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This morning, Sunday in America, the weekend talk shows are in full swing, and if you had a dollar for every time “we need a return to civility” is being uttered you would be rich indeed.
Ah, civility, which the mainstream media’s flying monkeys would have you believe is running deficits on both sides of the political divide. Civility like the New Republic cover pictured above. Once, years ago, the weekly magazine was a sane, reliable source of centre left nostrums and perspectives. No longer. It changed hands several years ago and, well, that cover equating Trump with one of history’s greatest mass murderers has been standard fare ever since.
You want more civility? Try veteran congresswoman Maxine Waters, who marked Trump’s 2016 victory by urging Democrats to get in Republican’s faces, abuse them in restaurants and department stores. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s first flak, was driven from a Virginia eatery within days.
It has been a relentless, multi-faceted assault ever since, as evidenced by Nancy Pelosi’s denunciation just two weeks ago of Trump and the MAGA movement: “This is something that is undermining our democracy. He must be stopped. He cannot be president!”
One might also cite Veep Kamala Harris rattling the cup for the Black Lives Matter rioters during 2020’s summer of smoke over American cities and mayhem in their streets. Those scenes of anarchy, memorably described by a CNN hack in front of buildings in flames, were “fiery but mostly peaceful.”
This how the state media always plays it. Consider the January 6 hearings and its nakedly partisan panel of hard-left Democrats and a pair of Never Trump Republican quislings. No such thing had ever happened before, TV’s talking heads repeatedly intoned, counting on the public’s general ignorance and short memories to avoid mention of the Puerto Rican separtists who opened fire on the House of Representatives from the public gallery in 1954.
Okay, that’s ancient history, but the same anchors and pundits also found it convenient to ignore the feminist occupation of the Capitol during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings just a few years earlier.
Civility, yes it would indeed be nice to see its return. As nice as it is unlikely.
UPDATE: On CNN just now, Obama strategist and stage-manager David Axelrod, the Clinton era veteran and one of the insiders who prepped Biden for his disastrous debate, is slamming J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator said to be a leading GOP veep candidate, for adding fuel to the dumpster fire of US election year politics.
Vance’s crime was noting that gross distortions, such as that New Republic cover, encouraged violence and, yesterday, an idiot 20-year-old to squeezing the trigger.
Noting that cause and effect, Axelrod has just said, shows why Vance is not fit to be within a heartbeat of the presidency.
Vance lacks “civility” don’t you know.
UPDATE II: Democrats talking up violence as the solution to their Trump problem.
— roger franklin
Godwin’s rule on internet arguments goes:
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Reductio ad Hitlerum (playing the Nazi card) attempts to invalidate an argument on the basis that the same reasoning was used by Adolf Hitler.
Both of these desperate and clichéd emotional strategies come from a position of defensiveness and weakness.
My personal rule of thumb (and I have been through this quite a few times, particularly from the Overland idiots a few years ago) is this: as soon as someone resorts to these kind of analogies, they have lost the argument.
Full stop. Game over. Take your ball and go home.
It is the equivalent of ‘flailing’ in boxing – out of control, aggressive and loud, but of no consequence and utterly losing.
Whether you support Trump or not, the reality now is that if, he is not jailed, he cannot lose the next election.
President Biden has become a doddering and befuddled old man that can hardly put two sentences together – (he makes Reagan look like a Rhodes scholar) – who inspires no confidence as a leader.
It is also sad indictment of American politics that these two are the best that can rise to the surface in the US political quagmire.
But it is what it is.
No contest now in my view.
my money is on the Donald.
mean tweets and world peace.
a strong economy plus law ‘n’ order.
what a refreshing change from the socialist fascista currently in control
I’m familiar with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and I’ve looked “flak” up in Merriam-Webster, Urban Dictionary and sites in between, but I still don’t know what “Trump’s first flak” means.
In this context, it means ‘press secretary’, as, for example, Karine Jean-Pierre.
If so, why not write “press secretary”?
I have read and heard many references to Karine Jean-Pierre, but “flak” was not amongst them.
Roger Franklin’s observations are valid – especially his comment about the despicable hate-mongering racist behaviour of congresswoman Maxine Waters. However, I too was slightly taken aback by his reference to Sarah Huckabee Sanders as ‘a flak’. I interpreted it as a soft put-down – although admittedly, he may not have intended it that way.
The words ‘flak’ and ‘flack’ seem to have had different origins, although the meanings now overlap somewhat, and the spelling is often melded. One dictionary suggests that its use to describe a press agent is slang and has a derogatory connotation – which is the way I took it.
During Sanders’ tenure as the White House Press Secretary, I formed the view she was a pretty smart woman – as with the black lady with the interesting hair and the French name who currently does the same job for Joe Biden. I take my hat off to anyone who could patiently carry out the challenging job of fending off myriad smart-arse gotcha questions from the group-think attitudes that dominate the U.S. corporate media. Such a task would be quite beyond me.
By the way – most Australians would not be aware that Sarah Huckabee Sanders career did not end when she left Trump’s employ. She is now the Governor of the State of Arkansas – the job once held by Bill Clinton. To have achieved that, her intellectual and political skills must be considerable – far exceeding those needed for a mere ‘flack’.
While searching, I found an amusing suggestion that “flak” may be a misspelling of the more familiar 4-letter word “f**k”.
“…the job once held by Bill Clinton” and her father!
.
I liked hearing her when she was a Fox News contributor. When refreshing my memory as to when that was, I came across this in Wikipedia – not uncommon for them to publish obviously wrong “facts”:
*****
…..she was the 31st White House press secretary,
.
Sanders hosted fewer press conferences than any of the 13 previous White House press secretaries.
Where does the buck stop?