Blaming the President

There's a tendency for the party out of power to hold the President personally responsible for tragedies. This often veers into conspiracy theory. One example for President Obama is Benghazi where many Republicans are convinced that Obama called off a rescue mission, leaving four Americans to die. Various Congressional committees have investigated this and none has found any proof.

But that's nothing compared to the left's need to blame Republican presidents. This was most recently on display after the tragic shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue which left 11 dead. The shooter previously announced that he was against President Trump and had voted against him. Regardless, Democrats and the news media lost no time in blaming Trump for the shooting. Trump, according to them, has raised the acceptable level of violence through loose talk to the point that shooting Jews is acceptable. He also used coded references. By complaining about George Soros, the billionaire who has donated millions to oppose Trump, is sending a dog whistle about Jews. never mind that Soros is a non-practicing Jew and Trump's daughter and son-in-law are practicing Orthodox Jews, Trump must be sending signals about killing Jews. This is a case of projection - they hate Trump so much that they can't admit that something bad can happen without Trump being the instigator.

This happened earlier. A news report listed Trump as the collaborator during a hurricane.

This is not unique to Trump, though. The left did it to President Bush.

After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, I watched the contributors for the Daily KOS comb through the state budget. They were positive that the levee failed because funds had been cut to pay for Bush's foreign wars. The levees actually failed because the cement parts weren't sufficiently robust. There was even a theory that Bush ordered the levees to be dynamited in order to floor the poor, black sections.

But that pales next to the 9/11 Truthers. To them, it is inconceivable that something as big as 9/11 could happen without the government's cooperation. They invented a conspiracy where the government secretly planted explosives in the Twin Towers and blew them up. Never mind how impossible it would be to secrete enough explosives to do that, they invented an imaginary form of thermite that could do it.

These are all irrational responses fed by hate for the purpose of justifying their hate. But they are not unique to Trump.

Political Violence

Two incidents in the last week have the left up in arms against President Trump. The first was a series of bombs sent to prominent Democrats. There were at least 14 of these. None actually exploded and all were sent to people who have mail rooms that open their packages for them so these were almost certainly meant to intimidate rather than harm. Far more serious was a gunman who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh in one of the worst attacks against Jews in US history.

The left blamed President Trump for both incidents. While it's true that the bomber appears to be a Trump supporter, he also appears to be a nut case.

The gunman is both anti-Semitic and anti-Trump. Considering that Trump is our naiton's most pro-Israel president and his son-in-law and daughter are Jewish, as are the President's grand-children, there's just no way that Trump could have influenced someone who is violently anti-Jew. Regardless, the left has been blaming Trump regardless, accusing him of using anti-Semitic code-words and in raising the level of violence in general.

Here's the thing, most of the violence is from the left. Just this month someone sent ricin-laced letters to members of the Trump administration including the President. These did not actually have ricin, only ground castor beans which is enough to set off ricin alarms. So this was nearly identical to the fake bombs - both were designed to alarm people rather than actually hurt anyone. But the ricin letters barely got any publicity while the bombs were a top story for days.

But the ricin letters where just the latest in a long line of violence against Republicans. That includes a Bernie Saunders supporter trying to assassinate the Republican members of Congress and going back to more Bernie supporters physically disrupting Trump rallies in 2016. Someone attacked a Republican candidate with a knife. A different Republican candidate, a woman, had her arm twisted. Republican headquarters have been burned or had their windows smashed. I could go on but you get the idea. There are a disproportionate number of attacks against Republicans than Democrats. But the left doesn't even see this.

When condemning political violence, it's important to condemn all political violence. Otherwise you are saying that you support it as long as it's against people you disapprove of.

That's what's been happening. The left condemns the KKK and the Proud Boys but cheers on Antifa. They complain about Trump's violent rhetoric while ignoring actual violence against Republicans.

This shouldn't be a surprise. This is just an extension of the left's definition of hate speech. For years they've been claiming that hate speech is not free speech and should not be protected but their definition of hate speech usually comes down to any speech they hate. Now they've extended that to violence. If it's against Republicans then it's justified because the Republicans must have brought it on themselves (this was an excuse after the Republican softball team was attacked). In the few cases where Democrats are attacked then it is immediately blamed on President Trump.

There are a couple of special cases that should be mentioned. First, if the violent offender is Muslim then the conversation immediately turns to gun control.

The second special case is the left's growing antisemitism. I mentioned this to a far-left friend on Facebook a few months ago and was called a troll. But antisemitism is growing world-wide and it's mainly from the left. There is a direct relationship between colleges with active BDS movements and antisemitic incidents. Bernie Sanders had to assure people that he was ethnically Jewish but not a practicing Jew. A member of Washington DC's city council insisted that Jews control the weather. Louis Farrakhan maintains relations with many Democrats regardless of how anti-Jewish his rhetoric is. Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of one of the anti-Trump women's marches has similarly made anti-Jewish statements. England's far-left Labor leader, Jeremy Corbin, has alienated Jews in his party. And, of course, the gunman who shot the Jews in Pittsburgh hated Trump as well as Jews. But the American left refuses to see this. They like to think of themselves as loving diversity but they also have a growing hatred for Israel which spills over into a general dislike for Jews in general and practicing Jews in particular.

Elizabeth Warren Enters the 2020 Race and Looses It in a Single Day

The initial headline sounded good: Senator Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test done and it proved that she does have some Indian ancestors. For years she's been haunted by the fact that in her early career she was listed as Native American despite looking whiter than white.

The problem was in the details. Yes, a researcher found some evidence of Indian ancestry but it was much further back than she'd been claiming. Rather than her mother being related to two modern tribes, the DNA analysis showed that the apparent Indian ancestor was six to ten generations back, far too distant to affect her mother's status. Further, there is very little DNA mapping from North American tribes so the analyst used Mexican and Peruvian DNA as a proxy. So all we really know is that, like most European/Americans, Warren had a distant ancestor who was from somewhere in the Americas. That's a long way from proving the Cherokee ancestry she'd originally claimed.

So the initial story was favorable but the follow-ups will continue to haunt her. She took a vague, unsubstantiated claim (every family has those) and proved it wrong while claiming it proved her right. In doing so, she brought the whole false claim back into the news cycle. What had been old news became news again.

And she did it three weeks before an election where the Democrats can't afford any further distractions angering Democratic campaign professionals across the country. It also gave President Trump a chance to dig her on her Indian claim yet again. By the end of the day she was sending out angry tweets, sounding more like Hillary Clinton than the high-minded icon she pretends to be.

This proves that A) Warren is running for president, B) she's already reacting to Trump rather than forcing him to react to her, C) her timing and judgement are really poor.

Six years ago she was widely followed. Her line about corporations not accomplishing things on their own was so powerful that Barack Obama appropriated it with his "you didn't build this" line in the 2012 campaign. Two years ago Bernie Sanders was seen as the consolation candidate after Warren decided not to run. But those days are past. She's no longer widely quoted. She's forced to do stunts like her "saving capitalism act" (an example of really bad economic policy) and releasing a genetic study that shows she's no more Native American than most whites.

Warren still has a decent shot at the nomination but there's no way she can defeat President Trump.

Why I Don't Believe Dr. Christine Ford

In evaluating the conflicting testimony between Dr. Ford and Judge Brett Kananaugh, people have been trying to read how earnest each was and how "believable" each seemed. This is the wrong approach. Rather than trying to judge how well they presented their case, we need to look at externals.

Years ago I was on a Duck tour of Plymouth, Ma. My daughter asked me if something the guide said was true. My answer was that the things I knew about were incorrect so I didn't trust the parts that I knew nothing about.

This is how I approach Dr. Ford's statements.

She claims that, while a teenager, Kavanaugh placed his hand over her mouth making her think that he'd kill her by accident and causing trauma that lasts through today. She said that the event is burned into her hippocampus.

The events she describes happened so long ago that it is impossible to prove or disprove with anything approaching certainty. But we can look at more recent events.

According to Dr. Ford, she has crippling claustrophobia caused by the attack. When she and her husband remodeled her house she insisted on having a second front door as an escape route from her living room. Her husband didn't understand the reasoning and loss of curb appeal. This lead to couple's counseling which is when she first revealed that she had been attacked.

But, records show that the house was remodeled in 2008 and she went to counseling in 2012 so the one did not directly lead to the other. Further, the extra door appears to have been installed so that the Fords could (and still do) rent out a spare room. And pictures of the Ford residence from Google Street View show that the extra door is not particularly visible so there is no affect on its curb appeal.

In other words, Dr. Ford wasn't being truthful.

Another supposed symptom of Dr. Ford's claustrophobia is her inability to fly. Her lawyer gave this as the reason that she could not appear before the Senate on September 24 - because she had to drive across the country.

But it turns out that she flies regularly. So that one is an outright lie.

She also told the Washington Post that she opposed President Trump because Kavanaugh was on the President's list of possible Supreme Court nominees and she did not want to live in a country where Kavanaugh was on the highest court. But that can't be true. Trump didn't add Kavanaugh to his list until a year after his inauguration.

These lies are significant, too. Part of Dr. Ford's story is that she's had life-long psychological problems because of Kavanaugh but the examples she gives are false. Does she even have any real lasting effects from the incident? If so then why did she feel the need to make some up? The obvious answer is that she wanted to make the incident more serious than it was. If she'd simply said that, while they were both teens and drunk, Kavanaugh had felt her up and put his hand over her mouth but it had no lasting effect on her then Kavanaugh would already be confirmed. So she embellished her story.

And that's where it really unravels. Once we establish that she embellished the facts we have to wonder how much of her testimony is true? Is she really convinced that it was Kavanaugh?

We also have to remember that this is a woman who twice traveled to DC to march in anti-Trump protests. So we have to wonder if she's really relating a traumatic experience from her teens or if she's using this as a chance to #resist?

The worst falsehood anyone has caught Kavanaugh in was that he was legally allowed to drink while in college. (Yes, some people have come forward and said that Kananaugh lied about his drinking but none of them have actually contradicted his sworn statements.) None of the various accusations about Kavanaugh have complimented each other. And Ford's is the most credible one.

So, measuring the statements that we can check by the two parties, I believe Kavanaugh is the one telling the truth.