{"id":28829,"date":"2022-11-02T21:32:53","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T01:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=28829"},"modified":"2022-11-02T21:59:17","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T01:59:17","slug":"anti-strident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2022\/11\/anti-strident\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Strident"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

If there’s a word (hyphenated forms allowed) that best describes my political bent, it might be anti-strident<\/em>.\u00a0 The Oxford Dictionary gives one sense of strident <\/em>as “presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively and unpleasantly forceful way.”\u00a0 To this I would add, the stridency I deplore is not simply harsh but ruthless: it cares only whether its arrow fells its target.\u00a0 Truth, kindness and responsibility are redundant.<\/p>\r\n

Our national discourse — if one can call it that — slides further into stridency every week.\u00a0 And each side gives it a push.\u00a0 But don’t misinterpret this as an equivalency: the far-right, and much of the not-so-far-right, are unabashedly meaner-spirited to their “opponents” than are the far-left.\u00a0 One need only consider the right-wing’s long-standing demonization of Anita Hill, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi to see what modern witch hunts<\/em> are like.<\/p>\r\n

[Donald Trump’s witch hunt<\/em> claims boil down to “You don’t like me and that’s why you think I did something wrong.\u00a0 Which I didn’t.”\u00a0 Give him credit for being two-thirds right.]<\/p>\r\n

While neither end of the spectrum is much interested in winning listening contests, I feel compelled to point out the media-awfulness of North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race between Cheri Beasley, Chief Justice of the NC Supreme Court, and Ted Budd, U.S. Congressman from a rural district tucked between Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham.<\/p>\r\n

Budd’s supporters apparently feel that stretching the truth beyond recognition is justified, if it secures the really-important task of… upholding the truth?\u00a0 Here are two scenes from an anti-Beasley commercial that aired in our parts, courtesy of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by Senator Rick Scott of Florida:<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/a>Sequential scenes from National Republican Senatorial Committee anti-Beasley TV ad<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The message that the NRSC hopes to deliver, in this misleading ad (which was pulled off the air<\/a>) and others being shown in this area, is that Justice Beasley is not simply soft on crime but wants to help convicted child pornographers find new victims on social media.<\/p>\r\n

That’s not good<\/em>, right?<\/p>\r\n

I find it sad that the appeal of one party amounts to Free To Be the Damn SOBs We Are<\/em> and that this has become a winning formula.\u00a0 Anti-strident ain’t doing so hot these days.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If there’s a word (hyphenated forms allowed) that best describes my political bent, it might be anti-strident.\u00a0 The Oxford Dictionary gives one sense of strident as “presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively and unpleasantly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28829"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28865,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28829\/revisions\/28865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}