A Nod To The Gods

Being a frugal old man, I’ve taken to doing my grocery shopping at Walmart.  I used to grocery shop at Target, but since they decided to take sides in thekulturkampf, I no longer favor them with my business – seems the least I could do.  But, I gotta tell you – sometimes Walmart is just too much of a blast of 21st Century America, right in the face:  an endless collection of fat, tattooed women with gangs of loud, hyper children, pulling overloaded grocery carts toward the checkout.  Other than me, I’m absolutely sure no one in the store is paying for their own groceries.  Critical, disapproving old white man that I am, I’m always wondering “how many different fathers spawned that brood?”  And “why do you have children you can’t afford to feed?”  And “don’t you have any self-respect?”  And “have you ever held a job?”  Never before, in the history of the world, have there been so many fat, poor people.  Never before, in the history of the world, have there been so many fat, poor people talking on cell phones they don’t pay for.

I grew up in pre-ironic, pre-racial healing America, in the 1950s, in the western suburbs of Minneapolis.  It was a high-trust, wonderful place to live – shopping centers, golf courses and the sound of sprinklers.  Women stayed home, by and large, and raised the family – dads worked.  Kids were everywhere and no one wore a bike helmet.  Ike was in the White House.  The sky was blue.  It was fabulous.  I went to a high school with 2500 other kids.  The school had a principal, two assistant principals, a nurse and three ladies who worked in the office – no metal detectors, no cops, no trouble to speak of.  I’m not even sure the principal had a four-year degree.  If he did, it was from some cow-college in North Dakota.  We laughed at him (behind his back) because his first name was Milo.  But Milo certainly wasn’t confused about what his job was.  School was orderly and fun.  Everyone got a decent education in the basics (and then some) and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.  Teachers were not called educators.  Lunch was 30 cents.

           And then my generation took over.           Here…

Politicians and the media is milking the “Fake News” narrative for as much juice as they can squeeze. Still in denial to the fact that it wasn’t “fake news” that won the election, it was the candidates they ran. Yet they still insist that a poorly educated gullible class of white people fell for all of this supposed fake information.
I don’t know what’s more insulting, the fact the liberal elites and their media really believe this, or they think they can trick their own minions into believing it.

“There are also serious problems with the evidence BuzzFeed presents. As Timothy Carney points out at the Washington Examiner, the “real news” that Silverman uses for comparison are, in many cases, opinion pieces from liberal columnists. The top “real” stories — which BuzzFeed presented in a graphic to compare against the top “fake” stories — consist of four anti-Trump opinion pieces and a racy exposé of Melania Trump’s nude modeling from two decades ago.

That didn’t stop others in the media from making the leap from bad analysis to causal connections with absolutely no evidence in support of it. The New York Times began running news stories on the pernicious influence of “fake news,” and even President Obama used it as an opportunity to lecture about the dangers it presents to democracy.”

“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not,” Obama intoned from Berlin, “and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”    Keep Reading…

No longer. The Trump presidency spells the end of days when legacy media could maliciously trash conservatives and Republicans with impunity. Trump is neither psychologically inclined to play nicely with the media, nor does he have any strategic reason to do so. Bashing them relentlessly while ignoring their petulant demands won him the White House. Why would he do anything differently going forward?

The howling, teeth-gnashing horde of media partisans will attempt to cast Trump’s push-back against their fraudulent coverage as a danger to a free and open democracy (republic). But they won’t get away with it. Because people have figured out that having no professional media, while not optimal, is still better than living under one that consistently bullies and smears one side while burying anything that might undermine the ideology it favors.    here….

“Trump is certainly a flawed vessel. Indeed, Peggy Noonan wrote an entire column bemoaning what Trump might have been had he only been sane. But the obvious answer is that a “sane Trump” would never have decided to mount a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by demolishing the weaselly evasive bipartisan consensus on illegal immigration and much else – and then playing smash-mouth with the media in a way no “sane” “respectable” linguini-spined GOP nominee would ever contemplate. In that sense, a “sane Trump” would not be Trump.”

— Mark Steyn