Roundup!
(1) Seven times supposed “disinformation” was the truth.
(2) The Saudis say that Biden tried to pressure them to delay cutting oil production for a month, till after the midterms.
The statement comes a day after Biden threatened Saudi Arabia on CNN, telling anchor Jake Tapper that the Kingdom will face “consequences” if it moves to cut oil production…
The bad blood between Biden and the kingdom go back to the 2020 presidential election, when the then-Democrat candidate vowed to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” state because of its alleged involvement in Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.
It worked against Corn Pop, didn’t it?
(3) It should come as no surprise that Mayorkas was knowingly misleading about the “whipping” by the border agents:
The media screamed that the men on horseback were “whipping” the poor defenseless undocumented future welfare recipients. ..Mayorkas repeated after Jen Psaki (remember her?) and said he found the pictures “horrifying.”
“Horrifying!”
The trouble was, however, there were no whips. What might have looked like whips to people innocent of the art of horseback riding were actually reins, items to control horses, not wayward aliens attempting to cross our southern border illegally…
And here’s the cherry on top: Mayorkas knew that the media narrative was, if I may so put it, horseshit. This just out from Fox News’s Bill Melugin: “Mayorkas was alerted by DHS’s top public affairs official that the ‘whipping’ narrative behind horseback BP photos wasn’t true, but at a WH press conference 2.5 hours later, he didn’t refute that narrative, instead calling the images ‘horrifying.’”
Notice that I didn’t write that Mayorkas lied. That’s because, as with so many creative liars, he didn’t exactly lie but said something that was designed to lead the listener to an incorrect conclusion. Apparently, many ignorant people had found the photos “horrifying” because they had no idea what was being pictured, and the Democrats and the MSM were leading them by the use of propaganda to incorrect conclusions. Mayorkas was doing his bit to do the same.
(4) Nury Martinez’s exit from the LA City Council doesn’t contain much of an apology.
Martinez bad-mouthed so many groups in her secretly-recorded remarks that one thing you can say for her is that she’s an equal-opportunity bigot.
(5) On the recent Ken Burns documentary about America and the Holocaust:
Jewish parents should be aware, for example, that those are not proto-Nazis making college life hell for their children from Berkeley to NYU. In the U.S. Congress, those are not proto-Nazis fomenting hatred of Israel. In the State Department, it is not neo-Nazis who are urging treaties and amity with an Iranian regime that has vowed to exterminate the Jewish state and its people. Nor is it neo-Nazis assaulting Jews in Brooklyn, or neo-Nazis at the New York Times maligning the Jews and their homeland. Yet sadly among those last-mentioned maligners are, to repeat, American Jews and even some who pride themselves on repairing the world.
All of this is known to the filmmakers to PBS, which is why they and others have taken such care to redirect any potential anxiety about the precipitous rise in anti-Jewish politics away from such threats toward the more convenient and already disparaged far-right.
Anything, in today’s horribly “woke-ified” America, which is derided by the MSM and the DNC as “disinformation” or “misinformation” or dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” is far likelier than not to be true. Should Republicans manage to gain control of Congress next month (possible, yet not inevitable, when one considers the possibility of malfeasance through massive mail-in balloting and other shenanigans beloved by the Democrats), their very first order of business in the new year should be to begin the process of impeaching both Garland and Mayorkas, the two most egregious malefactors in the rogues’ gallery which comprises the senile buffoon’s viciously destructive administration.
A further addition to the bad blood between Slow Joe and the KSA is that Slow Joe, utterly convinced that all that Trump did was bad, has made nice with Iran.
That does not please the Saudis.
Impeach Biden. No quid pro quos with foreign governments to interfere with elections.
I don’t credit ken burns, with any good intentions, I see how he didn’t learn anything new about vietnam, since 1975 (mark moyars ground breaking archival work, into the interval before the intervention) so this hackneyed narrative doesn’t do credit, to the tragic devouring* that happened, and was not really accounted for at nuremberg either,
In case you missed it: a terrific philippic!
https://www.revolver.news/2022/10/best-mama-bear-rant-weve-ever-seen/
justice deferred, yadda yadda
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11313317/Supreme-Court-REJECTS-Trumps-appeal-let-special-master-review-classified-documents.html
are they mad, this is not a rhetorical question,
https://computingforever.com/2022/10/11/seriously-this-is-the-ultimate-gaslighting/
I read the article about the Ken Burns Holocaust documentary. While the article points out that purported modern day Nazis are NOT the people in America who are making Jewish lives less enjoyable, the article does not, unless I missed it, point out that it is today’s liberals/progressives/Democrats, some of whom are Jewish, who are doing that.
Ira Siegel (7:18 pm),
Wisse dances around it (at least the way I read her prose) when she hints,
“American Jews and even some who pride themselves on repairing the world.”
Why can’t she be more plain about it? In one sense it’s a rhetorical question, but in another sense, it might be worth knowing what’s really tugging at her (if she even consciously knows). But I know nothing about Wisse, her history, or her milieu.
fwiwi
According to one critic, Wisse’s work has been characterized “by the sharpness of her insight, by her unwillingness to retreat from a skirmish and by the inability of even those who disagree with her to deny her brilliance.”[7] She won the 1988 Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature.[9] She received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals.[10] The award cited her for “scholarship and teaching that have illuminated Jewish literary traditions. Her insightful writings have enriched our understanding of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture in the modern world.”[11]
Wisse’s article concludes:
__________________________
I am certain that Burns, Novick, and Botstein did not deliberately set out to obscure some of the world’s anti-Semites, to undermine Jewish and American self-confidence, or to allow the ongoing defamation of Israel. But their documentary does just that, with a significant segment of American Jewry, wittingly or unwittingly, cheering them on.
__________________________
This seems to be another example of a writer who doesn’t hit the right note of high moral indignation with specific finger-pointing to satisfy some, but was still in vicinity of the target.
Is that good enough?
I’m wishy-washy enough to appreciate someone pointing out some of the contradictions in order to get people to think.
A big, specific “J’Accuse!” to Biden, Democrats, et al. would be satisfying, but might not move the needle on people in the middle.
Ira Siegel– Have you seen the new article posted at Quillette on the way in which progressive ideology makes life difficult for American Jews?
https://quillette.com/2022/10/13/building-a-progressive-tower-of-babel/
It’s an excerpt from a book titled Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.
Ken Burns has been riding off his Civil War documentary for decades. I haven’t seen all of it; what I saw was good, but it’s such an immensely popular topic with Americans and there is so much material for making great drama it would be hard for a documentarian to miss on the topic. Get a great narrator and voice actors for reading letters, play some sad, banjo music and show sepia images while detailing statistics on politics, deaths, disease and decay, edit it down to 20 hours and the awards roll in.
His Jazz series, which I did watch in its entirety, was generally disappointing. Same with Baseball, which I also watched.
Related (Burns):
“Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust” Fails”—
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2022/10/why-despite-good-intentions-ken-burnss-the-u-s-and-the-holocaust-fails/
(To be sure, one might say it HAD to be suspect given the “lessons” that Burns “learned” from his subject and then readily applied to DeSantis in the aftermath of the Martha’s Vineyard episode….)
Barry Meislin,
In my opinion, Ken Burns has been failing since his Civil War series, and, as I wrote, it’s such a big, popular topic I think any 20 hour treatment of it was bound to be successful. So, no surprise he fails here.
From Wisse’s article:
“To this day, bashing capitalism, trashing liberal democracy, and undermining confidence in America and Israel continue to play out everywhere in American institutions. In the documentary, there is no mention of them”
And much more. It is true that Wisse does not explicitly use the words “left”, “progressive” or “Democrat”. But can anyone honestly say they do not understand what she is talking about?
https://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2012/12/ken-burns-history-lesson.html
This will give you some insight into Ken Burns’ character. He’s in the business of narrative manufacture.
Finally! A fig leaf to grab on to…
You see it is the Left, Left, Left.
Nothing bad like this on the so-called Right, right?
Do we really need a reminder of how the Left is hypocritical, yet again, but then ignore the same on the Right?
Maybe that makes some feel good about themselves, but not much productive comes of it.
The pile-on on Ken Burns here is typical response on the Right. We don’t like the views of so and so, so what they produce is crap, and their motivations are crap, etc.. Let’s all devise the most clever way to articulate that.
Don’t y’all ever get tired of this? Don’t y’all want to figure out some way to get the ball rolling in a way that will preserve our democracy? Instead of being so frequently reminded of how bad the left is?
Or, do you care? You are entertained by the “fight”!
Thanks for the link, PA+Cat.
The pile-on on Ken Burns here is typical response on the Right. We don’t like the views of so and so, so what they produce is crap, and their motivations are crap, etc.. Let’s all devise the most clever way to articulate that.
Is Burns improving or damaging the quality of public discussion? I’d suggest you read KC Johnson’s evisceration of his remarks in 2012. There’s something malevolent about the man.