Whatever one’s opinion of [Michael] Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks....Much more at the link. Well done.
The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.... Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran....
Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....
Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent." Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers? That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth! And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 213 of 213Haldeman and Ehrlichman should have held out for their own MacNeill/Lehrer News Hour.
The boundaries between generations are blurry. Someone born in 1946 and someone born in 1964 are both part of the boomer generation, but the world changed a lot between the 60s when the first boomers came of age and the 80s when the last boomers did. Somebody born in 1948 probably had a lot more in common with someone born in 1942 than with someone born in 1962, other things being held equal.
It was like that with the GI or Greatest Generation. Someone born in 1908 or 1910 had a decade of rotten economic conditions after college or high school to look forward to. Someone born in 1927 could look forward to the postwar boom after leaving high school or college or the military. People who went through the Depression, the New Deal, WWII and the Cold War did tend to believe in big government more than people who lived before or after all that, but one can't hold people responsible for decisions made when they may have been in grade school.
It's true that we were never one people, but once 70% or 80% or more of the population had or believed they had a common culture. I don't know to what extent we have a common culture now - probably we have more of one than people think, maybe more than we had in the past - yet people do seem to believe that we are more divided than we have been in years. The absence of a common external enemy has a lot to do with it, and we do seem to think of ourselves more in racial or ideological terms, than we do at other periods.
I don't deny the great racial divides of the 50s and 60s, but when 88% of the population considered itself to be White, that 88% probably felt that the country was more united than divided. It may be that different ethnic groups have more in common today than in the past, but the expectation that there would be a mainstream American culture that the overwhelming majority of the country would identify with hasn't been satisfied, so we feel more Balkanized.
The boundaries between generations are blurry. Someone born in 1946 and someone born in 1964 are both part of the boomer generation, but the world changed a lot between the 60s when the first boomers came of age and the 80s when the last boomers did. Somebody born in 1946 probably had a lot more in common with someone born in 1942 than with someone born in 1962, other things being held equal.
It was like that with the GI or Greatest Generation. Someone born in 1908 or 1910 had a decade of rotten economic conditions after college or high school to look forward to. Someone born in 1927 could look forward to the postwar boom after leaving high school or college or the military. People who went through the Depression, the New Deal, WWII and the Cold War did tend to believe in big government more than people who lived before or after all that, but one can't hold people responsible for decisions made when they may have been in grade school.
It's true that we were never one people, but once 70% or 80% or more of the population had or believed they had a common culture. I don't know to what extent we have a common culture now - probably we have more of one than people think, maybe more than we had in the past - yet people do seem to believe that we are more divided than we have been in years. The absence of a common external enemy has a lot to do with it, and we do seem to think of ourselves more in racial or ideological terms, than we do at other periods.
I don't deny the great racial divides of the 50s and 60s, but when 88% of the population considered itself to be White, that 88% probably felt that the country was more united than divided. It may be that different ethnic groups have more in common today than in the past, but the expectation that there would be a mainstream American culture that the overwhelming majority of the country would identify with hasn't been satisfied, so we feel more Balkanized.
exiledonmainstreet @11:59am
This baffles me too. I've heard millennials bitterly blame their parents for ruining the country, while at the same time accepting every single left-wing Boomer premise taught by their professors.
Really, first of all these are two different groups of people, the 'cool' Boomer professors who is teaching the young to question everything their parents taught them has little in common with their parents other than age. Also, to many assume that the professor in question are Boomers, when like as not they are gen Xers who are doing the indoctrinating anyway. Socialist suck no matter what generation they are a member of.
This is why our favorite poster, Buwaya, recommends we completely burn down the Universities to stop the contagion of political correct fascism. I agree with him and are afraid we are too late but the coming financial implosion on the horizon may help us get rid of these pests so we can restore a polity that understands the constitution again.
I agree with him and are afraid we are too late but the coming financial implosion on the horizon may help us get rid of these pests so we can restore a polity that understands the constitution again.
I tend to agree and must say there is not much good about being 82 but this is one thing I do not look forward to living through,
However, I do have my AR 15 and plenty of ammo.
If you want to get up to speed on the Flynn case, Glenn Greenwald's Intercept podcast System Update is comprehensive, and I recommend it highly.
Two warnings: it is an hour and 45 minutes, and Glenn's dog is barking in the far background.
This is a model of how to explain something (1) when you dislike and disagree politically with a target, but (2) want to present the target's case clearly.
I admire Greenwald's honesty and clarity here.
"Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power?"
Science!
Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent."
Serious Question, from 1828, until Now; could someone point to a Democrat, whose contempt for civil liberties was NOT genuine-to-permanent?
Andy Jackson?
Jeff Davis?
Woody Wilson?
FDR?
JFK?
LBJ?
Clinton?
O'Bama?
any? any at all?
Do you know the difference between teaching and indoctrination? Lefty Boomers don’t teach!!!
Illiberal fascism believes the ends justify the means. The despot's last refuge.
Taibbi is one of the few journalists who empathetically tries to understand the people who make up extreme political movements. That's unbelievably rare. I wouldn't expect that from someone who once spent a decade in Russia behaving very badly, by his own admission.
But maybe someone needed to come along and do Hunter S. Thompson with a fully-functioning superego and morning-after regret. It's far more interesting, and decent. His insight that trutherism, for example, is a weird coalition where far-left and far-right meet isn't just accurate; he's also humane to the participants.
He's a one-man anti-cancel-culture crusade.
Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent."
Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers?
Read anything by Solzhenitsyn and the book 'The House of Government'. It's their fanatical atheism that has led them down this road.
Western religions, for the most part, are very light handed compared to the Soviet experience which they crave. The Bolsheviks greatly admired the Puritans.
For them life was about promoting 'the glory of god'. The Bolsheviks replaced this with 'the party' while pursuing the glory with the same zeal.
Soviet society was therefore very religious. Lot's of 'holy days of obligation' that you better show up for.
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