It’s been a staple of leftybloggers for the better part of a decade, now; every so often, some social “science” organization or another will release a “study” showing some variant “liberals are smarter than conservatives”.
This blog has made a decade-long romp out of trashing these “studies” – which are inevitably junk science.
The latest to the table in debunking this little lefty conceit is that noted conservative tool…
…Will Saletan? At Slate?
Huh.
How much reporting could conservatives save by simply referring to Berg’s Seventh Law - “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – to explain “progressive” efforts to slander/”attack” conservatives, their organizations, and their supporters?
Hard to say. Lots.
That said, it’s good to get the details.
James Taranto chronicles the left’s current assault on the Koch Brothers - who, along with the tiny think tank “ALEC” and the NRA are the the repository of most lefty boogeyman-mongering – and finds it a troubling variant on a standard “progressive” tactic…:
We’re torn between finding this effort sinister and ridiculous, and the truth is it’s both. Alinskyite tactics were meant to be applied against the powerful by the powerless. When applied by powerful men, like Reid, who are supposed to be public servants, they take on the character of tyranny rather than rebellion.
…as well as a classic case of Berg’s Seventh Law in action (
No doubt the Kochs can take it, but note that his attack aimed not only at them but also at ordinary Americans who have been victimized by ObamaCare and spoken out about it. The aim is clearly to intimidate others and thereby suppress information about ObamaCare’s failures.
Not to mention make dissenting from the “progressive” narrative too painful for non-billionaires to carry on. See also “Joe the Plumber”.
The other day, a pack of the usual crowd of waxy yellow Leftyblog and Leftytweet buildup teased themselves to ecstasy over this photo:
It’s a group of “Trail Life” boys – from a breakaway sect of Boy Scouts that bars openly gay members – “giving a Nazi salute” as they recited their creed.
Except it wasn’t:
But it turns out that the boys were not saluting Hitler and contrary to the first Associated Press caption, they were not reciting a creed. The boys were singing “Taps,” a longtime Boy Scout tradition that the Texas Trail USA troop had adapted as their own.
The boys had gathered in a circle with their hands raised straight into the air. They gradually lowered their hands as they sang the song. It concludes with their hands flush against their side.
“It really misrepresented what was going on,” [John Stemberger, chairman of the board of Trail Life] told me. “There are children involved and that made it more outrageous. They were exploited and misunderstood.”
The picture accompanied what was actually apparently a relatively fair story.
But when it comes to the un-PC, “fair” isn’t part of the left’s playbook.
The City Pages got out there are did that gumshoe journalism that they’re famous for, in noting that this photo…
…attributing a quote to Michele Bachmann, which has been sweeping Facebook for the past week, is in fact a hoax.
Just one problem: She didn’t say it, and a version of this fake quote has been circulating since 2011
Whew. Of course, some version or another of that quote has been around for decades - P.J. O’Rourke noted something like it in Holidays in Hell, twenty years ago, if I recall correctly. If you tell a liberal a conservative Christian supports snake-handling, they’ll believe it without question.
But this is good! Actual fact-checking!
I’ll urge the City Pages to start working on this one:
Or maybe this:
It’s good that we have highly-trained info-ninjas, watching society’s ramparts.
The Democrats are in trouble. Obamacare is tanking, and the economy is “growing” at a pace that would have been considered a disaster were Barack Obama, the vessel of the left’s hopes and dreams, not President.
And despite a concerted media attempt to black out the bad news, people are starting to talk.
And so the left is doing its best to get people to talk about…other things.
Any other things.
So when my Twitter feed (actually a tweet from one-time SITD commenter “TimInStP”, one of the most incisive liberal minds ever to comment in this space) screamed “The GOP Just Named its Hot New Innovation Lab After a Nazi Pistol”, I figured it was worth looking into.
It wasn’t. I mean, it was from Gawker, which is to national liberal media what Minnesota Progressive Project is to Minnesota; ergo, not worth the time it took, to look into.
But as a view into the lengths the deranged left will go to to try to slander dissenters, it’s instructive anyway:
The Republican National Committee today excitedly announced the launch of a new startup lab to bring techies and creatives together, Silicon Valley-style, to get Republicans elected. Oh, and they named it for a Nazi gun, a type of ammo, and a philosophy that puts war before peace.
Welcome to Para Bellum Labs, America!
Para Bellum? Why, I took enough Latin to know that means “prepare for war!”.
And Gawker got that part right. Sorta.
In fact, it’s part of an old Roman cliche, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—if you seek peace, prepare for war. That’s been quite an inspiring little phrase through history, at least to militarists. It was especially inspiring to Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, the German government’s arms manufacturer from the late imperial era to World War II.
DWM started using the “parabellum” phrase as a name for its signature guns—first, the light machine gun used by the Kaiser’s best during World War I, and then its most iconic gun: the Parabellum Pistole, or the Luger pistol…Yep, Nazi parabellum!
So let me get this straight: Because the Republican startup used a phrase that was also used by, among hundreds or thousands of others, a German company (in corrupted form) in 1908 to describe a pistol that was used, 30 years later, by a regime that wouldn’t even start to form for fifteen years, the GOP “named its lab after a Nazi gun?”
Oh, it gets better.
The gun was so popular in the Third Reich that its ammunition—one of the first to use a slug that was 9 millimeters in diameter—became known as “9 mm parabellum,” which you can find now at your local gun store.
It was nowhere near “one of the first” 9mm rounds (and if you walk into your gun store and ask for “9mm Parabellum”, the clerk will know you learned everything you know about guns from video games; it’s “9mm Luger”, or “9×19″). And the “Parabellum” pistol (usually called a “Luger”, or a “P-08″ in German) was so popular among the Nazis that they phased it out of production in favor of the Walther P-38, which was simpler to produce and easier to maintain in the field…
But wait! P-38 was the same designation as the plane flown by America’s top fighter ace, Superior Wisconsin’s own Richard Bong!
Richard Bong was a Nazi!
(Calms down).
Oh, yeah – most police in America today carry 9mm pistols. Are they also Nazi sympathizers?
Gawker is like a lobotomy that you don’t have to pay for.
It was a year ago yesterday that a depraved lefty walked into the national Family Research Council headquarters a a pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and the intention to kill every person in the office.
He was stopped by a building manager and acting security guard, Leo Johnson, who, although shot twice, subdued the leftist gunman, who had walked into the lobby claiming to be a new intern. Johnson asked for ID.
After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson’s left forearm. “And I just couldn’t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: ‘I have to get this gun,’ ” Johnson told The Weekly Standard. “That was my sole focus—I have to get this gun—this guy’s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.”
From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. “I just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,” recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There’s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.
This was a genuine hate crime; the shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins, had a backpack full of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear into his victims’ faces after shooting them, apperently to suffocate the wounded.
Johnson was a hero. And you’ve heard scarcely a word about it in the mainstream media, who spent most of the past 18 months trying in vain to pound the utterly-non-bias-related Martin-Zimmerman case into a “hate crime”, and the past couple of years trying unsuccessfully to politicize the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings.
And yet here was the real thing (and by no means for the first time). And…
(crickets)
There are some illuminating contrasts between the media’s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin…there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric—even “campaign” is a term borrowed from war—was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn’t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations…though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.”
And NBC news fairly raced to blame the Aurora shooting on the Tea Party.
By contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. “A detail sure to reignite the culture wars that erupted around the shooting is the fact that Corkins told FBI agents that he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” wrote the Washington Post during Corkins’s trial in February. It’s a little unseemly for a newspaper, when finally forced to confront actual politically motivated violence, to worry about the shooting’s impact on the metaphorical “culture war.” Particularly when irresponsible actors in that culture war continue to get a free pass from the media.
The SPLC – cited with grave solemnity as an authority by rafts of lefty bobbleheads – has become a bit of a hate group in its own right:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a “nonpartisan” watchdog. Some of the SPLC’s newly targeted “hate groups,” such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn’t just name the Family Research Council on its website—it posts the council’s address on a “hate map.” That map is still on SPLC’s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.
But they won’t.
I bring it up because we’re seeing the same thing with the Widstrand beating in Saint Paul. Now, to be clear, there’s no evidence that it was a “hate crime”, per se; in other words, there’s no evidence that any of the youths stood on a soapbox and bellowed “I’m doing this because I Hate Whitey”. And for purposes of charging that brutal assault, evidence is what is needed.
But you can see, feel and hear the nervousness in official Saint Paul and Minneapolis government circles; as crime as dropped in most parts of the Twin Cities, it’s stayed steadily well above average on the East Side, the North End, the North Side, Phillips. Parts of the East Side have been deteriorating before our eyes over the past decade, in a city that is generally mostly just stagnant.
And yet nobody in offical Twin Cities circles will call the elephant what it is. They hold official observances for the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” misery-exploitation caravan – which exists to protest the deaths of children who look like the children of NPR executives – and studiously ignore the fact that black on black crime in the Twin Cities is astronomically higher than any other rate in the state.
As we noted last week, Rep. Michael “The Kia Hamster” Paymar is proposing a bill to ban citizen carry at the Capitol complex.
Keep this in mind: to carry at the Capitol, a citizen (as opposed to a law enforcement officer) must have a valid carry permit – which means that they…:
…and have notified Capitol Security that they – a legal citizen – intend to carry in the Capitol complex within the limits of the law.
There’s no reason for this, of course. State Capitol police happily admit they’ve never had a whiff of a problem with a legal carry-permittee carrying a firearm at the Capitol. No outbursts, no threatening behavior, no nothing.
Oh, Paymar and his metrocrat pals funneled out a fake meme in the in-the-bag media that legislators were feeling “intimidated” by all the citizens with firearms in the hearing rooms. I don’t doubt that there were a few metrocrat ninnies who do wet their pants at the sight of a firearm alone.
But Paymar was deflecting – trying to draw attention away from the fact that his proposals were getting creamed. Even in a legislature controlled by Metrocrats.
What would be less humiliating for a legislator: to claim that a mob with guns killed your bill, or the fact that even your own party deserted your cause?
That is the only reason Paymar is proposing this change in the law.
It’s stupid, of course. Andy Aplikowski writes:
There were how many murders overnight in the Twin Cities? We have rampant gang warfare being carried out on the streets, but the highbrow lawmakers and bureaucrats are more focused on taking guns out of the hands of peaceful law abiding citizens. They are far less dangerous than violent criminals
We know that. So does Paymar. This proposal isn’t about facts.
———-
The Real Americans that stymied Paymar last spring are not sleeping through this. We’ve got work to do on Tuesday:
The Advisory Committee on Capitol Security will hold two meetings to consider changing current law to ban concealed carrying of firearms by permit-holders in the state Capitol. The first meeting will be held this Wednesday, August 14, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107. This meeting will focus on discussion of current law and policy, and there will be no public testimony heard at this meeting regarding firearms on the Capitol Complex. To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.
On Tuesday, August 20, this committee will meet again from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107 to discuss policy changes to current standards regulating firearms on the Capitol Complex. Please attend this meeting and OPPOSE these changes to current law that would ban concealed carry in the state Capitol. Public testimony will be heard (though time may be limited). If you wish to testify, please submit your name in writing to angela.geraghty@state.mn.us. To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.
Please plan to arrive at least an hour before each meeting. Remember, with a permit, concealed carry is lawful in the Minnesota State Capitol and other state buildings in the area if you have notified the Commissioner of Public Safety of your intent to do soin advance
Tuesdays are rough – they probably are for most of us in the private sector, and as little as the DFL knows about the private sector, they surely know that.
But I’m going to do what I can. I hope you will too.
Level-setting: Berg’s Laws are pretty much inviolable rules of human (largely political) behavior based on years of observation. And while Berg’s Seventh Law gets most of the action these days, Berg’s Tenth is getting a workout, too.
Berg’s Tenth Law reads:
Berg’s Tenth Law of Quantum Context: When a liberal says a conservative is “lying”, the odds of the “lie” being merely an ambiguity triggering some form of cognitive dissonance increases in geometric proportion with the volume and stridency of the liberal’s declaration. Here are the references in this blog to Berg’s 10th Law.
It’s a nice broad (but iron-clad) law. But sometimes laws need corollaries.
Which brings us to “The Santorum Corollary” to Berg’s Tenth:
The Santorum Corollary to Berg’s Tenth Law: If the news media reports something askance about a conservative’s behavior, a full look into the facts will almost invariably show that it was reported with key context missing.
That’s almost invariably. People misbehave; sometimes they’re conservatives, sometimes they’re apolitical, and sometimes they’re liberals; the media reminds us of the conservative ones, anyway (sometimes in an onanistic frenzy).
But the Santorum Corollary is nearly airtight, as in this week’s episode; the lefty “alternative” media thought they heard Rick Santorum saying something weird - or so they were told by the HuffPo, which is paid good money to do “progressives’” thinking for them:
Here’s the “story”, as reported by the HuffPo:
Speaking to anti-abortion group Students for Life after receiving an award last month, Santorum attempted to explain what he saw as an enthusiasm gap between liberal and conservative activists. During his speech, a clip of which can be seen above, via Right Wing Watch, Santorum argued that the pro-choice movement infuses passion about abortion rights into “every aspect of their life.” He said that because of this, showering at a gym had become an “uncomfortable” prospect for students.
(Switching into leftyblogger cant): Oh, noez! Can I haz weird?
(Back to English): Showering around pro-choicers is “uncomfortable?” That sure sounds…off, doesn’t it?
But the HuffPo said it! And thus it must be The Revealed Truth! Every leftyblogger took the “story” as gospel in the tittering, Junior-high cadence that is the lingua francaof the “Reality Based” alt-media community.
But was it accurate?
Have you read the Santorum Corollary yet? Of course not!
From the Byron York piece that the HuffPo wrenched out of context…:
“In July, members of anti-abortion group Students For Life, the group Santorum was addressing, complained that they had been bullied by pro-choice activists after using facilities at an Austin Y.”
“The group had come to the area to show support for anti-abortion legislation then being debated at the state Capitol, and had made last-minute arrangements to use showers at the gym. They did so one night, with the students entering the building in shifts wearing blue shirts, indicating support for the bill. After the first night went without incident, the Y contacted a director at Students For Life and asked them not to return.”
According to the director of the anti-abortion group, YMCA staffers stated that abortion rights activists had intimidated them into making the decision:
“Said, again, ‘You guys [the pro-life students] were respectful. We have no problems with you, in particular, however there were some people that support abortion who talked to our staff, intimidated them.’ They actually said that they felt threatened, and they asked us not to come back,” [Students for Life director Alexa] Coombs said.
So apparently its the pro-infanticide crowd that gets hinky about cognitive dissonance…
…and feels the need to sexualize their own bigotries.
Now, who are the weird, skeevy ones?
Just so we’re clear on that.
Michael Paymar is back.
His attempt to make the law-abiding gun owner pay for the Newtown Massacre squibbed in the last session; even his own party deserted his effort; even some sensible DFLers like Rep. Hilstrom threw Paymar and his metrocrat extremists under the bus.
But he and his buddies in the mainstream media are trying a different tack; around the time his bills bogged down amid party defections and an avalanche of public opposition, Paymar and the metrocrat extremists started a whispering campaign that the legislators were “intimidated” by the number of citizens who showed up at the hearings with firearms – legally, naturally (the law allows people to carry in the Capitol complex if they are legal carry permittees and they notify the head of Capitol security).
Of course, it is an objective fact that Paymar is vastly safer in a room full of carry permittees – who’ve passed background checks and completed training in the subject – than he’d be in a room full of, well, DFLers. Or any other private citizen. Because it’s an objective fact that carry permittees, nationwide and in Minnesota, are a couple of orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime than the general public are.
But Paymar wants to continue the slander of his fellow citizen; he’s authoring a bill for the next session that’d clamp down on citizens carrying in the Capitol complex.
It’s not just a solution in search of a problem, of course; it’s a bitchy little slap at the law-abiding citizen.
I can’t wait until he’s in the minority again.
I noticed this late last week; Buzzfeed noting that the GOP is working on a national level to turn the Democrats’ “War on Women” rhetoric back in their faces:
After enduring an election year in which the Obama campaign advanced a largely successful narrative that the GOP’s platform was anti-woman, the Republican National Committee has spent much of the past month gleefully highlighting the indiscretions and sexual harassment charges of male Democratic politicians.
With a flurry of public memos, tweets, and op-eds, the RNC is working to make the Democratic Party take ownership of Eliot Spitzer, who resigned the New York governorship after a prostitution scandal and is now running for city comptroller; San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, now facing allegations of sexual harassment; and Weiner, whose online sexual dalliances have driven the political news cycle all week, and given RNC communications director Sean Spicer some irresistible ammunition.
I’m inclined to call Reince Preibus and tell him to send his counter-message SWAT team here to Minnesota.
We’ve got a doozy for him.
———-
I had a conversation with a modestly prominent MNGOP source last week. Yet again, the source noted, the DFL-leaning media was trying, in their words, to “shame” a female conservative.
I’m not going to identify the former political figure involved; they’ve asked for people to keep their noses out of their private lives, and I’m going to do exactly that, and urge you to do the same.
But the source referred me to the Twitter feed of Shawn Towle, of “Checks and Balances”, a regional political publication.
Last week Towle tweeted with the breathless glee of a seventh-grader who’s just disovered his older brother’s stash of Playboys:
@ChecksnBalances: @ChecksnBalances: Breaking: alla #weiner style @UMNnews confirmed via source this pic [whose link I'm going to redact] is [the female conservative]
Towle tries, in successive tweets and with his oddly stunted written delivery (I think “alla” means “a la”), to equate the “incident” – a photo of a female conservative in her underwear – to the Anthony Weiner controversy.
I’m going to redact the photo; it’s on a “Tumblr” blog with one post – a photo – and no comments.
And if you have read Shawn Towle, it doesn’t seem a big stretch to think that he does think there’s an equivalence between…:
Or, for that matter, that Aaron Rupar of the City Pages – who writes about this “issue” like he’s covering the fall of the Twin Towers, only with that little tinge of smug, self-righteous prurience he seems to bring to ”reporting” on conservative women with marital difficulties or boyfriend trouble – thinks this is a story.
How bad was Towle and Rupar’s “reporting?” Even Nick Coleman – who rarely has a kind or constructive word to say to anyone to the right of his little brother Chris, the Mayor of Saint Paul – twote:
@NickColeman: City Pages published a pic of [the subject of the story] in underwear? Why on earth? Have they been to the beach? Maybe CP should get out more.
Or stock up on toilet paper.
And Dave Mindeman at mnpAct tweeted:
@newtbuster: [the subject] Story – Embarrassment for Her..Unnecessary For Public http://t.co/DPE18sgV0V
Yep. This “story” serves no purpose, other than to try to stick it to someone that Rupar and Towle disagree with, in the most personal, ugly way possible. (And no, none of the links you see in my story lead to the actual “story”)
But the real story here isn’t the fact that a couple of wanna-be liberal journos have gotten themselves a week’s worth of whacking material.
No, there are three real stories here:
Stalking- I’ll take the subject of this story at her word that the photo in question was obtained and distributed illegally. The woman who is the subject of this story has been cyber-stalked – with the complete, onanistic approval of at least two Twin Cities “media” outlets (and the tacit approval, I maintain, of most of the rest of the media).
While a civil suit seems a long shot, I do sincerely hope the FBI does in fact find someone to charge in this gross invasion of privacy – and that there are consequences for Towle, Rupar, Checks and Balances and the City Pages. In a just world, there’d be some way to sue them back to the stone age.
The Scarlet “C” – It’s that this is the kind of thing that every female conservative in Minnesota faces if they give the Big Left’s smear machine even the slightest whiff of imperfection. As I said on Friday, there’s a yawning double standard; Bill Clinton’s serial philandering was “Just Sex”; Elliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and Jesse Jackson’s sexual (and pseudo-sexual) peccadillos are accepted as the sort of thing that goes along with being great and powerful. But if a conservative woman for any reason colors outside the social lines that the left abandoned for themselves in the 1970s – gets divorced, has a social life that doesn’t pass their all-critical muster? They get turned into Hester Prynne with a healthy dollop of puritan-via-Beavis-And-Butthead “shaming” thrown in on top.
Women, to Democrats, are supposed to be barefoot, Democrat, and marching to the voting booth to thank the nice Democrat for their abortion and contraceptives. Thinking for themselves is the real crime.
Er, “Blind” Hate – Beyond sheer illogic and “shaming”, though, there’s a whole ‘nother layer of depravity at work here. What Towle and Rupar have done is isn’t just an Alinsky-ite smear job using the tactics of the internet stalker – which would be bad enough.
To dig into the personal details of a wretchedly difficult part of a couple’s personal life – a couple that is not currently involved in politics, no less – and pruriently splash it all over the public square? That’s beyond politics, beyond spite. That’s the kind of ritual misogyny you see in mobs of inbred cretins stoning a woman for infidelity in some Godforsaken third world backwater.
If you’re a female conservative, really, that’s what the Democrats – and their junior-league PR interns at the City Pages - are these days; rural Iran with better coffee.
———-
Questioned about this, liberals say “serves them right, belonging to a moralistic party” – which would be illogical even if their own party was itself morally consistent (which it’s not; the self-appointed party of the poor and the working class has left us with a terrible economy for workers. The self-professed party of minorities has made the economy worse for minorities, and has increased racial strife in this country, all the while mining minority communities for votes. The putative party of women has made “womanhood” all about the disposition of a uterus). It’s the ad hominem tu quoque, arguing that personal inconsistency invalidates an argument. This line of illogic would have you believe that stumping for a moral case is invalidated by not living up to it in every facet of one’s life; it’s actually quite the opposite.
No. The only reason this sort of non-story “story” gets covered by lefty “journalists” – and “covered” to the point they risk going blind – is that, true to Alinsky, it makes an example of any woman that leaves the liberal plantation. It’s done to warn other women – and blacks, latinos, Asians and gays – not to make waves. To sit down on the left side of the bus, and shut up, or the personal cost to you and your family will be just too high.
The only reason it hasn’t worked so far is that so many of Minnesota’s conservative women have enough guts to make Red Adair look like Woody Allen.
…but her slander of conservative groups lives on. A group of Campus Republicans in Missouri were barred admission to Obama’s big Economic speech because of the “safety risk”:
Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety, University of Missouri College Republicans Treasurer Courtney Scott told The College Fix.
The clear goal? Slander conservatives and their groups at every turn, knowing that the media will ignore the mistakes, carry the apologies at face value, and never, ever question the Administration.
Paraphrasing a remark I saw from Jim Geraghty on Facebook this morning:
“Rescues from cars: Zimmerman 4, Kennedy 0″.
Anyone remember this classic?
So, how is it that nakedly partisan bloggers who make things up left and right are gaining street cred while the mainstream media, which spend a lot of time criticizing themselves, are under attack?
Or this one?
“Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square.”
If you’ve been blogging in Minnesota any time at all, you know these quotes.
They’re from Nick Coleman, in his classic column “Blogged Down In Web Fantasy”, from 2004, in which he declared his sloppy brand of war on the Twin Cities bloggers (“Buh-LAW-gurs”, as he memorably pronounced the word on his unlamented radio show) that were starting to chip away at the sand castle he and his fellow “ink stained wretches” lived in. The Strib removed the column from their website years ago, but its legacy lives on, in local blogger and national journalism circles. In it, Coleman claimed that card-carrying journalists like himself were better than bloggers because they’d spent years covering the news, as opposed to bloggers, who merely work for decades and raise families and pay taxes and stuff. Journalists know the rules and operate with accountability, he said (amid a column attacking someone he never did actually name, which was a dodge of accountability and against the rules for “journalists”).
This was when Nick Coleman was riding high – when he had a three-times-a-week column at the Strib for well into six figures, and a morning show at the local leftytalk station…
…where he indulged a curious predilection for crudely sexualizing people who dared to disagree with him (Go ahead – count the gay jokes in the link. Only liberals on a liberal station can get away with that much homophobia).
Well, in The Boss’ immortal words, we’re still here and he’s all gone. From the Strib and AM950 (which I’m told is still on the air, not that anyone cares), at least. I’m not indulging in schadenfreud, here; I don’t believe in Karma, but what goes around comes around.
But old journos never die – they just get jobs with left-leaning non-profits.
And they start blogs. In which they do…
…well, pretty much exactly what Nick Coleman warned us about nine years ago.
The State He’s In – Nick popped up on the radar again. After a stint writing propaganda for a think tank in Saint Cloud, a couple of college classes (in which a fellow student noted he described himself as a “recovering journalist”) and I-really-honestly-don’t-care-what-else, Coleman resurfaced as the “Executive Editor” of “The Uptake”, a videoblog financed by liberals with deep pockets; think a slightly-downmarket MinnPost with more video and less Brian Lambert.
There, he roams the same halls he used to roam. And he gets positive reinforcement from other lefties:
That’s Coleman, in the jaunty racing cap. With (from L) Doug Grow (from the Joyce Foundation-supported MinnPost), Jane Kay, some minion, and Rep. Heather Martens (DFL-66A).
And he’s got a blog. And he still knows stuff…
…about crudely sexualizing his opponents with all the grace of an eighth-grade locker room bully.
As to getting a story right, as opposed to just making things up? Not so much.
Exhibit A: The piece he wrote about the open carry activists canceling their get-together at “Open Streets” (we wrote about it this morning).
Remember: He’s A Professional – I’ll add red emphasis to the frequent, dork-fingered sexualizations just to show how very, very juvenile the old duffer is. Go ahead. Scan it.
The gun-slinging flashers who threatened to bring their guns to town and parade them around openly in Minneapolis and St. Paul have put their warm guns back in their happy pockets and backed down, running away at the first signs of gun-control Mommas and urban bicycling activists.
As someone said on my Facebook page: “Buncha candy asses!”
To be fair, “someone on my Facebook page” is no worse a level of sourcing than Coleman ever did during his “official columnist” career.
And as we discussed this morning, the story had nothing – bupkes – to do with “gun control Mommas and bike activists”. Neither of them ever turned up in the decision. Second Amendment human rights activists mix it up with the usual “gun control mommas” constantly, and win the debate – emphasis on the term “debate” – every single time. Because the law, the Constitution, the facts and morality itself are on our side.
There are two absolute, incontrovertible facts to keep in mind:
Let me re-emphasize this: Coleman, and the dim bulb Jane Kay and habitual liar Rep. Heather Martens, are doing the end-zone happy dance over the non-news non-occurrence of a non-event.
That’s it. That’s their “victory”, the only one they had, even in a state run entirely by liberals. For now.
That’s just pathetic.
Insert The Usual Boilerplate – Coleman lays out the scenario. Sort of:
The story started Monday when a gun-owners group used its Facebook page to invite members to attend the first of this summer’s “Open Streets” events this coming Sunday in South Minneapolis. Although “attend” doesn’t quite cover it: The gun owners specifically were encouraged to bring their weapons and to flash them in public, carrying them openly for the benefit of all those in attendance at “Open Streets,” an ongoing series of good-humored street fairs promoting bicycling and pedestrian rights.
And – Coleman omits – the various virtues of neighborliness. Second Amendment supporters have been doing events like this for years, most notably our “Open Carry Picnics” a few years back at the Lake Harriet Bandshell, where dozens of regular Minnesotans would gather, eat, talk with their neighbors – many with their legal firearms in plain view.
If you heard about them, it wasn’t in the news. The only thing that ever happened was a good time. In the couple such events I attended (sans visble firearm; that wouldn’t be my style, even if I did own a gun and have a carry permit), I remember one person – white, upper-middle-class, female, oozing “Carlton College” attitude from every manicured pore – running to the park police and demanding mass arrests, and being politely rebuffed because we were doing something legal, in a legal manner.
He Doesn’t Know Stuff! – Coleman:
This Sunday’s kickoff event is scheduled for a 20-block stretch of Lyndale Ave. South, one of the south side’s gun-plagued corridors.
And there’s the conceit the left keeps trying – and with the dimmer members of our media and political class, succeeding – at passing off; the idea that guns are the problem. That there’s a “plague” of guns prowling Lyndale from the Twenties through the Fifties, randomly picking off innocent passersby and kids doing homework in their living rooms.
It’s untrue, of course; we have a plague of people who use guns to enforce their gangs’ rules, protect their (illegal) business’ turf from competition, take out revenge for various slights (in a manner our modern urban culture glorifies), with guns.
Not a one of them has a carry permit. Not a one of them passed a background check, taken the training course, or bought their firearms legally.
Maybe Coleman doesn’t know the distinction. Or maybe he, like the anti-gun groups with whom his “Uptake” shares funders, really really wants the distinction to be blurred.
If it’s the former, he’s wrong. If it’s the latter, he’s lying.
Again.
The Original Classist Gangsta – Coleman – the child of a highly prominent legislator, the stepchild of a prominent publisher – loves to try to pound the outlines of his childhood into the rough-and-tumble Irish-Catholic-In-America myth. He’s spent a career trying to portray himself as a Studs Terkel “Everyman with a Typewriter” type street journo.
It’s a crock, of course; the last we checked, Coleman lived in a tony part of Saint Paul, near Grand and Summit, a leafy neighborhood dotted with private colleges and tudor homes. And more power to him!
But watch Coleman wrap himself in the “urban activist warrior” flag:
For some reason, the promise/threat of suburban gun flashersbrandishing their weapons along the avenue did not have a reassuring effect on the benighted city dwellers who prefer fewer guns, not more, on their streets.
(“Hey! We don’t vote on civil rights!” Remember that from the gay marriage debate?)
A quick look at the city’s “shot spotter” maps, in addition to showing an alarming number of recorded gun shots on the city’s North Side (dozens each week), shows that there have been a couple dozen shots fired on the streets in the Lyndale-Hennepin area in the past two months.
Yep. Now – can Coleman show us that any of them were fired by law-abiding citizens, much less carry permittees?
Of course not.
Now, it’s time for some classism!:
Imagine how reassured you would feel when hundreds of bearded guys from Andover and Elko show up in North Minneapolis or the Summit-University area of St Paul (“Open Streets” events will take place in both of those communities later this summer) with Bushmasters and Brownings slung over their shoulders or Glocks and Rugers hanging from their paunches.
Condescension for People Not Like Nick is the main color in Coleman’s palette. That and junior-high pseudo-sexual japery.
It’s also part and parcel of the most cancerous trait of the Left; the battle isn’t ideas versus ideas, or even people vs. people. The battle they fight is Classes against Classes. And they define the classes.
At the very least, it’s a mark of intellectual laziness. At the worst, it’s a cancer that’s killed millions in the last 100 years.
But let’s run with the thought; what if hundreds of guys from Elko and Andover and Forest Lake – some bearded and paunchy, some elderly and flinty, some young and smokin’ hot, but every last one of them a carry permittee with the legal right to carry a firearm – did show up at the festivals?
What would happen?
The smart money says “Not a damn thing” – other than anti-gunners acting out on their paranoia.
Thought Experiments for The Unthinking – But since Nick’s in a mood to play hypotheticals, let’s come out and play, shall we?
Here’s a neat mental exercise: Try to imagine hundreds of inner-city residents carrying weapons at the Andover Family Fun Fest, July 13. Just because they can.
Nick, if you’re reading this; let’s do indeed!
I’ll take you up on your challenge! Let’s you and I get “hundreds” of “inner city residents” (by which I assume you mean “black people”, as opposed to “family guys who live in Saint Paul’s Midway”, like me), with legal carry permits, just like you had, and just like I may hypothetically have – complete with objective proof that they are law-abiding citizens that the permit conveys – and trek out to Andover on July 13!
And let’s see what happens!
Just think, Nick: you and me can watch the hijinx unfold!
What do you suppose is going to happen?
Nothing. Nothing is going to happen. Oh, some ninny may run to a cop, who’ll investigate, see the “inner city resident” is a regular schlemiel with a carry permit, and gently tell the complainant to relax. Just like happens with legitimate carriers all over the state or, more usually, doesn’t happen.
More likely? The “inner city” – which I suppose does mean “black” or “Latino” or “H’mong” in Coleman’s mind – carry permittee will tell us to get tied; they have a live to live.
And they’ll be right.
But let’s do get the ball rolling on this, Mr. Coleman.
Heres’s How You Tell A Hack With A “Journalist” Badge He Got From A Box Of Cracker Jacks – Next, Coleman drops any pretense of “journalism” that may have evaded extinction, and openly parrots his whiny pals in the gun-grabber movement; I added emphasis to the really demented stuff:
Openly carrying firearms inside the Minnesota Capitol this winter helped gun-law opponents shoot down gun-safety legislation.
Coleman is regurgitating Heather Martens’ delusion that the law-abiding carry permittees who had notified Capitol security of their intent to carry, and visibly wore their legal, permitted firearms into the hearings, were doing it to “intimidate” the legislators.
It’s bullshit, of course. It was a demonstration of “civil obedience” – showing the legislators that the law-abiding gun owner isn’t the cartoon that ghouls like Jane Kay and Nick Coleman and the City Pages portray to their audiences. We’re regular schlubs who work day jobs and raise kids, just like everyone else. And we vote.
And it worked.
But Coleman isn’t going to let facts get in his way:
But the tactic backfired this time. Maybe you can intimidate people in the Capitol, but not in the cycling community. Bicyclists wee outraged and told the gunslingers to stay away.
They wavered. Then they cracked. Finally, they called off the whole thing when the Gun Control Mommas stood up to them.
Let me put this as bluntly as it needs to be put: Coleman is lying.
The “Gun Control Mommas” – “Moms Want Action”, Jane Kay’s toxic little astroturf group with fewer members than “the Uptake” has paid staff – had nothing to do with the cancellation.
Neither did Coleman’s mythical “cycling community” (Note, Nick: I’m part of the “cycling community”. There was no memo).
Coleman is making things up. He’s taking correlations (a memo from the impotent Jane Kay, facebook proclamations from wannabe “biking community” spokesbots) and making up a causation.
He’s lying.
The Gun Flashers ran for cover. By Thursday, the skedaddling gunsters canceled their Gun Wiggle, blaming the liberal media, bicycle punks and the “intolerance” of the mamas who opposed the plan they had clearly hoped would get them some media time and notoriety. Their plan worked, but not the way they hoped. The guns blew up in their faces.
It’s the closest the gun-grabber “movement” – really a collection of astroturf checkbook advocacy groups – have come to a victory in recent years. And they’re jumping up and down like toddlers that just made a good pants.
Candy asses.
That’s big talk, coming from Nick Coleman, a nakedly (ew) partisan blogger who as we’ve shown makes things up left and right to gain “street cred”; a man who knows nothing about anything he wasn’t told by other people in his vanishingly tiny social circle, but who sat down to share his every thought with the moon. Like a grafitti artist holding a spray paint can between his knees, he’s tagging the public square, and doing it very, very badly.
A man who’ll never answer for any of his lies and distortions because he’s never had to; he’s used and abused the “journalist/columnist’s” factual “get out of jail free” card while enjoying the protection of the Big Institutional Media system his entire career, and who now – let’s be honest – gets paid to parrot the lies he’s told to parrot.
Same as he ever was. Just much, much smaller.
UPDATE: I didn’t even catch all of Coleman’s lies. Attorney David Gross – one of the legal workhorses of the Second Amendment movement in Minnesota – left a comment which points out even more perfidy.
One of many quotes worth reading (hence you should read the whole thing):
…Coleman was lying some more, as I read the published material, when he claimed that the Open Streets sponsors were against what Shelley had planned. I guess he can’t help himself from not letting the facts get in his way.
“Priem said Open Street organizers will not ask the gun owners not to attend. ‘Everyone is welcome at Open Streets,’ she said.”
Keep ‘em coming.
How long has it been since I, or any Twin Cities conservative blogger, lit up a Nick Coleman column?
Seems like forever.
Fisking Nick “I Know Stuff” Coleman used to be to Twin Cities blogging what bread was a a meal; a staple. But since Nick’s exit from the Strib, he’s been pretty much out of sight.
No more.
Tune in at noon.
A chunk of the next generation thinks a president siccing the IRS on his opponents is juuuuuust fine:
Remember; they’re college kids. “Tomorrow’s leaders”.
We’re so screwed.
A liberal acquaintance of mine on Twitter told me yesterday that this bit spelled out the case against the NRA “in a logical way”.
@tjswift2 @mitchpberg Reading the piece actually makes the point quite logical. Even if you don’t agree with it. @jruha
— John Shannon (@JohnTShannon) May 28, 2013
It’s by John Fugelsang. Now, I do try to seek civil conversation, but Fugelsang is becoming to the left what Bob was to Baghdad; people who quote or cite Fugelsang are justly derided as ninnies; he’s best ignored completely, or as we conservative bloggers say, “Billied”.
But since the lefty tweep took the trouble, let’s show all the ways in which this piece (transcribed below) does not lay out any case with any logic.
It’s almost too densely-misguided to even “fisk” in the classical sense. For starters, let’s stick with calling out the individual misstatements, evidence-free chanting points and distortions in blue. Like this: {Chanting Point!}
Maybe you’re someone who, like the majority of Americans, supports the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, but you feel kind of creepy about the weapons-grade cretins who run the NRA and do all they can to keep Americans {Ad-hominem – name-calling!} safe from any gun laws that might keep Americans safe. {Assertion made without evidence; not a single gun law proposed would have “kept” a single American “safe”}
Well, you’re not alone. And this is why: loving the Second Amendment while opposing the NRA is every bit as natural as loving Jesus while opposing Westboro Baptist Church.
Let’s take a break here. This is straight out of Saul Alinsky. Linking a mainstream organization of regular Americans – five million of us – with the “God Hates Fags” church? Seems a stretch.
In fact, Wayne LaPierre’s fake constitutional rights lobbying group {Perhaps Fugelsang would favor us by telling us how the lobbying is “fake”?} that gun manufacturers use to buy off congressmen actually has quite a bit in common with the revoltingly fake Christians of Westboro. {The “Buy Off” meme is an interesting one; we’ll come back to that…}
You see, Westboro is to Christianity what Jesus was to ignorance, hatred and inbreeding. They travel the country holding these vile, un-Christian protests at the funerals of anyone evil enough to live in a land that doesn’t stone gay people to death, Leviticus-style. They don’t want to hate gays — they’re just doing it because God commands them and they’re only following orders. It’s like Nuremberg, but with very bad teeth.
There’s a sign that Fugelsang’s piece is targeted at the insufficiently bright; he has to explain who Westboro – the church that pickets soldiers’ funerals – is.
These guys don’t picket outside gay bars or gay bathhouses or gay dance clubs or Lindsey Graham’s Senate office. Just places guaranteed to cause the most outrage possible – like funerals. Then when someone tries to stifle them, they engage in First Amendment lawsuits.
Then you’ve got the NRA. And please understand, when we talk about the NRA, we’re not talking about their members. {Oh, heavens, no!} In Frank Luntz’s 2012 poll of NRA members, 87 percent said they believed Second Amendment freedom went hand in hand with preventing gun violence. That’s responsibility.
But you wouldn’t know that from the group’s leaders. Under the stewardship of Wayne LaPierre, or as I call him, “Il Wayne,” the NRA has become the front for gun manufacturers, the guys who’ve cashed in big time since Newtown.
So much “wrong” packed into two paragraphs.
Where precisely does Fugelsang think the NRA gets its leadership? Who does he think elected, and re-elected, LaPierre? The members – whom current events show to be among the most engaged, informed voters (especially on gun issues and the NRA itself) out there.
And the “Front for Gun Manufacturers” meme is one that the left bruits about without ever showing what the problem is. It’s as if gun manufacturers, staring at legislation that would in many cases actively destroy their market – between the various confiscations, limits and price hikes that the bills would impose on the law-abiding and the law-abiding alone, don’t have a right to take up common cause with the biggest nationwide organization that’s on their side?
If someone tried to ban NPR, you don’t think Volvo or Patagonia or Starbucks would pony up for the defense?
They’re the reason why in America it’s now easier for a civilian to buy lots of weapons designed to kill lots of people really fast than it is for you to remember your old MySpace password. {What the hell is he talking about? This is just barking lunacy}
But while they’re protecting profits, they’re also juicing up profits through fear-mongering mailings about how Obama’s coming to confiscate your weapons.
Here’s a little tip, Skeeter: The fact that you’re able to heavily arm yourself while publicly calling Obama a gun-grabbing tyrant is pretty much proof that he’s not.
And there’s your proof that liberal never have to learn how to debate conservatives. I’ve heard that last bit countless times, even here in Minnesota during the session; if a noxious provision – a useless and price-gouging background check, a magazine restriction with a confiscation provision – hasn’t been signed into law yet, it doesn’t exist, so shut up about it.
But only if it’s about guns. Not like abortion, or defunding NPR, or defending traditional marriage, the very whisper of which is cause to rally the liberal troops.
By opposing background checks at gun shows — checks supported by 90 percent of Americans — the NRA guarantees that guns can be legally bought through the gun-show loophole by felons or third parties who sell to felons. And then those legal guns just kind of disappear, get sold a few more times, and when the cops recover those weapons years later from a killing that wiped out a playground full of kids, the NRA can say, “Look, illegal guns! Background checks wouldn’t have stopped anything.” See, who needs the black market when you’ve ensured that bad guys can get guns freely on the open market? {In junior high writing class, the story would then end “And Then I Woke Up”. The scenario exists only in John Fugelsang’s imagination}
Background checks only infringe on your Second Amendment rights if you’re a felon, a terrorist or criminally insane. And if you’re all three, you probably already work as an NRA lobbyist. {Not just an ad-hominem, but a really stupid one} It’s all about the money.
Westboro ignores the teachings of Jesus and takes one line of Leviticus out of context to justify their homophobic evil.
The NRA ignores the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” part and takes one line out of context to justify their blood-soaked greed.
The NRA ignores nothing – “well-regulated” meant “can hit what it shoots at” in 1787, and it still does. But Fugelsang, like every liberal who skis this well-worn rhetorical slope, ignores the whole “right of the people” bit. In his blood-soaked ignorance.
OK. It’s time for the home stretch. The part where Fugelsang – who has become one of the lefty alt-media’s name-brand public intellectuals, their sine qua non of debate – closes his case with eloquent logic, a command of fact, and calm reason:
Homophobia is an insult to God, and opposing gun safety is an insult to living people. {That’s right! If you smear the label “gun safety” on a polished turd like Michael Paymar’s background check bill – which will never deter a single crime – you love death!}
These groups are both rackets and they’re both doomed. Because the WBC has made untold Americans realize, “Hey, I don’t want to be like that.” {The NRA’s membership has increased by over a quarter since Newtown}
And now, the deal closer – the all-important final sentence:
And Wayne LaPierre’s complete indifference to the consequences of gun proliferation makes more NRA members realize every day, “Dude, maybe I’m OK with my own penis size.”
All that buildup…for a dick joke?
(I could throw in a “Berg’s Seventh Law” reference here, but that’d be gratuitous)
Here’s the scary part: it’s no dumber than most of the left’s arguments.
But John Fugelang? Not so much.
Wonder why Obama’s gun grab legislation tanked – and, beyond that, why Obama quietly tried to appropriate the “guards in schools” idea for himself?
Because the American public – the part west of the Hudson and east of the Sierra Madre, anyway – is closer to the NRA than they are to Obama:
After the NRA school-guard strategy was roundly denounced as outright crazy by the pundits, — the editors of theNew York Times called it “delusional, almost deranged” — President Obama came out with … aproposal for armed guards in schools. It is no small feat for an out-of-touch, on-the-ropes organization to get the president to basically endorse its signature policy proposal at a time of national debate.
But, then again, it turned out that 55% of Americans supported the NRA proposal. Turns out, it was the people calling it crazy — like the editors of the New York Times— who were out of the mainstream.
Meanwhile, pundits denounced gun-rights activists who said that the right to bear arms is in part a protection against government tyranny. Only a crazed militia type could possibly believe that, right? Except that — go figure — 65% of Americans see gun rights as a protection against tyranny. And only 17% say they disagree. Once again, it’s the critics who appear to be out of the mainstream.
We Second Amendment Human Rights activists have always known this, of course.
We just have to keep coming back and proving it every few years.
And I suspect we always will.
Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter. 
I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.
One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.
I’ve rung up quite a number of occurrences of Berg’s 7th over the years. And I’ve found another.
Big-time.
Sean Higgins at the WashEx finds yet another case of a major-media “fact-checker” burying inconvenient facts to slander gun owners.
Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.
“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”
“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”
Well, among others.
Read the whole thing. Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind. It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.
Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.
Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.
…it’s only Republicans that are corrosively racist.
Keep repeating it until the authorities instruct you to stop.
The media is having its usual bout of victorian vapours over this picture.
This would fool MPR, the AP, or any leftyblogger.
But as Stacey McCain notes, there is just not a chance in hell this isn’t a false-flag:
I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.
- Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
- Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.
What’s the old saying? ”If something is too good to be true, it probably is”?
That’s true for photographs too, isn t it?
My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.
- . . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.
Fearless prediction: This will turn out to be a bit of false-flag slander. This is what the Democrats, nationally and here in Minnesota, do when they’re in trouble.
Second fearless prediction: given the way it’s disappeared from the media, they are probably on the brink of finding that the shooting at the Obama headquarters in Denver was a false-flag, too – just like the one four years ago.
It’s been my theory for a long time that liberals in Minnesota are incapable of carrying on an informed civil debate because in places like the Twin Cities – and in some careers, all of Minnesota – liberals can, or at least could until recently, go an entire lifetime without encountering a conservative thought.
From the left-safe, feminized public school system, through the eliminationist “progressive” ghetto of the university system, a young person can spend the first 20-odd years of their life without ever encountering a conservative opinion on a level deeper than a progressive’s cliche. If they go into a career dominated by the left – teaching, academia, journalism, civil service work – and/or live in a place dominated by the left, like New York, Minneapolis or Madison, they can carry that ignorance well into middle age.
David French at The Corner has a similar, complementary observation; his thesis, that liberals in major liberal centers are much more prone to speaking and acting out of incivility and hatred, comes from the lack of diversity in these liberal centers:
The heartland of American leftism is less intellectually diverse than any large conservative community in the United States. The entire cities of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.
Don’t believe me? In 2008, McCain/Palin won 73 percent of the Evangelical/born-again vote. By contrast, San Francisco gave Obama/Biden 84 percent of its votes. All the boroughs of New York City (except Staten Island) went for Obama by wider margins than 73 percent, with Manhattan giving Obama 85 percent of its votes. There were similar numbers for Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In other words, these major American cultural centers are less diverse than churches entirely filled with self-selecting populations of Bible-believing Christians. Leftists have greater group solidarity than Christians.
French quotes that noted liberal tool Cass Sunstein, in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Law of Group Polarization”:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.
Which explains everything from Pauline Kael to Mike Malloy.
This next graf deserves to be a quote of the day somewhere:
It is a truism of American life that unless a conservative turns off all technology, grabs a gun and a dog, and heads for the hills, he will be exposed to an avalanche of liberal thought and ideas — in education, television, movies, and the Internet. Liberals, by contrast, can and often do live lives isolated from conservative thought, and their ignorance of our ideas is starting to show.
I was very left-of-center when I was a kid; chalk it up to my family. But it was in a place where, once I got out of the house, conservatism was everywhere. I never had the luxury of thinking that my point of view was the only point of view – indeed, I converted to conservatism in college, largely due to the efforts of an English professor, of all things.
I was apparently lucky:
I was first exposed to liberal ignorance of conservatism way back in 1991. I was a new law student and had just walked out of a class with my ears still ringing from the boos, hisses, and jeers at my conservative arguments. A classmate came up to me and said, “I wish they’d let you speak. I’d never heard anything like what you were saying and wanted to hear more.”
I was shocked. I was merely making a standard conservative argument — breaking no new ideological ground. “You’ve never heard an argument like that? Where did you go to college?”
“Princeton.”
Some liberal once told me: “Ignorance breeds hate.” I couldn’t agree more.
And if you’re a conservative in a place like, well, Wisconsin, you don’t need this explained.
I’m not going to get into the politics of the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.
Neither are the leftymedia. In stark contrast to…
…the media are being very circumspect about politicizing the incident.
Why, maybe they’ve learned their lesson!
Or maybe they are, as always, serving the narrative, if they bothered to note the incident at all.
Democrats who unctuously and tiresomely lectured us that “there are no Death Panels” (there are; it’s called Case Management) will smugly declare “Paul Ryan wants to kill Grandma” (whereas Ryan’s plan is intended someone can take care of Grandma – and Grandpa – after 2024).
Jim Geraghty goes into details, not that you really need them.
A couple of stipulations up front before we cut to the chase:
With that out of the way, it’s hard to miss the cascade of caterwauling that’s greeted Michele Bachmann’s statements (along with those of four other House Republicans – Louie Gohmert (TX), Trent Franks (AZ), Tom Rooney (FL), and Lynn Westmorland (GA). ”Why, even John McCain is bagging on her!”, the liberals, and not a few Republicans, phumpher – as if that were news. McCain even throws out the dreaded “M” word, “McCarthy”, which Democrats have turned into a rhetorical nuclear option over the decades (ignorant of the irony; McCarthy was right, there were communist infiltrators, although as his hunt went on it became both too broad and way too easily caricatured.
Speaking of McCarthy, the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy – presumably no relation – unloads on McCain, and Bachmann’s critics, with an excellent, moderately lengthy piece that documents both Huma Abedin’s real, honest-to-pete links to the Muslim Brotherhood (read the article), and shreds the notion that Bachmann et al were “witchhunting”, but rather…:
The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?
Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other
…as well as illuminates some of McCain’s own flip-floppery on the issue:
So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?
Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”
Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:
“I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government”
In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool.
By the way, Rep. Bachmann has claimed – with some considerable justification – that her words have been distorted and wrenched out of context, and she’s released all her communications on the subject to prove it. You be the judge.
So the flap isn’t about “witchhunting” Muslims in government. It’s about transparency and honesty about influence at the highest levels (as Rep. Bachmann’s letter to Rep. Ellison, whose has denied any knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood, although his 2008 trip to Mecca was largely bankrolled by a group that, court documents indicate, is affiliated with the Brotherhood) makes clear. It’s about transparency.
Lessons from this incident? Simple: When the media sounds off on conservatives, distrust, verify, and almost always distrust some more.
Personally? I’m not sure that the Brotherhood is the suffocating danger that some conservatives claim, and even if it were, those are sovereign nations. And I suspect Huma Abedin’s connections to the Georgetown Political Science Elite and Keith Ellison’s membership in the DFL are of more immediate danger to this nation and state, to be honest.
But since the subject is honesty – the flap about Bachmann seems to be little more than Dems trying to draw attention away from the real issue; Hillary Clinton and Keith Ellison’s disingenuity.