Shot in the Dark

Tag: Idiot Elite

  • Our Idiot Elite, Part MMMLCCXVII

    In twenty years of first blogging and then social media, you’d think the semi-literate popsies that populate the ranks of “new big media” would have learned by now: trying to make people you disagree with sound dumb, about things you’re not especially smart about yourself, is going to backfire. Molly Jong-Fast – a gift that…

  • Our Cuturally-Illiterate Elite

    I may owe Ryan Winkler an apology. I mean, growing up in rural North Dakota back when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, even I knew what “uncle Tom” meant when applied to a black man – so naturally I figured someone in his position, Harvard grad and all, would as well. Clearly,…

  • Blue Fragility, Part II

    It’s a steroetype of “blue” America – at least, the “elite” version of it that gets (and makes) the headlines – that liberty, at least the kind that involves something other than waving one’s genitals about and dunking crucifixes in urine – terrifies them. Stereotypes exist for a reason. Blue Amerca’s official vision is that…

  • Open Letter To The House And Senate MNGOP Caucuses

    To:  House GOP Caucus, Senate GOP Caucus From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant Re:  Focus Dear Cauci, Congrats on taking the majority.  I’m truly overjoyed. Now, let’s get real. Focus:  Ever watched someone doing karate?  When they do a strike, they focus all their energy, from their waist on down through their hands, into their knuckle.…

  • Our Idiot Elite, Part CXXXIX

    Kevin Williamson: There’s a great deal of talk about elitism in American politics lately, most of which misses the point: The problem isn’t that our media and our policy debates are dominated by elites—of course they are; that’s what elites do—it’s that our elites aren’t very good. Our elites do not effectively perform the social…

  • Our Idiot Elite: Freedom Is Slavery, Winston

    Was there a time when being published in The New Yorker meant you were a better, smarter, more capable writer than, say, a liberal blogger? I dimly remember such a time. But in reading Kalefa Sanneh’s “The Hell You Say” – an apologia for gutting the First Amendment and letting government decide how much freedom of speech we…

  • Our Idiot Elite, Redux

    The conclusion of Peggy Noonan’s latest is really a self-contained message on its own: What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens? What happens to its elites? It barely needs context. But the context is damning enough, and I urge you to read it.

  • Our Idiot Elite

    One of the things you learn by studying “progressivism” (as starkly opposed to classical liberalism) is the contempt its practitioners have for their subjects. Er, citizens.  Sorry.  That was a slip. Micheal Barone reviews a book – ““The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” by Fred Siegel – and  runs down some history…

  • Look Back In Anger

    Do you remember the puddles of smug joy that the clacque of jabbering Ivy League frat-boy buffoons and sorority-sister buffoonettes that run our governent squirted when they signed Obamacare? Byron York sure does – and he documents the descent from the End-Zone Happy Dance of March 2010 to the paranoid catatonia in the West Wing today:…

  • The Most Insulting Delusion…

    … not to mention dumbest conceit that the left has is that so many of them think that if I were given a choice in a race between two candidates – namely: A black Taoist lesbian who was a fierce Austrian-school trench-fighter with a solid private-sector background and a record as a spending hawk and…

  • Animal Farm

    In 2004, lefty commentator Thomas Frank published a book “What’s The Matter With Kansas” – which analyzed the growing conservative majority in America’s heartland… …in the most patronizing, contemptuous way I’d heard until the mainstream media’s response to the Tea Party five years later.  Frank hammered on the idea that conservatives in the heartland were…

  • “Ignorance And Incompetence”

    Remember when Barack Obama, the smooth-talking “smart’ Ivy Leaguer, was going to improve our standing overseas with his “smart diplomacy?” Either do the people of Poland: During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that [Polish underground hero Jan] Karski “served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the…

  • The Exposed Intellectual Id Of The DFL, Chapter CXXVI

    Today’s example of the DFL’s exposed intellectual id is Nicholas Dolphin of (where else) Minneapolis, who wrote a letter to the editor in the Strib – featured, naturally, as their “letter of the day” about a week ago. Mr. Dolphin wrote: State Rep. Kurt Bills, newly endorsed by the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate race, is…

  • Here’s A Flashback For You

    Remember back in 2008, when liberals would stare all starry-eyed into space with that look teenagers used to get when Leif Garrett or Nick Carter appeared in Tiger Beat: “Oooh, Barack Obama was a constitutional lawyer!  That’s an ideal background for a President!” At best, it’s irrelevant; a President needs to know about as much…

  • Hamlined?

    Did Hamline’s faculty break the law when they ganged up to prevent Tom Emmer’s hiring? Law professor Eugene Volokh wonders: Minn. Stats. Ann. § 10A.36 makes it a gross misdemeanor for “[a]n individual or association” to “engage in economic reprisals or threaten loss of employment or physical coercion against an individual or association because of that…

  • Empty Suit Esquire

    When Barack Obama was running for and/or fairly new in office, the left – and others who are impressed with such things – were all dewy-eyed over Barack Obama’s “intelligence” – as measured by the toniness of the diplomas on his wall. He was an Ivy Leaguer, of course – ending the long national nightmare…

  • Overrated

    During the campaign, two of the lefty memes that irritated me the most were “Obama’s smart“, and “Obama was an Ivy Leaguer” and, its close cousin, “Obama was a constitutional law professor”. None of them is especially a qualifier for the office of President. The “ConLaw professor” is the easiest disposed of; the President will…

  • Sedition For We, But Not For Ye

    From 2004, Lex Green at the Chicago Boys blog – the best political/economics blog that I never have time to read – worked over the “United States of Canada” meme – the sore losers who sprang up after John Kerry got sent back to Ville de Palooque: The basic idea is that the Blue Staters…

  • He Musta Been An Ivy Leaguer

    Obama says ” Republicans oppose my policies”: I think early on, a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, ‘Look, let’s not give him a victory, maybe we can have a replay of 1993, ’94, when Clinton came in, he failed on health care and then we won in the mid-term elections and…

  • What Sarah Palin’s Past Year Can Teach Us

    There are a few lessons Republicans, Conservatives, and women who opt not to vote Democrat can learn from the past year in Sarah Palin’s life: No matter how scrupulously you stick to your constitutional role on policy matters, if you are conservative and Christian, your opponents will call you a fundy theocrat. No matter how…

  • Christian Like Me

    Remember the old book “Black Like Me?”  It’s the story of a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who pharmacologically dyed his skin black to pass as Afro-American; the book relates his experiences. I knew it was only a matter of time until someone tried it with Christians. Peter Roose, an undergrad at Brown University, went…

  • Seated Incongruous

    Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article about the ironic incongruities of the past year. He’s got ten. I had to start with this one – on the media’s grotesque double-standard re Sarah Palin and, in this case, Caroline Kennedy: [Palin] surely didn’t give snap answers on foreign policy matters. In no short order, a…

  • The Bottom Of The Class

    Hugh Hewitt is a great friend, and was a crucial benefactor behind the launch of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.  He’s one of the five best radio talk show hosts out there. But if he has one habit that irritates the bejeebers out of me, it’s his constant focus on “credendials” – as if an…