Democrats get their own rapper
With rapper Kanye West's recent semi-bromance with President Trump, Democrats have found their own rapper.
Cardi B, a fan of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, recently praised the big-government policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt - "the real 'Make America Great Again'" - in a GQ interview and said something needed to be done to protect Social Security. She was referring to a bill Sanders introduced in February that would eliminate the cap on taxable income in relation to what people pay into Social Security.
That, of course, is the same Social Security that former President Barack Obama said was in fine shape when he was in office and when Republicans suggested any changes.
But liberal publications were quick to lap up the rapper love. Newsweek used the headline "Cardi B and Bernie Sanders in 2020?" The Cut noted, "Bernie Sanders Invokes the Wise Words of Cardi B," and Billboard trumpeted, "Bernie Sanders Quotes Noted Economist on Strengthening Social Security: Cardi B is right."
Objective? Nah.
The 76-year-old Sanders, of course, was gleeful about the words of the rapper who is less than a third of his age.
"Cardi B is right," he tweeted.
Her right was wrong
It only took eight years, but the cat is out of the bag about the Washington Post's "Right Turn" blog author and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin. She doesn't make right turns.
Readers had suspected it for years, but the Post's website admits the blog is now "offering reported opinion from a center perspective."
Rubin, according to the paper, previously - since 2010 - offered views from a "conservative perspective," but she had flip-flopped on several issues - including the Paris climate deal and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital - since Donald Trump became president, and she has opposed him at every turn. She also called on Congress to ban generals from serving in the White House in a civilian capacity.
National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke called her out last year, labeling her as a fraud and a hypocrite.
"The descriptions above Rubin's byline have come to seem tragically misleading," he wrote, according to The Daily Caller. "Contrary to popular myth, she is not in fact writing from a 'conservative perspective' but as just one more voice among a host of Trump-obsessed zealots who add nothing to our discourse. In so doing, she does conservatism a sincere disservice."
It doesn't do the already Trump-hating paper much good, especially among his supporters, either.
No joy in Joy
Even left-leaning publications like The Atlantic were having trouble buying CNN weekend host Joy Reid's claims that she had been hacked after numerous homophobic slurs were revealed.
"Among the implausible factors," the magazine wrote last week in an article titled "The Evidence Is Not With Joy Reid," "is that for Reid's story to be correct, someone would have had to hack her blog back in the '00s, but no one, including Reid herself, noticed the invalid posts."
Her words, ostensibly from her defunct blog The Reid Report, included "a lot of cliché gay jokes about [former Florida Gov.] Charlie Crist and others, concerns that "adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them 'into the lifestyle,'" and commentary like "part of the intrinsic nature of 'straightness' is that the idea of homosexual sex is well gross even if you think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals."
Later last week, Reid and her team were backing away from the hacking claim but weren't coming clean.
Meanwhile, left-wing Media Matters, which has targeted conservatives Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity on Fox News, said it wouldn't launch an advertiser boycott, wouldn't attempt to trigger a Twitter boycott and generally wouldn't target the host of the left-leaning cable network.
The group's president said "that standard isn't really met here" and called the old reports "right-wing chicanery and revenge."
In other words, round up the usual suspects.
Pro-life = white supremacy?
With the survival of younger and younger babies, it has become harder for pro-abortion advocates to suggest life doesn't begin until birth. So, like many other groups, they've resorted to name-calling.
One recent example came at a "Speak Out For Justice" event at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where speaker Reilly Manzer of the school's pro-abortion club suggested pro-life supporters were white supremacists and referred to them as "pale faces."
The speaker said attendees should "rise up and rip white supremacy from its roots."
Ayah Abuserrieh, a pro-life Muslim student, told Campus Reform that event organizers denied her the opportunity to speak, though they "didn't know what I wanted to say."
"But when I came up to the open-mic," she said, "they told me 'no' twice. Other students were allowed to speak about things that made them uncomfortable and I wanted to speak about the harassment that cultural minority groups face on campus."
Abuserrieh said Manzer's claim was "gross and ridiculous."
"The idea that the pro-life movement is related to white supremacy it's ridiculous that people actually believe that," she said. "Bulldogs for Life and College Republicans are some of the most inclusive groups on campus. There's never been a time where [I] - as a Muslim person of color - [have] felt uncomfortable whatsoever."