I slay me…
Have you tried more cowbell? @scrowder
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) December 13, 2014
Instead of Actual Content: Saturday Edition
December 13th, 2014BattleSwarmBlog Celebrates Victory Over Amanda Marcotte Day
December 11th, 2014After spending days pointing out Amanda Marcotte’s factual and intellectual fallacies over the unraveling Rolling Stone UVA rape story on Twitter, this finally happened:
I love the smell of Amanda Marcotte blocking me in the morning. It smells like…victory.
Henceforth, December 11, 2014 shall be known as “Victory Over Amanda Marcotte” day.
What a “Sober” South Texas Democratic Judge Looks Like
December 10th, 2014For all the justified talk of Republican gains in the Rio Grande Valley, it’s still overwhelmingly Democratic at the county level. So it’s no surprise that when a Democratic 13th Court of Appeals Justice Nora Longoria got arrested for DWI, the charges were dismissed by Democratic Judge Rolando Cantu.
You can take a look at what a “sober” South Texas Democratic judge looks like below.
Texas Democrats: The Party of Drunk Drivers.
Eulogies for The New Republic Go Straight Past Laments To Rending of Garments
December 9th, 2014The aftershocks following the collapse of The New Republic following an editorial change by Facebook millionaire owner Chris Hughes (no doubt still stinging from his inability to buy his boyfriend a congressional seat) continue to reverberate around the punditocracy.
For those who care, here’s the list of those who resigned:
Senior editors Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz and Jason Zengerle; executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis; digital media editor Hillary Kelly (who resigned from her honeymoon in Africa); legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; and poetry editor Henri Cole and dance editor Jennifer Homans. Contributing editors Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Christopher Benfey, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Justin Driver, TA Frank, Ruth Franklin, Jack Goldsmith, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Robert Kagan, Enrique Krauze, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza, John McWhorter, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.
There’s some real talent in there (Applebaum and Kagan among them). As well as some of the usual liberal chattering class. And if you hadn’t heard, the magazine has cancelled its next issue amidst the exodus.
There’s so much tasty schadenfreude on each side of the dispute it’s hard to know whose tears to start lapping up first. Or, as Mark Hemingway put it, “If I have to pick sides between liberal policy journalists insisting they are immune to the reality of business economics and a Silicon Valley enfant terrible who tried to buy his hapless husband a Congressional seat, I’m afraid I’m left rooting for injuries.”
Let it be said at the outset that as liberalism’s flagship magazine, The New Republic was kind of important for a quite a long time, and that in the last few decades it did offer an intellectually moderating influence to the hard left and their Social Justice Warrior cadres. That said, when’s the last time a New Republic piece that wasn’t a fabrication rocked people’s worlds? It had been in decline for a while, and the Obama era merely hastened the process.
Proving that even a winy liberal sycophant can be right twice a day, Dana Milbank offers up perhaps the most even-handed assessment of how Hughes screwed the pooch.
Check out the comically high dudgeon evident in this letter from former staffers: “The New Republic is a kind of public trust. That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated.”
As Clive Crook put it, “Sometimes you just have to marvel at the self-importance of the American political commentator. The outrage in that high caste provoked by the drama at the New Republic has been something to behold.”
Getting back to Mark Heminigway, “The New Republic’s demise appears to be a direct consequence of the liberal ideology it espoused.”
The New Republic took on a genuinely interesting role of being a magazine for liberals that had the guts to regularly question their assumptions. “One reason for the New Republic’s demise has not been fully appreciated, and that has to do with its unique tradition of heterodox liberalism,” observes former New Republic editor David Greenberg. Indeed, it’s not really appreciated at all. While the magazine was so heterodox that “Even the liberal New Republic [insert the magazine espousing conservative/contrarian policy here]” is an actual Beltway banality, people only pretended to see this as a virtue. Lip service is given to its diversity of opinion, but a great many on the left are using recent events to hammer the magazine for betraying the progressive cause. Even sympathetic obituaries for the magazine have gone out of their way to disdain the pivotal moments in recent decades where the magazine expressed genuine intellectual courage, including publishing Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, killing Hillary Clinton’s likely-to-have-been disastrous attempt at a overhauling health care, endorsing the Iraq war, and being a strong voice in support of Israel.
Not only is Hughes gutting of the magazine not particularly surprising, it’s such a common story that this ending was essentially foretold two years ago.
Liberalism needs heterodox opinions the way a sucking chest wound needs chest seal dressing, but liberals want heterodox opinions the way a teenage girl wants to hear how badly her favorite boy band sucks.
Democrats Hate the South, And The South Hates Them Right Back
December 8th, 2014With the defeat of Mary Landrieu, the Democratic Party no longer has a single national office holder anywhere in the South. In fact, with South Carolina re-electing Tim Scott, “there are now more black Republicans than white Democrats from the Deep South.”
Moe Lane says we shouldn’t be surprised by this turn of events:
It’s not demographics, and it’s certainly not gerrymandering, and shoot, it’s not even Barack Obama. It’s that the people who run the Democratic party [expletive deleted] hate the South.
And Southerners have noticed. It really does astound me that the national Democratic apparatus apparently thought that they could defecate on an entire section of the country for fifty years and still get that section to vote for them at the end of it.
Democrats: "I just don't understand why those gun-toting inbred redneck freaks in JesusLand won't listen to our message!" @moelane
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) December 8, 2014
And least you think that Lane is exaggerating liberal contempt for the South, along comes Michael Tomasky to provide an outstanding example of what Lane was talking about.
Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)
With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise.
And there’s your window into the Democratic Party’s id. The most economically dynamic part of the country is a “Fetid Free Market Jesus Paradise.” Tomasky has some advice for the Democratic Party: “At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there.”
I heartily endorse this strategy for the Democratic Party (with the exception that they should continue to pour money down the rathole that is Battleground Texas). Because what could possibly go wrong with that strategy? Besides Republicans making significant inroads among Hispanic and black voters in those states?
It’s also revealing that Tomasky quotes (approvingly) that Democrats are “not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.” Well, good thing only 73% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. And unremitting hostility to gun ownership hasn’t exactly been a surefire electoral winner for Democrats…
It’s not just national-level Democrats either. The Statesman notes that there will be only seven “non-Hispanic white Democrats in the Texas House and Senate when the 84th session of the Legislature convenes in January.” That piece also notes that “In 1983, white Democrats held 21 of the 31 state Senate seats and 85 of the 150 House seats.”
In this really interesting interview with former Texas GOP chair Wayne Thorburn about his book Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics (which I’m going to have to pick up), he talks about how liberal Democrats actively drove conservatives out of their own party so they could take control of it:
Q The most ironic part about “Red State” for me is how Democratic liberals actually encouraged their followers to vote Republican as a way of driving conservatives out of their own party. That doesn’t appear to have been too smart in the long run.
A For many years beginning in the 1940s Texas politics consisted of contests between conservatives and liberals in the Democratic primary. The more ideologically committed liberals saw themselves as the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” meaning that they were more in line with the northern wing in control of the national party. To gain control of the Texas party they needed to drive conservatives out of the Democratic primary, something that could be done only if the Republicans were a viable alternative. Thus, some prominent liberals endorsed a GOP candidate when the Democrats had nominated a conservative. This pattern began with John Tower in 1961 and continued on to include George H.W. Bush when he ran against Lloyd Bentsen for the U.S. Senate in 1970. Two old sayings come to mind: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and “Be careful what you wish for.” The liberals succeeded in gaining control of the Democratic Party by 1976 when the contest between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford drew nearly a half-million voters into the GOP primary. Two years later in 1978 their candidate knocked off Gov. Dolph Briscoe in the Democratic primary. The result of that, however, was the election of William P. Clements as the first Republican governor in 104 years. What the liberals failed to recognize was that most Texans were conservatives and to them ideology trumped party tradition and loyalty. As the Texas Democratic Party became more clearly liberal, the Republican Party was seen as the only conservative alternative in the state.
In short, it was the intolerance of liberal Democrats that drove voters away and turned Democrats into what Instapundit has dubbed “a dying regional party”…
Postscript: Actually, that first link says there are no more white Democrats holding office in the Deep South, however they define that. But there are still two white Democrats in the U.S. House from Texas: Lloyd Doggett and Beto O’Rourke, both of whom (I think) represent majority minority districts.
Little Rock Holiday Inn Presidential Seeks Very Specific Client
December 8th, 2014The Little Rock Holiday Inn Presidential seems firmly committed to celebrating the legacy of the 42nd President (and, to a lesser extent, his wife and other Presidents).
But I think they go a bit farther than that.
Paul Martin, my CHL instructor, sent me this picture of an ad for the hotel:
And least you think that picture of the slinky blonde is some sort of mistake, it’s in the hotel’s regular ad rotation:
I can think of two types of women who sit on top of pianos with slinky short dresses with a glass of wine. Since I don’t see her holding a microphone, I’m going to assume she’s the other. Or, as someone said on Paul’s Facebook post: “Wow, an escort and a steak. Who knew a Holiday Inn suite had that kind of concierge service?”
In short: I don’t think the Holiday Inn Presidential just celebrates Bill Clinton, I think they’re actively seeking him as a regular client…
Edited to add 7/24/18: See the disclaimer from the current management below. What they failed to explain was that the (now removed) URL previously in this space went to a Fleshlight ad…)