Columnist.
On Jan. 13, a judge in Houston, Texas, sentenced Alexandria Vera to 10 years in prison. Her crime? The 25-year-old teacher at Stovall Middle School struck up a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student — having sex almost every day, she said, for nine months — but with the parents' approval. She could be eligible for parole in five years.
Critics of the Hollywood left chuckled when Hillary Clinton lost the election. Those dramatic videos full of celebrity ardor for the Clintons flopped. Rarely has there been a more pronounced disconnect. It turned to belly laughs when those celebrities responded by making more videos.
For weeks, the liberal media have celebrated all that President Barack Obama means ... to them. CNN produced a two-hour documentary on the Obama legacy that never mentioned things like annual trillion-dollar deficits. Fareed Zakaria wrapped up the show saying, "He ran an administration that was largely scandal-free and did it all the while under a microscope because he looked different."
The secular-left website Slate recently warned on Twitter that "'Religious Freedom' legislation will be everywhere in 2017." "Religious freedom" is in scare quotes, a warning that deplorables will use that thing called religion as their weapon of choice in the coming assault on the LGBTQ community.
At the dawn of 2017, let us offer a philosophical question for the news media. If the scourge of the new year is "fake news," should we not concede that it's not news to speculate about what will happen after a news event? The problem is, without speculation about the future — whether immediate or distant — cable news channels and radio news outlets would surely enter a crisis about how to fill 24 hours a day, and newspapers would struggle to fill their pages.
Populism took the elites by surprise in 2016, so a review of this year's cultural winners and losers must begin with a very long list of arrogant entertainers who thought it was completely impossible for the American people to descend into a pit of despair and ignorance and elect Donald Trump. No one believed for a second the rich-and-famous losers who promised to move their arrogance to Canada or elsewhere if the Hillary Clinton juggernaut were to tank.
When Congress returns in January, the Democrats will be gunning for several of President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees. The left has already launched negative narratives on several, especially Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump's pick for attorney general. Not only are the left-wing news media giving oxygen to these vitriolic attacks but in some cases they are the very authors.
2016 hasn't been a hot year for discussions of a rhetorical war on Christmas in our malls or public schools. Maybe we've tuned out the secular hostility in our culture. We've gone from banning Linus reading from the Gospel of Luke to banning Christmas to banning Santa Claus to banning even the thought of a holiday, since it might not be for others.
Two months ago, the liberal media erupted in horror after the third presidential debate. Fox's Chris Wallace challenged Donald Trump on whether he would accept the result of the election, and Trump said he would wait and see. NBC described a "flood of condemnation" and cited President Obama accusing Trump of "(undermining) our democracy." "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie called it an "earthquake."
Conservative Twitter wit Stephen Miller unleashed his latest "President Ash Carter" joke recently with regard to the lack of seriousness of the outgoing president. He said: "President Ash Carter has made an unannounced visit to troops in Afghanistan. Barack Obama announced he's going on 'The Daily Show.'"
As President Barack Obama's White House days run out, it's time for his obsequious courtiers in the liberal media to announce his glorious "legacy." On Dec. 7, CNN devoted a two-hour prime-time special to the Obama legacy. It was hosted by Fareed Zakaria, a journalist whom Obama had invited to the White House so he could soak in Zakaria's wisdom and expertise — in other words, so he could flatter a journalist into giving him softball coverage.
On Dec. 4, the second Sunday of Advent on the Christian calendar, Fox's "Family Guy" mocked two-thirds of the Holy Trinity as only Fox can. In atheist Seth MacFarlane's gag, Jesus Christ had a human son who he mocked for being bullied at school, comparing that to the horror of the Crucifixion. When his son called him a "dick," he suggested that God the Father was a bigger "dick" for sending him to his death.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is under enormous pressure from the left to crack down on the "fake news" circulating on the social-media giant. He is well-advised to run as far as he can from the News Police.
Liberals in the press have spent weeks trashing "fake news" purveyors — which is to say, those in the press who are not liberals — while continuing to bow deeply to the fake newsmakers at "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and New York Magazine writer Chris Smith have written a new book called "The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests," and they're the toast of Leftyville.
One of the world's last brutal communist dictators, Cuba's Fidel Castro, died last week at the age of 90. While Cuban exiles celebrated long into the night, on America's "objective" networks, they pulled out hankies and mourned this despot's filthy works and celebrated the hellhole he made.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence was in New York during the transition, and he took his family to Broadway to see "Hamilton," the hot hip-hop Founding Fathers musical that people are overpaying to see. What resulted wasn't exactly surprising — rude and obnoxious, but not surprising.
Dear Mr. President-elect, Everyone else is giving you advice, so why can't we? (Then again, the last time you asked for our advice, we told you over lunch that winning was not in the cards, so you might be hitting the delete button before this sentence is complete.) But here it comes. Five thoughts.
Before the shock of President Donald Trump wears off, let's remember to tip our hats to Tinseltown. What would we do without it? The self-absorbed Beautiful People of the town called on America to become as enlightened as they by supporting Hillary Clinton. They proudly donned their "I'm With Her" buttons.
Donald Trump is a persistent critic of the media and is attacked for not granting them enough access. But three days after the election, there he was, the president-elect, recording a long interview with Lesley Stahl of CBS' "60 Minutes," whom he could expect to push, push, push from the left.
