Posted on 03/28/2019 4:20:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
It’s a weird time in American history. The truth no longer matters. Not the subjective truth of what you think is the best beer or who makes the best hamburger, but the objective truth of what is or is not a fact. It’s not that objective truth doesn’t exist, it most certainly does, it’s that so many people, particularly on the political left, no longer care what that objective truth is.
The “Russia collusion” story didn’t invent the concept of two different realities, especially in politics, but nothing exposed it more than the 2-plus year witch hunt.
Like the constellations in the stars, which can be made into anything when there are millions of them, people seeing what they want to see is nothing new. What is new is the idea that people deny what is unambiguously right in front of them because they either don’t like it or have too much invested in something else.
When word came down last weekend that there was no collusion between Russian agents and anyone remotely associated with the 2016 Trump campaign, worlds were rocked. CNN, MSNBC, and their fellow travelers in print form genuinely did not expect that to be the case. They’d spent those years swearing to their audiences it would be the case. Thus, one could understand why they’d immediately start the Küber-Ross stages of grief. Only they seem to be stuck on step one.
The first stage of grief is “denial.” It’s natural, no one wants to accept loss, but that’s all these so-called adults have. They’ve dabbled in stage two, anger, but only in the context of people mentioning the truth they’re in the throes of denying. It’s really bizarre.
More than that, it’s dangerous. How does anyone work with or trust people unwilling to admit the Sun rises in the East?
The queen of collusion has been Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host known for Muppet-like gyrations and mugging for the camera straight out of the silent film era. Friday, when the report was submitted and it was known no more indictments would be forthcoming, Maddow interrupted her fishing vacation in Tennessee to demonstrate what shock looks like on live television. By Monday, denial had fully taken hold.
“Whatever information (Barr) just received from Robert Mueller about the president's behavior as it pertains to potential criminal obstruction of justice, Barr could have just passed that information onto (Congress) for them to decide what to do with it,” Maddow said. “But instead, somewhat inexplicably, he decided to take it upon himself to declare definitively, ‘Yeah, you know, I looked at all that stuff, and I can tell you there is no crime there, it's fine.’”
You’d almost expect the digging in of heels from the people who’d been on camera or had bylines for two years putting their names to the, and I’m being overly generous here, falsehood. They’re the ones who told the lies as if they were gospel, and they’re the ones who have to find a way to convince their audiences they weren’t lying at all. But you’d expect management to sing a slightly different tune, to exhibit some introspection about how they’d so thoroughly soiled their sheets and credibility. Not full self-flagellation, but an admission they needed to do better in the future.
Nope.
Jeff Zucker, the brains behind the oldest and least-watched brand in cable news, sees blame, but elsewhere.
“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” he told The New York Times. No outlet had more corrections, retractions, and “mistakes” than CNN, yet the captain of the once-respected Titanic of cable news is blaming the iceberg for not swerving.
Dean Baquet, the man who runs The Times, absolved his paper of any and all responsibility as well.
“It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality,” he said. He seems unaware of the contacts his reporters have with CNN and MSNBC and how they routinely shared rumors and their wrong opinions through their other jobs. You can’t be an activist and a journalist simultaneously, they’re contradictory professions.
None of these people can admit they did anything wrong because they’re in denial about the president not having done anything illegal. The new mantra of the left is “We need to see the whole report and all the supporting documents.” This isn’t from a desire to read millions of pages of evidence, it’s to delay the inevitable.
Dozens of FBI agents and 19 lawyers worked on the Mueller investigation, if they’d found a smoking gun or something that contradicts what Attorney General William Barr wrote in his summary you can be certain someone would have called a friendly journalist to contradict it. The phones have not rung.
There is no incentive for denialists to accept the objective truth, only downside. Their narrative of collusion is so engrained in their worldview that even after the conclusions of the Mueller Report were known, fully 48 percent of respondents still told Reuters “Trump or someone from his campaign worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election.” That is down 6 percentage points from the previous week, but it’s also a testament to just how deep the denial runs. No amount of truth is going to sway people away from a lie they desperately want to believe.If the audience lied to doesn’t demand better from the people who deceived them because they so desperately want the lies to be true, there is no incentive to do better in the future. That objective truth means the greatest political fraud of the 21st century is likely to only hold that title for a very short time.
Depends on what year it is. The statement above was true for many decades. But more recent history would argue that Activist and Journalist have become one and the same. Many in the profession would argue that if you are not being an Activist, then you are not doing your duty as a Journalist.
Which is sad. Because it's not supposed to be that way.
Smollett.
Deconstructionism. Narrative.
For most of the time there were journalists, they were activists.
It was only a very short time in American history, from about 1915 to 1960 that non-partisan press was dominant. And that was somewhat interrupted by the heavy censorship during WWII.
By 1965, the mass media of the TV networks was irrevocably dominated by Progressive ideology, which is activist in its foundational thought.
The Dems. deliberately feed the Dem. News Industry negative Trump stories. They run with it. The gullible audience believes it, simply because it is on T.V. Liberals are threatened by the Trump Agenda and Conservatives. The audience is addicted to hate toward anything not liberal.
They are caught red handed in a millions lies and have no shame.
By lying to the American people, our civil rights have been violated. They deprived us of a free press.
But that's not Congress's job, as I said over and over again during all the Trey Gowdy goon shows.
If the House majority wants to (dares to) hold hearings on Articles of Impeachment, then fine, they are entitled to review any material evidence which it would not be illegal for DOJ to provide.
But otherwise, Congress does not and cannot prosecute crimes, convene Grand Juries, and in general should not "decide what to do" with investigative materials that belong to the Executive Branch, PARTICULARLY when DOJ has decided not to prosecute.
Contempt for TRUTH, scorn of TRUTH--TRUTH for its own sake--is the evil most fundamental to the decadence of Western Civilization.
Leftists don’t give one damn about the objective truth.
They only care about power, and lying to the dumb-masses is how they get it.
I believe Herr Mueller knew the “Russia collusion” was all fake. His calculus (I speculate) was that his “investigation”, countless insider leaks, hostile media narratives, spineless GOPe and pursuit of Trump’s closest advisers... (the bet/hope?) Trump would soon wilt under the pressure and resign. When it became clear Trump would not... Mueller and his “Grand Inquisitors” realized they were outta ammo... and (IMHO) he decided he wasn’t gonna fall on his sword for Hillary or the Deep State. So he had to fold his cards, admit there was no collusion or obstruction of justice, punt and attempt to save what little integrity he has left... which is (again IMHO) in tatters! #CoupFail
I hardly need to say this, but she hasn't the slightest clue. The Congress can pass criminal referrals to Barr, but not the other way around.
Complete and utter BS. But what do you expect? His "news" outlet routinely lies, that kind of rot permeates from the top.
I believe he has the characterization exactly backwards. His people most certainly are not journalists by any stretch of the imagination. They may file textual and video stories, but they are just that - stories. They most certainly are investigators though. They seem to spend all their time looking for information to use to further their political agenda. When that fails, the resort to simply manufacturing a story from whole cloth. CNN, crappy non-news. I don't believe it can be saved, needs to be shut down.
Okay, so what is the strategy of the sane amidst this madness? Sit around and wait for the whole thing to go pear shaped? Are We the People’s hand really tied or are we supposed to DO something at some point before we end up in Solzhenitsyn’s Regret?
The media has been slouching towards an Orwellian culture since it realized that the truth can be obscured and manipulated during the Watergate era. The ultimate challenge is to make people disbelieve what they see and hear and what their common sense tells them. It’s never been explained better than it is in the novel 1984.
Exactly. They lie with unprecedented CONfidence. That is their MO these days.
The Mueller investigation damaged politicians and the media for years to come. The damage to our country will take decades to heal and may never heal, since now the liars have been exposed. They looked in the camera and lied over and over for years.
TRUTH smashed delusion.
This is an old, old story--as old as Western Civilization itself.
Western Civilization began with tales of hubris and denial--the stuff of tragedy--and warnings of their dangers.
Back in high school or college, when we first encountered Oedipus and Jocasta, remember how incredulous we were that they did not realize that they were mother and son? Then the profound truth of the legend dawned upon us--as it had dawned upon Sigmund Freud and led him to discover the subconscious mind: of course they knew it! They knew it all along! They had built their lives around it! But they were in denial, and their denial and hubris brought them to destruction! When TRUTH smashed their delusions, Jocasta killed herself, and Oedipus blinded himself so that never again would he fail to see TRUTH, which was within himself all along and from which he had allowed the external world to distract him.
Hubris and denial inexorably lead to tragedy.
This warning has been a profound part of Western Civilization since before its inception.
Certainly the conspirators who attempted to annul the 2016 Presidential Election and stage a coup d'état were sleazy partisans who displayed none of the qualities of tragic heroes, and so far they have shown no evidence of having learned the lessons that history and their betters could have taught them, the dismay and anger that they are experiencing, now that TRUTH has smashed their delusions, was preventable.
It's doubtful that such scoundrels will suffer much--or long--from the disappointments of their failed scheme. Such dregs experience discomfort and melodrama. It's not as though these people were heroic figures experiencing tragedy.
The real lesson here is for the American People many of whom are heroic figures:
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