Left Jabs

  Kamala Harris is wired to be repulsed by the name of God. She mocks God. Again, everything Democrats love, God hates. Let me say that again: everything that Democrats love, God hates. And if you’re a Christian that votes [for] the Democrat Party, you are voting for things that God hates. That’s between you and God. Think about it. If you’re voting for the Democrat Party, you’re voting for stuff that God hates.  —Charlie Kirk,  “ The Charlie Kirk Show, ”  October 21, 2024   Let’s speak ill of the dead, shall we? Keith Olbermann now calls him “St. Charlie of Kirk,” and who could argue with a rapid canonization, given the deep piety of the statement above? It’s impossible for decent people to talk about Charlie Kirk’s assassination without starting the sentence with the obligatory “I condemn all forms of violence, but…” This is quickly followed by some watered-down version of Kirk that paints him as less loathsome in death than he was ...

  I’m not ready to write about Charlie Kirk, and might decide not to. Either way, it won’t be this week, in which writing has been impossible. So let me return to a piece that I feel has some resonance at the moment, given the concurrent shootings of Kirk and of two school kids in Evergreen, Colorado, a town I once lived in. I posted this in April 2023, but its subject is timeless. Even when an AR-15 isn’t directly involved with some atrocity, its culture usually is. F or decades, a standard tactic of anti-abortion activists was to display, in as much gruesome detail as possible, photos of aborted fetuses. It was a vile tactic — an easy punch in the gut to the gullible and squeamish — but it’s hard to deny its effectiveness, or the inflammatory role it played in the culture wars. It was, in a way, a harbinger of the death of Roe v. Wade. Revulsion, whether we like it or not, is a real political tactic. An extreme tactic, to be sure, but it has its uses. Hold...

N ot enough is being said about ripple effects. We still haven't felt the real fallout from the destructive policies and harebrained leadership we are currently stuck with. The effects have yet to fully ripple. When these policies are announced, we’re all rightly appalled at the immediate headlines. Then, even before the next news cycle, we’re on to the next atrocity before the last one even has time to dry. Outrage fatigue sets in, and we can’t keep up. But the toxic effects of these policies, while easily predicted, tend to happen in slow motion, and over time. Often, they’re not even perceptible, except through statistics. When the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fired last month for publishing employment numbers that reflected reality, as opposed to Trump’s fantasies, it was clearly a ripple effect of terrible policies, and Trump didn’t like it at all. Whether they ripple through the economy, the environment, the legal system, the healthcar...

  Even if all your knowledge of criminal law was learned, not in law school, or even in high school, but by watching reruns of Law & Order , you would still have a better understanding of the basics than, it appears, anyone in the higher levels of the Justice Department. You would, at least, be somewhat familiar with concepts like “probable cause” and “reasonable doubt,” which is more than it seems we can say for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Pirro, known more for her boozy lies on Fox News, seems to have forgotten much about the law since first being admitted to the bar, pun intended. Fortunately, there are judges willing to throw out her slipshod, outrageously political cases, which have seen a number of D.C. residents tossed in jail for the most specious of reasons. All so that Trump — as well as Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, and Pirro herself — can show the deluded base how effective they are at fighting crime in the supposedly blighted streets...

Labor Day Weekend, end of summer, and I have nothing new to say about the utter mess we're in. So once again I fall back on past posts that, I hope, still have something useful to say. This one is from April 2021, when Biden was a new president and there was a cautious, I've-been-burned-before kind of hope in the air. The piece is notable for how incredibly deluded it turned out to be — I was wrong about almost everything, and the optimism you read here couldn't have been more misplaced. Yet even so, the main points of the piece remain pertinent as pundits galore continue to bloviate about the "extremes on both sides."   Lately there has been much written — and more than a little hand-wringing — about the fate of the fabled American “Center,” that vast majority of sensible people who just wish we could all get along. In particular, there was an  op-ed in the  Times  last week by Thomas B. Edsall — a seasoned, generally respected journ...