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Occasionally, a news story breaks while we are recording this show and the hosts must react in real time. This week, two stories broke as we were in the midst of the show: news of Roger Stone’s indictment and the end of the shutdown (at least for now). In between these stories, we talk to the Washington Post’s Megan McCardle about the Covington High School blow up last weekend and the business model for newspapers. Then, the New York Post’s Op-Ed editor Sohrab Amari drops by to talk about his new book From Fire, By Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith and his remarkable life story. We also talk about the Catholic Church and the situation in Venezuela. Listen!
Music from this week’s show: Turn To Stone by Electric Light Orchestra
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McCardle is really a piece of work. She repeatedly evaded the question about whether the people who blasted the Covington kids, on the basis of a video that didn’t really show anything, will learn anything from it. The implied answer is: no. These people continue see themselves as objective and impartial, and the mistake was just a fluke, or Donald Trump’s fault, or even the fault of the Covington kids.
Admittedly, asking her about this is like asking about the mafia of someone who works at a corporation controlled by the mafia. The answers will be very tactful and circumspect, and will tend not to admit the existence of the mafia, much less that it controls that corporation.
It really tells you what it takes to be a house “conservative” (I’m thinking “house something else”) at a liberal organization. Basically, they keep you around only so long as you damage the conservative movement and promote liberalism. Thus, she proudly maintains Democrats’ most essential smear against Republicans, that they are racists. Presumably, if the guys had asked her to justify that irresponsible claim, she would have evaded that, too.
We are in such a bubble most folks here at Ricochet don’t realize that to a portion of the public beyond the wacky left wearing a MAGA hat is the equivalent of waving a confederate flag.
You are probably right here, but she might be more trying to preserve her position at The Bezos Post rather than being generically a problem like Bill Kristol et. al. Her gig is getting into the weeds on complex policy on behalf of libertarians and conservatives. Bill’s friends aren’t sensitive to that stuff at all. They just want centralized government run “conservatively” by “experts” in the service of war and etc. etc.
Therefore what?
Therefore Megan has a better grasp on reality than the Ricochetti. The MSM heard a bunch of teenage boys were prowling around the mall in MAGA hats and jumped to conclusions. I think it was very unfair to these boys but that’s what Trump has done to civility in this country.
Oh please. A) They are all statists in service to statism. They will facilitate anything that gives the left and government more power. B) It’s very clear that Obama and Eric Holder et. al. just made this type of thing worse. The cop in Ferguson did nothing wrong. The kid was a criminal. I fully support Trump in this sense. The media is worthless and the Democrat party reflexively uses Alinsky tactics without end.
Say what?
You’re preaching to the choir, but Trump derangement of both his critics and his fanboys has turbocharged the situation.
@pettyboozswha — “What Trump has done to civility”: Was that meant as a joke? Do you seriously believe that the Left started smearing conservatives and Republicans as racists only in 2016? And it’s Trump’s fault? You don’t remember when the naïve and well-intentioned Tea Partiers — who actually came in many colors — were smeared? You don’t remember the thousands and thousands of times the Left compared George W. Bush to Hitler? You don’t remember 20 years of conservative speakers being run off campuses?
In his podcast, Scott Adams has a much better take. He commends progressives for recasting Donald Trump‘s patriotic slogan as racist. Commends them, that is, in terms of the art of persuasion, not for their slimy ethics.
Democrats have no choice but to keep feeding the racism scare. Even as they screw over black people, denying their children good educations (because the teachers unions won’t permit it), they need to keep black people voting Democratic.
Trump, with Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and Alex Jones and the rest of his election crew turbocharged it.
How did it come to this?
link
Everyone should vote better.
Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Brilliant.
How ironic that what is actually the entropy/decay of civilization into liberalism, is labeled “progressive.”
I remember the Watergate break-in. I was almost there.
One reason the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) wanted to bug the DNC was concern about Soviet influence in the McGovern campaign.
And I’m confident that, if presented with the opposite argument – e.g., that the Bernie Bro shooter proves that all Democrats are violent loonies or something – she would practically erupt with denial and outrage etc.
What in the world would be an argument against life without parole?