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On erasing memory by Victor Davis Hanson.

… In our race to rectify the past in the present, could Ken Burns in 2017 still make his stellar Civil War documentary, with a folksy and drawly Shelby Foote animating the tragedies of the Confederacy’s gifted soldiers sacrificing their all for a bad cause? Should progressives ask Burns to reissue an updated Civil War version in which Foote and southern “contextualizers” are left on the cutting room floor?

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.

Are there gradations of moral ambiguity? Or do Middlebury and Berkeley students or antifa rioters in their infinite wisdom have a monopoly on calibrating virtue and defining it as 100 percent bad or good? …

… When Minnesota Black Lives Matter marchers chanted of police, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” was that a call for violence that was not long after realized by a spate of racist murders of policemen in Dallas? Are such advocates of torching police officers morally equipped to adjudicate which Confederate statue must come down?

And did President Obama swiftly condemn the forces that led the shooter to select his victims for execution? After Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 fellow soldiers in cold blood, screaming out “Allah Akbar” as he shot, did “both sides” Obama really have to warn America that “we don’t know all the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts”? And did it take him six years before he discovered the catalysts when finally calling the murders a terrorist attack? Did Obama have to dismiss the Islamist anti-Semitic terrorist slaughter of targeted Jews in a kosher market in Paris with the callous and flippant quip that the murderers had killed “a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”? Were there demonstrations over that moral equivalence?

And was it inevitable that the anti-Semite, homophobe, and provocateur with past blood on his hands for inciting riot and arson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, would advocate yanking public sponsorship of the Jefferson memorial? He who is with sin now casts the first stone? …

… A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

In the race to purge our past of unpleasant history, Al Sharpton passes the baton to John Kass who has an idea.

… But there’s one thing wrong with Sharpton. It’s not that he goes too far. It’s that he doesn’t go far enough.

Because if he and others of the Cultural Revolution were being intellectually honest, they’d demand that along with racist statues, something else would be toppled.

And this, too, represents much of America’s racist history:

The Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party historically is the party of slavery. The Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow laws. The Democratic Party fought civil rights for a century.

And so by rights — or at least by the standards established by the Cultural Revolutionaries of today’s American left — we should ban the Democratic Party. …

… So, the offensive statues will go, and then perhaps offensive iconography, offensive images, offensive books.

One book comes to mind. Let me quote a passage from it.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell. “1984.”

What print outlet would applaud Antifa’s violence? Why the execrable NY Times of course. John Hinderaker posts.

New York Times reporters Thomas Fuller, Alan Feuer and Serge Kovaleski are responsible for this admiring profile of the far-left Brownshirts called antifa: “‘Antifa’ members are ready to literally fight right-wingers.”

“Members of antifa have shown no qualms about using their fists, sticks* or canisters of pepper spray to meet an array of right-wing antagonists whom they call a fascist threat to U.S. democracy.” … *(Sticks? These are baseball bats. Not sticks. – PCKRHD)

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Here’s a few items not as crazy as what the telly and print media bring us.

Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor, puts context to Charlottesville.

… It should not be surprising how the left conducts its march through institutions. It is really rather brilliant in conception and execution, although malign in effect and intent. There is a long term objective–in this case, the transformation of the US. But there is a coherent operational plan that concentrates force on a specific objective, and once that objective is taken, moves on to the next one.

Right now the ostensible target is the legacy of the Confederacy, but once the battle of the Confederate monuments is won, they will move on to the next target, which will inevitably include sooner or later every person in the American political pantheon, and every political, social, and economic institution that reflects the American past and tradition. …

… Trump’s calling out of Antifa as well as Nazis has led supposedly conservative establishment figures like Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Charles Krauthammer to differentiate the indistinguishable, and to defend Antifa because of their opposition to Nazis and racists.

What Romney et al don’t get is who the hard-core left identifies as racists: it’s pretty much everybody who doesn’t agree with them in totality. It includes most whites (which is ironic, given the pastiness of most of the cheekbones and foreheads visible between black hats and masks). I guarantee it includes Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Charles Krauthammer. By vouching for them now, and validating their claim of authority in establishing who is and who is not a racist, Romney et al are putting a target on a lot of people who are by no stretch of the imagination white supremacists or Nazis.

But of course the left has always benefitted from useful idiots. Romney et al are playing that role to perfection. …

… White supremacism and even Nazism are not new to American life, of course. In a way, what is amazing now is how marginalized these things are today. In the 1920s, the KKK was a major political force throughout the US–not just the South. (Indiana was a Klan hotbed.) In February, 1939–almost 6 years after Roosevelt’s inauguration and 6 months before German tanks rolled into Poland–the American Bund (basically the American Nazi Party) held a rally in MadisonSquareGarden attended by an estimated 22,000. Yet Eleanor Roosevelt, an extremely liberal political figure whose husband was savaged by the Bund, defended its right to exist, organize, and speak: she also defended America Firsters, Father Coughlin, and others with whom she disagreed violently on basically every political and social issue.

But if she did that today, she would be savaged. Because the left has gone from being believers in and defenders of civil liberties and individual freedom to their avowed enemies. …

Harry Stein from City Journal asks “Who’s Next; George Washington?”

… in his exchange with the churlish and ignorant press corps in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Donald Trump got it right when he said: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He may not have been the ideal messenger—with his combative style, manic egotism, and casual relationship with facts, he never is—but he laid out a case that for months has cried out to be made, and he did it so clearly that the refusal of the media and the elites of both parties, not just to credit it, but even to acknowledge it, speaks volumes. Though Trump has never quite defined what his notion of making America great again actually means, preserving that which needs no fixing—including the history that is our common legacy—is a key part of it.

Trump also correctly pointed to the role played in the Charlottesville tragedy by the totalitarian Left, the vanguard of the would-be American Cultural Revolution. As a pair of astute commenters on the website Just One Minute observed (for brevity’s sake, I’ve combined their exchange): “These antifa thugs are descendants of the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army and other Left Wing terrorists. And we’ve reached the point where these communist anarchists are eagerly enabled by a media that become enraged if anyone even suggests they might have played a part in the violence with their piss balloons, mace, 2 x 4s and baseball bats.” (To her credit, at least one New York Times reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, acknowledged antifa’s role in the mayhem on Twitter, noting that “the hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”)

Objecting to the tearing down of these monuments does not make one a Nazi, or a racist, or even passingly unreasonable, much as Trump’s adversaries wish it were so. “Who’s next?” is the right question. ..

Scott Adams with calming words for grown-ups on mass hysteria bubbles.

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartinPre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. …

 

… The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or…

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or…

3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

or…

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance. …

And Rabbi Dov Fischer says “And Yet President Trump, in His Classically Inartful Way, Was Absolutely Right.”

I just did something fascinating. I just watched the President’s entire 14-minute impromptu news conference at Trump Tower on Monday that sparked all the latest barrage of anti-Trump screeds from the left media that will criticize him every day, no matter what he does, augmented by the “Never Trump” Republicans and neo-conservatives who will not rest until they can re-conquer the political party they lost because of three terms of two failed Bush presidencies, followed by the two failed Presidential candidacies of Sen. John McCain and of Gov. Mitt Romney.

Not the reportage about the conference, but the entire 14 minutes unedited, uninterrupted. I found myself agreeing with his every word. I did not find his tone or demeanor “unpresidential” in the least. He sharply and explicitly condemned the Nazis and White Supremacists unequivocally. He also condemned the extreme leftists who premeditatedly came armed with weapons to smash up a demonstration that, rightly or wrongly, had been granted a legal permit. (I personally wish that ACLU liberals were not so proactive in advancing the right of Nazis to get permits to rally at public venues, but the demonstration had a permit. Meanwhile, the Antifa Alt-Left thugs came with flame-throwers, bats, and shields, and they came to fight.) All the while, the police did nothing for much too long. Chaos and violence ensued.

The media get exercised when President Trump does not parrot their scripts, but they never minded that Barack Obama would not call out leftist rioters and violent leftist organizations by name. As inner cities would burn, with innocents watching their life savings go aflame as mobs would burn down their inner-city stores in cities from Baltimore to Ferguson, the Obama Administration avoided planting blame or naming hate groups. When a Jihadist murdered Americans serving our nation faithfully at FortHood, Obama attributed the murders to “workplace violence.” Obama never could articulate the term “Radical Islamist terrorist,” …

In Humor, Forrest Gump says, “And just like that, they stopped talking about Russia.”

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John Fund takes a look at GOP hypocrite; John McCain.

… Far from being a modern-day “profile in courage,” McCain’s vote against advancing Obamacare reform represents a complete reversal of the position he won his Senate election with last year. John Merline of Investor’s Business Daily notes that “In the private sector, promising one thing and delivering the other could be referred to as ‘deceptive trade practice.’ For some members of Congress, it’s just another day at the office.”

Like every American, I wish John McCain the best in his battle against a brain tumor. But in what may prove to be one of the most important votes he has cast in his 35 years in Congress, he chose to operate like the standard-issue politicians he likes to rail against.

Next on the hypocrisy list is Algore. Townhall says his home in Nashville uses enough electricity to power 34 homes. 

Hypocrisy, thy name is…Al Gore?

A new, more-than-slightly amusing report from The Daily Caller alleges that the former vice president just might not be practicing what he preaches when it comes to the environment. Namely: his house in Nashville uses 34 times as much electricity than an average house. According to the Daily Caller, the amount of electricity that Gore uses to heat his swimming pool over the course of a year could power six average households. …

Daily Caller posts that Gore got schooled by a real person; a man who has crabbed the Chesapeake Bay 50 years. 

Al Gore was challenged on climate science Tuesday night when the mayor of Tangier Island, a community threatened by coastal erosion, told the environmentalist film producer he hadn’t seen the sea level change since he began his first career as a commercial crabber in 1970.

Gore was taking questions from the audience at a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper when the fisherman and TangierIsland mayor James Eskridge refuted Gore’s assertion that rising sea levels were endangering coastal communities.

“I’m a commercial crabber and I’ve been working the Chesapeake Bay for 50+ years. I have a crab house business out on the water and the water level is the same as it was when the place was built in 1970,” Eskridge said. “I’m not a scientist, but I am a keen observer and if sea level rises are occurring, why am I not seeing signs of it?” …

Rather than calling him a hypocrite, we’ll stipulate Stuart Rothenberg, of WaPo and CNN is a CONTEMPTIBLE. Independent Women’s Forum posts on his tweets after Trumps visit to West Virginia. 

President Trump isn’t the only one  who says too much on twitter.

Stuart Rothenberg, a Washington insider who writes for the Washington Post and runs The Rothenberg Political Report, has just revealed what he thinks of the people of West Virginia, who gave a warm welcome to President Trump last night, in a vicious tweet:

“Lots of people in West Virginia can’t support themselves or speak English.” 

The elite has an itch and they can’t stop scratching.

The itch is disdain for Americans who live outside a few enclaves of People Like Them and whom they believe to be, as a one trailblazer in disdain once put it, deplorable. …

Mr Rothenberg is not only contemptible, he’s also arrogantly stupid. Here’s a look at what he wrote in WaPo less than a month before last November’s election.

The trajectory of the 2016 presidential race — which will result in a Hillary Clinton victory — remains largely unchanged from May, when Donald Trump and Clinton were in the process of wrapping up their nominations. 

But what has changed recently is Clinton’s likely winning margin. For many weeks, even months, I have believed that Clinton would defeat Trump by three to six points. If anything, that range now looks a bit low, with the Democratic nominee apparently headed for a more convincing victory, quite possibly in the four-to-eight-point range. … 

… No, Trump’s supporters have not turned on him. But he trails badly with only a few weeks to go until Nov. 8, and he must broaden his appeal to have any chance of winning. That is now impossible. … 

… In one of my last columns for Roll Call, on May 10, I wrote that: 

Given the makeup of the likely electorate, state voting patterns, the images of the candidates, the deeply fractured GOP and the early survey data, Clinton starts off with a decisive advantage in the contest. A blowout is possible. 

Three months later, on Aug. 9, I reiterated that Trump was so poorly positioned for the fall campaign that he “needs a miracle to win.” …

In April 2009 Rothenberg mocked the chances for the GOP to grab congress in 2010.

… Cheerleading has its place, including on a high school or college basketball court. But not when it comes to political analysis.

Over the past couple of weeks, at least three Republicans — House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.), former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and campaign consultant Tony Marsh — have raised the possibility of the GOP winning back the House of Representatives next year.

That idea is lunacy and ought to be put to rest immediately.

None of the three actually predicted that Republicans would gain the 40 seats that they need for a majority, but all three held out hope that that’s possible. It isn’t. … 

It wasn’t 40 seats won by the GOP, it was 63! It was the largest win in almost 100 years. Makes it obvious Rothenberg belongs at CNN with other ignorant people.

For another CONTEMPTIBLE, Instapundit offers a professor at TrinityCollege. 

Four days after James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, Trinity Professor Johnny Eric Williams sided with anonymous blogger “Son of Baldwin,” who proposed that black emergency personnel should let wounded white people die rather than lend assistance. Baldwin posted his opinions under the hashtag, #LetThemFuckingDie.

Professor Williams linked Son of Baldwin’s statement, adopted the hashtag as his own, and posted some additional denunciations of white Americans for “their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system.” Referring to all “self-identified ‘whites,’” he wrote, “The time is now to confront these inhuman assholes and end this now.”

Prof. Williams, I know you think you want a race war. But you really don’t. And I think it’s fine for Trinity not to punish faculty for “extramural utterences,” except that I don’t really believe they’d apply that policy to a white professor who thought white EMTs should let black people die. Instead, I feel fairly confident they’d weasel around it somehow.

Cost of attending Trinity College: $68,940 per year. A lot to pay for a “platform from which people can shout their disordered fury.”