Tag: froma harrop
The Persistent 'Both Sides' Mediocrity Of Jon Stewart

The Persistent 'Both Sides' Mediocrity Of Jon Stewart

Thank you, Mary Trump, for plumbing the shallow waters of Jon Stewart's wit. A psychologist and sharp critic of her uncle Donald, Mary Trump accused the Daily Show host of long suppressing the liberal vote by telling his fan base that the candidates stink equally. She cites political research showing that his what's-the-difference jabbering helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

But Stewart's recent resurfacing with a nuance-free view of the current presidential choices was truly the last straw to drift off the bale. After reciting some antique jokes about AARP cards, Stewart shifted into his old brand of analysis, holding that Donald Trump and Joe Biden were basically the same.

"We're not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive or even capable," Stewart said with his don't-you-love-me grin. "But they are both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world."

To which Mary Trump wrote in response: "In what universe is Donald vibrant, productive or capable?? And this statement wasn't even tongue-in-cheek. Stewart was making a straight-up comparison."

It would seem that a president who has successfully managed two global conflicts, resurrected U.S. manufacturing, slashed the price of insulin and overseen the strongest economy in decades would be called "capable." Biden did it, and he didn't grow younger in the process.

Stewart clearly wants everyone to love him, so he uses his both-sides arguments to ingratiate himself with the right, marketing it as truth-telling. Ten years ago, I was sucked into that vortex.

Back then, when bloggers at respectable publications could still get away with junior-high misogyny, a troll at The Wall Street Journal became obsessed with me. He kept calling me a "Baroness Catherine Ashton look-alike," a reference to a British parliamentarian whom he deemed ugly. About that, I could not care less.

Then he accused me of hypocritically trying to censure honest conservative speech, which this once-upon-a-time Republican doesn't do. (I sometimes even agree with it.) He had no idea of what my position was, but that didn't matter.

Anyhow, Jon Stewart swallowed his attacks whole.

The Daily Show treated the powerful New York media with fluffy gloves. But being identified as a lefty in the howling wilderness of Rhode Island, I was regarded as easy game for both-sideism.

And so John Oliver was shipped out to "interview" me. The segment that aired had Oliver repeatedly hollering a bleep-out F word, followed by a spliced-in photo of me allegedly looking shocked, followed by canned laughter. It was on that level.

Stewart's favorite theme was to broadly condemn the mainstream press as hopelessly lazy and incompetent. And then Stewart pinned on me beliefs I never had based on what some blogging bro said they were. He had done zero research.

Stewart opened by hissing "Journalists! Journalists!" After the segment aired, the blogging pest praised it as "comedy gold."

When Oliver had his own show years later, many of the greatest traditional news sources had fallen into deep trouble. The ever-earnest Oliver looked into the camera with doggy eyes and beseeched the audience to subscribe to their local newspapers.

Just a few weeks ago, lo and behold, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn was recycling one of his raps on liberals when he took yours truly to task for those beliefs I never had. And what was his impeccable source? The Daily Show of 10 years ago. I mean, my real beliefs are all over Google.

As Mary Trump notes, the stakes are too high for guys like Jon Stewart to get away with neutralizing the toxicity of Donald Trump with comparisons totally lacking in substance. It's a creepy kind of brand-building. And it comes at the expense of our fragile democracy.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Who Blinked In The Shutdown Game? It Doesn’t Matter

Who Blinked In The Shutdown Game? It Doesn’t Matter

By Groundhog Day, the government shutdown will have been largely forgotten. That’s a guarantee.

As memory of that long weekend fades, the matter of whether Democrats won, lost or tied in the deal to reopen the federal government will be of little consequence — at least to those of us who have lives.

But the shutdown did highlight three realities for Democrats going forward.

Reality No. 1: It’s not quite true that Republicans control both houses of Congress.

Republicans do have considerable power in the House, where they can pass legislation without any Democratic votes. But they don’t have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, needed to pass legislation without Democratic support in that chamber.

The truth is Democrats did have the power to shut down the government. Also acknowledge that a handful of Republicans who bucked their party’s leadership helped them.

Reality No. 2: Obtaining legal status for the so-called dreamers — immigrants brought to this country illegally as children — is a good cause. Closing the government over them is bad politics. That the dreamers were not threatened with imminent deportation made this hardball seem less warranted.

The reality is that once Republicans agreed to fund the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years, there was less urgent need to take the radical step of a shutdown. Yes, it’s hard to find a more sympathetic group — young people who are, for all intents and purposes, American. Yes, they’ve been cruelly tossed about by Donald Trump’s mood swings.

But Democrats ended up with a tough rationale for closing the government — that is, protecting people at no immediate risk of being sent away. That’s why Democrats were wise to pack it in.

Reality No. 3: The activist left isn’t totally on board for winning elections. Its more vocal spokespeople exploded at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for ending the shutdown without a definitive dreamer fix. They get to keep their jobs whether Democrats get elected or not. And if militant fist-waving unsettles large parts of the electorate, not their problem.

Some on the hard left argue that if the party leaders were more like them, Democrats would be winning big. The reality is radical-left candidates rarely win elections. They usually don’t even win Democratic primaries.

By the way, the spokespeople don’t own the women who recently marched in great numbers. The women were united in expressing opposition to Trump and congressional Republicans. In terms of issues, that covers a lot of territory. These women are indeed a massive political force, and the bigger their tent the stronger they’ll be.

(There’s no little irony that presidential prospects courting the Bernie Sanders base have made the shutdown a key issue. Sanders himself is quite direct on the need to protect American workers from poorly controlled immigration. Sanders’ ditching of the identity agenda for the labor agenda helps explain why many working-class Trump voters had previously supported him in the Democratic primaries.)

Splice all three realities into one feature-length picture and you can see the Democrats’ challenge. To gain real power, they have to retain or capture Democratic seats in Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana and other states with electorates highly wary of illegal immigration.

“Our major issues,” said former Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, “are jobs, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, Social Security, infrastructure, supporting domestic programs, clean air, safe drinking water.”

The shutdown did produce one significant success. It helped solidify a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans who now vow to buck their all-politics-all-the-time leadership and work to solve problems. That’s good news for everyone, dreamers included.

As for who blinked in the game of shutdown chicken, forget about it — if you already haven’t.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

What It Means To Be Truly Liberal On Abortion

What It Means To Be Truly Liberal On Abortion

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Donald Trump has mastered the authoritarian act, and that’s how he attracted his brigade of humble followers. Some on the left seem to envy this ability to force obedience through threats and attacks. But that approach doesn’t work on issue-oriented voters, doubly so on matters requiring nuance. Abortion is one such issue.

Thus, one cannot fathom the ongoing crusade by abortion rights activists to crush Heath Mello, a moderate Democrat running for mayor of Omaha. NARAL Pro-Choice America, it seems, would rather punish a Democrat straying from its dictates than defeat a more resolutely anti-choice Republican.

Democrats have this self-defeating habit of sabotaging otherwise progressive candidates who dissent from some base group’s orthodoxy. Bernie Sanders and friends relentlessly beat up Hillary Clinton over minor differences in economic policy. It may be ironic that Sanders is now supporting Mello despite the Nebraskan’s mixed feelings on abortion, but he is right this time.

What makes NARAL’s assault on Mello truly bizarre is that it is beyond unfair. Mello is not anti-choice. (Lazy headline writers, take note.)

Mello says he doesn’t approve of abortion on religious grounds but as mayor “would never do anything to restrict access to reproductive health care.” This position is identical to that of the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, an exemplary progressive who never curbed abortion rights while in office.

Here’s another reality check: In Germany, Belgium, Denmark and France, abortion without restrictions is limited to the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. In Sweden, it’s 18 weeks. No one accuses these countries of being anti-choice. Their governments also pay for abortions, something ours should do, as well.

Of more concern, Mello backed a bill requiring that women be told that they could see a fetal ultrasound before having an abortion. That would seem a government intrusion on a private decision, but there’s no forcing any woman to look at anything.

The liberal website Daily Kos meekly withdrew its endorsement of Mello over the ultrasound issue. So exactly whom are its writers endorsing? Put another way, do they see a difference between Mello and his far more anti-choice opponent?

National polls show widespread support for a basic right to abortion but also interest in adding restrictions. The prominent Nebraska Democrat Jane Kleeb, a strong Mello supporter, tries to explain that many Democrats she knows are troubled by abortion. In this part of the country, you elect either a Democrat like Mello or a Republican.

Let me make my view clear: Access to an early abortion should be part of a well-developed set of reproductive health services. And any restrictions must make room for those rare situations when something goes dreadfully wrong later in a pregnancy.

Clinton was careful never to frame abortion as a casual thing. NARAL itself took the word “abortion” out of its official name, preferring the emphasis to be on choice.

It’s therefore curious to see Democrats tormenting good candidates over small deviations in doctrine. On the complex issue of abortion, real liberals give wide latitude to other opinions. The ultimate question for single-minded activists is, Do you want to run the country or just the Democratic Party?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

New Yorkers Walk Past Political Bluster Over Bombing

New Yorkers Walk Past Political Bluster Over Bombing

The explosives going off in the dumpster in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea was not a major terrorist event — except on the TV news channels. No one was killed, fortunately. And thanks to superb police work, a suspect was captured within 48 hours.

On the night after, Sunday, trains from the northern suburbs were packed with young people returning to town for the workweek. They found a Grand Central Terminal patrolled by police and military personnel in fatigues — which had been the case when they left town. Were there more guards after the bombing the night before? Perhaps.

All the panic was on the television news channels, fanned to a great extent by Donald Trump and surrogates. Their bit is to blame the Obama administration for not having wiped out every Islamic State operative and sympathizer in the Mideast. How Trump would do that has yet to leave the realm of fantasy — and you wonder where he’s going to find enough young Americans to ship overseas to perform mission Trump.

In the real world, the Islamic State group has been losing territory, and that humiliation is why its terrorists are striking out at Europe and elsewhere in the West. They need to maintain the illusion of power. Horrifying attacks on innocents abroad are how they keep their story going.

And Trump is their storyteller in chief, pumping up these miscreants as supermen to be feared. That might sell on national TV, but not to New Yorkers.

They are apparently more fearful of the chaos — economically and securitywise — that a Trump presidency could unleash than of a few terrorists or other crackpots rigging pressure cookers to go off. And over the same weekend, it was noted, a knife-wielding fanatic stabbed mall-goers in Minnesota.

George Metesky, the infamous Mad Bomber, terrified the city for 16 years in the ’40s and ’50s, planting bombs in libraries, train stations, the subway and the RCA Building. He was apparently angry with the electric company.

No one can make us totally safe, but cutting down to size the terrorist tales of invincibility and claims of being Islam’s defenders is a step in the right direction. Rather than feed into the terrorists’ story, the Obama administration is trying to deflate it.

It’s a “bankrupt, false narrative,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said after the explosions in New York. “It’s a mythology, and we have made progress in debunking that mythology.”

In New York City polls, Clinton thrashes Trump by a margin of 63 to 20 percent — and it’s not because the people don’t worry about terrorist attacks. They know they are the center of the bull’s-eye but fear having the country run by a man they see as a dangerous clown. Sophistication, not bluster, is the sharpest sword.

The brilliant (now-former) New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said last month that he has full confidence in the NYPD to handle terrorism. Trump, he said, “scares the hell out me.” He went on: “The lack of depth on issues, the ‘shoot from the hip’ … I just shake my head.”

As for Clinton immediately after the bombings, she called for patience as the details of the case unfolded. Her words were wise, though not made for cable television against backdrop images of flashing police lights.

Better was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s simple response: “Whoever placed these bombs — we will find and they will be brought to justice. Period. … We will not allow these type of people and these type of threats to disrupt our life in New York.”

And all indications are — given the week’s traffic jams — that they haven’t.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (L) and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (R)  tour the site of an explosion that occurred on Saturday night in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, USA,September 18, 2016. REUTERS/Justin Lane/Pool