MarketWatch and TheHill loose #FakeNews anti-Trump horse

On 9/30, TheHill.com posted that the Trump administration was charging Puerto Ricans flying from devastation. It was Fake News of the sort the president frequently decries. 

Americans depend on sound information for our understanding of world events and democratic decision making. Reporters allowing their personal ideological prejudices to twist and taint their work do terrible harm to readers, as well as to subjects, and to the theoretically noble journalistic endeavor.

The Hill's erroneous report had as its sole basis a Tomi Kilgore anti-Trump MarketWatch.com piece. Kilgore's false claim was corrected by the U.S. State Department. But, undeterred, MarketWatch preserved the original false article, including reflective URL.

The Hill later retracted the untrue assertion, advising readers that the article had been updated at 2:21 PM EST. But, like MarketWatch, The Hill retained the original link, which preserved the subsequently withdrawn deceit.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/352824-trump-administration-forcing-puerto-rico-evacuees-to-pay-for

Clicking that link led to the corrected report [italics, mine]: "State not requiring Puerto Rico evacuees to pay transportation costs," by John Bowden.

"The State Department is not requiring anyone evacuated from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico to sign promissory notes reimbursing the government for travel costs," Bowden acknowledged, in the opening paragraph.

(Snopes.com also ruled the claim to be "false." http://www.snopes.com/is-the-trump-administration-puerto-rico-evacuees/)

Once Fake News is disseminated, though, as its unethical dirt-doers doubtless intend, subsequent retraction is as impotent as closing the barn door after a horse has gotten free. The initial fake story turned up on social media long after the correction was posted, spread widely by enthusiastic, partisan users sharing fake media's zeal for slurring Trump -- by any means necessary.

One was put in mind of the MarketWatch/Hill deceit by President Trump's tweet the same day. "To the people of Puerto Rico: Do not believe the #FakeNews!"


(In his piece quoting that Trump admonition, Bowden made no mention of The Hill's own #Fake News guilt. 
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/353264-trump-tells-puerto-rico-residents-do-not-believe-the-fake-news )

Iowa city: Goodbye, Columbus

National news stories tell of coast-to-coast statuary demolitions, campus anti-free speech rioters, liberal historical revisionism, and the obliteration from public buildings of iconic names and references.

But such erasing of traditional American icons also has representation in small-pond heartland outposts. The Davenport, Iowa, City Council recently voted to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day on Oct. 9, the date traditionally recognized as Columbus Day. (In 1934, FDR proclaimed Columbus Day a federal holiday.)

Recognition of benefits Americans today enjoy due to Columbus' historic accomplishments do not necessarily imply countenance with his every other activity. Celebrating primary good hardly signifies endorsement of any auxilliary wrong. No one among us could pass that test.

Davenport is only the latest locale to surrender itself to the cold and grey embrace of political correctness, and throw to the pavement Columbus Day honoring. The Associated Press notes that several municipalities and states have dispatched Columbus recognition in favor of the Indigenous Peoples Day moniker since that designation was in 1977 enshrined by the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations In the Americas. 

(It seems likely that the authors of UN titles are paid by the letter.)

The state of Iowa does not officially honor Columbus Day, but its governors are "authorized and requested" to annually extend recognition. 

Local KWQC reports that the council announced the move with a proclamation that did not even mention Columbus. Of course, without that explorer's accomplishment the members of Davenport's council would not rule on anything, live in their neighborhoods, or know one another.

In fact, had world history and geographic transmutations not followed the course Columbus personifies, Davenport council members probably would not even be. At all.

The body's action had been urged by the Native American Coalition of the Quad Cities, representatives of which had pressured council members to effect the plowing under of yet another emblem of the United States' unique historical and cultural character.

As indicated in the AP's coverage, though, this may not be settled. The proclamation's author asserted confidently that: "The City Council has decided Davenport will mark Indigenous Peoples Day on Oct. 9, not Columbus Day."

At-Large Alderman Kyle Gripp, though, offered a conflictive view: "Indigenous Peoples Day was and still is not a Davenport holiday."

Gripp further assured that proclamations are merely honorary, and do not confer official holiday recognition.

The real Oprah that Podhoretz ignores

John Podhoretz is prominent among the doddering dinosaurs of the Never Trump elite. He is favored by the producers of such cable news dreckish conventionality as MSNBC's Morning Joe, a seedy platform from which he's wheezed innumerable slurs about the President of the United States.

In his 9/27 New York Post column, "Democrats' best hope for 2020: Oprah," Podhoretz exalts that host's superficial qualities as if they alone mattered. 
(http://nypost.com/2017/09/27/democrats-best-hope-for-2020-oprah/) 

He floods the page with effusiveness ("dazzling," "grand," "fearless,") and jovially lauds Winfrey's afternoon talk show as a "parade of the positive, with happy celebrity interactions and relentless guidance toward self-actualization ('be your best self.')"

Image and public perception are certainly important. President Trump's success was, in part, attributable to them. But his supporters received much more, and responded enthusiastically to his thunderous enunciation of bedrock Constitutional principles, traditional values, common sense, and vow to Make America Great Again.

(Along his miserable way, Podhoretz demonstrates elitist contempt for the common man when he derides our victorious electoral choice as "America's crazy uncle." That sort of sniffing helped Trump to Pennsylvania Avenue and Hillary to Costco.)

Podhoretz does not cite any specific Winfrey issue postures. None. He does spend a bit of time on her lavish, celebrity fundraising for Obama -- though none on her more recent and crashingly unsuccessful Hillary boosting.

But Oprah did once give public voice to a particularly ugly personal belief, one at whose core lie racial animus and flabbergasting stupidity:

During a 2014 BBC interview, Winfrey leaned forward, her features deathly serious: "There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it -- in that prejudice and racism -- and they just have to die." 

Try selling that in Peoria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7QfC0Xjwk

Oprah offered those terrible and hateful words with the ice-blooded purposefulness of a serenely horrible cultist. And the video preserving them ensures that she'll never know national electoral victory.

Winfrey opened up and expressed broad-brush hate of the type frequently and without evidence imputed to the president. 
Adversarial campaign commercials broadcast nationwide would expose to average Americans a foul side of the host she never revealed to applauding, studio audiences composed of various ages and skin tones. 

And that's a popularity-killing revelation no praise-penning Podhoretz could hope to veil.

Fake News, off and running 

A 9/28 email sent to supporters by the Republican National Committee contained an ominous admonition from President Donald Trump:  

"We cannot allow the Fake News media and obstructionist Democrats to flood the airwaves and mislead the American people."

Only the night before, I'd seen exactly the political press deceitfulness of which Trump warned. I'd seen how "fake news" is cheerily wrought by its unprincipled architects.

On 9/27, the Hill.com published "Meghan McCain rips report Trump physically mocking her father," by staff writer Jonathan Easley. The physical mockery alleged consisted solely of a 'thumbs down' gesture. But, as McCain is presently suffering cancer issues, the obvious implication was that the president was somehow assailing the Arizona senator on related, beyond-the-pale grounds. 

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/352700-meghan-mccain-rips-trump-over-report-he-is-physically-mocking-her-father

Easley's entire deceptive effort cited only a single foundation, a brief Axios.com piece by Mike Allen. (Allen's resume features red flag-names like Time, Politico, and the New York Times.)  

https://www.axios.com/trump-at-war-with-everyone-mocks-mccain-mcconnell-2490111904.html

Allen's Axios article -- "Trump, at war with everyone, mocks McCain, McConnell" -- opened with an unattributed claim: "In private, President Trump has taken to physically mocking M&M: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (slumped shoulders, lethargic body language) and Sen. John McCain (imitating the thumbs-down of his historic health care vote)."

And, that's it. No attribution -- not even the standard, after-assertion "according to insiders requesting anonymity" familiar to everyone who's ever picked up a paper, turned to a news broadcast, or in some other fashion been bilge-splattered by the politically biased and ethically ramshackle mainstream media.)

(If Allen would claim to have witnessed any of this personally, he does not inform readers. Nor would his unsupported word likely be deemed reliable by anyone familiar with his professionally dubious past. In 2013, the Washington Post exposed Allen's under-table marketing of favorable Politico coverage to businesses in return for advertising dollars, Remember, too, that he was ignominiously caught out giving Chelsea Clinton veto authority over campaign-era Politico interview questions.)

Unsurprisingly, the dirty work of Allen and Easley quickly realized 
returns from undiscerning readers already loaded down with bias against America's president. Persons commenting online, many of whom hid behind the shadow-cover of anonymity, cheered the smear without critical consideration. 

Often cited by them was then-candidate Trump's ridicule of flustered reporter Serge Kovalevski. And just that link in the public consciousness was surely one Fake News dirty-tricksters had hoped to inspire.

By the following day, the unproved story had assumed further animation. "McCain on Trump reportedly mocking him: Nothing I can do about it," by Hill staff writer Jordain Carney, was based on Easley's Hill article, which, in turn, was wholly based on Allen's unattributed Axios claim.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/352921-mccain-on-trump-reportedly-mocking-him-nothing-i-can-do-about-it

President Trump has been right about many things. That the mainstream media is unscrupulous and unethical is one fine illustration.

Postscript: Let's not allow PC prissiness to strangle humor or effective communication. Whether or not Trump ever impersonated anyone, caricatures amplify individual characteristics. They easily identify select subjects. 

Obviously, decency dictates that handicaps and similarly unchosen impairments are not legitimate matters for mockery. But not every mannerism, vocal inflection, or idiosyncrasy belongs in that 'untouchable' category. To suggest otherwise, as would seem to be true of eager shovelers of this latest anti-Trump smear, advocates neutering a goodly portion of innocent commentary on the human condition.

In the 1980s, then-stand up Richard Belzer regularly and hilariously mimed a press-evading Ronald Reagan, pretending to not hear shouted questions over a helicopter's engine noise. Belzer effected a sort of rhythmic shuffle in which the former president alternately cupped an ear/shrugged his shoulders/stepped toward the 'copter/gestured bafflement, and screwed up his features. The entire process was repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

(Go to 1:12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpSs18Yr2PQ)

It was funny because it was immediately recognizable. It captured its intended object in a manner familiar to audiences.

And there's nothing wrong with a good laugh. It's something free people do.

NFL vs America

Some unpatriotic NFL owners and related advertisers have rallied to the banner of national anthem protesters. A positive product of their 'coming out' is that the majority can now recognize them for what they are and conduct ourselves, accordingly.

That prancing players have the right to their inferior opinion is beyond dispute. But, for the rest of us, choosing to not patronize a particular enterprise or maintain a social relationship is a right no less legitimate. Tolerance of differing opinions need not cover malicious schemings that intend harm to us or our country.

(Protesters deceitfully claim that their actions are wholly independent of national iconography. That posture can be immediately dispatched simply by noting that protests are purposefully effected during the playing of the national anthem and flag salute.)

Already, news accounts report dramatic plunges in NFL ticket sales and TV viewership. And video clips of Steelers' and other teams' former fans burning promotional apparel have gone viral. Calls to boycott all NFL activities are being heard from the political heights in Washington to the common-man, small-town America that in 2016 rejected such epicene progressivism in favor of the robust and proudly patriotic Trump Revolution. 

Given that some owners have thus far indulged apostate players, effectively inviting average man-outrage and corporate ruination, the reality of their increasingly dire financial fortunes is indeed delicious. Those owners unwisely bet against American patriotism. No good citizen will now mourn their falls.

An honest accounting turns up the truth that, far from a sincere expression of concern about serious cultural ills, the "taking a knee" phenomenon is just the latest gaudy manifestation of the low anti-Americanism that has prompted statuary destructions, historical revisionism, Antifa terrorists' street violence, and assertions that America and her essential ideals are without validity. 

Whether or not players intend them to, their sideline antics are conducive to the maleficent globalism that would erase all independent national identities, borders, laws, and traits, sublimating the worlds' innocent peoples to the dictates of an undemocratic ruling elite.

In 2017, America's enemies need not wear identifying insignia. Just look for the cretins on their knees. 

Although I'd always heard about it, it had never happened to me. Until it did.

A dispiriting truth now well-known is that Trump haters happily and without sound reason fling personally destructive character smears.

Doubtless, some who falsely hurl horrible epithets do so with the dirty hope of ending conversations. No one wants to be identified as a bigot. And some innocent persons, fearing such negative social branding, retreat into silence rather than contest ideas. 

Totalitarians love quiescence; it makes undemocratic domination easier.

Recently, a person I know but with whom I have little in common, politically, challenged my defending "white supremacists'" free speech rights, but criticizing NFL players' national anthem kneeling. The obvious and sickening implication was that I somehow sympathized with the content of noxious speech.

Rather than marshalling exonerative evidence, I'll simply borrow a line from Hitchens: "That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Understanding the difference between one's speech rights during private as opposed to company time is crucial here. Support for the rights of any given voice, though, does not indicate sympathy for thoughts it might reflect.

Persons who would seriously examine bigotry and expunge it from our shared American culture must acknowledge that some differences of opinion are legitimate. No one "owns" the issues involved, nor is it reasonable to arbitrarily denounce as 'haters' all who see matters somewhat differently.  

Anti-American League follies

(As I write, a shouting fascist is attempting to drown out planned free speech addresses by Milo and Pamela Geller, on Berkeley University's Sproul Plaza. Milo had attempted to conduct a Free Speech Week at the California university. But Berkeley's administrators had thrown up numerous financial and logistical impediments to the proposed event, hoping surely to stifle unpopular political expression. 

The Berkeley powers, city government, and the Milo-interrupting shouter represent current fascistic agitations against speech. Tellingly, though, mainstream media voices ignore that genuine suppression of political speech, favoring instead to wail over the counterfeit example dispatched below.)

Always slavering at the prospects of sedition and cultural disorder, news outlets are lousy with agit-prop-sputtering champions of the anti-patriotic posture opportunistically adopted by many in professional sports. 

Nevermind that those pampered and moneyed beneficiaries of America's promise are by no reasonable measure "oppressed." 

Often claimed by sympathetic partisans is that players' free speech rights are at issue. They are not. 

For years a chief union steward, I spent no little time arguing with management over the distinction between employees' private and company-time speech. Sometimes in heated shouting matches.

The NFL's limousine-lolling mock-victims are not communicating privately with fellow workers. Nor are they marching down Main Street on their own time. Were they, then of course First Amendment concerns would apply.  

But salaried players who "take a knee" while the national anthem is played are inappropriately expressing themselves personally while on the company's time. And they were not hired to exploit sports employment as a stage from which to wax philosophically.

When workers, whether they be quarterbacks or carpenters, appear at company functions and are "on the clock" and in the public eye, they are representatives of their employers. In taking the job, they agreed to certain expectations. (For example, wearing whatever uniform or insignia might be required, appearing for work at the scheduled time, not publicly making comments that reflect negatively on the place of business, etc).

In no way at issue, here, are private communications. They rightly enjoy protection. But it is entirely appropriate for employers to expect and take necessary actions to ensure that on-the-job employees not attract negative attention by publicly making statements that do not reflect employers' desired company image. 

And that's hardly an unreasonable requirement. Grocery store clerks, for example, cannot drop their assigned job duties and bellow show tunes whenever the whim strikes them.

Of course, charges of inequality in the administration of justice are well worth general citizen attention. 'Equality under the law' is an American bedrock principle. Its denial to any individual diminishes its soundness and imperils us all.

But sporting events are by their nature diversionary. They are not legitimate venues for weighty deliberation of Constitutional affairs. 

For fans insulted by players' insistence on mounting anti-American spectacles -- ones wholly unrelated to the job for which they were hired -- no longer buying tickets or tuning in are valid options, ones to be pursued. 

After all, if a restaurant server is rude, you might consider no longer patronizing that business. And if many servers, and their bosses, unite in rudeness toward paying customers, even pompously declaring their bad behavior to be 'noble,' no one would expect aggrieved diners to be tolerant and to open their wallets.

For players and owners, then, it's not about speech, but lack of national pride. And for fans, it's about both patriotism and self-respect.

Free speech campus assassins 
ThinkProgress anti-Milo piece indicates neither reasonable thought nor favorable advancement

Because an exhaustive study of the article at issue would be unpleasant for all concerned, only its odious philosophical undergirding will here be dealt with.

"Berkeley plans $1 million dollar spend on Milo Yiannopoulos' event amid massive budget cuts," was recently posted on the ThinkProgress site. Credited to Kira Lerner and Joshua Eaton, the piece puts forward the revolting conceits that freedom of speech is contrary to the general interest, and that it is morally just for identity groups claiming pre-event apprehension to exercise veto authority over disfavored voices.

https://thinkprogress.org/berkeley-free-speech-cost-c140085b8cc0/

The authors implicitly lay blame for unaddressed student want at the feet of event speakers, quoting campus representatives as complaining of underfunded nutrition programs. Were Universities not spending for security, they argue, those monies could be directed toward such human need.

"The security plan that's already in place, which the university says it's moving forward with until further notice, would waste resources on a campus where students say they need more financial support," say the ThinkProgress authors. 

Nowhere do the writers properly assign culpability to potential rioters, though it is because of their anti-liberty agitations that security is required. Milo does probably desire the residual publicity. But in principle, no speaker, regardless of their viewpoint, should be held responsible for costs stemming from opponents' destructive actions.

The jackboot fancy cherished in the article is at utter odds with the First Amendment. But it is also in lockstep with current prejudices against Constitutional rights and freedoms, including untrammeled political and cultural expression. 

Brookings' John Villasenor recently published a study of college students' relevant attitudes. Fewer than half, representing various demographics and political affiliations, believe that "hate speech" enjoys legal protection. (An astounding fallacy, given the abundance of judicial precedent to the contrary). 

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/

51% of study respondents supported shouting down objectionable speakers -- an interference with their First Amendment rights. 19% even believed violence to be an acceptable response to 'offensive' speech. 

(Washington Post writer Catherine Rampell recently asserted: "Here's the problem with suggesting that upsetting speech warrants 'safe spaces,' or otherwise conflating mere speech with physical assault: If speech is violence, then violence becomes a justifiable response to speech.")

There is no need to unfurl a list of once-unpopular ideas that eventually bettered America. Nor must a given thought offer that potential in order to merit legal safeguarding. 

Popularity is not a legitimate gauge against which speech can be measured for validity. And I'm talking, not about any particular content, but the quality of speech, itself. The liberty to believe what seems most likely, to endorse values and form opinions, and to give public utterance to those perceptions, is a treasure no good man would seek to deny his fellows.

For decades, indeed centuries, great minds have deliberated over the rights of the individual in a democratic society. Judicial and legislative efforts in that same noble task have all proceeded from the mighty foundation of the Constitution, a remarkable, America-founding document that literally altered the course of man's history.

Today, all of that stands imperiled by callow, authoritarian, intellectually superficial miscreants who don't recognize the enormity of their wrongdoing. That once precious and time-honored liberties are destroyed, they cannot later be restored to original soundness.

Hollywood Jimmy patronizes again
or, Will somebody please shut that celebrity the hell up?

During his 9/20 monologue, progressive posh boy Jimmy Kimmel groused at great length about the pending Graham-Cassidy health care legislation.

(See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5Hek7Z2b8)

Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit observed the following day that Kimmel: "[H]as no idea that the premiums are unaffordable for most American families. But he's an elitist, so he's going to lecture, anyway." 

With unctuous show business artifice, Kimmel read from a studio teleprompter words perhaps written by someone else, but with all the 'intensity' of a man who'd crafted them, himself. 

At one point, balling both fists and clenching his jaw, Kimmel mock-glared into the camera lens and issued a threat of physical violence to Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade: "Brian, you phony little creep! Oh, I'll pound you when I see you!"

Surely, the comedic talk show host was not seriously threatening Kilmeade, but only playing to his cheering audience's prejudice. And, probably, effectively waving his arms for publicity notice.

A Real Clear Politics article showed that Kimmel's lickspittle media allies rushed to his cause, rewriting in real time an event that had just happened before millions of eyeballs. 

The New York Times' Sopran Deb tweeted: "If you watch the video, I believe Kimmel meant 'pound' as mocking Kilmeade for offering fist bumps in person."

"I interpreted it the same way you did," seconded CNN's oily Brian Stelter.

Note the flabbergasting phoniness that mainstream media finger-waggers shamelessly demonstrated. Whither the furrowed-brow claims of concern for press welfare such Fake News toadies eagerly shovel whenever President Trump criticizes inky smirkers' skullduggery?

The present lack of Kimmel criticism reminds of the mainstream media's silent acquiescence in contemporary Antifa attempts to block cameras and physically attack reporters. 

Considering the filthy business of media scolds' hypocrisy -- throwing up bile or not, depending on political ideology -- one can only conclude that the Stelters were lying all along. It never truly was about principle, but just their foul, divisive, and oppressive prejudices.

Certainly, candidate Donald Trump made much of explicit hostility toward the mainstream media. It was a hoot, and I laughed, heartily. Especially when NBC's Katy Tur tremblingly (and, one feels confident, needlessly) sought the parking lot protection of armed guards.

Arenas full of Trump supporters roared their contempt for a snooty press industry that daily churned misrepresentative versions of realities calculatingly sculpted to conform to the needs of disconnected, coastal political biases. 

"CNN sucks! CNN sucks! CNN sucks!" went the chant popular across our nation.

These were common citizens, understandably resentful that a news media that mocked their values and perspectives at the same moment expected aggrieved viewers' respectful regard. 

And, therein lies an all-important distinction. Trump rally crowds' vehement bitterness toward the mainstream media had indisputably been earned. It was the legitimately self-defensive reaction of a nation of victims.

Jimmy Kimmel and other out-of-touch elitists are hardly of similar status. They are but spoiled toddlers who demand the world give them everything. And they throw ear-offending tantrums when the marginalized seek equity.


Postscript: At the risk of dating myself, I'll recall that 1980s voices from both the right and left decried citizens getting important news
information from trivial, late-night entertainment vehicles.

But these days, no one in mainstream media cautions against accepting political direction from prat-falling, whoopee cushion, baggy-pants commentators. 

The smothering "Kleenex" formerly known as McCarthyism

During a 9/29 Tucker Carlson Tonight interview, and surely despite his intention, Democrat strategist, attorney, and Huffington Post contributor  Michael Starr Hopkins revealed the rigged, deceptive business partisans like him now seek to engineer.

The host had played footage of crazed California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters hoarsely declaring the Trump White House to be 'controlled by the KKK.'

Hopkins was, of course, unable to substantiate Waters' dastardly charge, as it was a wholly counterfeit one. He did, though, cite "alt-right" Steve Bannon, the Breitbart editor formerly a Trump advisor.

In an aside, Hopkins called the KKK merely a "Kleenex," under whose cover speakers like himself and Waters include all non-liberal adversaries.

There is, obviously, a tremendous problem with that rhetorical chicanery. A couple, actually.

The Ku Klux Klan is a specific, unAmerican org. It has to its contemptible halcyon record horrifying acts of violence predicated on an unquestionably loathsome racial supremacy philosophy. The ragged, wretched, and thankfully dwindling scourge in no way accords with the bedrock American beliefs of equality and justice that the Trump Revolution so boisterously affirms.

To tactically conflate the detestable Klan with a vague "alt-right" phantom effectively condemns without individual examination any group or person so (unfairly) linked. The generally accepted term for that practice is "guilt by association," and it is outside intellectual legitimacy.

Today, though, anti-Trump partisans -- who, in years past, decried McCarthyism -- now take up the identical, deceitful tactic with ill relish.

The "Kleenex" with which they strive to smother ideological opposition in general would automatically class as beneath respectful consideration all perspectives and speakers contrary to liberal orthodoxy.

This Democrat-boosted phenomenon of arbitrarily narrowing the Overton Window, with no voices but those sympathetic to approved dogmas allowed open communication, conflicts with the traditionally cherished American ideals of freedom of thought, speech, assembly, and democracy. 

Fortunately, the Constitution is much bigger than any Kleenex.

  

Of parades proud and base

It was Independence Day, and could have been any small town in America's heartland.

Stores along Main Street were shuttered, that sunny and cloudless July 1 afternoon. Rousing marching band music filled the air. 

The uniformed players maintained a precise, lock step strut down the boulevard. 76 trombones blared. The bass drum pounded. Snares rat-a-tatted. "Star-Spangled Banner," the inspirational, thundering National Anthem, united every soul and lifted every heart. 

A blocks-long parade of citizens representing all walks of life rolled along. Gaudily decorated floats portrayed historic high points, military triumphs, workaday realities, and even local high school spiritedness.

The street was lined on both sides by citizens of all descriptions. They were practically bursting with pride in the country that had given its people so much, and that had raised high a lamp of liberty that inspired all who beheld it.

Bright American flags and vivid red, white, and blue bunting hung from every lamp post. They snapped smartly in the summery breeze, as if to do their part in the joyous, patriotic celebration.

Most citizens gathered that day had either lost loved ones in foreign wars, or knew families who had. Many had themselves served abroad. All were proud to have defended freedom. None would have had it any other way.

Now, calling out to friends, smiling men and women waved miniature replicas of Old Glory. Children darted about, laughing and playing among the buzzing crowd.

Consider now this current, Illinois case:

Orlando Gooden, a coach of pee wee football team the Cahokia Quarterback Club, chose to follow in a much lower parade. He recently had his 8 year-old players "take a knee," during a pre-game playing of our nation's National Anthem.

That an adult, who should know better, would inculcate in impressionable children hostility toward America is more than just disgusting. It constitutes rejection of the awesome responsibility given him to wisely guide young minds. And it encourages young Americans to wrongly consider themselves and their interests as distinct from the general country. 

National identity as Americans is those children's birthright. Effectively indoctrinating them to believe otherwise is theft of a preciousness irreplaceable.

Worse still, reports are that parents of children so mistreated by Gooden approve of his anti-American and faddish stupidity.

One hopes these victimized children will one day be able to throw off the coarsening effects of both that unpatriotic coach and their irresponsible parents.

And one reflects on those proud paraders. Hopefully, they can still march, somewhere in America...

Dollywood confidential

Sunday night's Stephen Colbert-hosted Emmy awards broadcast fully met expectations, as a poncy parade of powdery silver-screen snoots took turns under-handing slurs at the President of the United States. 

By logical extension, the American people who support Trump, and the country itself, were also targets of the foppish Hollywood hissters.

Positively adrip with show-people contemptuousness for Real America, the Emmy Awards broadcast reaped the lowest ratings ever posted by that stomach-turning orgy of self-congratulation. 

Average Americans in their living rooms by now know to avoid the treasonous, glittering falderal Hollywood invariably choreographs. (Despite this broadcast crashing into utter splinters, though, next year's show will surely be cut from the same scornful fabric. They hate us even more than they covet viewership.)

Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda appeared onstage, both to clumsily reference their 1980 film 9 To 5, and gigglingly smear the President. (Apparently, you can take Jane out of Hanoi, but you can't take Hanoi out of Jane.)

Some critics have noted that Parton herself did not comment during the awkward anti-Trump dido, merely raising her eyebrows as Tomlin and Fonda read scripted attacks. Those observers suspect Parton's silence might indicate disagreement with her erstwhile co-stars.

But, the singer hardly deserves exemption from sharing in the blame for only driving the getaway car. 

Parton well knows of Left intolerance. Only recently, an identity-addled Slate essayist joined in contemporary mania for historical reinvention, decrying Dollywood's Dixie Stampede. And, of course, she has throughout her career made much of the 'common folks' theme.

Given that, her volitional cooperation in the Emmy broadcast's flat anti-regular Americans antic conflicts with both her experience and cultivated image.

Dolly Parton may have chosen to participate in an act for which she did not herself feel enthusiasm, but that offered her profit. I believe there's a word for that.

Stop talking, start building 

White House staffer Marc Short, formerly a Koch underling, recently told CNN that Americans should discuss "what the definition of a wall is."

Perhaps after doing so, we could wrangle over what the meaning of "is" is.

During the 2016 campaign, and to the roared approval of arena throngs, nationwide, Donald Trump essayed no such lawyerly imposture. The promises he made during his campaign announcement were pledged anew throughout his successful effort.

"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I'll have Mexico pay for that wall."

Establishment voices already hostile to the populist Trump Revolution that threatened their political and economic hegemony later sought to mischaracterize the candidate's ambition as being one potentially satisfied by mere fencing. (A canard recalled by Short's quote.)

Trump then reiterated his intention to build a true, physical wall, and not simply a fence (or 'virtual barrier'). Citizen Free Press reports that on 9/14, he again stressed that vow in a message to CNN's Jeremy Diamond: 

"There's been a lot of noise today, and a lot of rumors. Let me set the record straight in the simplest language possible...WE WILL BUILD A WALL (NOT A FENCE), ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES TO HELP STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND KEEP AMERICA SAFE. Apparently, liberals in congress and the mainstream media need one more reminder that building that wall is non-negotiable."

Like many Trump supporters, I was attracted by his wall vow. I still believe it to be a fine idea with several benefits: Illegal immigration would be curtailed, the welfare of genuine American citizens would be protected, and our country's sovereign authority and independence from globalists' dark designs would again be unmistakably asserted. 

But I do understand that the significance of erecting such a wall may now be less imperative than in 2016, given the reduction in illegal immigration.

Regardless, in Marc Short's attempted obfuscation, perceptive listeners can detect an arrogant Swamp gurgle. Though it may not seem entirely presidential, I'd advise that the Commander In Chief take Short for a trip to the good, old woodshed.

New York Times' Charles Blow urges American democracy's overthrow

Far and away, the majority of New York Times columnist Charles Blow's 9/14 "Dispatch from the resistance" consists of threadbare, deceitful, and baselessly slurring attacks on President Trump of the sort we've come to expect and duly reject from that notoriously peso-propped paper.

But one matter the perpetually dyspeptic key-puncher bannered does merit consideration -- though only for the soundly warranted purposes of disassemblage and ultimate disregard.

Blow argues at excessive length that partisan refusal to abide by the legitimate outcome of a democratic American election is in some manner noble. And, that never setting aside defiant noncompliance with democratic machinery, instead devoting oneself to crafting obstructionist blocks to smooth order, are duties to which all good men are summoned by some supposed higher moral code. 

That, in short, is a bratty rejection of democracy, in whose elections not all emerge victorious, nor sport gaudy and substanceless participation ribbons. 

In fact, it is worse than bratty. Much worse. It is effectively clambering atop a rioters-destroyed police cruiser and exhorting mobs to anarchic abandon of all order and structures that reasoning men hold high as culminations of societal evolution. 

By wrongfully appropriating the name "resistance" from European, WWII-era Nazi-fighters, contemporary U.S. leftists surely hoped to leech off of established good repute. (An acknowledgement by Antifa types that they are not legitimately due acclaim on their own merits.)

In Blow's writing, we see the true, ugly nature of the resistance. It advocates only destruction of the existing, while not articulating anything of seriousness that might rise in its stead. It constitutes thoughtless viciousness of the lowest and most animalistic type. 

And, despite Blow's preening pretension to the contrary, advocating brutish disorder -- whether by donning a mask and hurling bricks, or by tapping out foul journalistic urgings to overthrow -- is not patriotic by any legitimate definition.

Bar now still lower

Recently waylaid in an airport by a TMZ interviewer, CNN Of Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain grinned of his desire to poison the President of the United States.

Bourdain, of course, is far from alone in political assassination fantasizing. Kathy Griffin, Johnny Depp, Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, Reza Aslan, Snoop Dogg. It is a shameful list that seems to grow weekly.

In crashing counterpoint to long-held conceptions of decency and basic respect for the Oval Office, political assassination is increasingly accepted in common conversation.

"Never in my 53 years have I seen people so casually and cavalierly advocate the murder of the President of the United States," wrote Deroy Murdock, in the march National Review. "Trump haters are eager to make assassination great again."

(Admittedly, candidate Trump also freely used rhetoric of types not previously common to national politics. A case could be made that he, too, served to reposition the discourse standard. But, he never advocated assassinating political opponents. Besides, supporters like myself found his bluffness refreshing, inspiring, and of distinctly real-world nature.)

The terrible assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy plunged America into hellish depths. And, for many years, talk of political killings was eschewed and reviled by all good people.

I remember watching MSNBC's Hardball one evening during the Democrat 2008 primaries. Barack Obama seemed likely to be that party's eventual nominee. Competitor Hillary Clinton had remarked that the situation could change to her benefit, as the California primary still lay ahead.

Many observers were critical of her, considering her comment a reference to the 1968 California assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy had just won that state's primary. Following his death, Democrats nominated George McGovern.

The 2008 night I watched Hardball, panelists began discussing Hillary's gruesome, hopeful intimation. Matthews, though, immediately squashed the conversation. All who are in the public eye, he stressed, and who travel the country as speakers, harbor apprehensions about anonymous crackpots with homicidal inclinations. Any conversation on the topic, he warned, might encourage killers.

Sadly, such common-sense solicitousness no longer seems to matter. Not so long ago, Matthews, himself, joked on MSNBC about a Trump White House assassination of advisor Jared Kushner.

The idea killers 

Much in the news these days is that ESPN's Jemele Hill tweeted nastily (and utterly without evidentiary foundation) that the President of the United States and supporters surrounding him are "white supremacists." 

To their rank discredit, ESPN executives have basically indulged liberal racial-bomb thrower Hill, whereas they have not given similar velvety exemptions to more conservative employees. http://ijr.com/the-declaration/2017/09/974177-espn-fired-curt-schilling-tweet-now-savage-response-espn-double-standard/ 

Hill was recently interviewed by Bryan Curtis, for the remarkably benign profile of her he filed for The Ringer. Curtis did not explore Hill's contemptible slurring of ideological adversaries. (It would be foolish to expect a reverent fan to maintain critical distance.) 

"There's a certain crop of people who's [sic] not trying to see ESPN get more ethnic, more gender-balanced," Hill claimed. "As a discredit to all of us, they use words like 'too liberal' or 'politically correct.'...Whenever I hear that, I'm like, I know what you really want to call me."
(https://www.theringer.com/2017/9/13/16299136/jemele-hill-espn-michael-smith-sportscenter-the-six)

Hill did not explain how she came to possess the super-power required for seeing into others' minds and hearts, to "know what you really want to call me." 

As a piece by The Federalist's Ben Domenech pointed out: "When everything's a hate group, dialogue becomes impossible."

While worthy of denouncement in its own right, Hill's tweet also represents a trend toward stifling contrary opinions by cynically heaving socially damning epithets. The hoped-for eventuality seems to be silent and chastened retreat by any and all who disagree even by scant degrees with The One Truth.

Intelligent adults of serious intent articulate ideas, and engage fellow citizens in reasoned and respectful debate. Contrasting ideas with one another can result in general benefit. But, in a world where dissent is ground beneath smiley-faced boot heels, there is no intellectual liberty, no latitude for individual expression.

Examples arose during the 2016 campaign. Remember that organized champions of the Hillary Clinton effort circulated among reporters a list of 'taboo' descriptors that were never to be used to describe the Democrat candidate. 

("We will be watching, reading, listening, and protesting coded sexism..." threatened a missive dispatched to the New York Times' Amy Chozick. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/26/the-13-words-you-cant-write-about-hillary-clinton-anymore/?utm_term=.c2c3b2bf4c72)

Another illustration that appeared last year was the push in some precincts to cast "thug" as necessarily a euphemism for the n-word. All who derided rioters as "thugs" were summarily tossed out of 
polite conversation.

All of these were of a part with burgeoning, broader hostility toward free speech and independent thought. Zealous efforts were choreographed to stifle dissenting voices through codes, laws, threats of job loss, online pressures, and mass economic boycotts. 

Controlling popular political discourse would be prized by any totalitarian. No citizens could then speak in opposition, or mount an effective challenge to existing clampdown authority. 

That public-in-chains ugliness would be directly opposite America's Constitutional, democratic ideal. One suspects that wouldn't bother Jemele Hill and ESPN's corner-office suits in the least.

A matter of decency

It's happened, again: Progressive commentator Richard Fowler, appearing on Martha McCallum's Fox show, Tuesday night, blasted President Trump for allegedly disparaging a Gold Star Family during last year's campaign.

The four Americans killed in Benghazi also had loving families. Those families' grievous status was no less valid than that of the Khans.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had refused to respond to numerous, desperate entreaties sent her by the men trapped in Benghazi as shouting, murderous throngs assaulted them. Beyond reasonable dispute, Hillary allowed those Americans to be tortured and murdered. And her gushing Democratic apologists were not for one moment stayed from their support of her by that grisly truth. 

Those claiming concern for the Gold Star Khan family, while not showing similar, genuine, heartfelt sympathy for the families of the Benghazi killed, are crimson-palmed liars. 

When accuracy becomes a casualty of ideology 

In August, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell told an interviewer that he wished for a president who, unlike Donald Trump: "would not give his daughter to a Jew." Cantwell then sneered: "I don't think you can feel about race like I do, and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl. Okay?"

I shared those detestable words with a purpose. That is what genuine bigotry sounds like. 

Calls to maintain national borders, reassert the Constitutional principle of equality for all men, and seek through international policies to advance American trade and other interests ahead of other countries' -- those are hardly of a piece with that horrific prefatory citation. In truth, they are not within philosophical miles of it.

As if his earlier slurs had not already been sufficiently damning of him, Cantwell also defended as "justified" the Charlottesville Emancipation Park killing of Heather Heyer. 

The notion that society's supposed 'systemic' hostility constitutes ongoing aggression and grants moral legitimacy to criminal acts -- rendering them reasonable 'defensive' tactics adopted by an imaginary 'oppressed' people -- is imbecilic and fraudulently self-affirming, whether claimed by Nazis, the KKK, Antifa, or Black Lives Matter.

It goes without extended explanation that those groups do not share historical records. But, anyone pretending to not perceive their commonly cherished senses of victimization, self-righteousness, moral surety, loathing of citizens not like them, and base terrorist natures is either unable or unwilling to address the true, and truly toxic, danger to democratic society each embodies.

Splentic anti-Trump expositors strive to transform our common political and social cultures to drastic unreason, until no innocent citizen dare utter any words but condemnatory ones about national, heraldic, historic, and politically conservative subjects. 

Both shameful and growing, the transgressors catalog includes notables from politics, media, and activism: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Tom Perez, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Shepard Smith, Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, Jeff Zuckerberg, Michael Moore, Deray McKesson, George Clooney, Jeff Zucker, and Maureen Dowd. 

Passion for combatting divisive racial and religious hates is admirable. And, when sincerely acted upon, can be an effective realization of America's finest moral quality. 

But, when opportunistically leveraged with intended political ambition, such only allows unaddressed animation to true hatred of the type enunciated by the cretinous Cantwell.

The ugly relish with which some Trump assailants now endeavor to exploit bigotries as momentarily advantageous vehicles for spewing vitriol at the President of the United States and his patriotic supporters leads to reasonable suspicion about the genuineness of their claims to impellent anti-bigotry interest.

Whatever their reason, they do not accurately characterize the plague. They cannot, then, be practical factors in its essential eradication.

Never forget that that they hate us very much

Career politicians in both major parties are indifferent to public sentiment. Our own realities illustrate that. Were establishment politicians of finer character, our circumstances would be better.

Far from taking serious action to relieve our suffering, though, they give every evidence that they find it acceptable. Nor will meaningful advancement of our legitimate interests likely be encouraged by the hideous activist/donor/lobbyist melange that makes possible office-squatting elitists' seemingly interminable Washington reigns.

There is no need to surmise that they regard the common man with 10 foot-pole distaste. 

Reading from docketed offal, 2016 candidate Hillary told donors: "To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'Basket of Deplorables,' right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name it.'

The contempt for regular Americans to which Hillary gave raspy voice in 2016 has since assumed prominence in both Democratic and Republican utterances. The monster that lurked all along now struts at center stage.

As patronizing, expensively tailored agents of the slothful, sniffing two-party behemoth will seek Americans' votes in 2018 and beyond, be aware of what they genuinely believe of We the People, before assigning to them your precious ballot endorsement:

Ever-sour California Rep. Maxine Waters strode haughtily onto the House floor in March, and issued this opprobrious bombardment: "We're saying to those who say they are patriotic but they turned a blind eye to the destruction that [President 

Trump] is about to cause this country, you are not nearly as patriotic as we are.'"

During an Aug. 19 appearance on MSNBC's Joy Reid Show, a markedly venomous Howard Dean assailed President Trump. Dean warned Americans, darkly, that: "If you want to vote for a racist in the White House, then you better vote for Republicans."

In late August, actor Mark Ruffalo joined in an anti-Trump   march, and as much as spat on common citizens: "Marching into Trump Country to confront white supremacy," read Ruffalo's concurrent Instagram post. To poncy red-carpet revolutionaries like Ruffalo, "Trump Country" does not mean "authentic 

America," but is used sneeringly (and wrongly) as a synonym for bigotry. 

Following President Trump's initial remarks on the tragedy in Charlottesville, CNN host Don Lemon was so beside himself as to stammer out this animus toward clear-eyed Americans: "Anyone who is in that White House, and is supporting him, is complicit in their racism, as well!"

Earlier this month, Breitbart quoted Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford, from his just-conducted TMZ interview. Commerford first slurred the President of the United States, then spewed toxic vitriol at all regular citizens who'd voted Trump with a desire to reaffirm America's greatness: "Anyone who voted for him is racist! He's a racist! And, as a racist who voted for a racist, you have an opportunity to make it right, and admit that you made a wrong

decision!" The bass player advised Trump voters to apologize by saying: "I fucked up." He further snarled: "That's what they should say! They should admit they voted for a racist, and that's how they can make it right!"

To bring it full circle, consider the fresh unpleasantness Hillary volunteered on Sept.10 to CBS Sunday Morning interviewer Jane Pauley: "Well, I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner. I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior -- as we saw in the Access Hollywood tape -- 

was deplorable. And, there were a large number of people who didn't care. It did not matter to them."

As significant as was our 2016 election of Donald Trump, it was just the first step in our reclaiming democratic control of American government from an undemocratic, permanent, bipartisan Deep State. Remaining faithful to our shared ambition, and expressing the values, principles, and ideals we esteem through incumbent -challenging candidates that are genuinely reflective of them and us, is the multi-faceted crusade lying ahead. 

Addendum: As if progressive Democrats weren't problem enough, there now are old-guard GOP voices counseling that voters abandon the defiant and principled American spirit that was embodied by the historic Trump Revolution, and resign themselves to the Deep State-approved establishment Republican fold. 

During the 2016 campaign, many such GOP dinosaurs could be found on stodgy cable news panels, op-ed pages, and websites, loudly damning table-overturning, outsider candidate Trump and all average citizens of good heart who'd rallied under his banner, 

They failed, of course. Resoundingly so, and to very public and long-lasting ignominy. But, not all Never Trumpers have ceased singing their discordant, anti-citizen air:

An historian formerly in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses, Bruce Bartlett posted this revealing Facebook vileness on Sept. 3: "There is no longer any doubt -- ALL (100%) of Trump supporters are racists. If you don't like it, fuck you." Bartlett added clarification in  a subsequent Facebook post: "I did not say all Trump VOTERS are racists, nor did I even imply that all Republicans are racists. What I said is all Trump SUPPORTERS are racists. That means the people who support Trump now, today, after all his horrible racist statements and actions. Those people are racists." 

Not only do neither seditious Democrats nor swamp-protective Republicans have anything worthwhile to offer the common man, but, they really do hate us.