It's easy to pass this around.
Posted on 08/22/2005 7:28:30 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I don't think you understand the situation. The fundamental problem is story selection - what is the lead, what makes the cut, and what isn't reported at all. Consideringwould the "memos" have logically been important even if they were absolutely genuine? Would it have been "objective" to call them a smoking gun, when all they putatively "prove" is that Bush wasn't the second coming of Audie Murphy - something which Bush himself never claimed?
- Kerry's book, Winter Soldier, and the rest of his quisling act back in the Vietnam era,
- Kerry's negative military expenditure votes in the Senate, and
- Kerry's dismissal of the "what did you do in the war?" issue when the Democrats were electing a draft dodger in 1992,
I'm not arguing that they wouldn't have likely suppressed the Bush vote enough to turn the election if the blogosphere and talk radio hadn't put the kibosh on them - I think they probably would. But that begs the question - why would an objective person think it was their job to promote the Kerry political line?
Just turn it around. Suppose that there was information about Kerry that was exactly as derrogatory as those "memos," but it was about John Kerry. Would CBS have aired it, and would it have affected the election? That's not a hypothetical question, of course - the answer is the book Unfit for Command by O'Neil and the other members of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." If 60 Minutes had breathlessly touted it they way they did the "memos," there would have been no doubt at all as to the outcome of the election. Instead CBS and the rest of the "objective" journalists pretended to give SBVT a hearing, then announced that they had been "discredited." And even so, SBVT is credited with the defeat of Kerry in Ohio.
The idea of "objectivity" is absurd when story selection determines the political slant of your reporting. Which is why the First Amendment is so elegant - and why the government was wrong to create the "titles of nobility" known as broadcast licenses.
CBS News counters bloggers with 'Nonbudsman'
Reuters via Yahoo ^ | 08/30/05
The tragedy is that "the media" can so blythely and so truthfully be spoken of as a single entity. Of course the relatively novel format known as "talk radio" cannot be lumped in with "the media" even though it obviously is a part of the generic term. The true distinction is not between "talk radio" and "the media" but between philosophical communication and sophistic propaganda.It has been known since Socrates that claiming virtue is arrogant. Claiming the particular virtue of wisdom is called "sophistry." It is impossible to have a rational debate with a sophist. The sophist will always demean anyone who disagrees with him/her in lieu of debating the merits of the issue at hand. Thus the littany which Rush so often recites - "racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe" - is so excrutiatingly familiar whenever a "debate" occurs between a liberal and a conservative.
And it is always the "liberal" who applies those labels. It is always the liberal who does so, because the liberal can rely on the support of the sophistic propaganda power of "the media." The conservative does not attempt to resort to that technique, not only because of the lack of propaganda power, but because the conservative is always defending the philosophical high ground.
Philosophy - "the love of wisdom" - claims only to be willing to listen to reason. Philosophy rejects ad hominum and other misleading argumentation. But in the present circumstances in the United States, there is an establishment (usually referred to as "the media") which claims the virtue of wisdom (tho they call it "objectivity"). That cabal is able to launch a tremendous propaganda campaign against anyone who dares to reject its claim of superior virtue. Consequently our political discourse is heavily biased toward emotion and against logic and factual data.
Historically it was sometimes claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee" - or alternatively, "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber." And since the Republican and especially the Democratic parties had "broad tents," there was at least a colorable argument for that perspective. The Democratic Party had such a broad tent because it included not only the liberals but also the conservative post-Reconstruction southerners who would "vote for a yellow dog before they'd vote for a Republican."
Then came the Johnson Administration out of the southern state of Texas. The Vietnam involvement that Johnson inherited was a mess, in the sense that the legitimate government of South Vietnam had been overthrown. Madam Nhu, the widow of the deposed President Diem, blamed the Kennedy Administration for his murder. It was infuriating to have our government slandered in that way. But it turns out not to have been slander at all; the CIA did indeed have its fingerprints on it.
A month later JFK was dead and Johnson was POTUS. Johnson responded to the moral obligation implied in US overthrow of a friendly government, and assayed to produce a better and stronger South Vietnam - in no small part by military defense thereof. Before you knew it the US had 500,000 troops in South Vietnam.
And then came the Tet offensive - a treacherous attack during a holiday for which the Americans had been pressured into declaring a temporary truce. It was a bloody battle which pushed US troops temporarily out of some critical positions. But ultimately it was a go-for-broke effort by the Viet Cong (the terroristic South Vietnamese Communists) which went broke. It went broke in Vietnam, but it hit paydirt in the form of the demoralization of American journalism.
Journalism had been in love with the Kennedy Administration, which was in a very real sense a precursor to the Clinton PR machine. Kennedy suffered the humiliation of the construction of the Berlin Wall by the Soviet Union, the failure of the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and the insertion of Soviet missiles into Castro's Cuba. But JFK changed the subject of the Bay of Pigs disaster by launching the crusade to beat the Soviets to a manned landing on the moon. Throughout the Kennedy Administration - and indeed long long afterward - the Kennedy family was a virtual cult of personality. During the Kennedy Administration you could never walk past a newsstand without seeing at least one magazine with a flattering cover photo of Jack and/or Jackie Kennedy. The assassination of John Kennedy was a bitter blow to the nation, but most especially to liberals.
Journalism was in love with the Kennedys, and suddenly JFK was dead and Johnson was president. Johnson had seen the adulation accorded the Kennedys, and assumed that by he would have similar acceptance as he pursued the goals with which Kennedy had associated himself. In that he was grieviously mistaken. Johnson attacked the agenda with vigor. Did Kennedy talk a good game about opposing Communist expansion? Johnson would send half a million troops to Vietnam. Did Kennedy talk about civil rights? Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (supported by greater majorities of Republican than Democratic Congressmen and Senators). Did Kennedy talk about helping the poor? Johnson would propose the Great Society programs of Head Start, welfare entitlements, medicare and medicaid, and so on. What Kennedy had only spoken of, Johnson did - big time.
But although JFK could easily be labeled a hawk by later standards, liberalism had never been enthusiastic about anticommunism. Support for that was concentrated in the embarassing southern conservative wing of the Democratic Party; the liberals unreservedly backed Alger Hiss. Who, as the secret Venona files now make crystal clear, was as charged a Communist mole as a senior aide to FDR - and as our representative at the founding of the United Nations.
Suddenly a southern Democrat was in the White House, paying suit to bereaved liberalism but putting his weight behind an anticommunist crusade. The effect was as if journalism and liberalism had been JFK's bereaved widow, and LBJ was a boor proposing to Kennedy's widow at Kennedy's funeral.
The demoralizing impact of the temporary Communist victories of Tet proved to be a sharp blow to that fault line in the Democratic Party. The fracture followed: suddenly anyone who supported the effort to redeem the Kennedy moral commitment to a free South Vietnam was a vicious "hawk," and those who wanted no part of the continuing sacrifice which that implied were virtuous "doves" (and so it remained, until the Berlin Wall fell and it became clear that Reagan had won the Cold War. Then the entire concept of vicious "Right Wing Cold Warriors" and virtuous "doves" was stuffed down the memory hole).
The Democratic Party went to the 1968 Chicago convention with this scism torn raw. It is interesting to speculate on alternative scenarios for that nomination and that election. But what is clear is that no subsequent Democratic candidate for POTUS has won unless headed by a southern governor. And indeed the last Democratic ticket to win election (by a plurality of the popular vote in a three-way race) was of two southerners. The Congress stayed in Democratic control until 1994, but the power of incumbency finally was broken by the House Bank scandal and dissatisfaction in the South with the actual liberalism of the pseudomoderate "New Democrat" Clinton Administration.
Liberalism has always pitted the rich and the poor against the middle class. Liberalism always chides Republicans as favoring "the rich," but a comparison of the distributions of donations in the Republican Partiy with that of the Democratic Party belies the application of the "party of the rich" label to the Republicans. It turns out that although it gets its votes from the poor, the Democratic Party gets its money - not to mention a disproportionate fraction of its Senate candidates - from the rich. And, it must be added, liberalism gets unstinting support from "the media" - and there isn't a major outlet of "the media" in the country which is owned by a pauper.
The stagflationary debacle of the Nixon-Ford-Carter era produced another signal change in American politics: the Reagan-Kemp-Roth revolution. Up until the Ford Administration, Republican fiscal policy was to oppose wasteful spending and to insist on balancing the budget. And as fine as that was in civics textbook theory, it was a political and ultimately an economic disaster. It was a scheme which gave the liberal Democrats a political free lunch. Democrats bought votes like drunken sailors, and Republicans paid the bill by voting for high taxes to pay the tab. Finally in the middle of the 1970s Jack Kemp called for a transformation of Republican fiscal policy. That change - to an outright low tax rate policy, deficits or no - was adopted by Reagan and was a smashing success.
From valley to peak, federal revenue doubled during the Reagan Administration. And although the Savings and Loan crisis caused a recession which doomed GHW Bush's reelection bid, Reagan-Kemp-Roth triggered a secular expansion which lasted through the Clinton Administration. Voters below the age of thirty have little concept of how desperate the economic condition of the country seemed by the end of the Carter Administration. And Mario Cuomo made his reputation with a single speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, at which he viewed Reaganomics with alarm and ridiculed as "rosy" Republican predictions which in the actual event proved conservative.
The effect of the Reagan-Kemp-Roth transformation of Republican fiscal policy was to transform Democratic fiscal policy. No longer able to count on Republican cooperation in a tax-and-spend vote-buying spree, Democrats have beem cornered into adopting a pure big-government - high spending, high taxing - position. At the top where it counts (not at the bottom where the votes are), the Democratic Party is the party of the big guy - big spending, big taxation, big media, and the big contribution and the rich senator.
If you look at the red-county/blue-county map, you find the Democrats carrying the inner city and the toney suburb - and the Republicans carrying the middle class suburbs and rural areas. It is a map of the areas where people are willing to condescend to others - or be condescended to - on the one hand, and of areas where the majority are neither desirous of patronizing others nor willing to be condescended to, on the other.
A Gathering Storm for the Media
Carolina Journal ^
My hubby was USAR, and they were pretty darned lax about drills and makeups. It's a good thing he's not running for public office!
(His records got burnt up in St. Louis anyhow.)
. . . The hour-long debate did not allow for lengthy answers. The candidates were asked about education, affordable housing, terrorism, crime, race relations, gay marriage, unemployment and disaster preparedness and in most cases had just 30 seconds to respond . . .
You see, that is just the trouble. They have, understandably enough, four candidates to winnow down to one nominee - and they have no principled way to choose among them, since the one who polls the worst could in principle be the one who is the second choice of the all the voters in the primary. So what do they do? They run a "first past the pole" race with a runoff against "second past the pole" if the winner doesn't get 40% of the vote.Let's just suppose that what they actually wanted to do was inform the public enough to get a good candidate for mayor. What would they do? IMHO they should:And how do they inform the public on the candidates and the issues? They broadcast a brief live, competitive joint TV
debatepress conference among the whole lot of them.
IMHO that process would seperate the wheat from the chaff - candidates who aren't ready for prime time would probably realize it by the time they got their clock cleaned by three different people in three seperate three-hour radio debates.I thintk that method of debating in the general election would enable Republicans to blow Democrats away - Democrats depend so heavily on being protected by journalists (see Hillary Clinton, poster child).
Democrats Debate, Asked 'Why Is Bloomberg Popular?' (NY) WNBC Television ^ | 9/8/2005 | Puppage
This is a federal system. There are vestiges of State's rights left in the country - at least when there aren't Clintons in the White House.The scandal is not that the governor was able to block the movement of people in an emergency situation, the scandal is that Governor Blanco in fact did block the Red Cross from supplying people with food and water. And blankets.
And the really big scandal is that establishment journalism did not then, nor even now does not, ask the Red Cross where the relief supplies were.
The real scandal is that, with the connivance of the FCC, big journalism arrogantly proclaims its own objectivity. To do that is is to argue from the premise of superior virtue. And to do that is to engage in sophistry, which is an ironclad proof of lack of objectivity.
The real scandal is that the journalism establishment is stuffing the fecklessness of the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans down the memory hole before your very eyes, and fabricating a Republican "scandal" out of whole cloth. The real scandal is that "objective" journalism merged with the Democratic Party during the Vietnam War.
Louisiana authorities DELIBERATELY MADE THINGS WORSE Various (see article) ^ | 9/8/05 | Various
I'm interested in the issue of the promised congressional hearings on the relief response to Katrina.Clearly Congress has the authority to investigate the conduct of the Administration; Congress after all has the authority to impeach the president of the United States.
But does Congress have the authority to investigate a sitting governor? Congress doesn't select or ratify the nominations of governors, and Congress doesn't have the authority to impeach them, either. And governors don't report to the president, either - President Bush was completely stymied when the Governor of Louisiana did not elect to do what President Bush recommended.
So the issue becomes whether in fact the Republican congressional majority can do anything at all about the propaganda assigning all blame for the aftermath of the hurricane to the Bush Administration. But when the issue is framed as a propaganda issue, it should be clear that the federal government does in fact have some resources. And a legitimate investigative target.
The problem is in fact that the distiction between "objective journalism" and the Democratic Party is not a substantive difference. Liberal "objective" journalism will always hype any problem, and will always blame the nearest Republican for any given problem. And that is all that is going on in the fingerpointing over the Katrina aftermath.
The organizational reality is that the local and state governments of New Orleans and Louisiana were the first responders in the Katrina disaster; the federal government has a role only as the governor of Louisiana requestst it. And the fact is that the (Democratic) governor of Louisiana did not ask for - did not allow - federal involvement in the aftermath of Katrina until the die was cast that there would be an insurrection in New Orleans delaying rescue efforts and until unnecessary suffering in the Superdome and the Convention Center was inevitable.
True to form, "objective" journalism and the rest of the Democratic Party has been insinuating that President Bush should have done what only the Democratic governor and mayor in question were authorized to do. Print journalism is as independent of the Congress as the governor of Louisana is, but print journalism is not where the action is. The core of the problem is broadcast journalism, and broadcast journalism - all broadcasting - exists at the pleasure of Congress. It exists because the FCC censors competion in radio transmission, and the FCC exists by congressional statute.
IMHO the right thing for Congress to do is investigate the disaster response to define the limits of the president's authority to respond, and compare that to the actual behavior of the administration. And compare the performance in Louisiana with that in Mississippi and Alabama, with the differing behaviors of the governors of those states. But part of documenting the problems in Louisiana must be to discuss the coverage of the event. The broadcast coverage which is ultimately done under government sanction. The real issue is the fact that government is giving sanction to claims of objectivity from Democratic activists.
Tsunami Minister Defends U.S. on Katrina The Guardian UK ^ | 9/11/2005 | Chris Brummitt
Why the media acts this way is one of the mysteries of our collective lives.
Excellent recap and point well made but there is no mystery.
The Roosevelt administration was saturated with Communists. That included Alger Hiss, one of his key advisers who was later accused, tried, convicted, and executed for treason. It also included his wife, Eleanor.
The heads of most of the media were also Communist sympathizers as were many journalists. It was the new, de rigueur thing to be. It was a new religion.
Much of the law breaking you mention was to secretly arm the USSR not just Great Britain. The maneuvering to get into WWII was to take the pressure off Joe Stalin. Pearl Harbor was a surprise but he had other plans already under way to instigate war with Japan. We fought Germany to take pressure off his Stalins western front and Japan to ease the threat on his eastern front.
Today the media are the same but we have an anti-Communist in the White House. Isn't it interesting that those who further the move toward Communism (FDR, JFK,Carter, and Clinton) by installing socialist policies and giving away our defenses, Panama Canal, and military secrets are praised by the media while those opposed (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes)are constantly faced with withering condemnation and out right lies.
You need look no further than that, the furthering of the progress of Communism, to understand the media and the left.
I listened intently. I read his biography and a very distuingished scholarly man he is. Yet, the hard, cold incisiveness of his condemnation of the government, chilled my inside.
The people are so clever and utterly incapable of equal consideration, it scares me. When that charlatan Galloway was said to have "cowed" members of Congress, I wondered if there can be any proper hearings at all? This given the forum for, yes, nothing more that hate. Perhaps I should have used another word. I cannot think of one.
Should have been, yes - but the statute of limitations had run out, or some such, and Hiss - who appears in a photo on the deck of a battleship, alone with FDR - was not tried for treason but for perjury about his treason. And imprisoned. Hiss was the US representative at the San Francisco conference which created the UN.You would be very interested in The New Dealers' War by Thomas Fleming; you appear to know some of what's in it which was new to me, but by no means all.
Bump.
I have the book on my desk at the moment. I have read most of it but I put it aside awhile back and haven't got back to it. I was unsure of my facts as I was writing them but was too lazy to check. Someone and his wife fits the description I assigned to Hiss, right? That may have dealt with the bomb.
Anyway, thanks for the correction.
Only time I remember to check the broadcast networks is when I want to watch a football game.
This is a First Amendment issue. Obviously when the First Amendment was ratified, nobody thought that it gave them the right to host a web site; there was no such thing as a web site. But if anyone has the right to speak, then I have the right to speak, and if anyone has the right to use a printing press then I have the right to use a printing press.And if anyone has the right to communicate via web site, then I have the right to communicate via web site (not that I have a right to post on FreeRepublic.com; that right is reserved to Jim Robinson, who so far has been willing to grant me that priviledge).
I confess that that is not the standard which has been applied to broadcasting, but in that case there has been the fig leaf of "bandwidth scarcity," and that does not exist on the Internet. Without that fig leaf, denying me (or Jim Robinson) access to the posting of a web site on the web would unambiguously be a naked, unconstitutional power grab.
And the United States has no authority to leave the enforcement of the First Amendment to the tender mercies of the United Tyrants.
U.S. Won't Let U.N. Take Control Of Internet
News4JAX ^ | 9-29-05 | AP
BTTT!!!!!
Bump.
bttt
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