07.14.10
Posted in Culture, Journalistic elitism at 10:47 pm by Administrator
Andrew Ferguson’s piece at Commentary on the death of Newsweek is stuffed full, line-by-line, word-by-word, with the kind of deep cultural insight and intuitive savvy that the aspiring culture-and-policy blogger would die for. He absolutely nails the complete disconnect between the mindset of the reporters and editors of these pointy-headed east-coast organs and the flyover-country readership that made their expense accounts possible over the last 80 years. I remember seeing each new issue of Newsweek on the back of the commode in the centrally located main bathroom in our house while I was growing up. This was the 1960s. As the decade progressed, I noticed, with glee at the time, the increasing sense of fascination – and then outright identification – the magazine had with the countercultural developments that were coming down the pike – well, weekly.
Alas, that vision of America and Western civilization never took hold like your local FM rock station – and Newsweek, and CBS News, and your Presbyterian Sunday school – said it would. Witness the daily plummet in the Most Equal Comrade’s poll numbers.
And now a great American journalistic institution is breathing its last – all because it would rather shove a phony vision down America’s throat than tell America what happened last week.
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04.21.10
Posted in Journalistic elitism, tax policy at 4:37 pm by Administrator
Use the same playbook they’re using for most everything these days: portray opponents as marginal cranks and kooks.
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04.19.10
Posted in Culture, Ideology, Journalistic elitism, Race card at 1:33 pm by Administrator
As I’ve said a few times recently, I’m really trying to keep my take on our national divide rooted in ideas and principles. This is, after all, a struggle for the understanding of the efficacy of free-market economics, a streetwise foreign policy, and the restoration of a culture based on decency, dignity, common sense and acknowledgement of God’s centrality. Getting mired in distractions takes time we don’t have. Plus, as we skirt the edges of a “teacher-he-called-me-a-name-first” level of struggle, we run the real risk of losing sight of that decency, dignity and common sense we want to have informing our culture.
Still, it’s getting to where one can’t avoid addressing the juvenile, vulgar and supremely disingenuous – and occasionally violent – level to which the left has taken this conflict. There were Bill Clinton’s disgusting insinuations about tea-party-ism boiling over into Oklahoma City-style anarchy. There was the savage beating of the Bobby Jindal campaign stafffer and her boyfriend in the French Quarter. Just today, I ran across a truly idiotic column by effete east-coast simpering pointy-head E.J. Dionne that I won’t even bother to link to; you can probably accurately guess its content. Tea-partiers are “privileged” and mainly concerned with protecting their “privileges.”
But now comes Charles Blow, one of the New York Times’s simpering pointy-heads, giving the most dismissive account of a Texas tea party you can imagine. He has the gall to try to denigrate the motives and effectiveness of AlfonZo Rachel, who has more character, insight, common sense and ability to communicate plain truth than Blow could cultivate if he lived another thousand years.
Michelle Malkin looks at the Blow column, and says, “You wanna talk pale? How about the NYT board? How about the on-air “talent” at MSNBC?”
There really are two universes occupying the geographic space occupied by the United States of America. They cannot coexist for long.
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04.04.10
Posted in Human freedom, Ideology, Journalistic elitism, journalistic dhimmitude at 10:43 pm by Administrator
It’s one thing to populate your op-ed pages with the likes of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd, but the utter lack of legitimacy of a major newpaper’s reportage sections is made plain by features on a 17-year-old suicide bomber’s devotion to her jihadist husband and a comparison of 1969 Weathermen and 2010 tea partiers, based on the “extremism” of each.
So far I’ve avoided the current national conversation on violence and allegations of it – which, I guess it needs pointing out, even though it’s obvious, are two different things – that have transpired since passage of FHer-care. I really strive to keep the debate at the level of ideas and principles. In a time of national peril, “Teacher-he-called-me-a-name-first”-type polemics is unproductive to say the least.
Still, this latest move by the NYT gets to the heart of what is at stake here. Those of us who hate FHer-care and who understand that the whole agenda of the FHers is an unprecedented assault on the essence of the United States of America are motivated by an unwavering fealty to freedom and the finest ideas to be distilled over thousands of years of Western civilization. Leftist radicals are motivated by a desire to dismantle that civilization as rapidly as possible.
I’d never seen the Ayn Rand quotes about extremism and consistency that Pam Gellar offers here, but they pretty much provide what’s necessary as a counter to the Grey Lady’s disingenuousness. Make that extreme disingenuousness.
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01.25.10
Posted in Journalistic elitism at 9:40 pm by Administrator
Joe Klein at Time demonstrates once again his bona fides as a senior member of the effete, chin-rubbing, dismissive, arrogant east coast chattering-class elite.
But take heart. Another Black Conservative smacks him down for his sniff at the CNN poll about the stimulus.
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12.07.09
Posted in Environment policy, Journalistic elitism at 2:11 pm by Administrator
The lamestream media, that is. 56 newspapers worldwide will run the same editorial tomorrow stressing the urgency of the Big Last Chance to Save the Planet getting underway in Copenhagen.
Hide the decline.
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11.25.09
Posted in Culture, Journalistic elitism at 2:28 pm by Administrator
In a Washington Examiner essay on the death throes of Newsweek magazine, Noemie Emery perfectly captures the whole aren’t-we-such-chin-rubbingly-judicious-culturally-astute-east-coast-smarty-pants-arbiters-of-what’s-important mindset. By the end of the piece, you are so covered with the odor of that whole CNN/CBS/NBC/NYT/New Yorker/New York Review of Books/Time/New Republic ethos you want to take a shower.
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10.13.09
Posted in American exceptionalism, Culture, Journalistic elitism at 4:04 pm by Administrator
I don’t often take the time to light into poisonously wrong-headed op-eds by effete east-coast America-haters, but occasionally I must chime in. I think the main reason I’m compelled to do so in this instance is that I’m pretty sure my next column for The Republic (the Columbus, Indiana daily newspaper) (deadline at the end of this week) is going to be on the subject of American exceptionalism. That was the subject of film critic / cultural observer Neal Gabler’s column this morning in the Boston Globe.
He makes one of my tasks – avoiding a I-can-match-your-stats-and-figures-on-this-controversy pissing match – easier by establishing at the get-go and at every turn afterward throughout his essay just what his assumptions are. He buys into the global-warming nonsense. He thinks national health care is an obviously desirable thing. He thinks our nation’s intelligence-gatherers have tortured. He bandies the term “affordable”- in the case of this column, in the context of education – as if there’s some objective definition of it. He thinks income equality is some kind of public-policy issue. And then comes the crown jewel of his foul, stinking premise: he sees Americans as “thinned-skinned and arrogant.”
I will take him on regarding what he has to say about immigration. He says that those who – well, I’m going to use my terminology here, not his – understand that America is exceptional point to the number of people who clamor to get here. The example he uses to make his point is Mexicans, and, while there are certainly a lot of them here, legally and illegally, they are far from the only foreign population seeking residency and / or citizenship inside our borders. Consider the growing number of people from India, various Pacific rim countries, Brazilians who come here, get first-rate educations and either start small businesses or make huge contributions to American corporations. He uses the example of Turks emigrating to Germany as his example of an equivalent pehenomenon elsewhere in the world. Well, yes. Germany certainly gets its share of Turks – and far less secular Muslims from far more strident lands. They are not so good at assimilating, Mr. Gabler may have noticed. Also, the United States has a history of people pouring in from various nations – even Germany – going clear back to its birth.
What Gabler doesn’t do is address the actual substance of the claim of exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not predicated on any kind of prowess or might we have. These are by-products of what makes our country exceptional.
To go over the basics again – something you constantly have to do with leftists, since they make an art out of obscuring the main point of an argument – America is exceptional because it was founded on an idea – in and of itself a novel basis for starting a country in the 1770s – and that idea was that human beings are free because God built it into the nature of our creation. That was powerful stuff. It certainly shook up George III, and Europe generally. (Can you imagine how it blew the minds of rulers and political theorists in Asia, Africa and South America?)
That’s why all those Slavs, Germans, Brits, Poles, Italians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Salvadorans and Kenyans have come to our shores. That’s why they by and large experience a rise in their standard of living beyond their wildest imagining. You can do what you want here. You can create, invent, refine, observe, comment on, organize or just plain draw a paycheck from just about anything you can think of, and, at least so far, no one will stop you.
Oh, and there’s our righteousness, too. DeTouqueville saw that. Americans volunteer, make charitable contributions and get civically involved like no other people on the face of the Earth.
Oh, and what was our Civil War fought over? The notion that no human being ought to own another. That was a first.
Where did the notion that women are fully equal human beings really take hold? That’s right. Here at Uncle Sam’s place.
The likes of Gabler must be refuted as soon as they spout their garbage. Think about where his line of thinking – I use the term loosely – takes us. To a world with no moral compass. To a world in which the likes of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Norway and China – to put together a list culled from the current stars of the United Nations – assume the mantle of leadership. Not a pretty picture.
I say “the likes of Gabler.” He’s not some isolated case. We have someone exuding the same odor strutting into the Oval Office every day.
ADDENDUM: I neglected to address his “government-inspires-people-more-than-people-inspire-government” line. For one thing, it sure is in keeping with his basic contempt for the actual citizens of this country – who, by the way, confer legitimacy on the government at their pleasure. Re: his World War II example: national security is the proper purview of the federal government – in fact, its basic duty. Re: JBJ and civil-rights legislation: he comes awfully close here to insinuating that the majority of Americans were basically racist and / or bigoted right up until 1965, which, if that’s what he’s getting at, is a vicious lie.
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07.17.08
Posted in Christmas, Congress, Environment policy, Free-market Economics, Human freedom, Journalistic elitism, Politics, iraq at 3:31 pm by Administrator
The mixed bag that is our current juncture is very mixed indeed. Just as Iraq is looking like a stable, unified country ready to take its place as a player in its region and in the struggle against jihadism, the danger from its neighbor to the east, Iran, looks like it’s reaching critical mass. Domestically, productivity and employment remain high, while bank failures blemish the landscape and inflation, a negligible factor for years, has come roaring back.
America is screaming for clarity and leadership. Or maybe the problem is that it’s not screaming for clarity and leadership,at least en masse in sufficient numbers. There is nothing plaguing us that adherence to the time-honored principles that have paved our way out of every similar past situation wouldn’t cure.
You do see little glimpses of it here and there. Thank God W finally said that we need to drill for oil. If the man who hopes to succeed him as a GOP president can find a graceful way to put his previous pristine-ANWR statements behind him (I guess I am calling for McCain to flip-flop, which isn’t per se a bad thing, if your previous position was stupid) and point out the stark difference between the corporation-bashing of the Freedom-Haters and the overwhelming obvious good sense of turning loose oil companies anywhere it seems likely that there’s oil, he and the congressional candidates of his pary may have a chance.
There are hopeful signs that the public is likewise beginning to see that the core of the banking and mortgage mess is likewise fairly simple: easy credit and shaky responsibility met head-on and shareholders, depositors and taxpayers were left holding the bag. A little of that is sufficient to make the vast majority of timely bill-payers say, “Now hold on, here. Why am I taking a whuppin’ for someone else’s failure to live up to his obligations?”
What I do not understand is this sudden overture the W administration is making to Iran. Sending Under-Secretary of State William Burns to meet with his theocratic counterpart? How does that jibe with the recent stories about W giving Israel an “amber light” to take care of business regarding a nuke program? It may be that there is some highly sensitive factor at play here, some consideration that must be kept tightly under wraps for the time being, but I feel that W owes the American people at least some kind of statement along the lines of “I know this looks like an abrupt turnabout, but if it leads to the favorable changes we anticipate, I will explain it thoroughly in due course.”
Yes, it’s a complicated world. That’s all the more reason to have a consistent set of bedrock principles that guide us as we encounter all manner of wacky twists and turns and some real threats. In a sense, it’s like having a chart in front of you when you’re playing music. If you get lost in the tune, you can’t blame the piece of paper on the stand.
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04.01.08
Posted in Free-market Economics, Journalistic elitism, iraq at 8:39 pm by Administrator
Once again, the House Energy Committee has dragged executives of Shell, Chevron, BP American, Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips before it, insisting that they genuflect, repent and generally puke all over themselves because gasoline prices are high.
This is a request and not a requirement that these businessmen go, correct? Couldn’t they just tell Ed Markey and his politburo of preening, demagoguing socialists to just go to hell?
And the Freedom Haters not only browbeat the oil guys about prices, but asked them why their companies aren’t investing mre in alternative fuels research.
Here’s why, you stool samples: there’s no profit in it. Our civilization runs on oil. Oil makes possible our advanced, convient, comfortable, secure way of life.
If ever any of BN’s detractors needed a simple example of why the rhetoric occasionally gets a bit purple around here, it’s this kind of thing. There’s no other term for it but Freedom-Hatred.
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