Read it.

More to the point, leaving the factory floor — where they’ve pretty much taken the jobs of the sort of people whom the Guardian champions (whether they like it or not) — and heading to take the jobs of the office drones into whose corner the Guardian is being forced because their traditional constituency (assembly-line proles) are going extinct.

Sky Is Falling – Film at 11 – Women and Minorities Hardest Hit. Wake me when we get there.

The problem is that the world is become a place that has a lessening need for people on the left side of the IQ bell curve, and the solution is to find ways to encourage such people not to reproduce. (But that would be raaaaaaacist….)

Read it.

Perhaps because nobody is surprised that a business that depends on politicians has a lobbying group. Does this come as news to anybody? Anybody Bueller?

Allow me to translate this headline out of Voice-of-the-Crust speak: ‘The biggest lobby of which we don’t approve that no one is bad-mouthing as much as we think ought to be happening.’

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, is shocked, shocked, that there is lobbying going on — and it’s always things they don’t like. Funny how that happens.

Read it.

‘Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.’

What is obviously in no danger of extinction is disaster-predicting academics. Let’s put this with the ‘peak oil’ and ‘population bomb’ predictions.

Read it.

Read it.

And, really, have been for some time. It’s just now becoming too obvious to fake.

There’s more than a bit of cognitive dissonance in the merger of Democrats with plutocracy – rule by the wealthy. After all, the party’s brand is supposed to be “party of the people.” For Democrats, the allure of corporate cash – in campaign contributions and, later on, in of corporate patronage – may be overwhelming, but it does pose a threat to the party’s positioning.

Oh, I don’t know — Democrites have never had a problem saying on thing and being another.

Read it.

Voice of the Crust The Atlantic burnishes it’s hipster credentials with this hand-wringer about ‘segregation’.

Racially concentrated areas of affluence, by the researchers’ definition, are census tracts where 90 percent or more of the population is white and the median income is at least four times the federal poverty level, adjusted for the cost of living in each city. Racially concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are census tracts where more than 50 percent of the population is non-white, and more than 40 percent live in poverty.

Note that ‘white’ = ‘affluent’ and ‘black’ = ‘in poverty’ by the researchers’ definition. Not hard to find the facts you like when you stack the deck before you start.

Oh … the writer, Alana Semuels, is a Harvard graduate — and, judging by her picture, white. Of course.

Read it.

Hint: Not what the dictionary says it means.

“Don’t console yourself that you are the 99 percent,” he says. “If you live near a Whole Foods; if no one in your family serves in the military; if you are paid by the year, not the hour; if most people you know finished college; if no one you know uses meth; if you married once and remain married; if you’re not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what’s going on, and you may be part of the problem.”

Like ‘subconscious racism’, ‘privilege’ is the catch-all leftist code-word for ‘you suck’.

Read it.

As I have explained earlier geologist M. King Hubbert famously predicted in 1956 that U.S. domestic oil production in the lower 48 states would peak around 1970 and begin to decline. In 1969 Hubbert predicted that world oil production would peak around 2000. Hubbert argued that oil production grows until half the recoverable resources in a field have been extracted, after which production falls off at essentially the same rate at which it expanded. This theory suggests a bell-shaped curve rising from first discovery to peak and descending to depletion.

As, of course, it did.

I was under the impression that in order to be a ‘geologist’ you had to know something about, well, geology. Apparently I was wrong.

Salon is being Crustian again.

Legacy preference in college admission, or the practice of selecting the offspring of alumni over other qualified candidates, was originally a strategy developed to grandfather Jewish applicants out of admission. Though the policy’s intention has changed, it remains the reality that as American students head back to campus this fall, 10 to 25 percent of them do not deserve their spots. They’re “legacy admits,” the kids who got a boost via birth.

Yet not a word about the 10 to 26 percent ‘diversity admits’, who also ‘got a boost by birth’, and who also ‘do not deserve their spots’. Funny how that works.

Read it.

The Guardian is, of course, a famous snooty British Lefty rag, and conveniently ignores the fact that any random passenger on this bus has had a more positive impact on the world than they in the last 100 years.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

A rich lady named Wednesday Martin who lives on the Upper East Side has published an article (“Poor Little Rich Women“) and book “Primates of Park Avenue” applying her anthropology degree to the other rich (but not super-rich) stay at home moms she hangs out with. Of course, it winds up being about:

A. How rich stay-at-home-moms are oppressed by society.

B. How the author is better than the rich stay-at-home moms because while it may look like she’s doing exactly what they are doing, she’s actually pursuing her career of anthropology by researching them by going out to lunch a lot.

Marrying a rich guy and staying home is a career choice that is far more open to women than to men, and still gets a lot of enrollees despite being denigrated whenever it’s mentioned at all.

It’s pretty common for anthropologists to get pranked by their subjects who figure out what they want to hear and then exaggerate and plain make up stuff. Margaret Mead getting taken in by the tall tales of Samoan teens is only the most notorious example. Pacific Islanders sometimes concoct elaborately silly rituals and folklore to amuse themselves at the expense of visiting academics.

But ‘progressives’ have no sense of humor so are thus more easily pranked.

Read it.

I strongly and consistently opposed the Iraq War that was initiated by former President George W. Bush and would equally strongly oppose any similar large-scale military venture today. But with ISIS gaining strength and calling on followers through social media to launch terror attacks in multiple nations, there is an urgent need for multilateral action to destroy ISIS before ISIS succeeds in mass murdering more of us.

‘Gee, somebody needs to do something about that. Not us, of course, I’m opposed to that; but somebody needs to.’

This is what passes for ‘journalism’ these days. People get paid to write this crap.

Read it.

This is the sort of silly shit that Voices of the Crust do these days: Just because Herbert Hoover was a Republican and did something stupid in 1932, Republicans are stuck with his mistake forever more.

I’m waiting for the headline ‘Democrats Ought to Embrace Segregation — After All, They Invented It’, which is much closer to the truth. But you’ll never see it.

Read it.

And only in America can these same media megaphone-mouths complain about “the media” without realizing that for all intents and purposes, they are the media.

…

At least one victim was a member of the larger and better-organized Bandidos gang. His name was Manuel Isaac Rodriguez, so I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that like George Zimmerman, he was one of those “white Hispanics.” The only shooting fatality that was allegedly “unaffiliated” with an organized biker gang was Jesus Delgado Rodriguez—again, I’ll presume he was a “white Hispanic.”

…

That’s right—even by a low estimate, cops killed four presumably white gang members. And yet no whites rioted. To my knowledge, the last group of reckless arsonists who tried to burn Waco down was the ATF in 1993.

Read it.

Yes it’s true: Rubio isn’t rich, like Hillary Clinton and so many others in politics. He has made his money honestly, practicing law, earning a salary from public service and publishing a couple of books. No $300,000 speaking fees for Marco. And unlike Harry Reid, he hasn’t gotten wealthy on corrupt real estate deals. Somehow, the Post spins this into a negative.

He’s a politician — how dare he spend his own money!

Read it.

Just about every day there are stories in the MSM about “Swedes”, “Norwegians”, “Danes”, “Germans”, “Britons”, “Australians”, etc. traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State and fight in the jihad. Except that the media articles don’t put the quote marks in — they’re willing let their audience think these are just ordinary Svens and Heinrichs who inexplicably decide to grow beards, sell all their worldly goods, and smuggle themselves into Syria.

Read it.

You can’t make this stuff up: some on the left are complaining that the Waco biker gangs have gotten more favorable press coverage than the rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore.

And you can feel their pain.

The way the left drags race into every damn thing that happens is corrosive. The Waco/Baltimore comparison is ridiculous, but it is far too typical of the nonsense we see from newspeople and commentators every day.

Read it.

Of course, when I want to know about a Texas shootout, the first place I look is the New Yorker, by a female ‘staff writer’ who has probably never been within yards of a ‘biker’ in her life. That makes perfect sense.

Read it.

The troubling fact is that none of this, neither the financial cost nor the emotional toll, was necessary. After all, the defense team, long before admitting their client’s responsibility for the bombings on the very first day of trial, was willing to enter a guilty plea if the government agreed to take the death penalty off the table in favor of life without parole. Would that have been so bad?

Yes.

Sure, critics would have complained about the high cost of housing and feeding Tsarnaev as a guest of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. They failed to recognize that this expense is a drop in the justice system bucket compared with the millions upon millions of dollars spent on prosecuting him.

One round of .45 ACP is 64 cents if you buy it in bulk. I’d be happy to pull the trigger for free. Hell, I’d pay my own expenses there and back pro bono publico.

Mark Steyn looks at the madness afflicting the New York Times.

What confidence can we have that traumatized war refugees can be transformed into budding American entrepreneurs? We cannot know for sure. But recent evidence of recaptured children from the clutches of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and victims of violent crime across five continents reveals that they become more active citizens than similar compatriots who have not suffered from these traumatic events.

What a fascinating study. If that’s how you make “active” citizens, let’s drop the entire student body of Oberlin in the middle of Somalia and see what they’re like when they get back.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Well, actually, a more accurate headline would be ‘Left-Wing BBC Reporter in Shock Over Tsarnaev Death Penalty’; of course, since the BBC (getting its money through compulsory license fees) doesn’t feel any inclination to wear a Clever Plastic Disguise over it’s ‘progressive’ bias.

This is almost a pure example of the type — the reporter is shocked, so of course all right-thinking people are shocked, and since Massachusetts is full of right-thinking people (having elected the Peter Pan Party since time out of mind), therefore Massachusetts is shocked and ashamed.

Read it.

Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim who won the Muhammad cartoon contest at the Texas free speech event attacked by two gunmen Sunday, will soon be added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups.

A very great honor which I hope he appreciates.

Read it.

The term ‘irremedially corrupt’ springs to mind.

But Clinton really had no other choice. The Republican presidential nominee, the Republican National Committee and groups associated with electing a Republican president are expected to spend at least $1 billion and probably closer to $2 billion to elect a GOP president. Democrats will attempt to match this fundraising, if not raise more.

No matter what happens, it’s always the Republicans’ fault. Thank you, NBC, Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Headlines you’ll never see in the Atlantic (unlike this one): ‘The Audacity of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’.

I’m sure they would have used ‘ego’ if the Washington Post hadn’t gotten to it first.

Read it.

Headlines you’ll never see in the Washington Post (unlike this one): ‘Barack Obama’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Bill Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Harry Reid’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Nancy Pelosi’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Jesse Jackson’s Over-the-Top Ego’, or ‘Al Sharpton’s Over-the-Top Ego’.

Ego, you see, is only a Republican characteristic, and cancels out his being black.

Read it.

If you like liberal ideologues who label inconvenient facts as “false,” then you’ll love PunditFact. Why? Because PunditFact just declared that a demonstrably true fact was false because, according to PunditFact, the factual claim “ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.” Facts are strange that way. They do tend to give an impression of the truth, even if some people find that impression discomfiting.

It gets more embarrassing than that, though. In an unsolicited April 28 e-mail to me, PunditFact author Louis Jacobson told me unequivocally that the demonstrably factual claim he was examining was “clearly accurate” and “technically true.” But today, Jacobson declares, that fact is suddenly “Mostly False.”

Read it.

Which it is, by their definition of ‘Islamophobic’ (i.e. daring to tell the truth about Islam).

Read it.

But let us express compassion for poor wee Brooke, a thirty-something special snowflake from the UNC Chapel Hill Department of Commie Propaganda (that is, Journalism). When I went to boot camp in 1987, my company commander was a SMC Baldwin. That’s Chief Signalman for you civilian types, though the rating was apparently merged with Quartermaster in 2004.

I kind of wonder what old Baldwin would think of his namesake slandering veterans as though military service turns Americans into some kind of foreign, invasive species. Veterans support and defend the Constitutional right of Brooke and her ilk to be as false and useless as they want to be. There is some irony to be mined in how the era of Hope and Change segregates Americans into victim groups, like the Baltimore rioters, and target groups, like veterans, Christians,  and males (trifecta for me!).

Read it.

There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why. The annual lovefest between Democratic politicians and Democratic journalists hasn’t generated any actual news in a long time. But this year’s event was perhaps notable because it exposed our president’s bitterness, as he approaches the end of his term. Humor is often revealing. Obama began with a joke that would be considered crude in a junior high school locker room:

After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, “Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?” And I said, “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’” (Laughter and applause.)

Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)

If I had said something like that when I was 12, my father would have whacked me. Now, we have a president so pitiful that he thinks such crudeness is appropriate humor.

Obama seems to share Hillary’s attitude of ‘Why can’t you people just do what you’re told?’

Read it.

A classic Voice of the Crust thumb-sucker.

Unmentioned: Why anybody should care.

Ross Douthat finds that his bullshit detector has gone off.

A LIVING cartoonist lecturing his murdered peers makes for a curious spectacle, but that’s what transpired at journalism’s George Polk Awards a week ago. The lecturer was Garry Trudeau, of “Doonesbury” fame; his subject was the cartoonists for Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satire rag, who were gunned down by fanatics because of their mockery of Muhammad and Islam.

Trudeau did not exactly say they had it coming, but he passed judgment on their sins — not the sin of blasphemy, but the sin of picking a politically unsuitable target for their jabs. By mocking things sacred to Europe’s Muslim immigrants, Trudeau lamented, the Hebdo cartoonists were “punching downward … attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” That phrase, and the critique it implies of “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first “identify the bearer of privilege,” then “hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”

As Frum notes, at its roots (both liberal and biblical) this is an admirable idea. Better to live in a society that favors underdogs than one that just lets victors have their way.

But on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

Why anyone would consider rich white Yalie Garry Trudeau a moral exemplar on anything escapes me.

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, tries to pull an Obama.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Much like the work of Garry Trudeau.

TrudeauLike Doonesbury itself, Garry Trudeau’s speech yesterday at Long Island University was entertaining at the beginning but eventually became tedious and smug. After opening with some funny reminiscences about his early struggles with unsympathetic editors, the cartoonist tried to tackle the topic of the murders at Charlie Hebdo. He did not take the position you might expect from a professional satirist. “Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility,” he lectured. “At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious.”

Trudeau’s talk took its turn for the worse halfway in, when he offered a garbled account of the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005. “Using judgment and common sense in expressing oneself were denounced as antithetical to freedom of speech,” he told the audience. I seem to remember some responses to those cartoons that were more clearly antithetical to freedom of speech, including death threats and assassination attempts. Trudeau alluded to some of this, but he blamed the speakers, not the censors: “Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened.”

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust must push the Narrative even if it derogates one of their tools, the teachers’ unions.

Read it.

The New Republic, with its punk owner Chris Hughes having locked the cockpit door, continues its rapid decompression and descent into the mountainside.  This week TNR carries a piece saying that the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax story is the fault of . . . conservatives.

The story (and “story” it is) by Elizabeth Stoker Brunig shows what an expensive college education in postmodern theory gets you these days….

Nicholas Kristof at Voice of the Crust New York Times phones in another rewarming of The Narrative.

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

Unexamined is the fact that ‘ordinary Americans’ who have a job and support themselves are doing fine; it’s the slackers who live off of the labor of others who are doing most of the whining.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.

At what? Being socialist? Be still my heart. This is like criticizing countries for being unlike the Soviet Union. ‘They may not be allowed to vote for more than one candidate, but at least they’ve got free day care!’

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Well, that’s pretty much horseshit. The government does a fine job of ‘prevent[ing] early marriage’ by offering every UnderCrust female an apartment, food stamps, and MedicAid simply for having a child without bothering to marry the father. The ‘equality of our education system’ is almost perfect, with every child being offered an equally-crappy public education at the hands of ‘teachers’ who are more concerned about their salaries and benefits than their formal jobs. Why have ‘high school enrollment’ when it subjects you to attacks by juvenile delinquents that won’t be disciplined by any kind of authority? And I fail to see how ‘cellphone use’ constitutes a measuring stick for civilization.

The fun part, though, is the accompanying list. Notice that, except for Japan, all of the countries above the U.S. are government by highly blue-eyed white people — and, judging from college admissions, the Japanese can be considered Honorary White People (at least for affirmative-action purposes).

Maybe the problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough white people. That seems to be the key to getting higher on the list.

Read it.

No doubt that the Washington Post has the hipster ‘progressive’ demographic nailed.

Can you think of anything more illustrative of the Peter Pan Party’s core cultural meme ‘We Wont Grow Up!’ than this one?

Read it.

Note the weasel-word ‘diverting’, as if profits must by some law of nature not go overseas. By this you may know a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Two prominent factions within the Republican foreign policy establishment are fighting for control over who will help guide former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush‘s policy positions as he gears up for a campaign for the presidency.

More hawkish Republicans — represented by the prominent, interventionist neoconservatives who populated the ranks of the George W. Bush administration — have repeatedly raised concerns about the more pragmatic foreign policy team being assembled around Mr. Bush.

By which phrasing you know that the Crust have decided that ‘interventionist neoconservatives’ (almost worth the price of admission, that hate-phrase) will be the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Bush campaign.

Vanity Fair, Voice of the Crust, still can’t resist shooting fish in a barrel.

But that afternoon, after a long presentation to 200 NBC advertising salespeople, Turness was feeling better than she had in months. When she had been hired she knew she was stepping onto a troubled ship; finally, she felt, the organizational changes she had made were showing results. Meet the Press’s ratings were edging up; Nightly News seemed to be stabilizing. “Things,” she told Fili, “feel like they’re in a really good place.”

Her sense of relief, however, lasted mere minutes. As she left Fili’s office around 3:30, Turness learned the startling news: the most important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003. A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write. Instead, to the dismay of NBC’s P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the record and admitted he hadn’t been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.

Read it.

Only The New Republic can be racist and anti-Semitic without breaking a sweat.

Read it.

Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning laws that protect religious freedom. Cook, who is himself gay, concluded with these words:

Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.

We agree with that, and we would like to see Apple show some courage. Not by writing op-eds that will be hailed by Cook’s progressive friends and will cost Apple nothing, but by facing up to the fact that around the world, homosexuals face a lot worse problems than buying cakes for their weddings.

Millions for Indiana, but not one cent for Mecca. Cook and his Aeron-chair commandos are a good example of the Folk-Song Army:

“One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.” — Tom Lerer

Read it.

A fine fisking of the notorious Timothy Egan, who writes about the world as viewed from the Upper West Side for the New York Times.

Read it.

‘Bioethicist’ sounds prtty cool, doesn’t it? Sounds as if it ought to be a science-based field, in which one can earn a degree, do research, get published, and be subject to the discipline such a thing implies.

Well, actually no. ‘Bioethecist’ is just the same old Leftist ‘you must listen to us because we know better than you what you ought to be doing’ cant, just more narrowly focused. Its political agenda is plain to see — next time you read some outgassing from a ‘bioethicist’, ask yourself if it’s something you can see a Peter Pan Party functionary pushing. If it is, that tells you all you need to know.

John Hinderaker asks the as-yet-unanswered questions.

The Columbia report takes us behind the scenes at Rolling Stone and adds new details about how the false story made its way into print. But it says little about why the scandal, one of the worst instances of journalistic malpractice on record, happened.

…

Of course: Sabrina Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, believed “Jackie,” even though there were obvious indications of unreliability, because she was telling them what they wanted to hear, something that was consistent with a “larger pattern.” One might think that the nightmare the principals at Rolling Stone have lived through might generate some self-knowledge. But no. Their biases are intact.

…

I don’t know whether sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses or not. FBI statistics indicate not women aged 18-22 who are not college students are significantly more likely to be raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, than those who are college students, as one would expect. It occurs to me that if you are a rapist, women aged 18 to 22 are probably a prime target group. But it is an article of faith within the establishment, of which Rolling Stone is emphatically a part, that campus rape is an epidemic. That’s why they wanted to publish the article, and that’s why they weren’t too particular about whether it was true.

Anything that happens is an opportunity to push The Narrative, whether true or not, whether relevant or not.

Heather MacDougal is the designated hitter expounding the Crustian party line.

Easter is a pagan festival. If Easter isn’t really about Jesus, then what is it about?

That’s the ‘progressive’ mind at work — ‘X ix Y, so why are you so wrong?’

However much ‘Easter’ may have at one time been a ‘pagan festival’, it is now a thoroughly Christian festival; it’s only called ‘Easter’ by the inheritors of a smallish section of the Latin Western tradition, and of course all the Crust knows is the modern West.

It really is about Jesus, Heather, and a little effort spent on research, although it will take you away from your day job of parroting cliches for the Left, it would really help you out. You might want to start here.

Read it.

Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that “no substantive basis” was found for the claim by a student known as “Jackie” that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What’s striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.

Mark Steyn looks at the latest leftist tar pit.

On Monday, when Trevor Noah landed the gig as Jon Stewart’s replacement, Salon‘s headline writers assured us:

Right-Wing Rage At ‘The Daily Show’ Is About To Get Very, Very Ugly

That’s because Trevor Noah is a mixed-race South African, and everyone knows right-wingers are ugly racists consumed with rage over miscegenation. As it turned out, there was not a peep from rage-consumed righties, perhaps because they don’t watch “The Daily Show” and had never heard of Trevor Noah, or perhaps because they were preoccupied with inconsequential foot-of-page-37 news stories like the nuclearization of Iran.

Once again. the left trips on its uncanny ability to see things that aren’t there. But wait, there’s more:

So instead by Tuesday morning it was the left that was all in a lather – or as those self-same Salon headline writers put it a mere 24 hours after their previous headline:

Did Trevor Noah’s Twitter History Just Kill ‘The Daily Show’?

That’s because the lefties were all mad about the oddly misogynist and anti-Semitic Twitter feed of Mr Noah, full of jests about porking fat chicks and running over a Jewish kid in his German car – which is certainly a strange choice of joke for a 21st century comic.

At this point, I realized that I did, after all, know who Trevor Noah is. I’d caught him on telly in Oz a couple of years ago, and in London at the Royal Variety Performance. He struck me as like a lot of chancers from around the Commonwealth, chaps who make a nice living tailoring their shtick to whichever corner of the Anglosphere they happen to be in. Yes, yes, I know, I do a bit of that meself. Anyway, passing through Britain only a few days ago, I got back after dinner and thought I’d watch ten minutes of TV before turning in. Unfortunately, it was the BBC’s annual “Comic Relief” fundraiser, a long night of leaden japes and forced jollity, in the midst of which up popped Mr Noah….

Read it.

As the 2016 election nears, contenders in both parties have been hiring staffers, traveling to early-nominating stats and feverishly raising money. Their operations can look to some like campaigns—but they aren’t subject to any of the restrictions that would otherwise apply.

That’s the subject of complaints filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission by two campaign-finance watchdog groups, who allege that four potential contenders—former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—are violating federal campaign finance laws.

How does one get to be a ‘watchdog group’? Apparently, coming up with an impressive-sounding name and reciting it to a reporter is sufficient. How about the more accurate ‘political stalking groups’?

The fact that three of the four are Republicans will not have been lost on the astute reader. Nor will the fact that Hillary Clinton has neither complied with this vague law nor been criticized by any of these so-called ‘watchdog groups’ for not doing so. Coincidence? I think not.