New York Times hyper-partisan pundit David Leonhardt’s hate speech in the New York Times was so bad, I couldn’t cover its ugliness in a reasonable length post. Here I pick up from Part I.
5. “publicly sought“; Lower and lower: Trump needled Hillary about her missing e-mails, and facetiously suggested that Russia should hack them so we could find out what was in them. This has been a disgraceful trope in the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, and citing it identifies the writer or speaker as an untrustworthy hack.
6. “When national security officials raised alarm with Congress, before Election Day, leaders of the candidate’s party refused to act.”
It is nice that the columnist supplies the news links so we can read what he is falsely characterizing. This is a good example: a typically slanted post by anti-Trump Fury Jennifer Rubin blaming Mitch McConnell for not agreeing to sign “a bipartisan statement of condemnation.” If there is anyone who thinks that the Obama administration was prevented in any way from taking measures to protect the election from the Russians because McConnell wouldn’t sign a statement, raise your hand. It’s like the old telephone game: Rubin makes a highly dubious claim, and Leonhardt cites it to mean something more dubious still.
7. “The foreign assistance appears to have been crucial to the candidate’s narrow victory.” Appears to whom? There is absolutely no evidence that Russians played a crucial or even significant role in Trump’s upset. This is now Democrat cant, and wonderful example of bootstrapping: obviously Hillary’s loss proves the case, because they are sure that she shouldn’t have lost.
8. “He won with only 46.1 percent of the popular vote, less than 16 losing candidates over the years had, including Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Williams Jennings Bryan and the little-remembered Horatio Seymour.” Yes, the Left is still complaining about the Constitutional rules of the system that all parties have played by from the beginning, and which has worked out extraordinarily well. What is Leonhardt trying to say? Apparently that Trump isn’t legitimate, so everyone should be angry that they are being governed by an evil pretender.
Psst! Idiot!! 46.1 % is also more than some prominent Presidential winners, like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Bill Clinton (twice), as well as some not so prominent, like John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan In other words, the statistic is cherry-picked trivia, and proves nothing whatsoever.
9. Sigh. The Supreme Court seat was not “stolen,” which falsely implies something illegal. The GOP was within its legal rights not to allow Obama’s nomination come to the Senate floor. The plan was unethical, unfair and a ridiculous gamble that easily could have backfired, but “stolen” is a falsehood.
10. ” A brutal, partisan process that was made into the norm by Democrats during the Bork and Thomas hearings, and sent plummeting to new lows by the outrageous conduct of, again, Democrats, this time.” There, I fixed it for you, Leonhardt.
11. Lie after lie. The President is not an admitted sexual molester. He mocked Dr. Ford for her collaborated testimony. It has yet to be determined is she was truly a victim. Mocking her is not mocking a victim, and is certainly not mocking “victims of abuse.”
12. Super-legislature! Conservatives could have used this nonsensical accusation when the Court legalized gay marriage. The Warren Court literally legislated repeatedly, as when it decreed that certain words had to be spoken by police during arrests in its Miranda ruling.
By “political influence-buying,” the deceitful pundit is referring to Citizens United, in which the Court struck down a law that openly defied the First Amendment. That’s not legislating by the Court. That’s called “stopping Congress from ignoring the Bill of Rights, like the Court is supposed to do.”
What is the purpose of all the inflammatory, warped, historical revisionism from the Angry Left? The purpose is to create more anger still, dark, unreasoning fury, and to demonize anyone who opposes the current progressive and resistance effort to take power rather than earn it. The purpose is to fertilize false narratives that encourage distrust, division and hate, relying on the inattention, intellectual laziness, ignorance and poor education of the American public.
In that one section alone, Leonhardt’s “review” falsely spins reality to state as fact that Donald Trump was elected President because of anti-black racism, that the conservative media was complicit in bringing a racist to power, that the Presidential election was rigged by a Republican de facto alliance with a malign foreign power, that the election itself was illegitimate because only the popular vote should count, that political hardball by Republicans to block Merrick Garland was theft, but opposing the unprecedented Democratic effort to destroy Judge Kavanaugh by weaponizing #MeToo was “brutal and partisan,” that the Supreme Court is rigged.
Though Leonhardt’s official prescription for the anger and hate he is fomenting is political activism, he knows the dangerously unstable stage current progressive activism has reached. Conservatives have been attacked on college campuses; Rep. Steve Scalise was shot; Rand Paul was attacked by a deranged liberal neighbor. Many Republican officeholders have been confronted by mobs on the street and harassed in restaurants as Democrats like Maxine Waters egg them on, and yet writers like Leonhardt, and leaders of the Democratic Party, continue to preach hate. Surely you have heard by now about Hillary Clinton’s jaw dropping statement yesterday,
“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.”
I want to be fair: President Trump has the precision of language of a stroke victim sometimes, so maybe Hillary didn’t mean to sound like a totalitarian thug. Yet here words seem to say that until Democrats regain power, anything goes. Of course, once they do gain power, is the Gulag far behind, with people like her calling the shots? Does anyone have a more innocent and less sinister interpretation?
I don’t.
Let us not ignore the racist and despicable Charles M. Blow, another Times columnist has been holding a non-stop anti-Trump rant for two full years. Here he is this week:
…view the entirety of the battle in which you are engaged, and understand that Kavanaugh is just one part of a much larger plan by conservatives to fundamentally change the American political structure so that it enshrines and protects white male power even after America’s changing demographics and mores move away from that power….Liberals can get so high-minded that they lose sight of the ground war. Yes, next month it is important to prove to the rest of Americans, and indeed the world, that Trump and the Republicans who promote and protect him are at odds with American values and with the American majority…Folks, Kavanaugh is only one soldier, albeit an important one, in a larger battle. Stop thinking you’re in a skirmish, when you’re at war.
There it is: the same people who are falsely calling Republicans racist are openly racist, and sexist as well. It is difficult for me to imagine anyone calling someone as mainstream and traditional as Brett Kavanaugh a pawn in a plot to change anything, and impossible for me to understand how anyone could follow the Kavanaugh hearings and not suspect clinical insanity of a pundit who claims the it was the Republicans who showed themselves to be “at odds with American values,” when the Democrats’ desperate #MeToo ambush depended on the elimination of such core of American values as the presumption of innocence, due process, equal justice, and basic fairness. Is someone who swallows this Bizarro World interpretation stupid? Gullible?
Similarly, how can the claim that liberals are “high-minded” after everything we have witnessed since Trump’s inauguration not provoke derisive laughter? Is Hillary’s statement high minded? Is Eric Holder, who said, this week, “Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them,” being high-minded?
One side of the political divide, and only one side, either because of frustration, corruption, desperation, a fully developed “the ends justified the means” political culture on the Left, or simply a lack of imagination, is now embracing what was once called Hillary’s Clinton’s fatal gaffe, declaring that the opposition to Democratic power are deplorables, and in so doing, encouraging violence. It is the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire, and still the Times and the rest of the mainstream news media are full allies in the effort.
Ethics Alarms 
“facetiously suggested that Russia should hack them so we could find out what was in them”
I thought the facetious suggestion was that the Russians would already know what was in Hillary’s emails, since the Russians are notorious hackers, and unsecured Sec of State email is an obvious target for them. Actually, the facetious bit is that the Russians would share with us what they had, not that they – or someone else – might have the emails.
No, that was the campaign’s walk-back after the original joke.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no-relationship-226282
I remember the speech where Trump said it… and thought it was silly to say.
But is WAS funny at the time.
“The foreign assistance appears to have been crucial to the candidate’s narrow victory.”
Assuming that this is even a sincere argument, it’s a faulty one. It rests on the fact that shifting about 75,000 votes in three states would swing the election to Clinton. In a race that close, many factors, such as Clinton’s failure to campaign in those states, could also have shifted 75,000 votes.
As always, it must be noted that the argument is riduculous because any impact that the Russians may have theoretically had would have been a mere add-on to the impact of the strategy of the Clinton campain and the DNC to “elevate” Trump, one of the most famous men in America, into a credible presidential candidate. That the architects of this Wile E. Coyote plan have paid no price within the party is itself evidence aren’t a functioning democratic organization anymore.
This is one reason they are unhinged: they created Trump (in their minds, and somewhat in fact) but have not been able to destroy him.
I was alarmed by some of the Blow column you quoted, so I decided to subject myself to the misery of reading the whole thing.
This…
… is a rejection of our founding documents as racist, and the suggestion that every thing that whites do in this country to ensure the Constitution is followed is racist by extension, and has only one objective — white power.
The funny thing is, people are lining up from every country around the world except perhaps Europe (where white people come from) to get into America, founded by putative racists who irrevocably enshrined their racism, according to Blow, into the very constitution of the country. How can such a wicked, racist country bent on enshrining white power for as long as possible become such a desirable destination for non-whites? How does Blow reconcile this dichotomy, I wonder? By ignoring it, I suppose, but it’s a glaring non-sequitur for anyone who cares to look.
We are facing a Left so radical that the very founding documents of our country are now seen as evil and racist, yet somehow this evil, racist country has been a force for good throughout its history. How could such badness be so good? Moral luck, I guess.
At some point, the disengaged in America have to look at what the Left is proposing to do. The Kavanaugh debacle was simply a trial balloon, in many ways — how horrible and partisan could a Senate committee be and not cause a backlash? Not quite as partisan and horrible as they were, apparently.
Jeremiads by leftist columnists like Blow and Leonhardt are dishonest, divisive and risible, but the engaged Left sops them up like gravy with a biscuit, and then cites them as essential facts. This is the Left’s echo chamber, and it’s getting more radical every day.
My fear is that radicalism is going to develop a callus on the American psyche, like Trump’s never-ending Tweets of Doom finally have. That would be bad, because if we continue to let this kind of trope pass unchallenged, it can take on the character of the Big Lie. We’ve seen how this works very recently with the Russia crap, something writers like Leonhardt can’t let go of.
So thank you for Fisking this column, Jack. I know it’s hard work but it’s needful. Challenging the counter-factual calls to arms by leftists like Leonhardt and Blow is Gods own work, in my view.
The rhetoric is already increasing. Lefties are proving my earlier words to be true and I’m sure they will continue to do so. It appears that the political left is building up their base waiting ignite the fire.
What do you” think will happen if the Democrats don’t achieve their desired majority in the House and/or the Senate in the mid-terms?
This question bothers me, Z. Riots are possible. Lynchings and assassinations are on the table, by their own words.
And the first time a useful idiot is killed in self defense it will all be the right’s fault.
Brown shirts again…ANTIFA thugs beating up random people at rallies and marches. Already here.
Hate and the ends justifies the means reigns supreme for the Political Antiology political left.
Truck set on fire because of pro-Trump stickers
So how many Monkey See, Monkey Do Hive Mindedness copycats attacks like this do you think we’ll see?
How long do you think it will take before they won’t care that someone is inside of the vehicle?
Z, I think it’s already here. After mid-terms, which the Dems will lose out on, it will get more pronounced and more public. And, the MSM will report on it gleefully, while blaming it on the right.
Another problem with Clinton’s comment is that it smacks of projection. One could just as easily say that the Democratic party wants to destroy what the Republican party stands for and cares about.
Of course, the likely response would be that the Republican party stands for evil things and should be destroyed.
-Jut
I was thinking that, too. The Republicans certainly believe that’s what the Democrats want.
I wish the GOPe acted like it. There is a glimmer of hope after the Senators were personally inconvenienced by the mobs that they understand the threat.
Given that the GOPe are ‘Democrat lite,’ there to get rich and have power, I am not holding my breath.
If not this year, then next, I fully expect mobs to clamber over the fences at the White House, storm into it and wreck it (and wreck many people in it). And still the swamp will survive and thrive on. After all, what better demonstration-by-proxy of an open-borders policy, than to welcome all undocumented visitors into the White House?
That Hlary Cnton quote is signature significance for unfitness for office. She obviously does not have the temperament for another elected job.
(just had to turn the Kavanaugh-assassins’ thinking against them)
Christine Blasey Ford should have just taken one for the team.
Our current divisions have made me realize how sheltered I had been. I had no idea when I was a democrat “activist” (or useful idiot) that trying to foster equality would lead to calls for inequality. I didn’t want white people to “pay” or to demonize minorities who didn’t abide by leftist politics. Then I simply worked for fairness, not vengeance based on hyperbolic hypocrisy.
Honestly I’m befuddled by the calls for violence, incivility, and mob rule. College and history taught me that such calls are how vicious wars begin. Where we are going I fear is a very bad place. If calls for civility is now part of the “white power structure” then really what else is there to do but stay close to one’s family, consider choices for protection, and perhaps depending on where one lives, consider fleeing.
My hometown (Portland, OR) is on the edge. We have Antifa directing traffic, cussing out a disabled white woman, and breaking a white man’s car window, chasing him down for visiting from the South & not abiding by Antifa traffic rules…while neutered police officers stand by. It almost seems Mayor Wheeler is hoping for a nasty confrontation that could seriously start something ugly here. Already protesters are camped out all over the city for various grievances. Striking a match would be all that’s needed.
“Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.” -Washington’s 1st rule of civility and decent behavior.
I don’t care if someone calls me a white supremacist, bigot, racist, traitor, etc. for abiding by this wisdom. I’m not going to let haters make me hate too.
Sometimes not killing encourages and enables haters.
I always kill my enemies out of some respect for them.
Feelings like hate are irrelevant when someone is trying to kill you.
Been there, done that, had the T-shirt.
“College and history taught me that such calls are how vicious wars begin. ”
I pray safety for you and your family, Lady Q. Portland is a powder keg, no doubt.
I am wondering if a vicious war is exactly what the left wants? Burn it all down so they can start over?
Since common Americans have been slow to react, condemn, and judge the left’s baloney over the years, do they think we WON’T defend ourselves?
Some among us want war. For the time being, almost all of those some are on the political left. Time will pass, and so will the current leftist bully-fest.
As with virtually all other leftist projects, the unintended consequences will overwhelm the intended ones. That certainty won’t spare any of us from a living hell, of course. But, it will spare us from being ruled by the left.
To answer your question, slick, yes, that’s exactly what they believe. The effort to take our guns is simply insurance, and they do not truly believe it’ll ever be successful. I have the feeling they may be in for a bit of a shock.
The only way to change radical progressive heart and minds is to make it personally painful. They only understand raw, naked power.