The New York Times wastes some more space on that whiny turd, Alan Dershowitz.
But this summer, Mr. Dershowitz says that because he has expressed views that back President Trump, he no longer feels so welcome on the Vineyard, a summertime epicenter of progressive values, money and sheer Democratic power in the United States.
He’s being “shunned”, he says, and for his plight, he gets a write-up in the New York Times. I don’t give a rat’s ass for Alan Dershowitz, but this is so symptomatic of how bad the NYT has become. It’s not just that a cranky old man (hey, where’s MY feature?) gets a sympathetic article, but that phrase: Martha’s Vineyard is the “epicenter of progressive values”? Martha’s Vineyard, vacation spot of the rich? If there’s any clearer picture of the delusions of the NYT and the Democratic party, this idea that Martha’s Vineyard matters, I’d like to see it.
But then, the NYT and the Democratic party have been ongoing oblivious catastrophes for years. Now a former executive editor has a few words to say about that.
I’m feeling about the NYT now like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade. I loved him to death, believed he was a thoroughly wonderful young man, but he needed a course correction. So I left my desk at The NYT, where I was DC [Bureau] Chief, met his school bus and read him the riot act. He needed a course correction.
So does the NYT… it’s making horrible mistakes left and right.
This sums up her litany of complaints:
More narcissism: It’s always about us. Yikes. Distance is part of journalism’s discipline.
It’s that narcissism that allows them to think they are doing good by including a line-up of deplorables on their opinion pages, and printing complete garbage with a straight face. Like this piece by Matt Schmitz, an editor at First Things, a website that claims to present a “theological perspective on life in America today”. It got past an editor because the editors at the NYT all have their heads up their asses.
Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children* as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.
Mr. Trump’s purple family values may even explain some of his populist appeal. Global leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker appear to have stable and loving marriages. But their childlessness makes them worse exemplars of family values in the eyes of some non-elites than divorcees who have multiple children — a category that includes Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally party, as well as Donald Trump. Contempt for elite respectability is reflected not only in the respective party platforms, but in the personal lives of these populist leaders.
First hint to any NYT editor with the flexibility to swivel their heads in their colon and peep out with one eye through their anus: reject any submission that uses “elites” in that way. They’re talking about a grifter billionaire, but to them, the “elites” are working class Democrats.
Do not accept the normalizing of misery and the pathologizing of women. It is not normal to find alienation from your children’s mother as admirable. It happens, it happens all the time, but it’s a consequence of poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Jesus, guy…listen to some country western songs. Alienated families are not a happy outcome. Single mothers are in for a world of struggle. He portrays these “red” families as moral monsters, who are just fine if their daughters experience marital difficulties and grief and alienation, and consider Trump to be an exemplar of an admirable lifestyle. These are lies. These are the excuses Trumpist bigots tell themselves to pretend they have good intentions.
And then…oh my god, look how he twists the perspective to make fascists look like the true models of familial unity. They have children! That’s enough to make them good people. But then he makes it seem that a few more liberal world leaders have been rejected by the American “non-elites” (Jesus fuck, how does this usage persist? Thanks, NYT) because they don’t have kids…as if those red-staters are so familiar with the family lives of European politicians. One thing we do know is that they were familiar with the fact that Hillary Clinton has a daughter, and that there seems to much love and respect between them, because Rush Limbaugh called her a “dog” and because they hated her. They knew that the Obamas had two daughters and a strong family, because those “non-elites” loved to fling racist vitriol at them.
If there was even a hint of truth in Schmitz’s bullshit, wouldn’t those wingnuts in Nebraska that he cites have been admiring Clinton and Obama, and cheering on the family values that they claim to love so much? But no, that would undermine his argument that good Americans love Nazis for their kinder.
But the New York Fucking Times published it. Because the NYT is a garbage rag that is completely out of touch with reason and reality that blithely publishes right-wing propaganda.
*One word comes to mind: Tiffany.
Now I understand.
To quote another Trump supporter, “Whomp whomp…”
I don’t even read the NYT any more. Frankly, there is noting the Times offers that you can’t find done better elsewhere. The grey lady turned grey because she’s dead.
There is also this assumption that Donald Trump is some kind of committed and loving father to his children. From all I’ve seen of it he’s anything but. He has a creepy reverse-oedipal desire towards one of his daughters, a complete lack of interest in the other one, and his two idiot adult sons are so desperate to impress him with their antics, but never can because he’s a vile solipsistic narcissist who only cares about himself. As for his youngest son, he cheated on that one’s mother with a porn star while he was still in the womb, and doesn’t display the slightest interest in him either.
I’m not sure there’s ANY model of family values that would laud Donald Trump as a good example.
I wonder which family value warrants holding an umbrella in the rain while wife and son are getting drenched. I understand going down stairs first as a ‘safety’, I don’t understand leaving wife at top of stairs while getting into the car well before she can take a single step, another family value i missed. I guess I have no family values. /s
It is sick who these dipsheets try to wring the slimmest reasons to value the dungheap “45”
?
not “how”, HOW
need coffee, even tpyo correction had tpyo
now WHO, correct it to HOW
all hail Lord TPYO
and more … I guve up
exersize for reeders
@3 Well the Windsor’s might .
Now we know why the NYT op-ed section is what it is. And .)they got what they wanted, you linked to it. (Go to link, it’s extremely droll.)
cartomancer@#3:
I’m not sure there’s ANY model of family values that would laud Donald Trump as a good example.
The Trumps look bad stacked up next to the Borgias.
PZ should have given me credit for the link, people who show up to this post late will think I was oblivious.
I used to take the position that while certain parts of the NYT needed a good pressure-washing (David Brooks, looking at you) but recently, to hell with ’em. But I wonder if they have done some sort of math that shows they come out ahead sharing all the guano, and if they have realized that’ll pull them steadily down as readership shifts because of it.
Love the video, cervantes.
Trump family values: give your kids highly paid influential jobs in gubmint even if they’re not qualified for them. What’s not to love about such typically right wing nepotism?
As someone who’s been estranged from his parents for decades I can say that I have copped far more flack over my disaffection with my mother than my father.
The Obama family meets all their family values requirements to a tee, and is practically the model of the perfect nuclear family according to their rhetoric. Likewise, the Clinton family meets practically all their requirements for an ideal family, including the fact that Hillary stayed with Bill after the horrible things he did. Yet, both are reviled by this “family values” crowd. These people should have to answer why they value the “family values” of Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich (i.e. those who repeatedly and unrepentantly fail the values they claim to espouse) over those who seem to be paragons of those same (supposed) virtues but from the wrong team.
ck @ 15 – The Clintons and the Obamas are all missing the One True Family Value of right-wing authoritarianism.
I read a great article by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs Magazine about the New York Times handling Hitler, from 1922 on. It is titled: “How horrific things come to seem normal – Coverage of Hitler`s rise gives moral lessons for our time…” Here just one quote:
*And while you don’t need to be a socialist to see threats in the making, you do need to have a clear moral understanding of the world, and a willingness to label things what they are, rather than feigning objectivity and declining to use divisive and alienating language for fear you will look biased.
We are not in a time resembling 1920s Germany just yet. Hopefully, we will never be again. But if we ever are, a “never again” mentality means understanding how atrocities can be normalized, how moral blind spots can cause us to overlook terrible suffering, and how real objectivity does not just require a sense of superficial balance, but a deep understanding of what matters.*
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/how-horrific-things-come-to-seem-normal
About Alan Dershowitz: Isn`t he involved with the so called Gatestone Institute? It is famed for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia. Poor Mr Dershowitz, not welcome “on the Vineyard”! He should try Gaza for a change.
“Family values” – just another meaningless propaganda slogan of the regressive, pardon me, Conservative manipulators.