Over at Powerline, this could be classified at Obscurata, or this could be a divining wedge regarding the very weird behaviors of IRS uppers in front of Congress – the quoted sentence is from Scott Johnson, but it’s spurred by a reader who is a retired IRS agent. I’ll add this – Section 1203, how creepy does that sound? Read it, kids, read it:
On its face, section 1203 requires a final administrative or judicial determination.
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This, then a quick trip down memory lane:
The end of the affair is always painful and poignant. Unaccustomed to sunlight, fleeing suspicions of malfeasance and outright criminality, the Obama administration is pleading guilty to incompetence and ignorance. Benghazi? Hey, who knew the Libyans to whom we had been secretly running guns would turn them on us? We didn’t want to make things worse by calling the cops. Besides, we knew the media would let the story die. The IRS? Shock. Outrage. Never heard of the place.
An independent press is a compass, a vital part of the American system of checks and balances. It can provide the ship of state with mid-course corrections. But a compass that swings any way the helmsman wants is worse than useless. It points the way to disaster.
via Death by Media by Clark Whelton – City Journal.
You may not remember it – not sure why I do – but although he’d been around for some time, Obama bootlicker Chris Matthews (then of CNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” fame) really came to fame during the second term of the Clinton Administration. My father and I, both hardcore Conservatives by any description, would’ve called it our favorite primetime news show back in the late 90s.
When z’affair’d'Lewinsky broke, Matthews hammered Clinton and his staff night after night, even making Howard Fineman a minor media star in his own right. Fineman, as I recall, was the Newsweek reporter who didn’t report the Lewinsky story, thus making Matt Drudge a gazillionaire.
The media have always fronted for Donkeys, but there was a time in my adult life when a real scandal hit, all bets were off.
Not anymore. Then, not now. The media are coming around a bit, but only because of the AP stuff. They’ve acted as whores, and to the White House, understandably, that’s what they are.
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Posted by godsowncrunk
Camille Paglia, one of America’s greatest academic treasures, eviscerates three recent books regarding BDSM. This, early in the long essay, caught my eye (emphasis mine):
But without a comparative study of and allusion to non-American hierarchies, past and present, such remarks are facile and otiose. The collapse of scholarly standards in ideology-driven academe is sadly revealed by Weisss failure, in her list of the 18 books of anthropology that most strongly contributed to her project, to cite any work published before 1984—as if the prior century of distinguished anthropology, with its bold documentation of transcultural sexual practices, did not exist. Gender-theory groupthink leads to bizarre formulations such as this, from Weisss introduction: “SM performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations.” The preposterousness of that would have been obvious had Weiss ever dipped into the voluminous works of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and important writers of the past three centuries and a pivotal influence on Nietzsche. But incredibly, none of the three authors under review seem to have read a page of Sade. It is scandalous that the slick, game-playing Foucault whose attempt to rival Nietzsche was an abysmal failure has completely supplanted Sade, a mammoth cultural presence in the 1960s via Grove Press paperbacks that reprinted Simone de Beauvoirs seminal essay, “Must We Burn Sade?”
via Scholars in Bondage – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Most liberty-minded folk in America are unaware that de Sade’s writing is every bit as compelling as F.A. Hayek’s regarding individual liberty. de Sade will never be popular reading among Conservatives in America because the writing is graphic, violent, and hypser-sexual. Yet, it has a powerful undercurrent of individual freedom and responsibility. When the players in Philosophy in the Bedroom turn on the pious, authoritarian mother of one of said players, the abuse heaped on her – physical, verbal and sexual – is in the name of her attempt to subvert their physical freedoms.
Some of de Sade’s prose is nearly unreadable because of its grossness – the only thing I’ve read that comes close to is absolute disgustingness is the rat sequence in Bret Ellis’ American Psycho. There are large passages in 120 Days of Sodom I simply could not get through, and I thought I could get through anything.
Any expert on de Sade could probably refute my beliefs regarding the meaning of de Sade’s work, because I”m not an expert on his voluminous writings. I’ve read a lot of it, but I’ve never studied the work nor have I so much as taken a class where he was taught. de Sade is one of those rare thinkers who is dangerous and, at the same rate, his own worst enemy. A good many American readers could pluck any random page of his work and be appalled.
However, unlike Foucault, he’s not unreadable.
If you’ve never read de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom or Justine is probably the place to start. Warning: gird your loins.
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Posted by godsowncrunk
Instapundit just posted this (yes, I blame a middle-aged law prof for providing this vidya to you, said reader):
Beatles fans and Prodigy fans unite – this is where the sauce is made.
FWIW – I was in my final year in college when “Smack My Bitch Up” came out, and MTV – yes, MTV – wouldn’t show it until after … 10 PM or so? Whatever. The vidya was awesome then and this mashup is awesome now.
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What?
In a must-read piece at NRO, Andrew McCarthy posits that were he investigating the Benghazi affair, he’d begin by zeroing in on the 10 pm phone call between Hillary Clinton and POTUS Obama the night of 9/11/12.
Again – what?
This is one story I’ve followed closely and remain strong in my feeling that this is the nastiest of all scandals plaguing the White House. I admit ignorance – I had no idea there was such a call. One of the enduring mysteries of Benghazi is, at least optically, the curious absence of POTUS Obama for eight hours as the siege took place. McCarthy, with what now appears to be, er, obvious sourcing, demolishes the idea that the POTUS was out of the loop, asleep, etc. To be clear on this, El Rushbo himself repeatedly went to the idea of ‘where was the President’ all last week during his show – no one on the Conservative side of things (and duh, the Liberal side) has focused on this.
It keeps getting worse – I cut a chunk, but click and read the whole piece:
I had the good fortune to be trained in Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around.
So if I were investigating Benghazi, I’d be homing in on that 10 p.m. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero attention.
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Two vignettes, both true, that occurred recently.
On St. Patrick’s Day, I was at a restaurant downtown and stepped outside for a cigarette. It wasn’t the best day for St. Pat’s, as it was extremely windy and cold for that time of year, and it landed on a Sunday. There wasn’t a lot of street traffic. I was standing in a doorway to be out of the wind, and a guy on a flip-phone passed by and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He walked a few more feet, got off his phone, turned around and I knew he was about to ask me for money. He began by asking me if he knew where he could get something to eat, an odd thing on a Sunday St. Pat’s since there’s any number of missions and churches downtown (to say nothing of a YMCA) and he clearly wasn’t Hungry. He then began his sob story about losing his job and needing to take care of his wife and kids (they weren’t with them and he didn’t wear a wedding ring) and he insisted he wasn’t asking for money even though of course he was asking for money, and when he finally got around to asking for it, it was so he could “get a couple tacos at Taco Bell,” no mention of his family at this point. Rare is the day that I carry cash with me and I never give money to panhanlders, but I happened to have two ones and a five, and not even feeling generous, just to end the lie that was unfolding before me – he continued to insist he felt bad about asking for money even though he was asking for money – I pulled out my wallet, where the $7 was clipped to the back. I gave him the two ones, and he looked expectantly at the five. “Nope,” I said, “that’s mine.” He looked disappointed, said thank you, and went on his way, probably to laugh with his friends how he’d just conned me out of $2. Happily for him, he didn’t try to actually rob me since I had a blackjack on me.
In the city today, it’s 95 and humid – hottest day of the year by far, so far – and at every Insterstate off-ramp there are more beggars than usual, all with their cardboard signs. Like anyone who lives in a city, I’m for the most part immune to this stuff. The last off-ramp I was on today, there was a very ragged, very thin guy who looked about my age and he had his dog with him, the best friend to all hobos and, right or wrong, a prop that will make me pay closer attention to them. The guy in front of me gave him a dollar. Because I work out of a car most of the time, I carry cases of bottled-water and bottled tea, so I thought I’d try something. I grabbed 16-ounce bottle of Lipton sugar-free out of one of the cases and rolled down the window. “You want a bottle of tea?” I asked him, and he said “absolutely.” He took it, thanked me, said “god bless” and had downed half of it by the time he got back to where he was sitting. He even patted his dog. The man looked my age – he could’ve been in his twenties for all I know – but his bear was long and straggled, his clothes were very worn and very dirty, and he was tan, tattooed and thin. If he was playing destitute or shit-outta-luck, he was doing a Method actor’s performance.
Thus, I might have found a small, personal solution to what I refer to as The Empath’s Dilemma.
==
Three quick comments to precede this prescient column by Mark Steyn, his best work in ages.
1) Benghazi remains the real story – so much of a clusterfuck is it that a planted question last Friday led to this story getting out. As ugly as it is, it’s still meant as cover for the Benghazi shenanigans. The GOP would be wise to keep their eye on the far-more combustible story that involved four Americans getting killed and the political cover-up that was meant to save the faces of, respectively, POTUS and SecState. I keep hearing how GOPers shouldn’t make this political, and my response is simple: why not, since the Administration made it political from the get-go, never concerned with the facts on the ground or how they might affect the actual people on the ground?
2) Standing alone, away from the other myriad of “scandals” (a better term would be “civic atrocities”), the IRS story will continue to grow legs because of how patently evil the IRS people come off, and not because their chosen route in life was enforcement of the tax code. Steven Miller, who testified before the House Ways & Means Committee today, came off as arguably the most unsympathetic figure to testify before a Congressional Committee in televised American history. In a nobler day, he’d have been garrisoned before appearing in front of a firing squad at sunrise for his utter contempt for the body questioning him – a body that represents us, mind you.
3) The naked ugliness of Benghazi and the IRS stories remains that both were meant to ensure the re-election of the tin-pot, banana-republic figurehead at the top of the ticket. I don’t doubt POTUS knew more than a few of the details of this business – I’ve always questioned his intelligence, but I’m starting to wonder if he’s the most intellectually incurious figure to ever darken the door of the Oval Office. Sold as this kind of hyper-intellectual-intellectual’s-intellectual, I’d be mighty curious to know when the last time this halfwit actually read a book from cover-to-cover. Maybe Katie Couric can score and interview with him and find out what new publications he reads? A boy can dream, no?
Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.
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Posted by godsowncrunk
