Progressives (Liberals)

No, actually, I did provide evidence that the Clinton campaign ordered up and received favorable puff pieces.

The following month, when she was at the Times, Haberman published two stories on Clinton’s vetting process; in this instance, Haberman’s stories were more sophisticated, nuanced, and even somewhat more critical than what the Clinton memo envisioned.

All presidential campaigns have their favorite reporters, try to plant stories they want published, and attempt in multiple ways to curry favor with journalists. These tactics are certainly not unique to the Clinton campaign (liberals were furious in 2008 when journalists went to John McCain’s Arizona ranch for an off-the-record BBQ).

Whatever contact the Clinton campaign had with journalists, it was nowhere at the level of cooperation, encouragement, and outright support that later developed between F0x News and Trump. And as Greenwald points out the idea was to give the press something else to report on besides missing e-mails and negative stories about the foundation.

I want journalists independently investigating, researching, and writing stories of substance that are relevant to the lives of people locally, nationally, and globally—not fed to them by rich people for rich people about rich people.

It is ok with one type of person—and disgusting to people like me.

“Fair is fair. I’m a conservative-leaning [person] [gender-identifying word redacted]. I don’t support anything this administration does. I don’t know much about the attorney general’s past, except she has a good reputation. But I really don’t like this executive’s office, so that said, politically, that’s where I’m at. But I just happened to be in a position to know firsthand what went down that day.”

No I don't [find yourself at a loss regarding revealed intentions.

Moreover I have equivalent impressions of your motives.

Or, as you could have added, exist today between the Washington Post, NYT, MSNBC and CNN and the Democrat leadership.

Trump's super power is his ability to shamelessly mock others with schoolboy taunts.

One of the most notable symptoms of ASPD is a lack of empathy. In response to another person’s feelings, they may come across as:

cold
unfeeling
callous
overly critical
harsh
People with ASPD don’t always realize how harmful their actions are. In other cases, they may simply not care that their actions hurt someone.

People with ASPD are often psychically or verbally abusive. They may physically harm people without any consideration of the resulting injuries to the other person.

Verbal abuse might include:

insults
deprecation
negative statements
public or private humiliation

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) opposes impeaching President Trump, she told the Washington Post, her most forceful statement to date on the topic.

“I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before,” Pelosi said. “But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

This week, Iowa TV viewers will be treated to a two-minute ad titled “Pedigree,” in which the Club for Growth expresses its outrage over the deeply problematic notion that Beto O’Rourke is the new Barack Obama. Specifically, the anti-tax group paints O’Rourke as the poster child for white male entitlement. In the spot’s telling, O’Rourke has spent his whole life falling steadily upward, as his race and class privileges transformed his failures into learning experiences. Obama and O’Rourke both earned undergraduate degrees at Columbia University, the narrator allows, but “Obama went on to become the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review, breaking barriers. Beto crashed into them; causing a collision while driving drunk, then fleeing the scene to avoid accountability. His charges were dropped as people of color languished behind bars for far less.”

Obama organized poor communities in Chicago, the conservative group notes (with affected admiration); O’Rourke let his wife’s “billionaire real-estate developer” dad buy him a city council seat — then, he voted to demolish a poor Hispanic community to make way for his father-in-law’s downtown development projects.

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I want journalists independently investigating, researching, and writing stories of substance that are relevant to the lives of people locally, nationally, and globally—not fed to them by rich people for rich people about rich people.

So do most people. Puff pieces about rich people hardly represent the bulk of the reporting going on today. And just because we can find alternative analyses by unaffiliated bloggers and researchers doesn't mean that their stories are necessarily true. There was that big story in the Nation, for instance, which inferred that an insider had given DNC files to Wikileaks because it was technologically impossible for such a volume of material to be hacked. Trump supporters had a field day with that discovery and because it originated from a left-leaning source it was picked up by anti-DNC leftists as well. Trouble is, it was flat out untrue.

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It is ok with one type of person—and disgusting to people like me.

It's ok with more than one type of person and I'm sure it disgusts people who aren't like you. Everything isn't binary.

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Everything isn't binary.

Well, everything is - if you happen to have a need to constantly set yourself up as being smarter, more savvy, or more in tune with reality than ‘others’.

After Media Matters unearthed tapes of Fox News star Tucker Carlson defending statutory rape, Carlson responded by saying the “naughty” comments were “more than a decade” old. But less than a day later, The Daily Beast surfaced an interview in which Carlson made essentially the same argument — in early 2015.

“There are lots of things you have to play along with in life, and I understand society demands compromises,” Carlson told the future founder of the Proud Boys gang, Gavin McInnes, in an interview, adding: “But there is a limit beyond which I can’t pretend anymore. And calling — in this case, it was a 17-year-old kid — a ‘rape victim’ because a teacher, who wasn’t even that old, or married, was kind enough to initiate him into the ways of adulthood. I’m not just going to sit there.”...

insults
deprecation
negative statements
public or private humiliation

Today’s column is about plastic straws, hamburgers and dishwashing detergent. Also Captain Marvel.

No, I haven’t lost my mind, or at least I don’t think so. But quite a few other people have — and their rage-filled pettiness is a more important force in modern America than we like to think.

My starting point is a weekend tweet from Representative Devin Nunes of California, who headed the House Intelligence Committee until the House changed hands after the midterms. In that role, he basically acted as Donald Trump’s stonewaller in chief, doing everything he could to prevent any real investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin.

But his tweet wasn’t about that. It was about a waitress who, citing the “straw police,” asked his dining party if they wanted straws. “Welcome to Socialism in California!” Nunes thundered.

If this seems like a weird aberration — he wasn’t even denied a straw, just asked if he wanted one — you need to realize that rage explosions over seemingly silly things are extremely common on the right. By all accounts, the biggest applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference — eliciting chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A!” — was the claim that Democrats are coming for your hamburgers, just like Stalin. (They aren’t, and for the record, Stalin was a mass murderer, but objectively pro-burger.)

By the way, this isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m sure readers can come up with many examples, but I happen to remember a 2009 blog post by the right-wing activist Erick Erickson that was practically an incitement to violence: “At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp?”

And what was the source of his rage? The observation that dishwasher detergent doesn’t work quite as well without the phosphates.

What do these things have in common? All of them involve cases where individual choices impose costs on other people. Plastic straws really are a source of ocean pollution. While nobody is planning to ban beef, flatulent cows really are an important source of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And phosphates contribute to toxic algae blooms.

But the rage seems to come from the suggestion that these costs imposed on others mean that white men — it does seem to always be white men — should consider changing their behavior, even a bit, in the public interest. Which brings me to Captain Marvel.

For those blissfully unaware of the issue, the latest superhero movie features a female protagonist, and the actress who plays her has expressed some mildly feminist views. So?

Well, for a significant number of men all of this is apparently extremely threatening. Mobs swamped internet sites like rottentomatoes.com with negative reviews before the movie opened, i.e., before they could even have seen it; YouTube filled up with attack videos and predictions that the film would be a disastrous failure.

Marvel rage recognizably drew on the same pathological pettiness as straw rage and hamburger rage. As it happens, the movie appears to be a big hit and is receiving favorable audience scores. This shows that the men afflicted with this syndrome are a fairly small minority.

But it’s not a minority without influence. Nunes was, for a time, among the most important politicians in Washington. CPAC sets the agenda for the party that controls the White House and the Senate. The recently revealed radio rants of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson could have come straight out of one of those bizarre anti-Brie Larson screeds.

The point is that demented anger is a significant factor in modern American political life — and overwhelmingly on one side. All that talk about liberal “snowflakes” is projection; if you really want to see people driven wild by tiny perceived slights and insults, you’ll generally find them on the right. Nor is it just about racism and misogyny. Although these are big components of the phenomenon, I don’t see the obvious connection to hamburger paranoia.

Just to be clear: To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, I’m not saying that most conservatives are filled with rage over petty things. What I’m saying instead is that most of those filled with such rage are conservatives, and they supply much of the movement’s energy. Not to put too fine a point on it, pathological pettiness almost surely put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 election.

At this point you probably want to know what I think we should do about it. The truth is that I don’t know. I guess there’s some case for using taxes rather than regulations to control pollution, since you won’t be telling people directly what to do. But one suspects that the people I’m talking about will still find something to be hysterical about.

At the very least, however, we should realize what’s happening. It may be comforting to believe that politics is driven by more or less rational considerations of costs and benefits. But the reality is that a lot of it is driven by unreasoning rage.