Saturday Miscellany

First, from Alan Dershowitz, a comment on the recent decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to ban Donald Trump from the state ballot.

Almost everyone considers it an appallingly anti-democratic gesture. Unfortunately, polls suggest that a majority of Americans favor the decision.

Anyway, Dershowitz wrote on his Substack newsletter:

The decision by the all-Democrat Supreme Court of Colorado to remove Donald Trump from the ballot is among the most undemocratic and unconstitutional rulings that I have ever read in my 60 years of teaching and practicing law.

The 4-3 judgment purports to derive its authority from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted after the Civil War. The measures were designed to prevent individuals who had engaged in the insurrection and rebellion of 1861-1864 from running for certain political offices.

But authors of the 14th Amendment never intended for it to be used to deny voters the right to decide who their next president would be in all future elections.

To the framers of this amendment that would have been utterly ridiculous.

Second, Glenn Greenwald offers his opinion about the court decision, because it pretends that Trump was a convicted insurrectionist; he was not: 

Just to recall: Jack Smith could have charged Trump with insurrection or inciting one. He did not. Trump has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, criminal insurrection. 

Liberal culture long ago stopped caring about due process, but it's still a vital safeguard.

When you’ve lost Glenn Greenwald…..

Third, the lieutenant governor of California, Elena Kounalakis tried, and apparently succeeded in out-stupiding everyone else:

In her statement calling on Trump to be removed from the ballot, idiot California Lt. Gov. @EleniForCA writes “the Constitution is clear. You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist.”

As everyone who had ever taken a civics course immediately chimed in-- the age limit for the presidency is 35, not 40.

Fourth, the Associated Press, indulging in rhetorical hyperbole, has declared the Israeli war against Gaza to be the most destructive in human history. 

Guess which side they are on?

Tyler O’Neil responds:

So, let me get this straight: Israel’s month-long campaign in Gaza, which warns civilians before striking and took a pause to free hostages, is worse than Leningrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and the indiscriminate massacres the Japanese perpetrated in Nanjing & Manilla?

And, Emily Zanotti adds this:

… dude, we nuked two cities in 1945 and that wasn’t even the bombing with the highest death count of that particular war

Fifth, we know that the Biden administration is enabling the Yemeni Houthis, allowing them to shut down all shipping through the Red Sea. 

As for Obama’s contribution to the current Middle East war, Shoshana recalls the facts. Doesn’t this sound familiar?

"In 2014, Hamas kidnapped and killed three teens, including Naftali Frenkel, an American 16-year-old.

“I’ve murdered three Jews,” the killer boasted. As Israel battled Hamas, Obama called for a ceasefire. “I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza,” he argued, while describing the terrorists as having behaved “extraordinarily irresponsibly”. 

“The US goal right now would be to make sure that the ceasefire holds, that Gaza can begin the process of rebuilding,” Obama said and urged that there needs to be “some prospects for an opening of Gaza so that they do not feel walled off.” 

After the fighting died down, the Palestinian Authority asked for $4 billion to rebuild Gaza, the international community pledged $5.4 billion with $212 million of it coming from America. 

“The people of Gaza do need our help, desperately,” Secretary of State John Kerry claimed. 

The ceasefire which allowed Hamas to rearm and rebuild was one in a series that led directly to the horrors in the Israeli communities near Gaza attacked by the murderous Islamic group. 

Obama’s pivot on Hamas was part of his pivot on the Muslim Brotherhood. When he delivered his ‘New Beginning’ speech in Cairo in 2009 , he specifically requested that the Muslim Brotherhood attend as he not only called for a ‘Palestinian’ terrorist state inside Israel and negotiations with Iran, but also legitimized Hamas which is an arm of the Brotherhood."

Now you know why Michelle Obama, in particular, has been silent about the October 7 massacre.

Sixth, an atypically astute point by David Frum on Twitter:

You don’t find a lot of murderous antisemites in senior business jobs. You don’t find many in the military or national security agencies. Maybe someone in academia should ponder why their one sector of public life is so susceptible to a plague so rare everywhere else. 

Seventh, meanwhile, as the world tires of Ukraine, its president has decided that he must draft 50-year-old men, and send them to the front lines. 

Nellie Bowles offers a commentary on The Free Press:

I’m not a military expert, but if you’re detaining old men (again, nothing but respect, don’t yell at me) and forcing them into battle and saying you need 500,000 more of them. . . maybe it’s time to make a deal? I was shouted down at dinner the other day for saying this. I don’t want Europe to fall. But just. Feels like we’re losing a lot here? And we should keep some elderly Ukrainian men alive?

Eighth, since our media, not to mention our president, seems more concerned with saving Gazans-- a la Obama policy-- we need to search to find information about the current state of Hamas.

Aviva Klompas writes this on Twitter:

The IDF has killed around 8,000 Hamas terrorists in Gaza since Hamas started this war. That's about one quarter of the terror group's fighting force wiped out. Hamas fighters have two choices: surrender or die.

Ninth, Sean Davis, normally with the satirical Babylon Bee, has this to say about the current political scene:

Joe Biden is imprisoning his political opponents while his friends cheer the murder of Jews and his administration funnels cash to Hamas and Iran, but yeah it’s the other guy who’s Hitler.

Tenth, astute observer Jessica Bennett has noticed that America is suffering a resurgence of girl culture. From Beyonce to Taylor Swift to Barbie… American girls seem to be rediscovering a song that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote in a 1958 musical; the song being: “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

As Bennett mentions, seemingly in passing, feminists hated being girls. Almost as much as they hated being called girls. They were women, or better, persons. 

Bennett is puzzled by the simple fact that this resurgence of joy in girlhood accompanies a time when girls are not doing very well. She does not have the mental acuity to put the two together, and to see that teaching girls that they belong to an oppressed class makes them hate themselves for what they are. 

So, the arrival of girl culture is a rebuke to feminism. Bennett does not quite get it, but allow her a word:

Decades after my mother’s generation tried to dissuade the use of “girl” to refer to grown women, that four-letter word, with all its connotations, still seemed to make things involving women more playful, less shrill, a little more fun. And who didn’t want to be fun? Surely there was nothing harmful about the idea, however silly, that a simple dinner could be a feminist act, or that light physical exercise could be an exercise in self-confidence. 

Unfortunately, she is puzzled by the advent of girl culture in a time of feminist ideology. Could there be a more complete repudiation of feminism? As long as she does not see the connection, she can join in the joy.

In many ways, these displays of girly euphoria have been a delight to watch; pure, unfiltered, even unselfconscious, in a time that is the opposite. They also felt like an antidote, or maybe a carefully calculated distancing, from the realities and difficulties of being women. 

As for the condition of girls, Bennett sees that it is not very good. Is it the world that feminism wrought? Now feminists ought to accept their responsibility. Their proposed solution is the problem:

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past year, it’s that girls, however strong, however able to endure, however good at pretending, are not OK. As study upon study over the past year has shown, girls face record sadness and hopelessness, double that of boys. They’re anxious. They are inundated with conflicting, and constant, messages, about who they should dress like, look like, act like, be, on platforms that have been shown to be toxic to them, and where they also face frequent harassment. In the real world, even amid celebrations of so-called “body positivity” and endless reminders (usually in the form of product placement) that “you are enough,” girls face record rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia; they’re wearing anti-aging products designed for middle age.

It is a basic and incontrovertible moral failing to refuse to recognize-- no less take responsibility for-- the simple fact that the solution you proposed to the condition that Betty Friedan called the problem that had no name has made things worse.

Eleventh, our fearless warriors have decided that they might do something to open up shipping in the Red Sea. They are going to talk tough about the Houthis, and will label their activities, Operation Prosperity Guardian. Obviously, not very original or cogent.

Anyway, the operation has already collapsed.

OSINTdefender remarks on Twitter:

Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea has practically Collapsed as France, Spain, and Italy have all announced their Withdrawal from the U.S. Command Structure for the Operation, with the Three Nations stating they will only conduct further Maritime Operations under the Command of NATO and/or the European Union and not the United States.

At least they had good intentions.

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