Byron York knows which way the wind blows. While assuring us that "I worked for National Review from 2001 to 2009 and know, like and respect many of the people involved in this matter," he nevertheless doubts his old buddies are qualified to moderate the National Review GOP debate (formerly known as the Telemundo/NBC/National Review GOP debate, before the Republican candidates went on the warpath against the Lame Stream Media and made Reince Priebus kick 'em out). Why not? Because National Review writers have been mean to the Republican front-runner, and might ask him impertinent questions -- just like those bastards from CNBC!
Trump is of course not the only candidate NR writers have criticized; just ask Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and others. But it's fair to say Trump is a special case, and he has been on the receiving end of unusually strong invective from NR.
Lowry says that won't be a problem come debate time. "We obviously have strong opinions and don't hide them, but that won't keep us from being tough but fair with everyone," he told me in an email exchange.
That's what they all say, Mr. Media Bias.
The underlying problem here is that some of the networks have leaned so far left in the past that the RNC felt the need to insist on including someone who "speaks conservative" among the debate panelists. But some of the best conservative speakers are prominent figures at opinion publications who are 1) appalled by Trump, and 2) unconstrained from expressing their feelings about him. That makes for a lively public conversation, but is it a good idea for a presidential debate?
This is even more delicious than NR's Jim Geraghty having to explain to readers that noticing Ben Carson was running a supplement scam and lying about it isn't the same thing as working for the enemy. As I've said before, in these guys' world truth is no defense against accusations of media bias. I'm not sure the Trump juggernaut can endure long enough to panic some of them into a Strange New Respect for Il Douche, but it would almost be worth a Trump Administration to see it. I mean, the country's fucked anyway, right?
Am I the only one left who loves Hank Thompson? He's ridiculous,
and this song is just absurd, but it fills me with delight -- especially
"None of the animals had a clock/But everybody knew it was time to rock."
• Byron York -- one is tempted to call him "poor Byron York" in this instance, but fuck him -- does his best with the exploding cigar that was the Benghazi hearing, but his best is a passive-aggressive sulk that will convince nobody except other conservative Pity Partiers. First, in order to avoid being laughed out of all cognizance, York has to acknowledge up front that things worked out better for Clinton than for the Republicans. Then he starts making excuses: "The Benghazi Committee has made incremental advances in the public's knowledge of the circumstances of the death of four Americans in Libya on September 11, 2012," he claims. "But incremental advances — nuggets of information — don't make for dramatic hearings." Of course I, like any other subscriber to wingnut publications, have been getting BENGHAZI BOMBSHELL emails for years -- e.g., from high-end vendors like from Sharyl Attkinsson at the Daily Signal ("Benghazi Bombshell: Clinton State Department Official Reveals Details of Alleged Document Review") to "BENGHAZI BOMBSHELL COMING OUT ANY DAY: THERE IS BOUND TO BE A TREASON CHARGE!" -- so there was always drama aplenty if you consider Clinton to be Snidely Whiplash. Similarly, York admits that the committee members' "near-obsession" with Sidney Blumenthal was a little weird, but then rushes to remind us that Blumenthal is pure evil -- indeed, "a master of misdirection" who is "probably happy to be the villain of the day, to the extent that it ensures Hillary Clinton will not be the villain of the day." See, he set it all up himself to make Republicans look bad -- O why won't anyone believe us! York finally says "the committee did find some good nuggets..." Again with the nuggets! This is exactly how you would expect someone who considers the hearings a serious inquiry into the death of four Americans to portray it. Well, on to Congressional hearings over the harsh treatment of Marine Todd.
• Bonus Benghazi: Clinton sent out a fundraising letter based on the hearings, and at National ReviewJim Geraghty sniffs this is "in poor taste." Where to begin...
• It's at National Review and it's by Mona Charen, which is two strikes right off the bat, but I thought you might enjoy the first graf:
"It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”
Hot stuff indeed! But wait for the punchline:
Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View is author of the above comment.
Life ain’t fair, and cannot be made perfectly fair. But it almost seems a conspiracy of silence among the college educated to keep from the working class the key secret to their success.
Rich Liberal 1: Isn't being married just the best?
Rich Liberal 2: I know! Look at this Tesla I bought with my marriage coupons!
Rich Liberal 1: They weren't going to let us refinance our mansion but I just slapped that marriage certificate down on his desk and dude was like why didn't you say so?
Bum (sidling up): Hi guys whatcha talking about.
Rich Liberal 1: Umm, Hillary Clinton.
Rich Liberal 2: Yeah we like her.
Rich Liberal 1: Def not about being married which sucks.
Rich Liberal 2: Yeah don't even man.
At National Review, Jim Geraghty laments that President Obama is making Republicans look bad. I know, but hear him out:
Mickey Kaus characterizes the approach as “gaslighting” – giving your opponent a legitimate reason to get angry, then turning around and pointing to their anger as evidence they’re unhinged, obsessed, incapable of governing responsibly, et cetera....
Free community college? Hey, it’s never going to become law, so why not propose it and make Republicans look mean for not enacting it? Goofing around with a selfie stick? Go right ahead. Chewing gum at an international summit? Hey, what are they going to do, impeach him?
In this atmosphere, it’s no wonder Republicans are furious. A midterm election victory that was supposed to constrain President Obama’s ability to enact his agenda has only emboldened and liberated him.
So, to sum up: Obama does things within the power of his office that his political opponents don't like. (Geraghty hints at "blatant disregard for [Congress'] roles under the Constitution" but, surprise, provides no examples, probably because he feels he's been laughed at enough for one day.) Also, Obama seems to have fun doing it. Wingnuts are therefore furious.
Jim, have you ever seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Yosemite Sam? Which of those characters do you think the audience is siding with?
Say this for Sam, though -- he never resorted to anything like this:
The insanely imbalanced media landscape ensures that almost any expression of Democratic anger is portrayed as justified (or ignored if it’s too obviously outrageous) while almost any Republican expression of anger is portrayed as irrational, deep-seated hatred.
Imagine YS turning on the camera and snarling, "Quit makin' me look like a eedjit, yuh gol-durned liberal media!"
This is as good a time and place as any to enjoy one of my fa-vo-rite Friz Freleng numbers:
UPDATE. Commenters are fun; Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard says, given what's really pissing these guys off, Kaus should have called it "blacklighting."
Haven't heard it in decades. Built to last, this stuff.
• AlterNet describes this six-minute disinfomercial as "Insane Video Presented by Kim Davis' Law Group at Extremist Christian Campus." We hear that kind of language all the time, but this thing is literally insane, in an instructive way. "Kim Davis' Law Group" is Liberty Counsel, experts at nuisance suits (and just plain nuisances) intended to lay the groundwork for an American theocracy; "Extremist Christian Campus" is Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's outfit. The film is a non-narrative collage of stock art, music, and news clips -- sort of like the indoctrination scene in The Parallax View, except incompetent -- that strains for a concatenation effect that will ready the viewer to do battle for the Lord. Among the "bad" things in the beginning (you know they're bad because they're interspersed with images of suffering, ominous quotes, and transgender rights) is Barack Obama, suggesting in a 2006 speech that the Sermon on the Mount is a better guide to righteous living than the absurd prohibitions of Leviticus. If it seems weird to you that someone would portray this eminently reasonable and Christian POV as an example of evil, remember, first, that this is blackety-black Obama and, second, that this was exactly what conservative Christians were saying about the speech when it was uncovered for the 2008 election (e.g., "WATCH OBAMA MOCK BIBLE IN 2006" -- World Net Daily). Eight years of repudiation by the American public has not sweetened their temperaments, and the film ends by suggesting the earth with be bathed in a cleansing fire, from which true believers will be saved to listen to inspirational music forever. Don't forget, folks: This is what these people really believe.
• Happy Patriot Day. I used to note each anniversary, and track the increasing grumbliness of conservatives as they found they were losing, in the words of Dick Cheney in The Onion, "the satisfaction of telling people to do things and then them doing it -- not because they want to, but because they are afraid to do otherwise." Sure enough, at National Review, Jim Geraghty marks 9/11 XIV and worries, "Is This Date Starting to Become Too Normal a Day?"
I think I’m starting to understand how the Greatest Generation used to feel when December 7 would come and go on the calendar with barely a mention of the date’s significance. On the one hand, life has to go on. We can’t live in fear. Our foes want us paralyzed and overwhelmed by the horrific brutality of their actions. In 2011, the date fell on a Sunday, and the NFL played games....
By and large, those worse terrors haven’t arrived – although assorted malevolent forces like the anthrax mailer, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Fort Hood shooter certainly tried. So have we, as a country, been spending the past f14 years waiting for another shoe to drop that never will? Or will it come some day, feeling even worse when it arrives because we let go of that late-2001 dread?
You can't see it at the website, but in the version of this appearing in Geraghty's email newsletter, he then dons the ghost sheet and warns us 9/11 heathens about all the jihadi stuff that's threatening to blow if we don't abandon our Obamaish ways, including Joshua Ryne Goldberg and "these shootings on Arizona’s highways." Seriously, can you prove these acts of vandalism aren't jihad? Maybe all those boys who used to drop rocks onto cars from overpasses were sleeper cells that are just now awakening. Ah-wooooo! Sigh. Even non-religious conservatives resemble a millenarian sect, in that they live in hope of a cataclysmic event (in their case, the resurrection of 9/11) that will restore them to power and glory.
• Jon Stewart's Moment of Zen may be over, but here's a Moment of WTF from (you probably guessed) The Federalist by Rich Cromwell, whose men-should-be-men-and-women-should-be-helpless riff climaxes thus:
For the continuation of the species, the Philips of the world have to be out there getting stupid and threatening to burn the place down. There may be a Bre next door, maybe even back living with mom and dad, but she’ll be waiting to offer a helping hand instead of encouraging him to burn the place down. Life and society may change, but every man remains a potential arsonist, every woman a potential firefighter.
You can read the whole thing if you're into context but I warn you, it won't help. I will tell you that the "arsonist" bit seems to refer to one of his Federalist bros accidentally burning Minute Rice. There's also a Chesterton quote, but I bet you knew that already. (I wish some hacker would break into all the Catholic-cons' websites and replace the Chesterton and C.S. Lewis quotes with Erma Bombeck.)
I had the great pleasure and privilege to see Harold Prince's
stripped-down version of Candide on Broadway in 1974 and still
appreciate its crispness, but I just love the original version of this song.
• I think I made the right choice to skip the debate and go see Loudon Wainwright III last night. He opened with "Double Lifetime" and "Heaven," which set the tone -- death and jokes! Wainwright seems to have repurposed some of his material from his Surviving Twin thing about fathers and sons -- in fact he not only prefaced some of his songs with bits from his father's Life magazine columns, he even performed one of those columns as a comic monologue. I wanted more songs but it made an interesting point of comparision: LWII's stuff is pretty good for magazine work; it's well-crafted and has the old-fashioned, better sort of middle-class attitude toward the big issues -- that is, a becoming gratitude for one's privilege, and respect for the mysteries of love and death and the inadequacy of privilege before them. It strikes me that his son picked up some of that, and though he likes to be more irreverent and playful that's still his grounding. Which may really be the reason he never got to be a big star -- not because of the "novelty-store garlic gum" bitter surprise lyrics I blamed when I wrote about him years ago, but because his truths are literally old home truths, a hard sell to a pop music audience (unless of course you lie about the truths). Concert highlights: A song for his upcoming Alaskan family boondoggle called "Meet the Wainwrights" ("Rufus used to be a tit man/Now he checks out pecs at the gym"), and a really good "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House," a song that sounds pretty mature considering it debuted in 1971.
• Tell you why else I think I made the right call: I saw the video clip where Donald Trump excuses calling women "fat pigs" on the grounds that "this country" doesn't have time for "political correctness," and I have to say he exceeds even my satirical gifts. I also see that the mainstream National Review conservatives, who were pissed when Trump began hogging attention, are starting to love him for it. A month ago Jonah Goldberg was calling Trump a fraud -- now he says, "[Trump] makes the debates entertaining and his competitors look more serious and responsible -- what’s so bad about that?" which suggests that they could have gotten the same effect with the Iron Sheik, who I understand has a higher Q rating. Jim Geraghty crows that Trump "killed with that 'Only Rosie O’Donnell' line" (in re women as fat pigs); he's slightly more protective of Megyn Kelly, which is perhaps just his way of showing that there's no principle of chivalry at stake, he just like fat jokes about lib chicks. I wonder what election this is meant to win? These guys already had date rapists and gamergaters locked up. On the plus side, Ben Carson mentioned Alinsky, thereby alerting whatever normal people may have been watching to this weird conservative secret handshake, which ought to help them decide how seriously to take the Republican Party as presently constituted.
"[Megyn Kelly] gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump said in a CNN interview. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"...
How will the Trumpenproletariat react? Let's see what Breitbart.com commenters have to say about it:
The more toffee-nosed cons protest: National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke sputters, "Trump has no attractive qualities at all. He's not a conservative, he's not a good politician, he's not eloquent, he has no experience." Which seems a harsh thing to say about his party's front-runner.
Jonah Goldberg has had a fartful morning. At The Corner, he reacts to a feature about Chelsea Clinton -- first, by acknowledging that he wrongly characterized it as a puff piece without reading it (for which he blames Twitter, no dog or intern being handy); then, by taking the opportunity to harsh on C. Clinton at length for -- well, for existing, it would seem, and for allegedly being a "total political mediocrity" which might mean something if 1.) the current GOP Presidential field did not exist as a point of comparison and 2.) C. Clinton were actively running for something. (She has said she's "open" to running for office in the future.) Also, she only got where she got to because of her family. "Are there many average people who can take inspiration from Chelsea’s 'struggle'?" asks Goldberg. "I doubt it." (To quote August J. Pollak, "PLEASE tell me Jonah Goldberg is whining about someone getting where they are because of their parents." Oh, here's a bonus.)
Goldberg then tries a few carom shots to get at Hillary via Chelsea ("she is also a total political mediocrity. In this sense she takes entirely after her mother," "she certainly didn’t get her dad’s political chops. This is pure Hillary," etc.), but this hot mother-daughter action isn't really doing it for him so eventually he just unpantloads:
As for the bit about her being the closest thing America has to a princess, well, when you think about it for a second, I think that’s right. The problem is that the closest thing to a princess in America is very, very, very far from an actual, you know, princess. We don’t do royalty here very well. The thing that makes her most princess-like is that she really doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself except get caught up in the lie of her family business. What I mean is that she may actually believe that the Clintons are a kind of secular royalty and a dynasty. No doubt she’s been told that a lot. No doubt her parents don’t loop her in on the seamier side of how the Tudors of the Ozarks operate. She probably thinks the primary purpose of the Clinton Foundation is philanthropy rather than extending the Clinton brand and empire, in much the same way descendants of the original medieval robber barons believe their family has always been about public service. Bless her heart
There is no coherent meaning to the paragraph other than "Are you proud of me now, Mom?" In the ancient tradition of Goldberg's less-connected colleagues coming to his rescue, Jim Geraghty tries to hand Goldberg a much stronger case against C. Clinton -- that she's been promoted beyond her competence in the media world due to her celebrity -- to which Goldberg responds that he entirelyagrees "about the broader phenomenon of Chelsea Clinton, which is why I assumed that Contrera’s piece was just another one of these insipid sweeteners." Well, Jim, you tried.
...It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
It was at least partly on these Jeffersonian grounds that proponents of removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds won their argument. The statehouse belongs to everyone, and forcing those who abhor that flag to pay for it, even symbolically and even if many of its supporters meant no offense, is still sinful.
Well, if you don’t believe that a fetus with arms, legs, a face and a brain is an actual human life worthy of protecting, or at least deserving of a level of respect greater than a hangnail, it’s doubtful anyone will ever persuade you otherwise.
But maybe you can still accept that other people disagree with you. Abortion is not simply a symbolic act, but perhaps it would help to see it as one. And, if you can muster that much imagination, maybe you can also understand why those truly offended by the practice don’t want their tax dollars subsidizing it.
In other words: Look, be fair -- we took down our tributes to the Confederacy, the least you can do is enact the Hyde Amendment what you already did well no uh because fungible did I say that rightand in conclusion farrrrrrtttt.
• Republican pundits (or should we say RINO elitists?) are panicking over Donald Trump's strong showing in GOP polls. Jim Geraghty attempts, unqualified as he is, to talk sense to his fellow wingnuts in a post called "Do Trump and His Fans Even Want to Persuade Others?" (something I ask about conservatives generally all the time):
I realize that if you’re a Trump fan right now, energized by his in-your-face combativeness with the media and anyone who disagrees with him...
But let’s take Stephen Covey’s advice to “begin with the end in mind” — presumably that is conservative governance — and recognize that to achieve that, we need a Republican president. And as much as Trump may be rising in the polls of the GOP primary... let’s take a look at his numbers head-to-head against Hillary Clinton:
CNN: Clinton 59 percent, Trump 35.
Fox News: Clinton 51 percent, Trump 34.
Quinnipiac: Clinton 50 percent, Trump 32.
Some of you will see the problem right off. Wait for it...
(One caveat: That CNN poll had Hillary ahead of Rubio by 16, Walker by 17, and Bush by 13, so perhaps we can argue that it was a Democrat-heavy sample...
A Democrat-heavy sample! Or "perhaps we can argue" that Clinton is a revered name in American politics and the Republicans are running approximately 239 feebs, flakes, and nincompoops led by a racist blowhard clown. Wait, though, Geraghty's not finished:
...Most polls have these candidates trailing by single digits or tied with Hillary.)
Geraghty provides zero links to support this assertion, so I looked up keywords in Google News and got some results such as this from the Washington Examiner:
Ted Cruz is winning at Twitter, tied with Hillary Clinton on Facebook
If only elections were totes social media LOL! Also, that was from December of last year. Much more recent (June 26) was this:
Poll: Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Statistically Tied With Hillary Clinton In New Hampshire
Well, now it makes sense!
• Jesus-con Alan Jacobs has a long more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger thing at The American Conservative about how all us gay marriageists and non-fans of the Confederacy are not merely expressing opinions he does not share, but actively trying to shut down debate with our Twitter feeds and our mean looks -- which schtick, I'm sure you've noticed, is a popular favorite among the brethren these days. "Survey and critique others, lest you make yourself subject to surveillance and critique," Jacobs characterizes his opponents. "And use the proper Hashtags of Solidarity, or you might end up like that guy who was the first to stop applauding Stalin’s speech." He himself, of course, is just trying to keep free discourse alive -- his post's called "The Value of Disagreement," see? The first tell that this is bullshit is an opening quote from a particularly passive-aggressive post by P-A Queen Mollie Hemingway. But it's even more instructive to get in the Wayback Machine and read Jacobs' 2003 article called "The War in Quotes: Journalists who don't like the war -- and like thinking even less -- have a little trick they use to tell us how they really feel." There, Jacobs calls rightblogger whipping-boy Robert Fisk "the Krusty the Clown of journalism," and notes that when referring to the invasion of Iraq Fisk put quotes around "liberators" and "liberation," which seems to me like basic hygeine for handling government propaganda, but which Jacobs calls "punctuational Tourette's Syndrome." Jacobs also complains that the New York Times and other peace creeps are doing the same thing:
...the Times apparently can't bear under any circumstances to use that term, in the context of the Iraq war at least, without scare quotes. Thus my description of this practice as a tic or as disease: After a while it kicks in automatically, and one wonders what habitual users could do to keep it from taking over their minds.
Twelve years later, Iraq is wreckage and everyone knows the idea that we "liberated" it was always a joke -- and Jacobs, then so diligent about what he considered journalists' inappropriate use of quote marks, is now telling us that liberals are the real language cops.
Mama had this record. Whole thing's great, but I particularly like the part
with the Leslie'd organ and what I believe is choked-pick percussion git.
• National Review's John Miller is again pimping Liberty Island, the website whose politically-driven belles-lettres we've examined before, so I figured I'd have a look. Among recent offerings is the winner of its recent Memorial Day writing contest, a story called Bait, in which he-men with Marine training use a sissy Hollywood actor to break up a super-sophisticated dogfighting ring, and then see to it that the sissy gets beat up because he's a sissy. The author demonstrates a great deal of knowledge about armaments, and sympathy for dogs if not Hollywood sissies; if you're going to be cruel at Liberty Island, it pays to be sentimental, too. Fave line: "Hell, there was even the rock god my kid sister had worshipped in high school [at the dogfight]. I guess meat was only murder sometimes." Picture Morrissey crying "ten thousand quid on the pitbull with the faraway eyes." Also in rotation: "WILL YOU SURVIVE IF (WHEN?) THE POWER GRID GOES DOWN?" which I think is sponsored content but with this bunch you never know. Oh, and an announcement for a new Book of the Year contest, sponsored by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, for people who like their art-product vetted by ideologues.
• Elizabeth Warren says "the game is rigged" and she's right, says National Review's Jim Geraghty, "but she’s off-base in her assessment of how it’s rigged" -- it's you liberals and your so-called "education" that rigged it! Geraghty points to an article in The Economist called “America’s new aristocracy: Education and the inheritance of privilege," and tells us,
...the liberal-dominated world of higher education has turned itself into the exorbitantly expensive entry gate to the middle class, setting aside quite a few slots for the offspring of current elites.
Wait a minute -- colleges are expensive, and the children of the rich get unfair advantages in them? This is brand new! Thanks, Obama! Wait, it gets worse: Geraghty says the article also tells us
...law firms, investment banks, and consulting firms tend to hire applicants from well-known universities who were already “culturally similar” to the institution. “Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity.” In other words, if you don’t remind the elite employer making the hiring decision of himself, you’re less likely to be hired for the big job.
It sounds as if Obama has changed human nature itself! In the old days, you could just search the candidate's chest for the right class pin or school tie; now I suppose you have check out his "self-presentation style" -- to see if it's liberal! Next Geraghty will read somewhere and rush back to tell us that under Obama rich people eat fancy food while ordinary Americans eat sammiches. This could break the election wide open for whichever rich theocrat the GOP nominates!
• I'm tired of doing all the hard work around here, so I'll just point out that in this Michael Brendan Dougherty column the job of proving, or even making an argument, that letting all kinds of people (including gays and singles) have babies will lead the disaster is entirely left to the framing device, which talks about an abandoned baby left in a bag -- another thing that never happened before Obama! -- and then shock-cuts to the tale of a child-support suit against a sperm donor and proceeds to other such curiosities, none of which, so far as the column tells, are related to the abandoned baby except in that abandoned babies are bad and these things near it are, in Dougherty's view, also bad. I knew these guys were feeble in the logic department, but couldn't they take a weekend course and learn something about metaphors at least?
Carly Fiorina? For President? At National Review, Jim Geraghty jokes about the demon sheep ad from her disastrous 2010 Senate campaign, but in his newsletter for the true believers Geraghty circulates some straight-up Fiorina PR: After praising Fiorina's staff hires ("CRC Public Relations is a pretty big mover and shaker in the world of conservative clients"), he says:
Heading into CPAC, she has the not-so-insignificant advantage of being accomplished and almost entirely dismissed by the political media, so the bar is set pretty low.
Pretty low indeed! "The not-so-insignificant advantage of being accomplished"? The consensus (bipartisan, as it were) on her reign at Hewlett Packard, the most significant of her alleged accomplishments, seems to be that she nearly ruined it. And getting on committees and boards is simple for high-level executives even if they are terrible at their jobs. As for tearing and ripping, you can get a dog to do that. (I will say it's nice that she got over cancer.)
Also: Fiorina has never won elective office. Neither had President Washington and President Grant, but we are talking about a whole different level of being-accomplished here.
In fact this is very close to the imaginary-but-with-a-budget campaigns of Ben Carson and Donald Trump. And it reminds me of the complaining conservatives and consensus-seeking politicos did when Scott Walker was recently mocked as a college dropout. I understand the anxiety that episode raised: American folk wisdom says you shouldn't need certification to excel and prosper, and I hope all good people lament that citizens are badgered by employment anxiety to get a diploma and the gigantic price tag that comes with it just to keep the wolf from the door.
But with candidates like Fiorina, it looks like the Party of Joe The Plumber, which has never put much stock in fancy book learning anyway, is not merely being open to talents (as if these people really qualify as talents), but favoring people who lack not only traditional qualifications but also common sense, as if having the slightest idea what you're doing is some elitist shibboleth that needs to be refuted once and for all with the election of a total dumbass.
Can they pull it off? Depends on how much the voters remember about George W. Bush.
UPDATE. Geraghty's not Fiorina's only friend in the world of wingnut journamalism -- Al Weaver of The Daily Caller:
Is Hillary Clinton Stealing Speech Lines From Carly Fiorina?
The Answer May Surprise You!
During her speaking event in Silicon Valley, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemingly snagged a campaign line from potential GOP 2016 candidate Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Clinton, the presumptive 2016 candidate for the Democratic Party, called on attendees at the conference to “unlock their full potential,” a line Fiorina uses.
Unlock their full potential -- has a ring to it! I bet it catches on, retroactively. Weaver also claims that "back in June during Clinton’s book release of 'Hard Choices,' much was made of the similarities between her book and Fiorina’s 2007 memoir, 'Tough Choices.'" No links and no quotes, natch, and besides, who believes anyone read enough of both books to make an informed comparison?
I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":
The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.
Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.
No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:
Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument.
For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”
So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.
My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.
UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:
[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like."
Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.
Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.
UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."
I like Clint Eastwood movies, therefore I want to see American Sniper, therefore I hope it's good. But I have to say, the political ravings about the movie are pretty annoying. Like a lot of people, I thought Dennis Jett's review based on the trailer at New Republic was stupid; but, as I've pointed out before, conservatives do this sort of thing all the time and no one cares -- because no one expects them to treat films or any other works of art as anything but propaganda. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:
I’ll reserve any serious comment on the film until after I have seen it – I guess I’m just not up to the standards of The New Republic –
Haw haw.
– but whether or not American Sniper is “pro-war,” it appears to be resolutely and proudly pro-soldier. And that is a giant factor in moviegoers’ enthusiastic embrace of it. Note that American Sniper isn’t afraid to showcase the painful and difficult parts of military life for soldiers and their families, and my suspicion is that audiences love that part, too – because showing the pain makes it honest. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and company don’t want to tell you only one part of Chris Kyle’s story. They want to paint as complete a picture as they can in the running time that they have. If you made the story about the battlefront, without the home front, or vice versa, you would only be telling about half the story.
So in the very next breath, Geraghty reviews the film he didn't see -- though I suppose "serious comment" is the crossed fingers behind his back. (This is the sort of thing I did as a kid when I wanted to pretend I had seen some big movie of the moment. I wonder if adults do this anywhere but in the pages of rightwing magazines.)
Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:
Next, chunky iconoclast Seth Rogen weighed in with his observation that American Sniper reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Bastards. What a scumbag. This came after we conservatives stood with him when the Norks threatened him over The Interview – even to the extent of watching his piece of garbage on VOD – while his hero Barack Obama whined about people actually exercising their free speech rights.
First, this supports my perception that the only part of arts journalism conservatives genuinely relate to is gossip columns. They don't know what art is, but they sure know who did what to whom! Second, it figures that Schlichter would be enraged that Rogen didn't repay the debt Schlichter imagines he owes "we conservatives" for yelling about North Korea in blogs and switching off porn for a couple of hours to watch this bro-com. Everything is politics to these people; movies, plays, novels, and choc-o-mut ice creams have no value for them except as symbols on a bloody flag to wave at their base. Sometimes I think when they relax at home in front of the TV, they actually watch a placard that says HOME ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT (CONSERVATIVE).
Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.
Back when Gabby Giffords was shot and some liberals gave Sarah Palin and other conservatives a hard time about their incendiary rhetoric before the fact, I wrote this:
To be fair, we can imagine a reasonable answer to [these liberals’] argument. And we have to imagine it, as no one is actually making it. (Those who come closest are actually milquetoast liberals like the New York Times' Matt Bai who, in our current, debased political discourse, take the role once filled by moderate Republicans back when such creatures existed.)
What we got instead was less reasonable, because once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense.
For example, when leftblogger Matthew Yglesias cited Congressnut Michele Bachmann's 2009 "armed and dangerous" comments as an example of violent rightwing lunacy, the Daily Caller's John Guardiano said it wasn't as bad as it sounded: "Bachmann clearly was using 'armed and dangerous' in a metaphorical and political, not literal and violent, sense," he said…
Etc. Now some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it. In fact, here’s Guardiano himself on Twitter: “Obama, Holder & de Blasio R to the mob today what Pontius Pilate was to the mob in Jesus’ time: weak-willed enablers.” Etc. etc.
It's tu quoque, I guess, but conservatives alway manage to be quoqueier than anyone else -- they whine such a lot about the flak they take (Jonah Goldberg even complained it was unfair to conservatives that Giffords continued to appear in public after her shooting) that it makes their viciousness when it's time to grandstand even more repulsive. Now they're circulating their clip of some knuckleheads shouting for “dead cops” at a New York protest and implying that all the tens of thousands who protested the Brown and Garner cases across the country were calling for assassinations.
Some of them put a lot of apparently wasted effort into trying to look reasonable -- like Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, who every few paragraphs assures us that "conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair" and such like, but keeps spinning around and coming back with convoluted quasi-accusations such as this:
If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.
This grammatical cloverleaf is not improved when you read the whole thing and realize that by “false set of assumptions” Tobin means the idea that police sometimes treat black people unfairly. (He also says "narrative" about 70 times, which is wingnut shorthand for "who ya gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?") More forthrightly absurd is New York Post harrumpher Bob McManus:
Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head.
But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional.
“Wow, a liberal Democrat is in office!” cried the psycho career criminal; “Now’s my chance!”
At National Review, Jim Geraghty says hopefully that “police shootings will do for the anti-police movement what the Oklahoma City bombing did to the militia movement.” This will sound weird to ordinary people, but it’s perfect in a way: Conservatives tend to think of Oklahoma City as a propaganda put-up job to make them look bad — you seldom hear them talk about what a shame it was those people were killed, and mostly hear them explaining, as Byron York did a 2011 column, “How Clinton Exploited Oklahoma City For Political Gain.” That’s really how they think about the Brooklyn shootings — it’s not life and death to them, and certainly not right or wrong: It’s just a way to get back at people who made them look bad.
While some of those few citizens who did not know that America tortures people basically for the hell of it got an earful from the Senate report -- you can read the Republican response, which basically complains that Democrats are unfairly making torture look bad -- House Republicans held a witch trial at which Congressmen stepped up to hurl carefully crafted and vetted insults at Jonathan Gruber, a freelance employee who had the poor taste to articulate said Congressmen's main political operating principle. Contract employees, beware and follow the dress code, these fuckers are strict!
Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors.
That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.
Difference left unmentioned: Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and Gruber was a fucking temp. Next week, a janitor at the Capitol will sneeze on the statue of Father Junipero Serra and, when this obvious anti-clericalist's voting record reveals him to be a Democrat, all hell will once again break loose.
Shorter Jim Geraghty, National Review: It's 2014 and race is still a problem in America. This is clearly the fault of the black guy in the White House.
UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson on America's recent wave of police-and-race demonstrations, which he seems to think have more to do with Michael Brown than with Eric Garner -- well, it's all the same to Hanson; that Trayvon Martin was a thug, too, and anyway what the protesters really want is a lawless Negrocracy in which cops cower before the dusky hordes:
Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs...
Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted?
You white liberals will be sorry when the oogaboogas steal your latte money! Beyond this Afro-6 vision, there's the usual black-on-black-blahblah ("That 5,000 to 6,000 African-Americans are murdered each year, the vast majority by other blacks... is not so important as the single death of Michael Brown"), and how come there's no riots when black people (who are not cops) kill white people, etc. Also, Hanson invokes Al Sharpton three times; maybe he thinks it's like Beetlejuice and it'll free him from this mixed-race netherworld before they remake Clash of the Titans with Morgan Freeman and spoil all hope of escape.
In his Morning Jolt email, Jim Geraghty engages A.O. Scott's thumbsucker on the lack of adulthood in sitcoms, and for a couple of seconds sounds non-crazy ("Not all popular culture needs to hold a mirror up to us" -- boy, where's that synapse been all these years?); but then, alas --
It's not that America doesn't have any grown-ups or non-loser dads left. We dads didn't go anywhere; it's just that television networks don't make as many shows about us, and when they do, the kind of people who review film and television for the New York Times aren't as interested...
Remember a moment ago when I described "communities dominated by underemployed urban quasi-professionals, unmarried, without kids, without mortgages, without a career path or plan"? How large a portion of the communities of our creative classes fits that description? Or perhaps more specifically, how many people in our creative classes percolated for years in that sort of extended-adolescence Bohemian urban environment? There's nothing inherently wrong with that environment -- for a while, at least — but it's light years away from being universal. Our national storytellers may be quite convinced that they're holding a mirror up to society — but they're only reflecting their own limited personal experience.
They're elitists, is what they are, these arty-farties who live in (spit) cities and don't know how to change a diaper. Not like the shirtsleeves, shot-and-a-beer kind of pundit-dads you see hand-lathing shelves at the National Review woodshop in Skunk Hollow, Ala.!
This sort of "You Hollywood types are too insular" complaint usually gets dismissed as whining when it comes from a conservative...
Come on little synapse!
...but maybe it sounds more valid coming from a Latino or Asian-American, when they note how few movies at the Cineplex or shows on the dial reflect the stories and experiences of their communities.
Is Linda Chavez still alive? Our nagging needs minority cover. Get her busy on a piece demanding the return of The George Lopez Show.
Believe it or don't, there's even worse at NR today: Kevin D. Williamson considers Hamlet and Sons of Anarchy together because, he says, they both address "maternal guilt" -- wait, don't run screaming yet, because here comes the sheet-enseaming shot:
“Hamlet and His Problems” was published in 1921. Seven years shy of a century later, Sons of Anarchy presents the question: Is the theme of maternal guilt still “an almost intolerable motive for drama” [as J.M. Robertson said]?
The model of motherhood that prevails in 2014 is fundamentally different from the model of 1921, so different in fact as to be an almost entirely distinct moral and social phenomenon. This begins with the world-changing fact that the progress from conception to birth is today optional. The millions of acts of violence that have been committed in utero since January 1973 inevitably have shaped our views of motherhood...
I ain't even kidding. There follows a catalogue of post-Roe horrors -- "feminist doublespeak, which regards the developing person as morally indistinguishable from a tumor," "the 117-minute meditation on sundry pregnancy horrors that is Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien," etc. -- meant to convey that as compared to the delicate, Jainistic Elizabethan era, we moderns wade through cord-blood in a global charnel-house where
meditations upon maternal guilt are hardly intolerable; they are, rather, inevitable... we have a different sort of problem than Hamlet had: His drama had to do with the degradation of his mother; ours has to do with the degradation of motherhood categorically. Dragging that into the sunlight is an unpleasant business, and a necessary one.
I wonder what his readers think this means; probably "See, Sons of Anarchy is conservative, just like choc-o-mut ice creams and everything else I like." Me, I want to be generous to Williamson, in return for all the laughs he's given me: Maybe his is a stealth mission to discredit modern liberal arts education by his example.
Don't use "orphanage" in a headline. It reminds people of why they hate you. (See also "widows.") Geraghty goes on:
We may help out these kids because we’re kind-hearted souls...
Sorry, had something caught in my windpipe.
...some will say it’s the Christian thing to do.
Sorry, same thing. Okay:
...But we’re not obligated to do this. This isn’t our responsibility and this isn’t our fault. The parents of those kids are the ones who should be taking care of them – feeding them, clothing them, sheltering them and educating them. And I don’t think it’s cold-hearted to ask whether our immediate effort to take care of these kids – because they so desperately need care – is setting us up to be their long-term caretaker.
Geraghty supported the idea that we should devote $2 trillion and thousands of lives to invading and occupying Iraq to bring them freedom. But that was different, of course: We got to kill a bunch of them, which made it butch. Also we didn't have to hang around with them. Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the worst!
Sometimes I wonder what these people think America is all about, but it's becoming clearer every day that their vision resembles an endless loop of Three Stooges shorts with Sousa marches playing in the background.
• Always forward-looking, Reihan Salam gets out front among the "third-time's-the-charm" Iraq War fans with "We Should Never Have Left Iraq." Never mind that our contract signed by George W. Bush with fucking Iraq was that we'd leave by 2011 -- which Salam does his considerable best to obfuscate:
So why did the U.S. leave Iraq at the end of 2011? Part of it is that many within the Obama administration simply didn’t believe that U.S. forces would make much of a difference to Iraq’s political future.
That loud noise was your bullshit detector exploding. It's not like he doesn't know the Status of Forces Agreement exists, because just last year he told Vice's Eddy Moretti:
REIHAN SALAM: I think that in my ideal world-- and I'm way,way out of the political mainstream on this issue. I personally think I would have wanted to have a larger American presence in Iraq even now. So one thing is that we didn't wind up negotiating a status of forces agreement that would have kept a substantial number of US military personnel in Iraq. Now, this is a crazy view, right? Because everyone is like, we want to wash our hands of Iraq, period.
Yeah, that's what everyone was like, Reihan. Anyway, Salam's best argument is that Brent Scowcroft didn't want to go to war in Iraq, but once we did he wanted us to stay there and finish the job:
Though Scowcroft was confident that the U.S. could succeed in destroying Saddam’s regime, he was also confident that military action would be expensive and bloody, and that it “very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” As we all know, Scowcroft’s warning went unheeded by the Bush White House.
Scowcroft offered another warning in America and the World, a widely ignored book published in 2008 that collected a series of exchanges between Scowcroft and his fellow foreign policy wise man Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Boy, how'd we all miss that gripping read?
Recognizing that Iraq remained riven by communal conflict, Scowcroft argued that the country would continue to need a U.S. military presence for at least a few more years.
Number 1: TEN YEARS. WE'VE BEEN THERE OVER TEN FUCKING YEARS. Number 2: He's Brent Scowcroft. What the fuck's he going to say? "Yeah, we fucked up, guess we're just going to have to leave those poor people to drown in suck." Scowcroft has to play the Wise Man (character requirements: Grey eminence, nice suits; must have both One Hand and The Other Hand) because that's what he's paid to play. Whereas those of us who told these idiots what a clusterfuck they were in for back in the day got called traitors by Andrew Sullivan.
Being right about these things has its quiet advantages but I gotta admit, I'd love to know what it's like to keep being wrong all the time and still get paid.
Arab governments complain when we intervene and they complain when we don't intervene. Basically, they complain no matter what. So asking what they want is pointless. It takes a while to notice this trend over time, but there it is.
“We’ll kill you if you mess with us, but otherwise go die” is not even close to my preferred foreign policy, but it’s what President Barack Obama prefers (phrased much more nicely, of course) and it’s what the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer, including most liberals as well as conservatives.
Translation: The liberals are always to blame, especially for refusing to support, as I demanded they do, this occupation which I am belatedly rejecting.
Still, it’s only a matter of time before we get sucked in kicking and screaming one way or another. Because the Middle East isn’t Las Vegas. What happens there doesn’t stay there.
Prediction: Some months hence, Totten will demand we re-re-invade Iraq to clean up the mess Barack Obama made. And, shortly thereafter, protest babes!
• If you're looking for new and exciting ways to spin the third-time's-the-charm Iraq re-re-invasion strategy, National Review's Jim Geraghty would like to show you the thisclose maneuver. It's like a cross between the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario and the Butterfly Effect:
...what if the Iraqi government is just short of being capable of pushing back ISIS? Is it worth withholding our assistance to make the point that they need to be independent? How much can fear of future scapegoating limit our options in the here and now?
Just get them over the hump, then you can leave! Then some other exotically-named menace will threaten, then we go back; then we return, then some other exotically-named menace -- it's the military equivalent of shuttle diplomacy.
Bonus dick move from Geraghty:
If we really are going to adopt a philosophy of “we could help you, but we suspect you’ll grow dependent upon us and blame us for problems down the road,” could we please apply that to domestic spending programs as well?
Haw! Stupid libs want to feed paupers when there are Iraqi citizens to re-re-liberate! Doesn't the Constitution apply to them, too?
At National Review, Jim Geraghty has one called "Jill Abramson, and Why Most Women Should Cut Themselves Some Slack." By "Cut Themselves Some Slack," he means don't worry your pretty little heads about any economic injustice you may have hysterically imagined you've experienced. Part of his argument:
As I was saying, employers are people (“Corporations are people, my friend!“) and there will be good ones and bad ones. The bad ones tend to have karma bite them in one way or the other — most often by watching their best, or perhaps most motivated and talented employees leave to work elsewhere.
I’d argue very few Americans really benefit from buying into Democrats’ (and the New York Times’s! ) preferred simplistic, demagogic narrative that America’s workplaces are a Kafkaesque, dystopian landscape of nasty male bosses conspiring to pay their female employees less. This viewpoint may in fact hold women back. If you perceive your boss as a sexist, conniving shyster who’s out to rip you off, then it’s going to be hard to show up every morning and do your best work. And whatever your circumstances, you’ll probably benefit, directly or indirectly, from doing your best work.
You're only hurting yourselves; c'mon, smile, baby! Then he tells the ladies that men have it rough, too, but you don't see us guys complaining, and (I swear to Christ) that you girls should try it sometime:
I am speaking broadly, and generalizing when I make this next statement: Men do worry about this sort of thing, but they don’t talk about it. They’re generally less likely to obsess about it, and/or publicly beat themselves up about it. There are not nearly as many bestsellers about the struggles of working fathers, magazine covers asking “Can Men Have It All?”, daddy blogs with passionate arguments and comments sections aflame, etc.
...the guys’ approach certainly is an one that involves less angst, self-doubt, and self-flagellation for failing to live up to some preconceived notion of how all of those roles should be fulfilled.
Also, a woman who thinks more like a man would understand why I want to have my cock sucked every morning.
For lagniappe with the emphasis on the yap, National Review also offers James Lileks chasing the not-all-men meme off his lawn.
Actually, pointing out that you’re not one of [the rapists and abusers] would indicate that you’re not the problem, and hence are part of the solution.
Let me ease your pain, ladies, with old matchbooks and accounts of my trips to Target! Eventually the lack of strawgirl response convinces Jimbo he's not being listened to:
I suppose this is useful information for men who want to have tendentious arguments about male perfidy with the sort of person who might want to put a “trigger warning” on Winnie the Pooh because a reader might have a honey allergy, but most men don’t. In fact, most –
...offering young people from around the country an opportunity to discuss the Affordable Care Act and other issues with senior White House officials. White House Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ followers ages 18-35 are eligible to apply to attend this White House event on December 4.
Interested in joining? Sign up for your chance to join other White House social media followers at the #WHYouth social.
This anodyne event has me halfway between "good for them" and "so what." But among my usual subjects, it's Hitler. No, really -- The Right Scoop:
White House youth. I think it has a certain ring to it…don’t you?
We Have a ‘White House Youth’ Now?... It’s about the cult, not the country, with this administration.
(Preston also complains Obama's "hosting this 'summit'" -- Scare quotes! So-called! -- "not to talk about our nation’s history or anything that all Americans could get behind. It’s hosting this summit to transmit its talking points about Obamacare." To appease the right -- always a big concern with Democratic Administrations, alas -- I advise the President to say "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two" before launching into his explanation of national policy/fascist propaganda.)
It's a sign of the times that, while normal people would be embarrassed to be associated with this nonsense, rightbloggers are actually reveling in this comparison of a bunch of kids visiting the White House to Nazi bund meetings. "The hashtag #WHYouth prompted all sorts of Hitler Youth-related mockery," giggles Breitbart.com. "The Photos ‘shop themselves and the tweets roll on," whoops Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air. My favorite is RedState's Moe Lane:
Somebody in the Obama administration had an opportunity to say You know, fellows: perhaps we shouldn’t describe this upcoming young person summit thing in a way that could be heard as “White House Youth” – only he or she didn’t, and so here we go again.
It's not his fault -- they keep making him compare Obama to Hitler! Just like all those people on the internet who wouldn't be wasting their weekends Photoshopping a toothbrush mustache on Obama if he weren't always going around annexing the Sudetenland and gassing Jews.
I've been joking about this for years, but it's worth noting that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has had a powerful effect on modern conservatism -- mainly by lowering the brethren's reading levels, but also by convincing them that slapping a swastika on anything they don't like is analysis, and inspiring a million puke-streams like "Top 50 reasons people keep comparing Obama to Hitler" (and no, that cowboy's not kidding, nor taking his meds, apparently).
It's been going on long enough that I wouldn't surprised if it were damaging the conservative brand. Or maybe just clarifying what it stands for.
UPDATE. Meanwhile, for upmarket conservatives, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:
ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset
That's how the toffs do it: Don't say Hitler, use abstractions. Less messy.
In his Morning Jolt thing he sends around to subscribers (here's a heavily-edited version some guy put on the internet), Jim Geraghty makes fun of the OFA PR campaign encouraging liberals to tell relatives about Obamacare at Thanksgiving dinner. Fair enough. I myself wouldn't bring it up, though if one of them came at me with some bullshit I would say, "that is some bullshit" and take it from there.
As often happens when a conservative has half a point, Geraghty keeps going until he has negative-a-point-and-a-half:
Our friend Jonah gets a lot of grief over Liberal Fascism, usually from people who have never read the book, and who usually go on to insist they don't need to in order to criticize it.
But there is a creepy quasi-fascist vibe in this effort to turn families' holiday gatherings into an opportunity to dissuade critics of the president's policies...
When you say the word 'fascist,' people usually picture Mussolini speaking from a balcony and his high-booted goons marching around in public squares. Because we don't see those images in American society today, a lot of people recoil from labeling anyone in our modern politics with the term "fascist."
Also because a lot of people aren't nuts.
But Mussolini wrote, "for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state." Among the Organizing for Action crew, there seems to be some irresistible compulsion to take something outside the state -- Thanksgiving dinner -- and co-opt it for the purposes of the state -- or its leader, or its agenda.
Meanwhile over at his National Review blog, Geraghty encourages his readers to send out Thanksgiving cards devised by the Heritage Foundation with messages like "Let's be thankful Kathleen Sebelius isn't coaching our football team." This isn't a fascist use of the holiday at all, though, because, as Professor Goldberg has taught us, faaaart.
UPDATE. The remainder of Geraghty's thing is even worse, in a way: When a fellow wingnut suggests that maybe income equality on the massive scale we're seeing in this country isn't good for democracy, he sorta sees the point ("All societies have winners and losers, but modern America's winners are separating from the rest of us rather rapidly"), but retreats into victim-blaming:
A big question that is likely to dominate our politics in the coming years is: How much are the "losers" of modern America responsible for their circumstances?... if most of our countrymen getting the short end of the stick are folks who "worked hard and played by the rules," some significant chunk of them exacerbated their problems with bad decisions: They dropped out of school, had children before they were ready, abused alcohol or drugs, pursued unrealistic career paths...
If most of you who are punished by inequality are blameless, comfort yourselves that your suffering also touches the nation's whores, junkies, and MFAs!
Obama has talked in the past about a “culture of irresponsibility,” but he’s mostly used that phrase in the context of Wall Street, and in fact pledged to “protect consumers from bad mortgages and greedy credit-card companies.” In his world, it’s always the big powerful corporations making trouble for the person in debt, not the person who actually ran up that debt.
Quite a few Americans want to hear that we ourselves are most responsible for the quality of our own lives. If we could overcome that, the rest of the problems would fall like dominoes.
I guess Geraghty had to satisfy himself that income equality, like everything else, is not Wall Street's fault before he could really enjoy sending out his Heritage Foundation Thanksgiving cards.
Again I have to ask: Do these guys even know any real people?
