The Fake News Is The Stupid News

So, AXIOS, this alleged paragon of purported “neutral” reporting, publishes an article on the GOP Freedom Caucus’ position on raising the debt ceiling which position, in short, amounts to insistence that SPENDING be reduced. The headline of the article is “Freedom Caucus draws battle lines on debt ceiling”. It can be found here.

First, the attempt, which seems to be the hallmark of ALL so-called journalism, to turn a meaningful and needful conversation into a battle, the better to turn the article into an invitation to rubber-neck (remember, “if it bleeds it leads”).

Second, the author simply MUST characterize the Freedom Caucus as “The Right-Wing House Freedom Caucus”. Would he ever refer to Chuck Schumer as the “Left-Wing Senate Minority Leader?” His implication is clear. Right = bad. Left = normal.

Third, and this is the statement that almost made me spit out my coffee. In the section entitled, “Why it Matters” the author writes the most stupid explanation I think I’ve ever heard, and while I have an undergraduate degree in economics, it doesn’t take any formal training in the field to see how incredibly idiotic it is. He says, and I quote,

“Their [the Freedom Caucus‘] votes on the debt ceiling could mean the difference between the U.S. continuing to be able to borrow money to pay off its debts and a potentially catastrophic default.”

Yes, you read that right. The United States must borrow more money to pay off the money it owes.

That’s like obtaining a credit card and taking a cash advance to make the payments on another credit card that’s already max’d out.

What could go wrong?

And THIS is what passes for journalism. This is what the dimwits in Washington feed on. This is how dumbed-down and completely ignorant of basic sense the media/reporting has become.

This is the result of giving a voice to a whole generation of poorly educated, easily duped and fundamentally dysfunctional and child-like Millennial through Gen Z so-called ‘reporters’.

Sigh…

The Left Doesn’t Build – They Only Destroy

I just read an article by Dennis Prager entitled “A Brief Guide to Leftist Destruction“. It makes the point that the Left never produces anything of value. It only destroys things and has done so since the first evil-doer walked the earth. It’s the age old conflict between the givers and the takers, of the producers and the indolent, of the haves and have nots. The Left are takers, indolent, have nots and all their whining and complaining is a product of their own making and choosing. Why work, why strive, why achieve when they can just take from those who DO produce, work hard and thus ‘have’.

I reproduce Prager’s article in full. It lists all the Left’s destructive results brilliantly.

To understand the modern world, perhaps the most important rule one needs to know is this: Everything the Left touches it ruins.

This first became clear to me years ago during my radio show. I was talking about the Left’s war on the Boy Scouts (for not accepting announced gay people). It was becoming clear that this would ultimately lead to the decline of the Boy Scouts, which led me to ask: “Will the left replace the Boy Scouts with a left-wing Boy Scouts?”

Then I answered my own question: Of course not. Because the Left only destroys; it doesn’t build anything (other than government).

In support of that observation, here is a list of many of the things the Left ruins and often destroys.

No. 1: Art. The Left long ago conquered the art world. Consequently, since the 20th century, most modern art has been ugly, meaningless and nihilistic — the opposite of what Western art had always been.

No. 2: Music. What the Left did to the eyes in art, it did to the ears in music. As a part-time conductor, I can say with some knowledge that since the invention of atonal music (an oxymoron if there ever was one), most contemporary classical music is also ugly, meaningless and uninspiring. The people who like such music are almost all music critics and, of course, music professors. Most lovers of classical music never listen to the stuff.

No. 3: Journalism. Journalists were once highly respected. Unless a piece was listed as “opinion,” people generally believed they were getting, to the best of a journalist’s ability, as truthful a report as possible — “just the facts.” Today, on virtually any controversial issue, they are getting opinion, not truth. The purpose of nearly every major newspaper and other “news” outlet is the same purpose Pravda had in the Soviet Union: to transmit the party line.

No. 4: Colleges and universities. The Left has destroyed universities as places of learning devoted to seeking truth and therefore welcoming, even cultivating, diverse opinions. Virtually every left-wing idea was born at a university.

No. 5: High schools and elementary schools. Most schools in America — private as much as public — teach children that America is systemically racist and that they are not born male or female, but at a later age will choose whether to be one or the other — or neither. And increasingly, American educational institutions deny objective truth exists, even in mathematics.

No. 6: Happiness. You can meet happy and unhappy liberals and happy and unhappy conservatives, but you are unlikely to ever meet a happy leftist. The only question is whether the unhappy gravitate to leftism or whether leftism makes people unhappy. Both are probably true.

No. 7: The family. People on the Left increasingly choose not to get married and not to have children — in other words, not to make families. And their welfare policies serve to disincentivize the creation of families.

No. 8: Women. The rates of depression among young people, especially young women, are higher than ever recorded in American history. One reason is that for half a century, women have been told, as one famous feminist saw put it, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” But the fact is that the vast majority of (heterosexual) women need a man to be fulfilled, just as the vast majority of (heterosexual) men need a woman to be fulfilled.

No. 9: Childhood. One reason young people on the Left don’t want children is that the Left doesn’t particularly like children. The teachers unions’ adamant refusal to open schools for over a year has opened many Americans’ eyes to this fact. So has the war on children’s innocence – like prematurely talking to them about sex and having schools introduce them to drag queens from the age of five.

No. 10: Black life. Like the Democratic Party historically, the left is racist. And it is so in precisely the way the word was always used — the Left believes in black inferiority. That is why leftists advocate lowering standards for blacks. That is why they advocate policies that always result in more blacks dying at the hands of other blacks. That is why they believe the state must take care of blacks more than any other group. That is why left-wing policies, from the Great Society to today, have destroyed so much of black life, especially its family life — and they don’t care.

No. 11: Black-white relations. According to polls and according to just about every American who remembers life from about a decade ago, black-white relations were far superior then and both groups were optimistic about relations continuing to improve. The Left shattered that with its anti-white, “America is systemically racist” propaganda shouted from almost every major media and relentlessly pushed in almost every school and big business. The Left knows that when blacks and whites feel good about one another, the Left loses its appeal and loses elections.

No. 12: The military. As the military gets more and more woke — recall the testimony of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testifying before Congress about the need to teach the military about white racism — soldier morale declines. Add to this the utterly gratuitous and cruel mandate that every member of the military get vaccinated or be discharged and you understand why military morale is in steep decline.

No. 13: Late-night television. Americans who remember the titans of late-night comedy — Johnny Carson and Jay Leno — remember how their sole aim was to bring some smiles and laughter to Americans before they went to sleep. Few people had any inkling of the political views of either host. That is now history. The Left has destroyed late-night comedy. It now consists of little more than angry rants against conservatives.

No. 14: Superman. Superman was an iconic American hero. Thanks to the Left, he is no more. About a decade ago, Superman stood in front of the United Nations to announce he was renouncing his American citizenship to become a “citizen of the world.” And the Left has now changed his motto from “Truth, Justice, and the American way” to “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.”

No. 15: Free speech. Never before has freedom of speech been threatened as it is today. As has been true since the communist revolution in Russia, everywhere the Left has gained power — from Russia in 1917 to the university and social media today — it has suppressed free speech. There is no exception.

No. 16: Sports. Until last year, sport was a great American unifier. It was one place Americans could go and, leaving politics behind, Left and Right, Democrat and Republican could root for the same team. No longer. The Left has ruined it by radically politicizing baseball, football and basketball.

The great American tragedy is just about every liberal knows the above is true, but nearly every one will still vote for the Left.”

Couln’t have said it better myself.

Despicable Them

With apologies to the producers and directors of the cartoon movie hit “Despicable Me”, the label “Despicable Them” aptly applies to politicians in general, but to Leftist politicians in particular. As always, it’s a question of degree. The degree to which the Democrat leadership (note I say leadership, not ALL Democrats) exhibits despicable behavior and spews despicable rhetoric dwarfs, as Jupiter dwarfs the Earth, anything the Republican leadership has done or said.

Examples abound but probably the best one is that of Nancy Pelosi ceremoniously ripping the State of the Union speech in half and claiming it was all lies. As regards despicable rhetoric: Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Bill deBlasio, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Linda Sarsour…the list of those with verbal diarrhea goes on and on. Every time any of these people open their mouths, nothing but despicable falsehoods and bile emerge.

How do they get away with this? Edmund Burke had the answer: The Fourth Estate. In Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes and Hero Worship he attributes to Burke: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”[i] He was of course referring to the Press, or in today’s language, the “Media”.

The term “fourth estate” and “fourth branch” are both used to describe what used to be journalism, which clearly doesn’t exist anymore. Someone I know with a degree in Journalism from Columbia University, arguably the pre-eminent journalism school in the country, grudgingly admits that the principles taught there are violated continuously.

Fourth Estate as a term is meant to emphasize the independence of the Media, while the related term “Fourth Branch” suggests the Media is an extension of the government. In my opinion, it’s hardly the latter, but the Media’s ability to influence (i.e. brainwash) inattentive or non-critical-thinking minds is obvious. Abandonment of journalistic principles such as three-source corroboration or the vetting of sources to ensure reliability, coupled with the power of the internet to broadcast the most salacious lies and twisted arguments, has fostered an environment where despicable behavior and rhetoric thrives.

Given that the professional Media is predominantly Leftist, as are the indolent with too much time on their hands to do anything productive but tweet and post (I hasten to defend that the reason I have the time is that I’m retired after working hard for fifty years), the Left are provided with overwhelming covering fire. The saturated with Leftist garbage airwaves thus leave little room for any reasonable debate or reflection. That same cover gives impunity to the most despicable, even immoral Leftist behavior in both the commercial as well as political realms.

The Left is guilty too of what I think is one of the most despicable behaviors: Projection. Albeit in its weak-mindedness much of the Left doesn’t even see it, or its hypocrisy, it’s axiomatic that if they are whining about something, accusing the Right of something, falsely claiming credit for or denying culpability for something, it is precisely what they are guilty of. Just today Chuck Schumer sent a letter decrying Attorney General William Barr’s throwing of the BS flag on the Roger Stone sentencing. Said the spotlight-hog/grandstander/demagogue Schumer: “This situation has all the indicia of improper political interference in a criminal prosecution.” Sure, and the Left has NEVER improperly interfered in a criminal prosecution…Schumer’s statement is stupid as the President and Attorney General are empowered to intervene ex officio, and the public knows damn well the prosecutors are piling on a Trump ally. (But put a microphone and a spotlight within a hundred miles of Schumer and he will RUN to it!).

Projection.

Thank God we now have pro-justice leaders like Barr who are willing to wade into the Swamp with a flame-thrower to destroy the truly despicable, poisonous rot of the Left that has festered for so many years.  


[i] Wikipedia: article – “Fourth Estate”