Meta-analysis interests me, as you know; the coverage of the coverage. Far more revealing to me than the quotidian details of Lauryn Hills’ hounding by the IRS was the manner in which Fox News, the so-called conservative network, framed Ms. Hill’s failure to pay her taxes.
After all, Hill’s story is humdrum—that of the theft of private property by the state (anyone still want to argue that taxes are not paid at the point of a gun? “Forfeit your private property or lose your liberty”).
Both Shepard Smith and Megyn Kelley gloated that the threat of prison did the trick and compelled the singer to fork over close to a million dollars in taxes owed. At Fox News, this was a good-news story.
The Good “Guy” here is Ms. Hill. Taxation rejects a man’s absolute and natural right to his property and vests property rights in the political establishment. The 16th Amendment (“The Number of The Beast”) does just that.
Last week, the once relatively forthright Jim Pinkerton cheerily informed Fox News Watch viewers that the media did a bang-up job in covering the Boston bombing, when the truth was exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Pinkerton belatedly changed his story, recounting the embarrassment of April 17, which Barely A Blog reported well before Big, Dishonest Media did:
Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—have gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.
We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.
Pinkerton went on to shill for Fox News, incorrectly crediting Megyn Kelly (I don’t care if I’ve misspelled her ridiculous name) with breaking the story about the brothers Tsarnaev as welfare recipients. Nonsense. As I chronicled in this week’s WND column, The Boston Herald did that shoe-leather reporting, not whatshername Kelly.
They call themselves “Fox News Watch”! It’s more like the Fox guarding the chicken scoop [sic].
Fox News mediated another magic meeting of the minds when it sent ditz Dana Perino to interview her ex-boss George Bush, who, sadly, has seen fit to emerge from hiding.
That chick is dumb.
Good for Tom Brokaw for refusing to attend the Annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner, held tonight. “It’s a sickening specter: Some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—get together to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us.”
UPDATE (4/27): MORE CONSERVATIVE CRYPTO-LEFTISM.
Mr. Pinkerton, who used to be a straight shooter, is an editor at The American Conservative. Recently, a prominent leader on the Old Right commented that TAC “has moved far to the left of The Nation.”
You can locate a non sequitur in almost every one of Noah Millman’s lightweight, bloodless blogs. The eyes glance over the stuff in speed-read mode, savoring not a thing—not a turn of phrase or an original insight—as the mouth opens in a yawn.
On this front, the 2006 “Final Solution to the Jewish State” preceded Larry in deconstructing the dissembling manner in which “TAC’s editor and publisher “introduc[ed his] readers to ‘Palestinian Liberation Theology.'”
…public intellectuals … thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’
Tell me that fools are not attempting to redefine, à la postmodernism, the very definition of news. And why not? Academics have similarly broken down the ancient concept of the intellectual discipline.
“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)
Failing to lead the news with coverage of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing is in-itself big news.
UPDATE I: MSNBC’s odious Martin Bashir, a Briton, is dismembering Thatcher. His correspondent’s source of analysis: Meryl Creep’s depiction in “The Iron Lady.”
As I said, disciplinary breakdown.
Of course, many of Thatcher’s moves I‘d oppose, however it is undeniable that she was perhaps the only true great female leader other than old Golda Meir. I cannot think of a woman with a Thatcher-like intellect in international politics. Golda didn’t have that intellect, but she was quite the character. Both were nothing like today’s whiny, idiot fems.
UPDATE II: Don’t bother searching the articles penned by the presstitutes in the UK and the US, about Baroness Thatcher. Her remarkable oratory they call simple—to these cretins plain-spoken reason is counter-intuitive and hence, simplistic. The so-called 10 best quotes from Mrs. Thatcher’s are really stupid things said about her by her intellectual inferiors in Labor.
Here is Mrs. Thatcher displaying that incisive intellect of hers:
“…What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poorer were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”
Watch the above bit of parliamentary flyting as only the British can do, and tell me the woman was not brilliant. Even her opponent delights in her retort.
“I detest every one of her domestic policies,” the Member tells the PM. To which she replies without flinching, in that crisp beautiful English:
“The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”
On the famous U-Turn:
“For those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase the U-Turn, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.'”
The exchange below with the pompous Peter Mansbridge of CBC is particularly relevant to the empty talk about “compromise” infesting current debates:
What perturbs Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian institution in his own right—a stuffy, ossified, yet rather able lefty journo—is what he calls “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.” A liberal doesn’t like a debate about substance, for it demands intellectual argument. Rather, the liberal is compelled to make silly points about style for those allow for an emotional approach (“Baroness, you make me feel bad; you hurt my self-esteem”).
Mrs. Thatcher offers up a gorgeous metaphor for the pursuit of truth: “When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. …consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”
Exquisite.
And Mrs. Thatcher’s coup de grâce: “Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives; and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”
Like any good Democrat, gaseous ANA NAVARRO REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST and her GOP sister strategists were upfront and in your face on the matter of Barack Obama’s comments about California Attorney General Kamala Harris, whom the president had described as “brilliant, dedicated, and tough,” but also “the best-looking attorney general in the country.”
I think he did the right thing by apologizing. Whether he offended Kamala Harris or not, he did offend some women. This is a sensitive issue for women. A lot of times, women are put through a double standard when it comes to their looks — professional women — that men are not. So as we fight for equality, it is an important issue. Also, Wolf, he’s the president of the United States. And like it or not, the president of the United States gets a higher level of scrutiny than just about anybody else. And I also think there’s some sort of double standard when it comes to President Obama. I can tell you that I had a conversation this morning with the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi. Forty-four years old, long, blonde hair.
And I said to Pam Bondi who was a very strong supporter of Mitt Romney, what would have happened if Mitt Romney, during the campaign, had told you just how attractive you were. And she said, you know what? All hell would have broken loose. I completely agree with her. So, I think he acted correctly by apologizing. It was the right thing to do.
Ridiculous. American women pride themselves on rejecting the biological realities of being female. The natural banter and sexual tension between men and women has thus given way to a frigid political script. Scary.
So too do these confused women expect to strut around half naked in the workplace. Let a man dare to so much as glance their way, or treat them dismissively for their brazenness–and the ladies run to Human Resources screaming discrimination.
CNN and the other cable and news nitworks have been extremely crafty in crafting the meta-message—for some time the networks have been presenting to the public regular Republican commentators who’re left-liberals in all but name.
ANA NAVARRO REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST (said in one breath) is an example. This Republican identity politics activist helped drive out the cantankerous and interesting old-timer John Sununu, openly offering up his old, white maleness as grounds for exclusion from national discourse.
The Navarro woman may not be as stupid as sister S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”), Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) or Margaret Hoover, but like them she is incapable of committing the sin of an original thought. And she will both follow and enforce the political correct scripts on feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, foreign policy, economy, while proclaiming her independence from the rooftops.
