Wednesday roundup

I tried to see Jeff Flake as a guy who acted smartly on his principles, I really did. He started out his legislative stint as a House member with a laudable voting record. Even after things began getting shaky when he moved to the Senate, I held out hope. Then came his book, Conscience of a Conservative (an unfortunate title; couldn't he have come up with something that didn't cause confusion  given the precedent of Barry Goldwater's book of the same name?). His enlisting of Bob Dole and John McCain as his examples of principled Republicans was nearly the last straw for me.

Well, the last straw is now upon us: Flake has written an albeit symbolic $100 check to Roy Moore's opponent, fetal-American-death-relishing monster Doug Jones. While Hot Air's Allapundit, in the piece to which I've linked, devotes much space to the hypocrisy of Moore fans, there's no way to spin this favorably. Flake is now dead to me. He needs to just slink out of public life and find something obscure to do that doesn't throw any more monkey wrenches into the nation's politics.

I'd love to find out that this whole series of tweets compiled in this HuffPo piece is a conspiracy of parody, but unless we find out that that is the case, this is just a case of cultural-rot perpetuation by a bunch of dweebs with no idea how to productively contribute to society:

On Saturday, HuffPost published a hit job on a 53-year-old movie, based on nothing more than unthinking animus (a.k.a. "bigotry") toward a popular children's tale. HuffPost accused the film of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every sort of bigotry — not realizing that the movie actually condemns these attitudes toward "misfits."

The HuffPost video featured a montage of tweets attacking the 1964 film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- and attacking the movie's "sins." It concluded with a tweet from user Cass Martino: "Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable."

As usual, the cultural-vibrancy-haters have no sense of historical context:

What "Rudolph" presents as vindication, HuffPost decides to view as oppression. In this context, no amount of praise for formerly "marginalized" people is enough to make up for the original marginalization. The validation of having bullies apologize is nothing to these SJWs. The whole system has to be upended.
In short, these SJWs have ruined an uplifting children's tale by imposing their view of ultimate societal upheaval on a story about "misfit toys." Rather than watching the film and understanding the message as it was intended, these liberal Scrooges cherry-picked the worst parts of the film, divorced them from context, and yelled, "Bigotry! Racism, Homophobia!" (As they do for the Constitution, American history, and often Donald Trump.)
Had they taken a second to think about the movie in its context, they would have realized that the 1964 film was a cartoon version of a song written in 1949. The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was adapted from a popular children's book.
It tells a story of a reindeer being born "different" — with the shiny, red, glowing nose. Despite bullying (a constant feature of childhood in any era), Rudolph goes on to prove himself by saving Christmas with his beacon-light nose. He receives the ultimate vindication, "You'll go down in history [like George Washington]!"

The movie adapted the song, and because it was doing so, the film had to show various forms of bullying. But the bullying was not the point — the vindication was the point. The moral was to teach both bullies and kids who were bullied that being different can be a good thing, and that bullying is wrong. 

In other words, it was a social justice warrior movie, long before there were social justice warriors — or rather, it was what social justice warriors should be.

John Stossel on how far the New York Times has sunk.

The main point of Ben Shapiro's latest NRO piece - that "we've stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and begun to think of ourselves as subjects" - is important, but so is the instance he uses to substantiate it: the Conyers dynasty in Detroit:

The city of Detroit shall not go without a Conyers. The Old Man appointed his son, 27-year-old John Conyers III, to run in his stead. Conyers III was a longtime defender of his father: “It’s very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true.” Unfortunately, a few years back, Conyers III also tweeted about his dad’s penchant for the ladies: “My dad is a f***ing player and reckless as hell! He just got at this doods wife super low-key.”

Yeah.

John will run against grand-nephew and state senator Ian Conyers in an internecine war that could end with John locking Ian up in the Tower of London and then having him assassinated, if history holds true to form.

Then there's Mrs. Conyers:

The king’s queen, Monica, served on the Detroit City Council — before she was convicted of bribery for taking cash in exchange for voting on a $47 million waste contract. The king mysteriously reversed his opposition to that project; according to Judicial Watch, in 2009 “Conyers even wrote the federal government a letter supporting the plan and pushing for the permit transfers required for the hazardous waste injection well in the city of Romulus, Michigan. The letter, addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained that ‘many things had changed’ in favor of the project since he stood in opposition to it.” 

Great piece by humorist Robert Cormack at Medium on the self-sabotage that aspiring writers who don't like to read impose on themselves.

Another huge and destructive fire ripping through the Lost Angeles area. Pray.