Salant got it wrong: NJ Republicans didn’t reject pro-Trump candidates…

(1) Who were the explicitly anti-Trump candidates?

(2) Generally, too many anti-establishment candidates ran.

By Sussex Watchdog

NJ.com writer Jonathan Salant is widely considered to be extraordinarily biased against Republicans and progressive reformers by both Democrat and especially Republican campaign operatives. Even the moderates think he sucks (and we have that in writing). Establishment Democrats count on him to robotically repeat their line but everyone else has little use for him.

So, you can imagine the bemusement that came with Salant’s political prognostications on Sunday morning. Sure, everyone can have an opinion, but Salant’s understanding of the GOP borders on superstition. You can imagine him beginning the effort by placing a mouse in his pocket and a garland of garlic around his neck.

Post-primary, the NJGOP establishment is still in its cups, yet to recover from a series of shocks, near-losses, and outright losses – all at the hands of vastly outspent rightwingers. Even the line didn’t hold up in places like Bergen and Morris Counties.

Nowadays, nobody runs openly as a “moderate”. Not in the GOP, anyway. Not even in the New Jersey GOP. So, every Republican candidate in every contested primary is trying to convince Republican voters that he or she is the conservative in that race. It makes for a lot of confusion.

Salant was trying to make the point that anti-Trump Republicans defeated pro-Trump Republicans or, as he put it, “only in the 5th District did the apparent pro-Trump candidate emerge victorious.” But that’s not being honest because none of the Republican candidates was overtly anti-Trump, not even in the way that Seth Grossman is (and he’s actually pro-Trump) and certainly not in the intellectually honest way that conservative columnist Paul Mulshine is. Ask yourself: Who is the equivalent of Paul Mulshine in the New Jersey Republican establishment today?

Criticism of the former President is muted, and the phrase “anti-Trump” is found on campaign literature as often as a self-description of “moderate” is, which is never. But despite all that many Republican voters, motivated by dissatisfaction, do figure out who is who and they appear to be getting better at it.

During the height of the Tea Party movement, Joe Kyrillos, an establishment State Senator running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator defeated three Tea Party conservatives 163,817 to 19,238 and 17,161 and 12,823 respectively. Kyrillos got 77 percent of the vote. In conservative Sussex County – without a line – Kyrillos won the primary with 45 percent of the vote (Sussex County’s Bader Qarmout came in second with 24 percent).

In last Tuesday’s CD07 Republican primary, establishment candidate Tom Kean Jr. defeated six opponents who were running to the right of him. He did so on a vote of 24,106 to 12,481 and 8,102 and 2,907 and 2,576 and 2,176 and 414. That is 45 percent of the vote. The anti-establishment vote in CD07 now mirrors that of Sussex County a decade ago. And on Tuesday in Sussex County, Kean was defeated with 33 percent to 37 percent for Pastor Phil Rizzo. And that was with the support of the Sussex County political establishment.

In 2006, as the establishment candidate, Kean won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Sussex County 4,809 to 2,414 – defeating a Steve Lonegan-backed candidate 66 percent to 34 percent. Now the relative strengths of the establishment and rightwing have been reversed.

Things have gotten a lot more crunchy, but maybe not in the way that people once defined it. Until quite recently, conservatives liked to talk about the movement’s three-legged policy stool of guns, babies, and taxes. More recently, especially since 2016, it was a four-legged stool of guns (the Second Amendment), babies (Pro-Life), taxes, and illegal immigration. That’s all in flux now.

The good news is that what it means to be a “social conservative” is changing and broadening. The bad news for some will be what those changes mean. Some talk of the rise of “bar stool” conservatism that is a reaction not to social changes, but to the bullying by movements associated with those changes.

Take same-sex marriage, for example. Many of the new “social conservatives” support it, just as they support basic civil rights protections for people regardless of their sexual preferences or identity. That said, these new conservatives (very often recent Democrats or with no party identification) loathe the religion-like proselytization by the LGBTQ+ movement, their demands that we fly their flag and celebrate their deal (and the name-calling if we don’t), and once in power their attempts to mandate their movement and indoctrinate children in schools and employees in the workplace.

A lot of “bar-stool” conservatives are former liberals (many still identify as liberals) – it is just that they still think they have the right to judge for themselves what a man is or a woman is, still believe they should be allowed to suggest that the science of chromosomes trumps the religion of faith-based feelings. They don’t like being threatened, they don’t care if they are “cancelled”, they have chosen to stand up to the bullying.

These new social conservatives have expanded the ranks but not the movement – because they are not “movement” people. They don’t want to be told. Not by a drag queen… or a religious leader. Nevertheless, they have potential for bringing together a loose majority.

Social conservatives – once a movement coasting south – have been provided a new urgency, a new momentum, by the overreach of the flag wavers, curriculum mongers, and pronoun Nazis’. But prognosticators like Jonathan Salant would be wrong to believe it’s the same movement it was just a few years ago. Here is an interesting discussion between two younger writers on the subject – one who was just published in the New York Times.

The NEW Culture War After the Religious Right | Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Premiered Jun 8, 2022 Krystal and Saagar have Marshall Kosloff interview National Review columnist Nate Hochman about the evolving culture war on the right due to secularization and the waning of the religious right.

Blame Trenton Democrats for making Cory Booker discuss his sexuality

Writer Matt Katz recently tweeted: “Cory Booker confirms his heterosexuality (which he has to do, because opponents have stirred rumors about this from the beginning) & says he sees a pathway to becoming the first unmarried president since 1884.”

Well lucky Cory Booker… at least he is alive to confirm his sexuality.  That’s not the case with James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, and someone whose sexuality has been the center of endless speculation – in an attempt to codify same and to teach children that he was America’s “first gay president.”

See, the LGBT movement has become a kind of religion… well, not kind of, it is a religion.  This new religion has adopted, as one of its core beliefs, something not unlike the Mormon Church’s “baptism for the dead” – also known as vicarious baptism or proxy baptism.  In the new LGBT faith, living people speak on behalf of those who are dead and ask on their behalf to become “gay” so that they may be added, posthumously, to the fold. 

Once added to the LGBT “sainthood” their life “stories” are then taught to children in the didactic manner, much as children in religious schools are taught about the lives of saints or martyrs or prophets.  In New Jersey, with yesterday’s passage of S-1569, the Legislature has made this an unfunded mandate – with the scrapping of old textbooks and their replacement with new “religious” tracts that focus on the lives of said “saints”. 

Strange how things go.  That we are back to this again.  It is like the ring-around-the-rosy in Poussin’s “Dance to the Music of Time”.  There is no such thing as progress… we just get stupid again, profligate, dissolute. 

But the religion bit is for real.  No less than Atlantic magazine and New York magazine have today unveiled stories that paint Cory Booker as the candidate of a “new” religion.  Atlantic calls it the “theory of love”, while New York magazine plumps for “candidate of the Christian Left”.  No kidding.  So it’s here.  Welcome to the new paradigm.  The religion of the Trenton Democrats is no longer Roman Catholic or Jewish or Protestant… but that of the golden ass, the most holy orgasm, and the sacrament of abortion.  These are not matters of policy… but of faith.  Not open to debate.

Writing in the Star-Ledger yesterday, reporter Jonathan Salant (pronounced Slant) noted that when Booker first ran for the Senate and was asked about his sexual orientation, Booker answered, “What does it matter?” 

We could not agree more.

But that was back in those quaint times of long ago… 2013.  Today, in today’s politics, religion matters – and nothing matters more than how you reach orgasm and with whom.  Piss on policy… today’s religious leaders in politics, corporate America, and academia want to know how you get down.  Just read S-1569.  It is the most important thing about you.

Poor Cory Booker.  He wants to run for President, so he has to declare a side.  And in the America of today – the America fostered by legislation like that passed yesterday in Trenton – it is a conundrum as great as that faced by any Irish politician in the midst of The Troubles.  What are you?  Who are you?  It’s all that matters.

Tom Moran’s propaganda or the A.C. Press’ journalism?

The showdown over the future of journalism is happening right here in New Jersey.  It’s between the editors of the Atlantic City Press and Tom Moran (and his acolytes) at the Star-Ledger (and elsewhere).

In October, the Atlantic City Press published an editorial which included these very remarkable lines:  “Telling readers how to vote, however, is contrary to the mission of newspapers and other media, which is to extend the public’s experience and perspectives.  News gathering organizations give the public eyes, ears and memory beyond the capability of an individual.  People want them to be reliable and credible.  When the media start making judgments, their audiences wonder if they’re altering their content to support that judgment too.”

“Altering their content to support (a) judgment”?  Isn’t that what Jonathan Salant (pronounced S’lant) does every day?  Isn’t his tongue so far up Editor Tom Moran’s perspective that it functions as a redundant tongue for Moran?  Repetition, repetition, repetition… via Salanted coverage and outrageously partisan editorials… isn’t that what political propaganda is all about?

But don’t take our word for it.  Here is Star-Ledger Editor Tom Moran himself, in his own words, in an editorial published just yesterday:  “Voters will be standing in the booth Tuesday, and our core mission is helping them decide which lever to pull.”

Well shit, if swaying voters is your “core mission” shouldn’t you register as a political action committee?  Afterall, the Star-Ledger is owned by some of the richest people in America – real 1 percenter scum – who have left no stone unturned in their relentless screwing over of working class union members and their families.  If they are going to exist with their “core mission” to influence elections, shouldn’t there be some transparency?  Or are we just going to let them operate in darkness – to use their billions and their paid whore mouthpieces like Tom Moran and Jonathan S’lant to keep screwing over working people and working class families?

Labor unions need to account for how their money is spent.  So do political campaigns and lobbyists and special interests groups.  So why not billionaire newspaper publishers whose “core mission” is helping voters decide which lever to pull? 

What makes it worse is that the rich pricks who own these newspapers are subsidized with taxpayers’ money.  They used their power and influence to lobby for a law that forces municipalities to buy advertisements in newspapers that could run for free on their own municipal websites.  This not only vastly expands their carbon footprint, and with it the threat to environmental sustainability, but it turns beautiful green forests into shitty pulp factories.  End the taxpayers’ subsidy unless the newspapers institute some transparency!

Now for some thoughts on the conduct of the campaign season that will come to a close on Tuesday.

The two major parties have starkly different ideas on how to conduct a political campaign.  The Democrats are all about the grassroots.  They raise money from their grassroots.  They make use of their grassroots base and their allies to prepare the ground, soften up their opponents, and inform their candidates.  You see it in these debates, with the Democrat candidates constantly referencing some conversation or concern with a real or mythical human being in the district

Most insiders don’t get what’s happening here because they are creatures of Trenton or Washington or politics – but it skews the outsider perspective into one where the battles appear to be between “a representative  of the government” (call him the Sheriff of Nottingham) and “a movement or collective of people” who are speaking through this individual who appears to be on their side and fighting for them (call him Robin Hood).  It is moving under the surface and goes beyond the traditional ideas of scoring debate points, which most pundits seem to focus on. 

The Democrats have the advantage here because they still have a grassroots that they have a relationship with and can work with and that depends on and works with them.  Because of their symbiotic relationship, the Democrats’ grassroots is well-funded enough to produce a harvest of volunteers, money, and votes for regular Democrat candidates.  Yes, there is a tinge of radicalism to much of this grassroots, but they appear to understand when to tone it down or keep it underground.  That’ probably because they are helped in their financing by the regular Democrats.

Republicans have largely decommissioned their grassroots in the Garden State, with campaigns becoming smaller and smaller “entrepreneurial” enterprises outside state and county party organizations.  The answer to everything is some new service or technology offered by some for-profit wunderkind.  The idea of motivating people with a message, of reaching out to one’s natural allies and of making them a part of a mission is utterly superfluous to this style of campaigning.  

And so, in keeping with this, Democrat candidates talk about the people they have met and what they have learned from them, while Republicans land the punches rehearsed in barren settings, devoid of anyone not political.  If the Democrats are real.  If the stories are not make believe.  If there is a depth of humanity to back each one up… look out on election day.

Finally, the talking heads who bracket these televised debates – both Democrats and Republicans – appear to forget that the same audience viewing the debate, is viewing them.  Cut the gentlemanly bullshit and get to work.  Rip the opponent worse than your candidate did (hey, your name isn’t on the ballot).  It’s the same damned debate, the same viewers, you are just a different means to deliver the message and continue the fight.  So get in the killer point that your candidate forgot.  Be a good wing man.  Shoot the bastard down.

Besides, nobody wants to see a self-reverential daisy chain of colorless “experts” or “professionals”.  Get into the mud and fight!

Tom Moran shits the bed again. NJ.com editorial goes nuts with the name-calling (again).

By Rubashov

At what point did Star-Ledger/NJ.com editor Tom Moran go from a somewhat reasonable – albeit excruciatingly liberal – man of journalism, to New Jersey’s own Julius Streicher, throwing invective and hate at anyone who doesn’t see the world through the increasingly dark and confused lens he does.  Like Streicher, who edited a newspaper called “The Attacker,” Moran discards journalism and adopts a political role as the state’s leading propagandist for what has come to be known as “The Resistance.”

Of course, what he is “resisting” is the outcome (under long established rules) of a national election in the world’s foremost democracy.  Moran and his movement are not only threats to the political and economic stability of United States, but of the World.  It takes humility to live in a democracy, to preserve a Republic.  But Moran and his movement place their will above all else – and if their will should triumph, all future elections would be fought after the fact, regardless of outcome, endlessly, the way they are fighting this one.

To Moran and his movement, we are in year three of the 2016 presidential election.  This election will not be over until they get their way.  Only then will they permit us to move on to the next election. 

But who is this movement?  They are the permanent Establishment Party of government.  That’s what they would be called if they were honest about it.  In Mexico, where honesty rates higher than in Washington, DC, the longtime ruling political party calls itself the Partido Revolucionario Institucional – the Institutional Revolutionary Party.  They held power for 71 uninterrupted years – until the corruption and economic decline got so bad that voters, in their pain, sought other answers (both good and bad).  Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, like Ralph Nader and Ron Paul before them, are symptoms of a corrupt institutional party producing more pain than benefits. 

Tom Moran is a chief propagandist for global corporatists, like those who publish his newspaper, and for all those who are made comfortable and secure by government and the largesse of the taxpayers.  These include the crony capitalists, pay-to-play government vendors, the Wall Street operators (like Moran’s heroes Jon Corzine and Phil Murphy), and the legions of lobbyists and senior bureaucrats who might as well be interchangeable.  It includes too, those well-off academics, like Brigid Harrison of Montclair State University.  A failed Democrat candidate, Harrison was provided a second life as an Establishment propagandist whose work has been pushed as required reading.    

The permanent Establishment Party straddles both established political parties in America – where our political choices are limited to faux chocolate and faux vanilla – and where propagandists like Tom Moran direct members of the working class to battle each other over race, ethnicity, and gender.  Using the last, they are now in the process of endlessly expanding the opportunities for internal division amongst the 99 percent. 

Candidates like Mikie Sherrill are the face of this “Resistance” to working class pain – to those same voters who bet on Barack Obama to rescue them in 2008, and who, in their pain, reached for Donald Trump in 2016.  A wealthy, expensively trained, representative of the Elite – whose career path was to “check the boxes” on the way to being given “power” as a safe pair-of-hands for those who actually wield it.

The means to Sherrill’s rise to celebrity are notorious.  Along with her Antifa-inspired thugs, she stalked and hounded the aged Congressman and Vietnam War Vet, Rodney Frelinghuysen.  They spat insults at him and lied about his record – acting as if this most bi-partisan and gentlemanly of public servants was akin to David Duke.  In this, they are not so different from Tom Moran and the NJ.com editorial board who over the weekend used words like “fraud” and “fanatical” to describe those who oppose their nurtured-by-hand celebrity, Mikie Sherrill.  If anything, they are using others as a mirror to reflect back what they see in themselves… frauds and fanatics.

Over the next two weeks and beyond – until they get their way and the result from the 2016 presidential election that they believe they are entitled to – Tom Moran and company will continue to behave the way they have been, calling names, spitting hatred, urinating down their own trousers.  They are like beings possessed, confirmed in their certainties, their righteousness and indignation.  They can not think outside of it… just ask Jonathan Salant. 

Is the Star-Ledger’s Jon Salant a handjob? He re-wrote a hit piece for Menendez using old news.

There is a lot of real news floating around out there.  Certainly enough to prevent a writer from needing to plagiarize an early hit piece by the Menendez campaign for reuse as “fresh” news three weeks out from an election.  If the headline reads like the title of an attack piece put out by Menendez – that’s because it is: 

“Hugin says he's a different kind of Republican, but his campaign donations show otherwise.”

Breaking news… Republican Bob Hugin donates to the campaigns of (wait for it)… Republicans!!!  No shit. 

And this differs from (name ANY partisan candidate for office – Democrat or Republican) how?   

As evidence for his screwy contention, Jonathan Salant actually attacks Republican Bob Hugin and HIS WIFE for failing to support a Democrat Senator from Washington State.  Salant claims the Senator is bi-partisan… the record shows that she is the 5th most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.  Maybe we should just change Jonathan’s name from “Salant” to “Slant”.  What a pissbrain!

(Speaking of wives, as they have now been made fair game by Jonathan Slant, old Mrs. Slant is a kind of lobbyist/crony capitalist out on the hunt for taxpayer dollars for “deserving” corporations.  Yep, you can’t make this shit up.)

Salant’s hit on Hugin was all addressed earlier this year in a series of campaign attacks against Hugin by the Menendez campaign.  It is now being repackaged by the Star-Ledger and Salant in order to give it an “objective” slant – three weeks out from Election Day.  Salant’s goal is simple:  He wants to influence those women who have been turned off by Menendez’s trafficking of Eastern European women for his pal’s sexual purposes or the Obama Justice Department’s allegations about sex with underaged girls in the Caribbean.  Salant wants them to put that aside and pull the Big “D” lever (as they used to say).

Jonathan Salant wants reform Democrats to forget what kind of corrupt POS Bob Menendez really is.  Salant wants them to forget the bank scams and the Medicare fraud and stare straight ahead while they yank that Big “D”.  And the best he can come up with is that Bob Hugin is… a Republican. 

And that’s a big deal to a religionist like Jonathan Salant, who sincerely believes that being a Republican is a kind of original sin.  Salant, as his writing shows, will not be comfortable until the last of these venomous creatures is driven from the public square.

Every candidate gets stuck in the ass by the media.  It happens.  But there’s a difference between getting stuck by what was once a generally “uninvolved” or “non-partisan” press and getting stuck by a partisan writer like Jonathan Salant.  Salant is the kind of guy who will stick a candidate in the ass and not have the common courtesy to give him a reach around.  It’s an act of violence with him… and he’s going to make sure there’s nothing in it for the object of his attentions.

Cory Booker hearing Jonathan Salant’s confession.

That is our critique on the writing of Jonathan Salant.  We acknowledge that he is a “writer” of some standing and craft.  We dispute the title “journalist” being applied to him, because he has ventured so far from it.  Others may disagree… particularly the more “clubbable” members of the Establishment.  Nevertheless, these are our opinions.  If Jonathan Salant would like to dispute them on these pages, we will gladly publish what he writes, UNEDITED, which is a courtesy the corporate arse-lickers who run the Star-Ledger would NEVER extend to anyone with whom they disagreed.

Selling out: Media's decline from Al Doblin to Jonathan Salant

New Jersey's establishment media -- its editors and reporters -- are in a freefall and have lost their sense of decency.  Job security is such that they have all become free agents, writing articles to please prospective employers. 

So we have Star-Ledger Editor Tom Moran performing a masochistic panegyric to please Democrat machine boss George Norcross.  Over at the Bergen Record, that newspaper's editor was turning out pro-Democrat columns non-stop while engaging in backdoor negotiations with Senate President Steve Sweeney's office.  A few years ago, boss Norcross tried to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer, now his machine is getting all the talent on the cheap.

The NJGOP's answer to this was predictably self-defeating.  It's idea of a GOP counterbalance to the growing Democrat hegemony over media was to bring back Bridgegate mastermind David "Wally Edge" Wildstein, possibly the only person more hated in New Jersey than his old boss, Chris Christie.  To fund Wildstein's operation they found former Jamestown alumnus Ken Kurson.  It was Kurson who ran such memorable efforts as incumbent Marcia Karrow's loss to Mike Doherty in 2009 and incumbent Jeff Parrott's loss to Parker Space in 2010.  But losing has never been a bar to advancement in the NJGOP.  In fact, it generally is an asset.

Yep, Kurson has been accused of sexual harassment by writer and cancer-survivor Deborah Copaken.  This comes at a time when Kurson's old firm is trying to convince the women of New Jersey that the NJGOP's choice for U.S. Senate -- Bob Hugin -- is a new kind of man, when it comes to women (whatever that is supposed to mean).  You can read about what Kurson gets up to here: 

https://www.mediaite.com/online/author-deborah-copaken-accuses-ex-observer-editor-ken-kurson-of-sexual-harassment-in-powerful-op-ed/

It was Wildstein who outted Al Doblin as the ethical-free-zone he is.  Doblin plainly hated the kind of attention he's bestowed on others his entire working life.  In a series of whines, he complained to Wildstein:

“I am the editorial page editor.  If someone makes me an offer, I have the right to consider it,” Doblin explained.

Doblin called a request for information regarding his employment search “truly horrific.”

“This is unfair.  Truly unfair,” he said.

But Doblin is not the worst of the bunch.  That "honor" must surely go to Jonathan "short-ass" Salant, a reporter worthy of his own Duranty Prize for consistent blindness to all but the party-line.  In case you've forgotten Walter "the hand" Duranty.  He's the assbandit who denied that Stalin was starving to death millions of human beings in the Ukraine and elsewhere in what was once called the "Soviet Union".  He even won a Pulitzer Prize for it. 

Duranty wrote for the New York Times, which later was forced to admit that his articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."  There have been calls to revoke his Pulitzer, but you know how tough it is to get elitist filth to admit they made a mistake.  So Duranty's award -- for 1930's era Fake News -- still stands.  And so much for journalism.

Salant's latest dry-humping of the news came a few weeks back, when he attempted to write an update of the various congressional races in New Jersey. 

He started off by being childishly giddy about Republican Leonard Lance's district having gone for Hillary Clinton in 2016, while failing to mention that Democrat Josh Gottheimer's had done the same for Trump that year.

Salant never fails to describe a Republican donor negatively, offering bits of color, always dark.  On the other hand, old short-ass describes such creatures as George Soros in this light:  "Malinowski (received a donation of) $5,400 from investor George Soros, a major Democratic donor."

Investor?  A major Democratic donor??  How about convicted financial scammer who liberal economists have criticized for his callous manipulations of currency? 

Perhaps Salant is displaying his talents for the consideration of one of the many Soros media organs?  That seems to be the way these days.

In writing about the fifth district, Jonathan Salant somehow missed the fact that a third Republican, Jason Sarnosky, had dropped out of the race weeks before.  He wrote about him as if he were still campaigning. 

He went on to cover the race in southern New Jersey's first district.  And once again, Salant behaved like he was on a job interview.  He never once mentioned the machine that bears the Congressman's name and wrote as if it didn't exist.

Not to place Donald Norcross in the context of the machine of which he is a part is misleading and unethical.  It promotes bad government by purposefully covering up the truth and it gives aid and comfort to one of the most authoritarian political machines in America.  Don't want to see it, Jonathan?  Well just try being an ordinary citizen when the machine decides it wants to use eminent domain to take your property in order to give it to one of their corporate friends.  That's what you are shilling for.

The southern region of New Jersey is an example of a dominant-party system or one-party dominant system of government.  According to South African political scientist Raymond Suttner, such a system occurs when there is "a category of parties/political organizations that have successively won election victories and whose future defeat cannot be envisaged or is unlikely for the foreseeable future".  It is a de facto one-party system, often devolving into a de jure one-party system, a semi-democracy. Usually, the dominant party has a tendency towards "suppressing freedom of expression and manipulating the press in favor of the ruling party." 

Well, short-ass, that is who you are shilling for.  That is who you are now.  All those romantic post-Watergate notions about doing right... well you're over that, right?  Expensive restaurants and sexy vacations got the better of you, didn't they?

Sell-out.