Tag Archives: right wing watch

01.12.16
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David Brooks Still Refuses To Get It

So, reading David Brooks when he is critical of the GOP is sometimes like watching a movie trailer for a bad comedy. You’re nodding along, laughing, things are going great, the narrator is saying something like “They were a perfect match, and had planned the perfect life, until…” and you hear the cheesy record scratch. Then there is, I don’t know, some kind of obnoxious kid or mean aunt or something. Maybe a really big rambunctions dog who raps. It’s not important. The important thing is that you are suddenly reminded that what you were vaguely enjoying is actually terrible.

That can sum up Brooks’s latest column about what an unbearable load Ted Cruz is. He starts with a story I had never heard, about how Cruz went to the Supreme Court to try to keep someone in jail for 16 years for stealing a calculator (he should have gotten a max of two, apparently)*. It is a perfect illustration of his unbending brutality and lack of anything relatable to human compassion. There’s even a few really good lines, like when he speaks of Cruz’s always-apocolyptic rhetoric, saying “As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everythings is described as a maximalist existential threat.”

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01.06.16
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How The West Was Won: The Oregon Militia Didn’t Build That

The militia- which even a cursory glance could tell you is not a well-regulated one- occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has been called many things. Attention hungry springs to mind (I admit they are well-orchestrated). A “clear case of white privilege” is another (to point out that if they were black or Muslim they’d be dead was as immediately axiomatic as it is correct). To a very select few they are heroes, but even to the GOP candidates they are misled, though their cause- militating, literally, against overwhelming federal power- is a correct one.

It’s the proximate cause that I think is underlooked in all the coverage. There are a number of underlying causes, the most prominent of which is the victimization complex of well-armed white guys who want to “take back the country” that never actually belonged to them. The psychology here is really is of course the big deal, the sharp end of something wild and dangerous howling through the country. But we also need to really look at their stated cause, which is both dismissed and under-remarked on.

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01.05.16
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What Donald Trump’s Bonedumb Ad Shows Reveals About GOP Foreign Policy

So, Donald Trump has finally released his first campaign ad, and it has some pretty interesting parts, showing not just how dishonest his campaign is (which is a given) nor just how divorced from reality is the entire Republican foreign policy debate (also a given, but maybe less so), but how the GOP has constructed an entire alternate reality in which they can’t help but live.

The interesting part isn’t that, when you Google his ad, the first few pages are media coverage of it, showing how much his campaign and the liberal media conspiracy feed off each other. Nor is it the nakedly racist xenophobia sounds like open mic night at the Bunkersville Patriots Lodge (though that matters). It isn’t even that the ad promises to shut off Muslim immigration until “we figure out what’s going on”, which might be the first time a campaign pleaded that we give it a few minutes to think, ok? It isn’t even that the swarms of Mexicans crossing the border are actually Morrocans.

(Speaking to NBC, his loathsome campaign manager  Corey Lewandowski clarified: “No shit, it’s not the Mexican border but that’s what our country is going to look like. This was 1,000 percent on purpose.” It’s an interesting argument, really. This isn’t what our country looks like, but it is what it is going to look like unless we build something we don’t currently have. One could ask why it doesn’t look like it now, then, but that would be churl.)

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