Monthly Archives: September 2018

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in GOP language factories and fever swamps, Sept. 18-25, 2018

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the progressive political apparat

rhetorical claim: the progressive political apparat has targeted Devon Nunes and Brett Kavanaugh in an all-out attempt to use hysteria to derail them.  Make no mistake: this is not so much “the voice of the people” as it is a last-ditch desperate shout designed to make Dem loyalist cattle stampede in one direction. The demonization of Nunes is especially a window into our times. We hunt for mythical Russian collusion while foreign collusion between Christopher Steele and his Russian sources is ignored. Progressives who claim an affinity for the middle classes demonize farmers as hicks. A supposedly noble press prints fake news and traces down someone’s long-dead great-grandmother to suggest divided loyalties. They exhibit an unthinking animus toward anything Trump-related.

rhetorical effect: makes Dems out to be tantamount to Bolsheviks; turns “progressive” into a slur, suggesting progressivism out to be a secretive cabal ; changes the Mueller investigation of Russian hacking into a non-existent investigation of Hillary.

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blacks for Trump

rhetorical claim: President Lincoln was not a Democrat, as they’d been led to think in school. It was not Republicans who were the party of racism, but Democrats. Blacks learned for the first time that Democrats were slave owners. Over and over, they share their surprise at learning the Democrats are the party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats are the party that destroyed the black family. Bill Clinton set off the explosion of black incarceration. They are done permanently as Democrats. But many black men feel targeted by feminism. Others are appalled by the Democratic Party’s promotion of abortion, which disproportionately targets black communities. Black men and women are furious that illegal aliens seem to receive better treatment from Democrats than American citizens.  Intersectionality is failing to unite them with the other privileged grievance groups. These voters realize their interests are not identical or even similar to leftist politics.

rhetorical effect: divide and conquer rhetoric always drives a wedge between groups in a coalition even if those in the coalition have far more similarities than differences. The tired old chestnut that the Dems were responsible for slavery is one of those statements that, while factually true, is actually demonstrably false. Lincoln would not be a Republican today, and the Dixiecrats changed parties years ago. Ignoring, Trump’s defense of police brutality and he KKK, systematic stripping of all safety net program funding, environmental racism in the form of stopping the cleanup of toxic waste sites, calling African nations “shitholes,” etc., it’s impossible to believe that more than a handful of  blacks would ever vote for Trump. Black voters can’t be bought with a bogus “paychecks are up” argument, since they are more ensconced at the bottom of the food chain than ever.

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disreputable anonymity

rhetorical claim: the attempted rape allegations against Brett Kavanaugh raise a red flag: we will no longer have a free country or enjoy civil liberties and the safety of a Bill of Rights, if any American, at any time, can be ruined by an allegation of unproven sexual assault of some 36 years past, when the accused was a 17-year-old teenager, by an accuser who initially trafficked anonymously in such allegations, came forward only as part of a wider, more intensified and collective last-ditch effort to destroy the reputation of the accused, and yet has no clear memory of exactly where she was at 15, or the approximate date, when she claims that she was assaulted, or why she made no such accusation for 30 years—or when she raised the issue some six years ago privately during counseling, why her therapist’s notes of such revelations do not now match her current version of the incident…Anonymity has never become more disreputable—and legitimized. An unidentified source is the new American means that is to be justified by noble progressive ends, often in the context of somehow delegitimizing Donald J. Trump and anyone or anything remotely connected to him.

rhetorical effect: of course, these charges are no longer anonymous since Prof. Ford came forward, but, as with the Mueller probe, the GOP strategy is to go after the process by which the facts were generated and not so much the facts themselves.

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transparency

rhetorical claim: Trump has ordered the release of documents related to the Mueller probe because the FBI has run amok with its witch hunt and political vendettas. The Dem attempt to nullify the last election will fail because transparency reveals the truth–in this case the conspiracy among Trump haters who were running the FBI AND Justice Dept.

rhetorical effect: best explicated by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent:

President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are running a systematic campaign of harassment and disruption directed at legitimate law enforcement activity being conducted on behalf of the American people — with the active goal of protecting Trump and his cronies from accountability and denying the public the full truth about a hostile foreign power’s effort to corrupt our democracy.

The latest example of this, like the others that preceded it, is being justified with the laughably disingenuous falsehood that the goal is “transparency.” And this one, like the others that preceded it, will likely blow up in Trump’s face in spectacular fashion.

Trump has ordered the Justice Department to release numerous classified documents related to the Russia investigation. A White House statement claims this is in the interests of “transparency.” One of Trump’s most dutiful servants in Congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, insists this release will “reveal to the American people some of the systemic corruption and bias” at “the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI.”

In reality, this is an effort at obfuscation, concealment, deception, and the weaponizing of the oversight process for “partisan political ends.” If recent precedent is any guide, the release itself will broadly confirm this — even though Trump and his allies will lie uncontrollably to the contrary.

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Set-Up

rhetorical claim:  the desperate, last-minute slur against Brett Kavanaugh has all the hallmarks of a set-up: unprosecuted, unproveable, and largely unremembered misconduct, toxic to even talk about politically without alienating women voters, and a ready-made excuse to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation until after the mid-term election. It’s a continuation of the war against Kavanaugh that was earlier fought with aggressively provocative, politically loaded questions and shouting. It is tantamount to a political mugging. It is a disgrace that this should happen in this republic, and in connection with the courts, which are not supposed to be political forces, but which have been converted into an uber-political institution that progressives are desperate to control.

rhetorical effect: forecloses on the possibility of any sober investigation of the claims; victimizes the alleged victim by calling her “mixed up”; turns any criticism of Kavanaugh into a nearly criminal act: a “mugging”. Alternatively, any critical question is potentially a “set-up”, a perjury trap for Trump, a habitual liar.

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fairness

rhetorical claim: Kavanaugh deserves a fair hearing to clear his name.

rhetorical effect: exactly the problem: “fair” to the GOP only ever means “winning.” “Fairness” never entails evidence, reason, justice or any moral position, but just allowing them time enough to generate as much smoke as possible. For example, they use the concept of fairness to justify racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this sense, in their rhetorical universe “fairness ” is synonymous with “transparency” and “tolerance” as deceptive master-tropes.. Moreover, they aren’t “hearing” Kavanaugh’s accusers, since they seem tone-deaf to their shame, anger, pain, and candor.

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descent into political madness

rhetorical claim: best described by the Victor Davis Hanson:

The progressive street is leading fossilized Democrats into a sort of collective madness.

The dinosaurs of the party desperately seek relevance by sounding crazier than the new unhinged base that disrupts Senate hearings, loudly pronounces a new socialist future, and envisions octogenarian Maxine Waters as more the future of the party than is septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi. The spectacle is right out of Euripides’s Bacchae, as the creaky old guard of the polis, Tiresias and Cadmus, dress up in trendy, ridiculous ritual costumes to stumble along after the racing and frenzied young maenads in their lethal courtship of suicidal Dionysian madness.

rhetorical effect: makes it impossible to seriously debate any political issues because one of the parties is unhinged, so must be treated as either mentally deranged or as children. (Note how the GOP goes from calling Dems deranged and adolescent to calling them unscrupulous, calculating hypocrites who have an insatiable will to power and a plan to seize it. Surely both charges can’t be true!)

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socialism

rhetorical claim: According to Jonah Goldberg in Commentary:

Socialism has never been a particularly stable or coherent program, a point I made in these pages in 2010. It has always been best defined as whatever socialists want it to be at any given moment. That is because its chief utility is as a romantic indictment of the capitalist status quo. As many of the defenders of the new socialist craze admit, socialism is the off-the-shelf alternative to capitalism, which has been in bad odor since at least the financial crisis of 2008. “For millennials,” writes the Huffington Post’s Zach Carter, “‘capitalism’ means ‘unaccountable rich people ripping off the world,’ while ‘socialism’ simply means ‘not that.’”

As a matter of practical politics, socialism’s durability as a concept owes almost nothing to economics and almost everything to the desire for power—power for the poor, for the left-out, for the “workers of the world”—and for the intellectuals who claim to speak for them. In countries experimenting with what Friedrich Hayek called “hot socialism,” the transfer of power from one set of elites to another was bloody and total (and no one, save those at the top of the new system, experienced much of the freedom Robin describes). In countries that have pursued “soft socialism” of the Western European varieties instead, power shifted primarily to bureaucrats and politicians—but these managerial classes managed to work well enough with other elites and recognized that their long-term interests were best protected by subsidizing not the poor but middle-class voters instead, mostly in the form of trade unions and government workers. The cost for this kind of socialism is typically a few points of GDP growth and the sort of sclerotic, corporatist economy that invites populist uprisings at the mere hint of reform and makes integration of immigrants much more difficult.

rhetorical effect: undercuts any social cohesion by giving preeminence to individuality and laissez-faire competition–substitutes Social Darwinism for cooperation and social justice. Labels any attempts at cooperation, from labor unions to the *Me Too movement, as subversive, fatuous and ultimately doomed to failure.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in GOP language factories and fever swamps, Sept. 11-17, 2018

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Obama vs. the nation

rhetorical claim:  As expressed on The American Thinker website:

In a moment reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s outrageous characterization of Trump voters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable,” President Obama said: “I have to say this… Over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.”

Labeling the 63 million Trump voters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” didn’t work out for Hillary Clinton when she ran a failed presidential campaign against Trump in 2016.  Labeling the same voters as divisive, resentful and paranoid will not work for Democrats in the November midterm elections.

No, it will not, and the remarks by this poster child for self-serving hypocrisy and delusion go a long way toward explaining how Obama shrank the Democratic Party by a thousand state, local, and federal legislative seats during his eight years in office.  Once again, to use President Obama’s own phrase, he “acted stupidly.”

From Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, President Obama’s words aiding and abetting the war on cops and inciting racial division have been the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.  He has encouraged a false narrative of racist cops and racist police departments whose officers are guilty until proven innocent, or buried, whichever comes first.  Never mind that in both Baltimore and Ferguson, the cops accused of racism and murder were found guilty of neither.

It was Ferguson, Missouri, where President Obama’s Justice Department sent forty FBI agents to prove that Officer Darren Wilson was a racist murder of an innocent black teen. He made the race-baiting Al Sharpton, who helped create the myth of “hands up, don’t shoot,” a key adviser on race matters and Ferguson…

Jesus preached peace long before the prophet Muhammad mounted a horse, grabbed his sword, and began beheading infidels on his way to Mecca.  As for the Crusades, they came after and in response to centuries of Islamic conquest and aggressive war against the infidels of the Christian West.  As Princeton scholar and Islamic expert Bernard Lewis explains, “The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war – to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”  According to St. Louis University and Crusade scholar Thomas Madden, “[a]ll the Crusades met the criteria of just wars.”

Slavery was an institution supported by Democrats in the South.  Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats.  Evils may have been committed in the name of Christ, but not at the urging of Christ, who preached peace and love and mercy to one’s enemies.

It is Barack Hussein Obama who divided America and incited paranoia, attacking, cops, Christians, and clingers, just to name a few.

rhetorical effect: not even the Russians could do so well at stoking the dying embers of the Culture Wars.

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pretty heavy cost

rhetorical claim: the National Park Service wants to charge protestors for the cost of the charges incurred by public protests. One NPS official said that last year’s Women’s March carried with it a “pretty heavy cost.”

rhetorical effect: essentially a tax on free speech. Ballots, vote-counting, poll watchers, etc. also cost money. Are they going to tax us to vote (i.e., impose a new [poll tax)?  Also makes it sound as if the NPS owns public lands, when, is essence, they are the steward of these lands on behalf of its citizen-owners.

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color blind

rhetorical claim: since conservatives don’t  see color and that therefore there’s too much talk about racism. People of all colors can get ahead, so nobody should whine about outcomes. Just talking about racism is itself racist.

rhetorical effect:  classic rhetorical inversion, turning racism on itself and claiming that its actual meaning is the diametrically opposite of its commonly-held meaning; elides structural racism (minorities being more likely to attend underfunded schools, have far lower incomes and higher unemployment than whites, are far likelier to be imprisoned than whites, etc.) ; robs social justice advocates of their political voice.

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the anti-Trump media firing squad

rhetorical claim: in the midterm election kickoff, the anti-Trump media firing loosed a fusillade of damp squibs, none of which had any effect on the President. They tried everything: disrupting Kavanaugh’s hearing, calling Kavanaugh a liar with, at best, cherry-picked evidence, the Bob Woodward fictional account of the White House, the New York Times’ fictional account of the White House (written by the Times but attributed to “anonymous”) wheeling out Barack Obama, falsely accusing Trump of killing thousands in Puerto Rico, etc. The American public just tunes this guff out.

rhetorical effect: undercuts, demonizes, or delegitimizes any criticism of Trump: this is total rhetorical war, scorched earth.

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self-destructive anti-Trump rage

rhetorical claim: according to Michael Walsh:

We are witnessing a similar self-destructive rage today: the rage of the American Left against the Trump Administration in general and the president in particular, an explosion of frustrated, impotent (but still dangerous) anger that has given up all pretense of genuine protest—against the results of a duly constituted American election, let us remember—and has devolved instead into a toddler’s extended tantrum. It bears the hallmarks of one of the most unseemly displays in American political history.

It’s being conducted in the halls of Congress, where the Democrats have at last dropped all pretense of civility and shown the voters their true, foam-flecked faces. It’s being waged in the media, where the ladies and gentlemen of the press, such as they are, have thrown over journalistic practices that served the profession well over the past century or so, and now regard malicious gossip and news as one and the same thing.

Most ominously, it is taking place in the streets where, over the past year, Republican congressmen and Trump supporters have been shot, attacked with a switchblade knife, clubbed with a bicycle lock, had their vehicles and offices vandalized and set on fire; even the president’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed.

The masked fascist thugs who ludicrously call themselves “Antifa,” routinely attack public gatherings, and Left wingers sporting “Say No to Hate” t-shirts scream at the sky at the very thought of Trump and his policies. Not since the 1960s have we witnessed such a public breakdown in moral and psychological order.

rhetorical effect: again, infantalizes the Left as socialist and power hungry, rendering any criticism of Trump as misguided at best, and part of a voracious will to impose a socialist state on Americans at worst. Equates political dissidence with mental illness.

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corruption

rhetorical claim: corruption from the Obama-Clinton era continues to be unearthed, in everything from the Clinton Foundation finances to the corrupt origins of the Mueller probe.

is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.

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toxic feminism

rhetorical claim: The damage that radical feminism has done to our education system is incalculable.  Yet the movement continues to grow exponentially, and gender studies faculties, which promote female empowerment at the expense of what is called “toxic masculinity,” continue to multiply.

Feminism has patently skewed the syllabus in the direction of gender asymmetry.  In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, women have progressively come to dominate campus life regardless of aptitude and competency.  Hiring protocols are female-friendly, as are faculty postings and grant opportunities.  Qualified male candidates need to make alternative arrangements.  (As Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute muses, in the prevailing climate, Einstein might have trouble getting hired for a professorship.)  Male students, already in declining numbers, are under threat of allegations of sexual assault or harassment, ad hoc tribunals, and arbitrary expulsion.  McGill University anthropology professor emeritus Philip Carl Salzman warns parents in a comprehensive essay for Minding the Campus, “Your sons will learn they should ‘step aside’ to give more space and power to females.”

Unfortunately, too many careers have been built on gender studies and feminist theory to allow surrender.  Leftist government bureaucrats, university administrators, “diversity and inclusion” officers, and faculty across the entire academic landscape are dependent on preserving perhaps the greatest scam in the systemic apparatus we call education.  Investing in a false theory or inequitable practice never prevented its adherents, whose reputations and livelihoods are at stake, from surrendering their perquisites.  Rather, educrats and their cohorts will double down and increase their efforts to further their agenda.  They will persist in finding ways to evade the most far-sighted and ethically determined efforts to redress the parietal imbalance by refusing to implement new directives from enlightened government agencies.

rhetorical effect: demonizes feminism as unethical, unequal, and self-serving, deeming it a kind of cabal or conspiracy against merit and equality.

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right to work

rhetorical claim: an increase in freedom because workers can no longer be required to pay for union services as a requirement of their employment. This is a union security clause, which Right to Work laws ban. Imagine if Best Buy entered into a contract with Sony whereby the store promised if they sell any other manufacturers’ TVs they will charge them $10 per square foot of floor space. Now imagine the government came in and said, “no, you can’t have deals like this”. This may increase Panasonic’s freedom by not forcing them to pay $10 per square foot, and in a sense it increases Best Buy’s freedom by allowing them to violate the terms of their contract. But this is at the cost of Best Buy and Sony’s ability to contract. In most contexts conservatives would agree that the government’s action decreased, not increased freedom, and in most contexts they would be correct.

rhetorical effect: The “right to work” laws really mean “right to work for less pay.” But these laws are not about liberty. Their real purpose is to tilt the balance of power in favor of employers at the expense of their workers.Some whose ideology tells them that the market system metes out perfect justice see no reason to worry about the weakening of workers and their unions. Let everyone compete in the market. But in order to make an idol of the market system, one has to ignore both common sense and the history of labor in America.

Common sense should tell us that if workers have to deal one-by-one with a giant company, they will be on the short end of a huge imbalance of power between management, which is unified, and the workers, who are each on their own.

In every other contest of power – politics, war, etc. – the side that is unified and a coordinated defeats the side that is fragmented. Why should labor-management relations be any exception?

Also institutionalizes economic inequality, one hallmark of a fascist state. As  Hannah Arendt argued, fascism flourishes when individuals are “atomized” and divided. Hitler denounced labor unions because he feared they might create solidarity among racially and religiously diverse workers. And he shows that the “right to work” movement that today seeks to cripple unions in the United States has its roots in an effort by Southern business elites to divide black and white workers in the 1940s. Many commentators have linked Trump’s victory to the economic dislocation brought by globalization. But by focusing on declining participation in labor unions — which can. From this perspective, labor unions must be crippled because they create class solidarity across racial, ethnic and religious lines, and the resultant economic stress buttresses fascist politics.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in GOP language factories and fever swamps, Aug 31-Sept. 11, 2018

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it oughta be illegal

rhetorical claim: President Trump said it ought to be illegal for audience members to shout out at Congressional hearings.

rhetorical effect: suppresses free speech. Other things Trump has said “ought to be illegal” include White House leakers and sources, protestors at his rallies, black or Hispanic judges ruling on race cases, Mexicans, Muslims, the free press, libel laws, flag burning, abortions, “flipping” in criminal cases to avoid jail time, not cheering and standing for Trump at the State of Union address, not kneeling for the national anthem, LGBTQ rights, migration, etc. He often uses “maybe”, “possibly” or “perhaps” to qualify “ought to be illegal” as a form of fake hedging. These are the wish-fulfillments of a would-be dictator. As the NYT editorialized:

Mr. Trump quickly corroborated these accounts by demonstrating precisely the sort of erratic, antidemocratic behavior that is driving administration officials to come forward with their concerns. He ranted that the stories were all lies and raved that the gutless traitors who had slandered him must be rooted out and handed over to the government. Finger-pointing, name-calling, wild accusations, cries of treason — it was an unsettling display, not simply of Mr. Trump’s emotional fragility and poor impulse control, but also of his failure to understand the nature of the office he holds, the government he leads and the democracy he has sworn to serve.

Twenty months into the job, Mr. Trump has yet to grasp that the highest law of this land is the Constitution, not whoever occupies the Oval Office at any given moment.

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fair and unbiased

Constitutional originalism

rhetorical claim: Brett Kavanagh will restore the Constitution to its rightful place as the lodestar for law-making in the US. Left-wing justices legislating from the bench will be a thing of the past.  The task of a justice will no longer be to formulate new constitutional law according to his personal preferences, but, rather to exercise restraint and wisdom in preserving the original constitutional scheme of separation of powers and preeminence of state and local governments.

rhetorical effect: Makes it harder for minorities to vote, for workers to bargain for better wages and conditions, for consumers to stand up to big business and for women to control what happens to their bodies. It also means making it easier for people to buy and sell weapons of mass killing, for lawmakers to green-light discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender Americans, for industries to pollute the environment with impunity, and for the wealthy to purchase even more political influence than they already have. the court had laid the groundwork for the destruction of our constitutional scheme, and had nearly abandoned the traditional ideas that judges were not legislators and that it was the state and local bodies, not the federal government, that were supposed to be the primary movers in national life. Justices David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy, all Republican appointees, had been instrumental in this dismantling of jurisprudential tradition, but they are all gone now.

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rigged search results

rhetorical claim:  Donald Trump denounced Google for having news results “RIGGED” against him, “so that almost all stories & news is BAD.” It happens on  various technology platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all of which have a liberal bias. according to  PJ Media, “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are From Liberal Media Outlets.”

rhetorical effect: as Michelle Goldberg argues

Essentially, conservatives want to create a world where objective information and right-wing disinformation are treated equally. They’re running the same playbook on tech that they ran, for decades, on media, caterwauling about bias so that defensive editors would treat them with kid gloves. Only now, these howls about viewpoint discrimination have the force of the United States government behind them.

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economic leveling

rhetorical claim: Congressional liberals want to change how GDP is measured in order to bring about a socialistic redistribution of wealth. This new, rigged way of counting–called distributional national accounts–will ignore trickle-down economics and be a stalking horse for fraudulent claims that a booming economy is stagnant. It is based on a misguided claim that economic inequality is a bug, not a feature, of capitalism.

rhetorical effect: best put by Paul Krugman:

By now everyone knows that conservatives routinely yell “socialist!” whenever anyone proposes doing something to help less fortunate members of our society — which is a key reason so many Americans now think favorably of socialism: If guaranteed health care is socialism, bring it on. But the right doesn’t just cry foul at any attempt to limit inequality; it does the same thing whenever anyone tries to talk about economic class, or measure how different classes are faring.

My favorite example here is still former senator Rick Santorum, who denounced the term “middle class” as “Marxism talk.” But that was just an especially ludicrous version of a general attempt on the right to suppress talk about and research into where the economy’s money goes. The G.O.P.’s basic position is that what you don’t know can’t hurt it.

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subversive

rhetorical claim: the subversive who penned the anonymous NYT attack on Trump ought to be exposed, fired and jailed.

rhetorical effect: the exercise of free speech becomes subversive: the First Amendment is turned upside down. Anyone criticizing Trump is undermining the country because Trump is now synonymous with America.

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your body is a battleground

rhetorical claim: your body is a battleground for the life of the fetus, which should be protected at all costs.

rhetorical effect: militarizes the abortion rights debate by turning women’s bodies into occupied territory and  robbing them of their autonomy.

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the circus Resistance

rhetorical claim: the anti-Trump resistance continues to hit new lows: 1) Apparently, in the case of Elizabeth Warren, fabricating an ethnic identity is sane, and getting out of the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord is insanity and grounds for removal; 2) Barack Obama, in his sanctimonious way, has taken credit foe the economy that he failed to resuscitate for eight years; 3) according to Victor David Hanson:

Contrary to popular opinion, there was nothing “newsworthy” about the recent anonymous op-ed, written by an unnamed “senior official” about the supposed pathologies of President Trump.

Or rather to the extent the op-ed was significant, it confirmed what heretofore had been written off as a “right-wing” conspiracy theory of a “deep state.” The anonymous author confessed to being part of a group that is trying to use subterranean methods to thwart an elected president, not because his record is wanting (indeed, the author admits it is often impressive) but because he finds Trump unorthodox and antithetical to the establishment norms of governance and comportment….

To cut to the quick, the op-ed was published to coincide with the latest Bob Woodward “according-to-an-unnamed-source” exposé, Fear. The intent of anonymous and the New York Times was to create a force multiplying effect of a collapsing presidency—in need of the Times’ sober and judicious handlers, NeverTrump professionals, and “bipartisan” Democrats of the sort we saw during the Kavanaugh hearing to “step in” and apparently stage an intervention to save the country…The recent op-ed is yet another episode in an endless resistance cartoon, another pathetic effort of self-important grandees to undo by fiat what the voters did by voting in 2016.

The op-ed is the latest cartoon of Trump, the Road Runner, finally, at last, and for sure driven off the cliff by the Resistance as Wile E. Coyote—infuriated by yet another Road Runner beep-beep. There were earlier and serial Looney Tunes efforts to nullify the Electoral College, to sue about election machines, to boycott the Inauguration, to introduce articles of impeachment, to invoke the 25th Amendment, to try out the Emoluments Clause and the Logan Act, to sue by cherry picking liberal federal judges, to harass officials in public places and restaurants, to warp the FISA courts, to fund a foreign spy to do opposition research, and to weaponize even further the FBI, NSA, and Justice Department—along with the now-boring celebrity assassination chic rhetoric of blowing up, stabbing, shooting, burning, hanging, smashing, and decapitating Donald J. Trump….

The media’s hatred of Trump is not necessarily determinative, but it is a force multiplier of the 24/7 unhinged narrative of the universities, popular culture, and Hollywood. Their shared goal is to make saying that one supports the Trump agenda so socially unpalatable, so culturally Neanderthal, that no sane person wishes to confess his delight with a new economy, foreign policy, and approach to the administrative state.

rhetorical effect: minimizes the mounting internal criticism, of Trump as nothing bur Dem propaganda and unsubstantiated rumor; dismisses all attempts to derail Trump  as desperate measures of an increasingly unhinged and totally unscrupulous Deep State Resistance; portrays Trump opponents as, curiously enough, both clowns and “grandees”–in the latter case, stirring up old class warfare, us-vs.- the elites-sentiments.