Progressives (Liberals)

Conspiracy theory nonsense.

Quote:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that former Vice President Joe Biden is "being taken care of pretty well by the socialists," suggesting that a recent wave of criticism against the potential 2020 presidential candidate is the product of attacks hatched by his own party's left wing.

A fine example of attempts to foment dissent on the left.

On the contrary the dissent preceded Trump's comment, which itself was simply the statement of an obvious truth.

Let's set aside the certainty that right wing dirty tricks folks are working within left organizations to forward dissent.

The NYT has an extraordinarily deep piece of reporting

But what we as reporters had not fully appreciated until now is the extent to which these two stories — one of an illiberal, right-wing reaction sweeping the globe, the other of a dynastic media family — are really one. To see Fox News as an arm of the Trump White House risks missing the larger picture. It may be more accurate to say that the White House — just like the prime ministers’ offices in Britain and Australia — is just one tool among many that this family uses to exert influence over world events.

Bound up with Keith’s [Rupert's father] business interests were ideological inclinations not just about how power should work but also about who should be allowed to exercise it: He was a member of the Eugenics Society of Victoria and in an editorial once wrote that the great question facing Britain was “will she, if needs be, fight — for a White Australia?”

If Murdoch’s papers were a blunt instrument. Fox’s influence was in some ways more subtle, but also far more profound: Hour after hour, day after day, it was shaping the realities of the millions of Americans who treated it as their primary news source. A 2007 study found that the introduction of the network on a particular cable system pushed local voters to the right: the Fox News Effect, as it became known. In a 2014 Pew Research poll, a majority of self-described conservatives said it was the only news network they trusted. Murdoch’s office above the Fox newsroom in Midtown Manhattan became a requisite stop on any serious Republican presidential candidate’s schedule.

Murdoch was deeply entwined with the Trump family. Trump had aggressively cultivated The Post during his rise to celebrity in New York in the late ’70s and ’80s. Kushner became close to Murdoch after he purchased The New York Observer in 2006. An improbable friendship blossomed between the octogenarian mogul and the 30-something publishing parvenu, with Murdoch and Wendi even taking Kushner and Ivanka on vacation in the Caribbean on Murdoch’s yacht. After Murdoch’s divorce in 2013, Kushner, who was also in the real estate business, helped him find a decorator for his new bachelor apartment. Ivanka was one of five individuals designated to oversee the trust for Murdoch and Wendi’s two daughters, which held $300 million in stock in News Corp and 21st Century Fox. (She relinquished her role as a trustee in 2016.)

Across the Atlantic, a similar right-wing wave was threatening to drive Britain out of the European Union. Murdoch had a hand in that as well. His most influential tabloid, The Sun, had long been advocating for an exit from the E.U., and so had Murdoch himself, distilling his opposition to the E.U. into a single quote to Anthony Hilton, a columnist at The Evening Standard: “When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice.”

Quote:

On the contrary the dissent preceded Trump's comment, which itself was simply the statement of an obvious truth.

Let's set aside the certainty that right wing dirty tricks folks are working within left organizations to forward dissent. Let's assume that a coterie (of unknown size but sincere in their purposes) within the progressive camp has been active here (certainly true). None of that means or logically entails that Trump is not working to foment dissent on the left. He is. Gleefully.

Grassley: Trump’s Claim That Wind Turbines Cause Cancer Is ‘Idiotic’

It's almost as if they are scared of Trump and scared of such a release.

Great crowd, these folks.

(...)

The arguments against Buttigieg fall roughly into four categories. The first is that Buttigieg acts too straight to have any gay cred.

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Buttigieg’s critics also allege that being gay isn’t important to him.

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There’s also the suggestion that being white and male trumps the fact that Buttigieg is gay. White men have already had their shot at the presidency, the argument goes, and it’s time for a woman to have hers.

(...)

How do Democrats properly vet their candidates for president without cannibalizing them? How do they rightly insist on sensitive and inclusive leaders while making allowances for past mistakes, present quirks, human messiness and the differences in the conversation and the culture now versus 10 or 20 or 40 years ago?

That’s emerging as a central challenge of the Democratic presidential primary. And it’s worrying me.

I’m worried because there was an actual mini-debate on the left recently over whether Pete Buttigieg is gay enough. Do his whiteness, upper-middle-class background and Harvard and Oxford degrees nullify his experience as a minority and undercut his status as a trailblazer? This question is out there, in both senses of that phrase.

I’m worried because it in some ways echoes an earlier question about whether Kamala Harris — whose father came from Jamaica, whose mother came from India and whose husband is white — is black enough.

And I’m worried because of what Joe Biden is going through — because of the intensity of the censure that he faced after the Nevada politician Lucy Flores’s allegation and because of the fixation on precisely what kind of apology he must issue.

Flores of course accused him of coming up behind her, touching her shoulders and kissing the back of her head: a gesture that’s inappropriate and demeaning. Biden says that he doesn’t recall the incident, from 2014. The media has given this breathless coverage.

I’ve written that I don’t think Biden, 76, should run, for many reasons, including that someone in politics as long as he has been carries too much baggage; that Democratic voters have generally preferred candidates significantly younger than he is; and that he mismanaged and failed miserably in his two prior presidential campaigns.

But I feel just as strongly that Democrats need to show some proportion, realism and reason as they assess and react to candidates (or, in Biden’s case, probable candidates). With Biden especially but with others as well, too many Democrats aren’t doing that.

It’s nonnegotiable that Democrats hold their presidential aspirants to high standards on issues of racial justice, gender equality and more. It’s crucial that the party nominate someone who can credibly represent its proudly diverse ranks. But it’s also important that the party not demand a degree of purity that nobody attains.

I’m not recommending the Republicans’ course in accepting and protecting Donald Trump, which was to bury principles so deep that they may never be exhumed. I’m saying that to turn the Democratic primary into a nonstop apology tour when the nominee will be going up against a president never expected to apologize for anything is a risky strategy. It obsesses over the flaws in candidates who have many strengths, defining them in terms of what they seek forgiveness for. It blurs the line between job interview and inquisition. Taken too far, it rips contenders to shreds before Trump even takes out his scissors.

As for the mini-debate about Buttigieg’s gayness, it arose principally from this column in Slate, which included the following paragraph:

“A marginalized sexual orientation can remain unspoken and unnoticed for as long as a queer person desires. A gay man who conforms to a critical mass of gendered expectations can move through life without his sexuality attending every interaction, even after he comes out. Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t activate the ‘Hey, that’s that homosexual gentleman’ response in the average brain. That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough — there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.”

The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.

Also, I guarantee you that Buttigieg’s adherence to “a critical mass of gendered expectations” and failure to “activate” the homosexual-alert siren don’t mean that being gay has been incidental to his life and is incidental to his perspective. That he didn’t come out until he was 33 is all the proof you need that he wrestled privately with his sexual orientation and with fears about how the world would respond to it and to him.

And when I first met and interviewed him nearly three years ago, this is how he argued that Democrats should reclaim the word “freedom” from Republicans, who have tried to reserve it for their brand:

“You’re not free if you have crushing medical debt. You’re not free if you’re being treated differently because of who you are. What has really affected my personal freedom more: the fact that I don’t have the freedom to pollute a certain river, or the fact that for part of my adult life, I didn’t have the freedom to marry somebody I was in love with? We’re talking about deep, personal freedom.”

He sounds sufficiently gay to me. His powers of empathy seem plenty informed by his sexual orientation. And we need to stop making assumptions about how well someone can understand and address what minorities go through based on his or her looks or vocal inflections or anything of the sort. That’s the quintessence of prejudice. And it’s the antithesis of enlightenment.