The Proper Use Of Rhetorical Nuclear Weapons

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Andrew Klavan, Bob Dylan, Donald Trump, George Soros, Hitler, Jed Babbin, nuclear weapons, Steven Bannon

Upheaval on the campus, marches for this, that and something else. Rioting in the streets. Congress critters swear to do everything they can to prevent the President from being president, and protest his cabinet and Supreme court nominees before they know their names. Cries of “resist!” and “Trump’s a racist! and Trump’s a Nazi!” and that’s just from reporters at news conferences. Is this the new normal? Are we destined to spend the next four to eight years, perhaps any year in which there is a Republican majority, inconvenienced and annoyed by very vocal, perpetually outraged progressive pajama boys and testosterone-laden girls? The Washington Post, and others, love that narrative, and they’re determined, in the finest social justice fashion, to keep it alive, as Scott Johnson at Powerline reports: 

Paul notes the Washington Post’s solicitation of readers for what he calls “immigration sob stories.” If you can explain how Donald Trump ruined your life and can tie it to the ‘extreme vetting’ executive order, the Post wants to hear from you.

But it’s not just the Post. The New York Times is also on the case. If you have been affected (or will soon be affected!) by the executive orders and are willing to share your story, the New York Times is asking for those stories via email to immigration@nytimes.com.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association would like to lend a hand. The AILA associate director of communications advises her contacts: ‘My recommendation would be to keep it to a paragraph or two, probably best written as first person from the client, but including your contact information too.’ Make it short and colorful.

Ah, for the good old days of the news business when there was enough news to go around, and media outlets didn’t need to solicit it. Steve Bannon, one of President Trump’s primary advisors, thus, a part of the cabal of evil in this fallen world, has a theory or two, as Townhall.com reports:

Steve Bannon
credit: breitbart.com

When Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, told the New York Times, ‘The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States,’ it was true.

Putting aside how the media had no problem with the Obama administration saying the same thing in 2009 about Fox News, rather than recognize just how far the profession of journalism has fallen from its purpose, journalists responded indignantly.

But what Bannon said is what they’ve been doing for more than a year. [skip]

That brings us to the other part of Bannon’s quote, the part the media doesn’t want to talk about. ‘The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut,’ he said. And while most headlines stopped there, Bannon did not. He continued with, ‘and just listen for a while.

It wasn’t a new sentence. It was the same sentence, though you wouldn’t know it from any of the headlines, tweets or talking heads who clutched their pearls over someone in the White House telling the media to ‘keep its mouth shut.’

They dishonestly played it as a ‘threat to the First Amendment,’ because outrage is cheap and self-reflection is hard.

The legacy media, dishonest? Who coulda thunk it? What Bannon might have added: “and report verified facts instead of social justice narratives and related leftist sound bites for a change.”

credit: thetimesinplainenglish.com

Part of the problem is Donald Trump himself, but not quite in the way many think. As I’ve previously written, Washington DC, and this includes the press, is experiencing something altogether new to them: work. Donald Trump is a businessman, and one does not succeed in business by dropping around 10ish, taking three hour lunches, knocking off for the day no later than 4ish, and spending much of one’s time golfing. Beginning with Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump has been a blizzard of activity, and expects those that work for him to keep up. He has accomplished more in a few weeks than our unlamented, feckless late president did in years, as Jed Babbin reports at the spectator.org:

In his first week, Mr. Trump:

• Began to cut the legs out of Obamacare;
• Started the process of building the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico and ordered a funding halt to ‘sanctuary cities’;
• Temporarily stopped the flow of immigration from seven terrorist-dominated nations;
• Exited the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’ trade negotiations;
• Revived the Keystone and Dakota pipeline projects;
• Reorganized the National Security Council;
• Directed a 30-day study by the Pentagon to recommend a strategy to destroy ISIS;
• Directed a Pentagon review of readiness of military forces, also on a tight deadline;
• Met with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and conferred with Germany’s Angela Merkel and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Not bad for one week’s work. Mr. Trump is quickly earning the reputation of a workaholic.

So far, pretty good. The uproar over the temporary ban on refugees from terrorist nations is so great (Chuckie Schumer broke down in tears) that it’s taking attention away from the other orders.

Quite so. Part of the panic on the left is the speed and variety of Mr. Trump’s decisions–entirely normal for him and other high-speed, low drag businessmen, people whose success and the livelihoods of their employees depend upon their industry–which leave leftists–congressional and other–quite dumbfounded. They’re used to being able to follow Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, where they can pick a single issue and relentlessly attack it for weeks, even months, filling the news and sucking all the air out of the room. But Mr. Trump, who plays the media like a Stradivarius, accomplishes so much so fast, they can’t keep up. By the time they’ve employed their usual tactics and started to moan about the latest Trump/Hitlerite injustice, twenty new things have been done. Not only that, Trump’s use of social media to end run the dying legacy media delivers preemptive strikes to nearly everything they can report–not that most rational Americans are listening to them anymore.

Even writing this scruffy little blog, particularly regarding political issues, is more challenging. For the past eight years, I’ve been able to take a little time–perhaps a day or two–in posting, confident the issues and ideas will still be fresh. Now, it’s more difficult to keep up, even when I strive to post at least one new article per day.

There is, however, a looming question (don’t you hate it when questions loom?) Have leftists gone so berserk, are they so deranged we are heading for a civil war, perhaps even one involving actual open warfare? Is our future endless marches and protests, and congressional bottom dwellers whining that Republicans have finally grown a pair and are actually treating them like they’ve treated Republicans and the American public for decades? Are we seeing the beginning of a new, and ever more powerful, movement? Andrew Klavan has a few thoughts:

Andrew Klavan
credit: youtube.com

Mainstream news journalists — by which I mean that collection of Democrats employed by large corporations to push the sort of big government that prevents small corporations from competing with them — have been breathlessly speculating that the recent “Women’s Marches” around the country may be the beginning of a movement. The marches, funded in part by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros, called forth such headlines as, “Cathartic Moment or Enduring Movement,” and “Women’s March Activists… Seek To Build a Movement.”

No one knows the future, of course, but I can’t help wondering if the marches, large as they were, were not rather the end of a movement, a fond farewell to an amalgam of obsolete leftist causes that either never had a reason to exist in the first place or have lost whatever reason they might once have had.

Watching the various marches and protests, as always, I wondered just who those people–and by calling leftists, anarchists, communists, socialists, etc. “people,” I’m being exceptionally tolerant and kind–were? They can’t all be independently wealthy, in fact, almost certainly, most aren’t. If they’re in college, they’re cutting classes. I know attendance is optional in many universities these days, but surely one or two professors expect to see their students upon occasion? If they have jobs, they’re either taking vacation time, or don’t much care if they’re fired. People that live respectable, productive, responsible lives, don’t tend to do such things, nor do they actually trash the places where they protest or commit a wide variety of other misdemeanors and felonies.

The recent pink pussified, walking, talking vagina wymyn’s marchs left sufficient trash behind, including posters and not a few contrived vaginas–is that a waste of precious national resources?–the joyous events might have been mistaken for the sacking of Rome. Contrast this with Tea Party protests, where protestors were unfailingly polite, nonviolent, displayed no genitals, real or artistically realized, and cleaned up after themselves to the point their venues were cleaner–much cleaner–after than before their presence. Contrast too those protestors of yesteryear actually had jobs, and needed to put their work and lives on hold to protest, doing so with clear, simple, direct goals, in the expectation their efforts would bear fruit.

Is this the beginning of a movement? Yes, but a movement away from the vacation from history, the shredding of the Constitution, and the national security fantasy world of Barack Obama and progressivism. Before long, the current brand of protestors, with the exception of a violent, anti-American fringe supported by anti-American crackpots and criminals like George Soros, will tire of protest for the sake of protest, protests without purpose or any expectation of accomplishment. As infants eventually tire of screaming, meaningless tantrums, so too will they tire of their obscene, unfocused tirades.

Some will need to support themselves, perhaps their children. Others will be arrested and get some real jail time, because there are encouraging signs the political correctness pendulum is not only swinging back toward reality, but may fall entirely off its mounting–permanently. There are also encouraging signs of the demise of social justice and the increasingly triumphant return of the rule of law.

But Trump is destroying the Constitution! He’s making illegal laws, violating American values, he’s a sexist, a racist, he’s HITLER! Unfortunately for the future cohesion of a “movement,” none of that is true. In fact, thus far–and Mr. Trump has been president only two weeks as this is posted–everything he has done has been well within constitutional and legal boundaries. His executive orders have not been attempts to write law, but merely to tell federal employees how to do their jobs to enforce it. Rather than burdening the people with new and unnecessary regulations, he has already begun to lighten that load, and nothing he has done or said could be mistaken for sexist or racist by any rational human being.

But he’s still HITLERRRRRRR! About that: when a “movement” fires its rhetorical nuclear weapons in its first volley, there is no way to escalate. If that volley falls short or fails to destroy its intended target, the end is foreshadowed.

Donald Trump remains unscathed. Each and every hysterical outburst from the left garners less and less attention. In fact, most Americans have long ago begun to ignore the media, and they’re certainly paying no more attention to women marching about dressed as vaginas.

But what about federal employees actively or passive-aggressively resisting Mr. Trump? Acting Attorney General Sally Yates discovered the answer to that question: ‘”you’re fired.” The radical leftist firebrands in the civil and voting rights divisions of the Department of Justice ready to start an internal revolution against the evil Trump had better be prepared to seek new employment, or perhaps to refocus their efforts when they’re transferred to areas of the law and the nation, more suited to their unique talents, such as patent research, or perhaps, Nome, Alaska. I hear Guam is lovely this time of year.

Perpetual outrage is difficult to maintain, and when the nation’s police are once again assured that the POTUS has their back, and protesters receive real jail time every time they break the law, much steam will leak out of the new “movement.” Perhaps a string of RICO convictions against professional protestors and their moneymen and women would be helpful.

As Bob Dylan once said, the times they are a changin’, and the current crop of protestors and noble revolutionaries aren’t upset because Mr. Trump is attacking American values, the rule of law and the Constitution. They’re scared to death he’s going to restore them.

We can’t know the future, but he’s made a good start in only 14 days.

They still haven’t quite figured out that’s why he’s president. That’s why all the pickup-driving, wrong-thinking, gun and God clinging, non-special snowflake, non-pajama boy denizens of the vast cultural wasteland of flyover country voted for him. They don’t care about who uses bathrooms, except to keep deviants out of the bathrooms used by their daughters, wives and mothers. They don’t care about global warming that isn’t occurring. They don’t care about safe spaces, triggering and micro aggressions. They care about national security, the safety of their families, western civilization, and about America. They don’t care how many people attended an inauguration, they care about what the president does thereafter. They care about the rule of law and the Constitution.

If a civil war is thrust upon them, they haven’t yet fired so much as a BB-gun. They’ll do better than that. Much better.