Most of them are lazy, and just want the next big thing–more money, a cushier gig, some big prize ( a Pulitzer?), a house bigger than Tom Friedman’s–and will do pretty much what it takes to help them achieve their goal, including willful omission, closing their eyes, exagerating, lying…

I lived in Israel in the early 1980’s, and knew a BUNCH of journalists. Many of the agencies had an office in a certain building in Jerusalem. There was a bar nearby (that served pretty good cheeseburgers), and a LOT of them hung out there. Thing that one scene in “The Year of Living Dangerously.” These were journalists from the US, from Australia, from Europe. Few knew any Hebrew, and almost none knew any Arabic. They were covering the ENTIRE Middle East–with the a$$e$ on stools in a bar in Jerusalem. Because Jerusalem was a LOT nicer than Cairo, Amman and Damascus, and the bars were better. They relied on their “stringers” for information. (Something the PLO figured out, and started getting their members to land jobs as stringers.) They would talk about the stories they wanted to find–and if the found any information to the contrary, that didn’t fit the narrative that they had already preconceived, than, well, that was just a “fluke” and not worth noting.

They might run, drive, fly, whenever they heard a “story” was going to break–but they weren’t exactly sniffing our the stories.

I peridiodically wonder if I ever met Friedman in that bar some time or another. He may have been “dispatched” to Beirut when he was hired by the New York Times, but odds are he actually lived, and hung out, in a bar in either Jerusalem or Nicosia. (Another popular comfy place to “cover” the Middle East.)

Anyhow…

It’s not like thirty years ago, journalists (as a whole) had the sort of work ethic we imagine they had. And as we know from Randolph Hearst to Walter Duranty, “news” and “truth” were relative terms well before the crowd I met in Jerusalem all those years ago.

Explain this “blame” thing you’re seeing here.

Because from my viewpoint, it’s a trigger for Leftist conditioning.

No other nation has exported as much socialism and dependence as the United States. A lot of people are unable to differentiate between that and what they think is exceptionalism, because they’ve never been forced to think about it in that fashion.

So long as people stick their head in the sand and overlook the century long history of the Leftist alliance in the US, they will only see the surface propaganda.

Pax Americana is over. That’s not due to the Japanese or some external threat. That’s due to something more on the domestic side.

In addition to the principle of logic oddly implanted within each of us (to different effects) there is also the implanted illogical (and heroic) resistance to death. Why are they side by side? No one knows.

Life is meaningless outside of the meaning those we actually know help to give us, which in turn depends on the more extensive culture which affirms the personal nature of human existence or divorces our relationships by policy.

If you really want to pay attention the key word you use is “meaininglessness”.

Why would a life be meaningless? There are a limited number of answers to that question.

Since the threat of meaninglessness is rampant for the shallow and hollow men and women we’ve bred into the modern spiritual gene pool…people will do anything, and I mean anything to get meaning in their lives.

They will, for example, vote for a malicious socialist from Chicago who never did a damn thing in his life or one day of honest work for President if his skin is dark and they want to be “relevant”.

They will, if they are Occupy Wall Street smash windows with large pieces of hard word bats if they can therefore be “cutting edge” progressives.

One day, trust me, they will get “meaning” by putting decent people in camps and cutting off their heads if they have to.

The alternative (for them) is unthinkable: meaning the old-fashioned way – as children of God working out their salvation in humility and gratitude for the very lives they’ve been given.

Naaahhh.

This wasn’t true right after WWII. What happened in the US was that FDR redistributed American wealth via printing money and war success, to other nations. Like most people who accept charity, they were grateful the first time, expectant the next, and then dependently addicted on the third.

The US was already socialist and wealthy by the end of WWII or even the beginning of it, exporting US free money to the rest of the world, making people reliant upon US power and economy.

Western Europe had yet to accept the fascist socialism or the Russian socialism just yet. By the end of WWII, for a number of reasons including American free money, socialism sounded a lot better to people. So long as America was around to forgive their debt and to provide free blood to protect European shores, why would anyone be motivated to defend themselves? We see it now in the uS, with people telling us the police are here to protect us so we should disarm. It’s the same mentality.

The thing is, the Left can be competed against and defeated by the same tactics they’ve used to gain dominance.

I think in the opposite fashion, that the Left was created using war techniques to destroy Western civilization, thus the Left itself is not particularly vulnerable to Leftist attacks the way Western civilization was vulnerable to the Leftist evil.

They’ve successfully programmed our society to respond to Marxist-method activism.

All societies were able to be destabilized. Marx created a set of ideological manuals for defeating Western civilization. But, if he was up against an Authoritarian Slave Empire like the Aztecs, it would not have worked very well. The Leftists would have died, just like Pinochet killed them by the tens of thousands. It didn’t defeat the Left because other nations hosted the evil and let it regenerate.

Of course the Left will prevent competitors from arising. That’s what the Revolutionary Guard is for in Iran. Like rich Democrats Bill Gates and Buffet, once they get rich using American liberty, they will ensure that nobody else can ascend to the same heights by rationing and regulating their competition in such a fashion that it favors the status quo. That’s because in order to graduate up the ladder of power, those at the top must be incompetent or weak enough to let the new kiddies stay alive long enough. The Left was given this stay of execution for near a century. The Left, however, will not give their competition a century or even a decade to work things up to the same level.

True the Vote’s suppression by the entire Fed bureaucracy is literal proof of this. The Left knows what they have done with voter type 501s that verify get out the vote results. They know, which is why they won’t let people get that power. Right now they don’t look like they are clamping down on academia, because they think it is safe from the touch of American patriots. Once they feel different, they will burn the bridges down.

I don’t see mimicking these people and their deceitful methods as winning anything. You will have become them, an ends justifies the means person and a manipulator of free thought in a supposedly free society.

I don’t want anybody coerced into obeying my world view anymore than I want progressives coercing me to obey theirs.