Communication Sucks In The Conservative Blogosphere

The National Review is warning us to Fight Liberal Word Games. 

5 years after I said The Left's NewAge Name Game (Fooled You!)

Not good enough? How about Glenn I-Love-Quackery Reynolds, just now discovering there's something wrong with the Wellness Programs being introduced through ObamaCare? 

I got him by 5 years as well, though I can't find the post I want, so here's a related one from 2009 that should make it plain.

My point is - as with a lot of our current problems - if conservatives had listened to someone, other than the usual suspects, instead of taking Glenn's "I really don't get your blog" approach (Ever heard of asking a question, Einstein? Sheesh!) we probably could've nipped in the bud many of these Dem nightmares, that await us, a long time ago.

But, I know, following the likes of The Frisky is deemed waay more important to politics than anything TMR might see or say,...

This Is Me - Blowing My Life - Trying 2 Get $ From Yours

A couple of days ago, when I wrote "'Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide' Ain't Just A Song" I ended the post with "Death stalks us in this land,..." Now I'm sure, to some of you, that's merely hyperbole but, to the rest of us, it ain't no joke:

“There are more African-Americans on probation, parole, or in prison today than were slaves in 1850. It is not a crisis of crime. It is a crisis of people being left behind. 

...We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”

Today it's not fair to say "no one acknowledges it," but it's difficult to understand how so few Republicans truly comprehend the life-or-death implications of how this plays out. Inside and out. 

Or the opportunities missed. 

Not to get all Glenn Beck on you but, speaking of the 1850s:

There's a growing fan club for Woodrow Wilson?

Although [Woodrow] Wilson promised African Americans "fair dealing...in advancing the interests of their race in the United States", the Wilson administration implemented a policy of racial segregation for federal employees. Although considered a modern liberal visionary giant as President, in terms of implementing domestic race relations, however, Wilson was "deeply racist in his thoughts and politics, and apparently was comfortable being so. 

...the Republicans won a landslide in 1920 by denouncing Wilson's policies."

I bet - and we could again. Why's Leo here? Because he's doing what I can't as a Republican (no worth in it) - he's living a life of being creative - but with the truth. Or, as one writer said, This is nuts.

Leonardo Di Caprio is making a biopic about Woodrow Wilson, based on a new book that celebrates the life of the most racist president of the 20th century. 

Wilson supported the KKK, defended lynching, re-segregated Washington DC, and fired all African-Americans from federal jobs. Wilson was not just a racist; he was a proud racist. He actually had the KKK-endorsing film “Birth Of A Nation” shown at the White House and called its depiction of the Klan as liberators of white southerners “history written with lightning.” 

Wilson was no mere man of his time. His time, on matters of race, was passing and he used the powers of the presidency to hold the clock back.

That's a light brush stroke, worthy of a Leo's making-a-movie exposé. But turn back to Woody Willie's hard-assed Wikipedia page and then, if you have any feeling for black people - as people - the true depth and horror of being bent over hits you. It hits me, anyway. The Right should already be ripping Leo's guts out (as they should've Oprah's, pre-Obama) making damned sure he gets this story correct:

In 1912, "an unprecedented number" of African Americans left the Republican Party to cast their vote for Wilson, a Democrat. They were encouraged by his promises of support for minorities. However, once in office, Wilson's cabinet members expanded racially segregationist policies. Black leaders who had supported Wilson in the 1912 election were angered when Wilson placed segregationist white Southerners in charge of many executive departments, and the administration acted to reduce the already-meager number of African-Americans in political-appointee positions. Wilson's cabinet officials, with the president's blessing, proceeded to establish official segregation in most federal government offices – in some departments for the first time since 1863. New facilities were designed to keep the races working there separated.

Historian Eric Foner says, "[Wilson's] administration imposed full racial segregation in Washington and hounded from office considerable numbers of black federal employees." Segregation was also quickly implemented at the Post Office Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. Many African American employees were downgraded and even fired. The segregation implemented in the Department of the Treasury and the Post Office Department involved not only screened-off working spaces, but also separate lunchrooms and toilets. 

 

Some segregationist federal workplace policies introduced by the Wilson administration would remain until the Truman Administration in the 1940s.

Other steps were taken by the Wilson Administration to make obtaining a civil service job more difficult for blacks. Primary among these was the requirement, implemented in 1914 and continued until 1940, that all candidates for civil service jobs attach a photograph to their application further allowing for discrimination in the hiring process. 

Despite these policies, Wilson was criticized by such hard-line segregationists as Georgia's Thomas E. Watson, for not going far enough in restricting black employment in the federal government.

Wilson did not interfere with the well-established system of Jim Crow and backed the demands of Southern Democrats that their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting without interference from Washington. 

In 1914, Wilson told The New York Times, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it."

I guess that was considered the president giving a pep talk. (Blacks get a lot of bullshit pep talks in the face of real obstacles. The line "Don't be a victim" is usually in there somewhere. Let's see, we got the enraged broke-back black guy and a Jewish blogger, against Leonardo Di Caprio and the marketing might of Hollywood - that's a fair fight to the Right.) Shut up, Leo. You're actually making me understand those slow-assed people in the DMV better. There's no point, in working faster, if they're so far behind they'll never catch up. A life of crime's right around the corner for their kids, trying to make up for what Woodrow took away, before their grandparents spent their lives fighting to get that shitty assed job for their children. "Don't be resentful" others say, while out kayaking, flying their planes, horseback riding, or the best - in email, while on this thing most blacks still have never experienced, a mythical escape from your troubles called a "vacation."

Fine, I'll stop resenting, and just stay depressed I'm not even surviving and the story of why is "history written in lightning." 

"They" ought to correct it - like stolen lives and fortunes easily come back. Or easily produce happy productive people, always on the right road, as long as they stay positive - over generations -  that's the fucking joke.

The implication, on top of everything else, that no matter what the issue, black lives are expected to consist of struggling to fix a multitude of injustices - or struggle at all - it's just sick. This isn't France - I'm at home, damn it, in NewAgeLand. Where everyone else pursues their interests, and I'm not supposed to notice what I've been stuck writing about, as opposed to my own possible concerns (or unlikely desire) for ebony ironwood lighting fixtures, the locations of any black Buddhist tourist attractions featuring unicorns bred by Rappers out to "save the planet," or the casually-approached question of whether the best place to post my long-awaited essay, A Negro Dolphin Wishes Of Love, is on Craig's List or not?

You know, good ol' dependably empty-headed, me:

I never have anything better to do,.... 

Hillary Clinton "Could Be Our First Lesbian President"

Shoot for the stars, baby, shoot for the stars,...

Were We Sure, When We Said, "It Can't Happen Here?"

Finding these memes can be amazing sometimes:

"Many of the progressive and holistic ideas that lie at the heart of today’s lifestyle Left, the environmental Left, and the New Age movement share numerous unquestioned philosophical, emotional, and practical similarities with the intellectual and cultural currents that fed into and sustained Nazism."

- JONAH GOLDBERG

  "Thank You!" everybody for the donations!

Laurence O'Donnell To Weiner: What's Wrong With You?

What a jerk.

Though, I must admit, it seems kind of unfair to hit Weiner with this question, alone, when so many need to have it placed before them as well,...

I'm Stuck On A High-Speed Rail Train To Nowhere Fast

While reading this, I had no idea if I should laugh or cry because, Buddy, TMR's already there:

A healthy culture transmits values. When it stops doing that, it dies. When the values no longer seem to be applicable, than the culture hunts around for new values, it undergoes a period of confusion while its forward motion slows down. That is where Japan is now. It's where America has arrived. 

The values of the left, that are present in both Japan and America, are a cultural suicide pact. The left pretends to add a spiritual dimension to modernism. It has been peddling that lie for two centuries and it has yet to deliver. In countries where it wielded full control, there was neither modernism nor values. Russia destroyed the economic, technological and spiritual potential of generations of its people. China is trying to use Communist values to avoid turning into another Japan, not realizing that those are little better than the collective obligations with which Japan rushed into the future. 

As America gazes at the ruins of Detroit and the insanity spewed forth by a digital frontier that increasingly looks every bit as eccentric and toxic as anything coming out of Japan, it is all too clear that we are Japan. There is no unique insanity in East, only a common disintegration of values in the East and the West. 

Asia and Europe have both witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations. It isn't technology that destroys technology that destroys civilizations, but a lack of values. 

To understand where Japan and Europe are, imagine an America decaying with no new ideas, losing its religion and values, losing its economy and finally its sanity, becoming coldly conformist and inhuman, while its families fall apart and its youth retreats into their own makeshift worlds. That reality is closer to home than we might like to think. 

America is destroying its values on an industrial scale. In a post-industrial nation, the destruction of values has become one of its chief industries. And while there is value in challenging values, in the conflict and clash of ideas, that requires that values go on existing, or there is no longer anything to challenge. And then there is nothing left but emptiness and madness. 

Another stupid product from an infomercial. Another ridiculous politician. Another protest. Another indicator of economic decline. Another day, week, month, year of empty nothingness.

I just used my "American Values" tag, on the last post, remembering all the flak I caught for it in the past. It does seem pretty worthless now, next to everyone scheduling "Eastern" medicines in with their meditation ("not just for new-agey folks") and no clue why they're doing either.

That's the only reason why I don't know whether to laugh or cry,...

Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.

America. Art. Culture. Liberals. (It Can't Be More Plain)

Meanwhile, conservatives don't even try to compete,...