Category Archives: Media

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

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CNN Halloween Ghoul Gloria Borger: Can She Be Humanized?!

Ethics, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Objectivism, Propaganda, Reason

In anticipation of Mitt Romney’s last major speech delivered on Friday, in Iowa, the voter was expected to endure the analysis of one of the most banal brains on TV (and that takes an effort, given the competition):

Gloria Borger.

This bitch (and yes, I’ve not been mincing words lately) has not stopped maligning Romney’s character. As I’ve said repeatedly, Romney’s political philosophy is situated on a continuum of statism, and, as such, is of a piece with Obama’s.

But in his personal life, Mitt’s a lovely man. That is unless the stupid hos who monopolize discourse in the USA no loner like the silent, tall, capable, hard-working, over-achiever.

Romney’s funny too.

Yet Borger, a member of the Bitches for Obama Brigade at CNN, has not shut up about the need to “humanize” Mr. Romney, the premise of which it that the man is inhuman.

Romney’s public persona is a fictitious construct invented by the characters on the liberal cable news stations, with some acquiescence from Republican women. All agree about his stiffness.

Stiff? Sure, Romney is as rigid as the “Mad Man” Don Draper of the eponymous HBO period drama. The good type of rigid.

So here’s what Borger disgorged about the role, in particular, of Ann Romney in rehabilitating her rogue husband:

BALDWIN: “I want to bring back Gloria Borger, because here we are, strategy wise, 11 days left. We’re counting every day. The Romney camp, you know, seems to be featuring more of Mitt Romney, you know, Mitt Romney the man. And you’ve spent quite a bit of time with the woman who’s been instrumental in that, Ann Romney.”

BORGER: “Right.”

BALDWIN: “Tell me more about that.”

BORGER: “Well, Ann Romney has kind of become their secret weapon here. You know that Mitt Romney has a large problem with women voters. Ann Romney is out there now trying to appeal to women.
She’s also sort of been Mitt Romney’s character witness. Because his big problem has been that average voters say he doesn’t care about my problems. He doesn’t understand my problems. He’s too rich. He’s too out of touch. He doesn’t get it.
So Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him, open Mitt Romney up and kind of say to people, you know, actually he does care about you. She pushed for more of that. You heard a little bit more of that at the convention. You heard some of that in the debates.
So now his message is two-pronged. Yes, I can talk about the economy, but, yes, I also understand your problems. And we’ll see if more and more people believe that he does, because he runs substantially behind the president when it comes to economic empathy, if you will. And she’s part of that plan to get people to think that he does get it.”

UPDATED: Benghazigate And The Media (Who Are Seasonal Defenders Of D.C. )

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Republicans, War

“Barack Obama is a despicable man.” These are the words of the always outspoken and interesting Michael Scheuer (a staunch, pro-military Old Rightist, whose patriotism often leads him to conspiratorial anti-Israelism).

Scheuer was on Fox Business discussing Benghazigate.

Fox News is covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all.

This reportorial bifurcation is pretty typical of mainstream media, which includes Fox, of course. In the ramp-up to a Republican president’s unjust war on Iraq, Fox gave the Shrub and his administration a complete pass, while The Other Cable TV stations exposed the corrupt Republicans quite well.

“Reporters who slept with their sources,” “PRESSTITUTES,“ bobble-heads who were “TUNED-OUT, TURNED-ON, AND HOT FOR WAR”: These were some of the terms I used in 2003 and onward for Fox News:

“… to watch these women doing the Countdown to Obliterating Iraq segments was like watching bitches on heat. One anchorwoman’s memorable Freudian slip was to express disappointment that there was as yet no “evidence that’ll give us an excuse [her words] to attack Iraq.” On and on. (Collated in Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture.)

Most of my information about Iraqi civilian casualties came from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. American mainstream media was generally missing in action on that front.

“ON PIMPS AND ‘PRESSTITUTES’” encapsulates the US media’s reporting during the invasion of Iraq, RIP:

…The monolithic quality of the reporting/cheerleading coming from the networks was and still is proof of the slutty sell-out. Practically all network embeds focused exclusively on the pentagon’s version of who did what, when, and how. Logistics usurped real issues; spectacle replaced substance, as the viewer was subjected to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of the night vision optics. …
…Reporting hearsay as truth and failing to verify stories has also been part of the networks’ war effort. A Geiger counter that went off in the inexpert hands of a marine was broadcast as possible evidence of weapons-grade plutonium. Every bottle of Cipro tablets became a likely precursor to an anthrax factory. Anchormen and women somberly seconded these “finds,” seldom bothering to issue retractions for misinforming the viewing public.

Then the guard changed. To American pundits (libertarians excepted), the changing of the guard in D.C. simply means a change of positions. Whereas MSNBC and CNN were more likely to expose the Bush Administration, they quickly assumed the position previously occupied by the Fox News network during the Bush years: defenders of D.C.

The pundits you follow, libertarains excepted, are all seasonal defenders of D.C.

To sum, Benghazi is a scandal. Fox News has been reporting (diligently, since their guy is NOT in D.C.) that: “…an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command — who also told the CIA operators twice to “stand down” rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”

Try to remember: The White House Situation Room, the State Department, CIA and Pentagon were just as good at forsaking Americans during the other bastard’s reign of terror.

For example, “Under ‘W,’ ordinary Americans were regularly beheaded in the theaters of war Genghis Bush launched. None of their representatives stateside bargained for their lives or staged showy Congressional hearings to probe their forsaken security.”

My hope is that the same readers who tried to have me dismissed from WND, during the Republican occupation of America, will elevate themselves above their current political preference and see the thing for what it is.

UPDATE (Oct. 27): If not for RT, we’d be as deaf and dumb (as ex-Facebook Friend, HJ) about the humanitarian disaster unfolding, a la Iraq, in Lebanon. Another Syria. Or rather, another Iraq. Read about the “Siege of Bani Walid.” Watch the visuals of the maimed and dead. Babies too.

Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer Is Back

Ethics, Journalism, Media, Morality

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is back from purgatory. Zakaria had been exposed for the second-hander I’ve long claimed he was—and worse. Front-and-center tonight—opining on the final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla.—Zakaria was found to have plagiarized another journalist’s work: the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore.

What’s more, plagiarism is a pattern for Fareed. Dan Amira provides a Zakaria background check, and with it evidence that “… this isn’t even the first time that Zakaria has been accused of taking ownership of another writer’s work.

If you’d imagined that a pathetic excuse for a writer, as is Zakaria, would be run out of town for his transgression—you’d be wrong. You’d be making a dodgy presumption of standards—moral and other.

Despite a pattern of plagiarisms, Zakaria’s employers were content to merely suspend his column for a month. (Someone called Tunku Varadarajan accuses everyone baying for Fareed’s journalistic blood of envy.)

Zombie Zakaria joins another by now infamous CNN friend, Candy Crowley, who helped tilt last week’s presidential debate in BHO’s favor.

What a lineup.