House of Eratosthenes

An important part of liberalism, as we know it today, is the continuing support of failed plans & predictions. If a liberal heads out early in the morning to catch fish for dinner — oh, just go with it, okay? — and has to quickly vanish into a grocery store that night for a take-and-bake pizza because there wasn’t any catch, there will be no lessons learned. Not a single one. A real fisherman will come up with some ideas about the bait, the time of year, time of day, the fishing hole, all those jackasses who discovered the hole and cleaned it out…something to be changed so the results will be better next time.

Only a true-believing liberal can see his precious theories bump up against and enter into a conflict with reality, and declare reality to be the loser.

The Washington Post died for Liberal Privilege.

The Doctrine of Liberal Privilege.

Let’s define that Liberal Privilege.

In four words?

“We make the rules.”
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How ingrained was Liberal Privilege at the Post? Listen to famed Post reporter Bob Woodward on the sale to [Jeff] Bezos:

This isn’t Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal, this is somebody who believes in the values that the Post has been prominent in practicing, and so I don’t see any downside.

This is amazing.

Why?

Rupert Murdoch, like the Graham family that is selling the Post, comes from a newspaper family and has been running newspapers all his life. Unlike the Grahams he wasn’t handed a major league journalistic inheritance in the Post, one of the most famous newspapers in America when the latest batch of Grahams took over the paper. No, Murdoch inherited the tiny Adelaide News out off the beaten path in Australia in a day when Australia itself was off the beaten path for most Westerners. Today, the Grahams are losing the Post. And the Murdoch News Corporation, named after that lowly Adelaide paper literally bestrides the globe with newspapers, a movie studio, Fox News, and more. And what is the condition of the Wall Street Journal, purchased a while back from another American journalist family that was struggling to keep their inheritance going? Here’s this release from a couple month’s back that captures the point in a headline:

WALL STREET JOURNAL REMAINS #1 NEWSPAPER IN U.S.

WITH RISE IN TOTAL AVERAGE CIRCULATION

And the Post? Said a saddened Donald Graham, the Post’s publisher:

Our revenues had declined seven years in a row.

So somehow, the despicable — read: conservative — Rupert Murdoch is running the Number One newspaper in America and the Journal’s circulation is on the rise. But the Post has had revenues decline for seven years in a row. And Bob Woodward thinks Rupert Murdoch is the problem with journalism? Why — shocking! How could that possibly be?

It can be because, as Woodward says correctly, the Post has been “prominently practicing” certain “values.” Or, as the Post’s Erik Wemple headlined his blog:

Don Graham sells, but doesn’t sell out

What Woodward and Wemple are talking about is the language of Liberal Privilege. What are those mysterious “values” at the Post that Woodward mentions? What is Wemple so pleased at that has him writing that Don Graham didn’t sell out?

That would be…Liberal Privilege.
:
Once Liberal Privilege is understood, decades of news stories make sense.

The treatment of Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney among others are all examples of Liberal Privilege at work. Each and every person on that list was presented by the Washington Post to the American public — specifically to their readers — through the eyes of Liberal Privilege. Everybody who counted at the paper had the code on how to write about these people.

In short hand? In the Code of Liberal Privilege?

Thomas was a black sexual harasser, Quayle, Palin, Bachmann, Reagan and Bush were stupid, Cain a black sex maniac, and Nixon, Gingrich, and Cheney varying incarnations of evil.

I don’t think bias gets to the heart of the issue. I think it’s a question of what exactly is being sold. “Rush Limbaugh sells conservative propaganda and the Washington Post sold liberal propaganda” doesn’t quite flesh out all the meaningful detail.

One may wish to pay attention to how the conclusions are reached. I’ve noticed before that one of the things that make liberal articles — blogs too, not just newspapers — hard to read is that it takes so long to get to the nuts & bolts of the story. It seems you always have to drill through twenty paragraphs about how disgusting something is and what all you’re supposed to think about it, before you get to the facts.

I guess if you’re a true zealot, that’s all forgivable. Most Americans aren’t, though. I think when people pay good money to get information, so that they can become informed, they really want it to happen. Say what you want about Rush Limbaugh, but when he says “Obama said such-and-such yesterday” he’ll lead with the sound bite. After that…whatever your own reaction to it…you’ll get Rush Limbaugh’s take on why he finds it ridiculous. Which, most of the time, might include more sound bites. This stands in stark contrast to lefty media reportage about Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle being a big dummy. When it’s written up by someone who’s never personally met Palin or Quayle, even if you agree with what’s concluded, it’s hard to mull that over and, at the end of it, consider yourself to have been truly informed.

So generally, when liberal “news” resources like this fail, it might be getting closer to the truth to suppose they fail because they just aren’t delivering the product on which the customer relies.

The Soviets had a pithy saying that nailed it. The two main papers in the USSR were Pravda, which means “truth,” and Izvestia, which means “news.” And so: “There’s no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.”

This is one of the things that makes liberalism so hard to understand, I think. They already know what they feel, don’t they? Why do they need to have their feelings regurgitated back to them in the form of a “news” story? If the takeaway from an innocuous story like “Sarah Palin addresses Fish and Wildlife Committee” is that Sarah Palin is a big stupid dummy, then… why do we need to read about her speech to the Fish and Wildlife Committee in the first place?

But evidently a lot of them do. Or did. It might also be the case that they’re now getting their outrage straight from the source — why bother with the window dressing of a “news” story when you can just log on to sarahpalinisadummy.com?
- Severian | 08/11/2013 @ 20:21
Because they are “Medicators”; and they’re medicating.
- mkfreeberg | 08/11/2013 @ 20:47
Good point.

Wow, how tedious. I just plain don’t have the free time to be a liberal. I mean, I know what I think and how I feel already; life’s too short to spend reading endless iterations of what I already know. Conservatism as… laziness? Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess.
- Severian | 08/11/2013 @ 22:04
Apparently I um…failed to respond, despite the multiple DIRE warnings, WELL in advance, that my print subscription to Newsweek, deliverable via. my USPS P.O.Box, (apparently unlike Paypal) was going to expire. I had no idea that my failure to renew meant the collapse of ALL “print” editions.

NYT is NOT for sale! But all those NYT Corp. “loss leader” assets sure are.

I kept scanning the remaining airwaves still “free” (and untrackable- unlike Cable/Satellite) to Americans and I couldn’t find Air America ANYWHERE. (Strangely, I couldn’t find free Glen Beck either.)What ever happened to the professional folks that served that venue anyway? Where are they NOW? “Extended” unemployment “insurance”? Food Stamps (can’t remember the new kinder, gentler name for them)? WIC? Jurno/hyphen/list “union” widows and orphans fund?

“We make the rules.” So “What does it matter…?”
Not that “Passing” (on it) will enable the “transparency” to see what’s actually in it.
Now that “Fast and Furious” has apparently been settled by executive privilege, (aka Because Shut Up) I suspect any pesky “false scandal” of 400 “missing” ground-to-air missiles will NOT prompt an AOL/Time Warner/ CAIR/Mary Kay Foundation sequal to “Charlie Wilson’s War”. I suspect it WILL cut down on political junkets, until legislation reintroducing “special” fly-over by military “executive” transport, of “certain”elected/appointed folk, for “certain” official travel is quietly attached to an infrastructure/energy/humanities bill.

Any projections on the ‘Vegas line on timing of official script changing (as it so often does) from “racist” to sexist, “homophobic” (back to) misogynist, “exemption” to misericord*, “Progressive” to Global? This kind of stationary reprinting is gonna’ cost SOMEBODY big money. Is Harpo Productions just gonna’ slap down their Black American Express on this?

SO will someone please explain to me the apparently too-subtile-for-me-to-grok distinctions between “New Department regulations”, Executive (including entire branch of appointed) Branch privilege, Appointees to Judicial positions, and that group of folk quaintly known to certain news “reporting” , as well as other propaganda folk, as “lawmakers”? (except infiltrators of the TP ilk ,of course)

*misericord: Came across THIS word while actually,…like… you know…um…looking up, all by myself, an agreed upon definition of “Misandry” (gee, couldn’t seem to find it) in one of my apparently obsolete tomes. Has OED officially declared Misandry a “new word”, by sole virtue of “usage”, yet? Mirriam Webster “College” ?, American Heritage? Roget’s Thesaurus? “Wiki”anything?
- CaptDMO | 08/13/2013 @ 07:32
[…] ITEM: An important part of liberalism, as we know it today, is the continuing support of failed plans & […]
- Steynian 486rd | Free Canuckistan! | 08/15/2013 @ 07:06

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The Doctrine of Liberal PrivilegeSunday, August 11th, 2013

The Doctrine of Liberal Privilege
Sunday, August 11th, 2013