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Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

by Mojambo ( 142 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Crime, Eric Holder, Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives at July 15th, 2013 - 2:30 pm

The Knish is right – The Martin-Zimmerman case was never about the two principles, but about intimidating and imprisoning the non minority citizens of the United States.

by Daniel Greenfield

The media indictment of George Zimmerman had little to do with the Latino Obama supporter or with the man he shot. These two men, one in life and one in death, were exploited to tell a story about racism; even though the one thing that both the Zimmerman and the Martin families managed to agree on was that race was not the issue.

Race was not the issue when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, but race was the story that the media insisted on telling. It was the story that everyone from Obama on down told and retold. And so the story stopped being about the need to determine what actually took place using eyewitnesses and forensic evidence, and instead became a toxic sinkhole of politically correct outrage and racial guilt.

The one thing that everyone knows about Martin and Zimmerman is the thing that matters least. Race. Based on George Zimmerman’s history, which included defending a black homeless man who had been a victim of police brutality, Trayvon Martin’s race would not have been a factor in his calculations. But the media was not interested in any of those things. The liberal narrative consists of a box labeled “white racism” that its activists have to fill from time to time. George Zimmerman was put into that box, not because of who he was or what motivated him, but because it was time to put someone in that box.

The race-baiting left had to tell its familiar story and they weren’t going to let anything get in the way of telling that story. They have to tell and retell that story because it establishes their moral authority to run our society and our lives.

[…….]It’s about race as martyrdom. It’s about white guilt. The story is already written and the left is always looking to stick someone’s name in the empty space between “White racist” and “Minority victim.” The head of Stalin’s secret police once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” The American left reverses that equation. They already know the crime. All they need is the man.

The goal of the rally organizers, the reporters putting their best face forward at the teleprompter and of Obama, rediscovering the son he never had, was not to indict or imprison George Zimmerman. That was a secondary or tertiary goal. It wasn’t George Zimmerman’s freedom that they wanted to take away. It was our freedom.

The left does not indict or convict individuals. It indicts and convicts entire groups.  […….]

Zimmerman wasn’t being indicted as one man, but as a representative of a group. It didn’t matter that his appearance, his background and his motives did not fit the profile. He was indicted as a white racist. And by indicting him, the media was actually indicting the ordinary American for being part of a racist system that murders black youth. The system that they call America.

Trayvon Martin became every black teenager everywhere. George Zimmerman became every white man everywhere. The simplified portraits of both men transcended their identities and defined them solely by the media’s construct of their races. They stopped being individuals and became characters in a familiar media story; “White” and “Black,” “White Racist” and “Minority Victim.”

Within the unreal world of the left’s race-baiting narrative, George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were stripped of their identities and transformed into iconic figures in a crude story of America as a country where a white man can murder a black man and get away with it. This is the story that the left needs to constantly retell because it justifies their overreach of government power.

The Zimmerman verdict gives the left its final dramatic conclusion to the race-baiting narrative by establishing the guilt of the system and by extension the society that is run by that system. And that is what it had sought to accomplish all along.

The left isn’t just out to indict George Zimmerman. It’s out to indict all of us. It isn’t just out to lock up George Zimmerman. It’s out to lock up all of us. The prison in which it intends to lock us up is big. [……..] The prison that they are building is meant to cover a country that used to be known as the United States.

The first goal of the Zimmerman case was to deepen racial divisions. That mission was undeniably accomplished. African-Americans walk away from the trial more certain than ever that the country is racist and that white people can get away with murder. There may be no race riots arising out of the verdict and even the hate crimes will likely be limited to a dozen violent attacks, but the deeper impact will be on a black community more resentful and more certain that the only thing standing between it and slavery is maintaining the absolute power of the Democratic Party.

It is no coincidence that the shooting of Trayvon Martin was elevated to prominence while both parties were preparing for a national election. […….] The Trayvon Martin shooting was used to fuel outrage and boost voter turnout in the black community.

The second goal was to give the Justice Department more leeway for intervening in local cases and to put local authorities on notice that such interventions can and will happen at any time. After intimidating local authorities into an arrest, an indictment and a trial, not to mention replacing their police chief, Holder’s DOJ has already accomplished its goal which was to treat every local police department like a subsidiary of federal law enforcement whose decisions can be overruled at any time.

Liberal race-baiting isn’t about race in the same way that rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.

The story of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was just the story that the left told millions of Americans to make their power grab possible. Any day now, they will find another way of telling the same story. The names will be different. The place may be thousands of miles away. But the story will be the same because the media will have found two more people to fit into its familiar race-baiting narrative.

George Zimmerman will have gone back to living his life, but we as Americans will be on trial once again.

Read the rest – George Zimmerman wasn’t on trial – we were

And the story will begin again.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Crime, Eric Holder, Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives | 142 Comments »

Bicycle lanes to nowhere

by Mojambo ( 127 Comments › )
Filed under Transportation at June 28th, 2013 - 8:56 am

Nanny Bloomberg’s latest “brain storm” is that every one should be biking to work and throughout the city. The problem is that the streets of Manhattan are too dangerous for bikers and pedestrians run the risk of being hit by “kamikaze bicyclists”.

by Daniel Greenfield

The streets of Manhattan are full of smiling white yuppies riding their Citibank bikes, blue lights flashing as they sail through midtown traffic.

But the great rack of bike share bikes planted next to a housing project is filled with its cargo of blue vehicles. No one is checking them out here. Instead black kids sit on the locked bikes, occasionally fitfully pedaling them, going nowhere.

The contrast is an apt metaphor for the city. The smiling kids who could just as easily be cashing checks from their parents and working at an ad agency while trying to pay off their student debts in Portland, San Francisco or Seattle. They happen to be doing it in New York City and they expect the same social amenities, the retro bars, the craft beers, the obscure bands and the bike lanes.

The street ahead has been dug up and water has been turned off to half the block. The operation has no other purpose than to turn two lanes of traffic into some kind of complex curved sidewalk on a street where there is hardly any foot traffic and you can wait two minutes to see a single pedestrian during the daylight hours.

Such street planning assaults are happening all over the city as traffic lanes are torn out and eliminated to make way for impromptu sidewalk cafes and expanded sidewalks that often no one needs or wants. And then there are the ubiquitous bike and bus lanes which see about 1 percent of the traffic of the street and the sidewalk, but are approaching equal billing in terms of space.

Bloomberg’s bike share program

When I wrote about Bloomberg’s bike share program back a few months ago, I was attacked by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, Gawker, New York Mag and the New York Observer. It’s easy to see what unites these outlets. They are the voices of the upscale city that doesn’t drive to work, but is driven. The one that thinks the city is only a few bike lanes away from being properly European.

Krugman and Co. assumed that I was against bike shares because conservatives hate sharing. I don’t claim to speak for conservatives, but most of them, I suspect, like me, are concerned about the political hijacking of urban spaces by a small elite. [……..]

Bikes passionately divide New Yorkers in ways that more commonplace national social issues like guns and abortion fail to do. Most social issues are really a form of class identification. When Obama sneered about poor Pennsylvania whites bitterly clinging to their guns and bibles at a San Fran fundraiser, he was really talking about class.

Gun control is a sharp divide between the regimented urban environment and the rural culture. Abortion is also about class as defined by the stark choices between family or career. They are about the new America and the old. The America of the gun and the gun pop tart.  [……….]

The America where everyone is jammed up by space and government and the one where you make your own boundaries.

To many New Yorkers, the bike is a nuisance

To many New Yorkers, the bike is a nuisance. To others it’s an identity. The issue isn’t two wheels over four in some vehicular hodgepodge of animal farm. It’s about control of the streets. The city is not its buildings. It is its streets. The buildings house people, but the streets define the purpose of the city. A city with streets full of cars is a working city. A city with streets full of bikes is a leisure city.

The gentrification blitzkrieg is as much social as it is environmental. It’s no secret that Bloomberg hates cars. Or that the yuppies or yuckies who have transformed corners of the city into tiny slices of Portland hate them even more. The new bikeshare program is as much about displacing people as it is about placing them. It’s about the kind of city that they want to see.

The old loud New York City is being made smooth and quiet. Old noisy bars are making way for fake retro establishments that look like they date back a hundred years ago, but weren’t even there last week. Car lanes are giving way to bike lanes. On one side overgrown children gleefully pedal their Citibank bikes, a habit they will abandon when winter sets in.  […….]

There are rural parts of the country where walkers are suspect. A man who walks down the street, rather than drives, is suspected of being a bum or a criminal. Solid citizens own cars and drive them to work or to the mall. Indigents walk. The urban centers however are swinging the other way. It’s the drivers who are suspect and the bike riders who are the solid citizens of the recyclable state.

Social standing is often a function of wealth signified by leisure. Fat was in when food was scarce and having a rotund belly meant having wealth and freedom from work Now that everyone can eat, fat is out. The mark of the wealthy leisure class is the time to spend on exercise programs that transform their bodies into some ever-shifting ideal. [……..]

Bikes, once associated with a wealthy leisure class who had the time to pursue their interest in nature and healthy activities, became universal when nearly every child could have one. Now bikes have been priced up into expensive adult toys. Cities are full of grown men and women who spend fortunes on expensive bikes that they hardly ever use except on the weekends, but hang prominently by their doors so that everyone can see.

The car owner is more likely to be a working man, while a bike communicates membership in a leisure class

The car owner is more likely to be a working man, while a bike communicates membership in a leisure class. Like an exercise programs, it says that the owner has the time and the money to take it slow, to not worry about timelines and deadlines, to do his own thing. The biking adult cares, which is the chief hobby of the leisure class. The more someone cares, the less he works.  […….]

The new elite cares. Its claim to caring is also its claim to power. They claim, therefore they rule. America doesn’t really make things anymore. It cares. It cares so much that it invades other countries to change their governments. It cares so much that it squanders fortunes on foreign aid. It cares so much that it goes deep into debt to fund social services and then promote them. It cares so much that it bans salt, cars and large sodas while insisting that everyone ride bikes.

Millennials are less likely to drive than any other previous generation. The American Dream in the new Yuckie outposts is compacting down from a home and car to a bike and an apartment just big enough to keep it in, a Netflix account and a small gig at a non-profit to pay down student loans. It’s all very European and all very doomed.

“A European country is — like Germany, France, England — those countries are between 60 and 80 million people,” Bill Maher told CNN. “We have those 60, 80 million smart people . . . but we just have more people. There’s a great, smart European country in America; it’s just surrounded by a bunch of rednecks.”

It would be hard to come up with a more accurate mission statement for the new technocracy than that. Focus on that core few million who can be persuaded to ride bikes to work and get into debt obtaining degrees in useless fields and get rid of the rest.  [……..]

And that’s probably true. But it’s not the rational Europe where everything is neat, clean and tidy. Where everything works and no one gets hung up on nationalism or religion. That place only exists in the wishful thinking of American leftists who still carry around an inferiority complex for a mother country that they never knew.

The Europe that they biking toward is a place sharply divided between the unemployed minority youth who burn cars and the unemployed over-educated natives who have six advanced degrees and nothing to do but demand that the government lower university rates further. It’s a place where some things are neat and clean, but other things are on fire. Where the only people who believe in nationalism or religion are immigrants and the nationalism and religion they believe in are of their own home countries.

Cities like New York are scurrying to attract the young urban elite with bike lanes and sidewalk cafes, with craft beer and organic food, and confidence that the only thing that can save them is transitioning to a knowledge economy in which people won’t drive to work on a 9-to-5 schedule, but will instead leisurely bike around while contemplating some breakthrough social media app that will change everything.

[…….]

Europe is a dead end. Its national societies and economics are in a state of deep insecurity and decline. The technocracy dreaming of a United States run to European Socialist standards is riding a bike lane to nowhere.

Read the rest – Daniel Greenfield

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Posted in Transportation | 127 Comments »

Liberalism is marginal, as is MSNBC’s audience

by Mojambo ( 103 Comments › )
Filed under Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives at May 30th, 2013 - 8:00 pm

One of the Knish’s better  columns. It is funny how the media refuses to identify itself openly as “liberal” and when it does (see Newsweek and MSNBC) it fails.

by Daniel Greenfield

In 2010, Newsweek was sold for a dollar and it has been devalued since. Its corporate owners have called buying it a mistake and a fool’s errand. Around the same time last year, Newsweek marked a major milestone. The loss of 2.5 million readers in ten years. Since then it lost another million leaving it with about the reading population of a small city.

Meanwhile MSNBC isn’t doing any better. It lost a fifth of its viewers since last year and it still can’t decide if it’s a network of angry idiots screaming at the camera (Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell) or snide aging college kids making wisecracks about Republicans (Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes). Neither format is working all that well and at this rate MSNBC may want to look into bringing Keith Olbermann, who combines both demographics, back for another run.

Newsweek and MSNBC will both attribute their bleeding readership and viewership to the internet, but that doesn’t explain why they’re both doing badly there as well. MSNBC was caught hiring bots pretending to be young women to pump up hashtags for its hosts and Newsweek’s fusion with the Daily Beast didn’t save it either. [……]

Neither do Newsweek and MSNBC suffer from a surplus of class. Newsweek’s desperate covers last year amounted to a formerly respected magazine descending into outright trolling. It was no longer possible to tell the difference between Newsweek covers and Newsweek parody covers. [……….]On the MSNBC front, no news network which includes Al Sharpton trying to read from a teleprompter can be accused of betting on class.

MSNBC tried to be FOX News for liberals and Newsweek tried to be the Huffington Post with a print edition. They didn’t outright fail at the job, but they couldn’t succeed well enough either.

The dirty little secret of liberal media is that it doesn’t work

The dirty little secret of liberal media is that it doesn’t work. Outlets that identify explicitly as liberal usually play to a very marginal audience. Mother Jones begs money from its readers in the same obnoxious way as PBS. NPR relies on donors. The New Republic is flailing. Liberal mags that succeed do it by focusing on a topic that overlaps with a liberal target audience and embeds their articles there.

It works for magazines like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker. Online sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed succeed by filling themselves with so much trash that the politics becomes a sideline. The liberal brand is fine when it’s stuffed into culture, elitist or trashy. It doesn’t however stand on its own two feet. It can’t, because it has no real appeal.

Liberalism remains marginal. Gallup polls invariably show forty percent of Americans describing themselves as conservative and twenty percent or less identifying as liberal. Liberals dumped the liberal brand after conservatives effectively destroyed it back in the Reagan era. [……]

The cultural dominance of the left did not come about because a majority of Americans knowingly identify with it, but because the left has succeeded in breaking up its agendas into tinier and tinier pieces and making them part of the national dialogue using seemingly agnostic media channels. These stealth tactics have been successful because they eschewed open identification. Liberal media doesn’t work when it’s transparently liberal. That’s why even liberals mock NPR’s news coverage.

Liberal media influence works when it isn’t identified as such

Liberal media influence works when it isn’t identified as such. And when it is identified as such then eighty percent of the country switches the channel and cancels its subscription. And then liberals realize that they are preaching to the choir and dump the whole thing as a bad business. MSNBC’s overt identification with a liberal agenda allowed viewers to see how little of a difference there was between a liberal news channel and the “objective” mainstream news media.

MSNBC exposed millions of people to what actual media liberals sound like when they take off their disguises and begin talking about their agenda. [………..]

It’s the agenda that has always been the issue. What conservatives understand and most of the country does not, is that the issues being debated are not singular events. It’s not just about an individual tax hike or gay marriage or background checks for gun owners. It’s about a larger agenda being put into place piece by piece. And that agenda is the ultimate taboo topic.  […….]

Watch a media report on any issue and there is never any identification or agenda to the left. Liberal activists are just activists. Often they are described as mothers or grandmothers. They don’t have a larger plan. They would just like us to ban something dangerous, raise taxes, protect our oceans and make the country more equal. [……..]And most of the country accepts this deceptive coverage at face value.

MSNBC however churned out naked liberalism. It showed career radicals like Melissa Harris-Perry discoursing on just what the agenda is. And that’s fine for Mother Jones, but it isn’t something that liberals like to see out in the open. And it’s not something that even many of them want to spend too much time thinking about because understanding what they have truly climbed on board with can be a troubling and alienating experience.

Naked liberalism makes even liberals uncomfortable. It’s why they get uncomfortable hearing the self-righteous voices on NPR. It’s too much like looking into a mirror and the things in the mirror are surprisingly unsettling. Hearing a Keith Olbermann or Jon Stewart tear into Republicans was one thing. Opposition is always safe ground. It’s when the talk begins to turn to what you stand for that things begin to fall apart.

Newsweek and MSNBC had made the mistake of going “Full Liberal”

Newsweek and MSNBC had made the mistake of going “Full Liberal” and not only is there a much smaller liberal audience, but that audience doesn’t really like naked liberalism. It would rather see its agenda dressed up in mainstream colors than see it for what it really is.  […….]

Conservative media outlets exist as alternatives to a dishonestly liberal media establishment. But what can liberal media outlets exist as alternatives to? All they can do is speak openly about the agenda that their big brothers choose to pass off as mainstream activism and when you already control the dialogue, there’s not much of a percentage in sudden bouts of honesty.

The liberal agenda relies on manipulation and deception. It can sell quite well so long as no one knows what they’re buying. But label the product with the liberal brand and it stays on the shelves. […….] They talk politics without letting on that they’re talking about politics because that admission is the death knell of everything.

Liberalism’s disproportionate influence depends on not being identified for what it is. That is why it is so panicked by right wing talk show hosts, not because of their rhetoric, but because they identify a clear political struggle between two political agendas and categorize both sides.  [……..]

What media liberals fear most isn’t the right, it’s being exposed as the left. It’s not so much what FOX News says, as its very existence that is threatening, because once viewers become aware that FOX represents the right, then, even if they don’t agree with it, they have to come around to the conclusion that there is another side and that the media embodies that other side.

Liberalism is marginal, as is MSNBC’s audience. Media outlets like Newsweek and MSNBC that go full liberal die. And that lesson has terrible implications for liberal power as a whole.

Read the rest – Death of a Naked Liberal

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Posted in Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives | 103 Comments »

Huma Abedin, perhaps our next Secretary of State?

by Mojambo ( 114 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood at May 2nd, 2013 - 7:00 am

If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as president in 2017 do not be shocked if Huma Abedin becomes Secretary of State. What a nightmare scenario that will be! A woman whose family has Muslim Brotherhood connections as National Security Adviser or even Secretary of State – in other words the perfect Democratic nominee and of course the aged John McCain and his buddy Miss Lindsey Graham would fall over backwards in praising her.

by Daniel Greenfield

In 2017, Huma Abedin may be the wife of the mayor of New York City or the National Security Adviser to the President of the United States. It’s even possible that she might be both.

Huma Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner, was once the front-runner for the top job. Weiner’s career was temporarily torpedoed by a sex scandal, but a weak campaign field has tempted him back into the race and already positioned him at the number two spot.

Weiner’s competition is a lesbian City Council speaker, who is seen as a Bloomberg toady, a Comptroller who may soon be headed to jail for campaign finance fraud and a radical leftist Public Advocate who quotes Che and whose wife once claimed to be a lesbian.

In that company, Weiner no longer looks as freakish as he once did and with a $4.3 million war chest, he could win by drowning his Democratic opponents in cash and then fundraising all over again during the general election when he becomes the only alternative to a Republican mayor.

Bloomberg proved that even an unpopular candidate despised by most voters could win elections by flooding community and interest groups with cash and Weiner’s biggest asset isn’t even his war chest; it’s his connection to the Clintons.  [……..]

The woman at the heart of that connection is his wife. Media reports say that Huma Abedin is the one to decide whether Weiner runs and the existence of the New York Times Magazine image rehab profile makes it clear that she has already decided. But no one really believed that Huma Abedin would have stayed married to a formerly promising politician who would never again run for public office.

The only thing standing between Huma Abedin and Gracie Mansion is Joe Lhota, a balding Giuliani official and Weiner’s likely Republican opponent, whose biggest asset is the Giuliani brand.  Lhota is pitching himself as a libertarian alternative to the Bloombergian nanny state, but the chances are still good that the Clinton machine will roll over him on Election Day.

For most politicians, Gracie Mansion is the last stop of their political careers. Ed Koch, the last mayor to try and move to higher office, couldn’t make it. Lindsay took a shot at the White House in 1972 and Weiner likely has dreams of following in his footsteps. It’s an unlikely project, but if Weiner climbs into the top spot in the city, it will only be as a stepping stone to higher office.

By then Huma Abedin is likely to have an even bigger place in the political sun. Bill Clinton traded his support in the last election for the coronation of his wife. Hillary Clinton does have a likability problem, despite the media’s best efforts to pretend otherwise, and she lost the last time she was the inevitable candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.  […….]

The prospective Democratic presidential candidates for 2016 include such charismatic figures as Joe Biden, Maryland Governor Martin “Rain Tax” O’Malley and New York’s Machiavellian governor Andrew Cuomo. It’s the kind of race that even Hillary might be able to win. And then it’s up to the Republican Party to put up a candidate who can communicate better than any of its candidates have in the last generation.

President Hillary Clinton is almost certain to take along Huma Abedin. The two women were virtually inseparable and politicians like to keep their close confidants and aides by their side. Huma Abedin served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Hillary Clinton during her Secretary of State days.  […….]

Moving Huma Abedin over into a job like the director of policy planning would allow her to reshape the State Department’s foreign policy worldview. And from there it would not be impossible to move her up to National Security Advisor or even Secretary of State.

Both of those positions might be a little too high profile for Abedin who works best in the shade. A 2007 Observer profile of her struggled to dig up any information on her official role, and whether with Clinton or Weiner, she has stuck to the background part.

The controversy that flared up over her background shows why she avoids the spotlight. With close family members, including her parents, involved in the Muslim Brotherhood and her own work at their Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, which was set up by the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood to build a fifth column of Islamization within the United States; Huma Abedin has every reason to be the woman behind the man or the woman behind the woman.

The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood player who has been accused of funding Al Qaeda front groups, is not an ideal mention on any resume. And yet few Republicans have been willing to challenge Huma Abedin when she was serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Secretary of State. Would they be willing to challenge an emboldened Secretary of State Huma Abedin?

[…..]

By 2014, Huma Abedin may be married to the mayor of the biggest city in the country. By 2018, she may be the National Security Advisor.

It would be a rapid ascension, but the process of moving agents of influence up the ladder has shredded the normal seasoning process that would usually required for the top spots. The Center for American Progress’ Denis McDonough went from being an aide to an advisor to the Deputy National Security Advisor to the Chief of Staff in a handful of years. It would not be too hard to imagine Abedin making the same rush up the ladder while the media gushes at her ambition and her posh designer handbags.

In an age of terror and appeasement, Huma Abedin’s Muslim background is her best credential. The close collaboration between the Obama and Clinton foreign policy infrastructure and the Muslim Brotherhood makes her own Muslim Brotherhood background another plus.

What seems like treason to most ordinary Americans is ideologically convenient to a political and diplomatic clique that believes empowering “moderate” Islamists is our best defense against Al Qaeda. Placing Huma Abedin in a position where she can shape American foreign policy would be their show of sincerity to the Brotherhood.

None of this is inevitable. Another Twitter scandal could sink Weiner’s comeback and a more likable Democrat could pull together enough support and media adoration to challenge Hillary Clinton. And the work of researchers and investigators could still sink Huma Abedin the way it sank Susan Rice.

Read the rest – Secretary of State Huma Abedin?

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Posted in Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood | 114 Comments »

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