Derp!

But hey, look at it from the Obama White House’s point of view. The Founding Founders produced a confusing document that’s over 100 years old and that 21st century ‘Progressives’ (in thrall to a philosophy that’s also over 100 years old) pay no attention to, when they’re not outright calling for its demise:

Plus in a town that’s so PC that homebuilders now eschew references to “The Master Bedroom,” that whole “Fathers” thing is awfully sexist sounding, isn’t it?

And besides, even Obama staffers don’t want to risk having the IRS sicced on them by their boss for using the wrong language.

Update (10:56 PM PDT): Looks like enough reverse-Alinsky shaming by the Blogosphere and Twittersphere caused them to change it. Still, I suspect the “Founding Founders” malapropism will live on for quite some time.

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Martin Bashir on MSNBC today: “So this afternoon, we welcome the latest phrase in the lexicon of republican attacks on this president: the IRS. Three letters that sound so innocent, but we know what you mean:”

You see, for Republicans like Darrell Issa – who knows something about arson – the IRS now stands for something inflammatory. Those three letters are now on fire with political corruption and malfeasance burning hot just like that suspicious fire that engulfed Mr. Issa’s warehouse back in 1982. And, despite the complete lack of any evidence linking the President to the targeting of Tea Party groups, Republicans are using it as their latest weapon in the war against the black man in the White House.”

And in case you didn’t, this headline at the Corner sums it up: “MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: ‘IRS’ Is the New ‘N****r’.”

Huh. It was only two years ago that guns were the new N-word on MSNBC:

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.

“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”

His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.

That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”

And of course, it was only last August that golf and “Chicago” were the new N-Word on MSNBC:

Chris Matthews “came to the conclusion that reminding people of the President’s roots in Chicago politics is racist.”

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson set the tone of the exchange.

“It’s all part of this Barack Obama as ‘other’ sort of blanket campaign that has been waged by the Republican Party for some time now. It may be gaining some traction now, though I wonder why now as opposed to a bit closer to election,” he said.

“Yea, well let me ask you about that, gentleman,” Matthews responded. “What about now, is this constant barrage of assaults, saying the guy is basically playing an old game of demagoguery politics, where you take the money from the worker bees and give it to the poor people to buy votes. That’s basically what they’re charging him with. Old big-style, big-city machine of 50 years ago.”

“They keep saying Chicago, by the way, you noticed?” he asked.

“Well, there’s a lot of black people in Chicago,” said New York Magazine’s John Heileman.

The same day, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that a reference to Obama’s golf outings was also racial code.

“For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said.

Naturally, O’Donnell saw racism in the remark.

“Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the — lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama,” he said.

Martin Bashir, another MSNBC host, asked O’Donnell to clarify his remarks.

“Lawrence — don’t you think — don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has?” Bashir asked.

Bashir talked self-declared socialist Lawrence O’Donnell off that racist cliff, but fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and eventually, everyone associated with MSNBC has to let their inner racist out eventually. Why should Bashir be any different?

There’s a hilarious list of everything that’s been speculated to be caused by global warming whose humor derives from its sheer endless length. The list of everything that MSNBC anchors claim to be racist code words since 2009 is rapidly approaching that length. And of course, it’s a reminder, as James Taranto quipped last year, if you’re hearing dog whistles — you’re the dog.

A statement that MSNBC also probably considers racist, paricularly considering their number one viewer’s unfortunate past dining habits, come to think of it.

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Great moments in Orwellianism, and more “fun” from the intersection of Detroit and DC, as “General Motors Co. is sponsoring a two-month cross-country tour on the importance of free enterprise in the U.S. economy,” which is being put on by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Detroit News reports:

GM’s embrace of free enterprise comes as the automaker has in recent years been derided by many as “Government Motors” after it won nearly $60 billion in government bailouts, including $49.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury and $10 billion from the Ontario and Canadian governments. The government intervention in late 2008 and 2009 kept GM from liquidating.

After GM’s 2009 government-sponsored bankruptcy, the U.S. Treasury acquired a 61 percent majority stake in the Detroit automaker.

The Treasury now owns 16 percent of GM and has recouped about $30.7 billion of its bailout. At current market prices, U.S. taxpayers would lose about $10 billion on the GM bailout. GM still operates under government oversight for executive pay. In April, Treasury rejected proposed cash salary pay increases for 12 of GM’s top 25 executives.

Shortly after World War II, a very different General Motors sponsored the publication of an illustrated pamphlet-sized version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. As I wrote last week, “If Only General Motors Had Taken General Motors’ Advice.”

This panel seems to dovetail well with both GM’s current state, and the intersection of Big Business, Big Government, and Big Journalism:

As I concluded last week, I won’t give away the pamphlet’s ending, but needless to say, like most of General Motors’ product today, it’s not pretty.

Perhaps somebody could print up a few of the pamphlets from here on their laser printer and show them to whoever’s hosting this year’s tour for GM to get their response — which I imagine would be quite astonishing to watch.

(Headline via Matt Drudge.)

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“Michelle Obama’s new ‘baller’ motto” — Another first for the Obama administration?

First lady Michelle Obama debuted a new motto as she hit DNC fundraisers in New York on Wednesday.

“We need you to keep on writing those checks, and if you haven’t maxed out, you know, what’s my motto?  Max out,” she told attendees at the DNC’s LGBT Gala on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Let’s say it together: Max out. And if you’ve maxed out, get your friends to max out. It’s a very — maxing out.

“Sounds kind of baller, too — maxing out. Everyone here should be maxed out. “

“That’s what I want. A First Lady who uses the term ‘Baller’ when seeking donations,” Kathleen McKinley tweets.

Ugh. Particularly since the FLOTUS seemed to think only recently that being a “baller” was a bad thing. At least it was earlier this month, when Mrs. Obama spoke at college commencement address:

In an address at Bowie State University, Mrs. Obama told graduates to bear the goals of the university’s founders in mind by highlighting the role of education in the black community.

Citing the high dropout rates of African-American students, Mrs. Obama lamented that–  despite their ancestors’ fights to ensure that African Americans have access to education — too many young people still “can’t be bothered.”

“Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” she said.

But why would young people think that being a lawyer or business leader is a positive career path? Particularly given the POTUS and FLOTUS and their own thoughts on the topic? In 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Barack Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama on the 2008 campaign trail:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

I guess the FLOTUS doesn’t consider that very baller. Or does she?

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In the first half of the 20th century, the American Left frequently apologized for brutality of the Soviet Union as simply being “Liberals in a hurry.” (Which must have made many wonder what the New Deal would have resembled if it ever reached the end zone.) Apparently, the long-term project of Bill Ayers has been to transform how his former Weather Underground terrorist group is viewed amongst the current American Left as “merely progressives in a hurry,” Peter Collier writes in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard.

Robert Redford’s odious, but entirely predictable choice to lionize the Weathermen in his dotage led Collier, whose frequent writing partner, David Horowitz was associated with fellow radical chic travelers the Black Panthers in the late 196s and early ’70s, to explore “Progressives with Bombs:”

The group has profited greatly from the time-lapse atonement our culture offers free of charge to those who simply hang on. Weatherman has no doubt also benefited from the leftward drift of our political world over the last 40 years, especially the etymological waterboarding of the term “liberal” to make it describe the radicals who killed authentic liberalism in the ’60s and then inhabited its corpse and claimed that it had always been them anyhow.

But it is also true that this sect, which was about nothing if not the triumph of the will, has created its own redemptive myth. Forty years ago, it might have been expected that the central architect of Weather revisionism would have been Bernardine Dohrn, the sensual face of the group from the moment it became news; the queen bee who maintained internal power by adroitly dispensing her royal jelly among all the jostling males of the group; the group’s sayer of the unsayable, as in her infamous reaction to the Manson murders: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate their dinner in the same room with them, then they even stuck a fork into the pig Tate’s stomach. Wild!”

But today, while Bernardine is the lawyer, it’s her husband Bill Ayers who has successfully constructed, over time, the brief accepted by Redford and others that argues, all facts to the contrary, that Weatherman was not a terror group at all, but the last of the just.

Ayers was the first to understand that the universities, dominated in the 1980s by those who had failed to burn them down in the 1960s, could provide a rat line back to the real world. Weatherman had already pioneered the ideology about race, class, gender, and national evil that was finally taking over the academy, and when he surfaced in 1980 (unprosecuted because of irregularities in federal surveillance), he saw that someone like him could use that ideology as protective coloration when resuming the long march.

Briefly a teacher in a Summerhill-like school in his early radical years, Ayers enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984 and embraced the “critical pedagogy” that was just then taking over the formation of teachers. This movement, as Sol Stern has pointed out in City Journal, charges that public schools reinforce the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist order, creating a sinister ideological tape loop that can only be destroyed by a “transformative” curriculum of “social justice.” With gurus such as Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire urging on a radicalism that “does not conceal but proclaims its own political character,” critical pedagogy slowly infiltrated leftist ideas into every aspect of classroom teaching, including science and math, and created a prime hitchhiking opportunity for someone like Ayers, who already spoke the lingo.

He got his Ed.D., peewee version of the Ph.D., which led to a teaching job at the University of Illinois, where he began to pursue his old ideas by other means. He began writing and became general editor of a series of teaching-for-social-justice texts (a couple of them bestsellers) that were regarded as cutting edge by his new colleagues. By the mid-1990s he had established himself as an “education reformer” whose academic credibility, combined with his family connections, helped root him in the rich political humus of Chicago’s bien-pensant left.

No wonder post-1960s academia, which was willing to toss a lifeline to Ayers and his colleagues, now seems like it’s collectively running on fumes. Or as James Taranto writes in “See You in the Funny Papers: A tribute to an anti-mentor:”

That, it seems to us, is the central story of our time. The left-liberal elite that attained cultural dominance between the 1960s and the 1980s–and that since 2008 has seen itself as being on the cusp of political dominance as well–is undergoing a crisis of authority, and its defenses are increasingly ferocious and unprincipled. Journalists lie or ignore important but politically uncongenial stories. Scientists suppress alternative hypotheses. Political organizations bully apolitical charities. The Internal Revenue Service persecutes dissenters. And campus censorship goes on still.

Not to mention other forms of academic Orwellianisms. At Power Line, Steve Hayward explores “When ‘Diversity’ = Hate.” Today the D-word “has become a term meaning the opposite of its dictionary meaning, and is a vehicle for racial division and resentment,” Hayward writes:

If you needed fresh evidence, check out this story out of Northwestern University, where a white student was rejected for a diversity appointment because “he is a white heterosexual male.”  The student’s name, incidentally, is Stephen Piotrkowski.  Just a hunch here, but he sounds like someone with immigrant roots that don’t trace back to the Anglosphere, and as such would represent what ought to be meant by “diversity” if it was meant seriously.  (Turns out his sister is gay, but that’s apparently not enough.)  But pigment is everything for the diversity-haters.

Finally, as Andrew Malcolm of Investor’s Business Daily tweets, Jay Leno has been goofing that “Obama tells Morehouse Coll grads their future is great. Unless, of course, they want jobs. Then, they are totally screwed.”

But how can that be? College kids in the 1960s and ’70s en masse, along with “progressives in a hurry” such as Ayers and their academic mentors all assured themselves that their goal was to “change the world” — and they succeeded. Surely, having hit the CTL-ALT-DLT keys on the society they inherited from their parents, they’ve succeeded at rebooting mankind into the best of all possible worlds.

Haven’t they?

Related: Via Maggie’s Farm, A black Bronx seventh grade Spanish language teacher “has filed a lawsuit claiming she was fired for using the word ‘negro’ in class. ‘Negro’ is the Spanish word for the color black.”

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“As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling,” Mark Steyn writes in his latest column, on the Islamic terrorist attack in London this week:

On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed “Allahu akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much road kill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

Which mundanely happened in again in France. “French soldier stabbed while on patrol near Paris,” the Reuters headline mundanely reads. As Andy, one of Ace’s c0-bloggers asks, the infamous one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter “news agency” makes the attack “sound like just another day at the office, don’t they?”

A police union spokesman said surveillance footage of the attacker showed him as tall and bearded, aged about 35, possibly of North African origin and wearing a white Arab-style tunic.

Beard? North African? Arab-style tunic? I don’t know about you, but if I were a criminal profiler, I might flag the suspect as a member of the Euro-Tea Party. Or it may possibly have been one of those damned Lutherans … they’re known for doing stuff like this all the time.

Three days after a British soldier was killed in a London street by two men who said they acted to avenge violence against Muslims, the attack near Paris raised questions about a possible copycat attempt to kill a French soldier.Interior Minister Manuel Valls noted the similarity in an interview on France 2 TV saying the attacker was clearly trying to murder his victim, but he added that it was too early to offer any theories.

“Let’s be prudent for now,” Valls said of the attacker’s identity and motivations. “Everything is being done to arrest this individual.”

Yes, yes. Let’s be prudent. Mustn’t leap to any conclusions.

As Steyn adds on this Memorial Day weekend:

Come to think of it, why are armed soldiers patroling a commercial district just west of Paris?

The soldier was on patrol as part of a heightened security plan initiated in certain areas following France’s intervention in Mali earlier this year, French President Francois Hollande said.

The “heightened security” doesn’t seem to heighten security:

The 23-year-old was patrolling in uniform with two other soldiers as part of France’s Vigipirate anti-terror surveillance plan when he was approached from behind around 6 p.m. and attacked with a knife or a box-cutter.

He has apparently lost a lot of blood. The very names of these crime scenes mock the fin de civilisation west: Drummer Rigby was killed on Wellington Street, named for the Iron Duke, and the French soldier stabbed in La Défense, named after the famous statue commemorating the French resistance against the Prussians in the Siege of Paris.

Concurrently, Sweden is seeing the same sort of flaming cars caused by those pesky “youths” which have been plaguing France in recent years. “Here’s a hint,” John Hinderaker quips at Power Line. Those ‘youths’ in Sweeden “aren’t named Erik or Gustav.”

Which perhaps explains why Swedish authorities are remarkably laid back about the whole thing. Hinderaker dubs it a case of “Fecklessness, Swedish Style:”

In Stockholm, riots have taken place for six consecutive nights, with windows smashed, cars and schools set on fire, and policemen pelted with rocks. This would normally be considered a major problem, but the Swedes seem to be taking it pretty casually:

Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

Apparently, the clash of these violence-oriented “youths” and passive-obsessed “authorities” has caused Sweden to have a second thought or two about immanentizing the eschaton, according to an article in the London Telegraph, with the brilliantly absurd headline, “Stockholm riots leave Sweden’s dreams of perfect society up in smoke.”

But perhaps Swedish authorities are simply misjudging what they’re up against. They’re not blood-spattered Muslim “youths” and crazed Islamic terrorists — they’re the proud spiritual brothers of slaves seeking emancipation. “MSNBC host compares terrorist ‘hunger strikers’ in Gitmo to American slaves,” as spotted by Right Scoop:

“I also appreciate that the hunger strikers are not trying to die. They’re trying to generate autonomy in the context of something that strips their humanity–something we certainly know about from the experience of American slavery. And that the language of before I would be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free. Just that idea of creating human freedom within the context of horrible human conditions.”

The analogy by NBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is right up there with Michael Moore comparing al Qeada to “the Minutemen,” shortly before being tapped by Jimmy Carter to sit next to him in the box seats at the 2004 Democrat National Convention in 2004.

Finally, Moe Lane writes, “I have only one real comment about the rioting/attacks in Europe:”

And it’s this: if the current people in charge over there don’t come up with an acceptable answer to the problem of Islamist (note suffix*) violence, the people on the sharp end of that violence will go looking for groups that do have an acceptable answer – or at least one that’s acceptable to the people on the sharp end.  And Western Europeans have a profoundly sh*tty track record when it comes to peaceful wholesale revisions of the social contract**.

Don’t be silly. That wasn’t a wholesale revision of the social contract; merely a brief pause to sort out “The European Civil War,” the EU’s latest euphemism for what their subjects still quaintly like to call “World War II,” speaking of Europe’s century-long attempt at finding various ways to immanentize the eschaton.

Related: From Tim Blair, “Message Unheard:”

You can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for your average Muslim terrorist. They go to all the trouble of blowing up children in Boston, killing US Army personnel in Texas, detonating bars in Bali, flying jets into New York skyscrapers and now basically removing a soldier’s head in a London street, all in the holy name of Islam.

And yet somehow, the news media just can’t seem to pick up on that relatively simple and easy to understand message. Read the whole thing.

More: Daniel Pipes on a decade worth of “Muslim Acts of Beheading in the West,” almost all of which are airbrushed by the MSM into the memory hole from the moment they are initially reported.

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In attempting to explain why “Liberals Should Worry About the IRS Scandal,” Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton according to his bio, seems to have a rather short memory of the past few decades:

Things got this way because from Reagan to Gingrich to Fox News and the Tea Party, right-wingers have systematically and relentlessly adopted the language and iconography of American patriotism. They’ve claimed the flag and the history of the founding of the Republic as their own.

During that time, left-wingers responded too often by walking away from the contest. They laughed off the shameless jingoism of conservatives. They made patriotism ironic, the way Colbert’s giant eagle and giant flag are meant to be ridiculous. When the Tea Party first came on the scene, progressives rolled their eyes at all the tricorner hats and colonial garb. They didn’t ask themselves how they might don the mantle of love of country. In a sense, then, those hapless IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati were performing their questionable task in an unquestionably rational way: liberals just don’t proclaim patriotism very much any more, so it was plausible to conclude that any organization using such rhetoric while seeking tax-exempt status must be a conservative outfit.

This is trouble. When words of the nation’s creedal origins and civic identity become mere partisan code, it’s bad not only for the party that no longer has access to them; it’s bad for the nation. Anyone who cares about civic education and the integrity of democracy has to be disturbed that in the word association game of contemporary politics, “Defend the Bill of Rights” and “Respect the Constitution” sound Republican.

Yes, how did that happen? It’s not like the liberals at Time photographed themselves a couple of years ago shredding the Constitution and asking if it still matters:

Oh, right. (Err, actually, oh, left). Actually, Time magazine began thinking of conservatives as The Other even before Republican founder Henry Luce permanently left the building in 1967. In 1966, the magazine founded four decades earlier by the son of Christian missionaries killed God; at the end of 1969, it determined that “Middle America” was its collective Man of the Year, writing in utterly baffled tones at how a majority of the nation could have voted for law & order candidate Richard Nixon after witnessing the blue-on-blue horrors of 1968.

Flash-forward to the 21st century, and we find CNN, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Time routinely sneered at the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Leftwing oikophobia continued as 2012 merged into the current year; Piers Morgan, described by Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN (expatriated from similarly left-wing NBC) as one of the network’s “foundation brands,” sneeringly described the Constitution as “your little book,” when handed a copy on-air by Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com in early 2013. This was only a week or so after  the New York Times ended the year by running an op-ed titled, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution;” CBS would approvingly interview its author the following month.

If it’s true, as Liu writes, that “in the word association game of contemporary politics, ‘Defend the Bill of Rights’ and ‘Respect the Constitution,’ sound Republican,” it’s only because the left ceded those words long ago. The fact that they view their loss as merely “a game” is telling as well.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

We do not yet know what prompted 22-year-old accused gunman Jared Loughner to allegedly shoot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others, including a child and federal judge who died from their wounds.

But critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a “target list” of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections.

– “Sarah Palin Criticized Over Gabrielle Giffords [sic] Presence on ‘Target List,’” CBS News, January 8th, 2011.

Remember when liberals thought targets caused people to shoot other people with guns? Think back to the Gabby Giffords shooting when liberals in media stampeded to blame Sarah Palin’s target map.

Now they’re openly using the term target for political purposes.

From The Washington Post…

That has made the New Hampshire freshman an easy target for the gun-control groups as they seek to regroup after the loss on background checks in the Senate. As she travels the state, Ayotte has been confronted by signs that read, “We are the 90%!”

From The Politico…

Gun control activists disagree, arguing that nine out of 10 voters back the more expansive background checks that Ayotte rejected. And they warn that’ll be a problem for her in a state that has grown increasingly Democratic in the past 20 years, and where there are more female voters with liberal leanings. All of this makes Ayotte a ripe target.

From The Huffington Post…

Kelly Ayotte Targeted By Gun Control Activists

– “New Tone: Liberals in Media Call Senator Kelly Ayotte a ‘Target,’” American Glob, today.

(Headline via Kathy Shaidle.)

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When the Bush administration coined the phrase “The War on Terror” after 9/11, it was a politically correct expedient for not wanting to reference the religion of the vast majority of its participants, and/or the region of the world that spawned them. As Diana West wrote in 2007′s The Death of the Grown-Up, “There is a hollowness to the whole enterprise…a barren chamber where the empty slogan ‘war on terror’ echoes on without meaning:”

That is, terror is a tactic. You don’t make war on a tactic; you make war on the people who use it. Imagine if FDR had declared “the war on sneak attack” or the “war on blitzkrieg.” It doesn’t make sense and neither does “war on terror.” And not only does it not make sense, it also uncovers our biggest handicap going in: that perilous lack of cultural confidence, that empty core at our heart.

Naturally, the Bush administration having already censored themselves in the early naughts, their truly PC successors in the White House would go even further, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, when discussing the Tsarnaev family with Mona Charen at Ricochet:

I mean, he could have easily stayed in Chechnya if it was so wonderful, and dealt with the Russians, but his family chose not to. So they came out to an embracing, affable society that allowed them a second chance in a way that millions would have only dreamed of. And then his reaction is to do that to the society that nourished him.

And it’s disgusting, but it’s almost as if, the more that he sees this popular culture that we’ve been talking about. And then he sees the official reaction: “man-caused disasters,” “overseas contingency operations”;  can’t use the word “terrorist”; can’t use the word “Islamist”; gotta create an idea of “workplace violence” for Maj. Hasan. He gets the other message that we’re sort of so easy-going that nothing really gets us upset. And instead of having respect for that liberality, he grows contemptuous of it.

But while the “Progressive” overculture apparently can’t call terrorists terrorists now, it can call everything else that. QED:

Why do liberals consider domestic violence “terrorism” but they’re afraid to call real terrorism what it is? twitter.com/caseykim12/sta…

— CG Casey Kim (@caseykim12) April 28, 2013

And Ace notes how the Washington Post’s tut-tutting article on a recent conservative sting video documenting late term abortions concludes:

An antiabortion group that mounted a six-month undercover investigation has released videos this week that raise questions about what might happen to a baby as a result of an unsuccessful abortion.

One video features a D.C. doctor, Cesare Santangelo, who said that in the unlikely event that an abortion resulted in a live birth, “we would not help it.” Santangelo was answering repeated questions from an undercover operative about what would happen, hypothetically, if she gave birth after an unsuccessful abortion.

…

“I mean, technically, you know, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive, but . . . it probably wouldn’t,” Santangelo is shown telling the woman, who was 24 weeks pregnant. “It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.”

…

He said he was “tripped up” by a hypothetical at a moment when he was trying to reassure a client. “Once the baby is born, it’s out of everybody’s hands, and the baby has rights, too,” he said. “I understand that and I support that.”

* * * * *

He said he has not watched the video because “I don’t like to feed into these people. I really consider them terrorists.”

As with numerous papers in 2009 condemning James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting, I await the blanket condemnation by the Post and its subsidiaries of CBS’s long-running 60 Minutes series. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in early 2001, before 9/11 and the birth of the Blogosphere:

60 Minutes has used secret cameras for decades and earned awards and ratings for it. But when 60 Minutes used a hidden camera to snoop on another journalist a few years ago, heads exploded in the hallowed halls of elite journalism. Why? Because we don’t do that sort of thing to our own. We only screw outsiders. Why do you think the media despised Linda Tripp so? It wasn’t just that she made life for Bill Clinton so uncomfortable; she was a scab, using the very techniques that thousands of journalists use each and every day. And she did it to protect herself! Nevertheless, when a private citizen employs such tactics she’s seen as an immoral betrayer of a friend. When a journalist does it, she’s a “news hound” — and an ethical one at that.

So in the future, will the left declare everyone a terrorist for 15 minutes? Of course. And the future is now.

Oh and by the way, the real terrorism? No need to worry about it, when there are much more abstract “crises” to obsess on. While I was poking around my archives the other day, I came across this 2008 quote from Nanny Bloomberg:

“Terrorists kill people. Weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill an enormous amount of people,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after addressing the U.N. General Assembly, but “global warming in the long term has the potential to kill everybody.”

Yes, it’s almost as lethal as a 64-oz bottle of Coke.

Or as Mark Steyn’s latest column on the euphemistic language employed by the media to cover (0r not) the Gosnell trial and the Tsarnaev Brothers concludes:

You can understand why American progressivism would rather avert its gaze. Out there among the abortion absolutists, they’re happy to chit-chat about the acceptable parameters of the “collapsing of the skull,” but the informed general-interest reader would rather it all stayed at the woozy, blurry “woman’s right to choose” level.

We’re collapsing our own skulls here — the parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about abortion, welfare, immigration, terrorism, Islam shrink remorselessly, not least at the congressional level. Maybe if we didn’t collapse the skulls of so many black babies in Philadelphia, we wouldn’t need to import so many excitable young Chechens. But that’s thinking outside the box, and the box is getting ever smaller, like a nice, cozy cocoon in which we’re always warm and safe. Like — what’s the word? — a womb.

We’re certainly collapsing our own vocabulary, as a certain Mr. Eric Blair predicted 65 years ago:

Update: So what happens when the Newspeak Dictionary shrinks even further? Headlines such as this one at The Hill today: “Dem resolution warns climate change could push women to ‘transactional sex,’” with the latest PC euphemisms for both “global warming” and prostitution in one silly headline, reporting on an even more ridiculous bill.

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“TV anchor leads story, Says “Gay f**king s**t” — First day on the job.”

Curiously though, while there are numerous Websites reporting the spectacularly stillborn debut of  North Dakota anchor AJ Clemente, most of the reports of the incident I found via a Google search on the anchor’s name don’t seem to be mentioning his use of the G-word. I wonder why — do they think they’ll do even more harm to his career by implying “homophobia,” than by that word followed by F and S-bombs?

But this is yet another reminder: all microphones should be considered hot when in the studio.

And of course, if nobody asked yet, I will: when will Bill O’Reilly have Clemente on, if only to kick around the good old days with him?

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Recently, David Horowitz’s long-running Front Page magazine adopted the slogan, “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out,” and it certainly seems spot-on. But do liberals call themselves liberals anymore? It’s likely no coincidence that as liberalism went off the rails in the wake of the election of GWB and 9/11, liberals went a century into the past and began to re-rebrand themselves as “Progressives,” having previously stolen the L-Word from classical laissez-faire liberals around the FDR era, after the P-Word had gotten such a bad reputation during WWI. Or to put it another way:

I’ve noticed that a lot of people today who would formerly have referred to themselves as liberal or left wing now prefer the term “progressive”, presumably because it sounds more… well, progressive. But there’s a difference between being liberal and being progressive. I like liberals, but I don’t like progressives. Even lefties are OK if they’re the right sort of lefty, but progressives give me the creeps. Progressive sounds like a positive word, doesn’t it, brimming with the promise of bright new tomorrows. In reality it means moving gradually, progressively, bit by bit, towards an ever more regulated, controlled, and less free society where group identity trumps all and every casual remark is a potential hate crime.

We’ll have more and more equality, and more and more fairness, and when we’ve had all the equality and fairness we can stomach, and then some, we’ll have some more, whether we like it or not. It’s the same agenda as revolutionary Marxism, only they want to do it gradually, progressively. You know, like a disease. A liberal is a person who will defend your right to free speech even when they disagree with you. A progressive is a person who will defend someone else’s right to shut you up because they find you offensive. A liberal sees the value in the free exchange of ideas and opinions.

– British video monologist Pat Condell; as quoted in this transcription. Watch. (and/or read) The. Whole. Thing.

(Via SDA.)

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Freedom is Slavery, as Winston Smith would say, while on a Victory Gin break in the canteen of the Ministry of Truth:

Eighth-graders in Wisconsin’s Union Grove school district were assigned to fill out a “Liberalism vs. Conservatism” crossword puzzle, and they learned some new and very questionable “facts.”

Students learned conservatism is “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ”

Conversely, they learned liberalism is “the political belief of equality and personal freedom for everyone, often changing the current system to increase government protection of civil liberties.”

Click over for a photo of the doubleplus ungood crossword puzzle.

(Via Twitchy.)

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That’s not a shutout the MSM should be proud of, but a big part of leftwing media bias is bias by omission. And you can’t spell omission without O:

The Rutgers basketball story continues to transfix the media, and why shouldn’t it? Mike Rice, the disgraced former Rutgers basketball coach allegedly killed a woman and at least seven viable, born-alive babies “by plunging scissors into their spinal cords” in his filthy, macabre “house of horrors” abortion clinic.

Oh wait, my mistake. Rice was fired last week from Rutgers over video of him shoving, kicking and yelling at his players, throwing basketballs at them and – most damning – using “homophobic slurs.” That’s made Rice the most notorious villain in America. And in one week it earned him 36 network news stories clocking in at 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Now, had Rice been accused of killing a woman and eight babies, he’d be enjoying the same anonymity as Kermit Gosnell – provided the killings were carried out in an abortion clinic. Gosnell is the West Philadelphia abortionist who ran an unimaginable charnel house of a “clinic,” for 30 years. Witnesses testified that he may have murdered over 100 babies outside the womb. Gosnell’s trial, underway for weeks, has featured wrenching testimony and horrific details. And it has received exactly zero seconds of airtime on the broadcast networks.

Let’s break it out by network.

ABC

• Rutgers: 8 min., 1 sec
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

CBS

• Rutgers: 14 min., 27 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

NBC

• Rutgers: 18 min., 58 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

So why all the zeros? Because the networks are terrified of running a story like this on the Today Show or the 6:30 PM news:

A Delaware woman who worked for Kermit Gosnell testified Tuesday that she was called back to a room at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia where the bodies of aborted babies were kept on a shelf to hear one screaming amid the bodies of aborted babies kept on a shelf…

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West said, telling the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge and jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at the Women’s Medical Society clinic…

West, who said she called aborted babies “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally,” said a co-worker had called her back to the room that night because she did not know what to do. West said the baby’s eyes and mouth were not yet completely formed and it was lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told the co-worker to call Gosnell and fled the room…

She later made it clear that she called it “a baby” in her testimony “because that is what it is.”

At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

That’s not the first time a clinic worker’s resorted to Orwellian euphemisms to make her “work” more bearable. Ed e-mails to remind me that you’ll also find “Product of Conception” in usage. More on Gosnell from NBC Philadelphia, one of the precious few media outlets covering this story:

An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions.

Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

The Anchoress notes correctly that, simply for reasons of sensationalism, the media should be all over this story. Dead children, body parts, harrowing testimony on the stand — even the most soulless news editor, untroubled by the horror-movie accusations against Gosnell, should be pushing heavy coverage for selfish reasons, to boost readership. (Britain’s Daily Mail, whose tabloid instincts are unerring, has posted several stories about it.)

Since 2008, the media has repeatedly submerged its instinct to push big stories (I always typed “killer stories,” before realizing how Orwellian such a euphemism would be in this case), in an effort to help the cause. I’ve long mentioned the San Francisco Chronicle burying Obama’s promise to them at the beginning of 2008 that he would bankrupt entire industries, and NBC not losing much sleep that year over his admission to their financial channel that he’s fine with raising gasoline prices, both goals that by their nature would punish lower income voters the worst, and would be examples of heartless cruelty from GOP presidents. (Or Tory prime ministers, for that matter.) Instead, the media altered their thinking on these issues to fit the president’s policies. (See also: The Wright-Free Zone, Funemployment! and ‘The Best-Looking Contraction in U.S. GDP You’ll Ever See.’) But Iraq, Afghanistan and Benghazi sure have dropped off the radar screen, haven’t they, along with Chicago area gun crimes.

Defining Deviancy Down, indeed.

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Good grief: “US Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism.”

In response, Mark Steyn quips, “Don’t Fire Until You See The Whites of Their Cassocks:”

When I first saw the headline, I assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists “extremist” groups, starting with “Evangelical Christianity” at Number One, “Al Quaeda” (misspelled under any Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, “Hamas” at Six, and “Catholicism” rounding out the Top Ten.

Think of the number of people involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic – and along the way not one of them stopped to say, “Hey, this is totally dumb.”

Shades of then-New York Times editor Bill Keller’s screedy meltdown in 2011 when he initially claimed that Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann believed in “fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity,” when the former is a Catholic and the latter a Lutheran.

The London Daily Mail has closeups of the images from the Army Reserve’s presentation to recruits and adds:

A slideshow presentation shown to US Army Reserve recruits classifies Christians, including both evangelicals and Roman Catholics, as religious extremists, placing them in the same category as skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, Hamas and Al Qaeda.

The presentation also warned that members of the military are prohibited from taking leadership roles in any organization the Pentagon considers ‘extremist,’ and from distributing the organization’s literature, whether on or off a military installation.

The opening slide warns that ‘the rise in hate crimes and extremism outside the military may be an indication of internal issues all [armed] services will have to face.’

Citing a Southern Poverty Law Center report as evidence that extremism is on the rise, the Army Reserve presentation blames ‘the superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories,the changing racial make-up of America and the prospect of 4 more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country.’

The Southern Poverty Law Center you say? In the latest edition of the Weekly Standard, Charlotte Allen has a lengthy read-the-whole-thing profile of “The King of Fearmongers:”

This leads to yet another SPLC irony: Its severest critics aren’t on the conservative right (although the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another “hate group” on the SPLC’s list, has done its fair share of complaining), but on the progressive left. It may come as a surprise to learn that one of the most vituperative of all the critics was the recently deceased Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and the leftist webzine CounterPunch. In a 2009 article for CounterPunch titled “King of the Hate Business,” Cockburn castigated Dees and the SPLC for using the 2008 election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president as yet another wringer for squeezing out direct-mail donations from “trembling liberals” by painting an apocalyptic picture of “millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.” Cockburn continued: “Ever since 1971 U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.”

Cockburn was following on the heels of Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote an article for the reliably liberal Harper’s magazine titled “The Church of Morris Dees.” Silverstein accused the SPLC of manufacturing connections between the “hate groups” that it highlighted in its numerous mailings—back then the groups on the SPLC list tended to be mostly fringe militia organizations—and the Columbine-style school shootings and a wave of black-church arsons during the 1990s that were a staple of the SPLC’s direct-mail panic pleas. “Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence,” Silverstein wrote. “More than 95 percent of all ‘hate crimes,’ including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by ‘lone wolves.’ Even Timothy McVeigh [perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people], subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI’s history—and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC’s—was never credibly linked to any militia organization.”

Silverstein followed up with more of the same in a 2007 blog post for Harper’s: “What [the SPLC] does best .  .  . is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest ‘civil rights’ organization.” In 2001 JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in the Nation: “Why the [SPLC] continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.” Silverstein had already noted in his 2000 Harper’s article that “most SPLC donors are white.”

What has infuriated the SPLC’s liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has used the SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his direct-mail talents that generates a nice living for himself (the SPLC’s 2010 tax filing lists a compensation package of $345,000 for him as the organization’s chief trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high ranking SPLC officials plus luxurious offices and perks, but that does relatively little in the way of providing the legal services to poor people that its name implies.

In contrast to all of the above, back in 2011 on his Captain Capitalism blog, Aaron Clarey spotted the National Guard actually promoting religion. Well, religion of a sort:

As the late Michael Crichton observed in 2003, “I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.” The above National Guard image flips the century-old “Progressive” notion of “the moral equivalent of war” on its head; as I asked at the time when I linked to Aaron’s post, “Does this mean that concurrently, the Peace Corps will be tooling around in heavily armed Abrams tanks, just to offset the absurdity?”

But back to the original topic at hand. As Rush Limbaugh recently noted, “We are living in a dying country.” Evidently, the Army — or at least some branch of it — has decided to accelerate the process. Linking today to the post on the Army labeling Evangelicals and Catholics as religious extremists, Kathy Shaidle responds, “Is America worth saving?”

Our elites don’t seem to think so. (See also: Obama, Barack.) Aaron’s new book is titled Enjoy the Decline; he posits that decline is exactly what America’s ruling class and low-information voters both want; there’s little the rest of us can do to change this collective death wish; we might as well have some fun before the lights go out. (Perhaps literally.)

Good night America, drive safe; it’s been fun!

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Ed Morrissey mentions why Jay Leno’s riff last night that the Associated Press is placing the phrase “illegal immigrant” with the words “undocumented Democrat” in the AP stylebook, the guide that all of their contributors use to ensure a uniform language in their articles, is resonating so strongly today. Not the least of which is that there’s nothing wrong with the original phrase:

Frankly, I think the term “illegal immigrant” works perfectly fine as a descriptor, which puts me in the same reactionary league as Janet Napolitano, as Allahpundit pointed out yesterday. In fact, not only do we have the same position on it, we have the same reasoning as well:

At a breakfast with reporters last week, she brushed aside concerns that the term is racist. “I don’t really get caught up in the vocabulary wars. They are immigrants who are here illegally. It’s an illegal immigrant,” she said. “They are immigrants who are here without documents. That’s an undocumented immigrant,” she added.

I think either term works, and it’s silly to keep looking for terms that don’t concisely describe a newsworthy and/or legal status just to prove an enlightenment that’s more of an affectation of concern than anything else. In this case, the statement itself proved just how inane the AP’s posture was. In the same blog post, the AP decided that their change, from a perfectly serviceable and non-discriminatory term that can literally be applied to anyone who enters the country illegally without regard to ethnicity or belief system, was both solidly founded — and tied to the whims of the moment:

Is this the best way to describe someone in a country without permission? We believe that it is for now. We also believe more evolution is likely down the road.

In other words: our new policy is superior, but we’ll change it in a heartbeat if enough people decide it’s not acceptable, either. Way to take a stand, AP! Why not wait until you’re certain that the new policy is solid before introducing it, especially in such a pretentious manner? Better yet, why not state that the use of “illegal immigrant” has no discriminatory issues at all, rather than cave to whatever current of political correctness happens to prevail at any point in time?

At the Daily Caller, Jim Treacher notes that even someone on the left such as George Carlin knew that the English Language was being corrupted by political correctness:

Here’s Carlin almost 25 years ago, talking about how the term “shell shock” eventually became “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Note that Carlin gets through several minutes here without cursing. It’s almost as if he knew these words would live on after he died, and he wanted as many people as possible to remember them:

It’s only gotten worse since then. If somebody engages in terrorism because he thinks it’s the will of Allah, you can’t call him a “Muslim terrorist.” Similarly, the needlessly blunt phrase “war on terror” becomes the more palatable “overseas contingency operations.” Control the language, control people’s patterns of thinking.

Just wait ’til you see next year’s AP Stylebook. In fact, we have exclusive behind the scenes video of the editors discussing what it will contain. Funny how it keeps getting thinner every year though…

Earlier: Dispatches from the Newspeak Dictionary: Everyone’s a Racist.

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“The Associated Press announced Tuesday that it will no longer use the term ‘illegal immigrant,’” Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters. “On NBC’s Tonight Show, host Jay Leno said, ‘They will now use the phrase ‘undocumented Democrat.’”

Heh. Click on over to Noel’s post for the video.

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This one’s dedicated to the Ministry of Truth, the Associated Press, for obvious reasons.

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It’s relatively easy for college students to avoid getting into trouble via political correctness, campus speech codes and the stifling of free speech. “Talk to the students you already agree with, join the groups that are ideologically similar to you. Don’t disagree with professors who have strong opinions because they might punish you either in grading or just punish you…if you follow these simple rules, you can really avoid a lot of the trouble that we see at FIRE,” Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, tells me in my interview today.

“But there’s a problem with that,” he’s quick to add. “Talking to the people we already agree with is exactly what’s wrong with our entire society.  And the one institution that could be helping make this problem better is higher education.  But it can’t even come close to working towards that goal if you can get in trouble for having the wrong point of view.”

And these days, as Lukianoff explains during our interview focusing on his new book Unlearning Liberty:  Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, “having the wrong point of view” is determined almost entirely by students and faculty with a hair-trigger sense of aggrievement. Lukianoff explains that each of the following incidents have led students to FIRE:

● Wearing a t-shirt with an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote.

● Being judged by the cover of the books you read. (In this case, the history book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.)

● Having a bible studies meeting in your dorm.

● Campus officials asking “When did you discover your sexual identity?”

And much more. click here to listen:

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“Yahoo now has a ‘common-sense guide to raising gender-neutral kids,’” Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club:

The problem for teenagers in the ’60s was to ‘find themselves’. The problem for modern pre-schoolers is to find their gender.

Yahoo now has a “common-sense guide to raising gender-neutral kids”. 1. Let your child pick his own clothes. 2. Eschew heavily gendered toys. 3. Don’t teach stereotypes. 4. Set a good example by not acting a gender part. 5. Don’t limit your child’s dreams of the future, etc.

Unless you raise your kids in a ‘gender neutral’ way you are failing in your duties as a politically correct parent … carer … guardian or whatever. Like optional infanticide, a child’s gender (you thought I was going to say ‘your child’ didn’t you?) is now a choice. A Colorado family sued a school after administrators barred six year old Coy Mathis from using a girl’s bathroom. “Coy was born a boy but according to her mother she started expressing herself as a girl at the age of 18 months.”

“For many transgender people, discrimination is a daily part of life. Unfortunately for Coy, it has started very early,” lawyer Michael Silverman said. “The world is going to be looking at the school (to) send a message to the world and teach tolerance, fair play and equal rights.”

There was a time when parents would have warned their male children against going into girl’s bathrooms dressed in a skirt.  Today’s that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Goodnight America — drive safe; it’s been fun!

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Twitchy watches the assault sausage being made; video of the initial doubleplusgood planning meeting posted above.

And don’t even think about tossing an imaginary assault grenade onto the playground:

In the politically correct world we are now forced to live in, courtesy of the progressive left, a second-grade student at Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colo., has been suspended for throwing an “imaginary grenade.”

“The 7-year-old says he was trying to save the world. But school administrators say he broke a key rule during his pretend play,” KDVR-TV reported.

What is the key rule? No real or play fighting.

A decade ago, these sorts of articles were staples of the Drudge Report — except that they all came from England. (IngSoc, indeed.) The same sort of political correctness that transformed the UK from the nation with broad enough shoulders to win WWII to its current enfeebled state is now working its way through America.

Which in just a few years will be unrecognizable. Well, even more unrecognizable than it is today. As Steve Green writes at the Tatler, we’re doomed.

Related: “On the Media’s Selective Belief That Words Can Pull Triggers.”

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