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Glossary, mid-September, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, Sept 9-11, 2013

appeasement: whatever Obama does in the Middle East. He is always either said to be appeasing the jihadis, political tyrants such as Assad, the Russians or Iranians, or the “peacenik Left”.

boots on the ground (botg): one week a good thing, the next week political anathema. The “Surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan were a classic example of “good” botg policy, which the GOP supported until they didn’t. Obama’s threats to Syria were “bad” botg policy.

gaffe : Peggy Noonan’s and William Kristol’s  go-to characterization of any foreign policy initiatives or ideas coming from Obama or Kerry. It was a “gaffe” both  to threaten a military response to Syrian chemical weapons and to offer a diplomatic solution. When every possible response and its opposite fit into the definition of a term, that term may be said to be a Master Trope.

junior camel trainer: The Wall Street Journal’s latest casting of Obama as Putin’s and Assad’s lapdog. (“Obama Rescues Assad”). This meme deftly double-brands Obama as politically gullible and as an Arab. In other words, just an all-around embarrassment and outsider.

leadership vacuum: first cousin to the “gaffe” and “appeasement,” but also carrying its own connotation of fecklessness, harkening back to the derisive meme that obama was unfit for the Presidency and In Over His Head (IOHH). (See “besotted charismatic,” above).

self-besotted charismatic: Peggy Noonan’s latest Obama smear, referencing all of his supposed narcissism, preening, grandstanding, moral hyprocrisy and inflated sense of historical importance.

unserious: one of the master tropes in the narrative of Obama as hapless dupe and preening egomaniac. (aka, “feckless”, or “Jimmy Carter”).

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, September 10-11, 2013

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1. Republicans are calling the possible diplomatic solution to the Syrian chemical weapons issues a “gaffe” at best and a hoodwinking by Putin and Assad at worst. In other words, they, as usual, are scripting an event as the opposite of what it really is. In this case, a peaceful solution is said to fatally weaken us and will only lead to our eventual destruction. Rather than acknowledging Kerry’s and Obama’s brilliant diplomatic move, they see it as the final disaster, and you have to wonder how long it will be until they start calling for a military incursion into Syria.

They even go all the way to Crazytown by claiming that Obama’s “gaffes” somehow justify the foreign policy positions of Bush and Romney:

But I’d bet that Bush and Romney aren’t actually laughing. That’s because they’re both serious men who understand international politics and who care for the future of the country. They no doubt understand that, as fun as it is to watch a political opponent twist in the wind due to his own ineptitude, the price will ultimately be paid not by Obama, but by the people of America.

Our diplomacy is a joke, our president is a laughing stock, our enemies are emboldened, and we’ve still got over three years of this to go. Nothing funny there at all, alas.

Glenn Reynolds, “Obama Is a Laughing Stock”, USA Today

2. Even though the Syria situation seems to be shifting every hour as a US military strike looks increasingly unlikely, the Tea Party wing of the GOP maintains their narrative that Obama is the worst US President ever and has completely bungled foreign affairs. Conrad Black pushes the “failed administration” meme further by comparing its disastrous effects to the fall of the Soviet Union. (Warning: hyperbole bomb about to be detonated):

Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and prior to that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.

Collapse of American Influence Recalls Disintegration of Soviet Union, Fall of France

3. Over at Breitbart, Obama’s quest for a deal with Putin and Assad on weapons inspections is now being called “Obama’s Munich,” even though just last week the Obama administration was being savaged for pursuing a military rather than a diplomatic solution:

A mere five days ago, the Obama administration suggested that any UN investigation into the Syrian chemical attack was irrelevant. “The UN investigation will not affirm who used these chemical weapons,” Kerry said. “By the definition of their own mandate, the UN can’t tell us anything that we haven’t shared with you this afternoon or that we don’t already know.”

Now, however, Assad is reasonable, the UN is hunky dory, and Harry Reid has cancelled a planned Senate vote on action in Syria. The Obama administration’s diplomatic genius has somehow emerged victorious. All America left behind was its credibility and any semblance of coherent foreign policy.

Thanks to President Obama’s statements in August 2012 regarding a Syrian “red line” on chemical weapons use in Syria, the United States was faced with three choices in Syria: depose Assad; do nothing in order to prevent al Qaeda from taking over the country (likely the best option); or, as Kerry advocated, push for an “unbelievably small” action in order to reinforce America’s credibility. The third option was the worst. But in a truly awe-inspiring display of his foreign policy genius, President Obama has found a fourth option: appeasement, complete with international weapons inspections it rejected just a week ago. Welcome to Barack Obama’s Munich.

“Peace In Our Time: Obama Caves In to Putin, Assad, Iran”

4. You can’t make this stuff up: Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) now suggests that our former consulate in Benghazi is somehow linked to arming Syrian rebels:

A top congressional appropriator suggested on Monday evening that the State Department and CIA might have been stockpiling weapons for Syrian opposition fighters when they came under attack by jihadists in Benghazi, Libya.

“I firmly believe that whatever the State Department and CIA were doing in Benghazi had a direct connection to U.S. policy in Syria—a policy that to date has not been fully revealed to the American people or Congress,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) said on Monday evening during a discussion focusing on “unanswered questions” surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed four Americans.

“Were these rebels being armed with weapons collected in Benghazi?” Wolf asked, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “Again, there is reason to believe this may be the case and a clear explanation is warranted.”

5. And if you’re going to play the Benghazi card, why not the race card as well? First, Rush Limbaugh called Obama’s Syrian policy “Operation Shuck and Jive”, and then Anne Coulter went on Fox News to call Obama “Putin’s monkey”.

6. Just after the Wall Street Journal called Obama a “junior camel trader” based on his speech on Syria, John Podhoretz, in the New York Post, went a wee bit over the top in villifying the speech:

“Thanks to Pres. Obama’s strength,” tweeted House Democratic honcho Nancy Pelosi, “we have a Russian proposal.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein tweeted, “Kind of amazed I’m saying this, but the White House may really be about to win on Syria.”

Ah, yes, winning. Which is to say, being humiliated, acting weak, behaving in vacillatory fashion, making a mockery of your office, destroying your country’s credibility, making your own words look desperately foolish, and ceding foreign policy to the Machiavellian machinations of a gangster regime in Moscow.

That’s what you call “winning” when what you mean by “winning” is “losing.”

Jimmy Carter can rest easy now. There’s another Democratic president worse at foreign policy than he ever was.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, September 4, 2013

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1. The GOP, split over our next move in Syria, continues to produce some furious attempts at Politiscripting the moment. In this case, Eric Erickson of Red State manages a triple word score: likening Obama to a homeless schizophrenic, an “effete liberal ninnie”, and the destroyer of the US military. Thus “effete” makes its return to the rhetorical stage, having last been the main rhetorical battering ram of Spiro Agnew:

A strike now is nothing more than the President trying to salvage credibility he dithered away over several years of ignoring Syria to focus on Libya only to see it blow up in his face. Striking now in an act of war the President refuses to call an act of war and making it known that the act is designed to hurt, but not end, the Assad regime, is an effete response only a liberal ninny could come up with….This Administration’s foreign and military policies make all the sense of a homeless schizophrenic off his meds running down the Washington Mall. They make even less sense when coupled with Administration rhetoric on the sequestration making it impossible for the military to do anything with the military….Words mean things and this Administration has yet to seriously put honest words together to explain what it intends and desires.

2. From Tea Party LaLaLand, a Tennessee state representative manages an even more impressive rhetorical flourish, linking the potential bombing of Syria with every failed GOP attempt to “scandal”-monger:

Tennessee state representative Joe Carr (R.), who is mounting a tea-party challenge against incumbent Senator Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), also cited a lack of trust in explaining his opposition to military intervention. “This is an administration that has been cloaked in secrecy since [Obama’s] first inauguration,” he told National Review Online, before reeling off a list of administration scandals — NSA spying, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious, Benghazi. “We can’t get a straight answer out of the president. I don’t believe we’re getting accurate information out of the president now, and I don’t believe we should go to war because he drew an arbitrary red line.” The White House has yet to provide a compelling national-interest argument for intervention, which the vast majority of Tennesseans oppose, he added.

3. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) upped the ante even more with a truly-inspired piece of hyperbole, virtually calling Obama’s looming bombing of Syria a treasonous act, turning the US military into “Al Qaeda’s air force”:

“Nobody wants to see another Benghazi in Syria, and that’s really the fear, isn’t it?” Pags wondered.

“That’s exactly right,” Cruz agreed. “But there’s a broader problem. This administration, when it conducts foreign policy, it doesn’t do so based on U.S. national security interests… It appears what the president is pressing for is essentially protecting his public relations because he drew a red line, and essentially the bluff was called.”

“We’re not going to resolve the tensions over there and the last thing we ought to be doing is sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way to get into the middle of this sectarian civil war,” he added. “We should be focused on defending the United States of America.”

“That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to — as you know — you know, serve as Al-Qaeda’s air force.”

4. The American Spectator also piles on, astonishingly linking a Syrian missile strike with abortion:

The justification for this war, from the vantage point of vital American interests, is nil. It makes about as much sense as Assad announcing that he will launch military strikes on the U.S. because Obama supports the killing of over a million unborn babies a year.

It is sad to see Republicans like Boehner join in this phony harrumphing about evil abroad. Fix your own country. Address America’s moral evils. Pols who can’t stop chemical abortions in America won’t stop chemical bombing in Syria.

5.  In a classic “they don’t know what’s good for them” moment, Richard Epstein of the libertarian Hoover Institute ridicules the “living wage” campaign of Bill de Blasio in NYC. After all, Epstein modestly proposes, who ever said that a person’s wages should amount to “anything they can live on”?

What is characteristic about these and other similar attempts is how little effort they make to understand anything about the underlying principle. For example, de Blasio’s stunt makes it appear that the test of a good minimum wage law is whether people can live on that salary. In so doing, he ignores all the non-pecuniary benefits that a job can give people: exposure to business, professional skills, networking, and the like. College seniors are eagerly seeking unpaid internships to gain experience in the work force. Why deny that opportunity to those from less privileged backgrounds who must contend with unemployment rates of 41.6 percent in the case of black teenagers aged 16 to 19?

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, August 28, 2013

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1. Assuming that the best defense is to be as offensive as possible, Bill O’Reilly is spearheading the counter-intuitive meme that Dr. King would be ashamed of all black people in America, 2013, who are nothing more than a pack of welfare queens, whores and drug addicts who are too lazy or government-dependent to ever assume any initiative or personal responsibility:

As the United States approaches the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, many are taking the time to reflect on how far the nation has come. In his Talking Points Memo tonight, Bill O’Reilly speculated what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would think of the racial situation in America today
.

“If Dr. King were alive today, I believe he would be brokenhearted about what has happened to the traditional family, and not only among blacks.”

O’Reilly speculated that Dr. King would not be pleased with the out-of-wedlock birth rate, the broken education system and the rap industry. “Would he approve the Civil Rights Movement that continues to blame American society for the problems encountered by blacks rather than encouraging personal responsibility as a way to achieve individual success?”

The Factor host criticized Saturday’s march in Washington D.C. for being “heavy on grievance” and “light on problem solving.”

O’Reilly slammed Al Sharpton’s National Action Network for financially profiting off of the event.

Fox news summary of the O’Reilly Factor, August 26, 2013: “Dr. Kinf Would Be Broken-Hearted at Breakdown of Traditional Family in America”.

2. The National Review editors echo this patronizing “blame the victim” meme. Again, blacks are equated with felons, addicts, government junkies, whores, and irresponsible layabouts and deadbeat dads, as the GOP ludicrously tries to seize the high moral ground on racial justice:

Another mark is the decrepitude of today’s civil-rights movement. The evils the movement fought — state-sponsored segregation, pervasive racial discrimination — have been vanquished. In their place are evils that are, alas, less amenable to marches. And so King’s heirs flail about. Where he spoke of a “bank of justice,” they just trade in grievances. Today Al Sharpton, whose chief political success has been to foment enough racial hatred to yield arson and murder, can present himself as a civil-rights leader without much fear of contradiction. We will have to look elsewhere for answers to the evils that now afflict Americans, and especially blacks: lousy schools, a thriving drug trade and a misguided governmental response, the collapse of marriage.

3. Allen West takes the blame-the-victim meme further into the Right’s twisted racial psyche by calling blacks “baby killers” who don’t care about their children’s education, with the added trademark Allen West loonytune that black abortions have robbed America of “the next generation of “prominent entertainers and sports figures”:

We are witnessing the complete breakdown and collapse of what was the foundational strength of the black community, the family. Today, 72 percent of black children are born out of wedlock … that is not part of the dream.
It is, however, the result of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Dr. King talked about the promissory note of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the guarantee of unalienable rights: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When it comes to life, over the past two score years there have been some 13 million black babies aborted. The black community would be 36 percent greater save for this tragedy, this genocide.
How many black babies will never experience King’s dream, the American dream? How many will never get to be the next generation of doctors, lawyers, successful business men and women, prominent entertainers and sports figures. This horror is not part of Dr. King’s dream.
The hypocrisy is that liberal progressive Democrats support the choice of a woman to kill black babies but reject the choice of the same woman, or parents, to seek a quality education for black children. President Obama ended Washington, D.C.’s,  school voucher program in 2009, yet his progeny attend the elite Sidwell Friends, and now the Obama DOJ is going after Louisiana for its school voucher program.

4. On Syria, the Right seems divided between neocon warhawks and doves, the latter arguing against any American intervention not on principle but on the hysterical assertion that any attack on Syria would be on behalf of “our new Al Qaedia allies”:

Cannibalism is fine. Massacres are fine. Ethnic is cleansing is fine. All so long as they are done by our new al Qaeda allies.

It is hard to believe that the power of the United States and what remains of its shredded national honor after four years of Obama is going to be yoked to the cause of aiding al Qaeda dominated rebels. Again.

Red State, “Ethnic Cleansing Begins in Syria”

5. Finally, today, some lovely pure crazy from Louis Gohmert (R-TX) Land:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday said that it was a “scary thought” that elites could be culling the population with vaccines to preserve the Earth’s resources.

The Texas Republican spent part of his five-week break from Congress this week by interviewing conservative activist Alan Keyes while filling in as a guest host for Tony Perkins on Family Research Council’s Washington Watch.

Gohmert pointed out that some liberals believed that the Earth was already over populated.

“A lot of people who fancy themselves elites, right, because they’ve made a lot of money, they’re names are all over the media and so forth, they’ve really signed on to an agenda that requires the depopulation of the globe,” Keyes explained. “And in the name of fighting global climatological change, called global warming — that’s proven to be something that’s wrong — they are saying that we’ve got to cut back the population of the world.”

“Bill Gates gave a famous talk back in 2009, which he was talking about actually abusing vaccinations, which are supposed to keep people healthy and alive, and saying how this could lead to a 15 percent reduction in the population of the globe as a way to achieve this result,” he continued.

Keyes warned that elites had a plan to reduce the number of people in the world to 700 million “by culling the population.”

“They’re preaching that doctrine because they actually believe we’re a blight on the face of the planet, we human beings,” Keyes said. “And we should, therefore, be put on a path toward our own semi-extinction. I often try to get people to see that if you think about it, if we actually get back to the levels they’re talking about, it would just be these elitists and the people needed to service them. That’s all that will be left in the world.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Gohmert agreed.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, August 26, 2013

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1. GOP Racism on steroids showcased in this blogpost from MJ Media, linked to via the National Review website. This irony-gone-terribly-wrong post manages to link minorities with alcoholics, manual laborers, felons, profligates, law-breakers, and deadbeat dads:

There’s nothing wrong with making excuses for bad, self-destructive behavior. That might be called “enabling” in some other context, but not here. It’s not really the criminal’s fault, after all. Conservatives just don’t know how hard it is and how the world is mistreating people of color. When you see an alcoholic who is down and out, it’s just common decency to buy him a drink.

When Dr. King said that he hoped for a day when his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, he meant precisely that: That racial preferences are a good idea, and that telling someone that they can’t have a job or vote because of some silly felony conviction is terribly, terribly wrong.

And it’s not just crime that is no big deal. Why should employers be able to get away with telling people that they have to pass some kind of firefighting test before they can become firefighters? Why should bankers care if someone is likely to repay a loan before deciding whether to make a loan at a particular interest rate? In our schools, isn’t it more important that all racial and ethnic groups be disciplined at the same rates than that there actually be school discipline? And why encourage immigrants to learn English when everyone knows that not knowing English is no impediment to a rewarding and successful career as a ditch digger?

People of color are much, much better off if they are not encouraged to study hard, live within their means, follow the rules, and otherwise “act white.” Acting white is, after all, for white people, and conservatives should not insist on such undiverse behavior for anyone else. In the long run, if folks in a particular group are not meeting some standard, it is better for them if we get rid of the standard than if we encourage them to meet it. After all, too, too many people of color won’t.

What’s worse, the fact is that it is much harder to raise children who do well in school and stay out of trouble with the law and have a lot of “values” in a home without a father. Now, given the choice between getting rid of these trifling and unrealistic standards, on the one hand, versus embracing an inspiring diversity of childrearing possibilities, on the other, isn’t it obvious that we should be nonjudgmental?

Fess Up, Conservatives: Time to Accept Blame for MLK’s Unrealized Dream

2. It’s shaping up as a big week for GOP racism, pegged to the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. They aren’t even hiding it anymore, as exemplified by this perfect counter-intuitive National Review piece that argues that affirmative action and racial preferences always actually only  hurt minorities’ educational attainment

But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/356718/devastating-affirmative-action-failure-heather-mac-donald

3. Not to be outdone on the race-baiting front, George Will plays the ancient, discredited and counter-intuitive non-sequitur card that single mothers are to blame for racial inequality, conservative columnist George Will asserted on Sunday that single mothers actually presented a bigger threat to minority communities than a lack of voting rights.

During a segment on ABC’s This Week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington for civil rights, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile noted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would still be marching today if he were alive.

“Marching to raise the minimum wage, to ensure that workers could organize,” she said. “He would be marching for the same values that he marched for 50 years ago.”

ABC’s Cokie Roberts said that the progress made in the last 50 years was why the voting restrictions being passed by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country were “downright evil.”

Will, however, pointed to a report published by Daniel Patrick Moynihan eight months after the march that said there was crisis in the African-American community “because 24 percent of African-American children are being born to unmarried women.”

“Today, it’s tripled, 72 percent,” Will added. “And that, not an absence of rights is surely the biggest impediment.”

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/george-will-single-moms-more-dangerous-minor

4. Obamacare Derangement Syndrome continues, in this nice little bit of hyperbole from Mark Steyn in the National Review:

It requires a perverse genius to construct a “health” “care” “reform” that destroys everything from religious liberty to full-time employment, while requiring multitudes of new tax collectors and other bureaucrats and ever fewer doctors and nurses. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356634/obamacares-hierarchy-privilege-mark-steyn/page/0/1

5. Tomorrow marks the  onset of the media blitz for Obama’s impeachment, spearheaded by Aaron Klein’s # 1 Amazon bestseller, Impeachable Offenses: The Case For Removing Barack Obama From Office. This grasping-at-straws, ragtag collection of trial balloons that went nowhere include the following “high crimes and misdemeanors”, which, collectively, resemble a garage sale of discredited ideas:

·                  Obamacare not only is unconstitutional but illegally bypasses Congress, infringes on states’ rights and marking an unprecedented and unauthorized expansion of IRS power.

·                  Sidestepping Congress, Obama already has granted largely unreported de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens using illicit interagency directives and executive orders.

·                  The Obama administration recklessly endangered the public by releasing from prison criminal illegal aliens at a rate far beyond what is publicly known.

·                  The president’s personal role in the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack, with new evidence regarding what was transpiring at the U.S. mission prior to the assault – arguably impeachable activities in and of themselves.

·                  Illicit edicts on gun control in addition to the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation intended, the book shows, to collect fraudulent gun data.

·                  From “fusion centers” to data mining to drones to alarming Department of Homeland Security power grabs, how U.S. citizens are fast arriving at the stage of living under a virtual surveillance regime.

·                  New evidence of rank corruption, cronyism and impeachable offenses related to Obama’s first-term “green” funding adventures.

·                  The illegality of leading a U.S.-NATO military campaign without congressional approval.

·                  Obama has weakened America both domestically and abroad by emboldening enemies, tacitly supporting a Muslim Brotherhood revolution, spurning allies and minimizing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/impeachment-author-on-fox-news-savage/#CQEevcHPTttkTZaP.99 

 

Glossary, late July, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, July 17, 2013-July 31, 2013:

adults: GOP voters. The GOP didn’t lose the last election because of their policies, but because not enough adults turned out to vote. Non-adults of course included Hispanics and Blacks, who were all “propagandized” to vote Dem.

the national leader model: Obama’s authoritarian master plan to create himself as a kind of new Mussolini, controlling all government policy, sidestepping Congress altogether. He’s always either a feckless leader or too forceful an autocrat.

Obamacore: GOP caricature of high core standards enshrined in the new national core curriculum. Yet another Obama policy only to be treated with contempt and ridicule: better student learning.

parasites: (aka, pillagers). Pensioners (especially the public service and union workers who “brought down” Detroit), food stamp recipients, unemployment benefit recipients, Medicaid recipients, etc. Never, ever corporations receiving huge tax breaks and subsidies.

the political class: Democrats in public office or lobbying; union “bosses”, liberal media pundits. A permanent layer of parasites in Washington and big cities. Never, ever Republicans.

the race card: whenever the GOP calls something “race baiting” or “playing the race card,” or “racially-charged,” they really just are justifying their own callous and calculated racism. As with Trayvon, they blame the victim for the crime.

responsibility (aka, “human agency”): what “parasites” lack, and what defines “adults”.

tolerance: what the GOP promises they are NOT practicing when it comes to gay rights.

union greed: a redundancy; the main driver of Detroit’s downfall.  Pensioners as the ultimate job-killers. Of course, corporate greed is never mentioned.

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards July 9-22, 2013

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West said he had “heard it a thousand times that Trayvon Martin was unarmed.”

“What the evidence will show you is that’s not true,” he insisted. “Trayvon Martin armed himself with the concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman’s head, no different than if he picked up a brick or bashed the head against a wall. That is a deadly weapon.”

 

So every black man walking on a sidewalk should be considered armed and dangerous?

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R, Tenn.) explained his position on food stamps by stating, “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” The Congressman’s remarks come on the heels of his taking the biblical route when responding to Representative Juan Vargas’ (D-Calif.) somewhat different take on the teachings of Jesus. During a recent House Agriculture Committee debate over the Farm Bill (which contains the food stamp budget), Vargas, citing the Book of Matthew, noted, “[Jesus] says how you treat the least among us, the least of our brothers, that’s how you treat him.” Vargas also noted that  Jesus directly mentions the importance of feeding the hungry. Not to be outdone by a Godless Democrat, Congressman Fincher responded with his own Bible quote taken from the Book of Thessalonians — “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

 

But it’s apparently OK to use taxpayer money to pay Fincher $3.5 million in farm  subsidies.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Monday that protesters upset with the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial were “prepared basically to be a lynch mob” during an appearance on CNN.

“The fact is, six women sat on a jury for five solid weeks. I watched these protesters, none of whom read the transcript, none of whom sat through five weeks of the trial, all of whom were prepared basically to be a lynch mob,” Gingrich said. “They only wanted one verdict, and the verdict was guilty.”

 

The Hill

God, if Newt didn’t exist we’d have to invent him: an ahistorical historian.

Unassimilated minorities in America typically hate the place. They frequently have valid and legitimate gravamen for their hatred. Anyone who looks at the rates at which African-Americans are aborted, shot, fail out of school and wind up either jobless or incarcerated couldn’t be entirely blamed for believing that most of the rest of America is attempting to eject them from our culture the way a white blood cell attacks a hostile bacteria. Absent any back-story, I really can’t blame them for hating my guts as a nameless, faceless White Man on a visceral level. Now quit being shocked. I only differ from the herd by being proudly uncultured enough to state the obvious and unpalatable truth….

So we already fail miserably at assimilating the cultural and racial minorities we have in Post-modern America. We don’t intend to assimilate them or in any way make them feel like a valued and decent contributor to our society. We use social welfare programs as an insulting and demeaning bribe for them not to burn our cities or shoot people. People not blessed enough to be part of our cognitive elite understand very well that the pampered upper-echelons of American Society consider the American Lower Middle Class no better than cretinous Moorlocks from a sci-fi dystopia

“Zimmerman, Martin and the Failed American Melting Pot, “ Red State.

 

“‘If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon.’ And this President wouldn’t bat a eyelash over the fact that ‘his son’ is a dead gangsta wannabe who simply jumped the wrong guy and got what he deserved. After all, his death may well resurrect the President’s failed agenda.”

 

“It’s Not Over,” Wizbang.

This is about as vile as it can get.

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

Shelby Steele, “The Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment, WSJ

Civil rights leaders have no moral core, they simply seek advantage and continually play the race card. Rather than being victims of American history, they are really now victimizing America’s moral generosity. This reversal is akin to making George Zimmerman into the victim.

his appointees for high office were demonstrably corrupt, incompetent or pursuing a toxic socialist or gay ideology” — as well as with RINOs like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio; he mourned the absence of “True conservatives – men like Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, men who were willing to stand up to bullies and call a spade a spade,” and that “modern man has been feminized by overwhelmingly liberal feminist teachers who see playing dodge-ball in the schoolyard as the moral equivalent of playing with a loaded gun.”

July 4, 2013: Can America Recover From Obama and His Fellow Travelers?”  One Citizen Speaking.

Glossary, mid-July, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, July 3, 2013-July 16, 2013

agenda-driven.  What the Koch Bothers, among other Tea Partiers, call any investigative journalism that supports climate change theory, environmental and other regulation, and corporate taxes or liability.

extraneous: the House GOP’s characterization of everyone on food stamps.

fiat: any Obama administration ruling or policy. (aka, “end run”)

the Fourth Branch: the federal bureaucracy. Almost certainly illegitimate, probably illegal and surely unconstitutional.

King FDR V-VI. The Obama administration.

race baiting: anytime the Dems bring up race (aka, “playing the race card”).  If it’s meant as bait to get the GOP to over-react, the GOP’s response is to ignore or airbrush the race question. Curiously, “justice is blind” could be attributed to either side because it has a double meaning.

rammed through: any successful Obama administration legislation.

relief: Boehner talk for  repealing Obamacare. Supposedly, Americans are choking for “relief” from such totalitarian concepts as universal coverage, no exclusions based on pre-existing conditions, and insurance not tied to a job.

sidewalk as weapon: according to George Zimmerman’s lawyer, Trayvon Martin “weaponized” the sidewalk. So any black man out for a walk should be considered armed and dangerous?

victim community: defenders of civil rights, voting rights, equal justice and racial equality. An other variant on “playing the race card” and “race-baiting”.

GOP Parallel Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims, and Canards, July 2-8, 2013

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The whole modern project has been an attempt to control the freedom unleashed by Christianity’s dual loyalty, to re-create the conformity to “traditional” culture that predated the Christian moral liberation. What we see today in the success of gay marriage is not really freedom run amok, but the result of turning the power to define morality over to the state, or to the dominant group representing it. “Same Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom, The American Conservative 

Denying marriage equality is a form of liberation from state power. In GOP terms, the more the state grants individual freedoms, the more it enslaves individuals to the state. Freedom ias enslavement.
This is why Mr. Snowden remains in a Moscow airport terminal, making demands (via his father) of the terms the U.S. must meet before he returns home. This is also how Russia merrily arms Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria, and how Mr. Assad unleashes chemical weapons on his own people, and how Iran marches toward an atomic bomb—all with little concern for what the U.S. might do.  “The President and the Hacker, “ WSJ.Connect-the-dots exercises such as this  are analogous to magnets that attract everything into a single congealed ,hyper-paranoid field theory.  But, wait, they left out Benghazi!
Modern liberalism, among other things, is a psychological state, in which very-well-off Americans find ways through their income and privilege to be exempt from the ramifications of their own ideologies, while adopting causes and pets that exempt them from guilt over their own status and limitless opportunities. Judging by their concrete actions, they are indifferent to the poor whom they romanticize at a safe distance. In short, voting for larger government and subsidies is seen as a necessary cost of being a reactionary, liberal elite. “Liberal Apartheid,” Victor David Hanson, National Review
But there is another less-discussed reason. The Obama administration’s instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House — even those who devoutly want immigration reform — trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress. “Why ObamaCare Threatens Immigration Reform,” John Fund, National Review.So if Obama has no respect for the rule of law, the is he an outlaw? If the GOP really believes  this, isn’t government dysfunction inevitable? This is part of the Machiavellian  Rove strategy to delegitimize Obama.
The basic premise of ObamaCare was the government’s superior ability to organize the health insurance industry.  That postponed employer mandate is the final proof that it can’t.  All of Obama’s projections were wrong, nothing in the ObamaCare system has worked as promised, everything is getting more expensive, and there hasn’t even been much of an improvement in coverage for the uninsured.  Central planning is once again exposed as an utter failure.ObamaCare’s continued existence now relies entirely on corrupting the basic principles of American government; the rule of law must be deformed beyond recognition to nourish it.  The whole deranged idea was never compatible with a Constitutional republic of free citizens.  It requires a bigger government, and smaller people, than we should be willing to tolerate.  Either ObamaCare ends… or America will have to shrink enough to fit inside it. “Trust In Government Dies With the Rule of Law,: Red State.
what sort of nation we are turning ourselves into… It’s hard to see how individual liberty can be preserved with the Feds setting loose swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance — and with half the nation cheering them on. That’s not democracy, or even a representative Republic. It’s mob rule. “Liberty, If You Can Keep It,” National Review.“Eat out their substance”???? ObamaZombies!
his appointees for high office were demonstrably corrupt, incompetent or pursuing a toxic socialist or gay ideology…we no longer see… true conservatives – men like Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, men who were willing to stand up to bullies and call a spade a spade…” modern man has been feminized by overwhelmingly liberal feminist teachers who see playing dodge-ball in the schoolyard as the moral equivalent of playing with a loaded gun. July 4, 2013: Can America Recover From Obama and His Fellow Travelers?”  One Citizen Speaking.

 

Glossary, June 24-July 3, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials and other precincts of the GOP blogosphere, June 24-July 3, 2013

Dreamers: undocumented aliens.

“faddish theories” : Clarence Thomas, in the Fisher vs. UT opinion, said that “”The Constitution does not pander to faddish theories about whether race mixing is in the public interest”. Since when did equal justice and access qualify as a “faddish theory”?

immigration deform: repealing or fighting any and all bills and executive orders  granting amnesty.

infanticide: new GOP synonym for abortion, via Peggy Noonan.

judicial activism: any judicial opinion supporting liberal views. The GOP days of denouncing activist judges obviously doesn’t extend to decisions such as Shelby County v. Holder. They consider this as an example of restraint on government, not one branch of the government (the Supreme Court) telling another branch (Congress) what to do.

lost innocence. The Bert & Ernie New Yorker cover, announcing the end of childhood and sexual innocence. Everyone in Obama’s America is now gay married by proxy.

marriage equality: the latest form of enslavement ot the state, masquerading as an act of liberation.

monstrosity: the Affordable Care Act. Aka, “train wreck”.

racial polarization: what Dems do any time they bring up race. Aka, ‘the race card”.

stabilization: In the context of the Middle East, restoring authoritarian or dictatorial regimes.

the Whig Party: Glenn Beck’s & the Tea Party’s new name for John Boehner and what’s left of the old GOP.