RUTHFULLY YOURS

A conservative cynic from birth, I foolishly thought I had seen it all when it came to leftist madness. But then I saw, posted on CNN’s website, “Why kids love ‘fascist’ cartoons like ‘Paw Patrol’ and ‘Thomas’.” The article referenced several other articles that described Thomas as “a premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia,” “imperialist racist and sinister,” and “classist, sexist, and anti-environmentalist.”

This caught my attention because my six-year-old boy — like children all over the world — loves stories of Thomas the Train. I recently took my children to Thomasland in Massachusetts and now my boy wants to visit the Thomasland in Japan. The Thomas cartoon is so popular that 1 billion dollars of merchandise related to the show is sold every year.

Reverend Wilbert Audrey, creator of Thomas the Train, has recounted how, when his 3-year-old son was ill with the measles, he told him stories about trains. Audrey says that in his own childhood he had to read boring books about perfect children so that he would learn from their moral example. He decided to write interesting books about engines with human characteristics in a fictional island he called Sodor. The trains would push the envelope until they got in trouble, be punished, and after making amends would be “bought back into the family so to speak.” Morality in the world of Thomas was making oneself useful to society, being a good friend, and keeping the railroad functioning smoothly. The human aspect of his trains is part of their appeal to children and the moral aspect of his stories was part of their appeal to the adults who read the stories to their children.

Now left-wing critics label the Thomas the Train show “racist” because the diesel villain is black. They call it totalitarian because trains are supposed to do what the manager of the rails, Sir Topham Hat, tells them to do. They call it sexist because there are more male trains than female trains. (In 2013 the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary actually called out Thomas for its lack of females.) When Thomas is awarded two female passenger cars to pull because of good behavior, the feminists call this sexist too.

Late on Christmas Eve, the 2017 finalist for Twitter’s most unhinged leftist compared House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to Judas Iscariot, the notorious traitor who delivered Jesus Christ into the hands of the authorities leading to the Crucifixion. Ryan’s crime? Tweeting about Christmas.

“paul ryan — don’t talk about Jesus after what u just did to our nation — u will go straight to hell u screwed up fake altar boy #Judasmuch,” O’Donnell tweeted.

O’Donnell’s tweet referred to the Republican tax reform bill, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday. While tax reform was passing the U.S. Senate, O’Donnell sent a barrage of deranged tweets, well documented by PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser.

“call 911 — crime in progress US SENATE,” O’Donnell tweeted Tuesday night.

Also that evening, she sent out a bribery offer, explicitly offering “2 million dollars” to Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) if they “vote NO NO I WILL NOT KILL AMERICANS FOR THE SUOER RICH DM me susan DM me jeff so sh*t 2 million cash each.”

Contrary to her deranged ravings, the tax bill will not kill anyone. The biggest count against it — from a liberal perspective — is that it will repeal the hated individual mandate in President Obama’s signature health care law, also known as Obamacare. This repeal has led to the charge that tax reform will result in 13 million people “losing” health insurance. In reality, the tax law merely removes a penalty for not signing up for insurance. This frees people who would not normally purchase health insurance from choosing between paying a hefty fine and buying something they would not normally buy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Remember that scene in “The Blues Brothers” when the dimwitted siblings, portrayed by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, enter a honky-tonk where they plan to play a show?

“What kind of music do you usually have here?” says Mr. Aykroyd.

“Oh, we got both kinds,” replies a chirpy barkeep. “We got country and western.”

The exchange came to mind last week when the best-selling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates quit Twitter in a huff after an argument with fellow black author Cornel West. Both men are committed liberals, but Mr. West, the veteran activist and Marxist academic, thinks that Mr. Coates’s writings don’t go far enough. Hard as it may be for some readers to fathom, Mr. West critiques Mr. Coates from the left.

What so upset Mr. Coates was a recent op-ed for the British newspaper the Guardian in which Mr. West praises his younger rival’s use of books and essays to highlight “the vicious legacy of white supremacy—past and present” and its “plundering effects” on black people. But he faults Mr. Coates for not connecting “this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.”

Ultimately, Mr. West writes, “Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable.” Mr. Coates’s focus on white absolution, in Mr. West’s view, is necessary but insufficient. “The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, U.S. military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading.”

Mr. Coates’s defenders in academia and the media dismiss these attacks as little more than jealous rage. Back in the 1990s, they contend, Mr. West was one of liberalism’s black intellectual darlings, but his star has since faded (along with his scholarly output), and now he’s lashing out in frustration at a younger generation of black thinkers. CONTINUE AT SITE