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The college educated elites are at a loss to understand why the working class don’t obey Their Betters

I almost never watch MSNBC or CNN, but I had to yesterday, and this morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth following Grover Cleveland 2.0’s electoral win. Joe Scarborough and his fellow travelers were talking, mostly in amazement, at the multi-racial working-class coalition that former and future President Donald Trump put together in winning not just an electoral college but popular vote majority.

Naturally, most of the ‘panelists’ were in the nice MSNBC studio, but one was remote, from home.

And what a nice home it is! A home library, with a green marble surround fireplace, and fire going, plus carpets, deep windows, a nice sofa plus chairs around it for gatherings, and my immediate thought was how we were being lectured by the elites on who and what the working class are.

But there was half of a point made, in which Mr Scarborough said that the Democratic Party was run by the Washington elites. What he doesn’t get, and the left may not ever be able to understand, is that, right now, the Republican Party is a populist party, run by GOP voters themselves. The Democrats combitch that Republican Party leaders are in some sort of fealty to Mr Trump, but that isn’t the case at all. What the party leaders are doing is trying to catch up with the voters, and not all of them do that very well. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and their like all think that the educated elites should be running the party, and the voters go along with their wishes. Perhaps it was that way, when the Bush family were ascendant, but not anymore.

The Republican Party leadership were aghast in 2015, when Donald Trump began his first campaign. He just wasn’t going along with the program, and he was financing his primary campaign himself. People like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina were trying to play nice, but Mr Trump was not: he was his bombastic self, and the Republican Party primary voters chose him.

Of course, he was going to get stomped by Hillary Clinton in the general election, so yeah, the GOP would lose that election, but everything would be back to normal after he was gone.

Oops!

Today’s Democrats still don’t understand. They’ve spent the past couple of years telling us how the economy was booming, unemployment was low, and everything was peaches but the cream. And they were shocked, shocked! that the peons didn’t see things that way. Yes, inflation is now, at least supposedly, lower than the rate of wage increases, but that didn’t account for the heavy inflation during President Biden’s first two years, which left Americans far behind, and they haven’t caught up.

Jeff Stein of The Washington Post tweeted:

Roughly *67%* of voters rated the economy as “not so good/poor,” per Washington Post exit polls A shockingly poor number amid a hot labor market, booming stocks, much lower inflation, growing GDP But widespread voter dissatisfaction w/ the economy been clear for years

I was reminded of Heather Long’s article, back when she was with CNN, on September 6, 2016, reporting that Americans didn’t really seem to believe that unemployment was down around 5%, seeing it as a lot higher.

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

As it happened, that “9% or higher” was pretty much in line with the U-6 unemployment number, people who have jobs, but which were only part time, because that’s all they could find.

Back to Mr Stein, I ask: What hot labor market? Yeah, you can get a job at Starbucks or McDonald’s anytime, but manufacturing jobs are now few and far between. You can get a job in construction, though you might have to commute, if you have skills and a strong back and are willing to do something really radical like actually work.

Booming stocks? Yeah, that’s true, too, and that means that people’s 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are doing well, for the roughly half of the population which have them, but for the vast majority of Americans, surging retirement plans don’t put food on the table this evening.

From The New York Times:

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

by David Brooks | Wednesday, November 6, 2024

We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

Yeah, perhaps Mr Brooks understands, but he was raised in intellectual privilege, with a father who taught English literature at New York University and a mother who pursued 19th British history at Ivy League Columbia University. When he was 12, the family moved to the wealthy Philadelphia Main Line. Does he really understand?

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.

Here’s where Mr Brooks comes close, but just doesn’t quite get it. Yes, Mr Trump is a billionaire, and born the son of a millionaire. He, too, received an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But somehow, some way, Mr Trump actually understands the working class, in ways that the Democratic Party elite just do not. The left may think it all hucksterism, but if Mr Trump’s understanding of the working class is fake, he’s good enough at it to make it real enough to be believed.

Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” The Democrats used to be the party of the working class, the party of labor unions. But, as Mr Brooks tells us, the Democrats, led by their hard left wing, abandoned working Americans, to go for all of the crazy social policy stuff. The labor union leaders are still mostly hard-core Democrat supporters, but the union members are increasingly abandoning what their leadership tell them.

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Who were the winners on election day? It's simple: the winners were normal Americans!

Crying Kamala Harris Emhoff supporter.

I did something I rarely do: I watched CNN and MSNBC this Wednesday morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among the credentialed media and their Usual Suspect panelists. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blamed misogyny among black and Hispanic men, and the Reverend Al Sharpton — if you can remember how Rush Limbaugh used to mock the pronunciation of his name, go for it! — blamed white voters for not going where logic should have taken them. We had CNN panelists crying about how they’d explain this to their daughters.

In a way, what they were bemoaning tells us exactly who won the election. This election was won by normal people! It was won by people who might have some sympathy for the transgendered and homosexuals, but not the silliness which the far left have used to insist that males who think they’re women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, nor the groomers’ efforts to push transgenderism and homosexuality as normal and acceptable in schools. They’re the people who hear the Democrats telling us how great the economy is, while having to pay their inflated grocery bills and the price of gasoline to fill their fuel tanks. They’re the people who might not like Russia and Vladimir Putin, but who still don’t want to see their tax dollars, and eventually their children, to fight Russia in Ukraine. They’re the people who like their Hispanic neighbors, but don’t like seeing waves of unregulated illegal immigration with its influx of criminals and the tremendous monetary and housing burdens being put on their communities to house and feed them. They’re the people who might have some sympathy for the ‘Palestinians,’ but don’t like the outrageous anti-Semitism of the pro-Hamas protesters, and who recognize that it was Hamas that started that war. They’re the people who might have some concern — though it’s not the main issue for more than a small percentage — about global warming climate change, but recognize that plug-in electric vehicles are impractical for their lives, and don’t want the government telling them how they can run their lives. They’re the people who might think keeping a pet squirrel or raccoon is silly, but were appalled that the state, a state run by Democrats, broke into someone’s home to seize and then slaughter ‘Peanut’ the squirrel. They’re the people who reject the normalization and excusing of crime.

We have been told, ad infinitum, by the left that if Donald Trump won, this could be our last election. Mr Trump will be in his final term under the Constitution, and is 78 years old; in four more years, he will be 82. Even if he wants to run again in 2028, he’s legally barred from doing so, and who could really run at that age? That’s where the Democrats failed: their claim that there’d be no future elections if Mr Trump won was an unbelievable one.

We were told, by the Democrats, that Mr Trump was ‘literally Hitler,’ something really overworn since the younger George Bush was also ‘literally Hitler,’ but he had already served four years in office, and regardless of his bombastic nature, he wasn’t Hitler and didn’t exceed what he could legally do. We were told, by the left, that the three-hour, unarmed protest on January 6th was the worst attack ever on our democracy, yet we had an actual Civil War between 1861 and 1865, making what amounted to a fraternity keg party spilling out of control seem silly. We were told that Mr Trump would throw all of his opponents in jail, yet it was the Democrats who actually prosecuted the Capitol kerfufflers and threw many in jail. We were told that Mr Trump was an evil, authoritarian fascist, yet it was the Democrats who were advocating restrictions on our Freedom of Speech, and crying that Elon Musk and Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — needed to be restrained for letting people sey what they wanted in public. We were told that Mr Trump really hates Jews, yet not only was he the best friend of Israel during his first term, but it was the left who were holding sit-ins, trespassing encampments, and anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas marches in our cities. We had the Usual Suspects telling us that they’d leave the United States if Mr Trump won, but they said the same things in 2016, and almost none of them did.

Basically, the left were lying to us all, and the credentialed media were promoting their lies.

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Freedom of Speech even for those who hold repugnant views. Today's election is a referendum on conservatives who protect Freedom of Speech, and liberals who would like to shut you up

It will be no surprise to either of my two regular readers that I do not thing particularly highly of Bill Kristol. The scion of a well-to-do family, now with an estimated net worth of $10 million, was born on December 23, 1952, which had him turning 18 in late 1970. If he really believed that war was a great idea, he was of age to have enlisted in the United States Army to help fight in Vietnam .  .  . but he didn’t. His draft lotter number was 171, so he was kind of on the cusp of being called up to serve, but in any event, never served a single day in uniform. Being Jewish, Mr Kristol could also have volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defence Force, which could have used his service in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but he didn’t do that, either.

Mr Kristol just loves him some American involvement in wars, advocating American involvement in just about any war, anywhere, but let’s tell the truth here: he supports having other people fight in those wars, not himself and not his children. He has been advocating a position, immediate Ukrainian membership in NATO, in which even his fellow traveler, Max Boot, has said would probably involve the United States directly in a war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia.

We get it: Mr Kristol hates Donald Trump. I’m not sure why, because our 45th President was the greatest friend to Israel that there could have been, moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and getting the negotiations which resulted in the Abraham Accords, but #TrumpDerangementSyndrome knows few bounds.

But, to me, this tweet by Mr Kristol, saying, “We’ve all had the privilege of being allowed to fight a good and worthwhile fight,” in which he meant fighting against Mr Trump, and he was doing so on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — which demonstrates owner Elon Musk’s dedication to the Freedom of Speech! Mr Musk vocally supports President Trump, but my Twitter feed is full of posts from those supporting the crackpot from California, the war in Ukraine, and the anti-Semitic babble of those who support Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and who hate Israel.

That’s important, because we cannot forget that today’s liberals are the ones who want to ‘regulate’ speech, to prevent the dissemination of Wrongthink.

Remember, how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

This is part of what is at stake in today’s election: whether we will have people who are dedicated to freedom of speech and our constitutional rights in office, or those who believe that our individual rights must be curtailed, for some cockamamie concept of what they see as a ‘greater good.’ We’re already seeing that in Europe, where governments are arresting and imprisoning people for praying outside of abortuaries, or protesting against Israel’s conduct of the war, two radically different things from two diametrically opposite parts of the political spectrum. Don’t think that there are not a whole Americans who would do the same thing.

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TGI Election Day

I will admit to some serious election fatigue. It is virtually incomprehensible to me that more than 10% of the electorate could vote for the Communist from California, but then I think back to an early Political Science class at the University of Kentucky, back in the days of quill pens and inkwells, in which the now late Professor Malcolm Jewell pointed out something very basic: in any at all competitive race, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are each guaranteed 40% of the vote; the fight is only over the 20% in the middle.

Here in the Bluegrass State, there is no real contest: Donald Trump carried Kentucky in both 2016 and 2020, by landslide margins, and will do so again. In my small, rural county, I’ve seen several campaign signs for our 45th, and hopefully 47th, President, and not a single one for Kamala Harris Emhoff. I expect the Vice President to carry Jefferson and Fayette counties — Louisville and Lexington — and Mr Trump to carry the other 118.

I voted last Friday, and for a state which was primarily Democratic, albeit moderate, Southern Democratic, 15 years ago, there has been a remarkable change. Republicans control the General Assembly by huge margins, 80-20 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate, and while there could be a couple of changes at the margin, the GOP will retain its very heavy majorities. My own state Representative, Bill Wesley, 91st District, drew a just-as-conservative Republican primary challenger, but is unopposed in the general election; no Democrat bothered to run. Other than the presidential and 6th district congressional race, all of the offices on the ballot were unopposed. Wayne Gretzky once said that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and as far most election campaigns in Kentucky, the Democrats aren’t even trying to take a shot. Sort of like the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday, they just plain quit.

I’ve already voted, but if you haven’t, hie the hence to the polling station, and cast your ballot for Donald Trump and the down ballot Republicans!

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The Las Vegas Raiders Suck!

View from my seat, Section 231, Row 19, Seat 9

My older daughter, as a present for her favorite dad, bought tickets for us to watch the Las Vegas Raiders play the Cincinnati Bengals yesterday. In several tweets, I’ve referred to my favorite team since I was first aware of their existence, back when Daryle Lamonica was still throwing bombs, as the Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders.

Now, I have to change that: they are indeed nothing like the silver-and-black from their glory days in the 1970s and 80s, the days of Art Shell and Gene Upshaw anchoring the best offensive line in football, the days of Ted Hendricks and Jack Tatum and Otis Sistrunk terrorizing offenses. They are truly the Las Vegas Raiders now, the Raiders who just plain quit on the field yesterday.

Raiders fire three coaches after losing fifth straight game

by Joe Lago | Monday, November 4, 2024

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce said the team would “look at everything” after falling to 2-7 with its fifth straight loss in a 41-24 road defeat to the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, News.Az reports citing The Biglead.

41-24 makes it sound as though the game was actually competitive; it wasn’t. Jack Jones scored on an interception returned for a 29-yard touchdown and Brock Bowers on a garbage time touchdown late in the fourth quarter.

The Raiders had seen enough of offensive coordinator Luke Getsy’s play calling. Late Sunday night, they fired Getsy after just nine games and also let go offensive line coach James Cregg and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello.

That was deserved, because the offense just plain sucked.

I was full of hope, in that the Raiders first drive resulted in a touchdown. Two touchdowns, actually, as the first one was overturned on replay, but scored again from the one yard line.

A replacement for Getsy wasn’t announced, but passing game coordinator Scott Turner, son of longtime NFL offensive coordinator and former Raiders head coach Norv Turner, is expected to be the front-runner to take over a Raiders offense that has gained just 4.6 yards per play (29th in the NFL) and scored only 18.7 points per game (26th).

It has been a disastrous first full season as Raiders head coach for Pierce, whose encouraging nine-game interim stint last season earned him the permanent gig. He’s continuing to learn on the job, and his harshest lesson so far was the hiring of Getsy.

Despite lackluster results as Chicago Bears offensive coordinator, Getsy was brought onboard by Pierce to construct a run-first attack to complement a talented Raiders defense. That physical rushing identity never materialized as Las Vegas has averaged an NFL-worst 3.5 yards per carry.

The Raiders did even worst than that yesterday, 21 carries for 60 yards, an average of 2.9 yards per carry, with the longest run of the day being just 7 yards.

The Raiders’ biggest problem, however, has been their terrible quarterback play. Then again, first-year general manager Tom Telesco didn’t do Pierce (or Getsy) any favors when he signed journeyman backup Gardner Minshew to compete with second-year pro Aidan O’Connell for the starting job. Both Minshew and O’Connell struggled in Getsy’s unimaginative passing attack.

Ahhh, Gardner Minshew. At the very end of the first half, with the Raiders trailing 17-10, Mr Minshew was about to be sacked for a big loss on third down, but instead threw the ball away. That stopped the clock, and the Raiders had to punt. If he had simply taken the sack, the Raiders could have run out the clock and not had to punt, not given the Bengals a chance for a significant punt return, and a chance at another score. He simply had no awareness of the situation.

The dismissals of Getsy, Cregg and Scangarello are a desperate attempt to salvage a 2024 season that’s already been lost as far as posteason hopes. With the obvious offseason priority of drafting a franchise QB, Telesco and owner Mark Davis must determine who is the best head coach and play caller to groom a young quarterbacking talent like Shedeur Sanders or Cam Ward.

Or Quinn Ewers!

At 2-7, the Raiders have a legitimate shot at the first draft choice, but there are a few other teams bad enough to qualify for that.

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And these are the people the ‘Palestinian’ supporters admire?

We’ve seen so many demonstrations, by supposedly educated Americans and other Westerners, in support of the ‘Palestinians’, their Islamic culture, ‘settler colonialism,’ and fighting ‘Islamophobia’. Sensible people have mocked them, noting that those protesters are the beneficiaries of ‘settler colonialism,’ being privileged to live in the United States, and especially the “Queers for Palestine,” pointing out that being openly queer in any of the Islamic lands is an invitation to beating, torture, jail, or even execution.

Now we come to this, from, of all place, al Jazeera:

Five children among seven killed in attack on Pakistan polio vaccine drive

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemns attack near a girls’ school in the southwestern province of Balochistan.

All Saints’ Day, November 1, 2024

At least seven people, including five schoolchildren, have been killed and 23 injured in a bombing near a girls’ school in southwestern Pakistan, officials said.

Friday’s attack targeted police guarding a polio vaccination drive in Mastung, a town in Balochistan province.

“The target was a police van which was going to pick up a polio [vaccination] team,” Senior Superintendent of Police Rahmat Ullah told the Reuters news agency.

One police officer and a shopkeeper were also killed in the explosion, senior police officer Abdul Fatah told the AFP news agency.

The blast was believed to have been caused by an improvised device attached to a motorcycle parked near the school.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have frequently attacked polio vaccinators, claiming that they were distributing evil, Western medicine. Some believe that the vaccines are prohibited by Islam:

Another population study from Peshawar, Pakistan, reported that 79% of participants were not willing to vaccinate their children as they believe that vaccine was composed of ingredients that are prohibited in their religion.

These are the people the supporters of the ‘Palestinians’ admire!

Of course, the doctors who developed the two polio vaccines were Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, both of whom were Jews, so perhaps that has something to do with the radical Islamists not wanting people vaccinated.

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I voted!

The rural counties of the Bluegrass State used to be solidly Democratic. Kentucky has had only a few Republican governors in recent memory, and up until the 2016 elections, the state House of Representatives was controlled by the Democrats, the one of the last legislative chambers in the South — I was tempted to write “in the Confederacy,” but Kentucky never seceded or joined the CSA — controlled by the Democrats.

Since then, the Bluegrass State has been solidly Republican. Donald Trump carried Kentucky in both 2016 and 2020, by huge margins.

How have things changed? I noted a sample ballot on the walls, and all of the candidates for the city council of the city of Irvine — where I do not vote — were listed as Republicans. Not a single one was a Democrat, which means that no Democrat even entered the May primary.

The races in which I could vote? Other than the presidential race, only the contest for Kentucky’s sixth congressional district were even contested. All but one had a Republican nominee, with no Democratic opponent, while one, for Commonwealth’s Attorney, had a Democratic nominee, but no Republican opponent. Naturally, I voted for all Republicans, but left the vote for Commonwealth’s Attorney blank.

The line was much longer than I had anticipated; there were well over fifty people who were in line when I was. And yes, the Commonwealth required a positive ID to be able to vote.

At least in our county, we had paper ballots, which we marked, and then fed into a machine reader. This way, if there is a recount necessary, the paper ballots have been retained for recount. This is the way elections should be held.

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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

“Why do you keep bashing your head into that wall?” ask sensible people.

“Because it feels so good when I stop,” answers Ali Khamenei.

“We are capable of destroying all that the Zionists possess with one operation,” said General Ali Fadavi, the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps deputy commander. So, General Fadavi is telling us that Iran’s two separate ballistic missile attacks on Israel, the vast majority of which were intercepted, and the few that hit doing little damage, were not attempts to ‘destroy all that the Zionists possess’?

Iranian Officials Threaten Retaliation for Israeli Strikes

It was unclear how or when Iran plans to respond, or whether the rhetoric could be bluster. Iranian officials had downplayed the damage of Israel’s last attack.

By Farnaz Fassihi | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2024

Two top Iranian officials on Thursday said Iran planned to respond to Israel’s recent attacks, according to Iranian media, threatening to continue a cycle of retaliation between the countries.

“Iran’s response to the Zionist aggression is definite,” said Gen. Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to Iranian media. “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years. We are capable of destroying all that the Zionists possess with one operation.”

General Fadavi’s remarks, made to Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television station, were the first statement from an Iranian official indicating that Iran intended to retaliate to Israel’s Oct. 26 strikes on its soil. The escalating tit-for-tat cycle of direct attacks between Iran and Israel over the last six months has taken the region to the brink of an all-out war, but neither side appears to be standing down.

The second Iranian official, the head of the supreme leader’s office, Gholamhossein Mohammadi Golpayegani, also said on Thursday that Iran planned to deliver “a fierce, tooth-breaking response” to Israel’s “desperate action,” according to Tasnim, a semiofficial news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.

A “tooth-breaking response”? It’s a good thing that there are so many Jewish dentists! 🙂

Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the attack after reviewing the damages reported by military officials, which detailed the strikes across Tehran’s missile production plants and defense systems, including the killing of four soldiers. The attack did not target existing missile stockpiles, meaning that Iran has some left, but the ability of the mad mullahs to have more of them built. The attack did not target Iran’s nuclear weapons research facility, which is supposed to have been seriously hardened against attack.

In one regard, I get it. The Ayatollah has to strike at Israel last, because he feels the need to save face, both for his country and for himself. However, he is reported to be seriously, if not terminally ill, and at 85-years-old, he doesn’t have that much time left on earth. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu probably looks at things the same way, that Israel must strike last, but his concerns are different: Israel faces enemies north and south and cannot afford the slightest sign of weakness. Mr Netanyahu’s political position isn’t the strongest, so there are personal reasons for him to continue to strike.

Iran striking Israel is, in the end, fanaticism. None of the actual nations bordering Israel want war, because they know that Israel is capable of defeating them easily. Iran is 1,000 miles away from Israel, and isn’t an Arabic nation; the people there are primarily Persians. Iran’s grievance with Israel is wholly religious, because the Islamists who control the place hate Jews. There is absolutely no other reason for Iran to want to fight Israel.

But, then again, Iran is ultimately governed by a madman.

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He will do it again

Tyler Boyle under arrest, via WPVI-TV.

What sentence did he face originally?

It is always a good thing to see child molesters sentenced to jail, but it’s not a good thing, not a good thing at all, to see them sentenced to far to little time in prison.

An Aldan man was sentenced to county jail for trying to lure underage girls into his car, possessing child porn

Tyler Boyle approached underage girls on two separate occasions as they were walking home from school. After his arrest, police found a hidden cache of child porn on his cell phone.

by Vinny Vella | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2024 | 2:29 PM EDT

An Aldan man who twice tried to lure underage girls walking near their schools to get into his car and asked one to perform a sex act was sentenced Thursday to 11½ to 23 months in county jail.

Tyler Boyle, 21, pleaded guilty in July to luring a child into a motor vehicle, corruption of minors, and related crimes for approaching the girls, as well as possessing child pornography for a hidden cache of images investigators discovered on his cell phone after his arrest.

As a result of the sentence handed down by Delaware County Court Judge Mary Alice Brennan, Boyle must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Assistant District Attorney Bryan Barth said that while it was fortunate none of the victims was physically harmed, Boyle’s behavior warranted incarceration.

So, a guilty plea. His sentence? 11½ to 23 months in the Delaware County jail. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Vinny Vella continued to tell us that Mr Boyle apologized for his actions and regretted the impact hey had on the victims and their families.

“I’m doing all I can do to change my destructive behavior,” Boyle said. “I vow to get all the help I need, go back to school to finish my degree, and become a productive member of society.”

Tyler Boyle receiving his award for becoming an Eagle Scout, via Pennsylvania’s 163rd Legislative District in Delaware County

Translation: his lawyer told him to express contrition. WPVI-TV identified him as a former Eagle Scout.

Well, perhaps he really is contrite, perhaps he really is sorry for what he did, as well as for having gotten caught. But this wasn’t his first offense.

When he was arrested for this offense, he was already out on bail for exposing himself to a kindergarten aged girl. The girls in the current case were 11-years-old at the time. He still faces the charges for the 2022 arrest.

What, I have to ask, are the odds that Mr Boyle will come out of the county jail reformed? What are the odds that the two incidents for which he was arrested are the only two attempts he made to lure young girls? After his first arrest, if there was ever any chance that Mr Boyle could somehow restrain his sick urges, that chance was obviously zero to judge by the fact that he offended a second time.

The fear of jail didn’t stop him from that second offense, so what are the chances that 11½ to 23 months in county will create enough of an overriding fear that his unnatural urges won’t get the better of him again?

Unfortunately, Mr Vella’s story did not tell us what kind of jail time he was facing. He was charged with “two counts each of felony luring a child into a vehicle, felony unlawful contact with minors, and felony corruption of minors, according to court records.” Under 18 §2910(a)(a.1)(2) Luring a child into a motor vehicle or structure is a second-degree felony, which, under 18 §106 (b)(3) carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. He could have been locked up for twenty years just on those two counts.

Was Mr Boyle given a lenient plea deal so the children would not have to testify? That kind of thing happens a lot. However, child pornography was found on his cell phone, and that, too, is a felony. Under 18 §6312(d)(d.1)(2)(i) simple possession of child pornography is a third degree felony, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, and none of the victims would have had to have testified for that charge to have been brought to trial.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly has provided for strict sentences for the sexual abuse of children and preying on them, but, as happens far, far, far too often, in many of our states, the criminal justice system is far too lenient in imposing sentences for these crimes.

Gary Plauché was unavailable for comment.