On America’s 241st birthday, apparently celebrated by only half of the country, we struggle with two gigantic, ankle-rattling first-time forces:
- The kind of president America never has seen
- A single-cell lockstep media last detected crawling across the Soviet Union in 1987 after President Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that (Berlin) wall.”
Four days before the lockstep media marks the eight-month anniversary of its mass suicide following Hillary’s willful defeat, we are asked to believe a tweet to a little-watched cable show is America’s No. 1 issue.
That is how far the lockstep media has fallen.
Don’t Smile for Any Birdie
Laughing is culturally offensive to leftists.
The congenitally insecure, insincere lockstep media selectively has declined to notify us of antics on their side. Unmoored Maxine Waters, reportedly a congresswoman, has said that if a Republican version of healthcare replaces compulsory Obamacare, “700 billion” people will lose their coverage.
Last month Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the reported governor of Virginia, held a news conference after a crazy Democrat shot a Republican congressman at baseball practice. Nah, said the erudite governor to the assembled peasants, this was not a political attack. This happened because guns are so freely available to non-criminals. Guns, said the governor with ministerial piety, “kill 93 million Americans every day.”
The governor has failed to correct his balmy supposition.
Explanation: Because he committed the presumed gaffe 20 days ago, this means America was emptied out as of June 18.
Beauty and the Daily Beasts
If you belong to the 50 percent of America authentically celebrating our country’s birthday:
Go to YouTube. Play 3 minutes and 48 seconds of Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful.”
In spite of sanctuary cities, homegrown detractors, an MIA media and MIA global climate warming change, America proudly stands as the world’s Nos. 1 and 2 democracy.
Tilt Without a Lilt
In an era when 93 percent of CNN’s post-election coverage of Mr. Trump has been negative, here is the most reasonable explanation I have seen of the lockstep media obsession with tweeting. Thomas Lifson of the conservative American Thinker argued:
As usual, President Trump is outraging the political-media establishment. They assume that his early-morning tweets last week zinging the Morning Joe odd couple, were the result of some form of derangement. They are not equipped to understand the strategy that lies behind his tweets. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, they operate on the basis of unconscious beliefs.
President Trump understands that the current informal-but-very-real rules of the game have allowed Mika and Joe (and the rest of the media-political world) free rein to savage him and his family. He is supposed to be a gentleman and just take it while they get support for attacking him.
That’s what President George W. Bush did. It cost him dearly, unto this day. His suffering may be noble. But that form of greatness does not seem to interest President Trump.
Mr. Trump understands that the culture governing D.C. and the media has to change because it systematically favors his opponents. They set the rules. Those rules give the media the ability to call the shots, and the media overwhelmingly oppose him.
Media criticism cows Republicans into submission. It boosts the causes of the left.
So President Trump, who is a doer, is actively working to change that culture by violating its norms. Norms are the key to the way behavior is actually regulated in the workplace (and other social groupings).