Because if it's not critical, it's just codependent enabling.
One thing the two Jennifer Rubins have in common: an association with screaming. Bad Jennifer Rubin makes me scream with rage, Good Jennifer Rubin starred in Screamers (1995).
The Iran deal is as big a threat to Israel as any event since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Well, good, I guess that's not much of a threat. I mean the Yom Kippur War took 19 days, took place almost entirely off Israeli soil and brought no civilian casualties, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, and brought Egypt to the negotiating table for Israel's first peace agreement with an Arab country just three years later. Is that the threat, that peace might break out?
The American people as a whole by a large majority oppose it
#NotAllJenniferRubins. Jennifer Rubin, the talented and good-hearted one, as Edie Sedgwick in Oliver Stone's 1991 The Doors.
Jennifer Rubin pushing a Biden candidacy May 20, June 8, July 1, July 22, and most recently yesterday, with some outstanding campaign advice, competing for general tastelessness with Maureen Dowd:
We now know Beau wanted his father to run for office. It may be too emotionally grueling and even off-putting for Biden to invoke his deceased son, but Jill Biden, a tremendous political asset in her own right, can do it.
Obviously it would be grotesquely tacky for you to exploit this family tragedy in the service of your political ambitions, but hey, you can let your wife do it for you!
What is it with this strange Rubinian passion for a candidate whose every policy she would despise (Biden is one of the strongest voices in the Obama administration against Israel's illegal West Bank settlements and in favor of Palestinian rights, which is why Binyamin Netanyahu made his famous attempt to humiliate him in 2010), and who probably can't win in any case?
I was inclined to chalk it up to Clinton hatred based on a self-hating misogyny like Dowd's, but maybe it's Republican strategic thinking—that Biden is the only person who could win the nomination and then lose the election (because of the false, but widely comedian-spread, belief among the public that he's a buffoon).
The effect on me is to make me feel more positive about Clinton, really—especially now that she's been doing some of that moving left from Obama, with the plan to make college debt-free (less ideal than Sanders's, obviously, but legislatively more achievable) and her new opposition to Alaska oil drilling. Anybody who is so hated as she is by these journalistic harpies do has to be good..
But as an obsession on Rubin's part, it's spectacularly weird.
The other Jennifer Rubin, the one who hasn't spent her life making the world a slightly better place, has come up with a listicle of favorite Republican moments of the week, with an air of desperate, Rubinesque randomness:
Best visuals on announcement: Former Texas governor Rick Perry in an airplane hanger surrounded by veterans made for a compelling tableau. Since then, he’s had one of the strongest performances in the field.
OK Jennifer, so this is an airplane hanger (works better for shirts than for airplanes; Rick Perry is smaller than an airplane, but he still wouldn't fit):
Great news from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post: She thinks hack Ed Gillespie is likely to pull an upset over Mark Warner in the Virginia Senate race (echoing yesterday's "exclusive report" by Alex Pappas at the Daily Squalor and this morning's breakfast for Dr. William Kristol, the only pandit in history of a wrongness so pervasive as to get him sacked from the New York Times, a feat not even David Brooks has been able to accomplish). So I think we can take it as a given that Warner is safe.
Two late polls showing the gap in what was nearly a 30-point race shrinking to single digits has lifted Republicans’ spirits in Virginia.
Rubin's "distinguished pol" award goes out in the plural this week, to conservative reformers who have decided to advocate—surprise!—reform conservatism, which gets the poor thing in some noun phrase trouble at first, and then in an increasingly violent conflict with a mob of ruthless metaphors.
The distinguished people this week were the group of conservative reformers, including elected officials like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and GOP Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Tim Scott (S.C.) who rolled out a unifying theme and agenda for the right – reform conservatism.
She doesn't mean to suggest that Lee and Scott are not elected officials or that Cantor didn't join in the theme-rolling, she's just warning us that some unelected non-officials in the conservative reform–advocating reform conservative camp are in the [jump]
Once again, a Jennifer Rubin of a different choler. Via IMDB.
Here's young Jennifer Rubin on the subject of the nomination by Iran's President Rouhani of Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as Iran's ambassador to the United Nations:
If you believe that President Obama’s Iran policy is correct, then you must assume Iran is a normal state like other states, that its leaders want their country to prosper and that it wants to function as a nation-state in the “international community.” For it is only such a state that would willingly give up its illegal nuclear program in order to reintegrate back into the “international community.” Only a run-of-the-mill regime would put the welfare of its own people over the retention of an unusual weapon system, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and blackmail neighbors.
I do want it noted that Iran cannot be accused of "retaining" a weapons system that doesn't exist. Or of conducting an "illegal nuclear program" when it has been found repeatedly [jump]
Jennifer Rubin indignant over the president's word choices:
Well, now the president is frustrated! After three years, 136,000 or so dead, use of chemical weapons, creation of a jihadi haven, millions of refugees flooding through the area and a strategic boost for Iran and Russia, President Obama has decided he is miffed.
Well, I always thought that to frustrate someone was to hinder her, to prevent her from achieving her goals (from the Latin adverb frustra "fruitlessly, in vain" and [jump]
The mainstream media don’t get New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They think he is a bully.
Writes Jennifer Rubin. I love how somebody with a full-time gig at the Washington Post gets to speak of the "mainstream media" as a kind of exotic species of which she has a specialized knowledge she can share with her audience:
It doesn't. The link, to a blog post by James Pethokoukis, suggests the president is one of the "smart people" who disagrees for some perverse reason with James Pethokoukis:
So why do so many smart people keep advocating for a higher minimum wage? The best answer I can come up with is that they think it is more politically likely than the better economic answer: wage subsidies. I recently chatted with economist Noah Smith on this very topic, as part of a discussion of what to do if automation seriously depresses wages in the future.
Or maybe laughing so hard they dropped one of the e's. Now they can't find it anywhere.
Dibble said she disagreed with the sentiments expressed by then-defense secretary Robert Gates in December 2010: "I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought."
Jennifer Rubin. No, a different one, in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).
The front-runners for worst columnist in a national newspaper are pretty well-known by now. Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Doctissimus, is busy explaining Egypt to the Egyptians. Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, laments that both parties are too progressive on health care in the US—i.e., both want to destroy it and kill us all. David Brooks, as observed, has fallen into deep Charles Murray Land, with its mutt mobs and lack of mental equipment. Margaret Noonan lurks, of course, on the other side of a paywall I have sworn not to cross.
A dark horse at the Washington Post, however, Jennifer Rubin, is looking very strong, nominating Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as "distinguished pol of the [jump]
Walker is an obnoxious, hyperpartisan brute who exemplifies everything in movement conservatives I've been complaining about for years now, but you should vote for him because he thinks exactly the way I do.
That's only part of the column; for the rest, Dean Baker offers an enjoyably acid takedown.
Walker himself won, of course, but not everybody believes it's because Wisconsin agrees with him, as Roy Edroso translated it into our language,
that the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.
Zandar at Balloon Juice and assorted colleagues argue persuasively from exit polls that Wisconsin just doesn't like recalls. Then again it seems that this recall has given control of the state senate to Democrats, so Walker will not be able to railroad any more of his ghastly program through it.
Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all
across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and
make the tough decisions.
That "tough decisions" phrase has to be one of the most abused in the zombie rhetoric repertoire, by the way. It sounds like a brave decision made by a politician without regard to cheap popularity, a "profiles in courage" choice. But it is invariably used to describe a decision that is self-evidently bad—a bogus solution to a problem that may not even exist presented as the only alternative, like trying to jail all the undocumented immigrants in Arizona—to conform with some kind of pharisaically pinched, narrow-minded notion of moral hazard: cutting off somebody else's nose to spite your own face, and ensure the votes of the nastiest people in your constituency.
Another piece of zombie rhetoric was used this week by secretary of defense Leon Panetta:
“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America
is going to defend ourselves against those who attack us,” Mr. Panetta
said. “This is not just about protecting the United States. It’s also
about protecting Pakistan. And we have made it very clear that we are
going to continue to defend ourselves.”
Panetta is here answering, or refusing to answer, the question of whether drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country's sovereignty. The usage, as a rhetorical trick, comes from Israel: every time the Israeli government is caught committing some abuse against somebody in the neighborhood they cry, "Israel has a right to defend itself."
The implication is always that this is a plea: justifiable crime, because it's self-defense. But they never actually argue it, because it isn't arguable—self-defense doesn't justify everything. If the United States is violating Pakistani sovereignty by dropping bombs there maybe it is truly somebody's idea of self-defense, but it's still violating Pakistani sovereignty nevertheless, and no amount of zombie rhetoric can change it.
Truth terrorists: China
Wu Xiaoqing, the vice minister for environmental protection, demanded that foreign governments stop releasing data on China’s air.
In a criticism clearly aimed at the United States, Mr. Wu said at a news
conference that the public release of air-quality data by foreign
governments’ consulates “not only doesn’t abide by the spirits of the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Vienna Convention on
Consular Relations, but also violates relevant provisions of
environmental protection.” (New York Times, June 6, 2012)
What's supposedly wrong with the data is that it's not "representative"—I guess in the sense that instead of building its consulates in a very large random sample of locations, the US puts them only in major cities, the very places most likely to suffer from pollution; you get no idea of the bracing atmosphere in Inner Mongolia or at the North Korean border, or the sultry breeze in semitropical Hainan.
What's really wrong is that it's data the Chinese government didn't get a chance to edit—those consulates are nothing but a bunch of truth terrorists. Anyway Wu's statement shouldn't be interpreted as some kind of threat; the vice minister simply wanted to clear the air, heh-heh.
Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.
No, you do not wreck havoc. Unless the meaning is, "You had some perfectly good havoc in the Democratic Party, and he went and wrecked it." Which would be a pretty odd thing—talk about concern trolling!
One wreaks havoc (past tense and participle wreaked) or occasionally works it (past tense and participle wrought). Not knowing this is illiterate, and illiteracy is a disqualification for writing a column in a national newspaper. See Zandar, again, for demonstration that the content of this column is even worse than the English usage.
