Tuesday, July 17, 2018

The disingenuous (or just dumb?) Tim Blair

Tim Blair has become the Nelson Muntz of Right wing punditry: never, ever tiring of going "ha ha" at any Lefty (or, especially - obsessively - Jonathan Green), and then getting on with his cheery outlook on the world in which motor sports is more important that just about anything else.

But really, sometimes I just can't work out if it is disingenousness or increasing stupidity which is more at work in some of his commentary.   Take today's column, wherein he notes that on his recent American trip, people were just getting on with life, without obsessing about Trump every day.   In particular, this:
Anyone who has not visited the US since Trump’s hilarious 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton might be surprised by the utter absence there of Trump in daily life. Everyday Americans are mostly just getting on with things, as normal, non-obsessive people tend to do. The apparent civil war we keep hearing about just isn’t happening.
The problem here is that those links to "civil war" are to articles in what Blair would call unreliable Left wing magazines - Newsweek and the New Yorker.   So he's suggesting that it's the Left that's been beating up the matter of America at risk of a new civil war??

How absolutely ridiculous, or just plain dumb, of him to ignore that the tsunami of paranoia about the Deep State plotting against Trump and the need of patriot Americans to be armed and ready to take out the wannabe usurpers of the last great hope for America (Trump) has been a ground swell building during the Obama presidency (he was about to stealthily disarm them, remember, and was a secret foreign Muslim not even entitled to the office)  that has gone mainstream at Fox News under a genuine conspiracy believing, dumbass President and a huge chunk of GOP congress persons.   


The civil war fantasies have arisen entirely from the paranoid streak on the wingnut Right of American politics, and just because some Left wing journalists note it does not mean they are responsible for promoting it.

In reality, like a lot of Australian Right wingers, Blair probably doesn't really care for Trump as a person, but their culture war attitude means that they will either defend him against all evidence, or (as in Blair's case) do another  Nelson Muntz and go "ha ha, look at how he drives Lefties nuts".   

It is a deeply irresponsible attitude, just as his is on (yes, but it's true) climate change.   "Ha ha, I can ignore science because it drives Lefties nuts.   Ha ha."

1 comment:

not trampis said...

Most amazing is that these 'conservatives' support a man who has no time for a rules based trading system and thus is NO conservative.