“Wouldn’t it have been funny if the all-the-way-to-Wisconsin plea had worked? Oh, yeah, poor you, going to Wisconsin, let me sit back down and yammer on with you, because you endured the ordeal of coming to Wisconsin. How many times has Trump traveled to Wisconsin in his political career? 40? 60? He’s put in the hard work of demonstrating to Wisconsin that we matter, and here’s Kristen Welker obviously irked to have had to touch down in a flyover state. I can’t believe I came to this hellhole for you!”
—-Wisconsin Bloggress Ann Althouse, mocking “Meet the Press’s” Kristin Welker for pleading to President Trump not to end his interview with her because she “traveled all the way to Wisconsin” to grill him.
Brava to Ann for picking pick up on Welker’s Coastal bias and thinly veiled disdain for “flyover country.”! I missed that: I only thought her pleading made her look foolish.
Maybe this is one more example of journalists’ obnoxious presumption of superiority and the pervasive arrogance of the news media finally sinking in. Boy, I hope so. Once you have concluded that a messenger is an untrustworthy asshole, it’s a lot easier to be properly skeptical of the message.
The comments to Ann’s post are fascinating—many ascribe to my conclusions regarding election fraud— and a bit shocking, both in the nastiness between commenters and the language Ann’s moderation let through. It is also remarkable how red-pilled her commentariate has become, with just a few bitter, and in my view, hysterical Axis fans remaining.
For example:
Ethics Alarms 
“‘Hegseth is a morinic Israeli shill who attends Bible study classes every week where he is indoctrinated into believing that those who help Israel are first in line for the ‘rapture.'”
False. And a generalization. Although the New Testament urges us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, there is no verse tying salvation to providing political, military or economic support to Israel.
This is an ad hominum attack mocking the Secretary’s proclaimed religious beliefs.
AM,
I’m not going to speak to Hegseth’s personal beliefs here, since I have not actually taken any time to dig into them, but I do think it is worthwhile to bring up some Dispensationalist thinking regarding the nation-state of Israel.
Dispensationalists have looked at the establishment of the State of Israel as the herald of the end times, and they justify that by reading into Matthew 24. In this chapter, Jesus and his disciples are leaving the Temple, and the disciples point out the grandeur of the Temple, to which Jesus responds that “there will not be left here a stone upon another stone.” Then the disciples ask when the Temple will be destroyed, and what signs there will be for the destruction of the Temple, for the beginning of Jesus’ reign, and the end of the age. Jesus then delves into his Olivet Discourse, describing the tribulations to come, the signs in the heavens, and the coming of the Son of Man. He ends this with a lesson regarding fig trees:
The key in this passage is tying the fig tree sprouting leaves and “this generation will not pass away” together with another passage where Jesus withers a fig tree back in Matthew 21. It is clear in Matthew 21 that when Jesus looks for fruit on the fig tree and finds none that this is a reference to looking for faith in Israel and finding none. So the fig tree symbolizes Israel. Dispensationalists then interpret the fig tree in Matthew 24 as continuing to symbolize Israel. The branch becoming tender and sprouting leaves is then interpreted as the restoration of Israel. Finally, “this generation will not pass away” is taken to mean that within a generation of the restoration of Israel, the Son of Man will return.
So, with Israel established in 1948, and a generation being 40 years, biblically, that means that the Son of Man will return by 1988. But that obviously didn’t happen, so Dispensationalists had to reinterpret events (rather than their theology), and concluded that since the original borders of Israel did not include territories that were acquired in 1967, then the 40-year countdown did not start until 1967. Of course, 2007 came and went without the Second Coming, so they have had to further investigate events. Maybe the clock doesn’t start ticking until Israel acquires all the territory that had been marked out in the original apportionment, or maybe not until Israel acquires all the territory it had at the height of Solomon’s reign.
It is at this point my current knowledge of Dispensationalist thought comes to an end. I don’t know if there is a movement among them to aid Israel in expanding its borders, or if that is just slander. My very cursory Google searches suggest that there are highly-motivated Dispensationalists who support Israel expanding its borders specifically to bring about the Second Coming, but again, I don’t know if that is fringe, or if that is what detractors claim about Dispensationalists, and it doesn’t help that if you have five Dispensationalists in a room, you have 12 opinions about the end times.
I think I can agree with the concern that if Dispensationalists try to steer US military operations toward specifically expanding Israeli territory, that’s a problem. On the other hand, I have not seen evidence that the US military policies are in anyway directed towards that goal, and that’s with the military establishment’s forever wars taken into consideration.
“Her “That’s the way they do it in California” was such a weak gambit. They do it that way in California because it makes cheating easier.”
I do not know how long we have to wait until the results are final. Long articles at conservative websites indicating that the election process in California is corrupt and rigged. California’s election system has as much integrity as that of Zimbabwe under Mugabe. I will keep this one short, as I have a gut feeling that our host Jack may dedicate an entire post to the California primaries.
“Welker is really down on those J6 animals. How dare Trump propose compensating them? (The fact that Democrats sponsored storming the Wisconsin State Capitol — how many times, twice, thrice? — is irrelevant to Welker and her fellow French cheese nibblers.)”
The fact that the hard left still keeps harping on J6 while staying silent about those who violently attack ICE officers proves the left’s hypocrisy.
You don’t even have to get to the ICE interference. The Black Lives Matter rioting–in the same 12-month period— went on longer, did more damage, had more participants, and took more lives than the j-6 riots, but only 300 rioters faced federal prosecutions, and for crimes like looting and arson.
I could have mention BLM of course, but Karen Welker was ditching up old cows.
But this opens a question: how comparable are all the recent riots (ICE, BLM, J6) with each other, and with the Boston Tea Party? At the 250th anniversary of the nation, with a prominent riot like the Boston Tea Party starting the Revolutionary War this question is almost inevitable.
The answer is: not very. The Boston Tea Party and what followed was actually colonists rising up to demand the same rights the folks in Europe had (albeit on and off). They were seeing rights stripped away by things like the Intolerable Acts and the removal of the gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg.
Black Lives Matter, more than anything, was an attempt by the left to seize on anger at an injustice one man suffered and use it to create a de facto militia without any checks on it. At the time I compared it to the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. With a little bit of distance now, I’d more compare it to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. It was an attempt to tear society apart and remake it in a revolutionary image.
J6 was an attempt by a very small group of idiots to stop the government from performing one function that had no chance of succeeding but could probably have been stopped if the DC National Guard and the Metropolitan Police had been deployed sooner and in greater numbers.
The ICE stuff was pretty close to organized domestic terrorism. One group decided they didn’t like governmental policy, and then decided that they were going to stop the implementation of that policy by whatever means necessary, including assaults on law enforcement. Unfortunately for them law enforcement was having none of it.
An entire section of the country believes that all human desires should be fulfilled as a matter of right. That kind of foundation is a recipe for something like the French Revolution or a Communist takeover. They hold those who adhere to any kind of tradition, even loosely, with utter contempt.
Meet The Press is a joke now; I haven’t watched it in years. The last time I seriously watched the mainstream media was during Trump’s first term, and it got to the point where their hatred of him has destroyed their own integrity, even on the 10% of the time they are right about something. I don’t believe anything they say anymore unless I check it against 5 other sources.
The people who keep the country running are not a bunch of leftists being propped up by taxpayer dollars and special FCC licenses. Her contempt for flyover country just confirms how nasty these people are. I feel even happier Scott Pelley is gone.