Becoming the bogeyman
As of this writing, the malicious and mendacious MSNBC proposes that the America-first president of the United States Donald J. Trump has been a "Russian asset since 1987", never mind that when they're not fantasizing of Trump as the agent of an alien and hostile foreign power, they're damning him for his militant American nationalism.
For half a century and more after the Red Scare and its McCarthyism and House Committee on Un-American Activities, it was a theme of the Left and the Democrat Party, and of the press and popular culture, that the Red Scare was as black a chapter as any in history of the republic, so if any leftist after 2016 cries "McCarthyism" then may lightning strike him, because it is the Left who have revived McCarthyism for the first time since the man himself, or more precisely they've become their caricature of Eugene McCarthy. The Russian agents and American conspirators, the wiretaps and transcripts, the Congressional committee hearings and witch trials of decent men, the guilt-by-association and the ascription of nefarious motives to innocuous words and deeds, and the hysteria, the hyperbole and hyperventilation, with its disregard for evidence and for common sense -- to the minutest particular the Left and the Democrat Party have reproduced their caricature of the Red Scare.
Any remark bearing on Russia which is not a calling-down of fire-and-brimstone on Russia, any fleeting dealing with persons from Russia or some lesser Eastern European nation in the vicinity of Russia, even an appearance in the same room with a Russian, among a hundred others, may be isolated and elevated by the Democrats and the press as still more proof of some arachnidan conspiracy for the Russian subversion of American democracy. Never mind that until not so long ago it was a theme of the Democrat Party that any troubles with Putin or Russia under Putin were down to that "cowboy" Bush, and never mind that for a century since the Russian Revolution the Left had defended and excused Russia, re-casting one of the most monstrous regimes of the 20th Century as a superior system where "the little guy gets a hand up" and other such sick-making ignorance. A century was obliterated in an evening, that evening of November 8, 2016 -- the great, psyche-rending trauma of every leftist -- and in their desperation first to deny it and then to "make it go away", the Left have become their bogeyman, the paranoiac imagining Russians "under every bed".
At the same time the Left extraordinarily have converted to cheerleaders for a bogeyman of theirs from the decade after the Red Scare, that bogeyman of the Deep State. "Deep State" is a neologism for a notion which by the late 1960s had seized the Left, of powerful and anonymous forces in the shadows of America's secret services, abusing their extraordinary powers and hiding behind their secrecy to influence events and veto elections. For going on a half-century since the '70s the leftist fantasy of a Deep State subverting democracy had been a fixture of Hollywood movies, but found only in fiction; then with the nomination of Donald J. Trump as Republican candidate for 45th president of the United States, the leftist fantasy was realized, only it turned out, the Deep State weren't conservative much less Republican, and so far from America-firsters, it was the America-first candidate for president they meant to sabotage. So when in 2018 it came out that the FBI had planted a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, the Left and the Democrats answered, "God bless the FBI and CIA," or rather they would've answered "God bless" except that the Left and Democrats in the 21st Century have decided that God is dead.
Then there's Watergate. In the election year of 1972 a couple Republican "plumbers" burgled some campaign paperwork from the Democrat headquarters at the Watergate Hotel; President Nixon was oblivious to the burglary and certainly he never ordered the caper, but by the time he swore publicly that he knew nothing of the business at the Watergate, he had been apprised of it. The investigations commenced, and in the end some of Nixon's administration landed in jail and Nixon himself resigned the presidency, after a deputation of Congressional Republicans made it known to him that they meant to vote with the Democrats for impeachment. I hasten to add, the Democrat nominee for president in '72 lost by 49 states to one, and the most extravagant indictment of Nixon doesn't propose that the burgled paperwork altered the vote.
For four decades since, the Left had preened about Watergate, the insufferable press and popular culture at least as much as the Democrat Party, until in the election year of 2016 the Democrat administration and the Democrat campaign for president played Watergate, and to the nth degree. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee commissioned a "dossier" from a dodgy outfit run by a Trump-hating ex-British-spy: seven figures for a packet of perfect lies about Trump and Russia. The campaign first peddled their costly dossier to the press, and then kicked it up to the Obama administration, who presented it to a FISA court, knowing it was the doing of Clinton and the DNC but not letting on about that to the judge. The judge signed off on the surveillance of a Republican campaign for president by a Democrat administration, on the strength of million-dollar lies commissioned by the Democrat campaign and Democrat committee, and so began the Obama administration's spying on the Trump campaign. That spying was extended well beyond Election Day, even, and is known as of this writing to have been attended by the planting of a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, reporting to Obama's rotten FBI; the "unmasking" of figures associated with Trump who were swept up in the surveillance but on whom there were no surveillance warrants; to say nothing of Obama's extraordinary, eleventh-hour executive order, enacted only days before he walked out of the White House for the last time, multiplying from three agencies to 17 the Deep State eyes on the unwarranted surveillance of figures associated with Trump.
(At the risk of whining, it must be said, had the spying administration been Republican and the spied-on campaign Democrat, the story would be the biggest since the Hiroshima bomb and it'd be years before the heads ceased rolling.)
And the Left in this first half of the first term of President Trump have become their bogeyman also in the way of what leftists before this time might've derided as the "sex police", namely the effort tagged "#MeToo". Sometime in the 1990s the Democrats and those arms of the Democrat Party called the press and popular culture set to instructing the nation in their New Morality: the president of the United States, so long as he was a Democrat, must be pardoned for fooling around with the help, and for lying about it to the country and to a court, and for coaching others to give fraudulent testimony in his defense, and for denying the court its subpoenaed evidence, on the grounds that "It's about sex." Allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault, even -- outright rape -- were to be dismissed contemptuously, and accusers were to be ruined, cast as vile creatures and taunted as trash and dogs. That was the Democrat angle, and it saved their lame-duck president, although they would lose the next four election cycles, '98 through '04.
Then one day in the fall of 2017, a story appeared in The Washington Post, the Post by then having been redirected under its new ownership from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The Washington Post had bought dirt on the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the Alabama special election that December 12, and they ran that dirt after the Republican nomination was settled and the ballot was set by state law. Because Alabama wouldn't elect a Democrat senator unless no Republican was on offer, The Washington Post arranged for effectively that: Alabama was presented with the choice of Republican or Democrat, only the Republican was effectively disqualified. The Democrats appreciated that if they accepted that an election for U.S. Senate may be decided by sexual allegations from 40 and 50 years prior, in too many instances believable but without evidence or corroboration, then they'd snatch a seat in the U.S. Senate which they had no business occupying and reduce the Republican majority for at least a year to an unworkable 51. So in an instant, and after decades of instructing America in their New Morality, the Democrat Party and the press and the popular culture traded their doctrine that what's "about sex" may not be considered in politics and government, for their New New Morality whereby sex is to determine the balance of the United States Senate.
The Democrats snatched that seat which could not possibly have gone Democrat had the vote been a question of policy and principle, and there followed a Noah's Flood of accusers of public figures high and low, termed aptly "#MeToo", their accusations having been dismissed until that time as "about sex". Which brings us to "Stormy Daniels": the less said the better about her erstwhile employment, but what may be said is that her very name is fiction, "Stormy" and "Daniels" both; she and her lawyer may be the rankest opportunists of the age; she swore in a signed statement that the relationship she swears to in television interviews never happened; and more than that, her unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claims are no grander than that Trump cheated on his wife briefly in '06, when incidentally he was a private citizen and a registered Democrat at every opportunity damning Bush and the Iraq effort. But "Stormy Daniels" under this New New Morality is elevated to household name and heroine, and her claims elevated somehow to high crimes and misdemeanors, assuring that Trump "won't finish his term." I retired from gambling after winning $5 on a bet in high school, on the principle of quitting while I'm ahead, but if I were to come out of retirement it would be to bet my ready funds that President Trump is quite safe in his White House from Stormy Daniels and her legal representation.
(And note that this takes as read those better-documented instances wherein the Left have become their bogeyman, e.g., the Left whose cry in time past was "free speech", long since appointed themselves speech police, then more recently they managed an effective prohibition on expressions of conservatism on America's college campuses, unto the point of violence and threats of violence, and just now they've gone one further, in Big Tech's blacklisting of conservatives; and of course the Left long ago became The Man, the "powers that be", to where it's a quicker job to enumerate the institutions of America that are not leftist and Democrat, because anymore there are only two to speak of, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces.)
Feminism without the feminine
Among the novelties of this debased century is the representation in advertising of women, as men who happen incidentally to have female reproductive organs. Women snarling into the camera, muscles developed and fists clenched, throwing jabs and hooks at the viewer like boxers in a ring smashing a human face into hamburger meat; or a severe woman with severe hair and a severe mug, squatting over a barbell with her fists at the ends of her muscular arms wrapped around the steel bar, on the point of dead-lifting her bodyweight; etc., etc. -- and the product in the former ad having nothing to do with boxing, like in the latter ad the product on offer had not a thing to do with weight training.
The debased feminism of this debased century does seem to me to be devolving into a repudiation of femininity, accepting masculinity as the standard for right and good. What is feminism in the 21st Century but the rejection of roles understood by every society in every age to be feminine, and the reductionist impulse of the Left is bound to render that as a repudiation of all things recognizably female. And so we're left with this unfeminine feminism whereby the worthy woman is a man, or worse yet a cartoon of a man, like some histrionic professional wrestler, musclebound and snarling and menacing the world, who happens incidentally to have female reproductive organs. The trouble in that for the feminist Left, beyond the more obvious point that it's madness, is that they'll find precious few takers for it among American womanhood, and outside the Western world they'll find no takers whatever.
As of this writing, the malicious and mendacious MSNBC proposes that the America-first president of the United States Donald J. Trump has been a "Russian asset since 1987", never mind that when they're not fantasizing of Trump as the agent of an alien and hostile foreign power, they're damning him for his militant American nationalism.
For half a century and more after the Red Scare and its McCarthyism and House Committee on Un-American Activities, it was a theme of the Left and the Democrat Party, and of the press and popular culture, that the Red Scare was as black a chapter as any in history of the republic, so if any leftist after 2016 cries "McCarthyism" then may lightning strike him, because it is the Left who have revived McCarthyism for the first time since the man himself, or more precisely they've become their caricature of Eugene McCarthy. The Russian agents and American conspirators, the wiretaps and transcripts, the Congressional committee hearings and witch trials of decent men, the guilt-by-association and the ascription of nefarious motives to innocuous words and deeds, and the hysteria, the hyperbole and hyperventilation, with its disregard for evidence and for common sense -- to the minutest particular the Left and the Democrat Party have reproduced their caricature of the Red Scare.
Any remark bearing on Russia which is not a calling-down of fire-and-brimstone on Russia, any fleeting dealing with persons from Russia or some lesser Eastern European nation in the vicinity of Russia, even an appearance in the same room with a Russian, among a hundred others, may be isolated and elevated by the Democrats and the press as still more proof of some arachnidan conspiracy for the Russian subversion of American democracy. Never mind that until not so long ago it was a theme of the Democrat Party that any troubles with Putin or Russia under Putin were down to that "cowboy" Bush, and never mind that for a century since the Russian Revolution the Left had defended and excused Russia, re-casting one of the most monstrous regimes of the 20th Century as a superior system where "the little guy gets a hand up" and other such sick-making ignorance. A century was obliterated in an evening, that evening of November 8, 2016 -- the great, psyche-rending trauma of every leftist -- and in their desperation first to deny it and then to "make it go away", the Left have become their bogeyman, the paranoiac imagining Russians "under every bed".
At the same time the Left extraordinarily have converted to cheerleaders for a bogeyman of theirs from the decade after the Red Scare, that bogeyman of the Deep State. "Deep State" is a neologism for a notion which by the late 1960s had seized the Left, of powerful and anonymous forces in the shadows of America's secret services, abusing their extraordinary powers and hiding behind their secrecy to influence events and veto elections. For going on a half-century since the '70s the leftist fantasy of a Deep State subverting democracy had been a fixture of Hollywood movies, but found only in fiction; then with the nomination of Donald J. Trump as Republican candidate for 45th president of the United States, the leftist fantasy was realized, only it turned out, the Deep State weren't conservative much less Republican, and so far from America-firsters, it was the America-first candidate for president they meant to sabotage. So when in 2018 it came out that the FBI had planted a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, the Left and the Democrats answered, "God bless the FBI and CIA," or rather they would've answered "God bless" except that the Left and Democrats in the 21st Century have decided that God is dead.
Then there's Watergate. In the election year of 1972 a couple Republican "plumbers" burgled some campaign paperwork from the Democrat headquarters at the Watergate Hotel; President Nixon was oblivious to the burglary and certainly he never ordered the caper, but by the time he swore publicly that he knew nothing of the business at the Watergate, he had been apprised of it. The investigations commenced, and in the end some of Nixon's administration landed in jail and Nixon himself resigned the presidency, after a deputation of Congressional Republicans made it known to him that they meant to vote with the Democrats for impeachment. I hasten to add, the Democrat nominee for president in '72 lost by 49 states to one, and the most extravagant indictment of Nixon doesn't propose that the burgled paperwork altered the vote.
For four decades since, the Left had preened about Watergate, the insufferable press and popular culture at least as much as the Democrat Party, until in the election year of 2016 the Democrat administration and the Democrat campaign for president played Watergate, and to the nth degree. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee commissioned a "dossier" from a dodgy outfit run by a Trump-hating ex-British-spy: seven figures for a packet of perfect lies about Trump and Russia. The campaign first peddled their costly dossier to the press, and then kicked it up to the Obama administration, who presented it to a FISA court, knowing it was the doing of Clinton and the DNC but not letting on about that to the judge. The judge signed off on the surveillance of a Republican campaign for president by a Democrat administration, on the strength of million-dollar lies commissioned by the Democrat campaign and Democrat committee, and so began the Obama administration's spying on the Trump campaign. That spying was extended well beyond Election Day, even, and is known as of this writing to have been attended by the planting of a "CIA asset" in the Trump campaign, reporting to Obama's rotten FBI; the "unmasking" of figures associated with Trump who were swept up in the surveillance but on whom there were no surveillance warrants; to say nothing of Obama's extraordinary, eleventh-hour executive order, enacted only days before he walked out of the White House for the last time, multiplying from three agencies to 17 the Deep State eyes on the unwarranted surveillance of figures associated with Trump.
(At the risk of whining, it must be said, had the spying administration been Republican and the spied-on campaign Democrat, the story would be the biggest since the Hiroshima bomb and it'd be years before the heads ceased rolling.)
And the Left in this first half of the first term of President Trump have become their bogeyman also in the way of what leftists before this time might've derided as the "sex police", namely the effort tagged "#MeToo". Sometime in the 1990s the Democrats and those arms of the Democrat Party called the press and popular culture set to instructing the nation in their New Morality: the president of the United States, so long as he was a Democrat, must be pardoned for fooling around with the help, and for lying about it to the country and to a court, and for coaching others to give fraudulent testimony in his defense, and for denying the court its subpoenaed evidence, on the grounds that "It's about sex." Allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault, even -- outright rape -- were to be dismissed contemptuously, and accusers were to be ruined, cast as vile creatures and taunted as trash and dogs. That was the Democrat angle, and it saved their lame-duck president, although they would lose the next four election cycles, '98 through '04.
Then one day in the fall of 2017, a story appeared in The Washington Post, the Post by then having been redirected under its new ownership from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The Washington Post had bought dirt on the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the Alabama special election that December 12, and they ran that dirt after the Republican nomination was settled and the ballot was set by state law. Because Alabama wouldn't elect a Democrat senator unless no Republican was on offer, The Washington Post arranged for effectively that: Alabama was presented with the choice of Republican or Democrat, only the Republican was effectively disqualified. The Democrats appreciated that if they accepted that an election for U.S. Senate may be decided by sexual allegations from 40 and 50 years prior, in too many instances believable but without evidence or corroboration, then they'd snatch a seat in the U.S. Senate which they had no business occupying and reduce the Republican majority for at least a year to an unworkable 51. So in an instant, and after decades of instructing America in their New Morality, the Democrat Party and the press and the popular culture traded their doctrine that what's "about sex" may not be considered in politics and government, for their New New Morality whereby sex is to determine the balance of the United States Senate.
The Democrats snatched that seat which could not possibly have gone Democrat had the vote been a question of policy and principle, and there followed a Noah's Flood of accusers of public figures high and low, termed aptly "#MeToo", their accusations having been dismissed until that time as "about sex". Which brings us to "Stormy Daniels": the less said the better about her erstwhile employment, but what may be said is that her very name is fiction, "Stormy" and "Daniels" both; she and her lawyer may be the rankest opportunists of the age; she swore in a signed statement that the relationship she swears to in television interviews never happened; and more than that, her unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claims are no grander than that Trump cheated on his wife briefly in '06, when incidentally he was a private citizen and a registered Democrat at every opportunity damning Bush and the Iraq effort. But "Stormy Daniels" under this New New Morality is elevated to household name and heroine, and her claims elevated somehow to high crimes and misdemeanors, assuring that Trump "won't finish his term." I retired from gambling after winning $5 on a bet in high school, on the principle of quitting while I'm ahead, but if I were to come out of retirement it would be to bet my ready funds that President Trump is quite safe in his White House from Stormy Daniels and her legal representation.
(And note that this takes as read those better-documented instances wherein the Left have become their bogeyman, e.g., the Left whose cry in time past was "free speech", long since appointed themselves speech police, then more recently they managed an effective prohibition on expressions of conservatism on America's college campuses, unto the point of violence and threats of violence, and just now they've gone one further, in Big Tech's blacklisting of conservatives; and of course the Left long ago became The Man, the "powers that be", to where it's a quicker job to enumerate the institutions of America that are not leftist and Democrat, because anymore there are only two to speak of, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces.)
Feminism without the feminine
Among the novelties of this debased century is the representation in advertising of women, as men who happen incidentally to have female reproductive organs. Women snarling into the camera, muscles developed and fists clenched, throwing jabs and hooks at the viewer like boxers in a ring smashing a human face into hamburger meat; or a severe woman with severe hair and a severe mug, squatting over a barbell with her fists at the ends of her muscular arms wrapped around the steel bar, on the point of dead-lifting her bodyweight; etc., etc. -- and the product in the former ad having nothing to do with boxing, like in the latter ad the product on offer had not a thing to do with weight training.
The debased feminism of this debased century does seem to me to be devolving into a repudiation of femininity, accepting masculinity as the standard for right and good. What is feminism in the 21st Century but the rejection of roles understood by every society in every age to be feminine, and the reductionist impulse of the Left is bound to render that as a repudiation of all things recognizably female. And so we're left with this unfeminine feminism whereby the worthy woman is a man, or worse yet a cartoon of a man, like some histrionic professional wrestler, musclebound and snarling and menacing the world, who happens incidentally to have female reproductive organs. The trouble in that for the feminist Left, beyond the more obvious point that it's madness, is that they'll find precious few takers for it among American womanhood, and outside the Western world they'll find no takers whatever.
