URLs du Jour

2017-06-15

■ I think these two verses (Proverbs 25:25-26) belong together:

25 Like cold water to a weary soul
    is good news from a distant land.
26 Like a muddied spring or a polluted well
    are the righteous who give way to the wicked.

I'm seeing too much of the second thing, still waiting on the first thing.

■ David Harsanyi (at the Federalist) makes a lot of sense: If The Alexandria Shooter Alone Is Responsible For His Actions, That Standard Should Always Apply.

Just like those who blame Donald Trump for every random act of violence, including a Montana Republican’s body-slamming of a journalist, those who blame Bernie Sanders are just finding a way to use tragedy for partisanship. Now, obviously every incident varies to some extent. We can call out rhetoric. Some politicians say things that deserve rebuke. We can debate the politics of guns. But we need a standard. And we need to stick to it. We can’t blame heated political rhetoric for some violence and then pretend it has nothing to do with it at other times.

Good luck with asking people to stick to a standard.

■ I'm not sure if @kevinNR is a counterpoint to Harsanyi, but he's always worth reading: The Left Embraces Political Violence.

A great deal of spittle has been deployed in the debate over whether or to what extent the Left’s recent indulgence of its penchant for violent rhetoric can be linked to the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise and other members of a Republican congressional baseball team by an angry Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders partisan. But the relevant question here is not violent rhetoric but violence itself. The violence at Berkeley and Middlebury did not lead to the shooting in Alexandria — they are part of the same phenomenon: The American Left has embraced political violence.

I think Thomas Sowell noted the adherents to the "unconstrained vision" find their opponents to not merely mistaken, but evil. It's not hard to imagine the result of that belief.

■ New Hampshire's own Drew Cline writes at NRO, asking and answering: The Real Hero of the Trump Resistance? James Madison.

The grand progressive project to unravel federalism and replace it with a unified national government capable of transforming society by enacting the will of a supreme executive has made some progress since the 1880s. But Madison’s system has proven surprisingly resilient — thanks largely to conservative efforts to defend and protect it.

For that, the Trump “resistance” should give thanks. If not for the protections built into the very system they have worked so hard to destroy, all the terrible power they tried to give themselves would be in Trump’s hands.

Unfortunately, this lesson will be forgotten a few nanoseconds after Democrats get their hands on the reins of federal power again.

■ From NRO's blog coverage of the Alexandria shoot-em-up yesterday, Rep. Mo Brooks:

“The gun was a semiautomatic,” Representative Mo Brooks said. “It continued to fire at different people. You can imagine, all the people on the field scatter[ing].”

The gun continued to fire.

So Mo Brooks is an idiot, right?

■ Well, no. He just said something dumb. But he also said something pretty smart yesterday. Via Skip at GraniteGrok:

On average, I'd give Mo a solid B grade for his remarks yesterday. I'm a generous grader.


Last Modified 2018-12-26 5:32 AM EDT