RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump took on the Left’s politicization of the NFL last week. This week, he is taking on their appropriation of natural disasters and human caused horrors for political gain.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/03/trumps-katrina-try-the-medias-waterloo/

The Left and its accomplices in the press couldn’t pin the blame on Trump for the administration’s responses to the hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast states and U.S. territories early last month. But in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico especially hard, they thought they finally got their story.

Instead of focusing on the myriad logistical challenges of reaching an island more than 900 miles away from the U.S. mainland, or on how FEMA has worked with the Puerto Rican central government and most municipalities, or the ins-and-outs of federal disaster management, the media pounced on Trump.

They couldn’t wait to allege that Trump’s response was akin to George W. Bush’s Hurricane Katrina performance. CNN ran an article with the headline, “‘Trump’s Katrina?’ No, it’s much worse.” A piece at The Daily Beast authored by noted Trump-hater Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC was titled, “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina.” The Leftist fever swamp Salon ran an article, “‘We are doing a great job’: Is this Trump’s Katrina moment?”

From the media’s lips to God’s ears.
The most transparent response came from the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. Earlier last week, Cruz described FEMA as “wonderful” and doing an all-around “great job.” She noted further that federal officials “have been here since last week—helping us and setting up logistics.”

But at a morning press conference on Saturday, Cruz completely changed her tune. As she stood in front of pallets of water bottles and other supplies, she shouted, “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency, and the bureaucracy!” Cruz claimed if Trump didn’t do something quickly, “we are going to see something close to a genocide.” The irony of this scene, of course, was completely lost on the press.

Trump, understanding exactly what was taking place, fired back:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

Trump’s refusal to serve as a Republican punching bag for Cruz, a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, and other Democrats sent shock waves through the media. In marked contrast with previous Republican presidents, Trump understands the Democratic-Media complex’s playbook when it comes to natural disasters when Republicans are in office: shame them into submission for their errors—real or imagined. And for the coup de grace, hint in not so subtle language that race was the deciding factor in how the disaster was handled.

The US media’s arrogance has once again blinded it to the genius of Donald Trump, whose denunciation of gridiron players ‘taking a knee’ has set the commentariat to another fit of frothing. How out of touch must the pundits be to back myths and spoiled millionaires above patriotism and good manners?

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired! He’s fired!”

Down come the Trump haters from great heights of sanctimony. Trump is a racist and white supremacist, charge the Democrats and their cheerleaders; to wit, the hopelessly-corrupted fake-news media. No other conclusion could be drawn, they intone over and over again.

Repetition of lies makes factoids. Leftists know that and are well practised in mythmaking. ‘The stolen generations’ is an exemplar in Australia. Talk to almost anyone you like and that myth has become a ‘truth’.

As most of the highly paid NFL players are black – they must have some physiological edge but we are probably not allowed to say that –Trump must be a racist. And he is dog whistling to white supremacists. His use of the word ‘bitch’ proves that to those who are prepared to go through any tendentious contortions to arrive at the answer they want.

The never-Trump Republicans get on board, if in a less colourful way. Karl Rove disproves of Trump’s language and his impugning of the parenthood of the NFL players. I was reminded of NSW Premier Robert Askin vocalising his thought “run over the bastards” to Lydon Johnson when anti-Vietnam War protesters were attempting to block his motorcade. Askin was criticised for this in some quarters, but I don’t seem to recall part of that criticism being related to the archaic literal meaning of ‘bastards’.

Memo to leftists and Karl Rove and company: Trump was using a common or garden expression, as was Askin. Moreover, in using the expression “he’s fired” he was parodying himself. The humour of the children’s literature character Amelia Bedelia, who took everything literally, would be entirely lost on today’s adult wallies. We are clearly living through a dumb age in which common sense has become a much rarer commodity.

Mark Steyn says that common sense presupposes a common understanding of the world, which is now absent. He’s right which is why Q&A panels and audiences, for example, appear to me to be mostly populated by aliens; and particularly dumb and nasty ones. Witness, as another example, an elementary school librarian, Liz Phipps Soeiro, who has just scolded Melania Trump for gifting her library “racist” Dr Seuss books. This lady can spot racist undertones in The Cat in the Hat. Imagine how young children will turn out under this dumb leftist tutelage. It is a growing curse on our children and on mankind.

Back to taking a knee for the flag and anthem. Though it has taken on an anti-Trump complexion, the initial protest by Colin Kaepernick was against (imagined) police brutality towards black men. Disconcertingly, even those who oppose the form of the protest; nevertheless, implicitly accept its premise, if only by their silence about it. The premise being that black men are disproportionately targeted and shot by cops. Quite simply, this is not supported by the evidence.

The editors of the National Review are back on their high horse again, recalling the days of their “Against Trump” issue devoted to foiling his quest for the GOP nomination. This editorial in National Review, calling for a “time out” on the NFL for Trump (like some naughty preschooler) and calling for better “judgment” (in other words, their judgment) from the president:

The president has conducted himself here in an unseemly fashion, to say the least, and has exhibited his remarkable knack for making everything he touches about him, which the NFL protests weren’t until he stuck his nose in. (snip)

This is not a question of rights but a question of judgment, which was, unhappily, in short supply over the weekend.

But along the way, the offer supporting context that makes it seem like the writers on the editorial board never read Heather MacDonald.

We do not believe that simmering white malice is the reason for it, but black Americans are arrested and incarcerated in numbers far disproportionate to their share of the population.

Huh? MacDonald has repeatedly shown that incarceration is not disproportionate to criminality.

Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the New York Police Department. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population.

In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects were black in 2015, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.

Such racially skewed crime ratios are repeated in virtually all American metropolises. They mean that when officers are called to the scene of a drive-by shooting or an armed robbery, they will overwhelmingly be summoned to minority neighborhoods, looking for minority suspects in the aid of minority victims.

This means that observers have a duty to be realistic in assessing what ought to be of concern. As Mac Donald writes:

Trump’s concern about rising crime is therefore not a concern about white victims and the loss of white life. Rather, it is a concern about black lives. As Trump said: “[Y]oung Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson . . . have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America.” Hint to the media: He was referring to black children in those cities, such as the ten children under the age of ten killed in Baltimore last year; the nine-year-old girl fatally shot while doing homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2015; and the nine-year-old boy in Chicago lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies in November 2015.

And yet the media is twisting itself into knots trying to downplay and trivialize the crime increase. Isn’t it white Republicans (and, of course, the cops) who are supposed to be indifferent to black lives?

Indeed, on their own pages, where Ms. Mac Donald is a contributor, a review of her latest book published by the very same National Review tells us:

You would never know it from the activists, but police shootings are responsible for a lower percentage of black homicide deaths than white and Hispanic homicide deaths. Twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers, compared to 4 percent of black homicide victims.