Yeah, so journalism is a vast left-wing conspiracy—so what else is new?
The big ruckus in the blogosphere today is that Journolist reporters conspired to downplay the Reverend Wright/Obama story during the campaign, and to attack and impugn anyone who didn’t play the same game. It is shocking, but unsurprising to those who have been noticing what’s been happening in the media for the last few decades.
But perceiving something is quite a different thing from having the smoking gun, and this story provides the latter. But will enough people know or care?
The difference between left and right may be (at least in this case) that the left thinks this sort of action on the part of journalists is a good thing. I mean, after all, didn’t they become journalists in the first place in order to make a difference?
The thing that surprises me most about the Journolist revelations is the openness of the particpants in creating a paper (that is, computer) trail of their machinations, complete with identifying names. Apparently they either thought what they were doing was noncontroversial, or they trusted their fellow-Journolistos to keep the transactions sancrosanct, never suspecting that one day a member would turn tail and rat.
But that day has come, and as a result we are treated to such thoughtful missives as this one from Chris Hayes of the Nation:
I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable.
Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent [sic] responded:
It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them ”” Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares ”” and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
There are also some interesting windows on the past. The Nation’s Katha Pollitt reminisces about how distateful it was to her, as a feminist and a woman, to have to whitewash Bill Clinton’s sexual offenses back in the 90s: “I am really tired of defending the indefensible.”
Not tired enough, Katha, not tired enough.
But Ackerman rallies the wearying troops, including Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly, who naively wonders:
I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”
Ackerman replies:
Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.
That will keep Obama’s hands clean—and it did, at least enough to get him elected.
Today’s scandal has prompted Andrew Breitbart to write:
The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?
To say that this question is almost certainly only rhetorical, and that the obvious answer is “no,” is to state the obvious. A more important question is how many Americans will even hear about this—and, if they do, how many will care. I think that most people who would care were already pretty sure that this sort of thing went on, even before the revelations of the emails, and that many of the rest would probably agree with the co-conspirators’ actions and quietly (or loudly) cheer them on.
[NOTE: The Journolist discussion in question was prompted by one of the debates moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, during which Gibson “asked Obama why it had taken him so long ”“ nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public ”“ to dissociate himself from them.” This relatively mild query was considered way too challenging compared to the soft pitches they were supposed to throw Obama, and it caused the resultant commotion in the Journolist ranks.
Perhaps Gibson had learned his lesson by the time he subsequently interviewed Sarah Palin; it would be instructive to read the Journolist entries in response to that performance. My guess is that it received much higher marks.]
Not tired enough, Katha
Neo,
There should be no surprise here, not because this bias was suspected, but because I believe that the media was never UNbiased. If you look at the history of journalism, you find that many papers were created as the propaganda arms of political parties (many still bear the identifier “Republican” or “Democrat” in their names). Some simple research will provide evidence of the unforgiveable criticisms and slurs directed at Abraham Lincoln by journalists; Walter Duranty, Walter Cronkite— the list could go on ad infinitum.
I think that it’s only been in the past 60-70 years that journalism has assumed the facade of an unbiased profession. This expose reminds us that this is not what journalism currently is, but where it has lived almost since the founding of the Republic.
Carrying my previous post just a step further, if there is any indignation to be had, it should be because the most prominent media outlets had become the arm of a SINGLE political party.
It’s not the lack of bias, but the lack of balance that’s a problem, especially along with the surreptitious nature of that leftist slant.
It has only been in the last decade or so, with the rise of the internet and (conservative) talk radio that there has been any counterbalance to the democrat leftist “main-stream” media. Even then, conservative media is unabashedly conservative, while the MSM has continued to cling to the facade of fairness.
I think T has it right. In fact the 1st Admendment is set up to protect the publication of biased stories and articles.
I have no problem with a newspaper called the Podunk Democrat; you know where they are coming from. It’s the rank hypocrisy of the current MSM that stinks to high heaven.
After many years of observation–particularly in the last few years, when they have made less and less effort to hide their true natures–I came to the conclusion that reporters and journalists were identical to the kinds of things that I occasionally needed to scrape off the bottom of my shoes, and this just confirms it.
This being so, when one of these “journalists” appears on TV or in print to tell me what the “news” is or to give me the benefit of his “analysis,” I turn away and move on to something else that might actually be honest and might be of some use to me.
T: I’m in complete agreement that it’s not outright stated bias that would be the problem. It’s the hypocritical duplicitous pose of objectivity where none exists.
Bernard Goldberg discussed this very thing, along with Brit Hume on Reilly last night. There conclusion, if memory serves, was that the MSM has become so unreliable that they are becoming irrelevant. Furthermore Fox is the wave of the present.
At least the public will know what they are being served in 2012.
BTW Congratulations to the Republic Party, Sharon Angle was so off the wall that apparently she alienated the middle who would have been all too happy to get rid of Reid. Now Reid has an advantage. Next we can expect the GOP find a Nazi-Pedophile to run against Obama in 2012.
One has to flunk an IQ test to qualify for electorate office in this country.
It’s an interesting cycle. The MSM began its march to the left, switching from slanted reporting to active advocate / shill. To fill the void of honest reporting and disclosure of competing view points talk radio and eventually Fox news came to being, followed by the numerous internet cites.
As they say, you know you’re over the target when you see flak — we had a sitting U.S. president call out individuals and news companies, trying to get the citizens to ignore their content. I look forward to the next few years as this cycle continues. Young people in particular, even those on the left, are going to resent the MSM picking and choosing what to report. They’re also going to feel foolish when they get into political arguments and they arrogantly say stuff like “what ACORN story,” “who’s Van Jones,” and “what Black Panther story.” In other words, the MSM has gone way too far.
This pretty much sums up how far out on a limb they are: “there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable.” Yeh, except that you’re holding yourself out as a journalist and not a political activist. Hayes is so far gone he doesn’t even know it.
I think the attitude these journalists display is pretty shocking. On the other hand, the journals these guys work for (Nation, Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, never even heard of Washington Independent) are pretty much for political junkies and recognized as leftist. One thing it demonstrates, though, is that on the whole liberal journalists conceive of themselves as activists in a cause and will resort to lying to advance it. Conservative pundits seem to hold it all a little more at arm’s length; sometimes they actually see the humor of human political existence.
jeff: oh, I bet he knows it. He thinks the point of being a journalist is to advocate an agenda while pretending not to. A higher truth and all that.
The taqiyah of Tariq Ramadan, the daily production of the MSM, the pronouncements of Obama, the theses of folk studies graduate students, the green learn to read books, hollywood movies, most poets and authors and scientists: they all “advocate an agenda while pretending not to.” Or to put it another way, they took a fairly neutral society and completely politicized it, and we let it happen.
It’s the BO as FDR reincarnate meme, as the reborn saviour of the poor during the New Great Depression, which allows them to rationalize their politicization in some way (sometimes by simple omission) of almost every news fact. It’s group and cult behavior, not unlike the phenomenon of a blind patriotism, in which loyalty to the group is a necessity to survive socially, and in some cases avoid being professionally blackballed. Perhaps one can say it happens at the other end too, but there is a difference between the expectation of loyalty and basic intellectual honesty, versus those who attemp to rewrite history for their particular ideological agenda. In such a vividly obvious and brazen Orwellian media environment, one has to wonder how many closet neocons are lurking in the shadows of free western journalism, not to mention those in subjugation in the openly and explicitly totalitarian left-wing/islamic world…
A useful big picture essay: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the
Objectivity to a leftist media type = presenting the an alternative point of view (not exactly the conservative view) – sometimes – near the end of the story – with ridicule – and then getting a comment from the Democrat to shred it.
This is good: “The difference between left and right may be (at least in this case) that the left thinks this sort of action on the part of journalists is a good thing. I mean, after all, didn’t they become journalists in the first place in order to make a difference?”
Advocacy journalism is the problem. It’s a short step from giving voice to the voiceless, or disenfranchised, or powerless or whatever you want to call them, to assuming you know what’s best for them and “reporting” in hopes of making it so.
As others have said, I have no problem with writers or journalists who are open and honest about their political ideology. The problem is with the utter and complete fiction of “objective” journalism.
I think the problem began when journalism went from a trade to a profession. Decades ago, journalists were generally from the working class (the “country class” in Codevilla’s formulation). They knew the people in the neighborhoods and the local cops on the beat.
Somewhere along the line (I don’t know exactly when) journalism became a “profession” with degrees and even dedicated journalism schools. The professors were cut from the same leftist cloth as other humanities professors. I think Watergate also marked an important turning point. Ever since, starry-eyed idealistic young people have gone into journalism to “make a difference” and “change the world”.
Now, journalists travel in the same circles as the ruling class elites. Rather than doing old-fashioned legwork, they often just read official press releases. And they can’t step on too many important toes, lest they be denied their all-important “access”. (See CNN’s Eason Jordan in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.)
I’ve remarked before that the Rathergate incident in 2004 led many of us to believe that the blogosphere had finally come of age and that the Old Media’s days were numbered. But they learned their lesson, and in 2008 they closed ranks behind their preferred candidate, Obama. They overwhelmed the blogosphere with sheer volume and repetition. Well, here is the smoking gun.
/Can we start calling them “journolists” instead of “journalists”?
A few months after the Iraq invasion, I watched a C-Span show that included Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Charles Gibson, and Wolf Blitzer. The subject of the show was the invasion and whether or not it was a good/bad thing. Of course the consensus was that it was a bad move by a misguided, even derelict George W. Bush. However, the most instructive thing in it was a bit delivered by Brokaw. He averred that, if the various TV news broadcasts had slanted the news more against the invasion, it might not have happened. He believed they could have prevented the invasion by using the news to change public opinion. It was a naked admission of the desire by the news anchors to directly change public opinion in political matters.
That convinced me that I could no longer trust any of the MSM. That everything they said or printed must be viewed as potential propaganda. This latest revelation does not surprise me at all. In fact it is what we should all expect.
rickl: in my opinion, this is when the problem began, and the line between opinion journalism and reporting was breached.
Neo: You’re probably right, although in the thread you linked, the commenter “The Postliberal” suggested that it might have started with Murrow vs. McCarthy in the 1950s.
It’s a shame; as a space-crazy kid growing up in the 1960s, my memories of Cronkite center on his reporting of the space launches and are generally positive.
I think the email contributors weren’t worried because no one they know disagrees with them to any significant extent. Anyone who did disagree would have to be some Yahoo (in the Swiftian sense) who doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s the downsizing at newspapers that has “forced” someone to sell the archive.
“Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?”
This is a joke, right? Where is this so-called unity he’s speaking of? Would that be the unity we are seeing in the Arizona lawsuit? Or in those states suing over the mandate to carry insurance or be penalized under Obamacare. The unity of the Tea Party protests? More racists that hate unity right. Clearly Ackerman has been inspired by that self-same unity to smear those who don’t agree with him.
Here’s a link to an essay:
http://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2010/07/the-oneparty-media-maimon-schwarzschild.html
The author coins a new name for what we have been calling the MSM. She points out that it is not mainstream. It is “One Party” oriented. Yep, it is the media arm of the democrat party. Shall we now call it the democrat media center or DMC? Sounds about right to me.
Paradoxically, these journo-advocates are actaully making the case for Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House. It seems that it’s only when Republicans are in control that the “journo-lists” are willing to do their job and hold elected officials accountable for their actions.
Adrian,
More to the point during the campaign, did the journolists believe that supporting a pastor who feeds young blacks AIDS conspiracies and left brain/right brain ignorance is really the way a president should inspire them and serve as their role model? The race baiters and radicals Obama hung with have done more to harm blacks in the last few decades than anything else. That Obama accepted their clichee victim lines told me back then that he was pretty dumb. Obama’s ruling class standards (You get an Ivy degree or you are nothing) and his condescension toward those who don’t make the grade are not what poor blacks need. Of course, the journolists have probably had very little real contact with poor blacks. They were all attending Bernstein’s radical chic gatherings instead.
“And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us.”
This also explains their silly ‘repudiate the racists at your tea party’ game…
“Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?”
It’s even about using the race card… except against a group instead of a person.
They have gotten off on the excitement of the back room conspiracy of their fantasy world, laid out, but what they believe they serve is not what they serve. the ideal they hold in their minds of what their making is not what they are making.
they are blindly walking a path to somewhere, and they are trusting where someone told them they are going
Always the same… as the end is always the same…
and until history invents some new method they just copy
Protesters and police scuffled Tuesday at a school board meeting in North Carolina over claims that a new busing system would resegregate schools, roiling racial tensions reminiscent of the 1960s.
The Wake County School Board has voted multiple times over the last several months to scrap the district’s diversity policy, which distributed students based on socioeconomics and for years had been a model for other districts looking to balance diversity in schools.
Barber’s supporters believe the new policy will resegregate schools. They carried signs that read: “Segregate equals hate” and “History is not a mystery. Separate is always unequal.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100720/ap_on_re_us/us_busing_fuss
Slander is not a legitiamte or defensible political tactic.
It’s a sin. A very grave one.
That is what the Left is. That is what it does. There are no rules. There is no morality. There is no truth. There is power, and brutality, and bullying, and ruling, and controlling.
That is all. Nothing else. The sooner we admit such things, the better off we will be. Before you can fight a thing, it is imperative to know what that thing is; and to face it and name it with unflinching honesty.
Nothing else works. Everything else fails. And in this case, failure means the return to barbarism and servitude. It is unthinkable.
At some point wouldn’t it make sense for a conservative group to target high profile lefty news types for in depth investigations of their personal lives as a way to encourage honesty in reporting? What the media did to America with the election of Obama is clearly a threat to our way of life. Some kind of hard ball is in order.
Hardball absolutely. With gusto and forethought.
The hardest ball of all is the truth. Told plainly. Told often. Dug up. Researched. Shouted from the rooftops. 24/7. 365.
I remember reading a book by, I think, Gore Vidal, about the 1890’s and the Adams and William Randolph Hearst. Maybe Hearst was the first!
I like the sound of DMC if it could catch on. Nothing works like a good label.
Artfldgr, tell ’em where that particular bit of disinformation originated, and which “organization” was proud as hell at having generated it.
The president of the soviet union Gorbachev admitted that the AIDS conspiracies were KGB active measures they used to deflect attention from their accident at a plant making weaponized anthrax. basically a bit went out an air vent/chimney, and a plume of death killed a bunch of people and I think some livestock.
it was picked up by CBS Evening News and anchor Dan Rather reported this charge on March 30, 1987
Yevgeni Primakov in 92 admitted that “the KGB planted stories in the late 1980s which alleged that the HIV virus was the result of a Pentagon experiment.”
They also spread rumors that Americans (and other nationalities) were adopting children to take parts for transplants.
i would look into a man named Georgi Arbatov…
“We have a ‘secret weapon’ that will work almost regardless of the American response — we would deprive America of The Enemy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/08/opinion/l-it-takes-two-to-make-a-cold-war-963287.html?pagewanted=1
how’s that Occam? 🙂
It’s Journalist … not “Journolist”
There is a site that documents on a daily basis leftist slants (or non-coverage) of events. I have linked to it before and will again below. I recall Neo linking to at least one article from that site in the past, though I no longer remember the specifics:
http://www.newsbusters.org/
LennyS: No, it’s JournoList.
T Says:
“It seems that it’s only when Republicans are in control that the “journo-lists” are willing to do their job and hold elected officials accountable for their actions.”
I wish it were so but I spent most of the 2000’s on fact checking site and most of what these guys had to say about republicans, back then, was nonsense.
So, they’re not even good for that…
Thanks Artlfdgr and Occams. I vaguely remember reading that here before, but still it takes a special type of idiot to believe it and spread it around. Funny thing is that there is a kern of truth about the anthrax part. See here and follow the enclosed link to Building 470:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick
I worked there at NCI in the 80s and walked by Anthrax Tower almost daily without protective clothing and without fear. An NCI administrator I knew worked at Detrick when it was a biological warfare research center. He told me that developing the deadly bugs was never the problem; it was figuring out how to use them so your side didn’t get killed too. I guess that would be illustrated if it were true that a virus created in rural MD managed to hop unobserved across the country and end up in SF. It would also be a stretch to think the army dreamed up anal intercourse as a weapons delivery system. Do you think the army also figured out a way to delete the skepticism gene from Dan Rather and Rev Wright?
I haven’t checked out the right brain/left brain source, but it’s quite clear that in certain people of mixed race like Jeremiah neither side functions particularly well. I don’t have 2 Ivy League degrees to certify my superior intelligence like Obama does, but I do have the integrity not to give credence to Wright. Oprah figured that out too. Of course, I wasn’t looking for street creds and Oprah didn’t need them. Funny how the Journolist folks are probably those who attack us for not respecting science.
“I think the problem began when journalism went from a trade to a profession.”
Good observatioin, rickl. Reporters have always leaned to the left but there used to be two things counteracting this. One was that many of the publishers leaned right. The LAT and Chi Tribune were noted for their very Republican, right-wing editorial pages. Now these papers are run by heirs who, never having worked an honest job in their lives, are guilt-ridden liberals. The other as you alluded to is that reporters used to feel that regardless of their political preference the number one job was to get the facts. The hard-bitten Front Page types had sensitive BS detectors and you couldn’t get any baloney past them no matter which side of the aisle you were on. The upper-middle class kids now coming out of J-schools see themselves as high priests and priestesses dispensing wisdom to the unwashed masses. Facts are useful only if they further the agenda.
Like neo, I am a latecomer to the right – did not vote for a Republican for POTUS until 2004. I would probably still be considered a “RINO” by some, especially on social issues. But there is one area where I am more rabid than Limbaugh, Coulter and Beck combined – my seething outrage at the MSM. They are utterly mendacious AND very stupid. My contempt for them is virtually limitless.
What these emails vividly show — veritably screaming at us — is that the Left is at war and our side is not rising to the challenge. The Left is highly organized and it is cutting a swath through the heart of this country like Panzers through Poland. Except for Rush, Beck, Horowitz, Breitbart, and Palin, the number of high profile voices taking the battle to the Left is pitifully few, and includes none in Congress (none of whom would even side with Barton’s “shakedown” remarks). Breitbart and Horowitz know how to fight. I wish I saw more like them.
“But will enough people know or care?”
Those that know and care already know and care. But they don’t add up to much when you think about the willfully blind exemplified by Maksim in this image:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/blinded_by_media_bias.php
“The New Media? Whatever for? I’ve got my Mainstream Media. If it’s not reported by the NY Times, WAPO, the three networks or CNN, It’s not worth knowing.”
Exposure isn’t enough. Consequences are necessary. Absent consequences, the monster just shrugs and lies on.
“Yeah, so journalism is a vast left-wing conspiracy–so what else is new?”
Myself, I’ve never thought that leftists could manage to mount more than a half-vast conspiracy.
“We found something different than what leading theories of emotional memory in adults say,” Brainerd said. Those theories say that “When you’re involved in a very negative experience of some sort, like a crime, it focuses your mind, and you really pay attention to details.
“But our research showed that exactly the opposite is true. By manipulating the emotional content of word lists, we found that materials that had negative emotional content in fact produced the highest levels of false memory. And when you add arousal to the equation, memory was distorted more.” Two experimental psychologists in China have contacted Brainerd to say that they have successfully replicated all of these results.
Brainerd and Reyna’s work “shows that these leading adult theories — namely that your memory is preferentially accurate for negative emotional experiences — are wrong,” Brainerd said. “We’ve been able to show that memory is most distorted in those situations.”
http://www.physorg.com/print198910620.html
Ilion,
A “half-vast conspiracy?” That is priceless.
Lindsay Bower (above 3:30 am) writes:
“What these emails vividly show – veritably screaming at us – is that the Left is at war and our side is not rising to the challenge.”
I don’t think it’s about rising to the challenge, I think it’s about having a finger on the trigger. In that regard, I think that Andrew Breitbart is the most important figure in this cultural war at this time. Limbaugh and Coulter write and provide facts, but Breitbart provides video and audio evidence, and his timing as almost flawless. He has shown a talent for baiting the left, and he understands them so well that (for now) they always take the bait and wind up wriggling on the hook.
I can just feel the leftist establishment cringe when Breitbart says something like “we’ll have something for you tomorrow.” I think that in very short order he will become more hated than even Rush Limbaugh (if that hasn’t happened already).
Fourth Estate, Fifth Column: A distinction without a difference.
As many, here and other places, have stated time and time again: The Left projects onto the Right that which they do in spades. Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy? Fake and made up. Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy? Just look at JournoList for starters. Tarring the Tea Partiers as racists is also a part of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.
Journalism ethics: A new and improved oxymoron for the 21st Century. More like journaljizm with such ‘stars’ as Christiane Ahmawhore or Helen ‘Jews Back to the Ovens’ Thomas or Maureen ‘Ellipses’ Dowd, Chrissy ‘Tingles’ Matthews, etc.
Aside from politics, what kind of person enjoys spoils gained through deceit? Normally moral people with a conscience get no satisfaction from such a life.
It is important to spread this far and wide. Not so much to persuade conservatives or even independents — they know the media are biased — but to confront liberals with it. Liberals really don’t believe that the media are biased. Just get into a conversation with one and mention it. You get this reflexive, Pavlovian response: “The media are owned by big corporations, therefore they cannot be left-wing.” (Never mind that the statement makes no sense.)
Liberals live in a world in which they are victims, a heroic minority fighting against oppression. Shoving evidence in their faces that they are actually supporting a conspiracy of the powerful may help them overcome those delusions.
Rising to the challenge?
yeah… like women woudl allow men to oppose them and actually fight the war they are fighting against them…
in case you havent missed it i explained that thsi is the social equivalent of threatening a piece on a chessboard but having the threatening piece covered by others. ‘
in this way, the oppressor group is held down as the vultures kick at it.
you cant oppose that, unless your willing to oppose feminist PC, and all that too. which has been my point and case since the beginning.
you cant do that, then you don’t win.
the leading feminist women are allowed to talk about extermination of males… how much can males talk about the extermination of women to solve their social problems? [not that we are that stupid]
i only use them as they are the most forward group everyone knows that operates under their noses.
but if you cant see that they normalize oppressor oppressed dialectical reasoning as applied to natural species mates, and that they are not fighting fair (which is the point of the dialectical process of hegel).
like che, they prefer their victims to be helpless, so that they can revel in the sadistic pleasure of it all. to feel power, as that is the only way for them to tell they have it. to keep doing things we don’t want, so that we cant stop them and so they know they have the power. welcome to the neurosis of aristocratic children (as the self made men who left their money to them were not that way).
we are not going to give up on a group in which we falsely bleive gave us so much. and who are now equated with women, so oppositino is equated to opposing women, not some organizational structure.
its a faite accompli…
[however, i keep thinking of the new future as a re do scene from pythons holy grail. the king is coming across the fields. the first couple are seen ass in the movie. whose he? must bet he leader of the presidium… how can you tell? he aint covered in s**t. then slide to another couple arguing… one man shoveling s**t and some woman harping on him about how next time women will not fail… as he keeps shoveling]
My only real surprise is that the public became aware of it before Obama finished his second term.
any one want to send this to a certian fox 5 guy?
rt.com/prime-time/2010-07-12/moscow-bomb-shelters-outskirts.html?fullstory
Starting in the Brezhnev period, Russia has been pursuing construction of a massive underground facility at Yamantau Mountain and the city of Mezhgorye (formerly the settlements of Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16). The complex, reportedly being built by tens of thousands of workers, is said to cover an area of up to 400 square miles, the size of the Washington area inside the Beltway.
Given its reported size it may span as much as an entire degree of latitude and longitude.
what do they know that we don’t?
“The US government has implemented no comparable program since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991”
If the Cold War is over, then why are Russian authorities building new bomb shelters?
There are only two countries that could lob things at Russia. the US, and China. Russia has an open alliance with China which was created in 2001.
Tu-95 strategic bombers test-fired cruise missiles at targets in the Pemboi last week…
news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-07/17/c_13402516.htm
see: Shanghai Cooperation Organization
see: Peace Mission 2010
more active measures:
Russian Military Oligarch Accuses the CIA and MI-6 of Flooding Russia with Drugs
http://www.pravda.info/kompromat/1203.html
http://www.zavtra.ru/cgi/veil/data/zavtra/04/565/13.html
Yes, they have for this ideal. They control the Bagram airfield, from where to fly military transport aircraft to the U.S. military base in Germany. This database is for two years became the largest transit point, from which Afghan heroin goes to other U.S. bases and installations in Europe. Especially a lot goes to the former Yugoslavia, in Kosovo. And from there, and the Kosovo Albanian drug mafia again to import heroin into Germany and other EU countries.
– How big is the volume of the American drug trafficking in Europe and who is behind all this?
– This is about 15-20 tons of heroin a year. When open Poznan, I think it might be 50 or even 70 tons. And behind this intelligence, the CIA and DIA. In fact, already been in Indochina in 60-70-ies and in Central America in the 80’s.
how long before we hear in the US leftist press about the military industrial complex wanting Afghanistan to control the drug market?
Dale-Scott, Peter (2003). “11, “Opium, the China Lobby, and the CIA””. Drugs, oil, and war: the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780742525221.
not that long… 🙂
CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan
“U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.”
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/11/24/cia-heroin-still-rule-day-in-afghanistan.html
Have to love international feminism, no?
for those musing as to whats going on, and dont like my long posts… how many would know ANY of this? and any one notice that i am way way way ahead of glenn beck? (maybe he reads us?) 🙂
and dont foget to add this domestic change.
how long before we use this for precedent in our laws?
Russia OKs law that casts shadows of KGB
http://www.startribune.com/world/98640074.html
“It’s a plain attempt on the part of the FSB to return to the old KGB methods … when a person committed no crime but still became an object of KGB attention,” said Nikita Petrov, a historian with the Memorial human rights group who specializes in the KGB.
Despite the outcry, the bill sailed to a 354-96 vote in the Duma
only the headline was supposed to be bold, not the whole print… sorry
Artfl dodger wrote (10:22 am above)
“to keep doing things we don’t want, so that we cant stop them and so they know they have the power. welcome to the neurosis of aristocratic children. . .”
Sounds also like petulant adolscents: Name calling; tantrums when they don’t get their own way; hating and dissing mommy and daddy (the private sector) while expecting them to continue to pay for things. What they need is a good spanking. We can only hope that the spanking will commence with a conservative/libertarian march to the sea in November and follow up with a repeal of Obamacare in th 112th congress.
In the 1983 movie “Under Fire” Nick Nolte plays a photojournalist who stages a phony picture to advance the cause of anti-Somoza insurgents in Nicaragua. He struggles with the morality and professional ethics of his action.
The issue is resolved for us, the audience, at the appearance of Ed Harris, a thoroughly amoral American mercenary who rises from hiding beneath a pile of corpses. He is jokingly familiar with Nolte, having crossed paths in several of the world’s hell-holes. His side seems to be losing while Nolte’s is winning. He shrugs amiably as he turns away and says, “See you in Thailand.”
With guys like that on the other side, then merely manipulating information for a good cause is easily justified.
An example of journalism and its power: Obama and his birth certificate. Do a study and see if you can factually prove he is a citizen. You will see that the best documentary proof is not available. The Supreme Court has not decided the issue; they decided to not hear the issue. The best proof for Obama’s citizenship is hearsay testimony about the longform certificate from a government official whose testimony doesn’t prove the issue one way or another. However, all those facts aren’t debated or even allowed to be debated because somehow or another all “sensible” people have decided to even look at the facts is to become an extremist or rascist. This issue is a text book case of the triumph of the manipulation and controlling of information by journalists. To prove it, start digging and see what you get.
It is actually worse than any conspiracy, it is a triumph of ideology over truth and common sense. And people became desperate. One commenter of to-day wretchard post wrote:
“I just don’t think we can ever clean the Augean stables of the Left. The manure is too deep and too wide spread. The only way it can happen is if somehow a committed Conservative achieves more or less dictatorial status, and can simply command that things be so.
It would have to be someone of deep and abiding honor, who would muck the shite out, likely imprison or execute tens of thousands of traitors, throw millions of invaders out of the country, demolish much of the Federal government while greatly expanding the military, devolve power back to the states, and then step down to return power to the elected representatives of the people. Basically, Revolution 2.0. Yet who can this possibly be? Sarah Palin? As if. (Not to smear that fine lady, but she is no savior.)”
A very dark vision, really, but probably correct.
It is actually worse than any conspiracy, it is a triumph of ideology over truth and common sense.
well said Sergey, at least someone gets it…
Sergey,
Not a dark vision, but a bright future needing much work. A single leader can not do this, the solution is to think of this as a beginning and begin to place people of limited govt mind in positions where they can begin cleaning out one of the Augean stalls. Once you get 100,000 beareaucrats of such a mind in place, the leaders job simply becomes making sure they do THEIR job. Once you have 100,000 stalls cleaned, the stables are well on their way to being cleaned up.
It is hard work requiring a clear vision and it will take a long time, but remember the manure has been accumulating for the last 50 years.
Artfldgr,
That’s why I have been fascinated by magicians and movies such as The Matrix; illusion over reality. Illusion is what the left trades in on a daily basis; not racial equity, but the appearance of racial equity, not economic stability but the appearance of economic stability, not individual freedom, but the appearance of individual freedom.
As I have said before, I am very excited about the long-term future of this country because I believe that we are seeing the left and leftist policies finally exposed for what they really are. The internet’s 24/7 information cycle is only helping to spread that exposure. The public dialogue has become rancorous because for the first time the one-party media no longer has a stranglehold on “reporting” what’s going on out there and the silent majority is starting to respond; and are they pissed.
The people are rearing up!
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-bell-hefty-salaries,0,3545022.story
I always wondered how it was that liberals seemed to simultaneously mouth the same talking points. After all, not being principled they can only posture about some lie or another and they seem to posture about the same lies in unison. I suspect that the Journo-list web site was one of their incubators for the postures of the day or week. Once they decided that a particular person was a racist, for example, without regard to the truth (or the consequences to the victim of that claim, which makes it truly evil), they all made the same claim at the same time and gave substance, through volume and repetition, to the lie of the day. Bush lied, people died was one the best lies. Another related lie was the sexing up of the intelligence by that idiot Bush (who was supposedly really stupid but somehow smart enough to outsmart the Democrats into voting for the war in Iraq). The Journal-ists are now all marked men (or women).
It’s hard to fight back against the posture of the day because the truth is harder to tell and requires time to relate, unlike a smarmy talking point. Moreover, one doesn’t want to stoop to that level. These Journo-lists are very insecure and immature and probably will never grow up.
Palin has learned the trick, though. Ignore them and communicate directly with people over the internet to get a mature point of view across. FOX News also scares liberals, as it negates their message and pulls the undecided towards reason and maturity.
We have been through this before and will come out all the stronger from the antics of the Dope. In the 1930’s communism and fascism were the darlings of the intelligentsia. They had good homes in HArvard, Yale, Columbia and a slew of other academic havens. Mussolini was all the fad until Italy invaded Ethiopia. FDR prided himself on saving the country from fascism as he brought us ever and ever closer to it. And, capitalism was not so well regarded then. The Dope could not administer the marxist poison to us slowly, so he woke up a sleeping capitalist giant in the Tea Party. Soon enough (maybe 2102), we will be free of excessive regulation (which is the prime cause of our loss of jobs), tax policy will modified reflect reality and growth and the economy will take off. I hope I am around to see it.
Curtis–Over these last 18 months Obama has proved to be a brazen liar, a fraud and a con man on every issue and on every level, and quite a long time ago I decided that the evidence pointed to Obama not being a “natural born citizen” either, and thus not eligible to run for or to be President.
Moreover, if any confirmation of his ineligibility were needed, that fact that he and the DNC have reportedly spent over $2 million dollars so far and kept several law firms busy flying attorneys around the country to appear in various courts to block each and every one of the reportedly more than a hundred suits that have been filed by ordinary U.S. citizens trying to force Obama to produce his long form, original birth certificate is that confirmation. You don’t go to all that trouble and spend $2 million dollars if your long firm birth certificate, that conclusively proves your eligibility, is sitting, very easily available, in your safe deposit box.
Curiously, every court, from state courts all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, has shut such efforts down, not by proceeding to call for the production of this birth certificate and settling this issue once and for all by an examination of that document, but, instead, by ruling on the threshold issue of “standing.” These courts have all ruled that those U.S. citizens and voters seeking to have the courts force Obama to produce his original, long form birth certificate to prove that he meets the test required by the Constitution do not “have a dog in this fight,” that none of them can prove that they would be harmed in any substantial way if Obama is not eligible to be President, and so these various courts are relieved of having to go forward to an actual proceeding to force the production and examination of this document. Some courts have also justified their rulings by saying that, in any case, the window to object to Obama’s status was open for just the 90 days prior to the actual election and has closed, or that since the DNC and Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker “certified” Obama as meeting the Constitutional test, these suits are moot, while other judges have berated petitioners for even raising the issue, and one judge has fined Orly Taitz, the lawyer for some of the most prominent of the questioners, $20,000 for her temerity in repeatedly pressing for answers.
I happen to think that saying that U.S. citizens and voters would not be and have not been harmed if Obama is not eligible, nor have the right to see the proof that Obama has complied with the Constitutional requirement is utter bullshit, and that the courts are simply not willing to delve into an issue so obviously fraught with the direst of consequences for the judges and courts who might touch this radioactive issue, and for the U.S. if they were actually given judicial scrutiny. So, they punted.
I also happen to think that the questions and issues, outlined in the legal brief originally filed by Philadelphia attorney and former Democratic Party official Philip Berg, which first sought this birth certificate, deserve very close attention.
Berg’s brief raised the question of the operation and requirements with regard to Obama’s citizenship status of the web of U.S., Kenyan and Indonesian laws, regulations and procedures in effect at the time of Obama’s presumed date of birth, of the legal effects of Obama and his mother’s travels, and of Obama’s residence in Indonesia to age 10 when he traveled to Honolulu, a brief which raised questions about the statements by Obama’s Kenyan paternal grandmother and sister, who (until they were silenced) very proudly proclaimed that they were present and witnessed Obama’s birth in Kenya at a Mombassa hospital, which has a record showing the birth of the son to Barack Obama Sr. at about the time Obama is supposed to have been born in Honolulu. A brief that raised questions about the absence of an original, long form birth certificate that would have listed the name of the supposed Hawaiian hospital where Obama was born, and which would bear the signature and name of the doctor who delivered Obama.
Curious, isn’t it, that none of Honolulu hospital records attesting to Obama’s birth there have ever been produced, and that none of the doctors, nurses or other staff of the Honolulu hospitals where Obama was supposedly born–again, curiously, not one hospital has been specified but two, one specified by Obama and a different Honolulu hospital specified by his sister–have ever come forward to say, “yeah, I delivered Obama, or I was there when Obama was delivered, or I saw him and his mother in the hospital after the delivery” or that no family friend or acquaintance has come forward, either, to say, “yeah, I visited Obama’s mother and saw the newborn Obama in the hospital,” or to say they “saw them right after they arrived home from the hospital. ”
And, finally, a brief that raised questions about the details and effect on Obama’s citizenship status of his parent’s citizenship status, and about the legal effects of the residency history and age of Obama’s mother at his birth; none of these very pertinent questions has ever been answered to this day.
Of course, Obama & Co. and the MSM have also been extremely successful in using the Alinskyite tactics of ridicule and name calling to marginalize all those who have dared to question Obama’s eligibility to be President, by labeling them with their newly coined pejorative term of “Birther,” the utterance of which is supposed to shut down all further debate, and it has been pretty successful in doing so. And now, of course, we can see, via the recent revelations about “Journolist,” just how such a smear campaign by the MSM, designed to protect Obama from his enemies and to marginalize and destroy them, is organized and coordinated behind the scenes.
Bottom line, Obama has very carefully obscured, artificially constructed, or brazenly lied to our faces about everything so far–about his background, about his basic outlook and philosophy, about his political orientation, about his positions, plans and goals, about his actions, and the results of those actions.
So, why would it be so unbelievable that Obama would also very brazenly lie about his citizenship status, and about his Constitutional eligibility to run for and to be President, when he calculated that with the connivance of the DNC and Congressional Democrats, with the support of the MSM, with an increasingly Leftist and gun shy Judicial system, and a trusting electorate that has had no experience of and is, therefore, not on the lookout for such monumental and brazen fraud, he could get away with it, and no one would have the temerity to or could successfully question his credentials.
When I was in Journalism…. 20 years ago, in HS and College, the mantra there was of COURSE the journalists were left-wing. Natch.
But the editors, oho, they were Hard-Line Republican! Tada! Balance! Checks! All is well with the world.
I didn’t find that that plausible back then, and as time passed, and more “journalists” moved into “editor” positions (and the bar/experience level was moved to apparently 21 for senior positions?!) it’s become laughable.
But some people still report it as the gospel truth, even today.
http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-far-weve-come.html
That’s the sort of thing that got me out of journalism (luckily). The groupthink and mantras that even then were almost parodies then.
T–from my experience with the Federal bureaucracy, such a cleaning of the “Augean stables,” and the hiring of, say, 100,000 new conservative Federal employees in order to change the entire orientation and attitude of the Federal service, would be impossible under the current Civil Service system that is in place and “the ways things are done” at present.
First, you have to understand the little appreciated fact that when he comes into office a new President gets to try to “control” the Cabinet Agencies, the Executive Branch and the Military by appointing roughly somewhere between 800 and 1,200 of “his people” to be his managers and advocates, to sit atop and direct the myriad agencies and organizations that comprise the gigantic millions-strong Federal bureaucracy, and just finding the people to fill those top level positions alone (start with an arduous and exhaustive 50+ page disclosure form for high level positions requiring Congressional confirmation that throws the whole of your life, background and finances open to an investigation by Congressional staffers–hardly a nonpartisan and disinterested lot–and whose details can sometimes, somehow, be “leaked”) can be a daunting task, and many such positions are never filled and just remain vacant or are only filled for a short time and the person leaves to take another position, which usually means that an “acting” person is put in charge, drawn from the very often recalcitrant bureaucracy that the President is usually trying to manhandle into getting it to do what he wants it to do.
In practice, this means that the President appoints a head for each agency, plus perhaps a couple or occasionally a few more people to high level management positions to be his advocates, who have to first get oriented to their agencies, to its power structure and ways, and who will then likely have just a few short years remaining in which to try to see to it that that President’s policies are fully and faithfully carried out by their agency.
So, you have to imagine, say, a leader and at most a half dozen of the “President’s men,” at the top, and issuing orders and trying to control the vast pyramid beneath them, sometimes consisting of thousands of employees, but more often consisting of tens or hundreds of thousand of employees who have their own politics, who have their own priorities and agendas, who are used to doing things their way, and who can basically ignore, “misinterpret,” go slow on, or sabotage any initiatives and orders they don’t like. Thus, any such control and major change would require much more and deeper penetration and control by the “President’s men” than is presently the case.
On the other end of things, you have to realize that in addition to the complex hiring and firing regulations promulgated by the Office of Personnel Management (that can require hiring procedures that can sometimes take a year or more of paperwork and effort to get an ordinary candidate for a position hired and on the job, but which can also be lightning fast for a candidate that management likes, when it uses its power to cut through the red tape and/or it sets up a “wired” position, tailor made for the candidate they want to get the job) and in practice each individual agency can develop its own specific interpretations and exemptions from these general rules, which means that management can usually find ways to hire, retain and promote pretty much whoever they want, can also find some reason to turn down pretty much whoever they want, and despite the very lengthily, arduous and exacting firing procedures in place, can usually make life miserable enough to drive out those they want to get rid of. In one example, reported in the Washington Post a few years ago, a whistleblower informed the Post that after other Federal agencies had abandoned the practice, the Library of Congress was still using forced mental examinations by psychiatrists of their choosing–(object to such a test and refuse to take it and you “proved” you had a problem, and you were immediately fired) as a tool to get rid of those employees that it claimed had various “mental problems,” and were people that management very badly wanted gone.
Thus, in order to hire such large numbers of conservative Federal workers that you would be able to achieve major changes in the orientation and attitudes of the massive Federal bureaucracy—which I believe is now generally quite Left leaning in orientation–would require that all of the hiring officials and procedures currently in place would have to be radically and quickly restructured, particularly since time is the great ally of the bureaucracy. For they figure that long after you have spent the couple of years you have available to try to make the changes you want to, and have been bogged down by red tape and delays and ceased to be a problem and to bother them, they will still be in power and working away at their desks, doing what they want to do, the way they want to do it.
Wolla Dalbo,
Fair enough. A gargantuan task. So, approach it from the other direction—-instead of hiring hundreds of thousands or federal positions, start to work eliminating many of those positions.
I never said it would be easy or pleasant or quick. Get the cabinet in place and have each secretary develop directives for each dept under his/her control as to which divisions will be eliminated. Don’t eliminate positions, eliminate entire divisions.
As for the federal paperwork, that’s why God created executive orders.
Only part of the problem is the size of the bureaucracy which is why I found Obama’s own promises to change business as usual without merit. The other part is those that we send to solve it.
It’s not that the Republicans are better at it than Democrats, it’s that both parties see themselves as a governing aristocracy—both parties are members of the same political elite. People like Barney Frank or Bob Etheridge reveal themselves with their arrogance as the same kind of snobbish dismissive aristocracy that the French Rebelled against in the 18th century.
For their part, Republicans after potent influence (or control) from 1994 to 2008, did not move to eliminate a single federal program or bureaucratic department. Republicans object to the expansion of govt, but after liberal Democrat programs are in place, they simply go with the flow.
“Journalism is politics by another name.”
http://weblog.theviewfromthecore.com/2004_04/ind_003503.html
The Daily Caller has more from JournoList today. I wonder how many of the list members are getting little sleep, trying to remember what they wrote, and wishing they hadn’t decided to delete a lot of old messages from their JournoList e-mail folder. 🙂
Sorry.
Above at 7:19 should read:
“Republicans after potent influence (or control) from 1994 to 2006 . . .”
Wolla Dalbo: thanks for bringing up the citizenship issue.
I don’t happen to think that Barack Obama is not a US citizen, or that he is not qualified by citizenship to be President. (I think he’s unqualified by having never run anything larger than a nylon stocking, but that’s another matter.)
It does, however, bother me that the President of the United States was asked to display his birth certificate, and he refused. It bothers me VERY much to live in an environment where it’s scandalous even to raise the subject.
It likewise bothers me that we have not, during the campaign or since, heard from ANYONE who knew Barack Obama… other than the ones his campaign told to talk. (One or two extremely rare exceptions were immediately shushed up by the campaign, e.g. his illegal-immigrant aunt in Boston.)
This is unbelievable. Does no one remember taking classes with him at Columbia or Harvard? Is no one willing to talk on the record about what he was like as a neighbor, or a boyfriend? Is no one even willing to step forward and say the equivalent of “he bought peat moss from me once, and he paid his bill”?
(Yes, Neo, that one’s for you.)
Or try this on for size. When was the last time you saw a photograph of President Obama with a cigarette in his mouth? His last annual checkup, as I recall, included a comment about how he really should smoke less.
The man gets away with things no politician, Democrat or Republican, has ever been allowed to get away with — in large part because of the abdication of our Fourth Estate, but also because far too many of us were willing to fall in love with the man at first sight, without knowing anything at all about him.
Someday a lot of things will be known that aren’t public knowledge today — what were the circumstances of Obama’s birth (and why he was cagey about it), what his freakin’ college grades were, and so on. It’ll be depressing, I suspect, but very illuminating, to see what they were hiding from us… and what fools we’ve been.
One more example — a totally fact-free one, in this case. I predicted, at the time of Obama’s election, that during his time in office, he would have an infidelity scandal. (I made this prediction without knowing anything at all about Obama’s personal life or married life. However, this does seem to be the pattern of young Presidents who act like rock stars and expect to be treated like rock stars, e.g. Clinton and Kennedy; throw in FDR if you like. If you want to observe that these men were also all Democrats, go right ahead.)
I still have no basis to believe that President Obama has been anything but completely faithful to his wife. However, I’m now less confident that, if contrary evidence existed, we’d ever hear about it. If we can’t even see a picture of the man with a cigarette, how likely is a picture of a mistress? If we can’t even find someone who sat next to him in class at Harvard Law School, how likely would a latter-day Monica Lewinsky be to speak up?
The silence is deafening. And, I strongly suspect, that’s exactly how President Obama likes it.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
too bad the thread ended before this article came up!
The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704684604575381083191313448.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
My response has usually been to say, yes, there’s liberal bias in the media, but there’s no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn’t be the case.
Now, after learning I’d been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I’m inclined to amend my response.
Here’s an interesting follow-up to my thoughts from yesterday.