Greta Van Susteren’s Career Threatened By Obama Administration

Greta Van Susteren has been a journalist for CNN and Fox News channels since the 1990s. She has a reputation for being objective, and reporting only on stories that she finds to be truthful. She has been known to vet sources and facts herself.

When she reported on the 9/11 Benghazi scandal, she chronicled the Obama administration’s attempts to portray the attack as a conspiracy created by an American filmmaker’s anti-Islamic short film. As soon as it became clear that the incident was a terrorist attack, the administration started to withhold their information.

Now Susteren is claiming that the Obama administration failed to invite Fox News to the State Department conference bridge, even as they alerted other news agencies. Fox News has also been repeatedly dodged in their mission to expose the Benghazi cover up.

Susteren claims that someone at the Obama administration has also made clear threats to members of her staff, telling them that they would have their careers ended if they continued to investigate the Benghazi incident.

This incident was months ago as I recall Greta said she got a call after that 9/11 incident in about Oct/Nov of the same year. The call was from a so called old friend she had known for years who now worked in the White House. The call was basically a so called favor to her to tell Jennifer Griffin to back off her aggressive reporting of the Benghazi story.

Greta and her husband were one the of the most powerful products liability attorney partnerships in DC. Coale and Van Susteran were partners and sued Acromed pedicle screws in a very large class action lawsuit. Those were the pedicle screws used with the stainless steel spinal fixation devices used in the early 1990’s to about mid 1990’s. I recall that well as I have those screws in my spine and they are now loose. Anyway, Greta has been straight up with many lawmaker’s on numerous hearings dealing with the IRS, Fast and Furious, etc. She repeatedly tells them to get an Independent counsel.

I wouldn’t even care all that much if a journalist is a liberal in their personal life, as long as they do their job with objectivity and simply report the facts.

That is a fine theory, but there is a fundamental flaw in it - the assumption that “the news” and “the facts” are the same thing. They are not. “The facts” would include everything that has happened since the beginning of time. Or at least, everything known to have happened, ever. Whereas “the news” is a very restricted subset of “the facts.” That subset excludes practically everything good that is known, and it excludes things that the audience has had a chance to learn from another source. Since in reality “Half the truth may be a great lie (Franklin), nothing prevents “the news” from being a true subset of “the facts” and, at one and the same time, highly tendentious.

But nearly two generations of journalists have been trained to put ideology before the truth, and are no more than public-relations pawns of the Democrat party at best.

The reality is that restricting your attention to the negative and the recent makes you cynical. And cynicism is what “liberalism” is about. I offer you Exhibit A:
”If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that."
Whatever else that is, it is sheer cynicism. It goes under the name “liberalism,” but - because the meaning of “liberalism” was essentially inverted in the the 1920s (the date is given in Safire’s New Political Dictionary) - in modern usage of the word belongs squarely inside scare quotes.
Liberalism, as understood outside the US and as understood in the US before 1920, responds to the cynicism of modern “liberalism” as follows:

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

We do not marvel that journalists assign the positive term “liberal” to those who agree with themselves, and smear those who do not. Journalists are in the perfect situation to be able to do that. And we do not marvel that journalists are cynical about the performance of people who work to a bottom line - because journalists don’t have to do that, they can take cheap shots at those who do.

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