Note: Normal people might find some of this offensive. (We hope. Dear Lord, please!)
The alt-left is completely nuts. If reading more than a year of this column hasn’t proven that to you, please get help. You might have contracted something.
Even when they admit they’re nuts, they have to blame someone. Naturally, they point the finger at President Donald J. Trump. And that takes us to an episode of “AM Joy” just before the new year.
Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart was guest hosting and discussing “Trump trauma” with his panel of people who hate Trump, conservatives and anything that doesn’t have a D after it’s name.
Capehart accused Trump of “provoking the leader of North Korea.” That’s forgetting a lot of history -- like the numerous times North Korea has threatened to nuke the U.S., the random attacks on American soldiers or that NoKo, as Trump likes to say, is a death cult that runs a giant death camp.
Still, that lead up launched the panel into a frenzy. Attorney Raul Reyes went to Crazy Land, literally. “You know that psychologists and therapists and that community, they have a term for it, PTSD. President Trump Stress Syndrome … Disorder.” Don’t blame me that he can’t spell. At least he fixed it.
Reyes called the Trump era “scary” and claimed, “all of our democratic norms being challenged if not demolished.” Forgetting, of course, that Trump was elected, wildly supports free speech, and mocks the press but hasn’t arrested anyone in the media. In other words, none of our democratic norms has been demolished or even challenged.
Then Capehart turned to writer and commentator Anushay Hossain who said she was “pessimistic, but trying to be optimistic.” Hossain admitted one of the ways she handled Trump trauma is by following “emergency kittens on Twitter.” “Whenever things get too stressful, just go over to the timeline of emergency kittens.” Then she admitted that, “2017 started out rough. First of all, for me as a lifelong feminist, I didn't get out of bed for a good three days.” She spent the time listening to “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “Hallelujah.” (Hopefully the Jeff Buckley version.)
I will agree with her point that they’re “going to need some deep therapy in 2018.” Yes, the alt-left seriously needs therapy.
Capehart capped all that with Karine Jean-Pierre, a Moveon.org spokesperson who teaches at Columbia University. (Ah, academia, the only place Moveon.org staff can find work.) “When I heard that awful carnage speech by trump, I was incredibly pessimistic. I was like, oh my gosh, the world is literally going to end this year.”
Let’s recap, shall we? One guest thinks libs have PTSD. Another relies on pictures of kittens and hid in her bed for three days. And the last one thought the world was going to end. I think the business opportunity for 2018 is to open a mental health clinic for the alt-left.
That naturally takes us to the rest of this week’s column on the blame game:
If Trump Is Making Liberals Crazy: The natural extension of “Trump trauma” is to claim that Trump himself is nuts. After all, he beat 16 GOP contenders, defied the media narrative time and time again and defeated Hillary Clinton for president in an upset that made the Patriots Super Bowl comeback look easy. Someone that accomplished must be … “crazy?”
Esquire’s Charles Pierce tried that line of attack. Here’s the allegedly intelligent assessment of: “Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline.” What follows is Pierce’s attempt to psychoanalyze the president. This is a common liberal theme. We disagree with you, so you must be crazy. The Soviet Union mastered this strategy during the Cold War, locking up political opponents in asylums.
Pierce cited the Trump (seen here during the inauguration) interview with the New York Times: “To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart.” Pierce has an admittedly sad personal tale, watching his “father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease.” That doesn’t make him an expert on the president.
Pierce later adds a strange criticism. “In addition, the president* exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys—or, as one social worker in rural North Carolina told me, their shotguns.” That used to be known as standing by principle, but this is 2018 and it’s the alt-left.
He followed with the discredited claims about Ronald Reagan having been senile during his presidency. “In Ronald Reagan’s second term, we ducked a bullet. I’ve always suspected he was propped up by a lot of people who a) didn’t trust vice-president George H.W. Bush, b) found it convenient to have a forgetful president when the subpoenas began to fly, and c) found it helpful to have a “detached” president when they started running their own agendas—like, say, selling missiles to mullahs.”
That should be a hint of how the media will continue to target Trump in 2018 and beyond. Remember, the alt-left and media always think people on the right are: crazy, stupid, racist and evil or maybe some combination of those four. They are hitting Trump with all four.
Let’s Blame The Constitution: If Trump has made the alt-left crazy and they can’t get away with claiming he’s crazy, what next? Let’s blame the Constitution. This article begins with a celebration of the play “Hamilton,” where the way they make the Founders cool is to make them people of color.
You know, instead of rebelling and creating the best, most-powerful nation in human history. Most people would think that’s cool. But then again, I’m not liberal like those involved.
That takes us overseas to the article itself, The Guardian UK’s “The year of Trump has laid bare the US Constitution’s serious flaws.” Because we always care about what the British think of our Constitution after we rebelled from them to create it. (The image is from Mel Gibson's The Patriot, when relations between Americans and their mother country were less ideal.)
Author Jonathan Freedland actually argues in support of the revolution and said it was Britain’s “inheritance” -- “a part of our patrimony mislaid across the Atlantic.” Starts out well, then we get to the Trump bashing. “For this first year of the Donald Trump presidency has exposed two flaws in the model that I cannot brush aside so easily.”
The big bad? Trump disregarded “norms. – that are essential to civic wellbeing.” Oh horrors! “Trump trampled all over those as a candidate” and did so even more after getting elected. The alt-left solution? Impeachment.
“Of course, there is a remedy, and its name is impeachment. Scholars are clear that Trump has already provided sufficient legal grounds for such a move – the case against him is far more compelling than the one against Bill Clinton. But impeachment proceedings are triggered by the House of Representatives, followed by a trial in the Senate, and nothing will happen so long as Republicans control both houses of Congress.”
Great. Even the foreign press is playing games trying to manipulate our elections. I guess it’s only bad when Russia does it.
But of course, let’s blame Republicans. “And today’s Republicans refuse to fulfil that obligation. They, like Trump, are without shame.” In other words, they won’t do what he demands.
That wasn’t enough. He then went after the 2nd Amendment, as well. His whine was “the fact that the argument hinges on interpretations of a text written more than two centuries ago is itself a problem.”
If We Can’t Blame The Constitution, Then Let’s Blame Trump Supporters!: This week in alt-left media was like a game of hot potato. Nearly a year after Trump took office, liberals are still trying to find someone or something to blame. I’ve lost track of how many candidates for that role have surfaced -- Hillary Clinton (she blames literally everyone else), the media, the electoral college, racist people, white people, white women, Fox News, James Comey, President Putin, Obama, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, sexism … well, you get the idea.
Naturally, Trump supporters who a) backed him in the election and, shockingly, b) back him now are the worst. The Daily Beast’s pretentiously named Jared Yates Sexton tells the liberal view of events leading up to now. (Of course, he’s an associate professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. There are probably alt-lefty authors who aren’t in academia. Maybe.) It’s filled with personal anecdotes that are completely unprovable but claim Trumpeters said nasty things. (One wonders if said professor has ever been to a football game and if he thinks fans genuinely want to “kill” bad referees.)
After regaling his readers with that awful description of events, he tells of the awful Trump supporters. “In order to maintain that devotion they had to accept a toxic worldview—a worldview that made them susceptible to hate groups that had grown large and powerful with Trump’s ascent to power.”
He just kept piling it on, astonished that Trump supporters still back the president. Then he waved the They Are Scary Flag, claiming: “It is, after all, bad enough that his base might support Trump firing a man charged with investigating him, but the talk among the fringe right, where many of his supporters can be found, is trending more and more toward armed insurgency.”
Ah rebels. You’d think conservatives had run around the country chanting “Revolution.” But no, that was lefties from Occupy Wall Street. He continued his screed and asked “the troubling question: just how far will they go?”
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