China
The impossibly fickle, selective and whimsical rules of cultural appropriation are hard to keep straight. (Oops! I said "straight." Apologies to whomever. Oops, can I say "whomever?" Zimever? Verselves? Gah.) According to the white people who run the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, eating tacos, drinking tequila and wearing sombreros on Cinco de Mayo "are textbook examples of cultural appropriation."
The New York Times just can't get enough of promoting, defending, and excusing Marxism and communism. At the paper's online blog called "The Stone" on Monday, Jason Barker, an associate professor of philosophy, celebrated the upcoming 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth by telling the Communist Manifesto's author: "You Were Right!
For a show whose hosts routinely flirt and joke with one another, panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe took an uncharacteristically (though not unsurprising) no-nonsense view of President Trump’s recent remarks about Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Before the question, how about a few statistics? The 20th century was mankind's most brutal century. Roughly 16 million people lost their lives during World War I; about 60 million died during World War II. Wars during the 20th century cost an estimated 71 million to 116 million lives. The number of war dead pales in comparison with the number of people who lost their lives at the hands of their own governments.
NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell played the role of Obama administration hack on Monday afternoon, bewailing President Trump’s national security speech as a rejection of his predecessor’s world view on everything from climate change to Israel to trade to the United Nations.
The 2017 competition for Ingrate of the Year is now closed; the disgraceful distinction belongs to LaVar Ball. Rather than thank President Donald Trump for his part in keeping his son and two other UCLA basketball players from rotting in a Chinese prison for several years, Ball, when asked by ESPN about Trump's role, shot back "Who?" — and complained that "Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out." Well sir, that's because he did.
One of the establishment press's rules about the Donald Trump era is apparently, "There shall be no puff pieces." The Washington Post's Simon Denyer unilaterally decided to extend this rule to Arabella Kushner, the President's young granddaughter, giving him free rein to tell readers that her wonderful singing for China's president wasn't really an unconditionally wonderful event — because, you see, she was "forced to perform."
On Friday’s Morning Joe, the liberal panel once again took issue with some of the President’s Twitter comments and portrayed them as evidence that Trump is a dangerous and “authoritarian dictator.” However, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson really upped the ante today by ridiculously claiming that Trump “wants to run [America]” like Xi Jinping runs Communist China and host Joe Scarborough suggested that Trump wants to play “judge,” “jury,” and “executioner” in a manner similar to President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, who has admitted to extrajudicially killing criminal suspects.
In a truly bizarre segment on Thursday’s Morning Joe, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed completely undisturbed by being told that a government official from the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea enjoys watching the MSNBC show’s repeated whitewashes of Kim Jong-un’s threats to kill millions of Americans with nukes. Joe actually suggested that “now is a perfect time [for Kim] to move forward” on developing nuclear weapons because Trump is perceived by the world as a “reckless,” “dangerous,” and “destabilizing” “pariah.”
On Monday, EPA Director Scott Pruitt announced that he would be putting an end to the Obama-era policy known and the Clean Power Plan. The plan put stiff regulations on new and existing coal-fired power plants which resulted in many being closed down, miners to be let go, energy bills to skyrocket, and put greater strain on the power grid. All in the name of so-called green energy. CBS Evening News was put off by the EPA’s reversal and turned to China for their example for how the U.S. should operate.
In its roughly 30th installment of "Red Century," a weekly series of op-eds dedicated to the notion that 20th century communism wasn't all that bad, the New York Times performed a bit of perhaps inadvertent recycling. On Monday, Helen Gao, in an item the Times appears to have had the good sense to keep out of its print edition, argued, with "crucial caveats" (but not enough of them) that "the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big." Times columnist Nicholas Kristof infamously said much the same thing in 2005.
Appearing as a guest on Friday's New Day on CNN to discuss the recent tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman went so far as to recommend that the U.S. should offer to recognize the legitimacy of the North Korean regime in an effort to get the dictatorial government to give up its nuclear weapons.