Der Spiegel says that America is becoming too European.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do
Barack? Ummmm…can we talk?
I guess what I was trying to say is that those early days were magical. But, well, maybe magic isn’t the best basis for a… Shit. Look, maybe the best way to do this is just come out and say it. I think it’s best if we take a break.
There, I said it.
Come… come on Barack, please don’t be that way. And don’t act so surprised, I mean you must have at least seen some of the approval rating signs. Tea Party? No, Tea Party didn’t put me up to this. Yeah, sure I’ve see him around the neighborhood. I mean, what am I supposed to do while you’re off vacationing with your friends? Sit around this place without a job and watch MSNBC? No, it’s platonic. So far. And for your information, Tea isn’t the retarded Nazi racist loser your friends are always painting him to be. And guess what? He listens to me and seems to like me for what I am, and doesn’t expect me to wear that stupid complicated Scandinavian nurse outfit like you gave me for Christmas. By the way, the charge card bill from Frederick’s of Stockholm just arrived yesterday. $1 trillion, Barack? Really?
“It’s not you, it’s me.” Heh.
Anyway, we’ll always have Denver.
The Revolt
A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.
In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.
Apres Barack, liberte.
Space Politics
Man, between Oler and all of the trolls and idiots, the comments section over there has become unreadable.
Al Gore Lied
Jason James Lee died. Today’s really inconvenient truth. There’s a lot more evidence that he was influenced by Gore than that McVeigh was influenced by Rush Limbaugh, or talk radio in general (which is to say, there was none for the latter). But don’t expect the press to spoil the narrative.
Indoctrination Nation
“Zombie” has been running a frightening series on the state of our educational system all week. Here’s today’s installment, but there are links to the previous ones.
What Glenn Beck Is Doing
Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.
He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.
Actually, it’s more like the pretense of their moral preeminence.
The Five Stages
…of MSM grief. I don’t think it’s in their nature to ever get to acceptance, though.
Health-Care “Reform”
…and the endangered Democrat majority:
It was during the health care debate that the essential building block of the Democratic majority – Independent voters – began to crumble. It was evident in the generic ballot. It was evident in the President’s job approval numbers. It was evident in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
What’s really amazing is the ongoing delusion (notoriously assisted by Bill Clinton) that once they passed it, it would magically become popular.
They used to say that Social Security is the third-rail of American politics, but given 1994 and this year, I think that health-care “reform” (at least democratic socialist style) is. And this time, the donkeys jumped on it with all four feet.
The Double Standards
…for who is and is not a “moderate“:
It isn’t the snarky first part of this statement that is interesting; that’s banal, and while revealing in its own way, it’s de rigeur for the sort of people we’re talking about to on the one hand demand no one reach conclusions on the basis of necessarily limited information when it comes to them and their mascots, but who feel free themselves to rush to entirely unsupported conclusions regarding their opponents and targets, and express them in the snarkiest way possible, all the while holding the self-conception that they’re stalwarts defending civil discourse. Of course, one commenter doesn’t control anything, any more than I “create the narrative” (If only!). But this comment will be a useful example for how those who do set the terms of debate do so, and a facet of the mindset behind it.
Be that as it may, the truly interesting part is the expressed definition of what qualifies as a “moderate Muslim.” Alchemist expressed what I suspect a lot of people on that side of things believe, without fully articulating it even in their own minds: For them a “moderate Muslim” is simply anyone who isn’t trying, either directly or indirectly, to kill them.
This truly does reflect having two standards, however. In normal discourse, this isn’t generally the standard for moderation: David Duke isn’t considered moderate just because he himself never engaged in a lynching and had learned how to express himself in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to find a statement where he openly and clearly encourages violence or terror. Yet people can get in trouble with the widely-respected SPLC for example,simply sharing a stage with him in a debate. We understand he’s not “moderate” in spite of the suit and tie, and the carefully couched statements.
Rauf is no moderate in my book. But then, I think that moderation is overrated. Goldwater had it right when he said that extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.