Category: Florida

Use ‘Derbyshire’ as a Verb

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It’s an interesting word-game concept, eh?

For years, I’ve advocated the overthrow of the decadent Rich Lowry regime at National Review, hoping that Jonah Goldberg might lead the coup. So my main interest in this remarkable controversy is whether or not it serves to undermine Lowryism.

What you might not notice is that this is a skirmish on the fringes of the Trayvon Martin controversy, which has turned into a stalemate, so that now frustrated people are in scalp-taking mode. The NBC producer got taken out by conservatives and now, for some strange reason, NR‘s John Derbyshire just volunteers himself as a target for the Left?

The smart thing to do would be to stay away from this, but Dave Weigel wandered over and made some remarks, and now the Left is going after Weigel: He’s not sufficiently outraged for their tastes.

The Left is intolerant, opportunistic and unprincipled. While it is impossible to imagine any scenario in which Lowry won’t be forced to fire Derbyshire now, I’m actually more fascinated by the Left’s attempt to bully Weigel for failing to denounce Derbyshire in strong enough terms.

This is a sort of Maoist tactic, the demand for conformity and solidarity. The Left is enraged by the fact that Weigel is an ideological wild card, yet employed by a “mainstream” news operation. So now they’re trying to indict him as “soft on racism,” and I suppose it wouldn’t help Dave any for me to say how much I’ve always liked him, huh?

Probably not. Anyway, the other day, a conservative friend of mine pointed out that, given Jen Rubin’s annoying pro-Romney bias, maybe some people are wishing they’d never gotten Weigel fired from the Post.

And now the Left’s trying to get Weigel fired from Slate?

Be careful what you wish for, lefties. It could be worse. Trust me.

Also, here’s the best headline yet in the Trayvon Martin controversy:

Armed Neo-Nazis Now Patrolling Sanford, Say They
Are “Prepared” For Post-Trayvon Martin Violence

Remember what I said about the “riot ideology“? Some people will be disappointed if the Trayvon Martin controversy doesn’t provoke a riot.

UPDATE (Smitty): linked at The Conservatory.

UPDATE II: Some interesting comments below, including this:

99% of the homeowners who are appalled by that article bought their house in the “whitest” school district they could afford.

UPDATE III: Also, Dan Riehl describes his own experience, and this is an important point: Everybody forms their own opinions based on their own experiences, and it is difficult to argue with people’s experience. That is to say, when discussing the military, lifelong civilians must defer to the combat veteran.

So when Dan says, “Here is an experience I went through, which exemplifies a general tendency,” your argument that no such tendency exists must be based on first-hand experience to the contrary. But if you’ve never been in a schoolyard fight — the subject of Dan’s anecdote — your personal experience is inapplicable as evidence.

One problem I’ve discovered in trying to communicate with intellectuals is that so many of them are wimps from sheltered backgrounds whose mamas wouldn’t let them play football — apple-polishing goodie-two-shoes who never strayed outside the confines of their safe, wholesome, upwardly-mobile affluent cocoon.

Dan’s from New Jersey and smokes Marlboro Reds. Deal with it.

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Eyewitness to History in Florida

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Newt Gingrich in Fort Myers, Florida, Monday, Jan. 30, 2012

“Well, it’s past 2:30 now, so I’d better get over to the airport. Let’s hope the Gingrich people don’t sic the cops on me.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 30, 2012

How many readers remember the day I covered a Newt Gingrich rally in Fort Myers, Florida? That was the Monday day before the primary and I filed my column for The American Spectator that night from a McDonald’s on Colonial Drive, near Page Field, where Newt had flown in for an event with Michael Reagan and Herman Cain in the airport parking lot. It was a historic day, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Yesterday, I did some research and discovered that Gingrich and his entourage were flying around Florida that day aboard a 16-seat Gulfstream IV jet. And what made Jan. 30 so historic was that on that day, according to their Federal Election Commission report, Newt’s campaign spent $970,826.77.

That was the peak — the pinnacle, the acme, the zenith — of Gingrich’s campaign spending. On no other day throughout the course of his entire campaign did Newt 2012 spend more money than on Jan. 30.

Not only that, but comparing reported estimates of attendance at Newt’s five rallies that day, the crowd at Fort Myers — which I estimated between 250 and 300 — may have been the biggest. In all, on that day when Gingrich hit his spending peak, his combined audience for all five events totalled fewer than 1,500 people.

And his campaign spent $970,826.77.

That amount was more than twice what Gingrich’s campaign collected on its best day of fundraising. On Jan. 22, the day after he won the South Carolina primary, Newt reported contributions of $403,164.

In case you don’t remember, Jan. 22 was a Sunday, and I was driving back home with my 13-year-old son Jefferson after a week spent covering the South Carolina primary campaign. We stopped in at a McDonald’s at Rock Hill, S.C., so I could do one more post from the Palmetto State. My wife called to tell me that, due to some wacky miscalculation or technological glitch, our bank account balance was near zero, and it was by no means certain that my remaining cash would buy enough gas to enable us to make it home to Maryland more than 400 miles away.

That crisis threatened a premature end to my campaign-trail travels, and it was therefore with a sense of desperation that I posted a “Memo from the National Affairs Desk” from that McDonald’s in Rock Hill:

How the hell am I going to make it to Florida? I’ve got press credentials for Thursday’s CNN debate in Jacksonville, but unless there is some kind of miracle between now and then, there’s no way I’ll be able to buy a plane ticket. Only the most frantic rattling of the tip jar can make it happen.

You came through, guys. Four days later, on Jan. 26, I flew out to Jacksonville to cover the CNN debate, and took note of this headline:

Gingrich Pledges To Establish
Permanent Base On The Moon
‘By The End Of My Second Term’

Yeah. Good luck with that plan, huh?

That Thursday night at the debate, I was wearing my Florida shirt (purchased at a nearby Goodwill store) in the media filing center:

Santorum left Jacksonville and went home to visit his hospitalized 3-year-old daughter, Bella. Meanwhile, I covered two Romney rallies — Friday in Orlando and Sunday in Naples, where I spent the weekend in a posh condo owned by Dan Collins’s parents — and then, on that history Monday, I drove to Fort Myers to cover the Gingrich rally.

Memories? It’s all kind of a blur now. If it weren’t for the daily account of these travels here on the blog and in my American Spectator columns, I’d never be able to re-assemble a simple chronology, much less remember little details about where I bought that crazy shirt.

And yet, despite all the madness and desperation, I was there — The Man on the Scene — the day Newt’s doomed presdiential bid hit its peak.

The $970,826.77 Gingrich’s campaign spent that day was equal to 17.4% of the $5.6 million Gingrich raised in January, which was its best fundraising month of the entire campaign. And I was there.

I saw it happen — an eyewitness to history in the making — without even realizing it at the time. The column I filed for The American Spectator that night at the McDonald’s half a mile from the Fort Myers airport was called “Fear and Loathing in the Sunshine State.” And so yesterday, when I began researching how Gingrich’s campaign spent its way to disaster, it was a kick in the head to realize that the pivotal moment had happened right there in front of my eyes:

Palm trees swayed in a warm Florida breeze one afternoon in late January while we awaited the candidate’s arrival. Four TV satellite trucks were parked outside the terminal at Page Field in Fort Myers, and I was among two-dozen or so journalists waiting in the airport parking lot where about 300 supporters of Newt Gingrich were gathered to greet the man who, just nine days earlier, had defeated Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary.
On Monday, Jan. 30, the day before the Florida primary, the omens were clear enough that Gingrich was about to be defeated in the Sunshine State, but none of Newt’s supporters that afternoon in Fort Myers seemed to suspect that the former House Speaker’s campaign was on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. Nothing reported by the news media prepared them for the disasters that swiftly followed Gingrich’s Florida defeat — his Nevada meltdown and his fourth-place February finishes in Minnesota, Maine, and Michigan — leading up to his March 6 wipeout, when Newt won only his home state of Georgia out of 10 contests on “Super Tuesday.” . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator, and thanks to everybody who hit the tip jar and gave me a chance to tell that story.

UPDATE: Looking for the appropriate link for the “posh condo in Naples” — thanks, Dan Collins! — this is what I found:

This morning I drove to Waffle House for breakfast — 5-ounce New York strip steak, two eggs over medium, hashbrowns, wheat toast, large orange juice and coffee, $11.71 — and the waitress had a tattoo on her neck.

Heh. It’s weird how the little details make the difference. The tattoo!

You can read the rest of that and see if you spot the annoying little typo that jumped out at me. Damn, I hate typos.

 

 

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Tom Maguire’s Excellent Idea: Let’s Pretend We Take Rod Dreher Seriously

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This kind of thing never works out well for Dreher, whom Maguire catches accusing George Zimmerman of being “paranoid,” which is doubly hilarious given that Dreher was writing in the context of being cautious about the facts of the case.

In fact, I have said all along that we have to be wary of trying the case in the media, so I agree with Dreher on that — as does Maguire, for that matter — but the way Dreher jumps to a diagnosis of paranoia totally defeats his point. (Evidently, Dreher had seized on an Orlando Sentinel typo about the frequency of Zimmerman’s 911 calls.)

What is amazing to me is how people have gotten so riled up about this case, as if their personal opinion about this incident in Sanford, Florida, had some kind of tangible purpose, without regard to the actual facts or the ultimate legal outcome. It’s as if they are trying to appropriate to themselves a sort of secondhand righteousness, based on their judgment of a case in which they are not directly involved and which in no way impacts their own lives.

I remember having a similar feeling of disbelief at how people became so emotionally involved in the O.J. Simpson trial. What was that all about, huh? I mean, if you’re in Los Angeles, I could see it being a big local news story, what with the slow-motion highway chase tying up traffic. But there were people who lived nowhere near California, who had never heard of O.J. before then, who nonetheless got glued to the TV, watching every minute of the trial, evidently feeling that the fate of this football-player-turned-movie-star was the most important thing in the world.

It’s mystifying, and I feel silly even wasting 300 words on it.

Anyway, for people who never heard of Rod Dreher, I’d say he’s a well-known idiot except that he’s not really very well-known anymore. He used to work at National Review, then he wrote a stupid book, and now he’s reported to be working on a sequel that I believe is tentatively titled, If You Thought My First Book Was Stupid, Wait ‘Til You See This One!

I’m sure Jonah Goldberg can hardly wait.

Dreher was raised Southern Baptist, converted to Catholicism, then decided he’d rather be Russian Orthodox, and then he got himself in trouble by creating an online alias to muck around in an obscure intramural Orthodox dispute. Oh, yeah: He hates Rush Limbaugh.

It’s probably only a matter of time before Dreher goes Hare Krishna or Zoroastrian or something. He’s tediously serious about everything, which makes him all the more laughable. At least Andrew Sullivan has AIDS-related brain damage as an excuse. Speaking of which . . .

Andrew Sullivan Blames Catholic Church
For Politicizing Contraception

Oh, boy, I bet this is gonna be good!

Yes, indeed: Whenever CNN needs a leading expert on contraception and women, they turn to Dr. Andrew Sullivan MD, OB-GYN!

Piers Morgan: ‘What a Load of Fatuous Nonsense You Speak, Touré, Don’t You?’

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OK, I almost never watch CNN and hadn’t previously had a high opinion of Piers Morgan, but on the other hand, I’d never heard of this Touré character at all, until I saw the Breitbart headline:

MSNBC’s Touré Has Epic
Race-Baiting Meltdown On CNN

So I wondered what the heck this was about. Watch the video:

Touré, whose career has been mainly writing about hiphop music, thought Morgan wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in questioning George Zimmerman’s brother Robert Zimmerman. Morgan objects to being lectured about journalism, and then Touré tries to claim that Morgan doesn’t really know or care anything about the “American soul.” Read the transcript at CNN.

Anyway, I was tired and bummed out and about to go to bed until I saw this and, somehow, it cheered me up wonderfully. Don’t know why.

The Riot Ideology

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Yesterday, I mentioned Fred 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.”

Having recently begun re-reading Siegel’s book, the latest news in the Trayvon Martin case is both familiar and disturbing:

The feet of thousands pounded the cracked pavement of Sanford’s 13th street . . . to reiterate that apathy won’t be an option for those moved and outraged by the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager.
The Goldsboro community played host to a march and rally Saturday organized by the NAACP that brought together a coalition of national civil-rights organizers, community leaders, clergymen and droves of local residents who joined the chants demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin’s death.
The Rev. Al Sharpton came to a podium outside Sanford Police Department headquarters amid raucous cheers from many of the roughly 1,000 participants. But he revealed few details about a plan he unveiled Friday for economic sanctions to force authorities to arrest Zimmerman.
Instead, he talked generally about sanctions against corporations that support and fund stand-your-ground laws, but didn’t name specific entities or outline strategies.
Everything is on the table for the nonviolent civil disobedience that could come in the coming days, he said. . . .
A special prosecutor has been assigned to the case and the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation.
“We want an arrest. Shot in the chest,” marchers said Saturday en route to Sanford Police Department headquarters. “I am Trayvon Martin.”

Wait: A special prosecutor? A USDOJ investigation?

Why not wait and see what happens with the investigation? Why this idiotic talk of “economic sanctions” and lynch-mob mentality toward Zimmerman? Why is MSNBC letting one its on-air personalities engage in such demagogic nonsense?

If George Zimmerman is not arrested in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin soon, the Rev. Al Sharpton will call for an escalation in peaceful civil disobedience and economic sanctions.

Civil disobedience toward whom? Economic sanctions where? In Sanford? A town of 53,570 people, 45% white, 30% black and 20% Hispanic? What possible good can Sharpton’s incendiary demagoguery accomplish for the people of Sanford? And isn’t it possible that, by purposefully inflaming racial animosity, Sharpton will make matters much worse for the people of Sanford?

If you’ve read The Future Once Happened Here, you likely suspect that Sharpton’s “activism” will produce only harm for those whose cause he claims to advocate. The consequences of the “riot ideology” are sadly predictable. Meanwhile, on the other coast:

Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The March 14 beating in Palmdale was captured on video and posted on YouTube . . .
During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video . . .

Perhaps Al Sharpton will call for “civil disobedience” there, too.

 

Trayvon Martin Rashomon

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The first time I talked to anyone about the Trayvon Martin case, I cautioned against the urge to jump to conclusions based on media accounts.

Remember, “Send the Body to Glenn Beck“?

That turned out well, didn’t it?

Whatever actually happened in the Martin case — and we still don’t know the whole truth of it — it’s a bad thing for an unarmed kid to get shot.

But the liberals insisted on portraying this incident with a certain slant: Saint Trayvon, innocent martyr to racism, with George Zimmerman portrayed as being incited to violence by right-wing talk radio.

Neither basic element of that narrative was accurate. Trayvon had been suspended from school and accused of criminality. Zimmerman was a registered Democrat. And, while Zimmerman clearly failed to comply with a 911 dispatcher’s advice not to pursue Trayvon, there are witnesses who say that Zimmerman shot Trayvon after an altercation in which Trayvon was the aggressor.

But we don’t know everything yet, and the ongoing effort to try the case in the media or turn this into a political volleyball match has resulted in people making fools of themselves:

The comedian Roseanne Barr last night tweeted the home address of George Zimmerman’s parents to her 110,000-plus Twitter followers, only to delete the posting after “not fully understanding that it was private not public.”

And as if that were not enough:

Friday night, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien leads a special town hall event about the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin that has sparked a national dialogue on race and what it says about America. “Beyond Trayvon: Race and Justice in America.”

My bedtime reading lately has been The Future Once Happened Here, Fred Siegel’s brilliant account of how liberal social policy destroyed America’s cities. Siegel’s book was a major resource for Chapter 8 of Donkey Cons, and is full of insights on the development of our contemporary attitudes about poverty, race and crime. On page 58 of his book, Siegel writes about “a cultural shift” that occurred in the 1960s:

[O]lder ideas about shame were starting to be replaced by a new concern for self-esteem. Christopher Lasch wrote that formerly “shame was the fate of those whose conduct fell short of cherished ideals.” But in the 1960s, the new age of moral deregulation and therapeutic ethics, shame came to refer to whatever prevents us from feeling good about ourselves.

Am I the only one who sees the Trayvon Martin carnival in this context? Liberals have turned the case into a sort of public festival, a self-congratulatory celebration of their own moral superiority. And they have arranged the symbolic elements of the narrative so that to criticize them — the shameless media moralizers — is to become implicated in George Zimmerman’s presumed guilt.

They are using the corpse of Trayvon Martin as a human shield to conceal their ideological agenda and protect themselves against criticism.

 

RECENTLY:

#Occupy Sympathizer Who Tweeted About Killing Cops: Meet Rusty Braxton

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As previously noted, when police shut down Saturday’s Occupy protest in New York, a Twitter user with the handle “smackema1” sent a message: “We wont make a difference if we dont kill a cop or 2.” After it was announced that a criminal investigation of the threat had been undertaken, the New York Daily News located the 23-year-old punk:

“I’m not a cop hater,” Rusty Braxton told the Daily News as the police continued to investigate Saturday’s ugly online remark.
“I don’t want any cops killed. They’re doing their job. They’re civil servants.”
Braxton, of Oviedo, Fla., sent the tweet from his hometown during Saturday’s six-month anniversary protest at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.
“We wont make a difference if we dont kill a cop or 2,” the restaurant manager wrote.
His Facebook page contains photographs of guns and he said in his Twitter feed that he has permits for a Mossberg shotgun and a Smith & Wesson pistol. . . .
He says he’s never been to New York or attended an Occupy protest.
But he admitted the actions of police sometimes makes him angry.
“When I see the police throw people down and push people, I get upset,” he said.

Oviedo is about 20 miles from downtown Orlando. Why this young Florida restaurant manager would be watching a livestream of the Occupy protests and urging violence against cops, I don’t know.

Braxton’s only previous criminal record was a juvenile dope bust. David Martosko of the Daily Caller had a Twitter exchange with Braxton and reports that Braxton’s account has since been deleted.

In his Twitter feed, Braxton’s spelling, grammar and punctuation were abysmal. So he’s a semi-literate dopehead who hates cops — which is to say, a typical product of the public-education system.

A Tale Of Two Viral Ads–Mark Oxner In Florida, Brian K. Hill In Connecticut

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by Smitty

Ladd Ehlinger’s yeoman work in support of conservative candidates in even the toughest political races is something of an inspiration. His Turn This Ship Around has managed to bring out the highest virtues of the Raaaaacism Industrial Complex.Not that there is any racial over- or undertone to the project, mind you. Barack Obama is portrayed captain of the now-pirate vessel U.S.S. Constitution, a. . .sqaure-rigged oared vessel? The ad serves the cogent point that future generations stand to be enslaved by the current policies of Barack Obama and the Democrat Senate that suck too much for adult budgeting. The children in the video seem a representative population sample. So from what sort of mind could a charge of raaaaacism emerge?

Mark Oxner was the original user of the ad, with the bird-brained Alan Grayson appearing bird-bodied alongside Obama. According to the Examiner,

Oxner is obviously trying to go after his opponent Alan Grayson, as well as President Obama, but does it cross the line into racism with its slave ship meme? Facebook thinks so; it has refused to run the ad.

The ad made a slim blog called Lightweight Racist, with a masthead I shan’t deconstruct. Not much to see other than the name of the blog. Also, We Are Respectable Negroes has enough lit-crit afoot to excite Jeff Goldstein. A taste:

Is race an element here? I am not sure. This anti-Obama campaign commercial could be one more example of the “benign” myopia that is common to the white racial frame (“how could anyone be offended by a boat, an allusion to slavery, and a black captain whipping his crew? How shocking!). Alternatively, the racial ideologies at work here could be more sinister, as any reference to “white slavery” has historically done potent political work from the Revolutionary War to the present (with the Tea Party faithful using that very same phrase to oppose the Obama administration and play on white racial resentment and anxiety).

WARN and its ilk have been a chorus of crickets since military veteran Brian K. Hill used the same basic ad. Hill, of course, is running for Senate in Connecticut. Oh yeah, and he’s. . .black.

It is, of course, written in the Gospel According to Marx that every single white male utterance is awash in raaaaacist concupiscence. This has been socially constructed Truth since the first Noble Savage, Adam, was ejected from #OccupyEden on the Mother Continent. Of course, Adam slapped fetters on the first human with relatively more skin pigment he saw, and became the Original, Evil Raaaaacist. Adam’s sin was passed down on the Y-chromosome to all modern male conservatives of European extraction. Leftists, of course, have said enough Hail Alinskys to absolve themselves of Adam’s crime.

With that introduction, you may find the following chats with Hill and Oxner at CPAC12 of interest.
Brian K. Hill is an impressive American and worthy political candidate, in my estimation, given a 7-minute exchange:

Mark Oxner talks about the blowback against the Turn This Ship Around ad. I had slight confusion as to whether Mark had been the producer of the video, or was in fact the candidate:

On a personal note, it is a privilege to have been blessed with the resources and location to go to CPAC and meet Americans who are turning this ship around. Knowing the situation, I can tell you to stand by for ‘high winds and heavy seas while the ship is coming about’. Watching these clips, I wonder if I’ll ever evolve into much of an interviewer. But the real battle is showing up, and putting forth the effort.


Brian K. Hill for Senate


Mark Oxner for Congress