Posts Tagged ‘woke’

“Centrist uprising” against Boudin in San Francisco shows how extreme the “Ultra Left” Democrats are

Posted: June 12, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

The big political news from last week, unless that is, your only news sources are MSNBC and CNN, was not the prime-time January 6 show trial masquerading as a hearing, but the resounding vote by San Francisco voters to recall radical leftist so-called prosecutor Chesa Boudin. 

Oh, he is a piece of work, this one. Boudin’s parents were Weather Underground terrorists, both of whom served long prison terms for their crimes, including murder. Boudin’s guardians were two other ex-Weather Underground terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, he attended an elite private high school, and he is a Yale law school graduate. Boudin was served a translator for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. In 2019, campaigning as if he was a woke social worker, Boudin was elected district attorney for San Francisco. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin the candidate said. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.” Well, I’ll concede this fact to him. Boudin honored his campaign promises.

And criminals received the message. Shoplifting soared under Boudin, as well as what one Nation writer, Sasha Abramsky, called other “low-end crimes,” including burglary and car break-ins. To me, a low-end crime is littering or jaywalking, but I am not a leftist. For many people, particularly renters and the poor, an automobile is their most valuable asset. Low-end? Really? Abramsky, you are quite out of touch, but of course you are, you write for the Nation.

The murder rate went up under Boudin. His misrule was a validation of the Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” policy of policing. Notice that I didn’t call it the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement.

I’ve only visited San Francisco once, in 2010, which residents of the City on the Bay probably look back on as “the good old days.” I was appalled by the level of homelessness there, and by all accounts, there are now many more indigents sprawled out on San Franciso sidewalks. Tellingly, during my time there I noticed the strong smell of urine even in the best neighborhoods. Boudin couldn’t smell the pee?

I’ve heard there are Republicans in San Francisco, albeit very few. The two Republican opponents of Nancy Pelosi–her entire district is within the city–collected 11-percent of the vote in 2020. But 60 percent of voters in San Francisco voted to purge Boudin last week. Earlier this month, another Nation writer, Christopher D. Cook, warned of a “centrist uprising” against progressivism in San Francisco. And all of this time, particularly from the left, I’ve been told we need more moderation in our politics, which of course to them means conservatives veering over to their side. In fact, as Democrat policies, from Biden down to Boudin, prove toxic, it’s liberals who are heading to the center, which is best exemplified by Bill Maher’s regular attacks on the far-left. 

Over at the Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. warns of centrist Democrats attacking far-left policies on crime. Writing for the New York Times, Shane Goldmacher commented, “Centrists and former law enforcement leaders hailed the successful San Francisco recall as a crushing blow to progressives.”

Oh, those evil centrists, they are taking America down a treacherous moderate path.

Boudin, true to form for any leftist, blamed “right-wing billionaires” for his defeat. Oh, what’s this? Radical leftist billionaire George Soros contributed to an anti-recall political action committee.

The Democrats of course don’t possess the right side of the political spectrum. And they are losing the center. Or perhaps it’s already lost to them. Which leaves the Democratic Party with the extreme left, or to channel Biden’s insult on conservatives which ricocheted against him, the Ultra Left.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Leftists in their silo created the Ministry of Truth, Ultra MAGA, and Chicago’s Summer of Joy

Posted: May 29, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

On occasion I get accused of living in a right-wing silo, or if you prefer, bubble.

But it’s left-wingers who are more likely to dwell in their own political silo. And it’s hurting their side. 

Good.

And because many people, particularly leftists, are terrible listeners, I have to repeat myself yet again.

Here we go.

Even if I wanted to, I can’t remain in a right-wing silo. Besides–broadcast and cable media, as well as streaming services, are dripping wet with liberal and woke bias. And I can’t always avoid them. Last year, Mrs. Marathon Pundit underwent a minor medical procedure. In the waiting room I had to sit through ABC’s Good Morning America, hosted by Clintonista George Stephanopoulos, and then, on the same network, The View. 

Earlier this year I had some complicated dental work done. My dentist has TVs in front of each chair. What was on? The View. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was one of the show’s guests. 

“John,” my dentist calmly said to me as she drilled, “tell me if you experience pain.”

Conservatives–and if you are a regular viewer of MSNBC or CNN this will shock you–are more tolerant of people who hold opposing views.

It’s an old study, but Pew Research found that liberals were more likely to block or unfriend a conservative than the other way around. 

The mainstream media, the Biden White House, and big-city governments are leftist monocultures. Big tech too, but I’ll attack them again, I am sure, in a future blog post.

When you live in an echo chamber, you are bound to inadvertently come up with ideas that outsiders will mock. Or even, like a lit stick of dynamite with a long fuse, have them thrown back at you. 

Last month, a contender–and oh my, is the competition steep–for worst Biden cabinet member, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board. Conservatives immediately pounced, and almost in unison, called the group “Orwellian” and labeled it “the Ministry of Truth,” which is where reluctant liar Winston Smith toiled in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. When it was revealed that a disinformationist, who had cast doubts on the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Nina Jankowicz, was the head of that panel, the Orwell analogy was complete. 

One rule of politics, one that the woke ignores because of what Ben Shapiro calls the left’s “unearned sense of moral superiority,” is that when (not if, because the right errs too) you make a whopper of a mistake, you must immediately correct it. So rather than eliminating the Disinformation Governance Board as soon as Mayorkas acknowledged its existence, “the Ministry of Truth” and Jankowicz dangled for three weeks. During that time the Orwellian memes of Jankowicz flooded social media, and an embarrassing TikTok video of Jankowicz, singing to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” emerged, which gained her the nickname Scary Poppins.

Anita Dunn, who in 2009 cited the genocidal Mao Tse-Tung as one of her favorite philosophers, which led to her departure from the Obama White House, worked on the 2020 Biden campaign. She was briefly a senior White House advisor to Biden. Dunn is said to have been behind the president’s recent use of not only MAGA as a pejorative, but the heretofore unheard moniker “Ultra MAGA.” Conservatives on social media immediately and proudly declared themselves as “Ultra MAGA,” mirroring the response in 2016 when Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump supporters “deplorables.” During a speech earlier this month, Biden referred to his predecessor as “the great MAGA king.” On Truth Social, Trump struck back with a Lord of the Rings-themed meme as he gleefully adopted the nickname.

If Dunn didn’t live in a left-wing bubble, she would have seen all of those snarky responses coming.   

On the local level, last month Chicago’s inept leftist mayor, Lori Lightfoot, declared that the summer of 2022 will be “the Summer of Joy.” John Kass has derisively referred to the Summer of Joy in several of his columns and he poked fun at it in his most recent podcast. Hey Jackass, the sarcastic yet accurate tabulator of Chicago murders and shootings, is selling Summer of Joy T-shirts and coffee cups. Now that Memorial Day weekend has arrived, every time there is a mass shooting in Chicago–and we only have to look back a few hours to find the most recent one–bloggers and right-leaning social media users will quip something along the lines of “Wow, here is more ‘Summer of Love’ Chicago carnage for you.”

All Lightfoot would have needed to prevent this mockery is to have a politically moderate advisor–she would never hire a conservative–who would be bold enough to say, “I don’t think ‘Summer of Love’ is a wise idea, and here’s why.”

As Mary Poppins, not Biden’s Scary Poppins, said in that classic movie, “Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of their own, can’t see past the end of his nose.”

Such is the status of liberalism in 2022.

Which is why it will be a glorious election season for the right this year.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Mike Myers’ Netflix debacle, The Pentaverate, attacks good taste and conservatives

Posted: May 15, 2022 by John Ruberry in comedy, culture, doctor who, entertainment
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By John Ruberry

After a long day at work earlier this month I clicked on the “Surprise Me” feature on Netflix. What popped up was Mike Myers’ new vehicle, The Pentaverate.

“Well,” I said to myself, “this might be pretty good.” 

In fact, The Pentaverate doesn’t even measure up to “pretty bad.” The six episode limited series is one of the worst shows I’ve suffered through. Oh, somehow I managed to view a couple episodes of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. I know about awful.

Warning: There are numerous spoilers and some rather disgusting things that I will mention in my review of this Netflix series.

The origin of The Pentaverate dates back to a throwaway line from Myers’ second film, So I Married an Axe Murderer, where the father of Myers’ lead character, also played by Myers, claims that a secret society, the Pentaverate, a five-man cabal, which at one time included Colonel Sanders as a member, rules the world. In this series narrator Jeremy Irons tells us, the original members of the Pentaverate discovered in 1347, contrary to the belief of the Catholic Church, it was fleas that spread the bubonic plague. 

As the first episode begins, the newest member of the group of five, Dr. Hobart Clark (Keegan-Michael Key), a scientist, is accepted into the Pentaverate after he is kidnapped. Apparently, he is the first non-white fellow of the all-male group, replacing a member who mysteriously died. The other members are played by Myers. Lord Lordington, an elderly Englishman, Bruce Baldwin, an Australian media mogul, who of course is based on Rupert Murdoch, Shep Gordon, a manager of various rock acts, a real person who is the subject of a documentary directed by Myers, and Mishu Ivanov, a Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin crony.

Warning! Not-safe-for-work language in the trailer.

But Myers isn’t done with his roles. The lead character of The Pentaverate is Ken Scarborough, a television reporter who wears plaid sportscoats; he is a quirky throwback from the 1970s who does man-on-the-street interviews of other oddballs, while overshadowing them. Scarborough works for, wait for it, Toronto-based CACA news. Yep, caca. 

The other four Pentaverate members manufacture a story that Dr. Clark, who was invited into the secret society because they believe he can reverse climate change, is dead. Clark’s phony passing occurs while attempting to mimic an internet video fad–kissing your own anus. Clark’s room at Pentaverate headquarters is guarded by a sasquatch, who immediately defecates outside the scientist’s door. 

In addition to a Shrek cameo, Myers plays two other characters, internet personality Rex Smith, a stand-in for Alex Jones, and Anthony Lansdowne, a conspiracy theorist from New Hampshire. 

Besides being an assault on good taste, The Pentaverate is an attack on right-wingers, with the implied message that all conservatives are conspiracy whackos like Lansdowne. He is a believer, or has been a believer, in QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Illuminati. His last words as he falls to his death is, “But what about her emails?” 

Lansdowne, in his bumper-sticker laden van, which not surprisingly has a malfunctioning portable toilet, drives Scarborough and his pre-woke Doctor Who-like young female companion, Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) to New York City, which looks nothing like today’s NYC, but more like your standard Doctor Who “future metropolis.” Scarborough, recently fired by CACA, is convinced by Clayton and Lansdowne to infiltrate Pentaverate headquarters, and he does so after a painful penis tug initiation. 

Clark, following an intimate evening with the Pentaverate’s executive assistant Patty Davis (Debi Mazar) in the Moon Room studio–did the Pentaverate fake the moon landings?–suddenly dies, this time for real. He is promptly replaced by casino billionaire Skip Cho (Ken Jeong). Oh, I have never thought Jeong was funny. Jeong recently showed his true political colors after childishly storming off the set of The Masked Singer after Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant.

Myers seemingly hasn’t emotionally moved on from being an 11-year-old. Flatulence jokes are among the things that ruined his cinema take on Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, a children’s film, by the way. Scatological so-called humor also undermined another Myers movie bomb, The Love Guru. 

Outside of Myers’ fading fame, why did Netflix greenlight this debacle? Could it be that woke Netflix executives fell in love with The Pentaverate’s snide attacks on conservatives, who they probably believe are personified by Smith and Lansdowne? I have liberal friends. Really, I do. And many of them insist that I take marching orders from Alex Jones.

Here’s a tip for Netflix and Myers: the first rule of comedy is that comedies need to be funny.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Its stock value plummeted 35-percent last month. Yes, when you go woke you go broke. And I can’t think of a single Netflix dramatic series that is aimed at conservatives. Longmire was the closest show I can think of, but production of it ended in 2017, and Longmire was originally an A&E offering. And as I wrote in last week’s review of Ozark, that otherwise quite enjoyable show contorted itself to find ways to attack Republicans.

Over 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. That’s a lot of viewers, Netflix. We don’t live in vans with clogged toilets. We own televisions. 

Cloying use of easter eggs, that is, references to other works that do nothing to advance the story or add laughs–assuming of course there is even one laugh in The Pentaverate–is also another problem here. Winks to other Myers’ works, along with yet another tired replay of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Game of Thrones, are simply annoying. Rob Lowe, a veteran of several Myers movies, makes an unnecessary appearance.

Myers’ acting, outside of his sympathetic portrayal of Scarborough, is subpar. In his review of The Cat in the Hat, Roger Ebert noticed that at times Myers sounded a bit like his Linda Richman “Coffee Talk” character from SNL. The use of convincing accents is supposed to be one of Myers’ strengths, but his Lansdowne character’s accent, rather than sounding like what you’ll hear from a rustic New Englander, varies from a Canadian to a New Yorker style of speech–that is, when Lansdowne isn’t coming across like Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World.

Oh, when there is a crack within the five members of the Pentaverate, who do you think is behind it? Why of course! It’s the casino billionaire and the Murdoch stand-in. 

I hated The Pentaverate. Hated, hated, hated. If you have any sense of taste or decency, you will hate it too. 

You have been warned. 

Oh, if you think I am just a grumpy old man with a minority opinion on this actual sh*t show, as of May 15, the average critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 20 percent. Only once in the last week have I noticed The Pentaverate ranking as a top-ten most viewed program on Netflix. And based on the CGI and the A-List (to some people) cast, I imagine Netflix wasted a lot of money on this fiasco.

The Pentaverate is rated TV-MA for full frontal (possibly with use of prosthetics) nudity, animals engaged in sex, violence, suicide, adult situations, foul language, and scatological references. Well, at least no one smokes in it. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

America’s worst year since 1864

Posted: December 26, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime
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Blogger this year at the Chickamauga battlefield

By John Ruberry

With Christmas past us it’s time to look back at the current year, 2021. And with a less than a week left we can say that 2021 was America’s worst year since 1864.

Why was 1864 so bad? While there were significant military successes for the Northern armies fighting to keep the United States together–Atlanta and Savannah were captured and General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was locked into siege warfare in Virginia–and a potential political victory of the Confederacy was averted by Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, Americans were still killing each other by the thousands. The following year was an improvement, despite Lincoln’s assassination. The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865 and the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified. 

As for 2021, it got off to a wretched start when hostiles, American ones, stormed the US Capitol in a riot. We have to go back to another horrible year for America, 1814, when the British Army seized the Capitol, for the only other time that happened. The hooligans who entered the Senate and House chambers on January 6 were not participating in an insurrection, despite claims made to this day by CNN and MSNBC. Sure, the rioters wanted to keep Donald J. Trump in power, but they had no plans for a coup, such as imprisoning Joe Biden, taking control of the military, and dissolving Congress.

Bad people? Yes. Nutty? That too. And sorry leftists, President Trump did not call for an insurrection.

And what about the people who were supposed to protect the Capitol, such as the Capitol Hill Police and the who they report to? You know, Congress, which is run by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They failed America.

In the fraught election of 2020, a feeble old man, Joe Biden, was elected president. “Lunch Bucket Joe from Scranton” was chosen as the Democratic nominee because he was viewed by many as the “safe” alternative to Trump, and not a radical like Bernie Sanders. Biden’s “good years,” assuming he ever had them, are well in the past. Biden, and the people who control him, such as Ron Klain or Susan Rice, went full-blown leftist on Inauguration Day. Economically, the result is the highest level of inflation in decades. These price increases, once dismissed by the Biden White House as “transitory,” will likely continue indefinitely, serving as a hidden tax for all Americans.

While not quite energy independent as Trump claimed, our nation was headed into that direction under his leadership. Shortly after his inauguration Biden suspended new drilling and fracking on federal lands. It has since been reversed in court, but the White House maintains a malevolent attitude towards the world’s most reliable form of energy, fossil fuels. Gasoline costs over $1 more per gallon since Biden became president. Biden also cancelled the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, essentially firing thousands of union workers.

An effective commander-in-chief, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, does his job so well it appears that he is doing nothing at all. While Trump certainly doesn’t have Ike’s soft touch, I’m of the belief that Trump would have seen the possibility of a supply chain crisis coming and would have taken steps to ensure we would not have seen the bottleneck of cargo ships outside America’s largest harbors. 

Meanwhile in the Biden administration the cabinet officer in charge of our supply chain, Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, went on an unannounced two-month paternity leave just as the shipping crisis began. Rather than resigning for failure or dereliction of duty, Buttigieg’s is being hawked by some Democrats as a possible 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden choose not to run for reelection. While family is of course important, liberals often claim that public service is the highest calling. Buttigieg could have simply quit as Transporation secretary. Or not taken the job at all.

While not something that the federal government is directly in charge of, violent crime plagued America’s largest cities this year–and all of those cities are run by Democrats. A dozen cities endured record murder totals. Some jurisdictions, such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County, Milwaukee County, and Cook County (Chicago), are burdened with woke prosecutors engaging in catch-and-release policies regarding criminals.

Biden was elected last November because more voters saw him as more capable to fight the COVID-19 epidemic than Trump. But wait, what’s this? There were more COVID deaths in the United States in 2021 than in 2020, despite the availability of vaccines. And lockdown and mask mandates are ramping up again with the new omicron variant, which so far has killed one American. That number will surely climb but I have a strong suspicion that omicron will not be killing 15,000 Americans a week as soon as next month, which is what the politicized CDC is predicting. 

In order to prove Trump wrong, Biden has proved him right in regard to enforcing the law at our southern border. In late October the Washington Post reported that a record 1.7 million people arrested while trying to cross that border. In addition to illegal aliens, it’s believed that large amounts of fentanyl have been smuggled across the border in 2021.

As Biden as Biden is, his vice president is even worse, the inept cackler, Kamala Harris.

I’ve saved the worst for last. America suffered a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan. Biden vowed that our departure from Afghanistan would look nothing like our bugging-out from South Vietnam in 1975. He was right, it was worse. As with the border crisis, the Biden White House blamed Trump for the debacle. While Trump did enter an agreement to pull our troops out of Afghanistan this year, it was not a treaty. We could have back out. Trump says, and I believe him, that he never would have made our country look so feeble, yes, feeble like Biden physically and mentally is, if we had departed Afghanistan under his watch.

When the next international crisis comes, our allies will have understandable doubts about American resolve. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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