John Podhoretz Needs To Take A Chill Pill

Some serious pants-wetting by John "Nervous Nellie" Podhoretz in Commentary Magazine because of the Vagina march:

This is where the follow-through on Saturday’s “women’s marches” will tell the tale. It would be a terrible mistake for conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters to pooh-pooh this mass event, which happened simultaneously in several cities and towns, with a gross turnout dwarfing any mass protest in American history. Dismissing three million people taking to the streets nationwide would be an act of willful blindness, and ascribing the march’s success to Soros...It was everyone’s march. And it worked, I believe, for one reason: It had a simple message. That message: We don’t like Trump and his behavior toward women.

Wait. It was "everyone's" march? That's laughable. It certainly wasn't "everyone's" march. It was billed as a "women's" march as if it somehow represented all women, but that's clearly false advertising. Do you know what women were not welcome at the march? Pro-life women. Even pro-life feminists. Also, women who voted for Trump. After all, if this is a "women's" march, don't women who voted for Trump get to be counted as women, too?

A better, more honest way to advertise this march would have been to call it the "Progressive Women's Anti-Trump March."

Second, what does he mean, "it worked"? What, exactly, worked? Are Republicans running around trying to placate women because of this march? Not that I can see. Trump is moving forward with the business at hand, and there's no indication that the new administration has given it one iota of attention other than the most bland, say-nothing answers when asked about it by the press. And has Mr. Podhoretz seen how much these hysterical women are being laughed at on social media? Did he see the photos of the vagina costumes, p*ssy hats, and nonsensical signage? This is not a serious movement. If it were a serious movement, if these women had serious, legitimate grievances, the whole tenor of the protests would be very different. And they would've cleaned up after themselves afterwards.

The protests certainly made a lot of noise, I'll give them that. Of course, being amplified through the megaphone of the MSM helped a lot. But even so, Mr. Podhoretz should not confuse loudness with depth.

One of these women is oppressed and fighting back. The other is a twat. Literally. pic.twitter.com/lKQRe9344r

— Skip Hackski (@SkipLicker) January 22, 2017

Third, "We hate Trump" is not a "simple message" that "worked". It' a temper tantrum thrown by progressive women who didn't succeed in electing their preferred candidate. You can't build a mass movement on a temper tantrum.

This is where one possible analogy to the Tea Party protests of 2009 and 2010 might hold. The Tea Party was about Obama’s rapid expansion of the size of the federal government and the fear of a growing Leviathan....If Democrats can use the Women’s [March] as a comparable accelerant to recruit candidates, particularly for the House, who have real connections to the Republican districts in which they are running and can frame their bids as a means of stopping Trump from working his will with an all-Republican Congress, they might really have something here.

Podhoretz needs to calm down. No, this isn't going anywhere. And the (now defunct)Tea Party is a really poor analogy. The Tea Party had a specific list of complaints, and specific remedies to address those complaints. It was logically coherent. The anti-Trump women's march was anything but. A better analogy is the "Occupy" movement, another Soros-funded series of manufactured "mass" demonstrations made to appear spontaneous. But other than resentment at "the 1%" and "Wall Street" and "big corporations", there wasn't any kind of agenda, and the various left-wing groups that made up the "Occupy" movement spent as much time squabbling with each other as they did actual protesting.

Which is kind of what happened with the "women's" march. And this is not a coincidence. Modern left-wing movements are unfocused collections of disparate groups whose goals are not necessarily aligned (I would argue that the last successful progressive protest movement was the one against the Vietnam War. Perhaps the anti-Iraq war protests might have been successful, but a diffuse bunch of gay rights, feminist rights, environmental rights, and minority rights groups all glommed onto the protests like parasites and introduced their own competing agendas, which only succeeded in killing the host).

What happened to Occupy? Well, it pretty much dried up and blew away. There was really nothing to hold it together and no coherent message that could be translated into legislative action. I suspect that the same fate is in store for the current protests. In a couple of weeks no one will care. In a month, it'll be forgotten, as the MSM moves on to yet another set of anti-Trump talking points in their ongoing effort to delegitimize his presidency.

Kurt Schlichter's latest Townhall column, which you should read in its entirely, trenchantly disposes of Podhoretz' crappy analogy:

Can the left pull off creating its own mass movement? Maybe. If it does, the Democrat Tea Party would not be another Tea Party, but simply a cohort of foot soldiers activated by the hyped up threat of Donald Trump. The left wants to use the current situation to pump up the enthusiasm of its base, while the Tea Party (and then, later, the GOP that it changed) expanded the base. Anyone involved in the Tea Party knows people who changed from liberal to conservative because of Obama. It seems unlikely that Donald Trump appointing Mad Dog Mattis, gutting Obamacare, freezing federal hiring, and approving Keystone is going to drive a lot of conservatives left.

So calm down, Mr. Podhoretz. The adults are in charge now.

posted by OregonMuse at 01:47 PM

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