WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE WAPO: When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls? It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 15, 2024
UNEXPECTEDLY: V For Vendetta Got It Wrong: Tyranny Comes To Britain Under The Political Left.
Whenever scientific dictatorship is envisioned by fiction writers the end result is usually very similar to already existing socialist regimes. Soviet doctrine and the ideals of the Third Reich were inspired by Karl Marx; meaning, both regimes were built on far-left philosophies. Progressives today often maliciously associate Nazis with conservative thought, but both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were avid followers of Marx. As Hitler noted on January 27, 1934, in an interview with Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt:
“National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism. Volksgemeinschaft: that means a community of all productive labor, that means the oneness of all vital interests, that means overcoming bourgeois privatism and the unionized, mechanically organized masses, that means unconditionally equating the individual fate and the nation, the individual and the Volk…”
Hitler presented himself as a Christian patriot to win over the German public as they faced economic and moral degradation during the unchecked liberalism of the 1920s, but in private he was not a fan of the religion. Hitler is noted by Albert Speer as saying:
“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
In fact, finding and defining a “conservative” totalitarian regime is almost impossible in modern times. Without the defense of free markets, individual liberty, meritocracy and a healthy respect for constitutional fairness one cannot call himself conservative. The Nazis were no more conservative than Neo-Conservatives are conservative, they are simply leftists that pursue ultimate power using nationalism as a proxy instead of pure globalism.
How the “right wing” was culturally associated with authoritarianism is all thanks to modern Hollywood. The same people that write endless tales of Nazi horror have long ignored the even greater genocides of communism in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere. And, whenever a modern dictatorship is portrayed in art or film it is usually tied somehow to a conservative (and often Christian) takeover of society.
This brings us to a little film called V For Vendetta released in 2006, and it brings us to the tyranny now accelerating in the UK.
QED: The riots have unleashed a torrent of class hatred.
The likes of David Goodhart, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Embery have been writing in recent years about one of the most profound social upheavals of the past 50 years, which has become even more acute and obvious of late – namely, the alienation of the white working classes from the better-off who profess to care for them. For many, the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the class hatred that abounded in its aftermath, confirmed many of their suspicions – that middle-class liberals regard the lower orders as ignorant, low-information scum.
Yes, we must condemn those guilty of acts of criminality and acts that make ethnic-minority people feel fearful. But don’t pretend that imperious disdain and naked contempt for the white working class in general, which may serve to boost your ego and earn you peer approval, will make matters better. It might just make them worse.
Earlier: When the elites loved rioting. From the London riots to BLM, liberals and leftists have spent far too long celebrating street violence as virtuous.
So much so that they kneeled in their presence:
ON GOV. TIM WALZ, COVID LOCKDOWN FANATIC:
Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.
Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.
How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.
Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.
Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.
But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.
But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.
Read the whole thing.
WHEN FICTITIOUS PRESIDENTS MEET: Lame-duck Biden urges Trump to ‘get a job’ while spending dwindling moments of his own with Martin Sheen.
Flashback: Magical Sorkinism:
Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.
As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.
It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week—not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
Or as Megan McArdle reminded leftists at the Daily Beast a decade ago: Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn’t Actually Work.
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR AIRBRUSHES! Attorney General Kamala Harris Was Even Worse Than You Think.
—The Bulwark, August 19th, 2019.
HEH, INDEED:
If Ukraine starts installing first-world plumbing in the areas they’ve occupied, Russians will turn against me.
— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) August 15, 2024
RIP: Bay Area rock icon Greg Kihn passes away at 75.
Kihn has passed away at 75, according to a blog post on his official website. Kihn, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but made his name as a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, lost his battle with Alzheimer’s disease earlier this week.
Known for his distinct songwriting style that blended folk, classic rock, blues and pop, Kihn scored a string of hits in the early 1980s with “The Breakup Song,” “Remember,” and “Lucky.” He is best remembered, however, for his 1983 smash “Jeopardy.” The song was Kihn’s only Top 10 hit, reaching number 2 in May of 1983, just behind Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”
It was also immortalized in the Weird Al Yankovic parody, “I Lost on Jeopardy.”
In addition to his successful career as a musician, Kihn was a morning radio host on KFOX for 17 years.
In addition to his hit songs, he became a highly talented DJ in his second career in the 1990s and 2000s; I’m sorry to read of his death at such a comparatively young age.
HOW HOWARD STERN BECAME THE MOST IRRELEVANT MAN IN MEDIA:
Stern has made more than Rush Limbaugh. More than Hannity, Beck, Imus, and Schlessinger combined. No radio talent has ever matched his checkbook.
For a time, he was so omnipresent in popular culture, that an article like this would never see the light of day. First of all, the premise alone would be preposterous — how the hell is Howard Stern irrelevant?! He’s everywhere! And second, journalists were terrified of Stern. If he turned his spotlight on you, it was brutal: His insanely loyal fans would terrorize you in public. Go ask Kathie Lee Gifford how fun it was to be caught in Stern’s crosshairs.
And really, that was the secret to his success: More than anything else, it was the connection Stern forged with his audience that made him so special. If he had an autograph signing or an appearance somewhere, thousands of his fans would huddle together in the pouring rain — waiting for hours — just to get a glimpse of their radio deity. His book “Private Parts” became the biggest literary smash-hit Simon & Schuster had ever published. His audience hung on to his every word. The emotional bond between him and his audience was unbreakable.
Or so we thought.
Then something strange happened: Howard Stern became the world’s first celebrity to go behind a paywall.
It was a clever move by Sirius: For satellite radio to succeed, they needed to figure out a way to convince audiences to pay for something that they’re accustomed to getting for free. So, if you’re Sirius, what’s the fastest, most efficient way to build a paying audience?
Answer: Find the biggest name in the talk-radio universe with the most loyal audience — fans so faithful, they’ll follow him anywhere — and sign him to an exclusive contract.
And that’s exactly what Sirius did. Stern left terrestrial radio and jumped to satellite in 2006.
Originally, this was pitched to his fans as an amazing new development for creative content: Before, Stern was limited by the FCC. Now, he’s finally free to do the show he’s always wanted to do — it’ll be wilder, crazier, and waaaay more explicit! Oh, can you imagine the antics Stern might pull without any risk of censorship?!
Does the wacky Stern 1.0 exist at all today? Between the clips of Stern fluffing celebrities on YouTube, Bruce Bower’s damning portrait of him in City Journal, in January of 2020, before the covid lockdowns, and Stern’s germophobic behavior since, that version of the definitive “shock jock” seems long gone. Stern tossing Biden the gentlest of softball questions in late April is yet another indicator that the once maniacal perpetual manchild is now just another cossetted megastar, arguably terrified of being cancelled over the past behavior that made him a household name in the 1980s and ‘90s.
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Moment CitiBank guard punches climate change activist in face during protest at firm’s NYC HQ.
A climate protester was hospitalized with facial injuries on Wednesday after being punched by a security guard at Citibank’s New York headquarters, Common Dreams reports.
The incident occurred as activists with the Summer of Heat campaign were gathered in the bank’s lobby.
Eren Can Illeri, the injured protester, was part of the protest demanding a meeting with Citibank executives to address the bank’s continued investment in fossil fuels.
Summer of Heat, a coalition backed by New York Communities for Change, Planet Over Profit, and Stop the Money Pipeline, has made Citibank a primary target this summer.
Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Citibank has invested $396.3 billion in coal, gas, and oil infrastructure projects.
‘We have been asking Citi to meet with us for weeks to talk about what it can do to tackle the climate emergency,’ Alicé Nascimento, a spokesperson for Summer of Heat told Common Dreams. ‘But rather than meet with us, they have sent their security guards to physically attack peaceful climate activists after weeks of intimidation and threats.’
Video footage of the incident shows Illeri filming with his phone when a security guard approached him and attempted to grab the device.
The guard then punched Illeri in the face and pushed him to the ground.
‘Citi backs violence and it’s sickening,’ said Alice Hu, a climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change, who said the violence that took place at the company’s HQ is a direct reflection of ‘the violence of fossil fuels and climate chaos.’
The increasingly deranged climate protestors believe that an ever-changing climate is an existential threat. They shouldn’t be surprised when their chosen targets respond in-kind, particularly when their private property is invaded.
OLD AND BUSTED: Make America Great Again.
The New Hotness? Make America Cuba Again! Castro writ large: Kamala Harris declares war on wreckers and hoarders.
If you thought the economy couldn’t get worse under Joe Biden, wait ’til you get a load of what Kamala Harris has in store for it.
According to The Hill:
Vice President Harris on Friday will outline a series of economic policy proposals as part of her presidential campaign, including a call for a federal ban on corporate price-gouging.
Harris will deliver remarks in North Carolina, a battleground state in November, where her campaign said she will focus on plans to lower the cost of groceries. The vice president will say that soaring meat prices in particular have contributed to a spike in grocery bills, and she will call out corporate consolidation in the market.
Those meat hike price rises, like everything else, including the price of oil, are the direct result of government overspending and money-printing that have brought us inflation. Harris proposes to control these prices, as if any business raising prices is “greedy,” cracking down on what the Bolsheviks used to call “hoarders and wreckers.”
But inflation and the interest rate hikes used to control it, hit every aspect of the economy, not just groceries, from rents to housing stock, to medical care, to credit card rates, to consumer goods. And they are all the function of too much money chasing too few goods, which is why prices go up.
On everything, everywhere. Inflation, as Milton Friedman has stated, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
And then there is a Mobius Loop feel of the Vice President simultaneously feigning an attempt to fight inflation while her administration is insisting that inflation is not a very big issue: “It’s worth noting how contradictory that is. On the one hand, the Biden-Harris administration is claiming that inflation has been solved*. On the other hand, they are saying Republicans want to do nothing to solve inflation. In a saner media environment, such an idiotic inconsistency would be lambasted as unserious. Unfortunately, we do not live in that environment. In short, the best case here is Harris is pumping out communist drivel to win the election without any intent of actually enforcing whatever executive order she’d release. The worst case is she’s serious and the entire US economy ends up looking like something that would make Nicolas Maduro blush. Neither is a good option.”
Finally, as Victor Davis Hanson asks as the first two of “ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:”
- How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?
- Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist agendas, or to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?
Politico indicated their approach to VDH’s second question yesterday, choosing the former option: “Trump moves to tie Harris to Biden on the economy: ‘They are a team.’”
* So much so that yesterday, a “Frustrated Biden Snaps at Reporter for Asking About Inflation. ‘My policies are working. Start writing that way, okay?’ Biden told reporters.”
August 14, 2024
ALL-DAY BREAKFASTS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED ON THE DOOM LOOP: Owner blames rampant crime as last Denny’s closes in San Francisco.
NEO: Can Trump get through the firewall?
The media is bound and determined to present Trump in the worst light possible, and Harris in the best light possible. To do this they will outright lie, distort the facts in more subtle ways, and ignore what doesn’t fit their narrative. For the most part, social media puts its finger on the anti-Trump scale, too.
It is propaganda, and do not underestimate its influence, which is pervasive.
One of Trump’s many problems, now that the Democrats got the impediment of Joe Biden out of the way, is to cut through all of that. During the 2016 campaign the anti-Trump propaganda was already present, but since then we’ve been subjected to nine years (starting in the summer of 2015) of it, nonstop and escalating. The lies build on the previous lies to form an edifice of anti-Trump lies, and there is also widespread ignorance about the good things that haven’t been covered or that have hardly been covered.
At this point there are a lot of Trump supporters and there are also a lot of people who would never vote for him (or perhaps for any Republican). It may be that those two groups are roughly equal in number, so let’s ignore them for a moment. It’s those voters in-between who matter in this particular election. But even they have been subjected to that relentless 9-year anti-Trump campaign in all its manifestations.
Read the whole thing.
The old spin was that “supply chains” were “snagged.” Two years after the reopening of the economy, that spin could no longer be spun, so Biden/Harris changed the propaganda: Now the only reason for inflation was “greedy corporations” jacking up prices. They were simply lying: No corporation was just increasing prices out of greed. They were increasing prices because the costs of their raw materials and labor had all gone up, because the dollars was now worth about 75% of it was before Biden flooded the world with cheap funny-money fake dollars.
Biden-Harris is basically North Korea, but operating out of the White House.
Presumably, the Northeast Corridor will not change its course, despite the bad news it’s been receiving since 2021: New Jersey/New York Tops National Inflation Rankings, New Study Reveals.
THAT’S ALL, FOLX! Embattled Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigns months after anti-Israel student protests: report.
Columbia University president Minouche Shafik has resigned from the elite institution, according to a report.
Shafik is stepping away after just one year at the helm, which was marked by constant — and sometimes destructive — anti-Israel protests, the Free Beacon reported.
The embattled president had been facing mounting calls to resign for months over her handling of the protests, which broke out following Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel.
She was accused of “gross negligence” while testifying before Congress after refusing to say whether the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” should be considered antisemitic.
Classical reference in headline:
They implement this insane made up language and terminology because they just think like "latinx" it will be widely accepted, and then when people notice it, they claim stupidity and feign ignorance about it. https://t.co/oVNyhy9npQ
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 17, 2024
JUST IMAGINE WHAT THEY’D BE WORTH IF THEY ACTUALLY WON PLAYOFF GAMES AND SUPER BOWLS: The Dallas Cowboys become first sports franchise to be worth over $10 billion, per Sportico. “The Cowboys, owned by Jerry Jones, were valued at $10.32 billion, far and away the most valuable franchise in the league and an increase of over a billion dollars on the previous estimate of $9.2 billion in February. Jones, 81, purchased ‘America’s Team’ in 1989 for an estimated $140 million (roughly $355 million in 2024) and has turned the organization into a financial powerhouse.”
TWO TIMS IN ONE!
Shot: Walz let Minneapolis burn.
This was Minnesota under Tim Walz.
Never forget.pic.twitter.com/UURbI1Z55G
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 12, 2024
Chaser: ‘Light ‘em up!’ Police shoot paintballs at Minneapolis residents standing on their porch.
This was during the George Floyd riots. But the power to do this to their citizens was only extended to them because of the Covid lockdowns and executive orders. This way all may-june 2020
— Sam (@Samantha_SN1) August 13, 2024
The juxtaposition between these two videos could make for a powerful campaign ad for Trump.
UPDATE: ‘Light ‘Em Up:’ Paintball Tim? Ed Morrissey writes, “The entire episode speaks to Walz’ utter incompetence as an executive in the public sector. He’s an authoritarian whose instincts run to either inaction or over-reaction. His pandemic management speaks volumes in that regard, especially his COVID-19 Snitch Line and his vicious punishment for those who dared defy his authoritarian rule by decree. Just ask Lisa Hanson, who served most of a 90-day jail sentence for trying to re-open her coffee and wine bistro…The Walz administration was still prosecuting these cases in December 2021. By that time, practically the entire country had reopened. Even most of Minnesota had reopened by that time. Rather than drop the case as moot, the state threw a business owner in jail for two months, which is about two months longer than nearly all of the rioters got. That’s how authoritarian Walz is by nature, and that’s the Tim Walz that Republicans need to expose.”
OLD AND BUSTED: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The New Hotness? Why did a Washington Post reporter urge the White House to censor Trump?
Unfortunately, the news media in this country has increasingly isolated itself from most of this country which has allowed an elitist attitude to emerge within the industry. It became more prevalent during the Trump era. We know Trump is crazy and dangerous, but the people are too stupid to figure it out on their own, so we need to do everything possible to help defeat him, even if it means shielding the public from what he has to say. Journalists repeatedly lobbied social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms — with many of them finally acquiescing post-January 6 — and encouraged corporate advertisers to pull paid ads from conservative or Trump-related content on social media and television. Many stopped carrying his speeches and events live so that viewers could not see for themselves what he had to say. All of his words were filtered through a biased media that wanted to present him in the most unfavorable light possible. Private persons who chose to support Trump anonymously online were harassed and “canceled” by news organizations, a warning that ideological dissent to the regime would not be tolerated.
Few of these journalists have ever stopped during this process to consider that their opinion of Trump might be wrong — or wonder why their strategy to silence him hasn’t meaningfully diminished his support. Instead, they have doubled down.
Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter took it to the next level by openly suggesting the government get in on the game. During a White House press briefing, the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked if the government has a “role” in tackling “misinformation” and if President Joe Biden planned to “intervene” in Trump’s X Space.
“I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s a — you know, it’s an America issue. What role does the White House or the president have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” Wootson asked.
The Biden administration has already been accused of illegally colluding with social media companies to censor content it deemed “misinformation” (unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs in this case lacked standing). Directly preventing a political opponent from speaking on a social media platform would be even further beyond the pale and it is frankly horrifying that a journalist, whose job is protected by the same constitutional amendment that shields the speech of everyday Americans from government censorship, would even suggest such a thing.
That the question was asked with little pushback from Wootson’s mainstream colleagues suggests to me that the American media has been emboldened in its illiberal ways. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. The media don’t seem to care that their trust with the American people is at an all-time low or that many of them have had to lay off staff. They have apparently decided it is more important to use their platforms and power to gatekeep “acceptable” ideas in society.
While attempting to censor Trump into silence, the WaPo is pretty laid back about receiving radio silence from Harris: Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris.
Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has neither given a sit-down interview nor held a news conference. Her campaign’s website lacks an “Issues” page (there’s only a biography). We get it, tactically: It’s tempting for Ms. Harris, as it would be for anyone in her position, to stay as vague on the issues as possible, for as long as possible, to avoid giving fodder to the opposition or dividing her supporters. Ms. Harris is confident she’ll win if the campaign is about the many flaws of former president Donald Trump.
And the Post will be perfectly happy if Harris never does an interview with them. And why not? The silent treatment has to be much more enjoyable for Democratic Party operatives with bylines than the constant abuse they received from her nominal boss over the decades. (Besides, have you heard about how badly Kamala treats her staffers?)
UPDATE: One prominent WaPo journalist weighs in editorially on Biden — and presumably the person that Democrats have chosen to replace him as well:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Two Weeks With Kamala, Tim Walz Announces He Has Signed Back Up With National Guard And Requested Deployment To Iraq.
THIS PARADE BROUGHT TO YOU BY BIDEN-HARRIS: Taliban parade US military vehicles, weapons to celebrate 3 years in power, AP reports.
Members of the Taliban on Wednesday celebrated three years since their return to power with a display at a former U.S. air base, according to the Associated Press.
Images circulating social media show uniformed troops flying helicopters and parading a convoy of armored trucks through what was once the Bagram Airfield. The hardware had reportedly been left abandoned since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
BREAKING:
The Taliban are holding a major military parade the former U.S. military base in Bagram to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of taking over Kabul.
Chinese and Iranian diplomats attended the ceremony. pic.twitter.com/RWRm1h7dfu
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 14, 2024
And it was quite a haul:
Flashback: Harris says she had key role in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal decision. The vice president confirmed she was the last person in the room before Biden made the decision to move forward with withdrawing U.S. troops.
MATT TAIBBI: FOIA Files: Did Special Counsel Robert Mueller Rely on Clinton Campaign Operatives to Point to Russia?
For over eight years, the world has been told that the United States government relied on a private firm called Crowdstrike to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee. Both former FBI Director James Comey and Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred to Crowdstrike as a primary source that Russian “conspirators hacked the DNC.”
That narrative was troubling enough and the subject of questions at Congressional hearings. Attempts by members of the public to obtain Crowdstrike’s analysis through FOIA have been shot down time and again owing to corporate “trade secrets” involved, and with Special Counsel Mueller’s July 2018 indictment of those 12 Russians who are unlikely to ever be apprehended, key facts about their investigation were set to be sealed for decades.
New emails obtained by Racket through the Freedom of Information Act, however, suggest there is more to the story. Cyber researchers at Georgia Tech who were indirectly working with the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS to produce the Alfa Bank claims, also appear to have influenced Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of the DNC hack.
Read the whole thing.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Colin Kaepernick Makes Delusional Comment About Potential NFL Return.
Colin Kaepernick seems to think he still has the ability to play in the NFL.
The former 49ers passer last took an NFL snap on January 1, 2017 in a loss to the Seattle Seahawks. It’s been more than 91 months since he last played pro football.
The man responsible for sparking massive national anthem protests in the league was simply not good for business, and teams never jumped to sign him after the 49ers cut him loose.
Despite it coming up on eight years out of the NFL, Kaepenrick still thinks he can help a team win the Super Bowl.
Blaine Gabbert smiles. This is getting into the same territory as Sports Illustrated putting Jim Brown on its cover in 1983 in an Oakland Raiders uniform at age 47. Except Brown had an longer and infinitely more successful career in the NFL before retiring to make movies in Hollywood in 1966. And didn’t kneel during the national anthem, wear socks depicting cops as pigs while in training camp, pro-Castro T-shirts, and didn’t refer to the NFL draft system as “slavery.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Morning Hate Speech: David Frum Compares Trump To Mass Murderer Charles Manson.
The Trump = Hitler analogy is getting old. We’ve been in desperate need of some fresh material! How jejune.
Unsurprisingly, Trump-loathing journalist David Frum appeared on CNN This Morning today to supply it.
Frum dug up, and approvingly quoted, this line from Republican consultant Mike Murphy — or to be completely up to date, “Republican Voters Against Trump” consultant Mike Murphy.
“Asking Donald Trump to talk about policy, it’s like teaching Charles Manson to foxtrot. He can manage a step or two, but then he’s going to put a pencil in your eye, because he’s Charles Manson. And Donald Trump is Donald Trump.”
Frum went on to call Trump an “insult comic” who “knows how to abuse and denigrate and humiliate and demean.”
The irony was apparently lost on Frum that whereas he trashed Trump for denigrating people, he himself had just analogized Trump to Charles Manson—the personification of pure evil. Maybe Frum could serve as the warm-up act for Trump’s next insult-comic appearance.
Even with the “Trump is Manson” comparison, I don’t think Rolling Stone is going to go for him. As Joe Hagen wrote Sticky Fingers, in his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”
And I doubt Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn will, either:
Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!
Best stick to rehabbing Woodrow Wilson’s reputation then, David.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Ilhan Omar Wins Minnesota Primary, Avoiding Fate of Defeated ‘Squad’ Members This Year.