op ed review 8/27
President Trump touched a media nerve in Arizona — and how.
Members of the supposed celebrated Fourth Estate tore into the president,
post-Phoenix, adopting a “how dare he!” approach to deal with their bruised egos.
Fact is: Trump may not be the most nuanced of speakers, but his accusatory rant
against the press, while lengthy, contained nuggets of truth.
First it was Russia, then it was racism, the democrats’ meme
of the week is now “Amid mounting
bipartisan concerns, debate over Trump's mental health takes off..”
“Among the self-appointed commissars of the culture, the
hatred for Trump assumes the dimensions of a psychiatric disorder. But like the
Soviet commissars of old, they don’t treat their own delusions. They instead
rant and rant about the mental health of “dissenters,” those deplorables who
refuse to conform to the dogmas of the commissars.”
President Trump granted a pardon to former Arizona lawman
and political ally Joe Arpaio, the "toughest sheriff in America," after
he was railroaded by the Obama justice department over racial profiling.
President Trump directed the
Pentagon to extend indefinitely a ban on transgender individuals joining the
military.
The pace of new government regulations has plunged in
President Donald Trump’s first seven months in office, a welcome relief to
businesses and banks that have long pushed for less interference in the
economy.
George Foreman praises Trump, slams Colin Kaepernick and
Kevin Durant.
International news agency Reuters was mocked on social media
Wednesday after it referred to anti-Trump protesters as "peace
activists" in its reporting of President Trump´s rally in Phoenix on
Tuesday night.
“This morning the New York Times published an extraordinary,
data-rich article examining the outcome of diversity efforts at colleges and
universities from coast to coast. The results, quite frankly, are sobering.
After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding,
mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort
and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at
the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago”
In January Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted
support for massive increases in migration into Canada. However, policy has consequences. Eight
months later, the same Justin Trudeau is now overseeing the largest mass
deportation increase in the history of Canada:
“Let me ask, “what if I told you that ESPN decided to pull
an Asian-American announcer from calling a University of Virginia football game
because his name is Robert Lee?” Your answer would probably be, “you’re making it
up.” But I’m not.
ESPN is now in full blown damage control mode over what
would seem to be one of the more ridiculous self-made controversies in recent
times.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has publicly supported
the removal of Confederate statues around the U.S. As it turns out, the Pelosi
family wasn’t always against the statues:
Nancy Pelosi’s father helped dedicate Confederate statues to Robert E.
Lee and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.
“One of my daughters asks, are Robert Lees across the
country scrambling to change their names, lest they be discriminated against by
their employers? Is Robert the new Adolf?”
What’s next? Thomas
Jefferson, ‘emblem of white supremacy,’ targeted in UVa. students’ list of
demands
A California Catholic school is facing a backlash from
parents after officials took down some religious statues -- including one of
Mary and baby Jesus -- over concerns that they were “alienating” prospective
students.
Ever since the Charlottesville protests, the Left has ramped
up their crusade against Confederate monuments and streets named after
Confederate generals. Using their logic, they should be calling for renaming
the leftist mecca of New York, whose namesake is derived from a slave trader.
Circular
firing squad: The relationship between
President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has
disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks,
and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be
able to salvage his administration.
Meanwhile, McConnell approval rating in his home state: 18%
Mitt Romney is a media hero now for criticizing Trump. CNN
and MSNBC spent much of the day Friday touting Romney’s long-winded Facebook
post urging President Trump to apologize for his “both sides” comments about
Charlottesville, Va.
“What´s the end game for these preening, posturing doofuses
who call themselves Republicans, but who can´t pass a CNN camera without
slamming their party’s president?”
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Richard Fernandez
8/24
January
2005 may be remembered as the Day It All Began.
At a Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,
Larry Summers lost his job as president of Harvard by suggesting there might be
small differences
in aptitude between men and women in STEM fields. That was enough to finish
him. Although the penalty may have struck some as disproportionate no one attached any wider significance
to the incident at the time.
In
retrospect Summers' fall was the start of a sequence of events that is even now
racing to a climax. After Summers the
vortex which pulled him down eddied on claiming further victims. By 2012 it had
become unacceptable to think of illegal immigration as a crime. A CNN
article marked the moment
when "the words 'illegal immigrants' and 'illegal aliens," became
verboten…
Gradually,
but with ever quickening pace a series of further breakthroughs occurred until
the public almost ceased to notice that the once sacrosanct verities were no
more. By 2016, when same sex marriage reversed the Defense of Marriage Act
enacted just 10 years before, the advance had become so rapid it surprised even
its most ardent supporters. "What explains the rapid change?" asked Conor
Friedersdorf in the Atlantic. His
theory was that the very fabric of American society had changed to the point
where tradition was no longer able to offer any resistance.
That
change worried some observers. Without tradition to apply some sort of
brake where was the limit? If marriage
could so easily be twitched aside where would the advance stop?
Polygamy?.......Shortly after the same sex marriage issue subsided, the
headlines became dominated by transgender bathrooms. This time the opposition
even feared to take the field. Katy Steinmetz writing in Time likened laws requiring transgender to
the repeal of Jim Crow laws. "Bathrooms and fights for civil rights go
hand-in-hand."…..
Perhaps
the issues were independent in the sense that they were logically
unrelated. But as a process of social change they were as connected as successive
waves beating on a shore. The subsequent
followed the previous with accelerating speed; a trickle was rapidly building
into a flood. Almost without a pause the transgender bathroom campaign reached
and breached the next boundary: gender definition. Identity rapidly became a construct. "UK Facebook users can now choose
from one of 71 gender options, including asexual, polygender and two-spirit
person, following the feature's successful integration in the US”…..
If
the traditional marriage definition fell rapidly the even more ancient
institution of gender collapsed in the blink of an eye. Questioning a
"custom gender" in 2017 had become an offense as heinous as
suggesting illegal immigration was a crime.
Just how serious a transgression was underscored by an article by Piers
Morgan saying" Trump’s
transgender military ban is reprehensible, bigoted." If suggesting gender differences could topple
the president of Harvard, questioning custom genders could undermine the
president of the United States.
Events
have since accelerated with dizzying speed.
College men are tossed out of university on rape charges neither the
police nor even the universities themselves can sustain. An engineer at Google was fired over
questioning diversity policies. Ten applicants had their acceptances to Harvard
withdrawn for saying politically incorrect things on Facebook. You can be
ruined, doxed, blackballed, fired not simply for violating current codes but
those still to come.
Just
when it seemed things could go no faster the War on Statues began. From
seemingly out of nowhere a campaign sprang up to rid America of Confederate
memorials. Within days the effort had spread to pulling down Christopher
Columbus' statue
in New York City….
We
want to pretend that sports are a safe sanctuary from the world's ugly
problems, but that has always been a farce. Truth is, not even the glorious
game of football can keep America's toxic culture of bigotry, hate and violence
at bay. It's just too heavy a burden. So
imagine if you're scheduled to be the announcer for ESPN's livestream of the
University of Virginia's season-opener football game against William and Mary
in a few weeks and your name is Robert Lee…..
Could
it be that events are spinning out of control? Maybe Rauch was right to argue
there is no "slippery slope", no connection between one demand and
the one which follows. But the tendency
of political activism to demand ever more extreme concessions the more are
granted suggests the opposite. In the progressive march toward
"progress" a slippery slope is not only possible but necessary
for the momentum to continue.
Quite
the contrary to "please stop changing the subject!" progress must
keep changing the subject. Like a man ascending a burning ladder he must get
his foot on the next rung before the present step burns beneath. The imperative is to move on to a new demand
before the demands of the latest concession can even be assessed. It dies if it
stops. Progress is in perpetual flight
from the consequences of its victories; like a gravitational singularity it
must keep assimilating more material because it cannot pause, not even for an
instant.
Even
if we can guess the Day It All Began, it is harder to predict the day it will
end. It will stop when the fire runs out
of fuel or events catch up, whichever comes first. Until then the question is
not 'who wins the war on statues' but what demands come next.
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“No
one speaking in favor of "free speech" in Boston was a Nazi, or a KKK
member……..(but) they were "counter-protested" for defending the
fundamental American right to speak freely without injury from other citizens……..
Politically speaking, if we boil this down to a uniquely American perspective,
we observe that there are two clearly recognizable sides. On the one hand, there are those Americans who
recognize the necessity of the Constitution and Bill of Rights as a shield
against the tyranny and oppression of a mob of frenzied zealots bent on power
and destruction. Those Americans – we'll
call them "grown-ups" – understand what the Founders knew……On the
other hand, there are those Americans – we'll call them "angry
toddlers" – who are emotional puppets, whose alarming mental weakness
predisposes them to manipulation and misdirection dressed up as virtue. They decline mental exercises that require
objectivity, reason, and actual morality, because these do not bring the
desired result, which is their presumed moral primacy over those their handlers
seek to dominate and control, not to mention the wealth and property of those
targets. These people are not the most
dangerous among us, but they run a close second because of their utter
inability to process basic information and come up with a correct answer. The most dangerous are those who manipulate
such people to steal what they want while pretending to be making things better.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/08/if_there_arent_two_sides_why_is_there_division.html#ixzz4qhBSy8il
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
“Liberalism, or How to Turn Good Men into Whiners, Weenies
and Wimps” by NFL star, Burgess Owens. “I caught
Burgess Owens on Hannity the other night and was blown away by the information
he shared as I had never heard most of it before. For instance, did you know it
was the Democrats who formed the Ku Klux Klan?.....shares information on how
the Democrats and liberals are actually hurting black advancement by keeping
them dependent on taxpayer-funded giveaway programs.”
___________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
The Boston rally was a watershed event. But not in the way
the mainstream media has been portraying it, as a bold stand against white
supremacy in the wake of Charlottesville. Rather, it demonstrates the power of
propaganda to foment mass hysteria and mob rule. For the media refuses to
report this seminal truth: There were no white supremacists or neo-Nazis. None.
The rally was planned before Charlottsville and was about defending the First
Amendment, stressing the importance of free speech and freedom of expression in
an age of growing intolerance. Instead,
the media engaged in a massive disinformation campaign that spurred over 40,000
“antifascists” to descend upon Boston Common, overwhelming the First Amendment
supporters. The massive protests achieved their goal. Free speech was shut
down. A hate-filled mob took over the streets. And the radical Left won a
decisive battle in its war against the Constitution, the First Amendment and
freedom itself. That this occurred in Boston of all places—the cradle of
liberty and the American Revolution—makes the Left’s triumph even more striking.
It is no secret to anyone who has been paying attention that
the Left’s commitment to free speech–perhaps never strong in the first
place–has been eroding rapidly. Now even the American Civil Liberties Union is
beginning to backtrack on the First Amendment.
How American Anarchy Parallels China’s Cultural Revolution
Former DNC Chair Howard Dean says if you vote GOP in 2018,
you are a racist.
??? ACLU gets accused of racism after tweeting
a photo of a cute white baby holding a U.S. flag.
Is Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out
Conservative Websites?
The John Brown Clubs are gun clubs for leftists affiliated
with Redneck Revolt, an outfit in turn affiliated with Antifa. “Putting the RED
back in redneck”?
George
Clooney and his wife just donated a large sum of money to the Southern Poverty
Law Center, a liberal hate group active in smearing non-adherents to Marxist
theology.
________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
President Trump has disbanded something called the Advisory
Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment (ACSNCA). Good. That
shrieking you can hear is the sound of the Green Blob, mourning the loss of
another of its tentacles.
_____________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Tyrell: President
Trump is in trouble again with his Moral Superiors. His problem, of course, is
that he cannot throttle his B.S. Detector. Trump it seems at some point in life
acquired a B.S. Detector that has usually served him well. It certainly served
him well during his long years in business and during his brief time in
politics. Now, however, it is problematic. The Detector sounds an alarm when it
perceives B.S., and during the Charlottesville disruptions it went wild. Every
time the Mainstream Media or a political figure (usually a Democrat) began
vituperating against only one side in a manifestly two-sided conflict, Trump’s
B.S. Detector could not be ignored. Frankly, if I were the President, I would
have thrust the device under the bed or asked the Secret Service to take it
outside for a walk. Instead, President Trump heeded its alarms and said there
was blame on “many sides.” Kaboom!
Malkin: “Newsflash
from The New York Times: Women may have starved under socialist regimes, but
their sex lives were out of this world! That´s the creepy gist of one of the
Grey Lady´s recent essays this summer hailing the "Red Century." The
paper´s ongoing series explores "the history and legacy of Communism, 100
years after the Russian Revolution." When its essayists aren´t busy
championing the great sex that oppressed women enjoyed in miserable Eastern
Bloc countries, they´re extolling Lenin´s fantabulous conservationist programs
and pimping "Communism for Kids" propaganda..”
If
(leftists) were being intellectually honest, they'd demand that along with
racist statues, something else would be toppled. And this, too, represents much
of America's racist history: The Democratic Party. The Democratic Party historically is
the party of slavery. The Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow laws. The
Democratic Party fought civil rights for a century…. The Democratic Party's military arm in
the South was the KKK. The Democratic Party opposed the 14th and 15th
Amendments to the Constitution, making the former slaves citizens of the United
States and giving them the vote. If the new Cultural Revolution was serious,
wouldn't it also demand that the Democratic Party be put in a museum somewhere,
away from decent people, along with those Confederate statues?
A recent Whitehouse.gov petition urging President Trump’s
administration to label the so-called “Antifa” a “terrorist organization” has
gained nearly 300,000 signatures.
Sign the petition here:
Prager: To understand
America´s crises today, one must first understand what has happened to two
institutions: the university and the news media. They do not regard their
mission as educating and informing but indoctrinating. In this column, I will
focus on the media.
_____________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every
book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and
street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that
process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always
right."
-George Orwell, "1984."
posted by gary at
8:26 AM
0 Comments
