The executive chairman of the company that owns the highest circulation US newspaper & top-rated cable-news channel: https://t.co/CN6CZxQm04
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 8, 2015
Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015
That sound you hear is 95 Wall Street journal reporters banging their heads into their desks
— Daniel Gross (@grossdm) October 8, 2015
Okay, everyone is rightfully jumping on the real black President thing, but I want to think about what's "terrific." https://t.co/aKMNvP7nHE
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) October 8, 2015
Read New York magazine for minority community disappointment with POTUS
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015
This tweet references @JenSeniorNY's column: "Has Obama Done Enough for African-Americans?" http://t.co/wDsYgnlM3x https://t.co/rsUvL1vo8d
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 8, 2015
Maybe Murdoch is saying Obama isn't really president, as opposed to isn't really black https://t.co/qkIWXgM5hM
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) October 8, 2015
*reads*
*rubs eyes*
*reads again*
*shakes head*
*loads up on popcorn* https://t.co/33EgHuatCk
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) October 8, 2015
I am amused to imagine Wendy Deng and Lachlan Murdoch frantically shouting over each other on a conference call with every lawyer specializing in geriatric guardianship issues that their researchers could unearth on an hours’ notice.
redshirt
Why do liberals always see race? Didn’t MLK Jr say look beyond skin color?
benw
So Obama’s a Communist, Socialist, Kenyan, Muslim, Alinskyite Usurper, but he’s NOT black? Okay, seems legit.
22over7
Holy shit.
gf120581
@efgoldman: To be fair, I think half the GOP House caucus is the same way.
benw
@efgoldman: those are the best kind of Aussies. Hey, I also realized that “properly address the racial divide” in this context means the opposite of what I think it means!
redshirt
Well, Obama is half white, isn’t he?
Jeffro
Props to Gross’ comment but it doesn’t go far enough…the sound of wing nut welfare stenos all across our fair land (not just the WSJ) banging their heads on desks would be more like the synchronized boot stomps of a cold-war era Red Square parade, times eleventy…eleventy billion.
How illuminating…a REAL black president, a real BLACK president, a REAL BLACK president.
Jeffro
@efgoldman: he understands it about as well as 1% of GOP and 10% of Dem voters do, unfortunately. Can’t say he isn’t taking care of the base
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: He is no Gentle Uncle Ben, he is the crazy uncle Ben who you have to keep medicated so that he doesn’t go totally loco.
I wonder whether his wife slips him some opium like Indian women supposedly did to keep their interfering husbands out of their hair.
redshirt
Do you think these wingnuts are ever joking? Like they know about Cleek’s Law and are just playing the part?
I hope so sometimes. It’s a saner explanation for this nonsense.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
That’s a beautiful image AL. I can only hope they’re all charging a difficult client premium. I suspect the dementing process has only intensified, as opposed to created, the lunacy of Murdoch. Who has, of course, made metric shit tons of money being a reactionary asshole. However questionable his ethics.
jl
I thought Bill Clinton was the first real authentic black president, and that the problem with Obama back when he was running, was that he was not authentically black at all, but an effete body surfer Gen-X mixed race slacker who was raised by a LIBERAL mother, and grew up in a foreign country with a very strange and un-American (e.g., universal health care) culture, Hawaii. I get so confused when I try to figure out what the reactionaries say.
Edit: that was back before the GOP understood how well the racism angle would work and were still dabbling with Kerrying Obama with the spicy mustards, body surfing and fancy baby lettuces stuff.
ThresherK
@efgoldman: Carson:
Well, finally a black candidate who gets the Green Lantern Theory. The Villagers will love it.
redshirt
@ThresherK:
What’s the Green Lantern theory? I bet its good.
Mike in NC
Hurry up and die, Murdoch.
jl
Oh, no, wait. I thought Obama was the Anti-Christ, the super evil humanity hating supernatural spawn of Zombie Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright. So, everyone know he would be divisive.
Warren Terra
I thought Wendi Deng got a divorce and is presumably free of responsibility for him? Not that I have any sympathy for her – she married Murdoch in the first place, after all, has no reputation for being a better person than he is, and apparently had an affair with Tony Blair, of all the horrible people.
@redshirt:
Basically, it’s the notion that with sufficient determination anything is possible, applied to foreign or military policy. The corollary is that any failure to achieve your goals means you lacked the necessary gumption. See also the notion that we lot the Vietnam War because we chickened out, and everything bad about it was the fault of the anti-war left – and that it’s unpatriotic to criticize dumb wars. It’s credited to Matt Yglesias, and the original (I think) is reposted here. It’s also in the Balloon Juice Lexicon (see the upper left of the page on Desktop view).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Obama, the No True Scotsmen of African Americans.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
That made my head hurt.
Anne Laurie
@Warren Terra:
IIRC, her two underage daughters by Rupert own some fraction of voting stock in the overall corporation — not enough to outvote their adult half-sibs, but quite enough that I’m sure Ms. Deng watches Rupe’s every move very closely.
Cervantes
@Warren Terra:
He filed.
redshirt
Go Cubbies!
SoupCatcher
That’s a lot of celebration from Chicago for one win.
catclub
@SoupCatcher: Been a LONG time since they have won in post season.
redshirt
@catclub: Oh, what could have been in 2004.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Hmm. I’m not sure I understand how your quote jibes with the previous definition.
SoupCatcher
@catclub: We’ll see if they can add three more to their win total against St. Louis.
eta: My local team didn’t make the play-offs this year, so I’ll be rooting for the West Coast entry (and the team I grew up listening to). Go Doyers!
ThresherK
@efgoldman:
@Warren Terra:
PS “Sufficient determination” also sounds like what Carson is selling on his “let’s all rush the gunman” solution to school violence.
Darkrose
Dammit. I’m not a Cardinals fan by any means, but I guess I’ll be rooting for them to beat the stupid Cubs.
Go Mets!
catclub
Fun OT point about the GOP Freedom Caucus: It has no members from California or New York. Also no members from Mississippi.
Warren Terra
@redshirt:
I think you have to click through and read the whole post. And even then maybe there’s a question of context: Loomis (not Lemieux) is writing in this case largely to an audience very familiar with the concept, and is going rather meta and riffing on the notion to talk about how people misportray the history of the Civil Rights Movement (and similar) as if its successes were the result of heroic individuals projecting the sheer force of their will will in pure service of a beautiful idea, when in fact they resulted from the planning, organization, and dedication of large numbers of people, many of them flawed.
Warren Terra
@catclub:
With iirc 40 members it couldn’t possibly cover all 50 states. True, CA and NY are about 20% of the country – though they’re probably a much lower fraction of the House Republican Caucus, and even more so of the true firebreathers.
Morzer
http://gawker.com/report-ben-carson-once-left-a-sponge-in-a-patients-bra-1735224497
I wonder whether Rupert Murdoch has ever had Ben Carson’s Sponge Donation Service inside his raddled old cranium.
Frankensteinbeck
@benw:
No, silly. Murdoch means he’s not a president for blacks, who’s helping blacks and cares about black issues the way Ben Carson would. Obama does not understand that welfare is keeping blacks in chains worse than slavery ever did, and only by removing dependency will blacks be able to stand up and lead good, hardworking, noble lives. They believe this shit. Carson certainly does. Murdoch is a ‘My best friend is black!’ racist, apparently.
@jl:
‘Black metrosexual Abe Lincoln.’
Felonius Monk
The world is full of senile, old fartz — Rupert is one of them. Who cares if he babbles incoherently?
redshirt
@Warren Terra: And that seems pretty spot on; I meant it doesn’t jibe with the idea of an action being correct according to the intention of the will, and not the result of the action. Iraq is a heroic victory because we freed the Iraqis from the terrors of Saddam Hussein. As the Green Lantern can create objects and energy with his thoughts, and very powerful objects with the force of his will, so too Republicans can make an action Good and Right and Freedom just by willing it to be so, regardless of outcome.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Warren Terra: To wit, Joe Lieberman telling Obama to go “get a better deal “out of Iran. At the same time he said the Iranians “couldn’t be trusted”.
Pure Green Lantern.
Wag
The Green Lantern theory sounds an awful lot like Peter Pan. Clap Louder, everyone! Then the President will be able to win!
Frankensteinbeck
@Wag:
The book hilariously comments that even if YOU didn’t clap, some other kids did, so Tinker Bell lives. Well, lives through that. One of Peter Pan’s last lines in the book is ‘Tinker Bell? I think she’s dead.’ And he just doesn’t care. That book is MESSED UP.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
I wonder whether anyone has written an article on the sociopathy of Peter Pan.
Frankensteinbeck
@Morzer:
*I* have. I wasn’t so much bothered by Peter Pan’s sociopathy – and he truly is a sadistic, murderous narcissist – but by the way the book acts like this is great, what all children should aspire to be, the true magic of childhood.
That and the pedophilia overtones when he talks about how grown women find Peter irresistably attractive because he has all his baby teeth.
MESSED. UP.
Omnes Omnibus
@Frankensteinbeck: Have you ever read about Barrie’s childhood? Messed up.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
Some years ago, I ended up watching a pantomime version of Peter Pan with Madame Morzer – and damned if it wasn’t one of the most embarrassing occasions of my life. Peter was bad enough, but the most cringeworthy part was the “Red Indians”. The director of the play had been foolish enough to retain Barrie’s original dialog and way of speaking for them and it made Dan Snyder look like an apostle of interracial enlightenment and mutual respect. I found myself shrinking ever lower in my seat and praying that the FSM would just take me now.
Frankensteinbeck
@Morzer:
Weren’t the Indians just one of the groups Lost Boys joined when they grew up? Like the pirates? Which would make them all white. Neverland was basically just Peter Pan collecting people to murder later.
trollhattan
Sweet Romping Ronny Reagan on a Roomba, I never imagined Murdoch could burrow deeper into the abyss but silly me.
He and Ginny Thomas should have a sleepover and drunk-dial folks. Comedy gold.
These people are pathological. And they want the reins, thank you very much.
redshirt
Wow! I can see a dark and gritty update of Pan,
who’s now 25 and leader of Neverland, but he’s transported
to 1977 NYC and must kill his way out of a Pimp War in order
to get back and kill the pretender on the throne.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
When you reflect that Peter is their “Great White Father”, the fate of the “Indians” looks ever grimmer. I have trouble thinking of any other children’s book that is so obviously the product of a profoundly warped mind.
SoupCatcher
@Morzer: *tries to remember if Farnham’s Freehold was one of Heinlein’s YA efforts*
Frankensteinbeck
@redshirt:
The book is worse than that.
redshirt
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m never going to read it now. It sounds horrid, and I’ve always found Pan as a character strange. Not Pan the God, mind you, who’s awesome and perhaps the best of all the Gods.
Frankensteinbeck
@Morzer:
I think the three biggest surprises in children’s literature for me were the deranged morals of Peter Pan, the rape scene in Mariel of Redwall, and the climax (pun not intended) of the His Dark Materials series where two twelve year olds save the universe by having sex. That last one in particular… I mean, it fits with the themes of the story, but who expects that? And good grief, why is the book controversial for killing God, when there’s something like THAT in it?
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Better than Baldr?
Wag
Wow. My simple attempt to be funny hijacked the thread and was interesting to boot! Thanks, all!
SoupCatcher
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s hard to overlook how lame it is to get killed by mistletoe.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, by a lot. It’s really just a competition between Pan and Dionysus, really.
Omnes Omnibus
@SoupCatcher: Yeah, fuck that Achilles dude about his ankle. And Superman, fuck him for the kryponite thing.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
I rather think Pullman was determined to show that CS Lewis was wrong to exclude humping from Narnia. He certainly comes across as a rather obsessive and odd man in interviews.
Calouste
@Morzer: Uhm, have you ever read Alice in Wonderland? Although that is maybe not as much the product of a warped mind as of the serious consumption of drugs.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus:
Comic book characters are our modern day mythology, very similar to Greek mythology in form and function.
Anne Laurie
@Frankensteinbeck:
Way I read the book (and the Pullman interviews I’ve seen agree), it’s implied that Lyra & Will are “intimate”, but not necessarily beyond the First Adult Kiss / heavy petting level. Pullman has talked about the awareness of adult physicality as something more profound, but not necessarily, requiring, full-penetration sexual intercourse — the difference between emotional innocence and physical virginity.
Frankensteinbeck
@Morzer:
I’m not particularly shocked by the inclusion, and it does fit the whole ‘You jackass prudish religionists have morality backwards’ theme, but it sure surprised me, and surprised me more that it’s totally overlooked in the controversy about the book.
@Calouste:
Alice is an exploration of a theme that Carroll more or less invented. Children’s literature was basically all educational stuff back then. He wanted to write stories for children that were about the nonsense kids made up for fun. As a result, it got pretty surreal.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Hence my comment.
@Frankensteinbeck: Carroll also secretly includes lots of math.
SoupCatcher
@Omnes Omnibus: Meh. Pikers. Now, Tanngrisnir or Tanngnjóstr – whichever one turned up lame – they have a legitimate gripe.
Morzer
@Calouste:
I have read it, but I don’t think it gets within a country mile of the sheer sickness that is at the heart of Peter Pan. Consider this passage from the end of Peter Pan:
I defy you to find me anything half so twisted and unhealthy as that in Alice in Wonderland.
Morzer
@SoupCatcher:
Tries desperately not to make a Tannehill reference and fails.
redshirt
@Morzer: Hashtag #PracticeSquadMoney
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
While he never actually specifically mentions intercourse, post-fade-to-black they are referred to as lovers, and how they hunger for the touch of each other’s lips and skin. It’s true that you could claim that complete sex does not happen, but it’s unequivocably a sudden and full-scale sexual awakening, so much so that it might as well be sex. And indeed, since the moral of the series is that our prudish fear of sex and ‘adult’ things is the actual immorality, the consistency would be sex itself, not ‘oh, but they didn’t go all the way through with it.’
SRW1
Interesting how Rupert has reversed the one-drop of blood theory. Used to be that one drop of blood from a black ancestor would make a person black. Now one drop of blood from a white ancestor makes a person non-black.
What apparently hasn’t changed, though, is that the standard of racists remain very exacting.
agorabum
@efgoldman: does Carson know anything about NY issue?
Do any of the Republicans?
Sherparick
@redshirt: Just a note, it was ol’Rupert who says in his tweet ” a Real Black President who can address the racial divide” (I guess by telling all African Americans it is time to grab their boot straps and stop taking all the “free stuff”), so unless Rupert has become a liberal (not likely), it was he who made both a point about Dr. Carson’s race and that a “racial divide” exists in America. So, this your response is just another of the on-going Conservative non-sequiter “you liberals are the real racists” because you notice and oppose our racism.
Black unemployment in 2009 (President Obama’s first year); 15.6%. Black unemployment now: 9.2% (still to high, but I would still say that was doing something for the African American community. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
In 2009 24% of African Americans were without health insurance. http://kff.org/disparities-policy/fact-sheet/health-coverage-for-the-black-population-today-and-under-the-affordable-care-act/ Now hat figure is down to approximately 16% http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/29/upshot/obamacare-who-was-helped-most.html
On the other hand, thanks to the decisions of the Conservative Roberts Court essentially nullifying the Voting Rights Act and the 15th Amendment, Black voting rights and civil rights have taken a large step back into the Jim Crow past under the leadership if Republican Governors and legislatures, guided by ALEC, in many states. Obama should make a bigger issue of this, I grant you.
Sherparick
@efgoldman: Rupert is probably the greatest single reason ACG Climate Denialism has such a popular following. All his media outlets in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia push Climate Science denial on both their news and editorial pages. The now former PM of Australia was a big a climate change denialist as an Republican as his Stephen Harper in Canada. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/07/climate-denial-us-uk-australia-canada-english