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.
How ironic, then, that readers have demanded that I justify, even atone, for my assessment of the sum-total of one coequal (female) branch of the media-military-congressional complex:
UPDATE II (April 18): BEATING JON STEWART TO CALLING THE MEDIA’S BLUFF. You’d have saved time—and spared yourself the confusion generated on the Colosseum of cretins that is American mainstream media—had you, my reader, come straight to Barely A Blog for news and commentary served up straight. Think about it: Jon Stewart, a comedian who cleaves to fact (if not to liberty’s principles), only aired the truth later that evening.
Barely a Blog beat Jon Stewart to it. BAB called the media’s bluff @ 11:20 am on that day (April 17).
UPDATE III: THE SUSPECTS & THE KNOW-NOTHINGS OF BIG MEDIA. “Arrogant, blasé, completely casual, brazen”: These are some of the adjectives the big mouths of big media are using to describe the demeanor of the 2 Boston bombing suspects in the footage released by the FBI.
These security and counter-intelligence loudmouths festooning cable and news networks and carrying forth on TV know nothing; they know no more than you do. They are just moving their giant gobs, performing as the compulsive exhibitionists that they are.
As is its wont, America’s lapdog media is neglecting to track the facts in the April 15, Boston Marathon bombings, favoring shock and awe—a sensational, ratings-oriented focus. The same news networks are telling you that security at the event had been impressive. Really? Israel’s DEBKAfile strongly disagrees:
“… The lack of adequate security jumps to the eye after twin bombings struck the high-prestige Boston Marathon Monday, April 15, killing three people, including an 8-year old boy and injuring 140 – seventeen critically. This was the world’s oldest annual marathon, with 28,000 runners representing athletes from every US state and more than 90 nations. Yet there was no sign of dogs along the route trained to sniff out explosives or a police helicopter overhead with sensors for detecting explosives or traces thereof on the person of anyone present around the finishing line after the blasts.”
So badly has the definition of news disintegrated that newsmen seem incapable of thinking critically and pursuing the right questions. They know one thing: they want a shock-and-awe fix.
Israeli civilians understand the deep and dark reality in the heart of their enemies; the existential meaning of painstakingly packing parcels of shrapnel, ball-bearings, nails and rat poison to lodge in the bodies of their civilians. Someone wants Americans to experience the same dark reality.
Although our networks rarely cover this aspect of Israeli life, “the task facing Israeli medics has become a routine. Surgeons must slice open the surviving victims of these fiendish devices, picking from the flesh and burrowing in the bone for embedded shards of shrapnel, ball bearings, and nails. The rat poison is a diabolic touch, intended to intensify internal bleeding. If they survive, victims are left maimed and wracked with life-long disfigurement and pain.” (“TO BE OR NOT TO BE BLOWN UP”)
Now we hear that our doctors are also treating “victims maimed by what looked like ball bearings or BBs. Doctors also said they removed a host of sharp objects from the victims, including nails that were sticking out of one little girl’s body.”
DEBKAfile, on the other hand, posits that a Saudi cell consisting of Al Qaeda of Arabia (AQAP) might be responsible for setting off the devices:
debkafile’s counterterrorism sources can disclose however that the investigation has in fact homed in on a suspected terror cell of three Saudi nationals, very possibly tied to Al Qaeda.
The flat they share in the Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston, was searched after the questioning of one of the suspects, a Saudi student, who was hospitalized with badly burned hands. One of his flatmates was taken into custody over “visa problems.” A third is on the run. All three hail from a prominent Saudi family belonging to a tribe from the Asir province bordering on Yemen.
The search for the wanted man led to the grounding of a plane at Logan International Airport Tuesday. The investigation has meanwhile broadened out to places in and outside Boston in a search for the cell’s accomplices.
The origins of the Saudi cell, if confirmed, strongly suggest that Al Qaeda of Arabia – AQAP –succeeded in planting a cell in the United States for the bombing attack in Boston – and possibly more than one in other parts of the US. Asir Province is known as a hotbed of resistance to the Saudi throne in Riyadh.
…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?”
To the extent that I understood his position, Stengel appeared to believe that by supporting The National Association for Gun Rights’ attack ad against House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Rand Paul was siding with conservatives as against libertarians.
Come again?
“…one National Association for Gun Rights ad accuses Cantor of “wanting to pass Obama’s gun control schemes,” and says Cantor “doesn’t sound like a Virginian or a Republican anymore; Eric Cantor sounds like someone else.” The ad includes a graphic of Cantor’s face morphing into Obama’s.”
Libertarians do not want to see law-abiding gun owners subjected to Barack Obama’s probes.
In any case, stumblebum Stengel did have a eureka moment, rare in mainstream media, when he galvanized the Clinton-era concept triangulation to describe Rand Paul’s political modus operandi.
