RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-radio-genius-changed-political-landscape/

His ‘army of one,’ inspiring millions who’d been ignored, changed the political landscape.

Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.

By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, a genre in which he not merely excelled but that he also singlehandedly reinvented as something entirely different — and entirely more powerful and instrumental in American life — from what was imaginable pre-Limbaugh.

Even stranger still, his ascendance coincided with the presumed nadir of radio itself. It was supposedly a has-been, one-dimensional medium, long overshadowed by television. Even in the late 1980s, radio was about to be sentenced as obsolete in the ascendant cyber age of what would become Internet blogs, podcasts, streaming, and smartphone television.

Stranger still, Limbaugh has prospered through two generations and picked up millions of listeners who were not born when he first went national and who had no idea of why or how he had become a national presence.

He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times. While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not. He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power. It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about “global warming” would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/journalist-was-fired-criticizing-ilhan-omar-daniel-greenfield/

Narmeen Choudhury spends a lot of time tweeting about Islamophobia. The daughter of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants has claimed that she faced discrimination in the workplace. But the one man she accused of Islamophobia was fired after 22 years on the job and is now suing for justice.

Choudhury had come to work at WPIX in 2011. Ken Evseroff, the reporter she accused, had not only been working at the New York City television station since 1997, but had worked his way up the hard way. Where Choudhury had graduated from Boston U, Evseroff had come out of SUNY and had done everything from working as a reporter to laboring as a camera operator on everything from All My Children to Nightline. By the time he came to WPIX, Evseroff was a seasoned professional.

And he expected to be treated like one.

The clash between Choudhury and Evseroff encompassed not just her allegations of Islamophobia, but class, political and generational differences. Choudhury was a privileged millennial from Duchess County married to an executive director at JP Morgan. And, like many privileged millennials, the WPIX reporter had a history of building her brand and lubricating her career by alleging incidents of discrimination.

In 2015, she claimed, “my husband was called a sand n***er”.  The story didn’t seem like an especially plausible event in multicultural Manhattan in the final years of the Obama administration. And some might wonder how anyone would have guessed that her finance executive husband was Muslim.

https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2020/02/01/communists-honor-fake-news-champion-cnn-n2560496

“Cuba is “prepared” for the possibility of Donald Trump’s reelection and the continuation of crushing US sanctions against the island, according to Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel….The Cuban president’s challenge to the Trump administration came during a tour of central Cuba last week, where CNN was given rare access to the Cuban head of state…CNN was one of three international outlets invited to accompany Diaz-Canel on parts of his trip.” (CNN, Havana, Jan. 29.)

Gosh!  I wonder why a “journalist” for the “press agency” CNN should be honored in such a manner by a totalitarian Stalinist regime that has jailed, tortured and exiled the most (genuine) journalists in the history of the Western Hemisphere? 

Perhaps a (genuine) journalist named Vicente Botin can provide a clue: 

“The Castro regime assigns 20 security agents to follow and monitor every foreign journalist. You play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.” (Vicente Botin, reporter for Madrid’s El Pais who was promptly booted from Cuba for refusing to play the same sniveling, cowardly game as CNN’s “reporters” play every time they file a “story” from Cuba.)

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/29/medias_nevertrump_voices_drown_out_republican_perspective.html

Over the weekend, Washington Post columnist Max Boot had a novel take on President Trump’s impeachment. According to Boot, what Trump said on the phone call with Ukraine’s president was in some ways worse than Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation of Native Americans or FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“Other presidents — from Andrew Jackson with the Trail of Tears during the 1830s, to Franklin D. Roosevelt with the internment of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II — have trampled our values, but they always had a public purpose and usually had congressional support,” Boot wrote.

Either Boot or someone at the Post came to their senses, because the sentence was later amended (stealth-edited) to clarify that Native American genocide and racist imprisonment were “far worse things” than Donald Trump’s alleged misdeeds. But by then, Boot was already being roasted on social media.

There are many more examples of open mouth, insert Boot. Back in October, after the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump said the terrorist was “whimpering and crying” at the end of his life. Boot couldn’t let stand this defaming of the world’s most prominent practitioner of sex slavery and beheadings. He retorted in his column, “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.” (For what it’s worth, Baghdadi killed three children when he detonated his suicide vest, and once again, Boot’s column was edited ex Post facto.) Trump supporters scouring Boot’s Twitter feed will find a riches of embarrassment, e.g., his contentions that “The Steele Dossier is way more credible than the Nunes memo” and that Nixon was impeached.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/28/unfunny-cnn-panel-ridicules-trump-supporters-as-credulous-boomer-rubes/

A CNN panel from Saturday night has gone viral this week, showing two guests appearing on air with anchor Don Lemon, mocking Trump supporters during the network’s impeachment coverage.

The discussion features New York Times columnist and CNN contributor Wajahat Ali with ex-GOP strategist Never Trumper Rick Wilson making fun of those who might ever vote for President Donald Trump.

Wilson kicked things off by first insulting the president’s intelligence before characterizing Trump’s supporters as ignorant:

Trump couldn’t find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter “U” and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. He knows that this is an administration defined by ignorance of the world, and so that’s partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience — the credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump.

Wilson and Ali then continued with a fake accents to mock those who put Trump into office as unsophisticated backwoods hicks.

“Donald Trump’s the smart one, and y’all — y’all elitists are dumb,” Wilson said.

“You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling!” Ali chimed in.

“Your math and your readin’!” Wilson responded as the three men laughed hysterically at the belittlement of those alienated by media elites such as themselves.