Mediaboss Marketing

|

Posted: May 29, 2017 12:01 AM

I know its theoretically wrong for a Republican candidate to smack around an annoying liberal journalist, but that still doesnt mean that I care. Our ability to care is a finite resource, and, in the vast scheme of things, millions of us have chosen to devote exactly none of it toward caring enough to engage in fussy self-flagellation because of what happened to Slappy La Brokenshades.

Sorry, not sorry.

And thats not a good thing, not by any measure, but it is a real thing. Liberals have chosen to coarsen our culture. Their validation and encouragement of raw hate, their flouting of laws (Hi leakers! Hi Hillary!) and their utter refusal to accept democratic outcomes they disapprove of have consequences. What is itself so surprising is how liberals and their media rentboyz are so surprised to find that we normals are beginning to feel about them the way they feel about us and that were starting to act on it. If you hate us, guess what?

Were going to start hating you right back.

Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, Were better than that, and one has to ask ,Whos we? Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and guess what? the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.

We dont like the new rules Id sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path but we normals didnt choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and Punch a Nazi which, conveniently for the left, translates as punch normals. And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.

So when we start to adopt their rules, theyre shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? Its not a surprise. Its inevitable.

Team Fredocon, when they arent, Oh well, I never!-ing about Trump and his uncouth supporters, moan about the threat of Whataboutism, the tendency for people to explain their sub-optimal behavior by asking, What about so-and-so? He did the same thing and you didnt care. But while whataboutism may be a logical fallacy, its still a devastatingly compelling argument.

Humans especially normal Americans wont tolerate a double standard. But double standards apply all the time to liberals they do it and its fine, but we do it and its Armageddon. The same jerks screaming for OReillys scalp worship Bill Clinton and his drunken, perv-enabling pseudo-wife.

Or take the Trump-Russia black hole of idiocy please. Remember how Obama whispered to the Russkies, I'll have more flexibility after election and that was cool? But according to an anonymous source reading a bar tab over the phone to some credulous WaPo hack one of Trumps relatives ordered a vodka once and its TREASON TREASON TREASON!!!!!!

It certainly applies to, What about when they hit conservatives with a lock in a sock and the liberal media didnt care? Yeah, what about that? Where was the sackcloth and ashes act from Schumer, Pelosi, and Felonia von Pantsuit when our side was being bloodied and beaten? There wasnt one, because the left supports us getting bloodied and beaten. It likes the zesty zing of violence. It makes them feel big and tough and edgy, except that it starts being a heck of a lot less fun when we right-wingers start adopting the same rules and punching back.

The left is shocked that the right has now stopped caring about the old rules, since for so long the left relied on the right to subordinate its human instincts and conform to those rules even when the left ignored them. We refused to stoop to their level, and for a long time, we were better than that. But you can only have one side being better than that for so long before people get sick of being the butt of the hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is poison not because it makes people stop knowing right from wrong, but because it makes its victims stop caring about right and wrong. Ben Jacobs got smacked around, and millions of us just dont give a damn.

We all know it was wrong for Greg Gianforte to beat up Ben Jacobs. But we also know the general attitude of the media is that when we conservatives get beat-up by leftists its perfectly excusable even laudable and thanks to the fact that Twitter is forever, we now know that Ben Jacobs himself specifically thinks its A-OK to slug conservative kids. So can someone tell me why anyone should be shocked that we conservatives refuse to devote one iota of caring to poor Bens wedgie?

This isnt a good thing. This is nothing to be proud of. We should not be happy that our society is heading toward the lowest common denominator, which itself is in freefall. But the alternative is worse. Should we allow ourselves to continue to be figuratively and literally beaten up while smiling at our own purity, secure in the knowledge that even though our dignity and freedom are stripped from us, we have not fought back? Not happening. Letting these bastards play by their own rules, and thereby crush us, seems a pretty high price to pay just to gain the approval of the smug and sanctimonious David Frums and John Kasichs of the world.

We conservatives have been warning for a long time that liberals are not going to like it when everyone plays by the new rules, and surprise! they dont. But guess what? Most of us dont like the new rules either. Yet its ridiculous to expect human beings to remain in perpetual denial about the situation they face, and to forever live under a double standard that results in their faces getting pressed into the dirt.

The hypocrisy has become intolerable, and we have stopped tolerating it. This is just the beginning of the reaction, and - make no mistake this entire situation is a bad thing. Our society is making choices that can lead only to ruin (and my new novel describing the consequences just dropped).

Lincoln mentioned the better angels of our nature also at a time when Democrats were rejecting the rule of law in order to promote their subjugation of those they considered lesser beings and the important thing to note is that angels is plural. You need two angels, not one angel and one demon. But thats what we have, and if it doesnt change well have two demons, and everyone should care about that.

Trump Communications Director Resigns

Read more from the original source:
Liberals Are Shocked To Find We're Starting To Hate Them Right Back - Townhall

In chapter two, the question shifts to how this was allowed to happen at all. A prominent place was awarded to a giant and "difficult artwork," which, when challenged about its causing offense, neither the museum nor the artist felt was worth the fight.

The reopening of the sculpture garden has been postponed until June 10, one week later than planned. Leadership of the Walker, the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board, and the artist, Sam Dunant, are meeting with a group of elders from the Dakota Sioux, whose ancestors made up the 38-plus-2 hanged at Mankato and Fort Snelling.

According to a statement the Walker issued Monday, Dakota elders are requesting "that others who feel allied in this endeavor, but who are not Dakota, or whom may represent other communities across the state and region, to please be patient and respect the process that is currently underway."

A similar plea for patience from "others... allied in this endeavor" came from the author Marlon James, the Jamaican-born Man Booker prize winner and writer-in-residence at Macalester College.

James (a known liberal worthy of a "professor watchlist") spent parts of the weekend watching the controversy blow up in his Facebook feed. What he saw bothered him.

Not that he meant to defend the Walker -- "that awful institution," he called it -- nor Dunant, nor his "Emmett Till piece, and the art of all privileged people making money off other people's adversity." James was instead concerned with how Twin Cities progressives discussing the piece attacked one another, displaying a viciousness conservative counterparts reserve only for their political enemies on the left.

On Saturday, James posted:

Monday, James revisited the idea in a longer post which examines Facebook's role, "decency" in political arguments, and how the left hobbles its movement by expending so much energy fighting its own.

James' post has been shared more than 300 times as of Tuesday morning. We've reprinted it in its entirety below.

Read more:
Read Marlon James on 'woke credentials,' and how liberals fight hardest against each other - City Pages

Liberal MPs will not be proposing amendments to the Canada Infrastructure Bank Act even as they move to rewrite other parts of Finance Minister Bill Morneaus budget bill.

After two weeks of hearings, members of the House of Commons finance committee began their line-by-line review of Bill C-44 on Monday, including debates over amendments.

The more than 300-page omnibus budget bill covers a wide range of issues that were included as part of the governments March budget.

The Liberal members, who hold a majority on the committee, announced on Friday that they would be proposing several amendments to address concerns over the bills changes to the powers of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, a spending watchdog office.

The PBO is expressing initial support for the proposed changes.

However, Liberal MPs on the committee said Monday that their amendments will be limited to the PBO provisions and they have no intention of suggesting changes to the sections creating a $35-billion infrastructure bank, which have also been controversial.

Some witnesses raised concerns, but others were quite supportive, as well, said Liberal MP and committee member Jennifer OConnell, in reference to the infrastructure provisions. Where Im coming from, Im quite comfortable with the bill as is.

Since the budget legislation was introduced in April, the provisions creating an infrastructure bank have faced criticism on several fronts. From a procedural point of view, critics have said that an initiative as large as this should have been introduced as a stand-alone bill, for more detailed study, rather than as part of an omnibus budget bill.

The proposed bank would encourage new infrastructure projects that would be led and owned by private-sector partners such as pension funds, which would receive a rate of return in exchange for taking on the debt and other risks associated with the project.

Opposition MPs have repeatedly questioned the purpose of the bank, warning that it takes infrastructure decisions out of the hands of elected officials. Industry officials have raised concerns from the opposite direction, saying that there may be too much political involvement. The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board and a former president of the Business Development Bank of Canada have cautioned that the proposed bank will not be independent enough to protect directors from political interference.

The Conservatives and NDP raised those concerns, as well, on Monday.

This is a scandal waiting to happen, said Conservative MP Kellie Leitch during Question Period.

Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi accused the opposition of arguing that the bank is both too independent and not-independent enough.

We have struck the right balance, Mr. Sohi said Monday.

As for the PBO provisions, the Liberals said their changes address concerns about the independence of the PBO to select its research topics and to control when and how reports are released.

The suggested changes by the Liberal members of the committee appear to address most of PBOs concerns, Mostafa Askari, the assistant PBO, said in an e-mail on Monday. Mr. Askari cautioned that the committee has not yet approved specific amendments.

Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, who was very critical of the original provisions in the bill, also said Monday that he approves of the proposed amendments.

Opposition MPs are still studying the Liberal amendments to the PBO sections and have said that they may not actually accomplish what the Liberal MPs say they will.

Opposition parties are also expected to propose their own amendments to the budget bill, which would require the support of at least some of the Liberal MPs in order to be passed.

Once the bill is approved by the committee, it will then go to the House for final approval and then on to the Senate. Senate committees have been holding prestudies on the bill. Some senators have mused about potential amendments, including the possibility of removing the infrastructure-bank provisions from the budget bill.

Follow Bill Curry on Twitter: @curryb

Go here to see the original:
No plans to amend Canada Infrastructure Bank legislation: Liberals - The Globe and Mail

New York Times

Paid Family Leave Is What Liberals Want, Right? New York Times In any event, here is a piece of classic liberal legislation that Donald Trump endorses. Or is there a catch? Yes, maybe. Several, in fact. Is this just something held in reserve to give away when budget negotiations get tough? Above all, there's the ...

More:
Paid Family Leave Is What Liberals Want, Right? - New York Times

We received a message from the future this week, directed to the outraged liberals of the so-called anti-Trump resistance. It was delivered by an unlikely intermediary, Greg Gianforte, the Republican who won a special election on Thursday and will soon take his seat in Congress as Montanas lone representative. (Heres a trivia question to distract you from the doom and gloom: Without recourse to Google, how many other states can you name that have only one House seat?)

If you found yourself ashen-faced and dismayed on Friday morning, because you really believed the Montana election would bring a sign of hope and mark the beginning of a return to sanity in American politics, then the message encoded in Gianfortes victory is for you. It goes something like this:

Get over Montana already and stop trolling yourself with that stupid special election in Georgia too. They dont mean anything, and anyway that dude Jon Ossoff? Hes about the lamest excuse for a national progressive hero in the entire history of Democratic Party milquetoast triangulation. Oh, and since were on the subject: Forget about the blue wave of 2018. Forget about the Democratic majority of 2019. Forget about the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Have you even been paying attention? Because none of that stuff is happening and its all a massive distraction.

A distraction from what, you ask? Well, thats a good question without a clear answer, and the message gets pretty fuzzy after that. I would suggest that rebuilding American politics and indeed all of American public discourse, now that theyve been Trumpified, is not about the next electoral cycle or the one after that. Its going to take a while, and Im not sure how much the Democratic Party will have to do with it, or what it will look like.

No doubt the exaggerated media focus on Montana was inevitable, in the age of the voracious 24/7 news cycle: This was only the second vacant congressional seat to be filled since Trump took office, and the first where the Democratic candidate appeared to have a real shot. But the Big Sky frenzy also spoke to the way American politics has almost entirely become a symbolic rather than ideological struggle a proxy war between competing signifiers whose actual social meaning is unclear.

Despite their abundant differences, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were both semiotic candidates, who appeared to represent specific worldviews or dispositions (the espresso cosmopolitan; the shameless vulgarian) but presented themselves as a disruption to normal politics and were difficult to nail down in left-right ideological terms. Understanding an off-year congressional election in an idiosyncratic and thinly populated Western state, where fewer than 400,000 voters cast ballots, as a referendum on the national mood or the GOP health care bill or much of anything else is patently absurd. But its a miniature example of the same reduction to symbolism, in which everything is said to stand for something else and democracy becomes pure spectacle.

As for Gianforte, the inadvertent vehicle for our message, nobody outside Montana had heard of him before this week, and were not likely to hear much from him in Washington either, where he will disappear into the chorus of fleshy, pickled-looking, age-indeterminate white millionaires who make up the House Republican caucus. Gianforte found his one moment of fame after allegedly assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs on the eve of the election, making the GOP candidate a focal point of widespread liberal wish-casting and concern-trolling. Surely the good people of Montana would see the light of reason now that the Republican candidate had been revealed gasp! as a thin-skinned, violent bully.

Its almost hilarious in the vein of that long-running Peanuts gag about Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football that anyone managed to convince themselves that purportedly decking a representative of the liberal media would damage Gianforte. It probably didnt make much difference; about 70 percent of the votes had already been cast before the Jacobs incident. But I think its safe to say that likely Republican voters in Montana, and damn near everywhere else, can be divided into two groups: those who didnt much care or were inclined to look the other way, and those who were absolutely thrilled.

Gianfortes decisive victory over Democrat Rob Quist on Thursday has provoked a fresh round of soul-searching from the same people who made too damn much of the Montana election in the first place. We have been told that Democrats must field stronger candidates and commit more resources, that Bernie Sanders does not possess some magic elixir that attracts disgruntled white people and that Donald Trump remains popular in places where people really like him. If thats not quite enough Captain Obvious, Washington Post columnist Greg Hohmann devoted an impressive amount of research and reporting to the Montana aftermath before arriving at the diagnosis that there is a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system. You dont say!

Let me be clear that Im indicting myself here as well: I edit political coverage at Salon, and I followed the Montana news closely. I knew perfectly well how it was likely to turn out, but one can always be wrong about that (as we discovered last November), and I shared some dim sense that it might be cathartic to experience an insignificant proxy victory in a state I have never even visited. But when I ask myself why I felt that way, even a little, the answers are not edifying.

For many people in, lets say, the left-center quadrant of the American political spectrum especially those who are not all that eager to confront the fractured and tormented state of the current Democratic Party Montana and Georgia and 2018 seem(ed) to represent the opening chapters of a comeback narrative, the beginning of a happy ending. If what happened in 2016 was a nonsensical aberration, then maybe theres a fix right around the corner, and normal, institutional politics can provide it.

First you chip away at Republican triumphalism, and the House majority, with a couple of special-election victories. Then its about organizing, recruiting the right candidates for the right seats, registering voters and ringing doorbells, right? Democrats picked up 31 seats in the George W. Bush midterms of 2006 and will need 24 or so this time so, hey, it could happen. For that matter, Republicans gained an astounding 63 seats in the Tea Party election of 2010, and many observers have speculated that Trump-revulsion might create that kind of cohesion on the left. So we sweep away Paul Ryan and his sneering goons, give Nancy Pelosi back her speakers gavel after eight long years, introduce the articles of impeachment and begin to set America back on the upward-trending path of political normalcy and niceness.

I suspect its pointless to list all the things that are wrong with that scenario, because either you agree with me that its a delusional fantasy built on seven different varieties of magical thinking or you dont, and in the latter case I am not likely to convince you.

My position is that Donald Trump is a symptom of the fundamental brokenness of American politics, not the cause. Electing a Democratic House majority (which is 95 percent unlikely to happen) and impeaching Trump (which is 100 percent not going to happen) might feel good in the moment, but wouldnt actually fix what is broken. Considered as a whole, the blue wave fantasy of November 2018 is a more elaborate and somewhat more realistic version of the Hamilton elector fantasy of December 2016: Something will happen soon to make this all go away.

(Lets throw in the caveat that there are plausible universes in which the Republicans ultimately decide to force Trump out of office for their own reasons. Entirely different scenario.)

If you dont want to believe me now, I get it. But take a good hard look at Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte, and go through all the excuses you have made to yourself about how and why that happened, and well talk.

Its worth making two salient structural points that I think are beyond dispute, and then a larger, more contentious one. As my former boss David Daley has documented extensively, both on Salon and in his book Ratfucked, the extreme and ingenious gerrymandering of congressional districts locked in by Republican state legislators after the 2010 census virtually guarantees a GOP House majority until the next census and at least the 2022 midterms. Yes, the widely-hated health care law might put a few Republican seats in play that werent before. But the number of genuine swing districts is vanishingly small, and it would require a Democratic wave of truly historic dimensions to overcome the baked-in GOP advantage.

As for the Senate well, Democratic campaign strategists will mumble and look away if you bring that up, because the Senate majority is completely out of reach. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election next year, 25 are currently held by Democrats and 10 of those are in states carried by Donald Trump last year. Its far more likely that Republicans will gain seats in the Senate, perhaps by knocking off Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, than lose any at all.

Those disadvantages could be overcome if we were looking at a major electoral shift, on the order of FDR in 1932 or the post-Watergate midterms of 1974, when Democrats won 49 seats in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. I can only suppose thats the sort of thing the blue-wave fantasists imagine. That brings us to the final and largest point: Exactly who is kidding themselves that the Democratic Party, in its 2017 state of disarray and dysfunction, is remotely capable of pulling off a history-shaping victory on that scale?

This is a paradoxical situation in many ways, one that reflects the larger decline of partisan politics in general. The Republican Party went through a spectacular meltdown in 2016, but wound up winning full control of the federal government, partly through luck and partly by default. Meanwhile, Democrats hold a demographic advantage that was supposed to guarantee them political hegemony into the indefinite future, and their positions on most social and economic issues are far more popular than Republican positions (except when you get to nebulous concepts like national security). Now they face an opposition president who is both widely despised and clownishly incompetent.

That sounds like a prescription for a major renaissance but not for a party that is so listless, divided and ideologically adrift. Democrats have been virtually wiped out at the state and local level in non-coastal, non-metropolitan areas of the country: They had full control of 27 state legislatures in 2010, and partial control in five more; today they control 14 (with three splits). There was plenty of bad faith and unfair recrimination on both sides of the Bernie-Hillary split of 2016, which theres no need to rehearse here. But the bitterness has lingered not just because each side blames the other for the election of Donald Trump (and they both could be right) but because it represents a profound underlying identity crisis that ultimately has little to do with Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. (Again, they are the symbols or signifiers.)

I have previously argued that the Democratic Partys civil war was unavoidable and has been a long time coming. Like most people, I assumed it would play out under President Hillary Clinton, not with the party reeling in defeat and at a historic low ebb. In the face of a national emergency, maybe Democrats will find some medium-term way to bridge the gulf between pro-business liberal coalition politics and a social-democratic vision of major structural reform and economic justice. Whoever the hell they nominate for president in 2020 will have to pretend to do that, at any rate.

But right now the Democratic Party has no clear sense of mission and no coherent national message, except that it is not the party of Donald Trump. I can understand the appeal of that message, the longing for a return to normalcy, calm and order that it embodies. What we learned in Montana this week and will likely learn in Georgia, and learn again in the 2018 midterms is that thats not enough. There is no normal state we can return to.

For the Trump resistance to have meaning, it must be more than the handmaiden or enabler of a political party that has lost its power, lost its voice and lost its way. Electoral victories will come (and go), but we should have learned by now that they are never sufficient in themselves. Rebuilding and redeeming American democracy if that can still be accomplished is a much bigger job, and there are no shortcuts.

See the rest here:
Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 blue wave, no Democratic majority and no impeachment - Salon