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A Grab Bag of Random Awfulness

So much gobsmacking nonsense, so little time
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Consider, if you will:

1. Cleveland cop who shot Tamir Rice resigned from previous job after being found emotionally troubled, incompetent with weapon:

In a letter dated Nov. 29, 2012, Independence Police Deputy Chief Jim Polak described Loehmann as “distracted and weepy” during a firearms qualification course the previous day. “He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” Polak wrote in the letter to the city’s human resources director. “I am recommending he be released” from employment.

“I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies,” he wrote.

According to another report contained in the file, written by a police sergeant who supervised Loehmann, the young recruit attributed his problems to a breakup with his girlfriend. “He stated that his girlfriend broke up with him and he cried every morning for four months,” according to the documents.

After being informed that he was facing termination, Loehmann submitted his resignation a few days later, citing “personal reasons” for his departure, according to the documents.

And he was hired by the Cleveland PD? Did they even bother to do a background check? Was this information available to them? If so, why on earth did they hire this time bomb?

2. Sweden leans forward into Putin:

Margot Wallström, the newly minted foreign minister, has said that under her leadership Sweden will become the only country in the world to conduct a “feminist foreign policy.” That’s a perspective that flows from U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark measure that recognized both the disproportionate impact war has on women and the role women must play in ensuring peace and security….

By empowering women, the argument goes, there are better chances of snuffing out wars before they start and of ending them in more equitable ways. However, it is less clear what such a feminist foreign policy has to say about the old-school power politics that Putin has helped resuscitate in the past year.

Only if the woman you empower if Margaret Thatcher. Somehow, I don’t think Madam Wallström is an Iron Lady. I could be wrong.

3. Minority snowflakes at elite colleges demand special treatment in final exams:

Minority student coalitions at Harvard and Georgetown law schools are pressing administrators to postpone or defer final exams because they claim they have experienced trauma over the recent grand jury decisions in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

The students are hoping for the same outcome granted to students at Columbia Law, another top-tier institution.

Over the weekend Columbia Law’s interim dean, Robert Scott, announced that exams would be postponed for students who feel traumatized over the two grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers in the deaths of Brown and Garner, both of whom are black.

The websites of all three student coalition groups at the three elite schools are bear a similar design, indicating that they are related in some way. 

“Because this national tragedy implicates the legal system to which we have chosen to dedicate our lives, it presents us with a fundamental crisis of conscience and demands our immediate attention,” reads an open letter sent by the Harvard Law School Affinity Group Coalition to Dean Ellen Cosgrove.

What on earth are these future lawyers going to do when they get into the Real World? “Help, help, I’m being microaggressed!” is not going to get you very far.

4. The DC-NYC media axis is very, very angry over this New Republic thing. The former New Republic writer James Kirchick, who is gay, calls Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge “America’s worst gay couple.” More:

One suspects that had this couple been heterosexual and conservative, the initial media attention would not have been quite so toadying. We would have no doubt been treated to endless stories about how a “rapacious” “right-wing” millionaire, who had done nothing to earn his fortune, set out to destroy one of liberalism’s great institutions all the while enabling his power-mad spouse to “buy” a seat in congress. But everything about the Hughes-Eldridge pairing militated against such a portrayal. The prospect of a fresh-faced, conventionally liberal, gay couple hit every media sweet spot.

Hughes and Eldridge are not “role models for a future generation of…gay people,” as The Advocate absurdly stated. They are little more than entitled brats who, like most fabulously wealthy arrivistes who attain their fortunes through sheer luck rather than hard work, are used to getting everything they want, when they want it, and throw temper tantrums when they don’t.

In their elitism and sense of entitlement, they represent much of what liberals are supposed to despise. Most in the media and gay community were perfectly willing to ignore this imposture when the couple was throwing their money at the right causes and dispensing jobs to their journalist and political consultant friends. Hughes and Eldridge were beneficiaries of a corrupt and compliant media and political establishment that grasped at their filthy lucre. Only now that the fairy tale has come crashing down—a magazine destroyed, a devastating political loss suffered—is the herd willing to admit the obvious.

Now that is a righteous hatchet job that goes down like an axe blade on Thanksgiving morning. Deliciousness abounds!

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