Obama and Springsteen: the Barry / Bruce bromance

 

Democrats, [Please] Break Up With Bruce Springsteen - POLITICO

"And while you’re at it, stop relying on pop culture to score points with voters."

..."Recent years have seen a growing penchant among online liberals for reworking the materials of pop culture into the shallowest sort of political commentary. Anyone who’s been on liberal-leaning corners of the internet over the past five years has seen Hillary Clinton imagined as Daenerys Targaryen, Donald Trump as Lord Voldemort, and Joe Biden as Captain America, to name just a few examples. Reworking pop-cultural figures into mascots for certain political values certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, but social media has made it a considerably more prevalent and embarrassing one.

"These sorts of political expressions are an inevitable result of a time when most of pop culture is thought to belong to Democrats.". . . 

. . . "As someone who writes about music for a living and is both a Springsteen agnostic and a reliable (if at times reluctant) Democratic voter, I’m fascinated by the party’s longstanding love affair with the Boss. And it’s often been reciprocal: Springsteen has endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 2004 and has been affiliated with liberal politics for far longer, going at least as far back as his storied repudiations of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At this point Springsteen and the liberal establishment’s mutual affinity feels completely intuitive, although it also feels like an early, analog model for an entanglement of political thinking and popular culture that has come to pollute Democratic politics in the 21st century."...

The Tunnel Wall: What Bruce Springsteen Has Said About Joe Biden on 9/21/20

I like his stuff, have always liked it, but now the bloom is long off the rose, knowing he would dislike me, and seeing so many unlikeable celebrities who adore him. One feels the urge to ask him if he thought Obama was vindictive when O shut down the government, fenced off open-air memorials and their viewpoints, then told his park service to "make it hurt". The Tunnel Dweller;                                     "Though his disdain for Donald Trump is well-known, Springsteen has revealed he supports Joe Biden and believes his election will help repair America's global reputation.                     "Speaking about this year's RNC, Springsteen said it was "just seeded with constant lies and total distortion of the American idea."

Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America?

 

National Review

A white woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of our largest state, and the media shrug.

"Do a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on the New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story entitled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of California, by hurling an egg that touched his head.

"If Elder were a Democrat, the attack would have been instantly and with good reason dubbed racist. It would not only be front-page news, it would be just about the only news you were hearing about today on CNN and MSNBC. Charles Blow, Perry Bacon, and Jamelle Bouie would each be writing the first in a series of angry columns about it. So would Gail Collins, Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Goldberg, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ezra Klein. We would be treated to multiple news analyses about the history of the usage of gorilla tropes against blacks. Joy-Ann Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon would be doing hour-long broadcasts on the attack, convening panels discussing just how the attack pulls the scab off racism in America, and proves we have so much work left to do in dealing with the problem. Vox would commission a series about California’s grim history of racism dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Asian-American and Latino writers would hasten to explain that California’s historic hostility to all sorts of persons of color is as traditional as its Tournament of Roses parade. Three-thousand-word essays about the brutal, unknown history of lynchings in the Golden State would be published in The Atlantic and/or The New Yorker. Al Sharpton, exhibiting a combination of exhaustion and despondency, would be a guest on half a dozen cable TV shows.

"The woman who threw the egg at Elder would find her picture, her name, and everything she’d ever said on social media scrutinized at great length and on the home pages of the leading news sites. Her appearance would be mocked by late-night comedians. Dozens of reporters would be sent out to learn this woman’s story, to check out where she lived, where she worked, and where she went to school.". . . 

California Recall Election: Larry Elder and Team Targeted by Eggs in Los Angeles  .."The woman in the gorilla mask appeared to slap a staffer in the face, while a man shouted at Elder that he is a “piece of sh**” as the candidate was escorted away from the situation.'...

Los Angeles deputies shot: Crowds protest, allegedly shout 'We hope they die' outside hospital  California seems to provide us all with repulsive people and politicians. I can visualize our egg-throwing gorilla being one of those trying to enter the hospital. TD

"Democrats Finally Get Comfortable Saying Obama Is a Jerk"

 Obama accumulated all this, while lecturing the world’s rich: “There’s only so much you can eat. There’s only so big a house you can have. There’s only so many nice trips you can take. I mean, it’s enough.”

Democrats Finally Get Comfortable Calling Out Barack Obama's Narcissism | National Review    "Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.

This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.

"There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left officeand when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.

"And now this appears to be the moment when Democrats feel comfortable publicly ripping into Barack Obama. There were moments during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary where candidates and factions within the party grappled with their disappointment and recognized that if Obama was as terrific a president as they insisted, the American people would not have elected Donald Trump." . . .

Obama Wants to Make the Shutdown Hurt Ordinary Americans ..."Mr. Obama’s behavior is not normal behavior but it is the behavior one would expect in a Banana Republic. "

Flashback to when Obama weaponized 2013 government shutdown (legalinsurrection.com) "Obama shut high profile monuments and national parks specifically so that the TV cameras could show veterans and others being turned away. "

“A Tale of Two Shutdowns”: Obama Closes War Memorials to Veterans; Trump Admin Keeps Them Open to Public   ..."In 2013, what President Obama did was nothing short of a political stunt. To make our veterans feel the pain of the shutdown, he weaponized our public lands. He actually had park officials working overtime to erect barricades and stand guard to deny access to open air memorials, which were normally open 24/7. Worse still, he did this knowing that groups of WWII veterans were planning once in a lifetime visits to the memorial erected in honor of their fight for freedom."...

Victor Davis Hanson Lecture; The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Hillsdale College - YouTube  "Victor Davis Hanson speaks at Hillsdale College on topics from his upcoming book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

National Review

The Taliban tracked down and killed 4 Afghan counterterrorism agents, in one case pulling out all their fingernails, report says

 Yahoo

Looks like Americans to me.

• Taliban death squads are hunting down Afghan counterterrorism agents, The Sunday Times reported.

• Four victims, trained by US and UK forces, worked for the National Directorate of Security.

• the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan has been characterized by violence.

"Elite Taliban death squads have tracked down and killed at least four Afghan counterterrorism agents since August 22, The Sunday Times reported.

"The men were members of two units working out of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) and had been trained by British and US forces, the newspaper said.

"A brother of one of those killed told The Sunday Times the Taliban came for his brother at their home outside Kabul in August.

" 'My brother was shot three times in the head and once in the chest and I was shot twice in the left shoulder and arm," the man said, per the newspaper. "I don't know how I survived.' ". . . 

26 Lancet scientists who trashed theory that Covid leaked from Chinese lab have links to Wuhan | Education News

Tony Branco

 Daily Mail Online via (educationviews.org)

• The Lancet letter published in March 2020 called claims that Covid-19 originated in lab ‘conspiracy theories’
• It was signed by 27 scientists from across the globe working in virology and other medical science fields
• The widely-read letter effectively ended all debate about origins of the global coronavirus pandemic
• Investigation by The Telegraph has found 26 out of 27 had connections to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology

Of the 27 scientists who wrote a letter in The Lancet medical journal dismissing the possibility that Covid-19 originated from a Wuhan lab, 26 have links to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or its benefactors, a new investigation has revealed.

On March 7 last year, the influential journal published the letter in which the 27 scientists said they ‘strongly condemned conspiracy theories’ surrounding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted all corners of the world.

All debate into whether Covid-19 had man-made origins or leaked from the lab in Wuhan – the Chinese city that was ground-zero for the virus – was effectively shut down by the letter.". . . 

Source: 26 Lancet scientists who trashed theory that Covid leaked from Chinese lab have links to Wuhan | Daily Mail Online

Why You Can’t Watch the ABC Miniseries “The Path to 9/11”

 American Greatness

How the Clinton Administration’s 9/11 coverup is disturbingly similar to the Biden Administration’s lies about his Afghanistan debacle.

"On September 6, 2006, the ABC television network aired “The Path to 9/11,” a three-hour documentary, written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh and directed by David Cunningham, which covered the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against our country. The program broke with other accounts of the causes of the 9/11 attacks— including by the 9/11 Commission—by casting substantial blame for the attacks on the incompetent foreign policy of the Clinton Administration. 

"This program aired only once. A DVD was produced but can no longer be purchased on Amazon.com. The reason? Former Clinton officials and their allies put heavy pressure on the Walt Disney Company—which owns ABC—to censor and suppress the film because it went against their false narrative absolving Clinton’s policies for contributing to the 9/11 attacks and instead putting the blame on the Bush Administration.

"What’s stunning about this story today is how similar it is to the denials and outright lies about the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by Biden officials, and the mainstream media’s willingness to change the subject away from a major foreign policy failure by a Democratic president.". . . 

Meghan McCain slams CNN's Brian Stelter for tweeting claim that the real leaders of 9/11 were ANCHORMEN 'with political leaders in bunkers or out of sight'

And of course, by extension, CNN's people.

T-Gate (tech-gate.org) (From the  UK Daily Mail Online)  "CNN host Brian Stelter has been slammed for tweeting a claim that the ‘real leaders’ of 9/11 were news anchormen – and adding that ‘political leaders were in bunkers or out of sight’. 

"Stelter tweeted a quote from an article written by AP writer David Bauder, saying: ‘Network TV anchors were the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9/11. They were the moral authority on that first day’. 

"He then added, ‘especially with political leaders in bunkers or otherwise out of sight’.  

"DailyMail.com columnist and former host of The View, Meghan McCain was one of the first to criticize Stelter, saying: ‘I don’t know what this is even designed to mean other than to be incendiary on a dark anniversary’.

‘First responders led & ran into danger and died. Mayor Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, George Pataki, President Bush, Chuck Schumer…. there were many real leaders leading us,’ McCain tweeted in response to Stelter’s initial tweet. "...

..."Stelter’s tweet was met with a furious response, with Twitter users reminding him that the true heroes and leaders of 9/11 were the firefighters, police officers and paramedics.   

"Stelter responded to the backlash in a follow-up tweet, writing that he merely quoted the piece he shared. 

" ‘I remember,’ Stelter said. ‘Please send your objections to the author of the story or the person he quoted.’ 

"However, several social media users ignored Stelter’s response, adding that the host included own input to the tweet."... 

As long as we're discussing media hacks: Nicolle Wallace hijacks solemn observance of 9/11 to defend Biden's dictatorial vaccine mandate (bizpacreview.com)  

...Responding to a question by anchor Brian Williams about how historians will look back on the day and the wearing of masks, Wallace went to bat to defend President Joe Biden’s dictatorial vaccine mandate, an unnecessary interjection of the vaccine politics that the administration and its media allies have used to bludgeon their enemies with into what should have been a solemn occasion....

Lara Logan drops dynamite Fox News segment on Biden's sweeping vaccine mandates

Thank you for not using the word "bombshell".

 American Thinker   "On Thursday, "President" Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. broke another of his promises by requiring vaccine mandates on most, but not all, American citizens.  The next day, Fox News aired a terrific seven-minute segment by Lara Logan titled "Mandate Nation," and it's really worth watching (see below).

"Ms. Logan began the show reporting on new directives to OSHA not to report on COVID vaccine side-effects.  She then segued into recent reports from the U.K. and Israel that report on serious problems with the vaccines.

"One feature of the segment that conservatives will appreciate is the montages from other channels, like MSNBC and CNN.  Their "commentators" are so crazed that it's surreal.  These un-American fools actually think Biden "didn't go far enough."

"The Biden Mandates are a civil rights issue, and they should appall lovers of freedom.  Do watch Lara:"

(If YouTube takes down the video, you can also find it at FoxNews.com after you sit through a commercial or two.)

9/11 photographers reveal behind-the-scenes horror of iconic images

 NY Post

"Photographers who shot some of the most unforgettable images on Sept. 11, 2001, and the days after remember[ing] the stories behind the pictures.". . . 

Read the full article here.

The Years We Wasted

Mark Steyn; September 11, 2021

"There are honorable ways to lose a war. This was not one of them. We have dishonored the dead of 9/11 and insulted their sacrifice."

. . . "We shall not resume our anniversary observances today. The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam's strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era - the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, "Does my bomb look big in this?" - would not be published today:

"In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the Chi-Com-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.

"As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 - and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.

"The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago. Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere. They are making their dispositions accordingly. It is not a question of wishing "the post-American world", but of accepting the known facts.". . . 

Police seek woman in Larry Elder attack as his supporters claim a double standard

 "When a male aide confronted the woman who threw the egg and missed, she slapped him in the face."

Yahoo   "As the Los Angeles police investigators try to identify a woman wearing a gorilla mask who threw an egg at Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder in Venice, some of the talk show host's supporters are complaining that the Wednesday incident that forced Elder to cut his campaigning short is not generating more outrage.

"The gorilla mask prompted conservative commentators to suggest that the incident was racially motivated, given the white supremacist history of dehumanizing Black people with ape imagery.

"Two law enforcement sources told The Times on Friday that the department was working the case as a misdemeanor battery because the woman gave no indication she was moved by hate in a video taken at the scene. But they stressed that no decision will be made until she's identified and police get more details about what happened."

According to a police statement: "As the aide and Mr. Elder continue walking to their vehicle, the aide was approached by a male, white, bald, wearing a grey t-shirt yelling profanities at him, who struck him in the back of the head. During that altercation, an unknown individual approached the aide from the side and struck him in the face.”