Category Archives: Journalism

‘Colorectal Crusader’ Couric Cries Foul

Ethics, General, Hillary Clinton, Journalism, Media

What never fails to amaze me about the anointed Idiocracy of America (Peggy Noonan comes to mind here) is that, no matter how evil and erroneous their way, they always get curtain calls; they retain their status as philosopher-kings. Or queens.

Colonic Crusader” Katie Couric said this at an award ceremony for her cherished self:

“However you feel about her politics, I feel that Sen. Clinton received some of the most unfair, hostile coverage I’ve ever seen.”

[Note the grating “I feel” locution]

Rewind to February this year:

Sly Katie recently interviewed Clinton while intoxicated—drunk with love for Obama. Couric’s below-the-belt barbs and blithe probes about Obama—but not the issues—made Hillary appear elevated by comparison. The Senator was courteous where Katie was cruel.

‘Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?’ Couric asked. ‘Only with some boys,’ Clinton said, laughing

The answer was quick, and, I must confess, classy. The question was base and bitchy. (It’s of a piece with another iconic ‘journalist’s’ cruelty—that of Barbara Walters. She prefaced an interview with Celine Dion by pronouncing: ‘you are not beautiful.’ Tears welled in Dion’s beautiful eyes.)

Excerpted from my “Militant Mama Obama.”

Update II: Mindless Monolith: Media Pick Obama

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media

“I suspect most media cheered for Obama reflexively, rather than consciously—too stupid to ask themselves whether what they were doing was journalism or advocacy. A couple of older news guys, ABC’s Charles Gibson comes to mind, failed to take sides. Consequently, the pack pounced on him and on George Stephanopoulos for asking the senator some pointed questions. But good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by mediocrities like Barbara Walters of the ‘cutting edge’ anti-aging reportage and colonic crusader Katie Couric.”

“So how did a mindless monolith’s hunger for Hussein help the Obama momentum?”

Find out by reading “Mindless Monolith: Media Pick Obama.” The column leads the WND Commentary Page today.

Update I: A friend, who’s no fan of Katie Couric, thought my description of her as a “colonic crusader” should be patented. Fun aside, to be a “good” newsman today means taking up a disease and fighting against it. The triumph of sentimentality over reason. Couric’s thing is colon cancer, an awful illness, indubitably, but, consider Fallaci who’d been blown-up covering many a revolution–she never so much as discussed the breast cancer that killed her. I suspect that given the kind of mind she had, it didn’t much interest her. I too switch off most newscasts when they start on the kiddies, cures, and critters crap. Part of the takeover by women.

Update II (June 7): In reply to the reader from Lewrocwell.com, who asserts that I have singled out “comrade” Obama for criticism for some reason he simply cannot fathom:

I too cannot quite understand why readers assert baselessly, rather than argue based on facts. The reader has clearly not read “Ilana’s” scathing commentary on the other candidates. It’s on this site, for those willing to do a wee search—two mouse clicks away really.

Of course, it’s also a no-brainer that the most prominent candidate—the frontrunner—would garner more commentary than the rest. Is it not? Perhaps not to all. Genghis Bush got my undivided attention in years past.

Here’s some of the commentary Mr. Allen “missed”:

The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil

Mitt’s Gone; Bill’s Back

Axis of Economic Idiocy

Lexicon Of Lies

Busybody Hillary’s Bhutto Blather

And more; practically every column of mine, here’s another example, is peppered with derogatory comments about the candidates and their positions, or lack thereof, as applied to the issues discussed in the column. I guess people see what they want to see.

A different perspective on my rather matter-of-fact narration of the media’s crowning of Obama comes from a rather independent-minded gentlemen I’ve come to know—he happens to be Sean Hannity’s producer, although as much as he often likes what I have to say has not succeeded in getting me on the program:

“This is your typical iconoclastic clarity – some people fight PC, you remind me more of some Buffy who stakes it through the heart and then cuts its head off on the backslash.”

Updated: Iraq 5 Years On: CBC Ignores American Anti-War Right

Ann Coulter, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Ron Paul

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commemorated the invasion of Iraq with an outstanding Fifth-Estate segment: “THE LIES THAT LED TO WAR: The Political, Diplomatic, and Media Spin that Convinced Americans to Invade Iraq.”

An important point made was that America is no closer to a reckoning that this “adventure” was a great wrong, if not an outright evil. Ann Coulter provided a strident example of this hubris. Tossing her magnificent mane, she mocked Canadians for not getting the goods on how good things were in Iraq. This was how democracies shaped up, Ann “argued.”

A disgrace really. Cruel too.

A question to the fine chroniclers of the war at the CBC: There is a small number of American reporters, pundits, and a few politicians that has always opposed this abominable invasion on the grounds that it violated natural rights, Just War Theory, the American Constitution, the comity of nations—and practically every single stricture familiar to babes on the playground.

(SEEJust War for Dummies
& “Unnatural Lawlessness”)

Rep. Ron Paul protested tirelessly; as did this writer (starting in September 2002 in an editorial for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe And Mail) and her non-Beltway affiliated libertarian colleagues.

(SEEWhy So Many Americans Don’t Support Attacking Iraq,” except that there weren’t so many Americans, despite the titular hope the Globe and Mail expressed.)

Why does the CBC fail to mention our much-marginalized faction? Is it because we are, for the most, of the Old, classically liberal American Right?

Why keep featuring the fiendish Coulter, Malkin, and their Canadian copycat, one Rachel Marsden? [SEELethal Weapons: Neocon Groupies“] Why not help consign them to the dustbin of punditry and look to the principled few (talented too) who stood for the soundest of philosophical principles?

We exist!

I grieved when the death toll in Iraq stood at 289—a lousy landmark I also happened to protest in an op-ed for the Canadian Globe And Mail. (SEEBush’s Warfare State”)

I continue to mourn now that it has climbed to 4000—yesterday. My grief at the trashing of Iraqi lives has been a constant in my writing over the last five years—in columns and blog entries alike. (The Archive is here)

Who chose to nominate the average suffering Iraqi as “Person of the Year”? Certainly not Time magazine.

(SEEMy Person of the Year: The Average Iraqi”)

Update (March 25): The Man From Texas and his simply stated, straightforward truth-telling:

“Five years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead; some two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees; and the Iraqi Christian community – one of the oldest in the world – has been decimated more completely than even under the Ottoman occupation or the rule of Saddam Hussein.
 
On the US side, nearly four thousand Americans have lost their lives fighting in Iraq and many thousands more are horribly wounded. Our own senior military officers warn that our military is nearly broken by the strain of the Iraq occupation. The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed by the volume of disability claims from Iraq war veterans.
 
A study by Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz concludes that the cost of the war in Iraq could be at least $3 trillion. The economic consequences of our enormous expenditure in Iraq are beginning to make themselves known as we fall into recession and possibly worse…”

Updated: Foul Tom Friedman

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Pseudoscience

Thomas Friedman, the mustachioed crunchy-neocon, can’t go wrong. He was wrong about Iraq, but that didn’t come back to bite him. What’s a little war between friends? He purports to understand free market economics, yet, on the Late Night Show, he complained that not enough capitalists were developing green technologies—the most lucrative potential market there is, says Friedman.
Let’s see: Is this because capitalists are not as smart as Tom Friedman, a statist ponce who pimps for the powers that be? Naturally, Friedman is being holier than thou. Scientists are fiddling with green technologies all the time; industrialists, not so much, since the scientists have yet to find a way to make these technologies commercially viable.
The profit motive, Mr. Friedman, ensures resources are directed to their most efficient use. Technologies that aren’t commercially viable are too expensive; aren’t profitable and are, therefore, invariably wasteful—of the very resources they aim to preserve.
Friedman, who got behind the neoconservative Manifest Destiny, is hungry for a new National Greatness Agenda. I guess exporting democracy didn’t go that well. In the Green Agenda he sees “a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.” Hence his motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
Reincarnation of the Reds” is more like it.
Americans have been fooled by the likes of Friedman, but the British Times Literary Supplement panned his last book—the reviewer had little good to say about Friedman’s reasoning.
As I’ve said, my only consolation is that the gangreens “are worried sick about the planet—genuinely…The Worry Factor may just increase the rate at which this particular invasive species falls off the earth.”
Come to think about it, the ethically challenged Friedman didn’t care much about the casualties of an unjust war; I’m sure he doesn’t lose sleep over alleged global warming.
Friedman’s grammar: he said “more fit,” and “more strong,” when he should have said “fitter and stronger.” And he polluted with a mouthful of cute coinages, such as “global weirding,” and by saying we should have an “earth race” (as opposed to an arms race, supposedly) with China. Puke.

Update (Feb 27): Cooling Trend. From “Daily Tech,” via WorldNetDaily:
“Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.”

Update II: George Reisman, Ph.D, sends along this apropos comment:

“As the ice thickens in the Arctic and in Antarctica and record cold temperatures are recorded practically across the world [SEE BELOW], so too does the ice thin—under the feet of the environmentalists and their global warming crusade. It may almost be time to begin speculating on what will follow global warming as the next great scare.”

George is referring to the appropriately humorous title of Sen. Inhofe’s circular: “Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way.” You can find a good collection of up-to-date articles here on the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.