Permission to Be Your Worst Self

Over at the Xitter, Dinesh D'Souza is really on drugs now:

No, Dinesh, it's a 1787 document. See the "We the people" up at top?

Eleven years earlier, the authors had been members of a rebellion against a monarchy, and they could conceivably have been arrested for it, if the British army had been able to get close enough (I know for instance that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were expecting to be arrested in 1775 and fled Boston for Concord), but they weren't, and none of them was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, a felony. You can't become a convicted felon without having a trial first. That's how Trump did it, with a grand jury deciding to charge him and a regular jury deciding he was guilty.

That's just one of the differences between Donald Trump and James Madison. If you're looking for a Trump parallel in the story, you'd do better going with George III, another extremely wealthy but profoundly stupid grandchild of German immigrants who believed that God had put him above the law.

Think about it: 

For the Record: Gunga Dinesh Holds Forth on the Demonstrations in Ottawa

 

Video screenshot via CTV News.

Oh, you're a Marxist now are you? That wasn't on my bingo card! Welcome to the Left, but there are a few things you need to get straight before you start speaking on our behalf.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

"Workers" revolting against vaccine mandates aren't doing anything to help workers. Low-income inviduals end up in hospital and dying of COVID-19 at horrifyingly higher rates than upper-income. https://t.co/8KJUIfz3Cc pic.twitter.com/6zoqrlemQG

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

But rich amateur pissants like yourself and Tucker Carlson get a big share of responsibility for all this suffering and death, as you work to churn up vaccine hesitancy and refusal because you think it will gain votes for your political party.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

So if you want to join a mighty workers' revolt, just remember that the class enemy isn't Justin Trudeau, it's you.

/fin

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Lumpenproletarier living in a false consciousness promoted by the pet intellectuals of the bourgeoisie is something Marx waa pretty familiar with, though I don't know if he would have identified it with white nationalism (arising among white trash told they could at least be proud of not being Black in the Old South) as easily as we can today.

It Ain't Necessarily So

A man learned in the Law stood up to test Jesus. "Rabbi," he said, "what must I do to attain eternal life?"

"What does the Law say?"

"It says to love the Lord with all your your heart and all your soul and all your might and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"Then that's what you should do."

"But who is my neighbor?"

For the Record: Cheap Shots

Married father of four and notorious pickup artist Corey Lewandowski, left, catches 'em all. How does he do it? Sheer Republican animal magnetism. "Mrs. Odom stated that over the course of the dinner, Mr. Lewandowski tried to hold her hand, and she pushed his hand away. He touched her leg, and she moved it away. He grabbed her napkin off her lap and tried to touch her leg again, and she pulled her dress over her leg, to move his hand away and cover her skin," Odom’s attorney wrote in the statement. "He touched her back and she tried to get away," the statement continued. "He described an area where he was sore from a workout, on the side of his butt, but he demonstrated this by touching her there—on the upper side of her rear end. Lewandowski tried to touch her approximately 10 times, and Mrs. Odom always rebuffed him." (Politico; composite photo via New York Post.)

I too was surprised by reports of Corey Lewandowski admitting to stabbing murders in the course of his amorous pursuit of Mrs. Trashelle Odom at a Republican fundraiser, in defiance of efforts to restrain him on the part of Governor Noem, who may be or have been his girlfriend, until I heard the event was held at a Benihana's:

"Hey, I'm pretty good with knives too," said Corey. "I've killed some guys." pic.twitter.com/kRwwUdR9Ex

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 3, 2021

More weekend miscellanea below the fold.

For the Record: Miscellany

 

Called a "Tomahawk" because it can be used as a weapon. No longer on the menu at Trump's BLT Prime in Washington, where the largest steak is now the 36-ounce Porterhouse at $102 and advertised as shareable.

Can't understand why this nutty algorithm keeps delivering your coke-addled video rants to my TL. Most incompetent censorship I've ever seen. pic.twitter.com/d3xIwQf6JK

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) February 20, 2021

Then there was the Times gangbang salute on the passing of Rush Limbaugh, inspiring double-edged idiocy from Frank Bruni and Ben Shapiro:

For the record: Semiotics of Outrage Calumny

So Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), of Palestinian origin, was telling some podcast listeners about how she finds her Palestinian anger dissipating when she contemplates the horror of the Holocaust: her ancestral lands may have been lost and her people driven into exile, but it was incalculable suffering, not hers but the suffering of Jews, that "started it", and people whose only thought was really reparation of that:

TLAIB: “There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. . . . I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time."

It goes into the noise machine to get its meaning turned upside down, and Dinesh D'Souza picks it up to offer new evidence for his contention that Democrats are Nazis but not really but yes really:

There's something so strange and interesting about this new product from the outrage factory. https://t.co/8nM6PSjFck

— Great Patriot Farmers (@Yastreblyansky) May 14, 2019

Comment

Dinesh D'Souza's response to the terror attacks on Muslim Friday prayers in Christchurch: Even though it's true and his story is imaginary, it's of the family of "fake news" because he feels it has the wrong emotional resonance. In this way he's the real victim, because now everybody's missing the point he would like to have made.

I sent him a question and he replied, in fact, after googling an example of a church that got attacked as proof that the media don't care:

For the Record: D'Souza as academic historian, Shapiro as historical hallucinogen

I know everybody's seen this picture, but I can't get over it: the evil, violent criminals invading our country, as Trump sees them, fleeing from tear gas. Photo by Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters, via NBC.

One of the more fun D'Souza owns, short and sweet:

Woodward clearly never read more than 10 pages of Illiberal Education. He endorsed it on purely ideological grounds, and as John Hope Franklin said it was reprehensible. When Eugene Genovese turned right he also crossed the line from history to propaganda https://t.co/kccrD38bXR

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And what George Fredrickson said about you? That he hasn't read your book but probably disagrees with one of the points. https://t.co/1NdLy9ReVp Kindly explain how that constitutes praise. pic.twitter.com/0tDCtNSDgj

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

Finally, nobody criticizes you for not being an academic historian, but for doing terrible, shoddy, ideologically distorted, historically illiterate work and being completely unaware of the rules academic and gifted amateur historians follow.

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And below the fold, an exhausting encounter with a troll and with reference to this:

Sunday morning

Tree of Life Holocaust memorial at the Great Synagogue in Budapest, via.

Donald just found out about Dinesh D'Souza and his theory that Donald is basically the same as Abraham Lincoln, and he's intrigued:

Very interesting! https://t.co/ZmSA4v5fKi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2018

Interesting! He's got that way of watching his own TV show from the real outside. He's a student of himself, but he always retains the ability to be surprised by the remarkable things he does, when an eminent critic points it out.

Dinesh is kind of like the Frederick Douglass of our time, in the sense that he's doing an amazing job and getting recognized more and more, and has understood that Lincoln is just like Trump because he owned the libs and drove them nuts.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 28, 2018

For the Record: A Little Joke

Via somebody's Pinterest.

Gunga Dinesh leapt to the defense of Emperor Trump for calling himself a nationalist:

You can't say he's using the word the way Ho Chi Minh used it. Ho demanded colonial powers let the Vietnamese govern themselves. Trump invites Russian, Israeli, and Saudi regimes to tell him what to do.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 23, 2018

It's a question, I guess, of "nationalist" as opposed to what? Ho was a nationalist for Vietnam as opposed to imperialist water-carrier for the French or the Americans, or the Chinese for that matter (who had fought to control Vietnam for a thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the Song, before they finally conceded defeat). Gunga Dinesh is an imperialist water-carrier for the British, that's why I like to call him that, when he talks about the Raj or East Africa. Dinesh isn't a nationalist with respect to India, though he may be a nationalist with respect to his adopted USA.

Ho, and Castro, also sometimes called themselves "nationalists" in opposition to "communists", when they were explaining their positions to a certain type of friendly Westerner at certain points in their careers. "No, no, he's just a nationalist. Go away, Mr. Quiet American." In this, I'm sorry to say, they were lying, though not without some justification.

D'Stort D'Newsa: The Puerilizing of Political Discourse

Used this picture a couple of years ago.

Alice B. Lloyd writing for The Weekly Standard explains why former young conservative firebrand intellectual Dinesh D'Souza has turned into old conservative mendacious toad D'Vorce D'Spousa (thanks Tengrain!). Follow the money!

He doesn’t whisper when he cops to the mercenary nature of his support for Trump.  Back during the 2016 primaries, he and his second wife, Debbie, a Republican activist, favored Ted Cruz, whose father married them that year. (They met on Twitter in 2014: She DM’d him clips of Bill Ayers, and he asked her for help getting his movies screened in Texas public schools.) D’Souza prefers to avoid publicly backing any candidate and to keep his focus on antagonizing the other side. “I was making a movie on Hillary, right? And I thought, I’m not going to get into an internecine Republican debate.” But Hillary’s America did only $13.1 million at the box office where 2016: Obama’s America had managed $33.4 million in 2012. D’Souza saw the writing on the wall. “I completely jumped on the Trump bandwagon after he was the nominee,” he says. It was a solid business play: The Big Lie was a big bestseller. 

Money, and influence! He thought he'd have more of an impact if he focused on influencing people who don't have enough information to argue with him:

For the Record: It's Complicated

Dinesh asking the big questions:

One of the things that make him look especially stupid here is the apparent belief that there's some kind of open competition going on—as if, from some point in time or other in history, people had been inspired every few years to put another head on the rock, debated it, and gotten to work, and as if there might still be some room up there. Guess who else is that stupid:

[Rep. Kristi] Noem, who is also running for governor of South Dakota, relayed a conversation she had with the president during her first visit to the Oval Office soon after he took office in January 2017. Speaking with Vermillion resident Mitchell Olson during the filming of a carpool karaoke show, Noem described her first brush with the concept of "Mount Trumpmore" being erected atop the 77-year-old Keystone, South Dakota, landmark.

"He said, 'Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,'" Noem said, according to an Argus Leaderreport. "I shook his hand, and I said, 'Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.' And he goes, 'Do you know it's my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?'"

Noem recalled that only one of them thought it was a joke. “I started laughing,” said the state’s lone U.S. representative. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

But Maureen McGee-Ballinger, public information officer at Mount Rushmore, said it’s not possible to add Trump’s facial carving into Mount Rushmore to join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

"There is no more carvable space up on the sculpture," McGee-Ballinger told the Argus Leader.... (Benjamin Fearnow, Newsweek) 

For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

Boom

Hey Dinesh, I think you need to take another look at this "leftist" who told you to go back to India. pic.twitter.com/UzGIckCNQz

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 18, 2018

Kind of confirms my point that you're too lazy to do even the most minimal research to check whether your hypothesis is valid or not.

For the Record: Fart Act and Other Disasters

Trump had to double down, of course, and say it was done on purpose, a message to the Fake Media, though he obviously couldn't say clearly what the message was ("Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares"), or explain why her communications director had said there was no message and her stylist was completely unfamiliar with the jacket. He's really trying to convince us that he was in control of whatever it was. I believe Trump would rather be accused of almost anything, no matter how gross, than admit that a woman got out ahead of him. 

Trump is about to blow up the global trading regime with an unsettling FART Act. https://t.co/tgDZxQSE2V

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 1, 2018

When I was first working in Singapore, the National University moved from the ancient hill of Bukit Timah to a new campus in the south of the island, everything very shiny and new, and in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences every office door was equipped with a bright brass plaque displaying the room number, ASS 1, ASS 2, etc. As a representative American, I quietly let the Dean know he had a problem, and the faulty acronym was replaced with something else, with Singaporean efficiency, basically overnight, before we moved in.

This kind of thing can happen in a densely multilingual society, where people up and down the hierarchy share enough languages to give and receive orders but not necessarily the ones they need to get the job done. In my later career as a magazine editor I found that the art direction staff were always graduates of Chinese-language schools, while the editorial were inevitably from English-language ones, and crucial miscommunications could take place, though none quite that funny.

For the Record: The Race Card

Action figure by FCTRY of Brooklyn, via popsugar.com.

This Dinesh-inspired thread touched what I think is an important point:

If you wanted to know what Republicans mean by "playing the race card", Dinesh helpfully illustrates: responding to an article about his shameless grifting that never mentions his race https://t.co/8abXf5by6a

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

Sarah Jones's argument is about how the noise machine deals with discredited "intellectuals" like D'Souza, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, or Ann Coulter:

For the Record: Pardon me, boys

Updated with music at end

I know, here we are, Dinesh again, sorry if we have been over-attentive to this slimy creature at a time when so many important things are going on, but as he was thanking The New York Times in its coverage of his pardoning with the indulgence of the Emperor for, I guess, not calling him a Nazi, I noticed that their story had, in fact, a couple of errors:

This @nytimes account is largely fair and the writer should be commended for an honest attempt to give both sides https://t.co/14DKtn30A7

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 1, 2018

They should have caught your gratuitous lie about losing your voting rights. As a felon sentenced to five years probation living under California law, you never did. https://t.co/Ml8oufvZ5M same would be true in New York.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: Is Samantha Bee a Traitor to Feminism?

The main thing wrong with the expression used by the comedian Samantha Bee to describe Senior Counselor to the President Ivanka Trump, by which I mean the only thing wrong with it, was that it gave Republicans a way of distracting us from the issue Bee was talking about, which didn't seem to be a part of any of the news stories, but as I learned from Steve, it was the issue that's obsessed me all week. Some idiot kid set me off last night:

If you think feminists call for a double standard and giving women advantages they don't deserve that's because you don't understand.

Feminists call for EQUAL RIGHTS and equal responsibilities. When a woman is vicious and corrupt Bee calls her out just as she would a man.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: D'Souza's wrong about something.

Egyptian-born singer Dalida congratulating socialist François Mitterand on his plans to seize the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat, Château Chinon, May 1981. Pinterest.

Ah yes, I remember Prime Minister Atlee's reign of terror https://t.co/GwywAXU42x

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

And how Lee Kuan Yew seized the means of production and exiled SIngapore's bourgeoisie https://t.co/94PAcXstI5

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

More nationalization of industry was accomplished in France under the conservative de Gaulle than in socialist Sweden or Denmark https://t.co/obTM17p2Sh

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

You know fuck all about history beyond the dumb bibliography you've been recycling since the 90's, Dinesh. You should really give up.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

For the Record: Is Rosie O'Donnell a criminal?

Jaywalking 1940, via HowStuffWorks.

Spoiler: No. During this year's primary campaign, it's alleged, the actor and former talk show host has been donating compulsively on ActBlue, clicking like a slot machine addict, animated as many of us are by fear and hatred of Trump but also so wealthy she doesn't have to think about how much money she's spending, and she didn't think about it, and ended up donating a lot more money than you're allowed to donate in some of those campaigns:

“If $2,700 is the cut off — [candidates] should refund the money,” she told the Post. “I don’t look to see who I can donate most to… I just donate assuming they do not accept what is over the limit.”

The Post found that she gave $2950 to Adam Schiff’s primary campaign, $3450 to Omar Vaid’s primary campaign, $3600 to Conor Lamb’s special election campaign, $4200 to Lauren Underwood’s primary campaign, and $4700 to Doug Jones’s special election campaign.

I'm guessing from those names she's got MSNBC on the TV while she's doing it, too. She's donating the way Trump tweets, in TV-driven bursts. But although this conduct is against the law, it doesn't even rise to the level of a misdemeanor; it is not handled by the court system but the Federal Elections Commission, and the appropriate penalty is that the candidate refunds you the excessive money. I haven't yet found a case of anybody having to pay a fine.

Our old fascist friend Dinesh D'Souza, however, is seeing or pretending to see an equivalence between this and his own notorious crime in 2012 of funneling money through straw donors—including his wife and his mistress of the moment, I've just learned, or as the DOJ report coyly put it "a woman with whom D'SOUZA was romantically involved":