► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Jonah Goldberg’

Being ‘hip’ is everything to Progressives

by Phantom Ace ( 217 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Entertainment, Hipsters, Progressives at July 28th, 2014 - 11:00 am

Recently on the show True Blood, there was an episode based on fundraiser for Ted Cruz. Republicans were portrayed in bad light and became objects of ridicule. This is one of the Progressive movement’s most potent weapons, the use of the popular culture to deride their political opponents and define what is cool.

If you took great offense of the recent episode of HBO’s True Blood in which two vampires crashed a Ted Cruz fundraiser — at the Bush Library no less — and said some bad words about Republicans, I have some advice: Lighten up.

The other week I wrote about how the standard conservative critique of the popular culture is just a bit too tightly wound. This minor kerfuffle strikes me as a good illustration of my point.

[….]

And that I think is the source of the real problem here. By any objective or commonsense measure, the uptight Republicans slaughtered at the Ted Cruz fundraiser are happier and more productive members of society than virtually every other character in the show. From the sympathetic white-trash werewolves to the corrupt human rabble-rousers, from the vampire aristocrats to the endless string of slatternly young women and men who come and go with regularity, the show focuses on creatures who are, variously, decent-but-doomed, evil, stupid, or morally, spiritually, or intellectually lost.

The one thing these people have going for them? They are cool — at least by the glandular, knee-jerk liberal, fashion-forward, standards of the show’s producers and its niche pay-cable audience. In other words, to the extent the show is politically appealing, it is an irrational hot mess (much like the goo vampires turn into when struck with a wooden stake). It’s like it was written for Bill Maher’s studio audience, a group that doesn’t care about real facts or arguments — they just want to hear how they’re awesome and the people they hate aren’t.

[….]

Once you start looking for it, it’s amazing how much liberal commentary — particularly about sex and religion — boils down to a kind of sneering self-satisfaction that liberals are hip and conservatives are squares (just think about how much “analysis” of Obama has been rooted in the assumption he’s cool).

Progressives view themselves as cool and hip. This view is perpetuated by their control over the popular culture and mistakes the Right has done in the culture wars. This episode of True Blood is just a microcosm of the advantages the Left has in defining the political narrative.

Jonah Goldberg: GOP Establishment abandoned Cuccinelli

by Phantom Ace ( 126 Comments › )
Filed under Election 2013, Republican Party at November 6th, 2013 - 5:00 pm

There were many factors that led to Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat in the Virginia election. His allies in the state party decided to have a convention and not a primary, thus depriving Cuccinelli of legitimacy in the eyes of many Republicans. He did not clarify his social stances and allowed Terry McAuliffe to paint him as a Rick Santorum clone. The false flag candidacy of Sarvis siphoned Libertarian leaning votes from Cuccinelli. All these factors contributed to the defeat, but there was a big one that might have proved fatal.

The RNC all but abandoned Cuccinelli and sent him no monetary support. Granted the polls had him down at one point by 17%, but that gap started to close in the final week. Despite the poll movement, the RNC did not send any money nor resources to help push Cuccinelli over the top. This was an act of pure treachery and its obvious, the GOP Establishment abandoned Cuccinelli when he could have used the help.

In the recent government shutdown fight I found myself in polite (on my part at least!) disagreement with the elements of the right inclined to denounce the “Republican establishment.” No need to rehash all that again. But, I will say that in the wake of the Cuccinelli defeat, I think the critics of the establishment have the better side of the argument.

If the folks running the party want the tea partiers to support their preferred candidates — when they’re the nominee, at least — it should work the other way around as well. It now appears that Cuccinelli, a flawed candidate running against an even more flawed human being, could have pulled this thing out if he’d had more help at the end. In fairness, the Republican Governor’s Association did help Cuccinelli, but it came too early. The RNC treated him like a write-off. I can understand that temptation when Cuccinelli looked like a sure loser. But I don’t understand why, when ObamaCare became a big issue, the RNC couldn’t have done more. I’m sure it’s hard to ramp up at the last second. But so what? Things are going to be hard in lots of ways for as far as the eye can see. Hard can’t be an excuse anymore.

Ken Cuccinelli would not be my first choice if I had to choose a Republican candidate. If it comes down to him or a Marxist, then I would get drunk and and vote for Cuccinelli. Life is not fair and you don’t always get the choices you want in life. The Republican Establishment abandonment of Ken Cuccinelli is just another example of the dysfunction in today’s Republican Party. Sadly I see nothing changing and this mentality of losing is frankly really idiotic.

Keep your doctor and your health plan? Not likely.

by Mojambo ( 118 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Health Care, History, World War II at October 29th, 2013 - 5:00 pm

What gets me is that there were people willing to be fooled by such a false statement.

by Jonah Goldberg

“All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it…. I’m infuriated because I was lied to,” one woman told this newspaper, as part of a story on how some middle-class Californians have been stunned to learn the real costs of Obamacare.

And that lie looks like the biggest lie about domestic policy ever uttered by a U.S. president.

The most famous presidential lies have to do with misconduct (Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” or Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations”) or war. Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then plunged us into a calamitous war. Franklin D. Roosevelt made a similar vow. “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Roosevelt knew he was making false promises. He explained to an aide: “If someone attacks us, it isn’t a foreign war, is it?” When his own son questioned his honesty, FDR replied: “If I don’t say I hate war, then people are going to think I don’t hate war…. If I don’t say I won’t send our sons to fight on foreign battlefields, then people will think I want to send them…. So you play the game the way it has been played over the years, and you play to win.”

The burning question about Barack Obama is whether he was simply “playing to win” and therefore lying on purpose, or whether his statements about Obamacare were just another example of, as Obama once put it, “I actually believe my own” spin, though he used another word.

“No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise to the American people,” he told the American Medical Assn. in 2009. […….]

No matter how you slice it, that was a lie. As many as 16 million Americans on the individual health insurance market may lose their insurance policies. Just in the last month, hundreds of thousands have been notified by their insurers that their policies will be canceled. In fact, it appears that more Americans may have lost coverage than gotten it since Healthcare.gov went “live” (a term one must use advisedly). And when the business mandate finally kicks in, tens of millions more probably will lose their plans.

Ah, but they’ll get better ones!

That appears to be the new rationalization for Obama’s bait-and-switch. “Right now all that insurance companies are saying is, ‘We don’t meet the requirements under Obamacare, but we’re going to offer you a better deal!'” explained Juan Williams on “Fox News Sunday.”

A better deal according to whom? Say I like my current car. The government says under some new policy I will be able to keep it and maybe even lower my car payments. But once the policy is imposed, I’m told my car now isn’t street-legal.  [……..]Why, even though you live in Death Valley, your new car will have great snow tires and heated seats.

This is what the government is saying to millions of Americans who don’t want or need certain coverage, including, for instance, older women — and men — who are being forced to pay for maternity care. Such overcharging is necessary to pay for the poor and the sick signing up for Obamacare or for the newly expanded Medicaid.

[…….]

At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Obama talked at great length about the middle class and not once about the poor. His critics on the right said he was lying, that he was really more interested in income distribution. Such charges were dismissed as paranoid and even racist. But the critics were right. Obama was either lying to himself or to the rest of us — because he was playing the game to win.

Read the rest – Obama’s big lie

MSNBC has mastered the art of making unracial things racial

by Mojambo ( 119 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Crime, Media, Politics, Racism at September 20th, 2013 - 7:12 am

Let’s see, you have race hustler Al Sharpton, Chris “tingles” Matthews, Rachel “Maddog” Maddow,  Toure, the incredibly nasty Martin Bashir, and rageaholic Lawrence O’Donnell – all of whom are either demagogues, wannabes, alcoholics and malignant narcissists who condescend to every “person of color” (God I hate that term) because at heart they are cowards.

by Jonah Goldberg

Why do they seem so determined to also make it racial?”

So asks Joy-Ann Reid, the managing editor of TheGrio, a web magazine owned by NBC News whose mission is to “focus on news and events that have a unique interest and/or pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience.” The “they” in question are conservatives and journalists asking, among other things, why President Obama hasn’t inserted himself into a new criminal-justice case the way he did in the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

The irony-impaired Reid was asking that question about a heinous murder in Oklahoma, where, according to police, an Australian student was shot by a black youth with the help of two friends (one of whom was white) “for the fun of it.” Police allege that the bored teens spotted Christopher Lane jogging and decided to follow him and shoot him in the back.

Reid asked the question while guest-hosting a show on MSNBC, a network that has mastered the art of making unracial things racial. Just two days earlier, Reid had insisted that there’s a “neoconfederate thread” running through the gun-rights movement. Whatever that means.

Then there’s MSNBC fixture Chris Matthews, who insists, with considerable regularity, that any criticism of Barack Obama is driven by “white supremacy.” Critics of Obamacare, Matthews claims, believe that “the white race must rule.”

Another MSNBC host, Martin Bashir, recently insisted that outrage over the ongoing scandal at the IRS is really nothing more than coded racism. The IRS is the new “N-word,” according to Bashir. “So this afternoon, we welcomed the latest phrase in the lexicon of Republican attacks on this president: the IRS. [………………]”

Lawrence O’Donnell, another MSNBC host, assured viewers during the Republican National Convention last summer that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s joke about Obama’s playing too much golf was really a deliberate racist dog whistle. “These people,” O’Donnell insisted, “reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”

And that of course leaves out Al Sharpton, an MSNBC host who can best be understood as the racial equivalent of an ambulance chaser.

Against this backdrop, Reid’s asking why anyone would bring race into the discussion is a bit like a pornographer asking, “Why make this about sex?”

But let’s get back to her question. One high-minded response might be that conservatives are bringing race into this discussion because they are simply doing what has been asked of them by Reid and countless others, including the president and the attorney general: They’re trying to have that coveted “national conversation about race.” Of course, the conversation that the conversation-mongers want is entirely one-sided; they only want to talk about why their ideological enemies are racists.  [……….]

But the truth is, that’s not what is going on. To the extent that people are bringing up race it is to turn the tables, rhetorically at least, on people like Reid and her MSNBC colleagues for their relentless — some might say shameless and disgusting — effort to exploit the George Zimmerman murder trial.

Recall that there was no evidence Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus, a fact so inconvenient to NBC News that it unethically edited Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it sound like he was racist. (NBC later apologized and Zimmerman is rightly suing.) This inconvenient truth was also why numerous news outlets insisted on describing Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” — to bend the facts to fit the preferred narrative.

Australian and British newspapers — which do not care about imposing a monolithic liberal narrative on race — are reporting that Lane’s alleged murderers may have been driven by motives other than boredom. But even if the initial reporting proves accurate and these thugs were just trying to break the monotony of the dog days of summer, the lesson for the MSNBC crowd should be the same.

From Obama down to his cheerleaders in the press, liberals have declared unremitting war on their ideological opponents, cynically polarizing the country along racial — and, when possible, gender — lines. They, not conservatives, have been the ones dragging race into any and every political dispute they can. This disgusting strategy has worked well for them, galvanizing minority voters and tarring the Republican brand. I don’t particularly welcome the fact that conservatives are fighting fire with fire, but you can hardly blame them given how liberals like Reid have been asking for it for so long.

Read the rest –  The ‘Race Conversation’ Network