Sitting on the couch, watching the Democratic National Convention, my wife and
I pondered the question,
"How long until the Tone Police show up?" Because it's never a
question of "If". Always "How long" and
"How many" and "What venue", but never "If".
You know the Tone Police, right?
3...2...1...
The tone police They live on cable teevee The tone police They're
paid to shush and decree...
As it turned out, The Boston Globe was first out of the gate:
Democrats try to highlight joy at their convention, but some can’t hide
their contempt for Trump
By Jim Puzzanghera Globe Staff
Which makes me wonder, is "Jim Puzzanghera" Michael Smerconish's burner
name?
Back to the Globe:
CHICAGO —
Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats say they are running a
campaign of joy, one that her running mate, Tim Walz, has declared is “not
about mocking ... not about name-callings.”
But when it comes to former president Donald Trump, some of the speakers
at this week’s Democratic National Convention apparently did not get the
memo. Instead, at times they’ve let their unbridled contempt for Trump
shade some of their rhetorical sunshine, and those flares of harsh tones
threaten to undercut the positive tone the party has projected since
Harris became the nominee.
The Republican presidential nominee has been described from the stage as,
among other things, “a career criminal,” “two-bit union-buster,” “one
petty selfish man,” “a fraud, a philanderer, and a felon,” and “a
five-time, draft-dodging coward.”...
Wait for the punchline.
Wait for it...
And while harsh in tone, the underpinnings of many of the Democratic
convention attacks on Trump have been truthful, such as calling him a
felon after he was convicted in May of 34 felony counts of falsifying
business records in his New York hush-money trial.
Democrats nonetheless have taken those factual points and spun them
further into insults this week.
The tone police They're coming to denounce me Oh no...
When you're America's most venerable* journal of White Supremacy (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce) and you're
once again caught flat-footed on the wrong side of history, there's only one
thing to do.
Nothing to see here; just the National Review criticizing dissents by
Justices Sotomayor and Jackson for their “shrill tones” and “shrillness.”
pic.twitter.com/7scgXVexBd
From Jonah Goldberg, David French and Ann Coulter to Dinesh D'Souza,
Noah Rothman and Kathryn Jean Lopez, the National Review has been the
whelping box for more poisonous ideas and noxious media creatures that were then portaged over into the mainstream media than any other single Patient Zero of the
Conservative mind virus.
By all rights, they should have been put out of business long ago, forced to
pay off their creditors like some weirdo pillow guy: by auctioning off their fax machines, Rich Lowry's Palin-era, jizz-stained
bow tie collection and Kathryn Jean Lopez's reliquary of dubious
Catholic artifacts.
But of course, as elite, front-of-the-line Wingnut Welfare Queen, the
National Review doesn't have to worry about such grubby, proletarian
concerns. From
Wikipedia:
As with most political opinion magazines in the United States, National
Review carries little corporate advertising. The magazine stays afloat
from subscription fees, donations, and black-tie fundraisers around the
country. The magazine also sponsors cruises featuring National Review
editors and contributors as lecturers.
[William] Buckley said in 2005 that the magazine had lost about
$25,000,000 over 50 years.
Let me state for the record that, as an extremely cost-effective Liberal
blogger and podcaster, I'd be willing to lose half that amount, twice as
fast...for America!
I Am The Liberal Media
And FYI, this is how you use venerable* in a sentence, Marj.
“Venerable”
ven·er·a·ble
adjective
1accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age, wisdom, or character."a venerable statesman"
Rather that writing my 700th or so (no kidding) Sunday Morning Comin'
Down column detailing the weekly crimes committed against journalism and
democracy by the Sunday Shows, today let us speak for a minute or two about
why you and I and everyone we know already knew what this weekend's Sunday
offerings would be and why. Because the Sunday Shows are nothing
but a flatboat that sails down the wide, polluted river of American
political punditry every week, always bearing its load of hackneyed opinions
with the current and never against it.
So, if during the preceding week you had been monitoring the strength and
direction of that wide, toxic sludgeflow, you would have known that the
American political punditocracy was not troubled by the now-out-and-proud
racism of the GOP or the fanatical obstructionism of the GOP or the fact that
the GOP has turned their base into Freedumb's own plague rats in order to
extend the pandemic and kneecap the Biden administration or the GOP's ongoing,
coordinated, nationwide campaign to finally rid themselves American democracy
once and for all.
None of that fazed them, because they don't live in the same country that you
and I do. They are Plato's Stepchildren -- powerful beings whose power
comes from the lovely walled garden in which they all live and where they
speak only to one another:
And thanks to the power that walled garden grants and the protection it
provides they can safely revert to the full-on "Why is Obama being so
divisive?" and "Why won't Obama lead?" mode on which they coasted for eight,
lazy years.
But of course, now it's Biden who is failing because he refuses to use the
magic Green Lantern powers which all Democratic president secretly possess but
refuse to use
And right down the line, the same old goof sang the same old song.
Peggy Noonan:
Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point
He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the
rest of the country against him.
Then Brooks advances the Beltway pundit party line using one of the many, many
platforms where he is a revered Elder Pundit:
...to which
@nytdavidbrooks
replies "I do think rhetoric like comparing Republicans to Bull Connor
& Jefferson Davis is not helpful. It's not 1861 anymore. I even think
the trope he has that, 'well, the Georgia law is Jim Crow 2 is also not
helpful.'https://t.co/1o40bmB0tM
A.B. Stoddard and Ben Parker join the group to discuss
Biden's kamikaze voting rights push and Putin's threats to Ukraine.
And Charlie Sykes and David French:
Here we find noted Twitter Quitter and NYT bridge troll Bret Stephens opining
in the The New York Times' long-overdue-for-the-scrap-heap
"Conversations" column.
In this weekly feature, Times' senior Beltway Conservative hack
tosses out Beltway Conservative talking points, and Gail Collins waves her
hand coquettishly and titters "Oh, g'wan you".
Bret: It’s another depressing sign of Team Biden’s political
incompetence. How did they think it was a good idea for the president to go
to Georgia to give his blistering speech on voting rights without first
checking with Kyrsten Sinema that she’d be willing to modify the filibuster
in order to have a chance of passing the bill? And then there was the speech
itself, which struck me as … misjudged. Your thoughts?
...
Bret: I meant Biden’s suggestion that anyone who disagreed with him
was on the side of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and Bull Connor. The
increasingly casual habit of calling people racist when they disagree with a
policy position is the stuff I’ve come to expect from Twitter, not a
president who bills himself as a unifier. And again, it’s political
malpractice, at least if the aim is to do more than just sound off to
impress the progressive base.
...
Gail: Well we are in total agreement about the Electoral Count Act of
1887. Back to Kyrsten Sinema for a minute — nothing is going to induce her
to do anything that would threaten the filibuster, also known as the Rule
That Makes Senator Sinema Marginally Relevant.
Bret: You won’t be surprised to learn that I like the newest Arizona
maverick more and more...
No surprise that Chuck Todd lined right up to speak the holy words (via Brother Charlie Pierce):
Confronted by the monster’s indulging in its rage, which it builds within itself by repeatedly declaring itself unloved, much of the elite political press hides behind politesse for which the monster has no respect anyway. Chuck Todd tweeted out a lament that the president hasn’t been able to cobble together a coalition with Republicans to pass voting-rights legislation, instead of noting that voting rights have no constituency within the Republican Party anymore. The monster has devoured it.
One of the punditocracy's more unflushable turds of nepotistic smarm -- Matthew Continetti -- was apparently been paroled from Trump-supporter jail long enough to bob to the surface of Chuck Todd's Meet the Press Panel and smirk some advice about how Joe Biden needs to get much more Centristy hurryupquick, while Andre Mitchell cried bitter tears over Joe Biden using impolite language to describe the behavior of Republican monsters.
And speaking of Meet the Press ...
... just last night I happened to catch David Gregory's Ghost of Meet the
Press Past act on CNN where he demonstrated that he can still shake his
huge, simian noggin and tsk-tsk Democrats for their "divisive" tone just as
well as he could back in his glory days (h/t Crooks & Liars):
ERIN BURNETT: So let me ask you one other point because you know the
majority whip James Clyburn today said there are more than two Democratic
senators who would oppose changing the filibuster. The others oppose it but
haven't been -- had to take the heat for it. And then, but the two
that oppose it, it's Manchin and Sinema and the one who takes the heat for
it and the anger and the ire and the personal diatribes is Sinema. Why do
you think that is?
DAVID GREGORY: I don't know. I mean, you know, misogyny, for one. She is a
woman. Sexism. But I think there is -- I mean, I think any Democrat who is
getting in the way of this is -- is focusing -- men and women -- are getting
the ire of progressive Democrats. I don't think that they were -- were
prepared for the fact, um, that, you know, they just didn't have the
momentum behind this to bring this forward. Look. I think the --
first of all, I thought the president overdid this speech. It was way
overcooked. Basically, saying you are either for this or you are a
racist, which I don't think was a bridge-building effort.
I think the President and the White House made a decision. They knew they
didn't have the votes, they were going to go for the argument, whip up the
base and I think that's what they felt they could do at this point but the
reality is Democrats are taking a hard look at this. There is not enough
support to do it.
Because this isn't a bridge-building exercise you log.
Because as I wrote in September of 2016, right now we're marching towards the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
And since you cannot, cannot, cannot be on both sides of that conflict, this was a demand that each member of the senate look history and their
constituents in the eye and declare which side of that bridge they are on:
