“Trump Gains 19 Points with Latino Voters During Border Wall Shutdown.” Via that well-known alt right cabal of NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist. Also: Trump popularity rating among Latinos at 50%. Gee, evidently Latinos like jobs and the rule of law too! Who knew? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“The Democratic National Committee is the latest organization to silently drop its partnership with the Women’s March. The DNC offered no explanation or condemnation of several march leaders’ well-documented history of anti-Semitism, yet the committee’s name is no longer listed as a “sponsor” on the Women’s March partner list.”
At least five Saudi citizens in Oregon facing serious charges (“two accused rapists, a pair of suspected hit-and-run drivers and one man with child porn on his computer”) disappeared after posting large bail and/or surrendering their passports.
Stupid news: “CNN analyst Areva Martin accused Sirius XM radio and Fox Nation host David Webb of benefiting from ‘white privilege‘ because of his views on race Tuesday morning.” There’s just one tiny problem…
Let’s not forget one of the stupidest pieces of stupid news this week: that Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. Here’s everything wrong with it.
Not only should you stop buying Gillette razors, you should consider stop buying everything parent company Proctor & Gamble makes until they clean house:
Nick Clegg takes a job with .@facebook and a few weeks later one of the fastest growing Brexit groups .@Leavers_Britain gets shut down. Coincidence? Keep up the great work @Lugey6 solidarity from your comrades in @labourleave
“In a change designed to make their mission more transparent to Colorado citizens, the state’s Civil Rights Commission updated its mission statement Thursday to read simply “DESTROY JACK PHILLIPS.”
Here’s another case of Google putting its thumb on the scale, making you go out of your way to find what it thinks you shouldn’t be allowed to find: Google won’t autocomplete the phrase “peter strzok lisa page.”
Here some other notable phrases Google won’t autocomplete: “fbi conspiracy”
“fisa warrant trump“:
It’s not just the FBI FISA scandal. Google also doesn’t want you to know other facts about various Democratic operatives. For example, it won’t autocomplete the phrases “Willie Brown mistress” or “Kamala Harris mistress“:
Strangely, Google won’t autocomplete just “Beto DUI” itself, but will autocomplete “Beto DUI reddit“:
Looks like someone was asleep at the censorship switch, there.
Google evidently exists to let you find any information you want…except when it’s embarrassing to Democrats.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
“There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There’s no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.”
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
“Hey officer, I have a dead body in my apartment, along with a bunch of illegal drugs.” “It’s cool. No worries.”
How long would it take for police to arrest me if they found 24 syringes, meth, cocaine, other ILLEGAL drugs and paraphernalia AND a dead body in my home?
How long b4 prominent politicians like @HillaryClinton to distance themselves?
Laws are for the little people: “He’s been a staunch supporter of gun control measures for decades, but in a surprising twist, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday that nearly two dozen firearms were discovered in Ald. Ed Burke’s offices during their raids in November.” (Hat tip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
Dan Crenshaw seems to be settling into his new job nicely:
HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT STRAWBERRY SLICES FOR MY CEREAL BENNY??
But seriously, we are presented with a K-Bar knife at SEAL training graduation, engraved with the name of a fallen SEAL. Never Forget. https://t.co/ZEfI4M0dw3
The “Inbred Redneck Freaks of JesusLand” liberal putdown is alive and well in “Republican” political consultant Rick Wilson, calling the border wall “a con for Donald Trump’s credulous rube ten-toothed base.” (Did anyone else recognize this guy’s name before cable news started putting him on after Trump took the Republican field by storm? I didn’t even have a tag for him before this post.)
Tucker Carlson lets him have it:
Remember when the left pretended to care about working for the downtrodden? That was before the downtrodden voted for Donald Trump.
Welcome to the first LinkSwarm of 2019! If things seem a little thin, I worked most of the week and threw a New Year’s Eve gathering, so things are a little discombobulated right now. Hopefully next week I’ll be back in the groove faster than you can say “Antidisestablishmentarianism.”
The caucus of black New York state lawmakers runs a charity whose stated mission is to empower “African American and Latino youth through education and leadership initiatives” by “providing opportunity to higher education” — but it hasn’t given a single scholarship to needy youth in two years, according to a New York Post investigation.
The group collects money from companies like AT&T, the Real Estate Board of New York, Time Warner Cable and CableVision, telling them in promotional materials that they are “changing lives, one scholarship at a time.”
The group — called the Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators, Inc. — instead spent $500,000 in the 2015 – 2016 fiscal year on items like food, limousines and rap music, the Post found.
The politicians refused to divulge the charity’s 2017 tax filing to the Post despite federal requirements that charities do so upon request.
Its main activity is holding and selling tickets to an elaborate party each year intended to raise money for its stated mission of providing scholarships for youth. But year after year, essentially all the money simply seems to go to festivities.
President Trump’s Iran sanctions are destroying their economy. “In the fallout, the Iranian rial has lost more than a quarter of its value against the dollar, sending the prices of food and other basic commodities soaring.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
EXPLOSIVE REPORT: Scott Israel's son and another student, sexually assaulted a boy after baseball practice. Israel’s son received 3 days suspension. The officer that handled the incident was Scot Peterson. https://t.co/LfJUWw5TCy
AKA “the resource officer who infamously failed to confront the Parkland shooter.”
“A California congressman is introducing articles of impeachment against President Trump on Thursday — the first day of the new Democratic majority in the House.” Because evidently they learned nothing from the Clinton impeachment…
The week between Christmas and New Years is always odd. Work slows down with so many people on vacation, but there’s always a personal rush to get things done before the end of the year.
If you want to see what a bunch of half-baked idiots and kettle-corn psalmists in a political march are up to, the easiest thing to do is to march around with them, as I did for a while in Portland. I do not look much like Tucker Carlson, and I remain, for the moment, able to blend in with such groups.
Which I did — and a funny thing happened: As the march began to peter out, a group of Antifa loitered for a bit on a street corner, and I loitered with them for a while, observing. And then I got tired and decided to bring my labors to an end and go on my merry. As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.
Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.
There has never been any vacuum in Syria (or Iraq). Sharia supremacism fills all voids. In focusing on ISIS, David discounts sharia supremacism as “an idea.” But it is much more than that. It is a cultural distinction — even, as Samuel Huntington argued, a civilizational one. It will always be a forcible enemy of the West. It doesn’t matter what the groups are called. You can kill ISIS, but it is already reforming as something else. In fact, it may no longer even be the strongest jihadist force in Syria: Its forebear-turned-rival al-Qaeda is ascendant — after a few name changes (the latest is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Levant Liberation Organization) and some infighting with other militant upstarts. There is a better chance that ISIS will reestablish ties with the mothership than fade away.
The fact that al-Qaeda, which triggered the “War on Terror,” does not factor into American clamoring about Syria is telling. The anti-ISIS mission David describes was not always the U.S. objective in Syria. First we were going to pull an Iraq/Libya redux and help the “moderates” overthrow Assad. But the “moderates,” in the main, are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very content to align with al-Qaeda jihadists — and our fabulous allies in Syria, the Turks and the Saudis, were only too happy to abet al-Qaeda. Syria had thus become such a conundrum that we were effectively aligning with the very enemies who had provoked us into endless regional war.
When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan).
Degrading ISIS into irrelevance would not degrade anti-American jihadism in Syria into irrelevance. If sharia didn’t ban alcohol, I’d say the old wine would just appear in new bottles. It was, moreover, absurd for President Trump to declare victory just because ISIS has been stripped of 95 percent of the territory it once held. Caliphate aspirations notwithstanding, ISIS’s mistake was the attempt to be an open and notorious sovereign. It was always more effective as a terrorist underground, and it still has tens of thousands of operatives for that purpose.
If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies; we can no more prevent it in Syria than in Burkina Faso. And I am not indifferent to the challenge David rightly identifies: terrorists occupying safe havens from which they can plot against the West. But that is a global challenge, and we handle it elsewhere by vigilant intelligence-gathering and quick-strike capabilities. We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root.
Trump campaigned on his promise to build a wall. He told Frisco Nancy and Chuck Odd that he would shut down the government if he didn’t get his wall money. The Republican establishment, which does not really want a wall because the GOP corporate donor class doesn’t want to turn off the spigot of cheap foreign peasant labor even though those illegals are all future Democrat voters, led Trump on and on. They put continuing resolution after continuing resolution in front of him, each time promising to really, truly, cross-my-heart-and-hope-you-die fight next time. He gave them a chance. He gave them too many chances. And they expected he’d go along again this time. But conservatives drew the line and Trump realized that he needed to do what he did best to get back inside the ruling class’s decision cycle.
He needed to disrupt, so he kept his promise. He refused to play along with the wall scam anymore. And the gleeful Dem senators singing carols as they expected to get away with another grift ended their serenade with a sad trombone. Now the government is going to shut down, and Trump has zero to lose by holding out.
Then he cranked up the disruption when he announced he was getting out of Syria, and it’s clear that Afghanistan is probably next. The establishment reacted with surprise and horror. It’s hard to understand the “surprise” part, since he campaigned on getting us the hell out of foreign hellholes and has always wanted to. Again, he played along, giving the establishment a chance. And another. And nothing happened. So now he’s done. He’s doing what he promised.
Is this withdrawal a good idea? That depends – we definitely need to provide for the safety of our Kurdish allies, and how that will happen remains unclear at this writing. ISIS is a danger; departing necessarily accepts risk. While the conservative anti-nation building attitude is blind to our successes doing it (like in Kosovo), neither Syria nor Afghanistan seem particularly fertile soil for it. And who is eager to dump more money into them after all the trillions we’ve wasted since 2001?
But beyond the substantive considerations is the fact that the overwrought reaction of the establishment to the idea of actually ending a war supports Trump’s plan. What is our objective anyway? What’s the endstate? In the War College they taught us we should have those things. But the screamers never tell us – instead, it’s always invective about how we love Putin, or how we are stupid or whatever, when we ask, “Okay, how much more in time, money and American lives should we devote to these projects?” We never get a timeline, or a dollar figure, or the number of coffins that they consider whatever their unarticulated objective happens to be is worth.
We keep hearing ISIS might return and we have to stay to stamp out those creeps again, and fine, killing jihadists is cool, but if the goal is to keep Mideastern jerks from being themselves then we will never, ever leave. The elite always denies it wants us to be the world’s policemen, but then it always demands that we keep walking a beat that never ends.
President Trump hasn’t destroyed free trade, he’s split it into two: One set of trading partners for us and our allies, and another set for China:
The status quo with China is crumbling. Businesses have grown disillusioned with China’s restrictions on their activities, forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at building up domestic competitors at foreign expense. Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are alarmed at increased military assertiveness and domestic repression under President Xi Jinping.
Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, personifies these broader forces reshaping the U.S. approach to the world. Mr. Sullivan has followed the rise of China for decades—as a Marine sent to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in a response to Chinese provocations; as an official in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and State Department; and for a time as Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources.
When Mr. Xi visited the U.S. in 2015, Mr. Sullivan urged his colleagues to pay more attention to China’s rise. On the Senate floor, he quoted the political scientist Graham Allison: “War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment.”
Last spring, Mr. Sullivan went to China and met officials including Vice President Wang Qishan. They seemed to think tensions with the U.S. will fade after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, Mr. Sullivan recalled.
“I just said, ‘You are completely misreading this.’” The mistrust, he told them, is bipartisan, and will outlast Mr. Trump.
While delivering one message to China, Mr. Sullivan gave a different one to the administration and its trade negotiators: Don’t alienate allies needed to take on China.
“Modernize the agreements but stay within the agreements,” he says he counseled them. “Then we have to turn to the really big geostrategic challenge facing our country and that’s China.”
His was one voice among many urging Mr. Trump to single out China for pressure. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush sought to change China’s behavior through dialogue and engagement. Obama officials had begun to question engagement by the end of the administration. Last year, in its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration declared engagement a failure.
The Trump administration regards economic policy and national security as inseparable when it comes to Beijing, because China’s acquisition of Western technology both strengthens China militarily and weakens the U.S. economically.
“We don’t like it when our allies steal our ideas either, but it’s a much less dangerous situation,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute whose views align with the administration’s more hawkish officials. “We’re not worried about the war-fighting capability of Japan and Korea because they’re our friends.”
Snip.
Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute scholar close to the Trump team who has long warned of China’s strategic threat, sees three plausible scenarios. At one extreme is a new cold war with drastically curtailed economic ties. At the other, the U.S. and China resolve their tensions, continue to integrate and run the world together.
Between those extremes, Mr. Pillsbury sees a more likely and desirable middle path—a transactional U.S.-China relationship of the sort that prevailed during the 1980s in which the two decide, case by case, when to do business and when to decouple.
Stray thought: With the U.S. disengagement with various Middle Eastern conflicts, there’s a possibility that the less-Trump Derangement Syndrome-besotted ranks of the neocons might pivot to back Trump against China. After all, there was no end to neocon Jeremiads against China prior to the 2016 election…
These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.
The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.
Speaking of scumbag sexual abusers, Kevin Spacey has finally been indicted for sexual assault. The one tiny bright spot is that it was an 18-year old man, so it’s slightly less reprehensible than the statutory rate charges made against him. [Insert innocent until proven guilty disclaimer here.]
Shocking news: Washington Post readers actually blame the illegal alien father who brought his son along as a pawn in his plan to enter the U.S., only to see him die. “Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump’s fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed.”
Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:
Wonders of modern medicine: Here I am just six days after my right hip was replaced. I’m still sore, but so grateful for the work of Dr. Anthony Unger and his team at Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C. Merry Christmas indeed! pic.twitter.com/onB87keKtT
For years I’d hear that David Icke was using shape-shifting reptoids as a codeword for Jews, and I’d always go “Nah, he’s just a complete lunatic who truly believes shape-shifting reptoids run the world! They’re not a code-word for anything.”
So, is Icke anti-Semitic? Well, here are some other things that he says in the book:
The Talmud is “among the most appallingly racist documents on the planet.”
B’nai Brith, the world’s oldest Jewish service organization, was behind the slave trade (an anti-Semitic canard popularized by Louis Farrakhan) and controls the Ku Klux Klan: “B’nai B’rith means ‘Sons of the Alliance’ (Ed: Actually, ‘Children of the Covenant’) and was established in 1843. Many of its speakers openly supported slavery during the American Civil War and it covertly supports and controls the Ku Klux Klan.”
Racist far-right groups are actually Jewish fronts. “In Britain,” he writes, “I am told by an extremely reliable source very close to the intelligence organisations that the ‘far Right’ group, Combat 18, is a front for the sinister Anti-Defamation League, the United States and of the ‘Israeli’/Rothschild secret service, Mossad. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been operating in Britain and Europe since at least 1991 and its role is to brand as anti-Semitic anyone who is getting close to the truth of what is going on. What better way to discredit an investigator than to have a ‘far Right’ group like Combat 18 to praise them?” (The “18” in “Combat 18” refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet: A and H, for Adolf Hitler.)
Jews are behind anti-Semitic attacks: “If you really want to discredit someone, you arrange for anti-Jewish or anti-whatever events such as the smashing of graves, assaults on people, even a terrorist bomb in the extreme. You then point the finger at your target person or group. You say they are either directly responsible or ‘incited’ the actions by what they are writing and saying.”
Etc.
Up until this time, I never read David Icke’s books, because that would involve reading David Icke’s books. But given those excerpts, it appears that he’s both a complete lunatic and an antisemite. Good to know. Having read small doses of Icke over the years, it may simply be that there’s no conspiracy theory he won’t believe in. He seems that credulous.
(Note: The piece resulted from the author reading a New York Times Book Review interview with Alice Walker, in which she expresses her belief in Icke’s work, something I’ve covered before in the other blog.)
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.
The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free?
Sarcasm aside, that is the Weekly Standard’s primary problem. In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.
Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater.
Back in the late 1990s, I used to subscribe to The Weekly Standard, and they did some good articles. They were the first place I read about how the French government had lost control of the predominately Muslim banlieues. But I dropped my subscription because I wasn’t reading as many magazines any longer as my Internet reading increased, and National Review filled my “what I read at breakfast and dinner” needs.
There were always oddities in The Weekly Standard‘s worldview, including their embrace of “National Greatness” conservatism, which struck me as Big Government with a conservative facade. But judging from their Twitter timelines, the 2016 election seems to given them a more severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome than any other institution on the right. They became the voice for that tiny strand of elite conservatism that cared more about properly creased trousers and liking the right opera conductors than improving economic conditions for the middle class or reigning in the excesses of big government. They’d rather join forces with Democrats than let the uncouth ruffian Trump besmirch their class credentials by winning without them.
Now some tweets on the subject:
Writers for @weeklystandard have written fundraising copy for Peter Strzok, called for gun control, praised censorship of conservatives, endorsed pro-abortion Democrats, and even run sock puppet smear campaigns against their own @dcexaminer colleague @SalenaZito.
If you want to know why the rise of Donald Trump (or someone like him) was all-but-inevitable, this Maureen Dowd piece about how Maureen Dowd was so very, very chummy with George H. W. Bush provides several clues. On the surface its a lighthearted memoir about how a Republican President and a New York Times reporter were fond of each other and stayed in touch even after Bush41 was out of office. But what it’s really about is how both came out of a stratified eastern coastal elite where everyone’s brother knew someone else’s cousin at Yale or Harvard, and everyone knew their place.
And, being a Maureen Dowd piece, it’s mostly about Maureen Dowd.
Note how Dowd’s memoir is filled with praise for the same Bush patrician qualities the media so savagely attacked when actual elections were on the line. “The most polite man who ever lived” of Dowd’s gauzy memories is the one the media dubbed “wimp” and “waffle” back before he was safely out of office.
There’s really only one quality our Democrat Media Complex really respects in any Republicans: Being a gracious loser.
