The Obama 2012 campaign is in full gear and playing from the Saul Alinsky playbook that has served it so well. You know the drill. Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it . Obama’s re-election team has set it sights on the Tea Party. Of course, it’s not the first time the Tea Party has been in Team Obama’s crosshairs. Just last month, while appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, David Axelrod told Candy Crowley that Republicans in Congress “were in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged the party to the right.” So if one of Obama’s top advisers is prepared to liken his political adversaries to terrorists then you know there’s no limit to what Obama and his acolytes are prepared to say about the Tea Party. In two of its campaign ads with its Maoist inspired theme ” Forward ,” the voiceover solemnly says, “Some said our best days were behind us,” accompanied by images with Tea Party protesters. Tea Partiers, like a majority of Americans, believe the country is going in the wrong direction under President Obama’s policies. But that’s a far cry from believing that America’s best days are behind us. As someone who addressed the Tea Party Tax Day Rally in Worcester, Massachusetts, last month, I can personally attest that Tea Party activists want to leave their children and grandchildren with a better America. Consider this portion from the Worcester Tea Party Mission Statement: The Worcester Tea Party is a local, all volunteer, non-profit organization. Across the greater Worcester County area we are building the bottom-up organization to return our country back to the principles that made her great. We need to connect with our neighbors to form strong local groups, ready to take on whatever challenges we face. Together, there’s no limit to what we can achieve. Now that doesn’t sound like an organization that believes America’s best days are behind it. If the Worcester Tea Party or any other chapter of the Tea Party believed that it wasn’t possible for America to have a better future, then the Tea Party would not be much of a political force and would have ceased to exist long ago. It could be that President Obama knows about as much about the Tea Party as he does about the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn legislation, the difference between the Maldives and the Malvinas. or how many states there are in the Union. Or it could very well be that President Obama knows exactly what the Tea Party represents and simply isn’t telling the truth. With regard to the Obama campaign’s targeting of the Tea Party, Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard writes that “one expects this line of attack many times over before November’s presidential election.” Halper is no doubt correct in his assessment. Obama’s targeting of the Tea Party has only just begun. Yet this shouldn’t be viewed as a negative development. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that obituaries were being written for the Tea Party. Back in January, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos wrote , “The Tea Party proved itself ineffective, irrelevant and co-opted this primary cycle.” A year after the mid-term elections, Robert Schlesinger of U.S. News & World Report sardonically wrote , “Remember the Tea Party? It was all the rage back in ’10, inspiring fear in establishment Republicans and loathing in Democrats.” Last September, Will Bunch of Media Matters argued that the Tea Party was basically a creation of “the right-wing media, and it echoes.” Bunch’s argument is basically a variation on the theme put out by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who once characterized the Tea Party as “Astroturf.” But if the Tea Party is so ineffective, irrelevant, co-opted, artificial, and as out of style as a polyester suit, then why does the Obama 2012 campaign feel the need not only to conjure up images of the Tea Party but to misrepresent its positions? If anything, Obama’s attention towards the Tea Party demonstrates its strength and resonance with a significant portion of the electorate. So by all means I hope the Obama campaign continues to target the Tea Party. In his pursuit of re-election, President Obama might end up making the Tea Party stronger than ever.
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Obama Targets the Tea Party
Several media outlets have run stories about a rumored gathering of conservative bloggers, writers, and others last week. You can find pictures on Facebook. You can find a list of names. The words “off the record” seemingly have little value. Much of the information came from invitees. I started blogging in October of 2003. In July of 2004, I started blogging at RedState. Along the way I’ve done some really stupid things I’m not proud of and some really cool things I am very proud of. Some of what I’ve done others have questioned, but I have never held myself out to be a reporter. I’m a conservative activist. Though I often report on what the conservative movement is doing, my primary goal is to affect what the conservative movement does. One of the fascinating things to me as my career at RedState and elsewhere has advanced is the number of conservative voices going into traditional media forms who originated at conservative blogs and online sites. It seems most of the newer voices and faces on the left have come from traditional left-wing print publications and moved into television and radio. Though there are a few exceptions, I think more conservatives have moved into television and radio directly from blogs and new media websites than the left. While I do not claim to be a traditional journalist or reporter, many of the traditional rules of the media have always applied to blogs since I started and even now as I and others move on to television and radio. Off the record means off the record. If some breach the trust, others should not. One of the only significant times I can think of in which I deviated from that was the off the record meeting of evangelicals in Texas earlier this year. The attendees themselves had already designated one of the attendees to talk to the media. In my one post on the matter, I explained what happened without using names and only did so, with thanks from the attendees, after several others had run to traditional news outlets to give less than honest descriptions of the meeting. Even in that post, I left out names, major details, and asked for permission before I even did it. There is no rule book for blogging, but there are best practices and the individual ethics of bloggers. Those practices have evolved over time. Here now nine years after I started blogging, let me tell you something I have noticed. The people who are the loudest haphazard voices and bitterest voices among the longest serving crop of bloggers on left and right are the ones who never grew up. They hold proudly to the standards and cavalier attitude many of us possessed when we first got started and are angry when they see their peers doing more and having more influence and impact than they are. They wonder why they don’t get invited to meetings, conventions, and the like when others do and instead of realizing it is them, they conclude everyone else is selling out. Peter Pan never grew up. Bloggers must. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a dear friend on radio all of you know. Obviously a great many people were more than skeptical of me, a conservative blogger, signing on with CNN. His advice really solidified my wake up and grow up moment online — have fun, don’t go along to get along, but be respectful and reasonable. If your opinion isn’t what most would consider reasonable, at least explain why your unreasonable opinion is reasonable to you and, above all else, try always to stay on offense. Most humorously, at CNN a polar opposite of this friend gave me identical advice. As I’ve grown up online, I’m one of the uncommon few who has moved on to both television and radio. I have been blessed. Along the way, I find others who are making the transition too, but still others who have been toiling away in the blogosphere for years who have refused to make the transition, or been unable to despite their hopes, and they may look at me and others like me and think we’ve sold out or decided to go along to get along. But I look at them and think what a waste of talent and energy. Some don’t want to transition, but have grown up and matured in their style and interpersonal relationships. They want to have an impact and they do. Hats off to them. But there are others who are dragging those folks down and the rest of us too. Sadly for them and the rest of us who get invited to nice places to meet nice people off the record, as long as the rest of us keep humoring them and their antics, those invites won’t come for any of us.
Excerpt from:
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Prince of Darkness Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (CNN) — The arraignment of accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was under way Saturday, but distractions were delaying the proceedings. It is Mohammed and four others’ first appearance before a military judge in Guantanamo Bay since being charged a month ago. Along with Mohammed, the
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GITMO: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Fellow Terrorists Mock the Court as Their Arraignment Begins
There is something very disconcerting about the faces of the five young men arrested in Cleveland last week for planning to blow up a bridge on a federal highway. Ordinarily we’re accustomed to seeing the faces of bearded Middle Easterners with some kind of turban on their heads and malevolence in their eyes. Instead, these were home-grown Americans. Granted one had a weird hairdo and they all looked pretty scruffy, but it wasn’t anything you wouldn’t encounter in your average grunge band. If this is the new face of terrorism, we’re in big trouble. And it seems very likely. You see lots of the same type among the crowd at Occupy Wall Street crowd or in those fanatical environmental groups that chain themselves to a grove of trees or burn down a luxury condominium. (In fact, these five were first tailed by police after talking anarchist violence at Occupy Cleveland.) There’s a kind of helpless fanaticism to all these young men, as if the world is stacked against them and only the wildest act of desperation can have any impact. America seems to be producing a lot more of these types today. My guess is that most of them have grown up without fathers and seem to have no connection with any adult male. The world of Father Knows Best is unknown to them. They’re angry at not having role models but they’ve also incorporated their divorced mothers’ jaundiced view of the world of men. In terms of personal and social roles, they have nowhere to go. Ordinarily you would hope such wayward youth would eventually find themselves, settle down, get married and raise a family. But we no longer live in that kind of world. We’ve already had one Fight Club generation, “raised by women” as the Brad Pitt character put it, and it looks like we’re headed for another by default. These young men are not very good marriage material. Television watching and video games are their major vocation. They haven’t done well in school — but then most boys never did. In the old days, however, there was always a factory job or outdoor work that offered the possibility of making a living. These jobs no longer exist. Unless they have a father or an uncle who’s in some father-and-son labor union, they’re out of luck. They’re the kind of whom their girlfriends will say, when they finally gets pregnant and decide they don’t want to get married, “it would be like having another child.” Meanwhile, those girlfriends are already doing better in school and are marching into the job market, for whatever that’s worth. This pattern cuts across racial and ethnic lines. As the young Cambodian girl tells Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino , “in this neighborhood, the girls go to college and the boys go to jail.” There are already more women than men in college and the gap keeps widening. Just last week the Gallup poll found for the first time that young women have more career ambitions than young men. It’s not surprising to find that when they reach the point of family formation, many of these women will decide they have better options — either the welfare system or their own resources. All this illustrates what Charles Murray says is happening throughout blue-collar America. Cultural norms are breaking down and nothing is taking their place — except perhaps the system where everybody becomes a ward of the state. There’s the usual nattering about men staying home to raise children while their wives go out to be breadwinners but that’s limited to a slice of the population barely big enough to give some CNN reporter the idea that she’s got a story. In the vast reach of an increasingly undereducated America, young men raised in homes dominated by women find no appeal in putting themselves in the hands of another woman. Better to hang out with the boys and get high. And so the cycle continues. So far there’s very little pushback against this gathering calamity. The dogma of women’s liberation says that anything women do to gain their “independence” is heroic, even if it means becoming a single mother with five illegitimate children and going on welfare. When black sports stars revert to the old African custom of collecting as many wives as possible, the press can only gape in admiration. ( Reported BBC-CNN last week: “As he celebrates his 28th birthday today New York Jets cornerback, Antonio Cromartie, has another reason to raise a glass — he now fathers 10 children… from a total of eight women across the country.”) When Hollywood decides to investigate Mormons, it doesn’t concentrate on the highly moral and successful majority that plays a central role in the Boy Scouts, but concentrates on the few remaining polygamous cults and gives us Big Love . No wonder that, when confronted with a breadwinning family man married to the same women for forty years with a healthy brood of children and grandchildren, the Obama Administration immediately responds by branding Mitt Romney as “weird.” THERE IS, HOWEVER, a glimmer of hope. Deep in the bowels of academia, a handful of scholars are beginning to acknowledge that there may be something worth salvaging in Western culture. In a paper published by the Royal Society last January entitled “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” three scholars — Joseph Henrich, of the University of British Columbia, Robert Boyd of UCLA and Peter Richerson of UC Davis — have done the unthinkable: offered an anthropological/sociological/psychological defense of the Western monogamous tradition. Why monogamy, sexual fidelity and fatherhood ever emerged in human culture, they admit, is a bit of a mystery. Physiologically, we are probably better suited to polygamy. In fact 85 percent of all human societies have allowed men to have multiple wives. The only exceptions have been: 1) hunter-gatherers, who deal with their challenging environment by practicing a fierce egalitarianism, and 2) “some of history’s largest and most successful… societies,” i.e., the West plus China, Japan and India, which have now adopted its mores. What is the particularly salubrious about monogamy is that it “shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men, ” Otherwise, “[f]aced with… little chance of obtaining even one long-term mate, unmarried, low-status men will heavily discount the future and more readily engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behavior. This will result in higher rates of murder, theft, rape, [and] social disruption.” Only by giving undereducated men a meaningful role in life will their energies be harnessed to the greater social good. The five footloose, forlorn young men who decided that blowing up a bridge in Cleveland would trigger anarchistic rebellion across the country are probably only the vanguard of a cohort that has been marginalized by the economics of welfare, the feminization of education, and the cultural bend for celebrating everything women do over anything that men do short of winning the Super Bowl. Western society owes its success to assuring that even the lowest status male is given the opportunity to participate in fostering institutions and fathering the next generation. As these norms break down, the peace and prosperity they have produced is likely to erode as well.
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The New Face of Terrorism
Bullies, as they are wont to do, have forced their way into everybody’s head. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a distraught dad wired his autistic son, catching educators calling him a “bastard” and laughing at him. The father made headlines this week by demanding the district fire the teacher as they did the aide. He wants the school to release their names. “There are people asking me, ‘How do I wire my kid?’” The most talked about but least watched film of the year is Bully , which has grossed $1.3 million in two weeks. The Motion Picture Association of America initially bestowed an “R” rating, but Change.org, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and celebrities Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, and Meryl Streep hectored the ratings board to loosen standards. “The original ruling prompted the aggressive campaign by the Weinstein Co., which is releasing ‘Bully,’ to lower the R rating to PG-13,” ABCNews.com reports . The new rating means it is safe for overbearing teachers to compel captive classrooms to watch the documentary. MTV airs “Bully Beatdown,” as if on a loop. The program provides vicarious vengeance for victims when cage fighters beat up their tormentors in front of a Roman gladiator-style crowd lusting for bully blood. Forty-nine states have submitted to pressure groups in codifying anti-bullying legislation. The Department of Education features a stopbullying.gov site , singling out Montana as the sole holdout. The president has gone beyond the bully pulpit to support federal anti-bullying legislation, which empowers Uncle Sam to pick on local schools. “We can’t continue to legislate everything,” Tennessee state representative Jeremy Faison reasonably said in reference to a new proposed anti-bullying law. He wondered if parents not instilling self-esteem in children at home rather than bullies stripping them of it at school were more culpable in youth suicides. The state’s Democratic Party called him a “disgrace,” claiming that “of course a tall and burly Faison doesn’t see any problems with bullying.” Predictably, the browbeaten state representative apologized. For a culture so big on irony it’s ironic that we don’t see the irony in ourselves. Alas, bullies never recognize themselves as bullies. They frequently imagine their victims as the bullies, which justifies the agony they inflict. Hell hath no fury like an adult rectifying the injustices inflicted in childhood. Whether the bullying is real (the New Jersey teachers) or imagined (a politician opposing legislation), those crusading against it often descend into bullying, too. The worst bullies rationalize their bullying as anti-bullying. People’s behavior goes terribly wrong when they insist they are in the right. Particularly distasteful is the use of deceased young people to silence dissent. Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi and Hadley, Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince may have been people once but are now iconic symbols wielded by demagogues. The post-Christian world makes saints of suicide cases. The Old Church granted neither funerals nor burials to those who ended their lives by ending their lives. Surely there is a happy (unhappy?) medium between venerating one who has done something so horrible and further victimizing one who is also, ultimately, a victim. All witch hunts are exercises in group bullying. They not only make it cool to terrorize the individual bucking the group, they make it obligatory. When Hollywood, the president, and cable news anchors gang up on bullies, it’s hard not to root for the underdog. It’s easy to take on bullies in the abstract. They pose no threat to hit back. They make an easy mark. What’s difficult is taking them on when they stare you in the face. The promoted method, snitching — whether to a teacher or a policeman — has traditionally been a surefire way to court, not repel, intimidation. A culture that is litigious, force-phobic, averse to family-sized families, and monitors children the way the Stasi spied on writers makes taboo the most effective methods of dealing with a ruffian: a hard punch in the face or an older brother. Thus does our passive-aggressive culture make bullying harder for adults to detect and for kids to combat. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Or, guard against becoming a bully when you crusade against them.
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Bully Pulpiteers
