LONG BEFORE TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, THERE WAS NIXON DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: How fear and loathing of Nixon sent Hunter S. Thompson crazy. The great gonzo journalist took acid, scotch and any pills to hand to make covering Nixon’s career bearable.
Something tells me that Dr. Gonzo would have consumed plenty of illicit substances no matter who had won in ‘72.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Captain Marvel Movie In Trouble? Drops Whopping $80M. “Interestingly enough, further evidence Captain Marvel is not as highly regarded among fans comes from the fact that Black Panther supporters have not supported the Captain Marvel gofundme to get girls to go see the movie. There is also a huge problem with Brie Larson who has been spinning Captain Marvel as a feminist movie, essentially isolating the audience, and she even recently came out against white males for some reason. I’m actually surprised and disappointed in Kevin Feige that he is allowing Larson to destroy the MCU audience, and that Disney and CEO Bob Iger haven’t learned anything from Star Wars. It’s never a good thing to split the audience or insult them. Do they not want white males to go see the movie? . . . Disney, Feige and Marvel Studios could be banking on having a zombie audience that will simply go see all their movies no matter what is said or how good they are; however, that scenario has been played out with the aforementioned Disney Star Wars movies and also Marvel Comics. As a result of The Last Jedi, Disney has put the movies on hiatus for what looks to be at least another two years.”
BUT DOES HE STILL ADMIRE THEIR TROUSER CREASES? On PBS, David Brooks Warns Democrats ‘Somewhere to the Left of Che Guevara.’
DID SOME MINOR HOME REPAIRS, BUT THEY GAVE ME AN EXCUSE TO GET OUT THE SAWZALL. As I’ve blogged before, they’re so much fun to use that once you have one out, you just want to saw all the things. Hence the name I guess. . . .
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED PRESIDENT, WE’D SEE CORRUPTION IN HIGH PLACES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Mark Penn: To get Trump, FBI and Justice Department officials trampled the Constitution.
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend with good cheer.
THEY’VE BEEN ILL-SERVED BY THEIR ELDERS’ INSTITUTIONS: Experts Say Gen Z Isn’t Prepared For The Workplace, But It Isn’t All Their Fault. “Depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide are all rising rapidly in Gen Z. . . . Haidt believes the issue has compounded on itself over time: in the 90s, American parents became much more protective of their children’s safety. Just as the crime rate was plummeting, play moved inside, onto screens, and kids came to be nearly always under adult supervision. This loss of free play and autonomy deprived kids of the kinds of experiences they most needed to grow strong and independent. These same kids then got heavily into social media beginning around 2010 — often while still in middle school. The heavy use of social media has been found to have some relationships with depression and anxiety, particularly for girls. Now, these kids are graduating and are entering the workforce, and Haidt says that he believes many employers will have trouble understanding them and their needs.”
IT ALL REALLY COMES FROM ONE ERROR: The One Wrong Premise At the Center of American Politics Today
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A TREE GROWS IN WARSAW:
It’s amazing, to us at least, that so little comment is being issued in respect of the Warsaw meeting on the Middle East. What comment there has been out of Europe has mainly related to the Munich conference, where America was subjected the usual condescension from France and Germany — capped off by a nauseating speech by Vice President Biden saying America had become an “embarrassment.”
What a contrast with the parley in Warsaw. Ministers from all sorts of countries came together in what Secretary of State Pompeo called a “testament to our seriousness.” Said he: “Arab and Israeli leaders were in the same room, sharing a meal and exchanging views. They all came together for a single reason, to discuss the real threats to our respective people emanating from the Middle East.”
“Something big” is how that is characterized by our Benny Avni, who has covered all this for more than a generation.
It’s a mark of how determined the left is to deny the result of the 2016 election in America that the Warsaw parley is being met with not just short shrift but hostility. “Few Are Inspired,” was the headline phrase over the New York Times’ editorial. It saw the news as “how few major powers are cheering along” in a parley that it put down as an “anti-mullah pep rally.”
If it were such rally, what is wrong with that? No less a figure than President Obama conceded — in one of his interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg — that the Supreme Leader in Iran is an anti-semite. Iran is maneuvering aggressively against Israel and the Sunni Arab regimes across the Middle East. The Times thinks it’s Mr. Trump’s fault that Germany, France, Russia, and China aren’t with us.
Britain sent its foreign minister to Warsaw, the Times notes, but France and Germany sent lower-level envoys, “apparently reluctant to be part of such a bellicose bashing.” Or maybe they preferred to lurk at Munich and turn what the Wall Street Journal this morning calls “deaf ears” to Vice President Pence’s call for help on Iran, while applauding a former vice president — Joseph Biden — as he says how embarrassing he finds his own country.
Mr. Biden is supposedly wrestling, yet again, with the painful question of whether to run for president. If he does, his suggestion in Munich that America is an embarrassment could become his campaign slogan. Meantime, it looks to us like the administration is doing relatively well in Europe.
Well, don’t expect that to be the news media narrative any time soon.
AND AGAIN: Facebook Bans Jussie Wrongthink.
Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives.
MANKIND ONLY HAS 12 YEARS LEFT. WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? AOC And/Or Her Chief Of Staff May Have Committed A Major Ethics Violation.
YOU CAN DISPARAGE COL. JEFF COOPER if you like. But the odds are that, even dead, he craps bigger than you.
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TIRED: THE FRENCH PARADOX.
Wired: The Israeli Paradox.
WILL THEY RETRACT? Pelosi, 2020 Dems, Liberal Groups Believed Jussie Smollett Hate Hoax.
A GOOD DEFENSE LAWYER WOULD NEVER REPRESENT A BAD PERSON! Harvard students demand Winthrop House faculty dean (basically, resident professor) Ronald Sullivan, who is a defense lawyer, be removed for agreeing to represent Harvey Weinstein. They write, “For survivors, hearing about other cases of sexual violence and assault can be triggering, even if only from the daily news cycle… [L]iving in a House with someone who is a daily reminder of the Weinstein case could be deeply traumatic.” Worse still, Sullivan has insufficiently sworn an oath of fealty to whatever grab bag of politics Harvard is calling “Title IX” these days, as his comments on another case indicate a disqualifying “disdain for Harvard’s Title IX policy.” This guy sounds like a serious villain.
“FAKE NEWS ABOUT FAKE NEWS:” Enlisting media myth to condemn Trump’s national emergency.
They’re pretty sure it’s apocryphal.
But they use it anyway.
Media myths can be appealing like that: Too good to resist. Too good for media outlets not to revive when they think the occasion is fitting.
So it was the other day when the Salt Lake Tribune editorially condemnedPresident Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to add miles of barriers along the country’s southern border.
In its editorial, the Tribune resurrected William Randolph Hearst’s debunked vowto “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.
“You want fake news?” the Tribune‘s editorial began. “Here’s some fake news about fake news.”
Read the whole thing.
COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: 14 Cereals that Defined Our Childhood
But no Kaboom? Not our class (of cereal), dear?
PLUS, I THINK THEY’RE PRETTY GOOD-LOOKING: The 2019 Ford Edge Remains a Solid Two-Row Option among Mid-Size SUVs.
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DON’T WORRY, THEY CAN CITE OTHER CASES FIRST: A Washington Post writer is concerned that, in the future, Smollett’s will be “the first example skeptics cite when they say we should be dubious of victims who step forward to share their experience of racist hate crimes or sexual violence.” This, she argues, will cause “irreparable damage” to the “communities most affected.”
She needn’t worry. Alas, skeptics have many examples to choose from: Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse team, the University of Virginia fraternity, the Covington boys, the University of Michigan woman who claimed a man threatened to burn her hijab. Here’s another one and a few more. Here’s a bunch more. And still more. I am sure that with minimal effort you can find others.
Somebody needs to start worrying about a different kind of “irreparable harm”–that being done to our social fabric by false accusations—especially those that aren’t found out … or those that receive huge publicity in the media until it turns out that they are false and then are quietly forgotten.
We are not a perfect country. Now and then ugly things will happen in 2019—though knock me over with a feather if they involve nooses, the KKK, or screams of “This is MAGA country.” But impressionable young people and immigrants are being convinced that Americans are far worse people than we actually are. Without a more realistic sense of the dangers of ordinary American life, we will all eventually lose our freedoms and our fortunes. Public trust is a precious thing.
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