Progressives and the Politics of Victimhood
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Charles M. Blow, communist, er, columnist for The New York Times, pulled back the curtain on the progressive mindset a little this week, as much as there is a mind behind it. Upon hearing something Mitt Romney said about single parents, Blow, who apparently is one, took exception. On Twitter he sent out the following:
Let me just tell you this Mitt "Muddle Mouth": I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear.
For those who don’t know, the website Buzzfeed describes the “magic underwear” this way, “Mormon men and women wear "temple garments" beneath their clothes as a reminder of their religious commitments, a rough equivalent of Jews' yarmulkes or tzitzit.”
That, of course, makes Blow’s tweet an attack on Romney’s Mormon faith, done willingly and before the whole world.  At a time when ESPN fires a writer for using the common phrase “Chink in the Armor” to describe a bad game by Jeremy Lin because Lin happens to be Asian, you’d think the blowback on Blow would be swift. You would be wrong. There was no blowback – or at least none to speak of.
Had Blow been anything but a progressive, the media would have opened up on him like he was Pat Buchanan, and justifiably so. But if you’re a leftist you’re allowed to be a bigot. It’s practically required.
In the progressive world people can’t be looked at as individuals. They must be divided and subdivided so the “professional Left” can set about making them victims when it suits their needs. It’s the hyphenated Americans, the gender Americans, the Americans who like to do this with their genitals. It’s the ones with this color skin, or that color skin, it’s this one and that one and blah, blah.
They create these groups, then tell people to identify with “their groups,” so, when a member of that group is the victim of something, it’s an affront to all of them.
It’s the mentality that created a group called the Asian American Journalist Association and emboldened it, without invitation, to release guidelines for how the media needs to cover Jeremy Lin. See, you can’t treat Jeremy Lin like any other human being, or even any other basketball player. He’s different. His ancestors were of Asian descent.
As such, phrases such as “chink in the armor,” though common for decades as a cliché about someone being discovered to not be perfect, can’t be used to describe his first sub-par performance because this previously unheard of group says so. 
Their release says, “As NBA player Jeremy Lin's prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race.”  See, Lin is not first a person or even a basketball player; he is a member of a race.
Has the AAJA been asked by Lin to lay these guidelines? No.
The group issued seven points of “Danger Zones” of which the rest of the world needs to be aware when talking about Lin, each more insane than the last.
It also listed some biographical information, the first point of which is the most telling. It reads, in part:
Jeremy Lin is Asian American, not Asian (more specifically, Taiwanese American). It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese.
Not only do the group have to divide Lin from everyone else by pointing out he’s of Asian descent, it subdivides him to Taiwanese.
It continues … “It's an important distinction and one that should be considered before any references to former NBA players such as Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, who were Chinese.” Who gives a damn?
If you’re a fan of the Knicks, you care that he’s good. If you’re a fan of whoever is playing the Knicks, you care that he’s good for the opposite reason. If you didn’t care about the Knicks, or basketball, before someone with your ethnic background started playing for them and doing well, the problem is yours, not some poor schlub writer for ESPN.
But that schlub from ESPN paid with his job because he didn’t refer to Jeremy Lin the way people not Jeremy Lin want Jeremy Lin referred to.
By dividing people into groups, progressives are able to easily manipulate people. If a group you’ve been taught you’re a part of is the “victim” of an affront, it’s easy to rile you up. This is not to say there aren’t instances of bigotry by individuals against other individuals. It’s to say jackassery by one against another is nothing more than that. Unless you’re trying to remove the individual and create a collective mindset to advance an agenda…
Progressive create or exacerbate issues based on the groups they’ve created, demonize conservatives as the cause of, or obstruction to the solution for, the problem and, with the willing help of the media, manipulate people too busy to pay close enough attention into thinking they’re trying to help. But progressives never help.
Umpteen trillion dollars into the war on poverty we have just as much poverty. Try to change anything about these failed progressive programs, such as incentivizing work or attempting to curb abuse, and progressives will mobilize the necessary groups to cry racisim, sexism or whatever ism they need to create to get the needed outrage. It’s a sick game that traps people in poverty, ruins lives and families and actually harms people. But it does do one important thing – it creates a bloc of voters almost uniformly ready to vote, unthinkingly, for their oppressors.
This is not a slave mentality; slaves yearned to be free and independent. This is the mentality most closely associated with monarchy. In monarchies, peasants were told their king was chosen by God, and he had their best interests at heart. Thus, they accepted it when king stole their property and liberty and sent them off to war over ego. They were told their king was their caretaker, when, in fact, he was their oppressor.
It’s the prefect progressive style of government. And it has no room for dissent.
Progressives spent so much time and energy creating this group mentality, they have no time or patience for those who refuse to conform. Be a black, gay or female conservative, and you not only don’t qualify for the victim status afforded others, you’re purposefully, and gleefully, targeted by the very tactics those groups were allegedly created to prevent.
There is virtually nothing a of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature that a progressive can say to or about a conservative that will illicit any ill will from fellow progressives, either in or out of the media. Sickeningly, the perpetrators are often rewarded. Al Sharpton, noted bigot, inciter of riots and inspiration of murderers (Google Freddy’s Fashion Mart), who made his name pulling a hoax against police based on race, now has a daily hour-long TV show on the progressives MSNBC.
Sharpton’s past is not anything sane people dispute, yet his hiring went largely unquestioned in the media. No one resigned from NBC News out of protest over the tainting of their brand because Sharpton’s politics and tactics ARE their brand.
Were Sharpton’s politics unknown, or if he were – gasp – conservative, and he’d written, “Chink in the Armor,” he would’ve been fired. Since his views are known, and shared by the vast majority of those in position to take a stand against him, he is granted a platform to spread his lies.
The same goes for Charles Blow.
There was no outcry from the Times’ editorial staff or readers that Blow should be fired. We don’t even know if there was any pressure on him to apologize.  The entirety of their anemic response was limited to AFTER Blow tweeted an “I shouldn’t have done it” non-apology apology a day and a half later, andreads, “It is enough. We are in agreement with him that the comment was inappropriate and we're glad he acknowledged it.” To put it another way, they wish Blow would save that sort of talk for where it’s appropriate – Upper East Side cocktail parties where everyone agrees and no one will talk about it it outside the room.
Blow never mention it again or actually use words like “I’m sorry,” just moved on like it never happened. And why should he? He’s a progressive, after all, which means he thinks correctly. Besides, there are more important issues to discuss, such as contraception.
I kid, of course. Contraception is, however, conceptually important because progressives are trying to screw all of us.
A Final Note or Two
We’ve been hearing so much about contraception lately you’d think this country was a brothel. You’d think breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc., were irrelevant as far as women’s health concerns go when compared to the mortal threat of pregnancy.
To match their made up crisis, progressives created their own statistics. This week they started throwing around that 99 percent of women use or have used birth control. If that’s the case, what’s the problem? It’s certainly not an access problem if 99 out of every 100 women in the country have, or had, no problem getting birth control. It’s a laziness problem on behalf of the remaining women.
But progressives won’t point that out; it doesn’t advance the agenda.
That’s why you get the cast of propagandists on Morning Joe talking about Republicans trying to deny access to contraception to women. Joe Scarborogh, who should know better, Mika Brzenzinski, who mostly seems like she knows nothing, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, who does know better, were talking this week about how Republicans and religious conservatives were trying to deny women access to contraception.
This reminded me of a tweet I sent out recently on the subject that goes like this: Upon hearing this outrage, I set off to my local drug store to put a stop to it. To my shock, I saw women buying birth control WITHOUT any help from the government, paying for it out of their own pocket, and exiting the store without being assaulted by any religious groups. I didn’t think that could happen in America today.
I’m not going to write any more about this topic, I covered why it’s a threat to liberty two weeks ago, but I will point out this is what you get on MSNBC. Even its “moderate” show, Morning Joe, is as radical as all the others; it’s just that the hosts there do it with a smile – and bring on “conservatives” more interested in being liked and invited back than winning an argument.
Whatever name you want to give it, it ain’t honest, and it ain’t journalism.
And in the End…
The Oscars are tonight, and it’s the least excited I’ve been about them since I can remember. Don’t get me wrong. I complain about Hollywood as much as anyone, but I love me some movies. Always have, always will. But his year…blech! When the Best Actor is probably going to be a guy who didn’t say anything, from a movie where no one really said anything, it’s a problem. Billy Crystal probably will have some good jokes and funny bits, and he’ll look a hell of a lot better following the awful performance of Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (man, was that a letdown). But you can’t polish a turd, and this year’s nominees are turds. That won’t stop me from watching, and it won’t stop me from making this prediction: The movie no one wanted to see will narrowly beat out the other movies no one wanted to see for Best Picture. That’s where the smart money is. Oh, and it will run long. And there’s a decent shot of me throwing a beer through my TV if there’s a section of the show where dancers interpret this year’s nominees.
That is all. Go about your week.