For some time now, Democrats have played the identity politics game, revving up grievances -- real or imagined -- of different ethnic groups with the only commonality a dismissive prejudice against middle-class white men. This divisive disunity strategy served them well for a while, but no longer. With nothing else to replace it, it’s between Scylla and Charybdis -- risk losing the base and seek broader appeal or crash into obscurity. They continue to choose poorly.

I don’t know the name of the person who created this, but it shows rather well the arguments of the everything-is-racism in their deck of cards:

This week a librarian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, churlishly refused a gift by the first lady of books to her school in a letter which she proudly published online. In the letter she suggests the very gift ignored the needs of poor children and that the books by Dr. Seuss in particular were inappropriate because the author was racist.

David Burge‏ @iowahawkblog Sep 29

If you think Dr Suess is racist, you have no business being employed in education 

The great Howie Carr weighs in:

Here is a selection of Liz’s descriptions of the children’s books that the People’s Republic considers more appropriate:

“… a Chinese-African-Cuban girl … Lahore, Pakistan … he uses a wheelchair … Haitian American Saya’s mother is incarcerated because she has no papers … the segregated reality of Mexican Americans … refugee children who emigrate from Central America …. the experience of a child refugee.”

In sum, she wants children to focus on the dispossessed of the world. Other postings by her on Twitter (since removed by her) show a systematic effort to get young students in her care to be critical of their nation and its unifying elements.

In no time, the denizens of the Internet found pictures of her hosting a Dr. Seuss party, wearing the Cat in the Hat’s garb, and both Obamas reading to kids from Dr. Seuss. No one doubts if Michelle Obama had gifted the same books to her library, the response would have been grateful and warm. This is what is called “confirmation bias”. If you think Donald Trump is evil and racist, everything connected to him must be.

Mark Steyn makes mincemeat out of the librarian and her librarian social justice warrior sources: 

“We’re making ourselves a society too stupid to survive.”

No one to my knowledge has done such a graphic for the sexism card, but this week Michelle Obama chimed in on the subject: 

Former first lady Michelle Obama told an audience in Boston this week that she believed women who chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election "voted against their own voice."

[snip]

"Quite frankly, we saw this in this election. As far as I'm concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice, in a way," Obama said, as the crowd applauded.

She continued: "To me, it doesn't say as much about Hillary -- and everybody's trying to wonder, 'Well, what does it mean for Hillary?' No, no, no. What does it mean for us as women that we look at those two candidates -- as women -- and many of us said, 'That guy. He's better for me. His voice is more true to me.' Well, to me, that just says you don't like your voice. You like the thing we're told to like."

When her husband trounced Hillary in the primaries for the 2008 campaign, were they voting “against their own voice”? Or are they forgiven if they “voted against their voice” for someone part black? It gets harder to keep up with the changing rules about voice and who can – uhm -- voice it and how.

If it’s not sexism or racism it’s neo-Nazism or Islamophobia, depending on the intended audience.

Manipulating Jewish voters -- in large part by playing on their confirmation bias that conservatives hate them, among other things, Democrats played up the Charlottesville riot and the President’s response as showing that he supported neo-Nazis, ignoring his correct analysis that both sides were in the wrong. When it turned out that the liberal icon Valerie Plame, who was instrumental in fomenting the  phony narrative that “Bush lied” to get us into war in Iraq outed herself as an anti-Semite, the press was largely silent. Certainly as compared to anything tagging any conservative as anti-Semitic with far less basis for doing so. Except for two or three op eds, including a notable one by Bret Stephens, I can find nothing  in the NYT as I check with Google.

And then there’s the matter of whose lives matter.

This week the NFL slit its own throat by allowing players who bought into the lie that blacks are being shot on purpose by racist police. It allowed them to disrespect the flag and tradition by taking a knee when the anthem was played pre-game to advance a meme that is notably fake.

As Don Surber observed, responding to Bob Costas 

More from Costas:

"Patriotism comes in many forms and what has happened is that it's been conflated with a bumper sticker-style kind of flag-waving and with the military only, so that people cannot see that in his own way Colin Kaepernick, however imperfectly, is doing a patriotic thing. And so too are some of these other players.”

Wrong.

Patriotism does come with the flag. That is why we respect the flag and the song about it, the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Symbols do matter. I know that because people want to tear down the Confederate flag and various statues (including the Lincoln Memorial) because of what they represent.

If you side with Kaepernick, you side with the reason he gave for his protest.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

He told that to the NFL on August 27, 2016. The league posted it online at its official site.

Believe me, I defend this fool's right to protest.

Americans may have their disagreements, but one thing we all agree on is not disrespecting the flag.

The president called them on it, the public responded. Viewership has gone down along with revenues in an already declining market. A week later, the teams relented and stood, but the damage to the brand and sport seems not to have ended.

Victor Davis Hanson explains that along with the League’s clearly non-diverse hiring practices, which points out to us how lame the left’s “diversity is the most important thing” is, it seriously misreads its audience:  

Outside the NFL bubble today, most of America, to the extent it still watches, now sees Sunday afternoon pop demonstrations as increasingly a farce, played out among players who appear neither exploited nor as exemplary model sportsmen, but rather as overpaid and pampered. Given the NFL’s enormous overhead, even a 10–20 percent reduction in attendance and viewing could send financial tsunamis throughout the league. Nor do the protesting players come across as informed, brave social-justice warriors on the barricades of dissent, but as mostly unable to explain to their fans precisely why and how they are mistreated or why America is a flawed society that does not deserve momentary iconic respect each week. If players were concerned about violence and injustice, why not collect a voluntary 10 percent contribution from the league’s multimillionaire players and use it to fund programs that address systematic and lethal violence in inner-city communities such as Baltimore or Chicago? And if ethics and values are the players’ issues, why over the last decade has there been an increase in player off-field violence and arrests, often marked by well-publicized violence against women? The owners, again fairly or not, are not viewed any longer so much as maverick tycoons and eccentric entrepreneurs or philanthropic regional family dynasties of the past, but rather as billionaire corporate magnates who invest their riches in glitzy cultural trophies and expect the state to subsidize their excesses. They are going down the Google/Apple/Facebook grandee path of losing their cultural appeal and, with it, their brand.

Rasmussen says in contrast that the President’s approval rating has popped and is now up to 45%. 

For the press, sensation sells, so some are playing up the disaster in Puerto Rico -- long a basket case of government dependency and profligate, corrupt politicians. Reporters like Geraldo Rivera suggest that the administration who did such a great job in Texas and Florida is fluffing the job in Puerto Rico, implying that we treat the residents there as less than the citizens elsewhere. (Racism again?) The facts do not bear them out.

Except for accounts from that media darling, Carmen Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, the relief effort is massive and as effective as it can be under all the circumstances, reporters like Geraldo and Shep Smith who did such a bang-up job deflecting blame on Katrina from the ineffectual New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, should ditch the old playbook and ask Ricardo Rossello, the island’s governor, who repeatedly praises the rescue efforts. 

A FEMA press release detailed some of the relief headed towards Puerto Rico:

• Six commercial barges transported and delivered meals, water, generators, cots, and other commodities to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• An air bridge is established, flying three flights per day to St. Croix, each carrying approximately 33,000 meals.
• The logistics support ship SS Wright arrived carrying more than 1.1 million meals, and nearly one million liters of freshwater.
• Two shipping barges with 1.2 million liters of water, 31 generators, and more than 6,000 cots arrived in St. Thomas.
• Two additional shipping barges loaded with food, water, and emergency relief supplies are en route to the Caribbean Sea from Florida.
• Millions of additional meals are being flown to Puerto Rico from staging areas in Kentucky and Florida.
• The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is transporting a shipment of 124,000 gallons of diesel fuel to Puerto Rico, with arrival in the coming days. [snip] The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and Expeditionary Strike Group 2, as well as the USS Wasp, USS Oak Hill, USS Iwo Jima and USS New York, have all participated in recovery operations so far. 

It may not be obvious to the media, but one of the difficulties in getting supplies to Puerto Rico is that it's an island 1200 nautical miles from Miami, the closest major U.S. port.

Clearing the ports takes time, and getting supplies for 3.4 million people by plane into devastated airports isn't a real option.

Stars and Stripes reports that the Defense Department has already sent 2,600 personnel to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands to assist in recovery

So many of the reported crimes purportedly motivated by Islamophobia have proven to be faked (like the crimes of racism and sexism) that rationally we’ve grown to view all with a jaundiced eye. Still, it took chutzpah for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (former DNC chair) to suggest that the still barely covered Awan brothers scandal was a product of Islamophobia. 

With such a cynical, divisive and mendacious strategy, is it any surprise that the DNC coffers are running low? Donors and supporters are abandoning the party in droves.

Next time someone yammers at you about what a horrible, racist, sexist, Islamophobic country this is, ask him if he believes in open borders and why he thinks so many people want to come here instead of staying in the countries of which they are citizens. It’s always fun to see the blank look and evasive response of those whose cognitive dissonance is being exposed.