What The In Crowd Knows

A tale as old as time:

Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else. 

While I appreciate the willingness of Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, to call out the hypocrisy of our Ruling Class, this observation isn’t quite right, actually. Dominant liberal culture is all about rule promulgation, not necessarily personally abiding by rules. As time goes on, the pretense fades, and why wouldn’t it? Nothing ever happens to the Ruling Class.

Dobie Gray, a more perceptive social critic than our man Greenwald, was all over this way back in ’65:

I’m in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows
Any time of the year, don’t you hear?
Dressin’ fine, makin’ time
We breeze up and down the street
We get respect from the people we meet
They make way day or night
They know the in crowd is out of sight

Back in ’65, the term “out of sight” roughly meant cool, fashionable, au courant, like that. Some 56 years later, out of sight has a more conventional meaning: in the shadows, behind the curtain, holed up in nondescript office buildings in and around the Beltway. Our in crowd is an industrious lot, and they keep coming up with more rules at all times, whether our Congresscritters weigh in or not.

Any time of the year, don’t you hear? Mocking fools, making rules

But many of our fellow citizens don’t hear, nor are they listening. Instead, we all hear our animatronic Leader of the Free World as he is sent out to joust with the Teleprompter.

We make every minute count
Our share is always the biggest amount
Other guys imitate us
But the original’s still the greatest

Just ask them. If you can identify them.

 

 

 

39 thoughts on “What The In Crowd Knows

  1. Nice. I would go one step further than Dobie. The in-crowd (aka the commies) doesn’t care about reports showing their hypocrisy. They revel in them. The in-crowd’s hypocrisy is the very thing that demonstrates what separates them from the rest of us.

  2. The thing that distinguishes as aristocracy from a republic is that in an aristocracy there is a class of people with different legal rights than commoners. It is not wealth that determines who is and who is not an aristocrat, or education, or political responsibilities. These things are a consequence of the fact that an aristocrat has different legal rights than commoners.

  3. As if on cue, Ondrasik’s new single was blacklisted because it dared call out the ruling class – by name. Remember when protest songs were de rigueur?

  4. Hey, I’m all for it. They ought to tax . . . wait, it says “Tax the RICH?”

    I thought that letter was a B. Never mind.

  5. I remember the Bush years, when he was “Glenzilla,” the scourge of mainstream power. How he claimed that his own publication was censoring him because he wouldn’t source smears.

    Greenwald went so far left that he ended up on the nut-case right. His kind of contrarianism plays well with certain zealots and ideologues but it’s fundamentally adverse to measured journalism. He can at least go back to Tucker and Hannity to rail against the censorship of fact checking. I’m sure he’ll have an amazing future at Breitbart or OAN.

  6. So, unable to actually erect a counterargument to Greenwald’s one single paragraph in this post, the little guy tries to kill the messenger. My compliments to that “measured journalism” turn of phrase. Do tell us when you come across an example of such in your world.

  7. I followed his writing when he was writing for Salon and The Guardian, and found it very helpful for understanding constitutional issues and threats in the US. But he’s really gone off course the last couple of years. His takes now are clearly driven by a personal anger against the left in the US. His writing and his public performances have become so childish. He’s become easy to ignore.

  8. “I wonder how much jail time this guy will see?”

    I’m looking forward to them calling this a “process crime” or maybe it was a “perjury trap” 😂

    To defend Trump, Republicans scoff at ‘process crimes’
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/defend-trump-republicans-scoff-process-crimes-msna1170331

    Evidently Mr. Durham likes his tea very weak, served with a side of desperation, a dollop of last-ditchery laced with a Hail Mary, and a chaser of absurdity. Oh, and he’s willing to let the taxpayers pick up the multi-million dollar tab before returning back to anonymity. I guess he figures that if he doesn’t try to indict somebody, none of the right wing groups whose water he’s carrying will give him any speaking gigs once he’s off the federal dole.

  9. Typical of the troll, I cite a mainstream news source, he counters with something written by an opinion columnist.
    The inability to tell the difference between reporting and opinion has been the troll’s trademark for years, as it was for his predecessor, Dog Gone.
    The troll thinks like a woman.

  10. If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

    – Bill Vaughan

  11. “I wonder how much jail time this guy will see?”

    Based on the charges they filed today, they must have found less than nothing.

    FWIW: the walleyes are snapping this evening 🎣

  12. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 09.16.21 : The Other McCain

  13. Andy McCarthy has read the Sussman indictment, and reports on it: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-real-story-in-durhams-indictment-of-democratic-lawyer-michael-sussmann/

    The indictment is a place holder, it was filed just before the statute of limitatations ran out. Seems pretty open and shut, Sussman told James Baker that a tech company found suspicious web traffic between a Russian bank (Alfa) and a Trump corporate server (this was in September 2016). Sussman knew Baker because Sussman had worked in the JD. He told Baker he was just passing along the info as a private citizen, but he billed the time he spent talking to Baker to Perkins-Coie, the law firm Hillary used to conduct oppo research on the Trump campaign.

    FWIW, I remember reading about this in the NY Times back in early November ’16. The article said that a private, anti-Trump network security group had informed the FBI that an Alfa Bank server had pinged a Trump corporate server several times. The article cited an FBI investigator who said that they had looked into it and it was nothing — servers and the apps they run ping each other all the time, nothing to see here.
    Of course, right into November 2016, the FBI, and the NY Times, and some internet trolls assumed that Hillary had a lock on the election.
    That little article that appeared in the NY Times in November 2016 is one of the reasons I was so suspicious of the “Russian Collusion” bull shit from the start. It looked like a scandal “ginned up” for political purposes, a sham pushed by pro-Hillary forces within the JD and the FBI.
    And so it was.

    Here is the NY Times article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html
    And, of course, it turned out to be exactly that.

  14. “The troll thinks like a woman”

    But otherwise exhibits none of DG’s customary written (as opposed to rhetorical) tells.

  15. But otherwise exhibits none of DG’s customary written (as opposed to rhetorical) tells.
    One of the Emerys does. DG was terrible at evaluating her sources. She would make some bizarre claim about economics and cite as proof that she was correct a decade-old draft of a term paper by a community college econ 101 student.

  16. Troll, as usual, doesn’t address the post content, then poops out snark when it thinks others have lost interest. There’s something to be said for consistency, I guess.

  17. 👆Right — it would be totally inappropriate for someone to respond to Woolly’s OT comment.

    I used to read Greenwald on a regular basis until I began to run out of patience with his sensational accusations. I was not surprised at his banishment. I had quit reading him because, frankly, I got exhausted by his cries of “wolf” and his relentless self pity.

    /“I feel like Glenn has lost his moral compass and his grip on reality,” the Intercept’s editor in chief, said in an interview. “He’s done a good job of torching his journalistic reputation. He’s a huge bully.”/ https://theintercept.com/ staff/betsyreed/

    Greenwald does indeed appear to have lost track of journalistic ethics in pursuit of self aggrandizement

  18. Still unable to actually erect a counterargument, much less even a comment to Greenwald’s one single paragraph in this post. But ad hominem attacks, you’re right there.

  19. Troll still doesn’t address post content. It’s not about Greenwald, it’s about the apparatus kept out of view.

  20. In other words, Emery, you steaming pile of dog crap, you couldn’t handle Greenwald exposing the criminal enterprise cult that you so so ardently follow.

  21. Greenwald resigned from the Intercept almost a year ago. He said he resigned because his publisher was censoring his stories that pointed out the )(obvious) corruption of Joe Biden.
    Trump exposed a lot of people’s authoritarian instincts. Drove them bonkers.

  22. And now the Pentagon admits it killed multiple civilians, and no terrorists, in Biden’s Afghan drone strike.

    What a monumental f*ck up by Biden. Unbelievablly bad. I admit that even I didn’t think Slow Joe could f*ck up this badly. I figured that there were some adults who could mediate the idiocy and temper tantrums as Biden’s mental state declined from medicrity to drooling idiocy.
    But he is surrounded by the sorriest excuse for “elites” this country has ever produced.

    Totally underestimates the taliban, while overestimating the abilities of our Afghan allies.
    Literally abandons the Afghans at Baghram in the middle of the night, leaving the taliban literally BILLIONS of dollars worth of American war gear.
    When Kabul collapses, Biden f*cks up the withdrawal. Thirteen American soldiers and more than a hundred Afghan civilians are killed by al Qaida in the airport we “controlled.”
    In anger and lashing out, Biden’s generals kills a goat herder with one expensive drone, and kills more than ten innocent Afghans, including multiple children, in another drone strike.
    Biden than pulls out out last soldiers and turns the airport over to the taliban, leaving hundreds of American citizens and thousands of Afghsn green card holders behind.

    Oh, and Biden pissed off the European allies that we had begged to take part in our occupation of Afghanistan.

    This was a f*ck up of epic proportions. Biden’s folley will echo for decades. He armed out enemies, dissapointed our allies, and showed Russia and China that we are weak with Biden in office, and that his advisers are just as dumb and spineless as he is.

  23. More proof of Team Biden’s fundamental stupidity:
    “The French government has immediately recalled its ambassador to the US for consultation in response to the recently announced national security partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia.
    . . .
    It’s believed to be the first time the French have resorted to such a move in modern times, a French official told CNN.”
    https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/french-ambassador-to-the-us-recalled/index.html

    There has never been an American presidential administration more incompetent. The Afghan withdrawal debacle, The crisis at the border, the utter failure to lead with the vaccine and the economy. We seem to have a President Joe Manchin these days.
    Where are the endorsements of Biden’s decisions by Obama and Hillary? They want nothing to do with this disaster.
    Everything has failed Biden. He is a third-rate intellect surrounded by fourth rate bureaucrats, and, nope, it ain’t going to get better.

  24. From Insty:
    The real failure — and I’ve warned about it since the beginning — is that our “public health” establishment has been so obviously corrupt and politicized that people who would have trusted it a decade or two ago now don’t. And the reason they don’t is that it’s been so obviously corrupt and politicized as to be untrustworthy.
    That’s a colossal institutional failure. It’s what you get when your institutions are controlled by people who are smug, inept, and lacking in moral fiber or self discipline. Which, sadly, is most of our institutions today. And that’s a much bigger threat to America than Covid, and one for which there are no vaccines.

  25. people who are smug, inept, and lacking in moral fiber or self discipline

    Sounds like the trolls who hang around here.

  26. And the bad news continues on a Saturday, even when Biden has run away from DC for a long weekend.
    If this was normal, you would expect to see the ex-dem presidents say something to the press about how it looked bad, but this was all normal stuff, Joe is okay.
    Where is Obama?
    Where is Bill Clinton?
    Where is Jimmy Carter?
    Nobody wants a bite of this shit sandwich.
    Antony Blinken is the SecState who signed off on the disastrous bugout from Afghanistan and the back-stab of the French.
    You could hardly dream up a person who fits the description of a credentialed elite than Tony Blinken (FYI, Blinken is big on allowing the Iranians to get nukes):
    Blinken attended the Dalton School in New York City until 1971.[6] He then moved to Paris with his mother Judith and Samuel Pisar, whom she married following her divorce from Donald. Pisar was the lawyer and confidant of British publisher Robert Maxwell.[13][14] In his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the story of his stepfather, who was the only Holocaust survivor of the 900 children of his school in Poland. Pisar found refuge in a US tank after making a break into the forest during a Nazi death march.[15][16] In Paris, Blinken attended École Jeannine Manuel.[17]

    Blinken attended Harvard University from 1980 to 1984,[18] where he majored in social studies and co-edited Harvard’s daily student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.[5][19][20] Blinken also wrote a number of articles on current affairs for the Crimson.[21][18] Blinken worked as an intern for The New Republic for around a year after graduating from Harvard.[6][18] He entered Columbia Law School in 1985 and earned his J.D. in 1988.[22][23] After graduation, he practiced law in New York City and Paris.[24] Blinken worked with his father Donald to raise funds for Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in the 1988 United States presidential election.[5]

    In his monograph Ally versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis (1987), Blinken argued that exerting diplomatic pressure on the Soviet Union during the Siberian pipeline crisis was less significant for American interests than maintaining strong relations between the United States and Europe.[25] Ally versus Ally was based on Blinken’s undergraduate thesis.[19]

  27. And now Milley says the drone strike that killed aid workers and seven children was done by the book.
    “In a dynamic high threat environment, the commanders on the ground had the appropriate authority and had reasonable certainty that the target was valid”
    Good Lord! He thinks that excuses him!
    There is truly no accountability for Senile Joe and his cronies.

    So much for Biden’s claim of “over the horizon capabilities.” The intelligence that led to the US kill an aid worker and seven children was probably fed to our military by the f’n taliban.

  28. Gotta love that Durham and Horowitz managed to bank expenses for that long and come up with very little.

  29. Where’s Mr D — it would appear some OT comments are more equal than others….

    I’m currently occupied with more pressing matters.

  30. BTW Thanks for making my point regarding your self righteous indignation towards some OT comments and to others — not-so-much

    Actually I am dealing with something in real life right now that is significantly more important than your whining.

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