"Doh! I duz know this op-ed gonna be da best I ever dun' while on MJ an' Ripple!'
Once again we see the WSJ's 'gig a week' misfit, Lance Morrow, pulling every conceivable strawman out of his hack's hat to try to assert voters' choice in 2020 is between Trump's lies and Progressive fantasies. But oh, what fantasies, making Dotard's lies look like a mythic truth by comparison. (Eliciting the question: How much of a mixture of weed and Ripple is needed to get an over- the -hill, former TIME essayist, to write such drivel?)
In fact, 2020 general election voters have a choice between Donnie Dotard's reckless deformation and destruction of civic and political reality and a leader who will be the opposite and beckon citizens to renew their national pride based on respect for our Constitution and reality.
Recall Morrow is now writing such trash - cherry picking the most extreme examples of progressive politics (what we call using the "strawman" fallacy) - after already desecrating his bona fides last year. In a piece of yellow journalism back in October (WSJ, Oct. 19, 'We've Grown Accustomed To Trump', p, A19) Morrow actually invoked a modified Stockholm syndrome to explain why the Democrats might not take back the House. He scribbled:
""Familiarity and the passage of time may breed a certain kind of acquiescence, even grudging acceptance. We see a touch of the Stockholm syndrome.
My guess is that the variations on Stockholm syndrome will play a role in the minds of independent voters in the 2018 midterms, producing a slightly friendlier inclination toward Mr. Trump and anyway, toward Republicans."
Of course, Morrow's midterm projections didn't happen. Most independents saw the insanity and disruption of the Dotard and sided with millions of Dem voters to generate what we now recognize as a true blue wave, and finally, a counterweight to Trump's excesses.
Morrow's recent piece - to try to disarm the unwary into believing he's remotely balanced - begins by comparing Trump's "falsehoods" to car sales tactics, e.g.:
"Trump works with huckster falsehoods - the flashy superlatives of a car salesman."
Hmmmm....I was thinking more of the proverbial carny barker or better, snake oil salesman. Never mind. Morrow quickly drops all pretense of fairness and invokes the usual false equivalence ploy:
"The progressive left works with conceptual falsities. Voters in 2020 will decide which style of lies is better."
Here is where this twit needs to be slapped down. Trump's 8,000 lies so far, are baldfaced, straight up, in your face LIES. Like claiming his inauguration crowd surpassed Obama's, that Obama had electronic bugs planted in Trump Tower, and also that he would "build a wall and make Mexico pay" when he knew damned well that was never going to happen.
What he calls "conceptual falsities" is Morrow's own brand of conceptual rubbish, much like the invocation of "Stockholm syndrome" for independent voters in his earlier piece. There is in fact nothing conceptually false about arguing for a nation that works for all citizens not just billionaires and corporations (like Amazon -which I will have more to say in a coming post).
Then, after spewing that indiscriminate bollocks Morrow really loses it, much like an earlier nitwit nabob (Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College) who insisted Trump's tweets were a form of "literature" as opposed to toddler-level garbage.
"Mr. Trump composes his reality after the manner of Renaissance painter's penitmento, except that he works at the speed of Twitter."
How about instead, Trump composes his reality in the manner of a drunken monkey handed two cans of paint and induced to splash the contents all over a wall? But Morrow isn't quite done, at least revealing for us the degree to which his brain has been scuttled by Trumpist balderdash and FOX ("Trump TV") propaganda, e.g.
"Trump's abuses, he and his followers believe, somehow become right by coalescing into a larger truth - the mythic America that radiated from my father's old Saturday Evening Post and came to the apotheosis of the Neverland in Dwight Eisenhower's 1950s"
Ah, yes, I recall that era well too. Traveling through the deep South in the late 50s - my Dad driving his '57 Chevy - to get us all to Milwaukee for a family reunion (we had left Milwaukee for Miami in 1956). . Passing through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky - and seeing all the stark signs labeled "Whites Only" and "Colored" at water fountains, ditto with restrooms.
I also recall my younger brother Jerry being read the riot act by an inebriated elderly cracker in Georgia when he mistakenly drank from the "colored" fountain. And we won't even get into the fact that the cafes and such we frequented for our breakfasts were barred to the "colored". Yeah, Morrow, real nice era- but glad you connected it to Trumpism and its "larger truth".
Then Morrow - likely overdosing on MJ candy and Ripple - vents his spleen on modern day progressives - as if anywhere in the same remote league of atrocity as Trump and MAGA -land:
"Progressive are busy reinventing the Kingdom of God on Earth. Trying to make their version as different as possible from his. They contrive elaborate new genders, for example - ones the deity didn't think of. They invent bristling and ecstatic vocabulary terms like 'intersectionality', 'cistendered' and 'heteronormality' -designed to bully reality into compliance."
Hold strain there, "MJ Morrow". The terms, examples you're citing are valid for perhaps 1/2 percent of progressives, if that. Like so many on the Right who love false equivalence, we also see Lance loves to commit the fallacy of hasty generalization. Given he probably doesn't know what that means - like most Trump boot lickers- we need to explain that it refers to an unwarranted inference made in a statement about a sample (or minor subset of a population) but generalized to the whole population from which it is drawn.
The same fallacy commission is evident later as when he blabbers:
"The progressive notion of gender as a social construct rather than sex as a fact of nature contradicts ages worth of human experience about the biological roles of men and women in the drama of procreation and survival."
By now realizing he's perhaps committed too many generalization fallacies as well as consumed too much of his column space on gender issues ( which characterize only a tiny minority of progressives) we read:
"The role of law is cast aside for a 13th century dream of open borders and sanctuary"
Actually, as I recall my 13th century World history, walls were ubiquitous, as were the beliefs that populations could easily be sequestered (and protected) by them. That illusion definitely was shattered with the siege of Caffa (Kaffa) in 1346 when Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes hurled plague-ridden rats over the walls. The scene was captured in assorted etchings and other art, e.g.
Morrow's next to last paragraph is just as loopy and crazed, as befitting a hack and senile doper on his last gasp of meaningful gig legs. Now finding temporary succor by wallowing in Trump glorification in the WSJ's dubious op -ed pages. So no surprise - while blinded to the "catastrophic awfulness" of Trump (Michelle Goldberg's description)- we next read this codswallop:
"The left disparages masculinity as evil and Western civilization as monstrous, hoping to extinguish the intellectual and moral legacy that created the U.S. in the first place. If we are not careful the strategy that might work."
No, idiot. The left does not "disparage masculinity as evil". Alert and aware progressives, in the wake of #MeToo, are instead trying to communicate the dangers inherent in toxic masculinity. This is of the same type Trump exemplifies, for example in his serial misogyny, multiple assaults of women through the years - even bragging on it in the Access Hollywood tape.
Nor does the left imagine or claim "Western civilization is monstrous". We instead point to how that civilization has evolved from the Enlightenment to become a cooperative, global trade entity - minimizing the wars and fractures that had gone before- and which nearly tore Europe apart. However, since Trump's ascent he has militated against that trans-Atlantic compact while finding more solace and succor with Putin, than say Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron!
Morrow is right about being "careful" about an incipient and ongoing "strategy". He's just wrong about the real culprit. Which would be Trump's slow dismantling of all constitutional norms and trans-Atlantic alliances to pave the way for his brand of unitary, narcissistic authoritarianism- in league with Putin's Russia. And what's to stop that descent into chaos and fascism with deranged fools like Morrow enabling him as he scribbles such utterly reckless prose? Prose in the form of op-eds devoid of historical fact and context as well as being replete with every logical fallacy I'd noted in some previous posts, e.g.
Brane Space: A Primer on Logical Fallacies: Part One
Beyond all this, former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal gives perhaps the best summary of why the voters' choice next year is really a no -brainer- all Morrow's balderdash aside:
"All the accounts together show that Trump is engaged in a serial murder of the Constitution and rule of law. He fires anyone investigating him who wants to seek the truth, whether it's McCabe or whether it's Comey or even Jeffrey Sessions. He puts in place constitutional jokes like Matthew Whitaker. He tries to discredit and destroy investigations. He dangles pardons at people who could help him out in any trials. He declares national emergencies without warrant. He discredits judges. All together this is someone who is unfit to discharge his duties as our chief executive officer."
See also:
Trumpworld’s outreach to Russia since the Mueller investigation began
And:
"All the accounts together show that Trump is engaged in a serial murder of the Constitution and rule of law. He fires anyone investigating him who wants to seek the truth, whether it's McCabe or whether it's Comey or even Jeffrey Sessions. He puts in place constitutional jokes like Matthew Whitaker. He tries to discredit and destroy investigations. He dangles pardons at people who could help him out in any trials. He declares national emergencies without warrant. He discredits judges. All together this is someone who is unfit to discharge his duties as our chief executive officer."
See also:
Trumpworld’s outreach to Russia since the Mueller investigation began
And:
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