Archive for 2021

November 14, 2021

ROGER SIMON: GOP Leaders Betray Their Voters Over Lisa Murkowski.

According to the Washington Post, the following transpired when Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)—chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—appeared on “Meet the Press” Nov. 7:

“Scott reaffirmed his support for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), defying the attacks that Trump has levied against both. Trump has endorsed Murkowski’s primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, saying in June that Tshibaka is ‘MAGA all the way.’”

When asked if the NRSC would back Murkowski financially, Scott said “Absolutely.”

What kind of game is the Florida senator playing here?  Arguments exist pro and con McConnell, who has done some things well, notably judicial nominations, but Murkowski?

Nothing is discernible for her and, as noted above, several good Republicans are running against her in the primary.  Moreover, Alaska is a reliable GOP state.  Trump won it comfortably in 2020.

I can only speculate what’s behind Scott’s support, but it couldn’t be more obvious that he is betraying, disdaining, alienating, ignoring—choose the word you wish— the Republican rank-and-file, who are finished with Murkowski. Ask virtually anyone. (It’s worth remembering Murkowski initially became senator through being appointed by her father, then state governor.)

This is a foolish thing to do on many levels, so the conclusion must be there is money involved for someone (or some candidate or candidates). Otherwise it makes little sense unless it’s part of a covert plot by so-called “moderate” (read: RINO) Republicans to subvert Trump. Possibly both are involved.

That this was done at a moment of maximum Republican enthusiasm after the victory in Virginia and the near-victory in Democrat stronghold New Jersey makes it all the more disturbing.

Plus:

Many people wonder why Republicans lose when they are able to outdraw the Democrats on the ground, and not just at Trump rallies, in large numbers.

Perhaps it is that some of them, the leadership in particular, secretly want to lose—or to win only when their candidates are part of the Deep State/Uniparty.

While Republican voters are eager for the midterms, I hope the politicians they’re electing know that the base is rather leery about a return to the Stupid Party’s patented formula of “failure theater.”

Posted at 7:11 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 14th, 2021

UNEXPECTEDLY: Media Calls for ‘Rules’ Treating Republicans as Not ‘Normal.’

While we see media going to all kinds of Orwellian lengths to defend the failures of Joe Biden, the opposite side of the coin is how much media will spin reality to attack Republicans.

Now, we’ve seen bias when it comes to media. But the Washington Post’s Jen Rubin exceeds bias and moves right into outright lunacy with this mad rant at Republicans.

First, she falsely claims that the Republican Party has been endorsing violence. But then she gets to the meat of what she wants to say — that the media has to have “rules” for how they treat Republicans. Now, I will give you a “Jen Rubin” warning going in. You’ve been warned.

“You have to have new ground rules for the media,” Rubin whines. “They have to stop treating Republicans like normal politicians. They are not normal politicians … This is a party that spends its entire time cooking up ridiculous culture memes & fanning violence & coming up with outright lies.” Then the MSNBC host completely endorses the crazy idea, shaking her head ‘yes’ and telling Rubin she’s completely right.

That’s quite a take for someone appearing on the network that employs Al Sharpton. But we’ve been here before multiple times; in June of 2020 Reason’s Matt Welch noted: Journalists Abandoning ‘Objectivity’ for ‘Moral Clarity’ Really Just Want To Call People Immoral.

Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer-prize-winning correspondent for the 60 Minutes offshoot 60 in 6, has the latest and perhaps loudest in a recent series of think-pieces extolling the virtues of newsroom revolts such as the one that erupted at The New York Times earlier this month after its opinion pages published a controversial piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.).

Lowery and his industry allies contend that the national tumult stemming from the police killing of George Floyd is a prime opportunity to overhaul journalism’s very mission statement. “Neutral objectivity” as an aspiration, he argues in a Times essay, has failed, and should be replaced by “moral clarity.”

“Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes—however cleverly—be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence,” Lowery writes. “Racism, as we know, is not about what lies in the depths of a human’s heart. It is about word and deed. And a more aggressive commitment to truth from the press would empower our industry to finally admit that.”

This proposed objectivity-for-morality swap is gaining momentum in the spaces where professional journalists congregate, pontificate, and/or swarm on Twitter to get senior managers fired.

Newsrooms “are really struggling to cover…in a way that appears to be nonpartisan a kind of political landscape where one political party in many ways has gone rogue and is not following the rules,” the Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Nikole Hannah-Jones said on CNN’s Reliable Sources after the Cotton flap, in which she was a driving figure. “This adherence to even-handedness, both-sidesism, the View from Nowhere, doesn’t actually work in the political circumstances that we’re in.”

And then there was ABC in 2004:

An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”

The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”

But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”

“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.

Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.

Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”

In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”

That was also the year that the New York Times’ then-ombudsman admitted the obvious: “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”

Between articles like that, ABC’s admission in 2004, Rubin’s appearance on MSNBC, and journalists preening on social media, it’s good to see the legacy media admitting that they’re simply Democratic Party operatives with bylines, though.

Related: John Kass, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, asks and answers: Why is corporate legacy media dying? Danchenko indictment and collapsing Russia Hoax narrative reveal the answer: Root Rot.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 14th, 2021

THE GAS PUMP #RESISTANCE CONTINUES TO SPREAD: From the comments to this post:

Posted at 6:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 14th, 2021

HOW ANTI-RACISM BECAME A RELIGION:

‘I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviours make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.’

If you’re looking for a sentence summing up what has gone so very wrong with modern anti-racism, you would do well to find one better than that. These are the words of John McWhorter – Columbia University linguist by day and anti-anti-racist thinker par excellence by night – taken from his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In it, there are plenty more elegant fulminations where that one came from, all aimed squarely at the new racial politics that has conquered not just America, but much of the Western world, these past two years.

But what elements of the left aren’t a substitute for religion? Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s love of paramilitary cosplay.)

Posted at 5:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 14th, 2021

SUVOROV UNDERSTOOD TOTALITARIANISM:

We commonly think of totalitarianism as controlling every aspect of people’s lives because Big Brother takes sadistic, power-hungry pleasure in stomping his boot on your face. While that is certainly true, Suvorov meticulously hashes out another, non-trivial aspect of totalitarianism: It’s an all-or-nothing system. Any pocket of resistance, any oasis of independence is not merely a bruise to the tyrant’s ego, but rather, a real and direct threat to the regime’s survival. As long as a Soviet citizen can dream of escaping to some place on Earth where he’ll be free from the boot, the regime is in existential danger. It is only when there’s nowhere to escape to that it can breathe a sigh of relief.

Leftism is inherently stupid and crazy, so it helps not to have any examples of sanity out there that allow people to draw contrasts.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 14th, 2021