Laura Ingraham, Fox News' mother superior of blonde news babes, has daily meltdowns on her program that the network packages and sends out like free online college course lectures.
She has a particular and long-standing animus toward The Gays. NBC News reported,
Her gay brother, Curtis, has called her a soulless monster.The conservative firebrand has also compared same-sex relationships to incest, equated transition-related care to “child abuse” and suggested people would rather wear “adult diapers” than share a restroom with a transgender person.
In her defense, Laura Ingraham has written that she was way worse before:
And that's not the half of it. Jeffrey Hart, the faculty adviser for The Dartmouth Review described Ingraham as having "the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable", claiming "she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual".Laura Ingraham had previously apologized in a 1997 op-ed for the Washington Post for her anti-gay actions while editor of Dartmouth’s right-wing The Dartmouth Review. In the 1980s, the paper infiltrated a meeting of gay students, some of whom were closeted, and outed at least one of them, labeled them “sodomites,” and published excerpts and quotes from the meeting.Ingraham wrote that “in the 10 years since I learned my brother Curtis was gay, my views and rhetoric about homosexuality have been tempered,” particularly after watching Curtis “and his companion, Richard, lead their lives with dignity, fidelity and courage.”Ingraham also wrote that she had helped Curtis cope “as his partner fought bravely to stave off death from AIDS.”But Curtis told Daily Beast that any tempering of Laura’s views was reversed as she leaned more heavily into her religious views, including telling him that she would “agree to disagree” with him about same-sex marriage and other issues.
Little surprise, then to see that she is bustin' corset stays at the prospect of a gay president.
Here's what she snarked on April 2. Let's fisk it. My comments are in italic.
Laura Ingraham: Why new 'It' Democrat Pete Buttigieg is just another media creation - and why we should beware
Three weeks ago, we showed you how the Democrat infotainment complex launched Beto O'Rourke into the political stratosphere, complete with a glossy, beautiful Vanity Fair feature.On October 24, 2014, Alan Eustace became the record holder for reaching the altitude record for a manned balloon at 135,890 ft (41,419 m). Dr Eustace also broke the world records for vertical speed skydiving, reached with a peak velocity of 1,321 km/h (822 mph) and total freefall distance of 123,414 ft (37,617 m) – lasting four minutes and 27 seconds."
O'Rourke is at the low end, where jet airplanes fly: Every poll since the Vanity Fair cover shows him stuck between third and fifth among Democrats running. In The Atlantic, Edward Isaac-Dovere confirms Ingraham's result but not her alleged malign media motive: "O’Rourke has shot forward to low double digits in the polls, ahead of most of the people who beat him into the race, and appears to retain about the same level of popularity across age groups and other demographic breakdowns. Media coverage of him raises his name identification, and name identification raises his poll numbers, and raising his poll numbers raises his media coverage, and all that helps his mammoth fundraising, so he might just be able to will his dream into reality.
The former Texas congressman was a hot political pin-up with an impressive fundraising haul. He went from Texas Senate race loser to a modern-day matinee idol, complete with legions of adoring female fans.
A pin-up model (known as a pin-up girl for a female and less commonly male pin-up for a male) is a model whose mass-produced pictures see wide appeal as popular culture. Pin-ups are intended for informal display, i.e. meant to be "pinned-up" on a wall. Pin-up models may be glamour models, fashion models, or actors. These pictures are also sometimes known as cheesecake photos. Cheesecake was an American slang word, that was considered a publicly acceptable term for seminude women because pin-up was considered taboo in the early twentieth century.
The term pin-up may refer to drawings, paintings, and other illustrations as well as photographs (see the list of pin-up artists). The term was first attested to in English in 1941; however, the practice is documented back at least to the 1890s. Pin-up images could be cut out of magazines or newspapers, or on a postcard or lithograph. Such pictures often appear on walls, desks, or calendars. Posters of pin-ups were mass-produced and became popular from the mid-20th century.
Male pin-ups (known as beefcake) were less common than their female counterparts throughout the 20th century, although a market for homoerotica has always existed as well as pictures of popular male celebrities targeted at women or girls. Examples include James Dean and Jim Morrison.
Matinée idol is a term used mainly to describe film or theatre stars who are adored to the point of adulation by their fans. The term almost exclusively refers to adult male actors.
Matinée idols often tend to play romantic and dramatic leading or secondary leading roles and are usually known for having good looks. The term can be taken as faintly pejorative in that it suggests the star's popularity came from the afternoon matinée performances rather than the "big picture" evenings and, hence, a less discriminating audience. Matinée idols often become the subject of parody during the height of their popularity, an example being Stan Laurel spoofing Rudolph Valentino in his film Mud and Sand.
Now a somewhat old-fashioned term, the phenomenon reached its height from the 1920s to around the 1960s in Hollywood. "Teen idol" is a similar term, which more often refers to youthful musicians rather than film actors. The term differs from "sex symbol", which refers to a star's sexual attractiveness in and outside of film more so than their romantic performances on the screen. A sex symbol, however, may also be a matinée idol.
Invoking terms of the World War II era, Ingraham is playing to the Fox News base of viewers, whose average age is from 65 to burial. Her rant's title is reminiscent of the Hollywood term "It Girl"- an attractive young woman, generally a celebrity, who is perceived to have both sex appeal and a personality that is especially engaging.
The expression it girl originated in British upper-class society around the turn of the 20th century. It reached global attention in 1927, with the popularity of the Paramount Studios film It, starring Clara Bow. In the earlier usage, a woman was especially perceived as an it girl if she had achieved a high level of popularity without flaunting her sexuality. Today the term is used more to apply simply to fame and beauty.
Fox News meat puppets and their viewers love their innuendos- and silent dog whistles, too- and Ingraham's invocation of ancient terms applied to celebrity women sends low-frequency thrills up the legs of elderly conservatives, who often refer to LGBT people as "it": a hat-tip to deviancy and sexual confusion.
While O'Rourke did raise a ton of cash- $70.2 million, over twice his opponent's- he didn't deploy it effectively enough to move the needle much in a race against a uniquely unattractive and disliked incumbent, Ted Cruz. The closest he came was three points in midsummer 2018. It took Cruz until October 10 to crack the 50% line:
In the end, Cruz won by seven.
"He went from Texas Senate race loser to a modern-day matinee idol..."?
In just four months?
But soon, it seemed like a sleight of hand, all of it -- or maybe just hand flailing.
"...the association of limp wrists with male homosexuality was very well-established in the United States by the beginning of the 20th century. A pair of postcards from around 1910 show limp-wristed men saying things like, “Sweet perfume of Violets! What a charming policeman.” In a Canadian postcard from the middle of the century, a dainty gentleman points, limp-wristed, at a police officer and asks, “Is it true you fellows always get your man?” At some point—certainly by the early 20th century, but maybe even earlier—gay men co-opted stereotypical postures and hand gestures as a way to signal their sexual orientation. In a 1919 homosexuality trial in New Hampshire, for example, the judge asked a witness how gay men identified each other. The witness said a gay man “acted sort of peculiar, walking around with his hands on his hips… the expression with the eyes and the gestures.
"In his controversial instructions on how to deal with gay-acting children, Pastor Sean Harris picked up on a recurring theme in popular culture: how to train apparently gay men to assume stereotypically heterosexual mannerisms. In the 1956 film version of the play Tea and Sympathy, for example, a college student tries to teach his roommate how to walk like a heterosexual man. The same scene occurs in the 1996 film, The Birdcage, in which Robin Williams repeatedly strikes Nathan Lane’s hand in an attempt to make him appear more masculine."
Ingraham is puffing furiously into her dog whistle again here. An article of faith at Fox is that LGBT Americans are just another client group of the Left.
Then came the gaffes about being a part-time parent and his apology for his privilege. And didn't you just start feeling exhausted by it all? And I think in this weird news cycle, Beto already kind of seems like yesterday's news.
Why attack one candidate when you can hit two in one column, even while claiming one is on the skids? Ingraham has been whaling away at O'Rourke for weeks: news fatigue is one problem Fox News fans do not have. She even re-runs the same story under different headlines to keep the pot boiling, as we see from this rant running twice in a day:
Meanwhile, the newest darling of journalists, Hollywooders and metro-lefties is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Meet 37-year-old Pete Buttigieg -- Navy reservist, Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar. And he's a married gay man, which means if he won the presidency, it would be a presidential first. And remember America likes firsts.
The coastal elites, I don't think they've ever loved a Midwesterner as much as they love Pete. He's a charmer.
Buttigieg is an Indiana native. He lives in Indiana. Indiana is part of the Midwest. While he probably will run, as of the date of this hit piece Buttigieg wasn't an official candidate yet.
"He is disarmingly charming," said CNN's Ana Navarro. "He's got this, like, you know, like almost like an innocence about him, but at the same time he is an intellectual."
Oh, Ana, he's beyond intellectual. He's so different from what we have now. He's "knowledgeable about the issues" and has a "good, positive spirit." And yes, he's humble. Leftists and never-Trumpers across the land are falling in love. But pronouncing his last name, that's another issue altogether.
Here Laura switched to the 'Foreign, Bad' Worry Whistle.
All right, Mayor Pete smartly makes light of his last name. But what do we really know about the new "it" boy? Well as mayor of South Bend, he spent tens of millions of dollars on infrastructure.
See "It Girl", above.
President Trump ran on the promise of a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. In office, he declared "Infrastructure Week" so many times it became a punchline. But when one attaches "infrastructure" to "liberal", Fox viewers think "light rail." Or-
He imported a lot of lime bikes, which a lot of locals abhor. And he seems to have trouble keeping track of the homicide numbers in his city.
Lime is a bike and scooter rental company. A capital L is therefore appropriate. As of the end of February 2019, there were 140 of their bikes in South Bend, with five downtown and the rest around the Notre Dame campus. The company has been switching them out for scooters over the last year reducing numbers from 3,000. "LimeBike in 2017 introduced its shareable bicycles to South Bend, the third city in which it had launched at that time. Users pay and track the bikes through a smartphone app. Many riders embraced the convenience of the bikes, but residents also complained about vandalized bikes and those left randomly on sidewalks or in front of homes.
"In May, the company announced it had changed its name from Limebike to Lime, to reflect its expansion from bicycle sharing to scooters and electric bikes. At that time, Lime did not signal it would ultimately offer only electric vehicles.
"But it has recently started doing just that, either entirely pulling out of cities that only allow pedal bikes or switching to only e-scooters and e-assist bikes in markets that allow them, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Louis, Tacoma, Wash.; Hartford, Conn.; Starkville, Miss.; and Rockford, Ill."
As for the murder rate, in 2015 the city recorded 17 in a population of 101,000. It ranked 29th among the top 30 cities in Indiana. In 2018, there were 12. Conflating transit boondoggles with crime is a popular conservative trope. As the Duke of Wellington famously said of crime control, "Trains would only encourage the lower classes to move about needlessly."
South Bend is a Republican town. Yet they re-elected Buttigieg overwhelmingly- after he came out as gay.
Don't be fooled by the carefully curated public image. Pete Buttigieg believes in a set of policies that would set back our economic gains and take money out of the pocket of people who work for government programs that don't. He would upend the Constitution to ensure that California-New York trumps the views of Heartland Indiana every time.
Buttigieg is certainly really smart. He worked at Mackenzie -- it's a global consulting company -- after finishing at Oxford.
It's McKinsey, dear.
Now he says he's a traditional Episcopalian, whatever that means these days.
"Now? As opposed to?" Ingraham's comment seems odd unless you follow evangelical media. See, e.g. Erick Erickson, "Mayor Pete Buttigieg Apparently Thinks Jesus Would Be Okay With Beastiality," The Resurgent, April 4, 2019. Erickson, the former head of the hard-right website Red State, also called unmarried former Supreme Court justice David Souter “a goat fucking child molester.”
In an interview with the conservative Christian Post, Buttigieg explained what "traditional Episcopalian" meant: "When asked when was the last time he prayed he said he prayed in Church on Ash Wednesday in the morning but noted it is an activity he finds challenging.
“I find prayer challenging. I’m liturgically conservative. I like to pray in church when we are all saying prayers at the same time because I think that’s a communal act of tuning our hearts a certain way. I have trouble with the traditional formats for prayer just because I have trouble, I mean grammatically,” he said.
“Grammatically when we pray we are in the imperative mood which means we’re telling God what to do. I get that there’s a lot more to prayer … but personally I think prayer is mostly about making sure that I am tuned. The prayer that makes the most sense to me is that may we delight in Thy will and walk in Thy way which is what we’re supposed to be, not telling God what he’s supposed to do,” he added.
New York Times columnist David Brooks downsplained it even more: "He speaks comfortably about his faith and says that when he goes to church he prefers a conservative liturgy to anything experimental."
The "Now" modifier is pure innuendo- more of that "Other" stuff Fox so loves. Ingraham is a Newt Gingrich Catholic: both traded up from Southern Baptist moral stuffiness about sex.
And in a New York Times column, neocon moralist David Brooks, in full fanboy mode, writes, "Buttigieg is gay and personifies the progress made by the LGBTQ movement, but he doesn't do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values. It's just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife."
Well, first of all, I don't know how many social conservatives David Brooks actually knows or interviewed for this column but Buttigieg's support for abortion on demand doesn't qualify.
Brooks explained his conclusion in his column:
"It’s important to remember that when Democrats vote next year, they’ll not only be choosing a policy alternative to Donald Trump, they’ll also be making a statement about what kind of country they want America to be.
"The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing.
"The Buttigieg surge suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who want to say goodbye to all that. They don’t want to fight fire and divisiveness with more fire and divisiveness. They don’t want to fight white identity politics with another kind of identity politics.
"They are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.
"Buttigieg’s secret is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.
"First, he is young and represents the rising generation, but he is also an older person’s idea of what a young person should be. He’d be the first millennial president, but Buttigieg doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes that have been affixed to America’s young people.
"Young people are supposed to be woke social justice warriors who are disgusted by their elders. Buttigieg is the model young man who made his way impressing his elders — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey, the Navy.
"Young hipsters are supposed to flock to coastal places like Brooklyn and Portland; after college, Buttigieg returned to Indiana.
"Young people are supposed to be anti-institutional, but Buttigieg is very institutional — his life has been defined by his service to organizations, not his rebellion against them.
"Second, he is gay and personifies the progress made by the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, but he doesn't do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values; it’s just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife.
"...Finally, he’s a progressive on policy issues, but he doesn’t sound like an angry revolutionary. Buttigieg’s policy positions are not all that different from the more identifiable leftist candidates. But he eschews grand ideological conflict."
By concluding Buttigieg "deftly detaches progressive policy positions from the culture war. He offers change without Sturm und Drang," Brooks' column was one of his "faint praise" specialties, warning his readers that Buttigieg is the Mike Huckabee of the Left: putting a smiley face on policies his readers will abhor. Ingraham is all about anger and Manichean opposites. It's a wonder she didn't call Brooks limp-wristed, too.
As for Brooks, his column drips the same sort of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" condescension that people used to use when they talked approvingly of "qualified minorities."
As they did with Obama, the media is attempting to take a novice with limited experience and wrap him up in a warm, fuzzy, personal narrative. As with Obama, Buttigieg's parents were radicals. His father, whom he describes in his memoir as a man on the left, was a Notre Dame literature professor.
To Ingraham, "the left" included Senator John McCain. Republicans are obsessed by their comparative purity. At the end of Mach, 2019, The New York Times reported that Jessie Liu, Trump's nominee to be deputy attorney general, withdrew her nomination:
Senator Michael Lee, Republican of Utah, led the opposition to Ms. Liu’s nomination, on the grounds that she was not a conservative enough choice, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the debate.NPR added,
Two sources told NPR that the attorney general got into a "shouting match" with Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, a key figure in opposing Liu's bid.
Four lawyers familiar with the matter said the stumbling block for Liu was a broader concern about her conservatism — specifically, her stance on women's reproductive rights. Interest groups had begun drafting letters to senators about their fears that Liu would not support restrictions on abortion. Another key factor: Earlier in her career, Liu had an affiliation with the National Association of Women Lawyers, which sent a letter opposing the nomination of Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
Philip Alito, a son of the justice, works for the antitrust subcommittee in the Senate, a subcommittee that is chaired by Lee.On April 5, 2019, another remarkable example hit the streets:
President Trump said Friday he is looking for someone “tougher” to lead the country’s top immigration enforcement agency, hours after the White House unexpectedly withdrew its nomination of Ronald Vitiello to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Asked why he had jettisoned Vitiello, the current acting director of ICE who had been scheduled to accompany him on a trip to the border Friday, Trump told reporters: “We’re going in a little different direction. Ron’s a good man. But we’re going in a tougher direction. We want to go in a tougher direction.”
The move blindsided lawmakers, Department of Homeland Security officials and others across the administration who said Friday they could not fathom why the president would pull his ICE nominee at a moment when U.S. government officials are saying the nation’s immigration enforcement system is at a “breaking point.”
...The president’s previous nominee to lead ICE, Tom Homan, languished without confirmation for months until finally stepping down in frustration. The White House picked Vitiello, a 30-year veteran of Border Patrol, as its nominee in August.He seemed a perfect fit- a former never-Trumper turned lickspittle who had a nice turn for racist tropes:
During the 2016 presidential campaign, on Twitter, Vitiello compared Trump to the cartoon character Dennis the Menace and in another post likened Democrats to the Ku Klux Klan. During his confirmation hearing, Vitiello apologized for the tweets and said they were meant as jokes.
In recent months, as unauthorized border crossings have soared to their highest levels in more than a decade, Trump immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller has been criticizing Vitiello to the president and looking for an opportunity to cut him loose, according to one senior administration official who works on immigration enforcement matters.
...“Stephen wants to put Attila the Hun as director of ICE,” said the official, who believes Miller is seeking to install someone closer to him in the top ICE job.So, that's great, but according to the Washington Examiner, Joseph Buttigieg was a committed Marxist, who affectionately embraced the Communist Manifesto and worked to "inject Marxism into the wider culture."
He was a Maltese, not a Marxist. One of his scholarly fields was the works of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), "an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist thought and so is considered a key neo-Marxist. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
"He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and high and popular culture.
"Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure." One can see why Trumpists find him annoying.
The Washington Examiner article's authors cherry-pick quotes to make Buttigieg senior a Communist without understanding their context. One can study and comment on radical ideas without advocating their implementation, after all. And as a role model for worldwide revolution, Gramsci is poor. He spent a long time in Mussolini's prisons and died without a single idea having been carried into practice.
Buttigieg's fields of study are better understood through the correct end of the telescope. An obit noted, "His research specializations included “modern literature, critical theory and the relationship between culture and politics,” the release said. He penned several articles and a book on James Joyce titled, “A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective.”
As for Buttigieg's mother, who taught at Notre Dame for 29 years, no source seems to identify what commie-symp field in which she taught.
Pete was close with this father, which you can expect, but which will lead, of course, many voters to wonder how far the apple fell from the tree. It's a question he's going to be asked on the campaign trail, but come on, why fixate on any of that? Does it really matter?
The Examiner article- and the Examiner is a hyper-conservative paper- explains. One assumes Ingraham's staff writers skipped over the bits contradicting her demanded outcome:
"Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father. In his memoir Shortest Way Home, Pete called his dad a “man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.”
"He wrote that while he did not understand his parents’ political discussions as a young child, “the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”
"Lis Smith, communications adviser for Buttigieg’s presidential exploratory committee, declined to comment on how his father influenced his political beliefs or on Pete Buttigieg's thoughts on Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci.
"Pete Buttigieg said in an MSNBC interview on March 20 that he considers himself a capitalist but that the system needs changes.
“The biggest problem with capitalism right now is the way it's become intertwined with power and is eroding our democracy,” Buttigieg said, noting the influence of big businesses in government."
David Brooks says he is awash in conservative family values, and despite having never held state-wide office...
President Trump never held an office of any sort whatever, and evangelicals praise him as having been chosen by God. Other presidents who never held statewide office, Ingraham's touchstone, include Eisenhower, Hoover, Taft, McKinley, Garfield, Buchanan, Fillmore, Taylor, John Adams, George Washington, and- as the president likes to call him, "the late, great Abraham Lincoln."
...Buttigieg has something else going for him, "He's a progressive on policy issues but he doesn't sound like an angry revolutionary. He eschews grand, ideological conflict."
See above e.g. Mike Huckabee.
God, this reads like an old ode to Obama that Brooks wrote. Didn't he write the same exact thing about Obama? The aura and the historic nature of the man is far more important than the substance -- kids get used to it.
Did he? We'll never know from her. If he had, seems like she'd quote it, as she does another Brooks column, above.
But ignore all the gauzy profiles and you find Buttigieg is pretty much a garden variety leftist. He's kind of common...
The most favorable definition of "common" is "without rank; ordinary; of the most familiar class". As used by ragers on the Right, it includes "of inferior quality, low-class; vulgar." Yet see also, "Buttigieg is certainly really smart. He worked at Mackenzie -- it's a global consulting company -- after finishing at Oxford", and "As with Obama, Buttigieg's parents were radicals. His father, whom he describes in his memoir as a man on the left, was a Notre Dame literature professor.", above.
and soft-spoken, for sure...
See, "limp-wristed" above.
but this is what he supports: the Green New Deal, a wealth tax, single-payer health plans, amnesty for certain illegals, packing the court with more than nine justices and getting rid of the Electoral College.
The Merrick Garland approach to court-packing is much easier. But for the latest models approved by the Right, click here. the Gren New Deal isn't even a law, but ideas alarm the Ingrahams of the world in a time when presidents declare Republicans are the party of health care- for a week.
On the tax front, Fortune reported in February that "Support for raising taxes is widespread, according to a new poll, which found that 76% of registered voters want the wealthiest Americans to pay more."
61% favor eliminating the Electoral College.
"Certain immigrants"? That's what Trump people call DACA, which the president supports from time to time.
So, don't be fooled by the carefully curated public image.
See also, "Don't be fooled by the carefully curated public image", above.
The guy believes in a set of policies that would set back our economic gains and take money out of the pocket of people who work for government programs that don't. He would upend the Constitution to ensure that California-New York trumps the views of Heartland Indian every time.
"Indiana," dear.
Last August, he derided President Trump as basically a "disgraced game show host." And on Vice President Pence, he said this: "a social extremist the likes of which our country has not known in national politics."
In law and logic, the truth is a defense.
Wow. So much for those conservative family values.
When did idolatry become one? As for modeling such values, Ingraham's discards include uber-liberal former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, former New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli, family values adulterer and campaign finance law felon Dinesh D'Souza, and George T. Conway, attorney and husband of Kellyanne Conway.
There will now be a slight pause for silent reflection.
Beyond his boy scout demeanor...
It's Boy Scouts, dear. You have also denounced the Boy Scouts as being run by "gender benders" for admitting girls while citing mixed-gender clubs as normal: "It's another reason why Trump won," she added. "Boys should be able to have a boys club. Girls should be able to have a girls club. And if they want to have a club where boys and girls are doing activities together, that's fine too."
...and Mayor Peach schtick,...
There is no Mayor Peach ("Mayor Pete"?), but ignorance and slovenly proofreading are Fox News punchlines:
Buttigieg is but another creation of a media apparatus desperate to oust Trump. It's the same reason they built up AOC and Beto - to whip up the Democrat base, keep them excited, keep them engaged.
Are those two over already?
Anything to divert voters' attention from the growing 401Ks, bigger paychecks and all that good news that happened because of Trump's policies.
One imagines people can see and read their paystubs, along with the 55 million Americans with 401k programs. On the other hand, if one assumes news is propaganda, this makes sense.
Oh, and another thing: The cool fact that Cool Pete speaks seven languages doesn't change the fact that socialism doesn't work in any of them.
Buttigieg speaks Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, and French.
Norway is cool:
.@NBCNews source: As Durbin explained how deal would impact ppl from Haiti, Trump said, "Haiti? Why do we want people from Haiti here?" Then they got Africa. 'Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway."— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) January 11, 2018
Spain's political system is a multi-party system, but since the 1990s two parties have been predominant in politics, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the People's Party (PP). ... The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Spain as a "full democracy" in 2016.
Italy has a mixed economy made largely of a free market with dwindling command economy elements. The political system allows for the private sector to own and control the countries resources and the means of production, and the prices and wages are established by supply and demand. After WW2, the economy, like the country, had to emerge from the rubble. By agreement with the Allies, the country instituted new political freedoms which allowed for economic freedoms as well. This opened the way for substantial economic growth through the 1960's but this stopped in the 1970s as the world's economic stagflation hit Italy hard. To combat this, Italy nationalized many industries and businesses, and begin heavy regulation of certain aspects of the economy including the financial industry. These efforts paid off, and by the late 1990s, many of the command elements began to be reduced as many of the public companies were sold to private investors. Today, Italy has the third-largest economy in the Euro-zone and the sixth richest in the world in terms of per-capita GDP. Politically, it is an unstable democracy, with a multiparty system that makes it difficult to hold office for long. While Italy has had 61 governments since World War II, since 1994 nearly all have been conservative, and the current one enjoys the favor of President Trump as being bigly in his image.
Malta has a competitive socialist party. It has a stable parliamentary democracy. It is also very small.
There are no socialist Arab states. The Arabist Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) stated: "Nobody seems to have a good word to say for Arab socialism. Commercial, professional, and middle-class elements bring against it the usual complaints which are brought against socialism in Western countries. Left-wingers dismiss Arab socialism with contempt as a half-hearted and inefficient compromise which has the merits neither of socialism nor of capitalism." Mostly it is academic nationalist wankery; in practice, it is authoritarian. President Trump is fond of the most authoritarian states in the region, which makes them not socialist.
Because Dari is one of two official languages of Afghanistan, it is not a socialist nation.
France is capitalist with a relatively high amount of government intervention. This would then be a combination of free market capitalism with some state capitalism thrown in. As President Trump often reminds us, much like the United States. But we are mindful about what the Right said about John Kerry's multilingualism.
No comments:
Post a Comment