctor's unmistakable style, and the illustrations are right on target.

The title character can be seen sipping from a "drink-box, water-bottle sorta thing." He uses the neologism "peoplekind". He is briefly pictured in blackface. And on one page, he gazes lovingly at a framed portrait of Winnie the Pooh -- a poke at Chinese President Xi Jinping, and a reference to Trudeau’s infamous 2013 remark that he admires China’s "basic dictatorship".

Here's a short review, just posted by YouTuber "Clyde Do Something".:

 

How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom is the latest addition to a rapidly expanding line of anti-Trudeau merch, represented by the dozens of hats, flags, bumper stickers and shirts bearing the ubiquitous "Fuck Trudeau" slogan, with the "u" artfully replaced with a maple leaf.

But wait (as Vince Offer used to say), there's more... The Canadian cottage industry in anti-Trudeau stuff is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the tsunami of products make fun of Sleepy Joe Biden, the suspiciously elected President of the US of A. 

In fact, Derek Smith started on President Brandon first! In October, he published Let's Go Brandon, a faux children's book also illustrated by Kaede Knipe.

It follows the travails of a hapless child named Brandon who some may think represents Crazy Joe. (Any resemblance is just coincidental, of course.) Brandon tried so hard to hold down a job. No matter how hard he tried, things would always go wrong. One fateful day after making a wish, Brandon believes he finds an answer to his problems. Could this be the answer he has been searching for? Has destiny finally come calling for Brandon? 

Let's Go Brandon is a satirical book based on the viral "Let's Go Brandon" jokes. Both it and How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom are available from Amazon and the other usual sources, and would make perfect gifts for that special someone or just for a laugh for yourself. 

* Footnote: In The Platinum Age of B.S., Fred C. Dobbs refers to the CBC as "Not much Canadian Broadcasting, lots of Corporation".

Al Strachan on social media and being deplatformed

Left-wing Hollywood celebrities are expressing their collective love of Big Brother after Twitter announced that it has permanently banned President Donald Trump. Breitbart News reported that Twitter kicked the president off its platform late Friday because, "After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence."

Yes, the Alphabet people have "deplatformed" the President of the United States, not just temporarily, but forever! They must be afraid that his campaign for re-election in 2024 will start on January 21st, as indeed it will, with or without Twitter!

Someone who knows a lot about being deplatformed is Al Strachan, a journalist and former columnist for the Toronto Sun, the Globe and Mail, and Montreal Gazette. For a time, he was a regular panelist on Hockey Night in Canada, from which he managed to get fired, not once but twice, for ruffling the feathers of the elites. I've just read (and recommend highly) his latest book (of seven), Hockey's Hot Stove (Simon & Schuster 2020). Here's what he has to say about social media.

Social media could have been such a wonderful addition to our lives. It could have prompted the exchange of information. It could have encouraged participation in worthwhile activities. It could have created friendships and promoted worthy causes. Some of those positive attributes were realized -- sporadically. But really, what social media does more than anything is allow for the exchange of vitriol.

No society in history has ever been so adamant in its demands for tolerance -- yet, it seems, no society in history has ever been so intolerant. We are a modern society and have the technology to prove it. But when it comes to social media, the mind-set is positively medieval. Or should I say media-evil?

Suspicion is aroused and someone on Twitter shouts, "Kill the witch. Kill the witch." Moments later, #killthewitch hashtags are springing up all over the site. Backgrounds are hastily researched and alleged witchlike transgressions that occurred twenty-give years ago are being posted and retweeted. Memes appear, Cartoons appear. By the end of the day, the verdict is almost unanimous. The transgressor deserves to be tortured and executed.

The Middle Ages are back. Bring on the Spanish Inquisition. We are repeatedly told by people on social media that we must accept all forms of alternate lifestyles in the name of tolerance. Fine. But anyway who asserts a contrarian opinion is vilified.

All very true. And now, it seems, politically incorrect opinions are not only not tolerated, but not to be expressed. Period. Freedom of speech is dead in Alphabetland. Forget about Twitter. But there is a bit of good news. Consider an alternative, Parler.com. They invite you to "Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being 'deplatformed' for your views. Engage with real people, not bots. Parler is people and privacy-focused, and gives you the tools you need to curate your Parler experience."

And this just in (thanks to Agent 17): Predictably, the usual suspects when it comes to Internet censorship -- Amazon, Apple and Google -- have removed Parler from their app stores, but you should be able to sign up directly by cllcking on the link above

VIDEO: A Muslima's thoughts about Islam, immigration and multicult

Please allow me, dear reader, to present some excerpts from a book written by a Muslim lady who now lives in the Paranoid States of America. I'll give you the title and the author's name later.

When massive immigration began in Holland, which wasn't until the 1980s, there was a sense among the Dutch that society should behave with decency and understanding toward these people and accept their differences and beliefs. But the result was that immigrants lived apart, studied apart, socialized apart.

Holland's multiculturalism -- its respect for Muslims' way of doing things -- wasn't working.... Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty. The immigrants' culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants' integration into Holland.

Many Muslims never learned Ducth and rejected Dutch values of tolerance and personal liberty. They married relatives from their home villages and stayed, inside Holland, in their tiny bubble of Morocco or Mogadishu....

Surely Islam was some kind of influence in the underperforming segregation of so many immigrants in Holland? ...of all the non-Western immigrants...the least integrated are Muslims.... Muslims in Holland make disproportionately heavy claims on social welfare and disability benefits and are disproportionately involved in crime.

If Muslim immigrants lagged so far behind even other immigrant groups, then wasn't it possible that one of the reasons could be Islam?... Why was it racist to ask this question? Why was it antiraciszt to indulge people's attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery?

If Mark Steyn (for instance) dared to publish those quotes in his blog, or say them out loud in a speech or podcast, he'd be hauled before a "human rights" commission by a group of Muslims and offended liberals. It's happened before. His defence would be that those aren't his words, but those of a Muslim, namely Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel (Free Press, 2007), from which those paragraphs are taken.

Ms Ali was born in Somalia, and lived the hard life of a good Muslim girl -- complete with gential mutilation -- in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, before fleeing to Germany, thence to the Netherlands, where she made which she admits was a bogus refugee claim. She did not give her right name, and, rather than saying she was running from an arranged marriage, said she was fleeing persecution, and in danger of her life.

Unlike many Muslimas, she did well in Europe, working her way through university with a degree in political science. Eventually she became a member of the Dutch parliament. Infidel is the story of her difficult physical journey, but also of her intellectual awakening and eventual rejection of Islam.

Ms Ali's political activism made her aq political superstar and champion of free speech. It also made her the target of threats from Islamic extremists and their apologists. But it wasn't she who paid for her supposedly Islamophobic views. It was Theo van Gogh [no relation. Ed.], who directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Ms Ali, which criticized the Islamic mistreatment of women. On 2 November 2004, Mr van Gogh was assassinated by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim who objected to the film's "Islamophobic" message.

In the last quarter (or so) of Infidel, Ms Ali tells how she was taken into protective custody, sent into hiding in the USA, and (almost) stripped of her Dutch citizenship. All this in spite of being named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2005, and Reader's Digest's European of the Year.

Within 24 hours of the announcement of the order declaring Ms Ali "unDutch" (later rescinded), she was offered a position with the American Enterprise Institute. Click here to read more about her on the AEI website. And do read Infidel!

Further reading: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali blasts Ilhan Omar over call to remake US, says 'I don't think we need a revolution'", by Charles Creitz, Fox News, 10/7/20. Read enough already? Here's the video.

From the inside: Matt Taibbi explains why the media want to keep Americans perpetually at war...

...with each other!

In fact, "Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" is the subtitle of Matt Taibbi's latest book, Hate Inc. (OR Books, 2019), which I have just finished reading and recommend highly. Mr Taibbi's political views are quite different from mine, but I always enjoy reading his accounts of what's really happening in American politics. He is a worthy successor to Dr Hunter S. Thompson.

Hate Inc. is something of a confession, a mea culpa for the part Mr Taibbi played in creating and feeding Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), both before and after the revolution of November 2016. See Walt's review of Insane Clown President, WWW 10/8/17.

The author now admits having been deceived by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and having deceived himself into being part of the "groupthink", the "conventional wisdom" purveyed by the lamestream media, which held that someone as worthy as Hellery Clinton couldn't possibly lose to such a patent phony as the Donald. To his credit, Mr Taibbi gives numerous examples of where he went wrong, while at the same time pointing out that he wasn't the only one.

But Hate Inc. is not an apologia for the honest mistakes of the media, because very little of the "news" they fed us was "honest". Mr Taibbi argues that what they gave us, and are still giving us, is a twisted and highly hyped form of the kind of entertainment epitomized by a WWE wrestling match! It wasn't an election, he says, but the grand finale of Wrestlemania, complete with a "babyface" (Mrs Bill) and a "heel" (Mr Trump) straight out of a reality TV show.

The "face" was supposed to win, but somehow managed to defeat herself, and that's a story already told by Mr Taibbi and countless others. The real story of Hate Inc. is why the media did it, and how they are still doing it. The answer is simple. Anger and hatred attract more viewers/readers than sweetness and light. More viewers/readers means more advertising revenue. More advertising revenue means more profit! Especially when you don't have to pay for the content! In fact, election advertising is a hyuge revenue stream for the meeja. The more elections, the more hotly contested, the more money they make.

And you, fellow "news consumers", are swallowing every drop of vitriol, every morsel of loathing, and begging for second and third helpings. In Hate Inc. you will find countless examples of the media's most egregious manipulation of your ignorance, prejudices, and fears. They whipped you into a frenzy, gentle reader, and want to keep you there so you won't log off their websites or turn off your TV, even though "some viewers may find this disturbing!"

I would like to post some excerpts, but Ed. tells me I have gone on long enough and must find just one for the conclusion of this review. Here `tis:

News consumers on both sides today behave like cultists; self-isolating intellectually, kept that way with a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens. Red-staters are told liberals are terror-sympathizers, desperate, out of white guilt, to eviscerate American cultrure from within.

Blue-staters are peppered daily with stories of fellow travelers and traitors in their midst, an incredible example being NBC's effort to paint presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of the Kremlin.... 

This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be.... We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict, not just for the grubby commerical reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.

What other things? Read the book! If doing so causes you to stop reading WWW, I won't be offended, as long as you also stop watching The View and Rachel Maddow and [That's enough biased "news" sources! Ed.]

Footnotes:
Hate Inc. doesn't have an index (tsk, tsk) but it does have an appendix entitled "Why Rachel Maddow is on the cover of this book". Enough said?

A second appendix is an interview with Noam Chomsky, co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Walt recommends reading this appendix first, before the book itself, to understand where Matt Taibbi is coming from. In the interview, he says to Prof. Chomsky: The main idea of Manufacturing Consent is...that it looks like we have a vigorous system of independent journalists, but the debate has been artificially narrowed. Why that is so is what Hate Inc. is all about.

Quiz: Which American city has been occupied 3 times by the US Army?

Got nothing? OK, I'll give you a hint. It's not Atlanta or New York or even Washington DC.
Nope, not Honolulu either.
The answer is... drum roll please... DETROIT!

In 1863, in the middle of the Glorious War of the Secession, a 10-year-old Detroit girl accused a swarthy-skinned tavern owner of rape. The barkeep claimed to be of Spanish and Indian descent, but that was close enough for a white mob who went berserk after his conviction, putting an axe in one black man's skull and burning down 35 buildings. Union troops were called in.

Detroit burned again in the race riots of 1943, in the middle of WWII, after a group of white teenagers got into a brawl with a group of black yoofs. Rumours of a white girl being raped by a gang of blacks fuelled the mobs. The black quarter of town (Detroit was 83% white at the time) was set on fire. After three days of rioting and 34 casualties, federal troops quelled the violence.

And then there were the race riots of 1967. After five days of violence, with 43 dead, more than 7000 arrested and 2000 buildings burned, the National Guard and the US Army's 82nd Airborne were brought in to restore some semblance of order. That's three -- count `em -- 3 times in just over a century that the Army has occupied an American city in the wake of racial conflict. It's always about race, isn't it.

This little bit of American trivia -- not so trivial, when you think about it -- is adapted from Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff, Penguin Press, 2013. I hadn't heard of Mr LeDuff when I picked this book up at a sale, but was intrigued by the title. Is Detroit really dead, I wondered. What killed it? Anything to do with race or the Democratic Party?

I was expecting a scholarly dissertation on such things as sociology, politics, city planning, and public administration, complete with charts, tables. I am very pleased to report that I got none of that! What I got was an intensely personal account of a reporter's journey through the wasteland that is today's Detroit, written by a native son.

To quote the dust jacket: Charlie LeDuff searches through the ruins for clues to its fate, his family's and his own.... With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its city against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption.

He investigates politicians of all stripes, from the smooth-talking mayor to career police officials to ministers of the backstreets, following the paperwork to discover who benefits from Detroit's decline. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, p0owerful businessmen and struggling homeowners, and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination.

Detroit: An American Autopsy is not a book by a liberal professor who has studied Detroiters like animals in a zoo. Charlie LeDuff writes real stories, about real people, of whom he is one. Like Studs Terkel and Ben Hamper (I was reminded of Rivethead), Mr LeDuff gives a powerful voice to those who are not listened to by the academics and the liberal media. I recommend the book most highly!

There's a bonus at the end of the book -- a photo essay of Detroit, so that when you close the book, you're not closing off your connection to the very real plight of the city. The images are imprinted into your head so that when you think of Detroit, you have something to remember it by. Here's just one of the evocative and provocative photos.

This photo, titled "Packard Plant, East Side", was taken by Danny Wilcox Frazier. Charlie LeDuff grew up on Joy Street, named after the founder of the now-defunct Packard Motor Car Company. Click here to find out more about the photo.

Further reading:
"Site contaminated with uranium partially collapses into Detroit River", Windsor Star, 4/12/19.
Autopsy of America, by Seth Lawless, Artivist Publishing, 2014. Haven't read it myself, yet, but looks like a good coffee-table book to give to your liberal friends for Christmas... oops, "winter holiday".

Book Review: Liberal bias in the media is old news

Ed. tells me that quoting oneself is poor form. [It's narcissistic. Ed.] Nevertheless, I want to lead off with the penultimate sentence of my earlier post today. Liberal bias is pervasive in the meeja, the civil service, and the schools of not just Canada, but the USA, the UK, and indeed just about every country of the Western world. This is not fake news. Nor is it new news. It's something Bernard Goldberg discovered in February of 1996 when he wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal entitled "Networks Need a Reality Check".

In the piece, Mr Goldberg accused his employers at CBS, and in particular the editors of CBS Evening News, reporter Eric Engberg and then-anchor Dan Rather of a profound liberal bias. He wrote: "The old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing any more. No, we don't sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we're going to slant the news. We don't have to. It comes naturally to most reporters."

The reaction to this CLM [Career-Limiting Move. Ed.] was swift, vicious and totally predictable. Mr Goldberg failed to follow "Walt's Rules for Survival in a PC World", as set forth in "Government publishes censorship checklist - comply or else!", WWW 11/6/19, yet he seems to have been taken by surprise to find himself defamed and in danger of being defenestrated. He tells all in Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Regnery Publishing 2002), which Walt recommends.

To quote from the dust jacket synopsis [Getting lazy? Ed.]:
If you've suspected your nightly news is slanted to the left, it's far worse than you think.... Bernard Goldberg reveals a corporate news culture in which the close-mindedness is breathtaking, journalistic integrity has been pawned to liberal opinion, and "entertainment" trumps hard news every time.... As the author reveals, "liberal bias" doesn't mean simply being hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats. Real media bias is the result of how those in the media see the world -- and their bias directly affects how we all see the world.

You can skip over the first two chapters, which are a rehash of Mr Goldberg's feud with Dan Rather, now also in the realm of old news. Start reading in earnest at Chapter 3, "The Emperor is Naked". The examples are dated, but the truths are as fresh as this morning, for, since the election of Still-President Trump, the bias has broadened and deepened exponentially. If you doubt me, just watch The View. [Oh please! Not that! Ed.]

Let me quote just this one passage, from Chapter 13, "The Ship Be Sinking":
Right after my op-ed came out, Mike Wallace was asked..."What is your reaction to CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg's charges of liberal bias in the media?"
     Mike replied, "When people suggest there is a bias in the media and we have all this power and then of course the bias is always supposed to be liberal and not conservative, well then, under those circumstances how many Democratic presidents and how many Republican presidents have there been beginning with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan twice, George Bush. It's just in my estimation, it's almost a joke."
     I think Mike Wallace is great, but in this case the joke's on him.

Just because Americans, starting in 1980, elected Republicans president four times...and Democrats only two times...doesn't prove, as Mike seems to think, that there's no liberal bias. A more likely explanation is that TV news viewers simply aren't influenced by the bias they're being fed from network anchors and reporters whom they lost trust in a long time ago.
     Besides, the problem of bias is not that the big network news divisions are reliably pro-Democratic...or even predictably anti-Republican. It's about how they frame the big issues of the day -- feminism, abortion, race, affirmative action, even taxes. On these issues they are reliably and predictably left of center.

Mr. Bloomberg wrote those words in 2002. Fast forward to 2016 and witness how Donald J. Trump won the election against the concerted opposition of Hollywood, the lamestream media, and all right-thinking (read: left-thinking) people on both coasts. Only Middle America supported The Donald, and he's president today, and will be president tomorrow, and so on until January of 2025. (Lifetime pct .986.) Mr Goldberg, who is now where he belongs (with Fox!) must be tired of saying "I told you so!"

VIDEO Book review: Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau

As Walt told you on Washington's Birthday [Uh, Walt... not any more. Ed.], Canadian Prime Minister Just In Trudeau has a problem. With each passing day, it looks and sounds more and more like "Junior" is fast becoming one of the least popular people in Canada. Even his own Liberal party is fed up with Prime Minister Selfie.

According to Sun newspapers' columnist Anthony Furey, a growing chorus of disenchanted Liberals are screwing up the country ["screwing up their courage", shurely! Ed.] to criticize the PM. And now there's a book -- Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau -- by Jocelyn Coulon. Since I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet, I leave it to Mr Furey to give you a quick review.



Further reading: If you read French, here's an excerpt published in La Presse, entitled (translated) "The fall of the minister".
And here's the blurb from Amazon.ca. Not that it'll do me any good, but tell `em Walt sent ya!

Book Review: Alta Vendita - The Masonic plot against the Church

Until his untimely death a year ago, John Vennari+ was the editor of Catholic Family News, a popular speaker at Catholic conferences, and the author of many articles and books on the Catholic Faith. I had the pleasure of working with him, off and on, for many years. I enjoyed his sharp sense of humour, and was inspired by his devotion to the True Faith and, especially, Our Lady of Fatima.

To commemorate his life and work, the Fatima Center has just published a second edition of The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita: A Masonic blueprint for the subversion of the Catholic Church.

Mr Vennari wrote the first edition (TAN Books, 1999) as a translation and commentary on a document, originally published in Italian in 1859, written by "Piccolo Tigre" (the code name of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini) for the highest lodge of the Italian Carbonari, a network of secret revolutionary societies active in Italy in the 19th century. It is a blueprint for revolution against the state, and against Holy Mother Church -- a revolution which continues in the mainstream Roman Catholic Church of the 21st century.

The 19th-century revolution in the Church, fomented by Mazzini and others intent on Her destruction, was condemned by Pope St. Pius X in his famous encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (On the Doctrines of the Modernists), published in 1907.

Following the Saint's motu proprio of 1910, requiring the Oath Against Modernism to be taken by "all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries", the virus of revolution lay dormant for half a century, only to be given new life in the 1960s, when the architects of Vatican II -- many of them secret Freemasons -- told us the Church must "reform itself" and "get with the times".

Thus began the jettisoning of all that has given the Church Her character and constant teaching. The diabolical disorientation which the Church and the faithful are now experiencing has not happened by chance. In The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, John Vennari shows that the disasters of the mainstream Church -- e.g. the questioning of the existence of Hell by the Pope himself! -- are the culmination of a long process of patient planning by a Masonic group that has infiltrated the Church, not to take over its government openly, but to transform it from within.

According to the booklet (only 43 pages), their goal is to turn the Church from its mission of supernatural salvation to a focus on saving the world. Thus Her mission becomes "social justice" rather than salvation. All we hear from the Church's leaders -- up to and including the Pope -- these days is globalism, immigration, open borders and other ideals of secular humanism. There is lots about helping our neighbours, but little about helping ourselves to save our own souls.

Can there be any doubt that the revolution Mr Vennari describes is in "progress" -- the word itself has a distored meaning -- right now? We must fight it, but to fight it, we must first recognize it. To get your copy of The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, click here to e-mail the Fatima Center or call (toll-free in North America) 1-800-263-8160. Tell `em Walt sent you!

Diversity does NOT make us strong, sez Ann Coulter

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I am sick, sore and tired of having pro-diversity propaganda shoved down my throat by the lamestream media 24/7. Fifty years ago the aim of all progressive and right-thinking people was "integration". It didn't take long for people to realize that "integration" lasts from the moment the first black family moves into the neighbourhood until the last white family moves out. So, in much the same way as "global warming" morphed into "climate change", yesterday's push for integration became today's shove towards "diversity", the more the better. Because diversity makes us strong. Right? Well, I call BS on that!

"Diversity is a strength" is a big black crock of bullshit, a Big Lie of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud. That's not just my opinion, but that of Ann Coulter, expressed very forcefully in Adios America! (Regnery Publishing, 2015), which I am just now getting around to reading. [My keyboard won't make the upside-down !. Ed.] Here, by way of my strong recommendation, is an excerpt.

The companion lie to the "America is a nation of immigrants" lie is "diversity is a strength." Praising diversity is simply part of the PC dogma, a mantra constantly being pounded into our heads. Repeat after me: Diversity is a strength. Diversity is a strength. Diversity is a strength. It's like the shrieking radios permanently attached to bright people's ears in the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron", to prevent them from using their superior intelligence. Contrary to everything you've heard, never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a disaster.

Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations. Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also review the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare -- I mean the "beautiful mosaic" -- in Third World disasters like Afghanistan, Rwanda, and South Central LA. If diversity is their strength, I'd hate to see what their weakness is. The fact that we have to be incessantly told how wonderful diversity is only proves that it's not....

In response to the wanton slaughter of thirteen American troops at Fort Hood by a disgruntled second-generation Muslim immigrant, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, Army Chief of Staff General George Case went on Meet the Press and said, "Our diversity, not only in our army but in our country, is a strength." Then a few years later, after two Chechen immigrants bombed the Boston Marathon, former CIA director Michael Hayden told a Fox News Sunday panel, "We welcome these kinds of folks coming to the United States." Really? The kind that launch murderous attacks on Americans? Do people even listen to themselves when they spout these bromides, or is it just background music? Saying he was speaking "as the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency," Hayden added, "Immigration to this country contributes to our national security." The 9/11 attackes must have been fantastic for national security!

Hayden also made the strange announcement that America is "required to look like the world." Is that in the CIA charter? I know it's in the Democratic Party's platform and also in the wedding vows of John Kerry and Teresa Heinz. This wasn't some nut from the ACLU. It was a former government official -- the head of the CIA. At least it becomes less of a mystery why no one at the CIA saw 9/11 coming.

A few days later on MSNBC, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California responded to Muslim immigrants' bombing the Boston Marathon by saying, "The American-Muslim community is a source of great strength to us...our strength in America has always been our diversity." Do these people have a silicone chip in their brains that makes them say that? How about a rousing chorus of: "Four legs good, two legs bad!" This is the sort of brainwashing Americans are relentlessly subjected to, day after day, from every major news outlet. The good news is, even after years of wall-to-wall propaganda, Americans still aren't sold on the idea.

Thus endeth the excerpt. Buy or borrow Adios America!, and read the truth the government and the lamestream media won't trust us with.

Book review: "Insane Clown President" by Matt Taibbi made Walt LOL

Ed. here. In "Hellery Clinton's 'Mannequin Challenge' campaign fail" (WWW 5/8/17 - includes video), Walt promised you a review of Insane Clown President, Matt Taibbi's book on the 2016 presidential election (Spiegel & Grau, 2017). This is it.

It's a pity that the original -- make that unique -- Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, offed himself before US politics sank to the dpeths of the 21st-century campaigns for the presidensity. How he would have enjoyed last year's down-and-dirty slugfest between The Donald and Crooked Hillary. "Fear and Loathing in the Beltway, 2016" would have been a great title for one of HST's no-holds-barred tirades against the swine that comprise the American political and media establishments.

Matt Taibbi covers politics for Rolling Stone, and, when he's in form, is capable of just as much indignation and rancour as HST. In Insane Clown President, Mr Taibbi reveals a blind spot when it comes to Barack Hussein Obama, who, he reckons, will be adjudged a great president, compared with those who preceded and followed him. QED.

Although he makes mock of the "Mannequin Challenge" -- see above, Mr Taibbi also averts his gaze, for the most part, from the glaring defects in Hellery Clinton's campaign and the manifest flaws in her character. He seems unsurprised by La Clinton's answer to a question about why she took $675,000 for casting a few pearls before select groups of bankers. What Crooked Hillary said was "Well, that's what they were offering." So that makes it OK, then.

Very little of Insane Clown President is about Secretary Clinton or President Obama. Most of the book -- a collection of articles written for Rolling Stone, with some footnotes and hindsightful comments -- deals with the Republican primaries of 2016 and the subsequent campaign which resulted in the election of President Donald J. Trump.

Matt Taibbi's average as a prognosticator was not nearly as good as Walt's (lifetime pct .986). Mr T batted only 1 for 2. He called the primary result way back in February, labelling Mr Trump as "unstoppable". But he drank the lamestream media Koolaid on the election itself, believing right to the end that there was no way a majority of Americans would vote for the "lunatic Trump". He was wrong, and, to his great credit, admits it.

Mr Taibbi provides a cogent analysis of how he, the DNC, CNN, MSNBC etc etc blew it -- by ignoring the opinions and feelings of the American people in the flyover states between the Blue Coasts. It is from that analysis, contained in the introduction, that I excerpted the bit about the "Mannequin Challenge". It's worth repeating.

As a metaphor for an overconfident and incompetent ruling class that was ten miles up its own backside when it should have been listening to the anger percolating in the population, the "Mannequin Challenge" is probably unsurpassable. Here was a planeload of effete politicos making a goofball video when they should have been frantically bailing water to stave off maybe the most disastrous loss in the history of American presidential politics. If those people had known the election was even going to be close, they would have outlawed smiling on that plane, let alone making nutty souvenir videos. But they had no clue what was coming.

There's a lot of very serious commentary in Insane Clown President, but it's leavened with humour, dripping with sarcasm, and larded with LOL put-downs like this description of "Rudy Giuliani...his eyes spinning and arms flailing like a man who'd come to a hospital lost-and-found in search of his medulla oblongata."

I laughed, loudly and often, at the invective the writer hurls at everyone except the Prez and Hellery. But our laughter at the clowns who dominate American politics and media should be tempered by recognition of the ugly truth that we are being led (laughing all the way) to the end of the "American era" -- the time when the US of A was arguably the best country on earth. I've selected two more excerpts from Insane Clown President which should sober you up, no matter whether you're a "progressive", like Mr Taibbi, or a conservative-cum-libertarian, like Your Humble Servant.

[We are] facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don't.
     Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood.

Way back in February...I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But later I made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I listened to polls and media outlets, instead of people. I thought Trump's maladroit and ridiculous general-election campaign, in which he went back on virtually every major primary-season promise while being revealed through seemingly hourly scandals as one of the world's most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals, would do him in. He would lose and lose huge, ending up a footnote to history, having served no purpose beyond the destruction of the Republican Party. Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional wisdom always right?
     Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.

Summary: If you're only going to read one book about the 2016 election and how The Donald became President Trump, don't waste your time on self-serving trash like La Clinton's What Happened (already reviewed for you right here on WWW). Make it Insane Clown President. You'll laugh and you'll think, and what more can you do, now that it's happened.

Footnote: The illustrations for Insane Clown President were done by Rolling Stone artist Victor Juhasz. Just as Matt Taibbi is no Hunter S. Thompson (and admits it), Victor Juhasz is no Ralph Steadman. The drawing above is supposed to show Mr Trump emerging from the anus of an elephant. Subtle enough for ya? But that's quite in keeping with the spirit of  '16.

Book review: "What Happened" by Hillary Clinton

As a public service, Walt presents the entire text of the new book Hillary Clinton is writing, explaining what happened in the 2016 presidential election. Save yourself $39.95 (or whatever exorbitant price they're going to put on it). Here's the whole thing.

You're welcome.

Book review: More on stupidity from Bill Bryson

More on stupidity... More on... Geddit? Moron!

I am working hard [hardly working? Ed.] on a review of Bill Bryson's latest book The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). My problem is that I keep running into long(ish) passages that I want to quote verbatim. I've already done that twice this week, and feel I'm now in danger of posting the whole book, a page or two at a time. The publishers wouldn't like that. So I content myself with copying one last excerpt.

An underlying theme of Mr. Bryson's latest "travel" book -- really a text in sociology and philosophy -- is the deep and abiding stupidity into which the world is falling. Although the book is ostensibly about Britain and the British, the author takes a few potshots at America and Americans along the way. (Being an American himself, he's entitled to do so.) Here's his account (from pages 284-285) of a visit to Austin TX.

Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.

Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house [in Britain] doesn't have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: 'City?'

I replied: 'London.'
'Can you spell that please?'
I looked at her and saw that she wasn't joking. 'L-O-N-D-O-N,' I said.
'Country?'
'England.'
'Can you spell that?'
I spelled England.
She typed for a moment and said: 'The computer won't accept England. Is that a real country?'
I assured her it was. 'Try Britain,' I suggested.
I spelled that, too - twice (we got the wrong number of Ts the first time) - and the computer wouldn't take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn't think of anything else to suggest.

'It'll take France,' the girl said after a minute.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You can have "London, France".'
'Seriously?'
She nodded.
'Well, why not?'
So she typed 'London, France', and the system was happy.

I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: 'Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?'
'That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.'
'Shoot,' she said and looked chagrined.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can't identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it's spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Having now passed on three excerpts from The Road to Little Dribbling, -- this one, "Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar" and "Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity" -- perhaps I can be excused from writing only a few more lines in praise of the book.

I'm not sure if Mr. Bryson set out to be a curmudgeon. Perhaps one doesn't "set out" so to do. With me, it just happened naturally as I watched the world around me sink into the muck of tastelessness, political correctness, and the other stupidities of which Mr. B complains. He pokes fun at our Western society and "culture" with a large pitchfork, in the manner of H.L. Mencken, but with even more humour.

The Road to Little Dribbling purports to be a travel book, the genre which Bill Bryson does best. It does describe his zigzag rambles up "the Bryson Line" from the English Channel to Cape Wrath (and considerably beyond), but, as noted before, the book is not so much about places and things -- although both are described in detail and with great wit -- but about people. Like Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, it is a work of serious philosophical inquiry wrapped in dry humour. Don't fail to read it.

Further reading: Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. The Project Gutenberg e-book, FREE.

Book review: Walt savages Savage's "Savage Truth"

Michael Savage (né Michael Alan Weiner) is a famous (it says here) talk/shock jock. He is also a "#1 New York Times bestselling author", according to the dust jacket of Stop the Coming Civil War (Center Street, 2014) which attracted Walt's attention on a recent visit to the Fort Mudge library.

When someone uses the American flag as a backdrop for his publicity pic, you pretty much know what you're going to get. Here's a sample.

Mr. Savage has summarized his political philosophy in three words: borders, language, and culture. He calls himself a conservative nationalist, while critics (and there are many) characterize his views as "fostering extremism or hatred." Since 2009 he has been barred from entering the UK on those grounds.

Critics on the right (and there are many) call him a "cuckservative".

The King of Speak-your-mouth opposes illegal immigration to the United States, supports the English-only movement and argues that liberalism and progressivism are degrading American culture and emasculating American men.

Walt agrees with most of those views. But if you paid 26 bucks for Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt thinks you overpaid by about $25.01. It's a crappy book, a veritable witches' brew of vitriol, hyperbole and right-wing rant, masquerading as a political manifesto.

Mr. Savage argues that "The United States may well be [note the hedge words] in the midst of a military, economic, and cultural collapse that is turning us into a country in danger of catastrophic failure and leading to the nighmarish scenario of a civil war." He presents his talking points as five questions, which you can get from the dust jacket:

• Why have so many of our top military commanders been summarily pushed aside, after years of brave service? 
• Is the falsification of records by VA personnel in order to cover up the horrific neglect of our brave soldiers a sign of what's to come with Obamacare? 
• How is Obama's irresponsible foreign policy not just weakening us in Russia, China, and the Middle East, but actually endangering our security at home as well? 
• What does it mean for our freedom and our way of life that negligent immigration law enforcement allows illegal aliens to cross the southern border into our country with little fear of penalty?

That's it. That's all. The "author" takes those four points and repeats them, rearranging the order, for ten chapters. Eventually -- I chose this word deliberately -- he tells us who the combatants in "the coming civil war" will be. North vs South? Black vs White? Noooo... It will be:

• The haves against the have-nots.
• The illegal aliens against hard-working middle-class families.
• Liberals who hate the Second Amendment versus lawful gun owners, millions of whom refuse to register their guns and ammunition in anti-gun jurisdictions.
• Climate activists whose policies cause forest fires and exacerbate drought against those who understand the effect of human activity on the climate is negligible.
• Anti-Christian communist educators versus god-fearing families.

So there you have it. Walt just saved you 26 bucks. Choose which side you want to be on and act accordingly. But what does "accordingly" mean? In the final chapter of Stop the Coming Civil War, Mr. Savage tells us that to win (not stop) the war "...our resistance must be a peaceful resistance. It must be waged through the ballot box, or else this country will descent into chaos and violence."

The ballot box? Who can Americans vote for who will stand up for hard-working, middle-class, god-fearing etc. families? Believe it or not, Mr. Savage says "Vote Republican"! He calls on Republicans and "Independents generally" to "return to being a nationalist party, a party that understands that such actions as cutting entitlement spending will spur us to take action against the leftist takeover that is occurring before our very  eyes."

The goal is to have Republicans win both houses of Congress in 2014 and elect a Republican president in 2016. That will avert the coming civil war and make America great again. Oh... wait... haven't I heard that phrase somewhere recently?

Walt cannot disagree with Mr. Savage's argument that a Republican president and Congress will be better for America than the incumbent administration, but if that president is a "moderate Republican" or "cuckservative" like Jeb, the difference will hardly be noticeable.

My main quarrel with Stop the Coming Civil War is that it's badly written, a point I'll return to later. It's not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants. And it's hard to take seriously someone who (at page 7) calls "the most vicious of all terrorist groups... the Islamic State of Iran and Syria". Too bad Center Street didn't invest a few dollars in the services of an editor and fact-checker.

Why the rest of the world hates America -- another view

D'you know where Chuck Thompson comes from? Juneau! I know, but d'you know Juneau? It's the capital city of Alaska [Not Anchorage? Ed.] and, according to Chuck, a good place to be from. Like Bill Bryson leaving Des Moines, Mr. Thompson left his hometown to see the rest of the world. And write about it.

Chuck Thompson is a travel writer -- the kind who writes magazine articles about places like Juneau, because doing so pays the bills and gets you a look at the rest of the world. But he has the self-awareness to know when he's writing bullshit, and the courage to write the truth, when he can.

In Smile When You're Lying (Holt, 2007) Mr. Thompson gives readers "a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes". (That's from the blurb on the cover.) A reviewer said "This Thompson will remind readers of Hunter S.". Walt disagrees. No-one writes like Dr. Gonzo at his best, besides which travelling was only a sidebar to HST's main topic. Nevertheless, this Thompson does remind me of the early P.J. O'Rourke. Holidays in Hell springs to mind. I give Smile When You're Lying a big thumb up.

But a book review isn't what I intended to write. And Smile When You're Lying is more than an anthology of bad trips. In the final chapter -- "Not-So-Ugly Americans and the Road of Good Intentions" -- Chuck Thompson gives his opinions on why Americans in general and American tourists in particular are more reviled in the rest of the world than ever before. His argument makes so much sense to me as to demand a lengthy quote. Here it is.

Around the planet, "America" has become a byword for the kind of pushy, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, scheming, intolerant, hypocritical, violent, militaristic, goose-stepping, blood-gulping, Limbaugh-worshipping bullies that civilized people since time eternal have despised and occasionally battled to death....

No matter how many beaches we [clean] up, no matter how many schools we build amid the rubble of villages we bomb, the world will judge Americans not as well-meaning individuals but as faceless supporters of a fascist regime drunk with military power and an unslakable thirst for oil. In the way Americans once held all citizens of the Soviet Union in contempt, in the way the world's 1 billion baptized Catholics are somehow held accountable for every impetuous decree from a geriatric pontiff whose native language the majority of them don't even speak, the world now judges Americans as an evil herd.

Unfair, maybe, but this makes a kind of sense. Universal scorn is what results from willingly paying taxes to a government that sends soldiers around the globe to secure oil fields and flatten ancient civilizations before trying to rebuilt them according to its own shabby blueprints.... If you pay the taxes that foot the bills, you're complicit in the big picture. And you're hated for it.

Since the entirety of American civilization is based upon European civilization...the progression of American history shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in the Old World. In the Middle East today, the United States is only acting in the manner that virtually all of its European fathers did whenever they enjoyed military, technological, and economic superiority over a foreign country -- that is to say, using a dominant army to overthrow a foreign regime and shuttle in private enterprise beneath the security of a semi-permanent military presence to extract resources and amass wealth....

Let's all stop being so naïve about who runs the U.S. government and remember...that it was that great peacenik Jimmy Carter who in 1980 signed the Carter Doctrine, making it official U.S. policy to employ "any means necessary" to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East, a document used by both Bushes to justify military actions in the region.

Democrat or Republican, the U.S. government always operates in the interest of corporate profit. And when it yaps about protecting your freedom and the "American way of life", that expressly means the inalienable right to burn Middle Eastern oil so that we can be warm in winter, cool in summer, and travel anywhere we want, whether it's to a beach in Tahiti or the beer cooler at the Quickie Mart down the street.

And now a few words for Walt's Canadian readers. Chuck Thompson concludes Smile When You're Lying thus: Just when you think you've seen the best the world has to offer, there'll always be Canada. That's the very last sentence of the book. The suggestion is that, compared with the Land of the Free [sic] and the Home of the Brave [sic], Canada is, in the writer's opinion, a veritable free and righteous paradise.

Dear Canucks... please keep in mind that Mr. Thompson wrote those words in 2007, before your Dear Leader, Steve Harper, got his hands on the levers of power and began his campaign to remake the Great White North into a pale imitation of the USA. See "Ralph Nader asks: What's happening to Canada?!" I'm sure Chuck Thompson is asking the same question.