Collaborative Writing
How Trump conquered the Jersey Shore
This past weekend I was walking down the boardwalk of Seaside Heights, New Jersey – the honky-tonk setting for the dubious reality series “Jersey Shore” – when a young man walked toward me buff enough to have been a member of that cast. That was no big deal. Guys like that have been walking this boardwalk since I was kid. What caught my eye was that he was wearing a “Trump 2020” muscle shirt. I had seen a lot of Trump paraphernalia in this part of the world but never a muscle shirt.
The house next to where we are staying proudly flies a large “Let’s Go Brandon” flag right under the American flag. So does a store on the town’s main street. A lady at church on Sunday carried a Trump tote bag. In 2020, as in 2016, one shop on the boardwalk sold nothing but Trump accoutrements. As I was walking back from church, management announced the opening of the beaches with a stirring rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. All the people I could see stopped, doffed their caps and faced the massive American flag flying over the boardwalk. That’s the kind of place Seaside is.
The ongoing mob ‘justice’ against Derek Chauvin
The Scottsboro Boys got more justice than Chauvin and company.
If a 22-year prison sentence were not punishment enough for former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, Federal Judge Paul Magnuson added another 21 on federal civil rights charges. In handing down the sentence, Magnuson had the nerve to tell Chauvin, “You absolutely destroyed the lives of three other young officers.” Chauvin destroyed their lives? Let’s back up here, Judge. To say, “I really don’t know why you did what you did,” raises the obvious question: Shouldn’t you have known before sentencing Chauvin to 21 years in prison?
Here, Judge, is why Chauvin did what he did. When Chauvin arrived on the scene, two of the three officers whose lives Chauvin “destroyed” were struggling to arrest chronic felon and doper George Floyd. What made the arrest difficult is that the muscular Floyd was a half-foot taller and at least 50 pounds heavier than the biggest of the officers. As senior officer on the scene, Chauvin had to do something.
Ivy Plagiarism Pandemic Invades Princeton
The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did not attend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate,
If Biden had an Ivy education, he too might have gotten a pass on his plagiarism.
while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party, and tried to pass it off as his own.
The Michael Dukakis campaign caught the theft, and the media, still in their journalism phase, went digging for more purloined pearls of Biden wisdom. They were not hard to find. Under pressure, Biden had to confess that he had plagiarized a paper while in law school — the Syracuse University Law School, that is — and he was out of the presidential race even before the corn stalks withered in Iowa.
As Biden learned the hard way, a Syracuse University affiliation offers no immunity to the plagiarism bug. Harvard’s does. Yale’s does. And Princeton’s will likely do the same. But even the Ivy schools require the individual to boost his/her/their natural Ivy immunity with renewable doses of progressive toxins.No Ivy Leaguer has done more to earn his immunity than “History’s Attack Dog,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse. In addition to his more prosaic tasks at Princeton, Kruse has assumed the responsibility of patrolling the daily news. “Online,” observes Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators.” It is the skewering that has netted Kruse his 502,000 followers on Twitter.
Would there have been an Obama had abortion been legal in 1960?
If Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, had been alive today, we can be confident she would have been among the loudest voices at whatever pro-abortion protest would have her.
As Obama describes his mother in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Ann was “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” And she was all these things before such things were cool.
Her parents were a bit more traditional. In the summer of 1960, they faced a dilemma. Their daughter was pregnant, and she had alerted them that the father was black. Today, a mixed-race couple can make a living just starring in TV commercials.
