Tucker Carlson's Treemas

In the opening lyrics of Don McLean's American Pie, "a long, long time ago," shortly after Thanksgiving, a fellow freshman student told us in the social hall of a dormitory "Tree is the reason for the season."

Actually, he said "Jesus is the reason for the season."  But Tucker Carlson, commenting upon the Christmas tree fire outside of Fox News headquarters, begs to differ:

lol I thought the symbol of Christianity was the cross, not a fucking pine tree. https://t.co/vAHKYmsB5I

— John Phipps: Himbo Slice (@GameDadJP) December 9, 2021

Carlson's first clue should have been the calendar, upon which December 25 is noted as "Christmas Day" rather than "Treemas Day." However, it appears that he was twisting the meaning of Christmas and trivializing its importance in order to make a different political point. He continued

It's an assault on religious observance. By current standards, destroying someone's religious symbol would be a hate crime. That's a category much loved and meticulously chronicled by the Biden Justice Department. The D.O.J. can tell you precisely how many Korans were burned last year in the United States but they don't keep track of Christmas tree. Why is that?

Well, because they could care less. Christopher Ray isn't dispatching a team of FBI agents to get to the bottom of Christmas arson . Merrick Garland is not going to issue a press release about it.

"By current standards," Carlson maintained, "destroying someone's religious symbol would be a hate crime." If the Christmas tree were a religious symbol rather than a decoration, it might be. But it's in public places, appears in holiday parades, and is increasingly wielded as a tool in ginning up retail sales.

Even then it might not be a hate crime.  Under federal law, a hate crime occurs when someone "willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person...." 

Under New York State law, a hate crime is an offense committed at least in part "because of a belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation of a person, regardless of whether the belief or perception is correct." 

Forty-nine-year-old Craig Tamanaha was arrested, arraigned, and released. He is homelesss and had been arrested in the past for drug charge(s) and indecent exposure.  Nothing has been reported of his political views, religious views, or whatever may have motivated the arson. The implication that the fire constituted a hate crime is premature at best.

Carlson targeted the concept of hate crimes by disguising it as a concern about the religious faith of the vast majority of his fans. He charges "torching Christmas trees is an attack on Christianity" and upon "a tradition that's hundreds of years old."

Yet, Christianity- as he intellectually is aware- is not hundreds of years old but thousands of years old. Except as used as a tactic, Christianity is of little concern to Carlson, who refers to a tree "a symbol of a specific culture." It's the tree as a symbol of a culture, increasingly marked by materialism and conspicuous consumption, that impels him. 

Tucker Carlson condemns the burning of a Christmas pine tree because the Christian tradition is, he suggests, "hundreds of years old."  For him, and for those who will continue to follow him faithfully after this, trees are indeed the reason for the season.

 

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Fight Temptation

In a case of wokeness, political correctness or just plain over-sensitivity

Members of Congress are calling for Representative Lauren Boebert to be removed after the Colorado Republican made anti-Muslim comments about Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota. Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley announced Wednesday that she is "leading a resolution to remove Rep. Boebert from her committee assignments."

"Her dangerous behavior & hateful, Islamophobic rhetoric has no place in our society & only emboldens further violence," the Massachusetts Democrat tweeted. "There must be accountability."

In the resolution, Pressley cited a House rule that states that members and employees "shall behave at all times in a manner that reflects credibility on the House." Pressley is asking that Boebert be removed from the budget and natural resources committees she belongs to as a member of the House.

In a video that gained widespread attention on Twitter last month, Boebert describes a conversation she had with a staffer while in an elevator in the Capitol. She said she saw a police officer running toward them and then saw Omar.

"Well, she doesn't have a backpack. We should be fine," Boebert recalled saying, according to CBS affiliate WCCO. "And I said, 'Oh look, the jihad squad decided to show up for work today.'"

Pressley is exorcised about Boebert's "hateful, Islamophobic rhetoric." She also decried "dangerous behavior" but it's clear she's referring exclusively to Boebert's despicable rhetoric. It is, Pressley argues, a violation of the portion of the House rule that members "shall behave at all times in a manner that reflects credibility on the House." 

That's ridiculously vague and subject to personal interpretation and misinterpretation. If the rule could be applied against Boebert because of highly offensive speech, it could be applied against numerous others. Recall when in June, 2018

Over the weekend, Waters urged her supporters to publicly confront Trump administration officials over the White House’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that has led to the separation of migrant children from parents.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” the California Democrat said at a rally. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents"....

Waters’ remarks followed protests over the immigration policy that drove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen away from a dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington last week. A restaurant in Virginia also refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday night.

Republicans howled, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi properly rebuked Waters.  However, no Republican introduced a resolution proposing that the California congresswoman be removed from the committees on which she served, even though she had obviously failed to behave "in a manner that reflects credibility on the House" and employed rhetoric that, nearly inarguably, "emboldens future violence."

If the GOP had made such a move, Democrats probably would have aggressively pushed back- as they would have been right to do.

If he had a sense of decency- a ship that has already sailed- House Minority Leader McCarthy would denounce Boebert for her latest remarks, which are completely in character. However, he wisely will not do so, waiting instead for Democrats to overreact, thus avoiding alienating the Trump wing of the Trump party while making Republicans other than Boebert appear reasonable by comparison.

Several individuals in Nancy Pelosi's caucus are ever on the alert, excessively and irrationally, for insults to Muslims or to racial minorities. The Speaker is not in an enviable position, but capitulation is not a satisfactory response as a matter of politics or policy.

 

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Punishing Nothing By Punishing Everything

The House of Representatives has punished two of its GOP members, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, for what Daily Beast reporters Sam Brodey and Ursala Perano label "their own insulting moves." Now House Democrats are considering penalizing Republican Lauren Boebert of Colorado because of bigoted remarks about colleague Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.

Yet Brodey and Perano maintain

But this time, Democrats are weighing how to respond knowing full well that very response could serve as exhibit A in the GOP case to retaliate should they, as is expected, take control of the House in 2023....

But the dynamics of taking such a step have shifted since Democrats took the rare step of doling out consequences to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for their own insulting moves. The party voted to remove both of them from their committees and to censure Gosar.

Assuming they regain control of the House, Republican won't "respond" at all.  These are people who voted overwhelmingly against investigating an armed insurrection against the United States government, and they won't be responding. They will come after Democrats- and not only members of the "Squad"- in one of their first moves to end representative government.

Nonetheless, Alexandria Ocasi-Cortez was wrong, albeit not as naive as the reporters, when she

told The Daily Beast on Thursday she was “saddened” by Democratic leadership’s delay in calling for action. “This should not take a long time,” she said.

“We have to have even enforcement against these things, because having that consistency is what actually draws the line. When we enforce and make these actions on some of these offenses, but not others, it actually encourages an increased frequency of them trying to test this boundary,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

“Because they think that, you know, if one of every four times you can get away with it, then they’re going to roll the dice,” she added.

There is no consistency when your target is "these things." Nor can your opponents, radically hateful Republicans, be testing a boundary when your boundary is unknown.

Ocasio-Cortez has set no boundary, nor does she intend to. "When we enforce and make these actions on some of these offenses," she states, urging a Democratic response to whatever may offend. That is a whole universe of things, especially (not exclusively) for the New York congresswoman. Congress can set boundaries, of course, if it chooses to disregard her standard that whatever offends at the time is forbidden. 

Trying her hand at stand-up, Boebert ridiculed Islam and implied that a Muslim colleague was a terrorist.  Gosar threatened the life of one colleague, Greene the lives of two colleagues. There is a difference from Boebert's stand-up act, which should impel House Democrats to establish boundaries, in which some acts are within, some outside.

The importance of Democrats' establishing those boundaries is only highlighted by their disinclination to do so. If they wished to take a stand against political violence, they could do so most effectively by denouncing bigotry but recognizing that tolerance requires acceptance of speech that is reprehensible, even insensitive and biased.

By contrast, there should be consequences if members commit or encourage violence against colleagues or other elected officials.  That can be clearly distinguished from speech that is antithetical to decency and respect for others. One is awful; the other, dangerous. It shouldn't be hard to understand nor to explain to the American people. Consistency established; boundaries set.

 

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Horrific War

He was a day late, but definitely not a dollar short. In what was criticism directed primarily against the media, Kyle Kulinski (video below) on December 4 argued

Yemen is the world's worst atrocity and it's currently ongoing and there's a famine there. There's a blockade from Saudi Arabia. There's indiscriminate bombing of civilians. They've bombed open marketplaces. They've bombed mosques. They've bombed civilian infrastructure and this is something that got a little bit of coverage for awhile but now it's mysteriously disappeared.

Now, why did it disappear? Well, Joe Biden famously came out and said we're not gonna help Saudi Arabia anymore with offensive bombing.

Now, notice the wording there? He added the word "offensive," which means--what- he's leaving the wiggle room to say we're gonna help them with defensive bombing. Yeah, but what if none of the bombing is defensive? Well, they'll just call it defensive and help bomb and that's the gist of it and that's what they did.

And the left has been placated, too. I haven't seen much from any of the people, even the ones who led the charge, whether it's Bernie Sanders or Ro Khanna on the left. I haven't seen them really take it to Biden on this.

The day before, the aforementioned Sanders and Khanna in an opinion piece in The Guardian wrote

The recent breaching of the United States’ embassy in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa by rebel forces, and the detaining of Yemeni employees of the embassy, is the latest escalation in a war that has gone on for far too long. It is a war that the United States has supported and remains deeply involved in. It’s time for that complicity to end.

For more than six years, Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen’s civil war on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government against Yemeni rebels has been a key driver of the largest humanitarian disaster in the world. “The country’s economy has reached new depths of collapse, and a third wave of the pandemic is threatening to crash the country’s already fragile healthcare system,” United Nations humanitarian relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in September, with millions “a step away from starvation”.

Under first the Obama and then the Trump administration, the United States was Saudi Arabia’s partner in this horrific war. In 2019, Congress made history by passing its first War Powers Resolution through both chambers of Congress, pressing Donald Trump to end this support. It marked the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to direct the president to withdraw troops from an undeclared war.

It appears the two congressmen (yes, Rachel Maddow and others, Senators are members of Congress) are not sitting idly by as

We have proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to finally end all US support for the Saudi war effort. The House already passed this amendment for the third consecutive year. Given that this amendment simply codifies a prohibition on providing support for the Saudi war that already passed both houses of Congress in 2019 – legislation supported at the time by multiple officials now in the Biden-Harris administration – it is long overdue for this provision to be included in the final defense policy bill that is sent to the president’s desk.

Still, Kulinski is right not only on the policy but also that nobody "has really take(n) it to Biden on this.  In their commentary, Sanders-Khanna mentioned the current President only twice, the above reference to the Biden-Harris administration and when they "welcomed the Biden administration’s announcement earlier this year that it would end support for 'offensive' military operations led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and name a special envoy to help bring this conflict to an end."

Noting "under first the Obama and then the Trump administration, the United States was Saudi Arabia’s partner in this horrific war," the two Democrats place blame on the two last presidents rather than the current one. Trump and Obama do deserve the brunt of the criticism, but it's now the Biden Administration which can, as Sanders, Khanna, and Kulinski all understand, time for an American president to end American support for Saudi Arabia's brutal adventure.

 

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Conscious And Calculated

In a story far more significant than threats to two election workers or even to the political process in this southern state

At its center were two masterminds: a clerical worker in a county election office, and her mom, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots. The alleged plot: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and mother Ruby Freeman cheated Trump by pulling fake ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center. In early December, the campaign began raining down allegations on the two Black women.

Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, falsely claimed that video footage showed the women engaging in “surreptitious illegal activity” and acting suspiciously, like drug dealers “passing out dope.” In early January, Trump himself singled out Freeman, by name, 18 times in a now-famous call in which he pressed Georgia officials to alter the state’s results. He called the 62-year-old temp worker a “professional vote scammer,” a “hustler” and a “known political operative” who “stuffed the ballot boxes.”

Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”

Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had come the night before, too. She begged the dispatcher for assistance. “Lord Jesus, where’s the police?” she asked, according to the recording, obtained by Reuters in a records request. “I don’t know who keeps coming to my door.”

“Please help me.”

Freeman quit her temporary election gig. Moss took time off amid the tumult. The 37-year-old election worker, known for her distinctive blonde braids, changed her appearance. Moss often avoided going out in public after her phone number was widely circulated online. Trump supporters threatened Moss’s teenage son by phone in tirades laced with racial slurs, said her supervisor, Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron.

U.S. Representative Adam Schiff- or, hopefully, merely the young man or woman who handles his Twitter account responded

Trump put a target on the backs of two nonpartisan election workers.

Both got death threats. It’s sick. Sadly, I know what it’s like to be threatened because of Trump’s lies.

After Jan 6, people need to wake up to the threat of political violence.

It’s real - and increasing. https://t.co/43d7DYtwOL

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 3, 2021

In a Fox Business Report (video below) of July, 2015, Michael D'Antonio, whose biography "Never Enough" recently had been published, can be seen (at 1:32) explaining

He admits that to some degree that this is a method, that this is calculated. So he'll say "look, I could say the right thing and- it's funny, that's how he described it to me. "I know what the right thing to say is but that's not going to get me on TV." No one's going to listen so he'll say something that's a little bit farther, taking things to the next level in business and politics.

It's all part of Donald Trump's public persona but when it comes to its fighting mentality, it's all in the family. I think that it was the idea of competition, of winning of his father wanting his son to be nothing but the best and he's run with it ever since.

It's impossible to determine whether the tweeter was referring to Trump, Giuliani, unnamed individuals making threats, or any combination thereof. But the amateurish psychoanalysis "it's sick" is not helpful.

Sick people, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally ill, need and merit assistance. So, too, do alcoholics and others suffering from addiction, who are typically (particularly by the left) considered to be suffering from a disease.  They deserve our compassion and help.

We have no hard evidence that Donald Trump is sick. Ditto for Rudy Giuliani and their fellow travelers.  Rather, we know someone who interviewed Trump extensively and has continued to follow the man has found "He admits that to some degree that this is a method, that this is calculated."

The ex-President periodically says or does something a little more vicious, absurd, or fanciful than before, "taking things to the next level." He then dials it back because it is part of the "persona" he strategically maintains.

And it works. Not only was Donald Trump once elected to the presidency, as only 44 other individuals ever had, he's the leading candidate for his party's nomination in 2024.  Even now, without evidence, 28% of Republicans "mostly agree", and 40% "completely agree," that the presidential election "was stolen" from him.

Nonetheless, the cry continues to ring out that Trump is "crazy" or "nuts." However, he's far less crazy or diseased than he than he is intentional.  We give Donald Trump too much leeway when failing to recognize and acknowledge that.

 

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Tweet Of The Day- Email

But her emails.

But do you remember her emails? https://t.co/q0KhkcW6X2

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) December 3, 2021

Four years- four years gained for global warming, four critical years lost to the effort to curb climate change, four years in which the nation was deprived of what probably would have been the most economically progressive presidential administration since at least Harry Truman.

That was the price that was paid, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to a coronavirus because the individual who was elected President did all he could to convince Americans that Covid-10 was as much a hoax as he led them to believe climate change was. Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, for which Donald Trump is so proud that he's expected to run for President again, hoping to wreak revenge upon the voters who turned him out of office. And others.

  .

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Now A Democrat With A God Complex

Oh, good Lord. Or, good Adams, to be redundant. Politico reports

Mayor-elect Eric Adams will head to Ghana Monday evening for a “spiritual journey” he likened to President Barack Obama’s excursion there in 2009, despite a worsening Covid-19 outbreak around the globe.

“My ancestors came over here in the bottom of slave ships,” Adams told reporters Monday, following an unrelated event in Brooklyn. “And 400 years later, I’m the mayor of one of the most important cities in New York.

"My ancestors came over here" as slaves "and 400 years later, I'm the mayor" of New York City. (They were nothing and look how far I've come!)

Not satisfied (except with himself), Democrat Adams wants us to know that his election resounds with people all across the globe, as did election of the first black President of the USA. He continued

I’m going there to pray. I’m going there to do some spiritual cleansing that’s there. The people of Ghana, just like Obama when he ran for president, they’re waiting for me to go.

No one is begging Adams to go to Africa and return with the Omicron variant, but we all like to make an impact in some way. Further, no one asked the incoming mayor to whom he'll be praying, but there have been hints, such as when

During an Easter Sunday visit to the Church of God of East Flatbush, Mr. Adams cited a biblical passage that describes a test of courage under duress.

“I believe in all my heart that this is an Esther 4:14 moment,” Mr. Adams, 60, told the parishioners. “God made me for such a time as this.”

He's not on the level of Barack Obama. He's far beyond that, as God's chosen messenger.

Three days after being elected, Adams attended a celebration, at which he was feted, treated as a "conquering hero," and declared "keep analyzing me. Do what you want. But trust me when I tell you, there's never going to be another mayor like me."

God's chosen mayor, that Eric Adams, though the Apostle Paul is reported to have said "there is one God and one mediator between God and men," and he was not referring to Adams, nor to Donald Trump, who once bragged "I am the chosen one." Like Donald Trump, Eric Adams is a poseur, and bad news.

 

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