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Happiness For You is A Horror For Them
Happy days are here again. John Hinderaker shared a chart showing Americans of all demographics are optimistic about their future, a chart that must have killed the Bloomberg enterprise to publish. The White House just keeps rolling out the barrel of new good news. What is a leftist to do? Why, mash the old “ism” buttons harder!
Give the Bloomberg crew credit. They make the worst of the good news about American optimism that they can:
Are Americans Really as Happy as Pollsters Say?
Most people are better off than they were a year ago, but record levels of optimism seem a bit irrational.
Hey, they are doing the best for their boss that they can. They cannot help it if NASCAR nation, fly over country, black men, and unenlightened women are not getting with the program. Apparently people are responding to results, touted daily by the White House.
The left is desperately mashing the buttons that used to work, and wondering why they don’t get the old results.
West Virginia governor runs afoul of the race mongering language police
But he is having none of it:
My definition of a thug is clear — it means violence, bullying, and disorderly conduct. And we, as West Virginians, should have zero tolerance for this kind of behavior. Anyone that would accuse me of making a racial slur is totally absurd.
Naturally it was the Washington Post spreading the smear against the West Virginia governor. Meanwhile activists are sounding the alarm about DNC talk versus action. See this warning that black men’s votes may no longer be taken for granted:
Trump needs only 14% of the black vote to win. He received 8% of the total black vote in 2016, more than then-Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney received. His focus, however, is predominately to woo more black men like Tony Rankins, a recovering addict Trump asked to stand up during his SOTU address. Rankins is a tradesman in an opportunity zone where wealthy Americans can invest in poor communities in exchange for tax benefits. Thirteen percent of black men voted for him last time whereas only 4% of black women. Black men are the most disenfranchised group among us black voters. However, the Trump team sees this demographic group as untapped possibilities, especially with the 2018 passage of the First Step Act, a prison reform bill that aims to revise the federal prison system and some federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws. With the unemployment rate at 6% for both blacks and Latinx, Trump hopes to woo this group that the last time they may have voted was in 2008 for Obama.
Congressman James Clyburn can’t get with this, though, and hopes mashing the button harder will work one more time. He did so on ABC “news”, saying if jobs were what mattered “then you would have to say slaves were in very good shape because they were fully employed.”
This is the sound of desperation. If Clyburn can’t help deliver the vote, what power will be left to the left? This is not to pick on one older member of Congress; Clyburn is running the Democratic playbook which has worked for the party for decades. Americans should be of good cheer, but work all the harder on the primaries and general elections at every level this year.
Published in Politics
By co-mingling two separate paragraphs of your essay, I just had to laugh:
Congressman James Clyburn can’t get with this, though, and hopes mashing the button harder will work one more time. He did so on ABC “news”, saying if jobs were what mattered “then you would have to say slaves were in very good shape because they were fully employed.”
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If Clyburn is tossed out of office, I think he could be a comedy writer. (If only he would wake up and see the irony in his statement.)
One of their problems is that traditionally, the Democrats and their supporters in the media have started mashing the button no later than 4-6 months after a Republican takes office, and even with Bush 43, due to the 2000 recount, they were button-mashing by the end of February, 2001. It was only 9/11 that caused a temporary hiatus due to the shock of the attacks, and they were back laying down on the button by mid-2003 (with the most radical types like Michael Moore, trying to hit the damn thing by the weekend after 9/11).
With Trump, of course, the shock on the Dems part that Hillary hadn’t been crowned Queen and they hadn’t figured out the Rosetta Stone to maintaining control of the White House into the 22nd Century had them lashing out from the moment they got off suicide watch following 11/8/16. But the Trump factor caused them to reach for a totally different button than in the past — instead of harping on Trump being an uncaring tool of the rich who only wanted to serve his fat-cat 1 percenter buddies, the Democrats have spent the past three years yelling about the Russians first, the Nazis second, and in the past six months, the Ukrainians.
They haven’t gone to their normal talking points, and by doing that, gave Trump and opening to do things like prison reform that had not been part of the GOP playbook in the past. Combined that with the fact the most of the rich elites disdain Trump as much as the intellectual elites do and the fact that Trump’s lifestyle before running for president was celebrated through reference in a number of rap songs that targeted the inner-city black communities, and you end up with a totally different dynamic than normal, heightened by the reality that, yes, things really are better now economically than under Obama.
Well said. Democrats have struggled with an opponent who refuses to play the game.
If you’re on the left, you care very deeply and sincerely about important things in society. (People on the right care about themselves and money.) You care about the environment, so you wheel out the recycling bin every other week, and eschew plastic bags, and tell yourself that your Prius and occasional bike-to-the-co-op trips balance out your plane trip to New Zealand. (You know better, but at least you’re torn about it, which gives you extra virtue points,.) You’re still gripped by the certainty that it’s not enough, and that the usual Big Dark Forces are preventing the decarbonization of the economy, and this makes you unhappy, and angry, because the world is literally on fire. Look at Brazil! Look at Australia! Why doesn’t everyone get it?
Because they are stupid and selfish.
It is hard to be happy in a country that is full of stupid and selfish people who enjoy the wrong things. It’s even harder to be happy in a country where those people have a say in the election.
The political trick is to help the “stupid and selfish people” see this clearly and give them a choice at the ballot box by which they can collectively render appropriate hand gestures.
Good news for the Democrats! Japan’s economy is shrinking even faster. COVID-19 is going to hurt the Chinese economy badly. Also anyone China trades with. But wait, there’s more! If the effects in China last a few more months, China’s debt bubble will burst! All that will cause trouble for the US!
I’m surprised they did publish it. The last thing happy people want is to put someone in office who’ll rock the boat, and all the Democrat candidates are promising to do just that . . .
Thanks to @kevincreighton for pointing out a Fox Business interview in which Rep. Clyburn used the same line with Neil Cavuto.
The line was clearly rehearsed, a part of the communications plan to keep African Americans voting for whatever Democrat their “leaders” tell them.
In addition to the reality that the Lefties think the Prius and the occasional bike trip balance out the airplane ride to New Zealand, they will go in full attack mode if they find you eating a hamburger and enjoying it. I mean, that poor bovine suffered!
I have tried to point out if everyone stopped eating meat and drinking milk tomorrow, there would be a mass slaughter of the bovines within a few short months. Cows are expensive to raise. However people inside cities think if cows are not used for meat, milk and cheese, the farmers will invite them into the home to watch TV shows on the big screen.
Meanwhile the Lefties guzzle wine by the bottle, and they have so little awareness of reality of all the animal and bird lives that are snuffed out by the clear cutting of forests, meadows, dairy farms and pear and apple orchards. Also at some point perhaps soon, a person will enter a supermarket and find no cherries, pears, apricots or other fruits, as it is much more groovy to grow grapes.