Is Disrespecting the President OK? Hypocrisy Run Amok

From Reason magazine, an essay on the question: Is It Cool To Call the President a Bastard Again?

For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was “rank disrespect,” as Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism, Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. “Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president, while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism … It is called treason,” insisted one particularly moronic meme by Occupy Democrats.

But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.

But with Trump:

And, where once Hollywood celebrities issued a thoroughly creepy “pledge to serve Barack Obama” when he took office as president, eight additional years of seeing the duties of that office exercised led us to singer Madonna saying she’s thought a lot about “blowing up the White House.”

Madonna made her comments at a massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration during which hundreds of thousands of regular Americans promised to resist the new chief executive before he’s even had a chance to start rivaling the damage inflicted by his predecessor.

It’s all such a welcome change.

For the libertarians at Reason, it is a welcome change, since the notion that a strong, righteous president will set everything right in the country is a huge threat to liberty. When all your hopes are invested in the president, then you’ll condone illegitimate exercises of power. Remember Obama and his pen and phone.

And the “blow up the White House” comment by the ageing slut Madonna is, in fact, no real threat to the Republic. But then, neither was the stupid “birther” notion that Obama was born in Kenya. But please, let’s just have an end to the hypocrisy.

Liberal “Diversity” at the Huffington Post

Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa

— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016

Donald Trump On Illegal Immigration. Wait! That’s Not Trump!

Bernie Sanders Loves the “War Machine”

From the Daily Beast:

The socialist trumpets his antiwar record. But he doesn’t mind expensive war machines—if they’re based in his home state.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Sen. Bernie Sanders has railed against big defense corporations at rallies, but he has a more complex history with the military-industrial complex. Most notably, he’s supported a $1.2 trillion stealth fighter that’s considered by many to be one of the bigger boondoggles in Pentagon history.

Sanders has made his opposition to Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness a cornerstone of his campaign. But he hasn’t exactly been antiwar all his career. When it has come time to choose between defense jobs and a dovish defense policy, Sanders has consistently chosen to stand with the arms-makers rather than the peaceniks—leading to tension with some of the most adamant adherents of progressive ideology.

When it comes time to make speeches, Sanders has slammed defense corporations for political gain.

“We know that there is massive fraud going on in the defense industry. Virtually every major defense contractor has either been convicted of fraud or reached a settlement with the government,” Sanders said in Iowa City last year at a town hall. “We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world. But I think we can make judicious cuts.”

But when those defense corporations come to his own backyard, he quietly welcomes them in.

The Vermont senator persuaded Lockheed Martin to place a research center in Burlington, according to Newsweek, and managed to get 18 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets stationed at the city’s airport for the Vermont National Guard.

“In very clever ways, the military-industrial complex puts plants all over the country, so that if people try to cut back on our weapons system what they’re saying is you’re going to be losing jobs in that area,” Sanders said at a Q&A in New Hampshire back in 2014. “[W]e’ve got to have the courage to understand that we cannot afford a lot of wasteful, unnecessary weapons systems, and I hope we can do that.”

History has shown that Sanders has not had the courage to do that.

Immediately after he made those comments, an audience member pointed out that the F-35 fighter jet project had a lifetime cost of $1.2 trillion: “When you talk about cutting wasteful military spending, does that include the F-35 program?” the questioner asked.

The F-35 stealth fighter is untold billions over budget, years behind schedule, and plagued with embarrassing problems. There have been problems with its software, its sensors, and its gun (which won’t be able to fire until 2019). A few months ago a military spokesman said that the fighter jet “wasn’t optimized for dogfighting.” In fact, in a test battle with the 40-year-old F-16, the brand new F-35 jet lost.

“The F-35 will, in my opinion, be 10 years behind legacy fighters,” one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program told The Daily Beast about a year ago.

Sanders countered that the plane was “essentially built.” He acknowledged in his 2014 Q&A that while the F-35 was “incredibly wasteful,” it is now the “plane of record… and it is not going to be discarded.”

During his 2012 reelection campaign, Sanders ran against a Republican who opposed the F-35 as a waste of resources. Sanders was all for it. In a 2012 statement, Sanders made the point that the F-35 would have to be located somewhere, whether in Florida or South Carolina or Vermont. “I would rather it be here,” he said.

Much of the criticism of Sanders’s foreign policy stances have come from his left flank. The World Socialist Web Site called Sanders a “silent partner of American militarism.” And Counterpunch, a left-wing magazine, has criticized Sanders on more than one occasion for being insufficiently pacifist.

“He behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen,” wrote Thomas Naylor in the magazine. “Since he always ‘supports the troops,’ Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.”

Sanders’s support of the Kosovo War led to the resignation of an adviser; when antiwar activists occupied his office, he had them arrested; and Sanders voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan, Howard Lisnoff wrote in the same publication.

So just as with campaign fundraising, Bernie Sanders looks like a rather conventional politician, doing the things that conventional politicians do.

Can we blame him for that?

Since he attacks conventional politics, and claims to somehow be above the things that conventional politicians do, most certainly. People generally (and with some justification) prefer a conventional conformist to a hypocritical prude.

But do his naïve, starry-eyed supporters know he’s a hypocritical prude? Not yet.

Bernie Sanders: Hypocrite on Fat Cat Campaign Contributions

From the very mainstream media CNN:

Bernie Sanders rails against big money in politics, but has consistently helped and benefited from the Democratic Party fundraising apparatus

Manchester, New Hampshire (CNN)Bernie Sanders complained on the campaign trail Friday that dialing for dollars “affects your entire being.”

What he didn’t mention: The Vermont senator and presidential candidate is a prolific fundraiser himself and has regularly benefited from the Democratic Party apparatus.

In recent years, Sanders has been billed as one of the hosts for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s retreats for the “Majority Trust” — an elite group of top donors who give more than $30,000 per year — at Martha’s Vineyard in the summer and Palm Beach, Florida, in the winter. CNN has obtained invitations that listed Sanders as a host for at least one Majority Trust event in each year since 2011.

The retreats are typically attended by 100 or more donors who have either contributed the annual legal maximum of $33,400 to the DSCC, raised more than $100,000 for the party or both.

Sanders has based his presidential campaign on a fire-and-brimstone critique of a broken campaign finance system -- and of Hillary Clinton for her reliance on big-dollar Wall Street donors. But Sanders is part of that system, and has helped Democrats court many of the same donors.

A Democratic lobbyist and donor who has attended the retreats told CNN that about 25% of the attendees there represent the financial sector — and that Sanders and his wife, Jane, are always present.

“At each of the events all the senators speak. And I don’t recall him ever giving a speech attacking us,” the donor said. “While progressive, his remarks were always in the mainstream of what you hear from senators.”

Sanders’ political leanings were well known by the donors who attended the retreats. “Nobody was more surprised that Bernie was there than the donors were,” said another Democrat who attended the retreats.

Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said Sanders has “raised more money for the Senate Democrats than almost any other member of the Senate Democratic caucus” because he sees helping the party regain the majority as critical.

In 2006, when Sanders ran for the Senate, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pumped $37,300 into his race and included him in fundraising efforts for the party’s Senate candidates.

The party also spent $60,000 on ads for Sanders, and contributed $100,000 to the Vermont Democratic Party — which was behind Sanders even as he ran as an independent.

Among the DSCC’s top contributors that year: Goldman Sachs at $685,000, Citigroup at $326,000, Morgan Stanley at $260,000 and JPMorgan Chase & Co. at $207,000.

During that 2006 campaign, Sanders attended a fundraiser at the Cambridge, Massachusetts home of Abby Rockefeller — a member of the same family whose wealth he had one proposed confiscating.

Two years later, when then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was being nominated at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, Sanders was among the senators who met with Sen. Chuck Schumer’s “Legacy Circle” donors who had given the legal maximum to the DSCC five years in a row or $500,000 over their lifetimes.

He paid dues to the DSCC, too, with his Progressive Voters of America political action committee cutting checks for $30,000 to the group during the 2014 election cycle.

Sanders told the “Politics and Eggs” crowd that he favors a public financing system for elections, eliminating campaign contributions entirely. But his presidential campaign, just as Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s in 2008 and 2012, has chosen to bypass that system, allowing Sanders to raise millions of dollars more.

He has repeatedly touted his campaign’s vast online fundraising apparatus, which has pulled in 3.5 million individual contributions, averaging $27 apiece, Sanders said Friday.

Pressed by MSNBC moderator Chuck Todd on why he hasn’t accepted public financing in Thursday night’s debate, Sanders said the system as it exists now is “a disaster” and “very antiquated” because it limits spending in early-voting primary states.

Who Needs Guns?

Greenpeace: Workers on Strike

From the very left wing San Diego Free Press:

On August 5, 16 of 19 canvassers for Greenpeace in San Diego walked off the job. They were followed by a majority of the Sacramento office. 22 total employees of the Frontline program, Greenpeace’s in-house fundraising program, have had enough of labor policies that give them no job security.

The strike, led by two veteran canvassers in Socialist Alternative San Diego, comes against an organization that claims to be progressive. However, Greenpeace uses a quota system where even veteran fundraisers can be fired for missing quota two or three weeks consecutively. Senior workers bring in six or seven times their salary in recurring donations, yet are routinely fired. Morale is understandably very low. But choosing to resist, they have mobilized in defense of their jobs and dignity. Non-profits beware: the persuasive skills developed by your employees can be used against you. Instead of selling Greenpeace, organizers now sell the strike against it.

Tara Dawn, a strike member from the Sacramento field office, said “As a single mother, I work hard week in and week out not knowing if I’ll have a dependable paycheck to keep a roof over our heads. That is a very difficult reality to face. I love my job and the organization I work for, but myself and the all of the other canvassers deserve to see reform.”

Resistance to reform, both in senior and mid-level Greenpeace administration, emphasizes the presence of “the worker elite”. Despite being former fundraisers themselves, low-level managers have decided not to stand in solidarity with their former co-workers, their interests now aligning with their superiors. In the absence of help from those potential allies, the street-level workers have banded together, using democratic methods and a sophisticated media campaign to damage Greenpeace’s most valuable asset: its image and reputation.

Canvassers have great labor power for two main reasons. First, because they gather monthly donations, each $20 donation that is not gathered is multiplied, since most people donate for 9 or 10 months before canceling. Second, attempts to bring in strikebreaking replacements are frustrated because good canvassers emerge from training, not raw talent. The trainers are on strike, thus nobody can truly be their replacement.

Socialists everywhere should stand in the new areas of labor struggle. Thousands of vulnerable canvassers for all sorts of non-profits can learn from a strong victory.

Their Facebook page is: facebook.com/GreenpeaceOnStrike
Their strike fund page is: crowdrise.com/GreenpeaceOnStrike

We generally take a dim view of strikers. They are usually what economists call “rent seekers.” “Rent,” in the technical jargon of economists, means “rip off.”

Our view is that if somebody doesn’t believe they are being paid decently by their employer, they should go find another job. If the employer can fill their position with a qualified worker at the same wage (and benefits package) they were being paid decently. If the employer can’t, then the market is telling the employer “you are going to have to up the compensation for this job.” That’s fair enough.

But that’s free market logic, and it’s nice to see the hoity–toity leftists who run Greenpeace faced with the same sort of demands that they endorse when directed at profit-making capitalist enterprises.

Liberals to Women Who Don’t Conform: Face Sexist Slurs

From Kirsten Powers on The Daily Beast:

“What about saying that she’s a whore?”

No, I wasn’t eavesdropping on a Duke fraternity meeting. This was the suggestion of an aide to Democrat Jerry Brown on how to deal with his GOP rival for the California governorship, Meg Whitman.

Brown’s response? “Well I’m going to use that.”

Not anymore.

Once a tape of the conversation was leaked, the Brown campaign apologized.

While we, sadly, are all too familiar with the casual misogynistic comment, what perhaps is more surprising is where these slurs lately have been coming from—progressive bastions like the Brown camp, and liberal women.

Last month, liberal talk show host Stephanie Miller laughed uproariously when a female guest on her show said that if she ever met Michelle Malkin, “I would kick [her] right in the nuts,” and warned, “Wear a cup, lady.”

Charming.

Or how about this: “You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women. You sure can’t find out by how they vote.” This is what Democratic Rep. Janis Baird Sontany of Nashville said earlier this year of her female GOP colleagues.

Or this: “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman,” as Cinta Wilson wrote during the tsunami of anti-Palin hysteria in 2008. In her Salon piece, Wilson went on to refer to the Alaska governor as a “Christian Stepford wife in a ‘sexy librarian’ costume” and the GOP’s “hardcore pornographic centerfold spread.”

Who needs misogynist men when liberal women will do the job for you, often sounding that shopworn theme that women GOP candidates are somehow inauthentic women?

Palin, of course, has been the target of many such smears. She was derided as, “Bush in a skirt” on Huffington Post, and at The Washington Post, Wendy Doniger blogged of then-VP candidate Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Not that liberal men are much better.

Ann Coulter is often referred to as “Mann-coulter” on political blogs in an effort to de-feminize her. And MSNBC’s Keith Olberman once referred to Malkin as a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.”

In a Salon column last month headlined “Forget about the tea party—what about the crumpets?” Gene Lyons wrote that, “The most entertaining aspect of the 2010 election season has been the rise of the right-wing cuties—political celebrities whose main qualification is looking terrific on television. From where I sit, in a comfortable chair in front of the tube, the GOP Cupcake Factor has enlivened an otherwise dreary campaign season.”

You, Sir, are a pig.

The “cuties” in question are a former Governor (Palin), a current Congresswoman (Michelle Bachmann) and a current Senatorial candidate (Christine O’Donnell.) Lyons take on O’Donnell was this: “Everybody knows some poor fool who married a woman like that.”

To anyone who believes that a man with the same religious views as O’Donnell would have received the same nonstop vicious mockery, I have one name for you: Mike Huckabee.

Yes, sexism matters—as does gender. But whereas you never hear anyone claim that men should vote a particular way because of their gender, feminists have no trouble treating women like pre-schoolers who have to be herded into the right camp, a camp that is apparently preordained at birth. In an interview with Katie Couric last year, Gloria Steinem said that where conservative women stand “is squarely against what most women need and want. If [women] still vote for them, they are voting against themselves, which is quite tragic to me.”

This kind of attitude should be antithetical to feminist thought because it is infantilizing to women.

Politically, I agree very little with any of the conservative women mentioned in this column. But they have the same right as any woman to be treated with respect and dignity. Every time anyone—liberal, conservative, man or a woman—engage in sexist smears, all women lose.

Of course, blacks who fail to play the role assigned to them by white liberals and leftists — the role of perpetual grievance mongers — face the same nasty response.

All of which tells something about contemporary liberalism. It’s not defined (as classical liberalism was) by a set of ethical principles. It’s defined by its division of the whole world into “oppressor” groups and “victim” groups.

Liberals pride themselves on siding with the “victims.”

Thus when the “victims” fail to play their assigned role, it’s a direct frontal assault on liberals sense of self-righteousness and self-worth. Of course, that is met with aggression.

But as Powers points out, this is profoundly demeaning to the “victim” groups in question. It means they are not allowed to reach independent conclusions. It means they are not allowed to stray off the liberals’ plantation.

Happily, liberals can’t (yet) use government coercion to shut such people up. So all they can do is demean and deride them.

Those Offensive Anti-Obama Signs

From the RealNews blog:

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon exploded onto the political scene a few months back, the Left has been up in arms over the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric featured on some of the signs and placards displayed by those in attendance. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow, among others, have fumed repeatedly about the bad taste exhibited by many of those expressing their displeasure with the President and his policies.

The Huffington Post ran a feature on this subject, titled “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs,” which singled out, among others, the following winners — or perhaps “losers” is a more apt term:

• “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery”
  
• “The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens”
  
• “Our tax $ given to Hamas to Kill Christians, Jews, & Americans”
  
• “Obama: What you talking about Willis? Spend my money?”
  
• “Obama loves taxes, bankrupt USA, loves baby killing”
  
• “Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler”
  
• “Barack Obama supports abortion, sodomy, socialism, and the New World Order”
  
• “Obama was not bowing [to the Saudi king]. He was sucking Saudi jewels.”

OK, that’s pretty rough stuff, and not at all civil. Of course, since there have been literally hundreds of thousands of protesters at tea party protests, carrying tens of thousands of signs, we have to expect a few to be pretty nasty.

But we have a collection of things said about the President that tops that.

• One sign exhorted Americans to “kill” the President and “bomb his f—in White House.”
  
• Another said, “I’m here to kill” the President.
  
• Another urged the powers-that-be to “hang” the President.
  
• Another said the President “is the disease, death is the cure.”
  
• Another said the President is “the only dope worth shooting.”
  
• Another showed a likeness of the President’s face with a bullet hole in the forehead, oozing red blood.
  
• Another called explicitly for the “death” of the “pig” in the White House.
  
• Another displayed a caricature of the President’s disembodied, bleeding head.
  
• Others featured the President’s face accompanied by such captions as: “Wanted: dead or alive,” and “Death to the dictator.”
  
• Another showed the President’s neck being fitted with a noose.
  
• Still another showed the image of a noose accompanied by a caption urging us to “support” the President (i.e., with the noose).

But how in the world did the Huffington Post miss the second set of really nasty signs, and single out the first set?

Simple, the second set of signs are from protests directed against George Bush.

Apparently, demanding the murder of George Bush isn’t any big deal to the people who are crying crocodile tears over the lack of civility shown toward Barack Obama by some of the tea party protesters.

The signs on the second list, calling for the death of George Bush, can be seen here.