WORD SALAD SURGERY: Sarah Hoyt on the Politics of Meaningless Words.
Archive for 2017
December 10, 2017
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EVERGREEN HEADLINE: The blundering news media gets worse. “The presidential tweet has become a strategic fixture in the war between White House and press corps, and an effective one at that.”
THE MOSSAD TROLLS THE SWEDES:
THOUGHT: Sex-scandal attacks used to be more effective on Republicans, because hypocrisy. But with the left’s shift into neo-puritanism, maybe it’s now the reverse. Discuss.
CHARLIE MARTIN ON BITCOIN.
ALIENS: NASA Readies Big Announcement on Possible Alien Life. “NASA has announced a press conference for Thursday and is expected to confirm a major discovery about life beyond earth. The announcement will be made by the team of scientists who have been studying the several thousand planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler is the most successful planet-hunting probe in history, having identified more than 2500 planets with another 2000 candidates that still need to be studied.”
ANN ALTHOUSE ON TRUMP, TWITTER, AND THE CRITICS:. “I don’t need 60 insiders to explain that to me. It’s an accurate picture of the media. Now, you may say, he just shouldn’t watch the TV, shouldn’t pay attention to media, should let media do its thing and stick to what’s conventionally presidential — ignore what’s being said about him. . . . Don’t fight back. Be above it all. Remember how well that worked for George W. Bush? But that’s not Trump. I can see why he uses Twitter. He’s a master at Twitter, keeping the media honest (or at least looking as dishonest as it is (or might be)).”
If George W. Bush — or Mitt Romney — had pushed back against the media 1/10 as hard as Trump does, there wouldn’t be a President Trump. For that matter, there wouldn’t be a President Trump if the media had pushed back against Barack Obama 1/10 as hard as they pushed against Bush, Romney, or Trump.
ANOTHER OPEN THREAD. Because people seem to like these.
ANN ALTHOUSE: David Brooks gets awfully grandiose and contemptuous. “If Roy Moore’s opponent wins, I would expect Democrats to exult at the fabulous new political opportunity and even to laugh openly at the Alabamans (who will be on the receiving end of contempt no matter what they do). And I do not believe that after this election there’s going to be any great shift to voting based on which candidate is more moral. I watched the Sunday shows this morning. All that cheesy emoting in the Theater of Sanctimony. Such scenery chewing! Especially by Brooks. Isn’t he too a sinner?”
Weird how none of these paragons of moral leadership got all upset about reports of underage prostitutes and Senator Menendez (D-NJ), when Menendez would be replaced by a Republican governor. . . .
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How To Get Out Of An Unwanted Threesome. The solution to this problem is found in the old adage: Inside every threesome is a twosome and a onesome.
THE MSM BLOWS THE LID OFF TRUMP’S EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Breaking: Man Goes to Own Home on Weekends.
HOW KIM KARDASHIAN has ruined butts.
EVEN THOUGH SHE PURPORTS TO COMPLETELY AGREE WITH HIM Sen. Warren critical of Trump decision on Jerusalem.
Warren told a Reform Jewish convention, “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians should determine the final status of Jerusalem for all parties.” Trump’s critics claim their criticism is over “timing” or the “absence of a comprehensive peace plan.” In reality, there are two types of critics among those who purport to support recognizing that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital: those who agree with Trump’s decision, but won’t give him credit for anything, and those who pretend to agree with the substance of Trump’s decision, but in fact want to deny Israel the legitimacy of having its capital recognized by the international community, indefinitely. The Jewish left is mostly in the former camp, the rest of the left, likely including Warren, in the latter.
CLARIFYING BOY SCOUT KNIFE POLICY: “Such a wonderful sentence, and policy for that matter.”
YES. OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES: An Abomination. A Monster. That’s Me?
Shot:
It used to be that when someone called me an abomination, I was in the presence of a homophobe.
But a recent opinion column in Texas State University’s main newspaper damned me for a different reason. I’m abominable because I’m white.
The column wasn’t aimed at me personally but at my kind, and the Hispanic student who wrote it began by saying that “of all the white people” he had ever encountered, there were a dozen or so who rose to the level of “decent.”
The allowance that 12 of us passed muster was perhaps the most generous passage in a screed that had an unambiguous message for white people, be they “good-hearted liberals” or “right-wing extremists.”
“I hate you,” he wrote, “because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”
The headline: “Your DNA Is an Abomination.”
Yes, this was deliberate provocation. By a college student. And he’s obviously right that people of color have been systematically oppressed.
But what college newspaper would have published a column by a white student telling his black peers that they’re a wretched lot? What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?
—“An Abomination. A Monster. That’s Me?,” Frank Bruni, the New York Times, yesterday.
“What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?” Well, a shot at working for the Times, or at least greatly increasing the odds that his resume will be read there.
Chaser:
Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”
“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”
—“Tumult at the Times,” New York magazine, November 16, 1991. It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Pinch’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down.
As with Jonathan Chait’s memorable 2015 freakout from the left over the corrosive nature of political correctness, Bruni’s mostly angry that a young fellow leftist thinks of him in the same way he and most other Timespeople dismiss half the country as unpersons. QED: Here’s NewsBusters from last year spotting “Anti-Trump NYT Columnist [Frank Bruni]: My Goal’s to Avoid the Truth About Trump Voters Until Election Day.”
Found via Christina Hoff Sommers, who tweets today, “Great article by [Bruni in the Times.] Just one thing he missed: Much of the current campus viciousness is inspired by a theory called intersectionality. Explained here:”
Earlier: Lorde of the Flies: Why College Students Reject Reason. Meet the poet who championed subjectivity and what is now called ‘intersectionality.’
CHRIS MATTHEWS ON THE FALLOUT FROM FORMER NBC CO-WORKER AL FRANKEN: “The worst you can say about Democrats is they’re too pure. That’s a stupid thing to say, but that’s the worst thing you can say about them, these guys set too high a standard for public office. How’s that for an argument?”
As typical for Chris, not a very good one.
I’m so old, I can remember when Chris Matthews guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh in the late 1990s, in-part because at the time, he was the rare Democrat who was publicly disgusted by Bill Clinton’s behavior. However, last month, Matthews claimed on air that he was “‘too tough on Bill Clinton’ during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Matthews apparently still views Clinton as the victim and forgot that the college intern was painted as the aggressor and villain in the situation,” as Rachel Mullen wrote at Hot Air.
THIS WAS POORLY THOUGHT OUT: Daimler Tore Apart a Rented Tesla to Learn Its Secrets Then Tried to Return It.
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I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN THE DNC-MSM MOCKED TRUMP OVER HIS TERRORISM IN SWEDEN COMMENTS: Swedish Synagogue Firebombed in Apparent Terror Attack.
SALENA ZITO: FOR ONCE, THE JOKE IS ON AL FRANKEN.
America is in the middle of a political awakening of sorts with all kinds of moving parts. Franken did not survive because he was caught in the storm, he left because he was part of the storm that swept out our culture’s moral compass a generation ago.
When we decided 40 years ago — at the beginning of the ‘me’ generation — to drop societal norms and boundaries, we gave people the OK to behave badly; especially men. It was cool to be naughty, uncool to be respectful and gentlemanly.
It appears that storm is fading fast in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in both our culture and our politics. And politicians and aspiring politicians who had the wink, wink, nod, nod OK to do this, while polite society looked the other way, don’t get any more winks or nods anymore.
Maybe the best test of all for our country would have been that Franken didn’t resign, but stayed to face the people who put him in office in the first place. It would be in that moment we would know if voters would bargain their values away in favor tribal of politics.
Well, Franken hasn’t resigned-resigned yet (as Polanski-apologist Whoopi Goldberg would say), and depending upon what happens in the Roy Moore election, Minnesota voters might still be put to that test.
But in the meantime, isn’t it curious that Lorne Michaels, who created Saturday Night Live in 1975 and still produces it, and infused its “nothing is true; everything is permitted*” style throughout the NBC culture, has yet to be asked about Franken, whose career he launched and employed for decades, or this current cultural moment? Considering Michaels works in the same office building with them, he shouldn’t be all that difficult for NBC “reporters” to track down, if they actually wanted to bother.
* SNL’s first lead writer, former National Lampoon co-founder Michael O’Donoghue, idolized William S. Burroughs, the heroin-addicted beat generation writer, and frequently quoted Burroughs’ motto as his comedy goal.