Saturday, August 26, 2017

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?”
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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.

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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.”

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."

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