never prompted a single call for "civility" or for "disagreeing respectfully."
We're supposed to have forgotten that no one was asked to tone down the rhetoric because of this:
or this
or this
So when I see these feckless conventional-wisdom beltway-insider moderate centrist idiots spewing bullshit like this:
If a hateful person makes you hate, they win. If a bully makes you bully, they win. If a vulgar person makes you vulgar, they win. Let us meet hate with love. Let us meet bullying with an embrace. Let us meet vulgarity with civility. This is how our country and world win.
Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of @PressSec and her family from a restaurant.
This, in the end, is a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America:
Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates!#sad
I just want to scream.
Like people are saying with a straight face that Sarah Huckabee and Stephen Miller should be allowed to eat in peace and how dare people bother them when they're just going about their daily lives, but apparently this:
is a satisfactory level of etiquette.
So if you're keeping score at home, remember: DSA activists shouting at Kirstjen Nielsen = They're the real fascists. Crowd of white trash screaming at Jim Acosta while he tries to do his job? Um. . . Inadvertent whistle, no foul on the play.
Here's the thing. It doesn't matter if we are polite to these people, if we are rude to these people, if we scream in their faces or recite love sonnets to them. They hate us. They will always hate us. There is no level of politeness that will make them behave in a civil way towards us. (And by "us," I'm speaking as a cis/het white dude. For anyone who is female, LGBT, black or brown, that goes at least double.)
No matter how many lunkheads on your Twitter feed spout the "gosh, this rudeness on the part of the left is making me want to support Trump" line, that line is bullshit. That person was always going to support Il Douche. That person was never on the fence until Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant and then thought "well, gee, if the liberals are going to be this ill-mannered, I don't see that I have any choice but to throw my support behind President Pussy Grabber, the guy who mocks handicapped people and encourages violence at his Junior Varsity Nuremburg Rallies and insults the IQs of anyone with whom he disagrees! I just have to take a stand for civility!"
Now, is making it uncomfortable for these horrid people to appear in public going to help anything? I don't know. I don't imagine they are capable of feeling shame, and if one of them was somehow shamed into quitting, there'd be a dozen other soulless ghouls lined up to interview for the vacancy. But it can't hurt. It can't get any worse. And if I remember my History classes, we didn't defeat fascism last time by being polite to it. We stormed their fucking beaches.
Fuck their "civility."
I don't know if it's true, but I always suspected that the name "Cowboy Junkies" came from a pseudonym used by Nick Cave on the "Honeymoon in Red" album. O ne track, he is listed as "a drunk cowboy junkie." This record came out in 1987, by which time Cowboy Junkies must have already been formed, but maybe he used it earlier? I don't know and I guess it doesn't matter. Anyway, enjoy a few selections from CJ's first two regular albums "The Trinity Session" and "The Caution Horses" as well as a collection of demos that was released under the awkward title "Whites Off Eartn Now."
And, of course, the song that really got them famous, their cover of the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane. When Lou Reed heard their version, he is supposed to have remarked that this was the way he had always intended the song to sound. I don't know if that story is true, because VU's version doesn't sound at all like they're trying to sound the way this sounds. But either way, it's a darn fine version.
I am so sick of this trend in columnisting. I am so sick of all the column-inches wasted on telling "liberals" that if only they would reach out to Trumpanzees and get to know them and try to understand them, then. . . I don't know, we'd all join hands and sing My Country, 'Tis of Thee and work togather for the greater good or some such bullshit. I have yet to see a single word written telling Conservatives that they should go out and shake hands with some real progressives and see that they're just like you in so many ways! No, it's always assumed to be incumbent on us, those of us on the leftward side of the spectrum, to be the ones to reach out and try to understand and make common cause with people who are literally fine with tearing children away from their parents and locking them in cages.
Here's the latest example I came across by someone named Salena Zito in the New York Post:
Honestly, it sounds like the tagline for a sequel to Deliverance.
What the hell happened to these poor kids out on the "Heartland?"
Let's find out, shall we?
On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard. We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Mass.
Woah, woah, hold on a second. You never left Massachussets? And you think you were in the "heartland?" You gotta go to like Kansas or Nebraska or, you know the heart is in the center, right? Okay, so what did you all do on your adventure into the forbidding hinterlands of Massachusets, a daunting 85-mile trip?
We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Mass., where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small-business owners, waitresses and firemen about their struggles living in small-town America.
The mayor, the police chief, cops, mayoral staff, business owners. . . you know - reg'lar folks!
The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. Chicopee is about 90 miles west of their prestigious university in Cambridge, but when it comes to shared experience, it might as well have been 1,000 light years away.
HOW? You didn't go to fucking Borneo, you went to the 'burbs. It's not like the people in Chicopee don't have paved roads or indoor plumbing. It's not even like they don't get the same cable channels.. They live in Massachusets. All you have to do is talk about the Sawx or Tom Frickin Brady. It's not like you needed a translator or anything.
“So,” I said, “who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president?” None of the students had an answer. It hadn’t come up in their conversations and they didn’t know I had privately asked each person whom they’d voted for. So I let a minute pass and told them. “Nearly every one of them voted for Trump.” My students at first looked stunned.
Oh my God this is such bullshit.
We're honestly expected to believe that these Harvard students, these scions of old-money dynasties and internet libertarians, were completely unfamiliar with Trump-voting Republicans. Because, of course, we're meant to assume that the wealthy "elites" are all limousine liberals and only the salt-of-the-Earth small town proles voted for trump!
We were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard’s Institute of Politics, called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America. Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time.
See, but no one would ever suggest that maybe the good people of Chicopee might benefit from a trip to Boston or New York or San Francisco. It's perfectly fine that small-town Americans are completely unfamiliar with the locales where the majority of Americans live, it's only the city slickers who are assumed to be missing out by not having visited the "heartland."
I have been a national political journalist for nearly 15 years. Whenever and wherever I travel in this country, I abide by a few simple rules: No planes, no interstates and no hotels.And definitely no chain restaurants.
No Interstates?
You literally travel the country via the back roads? Like some 1930s wandering troubadour?
And by the way, if you want to meet these real Americans of the heartland, the first place to go would be chain restaurants. Who do you think keeps shit-merchants like Applebee's and Chili's in business?
It's not big-city folks. We have our choice of many fine eateries from greasy-spoon diners to Michelin-star cuisine. I've lived in Atlanta for about 13 years now and it took me about 10 to figure out that once you get out into the sticks, you might as well look for an Outback or a Carraba's because all these tempting-looking little mom and pop restaurants - the ones who spell "Kountry Kookin'" with Ks, they almost universally suck. Hard. You'd think, you'd expect, that little local restaurants out in the country would have that good old fashioned southern cooking that you've heard so much about, but I have yet to find it. Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. Please do go on.
The reason is simple: Planes fly over and interstates swiftly pass by what’s really happening in the suburbs, towns and exurbs of this nation.
Nothing.
Nothing is happening.
People are watching sports on TV, playing Call of Duty or Fortnight or whatever on their X-boxes and posting memes to Twitter and Facebook, same as we're doing here in Metropolis.
Staying in a hotel doesn’t give me the same connection I can get staying in a bed and breakfast where the first person I meet is a small-businessperson who runs the place and knows all the neighborhood secrets.
Oh, yeah, that's totally something these Harvard kids wouldn't get. No rich person would ever stay in a quaint B&B in a small town in New England. That's something that only us reg'lar folk can appreciate!
Also, you have to spend time in a community to really report on it. Parachuting in for a few hours to interview the locals can lead to flawed evaluations. When you are short on time, your instincts can get blurred and you gravitate toward the shiny objects, the oddball people and conditions that make the most noise, instead of taking a broader focus on the bigger, fuller picture.
Yes, you have to take the time to get to know the mayor and the chief of folice to really get your finger on the pulse of the average small-town resident.
Those simple rules are what intrigued students at the Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) after hearing me speak at a Pizza and Politics event on the school’s campus last fall. Days after my speech, two IOP directors said the students wanted to learn more from me. I told them the best course would be a total immersion into the less-populated parts of the country, no different from the way I approach my daily job.
Your daily job? Your daily job is writing columns for the New York Post and Washington Examiner and appearing on CNN. So it would seem that you are immersing yourself in New York, DC and Atlanta. And seriously, are you taking the back streets from New York to Georgia?
Chris Kuang, a 20-year-old sophomore from Winchester, Mass., and Sam Kessler, 21, a junior from Blue Bell, Pa., led the charge, recruiting 18 other students for the class, which began in February.
Okay, wait a minute. Blue Bell, PA is a town of about six thousand residents outside of Fort Washington State Park. Winchester is a Boston exurb with a population of around 20,000. You're taking them to a town of Fifty Five Thousand to teach THEM about life in small-town America?
“The best way to blow apart a stereotype is to challenge it,” Kuang, an applied math and economics major, told me.
Yes. That is exactly the way we humans speak. This is clearly a real thing that a fellow human has said out loud.
So, before we started traveling, we held several workshops to discuss their ideas about the “other” America. They admitted they had been fed a steady diet of stereotypes about small towns and their folk:
Okay, I hate to keep harping on this point, but I notice that no one ever bemoans the fact that people in the rural south or midwest are fed a litany of stereotypes about the "coastal elites" in big cities. People from the flyover states have generally been led to believe that Southern California is Baywatch, San Francisco is RuPaul's Drag Race and Oakland is The Warriors. (the movie, not the basketball team.) And I get it. Before I moved to Atlanta, all I thought I knew about Georgia came from the Dukes of Hazard and Deliverance. I don't blame people for their misconceptions about blue state cities, I just wonder why it is that no one feels like they need to be disabused of their misconceptions the way we are always urged to get to know the "heartland."
“backwards,” “no longer useful,” “un- or under-educated,” “angry and filled with a trace of bigotry” were all phrases that came up.
Whaaaaaat? Where would anyone get those impressions?
As my students took their seats in the crowded restaurant, they couldn’t help but notice a 37-member family seated nearby celebrating an 11th birthday for Jasmine Smith, complete with a sparkly unicorn cake. Jasmine quickly struck up a conversation with the students and was thrilled when she found out they were from Harvard. “Well, you know, I am going to go to Harvard,” she proclaimed confidently. Her mother, Monique, smiled and shook her head in agreement. “That is all she has talked about doing for as long as I can remember,” she said. After devouring her cake, Jasmine sat with the students to talk more. “I want to go and be the best I can be at something that will help change my community,” she said. “I want to help make things work. I don’t want to leave and forget where I came from.”
Oh. Uh, Yeah. That is exactly how an 11-year-pld cjild speaks. This is obviously an actual person to whom you actually spoke and not a made up phony anecdote at all.
In our final week, the class attended Mass at St. Stanislaus, a Polish church in the Strip District of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.
Oh, yeah. Can't find a Catholic church in Boston! You really gotta go out into the boonies to fing Catholics! Oh, it must have been like observing the headhunters of New Guinea in their natural habitat. Actual living breathing Catholics, can you imagine?
You know, if you want to talk to some typical Trump voters, may I suggest a Pentecostal congregation in Alabama? Or a prosperity-gospel mega-church in any affluent suburb?
At the end of Mass, an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. When I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed.
“I have been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned, what’s that word … ? Snowbirds, snowflakes, anyways … that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won’t be open to opposing opinions,” he said.
Oh, bullshit. If this was a real person with whom you had an actual conversation in real life, he would have known EXACTLY what the word was.
And not to go off on a tangent, but have you noticed that there are two kinds of articles conservatives write about college? The first is "Oh, these dumb liberal snowflake college kids want 'safe spapces' blah blah blah. . ." And the second is "Waaaah! I don't feel safe expressing my coinservative views on campus!"
Anyway, the article pretty much ends there without it ever occurring to Ms Zito that perhaps the imaginary Catholics of Pennsylvania might want to pile on to a bus and shake a few hands in Manhattan or Philadelphia and maybe learn that their stereotypes of "coastal elite liberals" might be unfounded.
This lady who has worked for Rand Paul and Scott Walker, among others.
Remember: You may be a religious agnostic and not from the pro-life part of the party. But there is no chance in hell that pro-lifers will shrug their shoulders and say "meh" if a kid dies tomorrow. That is actually your route to impeachment. https://t.co/1e8F2bJRK5
I'm sorry, have you ever met a "pro-life" Republican? When have they ever given a single fuck about a kid who has already been born?
Did you see a lot of "pro-life" activists demanding action after children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook? Or any of the other schools at which children have recently been slaughtered?
When US drone strikes kill children, do you see a lot of "pro-life" people demanding an end to the policy of indiscriminate bombing?
Did any "pro-life" Republican speak out after Tamir Rice was murdered by a cop? Or after any black or brown person was murdered by police?
Of course you didn't. Because they don't give a single good god damn about actual kids. They only care about forcing women to carry pregnancies through to term. If a Mexican child dies from heat exposure in a Trump tent city, they will ABSOLUTELY shrug their shoulders and say "meh." Then they'll lay out all the reasons why it was the child's own fault, or the fault of the parents, or Barack Obama's or anyone's fault other than Trump and then line up to vote for his re-election.
If you think "pro-life" people actually care about the life of anyone outside the womb, you are sadly mistaken. Delusional even.
Person number two:
Whoever keeps booking Rick Santorum on CNN
Look, CNN person, they are never going to like you. The right is never going to like you no matter what you do. They aren't even going to not hate you. Even if you keep trotting out 10 lbs of scum in a 5-pound bag Rick Santorum, they are not going to change their minds.
Did they like you when you hired loathsome conservative shit-poster Erick Erickson?
Did they like you when you gave Glen Beck his break on tv on your CNN Headline News channel?
How about when you made Republican campaign strategist Ana Navarro a fixture on your network?
No.
And this isn't going to change. It won't change if you sold your network to Rupert Murdoch, gave Bill O'Reilly the 6am to 10pm slot and changed your name from CNN to the Heil Trump Network.
For two reasons.
One. The right's hatred of you isn't rational. It isn't something that can be addressed by making changes, by kissing their asses, by reaching out - nothing will change this because they have already decided that you are the enemy and nothing will ever make them reconsider that stance.
These are not rational people. You spent the entire 2016 election season fawning over Donald Trump like teenyboppers swooning over Elvis and what did it get you? Trump calling you "fake news" and his imbecile followers calling you the "Clinton News Network."
The other reason that there is nothing you can do to make friends with these people is that no matter who you allow to soil your airwaves, no matter how many Republicans you showcase, they won't know because they will never ever watch you. They don't need to. They have FOX. And every day, they sit there and listen to the FOX troglodytes complain about how CNN has some sort of huge lefty bias and is dishonest and is fake news and is an enemy of the state, and so on and so on and so on. So you might as well start booking Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and the Chapo Trap House crew, because the reaction from the right will be exactly the same as it is now that you're trying so hard to placate them.
Person number three:
Any of the countless people on Twitter and Facebook and other social media reacting to Trump's hideous family separation policy by saying "this is not America," or "this is not who we are!"
Oh, please. This is exactly who we are.
How can people stand there on land that was taken by force from Native Americans, that was tilled and harvested by generations of enslaved Africans, where police officers shoot unarmed black and brown people with impunity and, with a straight face, claim that child prison camps somehow violate "American values?"
You want to know if this ghastly policy is out of character for the US of A? Ask an Indian. Ask a black person. Hell, ask a Japanese American who was alive during World War II. This is exactly what we are.
And I'm not saying that to make a case for accepting this atrocity. We should absolutely be fighting tooth and nail for these kids. I'm just saying that it isn't realistic to pretend that race-based monstrosities don't reflect the fabric of our society. We should be working to ensure that they no longer represent who we are, not pretending that they don't.
Apparently, the former president has teamed up with James Patterson, he of the dime-store detective books, to pen a putative thriller called "The President is Missing." Is it any good? Oh, my - I wouldn't think so. But maybe? I wasn't about to buy it, and if the library even has it yet, it's probably wait-listed, so I went searching for excerpts on line. This is what I found:
So the titualr president, Jonathon Duncan, is also the first-person narrator of the book. His name is Jonathon Duncan because "Will Sminton" was nixed by Patterson. I assume. He is, as you would assume, meant to be a stand-in for POTUS 42, and he says very realistic, natural-sounding dialogue like "Everything I did was to protect my country. I’d do it again. The problem is, I can’t say any of that."
and
“All I can tell you is that I have always acted with the security of my country in mind. And I always will.”
and "I lash out and whack the microphone off the table. I knock over my chair as I get to my feet."
Referring to a potential cyber-attack from a terrorist organization, another character gives us this pearl of wisdom:
"One of the great ironies of the modern age ... is that the advancements
of mankind can make us more powerful and yet more vulnerable at the
same time.” And why? “The reason is reliance. Our society has become
completely reliant on technology"
Oh my God! I never thought of it that way! Is what I would say if I had just awakened from a 20-year coma and have no memory of the Y2K panic of 1999.
There are timely references, like the description of a hacker who is “a cross between a Calvin Klein model and a Eurotrash punk rocker”. And this completely tone-deaf description of an assassin:
“Sexy”, and “allowing just enough bounce in her girls [sic]”, as she strides around in her knee-high chocolate leather boots, she names her favoured weapon “Anna Magdalena ... a thing of beauty, a matte-black semiautomatic rifle capable of firing five rounds in less than two seconds”.
Because now is exactly the time in our history that you want to be fetishising guns! There's this proof that the fictional president is, after all, just a regular all-American guy at heart, when he attends a baseball game and says: “Ordinarily I’d be like a kid in a candy store here. I’d grab a Budweiser and a hot dog. . . there is no finer beverage than an ice-cold Bud.”
Christ, this guy can monetize anything! A beer commercial in the middle of your novel? Part of me wants to applaud, part of me is nauseous.
But regular guy or not, this president is woke AF!
“I know that there are bad cops, just as there are bad actors in every profession. And I know that there are cops who think of themselves as good cops but, even if unconsciously, see a black man in a T-shirt and jeans as more threatening than a white man dressed the same way.”
Woah. . .heavy! That's like a real like Marxist critique of the system or something, man! Although he feels it necessary to temper that scathing criticism of the biases in law enforcement with this bromide:
“I know that most cops, most of the time, do the best they can” Courageous! Anyway, my computer is acting up, so let's skip to the conclusion of a review in the New Republic:
To boot, the book ends with the revelation that the villain all along was feminism. The following is a spoiler, so look away if you wish to read The President Is Missing with all bells and whistles intact. “How could you do this?” the president asks the traitor in his midst, once he’s figured it all out. The answer, when it comes, is a surprise to him. The traitor’s face is “twisted up in agony and bitterness,” full of resentment. “Says the man who gets to be president,” she replies. “Says the man who didn’t see his political career tanked” over one little mistake.
Oh, my God, the villain is Hillary! This man wrote an entire novel in which his wife is the villain. The woman who is resentful because she doesn't "get to be president?" The woman who is bitter that her political career was torpedoed by "one little mistake? (emails? 'Deplorables?' Killing everybody in Benghazi?)" That sounds like Hillary. Or a caricature of Hillary, anyway. A caricature that a shitty husband might make of his wife. This entire novel is just a setup and the punchline is "take my wife, please!"
