1. Is the mainstream media reporting on this incident a tipping point in which the public finally sees and recoils from the dishonesty and the manipulation it is routinely subjected to? Coming on the heels of the election, the biased reporting on the Chicago attack as well the take of many pundits and on-air personalities have been especially shameless. It has pulled other themes and events along with it, such as Meryl Streep’s grandstanding at the Golden Globe Awards. I hope it’s a tipping point. It is for me, I think.
2. Rod Dreher has a superb essay about the media’s spin on this story and its implications—spin or outright lies—and his analysis is excellent. I recommend reading it, and also the comments, which are erudite and probing as well. As an aside: what a pity it is the ideologies in this country have become so hostile that no liberal or progressive would ever venture onto a site called “American Conservative,” and even citing a post from such a site automatically opens someone like me to the accusation of pushing a partisan agenda. As I have written and will continue to (The recent Ethic Alarms posts covering the attack and the news media’s distortion of it are here and here), the fact that even now, after its coverage of the campaign was scandalously biased and many organizations have emitted loud mea culpas, this refusal to report facts and continued partisan team play is proof that what once was annoying is now an existential crisis. Democracy will not work if facts have no meaning, and the truth is parceled out according to a political agenda. What follows is totalitarianism. Unless liberals and progressives see the threat and join in demands for reform, the likely future is bleak.
3. From Dreher:
“Earlier today in New Orleans, I had been having lunch with some friends, both liberals and conservatives. The issue of how so many Americans now don’t have much interest in truth (as distinct from believing what they want to believe) came up. Of course there was the matter of Trump’s dishonesty, but also the matter of the media’s ethics. I said that I read and subscribe to the Times mostly for the same reason Soviets used to read Pravda back in the day: to know what the Official Story the ruling class wishes to tell itself is. That’s not to say that the Times doesn’t feature excellent reporting and good writing; it does. But I don’t trust it to tell me the truth. I trust it to reveal to me the narrative that the greater part of the ruling class (minus the Republican elites) tells itself. That’s a useful thing to know, as long as you know that you’re only getting a take.”
4. A lot came together for me after learning from Dreher that both the Times and Salon attempted to bypass the anti-white, anti-Trump aspect of the attack and represent it as an anti-handicapped hate crime. Dreher cites Steve Sailer, who wrote,
So, you have your marching orders, right? The video of blacks abusing a white kid has nothing to do with virulent prejudice against whites or Trump, it has to do with Society’s prejudice against the intellectually disabled minority.
Do you understand your mission?
As you know, it is a priori impossible for Victim-Americans to abuse American-Americans. So, the victim must have been a Victim-American.
5. Is it possible that this was what actress Meryl Streep was doing when she picked an old but horrible example of Trump at his worst during the campaign, his mockery of a handicapped reporter, to launch her Golden Globes attack on the election results, average Americans, football, immigration laws and the MMA?
(Aside: The National Review performed a perfect take-down of Streep’s grandstanding, finding the beating heart of its hypocrisy, writing,
If your message is, “we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy,” fine. Empathy is a good thing. Except . . . no one’s going to feel obligated to be more empathetic if the call for empathy comes from the walking embodiment of Hollywood royalty, and it’s immediately followed by a declaration that the general public’s tastes are cruddy: “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ‘em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” What did football players or mixed martial artists ever do to Meryl Streep? This isn’t just snide, it’s really inaccurate. Both UFC and Bellator have plenty of competitors born in other countries. The number of foreign-born NFL players is increasing as well. Such a gratuitous shot, and so counter to everything else Streep said. Her very next sentence is, “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like.” Could she enter the lives of football or MMA fans at that moment? How does she think those folks would feel? Literally a minute later, Streep declares, “when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” Does she have enough empathy to understand why millions of Americans might feel like a multimillionaire superstar snickering about their entertainment choices might come across as a bully at that moment?
Imagine if the President-Elect had the wit and depth to return fire with something like this (or the sense to get someone to compose it for him) instead of his sadly predictable tweeted response the Streep was “over-rated.” Personally, I was betting on “loser.”)
Why the choice of that particular outrage by Trump? I don’t know Streep well enough to be sure she is so diabolical a partisan attack dog, but it seemed like an effort to argue that the Chicago attack, like all the alleged (and mostly falsely reported) “hate crimes” occurring after the election, according to the official anti-Trump narrative, was also sparked by Trump’s words and bigotry.
6. Back to Dreher: He closes his article with this…
About a decade ago, as a working journalist, it became clear to me that when it came to some subjects, the media thought it’s job was more about managing the news than reporting it. If you read, for example, The New York Times as if we were the USSR and it was Pravda, you better understand its meaning. The comparison is certainly not one-to-one, but it’s closer than it ought to be.
It’s a good thing I’m not Dr. Bruce Banner, because this makes me very angry. How dare anyone “manage the news”? When journalists manage the news, you are managing my mind, my beliefs, my understanding of the world, my autonomy, my life. This is an abuse of position and influence and power. I resent it, and the fact that everyone doesn’t resent it is a troubling a symptom of vulnerability to totalitarian ideology as I know.
7. A commenter on Dreher’s piece, called kgasmart, wrote:
That is, to be forthright about what happened gives the alt-right types the ability to say “See, we told you so!” The Times has its own narrative and will not give this competing, conservative, “hate” narrative any air.
But it’s inevitable that the truth will emerge. In which case the alt-right types are EVEN MORE empowered, because they can both point to events, and the media’s attempt to cover them up – “fake news” indeed.
The media is utterly destroying its credibility this way, but it’s more beholden to “tolerance” than it is the truth. And this is why it will die out, because when a business model built up on reporting the truth suddenly has a new primary goal – it can’t survive.
8. This is what I particularly find remarkable: the episode in Chicago had no special significance at all. It had to be reported accurately, that’s all. It was just four unsocialized, hateful individuals, bullying and abusing someone different from and weaker than themselves. Isolated incidents like that tell us nothing about race, youth, politics, social media, education, family or politics. But as with the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman incident, which also had nothing to teach us about race, youth, politics, social media, education, family or politics, it was the reaction by the news media, pundits and activists that exposed a deep and dangerous problem.
For another example, here’s most of the bile from a TIME essay by Tavis Smiley, the former BET commentator who seldom misses any opportunity to claw at the scabs of America’s racial divisions, and will open new wounds if the old ones seem to be healing. That my tax dollars help pay the salary of this bigot at PBS is like bedbugs in my soul. This time, he finds evidence of racism in the fact that the black torturers were arrested quickly, and boldly goes on from there to new worlds of propaganda and idiocy:
Smiley: All four suspects in the Chicago torture video now face charges of aggravated battery, hate crimes and kidnapping. See Jordon, Tesfaye, Brittany and Tanishia. See the crime they committed. See how swift justice is dispensed when the perpetrators, rather than the victims, are black.
Ethics Alarms: See how swiftly justice is dispensed when morons make their own smoking gun evidence by putting a video of their crime on Facebook! Tavis finds this suspicious. Dylann Roof, a white guy who gunned down blacks and was caught almost immediately, was sentenced to death yesterday. Smiley doesn’t care about reality, he just plays the same race cards, over and over, TV, radio and other news media keep giving him a forum as if he wasn’t an not-all-that-bright racialist, we keep paying him to do it.
Smiley: “How many fellow citizens who can’t stop their social media commentary about this sick incident have been just as outraged and outspoken about the regular harassment and abuse that black teenagers and other black fellow citizens endure daily at the hands of white cops?”
Ethics Alarms: 1) This is imaginary hypocrisy. First, we have to assume that there is a group of citizens who “can’t stop” their commentary on this episode, and then Smily rhetorically asks us to assume that this amorphous group—they must all be white, of coures— doesn’t care about unjust police conduct. What does one have to do with the other? 2) Do I need to point out that this is a false dichotomy of absurd dimensions? One is a single episode of utter depravity, the other is Smiley’s gross generalization of a complex phenomenon involving many different incidents that cannot be homogenized as race-baiters like Smiley find it convenient to pretend.
Smiley: “How do you think these kids came up with the idea to broadcast this wicked torture scenario? You think they just made this up in their heads? We all know from whence it came… the movies they watch and the video games they play. Mad money is being made off of selling degeneracy to young folk, black and white. The easy access they have to information allows them to make bombs that they take to school, get the guns that they kill each other with and to come up with this kind of torture scene. They see this stuff everyday, everywhere. And then we act surprised when they re-enact it—on Facebook Live. Really?”
Ethics Alarms: Wow, Tavis morphed into Tipper Gore so fast, I hardly noticed! Funny, the vast, vast majority of black kids in today’s culture don’t torture disabled white people and make them scream “Fuck white people” while the cameras roll….in fact, I don’t recall that video game. You’re right, Tavis, this was the fault of capitalist America and social media.
Will TIME magazine print anything?
Smiley: “The comments made just days ago by the former Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy about cops avoiding stops and arrests in certain parts of the city were more disturbing and damning than this one incident, tragic as this one incident may be. That’s what cops sign up for — to protect and serve all. Not to cherry-pick neighborhoods for justice. That far more revealing storyline barely had legs, but this story is headline news everywhere. What’s more germane to the citizens of Chicago — an ugly and vicious but rare story like this, or the fact that police stops and arrests decreased dramatically last year? The same year in which homicides in Chicago were more than double the homicides in New York City and Los Angeles combined.”
Ethics Alarms: Amazing: Smiley put this paragraph just one paragraph away from his attack on police for “regular harassment and abuse that black teenagers and other black fellow citizens endure daily at the hands of white cops.” Gee, I wonder why it is that Chicago police aren’t as pro-actively policing in neighborhoods where a confrontation with a citizen is likely to have them tarred as a racist brutes by people like Tavis Smiley, with Black Lives Matter demanding that officers be fired and imprisoned regardless of the facts? What a mystery Smiley has uncovered!
The police superintendent‘s statement is old news: it’s called the Ferguson Effect, and Tavis Smiley is one of the people responsible for it.
Smiley: “Why do we front like we really care about the mentally ill? Fake news, fake blues. We really don’t care about their plight, and the proof is in abundance. We don’t care enough to prioritize spending in our municipal and federal budgets to get them the help they need. Budgets are moral documents. We don’t care enough to enact and enforce legislation to keep guns out of their hands, even after they kill our babies and other loved ones. Repeatedly. We only pretend to care when their condition creates a convenient platform on which to stand and moralize about the menaces to society that maltreat and abuse them. Who are the real menaces in this sad situation, the kids who tortured the young victim, or all the rest of us who don’t demand that our leaders push mental health higher up on the American agenda?”
Ethics Alarms: Wow II. Now Smiley is also trying to shift the incident into a hate crime against the handicapped. It is his side of the ideological divide that insisted that it was unconstitutional to institutionalize the mentally ill against their wills, and now he’s citing the direct results of that position and all the unintended consequences it led to as proof that nobody “cares.” Smiley has no solutions, just throwing more money at the problem. This is an ignorant insult to everyone, and I know a lot of them, who struggles with this problem in their families and among their friends every day. We don’t care about the mentally ill? Almost 20% of the population is mentally ill, and if you add substance addiction and dementia to the mix, it’s much higher than that. I can’t think of a person I know who doesn’t have to care about a mentally ill family member, or several. This is just a phony—and despicable– deflection by Smiley, who is suffering himself from the partisan illness of believing that caring is measured by one’s eagerness to spend money on dubious government programs.
The main significance of the Chicago torture video is that it is serving as a catalyst, prompting journalists and others to pull off their masks, and reveal their shocking lack of integrity, decency, fairness and trustworthiness.
Ethics Alarms 
Great analysis Jack!!
This “Fuck White People” Torture Video incident has opened the eyes of some people to the fact that there is intense effort from a wide swath of our society to rationalize black racism towards everyone else. This kind of hypocrisy is at the core of genuine Morally Bankruptcy.
This is not the tipping point, Jack, I am sorry to say. This is where America’s road forks, and the blue urban trendy areas go one way, and everything else goes the other. It might even be a breaking point between worlds, like in the Harry Potter books, where there was a break between the mundane world and the magical world and each world goes on, barely cognizant of the other’s existence and in some cases refusing to believe the other exists.
A nation whose citizens hate other citizens more than they hate that nation’s enemies is in trouble. As some of us older types remember, during the Cold War for the most part politics stopped, or diminished greatly, at the water’s edge and we did our best to present a united front to the world. Those who tried to break that united front, like Ted Kennedy, like Phil Donahue, etc., were rightly derided (although that didn’t stop the Boston Irish from reelecting Ted till his dying day). There were more than a few who sought to understand the enemy and get insight into how he thought, which is normal and can be valuable. There were plenty who said our beef wasn’t necessarily with the people of the east, but that they bore some culpability for acceptance of the tyrants who ruled them, which is fair thinking. There were very few who sided openly with the other side, and even when they cloaked it in morality, like Philip Agee, they were justly scorned.
These days, someone on the outside looking in would wonder exactly which side the left in this country is on. There’s no question that one of the top three enemies of this country is radical Islam and its progeny. There’s no question that the values of that system are completely at odds with ours. There’s no question that most of its adherents come from certain areas of the world. There’s also no question that those Americans who choose to embrace that system (lone wolves, black Muslim wannabes) are usually the disaffected who see no reason to particularly love the system and usually many to hate it. As such, you’d think there would be a lot of questions about that system and a lot of care exercised about allowing folks into the country from areas of the world where it is powerful. Yet the left wants to throw the doors open and criticizes those who dare question the system much, tarring them as haters.
Building on that, there’s also no question that the current immigration policy isn’t working. There’s nothing good about allowing the low-skilled or the unskilled to disappear into our cities and there either stress our law enforcement resources by upping the crime rate or stress our welfare resources by squeezing the system for every dime in benefits while returning very little. As such, you’d think there would be a lot of questions about this and an effort to change it for the better. Yet to listen to the mayors of these sanctuary cities, every last one of them from the left, you’d think the citizens of this country, not those here illegally, are the enemy.
There’s no question that law enforcement in this country, especially big city law enforcement, has it tough on the best of days, dealing with everything from domestic disputes (which can go sideways really fast) to serial killers and always worried when they pull out of the garage at the start of watch that they might end that watch in a body bag. As such, you’d think we’d all be doing our best to make their jobs easier, not harder. Yet to listen to the left in this country, not only is law enforcement not to be trusted, they are to be hated, feared, and resisted, because they are no better than hunters with badges, whose favorite prey is innocent young black men.
I could give other examples, but I think you get the point. The left in this country sees this country as the enemy. Most of the news media comes from the left, and shares that view, whether they veil it well, veil it thinly, or veil it not at all. Those who veil it not at all are easily pushed aside, we know who they are and what they stand for. A veiled enemy is not going to be truthful, honorable, or forthright. A veiled enemy is going to do his best to deceive, sow doubt, and create distrust. A veiled enemy is going to do his best to create confusion in the other side’s ranks. A veiled enemy is going to cloak his message in all the ways that sound plausible and reasonable, in order to fool the gullible.
However, this last election tore the veil, or the media discarded it in the hopes that the one scrap they left in place, that Trump was a special case and dangerous, would be enough. It wasn’t, and anyone with a functioning brain not polluted by bad ideology now knows who the media are and what they are about. They crossed the Rubicon, and there’s no going back. That’s why formerly respectable publications like Slate and Salon are spewing open hatred at Trump like serpents spitting venom, and established flag publications like the NYT are becoming dragons who froth with the fire of hate for those who don’t agree with them. They think this fire and venom will destroy all that isn’t like them. Well, first of all, more than half this country, California excepted, isn’t going to let them. Secondly, and more to the point, since when is it the role of those who are supposed to be telling the truth to ruin those who think differently? How is a country supposed to stand when part of its own populace is trying to destroy it?
I wonder how they reconcile their hatred of cops with their support for new gun control laws, which would be enforced by these very same cops “whose favorite prey is innocent young black men”?
How do they reconcile their love of all things Islamic with the fact that radical Islam practices gender apartheid and the murder of gay people?
Steve-O-in-NJ said, “How do they reconcile their love of all things Islamic with the fact that radical Islam practices gender apartheid and the murder of gay people?”
Small correction; ALL Islam “practices gender apartheid”.
For the record; there are some extremist in Christianity that want to practice “gender apartheid”, I personally know some of these idiots.
I wonder if this will actually open any eyes.
Streep is a great example: The people who were inclined to agree with her are clapping and barking like seals, talking about how stunning and brave she is (without the benefit of a penis!). Meanwhile, the people who where inclined to disagree with her are calling out her blasphemy with mouths a-foaming. Talk about two Americas. Now, I get it, there’s a spectrum, and your individual results may vary, but I don’t think these two sides actually talk anymore, I don’t think that there’s an arena where there are battles of ideas. I think there are two echo chambers, and they communicate via zingers and bumper stickers, neither having much interest, or even incentive to engage the other side, as any attempt to reconcile the arguments is treated either as some various form of bigotry or weakness and immediately jumped on like a lion on a wounded gazelle. It’s not reasonable. It’s not honest. It’s not sane. And I’m tired.
I’ve been getting tired for a year now, and I hope, that it’s just a matter of election cycle burn out, and that I can bounce back… But it seems that despite the battle being fought and decided, it’s just ramping up. Yesterday, Buzzfeed published what has to be the most partisan piece of fake news I’ve ever seen: Documents peddled as being ostensibly from intelligence organisations, despite being formatted incorrectly, and riddled with spelling errors, that outline instances such as Trump renting a hotel room in Moscow and paying hookers to pee on the bed, because the Obamas once slept there. A part of me finds this hilarious, the subject matter reads like a bizarre fanfic, or wonderful satire, something birthed in the bowels of 4chan and bitten on by a media so willing to sell itself out, it didn’t waste time doing foolish things like verifying sources. And then CNN picked it up. They had the grace to label is “unverified”, but not the wisdom to avoid the embarrassment of pushing OBVIOUSLY fake news in the rush to keep up with a 24 hour news cycle, and especially when the content confirms their bias.
Let me make it even easier for you. I didn’t watch the soon-to-be-former President’s speech last night, I can read it online later. However, when I looked at my fb feed this morning all the black people I knew were swooning and begging him not to go, and all the white people were sneering and poking holes in it. 2 Americas, 2 completely different views. I have to sigh as I say that, at the end of this 8 year journey we not only didn’t come as far as we thought we did, we actually moved backward.
That was either by the design of the man making the speech, or he was even more inept than I thought.
I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
I read in other articles that even Buzzfeed, especially Ben Smith, stated that they have doubts to the allegations, but ran the story anyway: “Astonishingly, though, Smith cast doubt on whether the story his site published was true.
“As we noted in our story, there is a serious reason to doubt the allegations,” he wrote. “We have been chasing specific claims in this document for weeks, and will continue to.” (https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/buzzfeed-runs-error-laden-unverifiable-trump-russia-claim/) (Also on The Guardian)
That did earn him rebuke from other journalists, but the damage is done when people ignore the warning that the contents contained errors and were “unverified and potentially unverifiable” and see it as legitimate. Obviously, they don’t investigate, or even bother to notice that Buzzfeed is nothing but an entertainment site. Publishing the documents that are unverified under the guise of “being transparent” and letting the people decided for themselves is just stirring the waters more. Even Julia Loffe (formerly from Politico until her tweet suggesting Trump was having sex with his own daughter) said she was approached with the story but didn’t go with it because it was “impossible to verify”.
Smith also said, “But publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.” So in other words, just publish unverified, and possibly unverifiable, full of errors, (misspellings, grammatical, and so on) under the false guise of transparency to the public is going to be how “reporting” should be done?
Is it just the allegations that are unverified, or the claim that these allegations were provided by the CIA to Trump and Obama in the briefing?
If the latter is verified as factual, then I have no problem with Buzzfeed showing the contents of the memos. If they were presented in a briefing, then that is news, whether the allegations within are true or not. If Buzzfeed did not verify that this info was presented in a briefing, however, they shouldn’t have published it.
“ Is the mainstream media reporting on this incident a tipping point in which the public finally sees and recoils from the dishonesty and the manipulation it is routinely subjected to… I hope it’s a tipping point. It is for me, I think.”
From your lips…er, fingers, to God ears, I pray. I first notices the slanted coverage during my youth, when it was just peachy for the Soviets to have more and more nukes, while the evil USA should not have any at all.
The media (which was essentially CBS, NBC, and ABC along with The NY Times) celebrated what amounted to slavery in the Soviet Union for everyone not a communist party elite, while denigrating the ONLY country in the world where one had a fair chance to improve one’s economic circumstances no matter race, skin tone, poverty, religion, etc…
My hope is the silent majority has learned that they must pay attention so things don’t go so far, either political direction.
“But it’s inevitable that the truth will emerge. In which case the alt-right types are EVEN MORE empowered, because they can both point to events, and the media’s attempt to cover them up”
Yes, my former conservative brethren who have decided that “the fix is in, and fair play is naive” are marshaling their forces, and this sort of ammunition plays to the worst of that ilk. The press has never been objective (“Remember the Maine”) but there used to be two sides to the reporting, at least by competing news organizations. The Alt-right sees the monolithic Liberal reporting and feeds conspiracy theories that are hard to dislodge, because they are partially true.
This will be an interesting year… I hope not in the way the Chinese define interesting.
More like: 这将是一个有趣的四年
Zhè jiāng shì yīgè yǒuqù de sì nián
Jack,
“Wow II. Now Smiley is also trying to shift the incident into a hate crime against the handicapped.”
No, what he’s doing is far more dangerous: He’s salting his whole rant with a slew of liberal comfort words so that he sounds more open and inviting to anyone who finds comfort in such words and intentionally antagonizing those who don’t. “If you’re against budget initiatives for the handicapped, you’re a bigot.” “If you don’t believe in gun control, you’re responsible for the murder rates in our cities.”
Meanwhile, whenever he refers to the attack itself, he uses appropriately condemning words like “sick” and “wicked” in reference to the perpetrators to suggest his own disgust and disappointment, before immediately using it as a jumping board into another aside about something unrelated.
The trick isn’t new, but his use here is especially nefarious since, to his ilk, he sounds like the epitome of caring and empathy (he even throws in a superfluous “think of the CHILDREN” [one of your favorites] for good measure), while his critics are just race-hating bigots who are opposed to his ideas because of color or partisanship.
Tavis Smiley lost all credibility when he fell in with the King family in their disgraceful (and stupid) attempt to exonerate James Earl Ray. That said, what upsets me the most about Smiley is that, unlike Cornel West and even Sharpton, he’s not even that smart. He plays little more than a cheerleader to “revolutionary” causes that he would otherwise never soil himself by getting involved with (the hoi poloi are so unruly, after all). He surrounds himself with radicals and academics, repeats their rhetoric back in the form of a question, and then comes off looking like he’s at the center of the discussion when really he’s just goading others along.
Here’s to hoping your head remains intact another day …
-Neil
Neil,
I completely agree with your analysis. The conflation of the Chicago incident with lack of attention to black-police relations is intentional. Smiley’s dismissive attitude about the Chicago savagery is intended to show that there are two Americas: One white, and one non-white. His position is the same as enunciated by Symone Sanders on CNN: Hate crime laws go one way and only one way; black experience in America is totally separate and distinct from white experience, and the faux outrage of social media is exaggerated simply because this incident shows blacks being mean to a disabled person.
jvb
Smiley is just a slick partisan hack with an enormous ego:http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/04/a_smug_tavis_smiley_asks_bill_oreilly_how_may_incidents_make_a_pattern.html
Thank you for showcasing Rod Dreher’s thoughts. I had to share it on Medium cause, well, you know hahaha!
View at Medium.com
Trump never mocked a crippled reporter. He did a characature of a “journalist” who happened to have a crippled arm. He’s mocked many people is similar fashion. Gavin McInnes revealed this in a recent video comparing various incidents.
That’s just plain unvarnished bullshit. He mocked the reporter. There is no other possible explanation. You are seriously arguing that Trump just happened to do a crude spastic imitation, waving his hands around like that, to imitate a reporter who just happened to have a condition that causes him to have problems moving his arms, and Trump had no idea? What an amazing coincidence!!!
Occam’s Razor. Don’t insult me or this blog by posting such dishonest spin.
Jack I thought Trumps denial of the mocking was a lie too and he was stupid to even try. Trump is and was stupid but he wasn’t mocking the reporter. I learned the truth from a liberal radio show and then did my own research. It is the shtick that he does when trying to play a wimp, weasel or something. Media knew that but hit him with it anyway. Idiotic, unethical and immature thing he does but wasn’t an attempt to mock the reporters disability, which doesn’t present like that anyway, but his character.
http://ijr.com/2016/09/693873-remember-when-trump-was-accused-of-mocking-reporter-with-disability-this-video-might-clear-him/
CONTRAST, note how they make it about mocking and not mocking his disability.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/20/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-hillary-clinton-wrong-say-he-moc/
Nope. Don’t buy it. So if you mock a person without a lisp by doing a lisp, (like Rush Limbaugh does), when you mock a person WITH a lisp by lisping, you’re not mocking the speech impediment? Not how it works. So he isn’t a versatile mimic. In law, you take your victim as you find him.
Trump knew the reporter had the hand problem. He can’t duck responsibility.
So, are mocking impressions of someone you disagree with ethically off limits? Am I forbidden to do a mocking Indian accent when I make fun of Khizr Khan’s attempt to ride his son’s grave to fame? Was it wrong when Garrison Keilor regularly had an actor perform GWB with a much broader Texas twang than the 43rd POTUS ever had? Where are the lines?
Bullying and punching down was the issue here…from someone running for the highest office in the land. Making fun of people with an illness or disability of any kind is always cruel. These lines are neither new nor difficult. Satire in impressions of powerful people like Bush are not even in the same category.
Gotcha, I did not make that distinction, although I think it would only firmly be punching down now from the President-elect. Absolutely it’s not nice to make fun of someone who’s ill or who has a disability, but that sometimes disappears with the rationalization that politics is by nature rough and tumble. Somehow I doubt any entertainer would bring on an actor as Obama with a ridiculously exaggerated “ghetto” way of talking, but I think we will be seeing a LOT of exaggerated Trumps in comedy, although not from Obama ass-kisser Mr. Keillor, who finally retired his tired (sorry, 42 years of anything is a very long time) shtick of “all the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are smart, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average” this past July.
Am I forbidden to do a mocking Indian accent when I make fun of Khizr Khan’s attempt to ride his son’s grave to fame?
You’re not “forbidden,” but you shouldn’t do that, obviously. Khan isn’t even Indian, he’s Pakistani. How is this a serious question?
Somehow I doubt any entertainer would bring on an actor as Obama with a ridiculously exaggerated “ghetto” way of talking, but I think we will be seeing a LOT of exaggerated Trumps in comedy
Do you really not see a difference between mocking someone’s race or their disability, and mocking someone’s specific individual behavior? Seriously?
The accent is the same, whether from either country or the other, at least to Western ears, much the same as we Americans might have trouble telling the difference between a Belfast person and a Dubliner. I see absolutely nothing wrong with mocking someone by repeating what they say, something you do repeatedly here, and unnecessarily, since we can read the post you are responding to, and which is frankly getting on my last nerve.
I know I’ve spewed some rage in the past, but I’m saying this quite coolly. You need to leave this blog. You accomplish nothing beyond being annoying, but I suppose that’s to be expected from a millennial snowflake. Unfortunately we are on opposite sides of the country and unlikely to ever reach the same area, or I would teach you just how on my last nerve you have gotten. And believe me, it would be the kind of lesson that would leave a very memorable impression.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with mocking someone by repeating what they say, something you do repeatedly here, and unnecessarily, since we can read the post you are responding to, and which is frankly getting on my last nerve.
Are…are you under the impression that quoting a portion of your comments to make it clear what part I’m responding to is an attempt to mock you? Because it’s not. It’s a pretty standard convention when communicating on blogs such as these, and I’m hardly the only one who does this. Jack does it all the time.
If that’s not what you’re talking about, then what are you talking about?
I know I’ve spewed some rage in the past, but I’m saying this quite coolly. You need to leave this blog. You accomplish nothing beyond being annoying, but I suppose that’s to be expected from a millennial snowflake. Unfortunately we are on opposite sides of the country and unlikely to ever reach the same area, or I would teach you just how on my last nerve you have gotten. And believe me, it would be the kind of lesson that would leave a very memorable.
OK, tough guy. NOTE: That was intended to be mocking.
Trump made the same gesture when imitating Ted Cruz. Doesn’t prove intent, or lack of it, but casts doubt on the allegation for me.
Jack, I posted my comment before seeing Steve’s post and your reply. I didn’t know there were so many more examples of Trump using the same gesture. I think you overestimate Trump’s ability to remember every reporter he’s ever encountered, their names, and whether they may have a particular disability. I think he probably didn’t even remember the guy, and the gesture was an unfortunate coincidence. Don’t know for sure how he intended it, though, since I’m not an especially good mind reader.
I’ll post these sources without comment. I’ll be interested in what you make of them
NATO http://www.stratcomcoe.org/social-media-tool-hybrid-warfare
Brexit – House of commons: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmtreasy/122/122.pdf section 3
kidnapping UK coverage
mainstream popular press https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2567899/why-did-donald-trump-mock-disabled-reporter-serge-kovaleski-and-what-did-meryl-streep-say-at-the-golden-globes/
far left-liberal
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/05/facebook-live-beating-anti-donald-trump
one and only actual socialist print vehicle http://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2017/01/donald-trumps-twitter-attack-meryl-streep-reveals-why-he-won
Thanks. But please don’t send me lists of links like that again.