I had real life diverting me this last weekend prepping for renovating the master bathroom, which has involved emptying out all contents and decorative elements, bashing away at the tile tub surround, scraping paint off the concrete floor and starting removal of the cheap and nasty popcorn ceiling texture, among other chores. So, the Covington Kerfuffle erupting over Saturday evening and Sunday morning initially earned one of those “meh” reactions: another pearl-clutching media reaction over something simple and stupid, if not actually fraudulent. I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and too damn many of these racially-charged events, or those involving Trump and MAGA hats have usually turned out to be manufactured from nuts and bolts of trivia if not an outright hoax. So IAW (in accordance with) sensible practice, I deferred any interest, personal reaction or comment for at least 48 hours. The first reports about anything are usually wrong, misleading, inaccurate; SOMETHING has happened, and it usually takes at least that long for reporters to put out the fire in their hair and come up with some sensible reportage. Such was, I assumed (over considerable evidence to the contrary, gleaned through sad experience over the years) the common practice also among the more responsible news-gathering organizations. It seems that I am doomed to disappointment again, on this front.
Instead … instead… the resulting dumpster fire. No not just a dumpster fire; this is a dumpster fire out in back of a chemical factory/refinery/nuclear reactor, going with the heat of a thousand burning suns. The orgiastic editorial and social media hate is like that of Orwell’s daily Two Minute Hate, only dialed up to last for … this is mid-week after a holiday weekend and it seems to still be going strong. The madness of the Twitterati, the sheer vengeful hate is stomach-churning. These high-school aged kids, who proved to be rather good-tempered under the stress of a full-frontal exposure to raving political insanity (a quality held against them by the celebrity Twitterati and leftoid media generally), are now to be doxed, along with their families, condemned and persecuted, yea, even to their college prospects, fed into wood chippers, shamed even unto every generation … and threatened with every kind of atrocity, for the supposed crime of being there on a field trip to Washington DC for the March for Life, and inadvertently becoming a target for a bunch of insane racists and a professional activist/confrontational a**hole? I don’t much care that the most egregious media perpetuators of the slander over the weekend have walked it back. You said the words, you stand behind them, or apologize abjectly for hastily-judging as Scott Adams did, to his credit.
That’s the awful part, really. These are kids almost adults, most of them. Their school administration, the town administration and the local diocese leapt into the fray on a hair-trigger and censored them on the basis of a fragmentary media report and a severely edited video. I presume that these various parties will walk back their various mealy-mouthed condemnatory statements upon mature reconsideration.
Where will the rest of this go, and the fallout fall? Your thoughts? My immediate reaction is that now the kids their families and their community in Covington if they weren’t before this weekend life-long conservatives, they are now. Since about everyone else has done so, we all might as well join them with our own insights.
Two things.
One, I heard a Kentucky radio guy today say that one of the chaperones told him the kids did not buy the MAGA hats. Somebody gave them to them. That suggests to me that this was a setup from the start. The “Indian” is not a “tribal elder” unless they count DC homeless in the tribe. He and his “partner” landed there 6 years ago, according to an account I read yesterday, when “their car broke down.” They have been living in a shack and then a basement
Two, this should be a huge libel suit, especially with some of the media doubling down in spite of legal warnings. Melania Trump won $2.9 million but that was in Britain, which has tougher libel laws. Those kids were anonymous and efforts to get the parents fired sounds like serious damages.
If Trump wins, the leftist frustration and insanity is going to be off the charts, and crazy dangerous.
If Trump loses, the leftist revenge-taking against anyone and anything GOP and/or conservative is going to be off the charts, and crazy dangerous.
When I used to be on Facebook, I was a broken record, always saying “wait and see, we don’t have all the information yet.”
People don’t want to wait and see. They want to be outraged. It gives them a nice little adrenaline jolt that feels good.
If Trump wins, the leftist frustration and insanity is going to be off the charts, and crazy dangerous.
If Trump loses, the leftist revenge-taking against anyone and anything GOP and/or conservative is going to be off the charts, and crazy dangerous.
Resume (with apologies to Dorothy Parker… my memory might AHEM not be accurate….)
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well win.
Heck, I always called this the 7-Day Rule.
And I’ve worked in news media for the last 25 years expecting “better” from those “who should know better.”
Now it looks as if it will drag out for years in court. Imagine what a Hawaiian judge could do with this.
The Left always needs somebody to hate. Who is hated varies from time to time, but it is always somebody.
The Love Train always skips a station somewhere along the line.
Since November 2016, if not before, nothing anyone can do or say has had any impact on snuffle-grunting Ratski thugs.
As Trump’s Year Two shades to Election 2020, the crashing asininity of Rats’ bi-coastal Identity Ticket (black, female?) will incite self-defeating spasms unlike anything since 1858.
To our mind, the only question is: Will First Bull Run (or First Manassas) redux play out in the streets or Congress’ green-slime K Street halls? In 2016, the Electoral Vote of 304 : 227 went hand-in-hand with a legitimate (non ballot-stuffed) popular tally of 63-to-58 million (33.9 and 8.6%, respectively). However much Rat guttersnipes may bleat-and-squeak, odds are that 2020 will improve both margins.
… bashing away at the tile tub surround…
Satisfying work. A couple of years ago I had to bash away a cast iron tub. Noisy, took a couple of hours, but also satisfying. Bashing is therapeutic.
What brain-dead architect (but I repeat myself; Howard Roarke is fictional) would put a popcorn ceiling in a humid bathroom? Disgusting.
The Left always needs somebody to hate. Who is hated varies from time to time, but it is always somebody.
Our world looks more and more like Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) book.
I remodeled a bathroom myself about 20 years ago and did the same with a cast iron tub. I also remodeled a kitchen. Both were when I was much younger.
My Tucson house had popcorn ceilings when we bought it. We had the ceilings done and the interior painted before we moved in. I can’t remember about the bathrooms but I doubt they were there,
I have to admit I called this one, sadly, from the start. I saw the original snippet on the NBC nightly news (I know, but it comes on after the local news and I just left it on this day) and immediately said to my wife “either taken out of context, or a set up of some sort”. Correct on both, it seems.
Several internet commentators drew a comparison between the lunatics demanding violence against young Nick Sandman based on his smirk, and Orwell’s notion of facecrime
Slight quibble. A dumpster fire at a nuclear power plant has almost no potential for catastrophe.
These kids are in high school getting ready for college as are all the Covington Catholic students who weren’t there. Admissions offices, being deeply entrenched in PC, will look askance at any application from Covington Catholic. I hope Covington Catholic can work out some type of joint registration with a Cincinnati Catholic high school so that these kids can produce a transcript without the Covington Catholic taint. Moeller comes to mind. They know tough.
Admissions offices, being deeply entrenched in PC, will look askance at any application from Covington Catholic.
I doubt Hillsdale will. With the proceeds of the libel suits, they should have no trouble with the tuition .
Life is inherently unfair. About 100 years ago, those Covington Catholic students — young men, really — could have been conscripted and ordered to march into the fire of German machine guns. (Because their uncreative generals knew that eventually the German machine guns would overheat or run out of ammunition) … the young men’s lives snuffed out in an instant for no good reason.
Today, those young men who have been Libeled by Leftists still have their lives and their capabilities. That is positive! Perhaps those young men will indeed have their applications to a Sink of Stinking Political Correctness (aka, a university) rejected. That would be called — “dodging a bullet”! The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Still no recognition of the spate of anti-Christian, anti=Catholic “news”, from Mrs. Pence teaching in a Christian School (how dare she!!), to this with the well-behaved kids. the notorious RBJ must be sicker than we are given to understand and the battlespace is being prepared for the Amy Barret nomination. Religious test for judges any minute now! Maybe the Democrats hope that they can get the smear over so that the Catholics among their supporters will forget like the Jews that they are way down on the intersectional value chart before the 2020 election.
“the notorious RBJ must be sicker than we are given to understand”
One wonders how long it will take for someone in the MSM to state that we don’t really have any reason to believe she is even still alive.
To Scott Adams an apology is something you keep in your mouth. In the the days subsequent to his so-called apology he has said that this17-year-old boy has no right to an opinion, that is, to tell other people how to live, that their parents should not have allowed them to wear mega hats, and that as a male he has no right to talk about abortion. When someone mentioned That pesky old first amendment he responded by shrieking that as a result of our brilliant argument he was convinced that toddlers should be allowed to vote. It’s all up on his podcast.
Scott Adams is strongly anti-religion, which probably results in his very poor judgement in this case.
I made the mistake of reading his books “God’s Debris” and “The Religion War”. Very disappointing — but they do show a strange hole in Mr. Adams worldview. Enjoy Dilbert, but otherwise don’t pay much attention to Mr. Adams.
I would lay a very large sum of money on a bet that Scott Adams is somewhere on the autistic scale, and that’s a huge part of his issue with religion.
I’m tolerant of his views, recognizing that he himself isn’t quite “right”, and that he’s not entirely culpable for his views on religion. He’s a smart guy, but it’s a brittle kind of smart that is good only for a limited range of things. Within his limits, he’s brilliant; outside them? Not so much.
And, this is illustrative of the problem of intelligence: Not every “smart” person is smart at everything. Some people are incredibly smart in one aspect, but dumb as rocks in others. I don’t think I’ve ever met a truly all-round intelligence, in my entire life. Every supposed “genius” I’ve ever been introduced to had severe gaps in their intelligence. My very favorite one was a girl who had a MENSA-verified IQ somewhere around 150, who seemed intelligent enough–Right up until she started telling me about the evils of vaccines and the benefits of healing crystals…
Adams kind of reminds me of her; I listen to him because he’s intelligent in some ways that are valuable and which help to understand aspects of life, but in others…? The man ain’t all that bright.jk
We’re all flawed; you can be bone-stupid about a lot of things, and brilliant at some others, and if you reject the brilliance because the source is stupid about something else, well… You’re not very wise, either. You have to develop the insight to figure out what is dross, and what is gold.
I wrote a song parody of America’s “Sandman” – anyone got Paul Shanklin on speed dial?
—
Ain’t it sunny outside
All the high school kids abound
Bus not yet curbside
Let’s go stand and wait around
Funny, I was there
And you were nowhere near
What went down was not what you did hear
Cause I understand you bought the story from the man
Who faced down the kid called the Sandmann
He told the lie that caught the media eye
And brought a wave of misunderstaindin’
Ain’t the hours gone by fast
Other video was witnessed
Will the press now ask
Why his tale was inconsistent?
Funny, I was there
And you weren’t nowhere near
What went down was not what you did hear
Cause I understand you bought the story from the man
Who faced down the kid called the Sandmann
He told the lie that caught the media eye
And brought a wave of misunderstaindin’
Covington Catholic Minute of Hate has become a existential defining moment on Political Right versus Left in 2018 that the San Bernadino Muslim Terrorism shooting was for Jacksonian Americans in 2016 for dealing with institutional political correctness.
It’s something that will get you or your loved ones killed or injured, that you are powerless to stop, without Trump as President.
What is interesting here is less what was said than that the virtue signaling sob sister RINO’s at National Review are saying this:
>>”Conservative parents look at liberal hate and think, “They could do that to my son.””
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/covington-catholic-is-the-terrible-sequel-to-the-kavanaugh-case/
The proper response here by the Covington Catholic group is to sue everyone in sight on Twitter and in the media for liable and make 10,000 Leftists have to spend $5000 on legal filings in federal court.
This won’t stop the Soros crowd, but making a lot of Leftist social media orbiters in the MSM and Leftist SJW activism pay that straight out of their house hold accounts will put a real break on the Twitter outrage machine.
What I find interesting here is the MSM’s unwillingness to stop digging regards the Covington Catholic Minute of Hate.
The video message from this interview that the MSM think they are sending is not the one being received —
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/319577/
Not only civil suits for libel, but there are criminal charges for those in reach of Kentucky authorities.
At the bottom of it all, I am just boggled – all over again – that this whole thing was so simple to research. Nathan Phillips is a serial and malignant fantasist, NOT a Vietnam veteran; barely scraping in as a Vietnam-era veteran … and the Covington boys seem to have been actually rather good-natured and civil about the imbroglio which they blundered into. And yet, to our Establishment News Media – the next thing to Hitler Youth?
Do the Establishment Media Horde and their allies in the entertainment world really see how how making these kids and their school the focus of their 2 Minute Hate makes themselves look completely vicious, deranged, hateful? Do they have any care for their public image at all? It would appear, on this showing … not.
I think the Democrats had better get some policy proposals out before November 2020 or we could see a McGovern blowout.
What if China does a deal ? Then NK does a deal ? Then Venezuela settles down and starts to rebuild?
I know a lot of Democrats are delusional but Mueller is going to have nothing. Pencil Neck Shiff will spend a year blustering but what then?
Common popular delusions and the madness of crowds is real but eventually the guy ate the tulip bulb with the family life savings and the bubble popped.
“At the bottom of it all, I am just boggled – all over again – that this whole thing was so simple to research. Nathan Phillips is a serial and malignant fantasist, NOT a Vietnam veteran; barely scraping in as a Vietnam-era veteran ”¦ and the Covington boys seem to have been actually rather good-natured and civil…”
They’re not interested in research, only in propaganda. They know they cannot fool everyone, but they hope to fool enough to advance their program to demonize everyone who opposes the far left and make us into unpersons who deserve whatever harm the left may demand. After all, not even the Constitution means anything if enough citizens can be indoctrinated to prefer totalitarianism and to believe that those who prefer freedom are literally Nazis.
Regarding “research”, one of my personal favorite juxtapositions is Joe the Plumber and whoever is the current target of leftist hatred: Obama came to Joe’s neighborhood and Joe asked him a challenging question about his campaign positions. For this the press embarked on a nonstop investigation of Joe’s background. In contrast, Nathan Phillips, aka Nathaniel R. Stanard before he got a less-than-honorable military discharge, has repeatedly told his lies to the press and not one “journalist” thought it worthwhile to check out his claims.
The Left always needs somebody to hate.
Because without an enemy there is no justification for the totalitarian program.
In the future everyone will be Emmanuel Goldstein for 2 minutes.
These high-school aged kids, who proved to be rather good-tempered under the stress of a full-frontal exposure to raving political insanity…are now to be doxed…persecuted…threatened with every kind of atrocity…
Is there any remaining doubt that many on the left would gladly serve as guards in a new gulag archipelago?
Oops, that last one was me.
Read two sets of essays today.
First set continued maintaining the Covington boys personified evil. Even attempted to call to task those who had issued some sort of retraction.
Second set waxed eloquent regarding Pelosi’s skill, her controlling the Donks, her besting Trump, claiming she had no reason to cave, that the pressure on the ‘Phants exceeded by far that on the Donks.
I think I’ll try to calm myself by invoking/extending Sgt Mom’s 48 hr rule.
“Read two sets of essays today….”
Let’s see if this image posts correctly:
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Dang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks