SO-- JOE BIDEN

Four years ago, I posted SO-- DONALD TRUMP, so I may as well do the same for the new President-elect.

For the present I don't have a ton of stuff to say about this dull career politician, but here's something I just posted on a political forum regarding his probable reception by the MSM (mainstream media).

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I think MSM will continue to promote all this bushwah about how "empathetic" Biden is for the next few months at least. The media giants almost have to do so, because they spent the better part of four years complaining that Trump lowered the political discourse etc. 

However, even though the MSM will let Joe skate by on such matters as his son's dubious activities and Joe's fealty to China, there's one thing that they can't and won't ignore during Joe's tenure, and that's Covid.

Covid has become the lifeblood of the MSM industry, and it's not going to go away peacefully just because Joe Biden is the new Prez. There's a slight possibility that Trump's vaccine will be ready to go by the time Joe takes office, but even that is unlikely to eliminate Covid right away. The MSM will still have to continue reporting on daily Covid infections, albeit maybe not deaths, because the first concern of these MSM businesses is to get viewers to watch, and Covid reports make them watch. 

I imagine some of them will spin things in Joe's favor for a while, playing up his alleged niceness and probity. But infections will in all likelihood continue to mount, and when they do, it will increasingly difficult for the news people to make Joe look as squeaky-clean as they've been doing thus far.

QUICK TRUMP RALLY POST

 I've been discussing the question of President Trump's rallies on a political forum, and decided I would preserve one of my responses here, in case I choose to expand upon it later.

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I'm not especially happy about the possible contagious effect of the rallies. But I'm also not happy about the definite effect of the riots that have been championed by extremists like Omar and Ocasio-Cortez. If we as citizens were not dealing with a Left gone totally bonkers, I might well join you in condemning Trump for the rallies. But at present I consider the spread of Progressive extremism to be the greater danger. I wish people who attend the rallies would observe all of the precautions even if they don't believe in them, but it's their decision to risk their lives, not Trump's. 

To some extent the Dems have crafted Biden's "cautious citizen" image with an eye to portraying him as a model of probity, which admittedly Trump could never be. I'm not sure that his image is the only reason that they're keeping Biden in the basement, though, and if he becomes President and empowers the Progressives, I consider that at least potentially as harmful as Covid.

THE LING VIRUS

Posted this on my political forum re: the mini-controversy regarding "the China virus:"

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[the OP] spoke of "ethnic scapegoating." I reiterate that it's not incorrect to speak of a virus in terms of its point of origin, and that by NOT doing so, you open the door to losing track of persons who may be responsible for the virus' promulgation.

For instance, on an episode of THE VIEW this week, Lisa Ling found fault with Trump's lack of action in the first two months (which she describes as "months and months," as if half a year transpired). While (falsely) claiming that she didn't want to play the blame game, she claimed that Trump's only possible reason for using the term "Chinese virus" was to "deflect" from his own lack of action. "Wag the Pekingese Dog," if you will.

She also talked out of both sides of her face. One minute she claims she has "no love for the Chinese government" and that she found their hushup "indefensible." Yet the next minute she claims that it wouldn't made any difference to whether or not the U.S. took the disease more seriously as to its "severity?" Hello? Does anyone actually believe that, if the Chinese gov't had been totally transparent in January, Trump would not have ramped up defenses then, instead of in March?

This sort of willful amnesia is precisely what I'm talking about. Ling is of Chinese extraction, and some of her people have undoubtedly been attacked or inconvenienced by dimwit racists. But her problems don't excuse her attempt to rewrite the same history we've all experienced. At the end of her screed Ling even claims "we should be asking China for help" in managing our situation. Yeah, if I were Prez I don't think I'd be in any great hurry to follow China's lead. I don't have to believe that she likes the Chinese Communist government to realize that she's the one using the virus as an excuse to attack Trump on the usual talking-points of supposed inefficiency and supposed racism.

On a semi-related note, I heard some idiot reporter on MEET THE PRESS ask Joe Biden if Trump "had blood on his hands." Wow, talk about playing to the peanut gallery! At least Ling was relatively subtle in her partisanship. ADDENDA: the idiot reporter was Chuck Todd, whom I've never watched before, and plan not to watch again.

NO APOLOGIES IN THE ARENA

The title is a play on Camille Paglia's exhortatory essay, "No Law in the Arena," since in this essay I'll contend with an assortment of arguments lobbed at me by comment-poster Ryan. Infrequently I've used comments as the basis for extended blog-essays, and in this case it's necessitated by the sheer length of my rebuttals.

OK, in this 1-20-20 essay I commented:

Yes, I've heard Shapiro accused of being a racist because he doesn't like Palestinian culture. I defy you to produce an actual quote in which he's attacked Palestinians or any Muslims for being "subhuman." As an Orthodox Jew he's threatened by the Muslim hatred of his people, with their frequent promises to push all Jews into the sea, so I don't doubt that he's castigated their culture. But that's not the same as calling the people themselves subhuman. Moreover, while it's not impossible someone could find some questionable remark in Shapiro's history, that's a long way from demonstrating that he's any more a doctrinaire racist than Trump.

Ryan wrote, in part:

Wrong. Shapiro's comments basically said that "Jewish settlements are awesome" Arabs like to "live in sewage." That's basically saying they're animals no matter what prettying attempts you use to justify it. When Andrew O'Neil called him out on it he got angry and called him a lefty (which is rather rich).

Ryan did not supply me with "an actual quote," so I found a useful summation here, which happens to cover the Andrew O'Neil interview that Ryan finds so supportive of his position:

Shapiro, the founder of "The Daily Wire," was a guest on BBC's "Politics Live" Thursday to talk about his new book, "The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great." He reacted negatively when Neil brought up an old tweet of his where he said, "Israelis like to build, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage."
"That's a dumb tweet, but it is important to understand that the next few tweets clarified that that tweet is specifically referring to the Hamas leadership," Shapiro replied.
Neil had the next tweet too: "'It's not all Arabs that want to live in open sewage, it is just Palestinians,' you went on to say. And then you said the Palestinian Arab population is 'rotten to the core,' you went on to say. Not Hamas. The Palestinian Arab population."
"I say that by poll numbers, they elected Hamas," Shapiro said in defense of his comment about Palestinians. "They elected Hamas, they educate their children in school that Israel should be obliterated."

First, Shapiro later apologized to O'Neil, at least for mischaracterizing him as a Lefty. Second, in the transcript above he admits that he made a "dumb tweet," but he still viewed the Palestinians as "rotten to the core" because so many of them support the terrorist organization Hamas. (Why Ryan has a problem with this cultural slander I do not know, since he's shown elsewhere that he's totally OK with regarding all Trump-supporters as racists.) Third, Ryan is demonstrably wrong in that none of the tweets insult the Palestinians by calling them "animals" or "subhuman:" he insulted their lack of moral rigor-- which in turn, in more dubious fashion, he links to their willingness to live in crappy conditions. 

Now, Ryan is, in theory, on slightly stronger factual ground when he comments upon a host of abuses that the Palestinians allegedly would have suffered had they agreed to a "two nations" agreement with Israel. I don't imagine that Orthodox Jew Shapiro has any great empathy with Palestinian sufferings; I can imagine-- and this is only speculation-- that he might think that they should have to accept less than equal conditions because Israel had to protect themselves from an assortment of peoples whose ancestors were entirely willing (as I said before) to drive all Jews into the sea. Nevertheless, I believe that *currently* Shapiro advocates a "two nations" solution, even if he doesn't advocate giving Palestine every thing it wants.

My personal take is that neither Israel nor Palestine are playing with a straight deck, and in that respect, I can imagine that Shapiro is a Jewish chauvinist. But that's still not the same as his being racist, except in the minds of Americans who like to portray the Israel-Palestine conflict as a conflict of white skins and brown skins-- which I'm kind of surprised Ryan didn't bring up.

Ryan then cites "all the usual suspects" to "prove" Trump racist: the Fair Housing Act, allegations of racism from former employees, yada yada yada. The Trump-quote about Japan "stripping the United States of economic dignity" is ill-chosen, implying that no one can make any criticisms of an Asian government without being racist. Then Ryan brings up the matter of the Central Park Five. As it happened, I posted elsewhere some objections to the media's characterizations of both the 1980s Trump ad and his more recent comments:

Note the words in the original ad "when they kill." Since the CPF case did not involve someone being killed, it should go without saying that Trump did not call for the CPF to be executed for the alleged crimes of assault and rape. Thus it follows that he did say that criminals who did not commit the crime of murder "should be forced to suffer," but that's the extent of his verdict regarding the crimes of which the CPF were accused.

Yes, the NY TIMES ad mentions the death penalty. This was a common refrain of the "tough on crime" faction, with which Trump was clearly aligning himself. It was not then, and is not now, a proof of a speaker's racism to voice the belief that the absence of the death penalty would encourage crime.as Trump aware of the CPF's impending trial? I have no doubt of that. But he did not call for the CPF to be killed, as many current narratives have it.In mentioning that the five were "convicted," you omit a salient point: that at some point the Five confessed to the crime. Since it's been verified that they did not rape the victim, it's indisputable that they did not commit that particular crime, though it's not been demonstrated that the NY police coerced the CPF into confessing. Later it was the contention of Linda Fairstein that the CPF had some association with Matias Reyes, but if-- and I repeat, if-- the Five were guilty of any lesser crimes, all accusations against them were vacated when Reyes confessed. Fairstein's opinion, which may be nothing more than an attempt at covering herself, is probably what Trump has referenced in recent times when he said he still did not believe the CPF innocent.

In summation, I don't necessarily believe that Trump was guilty of racism simply by stating that rapists should be punished by the law, and I do believe that recent attempts to simplify the real-life story are illustrative of the current form of shame culture.

I could go on, but I don't have any ambitions of convincing Ryan or anyone else that Trump isn't a racist. I've stated that he may be, but that that possibility is far less significant than the incredible animus that ultraliberals have churned up over him. Ryan's attempts to list every single one of Trump's examples of racist behavior proves everything I wrote in the TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE series:

Trump's very existence was a thumb in the eye to the Left's shame culture, which insists that nothing is more worthy of total condemnation than white racism. (Thus, the Donald's "both sides" Charlottesville remark far outpaces George Dubya getting the country mired down in Iraq in order to make money for the oil companies.) Sadly, Trump himself is not capable of enunciating an actual credo that might fight back against the virulence of shame culture; he merely says whatever he wants to say and basks in the attention it earns for him. 

What ultraliberals hate about Trump is that they weren't able to shame him out of the presidential race. Had Trump never made his inflammatory remarks at the outset of his campaign, there can be no doubt that his critics would still have reeled out all the same litany of past sins as Ryan has done, with particular emphasis on that horrible, deeply revelatory "birtherism" routine-- while conveniently ignoring Obama's far more serious sins.

Life is not a shooting gallery in which ultraliberals get to win by pot-shooting easy targets. Life is, as Paglia intimated, an arena, and Trump, in his crude way, exemplifies this fact, in part with his endless catcalls at his opponents. When historians judge Trump's Presidential legacy, they may find him  guilty of political sins that undermined America's standing in the world community-- and here, I'm talking about sins on the level of Dubya's nation-making idiocy. Nevertheless, those sins won't be tied to all of these petty examples of his narcissistic insensitivity.

In one of his posts Ryan concludes by saying that I'm "basically an apologist for the worst conservative ideals." The inability of ultraliberals to know the difference between centrism and conservatism is something I've encountered and written about copiously, through my remarks on various Bertlatsky fellow travelers, various forums and a certain hive of buzzing psuedo-intellectuals who almost make Berlatsky look good. I call conservatives and liberals alike stupid when they say or do stupid things.

I think for myself, and I don't apologize for anything, least of all my belief that everyone in every political arena is irredeemably fucked up.

ADDENDUM: Just to further clarify my stance on the Central Park Five, when Ava Duveray's doc on the Five made the headlines, I listened to the earlier Ken Burns doc on the same subject. I found it interesting that one of the Five gives a lengthy description of how he and his chums went to the notorious Park that night, talking about other activities they passed by, and some of the violent acts they witnessed in the Park. But at no time did the guy say WHY he and his buddies chose to go there, rather than hanging out with other friends.

Only two real possibilities occur for going into a crime-ridden area like that one: either they dared one another to do so, like an adolescent rite of passage, or they were hoping to stumble across someone who would give them free sex, either with or without coercion. This does not mean that I am certain that the Five attempted to commit rape. But it may play a role in the confessions, as opposed to the narrative that the police simply browbeat the accused teens.

ON TRUMP'S "INSECURITY"

To an online poster who claimed that Trump was massively insecure, I wrote this.

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I don't think that's the whole truth about Trump. Consider that he made his bones with his base by being combative with the press. That's an image that, once established, he has to constantly re-affirm in order to keep that base.

Now, it may or may not be true that he's combative in the first place because he's insecure about one thing or another. In fact, I remember some celebrity on an interview show opined that back in the nineties, he'd hung out with Trump a fair bit, and the celebrity claimed that the one thing you couldn't kid with the Donald about was his wealth. More than a few anti-Trumpers have claimed that the real reason he's concealed his tax returns is because he doesn't want it known that he isn't nearly as rich as he advertises.

All that, however, does not change the fact that Trump's followers like the fact that he doesn't just passively accept the abuse of the press-- and I think it was abusive even before he started yelling "fake news"-- and so he constantly jabs back at the press in ways that few Presidents have done. I'm not claiming that he picks his fights wisely, but it's not coming ONLY from insecurity.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 3

Here's a follow-up statement to my two July issues on the above topic, originally written on DEBATE POLITICS.

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The original "shame culture" was the one that a dominant WASP population promulgated against all those who were not WASPS. It was bound to fail as Classic Liberals showed its ideological stupidities.

The current "shame culture," though, has an advantage. It's just as stupid as the first version, but it piggybacks on the genuine accomplishments of  Classic Liberals, much the way a dum-dum like Al Sharpton piggybacks on the accomplishments of Martin Luther King.

I think that real racism still exists, as can be seen with the much delayed, and just, firing of Daniel Pantaleo. However, there is as yet no real metric, no standard of measurement, for what is or is not a racist act. Joe Biden telling a black audience that Mitt Romney wants to put them back in chains is not a just identification of a racist act or even a racist attitude. It's just bad, overblown rhetoric, much like the supposed anti-racist rhetoric that Biden still attempts to use against the Donald.

As I said in the OP, Trump is not even close to being a person able to evolve or enable such a standard. But now that he's stood up to the new shame culture, maybe someone better than him will come up with such a metric.

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As it happens, in the last week the racial politics of anti-Trumpery manifested in a minor comic-book kerfluffle, courtesy of Art Spiegelman. As detailed on this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay, someone or other asked Spiegelman to write an introduction to a collection of Golden Age reprints from Timely (later Marvel) comic books. An editor asked Spiegelman to remove a political reference that had nothing to do with Timely Comics in the 1930s: one in which the artist compared the CAPTAIN AMERICA villain the Red Skull with Donald Trump, cleverly disguised as "the Orange Skull." Spiegelman refused to remove the reference and retracted his essay. He then publicized the disagreement, with the result that, as he himself states, far more people saw what he wrote through online news-media than would have read the intro in the Timely reprint.

No one will be surprised that, whatever my own reservations about Donald Trump, I find comparisons between the President and Nazi leaders to be yet more "bad, overblown rhetoric," much like the anti-Trumpery that appears at the conclusion of Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN. Spiegelman went on to claim that Marvel wanted to be "apolitical," which just shows that he's apparently read less current Marvel comics than I have. Though a lot of current Marvels use their fictional platforms as bully pulpits, it seems likely that someone on the editorial staff thought that an introduction to a bunch of Golden Age funnybooks was not a fit place for such a pulpit.

Most of the respondents on the BOUNDING thread tended to agree, and I for one thought it ironic that a comics-artist who has made much of his Jewish heritage would align the Donald with Nazism, given that he's been pretty supportive of both Israel and Jewish heritage, even if he's shown his usual goofiness by, say, claiming that all Jews ought to vote Republican. Nevertheless, I chose to chime in with the following:

All political leaders, before entering office, must ask themselves, "What Would the Red Skull Do?" And of course, the logical conclusion would be-- acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Yep, that's just what the Red Skull would do

While Spiegelman is free to make any comment he pleases to anyone willing to give him a podium, no one is required to give him such a podium, particularly in a venue that has a dubious relationship to politics. Yes, Captain America was seen punching out Hitler, and other Marvel heroes made forays against the Axis or doppelgangers thereof, but the stories were barely "political" in the true sense of the word. And though Trump is certainly guilty of his own political sins, conflating them with the heritage of even fictional Nazis like the Red Skull is ridiculous in the extreme.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 2

When I said at the end of Part 1 that the ultraliberal turnabout resulted in Donald Trump coming to power, I was in no way agreeing with the view expressed by many ultraliberals (like the moronic newscaster Don Lemon), to the effect that Trump rose to power as part of a "whitelash." In fact, I denied that facile interpretation when I first commented on Trump's victory in SO-- PRESIDENT TRUMP in 2016. I ended that essay with these words:

None of these observations should be taken as conferring approval on Trump or his noxious campaign. But I think our Clown-in-Chief put his finger on a lot of ways that poor whites feel marginalized-- and it's not all about either money or the fear of liberal policies.

I did not specify what I found "noxious" about Trump's campaign. For the most part, I did not like Trump's clownish persona, five parts vulgarity and five parts narcissism. Both of these factors resulted in him making awkward statements like this one:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
— Donald Trump, announcement speech, June 2015

Now, at the time I heard this, I did not agree with the Left's dominant interpretation, that Donald Trump was revealing his deep and thoroughly entrenched racism against people of color. To me he was simply following in the tracks of numerous Republicans before him in objecting to the incursions of illegal aliens. A more sensible politician would have foregrounded his remarks against said aliens by leading with something along the lines that, "even many of the illegals may be good people, nevertheless there are criminals and rapists among them, etc."  Trump was simply a terrible speaker, and at some other time, his clumsy words would have sunk his campaign immediately.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has frequently said (and I paraphrase) that for years the Left constantly accused any number of relatively centrist conservatives of being racist, with the result that over time the Right became so inured to such accusations that they decided that they might as well support a candidate who refused to apologize when twitted with accusations of deep-dyed racism.

Shapiro's idea is persuasive. He has pointed out that although current pundits have championed John McCain against Trump, liberals in the past often used the same rhetoric against earlier conservatives that they now use against the Donald. Recently on THE VIEW Whoopi Goldberg asserted that if Democratic Congressman John Lewis said that someone (such as Trump) was racist, then that person was indubitably racist. Then Shapiro noted that Lewis had made the same pronouncement against John McCain that Lewis made against Trump. Somehow, this nugget of information was not communicated on THE VIEW, and even John McCain's daughter Megan seemed either sanguine about, or ignorant of, Lewis's denunciation of her father.

In the end, though, Shapiro's concept may be a little too intellectualized. One should not forget that most "insider" Republicans did not support Trump during his campaign, and that he derived much of his support from the rank-and-file. Some voters may have liked Trump for explicitly monetary issues, as with employees of the coal industry. However, I think Trump gained ground not because he was definitively racist, but because he projected an indifference to being called racist.

In other words, Trump's very existence was a thumb in the eye to the Left's shame culture, which insists that nothing is more worthy of total condemnation than white racism. (Thus, the Donald's "both sides" Charlottesville remark far outpaces George Dubya getting the country mired down in Iraq in order to make money for the oil companies.) Sadly, Trump himself is not capable of enunciating an actual credo that might fight back against the virulence of shame culture; he merely says whatever he wants to say and basks in the attention it earns for him. Half the time conservative intellectuals like Shapiro ends up denouncing Trump's more inflammatory statements, and Trump merely goes on to his next bothersome tweet.

Trump may or may not go on a second term. I don't believe that his presidency will bring about the sort of sea-change necessary in order to reverse the incursions of ultraliberal shame culture. Still, to the extent that he subverted that particular dominant, perhaps he will serve as an "opener of the way" for a greater intellectual examination of the issues-- a proliferation of the spawn of Jordan Peterson to counteract the tides of Sartrean ideologues.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 1

I've often discussed the problems of "victimage addiction" here, as in this 2015 essay. However, I confess that until recently it never occurred to me to relate the ultraliberal penchant for victimage to the concepts of "guilt culture" and "shame culture."

Wikipedia opines that Ruth Benedict's 1946 THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD did not originate the terms, but popularized them at a time when postwar Americans became curious as to how the culture of defeated Japan differed from that of the United States. Benedict observed-- admittedly on incomplete evidence-- that America was dominantly a guilt culture, in that its citizens were expected to feel internalized guilt if they did wrong, while Japan was dominated by shame culture, in that its citizens were expected to subordinate their personal desires to society's view of what was shameful.

I find this distinction useful in a general sense, and not only with respect to Japan and America. This HUFFINGTON POST essay provides this broad summation:

Shame cultures focus less on individual responsibility and abstract legal transactions, and more on how one’s betrayal of the community creates estrangement and stigma. In a guilt culture, if I do something wrong and the public does not know about it, I am still expected to feel guilty and to seek to make amends by being punished. This is not the case in a shame culture. In a shame culture, if I do something wrong and there is no public knowledge of it, then I experience no shame, and have no motivation to seek amends.  Shame is all about public identity, and whether or not one is honored or dishonored.

However, there is one particular arena in which American culture seems entirely governed by the shame ethos, and that is the arena of race relations.

For roughly three hundred years since the colonization of the U.S., there seems to have been little doubt regarding the supremacy of Caucasian Americans over that of "persons of color," as well as certain Caucasian groups regarded as "outliers," such as immigrants from Ireland. A representative example of the cultural distance between Whites and Others appears in Fenimore Cooper's "Natty Bummpo" novels of the early 1800s. Natty, despite frequently hanging out with various tribes of Indians, summarizes his separation from the Red Man by occasionally stating that "there is no cross in my blood," by which he means no interaction with non-whites. The clear implication is that to have sexual interaction would be shameful to a white person. There were certainly exceptions in which certain romantic entanglements were viewed through a sympathetic lens, as with Cecil B. DeMille's 1914 THE SQUAW MAN (which DeMille remade twice). Yet shame was still the dominant response to the idea of "mixing the races." Even simple interaction with non-white persons could be viewed as eroding the distinctions between the ruling white race and those not so privileged, and this emotion too would evolve not from personal guilt but from socially imposed shame.

During the 19th and 20th centuries assorted philosophical and literary works put forth the case for the equality of the races and for the necessity of equal treatment, but in the United States the case did not gain any ground until the 1950s, marked by the legal ramifications of Brown vs. Board of Education. Having myself been a liberal of a slightly later period, I would assert as civil rights continued to make advancements, most liberals celebrated them, in the belief that true parity would evolve. The only exception would seem to be the hardcore Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote this sentence in a prologue for a 1961 Franz Fanon book:

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man.

About forty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, though, Sartre's ugly nihilism became emblematic of the Left's politics of ressentiment, as I summarized in COMBAT PLAY:

This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. 

Now, without making the assumption that the Left deserves total credit for the valorization of "people of color," it can be fairly said that liberals were most known for attempting to turn the earlier shame culture's priorities around. Natty Bummpo's assumptions of a beneficent whiteness gave way to portraits of white supremacists as either entirely vile, as seen in popular films like the 1951 anti-KKK film STORM WARNING, or as harmless by reason of sheer stupidity, as with Norman Lear's Archie Bunker. But even in these liberal attempts to reverse reactionary thought, one does not see the extremism of the Sartrean POV, in which ultraliberal pundits view "whiteness" to a source of shame as a *bouleversement* of the way non-white races were formerly treated.

And it's because of that massive reversal that Donald Trump came to power.

More in Part 2.

TRUMP: BORDERING ON GENIUS OR INSANITY?

A CBR post on President Trump's recent signing of the executive order to "keep families together."

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Here's another thing: failing any new revelations, I don't think the GOP obstructed Obama on the matter of immigration. This even-handed essay on his status as "deporter-in-chief" makes it sound like he pretty much did what he wanted on that score. There may well be laws he wanted to pass and couldn't, but my memory is that the GOP was far more concerned with unseating Affordable Care.

Regardless of Obama's legacy, the main point of my cynical post is that people forget a lot of dicey political matters if those matters aren't constantly shoved in their face by the media. I'm saying that now that Trump has signed the executive order, he's put the ball in the court of Congress, and it should go without saying that both sides will be wrangling over their respective agendas. Neither side will be primarily motivated by the suffering of young children, in my opinion. I mention Obama's legacy in part not to claim "both sides are the same," but that there were irregularities during his administration that were simply ignored by the media. I don't endorse Trump's concept of "fake news," but I think it's smart to remain aware of how the media often makes the news to serve an agenda. I used to think FOX News was egregious about its agenda, but Trump's regime has brought out some of the worst in CNN and MSNBC.

I don't know what Trump had in mind in increasing the criminal prosecution of illegals, and neither does anyone else here. I think it's possible that he showboated in order to impress his base, but that seems improbable, since even an egotist like Trump *must* have guessed how extreme the blowback would be. He went through a campaign in which the opposition tried to shame him with the "P**** video," so he knows that the primary anti-Trump weapon in the Left's arsenal is always going to be shame. I entertain the possibility that he knew how the Left would react when he upped the criminalization process, which then increased the already ongoing legal process of separation to the point that it became much more visible, so that not even modern journalists could miss it. Did Trump orchestrate this whole thing in order to get his Border Wall? That might be giving him too much credit, just as the other scenario may give him too little. The truth may be somewhere in between, though it's certainly not anything you're going to see on 24-hour news.

SO-- PRESIDENT TRUMP PT. 2

There's not much to write about Trump's uneventful inauguration today. I did notice an awful lot of religious rhetoric being used to sanctify the proceedings, which I found unusual given that Trump did not run an overly religious campaign as compared to George Dubya, or even Jimmy Carter.

Earlier in the week, however, there was this rather interesting revelation on Tuesday's episode of the VIEW. In short, singer Jennifer Holliday had accepted the president-elect's invitation to perform at the inauguration, and she backed out because, in her words:

“I was receiving death threats at this point,” Holliday said. “I was receiving death threats from black people, the N-word from black people. They were saying they were going to kill me.”

Holliday also said that she backed out because many of her gay fans apprised her of their opinion that Trump was going to endanger their hard-won status, but she did not say that the gays called her offensive names or threatened to kill her.

I plan to bring up this lapse in liberal etiquette on a certain forum, where, in the past year, it's been a regular thing to castigate the Right through the bad example of an event known as "Gamergate," though it would have been better called "Dumb-or-Dumbergate" (i.e., both the original criticism and the reactions to it were extremely dumb). The dominant trend of the forum's remarks has been to imply that only Conservative White Males ever sink to the low depths of making threats against public figures.

The Holliday Event also demonstrates that no people, including black people, have any intrinsic "right" to use the Big Nasty Taboo Word, and that the epithet doesn't smell any better being used for an ultraliberal purpose than for an ultraconservative one.

SO-- PRESIDENT TRUMP.

Since this is not a political blog, I'll keep short my remarks on the Great Upset this week.

Last Tuesday I shared the shock of many Americans when Donald Trump won the presidency by virtue of having the most electoral college votes. A day or so later, a pundit on the tube claimed that the election results were the result of "whitelash," a white backlash against progressive policies.

My take is, yes and no.

Yes, there's not much question that exit polls indicated a large white vote for Trump, particularly among whites with less than a full college education. This causes me to wonder where those "stealth voters" were when Barack Obama ran against both John McCain and Mitt Romney. The reigning interpretation seems to be that these Caucasians did not vote Republican or Democrat in the previous two elections, but did so for Trump because he was "an outsider." Here's one current essay that takes this view, and finds the reason for Trump-support in the desire of white voters to hearken back to a simpler time.

But a lot of white voters in rural communities aren’t convinced. They see images on their television screens that are frightening. The face of the new America looks strange. The music is different, the accents are wrong, the sexual and racial politics confusing.

This is certainly a possible motivation, but it may not be the only one. The author goes on:

Another reason for this breakdown is money. Our national shift toward true equality occurred at a time when the economic status of rural whites was eroding fast. It’s not black America’s fault that many of our small towns are basket cases, with soaring unemployment, a deadly drug epidemic, and generational poverty. But to a lot of rural folks it feels that way. They feel like they’ve been cheated, duped, and disrespected.

This is the point where the "no" comes in. I agree that money is probably an issue, and probably much more of one than race itself is. It's certainly no coincidence that in his victory speech Trump claimed that he would remember "the forgotten man and woman." However, it may not be a given, as per the ultraliberal narrative, that these uneducated whites are simply reacting with fear of the unknown. Rather, it may be fear of the known.

The Left's dominant "racial myth" is that People of Color simply want parity, and nothing more. I would like to see parity, but I think a lot of "Colored Americans" use racial stigmatization to their advantage. without any sense of perspective-- and that's not even mentioning celebrities like Larry Wilmore, whose entire deck of 52 is filled with nothing but "race cards."

Most Black Activist pundits, like the one I cited in the first paragraph, agree spontaneously that no one could oppose their policies for any reason but fear and ignorance. However, I don't think a lot of whites look at the Ferguson riots and see humble protesters. I think they see people out for their own interests. Certainly I personally believe that was the case with Dorian Johnson. And when those whites see a lot of riots over police shootings, even after those shootings are ruled as justified, whites are more likely to want to be sure the next president supports the Second Amendment, in case of an out-and-out race war.

None of these observations should be taken as conferring approval on Trump or his noxious campaign. But I think our Clown-in-Chief put his finger on a lot of ways that poor whites feel marginalized-- and it's not all about either money or the fear of liberal policies.