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To: SmithPatterson

The Second Amendment recognizes a right to "keep and bear arms," designed by the Founding Fathers to help prevent tyranny by government. If "fascist" Ashcroft wishes to trample on the Constitution, does this not represent the very tyranny by government that so deeply concerned the Founding Fathers? Some leftists see a movement toward a police state -- the very thing the Founding Fathers wanted the Second Amendment and the armed citizenry to prevent -- yet the very leftists also want further gun control.



Beeeeautiful. And this is just a taste of what Obamamsama is going to get when Keyes gets a hold of him.

That aside, Elders needs to pick him a little democratic runt to run over. Any suggestions.


2 posted on 08/05/2004 2:33:32 AM PDT by TomasUSMC
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To: TomasUSMC

How about Mitt Romney the comney? He's a worthless little Rat.


6 posted on 08/05/2004 2:52:35 AM PDT by the gillman@blacklagoon.com (Oh yeah, he claims to be a republican.)
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To: TomasUSMC; fporretto; walford; rwfromkansas; Natural Law; Old Professer; RJCogburn; Jim Noble; ...
Some leftists see a movement toward a police state -- the very thing the Founding Fathers wanted the Second Amendment and the armed citizenry to prevent -- yet the very leftists also want further gun control. Some leftists distrust the government as to the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, yet apparently feel sufficiently secure that we need not fear tyranny from this "fascist" government.
The leftists are not interested in the First Amendment. That seems ironic when leftism itself is derived from the PR power of journalism. But the trouble with the First Amendment, from a leftist perspective, is that while it enshrines freedom of the journalism which is the nexus of the PR power of leftism, the First Amendment also enshrines freedom to compete with that PR power.

Leftists define "the press" as being coextensive with "objective" journalism - they call journalism "the press" - but all nonfiction printing competes with journalism for the credence of the public in telling us "what is going on." The differences between "objective" journalism and the rest of "the press" are:

Nonfiction books are only written about subjects which justify the investment of far more time than is devoted to a news article. Nonfiction books delve into history; authors have no license from the reader to hide from history in a fog of breaking news.

The longer perspective of the book author means that, for example, the fact that an American secretary is better off than Queen Victoria was is not automatically buried in a welter of trivial factoids of the worst news of each day between Victoria's 1819 birth and today.

And although the book is fact-checked far more thoroughly than a news report is, the author of the book does not have license to arbitrarily dismiss all contrary ideas; his reader is far too critical to be patronized in that way. The author must lay his cards on the table, and if he has an interest in a particular conclusion he must declare it before the critics do.

Much the same can be said of talk radio. The host of the show spends so much time on the air that it is impossible to avoid the critical ear of the audience. In the long run noise and smoke simply dissipates and the actual person will be understood.

The motive of the noise and smoke of journalism is quite simple: it all derives from the power of the printing press to create PR. Nothing should be more obvious that the owner of a press will not willingly subject himself to bad PR, and on the contrary will naturally tend to make himself look good. And not merely within the pages of his own publication, but in others. The person whom the ordinary citizen avoids arguing with because he "buys ink by the barrel" also avoids arguing with others similarly situated.

All journalists tend to herd together for protection from bad PR. And that unofficial guild, that Establishment, protects itself from bad PR by attacking any serious critic. There is no need for orders to be dispensed from on high; any journalist recognizes an attack on the guild, and any journalist knows what to do about it. Journalists naturally avoid giving interviews to talk show hosts because in that milieu they can be put on the spot to justify the "objectivity" con discussed above. And each one knows that to publicly cast doubt on the objectivity of a "competitor" is death by a thousand PR cuts at the hands of all other journalists, not merely the "competitor" himself.

There is of course actual competition among journalists, so the scare quotes above are not perfectly fair. But because of the herding effect of journalism, that competition is limited in a way which is systematically conservative of the herd itself. Journalism focuses like a laser on what may cast anything outside the herd in a significantly negative light. Thus the status quo - the things and people which actually make society function and cohere - are under continuous, tendentious PR assault by journalism. Free, competitive - but free to cooperate - journalism is systematically anticonservative in the political sense.

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

19 posted on 08/05/2004 5:50:03 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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