Talking Heads
When you’re out to kill a vampire, you should always use a wooden stake and a silver bullet.
A word you will often hear tossed about on cable TV is “pundit.” Out of curiosity, I decided to check it out in the dictionary. The word traces its origin to India, where it referred to a Brahman, a man of profound knowledge of Hindi law. The second definition is a very learned man, an expert or authority. That hardly described the folks who regularly show up on any of the cable news shows, including those at Fox. But then, I found that the dictionary had taken reality into consideration, as it concluded with “A person who makes comments or judgments in a solemnly authoritative manner.”
And that, my friends, is how the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Rachel Maddow, Steve Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, Anderson Cooper, Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough and Harold Ford, Jr., get to pass themselves off as your intellectual betters. It’s all in the delivery.
This serves as a preamble to the fact that after a year in TV’s version of Siberia, Chris Matthews, who was exiled for having made one too many inappropriate remarks to his female colleagues, made a return visit to MSNBC the other evening. One can only assume he will soon be back hosting a show. In case you have already forgotten the news anchor who has trouble pronouncing his “s’s,” Matthews is the lump who admitted feeling a large tingle running up his leg whenever Barack Obama gave a speech.
The fact that he is on the verge of a comeback proves once again that when you’re out to kill a vampire, you should always use a wooden stake and a silver bullet.
Someone else who keeps popping up whenever there is a major trial taking place is Harvard law professor (emeritus) Alan Dershowitz. For Fox, he fits a much-needed niche. He is a lifelong Democrat who manages to keep his partisan politics out of the mix when commenting on a trial such as the one involving Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.
He rattled off a number of reasons why the three guilty verdicts (two for murder, one for manslaughter) should be thrown out. As a non-lawyer, they all struck me as pretty obvious.
Before getting to those reasons, I have waited for years for someone to ask Dershowitz why he continues to support the party of BLM and Antifa, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
And considering what a supporter of Israel he is, why would he vote against the man who brokered four peace deals in the Middle East and in favor of Joe Biden, who appears to see a moral equivalency between the Jewish homeland and people whose stated mission in life is to finish the job that Hitler left unfinished in 1945?
Frankly, I doubt if he were asked, he could come up with a cogent reason. A great many Jews I have known in my life will go to their grave not having ever voted for a Republican. There was a time when it was almost as if, along with the names of the parents, the hospital and the doctor, the birth certificate mentioned the baby’s party affiliation was Democratic.
These days, they can skip that part. By the time his bar mitzvah has rolled around, public school teachers, rabbis and pop culture have convinced him that Republicans are anti-Semites. At the age of 13, along with announcing that “Today I am a man,” he might as well pledge himself a lifelong Liberal.
After I wrote that bigots were just lazy and that once you got to know people, you’d find much better reasons than their race to despise them, I heard from Bonnie O'Brien. “Yes, the specifics for disliking each other should be based on something other than assumptions based on heritage.”
I replied: “Exactly. Even when it comes to black people, there are notable exceptions to the rule. Just not a great many.”
Writing in The New American, R. Cort Kirkwood, mentioned all the various outrages that were committed during the trial of Derek Chauvin. Perhaps the worst of these was allowing an airhead, Judge Peter Cahill, to oversee the trial.
I had known that Brandon Mitchell, a black man, had lied his way onto the jury. He had sworn he had not attended any of the George Floyd rallies. The fact that he was shown to have traveled all the way to Washington, D.C., to attend a rally, wearing a “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks. That alone should have nullified the trial and sent Mr. Mitchell to the slammer.
Another major failing of Judge Cahill is that he did not sequester the jury, making certain they’d know all about the mob surrounding the courthouse who, prompted by Rep. Maxine Waters, would have burned down the city.
It may be a citizen’s duty to be objective and only allow himself to be guided by the evidence brought out in the trial, but I won’t lie and claim that if I had been one of the dozen I could have ignored the fact that if I and my fellow jurors decided the ex-cop wasn’t guilty of three felonies (two murder charges with one victim?) we could be igniting a fuse that would blow up the city, costing friends and neighbors their homes, businesses and even their lives.
Even during the jury selection process, all the legal safeguards intended to protect Chauvin were tossed aside by Judge Cahill. Even though most of the jurors voiced support for BLM and got to talk about their own unhappy encounters with the police, they were empaneled.
There have been lynch mobs that were more fair-minded than these people. They brought the rope and Cahill provided the gallows.
Norm Silvers passed along this little poem by Noah Holland for the dog owners on my subscription list: "High up in the courts of Heaven today a little dog angel waits; with the other angels he will not play, but he sits alone at the gates. For I know my master will come, says he. and when he comes he will call for me.”
After I referred to the Arab woman who brought her ailing child to an Israeli hospital where Jewish doctors saved his life, and when asked what sort of future she envisioned for him, said “I hope he will be a martyr,” I heard from Bill Thompson: “Do you think the Palestinians (a misnomer of recent vintage) have an actual curriculum for such short-lived careers? Or is it just their idea of a maternal instinct to view their offspring as a means to collect the financial incentives offered by Abbas et al to families of mass murderers? Poor little SOB doesn’t stand much of a chance, does he?”
“It just occurred to me,” I replied, “that in this case, SOB isn’t an insult, but, rather, a literal truth.”
Recently, when Ralph Irish and I were discussing Germany’s peculiar decision to put its energy needs entirely in the hands of Russia, he wrote “The existence of NATO is based on Europe’s inability to care for itself.”
I agreed. It certainly explains why they were so eager to have the United States as a member nation.
These days, perhaps they were so upset that Donald Trump expected them to pay a larger portion for their own defense, they decided they wouldn’t wait for Russian tanks to roll in and kill them, and, instead, decided to commit suicide.
Bob Hunt passed along a bunch of memes, of which I decided these three were best:
“Mr. Rogers did not adequately prepare me for the people in my neighborhood.”
“If stupidity was a disability, I know more than a few people who would get monthly checks.”
“Sometimes, I laugh so hard, the tears run down my leg.”
