The Parasites and the Producers

From Kevin D. Williamson:

Public Enemy No. 1 in Democratic circles today is Heather Bresch, CEO of the company that makes the EpiPen, a super-convenient epinephrine auto-injection device used to treat anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that can be caused by anything from a bee sting to a bag of peanuts. At its worst, anaphylaxis is bad news of the kill-you-dead variety, which makes having an EpiPen or two around very handy indeed. Bresch’s company, Mylan, recently raised prices on the EpiPen and several other treatments they sell. An EpiPen dose might cost as much as $600, which is . . . about half of what the typical American family spends on cable TV in a year. Yeah, sure, little Bobby’s face is swelling up like a North Korean dictator’s and his kidneys are about to fail — but there’s two episodes left on Game of Thrones this season! And Daenerys is naked in both of them!

Spare me.

Of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to make a federal case out of this, as has her primary rival, sometime Democrat and full-time socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, i.e., the usual bulls—t from the usual orifices. Mrs. Clinton demanded an immediate reversal of the price hike, and Senator Sanders produced the usual flatulence about greedy executives.

Pardon my bluntness here, but screw these people. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has ever in a moment of mortal terror cried out: “For God’s sake, is there a politician in the house?” You know how many treatments for anaphylaxis have been produced by politicians over the course of human history? Zero. Congress’s sole contribution to the existence of a handy device that keeps your children from dying from bee stings is the fact that Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of a Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

If we were relying on the intelligence, work ethic, creativity, entrepreneurship, scientific prowess, and far-sightedness of the members of Congress to produce treatments for allergic reactions or any other medical problem, we’d still have a million people a year dying from smallpox and preventable infections. We’d also be starving to death.

Bernie Sanders doesn’t have the first clue how an EpiPen works or what went into developing it, but he’s sure he knows what one should cost, and he’s sure who should decide — him. You know what Bernie Sanders is? He’s a bum. He was damn near 40 years old before he ever found his way into a full-time job, and that was in elected office; before that, he collected benefits, sold his creepy rape fantasies for left-wing newspapers at $50 a pop, and never lifted a finger toward any genuinely productive enterprise. He’s been suckling greedily at the public teat since way back when he could remember where his car keys are. Funny thing, though: Now he’s a bum with a third home on the waterfront of a Vermont island worth the better part of a million dollars. Every good apparatchik eventually gets his dacha.

Mrs. Clinton is a bum and a crook who used the State Department as a funnel to guide the money of favor-seeking business interests at home and abroad into the Clinton Foundation, a sham charity that exists to pay six-figure salaries to Clintons (Chelsea is full-time executive there) and their courtiers.

These people are parasites. They make: nothing. They create: nothing. They produce: nothing. But they feel perfectly justified — they positively glow with moral frisson — standing between the people who create and build and the people who benefit from those creations. And they don’t just stand there: They stand there with their hands out. I don’t know how much Heather Bresch has in the bank, but without checking, I’ll bet you five dollars it is a good deal less than the Clintons have piled up in “public service.”

Thought experiment: Your child is dying. Who do you go to for help? Sanders? Clinton? Or one of the research scientists who made the EpiPen possible?

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The Modern Art Fraud

Are the Police Racist?

A Truly Unconscionable President

Well of course the Justice Department objected — it was illegal. It isn’t only the optics; it isn’t only that they are just looking ridiculous in denying that it was a quid pro quo. Obviously it wasn’t a coincidence. The reason that it was objected to by Justice — there is a statute that prohibits us from engaging in Iran dealing with dollars. So they had to print the money here, ship it over to Switzerland, turn it into Swiss francs and euros, and ship it over to Iran. If a private company had done this, this is called money laundering. The CEO would be in jail right now.

It’s the Supreme Court, Stupid!

From Hugh Hewitt:

Of course I am voting for Donald Trump. You should be too if you are a conservative. Let me break this down into three arguments, the first of which is Trump’s trump card on the #NeverTrumpers.

If Hillary Clinton wins, the Left gavels in a solid, lasting, almost certainly permanent majority on the Supreme Court. Every political issue has a theoretical path to SCOTUS, and only self-imposed judicial restraint has checked the Court’s appetite and reach for two centuries.

That restraint will be gone when HRC’s first appointee is sworn in. Finished.

This is not hyperbole. I have the advantage of having taught Con Law for 20 years, of having argued before very liberal appellate judges like Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the very liberal Ninth Circuit, of practicing with the best litigators in the land, and I know what a very liberal SCOTUS means: conservatism is done. It cannot survive a strong-willed liberal majority on the Supreme Court. Every issue, EVERY issue, will end up there, and the legislatures’ judgments will matter not a bit.

So vote for Hillary Clinton (or sit it out) and then prepare for the deluge of court-ordered solutions to every social problem, bench-drawn congressional districts and extraordinary deference to every agency of the federal government combined with a sweeping away of federalism.

Second, but much harder to see or understand, Hillary Clinton is thoroughly compromised by the Russians (or the Chinese, or the Iranians, or all of them). Deny the testimony of expert witnesses like former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell or Rudy Guiliani if you want, or the implications of the distribution of DNC emails via the WikiLeaks front, but just know everything she sent and received on her security-free “private” server is in the hands of the bad guys.

The influence they will have over her and all of her cyberassociates as a result will be complete even if unknown to the folks being worked and watched.

That’s espionage. The Russians are very good at it. They are a GEICO ad of spying: That’s what they do. They use what they steal to advance their national interest, sometimes crudely, sometimes with breathtaking sophistication. The consequences of her complete compromise haven’t sunk in yet, but it is real, not reversible, and dangerous beyond description to the national security of the U.S. Trump critics worry that he’s oblivious to Vladimir Putin’s risks. Hillary is already a Putin pawn.

The first two arguments are negatives. But there is a positive case for Donald Trump, a third prong in the case for working for Trump’s election: He brings 3,000 political appointees with him, and the first two — Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as VP and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has chief of the transition — telegraph that the vast majority of his team in the executive branch (and his appointees on the courts) will be conservatives.

Yes, Trump is transplanting economic populism into the GOP, and parts of the conservative movement are struggling to reject the transplant (just as parts of the Democratic Party are denying that the principle of transference works when applied to their passion for/love of Bernie Sanders/President Obama and HRC.)

But Donald Trump, like it or not — like him or not— is the imperfect messenger of the perfect storm in American politics. He is the shuddering, convulsive conclusion to decades of perceived indifference to the American middle class combined with a conviction that the GOP is spineless, and if he is not to your tastes, too bad.

If the charges of elitism and weakness are unfair, too bad. He won fair and square. No one stopped him because he could not be stopped. And he picked a genuine, deeply principled conservative to partner with on the ticket.

Read or listen to the long interview I conducted with Gov. Pence on Friday morning, then put down your #NeverTrump pride and start working to save the Supreme Court and national security. Help Christie staff the new government. Explain to family and friends what Clinton’s compromised status means. Argue for the future and make peace with the present.

I would not have picked Donald Trump as my party’s nominee. But he is that nominee. And he backed away from the cliff of indifference to race of such massive proportions — the Judge Curiel episode which had me launching whatever rhetorical broadside I could muster against him — that it would have obliged me to surrender the election and the courts.

That demonstrated to me, as did the Pence selection, that Trump is learning that there are indeed third rails in politics and governing. In this process he is being assisted by his remarkable children and a growing team of, wait for it, conservatives.

And, a key and non-negotiable thing, Trump isn’t a racist. He is simply monumentally indifferent to the language of race, and having interviewed him a dozen plus times and helped conduct four debates among the GOP candidates including him, I’m confident of this judgment.

He has many flaws and some strengths, but he isn’t a racist, or a dangerous demagogue, a Mussolini-in-waiting, a Caesar off-stage. He isn’t going to roll Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell or, most formidable of all, the Constitution. If he nominated a replacement for Justice Scalia who wasn’t on his list of nominees — the most frequent of imagined future outrages I hear from #NeverTrumpers — the GOP Senate should simply refuse hearings as it has to Judge Garland.

In short, there is too much at stake to spend August fanning yourself and the fall fuming about foiled plans for a better nominee. It is Trump or Clinton. The choice is easy. If you have any doubts at all, take a course in Con Law. If Hillary wins, the casebook you use to do so will simply be a history book, not a guide to how the Supreme Court should decide things based on precedent.

To borrow from James Carville, who ran the first Clinton campaign in 1992 from a room adorned with a sign “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”: “It’s the Court, Stupid!” Which means it’s the Constitution. Think on that at the beach.

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