The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Over-Woke and Under-Informed

As if to add an exclamation point to my last post, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters implicitly endorsed mob rule by suggesting that activists continue their verbal and near-physical assaults on Trump administration officials at their homes and during private activities. Many Democrats cheered.

Time reports:
“If you see anybody from that [Trump] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Waters’ call to action comes after two Trump administration officials recently faced backlash in public and, in one case, was denied service at a restaurant.
Waters is but one of dozens of prominent celebrities, media types, and Democrat politicians who are, in the words of Alan Richarz, "over-woke and under-informed." He writes:
That the Trump administration would be compared with Nazi Germany is not surprising. Accusations of “Republicans-as-fascists” long predate this administration. A Democratic congressman accused President Ronald Reagan of “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from ‘Mein Kampf.’ ” In more recent times, recall Keith Olbermann’s tarring of President George W. Bush as a “fascist” in an on-air segment in 2008, an appellation also bestowed upon other members of the Bush administration.

Perhaps memories of the unfair accusations of fascism experienced by her husband explain Laura Bush’s decision to break ranks and instead go with a tortuous comparison of separating families of illegal border-crossers with the internment of Japanese-American citizens, keeping with the World War II theme but without resorting to outright accusations of Nazism.

Others, however, have no such compunction. Members of Congress, former officials, reporters and TV commentators have tweeted comparisons of U.S. detention facilities to Nazi concentration camps or issued none-too-subtle invocations of gas chambers in their tweets about children being led away from their parents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Reporters have peppered administration officials with questions about their “Nazi” tactics.

On Friday, an MSNBC commentator extended the Nazi label to every Trump supporter, declaring: “If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going: ‘You here, you here.’”

Earlier, one magazine fact-checker beclowned herself by mistaking the tattoo of an ICE forensics analyst — a wounded Marine veteran and Paralympian — as a Nazi symbol.

Given that the Obama administration also housed separated children in “cages,” which merited the faintest of peeps from supplicant media, politicians and activists, this newfound outrage comes off as contrived partisanship.

Apart from the historical ignorance in comparing the mechanized genocide of 6 million people with the temporary warehousing of children in detention facilities, going full-bore with accusations of Nazism is a grave strategic error on the part of those opposing the president.
At this point, the Nazi comparisons and the rantings of people like Maxine Waters have become a cartoonish caricature of an infantile tantrum. Outside the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd who cheer the recent words and actions of Waters and others, the broader public (if you can believe recent polls), looks on and shakes its collective head. With every hysterical comparison to "Nazis" or concentration camps, with every refusal to serve an official in a public place, with every vile verbal attack at a Hollywood awards show, with every demonstration of outright viciousness and intolerance for ideas that conflict with their own, the Dems lose another vote — or maybe 100 or 1,000 or 10,000.