Category Archives: Media

The Death Heads Are Just Dandy

Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

The New Individualist’s Spring 2010 edition doesn’t carry one of my columns (The Winter issue featured two), but it has a good, much-needed photo-journalism spread titled “This is War.” Iraqi family homes flatted by SCUDS (ours), streets in the aftermath of stupid bombs (from the US with love), the purest of the pure—the body of a beautiful little girl—washed for burial (“we love ya, democratized Iraqis”).

Scrutinizing the ever-so sad images of war brought back those horrible years during which, in vain it seemed, I pelted my readers with non-stop facts and doses of reality, the kind these images transmit with such ease. I tried the power of the Jewish teachings; these instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice; Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And I mentioned over and over again the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided: “A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

If you have a moral compass I ask you to patronize moral writers (provided they have talent, of course), not the apologists who supported this wicked foray, and are still unapologetic about it. All of them, I wager, are doing well—walking around, grins on their smug, death-head mugs, their claws dripping with blood, their wallets stuffed with wads, the Empire’s counterfeit currency. Incitement to murder and war profiteering are lucrative occupations in fin de siècle America.

The blowhards and blonds who slithered on their bellies for Bush (still do)—why do you read them? Buy their sick-making “Obama-this; Obama That” Micky-mouse books? (Okay, some like Coulter and Malkin have real talent, but the rest? Nothing but a T & A show all.)

It’s the story of Job, that Hebrew individualist, all over again; the wicked and the foolisher prosper, the righteous suffer, isn’t it?

Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod

Affirmative Action, Ethics, History, Human Accomplishment, Journalism, Media, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The following is an excerpt from my new WND.com column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod”:

“‘Expectations tend to be self-fulfilling,’ said an anonymous wag. Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. Except very little and that’s all you’ll get. In modern-day USA, a kid so much as dials 911 in an emergency, and he is decorated for bravery. And if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites—she is up for beatification.

Repudiate this elevated ethical standard, and a deranged, fulminating Keith Olbermann will pelt you with a panegyric on the imagined martyrdom of one Shirley Sherrod, now the most celebrated public servant in the United States, and perhaps the world. …

… Keith Olbermann is a crude pamphleteer who imagines himself a modern-day Emile Zola. Most recently, the anchor has sunk to the level of fraud and falsehood in comparing Ms. Sherrod—a contemporary black woman, who has, hitherto, enjoyed safe and secure sinecure in liberal, post-Civil-Rights-Act America—to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a nineteenth-century Jew living in illiberal France, falsely accused of the worst military breach possible.

The similarities are as startling as Olbermann’s leveling logic.

In 1894, this patriotic Frenchman was charged with spying for the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason with no due process of the law. He was sentenced to a lifetime on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in South America. There, Dreyfus languished until 1899. Outraged at the miscarriage of justice, French writer Emile Zola penned a stirring tract, ‘J’Accuse,’ in defense of Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated twelve years after his ordeal began.

Dreyfus’s fate clearly mirrors that of Sherrod. Especially glaring are the parallels between Sherrod’s 48-hour, celebratory ride on the cable news merry-go-round, and Dreyfus’s four-year romp around Treasure Island, in French Guiana.” …

Read the complete column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

The Making Of An American Saint

Affirmative Action, Glenn Beck, Government, Journalism, Media, Race, Racism

ROSA PARKS REDUX. Glenn Beck was in tears (just about). Shepard Smith is being as solemn and pious as I’ve ever seen him; the White House press corps is in a collective conniption—all over the great injustice done, and corrected forthwith, to a black Agriculture Department employee who turned out to be less of a racist than was alleged.

Andrew Breitbart is alleged to have created the confusion with a misleading, incomplete report of this allegedly decades-old incident. Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Lawrence Auster has termed “low-grade conservative media.” “Tease journalism,” I wrote.

Shirley Sherrod, state director for rural development (Great Journalism doesn’t say which “rurality”), said this (16 minutes into the tape), paraphrased: she began her work intending it to be for black people. G-d put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer came to her for assistance with a superior attitude. (I guess if it were a Brother, she might have described him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances.) So many black people had lost their land, and here she was faced with having to help a white man save his property. [Hallelujah; what a pure heart] “So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod said. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of Them; to his own kind.”

Paradiddle, please: (verbatim): “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod goes on to reveal how she did her job even when it came to a desperate, downtrodden white man. She may be a charming woman, but she does not deserve to be beatified, as she is, by the BHO admin and the press. She came to work preparing to work for her Race. Arguably, this is not uncommon among blacks and Hispanics who have a sense of cohesion and unity in opposition to mainstream whites.

Here Andrew Breitbart makes excuses for his shoddy excerpting:

UPDATED: Bull’s-Eye, Bill O’Reilly

Conservatism, Crime, Law, Media, Race, Racism

I thought that the Bill O’Reilly’s July 13th “Talking Points” would have been removed from the FoxNews website, by now. I’ve been waiting for the segment to come online. In it, the famous talker alluded to rates at which blacks commit violent crime proportionate to their numbers in society. It is up. And it was brave of Bill to come straight out and say this:

“African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but according to the Justice Department, they comprise 39 percent of violent crime convictions. Thirty-six percent of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, and 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Perhaps we can hear more from the NAACP on the ugliest form of racism in America, interracial violent crime—which, according to FBI statistics, is largely black-on-white, not the reverse.” Pat Buchanan, with the most impassioned response to the allegations of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People against the Tea Party.