As the Gyre Widened….
This was written just a few days after Trump’s inauguration, and hasn’t
been changed since except for the heading. A lot has happened since then, but
the partisan invective hasn’t changed a bit…
The numbers game:
Millions turned out yesterday for the Women's march. And Trump claimed that he
set a new record for attendance at his inauguration, despite publication of
pictures showing otherwise.
I've seen claims that
those pictures of the Obama and Trump crowds weren’t really taken at the same
time of day. But even if that's the case, Trump is clearly delusional if he
thinks he set a record. No surprise; he was delusional in November when he
claimed Clinton's lead in the popular vote was only on account of millions of
illegal aliens being allowed to vote.
The Women’s
March clearly drew millions, not only in Washington but around the country and
even the world. That makes it the greatest political outpouring in decades,
surpassing even the reaction to the Kent State massacre in 1970. Other
supposedly populist movements have been pitiful by comparison. Remember the
Occupy movement? Their demonstrations drew a few thousand people at most. It
has been the same lately with Black Lives Matter – compare its media shots to those of the
Women’s March:
Moreover, the
Women’s March seems to have been almost entirely peaceful (although there was
some vulgar and even nasty language) in contrast to the violent demonstrations
the day before that were the work of self-styled anarchists (the “Black Bloc) who
seem to think they can save the world by trashing Starbucks. The same fanatics
tried to hitch a ride on the Occupy movement:
And in a revival
of Radical Chic, some on the Left have sneered on the Women’s March as a
betrayal of the True Faith and True Cause of the violent radicals:
But the reborn
women’s movement, and other opponents of Trump, should beware of falling into
the same trap as the Trumpistas. There is a growing narrative that Trump’s was
elected only because of either intervention by Russia or voter suppression.
Soon after the election, there were reports like this one in Forbes that it was
more a failure of Democrats to support Clinton than of grass-roots enthusiasm
for Trump (Remember that polls consistenly showed a lack of enthusiasm for
both.):
Only, since
then, it has become a matter of faith among some liberal activists that black
voters hadn’t just stayed home, but that millions of them had been blocked from
voting. An exposé in Rolling Stone
suggested that as many as 7.2 million had been struck from the rolls in a
conspiracy launched in 2013 by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach:
Apparently none
of the fact check organizations has addressed the question of whether that many
voters have actually been suppressed, but Snopes was dubious of another claim
that 300,000 had been turned away from the polls in Wisconsin:
Another
conspiracy theory is that FBI Director James Comey had been out to get the
Clintons ever since Whitewater, and that his announcements about closing and
reopening and then reclosing the e-mails case weren’t a matter of fumbling but
of a deliberate plan to throw the election to Trump (who is keeping him on):
When Comey found
nothing warranting prosecution in July, the liberal media praised him, but when
he went on the Weiner hunt in October they did a 180, just as he did again a
few days later – well, you might call his switcheroos a 360. But if it was all
part of the plan, could some conspiracy theorist now “reveal” that Obama, who
had appointed him in the first place, was part of that plan? Obama had reason
to be upset with his secretary of state for relying on Sidney Blumenthal as an
advisor; Blumenthal supported her on the campaign to get rid of Libya’s
dictator Muammar Qaddafi – which didn’t turn out any better, alas, than Bush
II’s “liberation” of Iraq from Saddam Hussein… and which led to Benghazi (Obama
was surely also upset with Clinton for
doing a 180 and denouncing the Trans Pacific Partnership.):
Obama can
certainly let his umbrage get the better of him. Letting a U.N. resolution
against Israel go through last year after ordering a veto every year before
that was clearly motivated by his distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had lent
his support to the Republicans after they invited him to speak before Congress.
Mind you, I think it’s wrong for Israel to build more settlements on the West
Bank, and even annex it. But the logic behind the veto has always been that it
is hypocritical of the U.N. to condemn only Israel, while ignoring the abuses
of other countries, such as Sudan for its ethnic cleansing in Darfur. As for
banning immigrants from Cuba who don’t have permission to leave, that’s
obviously just a last-minute move to stick it to Trump for opposing Mexican
immigration (Mexico itself may have been sending a message by extraditing El
Chapo the day before Trump’s inauguration.). Mind you again, I have nothing
against diplomatic relations with Cuba; we have relations with plenty of other
autocratic regimes.
We all know that
Trump is an easy target for satire. Saturday
Night Live has been skewering him mercilessly. But that sort of thing is
nothing new. It has also made fun of Hillary Clinton, and back in the day it
took on Bill Clinton in a number of sketches – including a series called Tales
of the Arkansas Highway Patrol.
But on the night
after the inauguration, the Beck Bennett and Anzi Ansari stepped out of
character to berate Trump. And one of the SNL writers, Katie Rich, made a
tasteless tweet that his 10-year old son Barron would become “this country’s first homeschool shooter.” If
Trump had tweeted about Malia and Sasha Obama in the same vein, Rich would
doubtless have been outraged. In this case, right-wingers took her on – but so
did Chelsea Clinton. Rich later deleted the tweet; she lost her job with SNL and
apologized a few days later.
And then there was Brian Todd
of CNN, who seems to have thought it was cool to speculate about how the
Democrats could retain the White House if Trump, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan were
all assassinated. That caused a firestorm in right wing circles, but then Fox
News analyst Liz Trotta had pulled the same stunt on Obama in 2008. At least
she apologized, as did Rich; Trump has never apologized for anything, from
making fun of a reporter with a disability to groping women.
Then there are
the accusations of reverse racism on the part of progressives. I’m not going to
single out the black radicals who demonize white cops, because a lot of blacks
live with bad cops… and even die at their hands. But what about this guy?
And then there
was this woman who really went over the top:
I’m worried
about what Trump might do with the nukes myself. But the viral meme on the Left
isn’t just about that. There’s a narrative that everybody who voted for Trump,
and even that everybody who lives in “flyover country,” especially the South, must
be a hard-core racist or even a Nazi -- and that the KKK is more powerful today
than it was in the 1920s, when lynchings were at an all-time high and white
mobs engaged in mass murders of blacks. A couple of years ago, Anonymous posted
a phony exposé of prominent Southern politicians as KKK members.
Well, I have a
lot of cousins down South, and I never hear any hate speech from them – one even
admits having African DNA, though she doesn’t know how she got it; some
ancestor of hers must have “passed.” Some of my kin praised the movie Glory, hardly a paean to the Lost Cause
of the Confederacy. One cousin in Georgia I knew remarked to me at a family
reunion that she’d refused to support another cousin running for sheriff
because he wouldn’t appeal to the black vote; she thought that was stupid – and she was old enough to have
grown up at a time when blacks weren’t allowed to vote. As for Southern whites in
general, well… have you see anything in the news about them turning out by the
thousands to support Dylan Roof?
But it isn’t
just white folks in the South or the Middle West who are coming under fire from
ideologues on the Left. There’s a
backlash against La La Land, Damien
Chazelle’s musical that has won a raft of Golden Globe awards and Oscar
nominations. There had already been complaints (“Oscars So White”) about black
movies being ignored at awards time; this year, Fences and Hidden Figures
are among the contenders, Whatever… Geoff Nelson is among those condemning La La Land as a racist exercise in
nostalgia for white supremacy, and finds it ironic that supposedly liberal
white folks are enjoying it. The rave reviews and huge box office, it seems,
couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the film’s innovative song and dance
numbers.
Speaking of
numbers, Nelson assumes, as he must, that whites (especially Trump voters) in a
recent poll who think life for them was better in the 1950’s than today must be
nostalgic only for white supremacy – as opposed to, say, a time before the
decline in traditional jobs and stagnation in pay. But it doesn’t occur to him
that the fact that 62% of black voters think life is better for them today than
in the 1950’s runs counter to the meme that things are worse than ever for them
now. A new documentary, The 13th,
for example, makes a case that mass incarceration is the fruit of a master plan
by Nixon, Bill Clinton and plutocratic profiteers -- including Walmart as well
as private prison operators -- to restore slavery (So how come Obama had
nothing to say about this?):
Back on Jan, 13,
I posted here about a call for boycotting any and all books published by Simon
and Schuster because it had published an autobiography by Milos Yiannopoulos, a
Breitbart News editor accused (among other things) of having orchestrated a
campaign of racist abuse, including death threats, against Leslie Jones, one of
the stars of the reboot of Ghostbusters.
She struck back and got him banned from Twitter. Yiannopoulos has also drawn
protests at colleges where right wing groups invite him to speak, and left wing
groups try to have him banned. But those behind the boycott of Simon &
Schuster talk as if they think all the other authors there are somehow
responsible for him, and must thus suffer the consequences – even if he himself
doesn’t.
Well, liberals
are at least above making death threats. Or are they? CNN reported a while back
about a Republican elector targeted by the quixotic campaign of Clinton
supporters who thought they could change the outcome of the election by getting
Trump electors to switch their votes. I saw Michael Banerian interviewed on
CNN; he showed off stacks of mail, much of which he said was abusive, as well
as saying that his life had been threatened. A Detroit News account offered further details:
Then there’s
Rosie O’Donnell, who a week before the inauguration, called on Obama to declare
martial law to keep Trump from taking office:
And Rachel
Maddow of MSNBC, who told Bravo – perhaps in jest – that if she interviewed
Trump, her first question would be whether he’d throw her in an internment camp:
But more
disturbing is the fact that ordinary people are so polarized by what passes for
political discourse since the divisive 2016 campaign and election is that they
won’t even talk to each other – there isn’t
any discourse:
