Newsweek vs Chick-Fil-A Barack Obama & Democrats choose...Poorly

Doyle Lon­negan: You see that fella in the red sweather over there? His name’s Don­nie McCoy. Works a few of the pro­tec­tion rack­ets for Cun­naro when he’s wait­ing for some­thing bet­ter to hap­pen. Don­nie and I have known each other since we were six. Take a good look at that face, Floyd. Because if he ever finds out I can be beat by one lousy grifter, I’ll have to kill him and every other hood who wants to mus­cle in on my Chicago oper­a­tion.

Henry Gon­dorf: If they put you on the spot, we’ve got to fold the con.

The Sting 1973

Got no opin­ion sir, they’re bad for business

Inherit the Wind 1960

One of the things that the Inter­net has done is amplify the “crazy uncles”. Every fam­ily had one, and on the fam­ily level it doesn’t mean much, but give that guy an inter­net con­nec­tion and a way to talk to the other crazy uncles and presto you have 3,000,000 Amer­i­cans ready to go, ready to swarm and intim­i­date busi­ness who assume that 1 con­tact equals 20 peo­ple who do not.

That is pretty much what hap­pened with the gay mar­riage move­ment, a move­ment that had prac­ti­cally no pub­lic sup­port but thanks to net­work­ing and the strong-​arm tac­tics con­vinced large amounts of peo­ple of their strength (polls indi­cate adults over­es­ti­mate the num­ber of Gay peo­ple in the coun­try by a fac­tor of 8 – 10) because of that extreme strength and the pas­siv­ity of the peo­ple who dis­agreed with them, such activists wielded an inor­di­nate amount of power with the cor­po­rate world.

It was not unsur­pris­ing that they would adopt this tac­tic, there is a lot of crossover with the most rad­i­cal parts of the left and said left had used these tac­tics over and over in the past

The only prob­lem with this kind of con is scale. In order for it to be suc­cess­ful one has to avoid two things:

1. Never allow the marks to real­ize how weak you are com­pared to your foes

2. Never ener­gize your foes or they will start to move on the marks

The first allows the mark to ignore you, the 2^nd allows your foes to both intim­i­date the mark and defeat you. Both are fatal to the con and are an excel­lent exam­ple of what the Tea Party has done to the MSM over the last two years

This brings us to the whole Chick-​Fil-​A business.

It is no secret that Chick-​Fil-​A is a Chris­t­ian busi­ness. It is also no secret that long before the Gay Mar­riage issue reared its head the left despised them, one friend who works at CNN would go on about how some of his co-​workers were incensed that they would close on Sun­days. It was (at least it would be to a non-​Christian) an irra­tional hatred. That the Gay Mar­riage Crowd would dis­like them was a given, but the deci­sion to high­light that posi­tion was a HUGE mistake.

The wise move would have been a small state­ment and then allow the media to sub­tly drop hints that a visit to Chick-​Fil-​A was not a place where an “enlight­ened” per­son would go. That would have kept up the con with­out a whole lot of fuss.

Alas for them Mayor Tom “I don’t mind if you slaugh­ter gay peo­ple as long as you let them get mar­ried first” Menino decided to open his mouth.

Why did he do this? Was he pres­sured by mem­bers of the gay com­mu­nity feel­ing their oats after forc­ing the Pres­i­dent to “come out” on gay mar­riage, as the mayor of one of the bluest cities in the nation did he fall for his own pro­pa­ganda think­ing the sheer num­bers involved were in his favor or was it a mat­ter of sheer oppor­tunism as a per­son in a place where such a pro­nounce­ment could only help him?

regard­less of the rea­son it was highly nec­es­sary for the back­lash to be coun­tered. Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and May­ors in Philly & DC jumped into the fray, the story now had to be one focused on them not on the populace.

There were two sig­nif­i­cant responses to the story that I’d like to look at. One was by Brian Ries of Newsweek:

So. Here we are. Tum­blr, lis­ten up.

We’re hop­ing to find a cur­rent or for­mer employee of Chick-​Fil-​A who might want to spill the beans on life inside the alleged anti­gay company.

That was July 24^th I haven’t seen said follow-​up story from Newsweek

The other was Mike Huck­abee sug­gest­ing sup­port Chick-​Fil-​A day.

The pre­vi­ous week peo­ple on twit­ter had sug­gested it but Huck­abee is a radio talk show host and a for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date with hun­dreds of thou­sands of fol­low­ers. The media could mock him or ignore what he said but lit­er­ally mil­lions would dis­cover the idea via the net totally bypass­ing them. Then the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds for the left took place Wednesday.

They showed up

By the hun­dreds and the thou­sands and the hun­dreds of thou­sands they showed up. Restau­rants ran out of food, lines were incred­i­ble nation­wide and worse of all there was a lack of all the vit­riol that the left would nor­mally por­tray and the vio­lence and threats came from the left, not their foes.

While the media did their best to ignore or spin events some few decided to do actual report­ing:

My obser­va­tions printed on Forbes​.com about Chic-​Fil-​A day forbes​.com/​s​i​t​e​s​/​d​e​r​ekbro… and how the media has handled.

— Mr Broes (@mrbroes) August 2, 2012

For the first time in my life, today I vis­ited a Chic-​Fil-​A to show my sup­port for the CEO’s right to free speech. Today was billed as “sup­port Chic-​Fil-​A Day”. I live in LA so, I was not expect­ing much in way of sup­port but, I was not just sur­prised, I was blown away. The Chic-​Fil-​A in North­ridge, Cal­i­for­nia had a line that twisted through­out the park­ing lot. It was almost 100 degrees but, that didn’t seem to deter any­one. They were peace­ful and the demo­graphic was wide ranged. Blacks, whites, teenagers, kids, Latino’s and all other cat­e­gories you could imag­ine. At this loca­tion their there were no anti-​Chic-​Fil-​A protesters.

So, how was the chicken? Amaz­ing! Now I know why peo­ple love this place. The store was run extremely well. Clean, polite and effi­cient. The staff brought water to those in line, they handed out umbrel­las for pro­tec­tion from the sun and they served deli­cious food quickly. This has been repli­cated across the nation. This huge one day move­ment involv­ing mil­lions of sup­port­ers made their opin­ions heard and voted with their money and pres­ence. It has been esti­mated that the chain will have booked almost $100 mil­lion or more just today.

When I returned home I turned on the news to see how this would be reported. NBC in Los Ange­les chose to focus on the pro­test­ers. Not the ones sup­port­ing Chic-​Fil-​A but, the ones protest­ing the sup­port­ers. The pro­test­ers are a tiny frac­tion to the sup­port­ers yet the media focused 90% of their atten­tion on those few. This does not rep­re­sent the truth of the actual event.

Mind you this is a reporter from Forbes talk­ing about this and call­ing out his fel­lows in the media

But it didn’t mat­ter any­ways, on twit­ter Chick­fila was trend­ing and a mul­ti­tude of pic­tures & video of long lines and happy peo­ple were all over twit­ter and face­book. The kicker came from Pas­tor Rick Warren

@dan­cathy just called me. #Chick­FilA has already set a world record today, with 7 more hrs to go in the West. #Out­OfChicken

— Rick War­ren (@RickWarren) August 2, 2012

The media can spin this, they can deny this but every per­son dri­ving by a Chick-​Fil-​A saw the lines, the pho­tos are avail­able any­where on the web and you’d bet­ter believe every other busi­ness noticed those lines too and will remem­ber them the next time these issues arise, and at least one of the Wendy’s likely wishes they kept their mouth shut.

Some eleven hours after this all began, Wendy’s finally tweeted an apol­ogy to Chick-​fil-​A. “@Chickfila Looks like some thought we were pick­ing on CFA ear­lier on Twit­ter. Really wasn’t the case– apol­o­gize if it came off that way!”

And while they did issue an apol­ogy, some may ques­tion the sin­cer­ity given that it was a tweeted directly to Chick-​fil-​A, there­fore leav­ing it out of Wendy’s fol­low­ers’ feeds.

Even worse for the left what are the odds peo­ple will­ing to stand in line for hours to get a meal for the sake of prin­ci­ple will not stand in line to vote when Novem­ber comes along?

So lets com­pare the responses.

Newsweek, the mag­a­zine that lib­er­als have lost mil­lions of dol­lars to sup­port goes fish­ing for a story and as of right now has come up empty.

While Mike Huck­abee lit­tle sug­ges­tion has resulted in record sales for Chick Fil A and has made a vis­i­ble demon­stra­tion of the power of their sup­port­ers on this issue.

The ulti­mate irony, Thanks to Huckabee’s call and the response Chick-​Fil-​A may have man­aged to gross more money Wednes­day than Newsweek lost all of last year and the prof­its they made today were fueled by indi­vid­ual cus­tomers who each spent more money on their meal than the sell­ing price of the entire Newsweek franchise.

Our friend on the left did this to them­selves, because they for­got or were unaware of this verse that Mr. Cathy doubt­less remembers

When they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirl­wind Hosea 8:7

and a lot of other busi­ness own­ers will remem­ber this as well.

The last word belongs to Pat­terico:

I keep telling myself that actions like this are not a rea­son to oppose gay mar­riage. But note: I have to keep telling myself that.

A tip­ping point may arrive: where I decide that the need to oppose ter­ror­ist tac­tics out­weighs my desire to seek social justice.

I’m not there. Yet. But does the fringe of this move­ment really want to keep push­ing me that direction?

And do you think I’m the only per­son hav­ing thoughts like this?!

I won­der if he’s read Hosea?

Update: I men­tioned the left and bul­ly­ing. One mem­ber of the left was so proud he videoed this Chick-​Fil-​A video berat­ing them:

It would seem that the poor fel­low is a lit­tle com­puter illit­er­ate and some­how acci­den­tally deleted (or per­haps made pri­vate) his video, not to worry though Ace informs me Jim Treacher being a fair minded fel­low want­ing to give both sides of the story, plus he is such a help­ful guy, he is put it up on his account for him.

Just a reminder, the inter­net is forever.

Update 2: A con man knows a blown con when he sees one:

The whole Chick-​fil-​a boy­cott deba­cle demon­strates that the con is blown, that the marks aren’t buy­ing the B.S. any longer. It’s time to fold up shop and run for the hills like Morde­cai C. Jones M.B.S., C.S., D.D. (Mas­ter of Back-​Stabbing, Cork-​Screwing and Dirty-​Dealing).

And Legal Insur­rec­tion maps it out:

Update 3: Hey maybe the left was right after all:

Now that’s funny!

Update 4: Appar­ently the fel­low in that video (the one with­out the lasers) has been iden­ti­fied, then fired
Vante regrets the unfor­tu­nate events that tran­spired yes­ter­day in Tuc­son between our for­mer CFO/​Treasurer Adam Smith and an employee at Chick-​fil-​A. Effec­tive imme­di­ately, Mr. Smith is no longer an employee of our com­pany.

The actions of Mr. Smith do not reflect our cor­po­rate val­ues in any man­ner. Vante is an equal oppor­tu­nity com­pany with a diverse work­force, which holds diverse opin­ions. We respect the right of our employ­ees and all Amer­i­cans to hold and express their per­sonal opin­ions, how­ever, we also expect our com­pany offi­cers to behave in a man­ner com­men­su­rate with their posi­tion and in a respect­ful fash­ion that con­veys these val­ues of civil­ity with others.

Speak­ing as a guy rat­tling his tip jar to buy a car I can’t be happy about a guy los­ing a job, even if it was due to his own fool­ish­ness. Maybe Chick-​fil-​A is hir­ing.

Update 5: The Daily caller/​Newsweek shows why they lose 10 mil a year:

I can’t tell you much more about the cus­tomers today, because of my lim­ited con­tact with them. I work in the kitchen, so I don’t see much of the clien­tele. What made today so dif­fi­cult — more dif­fi­cult than always being behind on food, run­ning out of one thing or another, need­ing to be in two places at once, etc — was the atti­tudes of the other employees.

Maybe it’s just me, but even in a bad econ­omy nobody is telling me that some­one who cooks at Chick-​Fil-​A can’t cook at McDon­alds, or a Wendy’s or a Burger king or even a diner, those type of jobs, even in a bad econ­omy are con­stantly turn­ing over.

Even though I did my best to make the sal­ads and wraps extra-​gay, I don’t want to harm the cus­tomers. (Oth­er­wise I may have been moved to spit on their food. I didn’t, because that’s going too far.)

Then again…

And yes this woman IS an anti-​Christian bigot. I’ll pray for her
— — — — — -

DaTechGuy’s sum­mer fundraiser con­tin­ues as I edge ever closer to not have to bor­row a car.

Any help is appre­ci­ated. For details click here for the progress check the ther­mome­ter to the right and to kick in hit DaTipJar”.