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Millions of Americans are sick of smug liberal elites who insult their intelligence, impugn their motives and ignore their concerns. Thats why Donald Trump won. In the days since Trumps ascendancy, youll come across some version of this argument in just about every political magazine or newspaper you consult including the ones that are edited by smug liberal elites. But ask yourself: Who are these elites? Was their influence really inflammatory enough to convince voters that handing Trump the White House was their only option? Were Trump supporters acting on a rational set of social and political grievances? How much blame does the left deserve for the rise of a president who spent most of his time pandering to the right?

When a pundit moans about how disconnected the elites are from everyday Americans, he could be talking about a professor at Brown or a long-serving senator or a columnist at The New York Times.

Elite is one of those words that comes with a built-in repository of negative associations (sort of like professor, senator and columnist, but we dont have all day). If youre someone from a state like Kansas or Oklahoma who leaves work with calluses on your hands and grime beneath your fingernails, plenty of politicians (usually Republicans) are eager to convince you that a bunch of coastal snobs are conspiring to make your life unbearable.

The image of a gruff, hardworking midwesterner with no patience for the Beltway or the ivory tower is a clich for a reason: It faithfully captures a common political and cultural attitude in the U.S.

Many disillusioned (often white and working class) voters are convinced that their values and interests are constantly under threat from Washington, D.C. And this scorn is often directed at people in academia and the media as well elite stooges who live on the edge of the swamp, but only wade in when it suits them.

The 2016 election produced abundant evidence that the anti-elite narrative works 67 percent of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump (a 39-point advantage over Hillary Clinton). In 2008 and 2012, the same demographic voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 25 points and 18 points, respectively. Even though these are all substantial margins, Trump managed to secure a larger proportion of white working class votes than any candidate since 1980 (according to Pew). Does this mean the elites have been extra insufferable over the past few years? Or could it mean Trump is better than McCain and Romney at harnessing the resentment and rage of the anti-elite voting bloc? And heres a third possibility: Trump just has a talent for creating resentment and rage where none existed before (Millions of illegal votes? Yeah! Im angry about that!)

While theres some truth to the first interpretation, the second two are invariably overlooked by writers who think the outcome of the election was simply a rejection of the pious and censorious left-wingers who think Trump is an orange composite of Hitler and Montgomery Burns. Here are a few of the articles Im thinking of: How the Left Created Trump (Rob Hoffman, Politico), How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump (Tom Nichols, The Daily Beast), Blame Liberals for the Rise of Trump (S.E. Cupp, Townhall). Other than the typical complaints about Clintons inadequacy as a candidate, these articles (and countless others like them) cite liberal complacency, arrogance and intolerance as the impetus behind Trumps victory. If liberals werent so moralizing and conceited if they would just listen to the rest of the country if they would stop tarring their political opponents with charges of bigotry, misogyny and racism then we wouldnt be facing four years of President Trump.

In other words, Trump voters are right about the liberal elites they really are a bunch of cackling imbeciles who didnt realize that they were the ones who made Trump inevitable.

Im sympathetic to these arguments theres no shortage of stupid liberal dogmas that empower the right, and it would be silly to suggest that this doesnt have anything to do with Trumps popularity. Heres the sort of thing that comes to mind: the obsession with gender pronouns, identity politics, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and clumsy, counterproductive training programs for college students (I always found it insulting when I was forced to undergo training courses on sexual harassment and racial sensitivity I think I already understand the dos and donts, thanks). Theres also the immovable conviction that sincere religious beliefs are incapable of inspiring people to commit atrocities a form of advanced left-wing myopia that constantly allowed Trump to go on the offensive: Liberals dont even know who were fighting! They refuse to say radical Islamic terrorism! Sad!

Again, I get the point. But heres the problem: Trump isnt just a vessel for the complaints and anxieties of disgruntled Americans. If you voted for him, your vote was more than a repudiation of the liberal elites or the establishment or whichever murky, overused term you prefer.

You elected a man whose ignorance, narcissism and dishonesty was totally unconstrained by the standards to which Americans used to hold presidential candidates. You elected a man whose blind insularity (which is endlessly reiterated with his noxious slogan, America First) will only make the country poorer, less open and more vulnerable. You elected a man who rants about nuclear policy on Twitter and couldnt care less about the proliferation of weapons that have the destructive power to extinguish every life on the planet. You elected a man who thinks the U.S. should have stolen Iraqs oil at gunpoint. You elected a man who says yes to torture (I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding!) and no to Muslim refugees. You elected a man who promised to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and consign American Muslims to a draconian registry on the basis of their religion.

Youre to blame not liberal elites; not social justice warriors; not pretentious professors. You.

By the way, what could be more elitist than the liberals created Trump thesis? Unlike the writers mentioned above, Im treating you like a thinking person who made his or her own decision in November. You didnt elect Trump just because liberals despise him you elected Trump because you identify with his rhetoric and endorse his policies. You elected Trump because youre convinced that hell Make America Great Again. Right?

Contact Matt Johnson at (785) 295-1282 or @mattjj89 on Twitter.

Excerpt from:
Matt Johnson: Are liberals responsible for Trump's victory? - Topeka Capital Journal

English[edit] Etymology[edit]

The adjective is from Old French liberal, from Latin liberalis (befitting a freeman), from liber (free); it is attested since the 14th century. The noun is first attested in the 1800s.

liberal (comparative more liberal, superlative most liberal)

pertaining to the arts the study of which is considered worthy of a free man

generous, willing to give unsparingly

ample, abundant, generous in quantity

obsolete: unrestrained, licentious

widely open to new ideas, willing to depart from established opinions, conventions etc.

open to political or social reforms

Translations to be checked

liberal (plural liberals)

one with liberal views, supporting individual liberty

one who favors individual voting rights, human and civil rights, individual gun rights and laissez-faire markets

liberalm, f (masculine and feminine plural liberals)

liberal (comparative liberaler, superlative am liberalsten)

Positive forms of liberal

Comparative forms of liberal

Superlative forms of liberal

liberalm (oblique and nominative feminine singular liberale)

From Latin liberalis (befitting a freeman), from liber (free).

liberalm, f (plural liberais, comparable)

From lberlan.

librlm (Cyrillic spelling )

liberalm, f (plural liberales)

liberalm, f (plural liberales)

liberal (comparative liberalare, superlative liberalast)

liberalc

Read more:
liberal - Wiktionary

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Posted: Jan 28, 2017 12:01 AM

Last week, I put out The Liberal Translation Guide: 20 Translations of Things That Liberals Say and people were like, Woah, I had no idea that when liberals say they want organic food; what they really mean is that they want to EAT BABIES. Okay, thats not true at all. But, what is true is that people loved those translations and wanted more. Now its time to give the people what they want

1) "Dressing up as a giant vagina in public" -- The best way to preserve the dignity of women.

2) Nazi Germans who attempted to take over the world during WWII and members of the American Nazi Party. Oh, and Donald Trump.And Mitt Romney, too. George W. Bush? Of course! Definitely all the Tea Party members and the people who voted for Trump. Conservatives in general? Sure. Come to think of it, pretty much every American who doesnt agree with any part of the liberal agenda.

3) Fetus A life-sucking parasite with no soul that feeds off the life of a woman and should be destroyed via abortion before you have a party celebrating its demise, unless you want the fetus, in which case its a sweet, loving baby.

4) Corporate Welfare Something thats horrible and should never happen unless it involves Planned Parenthood, PBS or NPR.

5) Fake News News from non-liberal sources which are, by definition, fake because they make you stick your hands in your ears and yell, La-La-La, I dont want to hear from conservatives, la-la-la!

6) Stolen Election Relatively close elections that Republicans must have won with the help of Vladimir Putin, Jeb Bush or the Koch brothers.

7) Homophobes Christians who believe in the almost universally agreed upon standards of male/female marriage that existed for thousands of years until liberals decided that the foundation of our civilization isnt trendy enough.

8) Xenophobe Americans who believe we should put our countrys interests ahead of other nations like Mexico, Iran and France.

9) Diversity A group of liberals who agree on every single issue, but also happen to be gay, black, female, Hispanic or transsexual.

10) Investment Wasting billions of dollars on useless government programs and giveaways that produce nothing of value.

11) White Privilege The special superpowers gifted to white people that insure that there will never be a black President and all white people will always be wealthy and successful without having to work for it.

12) The constitution is a living, breathing document. If there are enough liberals on a court, they can ignore the law and override democracy to implement a left-wing agenda.

13) Patriotism Hatefully complaining about every real or imaginary fault of America while unfavorably comparing our country to places like Cuba and China.

14) Violent rhetoric Words like crossfire, job killing, crosshairs, and targeted when used by Republicans.

15) Detroit An extremely liberal city in a liberal state that must have been run into the ground and bankrupted by Republicans despite the fact that it hasnt had a Republican mayor since 1962.

16) Radical Islam Words youre not supposed to say because it may make people who are trying to kill us in the name of their religion mad.

17) Choice A wonderful thing when it comes to killing babies, but awful when its applied to guns, schools, opting out of Social security or having less government in your life.

18) Rape Culture When men want to have sex with women and worse yet, dont bother to use consent forms for everything from hand holding to dirty sex on the hood of a car.

19) Vagina hats What you wear to let everyone know youre serious people.

20) Love Trumps Hate Screaming obscenities, smashing windows and assaulting people to show that youre loving and theyre hateful.

First Would-be Migrants to US Grounded in Cairo

See the original post:
The Liberal Translation Guide Part Two: 20 More Translations of Things That Liberals Say - Townhall

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In tonights New Rules, Bill Maher hit liberals for being overly outraged about every little thing that may seem to be somewhat politically incorrect to them and allowing those issues to take up their attention while Republicans took over the government.

Highlighting a number of incidents involving celebrities apologizing for being too insensitive, Maher sarcastically asked, Where do you think you are some kind of melting pot?

The comedian offered up a laundry list of sensible and fairly popular positions that Democrats endorse while still losing elections, stating that there could be a myriad of reasons for the dilemma, but one that can be quickly addressed.

The one we can immediately fix is that too often Democrats remind people of a man who has taken his balls out and placed them in his wifes purse, he explained. Maher also challenged the audience to be offended at the remark, telling them to tweet at him so he could tell them to go f*ck yourself.

Swinging back to celebrities having to apologize for something that in the grand scheme of things is trivial, Maher invoked the election of Donald Trump.

What matters is that while you self-involved fools were busy policing the language at the Kids Choice Awards, a madman talked his way into the White House, he exclaimed.

Maher ended the segment with this: While liberals were in a contest to see who could be the first to call out fat-shaming, the Tea Party was taking over school boards. Stop protecting your virgin ears and start noticing youre getting f*cked in the ass!

Of course, smacking liberals on the nose for being too PC has been a running theme of Mahers. Following Trumps election, Maher stated that one good thing coming from it could be the riddance of PC culture. Hes also called PC college protesters little monsters, begged the PC police to stop ruining Halloween, and smacked Democrats for betting caught up in PC bullsh*t.

Watch the clip above, via HBO.

[image via screengrab]

Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

See more here:
Maher Slams Liberals For Being So PC They Don't Notice They're Losing and 'Getting F*cked in the Ass' - Mediaite

As liberals prepare to fight back against Donald Trump and his nascent administration, they are swiftly finding reasons to be disappointed in the elected leadership of the Democratic Party.

Liberal senators like Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren are voting to confirm Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development, outraging grassroots progressives.

Ben Carson openly said that he was against constitutional rights for Muslims - and Dems are voting him in.

Democrats are going soft on proposed Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon, setting off even more establishment-oriented outlets like the Center for American Progresss ThinkProgress blog. And theyre offering a mixed message on Jeff Sessionss selections to lead the Department of Justice.

7. Only 17 Democrats are publicly opposing Sessions, who couldn't get confirmed as a federal judge because of his history of racism

Meanwhile, even as congressional Democrats mobilize to stymie Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they say they are trying to call Trumps bluff on infrastructure spending by introducing their own plan for $1 trillion in direct spending, a political tactic Jonathan Chait denounces as delusional on the grounds that anything that gives Trump bipartisan cover on anything will boost his popularity.

In the pungent words of the New Republics Clio Chang, Democrats are already screwing this up citing Democrats selective willingness to vote yes on some of Trumps Cabinet nominees.

Lurking in the background is the accurate perception that Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell orchestrated an unprecedented and successful years-long campaign of obstruction to Barack Obamas agenda, a campaign aimed in part at policy victories but largely at delegitimizing the new president and denying him the halo of bipartisanship. Is it really possible that Democrats have learned so little from the success of McConnells just say nothing approach?

The reality, however, is that while McConnell certainly did break precedent and certainly did have this kind of strategy, GOP opposition was less across-the-board than its remembered in liberal folk history. Obama passed a number of significant bills with Republican support in his first two years in office, and Democrats have, thus far, been drastically less cooperative with Trumps Cabinet nominees than Republicans were with Obamas.

McConnells success wasnt that he literally held his caucus together in unanimous opposition to everything. Its that he made sure the political agenda was dominated by the things he was choosing to oppose most of all the Affordable Care Act rather than the things that divided his caucus. Democrats core strategy at the moment is to paint Trump as a closet plutocrat, and to focus on aspects of his agenda that point to tax cuts, financial deregulation, school privatization, and health care cutbacks. And their votes have been consistent with that.

Obama was inaugurated on January 20, standing in front of a record crowd despite the freezing cold weather. The very next day the Senate confirmed six of his Cabinet secretaries Hillary Clinton, Ken Salazar, Tom Vilsack, Steven Chu, Arne Duncan, and Janet Napolitano. Clinton received two no votes, Duncan and Napolitano received so little opposition that Senate only did unrecorded voice votes, and the other three were literally unanimous. The very next day, the Senate unanimously confirmed Obamas nominees for HUD, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, United Nations ambassador, Securities and Exchange Commission chair, and the Council on Environmental Qualities.

Other Obama nominees were more controversial but still had plenty of Republican support. Eric Holder, not exactly a conservative favorite, got 19 Republican votes. Hilda Solis got 24. Ron Kirk got 38. Tim Geithner got 10. Kathleen Sebelius ended up being the most contentious nomination, since anti-abortion groups decided to go hard at her, but she still got nine Republican votes.

At the time, there were only 40 Republican senators, so that meant about a quarter of the GOP caucus was voting for even the most controversial nominees.

Trumps nominees have received much less support than Obamas. Even his least controversial nominees like Defense Secretary James Mattis and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley have drawn token opposition from someone looking to make a point.

Obamas legislative agenda, of course, met with considerably more resistance. But though his signature creation of a new health care program paired with a consequential overhaul of student loans was famously passed on a strict party line vote, basically nothing else he did was.

That includes a stimulus bill that was backed by three Republicans (one of whom was later run out of the party as a result and became a Democrat) and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul (backed, like the stimulus, by the two Maine Republicans, this time joined by Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown).

But there was also a whole raft of less controversial but still consequential bills that passed with bipartisan majorities:

Beyond those seven measures, the 111th Congress also passed a series of lower-profile economic stimulus measures an employment benefits extension, a payroll tax holiday, the cash for clunkers program outside of the main stimulus bill, all of which garnered at least a handful of Republican votes.

To be clear, Democrats who say that Obama faced an unprecedented level of partisan opposition are not misremembering.

George W. Bush came into office with a much weaker electoral mandate than Obama, but nonetheless ended up getting a dozen Senate Democrats to vote for his tax cut plan. After the GOP gained seats in the 2002 midterms, Democrats simply chose to allow the GOP to pass a Medicare reform plan without filibustering it, even though the Republicans didnt have 60 votes to pass the bill.

Democrats were surprised to see that they received no comparable deference on anything. They were also surprised by the GOP leaderships determination to simply throw as much sand in the gears as possible of many of these bills using extensive delaying tactics even when they didnt have the votes to block legislation in order to chew up floor time and limit the amount Democrats could accomplish. Republicans also used their filibustering prerogatives to delay or block the confirmation of many sub-Cabinet appointees, often for trivial reasons.

Most of all, McConnell ensured that the dominant narrative of Obamas first year in office was one of highly partisan conflict. The stimulus passed with some GOP votes and was honestly not that substantively different from the Republican alternative. But as the economy continued to deteriorate, Republicans excoriated it as a blunder and a failure. They lured Democrats into a trap on health care, where Chuck Grassley and others maintained a protracted facade of bipartisan negotiations even while party leaders endlessly slagged the reform process. Its not that nothing else got done so much as nobody heard about anything else.

And with a not-so-trivial helping hand from objectively bleak background economic conditions it paid off in the 2010 midterms.

Republicans would counter, of course, that this was all merely retaliation for unprecedented Democratic obstruction during the Bush administration. Democrats counter-charge that Bill Clinton faced unprecedented obstruction. Republicans say the real problem was the tactics Democrats used to block Robert Borks Supreme Court confirmation back in the 1980s.

The truth is that this is a ratchet that has been shifting for a long time.

In the middle of the 20th century, the two political parties did not offer clearly contrasting ideologies. That meant members of Congress generally felt cross-pressured between partisan and ideological imperatives, and it fostered a broadly cooperative atmosphere. For decades now that has been changing, as both parties have become more ideological and thus members of Congress from both parties face more pressure from their respective activist bases to stand up to the other side. This means each new president is greeted by a level of uncooperativeness from the opposition party that is genuinely unprecedented.

The Reagan Revolution of 1981-82 was undertaken even though Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives because Speaker Tip ONeil was willing to repeatedly bring Republican bills to the floor that would then pass with the support of a small number of conservative Democrats a scenario that is totally unthinkable under todays legislative norms.

Democrats are responding to the Trump administration by offering so far an unprecedentedly low level of support for his Cabinet nominees. They are signaling potential willingness to pass an infrastructure spending program that, if it comes together, would essentially amount to Trump coming around to a view Democrats have espoused for years. Meanwhile, there is zero indication of any Democratic support for any Republican Party legislative initiatives to reduce taxes or federal spending.

Given the combination of rising polarization, Trumps unprecedentedly low approval ratings, and Trumps unique personal attributes, an unprecedented lack of cross-party support is probably to be expected. But the ratchet of activist expectations has moved even faster than the ratchet of legislative reality, and consequently Democrats currently find themselves disappointing their own supporters, who want them to adopt a posture of root-and-branch opposition that they mistakenly believe McConnell took eight years ago.

Read more:
Democrats are putting up a tougher fight than liberals realize - Vox