Cedric Richmond (D) - Oh the Hypocrisy!

 

@CedricRichmond: "Y'all seen that photo of Kellyanne
on couch? She looks familiar in that position."

The Trump-bots are all atwitter over Louisiana Democrat Cedric Richmond's crude shot at Kellyanne Conway's picture kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office during a visit to President Trump by presidents of a number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). 

And I don't blame them. 

If a Republican Congressman (or any Republican for that matter) had made the same comment (even if it had been about Monica Lewinsky about whom the joke would have been true) the press would have crucified said Republican. Later Congressman Richmond tried to explain that his "joke" wasn't crude. Apparently it just wasn't funny the way he meant it to be. Here's what Richmond said.

• “I decided to use that joke due to the large social media backlash over her inappropriate posture considering there were more than 60 HBCU Presidents in the room.”

And it's exactly what I thought it was when this started up days ago. Once again it's about race. How dare a white woman kneel on a sofa in the presence of all those black men. (I guess she should have knelt on the floor or something.) If there had been 60 white guys or Asian guys or Indo-European guys in there, Conway would not have been expected to genuflect in their presence. But because she did not show the proper obeisance in front of 60 black men, she therefore deserved to have Cedric suggest that she was familiar with that position (i.e. familiar with doing sexual favors for Trump). There was no other way to interpret Richmond's "joke". And by the way, It didn't look like 60 guys in that picture, but I'll give Cedric the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't matter anyway. Kellyanne was working and apparently not overly awed by the gathered crowd of "men". Should a very competent working woman have to bow to these people, especially as this was not an official photo, but a candid caught before the official photos were taken? I'm sure the photographer was looking for something controversial.

A liberal woman would have been applauded if she'd assumed the same posture with a group of 60 white world leaders. Feminiists would have praised her for showing that women were not intimidated by males no matter how important they think they are. Democrats would have defended her to the hilt, but only if she were a Democrat, of course. If we are going to have women in the workplace, it looks to me like we should allow women to be actual women. Women tuck their legs under them on sofas. They've done it since time immemorial (except possibly during the Victorian era when they wore corsets, whalebone and a stick up their backs).  So since Cedric ain't gonna do it, I will say it!

Way to show 'em you aren't intimidated by their race, creed, color or gender, Kellyanne!

You know I really like this lady more and more every day. And you can tell she's getting to them. They're already into creating a fake furor over nothing-burger* incidents. Next there will be books and movies out in which a woman in her position, working for the president is assassinated or causes a scandal or overdoses on drugs or something. Liberals are such hopeless dreamers!

© 2017 by Tom King

*By the way, Ted Cruz, thanks for that new term. I hadn't heard it before, but I like it. I hope you don't mind me stealing it.

Dan Rather - Teacher of Journalistic Integrity?

I finally found time to watch Trump's State of the Union Speech. As my regular readers know, I was not a Trump supporter during the election and don't trust him farther than I could toss him with my two bad knees and galloping arthritis. But I found the speech laudable and found nothing troubling in it. A CNN guy said the speech was full of big words that Trump didn't understand, but in listening to it, I found his language very simple. In fact, if you stumble over any of Trump's word, you probably are not reading at a fifth grade level.  

I didn't agree with every policy in the speech, but even when he talked about things I oppose in principle, I had to agree with him when he talked about how he'd execute the solutions. Whatever you think of Trump, the big thing was that he delivered a clear message. What was funny was the Dan Rather commercial for his "journalistic Integrity" online course (which he is teaching). He said this last election convinced him that journalist integrity was threatened and that he should teach an ethics course for young journalists to save journalism.

If you remember, Dan Rather was forced to resign from Walter Cronkite's old job as evening news anchor because he made up a story about George W. Bush's National Guard Service using forged documents. That Rather would be whinging about journalistic integrity is monumentally laughable. One wonders if he realizes how silly it looks for him to be teaching ethics to journalists given his history.

© 2017 by Tom King

Progressives Aren't Liberals - Really? You're Kidding Right?

Woodrow Wilson - Godfather of Progressivism

A friend recently told me he would rather be a "progressive" than a "stick in the mud".  If he's referring to conservatives as "sticks in the mud", I would challenge that idea.  Then my friend added that "progressive" didn't mean "liberal".  Well if that's true, then progressives need to work on their advertising because in common parlance "progressive", "socialist", "liberal", and "Democrat" all mean practically the same thing or at least are as closely matched as "conservative" and "Republican".

AND conservatives are NOT stuck in the mud. We were once considered liberals. When the country was founded, the founding fathers were very much liberals. It was the American Tories (conservatives) who opposed the Revolution, even serving in the British Army to put down the rebellion. The liberal authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were heavily influenced by the philosophy of noted 18th century philosopher, John Locke, and others of the time. They believed in small government and that all men are created equal. They were against setting up a "noble" class, all except a few Federalists, who thought they ought to become a ruling nobility. Thanks to Jefferson and Washington and others, the idea of creating an American noble class was shot down. 

Later in the 1800s, upper class Americans came to consider themselves a breed apart - a new nobility if you will. They seized on the ideas of Charles Darwin to try and make the case that some folk were genetically superior to others and that those traits were passed down to their progeny. They latched on to socialist ideas propounded by Marx and Engels to justify the idea of an elite ruling class and a classless society or more accurately a single class proletariat which served the collectivist state ostensibly for their own good. Of course, it was clear to these earlier "progressives" that they should rule such a collectivist state, given their genetic intellectual superiority. This was, of course, for the people's own good. 

The Democrats seized on this because it fit the Southern notion that certain folk were naturally inferior to the upper classes and that these societal elites were chosen by God to rule. Actually, most of the upper classes didn't believe in God anyway. As American theologians more and more challenged that notion of the natural superiority of any particular class, the Democrats soon openly pushed aside the notion that God had anything to do with anything anyway and became the socialist, elitist, paternalistic, and damned near atheist political party that it is to day.

Early progressives under Teddy Roosevelt were well-intentioned and actually did some good for the working class. Unfortunately, the very people who were responsible for the exploitation of working Americans seized upon the movement as a means to convince the very people they exploited to embrace socialist style collectivism as a means to achieve freedom for all workers. The slave masters simply adopted a new racket to maintain their position and profitability. It wasn't long before progressives adopted the ideas of the eugenicists and began sterilizing the "mentally feeble" and passing laws to prevent certain immigrant races from owning land, putting quotas on certain racial immigrant groups and discouraging black migration from the South to the North. Progressives built statues of Mussolini at Rockefeller Center and praised Hitler and Stalin's policies and then smoothly morphed into patriots and New Dealers and tried to pretend they'd had nothing to do with their previous "progressive" ideas once it became clear that those were the ideas had bred monsters like Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.

Democrat/progressive/liberal propaganda links these three nebulous ideologies into a single unified whole in the public mind. Conservatives and Republicans (at least up until the age of Trump) have been defenders of the idea of decentralized, limited government, individual rights and equal opportunity for all. Just because they call themselves "progressives" doesn't make them progressive. The ideals spelled out in the Declaration and the Constitution are as progressive now as they were then. Modern so-called progressivism is, in point of fact, entirely regressive, seeking to drive society backwards to the old feudal system of a one class peasantry (Marx called them the "proletariat") ruled over by an elite class of self-identified "leaders" who live in their dachas and mansions and rule over the human hive that socialism always tries to mold a society into.

The term "liberal" has come to mean the polar opposite of what it meant during the time of the Founding Fathers. In those days liberals believed in the rights of all men and women, equal opportunity, and the elimination of rule by elites. Today "liberal" according to its own advertising means a strong central government that doles out housing, medical care, jobs and opportunity as determined by central planners and a leader class which takes care of the proletariat while the proletariat collectively serves the state.

Like I said, if that's not what liberalism means, then they need to get themselves some new PR guys. What I hear from the left is that liberalism is about feeling good because you give your responsibility for your neighbor over to the government. To me it seems that all that does is make you feel okay about walking past your injured neighbor like the Pharisees of Jesus' parable, secure in the knowledge that he can go to a dot-gov website and apply for government aid if he needs help and you don't have to be bothered about his difficulties. 

© 2017 by Tom King