Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

The Bookworm Beat (11/12/14) — The “trigger warning” edition (and Open Thread)

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Woman writingIf I’ve written this post correctly, it should trigger discomfort in sensitive Leftists.  “Trigger warnings,” for those of you fortunate enough not to move in circles that use them, are warnings at the beginning of any information presentation, be it fact or fiction, written or oral, aural or visual. They tell people with certain sensitivities that the material following the warning might upset them. For example, The Cat In The Hat might be preceded by a trigger warning stating “Trigger Warning: This book contains references to cats, which may be triggering to people suffering from Ailurophobia; references to boys, which may be triggering to people suffering from Misanthropy; references to girls, which may be triggering to people suffering from Misogyny; and references to Things, which may be triggering to people suffering from fear of Things.”

These trigger warnings started amongst the feminists, who manage to hold simultaneously conflicting thoughts, the first being that they are roaring women (and you’d better hear them), and the second that they are such fragile flowers that anything can permanently damage them. I’m not so sure anymore that trigger warnings are just a malicious feminist virus.  Instead, to the extent that trigger warnings are taking over American college campuses, I think that they’re actually part of a fiendish plot that transcends lunatic feminists in Herstory Departments across America.

Think about it: For decades, the Left has carefully controlled the material available to college students. Just when young people’s minds should be in their most receptive, inquiring mode, these youngsters are shut off in an institution that spoon feeds them carefully vetted material pointing to a single world view. As a conservative I met today told me, his grandson, a UC student, proudly boasted that everyone at his college voted Democrat in the last election. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s close enough to the truth to disturb all of us.

The problem for Leftist control freaks is the fact that they only get the students for 4-7 years, and that even during that time there’s the chance that the students, during visits home, or while picking up a random magazine abandoned at a Starbucks might accidentally be exposed to facts or analysis challenging the Leftist paradigm. Even the most zealous Leftist academic can’t police students all the time. Moreover, there’s always the problem that an insufficiently indoctrinated student might be embarrassed at the sheeple-ness of it all (is there no rebellion left amongst the young?) and foment an intellectual revolution.  What’s an academic to do?

What the enterprising academic will do is vaccinate the students so that they develop antibodies that make them permanently resistant to any new information whatsoever. That’s what the “trigger warning” is. It inoculates brains against all ideas but for Leftist ones.  Mention preprogrammed words, phrases, or ideas — e.g., liberty, Founding Fathers, Constitution, decent men, rape fallacy, conservatives, Republicans, etc. — and the students are so sensitized that they instantly, and without any higher brain function, start screaming “It’s a trigger!” after which they fall on the floor in a sobbing heap, inconsolable until someone comes along and whispers in their ears restorative words such as Social Justice, right side of history, racism, sexism, etc.

As long as our young people are not just taught Leftism, but are taught to panic at anything that challenges Leftism, they are unreachable. They have been vaccinated against ideas about individual liberty, constitutionalism, morality, etc. Sad, but true….

But if you’re made of stronger stuff, if you can read ideas that might not mesh with yours, I probably have something to offer you in this little grab bag of links and pictures.

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The memo about Valerie Jarrett is EXACTLY how I see myself

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The White House was apparently worried that Valerie Jarrett wasn’t getting the love she deserved, so it prepared a memo preparatory to Jarrett’s New York Times profile in 2012. just to make sure that everyone at the Times fully understood that, unlike Mary Poppins, Jarrett isn’t just practically perfect in every way, she’s actually perfect in every way. Mark Leibovich got a’hold of the draft memorandum, and shares it with the public in his upcoming book, The Town.

It’s really strange reading the draft memo because it is exactly how I see myself — and all of you, of course.  I can tell that you guys, much like Jarrett herself (and me, of course), can out-saint a saint.

WARNING:  Do not have liquids in your mouth as you read the following memorandum, or you will have to clean those liquids off your keyboard and screen:

The magic of Valerie is her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and shine a light on them and the issues they and the President care about with the ultimate goal of making a difference in people’s lives.

Valerie is the perfect combination of smart, savvy and innovative.

Valerie has an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy. She balances the need to be patient and judicious with the desire to get things done and work as hard as possible for the American people from the White House.

To know what both drives Valerie Jarrett and why the President values her opinion so much, you benefit greatly from really getting to know the woman.

Valerie is tapped in to people’s experiences, their good times and bad. She knows from her own life what it is like to believe and strive for your dreams.

Valerie expects people to work their hearts out for the President and never forget where you work and the magnitude.

Single mother, woman working to the top in a competitive male dominated world, African, working for change from the grassroots to big business.

Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)

And you thought “rich radicals” was an oxymoron

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Join with Zombie on a head-spinning journey to the ultra rich enclaves in Palo Alto, where Obama’s deep pockets — Silicon Valley’s rich radicals — celebrate and enrich a president who then castigates and insults them from his bully pulpit in the White House.

And is it just me, or is Obama unlike any other president in that he never stops fundraising.  That seems to be his primary job, with governing the nation slipped in when he gets the time.  Since I don’t like the way he governs, I probably shouldn’t complain.  Anyway, we all know that Valerie Jarrett’s probably doing the real heavy lifting back in the White House, leaving her cover-boy to raise money.

Is Obama’s puppet master to blame for all the scandals?

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Barack Obama -- small and helpless

Scandals, scandals, and more scandals.  My list so far includes:

1.  Benghazi:  politics before, politics and apathy during, and politics and a wall of lies and cover-ups afterwards.

2.  Fast & Furious:  a completely bungled effort to track cartels in Mexico or a deliberate attempt to gin up gun crime as a way to feed anti-gun fervor.

3.  IRS:  Deliberate targeting of conservative groups and individuals in order to disable them in the lead-up to a tight election.

4.  AP:  Justice Department eavesdrops on media, with recent news indicating that this wasn’t about national security but was a tit-for-tat step taken because the AP mis-timed releasing a story about a thwarted terrorism plot.

I feel as if I’ve forgotten something. I’m sure there’s something else, but I’ve reached the outer limits of my brain’s capacity for the scary, sordid, disgusting, and illegal.

Anyway, the above is a starter list, which shows a distinct trend-line:  the Obama government is about politics before country, revenge before law and morality, and cover-ups above and beyond everything.  That’s why the New York Times’ desperate attempt to blame Republicans for all these things makes for amusing reading.  Although the Times was absolutely outraged by the AP scandal (and I agree with their outrage), everything else is just business as usual.  Nothing to see here.  Just move along:

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines. The tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, never a scandal to begin with, has devolved into a turf-protection spat between government agencies, and the e-mail messages Republicans long demanded made clear that there was no White House cover-up.

The only example of true government overreach was the seizure of The Associated Press’s telephone records, the latest episode in the Obama administration’s Javert-like obsession with leakers in its midst.

(A total aside here.  The myth is that reporters are, at heart, curious people who want to know what’s going on.  Although they’ve been temporarily blinded by ideology, once they catch the scent, they’ll be like the crazed reporters in His Girl Friday.  That’s just wrong.  Today’s reporters signed on, not because they like sniffing out information, but because they’re ideologues who want to pursue an agenda.  The Times perfectly exemplifies this.  It does not report on all the news fit to print.  It doesn’t report at all.  It simply works like a Leftist propaganda arm, reporting all the spin necessary to advance an agenda.  It’s utterly incurious and cares only when it, personally, gets poked.  And now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.)

Wow.  Just wow.  For one thing, it’s clear that the New York Times wrote this editorial before the head of the IRS went before Congress and confessed that the IRS denied what was going on before the election (a lie) and that it timed the release of information to bury it in the news cycle.  And then there’s all that other fascinating stuff that’s been oozing out from the single most powerful coercive entity in the federal government.

In every single statement she made, Lois Lerner, the IRS official who every so casually broke the story, lied.  Just some examples are the fact that the IRS didn’t target, maybe, 75 groups.  It targeted at least 470 groups.  And it wasn’t just wacky Tea Party groups that got caught it the cross hairs, it was any group that appeared even vaguely to oppose Obama’s policies.  The targeting wasn’t just confined to a rogue Ohio office, it went to the top.  And, indeed, the very top person got over $100,000 in bonuses and was promoted to head the — ahem — nonpartisan branch of the IRS in charge of enforcing ObamaCare.

We also know that the IRS illegally leaked information about Obama’s political opponents — which definitely has a kind of mirror-like Watergate quality to it.  Nixon’s henchmen stole data directly from his political opponents; Obama’s henchmen release data about Obama’s political opponents to Obama’s supporters.  And of course, speaking of stealing things, it appears that the IRS stole tens of thousands of medical records — this would be, of course, the same IRS that’s in charge of enforcing ObamaCare.

Worried yet?  I know I am.

Despite all this, Obama remains perched precariously atop ignorance mountain.  His line is consistent:

Either Obama’s lying, which is entirely possible, because he’s a compulsive liar, or he was as ignorant as he seems.  Those Leftist media figures who are not in total denial have latched on this as the excuse to protect their idol, now that they know there’s a lot of clay mixed in with his feet.  He’s a little too disengaged, he’s not a micro-manager, he’s too pure to know what evil lurks in the heart of men, etc.

John Fund, however, has a very different idea, and I think he may be on the right track.  His version of events posits that Obama has never actually been president.  We’ve been operating, instead, under the shadow presidency of consigliere Valerie Jarrett:

So if Obama is not fully engaged, who does wield influence in the White House? A lot of Democrats know firsthand that Jarrett, a Chicago mentor to both Barack and Michelle Obama and now officially a senior White House adviser, has enormous influence. She is the only White House staffer in anyone’s memory, other than the chief of staff or national security adviser, to have an around-the-clock Secret Service detail of up to six agents. According to terrorism expert Richard Miniter’s recent book, Leading from Behind: “At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving” the mission for May 2, 2011. She was instrumental in overriding then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel when he opposed the Obamacare push, and she was key in steamrolling the bill to passage in 2010. Obama may rue the day, as its chaotic implementation could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections.

A senior Republican congressional leader tells me that he had come to trust that he could detect the real lines of authority in any White House, since he’s worked for five presidents. “But this one baffles me,” he says. “I do know that when I ask Obama for something, there is often no answer. But when I ask Valerie Jarrett, there’s always an answer or something happens.”

You really should read the whole thing.  That theory explains so much….

Sunday morning mish-mash

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Legal Insurrection argues compellingly that, even though Journolist was exposed and, presumably, disbanded, the MSM is stilling using the same playbook.

Well, maybe not quite.  Very peculiarly (and practically minutes before the DNC in political time), the New York Times is running an article about Valerie Jarrett, identifying her as the most powerful person in Washington, and identifying the president as an isolated, insular figure who looks to her first on all things, both practical and ideological.  The Times article never mentions Dick Cheney, but the article makes it seem as if Jarrett is what Dick Cheney never was — the Machiavellian power behind the Oval Office chair.  In other words, when Obama tweeted the post-Eastwood picture of himself in a chair, maybe it should have been the back of Valerie Jarrett’s head we saw.

Of course, I may be misreading this.  I see it as a slap to Obama that he’s portrayed as a weak puppet in the hands of a powerful Leftist puppet master.  For the disappointed masses on the Left, however, who believe Obama is a centrist, maybe this is the dog whistle they need, ensuring them that the centrist is in thrall to a true believer.  The implication would be that, in a second term, the puppet master can go full throttle.  It’s not the puppet who matters, it’s the puppet master.

In the continuing peculiar world that is Obama’s America, what was once a nasty sexual slur, one that managed to insult both blacks and whites, is now a campaign slogan.

If you’re looking for a non-typical movie to watch this Labor Day weekend, Machine Gun Preacher might be just the ticket (although I understand it’s a bit violent).

On the lighter side, is this the next Macarena?  This song, by Michel Telo, is apparently taking Latin America and Europe by storm, but it seems to me to lack the frenetic urgency that drove the Macarena to iconic status:

I happen to be incredibly fond of Brazilian music, so it works for me, but I wonder how far it will go generally in America. Speaking of Brazilian music, here’s one of my favorites:

Please consider this an Open Thread.

Valerie Jarrett: The woman who fills Obama’s empty suit

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If you read only one thing today, read Edward Klein’s answer to the question “Who is Valerie Jarrett?”  (Edward Klein is the highly respected political writer and author of The Amateur.)  Klein’s article can be broken down into two parts:  Part One concerns Jarrett’s unfailingly bad political instincts; Part Two concerns the Svengali-like hold she has on Obama.

We’ve always known Obama was an empty suit.  Now we know who fills it.

Oh, those cwazy uniforms; or, no wonder Valerie Jarrett was confused.

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May I quote myself, writing about the beautiful and moving Battle of Midway Commemoration in San Francisco last year?

The event was a formal one, which is much more beautiful than a civilian black tie affair.  The women, of course, presented a familiar and pleasing picture.  They had on lovely dresses ranging from safe (but always elegant) black to a rainbow of jewel-like colors.  Their hair was piled high or cascaded down in graceful ringlets, curls or curtains of silky hair.  Their make-up said, appropriately, “Here I am and aren’t I lovely?”  I expected that.

It was the men who were such a treat — and a surprise.  To me, “formal” means black tie.  It’s a good look, since it’s the rare man who isn’t elevated slightly by the dignity of a black jacket, pleated shirt, and neatly tied black tie.  Add in a cummerbund, and he’s ready to face anything.  I am, therefore, not complaining about traditional formals.  It’s just that, after having seen Navy formal wear, traditional men’s formal wear will, forever after, seem a little bit bland.

As I knew, but had never seen, Navy formal wear is white.  The uniform therefore brings the light in a room up, rather than down.  On their arms and shoulders, the officers wear the golden insignia of their rank.  I know now, although I didn’t understand that fact when I walked in, that many of the men present boasted an Admiral’s rank.  There was no shortage, however, of other ranks, whether chiefs or captains or lieutenants. The young men and women in attendance who had not (yet) attained the higher ranks were nattily attired from head to toe (or, if they were women, from head to knee) in whites.  The only exceptions were the two tall, trim, young Marines who were resplendent in their dark blue uniforms, lavishly decorated with gold and red.

Every uniformed guest had a variety of “mini-medals” on his (or her) left chest, over his (or her) heart.  The higher the rank, or the longer the years of service, the more of these exquisite medallions adorned the wearer — exquisite both because they are beautiful on their own terms, as mere objets, and because each represents a special level of accomplishment, dedication or bravery.

I’ll admit to being a girl (an aged girl, sadly) who still gets a thrill from a uniform.  I can’t help but think, though, that my possibly silly attitude ranks higher than that shown by White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.  She clearly believes that one uniform is pretty much like another — and that none are that special:

According to our tipster, Jarrett was seated at the head table along with several other big-name politicians and a handful of high-ranking military officials. As an officer sporting several stars walked past Jarrett, she signaled for his attention and said, “I’d like another glass of wine.”

Garçon!

White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, who was seated next to Jarret, began “cracking up nervously,” our tipster said, but no one pointed out to Jarrett that the man sporting a chestful of medals was not her waiter.

“The guy dutifully went up and got her a glass of wine, and then came back and gave it to her and took a seat at the table,” our tipster said. “Everyone is in tuxedos and gowns at this thing, but the military people are in full dress uniform.”

“There was no shortage of waiters either,” the tipster added.

It’s great to know that the world’s knowledgeable intellectuals are firmly in control of Washington, D.C.’s levers of power.

Hat tip:  American Thinker, which got it from Instapundit

More about Obama’s “consigliere”

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Michelle Malkin has a great take-down of a NYT week end magazine article about Valerie Jarrett, pointing out all of the things the Times conveniently omitted from the its glowing review of this important behind-the-scenes player in the Obama White House.

I actually saw the same story on-line last week and blogged about it at the time:

Read this and, aside from hearing effusive praise for Valerie Jarrett, the President’s consigliere, you also learn so much about Obama.  Just on the first page, you learn that he’s whiny, bad-tempered, lazy, ill-informed, stubborn, a loose cannon, and, when it comes to strong women, submissive.  (Oh, gee, just the qualities I want in my president.)  It’s strange when a loving NY Times article sounds as mean as a less than loving National Review article.  Jarrett’s power is a bit creepy, especially given that she is a true Chicago political insider (and that’s no compliment).  But what makes the article really amazing is the way in which it demeans Obama as a way of highlighting Jarrett’s behind-the-scenes control.  As for Jarrett, she bears further examination, given her control over the President.

I’m delighted to see that Michelle has done precisely the “further examination” I thought so necessary.  It’s just a shame that most New York Times readers will never learn (or want to learn) the whole story.