Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™

15 June 2013

Little Brother in the Big City






By Daniel Greenfield

When the big things start getting out of control, we start focusing on the little ones instead. Tackling small problems we can't solve is a good way to feel good about the big ones that we can't.
 
Can't do anything about the nice young men from Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh who occasionally stop maxing out social welfare and working odd jobs to set off bombs in the London Underground or butcher a soldier within sight of his base? 

Just arrest an 85-year-old woman who shouts at Muslims that they should go back to their own country. At 85, she probably won't put up much of a fight. Then send out 1,200 police officers to protect Muslims from the wrath of a few dozen angry Brits who might conceivably hurt their feelings. And follow that up with some interfaith sessions with community leaders and you're all set. 

Can't do anything about Muslims rioting and burning cars in Stockholm? Just send them out to leave parking tickets on the charred wrecks afterward. The owners probably won't do more than mutter a few obscenities and then recollect that they are lucky to be living in such a progressive country that stays out of both foreign and domestic conflicts while providing the best in social welfare. 

Most multicultural urban utopias are sliding downhill under a new generation of technocrats who can juggle the numbers and focus on what really matters. Salt in food. Bike shares. Toy gun buybacks. Plastic bag bans. Composting. Obesity programs. Diversity programs. Bullying programs. And forty other mostly irrelevant things. 

The city is being segmented into unlivable welfare ghettos where there is no law and gentrified areas inhabited by hipster technocrats who want a thousand regulations that will make everything come out exactly their way. Both the ghetto and the gentro are expanding and squeezing out a working middle class baffled to wake up one morning and find out that they are the enemy of the new state. 

In the modern city, you can walk two blocks or drive two miles and cross from a graffiti streaked strip of subsidized housing where the only law is don't talk to the police to an oasis of renovated homes where there are roughly four million regulations covering every little thing. 

On one side, the police are out in force responding to shootings, stabbings and domestic violence complaints. On the other, the community board or local council is constantly under pressure from "community activists" to pass new Green regulations on energy efficiency or a ban on displaying toy guns in store windows.  

The big effort to salvage the cities lay with courting a new elite of top grads by catering to their proclivities for bike zones, artisanal fusion cupcakes and just enough multiculturalism to make them feel good about sending Sierra or Madrigal to a private school that reserves 10 spots for diversity. That made trendy companies more comfortable about setting up shop in the city and the new burst of gentrification ticked out numbers that made it seem like the city was on the way up. Growing populations of hipster yuppies were displacing the ghettos to the suburbs, helped along by diversity lending mandates from banks, and ushering in a new clueless incarnation of the nanny state.  

 The old city was liberal. The new one is retarded. It's chock full of all the insane regulatory treehouse agendas of the college campus and just as tightly controlled. Its livable areas are hideously expensive post-college hangouts for grads with big money and big debts looking for hip places to live and its unlivable places are kept to a dull roar with lots of freebies. That worked in the 90s when cities were full of tech and finance sector money and were happy enough to pass it down to the ghettos or to even export the ghettos to the suburbs. But now the money is tight and the violence is up. 

Progressive technocracy failed at all the big stuff, but it's focusing on all the small stuff. Set foot in a modern college campus and you'll be leafletted by a dozen activists pushing their petty agendas. That is now the state of the city where no one talks about mass riots and unsustainable pensions, instead the agenda is dominated by the petty fascism of environmental activists and diversity activists. The areas of every city not inhabited by the hipster yuppies and their dog parks could burn to the ground and the very next day the big agenda would still be LGBT school bullying or plastic bag bans.

 Bloomberg isn't some kind of outlier. He just happens to be more obnoxious than the rest. The truth is that in policy, he is no worse than dozens of other mayors, who eagerly sign on to all his initiatives. And the other truth is that this petty control freakery is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the big issues. The worse the big problems get, the more focused the entire policy apparatus becomes on the minutia of liberalism. It's not big brother anymore. It's his obnoxious little brat of a sibling.

Forget burning cars. If anyone can smell a waft of cigarette smoke, Little Brother will be on you. Bombings and beheadings are taken in stride. But sensitivity violations bring out the cops, who always know whom they can take a club to and whom they can't. Fighting Morlocks is dangerous, but abusing an Eloi who didn't use the proper verbal form for a protected group or didn't put something recyclable in the right trash bin is fun for the whole government family.

What we have is not quite fascism. It's a selective fascism. It's stuff white people like fascism. It's fascism for enclaves of hipster yuppies who still believe in initiatives advocating perfecting the community through petty tyranny while around them the world burns. It's not Reichstag fascism, it's a compartmentalized fascism in which the sheep prey on the sheepish while pretending that the wolves don't exist. It's the fascism of the Eloi who don't just sit around helplessly, but oppress other Eloi.

Little Brother and Little Sister never grew up, and instead of a family album, they have photos of their favorite meals in their social media. They would only wear jackboots ironically, but they have painstakingly exact tastes in everything from food to fonts to politics and they want everything to be exactly the way that they think it should. They believe in freedom and in reporting their neighbors to the authorities. They believe in personal choice for everyone who thinks the way that they do. They are, it goes without saying, Obama voters.

In Little Brother's state, the police don't enforce the law. They enforce the whims of Little Brother and Little Sister. They are there to see that all the children play with Little Brother and Little Sister the way that they want them to. They don't believe in fighting crime or terrorism, except briefly when it happens to them, and they let go of it once their Facebook friends tell them to check their privilege, but they do believe in enforcing the million petty regulations of utopia.

Little Brother doesn't want anything done about crime. He wants something done about the rude people who drive cars to work or carry food home in plastic bags without caring about the impact on the environment. Little Sister doesn't care about Islamic terrorism. Islam is like spiritual and part of the great fabric of diversity. She wants something done about the unenlightened people who just don't get that.

Little Brother and Little Sister are the new elite. They are the unthinkingly glib products of an educational system that teaches little, but indoctrinates a lot. Their knowledge comes from Wikipedia. Their actual education taught them little except about how many people the United States managed to oppress in such a short time and how we need to feel connected to the environment to truly be alive.

Every age has its elites. Our age is burdened with idiot elites dedicated to destroying the "elites". We have a 1 percent that inveighs against the power of the 1 percent and then throws around its weight to get its way. We have people who work for corporations denouncing corporate power only to make use of it anyway. Our elites offer a torrent of contradictory pieties that are undone by their actions.

And the people who actually run all this, negotiating between the idiot elites and the violent classes, are only too happy to focus on the small stuff because the big stuff is officially hopeless. The real problems are a tangled Gordian knot that can be cut through, but not unwound individually the way the technocrats would like to do. And the little problems devolve into petty fascism that makes everyone but the people being stepped on feel better.

The angry mobs get to torch, behead and bomb. And the remnants of the middle class get a boot in the teeth. And Little Brother and Little Sister get to turn another street into a bike path or to insert calorie counts or environmental warnings or some other treehousery into daily life so that they can pretend that they have power, when the territory that they have power over is actually shrinking.

The center of power is always the last to feel the sensation of deadening chaos outside. It takes tyrants, even petty ones, a while to figure out that the system is over. The power that insulates them from that knowledge becomes petty. Instead of controlling nations, they control capital cities and eventually only their own courts. That micromanagement gives them the illusion of being in charge.

The Little Brothers have pushed the West to the edge, but they laugh at the very idea of danger. By all their metrics, everything is better than it was before. There are more jobs developing apps and more bikes being ridden and fewer people saying insensitive things and more little boys being taught not to play with guns and more diversity everywhere. It's progress. It's the future. It's forward and onward.

They're winning all the arguments and controlling the debate, but yet somehow everything is slipping through their fingers. Every initiative of their agenda passes, but it never works out the way that they think it should.

Little Brother, that poor sad imitation of Uncle Joe or Fidel, is a child playing with toys. All his experiences have taught him that he can control whatever he wants to, from his parents to his electronics to other children, but his societies, cities and countries are slipping out of his grasp and into a dark territory of anarchy.

The new power isn't an entitled brat with a government, but a gang leader with a hundred men or a kid who figures out how to bypass some onerous aspect of the system and tells other about it. Civilization is coming apart at the seams and it is the destroyers who have the power, not the petty liberal fascists who can dictate the ingredients of every meal, but not whether they will be beaten to death while biking home.

Liberals have wrecked cities and nations. And what rises out of the wreckage is not some progressive utopia, but oases of petty progressive fascism surrounded by a growing darkness of unmanageable and ungovernable territories and people. The dark age isn't coming. It's already here.




14 June 2013

Woolwich Outrage: We Are Too Weak To Face Up To The Extremism In Our Midst


 
 Flowers laid in trirbute to Drummer Lee Rigby. 'This act of blatant, total barbarism on an English street in broad daylight shocked every decent person, but not quite enough'
 Flowers laid in trirbute to Drummer Lee Rigby. 
 
'This act of blatant, total barbarism on an English street in broad daylight shocked every decent person, but not quite enough'
It is less than a month since Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered in Woolwich, yet already the incident feels half-forgotten. In terms of the legal process, all is well. Two men have been charged. There will be a trial. No doubt justice will be done. But I have a sense that the horror felt at the crime is slipping away.

The media, notably the BBC, quickly changed the subject. After a day or two focusing on the crime itself, the reports switched to anxiety about the “Islamophobic backlash”. According to Tell Mamma, an organisation paid large sums by the Government to monitor anti-Muslim acts, “the horrendous events in Woolwich brought it [Islamophobia] to the fore”. Tell Mamma spoke of a “cycle of violence” against Muslims. 

Yet the only serious violence was against a British soldier, who was dead. In The Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan brilliantly exposed the Tell Mamma statistics – most of them referred merely to nasty remarks on the web rather than actual attacks, many were not verified, no reported attack had required medical attention, and so on. Yet the “backlash” argument has sailed on, with people shaking their heads gravely about the need to “reassure” Muslims. Tell Mamma equates “hate inspired by al-Qaeda” with the “thuggery and hate of the EDL [the English Defence League]”. 

A trap is set here, inviting those of us who reject such statements, to defend the EDL. I do not. While not, in its stated ideology, a racist organisation like the BNP, the EDL has an air of menace. It must feel particularly unpleasant for Muslims when its supporters hit the streets. But the EDL is merely reactive. It does not – officially at least – support violence. It is the instinctive reaction of elements of an indigenous working class which rightly perceives itself marginalised by authority, whereas Muslim groups are subsidised and excused by it. Four days ago, six Muslim men were sentenced at the Old Bailey for a plot to blow up an EDL rally. The news was received quietly, though it was a horrifying enterprise. No one spoke of “white-phobia”. Imagine the hugely greater coverage if the story had been the other way round. 

All journalists experience this disparity. If we attack the EDL for being racist, fascist and pro-violence, we can do so with impunity, although we are not being strictly accurate. If we make similar remarks about Islamist organisations, we will be accused of being racist ourselves. “Human rights” will be thrown at us. We shall also – this has happened to me more than once – be subject to “lawfare”, a blizzard of solicitors’ letters claiming damages for usually imagined libels. Many powerful people in the Civil Service, local government, politics and the police, far from backing up our attacks on extremism, will tut-tut at our “provocative” comments.

Much more important – from the point of view of the general public – you frequently find that Muslim groups like Tell Mamma get taxpayers’ money (though, in its case, this is now coming to an end). You discover that leading figures of respectable officialdom share conference platforms with dubious groups. You learn that Muslim charities with blatantly political aims and Islamist links have been let off lightly by the Charity Commission. And you notice that many bigwigs in Muslim groups are decorated with public honours. Fiyaz Mughal, for example, who runs Tell Mamma, has an OBE. Obviously it would be half-laughable, half-disgusting, if activists of the EDL were indulged in this way; yet they are, in fact, less extreme than some of those Muslims who are. 

More than two years ago, David Cameron delivered an important speech in Munich when he emphasised that Islamist terrorism arises from the poisoning of young minds. He said that extremism does not have to be violent for it to be dangerous. If it stirs up hate and spreads lies, it rolls the pitch for violent action. He wanted the Government’s counter-terrorism Prevent programme reviewed in this light.

The results were initially good. Grants were cut and people were denied access. But there was too little follow-through within government, Civil Service or police. Although consistently tough himself, Mr Cameron has not persuaded others to be the same. Seeking a sop for Lady Warsi, whom he wanted to demote from the Tory chairmanship, he made her the “minister for faith and communities” without thinking of its consequences for his Munich agenda. This strange job, which gave her a foothold in two government departments, has made her a spokesman on these issues. Yet Lady Warsi is very slow to condemn Muslim sectarianism and has appeared on the platform of FOSIS, the federation of Muslim students which has repeatedly given house room to extremism. Five subsequently convicted terrorists have held office in Muslim student societies in British universities, yet the university authorities usually disclaim any responsibility. 

Malcolm Grant is the president of University College London, whose student Islamic society was run by the “Underpants Bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He resists the suggestion that he should prevent such extremism on his premises. Now, as well as UCL, Prof Grant manages to be chairman of NHS England. I predict a peerage very shortly, or at least a knighthood. I also predict that preachers of deadly hate will continue to operate easily in our universities under the banner of academic freedom. FOSIS encourages “community cohesion”, according to a universities spokesman.

I come back to the killing of Lee Rigby. This act of blatant, total barbarism on an English street in broad daylight shocked every decent person, but not quite enough. Almost as shocking as the bestial cruelty was the brazenness. When you saw young men with blood-soaked arms standing there and talking about what they said they had done, you knew that they would be arrested. But that was not as much comfort as it should have been. You also sensed that they had little fear: they felt that they almost had permission to act as they had done from a society too weak to make such an act unthinkable. They were, unfortunately, right to think that way. 

In Britain today, extremists intuit that organised society is at a disadvantage to them. They understand that what makes them feel strong – the power of obnoxious ideas – is exactly what the authorities do not want to investigate and attack.

It is worrying, for example, that MI5 has a “behavioural sciences unit” to try to understand the psychology and anthropology of young terrorists, but no comparable unit studying ideology alone. It actually states on its website that the threat of subversion in Britain is “now [since the end of the Cold War] considered to be negligible”, and so it no longer investigates it. Intelligence agencies think in terms of state power, and they know that subversion by enemy states is not happening now. They have not adjusted to the new reality – subversion that goes way beyond states, the capture of hearts and minds by evil. 

This weekend, Nelson Mandela is gravely ill. When he was a boy, his teacher – whose name was Wellington – replaced his African first name with that of a British hero: he called him Nelson. It stuck. Anti-imperialist though he is, Mandela was educated with a profound respect for the British culture of parliamentary democracy. It became, in many respects, his model for a multiracial South Africa. It arose from good beliefs inculcated early in life. In our own country today, almost the opposite happens. In our state schools, in mosques, on the internet, in university gatherings, many young people are taught to detest the freedom in which they live. Just as surely as good teaching, bad teaching has its power. We refuse even to face it, let alone to stop it.













We'll Keep The Red Flag Flying Here






Ever since FDR made it his campaign song in 1932 while running for office during the Great Depression, the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party has been that Tin Pan Alley classic, "Happy Days are Here Again." But no matter how often the old Victor spun, it would not be until well after Roosevelt's death that happy days would be here again.

Like Hope and Change, Happy Days are Here Again was a blandly optimistic and non-specific promise that good times were coming. Someday the happy days would arrive, an appropriate enough sentiment for a song whose pivotal moment came in the movie "Chasing Rainbows" where it was sung to reassure a cuckolded husband who is threatening to kill himself. And in an even more appropriate bit of symbolism, the actual movie footage of that moment is as lost as the happy times.

No matter how often the Democratic Party cheats on the American people, it can always break out a new rendition of "Happy Days are Here Again" to win them back. And even if the happy days never seem to actually arrive, the promise of "So long sad times" and "Howdy gay times" where "your troubles and cares are gone" is always a winner.

While the American Democratic Party may not have an official anthem, the British Labour Party does and its anthem, "The Red Flag" would be entirely appropriate for the new Democratic Party that no longer has anything in common with Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.

It might be awkward to imagine Harry Reid or Joe Manchin trying to make it through verses like, "The people's flag is deepest red" and the sonorous chorus, "Then raise the scarlet standard high /Within its shade we live and die/Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/We'll keep the red flag flying here."

They would probably look almost as awkward singing it as Labour Party leader Ed Milliband does, but you could easily imagine Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett belting it out. And that would be only right because while The Red Flag never gets around to mentioning Manchester, despite its popularity there, it does namecheck two cities. "In Moscow's vaults its hymns were sung/Chicago swells the surging throng."

These days red flag songs, once mandatory, are confined to all sorts of vaults in Moscow. The new Russian anthem is Putin's redress of the old Soviet one, with lyrics by the same composer. And the Soviet National Anthem, that secular hymn, has a familiar pedigree going back to the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party in 1938, which took its melody from "Life is better, Life is fun."

You might be forgiven for thinking that the Bolshevik Party had borrowed its melody from some Moscow musical, but that wasn't the case. "Life is better, Life is fun" was based on a statement by Stalin: "Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more fun." The year was 1935 and while it is impossible to know whether Comrade Stalin had decided to crib from the Democratic campaign of 1932, the theme was the same. So long sad times. Happy days were here again.

And just to remind everyone that happy days really were here again, Stalin began another round of brutal purges. A year earlier, Uncle Joe, as the Fireside Chatter liked to refer to one of the world's bloodiest mass murderers, had arranged for the murder of Sergei Kirov, who was everything that Stalin wasn't, and used the murder to begin a purge of anyone more popular than him, with the support of red flag wavers in Chicago, New York, London and Los Angeles.

Unlike Franklin, Stalin's idea of a campaign involved a lot of firing squads to properly soak the red flag in the deepest red, while the band played, "Life is better, Life is fun." After the purges were wrapped up, Stalin signed a pact with another red flag waver from Berlin. The Nazis and Communists might have disagreed on any number of things, but both of them had inherited the Jacobin fetish for painting a flag red with blood and then waving it while calling for more death.

While Moscow might have turned in its red card, Chicago's "surging throng" is still swelling the polls, and even though their shirts are purple, their fingers are red from the strain of repeat voting. If there is anywhere in the United States that the red flag has gone on flying, outside of Marin County, it's Chicago. In its shade, generations have lived and died, and now generations have begun living and dying in its shade across the country as the red flag keeps flying for another four years over D.C.



 
The red flags of the post-modern, post-American, post-British, post-everything revolutionaries aren't usually as obvious as a gang of wealthy politicians staggering to a microphone once a year and belting out, "We'll keep the red flag flying here". It usually sounds more like the parody of that anthem, known somewhat sarcastically as  the "Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party,"

"White collar workers stand and cheer/The Labour government is here/We’ll change the country bit by bit/So nobody will notice it." A policy of changing the country bit by bit so none of the workers who want their benefits notices that everything else they value is being dragged away to the rubbish heap while they sleep may be sneered at by the real reds, but it's worked quite effectively.

Tony Blair did a masterful job of changing Britain, leaving behind Neil Kinnock's threats to take the workers into the streets if the election did not go his way. (It did not. He did not.) Kinnock proved good enough for Joe Biden to plagiarize his biography from, but the future rested with a sensible left. A New Labour that would talk like technocrats while importing unprecedented number of immigrants to change the electoral balance of the country, so that the red flag would go on flying here, even if it was green and had a crescent and a pair of crossed swords in the middle.

Instead of the flying red flag, Tony Blair's New Labour used D:ream's "Things can only get better" as its election anthem, which despite a title that made it sound like another, "Happy Days are Here" or "Life is better, Life is fun" was more of a love song to a Labour messiah promising to cure "prejudice and greed".

"Walk my path/Wear my shoes/Talk like me/I'll be an angel," New Labour voters were promised and they fell for it. The age of the Me Generation PM was here and the new egotism resounded in lyrics like "Things can only get better/Can only get better/Now I've found you/(That means me)" that took both self-help and self-involvement to a whole new level. But British voters probably should have paid more attention to warning lyrics like, "I sometimes lose myself in me".

Bill Clinton was America's Tony Blair, but with enough Good Old Boy charm to leaven the false earnestness that led so many to hate Blair. If Blair was a liar pretending to be an honest man, Clinton was a liar pretending to be an honest man pretending to be a liar, a rotten sandwich of a paradox that you have to be a politician or an observer of them to properly appreciate. Like Blair, Clinton worked to change the country bit by bit, appealing to white collar workers and leaving the red flag in the trunk next to the road flares and the dynamite.

It's Chicago time now and the red flag is back. Talk of changing the country bit by bit is done. Now the country is being changed aggressively, every change a finger poke in the eye of the people who don't notice right what is in front of their faces. The cuckolding is no longer subtle. It's more out in the open than ever and the country is being bankrupted and the middle class is being wiped out to a rousing chorus of "Happy Days are Here Again", when an entire generation has come of age never knowing a time when happy days prevailed.

Whatever faults Kinnock and old Labour had, losing himself in himself wasn't one of them. But the Baby Boomer and Generation X leaders had the narcissistic habit of doing just that. Clinton and Blair both lost themselves in themselves and since then never appear to have found themselves again. And Barack Obama never lost himself in himself because he never stepped out of himself to begin with.




 
Obama marries the red flag radicalism of the old left with generational egotism to show us the spoiled brat as leader, the tyke born with a set of silver spoons in his mouth who not only waves the red flag, but who mistakes his shamelessness for political genius. Where Clinton limited his shamelessness to his personal life, for his Democratic successor, in the tradition of both the hard left and the fellowship of mirror gazers, the personal has always been political. To the Hope and Changer, the man is the office, the state is the man, and the whim is the national agenda.

Stalin famously told his mother that he was the new Czar, transmuting collectivist revolution into the egotistical authoritarianism of one man. Obama has managed the same trick, merging revolutionary politics with his own brand until there is no longer a difference between the man and his revolution. FDR only promised happy days, but Obama has become the actual incarnation of hope, which may explain why there is no longer any hope to go around.

There is a flag flying over Washington and it's no longer the stars and stripes, but the same red flag that flies over Chicago. It's the red flag under whose shade misery and tyranny spreads while the band strikes up the same anthem over and over again. "Happy days are here again." Life is better, life is fun." "Things can only get better" and of course Obama's victory speech promise; "The best is yet to come."

It might have been more honest if he had instead admitted, "We'll keep the red flag flying here."


Muslim Thug: 'We Aren't Violent And I'll Kill You If You Say It Again'



Muslim thug threatens to kill a young kill for daring to say that she doesn't like Muslims because they are violent.

I guess he proved her point (language warning)...






Would it be wrong to say that he hasn't read 'How to Make Friends and Influence People'?



Related:  Fatwa: 'Sodomy For Jihad' Is Honourable


 


http://tinyurl.com/lrqdbn7

Big Politically Correct Brother




The bozo leviathan sees everything . . . and nothing. 


By Mark Steyn

Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days — except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for the National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology The Face of the Tiger. It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected. The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long-ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-aged latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy. As I wrote in my column, “I’d love to see Norm get his own cop show:

“Captain Mineta, the witness says the serial rapist’s about 5′10″ with a thin mustache and a scar down his right cheek.”

“Okay, Sergeant, I want you to pull everyone in.”

“Pardon me?”

Everyone. Men, women, children. We’ll start in the Bronx and work our way through to Staten Island. What matters here is that we not appear to be looking for people who appear to look like the appearance of the people we’re looking for. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and I want to hear all of them.”

A decade on, it would be asking too much for the new Norm to be confined to the airport terminal. There are 300 million stories in the Naked Republic, and the NSA hears all of them, 24/7. Even in the wake of a four-figure death toll, with the burial pit still smoking, the formal, visible state could not be honest about the very particular threat it faced, and so in the shadows the unseen state grew remorselessly, the blades of the harvester whirring endlessly but, don’t worry, only for “metadata.” As I wrote in National Review in November 2001, “The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the citizenry’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.” As the IRS scandal reminds us, you have to have a touchingly naïve view of government to believe that the 99.9999 percent of “metadata” entirely irrelevant to terrorism will not be put to some use, sooner or later.

Along the way, alas, Secretary Mineta’s dream of a world in which “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach” and “a Muslim young man” are subject to equal scrutiny has not come to pass. The Vero Beach gran’ma gets a lot more attention than the guy from the Yemeni madrassah, especially if she’s made the mistake of attending a tea-party meeting or two. The other day the Boston Globe ran a story on how the city’s police and other agencies had spent months planning a big training exercise for last weekend involving terrorists planting bombs hidden in backpacks left downtown. Unfortunately, the Marathon bombers preempted them, and turned the coppers’ hypothetical scenario into bloody reality.

What a freaky coincidence, eh? But it’s the differences between the simulation and the actual event that are revealing. In humdrum reality, the Boston bombers were Chechen Muslim brothers with ties to incendiary imams and jihadist groups in Dagestan. In the far more exciting Boston Police fantasy, the bombers were a group of right-wing militiamen called “Free America Citizens,” a name so suspicious (involving as it does the words “free,” “America,” and “citizens”) that it can only have been leaked to them by the IRS. What fun the law-enforcement community in Massachusetts had embroidering their hypothetical scenario: The “Free America Citizens” terrorists even had their own little logo — a skull’s head with an Uncle Sam hat. Ooh, scary! The Boston PD graphics department certainly knocked themselves out on that.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was training in Dagestan, posting terrorist videos on YouTube, and getting fingered by the Russians to the FBI. Who did nothing.

If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.

We’re told that universal surveillance has prevented all kinds of atrocities we can never hear about — an answer straight out of Orwell. Yet oddly, in the ones we do hear about, the perps are hiding in plain sight (Major Hasan with “Soldier of Allah” on his business card), the intelligence services do nothing (the Pantybomber known to the CIA but still permitted to board the plane), and the digital superstate is useless (the Tsarnaev photo rang no bells with the facial-recognition software, but was identified by friends who saw it on TV).

And thus, the bozo leviathan blunders on. Big Politically Correct Brother sees everything . . . and nothing.



Related Reading: 

Until Our Leaders Admit  The True Nature of Islamic Extremism, We Will Never Defeat It

The Enemy Within That Hates Our Tolerance: A Menace More Chilling Than Any Foreign Threat

 





The Sickening Snowden Backlash



Edward Snowden Backlash

It's appalling to hear the Washington bureaucrats and their media allies trash Edward Snowden as a traitor, when it's our leaders and the NSA who have betrayed us



By Kirsten Powers

Since Edward Snowden came forward to identify himself as the leaker of the National Security Agency spying programs, the D.C. mandarins have been working overtime to discredit the man many view as a hero for revealing crucial information the government had wrongfully kept secret. Apparently, if you think hiding information about spying on Americans is bad, you are misguided. The real problem is that Snowden didn’t understand that his role is to sit and be quiet while the “best and the brightest” keep Americans in the dark about government snooping on private citizens. 

By refusing to play this role, Snowden has been called a "traitor" by House Majority Leader John Boehner. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called the leaks "an act of treason." The fury among the protectors of the status quo is so great that you have longtime Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen smearing Snowden as a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” The New York Times’s David Brooks lamented that Snowden, who put himself in peril for the greater good, was tooindividualistic.” It seems that he wasn’t sufficiently indoctrinated to blindly worship the establishment institutions that have routinely failed us. Brooks argued that “for society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures.” 

This is backward. It’s the institutions that need to demonstrate respect for the public they allegedly serve. If Snowden or any other American is skeptical of institutional power, it is not due to any personal failing on their part. The lack of respect is a direct outgrowth of the bad behavior of the nation’s institutions, behavior that has undermined Americans’ trust in them. According to Gallup’s “confidence in institutions” poll, trust is at an historic low, with Congress clocking in at a 13 percent approval rating in 2012. Yes, this is the same Congress that has “oversight” of the government spying programs.

When one major institution (the Washington media establishment) so seamlessly partners with another (the U.S. government) in trashing a whistleblower, it’s not hard to understand why Americans might be jaded. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Snowden is "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison." MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell complained about Snowden’s naiveté and “maturity level,” as if only a child would believe the government should be transparent about its activity. Politico’s Roger Simon called Snowden “the slacker who came in from the cold,” with “all the qualifications to become a grocery bagger.” That people feel comfortable sneering about grocery workers—a respectable job—and writing off Snowden’s years working as a security guard as sloth tells you a bit about the culture of the nation’s capital, doesn’t it? 

Some members of the Washington political elite, like John Boehner and Dianne Feinstein, have called Edward Snowden a "traitor" who deserves to be prosecuted. 

But he didn’t finish high school! Actually, Snowden earned a general equivalency diploma (GED), but that hasn’t stopped his detractors from spitting this accusation like an epithet. On Wednesday's Late Show With David Letterman, Tom Brokaw dismissed Snowden as "a high school dropout who is a military washout." On Tuesday, Sen. Susan Collins, mocked the 29-year-old man as “a high school drop-out who had little maturity [and] had not successfully completed anything he had undertaken.” Yes, if only he had gone to Harvard or Yale like our last four presidents, who have done such a bang-up job running the country. By the way, according to Glenn Greenwald, Snowden actually worked as a contractor for four years at the NSA, which suggests some level of specialized skill.

It says something about the lack of a positive case for keeping the NSA spying programs secret that the main line of defense is to attack Snowden for lacking the proper credentials to speak out against the government.

Apparently we are supposed to “respect institutions” so much that we never feel entitled to information about how they operate, even when it involves our private communications. Only because of Snowden do we know that our government is storing records of our phone data that can be mined for God only knows how long. This same government opted to not prosecute its workers who destroyed CIA interrogation records that might have implicated the government in law breaking. Does this seem right?

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper blatantly lied to Congress about the activity of the NSA, and there seems to be no ramifications. Yet the Washington establishment wants to put Snowden in jail and throw away the key for telling the truth. We are told to blindly respect an institution that persecutes whistleblowers for leaks of overclassified government information while watching the Obama administration’s leaking of secret government information to aggrandize the president during his reelection campaign. So, please tell us more about how we should have more respect for our institutions.

Whether one supports or opposes the NSA spying programs, Snowden has done a public service by exposing them and igniting a debate about government surveillance that even the president says he welcomes. There is no reason for the mere existence of either program to have been classified by the Most Transparent Administration in History. The claims that terrorists have been tipped off by these revelations are not credible. Nobody seriously believes that until now terrorists didn’t know the American government is monitoring their email and phone calls. Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told MSNBC Wednesday, “I don't see how [Snowden’s leaks] compromises the security of this country whatsoever.”

In his 2003 book, Why Societies Need Dissent, liberal law professor Cass Sunstein pointed out that, in society, “a single dissenter or voice of sanity is likely to have a huge impact.” But the problem for dissenters is that they “have little incentive to speak out, because they would gain nothing from dissenting” and in fact might be punished.

Snowden knew this and he did it anyway. He clearly understands something that those screaming "traitor" do not: the allegiance we have as Americans is to the Constitution, not the institution of government. Snowden summed it up best when he told a South China Morning Post reporter this week, “I’m neither a traitor nor a hero. I’m an American.”





'Toons of the Day: Leading From Behind



Political Cartoons by Bob Gorrell

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

Political Cartoons by Steve Kelley

Political Cartoons by Gary McCoy

Political Cartoons by Jerry Holbert

Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson




http://tinyurl.com/kvm5np2

Pic of the Day: Los Mariachi Ocho



The genius of Bmore...






http://tinyurl.com/m4984qn

Dogwhistles For Dummies






And, now for a word to Jay Leno from our Overlord:

'I've got a shout-out for Jay Leno, that old, fat, passé 'comedian.'  Leno, I have been reviewing the soon-to-be-released 'Dogwhistles for Dummies' by Chris Matthews, Martin Bashir and Al Sharpton, who are intelligent, informed, and thoughtful commentators on a real news political analysis network (which is defined as a channel that is so far up my ass that its people have leased condos in my colon).  According to these Three Wise Men, your frequent jokes against me, The Messiah, are raaaaaaaaacist!

You said that 'Americans wanted a President, who would listen to them, and now it has one:  'Big Brutha.'  Calling me 'Big Brutha' is code for 'Chicago,' which you will recall from last year's campaign, is code for 'n*gga.' 

You said that I was now 'Snoop Obama.'  Well, 'Snoop Obama' is code for 'fried chicken and watermelon.' 

You said that I should stop worrying about closing Gitmo, the symbol of the assault on American constitutional & human rights and civil liberties, and '[ship] the IRS to Guantanamo Bay.'  Well, I'll have you know that 'IRS' is code for 'n*gga' and 'ship the IRS to Guantanamo Bay' is code for 'put y'all (especially, THAT black man - ME) back in chains.'

You said that I was now running a government that was, essentially, the country's 'psycho ex-girlfriend.'  Well, 'psycho ex-girlfriend'  is code for 'Black Man in the White House.'

If you don't cease and desist from ridiculing me, I will sic US Attorney, Bill Killian, on you for 'hate speech' crimes.  Even though 'ridicule is man's most potent weapon' and my mentor, Saul Alinksy, enumerated such as Rule #5 in his Rules for Radicals, YOU CANNOT RIDICULE ME. 

So, even though the Supreme Court may have let my brother, Robert Watts, off for saying 'I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ' before hundreds of thousands of people at an antiwar rally because it was, rightly, seen as hyperbolic, political speech, which was protected back in the BBHO Era, don't think you will be so lucky before the Court when I have you charged with hate speech and making criminal threats aimed at me.  And, before you scream 'First Amendment!' and 'a Conservative-leaning Supreme Court will never uphold the prosecution of a clearly jokifying blob out in Obama Campaign Donor Central California,' just remember:  I can do to those black-robed jokers exactly what I did to General David Petraeus.  Never forget that, pudgeboy.'



SoRo:  Readers, let's write 'Dogwhistles For Dummies' for Chris Matthews, Martin Bashir, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Al Sharpton.  Think of words or phrases that are, clearly in the eyes of Obama and the Obama Firsters, code for something to do with race.

'States' rights' is code for 'blacks hanging from trees.'

Opposition to Obamacare: 'You oppose Obamacare because you are a racist and want black people to die quickly!'

One more example:  'Obama plays too much golf.'  

RRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTT! 

As you will see, talking about Obama playing 'golf' is racist.  The following convo was had between two of the would-be authors of a real 'Dogwhistles For Dummies,'  Lawrence O'Donnell & Martin Bashir, whose dogwhistle-dar must have been running on very weak batteries that day because even he didn't hear what O'Donnell did although he, eventually, falls in line.  The debate was over the following statements made by Senator Mitch McConnell in a speech:


'For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.'


Here goes the debate:

Lawrence O’Donnell:  'Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the — lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.' 

Martin Bashir:  'Lawrence — don’t you think — don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has?  Is he really — Mitch McConnell really making a connection with Tiger Woods who, of course, has become infamous for chasing various cocktail waitresses around Las Vegas and so on?' 

O'Donnell:  'Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point up want to make. If he wanted to make the point that you just suggested and I think he does want to make that point, they had a menu of a minimum of ten different kinds of images that they could have raised. And I promise you, the speech writers went through, rejecting three or four before they land order that one. That’s the one they want for a very deliberate reason. That — there’s — these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.' 

Bashir:  'You really believe that about Mitch McConnell?' 

O'Donnell:  'I know these people are insensitive. I know the speechwriters are insensitive. I know the way they work. They do not have the same sensitivity level that other speechwriters do. But when you get to the Tiger Woods reference, there were people in the speech writing room, I know this, without a shadow of a doubt, who said wait a minute, do we really want to go there?  'Beyond a shadow of a doubt'?  Then it must be true.  Do we really want to go to Tiger Woods and the vote in the room was yes, we do. Mitch McConnell agreed to do it.' 

Bashir:   'Wow. Things are getting lower and lower by the day.'

******************

Thus:  'Golf' is code for a 'lazy, shiftless, promiscuous black man, who preys on white women and lives in the White House.'

Got it?

One last thing, dogwhistles that only by the race-pimping lunatic fringe atop the Progressive surrey a/k/a Dowderisations (cf, Maureen Dowd: Congressman Joe Wilson actually said 'You lie, BOY!'  If you didn't hear 'boy,' it's because of your own racism and white privilege) should be marked as Dowderisms and will get their own chapter).


13 June 2013

The Non-Existent Immigration Crisis







By Kurt Schlichter

With the immigration scam well underway in Washington, the only real takeaway for the outside observer is that the Beltway Establishment truly thinks we are idiots. There is no other way to explain the Establishment’s tsunami of faulty premises, bogus clichés, moronic advertisements and bald-faced lies.

There is no immigration “crisis.” It’s not a “crisis” when people who shouldn’t be here anyway don’t have all the privileges of people who do have a right to be here.  That’s how it should be.

There are a lot of people who shouldn’t be here who are here, but this is a “problem,” not a “crisis.” They’ve been here for decades, since the last immigration reform fraud failed. Oddly, the solution offered by the reformers to the problem of people being here who shouldn’t be here in the first place is to let these people here who shouldn’t be here stay here.

That’s like a guy going to the doctor saying he wants to lose weight and the doctor writing him a prescription for a dozen Big Macs.

All the Establishment feeds us is lies. If the reformers are so intent on securing the border, why isn’t it secure right now? Why does that have to wait until we somehow let the last bunch of people who scoffed at our sovereignty get on their pathway to citizenship before we take the most basic step any nation must take to be a nation at all – to protect our borders?

The answer is simple – they don’t want to secure the border, they never have wanted to secure the border, and they never will secure the border, at least until forced to do so, and then only grudgingly and while employing every passive aggressive tool they can to subvert doing so.

And they’ll even tell you they have no intention of securing the border – provided you speak Spanish. 

To convince us of the vital need to immediately, this minute, right now, no time to think about it, pass their thousand-page wish list of immigration giveaways we get clichés. Facts? Numbers? No, we get told we must do it because illegals need to “come out of the shadows.”

The hell they do. If you shouldn’t be here you should be in the shadows.

We get told that bringing in some untold millions of low-skill immigrants – 30 million or more – will “help our economy.” Let’s assume that’s true. Let’s even assume what we all know is a lie, that none of these people will be able to cash in on the welfare state that already pays too much money to freeloaders who have a right to be here.

So how much money, in dollars, will this bounty bring each of us? I know it will help crony corporatists who want a docile, dirt-cheap labor force. But what’s in it for us regular people?

That’s a legitimate question, and I’ve never heard the straight answer we deserve. After all, this is my country, and adding a zillion new voters will dilute my voting rights, so I’m giving up something. What I am giving up is really, really valuable to me – American citizenship.

I may have been lucky enough to be born into my citizenship, but I earned it in two wars. And my wife and her family – who respected the United States enough to ask for permission to become citizens and then either served in uniform or saw-off family members to war to defend her – earned it too.

So, when we ask why we should just give citizenship away to people who have already disrespected us by coming here uninvited, we deserve an answer, and not some cliché or vague platitude either. If this is going to benefit us, we want to know exactly how, and how much. Then we’ll know if it’s also in our best interest to do it.

But we won’t get an answer. The fact is that this is not meant to benefit us. It’s meant to benefit the Establishment. We just get to pick up the tab.

“Trust us,” they say. The IRS, the NSA, reporter subpoenas, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Obamacare: I'm done trusting the Establishment.

So we get those ubiquitous advertisements on conservative shows to try and fool us into signing on. The one from the weirdly-named, liberal front group “Americans for a Conservative Direction” offers the usual lies about securing the border first. They think they can distract us from the prize – citizenship for millions of future Democrat voters.

Why again am I morally obligated to allow a bunch of people who shouldn’t be here in the first place to vote when I know, and you know, and everyone knows, they will vote en masse for my political opponents?

I wish the GOP Establishment was as intent on destroying liberalism as it seems to be on destroying conservatism.

Maybe “comprehensive reform” is what Jesus commands in some chapter of the New Testament that none of my ministers have ever mentioned, perhaps the Book of Mario or the Gospel According to Chuck. That’s the message of the most obnoxious ad, the one that assumes Christian conservatives are morons who will fall for anything pushed by a quivering-voiced “evangelical” babbling about prayers. This simpering woman sounds like she’s about to burst into tears as she asserts that Christ commands us to give away the store to the illegals.

Maybe in your Bible, lady, but not mine.

I’d be insulted that the people behind these cheesy ploys think we are that dumb, except those coastal enclave Establishment types know nothing about us at all. Well, except for one thing – they know that we are the only obstacle to them pushing through this obnoxious, ruinous disaster.

They are scared of us, because they know that our representatives fear us and our votes more than they fear the Establishment. So they lie to us, try to rush through their scheme, and trick us into just letting it happen.

There is no immigration “crisis.” The only “crisis” is the one faced by an Establishment that needs millions of new voters to cling to power because millions of real Americans are waking up to the nightmare they have created.





Contrary to Media Myth, Today's GOP Is Less Conservative Compared to History








It’s become a pretty much a staple of modern Democratic political rhetoric to say that today’s Republicans have departed from their predecessors in being more obstructionist toward liberal policy objectives. Since it’s something Democrats say a lot, it’s also a frequently repeated talking point in the self-described mainstream press as well.

Even some Republicans, like Bob Dole for instance, appear to believe this notion. Too bad it’s entirely a myth.

It’s particularly unfortunate to hear Dole buying into the myth because he was actually there and ought to remember how things were. When asked to reflect on some contrasts between the modern Republican Party and the one of his day, here’s what Dole had to say on the May 26 edition of Fox News Sunday.

“Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.”

It’s not hard to see where Dole would get such ideas. This line of thought is something that media liberals and their Democratic counterparts have been pushing for decades. Bill Clinton described himself as an “Eisenhower Republican” frequently. In 2008, liberals such as New York Times columnist Gail Collins tried to portray former leftist activist Barack Obama as some sort of moderate because he wasn’t calling for communist revolution in his speeches. Failed former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham called him a “raging moderate” a few years later.

The talking point has become almost unavoidable recently after Obama himself embraced it at the perfect place to make such an argument, a convention for customers of the Associated Press, the powerful wire service which actually has a greater reach and influence than the New York Times or any television channel.

“I think it’s important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago would’ve been considered squarely centrist positions,” Obama instructed.

While the president is correct that a handful of his policies have mirrored those favored by some Republicans over the years, it’s simply inaccurate to say that his views are anywhere close to the Republicans of the past.

As Weekly Standard writer Jay Cost notes, it’s also grossly inaccurate to say that Republicans of yore favored far more centrist positions than today:

Consider the behavior of House Republicans during the Great Society Congress of 1965-66. That Congress produced Medicare and Medicaid, federal funding for education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and more. On item after item, Republicans in the House opposed or tried to alter drastically these measures. In fact, none other than Bob Dole​—​then a representative from Kansas​—​was a regular vote against President Lyndon Johnson’s major reforms. Along with a majority of his own caucus, he voted against Medicare. He voted to reduce spending in LBJ’s war on poverty and retain state authority over funds. He voted against federal funding of elementary and secondary schools. He voted to cut spending for housing assistance. He voted to cut highway beautification programs. He voted to delay implementation of a new minimum wage floor. And so on.

History likewise suggests a skeptical verdict on another liberal complaint of the modern age​—​that Republicans used to be reliable supporters of the very sorts of programs President Barack Obama has been promulgating. Congressional Republicans opposed Harry Truman’s universal health care program after the 1948 election; Dwight Eisenhower himself disliked it. They opposed Ted Kennedy’s late-1970s proposal. They opposed Bill Clinton’s universal care plan in 1994. As for Obama’s massive 2009 stimulus, Republicans in 1993 successfully filibustered a stimulus that cost a tenth of Obama’s proposal. Leading the charge for the GOP that time? Senate minority leader Bob Dole.
The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans have shifted leftward over time. Today, were a Republican to take many of the positions described above, he would be considered an extremist. Instead of trying to “destroy” the welfare state, Republicans are in many cases trying to increase spending on it or simply to make reforms to it.

One of the top arguments of many Republicans against Obamacare is that it takes money from Medicare to pay for itself. Far from trying to completely eradicate Social Security, Republicans have called for semi-privatization of the program, even though that policy will actually lead to more spending on it in the short term. Let’s also not forget that the congressional Republicans keep signing off on the radically increased federal spending baseline put in place by the original Obama “stimulus” instead of pushing hard for a return to more normal levels.

No longer do you hear Republicans in leadership positions talk about eliminating large bureaucracies like the Department of Education. Instead, Republicans were the ones responsible for No Child Left behind which increased federal education spending to levels never before seen. Republicans also passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the largest expansion of that program since its creation. It was also the GOP which created an entirely new department, the Department of Homeland Security. One also gets the distinct impression that Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower did not ever give speeches advocating for gay marriage.

Sure there are fewer liberal and avowedly moderate Republicans like Jacob Javits or Connie Morella than there were in the decades past. The primary reason for this is that Democrats have targeted such politicians for defeat, just as Republicans have done the same to conservative Democrats. The same sort of ideological pushes are also prevelant in primaries where both liberals and conservatives have successfully gone after Democrats and Republicans who do not fit into their respective parties’ overall political orientation. If liberals were truly upset that individual moderate Republican politicians are not more common, they would stop trying to target them in elections. That, of course, will never happen.

It makes sense that Democrats and their supporters in the media would try to portray themselves as the centrists of yesteryear. Such claims fit very well into the laments of every generation that “kids these days” listen to bad music and won’t listen to their elders. Neither of these is a serious argument, however. Smart conservatives would do well to push back against such obvious falsehoods.



SoRo - I wrote a piece similar to this a few weeks ago, if you're interested: