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.

Twerking, Twisted Sister Trojan

Feminism, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

The slightly tangential title of this post was inspired by a news headline. Not only do some women get off on elder abuse; but their weapon of choice is the vibrator, which, no doubt, they keep as close as I keep my Smith and Wesson 686P .357 4″.

To the meat of the post: In search for a golden oldie capturing just how twisted is your average North-American female, I came across “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” in which an assessment of Miley Cyrus was rendered as ealry as 2008.

Sharon Smith Fox had mentioned she’d be interested in my take on Miley. So how about this 2008 prediction? It earned the opprobrium of my extremely conservative editors for … its unfairness to the future twerking Sister Trojan. Come on. The writing was on the bedroom wall.

It’s on the money, as is the rest of “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” except that I believe I consistently underestimate the depravity of distaff American:

You just know that before long we’re going to be forced to partake in the awakening of yet another vacuous narcissist who flaunts her character flaws, and other folds, before millions of video voyeurs. A Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan in the making.

Admittedly, I know very little about “Hannah Montana” and her handlers. What I’ve seen of the overbearing, extremely precocious, brassy, and not very bright Miley Cyrus doesn’t conjure the “wholesome” descriptive. When I think of “wholesome,” I think of, say, Martina McBride. Miley in various states of undress, nestled in the arms of father Billy Ray Cyrus, gazing at him seductively—this may be cringe-making, but not surprising.

As for the whole blame Dad and Disney thing: Adopted by left and right alike, the paternalistic depiction of women as passive agents, demeaned by male-driven appetites, is feminist fiction. Miley Cyrus may be 15, but she’s a single-minded exhibitionist, propelled by the fame thing. She’s been raised like that. In all likelihood, Miley originated the idea of posing for Vanity Fair and would not stop pestering pappy until he relented. The typical American parent treats his teenager like a Delphic oracle. Any parent who has such a demigod under construction knows I’m right.

Those who persist in the he-done-me-wrong routine don’t have teenagers. Or are oblivious to the reversal in parent-child roles that has come to typify the dynamics in the American family.

MORE Bimbos.

Uncle Sam Aggression Is The Only ‘Good’ Kind Of Aggression

Foreign Policy, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

Unless you are the United States of America, “… you just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” said Secretary of State John Kerry to the chronically incurious David Gregory, on Meet The Press.

OK, Kerry did not disgorge the first 8 words not in quotation marks. But they are implied, given the historical facts. So I added them.

Another correction: Unlike the Russian government, the US government does not do anything that is in the interest of its people—although the think tank industry and the media-military-congressional complex would argue otherwise.

Agree or disagree with him; like it or not, Putin’s goal is “to protect Russian-speaking people in Crimea or other parts of Ukraine.” Which American community was Genghis Bush and B. Hussein protecting when they decimated Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the droned-upon countries?

To reiterate the question asked and answered in “The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us,” “More than anyone, who benefits when America goes to war? Those who ‘function within the nimbus of great power’ in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.”

You see, the chattering and political classes cannot conceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus and depend on it for status and income. Conversely, individual Americans—who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from war—should never conflate their interests with those of the government and its emissaries, who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war.

Not Every European Yearns For Fascists To Breathe Free

EU, Foreign Policy, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Russia, The West

The American claim on diversity–does it extend to diverse opinion? Or, on Ukraine, must everyone march in lockstep with John McMussolini and our media mavens?

A Barely A Blog Jewish reader, who resides in Europe and has seen her share of European violence, holds strong opinions about the Ukraine.

She informs me that the missive below was meant to be hyperbolic and a little satirical. Nevertheless, I hope that diversity lovers will apprecaite her fear as they do the pain of the fascists frolicking across the Ukraine. (The opinions published are not my own.)

Writes anon from Europe:

The best thing for Ukraine and Putin is that Putin should order his troops to take over the Crimea and the eastern part of the Ukraine. Why should the west have the burden of financing the Ukraine whose people have not the faintest idea of democracy?

They think that killing each other in Kiev and causing a bloody revolution will solve their financial and economic ills. No, it is only the Russian, Putin, who can bring order back into this unpleasant country, peopled with most radical racist population whose record of murder of millions of Jews and homosexuals has been well documented throughout their recent history.

Putin is the only one who is thinking straight. His Russians in both the Crimea and the Eastern part of the Ukraine do have to be protected, his border borders on that of Ukraine, and the smartest move would be for Putin to go in and take over this failed country.

Then the people of this failed country will again have some sort of economic stability, receive oil through the pipeline from the Russian oil wells, and the illusion that the European Union will save the catastrophic financial debacle that is the economy of Ukraine will be put to rest.