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Inconvenient truths are the ultimate gaffes

by Mojambo ( 175 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney at September 21st, 2012 - 8:00 am

The Knish eviscerates the”gotcha” culture of manufactured “gaffes”. Somehow pointing out that Obama apologized to the Islamic world (which he did) is a gaffe, saying that 47% of the population hooked on government will not vote for candidate who prefers to help get people onto payrolls and off of welfare rolls is a “gaffe’, saying that Palestinian/Islamic culture is inferior to Israeli/Jewish culture is another “gaffe”. The problem is that all these so called “gaffes” are inconvenient truths.

by Daniel Greenfield

Gaffe, a word that temporarily came to be associated with political misstatements, has returned to its origins as a social faux pas, such as saying something at a dinner party that everyone knows to be true, but that know mustn’t be said out loud.

The media is still doing its best to pretend that a gaffe is a mistake, when they are actually using it to mean the telling of inconvenient truths. Obama’s reign of error is a constellation of inconvenient truths, economic, security and legal, that cannot be discussed in public. The telling of these inconvenient truths has been met with cries of racism, no matter how little they have to do with race. Now they are being met with cries of “Gaffe, Gaffe”, when Romney brings them up.

Did Obama skip presidential intelligence briefings on the most serious national security threats for a week before September 11? Did the Benghazi consulate lack basic security in a city where Islamist militias were running rampant and attacks on foreign diplomats had already taken place? Was the entire situation a result of an illegal war fought by Obama under false pretenses that armed Islamist militias and set them loose to persecute Libyan Sufis and seize half of Mali? Did Obama sleep through the beginning of the largest wave of attacks on America during his term while partying in Vegas?

Such inconvenient truths can only be met by accusing their teller of committing the horrible gaffe of politicizing the formerly apolitical and bipartisan arena of unilateral wars and the violence arising from them– an area that the Democrats decided was off-limits ever since they stopped criticizing such wars and began fighting them four years ago.

[……]

In a state of national and international disaster, the worst possible gaffe is telling the truth about the state of affairs we are in. These gaffes disturb the party-goers signing up to work for non-profits and watching cheerful reports about the Arab Spring and the economic recovery while the ship sinks around them. And the party men and women react to it with the outraged demeanor of spoiled children.

A gaffe occurs when Mitt Romney talks about a real problem. It’s the real part, more than anything else, that is the problem. Reality has no place in the hysterical media feed from an imaginary world as unreal as anything that Communist apparatchiks or Nazi propagandists were broadcasting to their people in the dying days of their regimes.

Consume enough media and you come to understand that the people manufacturing it are not only hacks, they’re clueless hacks, who like their master in the White House, have absolutely no idea how to solve any of the country’s problems and no interest whatsoever in even bothering to try. They are mechanical men marching to an ideological beat and have no more interest in reality than do the denizens of a mental ward.

[………]

The left has long ago passed the point where they can be parodied. Any lunatic thing that you can imagine, they have already done or are planning to do. And compared to them the Soviet Union looks like a picture of credible management since its commissars reined in much of the insanity early on and at least made the occasional effort at applying their ideology to actual problems.

Our version of the Soviet Union is a ceaseless application of ideology whose only purpose is its application. There is no purpose to any of the three pieces of insanity listed above except the grad school exercise of a senseless ideological program chasing its own tail. Unlike the Soviet Union, there is no goal beyond the application of increasingly stifling programs of ideological conformity. There is no purpose except for the smug left to get even smugger at the expense of everyone else.

Men and women who are this ruined as policymakers, journalists and human beings are in no shape for an encounter with reality. When you’re crusading to ban plastic bags and include Islamist killers in the progressive camp, when your goal is to fight a truly progressive war on drugs and defend the rights of prisoners to unwillingly contract HIV from their servers, then reality is a foreign enemy to be fought tooth and nail.

[……..]

Mentioning any of this is another gaffe, another cold blast of reality blowing through rooms heated to Hawaiian standard temperatures. And the people in those rooms are as threatened by reality gaffes as schizophrenics are by the gnawing sense that the world outside is a very different place than the one in their skulls. And they react to it in the same way, with fear, hate and barely restrained violence.

It’s not just Muslims who react with hysterical violence when the power of their delusion is undermined by an outside world that cares nothing for the status of a 7th Century pedophile warlord, not any different than his ilk cluttering up Afghanistan today. The left’s response to anything that lowers the status of their prophet, stops just short of torching fried chicken places, especially if those places are also against gay marriage.

The streams of reporters gritting their teeth at the sight of Romney, a man whom like McCain they would have had no objection to if not for his temerity in insulting the Prophet Ibn Hussein, don’t quite explode into violence. Instead they angrily denounce the faux pas all of that talk about real world economics and foreign policy is. Gaffes are what they call that kind of talk. And no one at a party likes a gaffe.

During the Bush years, the media complained that the party circuit had died. It’s come roaring back in the age of Obama and no one is willing to give it up. The media is an extension of the party, not just the cocktail parties, but the party behind the party, the one that believes in revolution for the sake of revolution, and that turned a grunt community organizer into a senator and then the man on top.

[…….]

The gaffe is that the emperor is naked. The gaffe is that the smartest man in America, the technocrat in chief, stumbles onto the Letterman set, which looks almost as fake as he does, and can’t even name the size of the national debt. And who cares anyway except that it’s big and getting bigger. No one is supposed to even bring that up, harsh the mellow and bring the party down. That’s another gaffe right there.

The gaffe is that the same people who are running the country into the ground are also showing up every night on the news and every day on the sites to lie through their teeth about it. The difference between liberal media and liberal politicians has become a technical formality that mostly has to do with who signs their checks. The gaffe is that no one is allowed to remind the sweating throngs of the government-media complex m that while they party, the arrow has moved closer to midnight.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But that’s a myth. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is a walking hate crime. In the kingdom of the blind, sight is a crime and mentioning what you see is a gaffe. In a kingdom where the king doesn’t know how much he owes and doesn’t want to know, mentioning the amount is a gaffe. Showing the king and his advisers up as fools and knaves is an even bigger gaffe. And when the king decides to parade around in his invisible clothes– mentioning that he’s naked is the biggest gaffe of them all.

Read the rest – Truth is the ultimate gaffe

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney | 175 Comments »

Liberalism defines race, allowing white liberals to be defined as black and black conservatives to be defined as white

by Mojambo ( 85 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Cult of Obama, Democratic Party, Hate Speech, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Racism, Republican Party at September 5th, 2012 - 11:30 am

The Knish, in his inimitable way, points out the increasing flexibility of the overused term “racism” and how it is being used as a shield to deflect any criticism of The One. Did you know that if you refer to Obama as “The Golfer” – that is a code word for racism? How about referring to “Chicago” meaning corrupt Cook County politics? The Orwellian misuse of the term has served to stifle legitimate debate and criticism to the point where we twist ourselves into pretzels in order to prove a negative – that we are not racists.

by Daniel Greenfield

Once upon a time racism used to be relatively easy to pin down. It was segregated lunch counters and slave ships, it was nooses and chains, it was the legal oppression of a group of people on account of the color of their skin. Then racism stopped being a set of laws and became an abstraction, first a set of attitudes and then a set of attitudes implying another set of attitudes.

Racism changed from laws that deliberately discriminate against black people to policies that serve to disadvantage black people, whether or not that is their intent. In 1971, 17 years after its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court decided that schools shouldn’t just not be forcibly segregated, but that they could be forcibly desegregated with the use of busing, even if there was no actual intent to segregate and where the racial differences were the result of geography. That same year in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the Court ruled that a high school diploma job requirement was racially discriminatory because fewer black people possessed them.

From an attempt to overturn racist laws, the war on racism had shifted to forcibly legislating big government’s idea of racial equality. The goal was no longer removing inequality, but artificially creating a desired statistical Republican formula of Federalism as anti-racism and States’ Rights as racism. 150 years after the Civil War, federalism as anti-racism is a false formula imposed on a debate going back to the Washington Administration about where the center of political power should rest.

That formula is the one still being used to tar Republicans, who invented the formula of Federalism as Anti-Racism. In 1872, Thomas Nash was smearing abolitionist Horace Greeley as a racist for resisting Grant’s Republican Federalism. In 2012, Nast’s even nastier ideological descendants are treating any challenge to unlimited Federal power from Republicans as a cross burning on the White House lawn. If Nash was at least operating within a historical framework where Federal power was used to restrain racial violence, 140 years later those same attacks are the clothes of power worn over the frame of a naked cynicism.

Obama is neither Grant nor Eisenhower. When he wields unlimited power, race is only there to disguise the power of the naked emperor and his naked empire. Throughout the 20th Century, Democrats searched around for a compelling justification for seizing and wielding unlimited

[……..]

President Wilson did it in the name of a global crusade, imprisoning critics of his intervention in World War I. FDR did it in the name of an economic crisis and the underclass, even as he put his boot on small business and targeted Jewish and Italian immigrants for raids and show trials for economic crimes. But his Democratic successors zeroed in on race and made it their own, abusing power in the name of combating racism.

Like Wilson, Obama abuses power in the name of wartime contingencies. Like FDR, he abuses power to combat an economic crisis. But mostly he uses the same excuse that his white predecessors used. Race.

Racism is no longer about race. Not when Bill Clinton was the first black president and Allen West is a racist for bringing fried chicken to a Congressional Black Caucus meeting. Liberalism is the new race, and it is a category that transcends and encompasses race. Liberalism defines race, allowing white liberals to be defined as black and black conservatives to be defined as white.

[………]

Most people, black and white, don’t understand the switch that has been pulled on them or that the racism being talked about is not the kind that involves a white man hitting a black man, but a debate over unlimited political power between two political parties, both of whom have at one time eroded the “States” part and emphasized the “United” part with a variety of justifications, among them that of treating black people as wards of the Federal government.

Racism accusations are delivered by white people speaking on behalf of black people and black people speaking on behalf of white people for an agenda that is not about race, but about power and wealth. These accusations have become increasingly ludicrous as they have become disconnected from actual racism and even from race.

On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell insisted that “golfer” is a racial stereotype and Chris Matthews dubbed “Chicago” a racial codeword. Besides the obvious display of hackery, the search for codewords is a sign of how abstract racism has become. Racism is no longer a slur or a stereotype of a black man, but a criticism directed at a Democrat who happens to be black.

[……….]

Say any word often enough and it begins to lose its meaning, look at it long enough and it begins to look misspelled. In a world where “Chicago golfer” is a racial slur and a racial slur is in one of the country’s bestselling songs, racial slurs no longer mean what they used to. The national grammar of race has shifted and while liberals talk incessantly about race, they have nothing to actually say about it.

Racism, for the most part, was never really about race, it was about power. It was about power when slave votes and slave labor were being used to shift the balance of power. And it is about power when black votes and accusations of racism are used to shift the balance of power. And in one of history’s great ironies that renders PBS pieties so absurd, the same Party was responsible for both sets of actions. The ideology, whether that of the permanent racial inferiority of black people of yesterday’s Democratic Party or the permanent social inferiority of black people in today’s Democratic Party, was and is just the clothing that the naked emperor wears on his power trips.

Racism still endures in the nooks and crannies of the country, but it isn’t the kind of racism that’s talked about in the news. It’s the unextraordinary and unexceptional bigotry of small petty men, of any color and creed, who practice their small mean-spirited acts outside the law. This is not the political racism that we talk about as a national phenomenon. That political racism is not about a man being beaten outside a bar, it’s about the power of the bar’s lawyers to wield unlimited authority in the name of a problem that can never go away, no matter how abstract it becomes, because they have turned it into the source of their power.

Real racism is slowly dying out, but political racism can never go away. Instead it is rediscovered in ordinary words, in “Golfer” and in “Chicago.” The more it declines, the more it emerges everywhere in dogwhistles and hidden codes that become more and more abstract until no one can find it anymore

Read the rest – The Great Lie of Racism

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Cult of Obama, Democratic Party, Hate Speech, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Racism, Republican Party | 85 Comments »

In the kingdom of the weird, the non weird are the weird ones

by Mojambo ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Censorship, Marxism, Media, Political Correctness, Progressives at August 23rd, 2012 - 11:30 am

The Knish points out the delicious irony that he Trotskyite rag “The Village Voice” which is closing (thankfully ) became redundant when the main stream media became “the alternative media” themselves. As Mr. Greenfield points out, when every one one is “weird” then nobody is weird and that applies to the media as well – Newsweek, Time, The New York Times – all are viciously left-wing so there is no need for The V.V. The same phenomena was seen with the epic failure of “Air America”. Why does a leftie need liberal talk radio when just about every media outlet is left-wing? Talk Radio became popular because it was the only place where conservatives could be heard, but liberals have thousands of media outlets to satisfy their socialist cravings (NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, L.A. Times, yadda yadda yadda). I do recall in December 2004 right after George W. Bush narrowly won re-election against John Kerry, Time Out New York had a cover “How to survive the next four years”, can you imagine the rage if Romney wins in November (yes I think you can)? Ironically Fox News and the Internet are the real ‘alternative” media.

by Daniel Greenfield

The death of the Village Voice has drawn out a coterie of mourners bowing their heads over the venerable radical rag, but their orations at its funeral are completely wasted. The death of the Voice is not due to mismanagement, the right wing or its complicity in human trafficking. After all, its former competitor, the New York Press, which forced it to go free instead of charging a buck fifty, died fairly recently. The end of the Village Voice has to be seen in the context of the death of alternative media.

The passing of the Village Voice, its thick greasy pages smudged with desperate cries for attention in between glossy cigarette ads and phone sex ads, also coincides with the passing of the bohemian nature of the East Village, now little more than tall glowering condos and coffee shops. To those residents who showed up there in the ‘70s and ‘80s bearing art school portfolios and a burning desire to be part of the “Scene”, it’s one more triumph of the capitalist running dogs over the “People”.

But the real reason that the Village Voice is dead is because the alternative media is dead and the alternative media is dead because there is nothing for it to be an alternative to. New Yorkers can just as easily read shrill rants about the NYPD in the Daily News, pretentious movie reviews for artsy films at The Onion and leftist denunciations of the War on Terror in the New York Times.

The way that the Village Voice used to cover Republicans is now the way that every media outlet, but the handful that aren’t part of the liberal collective, covers Republicans. Every mainstream media outlet is opposed to fighting terrorism, opposed to the police and opposed to any notion of balance in reporting. And every outlet is churning out the same tired 24/7 coverage of something provocative a Republican allegedly said because every outlet wants to be the Village Voice, the ink-stained pamphleteer on the corner screaming about capitalist pigs before heading off to a concert at CBGB’s, also as dead as the Village Voice and the rest of the East Village.

Newsweek, once the paragon of middlebrow inoffensiveness, now does the kind of covers that the Village Voice used to do. It still hasn’t run a picture of Bush drinking the blood out of the green neck of the Statue of Liberty, but, if Romney wins, you can expect that as the March cover. And by then even that might be considered tame.

Under Bush the entire media became alternative and the alternative media became supplementary to requirements

If anyone deserves credit for killing the Village Voice, it’s George W. Bush, who was its unwitting cover boy more often than Obama has appeared on the cover of Essence. Under Bush the entire media became alternative and the alternative media became supplementary to requirements. When mainstream newspapers give positive reviews to books and movies that envision Bush’s assassination, cheerlead anti-war rallies run by militant Trotskyites and demand unilateral surrender in the War on Terror; what possible territory is left for the alternative media to explore?

[…]

The very effort to preserve edifices of radical history like the Village Voice runs counter to the alternative instinct to escape the past, denounce it in a Tumblr post that will be reblogged by all the right people, and then move on to doing something that hasn’t been ruined yet by the unspeakable appetites of the bourgeoisie. The death of the Village Voice serves only as an occasion for denouncing the soulless mercenary capitalists who bought up the alternative media, even if the soulless mercenary capitalists are actually their own more successful comrades who wanted to make the Village Voice into a viable concern.

The death of the Village Voice only matters to those for whom exclusive radicalism was an identity and for those who are concerned by the sight of the entire press turning into the Village Voice and the entire country turning into the East Village, concerned only with staying weird. A decade ago, Lady Gaga would have been a warm-up act in the Village before a transvestite beauty pageant to raise money for a documentary about Nestle’s depredations in the rainforest. Now that forced preening weirdness-for-the-sake-of-weirdness is being marketed to everyone.

Alternativism used to be for the people who felt ill at ease, who weren’t comfortable anywhere and made a fetish of their discomfort, transforming that awkward disconnection from the larger world into art and poetry. And now everyone feels disconnected or wants to feel disconnected. Weirdness is fashion in a time when no one fits anymore because there is nothing to fit into anymore.

[…]

Today, we are the alternative media because we are the alternative to the alternative that has become the new norm. Their norm is the alternative, while our alternative is the norm. There is no longer any place for a leftist alternative media because it is no longer an alternative to anything. Only we are the alternative.

We are the ones standing aside while the herd rushes over the cliff. We are the ones who see what they cannot see, because we are outside their culture and their world. We lack their fears, their anxieties, their guilts and their insecurities. We are not afraid that the world is about to end, the poles about to melt, we are not terrified that we are secretly racist, that we lack racial consciousness, that we are not afraid enough, that we have still not learned the meaning of life in the back of the self-help section or gotten real enough. We are not worried about being cliches or losing our souls to corporate America, and we do not wake up in the middle of the night wondering who we are.

We are the alternative that they have left behind but cannot escape. We are the alternative to the endless alternative, the alternative to national guilt, national suicide and national armageddon. We are the rebels who rebel against the rebels, the counterrevolution to the revolution, the people, who, when the noise has grown loud enough and there are fires in the streets, step out and show a better way.

Read the rest: The End of the Alternative Media

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Censorship, Marxism, Media, Political Correctness, Progressives | 130 Comments »

The moderate anomaly, or the left plays chess while the right plays checkers

by Mojambo ( 70 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Conservatism, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Islamists, Liberal Fascism, Muslim Brotherhood, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Tea Parties, The Political Right at August 16th, 2012 - 8:00 am

Another brilliant essay by the Knish concerning the futile search for “moderation” from Republicans which in essence means slowly taking one step to the left for every six steps to the left that the Democrats do. Daniel thinks it is futile to do so as long as the cultural trajectory is constantly moving Left.

by Daniel Greenfield

The moderate solution is deeply seductive for Republicans, who see their opposition sliding to the extreme left and believe that they can sweep up the middle by just moving a little to the left. All they have to do is moderate their position on X, Y or Z, and they will win over all the unaffiliated voters who are a natural fit for their common-sense policies.

This seems like such a no-brainer that high-profile Republicans keep earnestly and then angrily pushing for a surrender on one point or another as the key to becoming the moderate mainstream party. But no matter how many times the Republican Party plays this game, it never stops being the “extremist” party that is out of touch with whatever the new normal is.

Like Lucy’s football, the moderate identity is a paradox. The more you pursue it, the less likely you are to reach it. Our current political grammar, which leans heavily on ideas such as moderation and extremism, was crafted by the left. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, the meaning of such words is relative and varies unpredictably. That relativism has given us the moderate Taliban and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. Before long, it might give us the moderate Al-Qaeda member.

“Moderate” and “Extremist” are words that are used with an absolute air, as if what they refer to is clear and fixed. Actually, the value of each is relative to the other. If the range of views among Muslims is such that the Taliban are actually somewhere in the middle, then they are indeed moderate. This does not mean that they are decent people or that we can reason with them. It just means that the spectrum of Muslim views is bad enough that, within that spectrum, the Taliban fall in the middle, rather than on the extreme end.

[…….]

The moderate positions of ten years ago are the conservative positions of today. Not in principle but in practice. When the culture is moving fast enough leftward, then anyone attempting to adopt a moderate position is already trying to conserve something, which makes him a reactionary in the eyes of the left.

To repeatedly attempt to be a moderate is to adopt the positions of the left at a slower rate than the culture as a whole. This is only useful as a cynical political position adopted by someone who believes in nothing at all. It is not good for anything else. That type of moderate is always standing in the middle of the ship as a showy pose, while pretending that the ship isn’t moving at all.

[…….]

The moderate Republican calculates the position of the left, factors in the position of his party and stakes out a middle position. The Democratic Party moves six steps to the left making it extremist. And our moderate Republican decides that he has found his chance. If he just moves one step to the left, he will seize the moderate position and lay claim to the terra incognita of the middle ground. But when the Democratic Party moved six steps to the left, the new moderate position is actually three steps to the left. All that the moderate Republican has done is watered down his message and made himself slightly more palatable to the middle, but that will change next week when the Democratic Party moves another six steps to the left and the middle will move with it.

Moderation is an unreachable goal as long as the culture is constantly in motion. And it’s off limits to Republicans as long as its trajectory is always moving to the left. The moderate position is not defined by the right so long as the right remains in place or moves to the left. The left is moving and so its movement defines what the new moderate position is.

The moderate is not a better man or post-partisan; he is chasing the left’s bandwagon and temporarily occupying the open space that the left has created for him to occupy. The moderate is the left’s camp-follower. The jackal who feeds off the scraps that the left has left behind for him before he has to move on to follow its new campground.
By constantly moving to the left, the left is exerting control of the political space, defining the Overton Window in terms of its own political leanings. Moderates become slow leftists and conservatives become slower leftists. The entire spectrum comes to be defined by the positions of the left. Everyone in the spectrum becomes a leftist of radical, moderate or conservative temperament.

[……]
We’ve spent plenty of time calling Obama a Socialist, but the reality is that, for the last 50 years, we’ve been debating just how much Socialism we should have. We have repeatedly concluded that the new proposal is too much Socialism, and that the amount of Socialism we have now could be reduced by 10 percent or so to leave over the perfect amount of Socialism. Is it any wonder that the left is winning?

The difference between the left and the right is that the left plays chess while the right plays checkers. The right sacrifices long-term principles to short-term advantages, while the left sacrifices short-term advantages to long term-victories. The left will accept being embarrassed. It embraces the extremism tag. It doesn’t care that liberalism has a negative perception or that people consider its views to be too radical. Those same views that people consider too radical will be mainstream in a decade or two.

The left does not occupy the moderate space. Instead, its positions do, because it focuses on moving the dialogue further to the left. The right, which prides itself on being more sensible and avoiding extremist labels is instead tarred with the extremist label, not because it has moved to the right, as the leftist media often insists, but because it hasn’t moved to the left quickly enough.

The same phenomenon has occurred with Islam. Every time Islamists pull in their direction, the dialogue space is expanded to define new versions of moderation and extremism. Many Muslim terrorist groups are now moderate, not because they are moderate in our terms, but because they are moderate in Islamist terms.

The most common reason why a Muslim terrorist group is labeled as moderate is because is it less open to killing other Muslims than some of its more extreme variants. Violence no longer defines extremism, only the full scope of that violence does. All Muslim terrorist groups, including the moderate ones, favor suicide bombings directed at infidel civilians. Not all favor suicide bombings directed at other Muslims. Those who do are often labeled extremist.

[………]

A Muslim terrorist group which is open to killing 72 percent of the planet is considered more moderate than one that is open to killing 83 percent of the planet, which is still moderate compared to the truly extremist terrorist groups who want to kill 94 percent of the planet. Since there are always new and more extreme Islamist terrorist groups springing up, the logical outcome of this madness will leave us with a moderate Muslim terrorist group that only wants to kill 99 percent of the planet, as opposed to the truly dangerous extremists who want to kill 99.9 percent of the planet.

The moderate paradox is that, while moderate positions are praised as superior to extremist positions, they are actually defined by extremist positions. The moderate is an echo of an extremist’s voice, and is it the extremist who defines society, politics and culture. A moderate is a man who allows himself to be defined by extremists and there is nothing praiseworthy about that.

That is why the left is so obsessed with “right-wing extremism” and so eager to call for moderation on the Republican side. It knows that extremists shift the dialogue space to the right while moderates allow it to shift further to the left.

Moderates will not change America. Rather, they have already accepted that they will be changed. Change does not come from moderates, it comes from extremists whose eagerness to push the bubble is what brings change.