July 19, 2015

MARTIN O’MALLEY BOOED OFF STAGE AT NETROOTS NATION AFTER SAYING “ALL LIVES MATTER:”

The long knives are out at Netroots Nation 2015, but for once they aren’t pointed at the Republicans. The infighting has gotten ugly because the non-Hillary Democrat candidates were apparently not focused intently enough on the #BlackLivesMatter movement. No other topics of discussion seem to be acceptable this year, and the high profile speakers got an earful if they strayed from that script or dared say something more general about the needs of the entire population of the nation. The first, and probably biggest loser of the day was Martin O’Malley, who showed up there and foolishly began talking about things like income inequality and prison reform. The crowd wanted none of it and began chanting, “Black Lives Matter” until O’Malley was silenced and the stage was given over to a “Black Lives Matter activist” who explained that they didn’t need to hear about those other things. That’s when O’Malley attempted to respond and foolishly uttered the one phrase which will get you hounded to the ends of the Earth with that crowd.

Reading the above passage from Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw, I can’t help but think of a quote from a 2007 article by Norman Podhoretz,  “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very “Establishment” they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) “the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known.”

More incredible yet, in a mere decade the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out.

And because the “Progressive” left is in reality trapped in 1960s-vintage amber, the “fun” never ends:

RELATED: This would make a great wedge issue for the GOP:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll