Monday, August 28, 2023

FRENCH WORDS AREN'T VERY MANLY, SAYS HATEMONGERING FORMER BOWTIE WEARER

I learn from Gateway Pundit that Tucker Carlson has made another trip to Hungary, where he's not just being a Viktor Orbán fanboy -- he also expressed anger at America because the current president chose an ambassador he doesn't like:
US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, who is gay, has attacked his host country for “anti-LGBTQ” policies. Speaking in Budapest on Aug. 26, Tucker Carlson said that “the behavior of the American Ambassador to Hungary makes me want to apologize. It’s disgusting and inexcusable.”

... The behavior of the Biden lackey Pressman is “so far from the norms of diplomacy in my country that it’s hard for me to believe that David Pressman is doing what he’s doing,” Carlson said....

“The point of diplomacy is not to hector other nations”, Carlson said. “To show up in someone else’s country and scream at them because they’re different from you... That is the opposite of diplomacy.”

“And so, for a creep like David Pressman – who is not a diplomat, he was a political activist and Biden donor – to show up in your country and lecture you about your culture and threaten you because you do things differently... hurts the United States, is a grave embarrassment to me as an American and an outrage as someone who pays his salary. It’s disgusting.”

“David Pressman is doing this, not on behalf of the American people, who do not share his views, he’s doing it on behalf of a tiny percentage of the American population, on behalf of an interest group, the Human Rights Campaign, paid by US taxpayers to attack you because you have views he doesn’t like”, Tucker said....
In fact, Americans broadly support LGBTQ rights.

Carlson thinks he can hammer home this point by using a word that derives from French, which every Real American knows is an effeminate language:
“My advice is, just wait it out”, Tucker said. “The United States is in a place right now where this is not sustainable. You can’t run a global empire based on the imposition of boutique sexual politics on countries that don’t want them.”
Boutique. Carlson likes this word so much he uses it again:
“The Soviet Union told you, you had to worship Lenin. The State Department tells you, you have to worship transvestites. It’s not so different. It’s a foreign power pushing its weird boutique religion on you. It’s wrong. You worship whatever you want. It’s your country.”
If this use of the word boutique makes you long for the days of the polite, genteel pre-Donald Trump GOP, let me remind you that George W. Bush said in 1988 that Michael Dukakis's foreign policy ideas were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique," which made absolutely no sense but sounded effete and unmanly. Poppy Bush, Tucker Carlson: Preppy wannabe tough guys think alike.

Carlson does videos about UFOs and testicle tanning. Ambassador David Pressman, by contrast, is a serious person:
He ... clerked for the Supreme Court of Rwanda, where he evaluated post-genocide transitional justice initiatives. Returning to the US he worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama....

In early 2006, Pressman accompanied actor George Clooney and his father on a trip to Darfur to make a documentary. He joined Clooney on several missions to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa to lobby for peace in Darfur.... Pressman joined Clooney in founding Not On Our Watch Project, an advocacy and grant-making organization focused on raising awareness about mass-atrocities.... Working as an attorney in private practice, he represented the Indian activist Leonard Peltier in seeking a pardon and had a conviction overturned in the case of a man who spent 10 years in prison for a crime he did not commit....

Under President Barack Obama, Pressman served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was responsible for policy development on global criminal justice issues there.... He also served as the Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council, where he coordinated the government's efforts to prevent and respond to mass atrocities, genocide, and war crimes....

In early 2015, he successfully lobbied against a Russia-led attempt to deny benefits to the same-sex partners of U.N. employees....

The day after a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida in June 2016, Pressman told the UN General Assembly that denouncing terrorism was an insufficient response: "If we are united in our outrage by the killing of so many — and we are — let us be equally united around the basic premise of upholding the universal dignity of all persons regardless of who they love, not just around condemning the terrorists who kill them." He was influential in winning UN Security Council approval of a resolution that condemned "targeting persons as a result of their sexual orientation". It was the first time that body addressed sexual orientation and required what diplomats called "intense consultations" to overcome the reservations of countries that provide no civil protections for sexual orientation or criminalize homosexuality.
You get the picture. So what got Carlson all worked up? This speech:
U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman on June 16 criticized the crackdown on LGBTQ and intersex rights in the European country.

“It is impossible not to see echoes of this in your Parliament’s vote earlier this year to encourage neighbors to report to the authorities their gay neighbors raising children,” he added. “Turning neighbor on neighbor conjures a dark past of covert agents and informants, of fear and betrayal, in this country and this region that I do not need to recount. You have a museum for that. While this legislation did not become law, the fact it was ever considered, let alone supported by this government and passed by the legislature is chilling.”

Pressman noted “this proposal is not unique; others became and remain law.”

“Laws prohibiting ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships’ were adopted by Russia in 2013,” he said. “These Russian laws found a new home here in Hungary eight years later — like a virus spreading — when the government adopted laws to forbid ‘educational programs aimed at the promotion of … homosexuality.’ And this law remains in force today. And — in both Russia and in Hungary — the crackdowns on discourse related to gayness were preceded and accompanied by a closing of space for independent institutions and civil society.”

“History teaches us that when governments start discriminating against one group — whether for who they love or what they believe, their politics or their race, or the color of their skin — others are usually not far behind,” added Pressman. “It teaches us clearly what can happen when we fail to speak out and stand up to these laws and policies as soon as they infect our democracies.”
To Carlson, these are un-American, "boutique" ideas. He's wrong, at least for now. Maybe he's describing a future America dominated by hatemongers. But that's not where we live now.

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