Archive for the ‘Blogs vs. MSM’ Category

The “Fact Checking” Fad

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

James Taranto savages the “fact-checking” fad. It’s your must-read column of the day. Maybe even for the week.

The “fact check” is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four “Pinocchios,” just like movie reviewers giving out stars.

Like movie reviewing, the “fact check” is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be “fact checked.” The facts themselves are sufficient. “Fact checks” end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican).

Example: USA Today has a “reality check” of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:

Narrator: “Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .
Obama: “. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”
Narrator: “How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America.”

The USA Today headline reads “Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context.” In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes “used in a misleading way.” Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:

“We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

One the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are “just” doing so.

We’re slowly going insane, you know; confusing the subjective with the objective is the first milestone to complete insanity.

One More Thing On That Veep Debate

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

You know how the CNN news-babe had her teleprompter programmed to reminder her that Whoah, we have an overwhelming consensus that Biden won the debate!

Well, that was fishy from the get-go because anyone watching for themselves could see the special CNN panel was more-or-less deadlocked.

For those who care about consensus-politics…which is most people…Blogger Friend Phil has gone through and tallied up the votes. Hit the freeze-frame button just as many times as he needed to. And yes, indeed, it would appear that whether fourteen is a bigass overwhelming number or a teeny-weeny throwaway number depends…entirely, not just a little bit…on fourteen of what, exactly?

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the CNN Zone!

This is why we have blogs, folks. You really have to wonder what kind of crap we were being sold by Jennings, Rather, Brokaw, Cronkite, et al. You really do have to stop and seriously wonder. This bullshit has a long history of working; if it didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying it.

Soledad’s Teleprompter: Not Always Helpful For Her

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

H/T: Neo-Neocon

Brings to mind one of those things I know…

Thing I Know #259. The first grade teacher says “may I see a show of hands…” and this should not send a roomful of heads swiveling from side to side. But it does. Always. Left…right…swoosh, swoosh. Everyone wants to see how the other guy is answering. Most of them never grow out of that. In fact, those are tomorrow’s bosses. Trouble is, nobody ever solved a problem by emulating the guy who made it.

What you’re seeing here, is communication — embarrassing communication — from those head-swooshers to other head-swooshers. “This is what everybody thinks.”

Who ya gonna believe…the teleprompter, or your lyin’ eyes?

Paging Saturday Night Live

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

This is just crying out for decent satire.

IfillQuestions are being raised about the objectivity of Thursday’s vice presidential debate moderator after news surfaced that she is releasing a new book that appears to promote Barack Obama and other black politicians who have benefited from the civil rights struggle.

Gwen Ifill, of PBS’ “The NewsHour,” is expected to remain as moderator, however.

“The book has been a known factor for months, so I’m not sure what the big deal is,” said NewsHour spokeswoman Anne Bell.

Aw gee, Anne. I dunno. What a big mystery!

Here’s a question. What in the world would it take, for Anne Bell to see “what the big deal is”? What if Ifill wore an Obama tee shirt to the debate, would that do it? Or sold advance copies of her book before and after? How about if both podiums prominently sported the unmistakable Barack Obama presidential seal? Suppose if the first question put to Gov. Palin was something along the lines of “Isn’t it wonderful that Barack Obama is going to be sworn in this January?”

I’m not satirizing well; I’m satirizing somewhat clumsily. But all this has a basis in reality. Age of Obama. That’s what Gwen Ifill’s upcoming book is about. She’s on record wanting Obama to win, and she stands to profit from it. She’s a moderator. Does Anne Bell really think there’s nothing outta whack here?

She told FOXNews.com that there were no concerns about Ifill’s neutrality…

Liar.

…and that the debate Thursday between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden would go forward as planned. Ifill also moderated the 2004 vice presidential debate.

“We were pleased that the (debate) commission once again turned to Gwen to moderate the debate,” Bell said. “They’ve known and trusted her as a moderator and that’s wonderful.”

Apparently, they didn’t properly “vet” her.

“Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?” said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I find it curious.”

You don’t know what it is — when you’re wanting one of the contenders to win, you’re on record wanting one of them to win, you’ve written a book that is obviously positioned to sell based on the prospects of one of them winning…and you’re the moderator. Not only do you think that’s proper, but you’re at a loss to imagine why anyone would think that’s improper.

Really? Seriously?

I thought you had to be smart to be a journalist. Next to this, Sarah Palin’s failure to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of John McCain’s voting record, is nuthin’.

Where do they find these people? Seriously. I seriously want to know. And I seriously want to know if they think dinosaurs walked the earth four thousand years ago.

H/T: Cassy Fiano.

Update: Newsbusters has a fascinating profile on evening news’ collective decline. I guess we find it fascinating to know what Manhattan’s take on things is from one year to the next…but not that fascinating. The plants need watering, ya know.

H/T: Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Graphic from: Warrentoons, found via Rick.

“The Fix Is In”

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Insty, via Toldjah:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

Truly a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one. I wonder what we weren’t told all those years when whatever Cronkite/Rather/Jennings/Brokaw said, must’ve been the way things were, and there couldn’t possibly be any more to be learned of or said.

Anybody else see what I’m seeing here? Labor…working seemlessly with management…toward a common goal. Among Obama supporters, it seems to be something of a rarity to find anyone who can even believe such a thing is possible. And here, they make it look so easy!

Campbell Brown’s Speech…I Mean, Er, Interview

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Tucker didn’t come off this looking too good.

Nevertheless, I eagerly await someone to approach me with an argument that this was a fair, enlightening interview around the 1:48 mark, at which point Mr. Bounds directly and substantially addressed the question put before him…something I rarely see Messrs. Obama or Biden do, ever.

And it’s pretty damned embarrassing when the Los Angeles Times does a better job than you do at being impartial, even-handed, fair and educational. Good on ya, LAT. When people talk about presenting both sides, I think most would agree this is what they have in mind.

Seeking to buttress the foreign policy credentials of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republicans have repeatedly cited the vice presidential nominee’s experience as commander of the Alaska National Guard.

As governor, Palin oversees military units whose duties include serving overseas, search-and-rescue missions across the state’s vast landscape and manning key elements of the U.S. missile defense system at Ft. Greely. But foreign deployments of Guard units and the operation of national defense assets like the Ft. Greely missile interceptors are not the responsibility of state governors. Those functions come under the regular U.S. military chain of command.
:
Overseeing a state Guard is a “chief executive role” with real management responsibilities, said Mark Allen, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, the federal office that coordinates state National Guards.

“I don’t think people should think it is a casual relationship, or is like the king putting on the medals,” Allen said. “It is not that at all. But the role of the governor is to use the Guard to help the citizens of a state, as opposed to declaring war on a neighboring state.”

See, that’s called presenting both sides. Pro and con. Letting the readers decide for themselves. Campbell Brown could stand to learn something from this…but why in the world should she? She’s proven herself so adept at giving a speech and making it look like an interview.

The article goes on to point out something that hasn’t received a great deal of mention in this little tempest-in-a-teapot —

The Alaska National Guard is unusual in that its jobs include manning part of the U.S. missile defense system. The 49th Missile Defense Battalion works on interceptor missiles designed to shoot down intercontinental missiles.

Members of the Alaska National Guard also were deployed to Iraq, and Palin visited their unit in July 2007. The McCain campaign has pointed to that experience as an example of Palin’s foreign policy background. [emphasis mine]

So it really depends on the point of comparison you’re trying to make. If you’re asking whether the Republican ticket substantially improved its foreign policy credentials the day McCain picked Gov. Palin to be his running mate, the honest answer is no, of course what she possesses in terms of this kind of experience is next to insignificant. If what’s being asked is whether the McCain/Palin ticket is superior to the Obama/Biden ticket in this area of experience, even if something should happen to President McCain on his very first day, then the answer is absolutely yes…and the responsibility as the commander of Alaska’s National Guard, is relevant to qualifying that.

Nevertheless, I do have to admit that where the conversation is going — McCain and Palin are sworn in on a Tuesday, McCain has to step down on that Wednesday, then a standoff emerges on Thursday with Achmadinijad. Can Sarah Palin negotiate with this guy? The answer is probably: Somewhat, but no better than anyone else who is somehow competent to communicate verbally, and briefed here-and-there in whatever way incoming Vice Presidents are briefed.

She has very little helpful experience here. National Guard Commander is worth mentioning elsewhere, but not quite so much here…just admit it. In fact, let’s have a national debate about just that.

But let’s follow through on this good habit, and be even-handed about it. Which means some firm, scrutinizing questions are directed toward the An Idea Bomb guys. Gone, forever, are the days of skating by with weak cliches like “we need to talk with our enemies” — please, Senators, if you could, elaborate on what would be going on in those talks. What would be asked? What would be granted? What would the goals be of such talks, exactly?

I mean, really, how many questions can you think of to ask, that are more important? It’d be only fair.

Yeah, I know. I’m dreaming. Well, back in the world of reality…we’ll be right back with the next soapbox-speech thinly disguised as an interview, after a brief word from our sponsors…

Umbrage

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Jonathan Alter is blaming bloggers and other entities of the innernets for “umbrage”:

All Umbrage All the Time

After a decade of waiting for the first “Internet election,” it’s finally here, and we’re adrift from all the old-media moorings. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” the great critic A. J. Liebling wrote more than half a century ago. Today, of course, we’re all press lords, or can be. But the “crowd-sourcing” of news cuts both ways. Like democracy itself, it can cleanse, correct and ennoble. Or it can coarsen, spread lies and degrade the national conversation.
:
Like senior citizens suffering from dementia, Web users often fall prey to “disinhibition”—the lack of a filter for their most brutal thoughts. In the campaign, this takes the form of an umbrage explosion, where a day rarely passes without someone’s taking grave offense over something.

In the pre-Web era, this was less of a problem. The New Yorker cover satirically depicting Obama as a flag-burning Muslim and Michelle as a gun-toting radical would have been seen by only a few hundred thousand subscribers, almost all of whom would have gotten the joke. Instead, in today’s 24/7 news cycle, it was seen by tens of millions of people. It was the knowledge of such a big audience for the cartoon—other Americans who “wouldn’t understand”—that fueled the over-the-top fury of the Obama supporters.

Meanwhile, as I make my way through this, the guys on the radio are talking about one of Alter’s cool-headed, reasonable old-media moorings, and how they refused to run John McCain’s editorial.

New York Times op-ed editor David Shipley dropped a courteous line to the McCain campaign on why their editorial wouldn’t appear…said editorial written specifically to respond to Obama’s note, which the Times had cheerfully dropped right on in.

Darn those impetuous bloggers, eh Jonathan?.

From: David Shipley/NYT/NYTIMES [mailto:XXXXXXX]
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 8:31 PM
To: XXXXXXX
Cc: XXXXXXX
Subject: Re: JSM Op-Ed

Dear Mr. XXXXXX,

Thank you for sending me Senator McCain’s essay.

I’d be very eager to publish the Senator on the Op-Ed page.

However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.

I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.

Let me suggest an approach.

The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.

It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.

I’m just lovin’ what came next…

I am going to be out of the office next week. If you decide to re-work the draft, please be in touch with Mary Duenwald, the Op-Ed deputy. Her email is XXXXXXXX; her phone is 212-XXXXXXX.

Now look what we have here. We have “reporting” upheld on high as the classical solution to all the world’s problems, but once it’s engaged it could more properly be described as “screening.” Not the conveying of information, but the blocking of it. Oh, goodness, I’m so glad we have David Shipley and Mary Duenwald vigilantly standing guard to make sure I don’t hear anything that isn’t articulate, concrete and laying out a clear plan. I feel so well-informed having all that sub-par chaff kept away from me!

Is that off topic from what Mr. Alter was writing about? I don’t think so; he specifically comes out and says the New Yorker cartoon generated the flap it did, not because it was drawn up, but because too many people found out about it.

So I guess, in his world, there’s less umbrage because information is kept in silos. And these trusted individuals stand watch over it all, making sure this guy over here, doesn’t get hold of that nugget over there.

Yeah. I feel so much better informed now. And, six hundred years ago, I would have felt so much more spiritual after a good blood-letting.

Newspapers Run Out of Anti-Bush Headlines

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Now, here is some good satire. The Peoples’ Cube, via Gerard.

“There are only so many words one can string together while remaining impartial and objective – even if it’s such a fertile topic as our dumb and evil dictator President who is bent on bombing caribou herds back into the Stone Age in Alaska,” says Susan Stein, editor of The Village Voice, a mainstream New York newspaper. “Our paper is getting thinner with every issue. We are now considering running blank pages; we call it a “fill in the blanks” approach. Our readers are extremely educated and knowledgeable; they’ll get the point anyway.”

See how that works? You do not have to be of a certain mindset to get it; you do not have to have certain pre-formed prejudices in order to understand how it emulates reality, and once it does, how it is ridiculous and absurd. It was not created for the purpose of injecting absurdity into where it did not previously exist — it simply points out that the absurdity is there.

It visits itself upon what was strange, surreal, and weird — but subtle. It changes the degree of subtlety without changing the degree of strangeness, surreality or weirdness. As to whether the subject matter was strange or surreal or weird it allows the reader to come to his or her own conclusions…but only after backing the reader into a corner about it. That is good satire. It is not schmatire.

So, a sympathetic sorry-’bout-that to Mr. Pitts, and better luck next time to Ms. Churchwell. Nice try, folks. Satire is not that tricky. You just have to show some cleverness. Find a way to point out what makes sense in things that really do make sense, and point out what’s laughable in things that really are laughable.

Sure you can pump out some stuff designed to switch those two around.

But that’s called “propaganda,” not satire. There’s a difference.

Retired Marine Shoots Crooks

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Yay, retired marine.

Two armed men barged into a Subway Sandwich shop shortly after 11 p.m., demanding money from the employee, behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell – the lone customer, age 71, into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.

Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.

Lovell, 71. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit. Retired US Marine.

But the grandmother of the hoodlum who survived the (hoodlum-initiated) incident, has a beef with the way the media has been portraying this. I dunno what she’s talking about; as far as I know, the most prominent example of how “the media” has portrayed the (hoodlum-initiated) incident is the one I read over here.

I found it to be friendly to the pro-hoodlum side of things, that is, the pro-chaos anti-respect-for-property side, to the point of self-parody. It’s the one that put Grandma’s favorite sound bite right in the freakin’ headline.

Family Of Subway Robbery Suspect Says Customer Shouldn’t Have Pulled Trigger

The family of one of the men who was shot by a retired United States Marine while they attempted to rob a Subway sandwich shop said the customer shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

According to Plantation police, two armed men barged into the Subway at 1949 Pine Island Road shortly after 11 p.m. Wednesday, demanding money from the employee behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.

Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.

Lovell, 71, was the lone customer at the time. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit.

Gadson’s grandparents told Local 10 on Thursday that Lovell was wrong for pulling the trigger.

“He should not have taken the law in his hands,” said Rosa Jones, Gadson’s grandmother.

Her husband, Ivory Jones, also condemned the media for its portrayal of Lovell’s actions.

“I don’t condone what they did, (but) I definitely don’t condone the news people making him out to seem like they’re making a hero out of this man because he shot somebody down,” he said.

Ah yes — as Maxwell Smart would say, THE OL’ “He Shouldn’ta Done It BUT” ploy…oldest one in the book.

He shouldn’ta shot your grandson because the way things are, your poor grandson never knows when he’s going to get shot next? I got a great suggestion. Don’t rob stores.

As Blogger Cap’n opines further…

As stated in the SCOTUS decision – a gun levels the playing field – a victim has a chance against their aggressors. Where else does a 71 year old have a chance against two gun wielding 20 year old? How much imagination does it take to imagine reversing this narrative – an employee and 71 year old customer are found dead in a Subway bathroom? Not much, right?

And how about the criminal being the “victim” here? That sickens me. John Lovell isn’t a vigilante. He defended his life. Now he’s alive. Simple.

And yes, I have rewritten this story, because the first time I read it – it was very anti John Lovell. The fact John is alive was on the bottom of the story, and the Grandma statement was on the masthead of the story. Totally bogus.

Well done, Cap’n. And this is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one.

I do not trust these “shouldn’ta” people. What’s she talking about — and to be more precise about it, why isn’t she getting asked? Is she saying there are two different levels of “shouldn’ta” here, with her grandson violating the lesser one and Mr. Lovell transgressing against the greater one?

If that is the case — add looming injustice to the list of reasons why you shouldn’t rob stores.

If that is not what she is trying to say — what’s the freakin’ problem? Her grandson did something wrong, and found out why you shouldn’t do that.

Either way, in my book she’s been exposed as a proponent of lawlessness. But I know how these things work. She’d deny this in nothing flat and the whole exchange would turn into a “nailing jello to a tree” exercise, as her intended meaning is buried behind thick veils of deceit and obfuscation. I know this because she’s not alone. There are millions of people just like her; they want what they want when they want it, hell with everybody else, and they act like anyone who stands up to them has the same problems they do.

If she’s raising any other grandchildren, I hope they’re taken away. In a sane world, she’d be under investigation for encouraging exactly the anarchy and lawlessness I know she is. One powder-puff press conference and she gets to put John Lovell on the defensive, for doing what he had to do to stay alive. And she takes the opportunity to do it. Good Lord, what a nasty, vile woman.

A Blue State Columnist Comments on Our Gun Culture

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

My goodness, that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, is getting a good workout. Let’s start with the headline of the column:

Walsh: Time to grow up and put your guns away

Christ on a cracker, are we in a competition for the “snooty condescending prick” award here?

I understand the thrill of firing a Glock (I’ve done it), the euphoria of hitting the center of a target (and that, too), generations of family deer-hunting weekends and the legitimate self-preservation instincts of Utah’s elected concealed weapon carriers.

But the OpenCarry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology – overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality – is behind that thinking?

Uh…how about taking real responsibility for something, as in, “I’ll pack the equipment to do it myself if everything else fails”? And since that is a far bigger issue than just the conceal-carry situation, you, Ms. Walsh, have just revealed yourself to be a stranger to that line of thinking. Good. Now I know you’re one of those “I done my bit and if it goes to crap it’s not my fault” people.

Hope nobody’s depending on you for protection.

“Second Amendment questions aside,” says [Anthropologist Charles] Springwood, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, “the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with ‘portable killing machines’ strapped to their bodies?”

Well I dunno. I was born well after the days of the Old West, so I haven’t lived in “a society in which it was an unconscious emblem” blah blah blah. But I was born in the sixties. So I’ve lived in a society in which violent criminals got arrested for damaging property and hurting people, and released on technicalities, and then when men women and children were chopped down like cattle marching to slaughter the law rolled it’s eyes and sighed and said “ah, well.”

Ms. Walsh, I recommend you just think of it as the mark of a civilized society — people living here have the right to defend themselves. That means, if they anticipate something bad might happen to them they can prepare for it, and it’s not the business of you or the busybody lawyers and anthropologists in your rolodex to second-guess ’em about it. Nerdy little boys, getting beaten up by bullies on the playground, can hit back. All that good stuff.

Mark of a civilized society. As opposed to one that requires the people living within it to just sit around waiting to be victimized…which would be the mark of a primitive society.

Oh, and that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, that’s getting such a good workout lately? That would be #27:

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

No Evidence of WMDs…Here

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

From Powerline comes a nugget that is worded so tightly and efficiently that I see no way to “tease” it, so I’ll just quote it in full…

One of the several reasons why the mainstream media have consistently underestimated the significance of the Trinity/Wright/Pfleger story is that, to a considerable degree, conventional reporters and editors tend to agree with Rev. Wright’s critique of America. When Wright said, “God damn America,” reporters thought he’d gone a little too far but didn’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.

A good illustration of this was the New York Times’s article on black liberation theology in which the paper endorsed as true Wright’s claim that the United States has used biological warfare against other nations. (This was cited to explain that the idea of the federal government inventing the AIDS virus in order to exterminate African-Americans was not so far-fetched.)

What on earth could the Times reporter have had in mind? Maybe the old canard about smallpox and the Indians; I can’t think of any other candidates. In any event, this morning’s Times corrects the error:

An article on May 4 about black liberation theology and the debate surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Senator Barack Obama’s former minister, erroneously confirmed a statement by Mr. Wright that the United States has used biological weapons against other countries. There is no evidence that the United States ever did so.

Note, though, that the paper is keeping its options open. Who knows, maybe the evidence will turn up someday.

This usually-unacknowledged sympathy with Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism is, I think, part of the reason why the mainstream press misreported the Wright controversy from the beginning.

I remember the last time I had occasion to think about this. It was…a day and a half ago, Thursday evening, cleaning out my son’s end-of-school homework folder. I found an essay about the Santa Ines Mission. I remember helping him with the photographs & illustrations involved in this, but this was the first time I saw the core thesis. I sent it along to his mother, and didn’t copy it, but I remember about forty percent of the way through it makes brief mention of the fact that the Indians burned down the Mission in 1824. It had been rebuilt since then but did not resume it’s missionary functions after that.

The punch in the gut was the very last sentence, something about how “the white settlers were mean to them [the Indians].” I thought for the briefest moment of jotting in something smarmy at the bottom, like, “So the moral of the story is you shouldn’t burn down peoples’ buildings or they might be mean to you?” I thought a little while longer about having a chat with the boy about it. I decided both actions promised inadequate return; my son’s already been counseled against absorbing politically correct nonsense, and the truth of it is — hey, yeah, the white settlers were pretty mean to the Indians.

But I’m not going to pretend to deny what’s going on here. You’re supposed to attach little “down with whitey” trailers on the ends of your essays — if you do that, you’re much more likely to get an A+. That’s the way it worked in my day. We used the word “education” to describe what was taking place there. To borrow a phrase from Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what they think it means.

But the sin committed here, is not so much with regard to truth, as with regard to relevance. The subject is the Santa Ines Mission. What’s that got to do with white guys being mean to the Indians? Not an awful lot…on the other hand, Powerline’s example from the NYT has to do with truth. It made the white guys look like a bunch of Dirty Rotten Creepy Jerks (DRCJs), and we’re the New York Times so hey, we like that a lot. Let’s run with it.

After all, we’re the “Paper Of Record.”

Update: This passage from the original New York Times article, also, hit me sort of like a pillowcase full of dead batteries:

“Most black church members want to see their ministers involved in defending the race and improving civil rights,” [Bishop Harry] Jackson said. “The anger and bitterness that bleeds through in Reverend Wright’s comments are something that many blacks can sympathize with, even if they don’t want to hear it in the pulpit.” [emphasis mine]

May I suggest a stronger identification of what exactly it is we’re trying to do as we tinker with something called “race relations.” We’ve been making it a social project for a very long time now, kind of a heavy-handed one at that. Do we want the races to come closer together, or grow further apart?

Because if we don’t want them to grow further apart, it hardly seems productive to me for anyone to be spewing a lot of bile from the pulpit, just because there are some blacks somewhere who “sympathize with” the “anger and bitterness.”

That strikes me as a case of, with friends like these, who needs enemies.

And this white straight middle-aged guy, if nobody else, is pretty sick and tired of seeing Reverend Wright defended this way. In what universe do these apologists live, in which you can spout such acrimonious and unsubstantiated hateful rhetoric, and it’s somehow copacetic if it brings legions of bigots to their feet with cheers of rah rah rah…because they can “sympathize with” it?

This doesn’t impress me as productive — not even potentially. Let’s try the Spock approach for a little while — putting a stop to the emotionalism, and use logic instead. Emotion has been our hydraulic fluid of choice in normalizing race relations, for over forty years. That’s a long time. I keep hearing “we still have a long way to go” so it’s effectiveness as said hydraulic fluid ought, by now, be called into question. One cannot help but wonder, if we channeled logic in this endeavor instead of emotion, how far forty years would have brought us.

The New York Times would certainly not have been just caught with it’s tail in a crack. Because they would have been more vigorously motivated to do their jobs — print up facts, and things those facts support, rather than whatever feels good at the moment.

And, of course, if we went that route Barack Obama would not be a good candidate for any office this year.

Eyebrow Raising Headline

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

From Reuters, H/T to Boortz.

How about substitute the name “Bush” in place of “Hamas,” and see if the result would ever make it into print beneath that prestigious Reuters name.

Inspired by God, Hamas fighters battle on

Battle on, Reuters.

Yeah…Oh, Yeah…That’s Objective

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Two MastheadsVia Verum Serum, via Cartago Delanda Est, via Rick.

The stories are tragically similar. The Bush incident took place six months ago in Albuquerque, and Victor Lozada Tirado lost his life in the Clinton motorcade in Dallas last week.

At this time, I can’t locate the name of the officer who was killed six months ago in Albuquerque. Mostly because, even with the Clinton headline an unknown future event and the contrast therefore missing, “Bush Motorcade Kills Cop” was a shockingly irresponsible headline on its own. (Also, it should be pointed out that in some sources Sen. Cpl. Tirado is identified as “a policewoman” so it would appear more details are needed here as well.)

Now to tell the truth, I’m really ignorant about how the public-at-large perceives this problem. That media bias exists and that it slants to the left, seems to be something that can’t be doubted by anyone except the insane. But that’s just the way I see it. I can’t speak for others.

I think most of us acknowledge the leftist tilt — this Zogby poll pegs the quotient at two-thirds — but handle the issue with an “out of sight, out of mind” approach. In other words, when we aren’t constantly reminded of it, we have a tendency to presume the problem has gone away, and even to rely on our media sources for balanced coverage the very next day. Presuming that, then, I predict most people becoming aware of these two “dueling headlines” will conclude that sometime over the last six months Time Magazine “grew up” and can now be relied-upon.

How adorable. How charmingly naive. I have to blatantly steal a line from Rachel Lucas and gush that I could just pinch their cute little cheeks, really, really hard.

Managing the Economy

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

An annoying platitude commented-upon by Michelle. And Stossel.

We’re losing our republic because the people who ask candidates questions have the real power right now; they demand detail where there is no detail to be demanded, and let things slide right on by when a little bit o’digging would be most appropriate. Their spotlight is vertical when it should be horizontal, and vice-versa.

We Act Like We Want More

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Effectiveness? Zero.Gerard chose to caption the picture you see to the left “After the predictable killings comes the predictable vigil. Effectiveness? Zero.” Of course, that depends on how you define effectiveness. Nobody wants such acts of violence to occur and re-occur again and again. Not wanting it is easy. Acting like you don’t want it to happen again…that’s the tough part.

I think the vigil is remarkably effective. Effective for selling newspapers and getting people to tune in to the idjit box, that is. Effective at preventing the next murderous rampage? Not so much. And, as Gerard points out, the gun free zone doesn’t do much either. The way we make rules to address things like this, and the way we talk about it when the rules don’t do what we thought they were designed to do…none of this stuff looks like we really want the carnage to stop. Simply put, we act like we want more.

What I think is going unmentioned here is the ever-evolving way in which we talk about newsworthy events like this. It’s something we’ve discussed here before, noting how strange the wording seems now in a contemporary article about a horrible San Francisco accident in 1900. We put a lot of effort now into making things more seeeeeeennnnnsitive before they make it into the newspaper. In the case of structural accidents at football games, this has little to no effect at all on the likelihood the accident will happen again.

Not so much the case with people shooting other people, though. I think deep down everybody understands that.

Seldom does anybody directly address it, though.

Case in point: Another article about a horrible newsworthy event is much more recent than 1900, and closer to me than San Francisco. Specifically, this came out in my local paper on Friday (registration required). It describes the murder of a young man in a hotel parking lot a week ago. First four paragraphs…

It took Joe Hunter five years to rescue himself from the cycle of despair that followed the slaying of his 17-year-old son more than a decade ago.

When he did, Hunter made a decision: He would become a part of the lives of his five other children.

But he is being tested again.

Alex Hunter, Joe Hunter’s youngest child, was shot to death early Sunday while leaving the Doubletree Hotel off Arden Way, police said. He had just celebrated his 21st birthday when a man driving a car nearly hit his older brother in the parking lot, then got out of the car and began arguing with the group, witnesses said.

Bereaved Family…last three…

His father smiles when he talks about his son’s life, but has trouble listening to the story of his killing or looking at the bright yellow Ford Mustang the young man bought last summer.

He said he is trying to focus on remembering his son’s spirit, and he wants those who attend Alex’s funeral at 10 a.m. Monday at Antioch Baptist Church in Meadowview to dress in bright colors to celebrate his life.

“I’m going to get over … No, you can’t get over this,” Joe Hunter said. “But I’m going to stay strong, because he would want that.”

Joe Hunter’s story is indeed sad and troubling. But as my Sunday morning news channel drones on about how saaaaaaaaad the little kidlets are up in DeKalb, I’m becoming famished for some hard news about these things. They aren’t natural weather patterns, you know. Some tornado carries off a guy’s house, you can bring me some “news” about how he’s being tested and how he’s coming to grips with it and trying to stay strong. I won’t want too much else. If the house had his family inside, I’m still with ya.

But this wasn’t an Act of God.

This was an act of some dickhead with a gun.

Which makes this section in the middle of the story ironic and profoundly troubling…

Joe Londell Hunter, who was 18 when his other brother was shot to death less than two miles from the Doubletree, tried to come up with a license plate number or a suspect’s description for the police. No arrests have been made, and investigators simply said they are looking for a young man.

Sacramento Police Sgt. Matt Young said the trend of more and more simple arguments being settled with guns is “really disturbing.” Three people have been killed by gunfire in the city this year – all 22 years old or younger.

“Altercations that 15 or 20 years ago would have been handled with a fistfight, the young people in our society today are pulling out guns and killing people,” Young said. “What’s troubling is trying to pinpoint where these young people are getting this message that there’s no value attached to someone’s life.” [emphasis mine]

Where do they get the message that there’s no value attached to a life?

My answer to that would be the old adage about nature abhorring a vacuum. I don’t see any messages here that a life is worth much of anything. Yeah, there’s a family of people who are very sad now that the life is gone, I guess from that some would say the life has meaning. But I don’t think those are the people who have much need to get the message. You have to have some human decency for that to affect you.

Where’s the message that you’ll get punished if you take a life?

Where are the details that would help us everyday citizens to find this “young man”? I think it should be obvious to everyone, that phrase could benefit from a bit more narrowing-down.

If & when the young man is found, what is likely to happen to him? Depending on the circumstances when you shoot someone, there are a number of charges that could be filed, and it’s not necessary to find the perpetrator before there’s some definition involved in how the justice system is going to treat the crime. Seems to me a press that truly values human life, might see fit to mention some of that.

But above all, when people are special and have worth, you don’t just hope-against-hope they can ramble around unharmed for awhile, crying in your beer if a predator does happen to come along and carry off one or two. That is how you manage a flock of sheep. Or chickens. Except…not quite…because sheep and chickens have a little bit more value. If one or two sheep/chickens have gone missing, and then you’re out with your rifle and you see a wolf lurking around, you don’t take the time to confirm that this might, indeed, be the animal responsible for the shenanigans. You just cock and aim and shoot the sucker on sight.

Of course we can’t do that. Even predators against humans are human as well, and they do have rights. But I’m hard-pressed to see how that backs us into a corner of discussing only the family’s pain, and remaining so ignorant and reluctant to discuss the “hard” aspects of this story. You know. The stuff that might make it a bit more likely the thug will be taken down. And, if he isn’t, that the message will nevertheless get out that human life has value, and you’d better not end anybody else’s if you want your own to last awhile.

Look at it this way: The way we do things now, is supposed to be so much more “civilized” than having a gallows in the town square. We just take that at face value, leaving it unscrutinized. But can someone tell me please: If we did have a gallows in the town square, would we have a police sergeant bemoaning the problem that young people “are getting this message that there’s no value attached to someone’s life”?

I doubt it. I highly, highly doubt it. If I’m thinking of seriously killing someone, I take one look at those gallows, with my weight in a sandbag being test-dropped a time or two…and from that moment forward I’m going to be as gentle as a lamb.

As it is now, if I have those same thoughts, and I actually take the time to read a story like this one to figure out what’s going to happen to me, here’s what I get out of it: I’ll get away. Police are going to be looking for a “male” (I’m a little past the “young” stage). And I’ll make some people sad.

That’s it.

Time for a re-think of some things.

Don’t FOX Me

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

I do have to disagree with Shep…the part where he apologizes for pointing his finger.

I wouldn’t-a DONE it, but I don’t see where an apology can be expected, and certainly not how one could be owed.

There’s been way too much water over the dam before someone finally tossed up a B.S. flag on this.

I steal a cookie from the cookie jar…you run a hard-right-wing news network…hell, you LIE about stuff all day long, month after month…you say I steal a cookie from the cookie jar — guess what? I still STOLE IT!

Who points it out…it don’t matta. Not one bit. Not if it’s true.

Myth of the Fact Checker

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

The whole “TNR” blow-up has inspired Roger L. Simon to share his thoughts about this thing called “fact-checking”, what it really is, how it works, how it might…possibly…fall short.

Institutions like the New York Times have an evident vested interest and their editor Bill Keller laid out their case the other day at a lecture in the UK:

First: We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion, meaning we put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Now, of course, newspapers are written and edited by humans. We get things wrong. The history of our craft is tarnished down the centuries by episodes of partisanship, gullibility, and blind ignorance on the part of major news organisations. (My own paper pretty much decided to overlook the Holocaust as it was happening.) And so there is a corollary to this first principle: when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly as possible.

At the Times, we are obsessive about owning up to our mistakes, from the petty to the egregious.

My personal experience of mainstream media fact-checking, New York Times included, has not tracked with Keller’s hyperbolic declaration….In short, mainstream media doesn’t do much. Essays I did for The New York Times Book Review were not fact-checked at all (though they did copy edit, luckily for me). Over at the Los Angeles Times, an amusing example is an article I did on a Siberian film festival at which I was a juror. After I submitted it, the LAT fact-checker called and asked, “Did this all happen?” “Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” she said and hung up. So much for mainstream media fact-checking.

Now, that’s the LA Times, not the NY Times which I’m sure must be much better. They must be. I mean, I think back on all those left-wingers who argued with me and in doing-so, “sole-sourced,” the NY Times, and mocking me for my failure to immediately and unconditionally accept as my own religious belief, something sole-sourced to the NY Times. Surely such a venerable institution must be doing something to earn all that fawning adulation.

It occurs to me that this barb-fest between the mainstream media and these things we call “blogs,” is an ancient exchange. It’s really all about, should truth be institutionalized? Or is it the property of every common man?

One point in favor of the blogs is one of necessity. If truth is not under the ownership of every common man, it is not the responsibility of every common man. We can then shuffle off the “fact checking” to our clay-footed institutions, confident that some nameless faceless fact-checker will verify the things we will be told to think we know.

And then we can read all the “Memo For File” copies we want to and believe every word without reservation. The ones from 1974. In Times New Roman font, with kerning.

Morgan’s Diary

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

…as ghostwritten by a certain fawning Associated Press toady.

Great AmericanHaving triumphed over the herculean task of cleaning out the coffee pot and getting it started on a fresh batch, Morgan K. Freeberg used his powerful legs to carry his naked, Adonis-like form, his massive muscular shoulders barely fitting through the doorways. As the coffee pot gurgled away, he logged back in to his Windows XP account. Outside the window in the hours before dawn, just a few house lights could be seen; the entire world slept soundly, including his paramour who slumbered away in blissful exhaustion from the carnal activities the night before, but Freeberg was already hard at work. As the Firefox windows refreshed, bringing him news of various crises brewing all over the world, Freeberg ran his rugged palm over his majestic, cash-register-like stubble-covered chin, a picture of calm in the face of crisis. It was a vintage example of a dedicated blogger getting ready to lay the smackdown on a bunch of grandstanding liberal politicians, glory-queens, attention whores, phony guilty-white-males, and preening Associated Press lackeys.

A quick shower and a commute to work beckoned, but before Freeberg could join the morning rush on Highway 50 like thousands of other clock-punching automatons, he knew it was his destiny to make this one contribution as an erudite, intellectual, and powerful communicator of current events: The noble blogger. He used his position as a national teaching opportunity, a skill often employed by such dedicated practitioners, although of course Freeberg was the best of the best of the best. Lording his majestic form over all creation, godlike, and rightfully, Freeberg scanned the headlines — the very picture of attentiveness, leadership, resourcefulness, and quiet competence — a shining beacon of sanity in a world gone mad. One particular headline caught his eye; he cocked an eyebrow toward it, majestically, pulled out the keyboard and began to use his awesome blogger powers to put wrong things right, biceps and triceps writhing away beneath his bronze skin, like massive pythons, his lean, powerful fingers fluttering away like ten jackhammers on speed…

Yeah, okay. Pushing myself to the limit on this stuff, laying it on this thick, I think I’m much better suited for a sprint than a marathon. Glen Johnson clearly raises the bar to new highs. He is, in what I presume is an attempt to be completely serious, far more ludicrous than Rush Limbaugh is when he’s joking.

I understand where the guy’s coming from — he wants to be a speech-writer in a Clinton administration. The real question is for everybody else. Why do we let things get this far?

H/T: Many, potentially at least, but I learned it for the first time from Rick. And barfed on the spot, just about.

Update: You know, a thought occurs to me about womens’ equality. It should already be raising red flags with everybody — and I think, in secret and in the thoughts to which one never dares give utterance, it does indeed — there’s just something terribly wrong with championing “equal rights” for any demography, and having to crank away at it for forty years plus in the phony spirit of CALWWNTY (Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet).

I know it’s politically incorrect to say such a thing, but forty years is too long. There must be a lack of energy being channeled into the movement, in spite of all the bluster and complaining we’ve been hearing; or the tactics are wrong, somehow incompatible with fundamentals of human nature; or, there must be a paralyzing disagreement on what exactly it is we’re trying to do.

We may very well have a female President in 2009. Nobody is even bothering to pretend that if we do, the feminist caterwauling will shut down for good. Or even drop a bit, for that matter. We just got hold of our first female House Speaker earlier this year, and this event hasn’t silenced anyone. Every single soul who was bitching about equal rights before that, is bitching now about the same things.

I think this is the new glass ceiling. Right now. I think we’re looking straight at it. Women are not being treated equally, and because of that they will never have equal rights. Certainly not according to this bizarre post-modern measuring device we’ve gotten going…where a bunch of lazy scientists and energized busybodies put together some statistics, and look for differential bumps, some well within the margin of error, that might possibly feed the next Big News Story.

I think the next two things we have to do are very clear. They both have to do with fewer praises lauded upon females, so I doubt they’ll be implemented. Until they are, you can forget all about equality and I think that will remain true even if we pursue it for the next thousand years.

First of all, we have to stop lavishing praise on “First” women who do things a zillion and one men have already done. By that I mean being President of the United States, or being the person walking on the moon getting a phone call from that President. When a man’s already done it, and you shower these phony congratulations on the first woman who does the same thing — that’s degrading to women. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, until you think on it awhile. And then it has to make sense. If you can think clearly about things, that is. It’s measurably degrading — it degrades in direct proportion to the amount of time that has passed since the first man did it. In President Hillary Clinton’s case, that would be 218 years. Quite the slur.

Secondly…the whole “not freaking out” thing. Men don’t get credit for that. Women shouldn’t either. Again — put some quality thought into it, you’ll see this is as degrading to women as any butt-slap Captain Kirk ever dealt out to any space-babe in a miniskirt who brought him 23rd-century coffee. Stop giving women, especially women in positions of authority, credit for being “calm.” I mean, what were you expecting? After sixteen years in the public eye on the national stage, to restrain one’s self from running room to room, arms overhead, shrieking like a banshee when there’s a hostage situation in your office hundreds of miles away — doesn’t seem like much to ask. It’s good that Hillary stepped up to the challenge. But her alleged vagina is only so much of an argument for inflating such an achievement under the masthead of the Associated Press.

I’ll bet my last ten dollars that Glen Johnson is as big a male chauvinist pig as anyone you’ve ever met, including me.

Update: Gerard coins a newly-minted portmanteau, yabbling, and affixes it to our bit of creative writing up-top.

On “YouTube Debate” Questions

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Okay, so I see that CNN has released a statement about the now-scandalized “YouTube Debate” that basically says CNN doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “The whole point of these ground-breaking CNN/YouTube debates is to focus on substantive questions of concern to real people and to throw open the process to a wider range of Americans all around the country. CNN cared about what you asked, not who you were. This was the case for both the Democratic and the Republican CNN/YouTube debates.” This is in response to revelations that democratic “plants” fairly well saturated CNN’s selection out of the YouTube questioners, who were supposed to be representative of the much-sought-after undecided Republican voter.

My local morning radio guys, yesterday, drew an interesting analogy which I think highlights the problem quite usefully. I think this because I see the problem as being not necessarily one of bad questions; I see the problem, rather, as one of asking questions that might appear useful, but only to someone who’s made up his mind that Republicans are terrible people, and looking for reasons to think so. The analogy drawn by the radio guys involved interviewing a famous athlete and having a non-sports-fan (like yours truly) come up with the questions to ask. No one would try such an absurd thing because nobody would want to watch it, and, well, that seems to be exactly what occurred here.

Of course it is hard to get much momentum behind criticism of debate questions for being too hostile, in an age where everyone seems ready to blame our various problems on too low of a bar imposed on presidential candidates. Right now, if you come up with new and improved ways to ask embarrassing questions — the zeitgeist will be kind to you (unless, of course, you’re asking the embarrassing questions to a female candidate). But there could be a downside to embarrassing candidates just for the sake of embarrassing candidates. One thing I can think of is that in an environment where embarrassment is easy, the specimen that is left standing is the loathsome, slick, oily kind. So regardless of party leanings, I would hope we can all agree the “embarrassment for embarrassment’s sake” just might not be the magic bullet that instantly solves our national woes.

But in addition to that, there is a difference between embarrassment and inspection. David Kerr’s question (embedded) fails to inspect — or, at least, it fails to make inspection a priority over embarrassment. His primary purpose is to preach at anybody listening “you shouldn’t vote for these guys.” It makes wonderful sense if you’ve already decided not to. You could enlighten and scrutinize, every bit as productively, by asking “If you are sworn in as President, what if anything do you plan to do about the standing policy with regard to homosexuals serving in the military?” And of course, that isn’t what he asked.

This language about the situation being “the case for both the Democratic and the Republican CNN/YouTube debates” is particularly tragic, in my view. It seems to me fair to say David Kerr, LeeAnn Anderson, David Cercone and “Journey/Paperseranade” are just about as ready to vote for a Republican as I’m ready to vote for a democrat…we all have our little biases. And yet, if those questions were chosen and the objective really is to uphold symmetry between the two parties in the YouTube debate forum, I would respectfully offer these beauties for the next democrat event.

1. The Republican party was formed just before the Civil War for the express purpose of ending slavery in this country; being a dedicated democrat, do you think this was a bad thing?

2. If America is ever put under a national healthcare system and I use my personal finances to acquire specialized services not available to everybody else, how do you think I should be punished and what should happen to my doctor?

3. How much money, if any at all, do democrats think I should be allowed to keep every year?

4. Do you think there is some solid evidence worth checking out that 9/11 was an inside job?

5. If George Bush is such a freakin’ idiot, how come he continues to get his way whenever he faces off against your representatives in Congress and his dismal approval ratings run twice as high as theirs?

6. If the global warming movement fails to destroy the American economy, what do you want to try next?

7. Speaking of global warming, what do you drive?

8. How many Americans should die so that we can say America doesn’t use torture, including the infamous “waterboarding”?

9. How many little kids should be kidnapped, slaughtered and left in a field somewhere, so we can say America doesn’t allow a death penalty?

10. As blogger friend Phil points out, you need a license in the United Kingdom just to watch TV. When, in your view, should we get such a policy going here in the United States, and how big of a commission should we set aside for the busybody cops who ring the doorbells and pass out the fines?

11. When did you decide that terrorists are more deserving of these things you call “civil liberties” than, say…Republicans?

12. In what year, exactly, did the Second Amendment lose all of it’s potency and value for keeping a potentially oppressive government in check, assuming you think it ever had any in the first place?

You know, I could keep on adding to such a list all day long but I think the point is made. Questions put to candidates can be revealing, and they can be hostile; there is overlap between those two, but they’re not synonymous.

And, since we’re still in “primary” mode and Republicans are supposed to be sniffing out Republicans and donks are supposed to be sniffing out donks, the question that’s designed to open one side to inspection and appeal sympathetically to the other, it seems to me, could be postponed for awhile. But if we live in an information age and we want the political parties to reach across the aisle right-freakin’-now, it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask that the burdens imposed on them in this regard be somewhat equal. In which case, the twelve questions above or some facsimile thereof, could be seriously considered for the next go-round…and speaking for myself, I’m definitely not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Why Good News Shouldn’t Get Reported

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Truly, truly, this is a frog in a pot of boiling water moment. Journey through a time machine to any year you care to choose…from the advent of “modern” journalism, in whatever way you wish to define it…to whatever you think ushered in this crazy, surreal, other-worldly “new new news” era in which we live. I dunno. Maybe figuring out that latter moment, would be worth a post of it’s own. March 17, 2003, maybe? But I digress.

In that era of “semi-modern” journalism, there’s probably a good fifty years of days to which you could hop, and tell the people living in any one of those days, that…well, read for yourself.

As CNN’s Howard Kurtz accurately pointed out on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources,” few media outlets seemed at all interested in giving much attention to the great news out of Iraq last week regarding September’s sharp decline in casualties.

To Kurtz’s obvious frustration, his guests – Robin Wright of the Washington Post and Barbara Starr of CNN – both supported the press burying this extremely positive announcement.

No, it gets better still. Good news shouldn’t be reported, but bad news should. Yeah. They’re admitting to the bias, right up to, but not including, the point where you use the b-word. I guess. I mean, read for yourself.

Even Kurtz recognized the hypocrisy here, which led to the following:

KURTZ: But let’s say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that’s certainly — that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?

We’ve had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this.

Hmmm. So, a shocking increase in deaths would have “certainly” been newsworthy. However, for a decrease to be reported, skeptical journalists have to be more convinced that it’s a lasting improvement.

So the “we’re not biased” has been whittled down to a meaningless catchphrase, nothing more.

Journey to any date between 1945 and 2003 and let ’em know about this, and people will think you’re a partisan shill. Or a satirist. Or a freakin’ lunatic. In 2007, it is what is really going on.

Best Sentence XVII

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

The winner of the “Best Sentence I’ve Heard Lately” award is, once again, Ann Coulter. Hey, what can I say, she tries harder than most other folks. It’s her schtick; she makes it her business to win these things.

And like the girl with the curl, when she is good she is very very good. It’s actually two sentences this time:

The editors of The New York Times have been engaging in a spirited debate with their readers over whether doctors are wildly overpaid or just hugely overpaid. The results of this debate are available on TimeSelect, for just $49.95.

Memo For File XLVII

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Via Gerard: I find it worthy of comment how much the New York Times reads like the National Review, or maybe even a Rush Limbaugh sound clip, in editorializing about the Dan Rather lawsuit against CBS, the disgraced anchorman’s former employer. Must be somebody’s first day…or last day…or both.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”
:
In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect.
:
The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, seemingly fearless anchor who for two decades shared the stage with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as the most watched and recognizable journalists in America. By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

This is the first time I’ve been aware of the New York Times insisting on “evidence to that effect” in this context, or even bothering to take note of lack of such evidence. Good on them. Maybe after generations of running under the slogan “All the news that’s fit to print,” they’re finally living up to it.

As for Mr. Rather, I seriously doubt he needs a post-retirement career to be able to afford the buckwheat. Nevertheless, I’m tempted to entertain the fantasy that he’s found one, as a secret agent for the talk radio industry. Once you overcome the initial misgivings about such intellectual extravagance, this would all make sense. Perfect sense.

Dan Rather, fearless anchorman, tells us all what to think for a quarter of a century as the successor to Uncle Walter, and we believe him just like we believed Uncle Walter. Dan Rather is busted when someone slides a Microsoft Word document under his nose, and he and his producers present it as a document typed up in 1974 because they were told to think that. The bust is made by something called “blogs,” which didn’t exist for some 80% or more of Dan Rather’s career as Uncle Walter’s successor, and perhaps 90% or so of his career as a hard-hitting newshound. So…

…hucksters and shysters tell Dan Rather what he should think, and he tells us what we should think, naturally inspiring the question “how the hell long has this been going on?” But after the bust brings his career to an inglorious end, he presents himself not as a fearless anchor, or a hard-hitting newshound, but as a know-nothing pretty-boy behind a fancy desk reading from a teleprompter.

So he’s an old-school, notebook and shoe-leather take-no-prisoners journalist when there’s glory involved, but when it all turns to crap he’s suddenly just a talking head and nothing more. His former colleagues are just as guilty of failing to do the proper homework, and have been observed conducting themselves with equal measures of duplicity. In short — nobody got fooled by the Microsoft Word document. Everybody says it was somebody else’s job to check it out properly. Nobody got fooled…and yet, with all these reputations in tatters and all these careers ruined…you, the viewer, are still a stupid idiot Bush-bot if you don’t believe the documents were authentic.

When all the dust has settled, you tune into the evening news…why?

If Dan Rather can follow a news trail as well as people say, and is as smart as people give him credit for being, that’s got to be the answer. He’s a turncoat. He’s communicating a hidden message to us, that we should stop watching the boob tube and start reading blogs and listening to talk radio. That has to be it…because he’s turning the industry that made him a wealthy man — into a freakin’ joke.

An interesting aside: I was going to use the phrase “Swift Boat” as a verb to discuss what happened to poor Dan, when exploring the whole sorry episode from his perspective. It occurred to me that it’s never been satisfactorily explained to me what exactly this means — nevermind how often I hear it. In fact, “swift boat” may very well be the first term to be thoroughly worn out and tossed into the cliche junk heap before I even managed to catch a glimmer of the substance behind it. Well, I don’t like using words without knowing what they mean, and I don’t like shrinking from using words just because I don’t know what they mean. I certainly don’t like it when a lot of other people know something I don’t.

So I looked it up.

The substance was unsurprising, but the lack of discussion was not. There are — exactly — two definitions in the online Urban Dictionary, one constructed for appeal to the lefty-loosies and one for the tighty-righties:

1. The phrase “swift boat” describes a Vietnam-era patrol boat, but it is increasingly being used to describe the political tactic of using a concentrated media effort to discredit a person or idea.

The phrase developed out of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, when a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attempted to suggest that Democratic candidate John Kerry lied in order to earn two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star during the Vietnam War. The group, as it turns out, was funded primarily by people who also frequently donated millions of dollars to the Republican party. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was formed for the sole purpose of discrediting Kerry’s Vietnam War service and has not been heard from since the end of the election.

2. To thwart a conspiracy to deceive the public by getting the facts out on someone despite a concerted effort on the part of the media to ignore and/or actively discredit a politically inconvenient truth.

ABC’s false stories were unable to prevent the veteran’s group from being able to swift boat Kerry’s Vietnam fantasy.

Both sides give you an ounce of real definition, and a gallon of self-service to their own respective agendas. At this writing, one can easily observe that people who cast votes for these definitions, overwhelmingly would have preferred a Kerry presidency in 2004 and presumably now as well. But from this, we don’t know a lot about “swift boating” other than that it’s an assertion of something that some people happen to dislike. Wikipedia is no more helpful:

Swiftboating is American political jargon that is used as a strong pejorative description of some kind of attack that the speaker considers unfair—for example, an ad hominem attack or a smear campaign.

The term comes from the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth (formerly “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”) and their widely-publicized attacks on 2004 Presidential candidate John Kerry. Historically, terms like “swiftboating”, “Swift Boating”, “Swift Boat tactics”, etc. were given currency by people who had very negative views of SBVT.

I briefly toyed with the idea of editing the article and removing the reference to “ad hominem”; I have never once heard the term “swift-boating” used to refer to an ad hominem attack. I have heard it repeatedly used to describe things the speaker would like listeners to think were ad homs; but nothing that would, according to said speaker’s own arguments, qualify.

The phrase “ad hominem” has certain rules to it. You have to engage in deception by distracting from the subject at hand. You can’t be attacking the argument itself; if you are, it’s unlikely any logical fallacy is being engaged, and this certainly isn’t an ad hom. If I use poor logic in the classic example of “All fish live in water, Flipper lives in water, therefore Flipper is a fish” — and you are heard telling someone “Don’t listen to Morgan, he is using poor logic” — this is not an ad hominem attack. You’re attacking my argument by attacking the logic used to construct it.

A better example of ad hominem would be “Don’t listen to Morgan, he only drinks beer from glass bottles.” The misplaced presumption of solidity in the attack, is the key. The presumption should be misplaced because the attack deals with personal attributes, removed from the substance of the original argument. People who drink beer from glass bottles can be right about things, people who drink beer from cans can be wrong about things.

Come to think of it, a great example of the ad hominem is “The group…was funded primarily by people who also frequently donated millions of dollars to the Republican party.”

But I’ve learned to leave my edits out of Wikipedia, whose problems of late result from being policed above, rather than below, par. While I believe in the experiment overall, I fear it is doomed to carry, everlastingly, at least a stain of defeat. This is perfectly acceptable to me, since we live in an imperfect universe filled with imperfect things. But some folks have made it their mission in life to police Wikipedia. Edits that offer another perspective on things, disappear so quickly that they have no effect at all, and this is by the design of an excessively enthusiastic editor who doesn’t happen to like that other perspective.

Said hyperactive and overly self-indulgent editors tend to lean left. That’s just the way things are. Leftists have more time.

On the swift-boat verb, I like my own definition better than the others I’ve read. Not just for the way it flows, but for it’s marriage with the truth. And it is truly an occasion worth noting when I manage to be concise while everybody else rambles on endlessly and in relative futility. Things do not often happen that way.

The act of pointing out something with regard to a matter under immediate discussion, that extremist zealots (particularly those inclined to the left) would just as soon have been left unmentioned. Especially, testimony from knowledgeable individuals that would place a purported certainty into significant doubt.

I think that says it all. To say someone has “swift boated” is not, despite appearances, an accusation of anything. It is a simple declaration. “I am an extreme, politically-motivated zealot and I wish you hadn’t said that.” It doesn’t mean anything beyond that.

Steep Discount for Move On

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Terry Trippany, CEO and Chief Bottle Washer of Webloggin which currently hosts House of Eratosthenes, wrote up a revealing piece at Newsbusters about money changing hands between the New York Times and that advocacy group I like to call “Move On From Some Things, Dwell Obsessively On Other Things Dot Org.” Since, hey, let’s face it — that’s what it’s all about. democrat President lies under oath, move on…Florida is certified for President Bush in 2000, just keep picking at it like a little kid with his finger in his nose.

Betray Us?For the last handful of years, I’ve noticed being a good little leftist is all about telling others what to think. Move on from this…don’t move on from that…forget this…remember that. Never even think of allowing anybody to make up their own minds about things. Conservatives argue things, liberals chant things.

Really, since about the Great Depression our “progressives” have been hostile to the concept of the individual, so this is all to be expected.

What I really don’t get, though — and maybe this should make it on to the Things I Don’t Get list, because it really does baffle me — is the news monopoly. The dictatorship-ism of it all. I’ve encountered a lot of leftists, who don’t seem to even suspect they themselves are really leftists…bemoaning the dwindling number of corporate entities owning the news outlets. Much of this is inspired by the Murdoch acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and on the surface it doesn’t seem to be a leftist argument. I personally find it pretty compelling. The theory is that our news drifts toward a railroad-baron-era monopoly, as the corporations that bring us our news, start to merge. Really, this just makes sense. The argument just boils down to this: Competition is healthy. What good American can argue with that?

Other than the speaker using the word “corporation” as a slur, like Ralph Nader, there isn’t much that’s even leftist about it.

But then I see our leftists going from that…to instructing me to believe, like Virginia’s daddy, if I see it in the New York Times it must be so. HELLO…big, leviathan, evil corporation? Monopoly? This was a concern just a minute ago?

Guess not.

So “Trip” finds out about this transaction and writes it up. Gets linked by Boortz, who for the moment has managed to screw up his archive page for September 12, so I can’t give Neal Boortz the customary hat tip with linky goodness like usual; I will when I can. Here’s the high level stuff. The notorious ad accuses General Petraeus of betraying his country, using a play on his last name. There is an argument used to support this accusation, and the argument is…well, the typical leftist bullcrap. He didn’t say what we leftists think he should have said, so that’s a betrayal.

See, when you’re a liberal-donk, you always start from the premise that someone owed you something. Must be a great way to go through life, in spite of the disappointments that must surface day after day.

The ad is freakin’ huge. The least you can expect to pay for a placement such as this is about $167 large. “Move on from some things, pick at other things like a skateboarding kid with a scab on his knee dot org” paid…drum roll, please…65.

Financially, so far as anybody knows, “Move on from some things dot org” is doing pretty well. The New York Times is NOT. Neither one of those is purely a private organization, so the public is entitled to know pretty much everything…and nothing has come to light to excuse this. In sum: If this isn’t an “in-kind contribution,” nothing is.

And there’s another angle to this as well, when one considers the laughable fantasy that the National Rifle Association or any other conservative-friendly group might get such a sweetheart deal. The “liberal press” angle. This is just one more piece of evidence to toss on the pile. It’s devastating, just like when the staffers at the Seattle Times erupted into applause upon hearing Karl Rove’s resignation. We are to presume when we read news out of a paper, it has been gathered with a sufficiently decent respect for truth and honesty, that we can make decisions based on what we read. This presumption depends on the supposition that there’s some objectivity at work here…some maturity. Maybe it’s impossible to be completely neutral when you’ve got a working brain and red blood in your veins, but if you do have some vicious slant and you’re a journalist, we the readers expect you to leave that at home.

Well…we’re running out of reasons to expect that.

It’s a “Why We Need Blogs” moment if ever there was one. Blogs are put together by loudmouths like me. We can lean right, we can lean left…whichever way we lean, we might as well ‘fess up about it because there isn’t much point trying to hide it. But newspapers on the other hand — they try to hide it. And it’s not like they can lean any ol’ way. They tend to slant left. They’re institutions. Institutions tend to harbor acrimony toward the individual, and when you’re hostile to the individual it just makes sense to lean left.

Which does wonders for the “move on from some things and stick to other things like krazy glue dot org” pocketbook.

Well — really, I think the public owes a thank you to the New York Times. Look what they let us know about for forty cents on the dollar: When you’re a left-wing activist group, you tend to define truth, honor and loyalty according to whether people say the things you like. This is a valuable chunk of information, and I know of some people who need to be told about it. Maybe if the Old Gray Lady gets in too much hot water, the feds should bail her out. And maybe, just maybe, that situation won’t be too long in coming.

Memo For File XLVI

Monday, September 10th, 2007

A little bit of constructive criticism for my local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee.

On the desk in front of me is the “Forum” section to the Sunday paper, slightly misshapen from what has become a customary “oopsie” or two as the corners are accidently dunked in the hot tub at twilight. Let us review all the opportunities this piece of paper had carry something important, by reviewing the seven days of events upon which this section might have commented.

Someone claiming to be Osama bin Laden appeared on a videotape that was released on or about Monday, dispensing a lot of instructions to Americans that we should convert to Islam, bemoaning global warming, chiding the democrats in Congress for failing to pull America out of Iraq, and basically sounding just like middle-eastern version of Keith Olbermann. Word got around Washington that the long-awaited report from Gen. David Petraeus is going to say more positive things about the “surge” in Iraq than the democrats would like it to say. As a result of that, after months of going on record with a wait-and-see approach about the General’s report, our democrats have decided to pull a hairpin U-turn and start trashing the report before it is released, questioning the General’s value as an impartial observer of the progress in the theater, and sending Harry Reid and Charles Schumer out in front of cameras to make asses out of themselves.

MoveOn.Org, the liberal activist group that for seven years has been dedicated to not moving on from things, has started attacking Congressman Brian Baird, D-Washington, for traveling to Iraq, returning back here, and daring to speak candidly about what he saw over there. So now, not only are Islamic terrorists attacking Americans for being American, but Americans are attacking other Americans for practicing freedom of speech after being elected to Congress, seeing the success of our country’s military engagements with their own eyes, and honestly informing the rest of us about what it is they’ve seen.

There was an absolutely unbelievable story about one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent fund-raisers missing his bail hearing. Whereabouts unknown!

Oh and one other thing — in making his remarks, Sen. Schumer got busted by some intrepid bloggers after his web site was updated with a phony transcript of his comments on the Senate floor. In the floor speech, he singled out our troops for special criticism, citing “The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes…” and someone altered this on his web site to “The lack of protection for these tribes.” So we learned our senior Senator from the state of New York wants to bash the men and women who are out there, risking life and limb, and he doesn’t even have the stones to stand behind his own remarks. Certainly, this is valuable information for the citizens of a democratic republic to have.

Fertile ground for my newspaper’s opinion section that coming weekend, wouldn’t you say?

See, to an American who has his priorities in order, I know what is to be concluded from the events above. I am one of those Americans. But numerically, I am insignificant, and so this is why I buy the Sacramento Bee from time to time — especially on Sundays. How do our nation’s most ignorant and easily-led citizens see such things? Can they detect lies, deceipt and charlatanism when such things are paraded right in front of their noses and pointed out to them? Well…now that the pages have dried out again, let’s rustle them open again and see what we have here.

I see the token conservative George F. Will wants us to think about Iraq. But only from a very high level, with commentary about Gen. Petraeus’ educational background, how we got the situation we currently have over there, the mistakes some of our civilian leaders have made. Not too much about recent events and how they might shape things from here on out. Nothing about Schumer’s shenanigans, or the videotape, or the political machinations by our democrat leadership in Congress as the Petraeus report comes due.

Leonard Pitts would like to talk about peoples’ feelings as the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks comes up. Always nice to have a human-interest story in The Bee; you can never have to many of those, I guess.

Commentary about healthcare. Together with a cartoon by Rex Babin prominently featuring a man’s bare buttocks. Good…what else? Letters to the Editor about whether or not President Bush should be impeached. Looks like it was “Impeachment Day” at the Letters Desk…there’s one letter about the Hillary fugitive, another one about kids not being able to play rough anymore, all other letters are about an impeachment that isn’t going to happen. Someone managed to detect some irony in Tony Snow’s overall medical condition — but not Michael Moore’s. For the uninitiated, Snow is the outgoing White House Press Secretary, and Michael Moore is a filmmaker who produces left-wing propaganda, calls his works “documentaries,” and wins awards for said documentaries as if they really were documentaries. One would expect Snow to have a right-wing outlook on the United States’ healthcare system, whereas Moore thinks our healthcare should work kind of like Cuba. Tony Snow has ‘fessed up to not having a 401(k) account. He is not yet cancer free. Moore, on the other hand, is a big fat slob who’d rather make movies about how our healthcare should work, than stop making his own healthcare needlessly expensive by being a big fat slob. So anyway…we have a special hatchet-job on Tony Snow for having an empty 401(k) account, branding him some kind of a hypocrite, but not a single peep about Moore.

Ah, and I almost the centerpiece: A hit piece on the front page, chastising homosexuals who dare to support conservative values…or conservatives who dare to be homosexual. It’s called “Hypocrites & Haters” but it should really be called “Who We’ve Decided You Should Hate This Week.” Not deemed complete without a huge splash photo of Sen. Larry Craig resigning in front of a zillion cameras. Not sure which is the bigger crime, being a gay Republican or a Republican who’s gay, but it’s clear someone’s got a big beef with anyone who is both of those. The dirty little secret is, it’s a reprint from an article on the hard-line extreme left-wing web site The Nation. I have never understood this practice. I hope it’s a questionable one: It’s like newspaper editors walked into your living room or home-office, fired up your inkjet printer, printed up something freely available on the Internet, reimbursed you for the ink but then charged you $1.62. If you wanted a printout — you would have made one yourself, right?

I’m also a little lost on this thing where you can’t have a negative thought about homosexuals in general, or even any thought that approaches negativity, until you find out they’re Republicans, at which point you’re somehow obliged to be displeased with them. Had the article taken homosexuals to task for their sympathies to any other political viewpoint, it surely would have been branded as “hate speech.” Since homosexuals are being effectively disallowed from any service or activism in support of conservative values, it seems not only are you allowed to write such stuff without anyone calling it a crime, but you can charge money for the reading of it…to be paid by Bee subscribers who lack Google skills, and can’t track down your hatred and invective on the Internet.

Well, with all these things going on with terrorism I’m glad to be reminded there are gay Republicans and that I’m supposed to hate them, that’s certainly valuable. Personally, I’m still of the opinion that if a politician is gay, but his votes are likely to bring in more dead terrorists, then by all means let ‘im go to work. But keep on burning up ink by the barrel, telling me what kind of prejudices I’m supposed to have a zillion more times. Maybe I’ll come around eventually. Well done.

David Brooks writes about a social contract for healthcare. Weintraub gives us more info about some kind of a health care “deal” coming into focus. I like Weintraub overall, but counting the “butt” cartoon this is four pieces already. Maybe my own good health has spoiled me rotten…it just seems like I should be reading more about terrorists, and what we’re doing to kill them, and less about how politicians and union officials think overly-expensive pills should be covered.

The Supreme Court ruled that the public has a right to access information on salaries of public officials.

A puff piece on Couric. A tasteful farewell to Pavarotti. Ginger Rutland isn’t pleased with the way the city handled Tex Mex and other downtown restaurants. Someone else is unhappy with the way prison guard pay is managed.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. We’re about to have a big showdown over the killing of terrorists, how well we’re doing it, whether Iraq will end up being a place where a lot of them get stamped out like the weeds they are, or to bloom like never before. I could, with very little effort, assemble a logically compelling argument that no other issue really matters by comparison. At least not right now. But whoever has the task of assembling the “Forum” section for the Sacramento Bee, doesn’t seem to see it that way. That person lacks a certain vision. It would be beneficial for that person to be called into a meeting with his or her superiors, for a quick talk, which need not be altogether pleasant.

I would start with this: Henceforth, let’s draw straws to see who gets to write the ONE editorial about health care, sniveling away about how America hasn’t “pinkified” the industry fast enough or hard enough to make us happy. Just one of those — that way we have the defense that the topics covered on the weekend may be marginal in importance and interest, but hey, they’re diverse. No need to sprinkle the healthcare-whining throughout the six-page opinion section, like flakes of pepper on a cod fillet, thereby depriving the paper of even that defense-of-last-resort. But in general…share some opinions that are timely, poignant, thought-provoking and important. There’s an agenda present that is due for a dropping, or an agenda absent that is due for a picking-up. Maybe both of those.

See, I don’t really begrudge my local paper for being hard-left-wing. I don’t even begrudge them for missing the cajones to admit this is what they are. Such misdemeanors are expected of newspapers nowadays. But newspapers should be topical. Or at the very least, they shouldn’t engage such an abundance of effort in making themselves trivial.

Jackasses Ride It Out, Pachyderms Fall And Stay Down

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

When I was younger, if you defined for me a “scandal” as something that blows over if it affects a democrat but ends a career if it affects a Republican, I would have dismissed this as just so much whiny paranoid conservative right-wing garbage. But now, after so many years of seeing it work that way with so few exceptions, I’m just amazed it’s taken me so long to accept it. I find it even more amazing people can’t just look at what’s going on and just see it, like, instantly.

About the most charitable interpretation you could apply is that as a country we have an abrupt limit to our patience where hypocrisy is concerned. Republican politician says we need more “family values,” his donk opposition says no, we need people to be less judgmental — both get caught in scandal — I suppose you could have a greater desire to see the conservative bite the mat, without being prejudiced against conservatives. There you have a situation where both sides did something wrong, but only one side is a hypocrite. Maybe that’s all that is happening.

We can award forgiveness to our perverts and our white-collar criminals and our liars, just not to our hypocrites.

This is a worthwhile theory, and it can survive some scrutiny…even significant scrutiny. But not too much. Once you start to look at some other issues besides the famleeeee valyoooooz, you tend to make a rather surprising discovery about hypocrisy, and our tolerance of it. It turns out we have some. We have quite a bit.

Take tax policy as an example. if you’re serving as a “progressive” donk politician and you’re pissing and moaning about the public debt, how we need to “roll back the tax cuts of George W. Bush” so we don’t add on to the deficit too much, and to do that we need to soak the rich — I don’t think it’s the slobbering rabid right-wing Republican in me who wants to know if you’re mailing something extra to the federal treasury every year because you don’t think you’re being taxed enough. That’s not a right-wing question; it’s a neutral, and reasonable, question. Just because our print-media people aren’t inclined to ask it, doesn’t mean it isn’t the natural question to ask. Certainly not when you start bragging about how rich you are personally, and see this just proves how righteous you are because you want a tax policy that’s going to be unhelpful to you personally because you’re willing to “sacrifice.” I don’t think wanting to see your check stubs for those “extra” taxes your paying, is partisan. It’s just common sense. You think we don’t tax rich people enough, you’re rich yourself, you’re even bragging about it…show me your canceled checks for the “extra” taxes you’ve been paying. It’s perfectly legal to pay more taxes than what you owe in this country. The treasury won’t say no.

So to me, in a land that is ideologically-centered but shows glaring intolerance of hypocrisy, we wouldn’t have any politicians like this. In other words, give me twenty legislators who want to hike the marginal income tax rates and the capital gains taxes and the death tax, you should be able to show me twenty legislators who’ve been sending in “extra personal taxes” at the end of the year because they don’t think they’ve been getting taxed enough. Well, guess what. We’ve got all kinds of creeps under the dome that want to raise taxes. Rich creeps, who hire accountants you and I can’t afford to hire, to snag every single loophole that can be snagged just like any other financially savvy rich person. If that isn’t hypocrisy, why, I don’t know what is.

And there’s more than just the tax issue. There’s gun control…we have hypocrites there. Politicians using firearms, or hiring people who use firearms, to buttress and safeguard their personal safety, simultaneously working overtime to make sure it’s illegal for you and me to do the same thing. Hypocrisy. Hate crimes…as I was noticing last week, Janet Reno liked to pick-and-choose what would be prosecuted as a hate crime, apparently according to who was doing the hating and who was hated. You know, there are some powerful arguments in favor of and opposed to hate crime legislation, but it seems to me if you’re going to prosecute hate crimes in one direction, you should be willing to do it in all directions. Otherwise — that’s another example of hypocrisy.

I’m not jotting this down to pass judgment on it, that’s for the electorate to decide…or, I’ll pass judgment on it in some other essay, where that’s more in keeping with the point I want to make. In this space, I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on: Do we have a societal value or set of values, a universal moral code if you will, that bristles with hatred against hypocrisy down to the marrow of it’s bones? Erm…no. No, that’s not it. It’s silly to entertain it seriously even for a few minutes. We’re just fine with hypocrisy.

Even if it has to do with our leaders telling us not to do something, and then going off and doing that very same thing themselves. We will find a way to deal.

Now, nobody ever reads this blog, as I keep saying…but if you were to pore over the hundreds and hundreds of postings, you would see an ongoing theme where we catch “us,” as in the big “we,” pretending to be independent thinkers and making up our own minds on things…but in reality, getting told what to do, carrying it out, and looking back toward whoever told us to do it, so we can do what they want us to do next. In early 21st-century western civilization, this is the great tragedy of the human race. We like to think we arrive at conclusions independently — this is good, that is bad, we should stop doing such-and-such, so-and-so’s gotta step down — but…we don’t. We are pilot whales. We are lemmings. We think what we’re told to think.

We have to do this. How can we not?

After all, we’ve been sold on the idea that if two guys live next door to each other, one believes in Creationism and the other one believes in Evolution, they can’t be friends. Certain individuals, of course, have friendships they truly treasure, and with those ideologically-opposed friends, they become exceptions to the rule. But overall, the pattern holds firm. And it is truly sad. You think Atlantis existed, and your friend doesn’t…you think Jack The Ripper was a woman, your friend says otherwise…you think O.J. Simpson got away with murder, your friend says he was framed…you must stop being friends now. You’re not supposed to have anything to say to each other, except for periodic attempts to show each other how wrong you are.

So…to stay friends with people, we have to agree with them about things. We’ve lost the ability to maintain camaraderie with acquaintances who’ve looked at the same facts and formed different conclusions. If not lost it, we’ve allowed much of it to erode away.

And we’re a gregarious species. To our credit, we want to get along with each other.

So you see, logically, there’s no place else we can take that. We have to make sure we all think the same thing about a given situation. If everybody “knows” something is true and in our hearts, as thinking individuals, we know the opposite…we have to give that up for the sake of getting along with others. It’s got to be that way.

And in the right line of work, you get to tell people what they should be thinking, all day, every day. It’s really become rather useless and redundant to argue whether these kinds of professionals are slanted toward progressive political candidates and solutions. Everybody knows by now that they are; nobody’s saying otherwise, except the progressive candidates who are being handed sweetheart free-publicity deals and softball questions, and just a few of the journalists who are inclined to vote for them. To the rest of us, it’s become abundantly clear. Editors, columnists, people who are in the business of telling the rest of us what to think — they just like democrats.

Except the talk-radio heads. For a number of reasons, that’s different. I’ll get to that some other time.

But our print and electronic opinion-maker people, they really do love those democrats. Nowhere is this more plainly obvious, than in America’s newest tradition: The scandal. Conservative Republicans don’t survive them; liberal donks do. One scandal turns out that way, then another, then another…nobody questions it anymore. The questions are now reserved for milestones. How long till the conservative guy resigns? Is the liberal guy all done riding this thing out yet, or is there more to come? As far as how it’s going to turn out — there isn’t even any mystery to it anymore. Newspaper people want the Republicans to bite dust and for the liberal donks to hang tough…the rest of us obediently comply. And so this is the way things turn out. What was done, what we know about what was done — what, you thought those things had something to do with it? They don’t.

Yesterday morning, I tripped across Panda’s Thumb’s comment that scandals seem to afflict “Creationist” types disproportionately. I said the Thumb was correct, but not in the way the Thumb thought — the scandal has become an instrument in the surgical procedure that is the periodic removal of those who are religion-inclined.

…Panda’s Thumb is right: Scandals disproportionately afflict those failing to demonstrate an inimicable attitude toward religion, failing to embrace secularism. Scandals will continue to be pointed in that direction, toward those targets. The theory is correct, just not for the reasons thought.

That was yesterday. Today is today.

Effort to oust Doolittle grows
Embattled by scandal, he faces a possible fight to keep his seat.

By David Whitney – Bee Washington Bureau

One by one, Republicans are lining up to elbow John Doolittle out of the way.

Conservative Air Force reservist Eric Egland, who appeared in an ad for Doolittle last year, says he will run against the congressman in the June primary, and he’s already raised $100,000.

Moderate Mike Holmes, the Auburn city councilman who received 33 percent of the primary vote against Doolittle last year, says he will try again.

Last week, Roseville Assemblyman Ted Gaines, another Republican politically aligned with Doolittle, all but announced his candidacy, saying the congressman has lost his “moral ability to lead.”

Their collective message is that a federal investigation of Doolittle and his wife has become an insurmountable political obstacle.

If Doolittle doesn’t make plans to retire, they say he will have to be defeated in a primary to prevent Democrat Charlie Brown from capturing the 4th Congressional District.

Republican consultant Jeff Flint said it’s time for party leaders to take action to prevent Doolittle from seeking a 10th term next year.

“Eventually, the party leadership is going to have a serious conversation with him,” Flint said. “Those things tend to work better sooner than later. If you wait too long, it just taints the whole district. You end up losing the district even if the troubled incumbent is not the nominee anymore.”

What’s the story missing? It’s missing an event that made it imperative to do a write-up about the situation. Other than the elections next year, there isn’t one…there’s a scandal, with an associated hubbub that’s been waxing and waning for many years now. Nothing has happened with the scandal lately, nothing at all. It’s just kind of hanging out there. It was supposed to create a desired result, it has not done so yet — and so it’s time to write up a story about the “troubled” and “embattled” congressman Doolittle.

You see, our newspaper editors don’t get to decide how we vote. But they do get to decide what we talk about.

And if Doolittle was a liberal donk, this would not be happening. The layman doesn’t understand what Doolittle did wrong, and the scandal is over two years old. Granted, those are very dismal reasons for overlooking, or dismissing, a scandal. But let’s face it: For a liberal donk, either one of those would be more than adequate. Liberal donk does something wrong, nobody really understands what it was…well, that’s okay. Or…scandal grows around the liberal donk, two years into it the donk is still there — well, just forget it then. The public is “tired” of the scandal. You’ve “shot your wad.” “Move on.”

Both of those factors together? The scandal has crossed the two year mark, and nobody understood what it was all about in the first place? Hah! Forget it. A liberal donk, in that situation, would have nothing to worry about. He’d live to bury us all.

But Doolittle is a conservative Republican, with short fine slick black hair parted on one side.

Look at the week just gone past that this Sunday edition of the newspaper “bookended”: Yes, Sen. Larry Craig got taken down. In record time. Which further helps to support my theory…but something else happened. Hillary Clinton learned one of her most energetic fund-raisers was a fugitive on the run from the law.

That is a scandal. Hillary will survive it, relatively unscathed. Larry Craig did not survive his…Doolittle will not survive his either. Deep down, anybody who’s paid more than a passing glance worth of attention to this kind of issue, knows this is exactly how things will turn out. Why things are this way, nobody can explain. Not according to an innocent viewpoint about how our political society judges people, they can’t. By being cynical, and suspecting the worst, I think I’ve cobbled together a serviceable explanation above.

It is the only one…the ONLY one…that works. We just aren’t into right-and-wrong that much. We just don’t care. We’re into making sure donks live to fight another day, and elephants bite the dust. Our newspaper editors, you see, want things to be that way. And we all want to get along with each other. Therefore, we comply.

And we’re worried about “civil liberties” because some murderous creep down in Gitmo doesn’t understand air conditioning, and thinks he’s tortured when a machine blows cold air into his cell? I dunno, y’all…seems a better sense of perspective is overdue.

Worlds Collide

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

This is very interesting. I wish Sacramento Bee Public Editor Armando Acuna had put a more surgically-precise cut in his definition on things. Not that I think he’s completely wrong. It’s clear he disagrees with John Hughes, with whom I’ve been corresponding here & there, and I’m in the middle of these positions. Some areas I agree with Acuna, some other areas I agree with Hughes.

But although Acuna is using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would be a better tool, it’s interesting reading.

This is at the junction where ink-on-paper journalism intersects with the blogosphere.

The inevitable collision leaves a messy entanglement of journalism ethics and standards, of tried-and-true past practices versus the Internet’s frenetic and often anonymous ethos.

At curbside, there is also plenty of hand-wringing among newspaper managers and editors as they ponder a path to a new future without benefit of a map.
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Hughes tracks 309 regional blogs through his personal blog at www.ipsosacto.com.

Typically, the paper publishes excerpts from three to four blogs.

Recent musings have ranged from a lament about old midtown houses tagged with graffiti to the emotions of someone helping a homeless Davis man to a chat about a regional transit tax to the vagaries of finding a human skeleton outside Sutter’s Fort.

“I’m here! I’m busy! I can’t find more than two minutes to update! I miss you all! I love exclamation points! I have to find some extra time in the day! Eeek!

“OK. Morning caffeine all used up. *bangs head on keyboard*” wrote the blogger at wickedsmaht.vox.com, who, like all the other bloggers published, is identified no further.

And that’s where a collision occurs.

“I do not understand why The Bee publishes these items without attribution; that is, these are the only items in the Forum section without a (name),” wrote reader Gerald O’Connor of Sacramento. “A Web site citation doesn’t count. When I go to check on the blogs to find out who the writer is, I am unable to find a name. Have we gone from anonymous sources to anonymous contributors? I can’t get a letter published in The Bee without my name.”

Yeah, point made. Speaking as one of the 309, I do have to admit some blogs can get awfully silly — and many’s the blogger who has been caught bloviating about his reasons for not blogging too much lately, providing a greater supply of such information than could ever be associated with a commensurate demand. As far as the next notch up on the scale of relevance, opining “such-and-such irritates me, am I the only one?” Acuna’s point remains equally relevant, and perhaps even more. Let’s say an anonymous blogger finds Hillary Clinton irritating — clearly, it means a lot more if the blogger is a disinterested observer, or a passionate Clinton fan, than if he’s a life-long Republican. We probably want to know what the situation is before reading further.

On the other hand, you know…four times out of five, the blogger will go ahead and provide that information anyway, albeit without the much-sought-after individual name. Yeah, the information is still on the honor system. Yeah, we still don’t know that blogger personally. But how much do we know about our journalists?

And when our journalists have a political bias, are they well-known for disclosing that information to us?

Well look. I don’t want to exacerbate the situation any…my name is Morgan Freeberg and everything about me that has to be known, is in the FAQ. On the other hand, I do realize there are bloggers who really are anonymous, and this is what inspires the problems Acuna intends to address. I do get that.

This thing about anonymity, however, fails to culminate in anything meaningful unless the blogosphere enjoys a monopoly within the industry of printing silly, useless things. It does not. And I don’t wish to bash The Bee here. It’s outside the scope of the point I want to make to go hunting for ridiculous items in the pages of The Bee. If I need to support my point, I could do it by citing…uh, let’s say, morning news programs. A horny and confused wild turkey attacked a fire hydrant, or an enormous sheepdog has adopted a cute baby squirrel.

This is more worthy of our attention than a blog because of “journalistic standards” and “ethics”? I think not.

His column does identify an important problem. But it’s not his place, or The Bee’s, to solve it. It’s something decided by each inividual reader. You read a story about “key Republican senators speaking out against President Bush’s plan in Iraq” — you’ll probably need a blog. Savvy news readers understand, by now, that “key Republican senators,” where criticism of the President is concerned, is a synonym for Chuck Hagel. The mainstream news hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about things like this, and by engaging in this and other similar sneaky tricks, they’ve given the blogs legitimacy and a real sense of purpose. The fact of the matter is, if you consume news by glancing at the front page, gulping the rest of your coffee, smooching your wife and running off to work — you don’t know nuthin’. That’s just the way things are.

Blogs are needed. The bloggers may be creating questions about the security of the print- and electronic-news industries…but those industries are doing it to themselves.

Now, in the “being what I myself criticize” department…the reason I haven’t been blogging much lately, is. Well. The fact of the matter is, my blog is a castle built on the sand of my own insomnia. My gal and I have been taking extraordinary steps to deal with my insomnia. And they’ve been working. We’ll find a way to keep the blog updated sometime down the road, I’m sure. For now, this “sleep” thing you normal people do from time to time, feels pretty good.

Don’t Hire Bloggers?

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Heh. Well, there’s a certain logic to it I must admit. And yet I have to wonder. Any employer who figures this out from a magazine article, said magazine article, itself, figuring it out from John Edwards’ little problems in the Spring of 2007…how long would they have been able to meet the payroll in the first place? Not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Act One: In early February, the John Edwards campaign announces the hiring of two writers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, both fairly well-known in the hothouse world of political Web sites. Liberal bloggers swoon at this Web-savvy move by the erstwhile vice-presidential nominee, not to mention the attention paid to liberal bloggers.

Act Two: Persons unfriendly to Edwards quickly unearth blog entries written by the women at their personal sites before joining the campaign, which strike some observers as anti-Catholic screeds, and others as typically scabrous blog commentary. The story of the politically incorrect bloggers spreads from the Web to the traditional press; hay is made by political pundits. Edwards distances himself from the statements but does not fire Marcotte and McEwan.

Act Three: Marcotte and McEwan resign in order to halt the barrage of hostile e-mail and blog-posts, and to stop the bleeding for Edwards. Anyone familiar with the long memory of search engines and the gaffe-phobic culture of political campaigns wonders, what was the Edwards camp thinking? How could it have been caught so flat-footed by the inevitable reaction to the very public opinions of its staffers? It’s not as if this scenario is new anymore: In 2004, the John Kerry campaign Web site killed links to other blogs after critics pointed to the incendiary words of one of the linked bloggers, Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas.

The Edwards campaign is close-mouthed about the details of the whole affair, including the internal politics of the hirings and departures, as are Marcotte and McEwan. But at least some lessons are clear, for campaigns as well as companies that allow people to blog (or that hire people who may blog): Google is forever, so you need to know what your people have said in the past and be prepared to answer for it.

Gee, I’m a blogger who likes to work. So maybe my personal biases are at work here. But I think this is retarded. If there’s one thing to be learned from the Edwards affair it’s this: politicians who want to be provocative and smarmy, are no longer able to choose the audience in front of which they provoke and smarm. Thanks to the search engines, they put on their show in front of everybody or they don’t do it at all. That’s a good thing.

Think on it for just a second or two. It’s obvious. Without the massive memory of the innernets, John Edwards would have put Marcotte and McEwan front-and-center during his speeches to Move-On-Dot-Org, and then he would have turned around and buried them deep when addressing…not just Catholics…but any religious institution at all. And he would have gotten away with it. Thanks to Yahoo and Google, those days are over, or are on their way to being over.

Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing Ziff Davis eat a little crow over this one. Hey all you other bloggers. ZD thinks you are just like Amanda Marcotte. Is that an unfair characterization? I’d love to see them come out and say so.

Memo For File XL

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

A couple of weeks ago the Dean’s World blogger, Dean Esmay, laid down a law. It was a new Anti-Islamophobe policy. And for the new policy he drew inspiration from a “Line in the Sand” drawn by William F. Buckley at the National Review half a century ago:

Back in the 1950s William F. Buckley Jr. conducted a purge in the ranks of his young publication, The National Review. He was running a conservative publication at a time when conservative publications were not respected and were thus by nature low-circulation. In those circumstances it would be hard to stand on principal and refuse to associate with certain parties who might provide short-term gain.

Buckley refused to align his publication with elements on the right that were excessively hateful, rabidly racist, or just plain nuts. The whole thing came to a head when Buckley one day drew a line in the sand:

You could either be a John Birch Society supporter, or you could write for the National Review.

One or the other. “Both” was not an option.
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…having wearied of fighting constantly against Islamophobic fools on Dean’s World and other places, only to have people ridiculously deny the very possibility that there could be any such thing as Islamophobia even when the evidence is presented them full in the face, I’ve decided to draw a similar line in the sand:

You can be an Islamophobe, or you can contribute to Dean’s World. You cannot do both.

This is meant for front-page contributors, submitters, or even commenters. It is time for you to make a choice, and to live by that choice. Because I certainly intend to.

Simply put, you must agree to all of the following assumptions:

1) Islam does not represent the forces of Satan or the Anti-Christ bent on destruction of the Christian world.

2) There is no 1,400 year old “war with the West/Christianity” being waged by Muslims or anyone else.

3) Islam as a religion is no more inherently incompatible with modernity, minority rights, women’s rights, or democratic pluralism than most religions.

4) Medieval, anachronistic, obscure terms like “dhimmitude” or “taqiyya” are suitable for polite intellectual discussion. They are not and never will be appropriate to slap in the face of everyday Muslims or their friends.

5) Muslims have no more need to prove that they can be good Americans, loyal citizens, decent people, or enemies of terrorism than anyone else does.

Is this a test of “ideological purity?”

Why yes. Yes it is.
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Criticism is fine. Intellectual argument is fine. Traditionalist moral arguments are fine. But I will not provide a forum for haters or paranoids.

I’m done. Islamophobia has no more place in polite society than any other form of irrational hatred, and I will no longer be any part of hosting discussions or “debates” with Islamophobes.

I learned about this from His Royal Majesty, and it’s an interesting phenomenon to watch, although certainly by no means anything untested. Nowadays, anytime the ideological purists erect their guardrails of ideological purity, the first trailheads to be sealed off are the ones leading to something that someone somewhere can call “hate.” The ideological purists, then, block off all the other trailheads later. Until purity is achieved.

This Bullet #2 in Dean’s “Line” has caused a lot of discussion; one gains the impression, the discussion exceeds whatever Dean himself had in mind about it. FIAR at Radioactive Liberty enjoyed fisking this one immensely, it seems:

Uh, be sure to send a copy of the memo to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc. I’m pretty sure they missed the memo. I think you should also send a BCC to the Marines so that they can play whack a muj by listening for the sound of explosive laughter.

It’s caused quite the controversy. Frank J is disturbed. Misha says, “Enjoy your echo chamber.” His own wife is glad she’s not a contributor, or she would be out. Contributor Ron Coleman says Buh-Bye now. It’s odd that an Orthodox Jew might be troubled, isn’t it? Contributor Kevin Dombrowski is out too. Contributor Mary Madigan compares him to Maoists.

The forementioned Rosemary The Queen provides the most entertaining response, I think:

I’d certainly not be welcome here any longer. Dean’s line in the sand is one that I would stomp all over, if, I were still an active contributor here.

Dean is welcome to make all the rules he wants but I don’t like echo chambers. There can be no debate if everyone agrees. What’s the friggin’ point? Does it make me an Islamophobe to notice that people who strap bombs on themselves in the name of Allah are … muslim? Well, tough crap. I’m NOT BLIND. Does that mean I think all muslims are bad? No. But there are some problems in the muslim world and it doesn’t make me a racist to say so.

I have a problem with all of Dean’s assertions. My problem is the fact that we are being blackmailed into accepting his edict. Well, I won’t be browbeaten into “acceptance”, I like to think for myself and make my own decisions. Demanding that I accept his edict on Islam is not gonna happen. I won’t be told what to do or believe, that’s why I quit being a Democrat. And if I were still a major writer here, I’d quit too.

Anyone who wants to debate without having to swallow what Dean’s serving is welcome at The Queen of All Evil or as I have been affectionately dubbed, the Queen of the Banned.

And on her own resource linked above, she opines against one of the sub-edicts in particular, with no small amount of solid justification for doing so.

Well, I have a big problem with #3 and I would like to thank Saudi Arabia’s latest decision for spelling it out so clearly.

A 19-year-old Saudi woman who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by seven men who then took photos of their victim and threatened to kill her, was sentenced under the country’s Islamic-based law to 90 lashes for the “crime” of being alone with a man not related to her.

Well, most ancient religions are well versed in the ideals of the 21st century. Till, Islam catches up, #3 is a big FUCKING JOKE. I’m also pretty sure that no ancient religion currently hangs gays for being gay, either… cough Iran cough.

But for sheer quality and educational value, nothing beats Ron Coleman’s essay on the subject.

I was very inclined to wait this out, but then in the comments someone raised the issue of “Galileos” on the masthead. I don’t want it to be inferred that in order to have access to this platform — which I value highly, as Dean knows well — I am going along with what are arguably controversial propositions. I think Dean is grossly oversimplifying the issue, one of the most important and controversial in the world today. I think, for what it’s worth, that he’s doing so because of a powerful inclination he has to do the right thing, especially by underdogs.

Why he thinks Muslims are underdogs in this time (and place), as I have said before, I do not know. I’ve been a little annoyed by the suggestions that as a Jew, I should be the one to be most sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed Muslim, which frankly I believe is preposterous. As a Jew I am the number-one guy in the gunsight of the oppressed Muslim, just because of who I am. Not every Muslim kills Jews, but in my lifetime no one has killed as many Jews as Muslims. I won’t have my view of what that implies about Muslim civilization dictated to me by anyone.

Just as Dean has certain things that he’s really picky about, I do too. And number one is being told. Tied for number one is cowardice. Those are my lines in the sand.

So by drawing his line in the sand Dean has forced my hand. Not because I’m an “Islamophobe.” My way of life as a strictly orthodox Jew has more in common with that of religious Muslims than Dean’s does, and then some. But I won’t be cornered this way. It’s a bit of a precedent issue — where will Dean draw the next line? I don’t want to find out or to worry about it.

Well, speaking for myself I think folks are being a bit tough on Dean. Dean didn’t invent this practice of Clean Thinking, and he will not be the last to practice it. He’s just the latest example of someone who thinks it’s a swell idea.

Trouble with it is, it’s antithetical to “learning” in the strictest definition of that word. It justifies itself, not by providing an alternative avenue by which information may be acquired, but by declaring itself a scourge of hate. So by its own foundation it provides a choice: You may learn, or you may abjure hatred. And then, it foresakes the first of those two, and demands all others do the same.

But it never seems to stop there, does it? Once you refuse to learn things because you’re afraid of what you might learn — you have to continue honoring that taboo. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. A new piece of information might make you hateful…or protestant…or agnostic…or gay. You risk becoming tomorrow, things you are not today, and don’t want to be today. This kind of risk is what learning is all about. And so, in the same manner you may “guarantee” no car will run you over, if you simply resolve to stay in your house all day long…you’re assured you will cling to the same values everlastingly, so long as you refuse to learn new things. The only catch is this: There can be no exceptions. It’s a “needle and balloon” situation. No room for moderation.

Can’t be half-a-dimwit, or the formula doesn’t work.

As far as those with a sincere desire to exchange ideas, I think the Queen of Evil said it best. “There can be no debate if everyone agrees. What’s the friggin’ point?”

Cemetary Piddling

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

Is it unfair of me to read something in to this?

A television photographer who was fired for urinating in a cemetery while covering the funeral of an Iowa soldier was denied unemployment benefits. Gerry Edwards, of Center Point, was dismissed in December by KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids.

In November, Edwards urinated near a monument at a cemetery while he was there covering the funeral procession for 23-year-old Sgt. James Musack, of Riverside, who was killed in Iraq, court records said.

Another journalist photographed the incident, and it was e-mailed to Edwards’ managers. Records said officials escorted Edwards out of the building within hours and gave him a choice of resigning or being fired.

I think the most accurate answer I can give to that question is: Kinda. A little. But not completely.

I see the tombstone piddling as metaphorical. I see it as a microcausm of everything our Fourth Estate, and our angry anti-war leftists, have been doing for the last four years. They whip out their cameras, point at the three-thousand-plus casualties and damn George Bush to hell for sending our brave soldiers in to harm’s way. And then after the cameras have shut down, they piss on tombstones. The whole lot of ’em. Gerry Edwards, and his antagonistic colleague who took this action to end Edwards’ career, acted out this little conflict in the middle of a solemn ceremony. They were dispatched to that ceremony to arouse the passions of the rest of us. Passions borne of decency. Decency which neither one of them reflect.

Isolated incident? Perhaps. But why am I to think so? Really?

Gerry Edwards disgusts us not because of the vile fluid that came out of his body, but because of his willingness to dispense it in such a hallowed place. I think there’s nothing unique about him. I think he’s just the guy who couldn’t hold it any longer…and got caught.

Trackposted to Bullwinkle Blog

I Knew There Was Something About Her

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I wish it were easier for me to get ahold of hard news and information about Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo.

She’s a Democrat; she’s a woman; she’s anti-war; she’s got names in her rolodex and other folks have her name in theirs; and, she has an illness. So my local newspaper won’t say too much about her that isn’t fawning and glittery. Very little that is issue-related.

It’s up to the bloggers. Hey, that’s one of the nice things about being alive right now. Thanks Jen.

I just knew there was something about Her Honor that rubbed me the wrong way.

Talking About Crime Commissions

Last week I wrote about Sacramento’s useless Mayor Heather Fargo, and her idea of fighting crime and gangs: A Youth Commission of Sacramento Area high school students to keep City Council abreast of “Youth-related issues.”

Instead of adding more cops to the already pittiful number (668 on the street), Heather and her merry band of Council Nitwits want to talk more about the problem. In what amounts to a typical liberal response to a very real problem, Sacramento City Council lead by Mayor Heather Fargo established a “youth czar” position to coordinate prevention and intervention programs.