White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”
The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
That’s from Eli Lake at Bloomberg, but the person who first broke the story was Mike Cernovich at Medium. He was able to break the story because folks working at Bloomberg and the New York Times revealed that both Lake and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times were sitting on the story to protect the Obama administration. “‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that’s why they sat on it.”
— Mike Cernovich đşđ¸ (@Cernovich) April 3, 2017
It seems that Rice ordered preparation of detailed spreadsheets “of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president”:
âWhat was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,â [former U.S. Attorney Joseph] diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
âThe overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,â diGenova said. âIn short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.â
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenovaâs description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obamaâs Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obamaâs CIA Director.
Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.
So the Obama Administration was using the National Security state to illegally gather information on Trump and his associated a year before the election. A single break-in by Nixon’s bumbling plumbers are pathetically small potatoes by comparison.
What are the odds that Rice just out of the blue decided to start gathering surveillance information on Trump and his associates rather than being told to by Obama?
And add the previously revealed Trump wiretapping as the cherry on top of the “using the national security apparatus to surveil domestic political enemies” cake.
Given all this, why on earth would President Trump stop tweeting? His hit rate seems higher than the Oracle at Delphi…
.@FoxNews from multiple sources: "There was electronic surveillance of Trump, and people close to Trump. This is unprecedented." @FBI
By accepting the use of preelection statements to impeach and limit executive policy, the 9th Circuit is taking a dangerous step. The statesâ argument is in essence that Trump is a bigot, and thus his winning presidential campaign in fact impeaches him from exercising key constitutional and statutory powers, such as administering the immigration laws.
This would mean that Trump is automatically disbarred, from the moment of his inauguration, of exercising certain presidential powers, not because of his actions as president, but because of who he is â that is, how he won the presidency.
When Judge James Robart stated that “no” terrorists had attacked America from the countries on President Trump’s travel ban, he was engaged in the rhetorical device known as lying his ass off. “At least 60 people born in the seven countries had been convicted â not just arrested, but convicted â of terror-related offenses in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Trump’s sanctuary city and terrorist-supporting state travel bans are his most popular executive orders. To quote Mark Steyn yet again, “‘divisive’ appears to be elite-speak for ‘remarkably popular.'” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Here we go; this is what Iâve handled from Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again. Christopher⌠what, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name snuck in on the edges of a drug crime. Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.
Countries representing all the crimes this week: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. Half of the suspects, we canât be sure because they donât have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that theyâre lying about their nationality and identity.
Iâm ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldnât feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so Iâll take his word for it.
Iâve decided to side with the Jewish gay immigrant who has an African-American boyfriend, not the hypnotized zombie-boys in black masks who were clubbing people who hold different points of view. I feel thatâs reasonable, but I know many will disagree, and possibly try to club me to death if I walk on campus.
Yesterday I asked my most liberal, Trump-hating friend if he ever figured out why Republicans have most of the Governorships, a majority in Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court. He said, âThere are no easy answers.â
I submit that there are easy answers. But for many Americans, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias hide those easy answers behind Hitler hallucinations.
House Democrats are going on a retreat in Baltimore where they’ll go over an autopsy of the election. Will they learn from their many mistakes? “The Baltimore retreat, which will take place at the scenic Inner Harbor, will focus on the party’s fight for all Americans and feature speeches from top Democrats and various celebrities, including Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Chelsea Handler, as the party looks to get back on track.” Signs point to “No”… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Both Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus want you to know that they are not bitter enemies fighting for influence in the Trump White House. The truth is that they are “rather chummy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In the end it would appear that Trump is playing the kind of game that I was taught to play by my coach. His opponents are never given time to mount an attack. Their queen â the MSM has been removed from the board and their favorite piece â the Celebrities are locked in a war of attrition while Trump gets the rest of his pieces on the board. Remember, these are all Tactics but Strategy flows from Tactics. Sooner or later the Left will find itself in some terrible position and the Strategy to drain the swamp will present itself.
“Leftists said if Trump won, that thereâd be violent mobs of hate, and intolerant fascists would try to silence those with whom they disagree. And they were right. It just was by a group of people from which they didnât expect it: themselves.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
NSA contractor allegedly stole over 500 million documents. The news came out October last year (I guess reporting yet another giant classified data breach was something the media wasn’t too wild about digging into in the election homestretch), but he was just indicted yesterday. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Well, with Trump, Modi, Brexit, and now France, there are some similar problems in those countries. What you are hearing is people getting fed up with the ruling class. This is not fascism. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has to do with the faux-experts problem and a world with too many experts. If we had a different elite, we may not see the same problem.”
Nikki Haley’s first speech at the UN blasts Russia over their continued occupation of Ukraine. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Gun sales finally dip. Obviously gun owners don’t feel like NRA-endorsed President Trump is a threat to take their guns, unlike “World’s Greatest Gun Salesman Obama.” It also suggests that those of us in the Vast Right Wing aren’t even remotely worried about that mythical leftwing “resistance” launching an actual civil war. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Can an average engineer earn more in a lifetime than an average NFL player? The study says yes, but I think the engineering pay average ($125,418) is probably a bit on the high side (I suspect California companies were oversampled).
Twitter had decided, in an election year, to surrender control of its platform to a crew of feminist social justice warriors (SJWs) designated the âTrust and Safety Council.â This secretive group of Soviet-style commissars included the notorious anti-male hatemonger Anita Sarkeesian, and soon Twitter began purging conservative accounts…. Jack Dorsey had made his company part of the Democrat Partyâs campaign team and four months later, when Twitter banned popular commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, the partisan nature of âTrust and Safetyâ became transparent. Banning conservatives from Twitter was Dorseyâs contribution-in-kind to the Democrats.
Scott Adams pointed out this video that suggests Twitter is using deep analytics to hide the posts of some users from the “power users” among their followers:
They basically cut them off. Say you’ve got a hundred followers and 10 of them are able to get you a shit ton of retweets 10 of them are able to spread your message far and wide maybe they have a large follower base. Maybe they’re just somebody who a lot of people pay attention to they make it so those 10 people can’t see what you say. Maybe they make it so the tweet is unavailable…it’s using analytical data, using the user information effectively to fuck with and silence people in a way that is not that obvious. You’re not banning them, you’re not shadowbanning them, you’re merely cutting off the power users in their follower base to make it so whatever the tweet out does not spread.
Mike Keen says that Twitter carries out another form of throttling this on tweets from President Trump. After Trump’s initial Tweet, the first few moments afterwords may show top tweets from Trump supporters, but soon those disappear and all the reply tweets to Trump are negative reactions from leftists. “Every single Tweet by President Trump has top comments that are 100% negative. Positive replies are simply not seen. Twitter is absolutely censoring Pro-Trump replies and Trump supporters from voicing their support of the President.”
Says Keen:
Over the past few days, I have continued to reply directly to the President, voicing my support of his policies and ideas. However, I have found that while initially, for about the first minute or so, I get a flood of reactions and notifications. Favorites, retweets, etc, and then they abruptly stop, because my tweets are being manually removed from the main conversation thread.
Anyone having experience with this? Is this real or just paranoia? “Did Instapundit not retweet this because it wasn’t interesting, or because he just can’t see my Tweets?”
Sarah Silverman, the comedienne who starred in such big hit movies as….
Sorry, that was the wrong way to start that sentence. My bad. Let’s try again.
Sarah Silverman, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” and the second voice actress to play Fry’s ex-girlfriend Michelle on Futurama, called for a military coup against President Trump:
WAKE UP & JOIN THE RESISTANCE. ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET OVERTHROWN. MAD KING & HIS HANDLERS GO BYE BYEâ¤â¤â¤â¤ https://t.co/Y2WZbL012A
Because Twitter is an optimal secure platform from which to launch a military coup, and no one is more likely to cause our soldiers to abandon their sacred oath than a voice actress from Untitled Wreck-It-Ralph Sequel.
Hollywood liberals are “The Resistance” in the same way that I’m “The Heavyweight Champion of the World,” and the idea our military would follow them in a coup against President Trump is laughable.
"Once the military is with us" = "Once I've successfully trained these pigs to fly out of my ass" @SarahKSilverman
This was odd for a number of reason, not least of which is that after you’ve been brutally pwned, it’s best to not draw attention to how badly you’ve been pwned. If you’re Marvis Frazier, and Mike Tyson has just put you down for the count 30 seconds after the opening bell, the last thing you should do is start bragging about what a badass you are.
But that’s precisely what Marchman did:
Unsurprising that not one Ted Cruz-supporting cuck/Twitter user is willing to face me in the UFC octagon.
Like his minion’s original Cruz tweets, it appears that Marchman did not think his cunning scheme all the way through:
I'm your huckleberry. I also take note that you are a pathetic cyber bully. My email is tim@rangerup.com I'm available at your leisure. https://t.co/6AS3qAllXV
Upon finding out that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz started a regular senate basketball game, Deadspin asked for pictures of Cruz playing. Cruz himself posted a reply:
That just goes to show: You can take Deadspin out of Gawker, but you can’t take the Gawker out of Deadspin.
(As for those who object to this post’s title: I thought it was important to pitch it at an intellectual and emotional maturity level that Deadspin staffers were sure to understand…)
This past week brought one of those small, illuminating skirmishes in the culture wars, this time over that quintessentially Texas vehicle, the pickup truck.
First came this New York Times piece by Many Fernandez on the Texas Truck Rodeo. If it weren’t for the opening paragraphs, it would be a pretty solid (if not terribly in-depth) piece on pickup trucks in Texas.
But look at those opening paragraphs:
DRIPPING SPRINGS, Tex. â Tim Spell has noticed a peculiar condition that affects Texansâ mental, physical and automotive well-being.
“I call it âtruck-itis,'” said Mr. Spell, the former automotive editor for The Houston Chronicle. âPeople in Texas will buy trucks even if theyâre not going to haul anything heavier than raindrops. I was interviewing one guy. He had a 4-by-4. I said: âYou live in Houston. Why do you have this 4-by-4?â He said, âWell, I own a bar, and 4-by-4s are higher, and I can climb up on the cab and change out the letters of my marquee.'”
It’s like New York Times editors think their target readership wouldn’t dean to read an article on pickup trucks without two opening paragraphs of smug, patronizing condescension. The rest of the piece focuses as much on Texans’ love of pickup trucks as the truck rodeo, and few would take issue with that portion:
Whether for high-up urban letter-switching or more rural and rugged purposes, pickup trucks are to Texas what cowboy boots and oil derricks are to the state â a potent part of the brand. No other state has a bigger influence on the marketing of American pickup trucks.
Texas is No. 1 in the country for full-size pickup trucks. More of them were sold in 2015 in the Dallas and Houston areas than in the entire state of California, according to the research firm IHS Markit. There is the Ford F-150 King Ranch, named for the iconic Texas ranch. And the Nissan Texas Titan, the floor mats and tailgate of which are emblazoned with the shape of Texas. And the Toyota Tundra 1794 Edition, featuring leather seats that mimic the look and feel of Western saddles, was named for the year that the JLC Ranch in San Antonio was established.
The Texas-edition truck is a product of the stateâs pull on the truck world. Some truck styles are sold and marketed only in the state as Texas editions, ensuring that pickup trucks, like a lot of things in Texas, are different here than elsewhere.
“I like to say that you almost canât overmarket Texas to Texans,” said Fred M. Diaz, a Nissan North America executive and a native Texan.
All true, and all largely uncontroversial.
But what really shifted The Great Pickup Truck War into high gear was one simple Tweeted question:
The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?
1) this is wrong, 2) many of these are fleet vehicles, 3) theyâre geographically concentrated bc duh, 4) this is a dumb question for stupids https://t.co/6kulkdzStO
You ever notice how a lot of these "get out and meet some REAL AMERICANS" suggestions are pretty patronizing toward those "REAL AMERICANS"? https://t.co/TVUYwuUNKn
And there’s been many an interesting roundup on the subject:
Sean Davis at The Federalist: “Even after a presidential election in which scores of media personalities were shown to be entirely disconnected from the country and people they report on, the liberal media bubble is alive and well. All it took to reveal the durability of that bubble was a simple question about pickup trucks.”
Rather than answer with a simple âno,â the esteemed members of the most cloistered and provincial class in Americaâpolitical journalists who live in New York City or Washington, D.C.âreacted by doing their best impersonation of a vampire who had just been dragged into the sunshine and presented with a garlic-adorned crucifix.
There were basically three types of hysterical response to a simple question about truck owners: 1) shut up, 2) youâre stupid and/or sexist and/or racist, and 3) whatever, liar, trucks arenât popular (far and away my favorite delusional response to a simple question from a group of people who want you to believe theyâre extremely concerned about âfake newsâ). It turns out that people who are paid large sums of money to opine on what Americans outside the Acela province think get very upset if you demonstrate that they donât actually know any of the people about whom they pretend to be experts.
I have a quibble with that: I doubt many of the liberal reporters snipping at Ekdahl are well-paid.
The responses were predictable: The sort of smug progressives who are proud of their smugness scoffed that pick-ups, pollution-belching penis-supplements for toothless red-state Bubbas, are found mainly in the sort of communities where theyâd never deign to set foot; the sort of smug progressives who are ashamed of their smugness protested that it is a silly question (which it is â thatâs part of the point) and made strained connections with pick-up-owning childhood friends back home in East Slapbutt; conservatives mainly said âHar har stupid liberal elites.â
Snip.
Russell Kirk, describing his âcanons of conservative thought,â argued that to be a conservative is to appreciate genuine diversity, âthe proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.â The Left is living up to Kirkâs expectations: The increasingly sneering attitude of coastal elites toward the more conservative interior, particularly for the poor communities there, is as undeniable as it is distasteful. But conservatives are not immune to these Kulturkampf tendencies, either. No, the whole country does not need to be Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It doesnât need to be Lubbock, Texas, either.
T. Becket Adams at The Washington Examiner: “Following Trump’s win, one would think members of the press would reflect more on what they know and don’t know about the electorate they cover. Though some journalists seem to be doing just that, others appear to be extremely upset with the idea that their industry is insular and operating out of a bubble.”
Ekdahl’s question doesn’t suggest that owning a pickup truck somehow makes one morally superior or “more American” (it’s sort of pointless anyway for someone living in Washington, D.C., or New York City to own a vehicle, let alone a giant, hulking truck. Good luck parking that thing). His question appears to be about the insular nature of media, and whether those who cover the electorate have a broad and significant understanding of American culture.
The point is that a significant number of people drive pickup trucks. How many national media reporters can say they know one of these drivers? The question seems like a worthwhile exercise in self-reflection for the press, especially after it was so violently broadsided in November by Trump’s victory.
Becket concludes with this question:
Rifles are consistently the most manufactured firearm in the U.S., according to the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the U.S., according to the National Rifle Association.
How many reporters can say they own or know a person who owns an AR-15?
Hell, no need to even go that far: How many reporters know someone that owns any gun?
If there’s one thing missing from the commentary, it’s the unspoken moral code liberals bring to the question. The late novelist Michael Crichton noted that environmentalism is the new religion for unchurched urban elites. To them owning a pickup truck makes one an environmental sinner, a moral lapse no less offensive than committing adultery is to a Baptist.
Declaring you own a truck is declaring you’re a sinner in the eyes of an angry media…
George Ciccariello-Maher, a “radical political theorist, and currently Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University,” tweeted that all he wanted for Christmas “is White Genocide.”
Naturally, now he’s claiming that it’s all a joke, though John Sexton at Hot Air has his doubts:
So the professor is claiming his tweet was intended to mock the alt-right. But if it was intended as mockery, why did he issue the follow-up tweet about the Haitian massacre? Clearly that wasnât meant as a joke. It seems his first reaction was to defend the tweet as justifiable. Then a couple hours later he said it was satire. Which is it?
Given that Ciccariello-Maher has now made his Twitter feed private suggests that he realizes he’s really cocked it up.
Drexel University doesn’t seem to be taking it as a joke:
Given that Ciccariello-Maher seems to be a big fan of communism, the political movement responsible for more genocide than any other in the 20th century, I too have my doubts about the sincerity of “satire” claim. But just imagine if a university professor had called for “black genocide,” then tried to pass it off as a joke. As Iowahawk noted:
I'm sure the Drexel prof's "white genocide" crack was just an ill-delivered joke, but I didn't set the ancient Twitter Outrage Mob rules
While this is America, and any lunatic can say incredibly stupid things without being thrown in jail, that doesn’t mean that Drexel University is required to keep him in their employ, especially when he’s violated university policy:
If Ciccariello-Maher were a tenured professor, they’d probably blow it off and seep it under the rug. But since he’s a mere Associate Professor, Drexel may decide it’s less painful to cut ties with him…
Hope all of you had a happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm before you go off to engage in mortal combat to save $5 on an improved deframbulator.
“If Americans outside the big blue cities donât care about the social obsessions of aging hippies, indoctrinated millennials, and frigid feminists, then theyâre wrong. You can probably fix everything by redoubling your efforts to show them how horrible they are.”
“Why pretend to respect their opinions when you donât respect their opinions. They like guns and America and Jesus, and frankly those things are, at best, embarrassing if not downright horrible. I mean, #Science, right?”
“Why bother assembling and analyzing the facts when you know what the answer will be, what it must be: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and whatever other faux-phobias that come slinking out of academia to give you an excuse to hector and nag normal people.”
If you want to see politics based on emotionalism over reason and a borderline-religious devotion to an iconic figure, forget the Trump Army; look instead to the Cult of Clinton.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election, all eyes, and wringing hands, have been on the white blob who voted for him. These “loud, illiterate and credulous people,” as a sap at Salon brands them, think on an “emotional level.” Bill Moyers warned that ours is a “dark age of unreason,” in which “low information” folks are lining up behind “The Trump Emotion Machine.” Andrew Sullivan said Trump supporters relate to him as a “cult leader fused with the idea of the nation.”
What’s funny about this is not simply that it’s the biggest chattering-class hissy fit of the 21st century so far â and chattering-class hissy fits are always funny. It’s that whatever you think of Trump (I’m not a fan) or his supporters (I think they’re mostly normal, good people), the fact is they’ve got nothing on the Clinton cult when it comes to creepy, pious worship of a politician.
By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machineâthe celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I’ve come across.
Trump supporters view their man as a leader “fused with the idea of the nation”? Perhaps some do, but at least they don’t see him as “light itself.” That’s how Clinton was described in the subhead of a piece for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter. “Maybe [Clinton] is more than a president,” gushed writer Virginia Heffernan. “Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself,” Nothing this nutty has been said by any of Trump’s media fanboys.
“Hillary is Athena,” Heffernan continued, adding that “Hillary did everything right in this campaign…She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second.”
That’s a key cry of the Cult of Hillary (as it is among followers of L. Ron Hubbard or devotees of Christ): our gal is beyond criticism, beyond the sober and technical analysis of mere humans.
Snip.
As with all saints and prophets, all human manifestations of light itself, the problem is never with them, but with us. We mortals are not worthy of Hillary. “Hillary didn’t fail us, we failed her,” asserted a writer for the Guardian. The press, and by extension the rest of us, “crucified her,” claimed someone at Bustle. We always do that to messiahs, assholes that we are.
And of course the light of Hillary had to be guarded against blasphemy. Truly did the Cult of Hillary seek to put her beyond “analysis for even one more second.” All that stuff about her emails and Libya was pseudo-scandal, inventions of her aspiring slayers, they told us again and again and again.
As Thomas Frank says, the insistence that Hillary was scandal-free had a blasphemy-deflecting feel to it. The message was that “Hillary was virtually without flaws⌠a peerless leader clad in saintly white⌠a caring benefactor of women and children.” Mother Teresa in a pantsuit, basically. As a result, wrote Frank, “the act of opening a newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.”
Then there was the reaction to Clinton’s loss. It just wasn’t normal chattering-class behavior. Of course we expect weeping, wailing videos from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton about how Clinton had been robbed of her moment of glory; that’s what celebs do these days. But in the media, too, there was hysteria.
“‘I feel hated,’ I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt, holding my bare neck,” said a feminist in the Guardian. Crying was a major theme. A British feminist recalled all the “Clinton-related crying” she had done: “I’ve cried at the pantsuit flashmob, your Saturday Night Live appearance, and sometimes just while watching the debates.” (Wonder if she cried over the women killed as a result of Hillary’s machinations in Libya? Probably not. In the mind of the Hillary cultists, that didn’t happenâit is utterly spurious, a blasphemy.)
Then there was Lena Dunham, who came out in hivesâactual hivesâwhen she heard Clinton had lost. Her party dress “felt tight and itchy.” She “ached in the places that make me a woman.” I understand being upset and angry at your candidate’s loss, but this is something different; this is what happens, not when a politician does badly, but when your savior, your Athena, “light itself,” is extinguished. The grief is understandable only in the context of the apocalyptic faith they had put in Hillary. Not since Princess Diana kicked the bucket can I remember such a strange, misplaced belief in one woman, and such a weird, post-modern response to someone’s demise (and Clinton isn’t even dead! She just lost!).
It’s all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn’t even realize it’s doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one second, in Heffernan’s words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.
A word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. Youâve been barfing all over yourselves for a week-and-a-half, and itâs revolting to watch.
For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didnât vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again.
What kind of president will Trump be? Itâs a tad too early to say, isnât it? The media are supposed to tell us what happened, not speculate on the future. But its incessant scaremongering, the utter lack of proportionality and the shameless use of double standards are an embarrassment, one that is demeaning the value of the institution. The pressâ frantic need to keep the outrage meter dialed up to 11 at all times creates the risk that a desensitized populace will simply shrug off any genuine White House scandals that may lie in the future (or may not).
Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter, the two are creating a taste thatâs like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.
“One by One, ISIS Social Media Experts Are Killed as Result of F.B.I. Program.” My reaction: đ (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More of those “mostly peaceful” protestors we keep hearing about, this time in North Dakota (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The reason the micro-group of neo-Nazis got attention is the media. It’s not the Right. This is an active attempt by CNN and others to paint all conservatives as anti-Semites. It’s disgusting.” Or why Richard Spencer is the new Westboro Baptist Church: A tiny, unimportant thing constantly hyped by the mainstream media as a way to paint Republicans as evil. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Mickey Kaus wonders if Democrats are finally willing to flip to an enforcement-first approach, giving up on amnesty to take the issue off the table and win back working class white voters. That idea makes a lot of sense, which is why I’m sure Democrats will never go for it…
Palestinians are shootinge each other, since the border wall makes it difficult to shoot Israelis. “The violence, much of it directed at a Fatah leadership seen as corrupt and out of touch.” Has there ever been a single moment in the history of “Palestine” when their leadership wasn’t “corrupt” and “out of touch”?
More Trump dividends: France cancels umpteenth Israel-Palestine summit because nobody gives a rat’s ass.
Twitter suspends the account of their own founder. That’s some mighty fine vetting process you’ve got going on there, Jack… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Here’s some quick Twitter reaction to yesterday’s torrent of Clinton Corruption/FBI/Anthony Weiner news. But first let’s look at a prophecy fulfilled from August 31 last year:
Huma Abedin, the top aide to Hillary Clinton and the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener, was a major security risk as a collector of info
