Category: Ed Driscoll

The Riot Ideology in Ferguson

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Ginning up racial strife is bad for business:

Fusion, a Website that’s an, err fusion between Univision and ABC/Disney is shocked that Ferguson real estate prices are “Down nearly 50 percent since Michael Brown’s death.” There’s more than a hint of bias in that subhead, as the cause wasn’t Brown’s death after he slugged a convenience store clerk and attempted to steal a police officer’s gun, but the riots and looting that followed — which were another kind of media fusion, ginned up by via the minicams of CNN and fueled further by NBC anchorman Al Sharpton’s corrosive presence . . .

Read the whole thing by Ed Driscoll, who includes a quote by Manhattan Institute urban policy scholar Fred Siegel. Two years ago, when the itinerant race hustler Sharpton was inciting hatred in Sanford, Florida, I mentioned Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here in connection with the Trayvon Martin case:

Siegel’s book is one of those timeless classics — like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed — that I frequently recommend as guides to understanding important social phenomena more deeply.
The Future Once Happened Here recounts how liberal policy turned three once-great American cities — New York, D.C. and L.A. — into dangerous urban nightmares, and one of the things Siegel describes is the “riot ideology” whereby organized violence (or the threat thereof) is used to intimidate officials into doing the bidding of “community leaders.”

Fools can’t be bothered to learn a damned thing about history, however, so disgraced charlatans like Sharpton are always able to find a mob of fools who buy into their bankrupt ideology. These fools are always mystified by the result. The race hustlers get rich off their “social justice” scam, but when the media spotlight turns away and the protest carnival leaves town, the people left behind are in no better condition than they were before the protests began. In fact, as in Ferguson, communities suffer more harm from the riot ideology than they did from whatever “oppression” the race hustlers were supposedly protesting against.

Alas, some fools never learn, and so hate remains a lucrative industry from which vicious liars like Al Sharpton get rich.

UPDATE: When Jeffrey Williams was arrested and charged with shooting two cops in Ferguson, liberals tried to claim Williams was not one of the protesters. Yet now the suspect’s own family confirm he was: “After Michael Brown, he was out there protesting. . . . He had his shirt on. He had his signs up.” Williams, 20, has a criminal record, a pregnant girlfriend and “made money by placing bets on the basketball and football video games he played with others, relatives said.” Which is to say, he is an outstanding example of the Obama Age lifestyle.




 

The Obama Age: ‘That ’70s Show’

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In last night’s traditional Christmas round-up — genius! — I began by quoting Rob Long’s doom-and-gloom comments from a New York magazine feature about the post-election National Review Caribbean cruise, an article you should read in its entirety, if you want to be thoroughly depressed about the uselessness of our conservative elite: Wonks, pundits, pollsters and consultants on a free tropical vacation paid for by elderly magazine subscribers who, we presume, were grateful to be in the intellectual presence of the presumed heirs of Bill Buckley.

Near the end of the article — the “print” version is 11 pages — Joe Hagan quotes Jonah Goldberg, who offered this assessment of the cruise:

“This is a more downbeat bunch this year,” he said. “We lost in 2008, but it was almost boisterous and fun. This, a little less so. People were dyspeptic.
“Their conception of what the country is about, they really were sure the country would reject Barack Obama,” he continued. “I do think it hits them hard. The fear I have, why this election stung, I think, Obama has successfully de-ratified some of the Reagan revolution in a way that Clinton never could and didn’t even try to. That’s what freaks people out, that feeling in their gut, either Obama has changed the country, or the country has sufficiently changed that they don’t have a problem with Obama. That’s what eats at people.”

Indeed. You might even say that we are Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption, but if there is any hope of redeeming us from this disaster, it wouldn’t involve a political campaign or a legislative agenda. The problem is the culture, especially the culture of youth, over which Jonah Goldberg and his fellow NRO cruisers — both the geriatrics who footed the bill and the intellectual free-riders — have near-zero influence.

Flashback to Paul Weyrich’s 1999 pronouncement that America had suffered “a cultural collapse of historical proportions.” The demographic aspect of that collapse was apparent to me, and yet where is the evidence that the Bush-era GOP took it seriously? For that matter, where were the conservative intelligentsia? When Weyrich died four years ago, I wrote:

One aspect of the collapse Weyrich decried was the rise of the celebrity culture, wherein the famous people on TV exercise more influence over our attitudes than do the ordinary people in our own real lives.

Has there been any conservative intellectual pushback against that phenomenon? Or has the celebrity culture overwhelmed our intelligentsia? Coming up next on The Daily Show . . .

The consequences are nearly too grim to contemplate, particularly in what it means for the economy, namely a continuation of conditions that resemble the “stagflation” of the 1970s. Obamanomics will forever blight the prospects of an entire generation:

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life — and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.
Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.

Bitter irony: Culture overwhelms politics, and politics overwhelms economics, so that ambitious young people — reacting to cultural cues that told them to oppose Republicans as “rich old white men” — end up supporting a political agenda hostile to their economic interests. It’s the mirror-reverse of the left-wing woe that Thomas Franks lamented in What’s the Matter With Kansas?

And where is our Thomas Franks capable of explaining this?

Ed Driscoll was on that National Review Voyage of the Damned, and Ed has further thoughts on the ongoing Obama Age catastrophe.

Merry Christmas! 

 


The Democrat Graveyard Whistling Choir Ignores ‘Preference Cascade’ Scenario

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Ed Driscoll points out that the “War on Women” hero/martyr Sandra Fluke drew a much smaller crowd than did the actual victims of the “War on Coal” in Grundy, Virginia.

As they say, the plural of “anecdote” is data, and these are just a couple of points on the scatter-chart which are beginning to form into a clear pattern that looks a lot like an Obama meltdown. Democrats don’t want to admit this, of course, and Nate Silver is a Democrat, which is the only plausible explanation for why the Magical Forecasting Model™ still gives 2-to-1 odds for Obama.

This creates a serious problem for Nate, who now has only 15 days to walk that back. If he were to shift one net point per day from now until Nov. 6, the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it at Obama 52.6%-Romney47.4% on Election Day. Yet insofar as Silver’s predictions are a proxy for the popular vote, there is an increasing likelihood that the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it bass-ackward: Romney now leads the RCP average, and is ahead by 2 points in the latest Battleground Poll, to say nothing of Romney’s 7-point lead in Gallup.

Something else: Look again at Real Clear Politics, and you notice that the last time a national poll showed Obama at 50% or better was a CNN poll taken Sept. 28-30.

When an incumbent president has been below 50 percent throughout October, on what factual basis does Nate Silver justify the persistent advantage for Obama in his Magical Forecasting Model™?

Even if you think Obama could still pull out a narrow win — and the cable news networks now seem to feel obligated to feature hourly showings of Electoral College map scenarios to that effect — the precise 67.6% chance offered by Nate Silver is absurd. So unless there is some game-changing event in Obama’s favor over the next two weeks, Silver’s probably going to be hard-pressed to shift the odds toward Romney quickly enough to be “right.”

Whistling past graveyards is not science, Nate, and the aroma of bovine excrement is not perfume.

Quinnipiac has Obama up 5 points in Ohio, but Quinnipiac is the same outfit that had Obama up 10 points in Ohio — an absolute absurdity — a month ago. Even stipulating the bogusness of Quinnipiac’s D+9 sample, however, Mitt has gained 5 points in Ohio according to them, while the Democrat polling firm, PPP, shows Romney gaining four points since their previous Ohio survey.

If Romney has gained either 5 points in a month (Quinnipiac) or 4 points in a week (PPP) in what everyone acknowledges to be the most crucial swing state, exactly how the hell does Nate Silver justify his Charlie Sheen pose? #Winning!

Here’s something else for you, Nate: Why does the Battleground poll (which you consider reputable) now show the exact same margin, 49-47 as the Rasmussen poll, which you consider so unreliable? Is it possible that Rasmussen’s methodology is actually providing a more accurate measurement of public opinion than your Magical Forecasting Model™ had hitherto acknowledged?

Tonight’s debate is about foreign policy. When CBS News (not exactly a right-wing outfit) is all over the bungle in Benghazi, and the president’s spokeswoman is compelled to deny that the death of a U.S. ambassador is a policy failure, excuse me for suspecting that tonight won’t be an easy win for Obama. Yeah, maybe the talking heads on MSNBC will score it a “win” for President Gutsy Call, but what about those patriotic red-blooded American swing voters in Ohio? Probably not so much.

The dots are beginning to form a pattern, as I say, and the Graveyard Whistling Choir can ignore the pattern only at peril of their credibility. Is there a phrase for this? I think we know:

Public-opinion polls are lagging indicators in politics. By the time a shift in the trend becomes clear from poll data, the causes of the shift are days or weeks in the past. It is therefore unwise to extrapolate the current trend forward or to begin thinking of polls as supernatural prophecies that predict future events.
With all those caveats in mind, however, Mitt Romney enters the final two weeks of the presidential campaign looking very much like the next president of the United States, and it is not merely poll data that creates this impression. President Obama’s own campaign has begun to emit clear signals that the incumbent’s re-election prospects are dwindling, and anecdotal evidence of strong Republican momentum is not hard to find these days. We cannot predict what will happen in tonight’s third and final presidential debate (9 p.m. ET at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida), but it is a fairly safe guess it won’t have the game-changing impact of the first debate on Oct. 3, one of two apparent pivot points that triggered Obama’s downward slide. While the impact of Romney’s one-sided victory over a listless Obama in Denver has been universally acknowledged, it would be wrong to overlook the political effect of the other pivot point, the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The Benghazi attack appears to have started slowly sapping Obama’s support in late September. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator. And please pay close attention to the last three words.

 




 

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Did You Say ‘Preference Cascade’?

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“One might have thought that the 2010 mid-term elections . . . would have convinced the Left that they had miscalculated. Instead, they placed their confidence in Obama’s ability to navigate the new environment . . .
“Everything seemed to be proceeding in accordance with those beliefs until Romney dismantled Obama in Wednesday’s debate — a psychological shock that has unhinged the Left, causing them to begin lashing out furiously and rather erratically at anyone who suggests that the dam has broken and that the ‘preference cascade’ may doom Obama to defeat in November.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6

“[I]t is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 7

As a great man once repeatedly said, “Don’t get cocky,” but there are good reasons for Republicans to be optimistic with 22 days remaining in the 2012 campaign. Ed Driscoll has previously invoked the phrase “preference cascade” to describe what we may see if Americans wake up to the reality of the SCOAMF’s incompetence. And today Ed Morrissey employs the same phrase:

I don’t think that Obama has lost the election yet, but there is only three weeks to go now. This is when preference cascades begin to materialize, and usually away from the incumbent, who has had nearly four years to make the case for re-election.

Exactly. While defeating an incumbent president is always an against-the-odds project, history would suggest that (a) the debates would be a decisive factor, and (b) the shift toward the challenger wouldn’t happen until fairly late in the campaign.

If this is what we’re seeing now, then Obama’s poll surge in September — on Sept. 29, he led the Real Clear Politics average of national polls by 4.3 points — was in fact a mirage. Whether or not those of us whom Jonathan Chait called “poll denialists” were right about the skewed samples, Obama’s poll lead prior to the first debate was actually an illusion that did not take into account the underlying reality of (a) Obama’s failed policies and (b) his inability to defend those policies when challenged by Romney outside the media filter.

So far, only one poll (Pew) has shown Romney leading by 4 points nationally, and Romney’s biggest RCP lead was 1.3 points on Saturday, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has Mitt leading 49-47, and if Obama doesn’t score a clear win Tuesday, the whole thing may shift toward an outright Romney landslide.

The RCP Electoral College map currently has the race at Obama 201 and Romney 191, with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the “toss-up” category. By this point in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was in meltdown mode and had already pulled out of Michigan. For Romney to win any of those four states would almost certainly be decisive: If Mitt wins Michigan he won’t lose Ohio, and if Pennsylvania is even competitive in the final week of the campaign, Romney could win as many as 300 of 538 Electoral College votes.

What will happen in Tuesday’s debate? Both campaigns are “working the refs” with CNN’s Candy Crowley as moderator, Michelle Malkin reminds us of “plant” infestations at town-hall debates and Noel Sheppard quotes Ed Hart: “We will know in the fullness of time.”

Keep watching the slo-mo walkback by Nate Silver, whose Incredible Mystical Forecasting Model™ has now raised Romney’s odds to a precisely calculated 36.7% after having him at 12.9% Oct. 4.

UPDATE: The Insta-Driscol-lanche! Thanks, Ed.
 




 

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Racism Industrial Complex Training Film: “Bob Is A Racist”

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by Smitty

This country in general, and this blog in particular, cannot stop in its relentless quest for ‘fairness’, and a raaaaacism-free country.
Sadly, it appears that Bob Belvedere has been outed as a raaaaacist by the Solipsist Piffle Legal CanYouNameTerrorists (SPLC):

Next up on the list to be outed, apparently, are Troglopundit and American Glob. It’s all about the children, you see.

On a related note, Althouse explains the mental gymnastics required to view mention of a birth certificate as a raaaaacist statement:

To see it as racist, you have to have a background belief that to think of someone as a natural-born citizen is to think of him as white.

Ah, so! Connecting the dots in that fashion, the picture would start to resemble a bodily orifice.

Video via Ace and Ed Driscoll.

If We Had an Actual Press Corps, They Would Be Asking …

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by Smitty

Driscoll links Harsanyi, “Obama supports same-sex marriage, cites states’ rights”:

Which begs an obvious question: If Obama has endorsed federalism and believes that states have the right to define marriage, then why doesn’t he support the ability of states to extricate themselves from Obamacare? Why don’t states have the right to dictate their immigration laws? And does he “personally” believe that states should be able decide the issue of abortion? Roe v. Wade exists, but so does the Defense of Marriage Act.

More generally, what are the meaningful political objects in our system, and by what rational, consistent, generally agreed upon rules are responsibilities assigned to them?

I anticipate #OccupyResoluteDesk would answer somewhere between a brief “Shut up,” or the even more elemental “Racist!” Now, if you’re a bundler dropping some cash, you might get told “I’ll do something beyond spewing words into the air after the election,” which is just long for “Hard questions are hahrd.”

Aside: Andrew McCarthy points to what an overweening, self-aggrandizing narcissist afflicts us. Let me stop there, before I get too upset.

Update: linked by Da Tech Guy

Ed Driscoll Missed One: Introducing The New Lefty Craze ‘M-bowing’

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by Smitty

First, there was Obama’s bowing, and then Tebowing, and now M-bowing (Mao-bowing?), with the arms forming the outsides of the character, with the middle V described by the outline of the leg. The left leg.

This new body language is suitable for an #Occupy mike check near you. Try not to bite your mousy tongue while reading Driscoll’s whole post about the sad, drool bucket Left. But don’t laugh too hard, though: these creepy crypto-Marxists have the ear of #OccupyResoluteDesk. Just because they are not terribly bright does not render them harmless.

A Little Schadenfreude From Ed Driscoll

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by Smitty

Because Mrs. The Other Smitty loves it when I abuse her tongue.
Ed Driscoll rolls out the hot shadow laughter for BHO-One Quixote*:

Incidentally, it’s got to be quite a comedown from having a rare combination of enough chutzpah and imaginary messianic power to say with a straight face, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” to being told less than three years later by CNN that “There is almost nothing a politician can do about it at least in the short run.”

When this presidency ends as a totally farcical take on a Greek tragedy, I want it known that I called it a while back.

*Attempted Obi-Wan Kenobi reference that fell short of congealing, sorry.