Showing posts with label partisanship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label partisanship. Show all posts

Sunday, March 7, 2021

"Democrats have bollixed up every sexual harassment scandal I’ve covered."

"Joe Biden truncated the Hill-Thomas hearings in the name of comity. The Clintons had henchmen smear Lewinsky. Democrats vainly hammered Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh on sexual misconduct, hoping to stop judges they opposed on ideological grounds. Now, some Democrats are feeling regret over forcing out Al Franken, and for all those statements by prominent Democrats about how we must start with the presumption that women are telling the truth — an absurd standard.... 'Probably enough Democrats feel it no longer makes sense to hold your own side to serious ethical standards if Republicans won’t, so it’s possible to tough out things like this,' Ron Brownstein, a senior editor of The Atlantic, told me. 'I wouldn’t look at this as evidence that #MeToo is losing momentum; it’s more the sense that a red-blue cold war is gaining momentum. I think there’s less and less willingness to unilaterally punish your own side. Why take your own piece off the board if they won’t?'"

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Cuomo Discovers #MeToo Means #HimToo/Democrats agonize over the fate of a falling star" (NYT).

I kept the Brownstein quote in my excerpt not because I think he's sharp and getting it right. I kept it because it is such ripe bullshit, and I thought you might enjoy a laugh.  He wouldn’t look at this as evidence that #MeToo is losing momentum? Well, I sure as hell would.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Now who's saying the Nazi imagery was unintentional?

I'm reading "CPAC’s ‘Nazi Rune’ Stage Designed By A Liberal Company Which Has Worked For Biden, MSNBC"(National Pulse): 

The company – Design Foundry – told Forward it “had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did.”... The statement comes days after mainstream media outlets and left-wing Twitter activists slammed the conference for intentionally designing a stage to depict a Nazi rune, as outlets ran stories like “Nod or blunder? No CPAC 2021 apology for a stage shaped like a white supremacist symbol” and “CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters.”

That last one, saying the deliberateness "hardly matters," was in Salon, here.  Does it still hardly matter when you could accuse this design firm of branding CPAC as Nazis?

Saturday, June 13, 2020

"So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it... was deemed immoral."

"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."

From "The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings" by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept).