Posted on 12/31/2017 11:28:39 AM PST by upchuck
As this appalling year limps to a close, with President Trump consistently underperforming even the lowest of expectations, a note of holiday cheer: Our country’s institutions and values have, so far, proven remarkably resilient.
This outcome was not a given; complacency that it will continue would be dangerous. And yet, after nearly a year of Trump, the warnings about incipient fascism and the insidious ways strongmen acquire power feel overblown. I suspected so from the start, but I wasn’t sure — nor should we be cocky about the future.
Still, for now, there are reasons for optimism in the performance of the media, the courts and, yes, even the Republican-dominated Congress — undergirded and reinforced by the American people.
On the media: How scary it is to have a president who derides us as “the enemy of the American people.” To have a cable news network that inflames his worst instincts and recklessly flings suggestions of a “coup” by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. To have nearly half the public, egged on by Trump’s bellowing about “fake news,” believing that reporters simply invent negative stories about the president.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Appalling year? No bias there.
On the media: How scary it is to have a president who derides us as “the enemy of the American people.”
Not scary at all.
Wait. This WAS parody, wasn't it?
Wow, what a steaming pant load.
“consistently underperforming even the lowest of expectations”
He has so overachieved at destroying liberalism, overturned Obamunism, uprooting deep state corruption and cronyism, and reigniting the economy that I’m in awe. He is so energetic and gets so much different he — just wow.
Appalling? Writer doesn’t like prosperity? Moron.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning...”
kind of like we felt after 2010, yet Obola still shoved EOs through like a mad man, the only problem is now we have the majorities and should be sailing laws through. Damn Rinos
Dear Ruth Marcus,
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out
My word’s but a whisper your deafness a SHOUT
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think
Your sperm’s in the gutter your love’s in the sink
So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men don’t know how it feels
To be thick as a brick
And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away
In the tidal destruction the moral melee
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
And your suntan does rapidly peel
And your wise men don’t know how it feels
To be thick as a brick
This is strong in dumbness.
Apparently I’ve picked up the ability to travel to parallel dimensions, because this article certainly doesn’t describe the one I live in.
Why post from that POS rag? It turns my stomach.
>>On the media: How scary it is to have a president who derides us as “the enemy of the American people.”
Boohoo. Got caught. Got outed. FUWP
Trump is saving is from this idiot’s liberal horse dung. Worried about attacks on CNN, while attacking Fox News. Okkk
Over the target, taking flack. That’s my guy! :)
https://twitter.com/RuthMarcus
But while Trump & Co. went to war against the press, we went to work, to paraphrase Post Executive Editor Martin Baron. Without that work, the public would probably not know about: former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russians; Donald Trump Jr.’s “I love it” meeting with a Russian lawyer peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton, and the president’s efforts to mislead people about the event; Trump’s description of fired FBI director James B. Comey as a “nut job” in a meeting with Russian officials in which he also divulged highly classified information. The list goes on.
Marshall Kamena is a registered democrat and was elected mayor of Livermore, CA.. He ran on the democratic ticket as he knew a Bay Area city would never vote for a republican. He is as conservative as they come. He wrote the following.
Trump’s lack of decorum, dignity, and statesmanship
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”
Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.
We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?
We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?
And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”
The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today. The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety. With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ’s first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
General George Patton was a vulgar-talking. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.
Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”
That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.
Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal.
Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.” Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery. The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve.
It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read propaganda) that keeps the Left alive. Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church. Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up
So, to my friends on the Left — and the #NeverTrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years. So, say anything you want about this president - I get it - he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights for America!
Constant drum beat now. The media is laying the groundwork to panic the public into “taking action” against the “danger” that they claim Trump represents. By “taking action” I am referring to their desire to inflame assassination attempts or other violent means; they are trying to say the rules don’t apply when you’ve got a frightening person about to harm you.The Deep State is in danger and they are prepping their servants on the left to help them in some way harm Trump or his administration as if heroics are needed to save us from “the next Hitler”.
>>To have nearly half the public, egged on by Trump’s bellowing about “fake news,” believing that reporters simply invent negative stories about the president.
Twas the media that created the term “fake news”, said it was what swayed the 2016 election. Fake news posted on socialist networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
That phrase came to bite them on the rump.
And yep, every damn week for awhile now it seems they are caught making up yet another fake story (e.g. recall the leftist activists at the CDC who spread the talking point that Trump was banning words, when in fact it was the CDC trying to hide terms to get measures passed in Congress).
It isn’t Trump you need to worry about Ruthy baby...
It’s the American half of the Country that voted to put him there, and that will do whatever it takes to make sure he STAYS there for his full term(s).
Sleep on that, sweetie.
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