JOE SCARBOROUGH, MIKA BRZEZINSKI AND THE VICTIMIZED MEDIA:

The morning after Trump’s vicious attack on Brzezinski’s facelift — she admitted that she had her chin “tweaked” — MSNBC promoted that she and her co-host Joe Scarborough would appear (on their own show!) to respond (delaying a planned vacation).

Taking on the air of two freed hostages suffering PTSD, Brzezinski and Scarborough assured a shaken nation that they were “okay.”

“I’ve been getting a lot of texts and hearing you all talking,” Brzezinski said. “Thank you. I’m fine. My family brought me up really tough.”

“We’re okay,” said Scarborough, a defiant hero.

Less than two weeks after their trauma, the pair appeared this past Tuesday on late-night TV to giggle about it and promote Scarborough’s side hustle as an aspiring rock artist.

Before a live performance of his song “Welcome to the Monkey House” — the music magazine Spin described it as “pretty bad” — Scarborough took the opportunity to announce in front of a sympathetic audience that he’s switching his party identity from Republican to independent.

Applause followed and the look of pure satisfaction on Scarborough’s face said that the tweet about Brzezinski, his new fiancé, paid off.

This is what the media do with Trump: Criticize him, await the blowback, then play dead before cashing in.

Or as Ace of Spades quips, “Say It Ain’t So, Joe: Legendary Vanity-Rock Sensation Joe Scarborough Quits the GOP on Steven Colbert, After Admitting He Buys Into Liberal Progressive Line 100%:”

[Scarborough] has announced to his millions of adoring fans that he’s decamping the Republican Party, making this announcement on the place where Republicans come to discuss issues, the Stephen Colbert show.

David Harsanyi only briefly hints at how miserable this fink’s (double hand finger airquotes) “music” is, to instead talk about his rampant hypocrisy for having done everything in his power to get Trump nominated as GOP candidate, then becoming a loud-and-proud liberal Democrat the moment he succeeded in getting Trump to that position.

Alternate hypothesis for your consideration: It wasn’t hypocrisy, it was covert action. Maybe Scarborough has been a Democrat for a good long while, and was following the Democrat Conventional Wisdom that Trump was the weakest candidate the GOP could field and so it was in ever Democrats’ interest to pump him up — until he secured the nomination at the convention.

Really? The guy who took on-air real-time story corrections from the Obama administration is bolting the Republican party? I’d cover more of that, but first I’m off to investigate the reports that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Café.

HAS ANDREW LANDED YET? CNN KARMA: Andrew Kaczynski gets fussy when others use his old tweets to push a ‘scandal.’

(Classical allusion in headline.)

HOT AIR’S JOHN SEXTON IS REMEMBERING THE JOURNOLIST IN 2008 AND THE “PROGRESSIVE” MEDIA’S BAG OF TRICKS:

For those who don’t remember it, Journolist was just a listserv created by Ezra Klein. The list was invitation only and was mostly made up of progressive journalists. In theory, the list was a kind of digital water cooler where like-minded people could talk to others in the field. That may have been all it was much of the time, but when candidate Obama got in trouble in 2008, it also became a place for partisans to discuss a coordinated media strategy.

Author Jonathan Strong wrote this particular piece about the Journolist response to a crisis in the 2008 campaign. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as you probably remember, was the pastor of the church Obama attended. He was the pastor who married Barack and Michelle and the person who inspired the title of Obama’s book: The Audacity of Hope. Wright was also a far-left crank who regularly denounced America…Obama would eventually denounce Wright and quit the church in June, but in the interim, it seemed possible the issue could seriously damage his campaign. Journolist members discussed various ways to respond to the Rev. Wright story. Michael Tomasky (now at the Daily Beast) wanted members of the list to “kill ABC” and thereby kill the story[.]

Read the whole thing.

Between 2000 and 2017, the Democrats pivoted on a host issues ranging from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and gay marriage. But few moments have had the full “Oceania has always been/has never been at war with Eastasia” (which Orwell based on how the British left flip-flopped under Stalin’s orders in WWII) feel as the week between Rev. Wright’s racist 2008 NAACP speech, which CNN’s Soledad O’Brien (herself a Wright acolyte) proclaimed “a home run” to anchor John Roberts asking on-air then-candidate Obama if it was OK with him to declare the network “a Wright-free zone.” If CNN is angry that it’s now constantly being called “fake news,” transparently politics-motivated flip-flops such as this are a big reminder of how they brought that well-deserved epithet upon themselves:

UPDATE: From a 2010 Free Republic post, “JournoList: 157 Names Confirmed (With Organizations).”

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Does My Dentist Order So Many X-Rays?

DEROY MURDOCK: The vote fraud Democrats refuse to see.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Myths About Sulfites And Wine.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Berkeley student who cried racial profiling & mistreatment is arrested for hate crime, vandalism.

Police said last week that they had tallied more than 35 instances of vandalism, including graffiti on cars and fences, and slashed tires on at least 17 vehicles, in the Southside neighborhood along several blocks of Prospect Street near Hillside Avenue that appeared June 28. The graffiti included phrases such as “fuck white people,” and is therefore considered a hate crime, BPD said. …

Details about the June 28 vandalism appeared on private social network Nextdoor: “Multiple cars, and fences were spray painted with Anarchist symbols, painting out license plates and slogans such as, F$%# white people, Class Warfare sometime during the night,” one local resident near Hillside Avenue and Prospect Street wrote.

The messages also included “FTP,” an anti-police term. Another resident who saw the original Nextdoor post initially brought it to Berkeleyside’s attention.

Another Antifa twerp, sounds like. Plus: “Another Berkeley student, Peter Estrada, was arrested on Friday and faces the same charges as Chamu. Both are to be arraigned on Monday.”

So this looks like it could be federally prosecuted as a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights, if the Department of Justice wants to get involved. And I think it should, to send a signal that this sort of behavior isn’t tolerated.

ROGER SIMON REPORTS FROM EUROPE: I Have Seen the Future and It’s Miserable.

NEWS FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY: Russia Scandal Looks Different Outside of Washington.

Elite conservative opinion has shifted markedly. Andrew McCarthy, the former prosecutor who had consistently and compellingly defended the Trump administration against Russia allegations, wrote a powerful piece in National Review raising the prospect of impeachment after it surfaced that high level Trump staff had met with a Russian lawyer and lied about it. The Federalist, which had consistently highlighted and mocked Russia hysteria, ran a piece calling the meeting “shady as hell.” Ross Douthat, a Russia conspiracy skeptic, wrote in the New York Times that he could no longer give the President the benefit of the doubt. Outside of avowed Trump loyalists, the anti-anti Trump arguments on journalist Twitter have been few and far between. It would be hard to find a Republican in Washington who actually thinks that Trump Jr.’s contact with Russians is no big deal. Even the Breitbart staff was shocked.

And yet despite this unmistakable, watershed shift, Republican voters appear to be (mostly) unmoved. This is a reminder of how marginal D.C. media is when it comes to shaping the opinion of the mass of actual conservatives in the heartland—a lesson learned during the primary election, but worth keeping in mind during this tumultuous time as well. The D.C. media environment is a simply a different world from what most conservative voters are exposed to. As long as the GOP controls both houses of Congress, it’s possible for a scandal to play out 24/7 for months on virtually all mainstream media platforms without it actually moving the needle politically.

Second, voters as a whole aren’t nearly as concerned with the Russia issue as those of us in Washington might think. Just 12 percent of Americans—20 percent of Democrats, 12 percent of Independents, and 2 percent of Republicans—rate Trump’s relationship with Russia among the top two issues they are concerned about. The Russia issue is dwarfed by healthcare, the economy, and immigration. Meanwhile, for virtually every person who does politics for a living in Washington, Democrat or Republican, Russia is number one.

Well, to be fair, they all have cushy jobs. So far, I still don’t see much of anything to this scandal. And if you look into all of the “suspicious” Russian contacts Trump Jr. had, I’ll be you’ll find that half of Washington was talking to those people at the same time.

Related:

THE GOP MAKES A GOOD TRADE: Joe Scarborough for Kid Rock.

The contrast between the two is striking.

Scarborough is at home in Washington. Kid Rock lives in Detroit.

Joe curries favor with coastal elites. Kid Rock is at home in the middle of the country. And it’s no wonder: He’s travelled the country by bus and minivan on more than 25 tours with legends like Lynyrd Skynyrd and David Allen Coe. . . .

Perhaps most striking is the music. Kid Rock plays straightforward American rock and roll. Scarborough sings Britpop retreads steeped in the sort of hipster self-regard that is unbecoming in a 20-year-old student at a small liberal arts college let alone in a middle-aged man.

Like I said, a good trade.

NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE, EVERYTHING WITHIN THE STATE: Harvard University Faculty Group Proposes Banning All Social Clubs.

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

READY TO SUPPORT SOUTH KOREA: Two B-1B Lancers fly with U.S. and South Korean fighter jets. The photo was taken July 7 during an exercise over the Korean peninsula. The B-1 would play a major in Trump’s Option 6.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN VENEZUELA: The opposition is holding an unofficial referendum today. The referendum is designed to “increase pressure on President Nicolas Maduro as he seeks to create a legislative superbody that his adversaries call the consolidation of a dictatorship.”

MORE:

The opposition has cast the vote, which begins at 7 a.m. local time at some 2,000 centers around the country, as an act of civil disobedience to be followed by “zero hour,” a possible reference to a national strike or other escalated actions against Maduro.

But the vote does not appear to augur a short-term change of government or a solution to the country’s political stalemate.

Maduro, 54, says Sunday’s plebiscite is illegal and meaningless. Instead, the leftist leader is campaigning for an official July 30 vote for the new assembly, which will be able to rewrite the constitution and dissolve state institutions.

Stay tuned.

FAKE ACCOUNT BUSTS FAKE NEWS:

A FAR-LEFTY WRITES: Excommunicate Me From The Church Of Social Justice.

There is an underlying current of fear in my activist communities, and it is separate from the daily fear of police brutality, eviction, discrimination, and street harassment. It is the fear of appearing impure. Social death follows when being labeled a “bad” activist or simply “problematic” enough times. I’ve had countless hushed conversations with friends about this anxiety and how it has led us to refrain from participation in activist events, conversations, and spaces because we feel inadequately radical. I actually don’t prefer to call myself an activist, because I don’t fit the traditional mold of the public figure marching in the streets and interrupting business as usual. When I was a Christian, all I could think about was being good, showing goodness, and proving to my parents and my spiritual leaders that I was on the right path to God. All the while, I believed I would never be good enough, so I had to strain for the rest of my life toward an impossible destination of perfection.

I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist a decade later. I self-police what I say in activist spaces. I stopped commenting on social media with questions or pushback on leftist opinions for fear of being called out. I am always ready to apologize for anything I do that a community member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate—no questions asked. The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of a fast-moving activist community is enormous. Activists are some of the judgiest people I’ve ever met, myself included. There’s so much wrongdoing in the world that we work to expose. And yet, grace and forgiveness is hard to come by in the broader community. At times, I have found myself performing activism more than doing activism. I’m exhausted, and I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do. The quest for political purity is a treacherous distraction for well-intentioned activists.

Well, if you want grace and forgiveness, you’d be better off going back to Christianity than looking for it from cultural Marxists. But it’s nice to see that even a “queer designer, trans baker, cultural studies scholar” can notice what’s going on.

And are they really “well-intentioned?”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Student accused of false rape allegations claims mental illness. “The former Sacred Heart University student accused of making up rape allegations against two football players to gain sympathy from a prospective boyfriend filed an application in court Friday contending she was suffering from a psychiatric disability. It will be up to a judge to decide whether to grant 19-year-old Nikki Yovino a pretrial diversionary program that could result in the charges being dismissed against Yovino at a hearing set for Sept. 8. Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Craig Nowak said he is going to object. . . . Agustin Sevillano, the lawyer for the now-former football players, who are not being identified, described what his clients went through as a result of Yovino’s rape allegations. They were scheduled for a school disciplinary hearing but, on the advice of legal council, agreed instead to withdraw from the university rather than face the chance of being expelled and having that on their records. He said one of his clients lost a football scholarship. They have also had to live with the stigma of being accused rapists, he said.”

YOU KNOW, STUFF LIKE THIS MAKES ME WONDER WHY WE EVER BOTHERED TO END SEGREGATION. IT’S JUST SO STRESSFUL BEING IN AN INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT WHERE PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU. NYU librarian laments ‘fatigue’ from ‘presence of white people.

If you could send these stories back to 1964, would we even have a Civil Rights Act? Or would most of America have knocked itself unconscious from the massive face-palming?

AT SOME POINT, THE DNC-MSM – ESPECIALLY MSNBC! — HAS TO STOP PRETENDING THEY’RE OBJECTIVE: GOP’s Dave Brat Hits MSNBC Host With Stat of Journalists Donating 96% to Clinton.

SHOCKER: After Donald Trump Jr. Emails, Still No Evidence of Russia ‘Collusion.’

Related: Democrats Hatch Plans A, B, and C to Impeach Trump.

SIMPLE JUSTICE: “The Washington Post op-ed by Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson is a facial lie. No college or university needs the ‘help’ of the Department of Education to deal with campus sexual assault. If the DoE got out of the business of pushing colleges to twist Title IX altogether, it would have no impact whatsoever on the choices colleges make in handling accusations of sexual assault or rape. What the DoE has provided was cover, the means by which colleges could discriminate and blame it on the DoE.”

Why does Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson hate male students?

I ONLY WANT AN ANSWER TO THE VERY LAST QUESTION: Five Questions to Ask About the Current Trump Kerfuffle.

SPEAKING OF SHIA LABOEUF:Bodycam Footage of Shia LaBeouf Arrest Shows Actor’s Racist Comments.  Someone should tell him that he shall not divide us…