On Sean Spicer Being Uncool

What all the cool kids are wearing.

A very odd piece appeared the other day in the National Post. It argues, almost without explanation or justification, that it was simply wrong, in some moral sense, for Stephen Colbert and the administration of the Emmys to allow Sean Spicer to appear onstage during the ceremony, even though he was doing so essentially to poke fun at himself as White House Press Secretary. Worse, Spicer was actually invited to some of the Emmy parties after the broadcast. This is unacceptable!

This is a classic example of bullying, of a familiar and pernicious high school variety. Some kid or kids are designated uncool, and to be part of the cool in-group it is necessary not to be seen hanging out with them. You must shun them. Why?

No good reason is offered. This is not a moral act. Because they have been designated by the “popular” crowd to be uncool. You show your supposed superiority by knowing, without it being explained, that they are uncool. If you challenge this, if someone has to explain it to you, you are just showing you are uncool. The matter could be completely capricious; but it is necessary to show membership in the herd of the cool.

It is all terribly nasty and immature. But kids are cruel. It is very like the choir in Lord of the Flies, with Spicer here in the role of Simon or Piggy. It is especially ugly to see this sort of thing in a national newspaper.

But it is the tactic now of the left as a whole. No arguments are presented for why Sean Spicer is somehow as a human being beyond the pale of polite company. Indeed, no arguments are given any more for most leftist positions, You must either passionately subscribe to them without question, or you are revealing yourself as uncool.

In this case, there are a few vague mentions of supposed sins: “being caught in multiple lies, exaggerations and, of course, the time he tried to make a worse than Hitler comparison to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.”

Only one example is given, then, of supposed lies and exaggerations. The reader is supposed to accept this all as so, or reveal themselves as uncool. This is a reference to Assad—being the only example given, we have a right to assume it is the worst thing Spicer has ever said.

What he actually said was “someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons [in World War II].” On the face of it, this is perfectly true, and a common observation.

Some at the time protested that this was not true strictly speaking, because Hitler indeed used sarin gas in the concentration camps.

I think it would be fair to dispute whether an execution technique counts as a “weapon,” especially when the context was given as war. It is not assumed to be such in common speech.

If all press secretaries are all to be held to this standard, all of them would appear to be at least as lying and deceitful as Spicer.

As would any one of us.

In other words, the bill of indictment against Spicer is objectively nuts. He is just a designated scapegoat, an uncool kid. It does not matter what he ever actually said or did.

A Twitter twit is quoted as saying he “passionately advocated against human rights, health care, & American values.” Again, with no examples.

This is obviously untrue. You are just expected to accept it as true without evidence, or reveal yourself as uncool.

This attitude, standard on the left, is suicidal.

Spicer was the official spokesperson for the US President, elected by roughly 50% of the American people. It follows that what he advocated reflected the views of fifty percent of the American people. Half the population of the US and their opinions is here being branded beyond the pale of polite society, “against human rights, health care, & American values.” Americans’ values are against American values? Who gets to say so?

How long are the majority of the student body—continuing the high school example—going to continue to support a group that thinks of them this way? Or continue, for that matter, to read a newspaper that does? The proportion of Trump supporters might be lower in Canada. On the other hand, this newspaper, the National Post, has traditionally been seen as on the right.

This is why the mainstream media is dying; and it is why the left as we now know it will die. They think of themselves as the popular and admired in-group at school, and of the general public as humble supplicants who crave but do not merit their approval.

This works only so long as everyone buys into the illusion. It helps if you have all the hunky athletes and the pretty girls in your group. Sex appeal, at a certain age, works wonders. The modern left cannot claim this to be so. They are sitting high on a branch unconnected to any tree.

They should have noticed that the illusion is evaporating. Trump got elected. Rolling Stone Magazine was just sold for one dollar. Movie attendance is cratering.

Yet they are so self-absorbed and unaware they think they have the power to socially shun the elected head of the student body.

It is a quick drop from this position to one of general ridicule.

History will not mourn them, this modern left.

Sean Spicer Reveals That Trump Is Hitler by Denying the Holocaust

Quick! The Alka-Seltzer! 

When Sean Spicer noted that even Hitler had not used chemical weapons against his people, I immediately knew what he was talking about. It is a familiar observation. Poison gas was used by all sides in the First World War. Hitler had stockpiles of it. Yet he allowed Germany to go down to total defeat without ever resorting to using it.

This was probably not for purely humanitarian reasons. The problem might just as well have been that, after the experience of World War 1, England, France, and the US also had their stockpiles of poison gas. Establish the precedent, and it would probably be a wash. Maybe useful once, in one vital, desperate battle, but no more.

There is another theory: that Hitler, having himself been gassed during the First World War, had a visceral aversion to it.

But I am utterly surprised by the public and press reaction to Spicer referring to this: that it was not true, and insensitive, because of the Jews Hitler gassed in the concentration camps.

What Spicer actually said was “We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. Someone as despicable as Hitler ... didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.”

Exactly right. The preceding sentence makes it clear that he was referring to a weapon of war. Even without the specific reference to the war, an electric chair, a gas chamber, or a guillotine may qualify as a weapon, but it is not the sort of thing we usually think of when we use the term. It should not have been necessary to add “in war” in the second sentence to make this clear. If it were, this is a trivial error of clarity in an off-the-cuff spoken statement. We do not normally require precision in such circumstances.

In reaction, the Anne Frank Centre released this statement:








Excuse me, but are they nuts?

 

The Inaugural Crowd

View from the podium

I don’t get it. I seem to be the only person who thinks Sean Spicer’s berating of the White House Press Corps on Saturday was reasonable. Even Andrew Coyne and Charles Krauthammer are accusing him of straight lying on the numbers in attendance at the Trump Inauguration. CNN and seemingly everyone else are grabbing at Kellyanne Conway’s reference to “alternate facts” as a denial of the facts.

Seems like bollocks to me.

Spicer, contrary to what just about everyone is saying, did not make any specific claims about how many people were there. His stated point was that nobody knew. Accordingly, it was dishonest of the press to all be reporting that the turnout was small. They could not know. He was perfectly right, surely.

He was also obviously right to say that more people viewed the Trump Inauguration than any other in history. Has everyone forgotten the Internet? I, for example, was watching live on Facebook from the Philippines. That would not have been possible even four years ago. What Spicer said was true, and everyone else is being willfully stupid.

He went on to claim that the National Mall was packed right back to the Washington Monument at the moment of swearing in. Everybody and his dog have now published photos showing instead that crowds were sparse. Okay, but when? That, from the pictures, we cannot tell.

On the other hand, here is a picture we can time precisely: Trump’s hand is up, apparently taking the oath of office. This is the moment Spicer referred to. And, from the viewpoint of the podium, it sure does indeed look like the crowds are solid all the way back to the Washington Monument. We report, you decide.

Just possibly our lying eyes are deceiving us, and we ought instead to trust the press’s word. But if so, we have every reason to assume that Trump’s and Spicer’s eyes showed the same bizarre optical illusion that the camera catches. So, at a minimum, if wrong, they were objecting in good faith. And, even if wrong, Spicer’s main point was perfectly valid: why did the press feature photos making the crowd look sparse, instead of this obvious and more natural perspective that made it look large?

The press everywhere goes on to blame Trump for some weird obsession about crowd size. This is painfully disingenuous. It is the press who raised the issue, in the first place, and it is the press that will not now let it go, weirdly obsessing about crowd size, ignoring everything else Spicer said in the press briefing. Including an important other example of press bias, and one easily proven, regarding the presence of a bust of Martin Luther King in the Oval Office. It’s almost as if they are trying to distract attention from that.

And they are accusing Conway of rejecting facts when this was expressly the opposite of what she actually said. She said Spicer offered “alternative facts.” In what alternative universe does that mean that she is denying facts matter?

I never supported Trump during the primaries. I have always thought of him as a bull in a China shop. But, seeing the utter dishonesty, violence, prejudice, meanness, and hysteria of the folks everywhere ranged against him, it really forces me to believe something is very wrong here, and an angry bull was needed.

As Confucius observed, more or less, the best measure of a man is to have a look at his enemies.