The Take Offense Offensive

John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Reason, Republicans

Yesterday it was Elijah Cummings, today it’s John McCain who took The Offense Offensive on the road.

Like any good lefty, Sen. John McCain has officially taken offense at Young Turk Ted Cruz—but not for slights against his own sanctimonious self. No. Our noble neoconservative is too big for such pettiness. He’s taken up The Take Offense Offensive over slights Bob Dole is alleged to have been dealt by Cruz.

McCain the insufferable:

Sen. John McCain said Friday he doesn’t mind criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz, but he called on the Texas Republican to apologize for comments he made about former Sen. Bob Dole in a speech Thursday.

The Arizona Republican said he spoke with Cruz on the Senate floor after his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“I spoke to Ted Cruz. He and I have a cordial relationship about this,” McCain said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Friday. “He can say what he wants to about me, and he can say anything he wants to, I think, about Mitt [Romney], Mitt’s capable of taking it. But when he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country?”

Cruz made fun of McCain, Romney and Dole’s failed presidential campaigns on Thursday, joking about “President McCain,” “President Romney” and “President Dole” in urging Republicans to stand for their principles and not repeat past mistakes.

McCain said Friday that Cruz should apologize.

Cruz is right. McCain is a distraction.

UPDATED: Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly

Celebrity, China, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Sex, Technology

“Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Glenn Close’s remarks, In Memoriam, at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony, captured the delusions of grandeur held by the “tarts and tards of Hollywood,” and helped by their fans.

The actress (or is it “actor”?) did not thank the dearly departed for merely entertaining the masses, which is all actors and directors are capable of doing. Oh no. Her deities were, instead, acknowledged for “mentoring us, challenging us, elevating us”; “they made us want to be better, and gave us a greater understanding of the human condition and the human heart,” language that should be reserved for the likes of Ayn Rand and Aristotle.

Where a motion picture has indeed transported anyone—it is because it cleaved to a decent script, usually a good book. “Gone With the Wind,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Midnight Express,” and “Papillon,” are examples.

Still, Hollywood is quite capable of reducing great literature to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by shrill starlets. This was the fate of “Les Misérables,” last year. Lost in the din were a lot of lessons about “the human condition.” The Victor-Hugo masterpiece I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations—a lot like the powers that hounded Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit.com, to death, in 2013, and are intent on doing the same to the heroic Edward Snowden.

The dead were deified, but what of the walking dead?

To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of “grey hairs and no-hairs” to “black hairs”—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

On the old, Hollywood performs professional geronticide.

Aging actors are put out to pasture, retired into buffoonish, badly scripted roles (“Nebraska”). The annual Oscar Awards will see at least one old actor trotted out (in 2011, the “distinction” went to Kirk Douglas) from retirement. From the sympathetic thunder clap received by Harrison Ford, 71, this year, I’d say he’s ready to be retired.

Yes, a silly society is a youth-obsessed society. Duly, a precocious kid actor will typically cameo. This year, viewers were spared the spectacle. Tykes did, however, twerk and twirl with the adults in a Pharrell Williams routine, conjuring the current crop of Walt Disney cartoon characters (“Rio 1”). Once-upon-a-time, our beloved cartoons were cute, innocent and mischievous. Think Disney’s Donald Duck, Warner Brothers’ Bugs-Bunny and Amblimation’s Fievel of “An American Tail” fame.

Alas, like The Kids, the animated characters that festoon film nowadays sound and act as if created by another Victor (Frankenstein), combining pixelated bits of the putrefying Bethenny Frankel, and some “Mob Wives,” “Real Housewives,” and “Dance Moms,” for good measure. …

Read on. The complete column is “Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly”” now on WND.

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* For his help, I thank my young friend, movie maven Kerry Crowel.

UPDATED (3/7): Anyone who praises the Titanic idiocy as a “classic” is lacking critical faculties (see Facebook thread). The scenes of the ship going down are fun and well done. But as to the “story”: It includes the use of “Freudian slip,” before the term was known, among other Americanized inaccuracies, and the upstairs-downstairs dynamic and proletarian insurrection: Whence does that rot come? But then, if you read the comments @ WND Comments (http://www.wnd.com/…/hollywood-the-no-good-the-bad-and…/), you get that our readers are more comfortable with Bill O’Reilly’s “output” or that of Maureen Dowd at the NYT.

UPDATED: CPUKE 2014 Is Upon Us

Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Sarah Palin

At least the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPUKE) is a little lighter on the bimbo factor, this year, but heavier with the weight of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. (CPUKE usually showcases retards like S. E. Cupp and assorted Townhall.com twits.)

The megalomaniacal Donald Trump, however, is pretty scary. “The business mogul is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to search closer to home for the causes of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny, Freddie, and the Fed, for a start. Since Trump has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate — he blames OPEC and China for the burdens of doing business in the US.” (From “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense”)

The Trump plan to reclaim global greatness and glory includes a strategy America has yet to try: the use of force, of course. Strutting around on the world stage, showing those Russians, Saudis and Chinese who is boss: this may serve as a perfect panacea for the deficiencies in Trump’s persona, but is hardly a solution to US woes, at home or abroad.

Sadly, most other Republicans will echo these themes. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) promise to be the only impressive individuals in the scheduled lineup.

And Sarah Palin, once a real beauty, may have tampered with her face.

That’s about all from CPUKE.

UPDATE: Ted Cruz tells CPAC: ‘Stand on principle’:

“There are a lot of D.C. consultants who say there’s a choice for Republicans to make: We can either choose to keep our head down, to not rock the boat, to not stand for anything, or we can stand for principle,” he said. “They say if you stand for principle you lose elections. The way to do it — the smart way, the Washington way — is don’t stand against Obamacare, don’t stand against the debt ceiling, don’t stand against nothing. I want to tell you something — that is a false dichotomy. … ”

… Those principles, he said, include defending the Constitution, abolishing the IRS, expanding school choice, establishing term limits and combating “lawlessness” and corruption in the government.

The crowd for Cruz’s speech, which came first in the conference, was fairly small at first as attendees waited in line to get in. But it grew throughout the speech — and the biggest applause for Cruz came when he said the GOP needs to “repeal every word of Obamacare.”

MORE.

UPDATED: Procedural Mishap Turns Democrat Elijah Cummings Into M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever)

Democrats, Politics, Republicans, Taxation

It’s in the nature of politics in this country. The terrifying Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted conservative non-profits and conservative individuals. Yet a procedural silliness has made Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings the focus of attention, as the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever) in the IRS scandal. (The IRS is a scandal.)

Long story cut short: The American President’s Woman, Lois Lerner, who was likely involved in the “agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups,” has once again refused to talk, taking “the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nine times during the House Oversight Committee hearing,” a constitutional right that ought not be available to state officials.

Rep. Cummings of Maryland began carrying on like a crazed man when “Congressman Darrell Issa of California” “shut down the committee hearing on Wednesday when the IRS official at the center of the scandal” refused to talk.

Issa … defended his actions and told reporters after the hearing: “He was not directing questions toward the witness and the committee [had] already adjourned.”

He later told Fox News that Cummings “was simply endlessly slandering the efforts of the committee.”

Members of both parties, though, have apparently criticized Issa’s actions.

MORE mindlessness.

UPDATE: Search engines are probably biased. It is not easy to find the text of the emails released in 2013, that “show that Lois Lerner “specifically singled out applications for tax-exempt status from organizations that described themselves as right-wing ‘tea party’ groups, and ordered that the politically sensitive requests should be held in limbo until the IRS could develop a coherent policy to address them.”

The Daily Mail online has excerpted fragments of the incriminating emails, barely:

The ‘Tea Party Matter [is] very dangerous, Lerner instructed her IRS colleagues in February 2011. ‘This could be the vehicle to go to court,’ she added, on the question of whether a Supreme Court ruling about the status of political donations from corporations might also apply to nonprofit groups.
‘Counsel and Judy Kindell [Lerner’s top advisor] need to be in on this one … Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.’

MORE.

And at The Blaze.