Everybody's Stupid

How does it go... "Everybody's stupid, but on different subjects". The liberal elite are so intelligent, however, that they can claim proficiency in all subjects, even those they've never heard of before. Awesome. No clear-cut decisions, only statements supported by every possible obfuscation to thoroughly confuse and lord over we common folk.

What happens when conservatives call liberals on their verbal gymnastic games? We get Howard Dean's roar. Teddy Kennedy's orbital responses including calling an African American judicial appointee a Neanderthal. Give us a break!

Camel's Nose Under The Tent

Remember when only Las Vegas had legal gambling other than card rooms and race tracks? Then there was Atlantic City. Then there were the Indian Casinos. Then...Then...

So it is with the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. The only thing missing is the false economic incentive that carried gambling into a building next to you.

Writing Pet peeve

If we are the sum of our experience, why is there this insistence that everything be thoroughly referenced and footnoted? Facts or substantiation never got in the way of the progressive thought processes, so why waste the time?

Clearly, if one lifts other's words or ideas, one must give credit where credit is due, but for the most part, this continual need to substantiate ones theories or writings undermines its originality and relegates the piece to some sort of incremental blip to the knowledge of man.

As it states in the Bible book Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun." So it would seem that anything accumulated in our gray matter and then regurgitated in a BLOG such as this is nothing more than a restructuring of that which has gone before. How sad.

The truth of the matter is that man is seldom convinced by a footnote, but by the deeper meaning of the words he is reading. It is quite popular to publish book after book of facts and footnotes to support arguments with very little space given to vision. This admonishment applies to both sides of the political spectrum.

The trouble we have now is that some group's vision is pretty screwed up! Q.E.D.

Liberalism

One of many issues with liberalism or progressive thought is its total lack of response to facts which determine a line of thought or program are invalid or ineffective. Instead, the standard response is to increase funding justified by the fact that unachieved results were due to underfunding or inadequate resources applied. A perfect example of this is the horrible state of public education bastardized by the perverted influence of the teachers unions.

The resistance to change in the government bureaucracy is strong no matter what the politics of the situation is, however when progressive policies take a strangler, it becomes like a spreading cancer consuming all healthy structures, public and private, in its path.

Why does this happen? It is actually quite simple. When subjective thought processes (progressivism) and objective thought processes (conservatism) clash or cross, the subjective dialog usually wins by attrition. The objective thinker cannot logically follow or counter such chaos and is more given to throwing up his or her hands, finally, or losing his or her temper due to the silliness of it all.

There is hope, however. The attack dog of conservatism, Sean Hannity, will not let his opposition change the subject or evade a direct response to his questioning. He needs to "Hannitize" more of us on this one aspect of his repertoire.

All The News That's Fit To Print

Listening to the radio today, I heard Donald Rumsfeld state he no longer reads the newspapers, but is inclined to read books on history, etc. These comments tend to track my thinking pretty well. Only when there is a local story in the San Francisco Comical or the San Jose Murky News will I purchase a single copy. My current refuge is the Wall Street Journal for daily news consumption, first, for its conservative editorial leaning, and second, because it tends not to get carried away on various topics.

The other source of news is on the Web where I triangulate every news bit to "trust but verify." Of recent interest are the weekly writings of Dennis Prager. This week's blurb ties in well with the comments above. It is reproduced below for your convenience.

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townhall.com

Shame on the news media, too
Dennis Prager

May 11, 2004

During the very same 10 days that every newspaper and television news program in the world featured photo after photo, day after day, of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated, a government not far from Iraq engaged in mass murder, mass rape and ethnic cleansing of approximately 1 million people.

Is that more serious, more evil and more scandalous than a handful of Americans sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners?

Not to the world's news media.

To the world's (including America's) news media, the Nazi-like, racist, mass ethnic cleansing warranted minuscule attention as compared with the humiliation of some Iraqis.

Why?

The answer is as obvious as it is painful.

The world's news media are, with almost no exceptions, agenda-driven rather than news-driven.

The agendas are:

1. The political bias of the news reporting organization.

2. The monetary need to attract readers/viewers.

3. The desire to be the center of society's attention.

4. Not to be too different from other news media. As one who peruses up to a dozen American newspapers a day, I am struck daily at how virtually identical international news articles are. International reporters are like baseball players -- they all do the same thing, just on different teams.

In the case of the massive attention the news media have been giving to the stripping and humiliation of Iraqi male prisoners, all four agendas play a role, but the first one predominates.

How does this explain the tiny amount of news media coverage devoted to the near-genocide in Sudan (and North Korea and Tibet) as compared with the massive 24/7 coverage of the Iraqi prisoners?

The primary reason is the political bias of the news reporting organizations. Virtually every major newspaper in the world is anti-Bush, and most are anti-American. The desire to humiliate America (or George Bush) has deep roots. The America of those who support President Bush portrays itself as a moral beacon, and it has contempt for the moral authority of the United Nations and "world opinion." Therefore, those who loathe this American self-appointed moral role cannot pass up the chance to portray America as morally no better or even worse than other countries.

The virtually monolithic ideology that drives the world's news media should be a major concern among all those who treasure independent thought, not to mention moral clarity and America's well-being. For example, though free of governmental control, the reporting of the BBC has been almost as predictably leftist as Soviet newspapers.

The news media are numbing the human mind. The anti-American and anti-Israeli news reporting that saturates the European media is the major reason for the recent polling results that show most Europeans regard America and Israel as the greatest threats to world peace.

There is a second and related reason for the mind-numbing coverage of the Iraqi prisoners. The world's Left, which sets the United Nations' and the news media's priorities, is only interested in human suffering when it is caused by whites, Christians or Jews, especially Americans and Israelis. That explains the world's and the media's indifference to the decimation of Tibet -- it was perpetrated by Chinese; to the genocide in Rwanda -- it was perpetrated by black Africans; to the genocide of blacks in Sudan -- it is perpetrated by Arab Muslims; to the genocide in North Korea -- it is perpetrated by Koreans. On the other hand, when Israelis killed Palestinian terrorists and bystanders in Jenin, the world press was fixated on it, and the BBC declared it a "massacre."

So, too, the deaths of Arabs at the hands of Arabs -- the tens of thousands in Algeria, the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, the tens of thousands in Syria, the thousands of Arab and other Muslim young women in "honor killings" -- are of little interest to the news media, the Arab world, the United Nations and the Left. But Americans stripping male prisoners in Iraq? It is the most important story on earth.

It is essential to note that it is precisely because I believe America's role is to be a moral beacon to the world that those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison so anger me. Americans are not dying in Iraq so that other Americans can pile naked Iraqi men on each other and smile for photos next to them. The harm those pictures have done to the cause of good may be incalculable.

But it is not moral revulsion, let alone newsworthiness, that is animating the news media. One day, a Sudanese black will scour the world press archives to find out what the world was preoccupied with while her family and hundreds of thousands of other Sudanese blacks were raped, enslaved, ethnically cleansed of their lands and murdered. She will learn the world was deeply concerned with a couple of dozen Iraqi men photographed in humiliating sexual positions.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.