Category Archives: Media

Updated: Elections Fatigue (& A Shout-Out To An Anti-Politician)

America, Education, Elections 2008, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Taxation

What’s there to say about the interminable electioneering we’re being subjected to? I have less and less to say by the day.

For one, the candidates do not represent me or uphold my rights. If anything; they promise to violate them. The Hillary-Hussein-McCain unholy trinity caters in one way or another to the burgeoning American welfariate.

I’m also repulsed by the unchecked chauvinism of the elections coverage. Not a word about world events have I heard in weeks, perhaps months. America’s pathological, election-time self-absorption makes a mockery of the idea that the US is suited to lead the world. Shouldn’t a world leader take an interest in the world?

I believe the last debate between Hillary and Barack was actually worth watching if only for the performance of a journalist whom I’ve praised in the past: Charles Gibson. Gibson actually flouted the common consensus about his job description and asked the messiah some tough questions. He has a pattern of such subversion.

Alas, by that time, I was so thoroughly fatigued, I failed to watch.

Let me take the time, however, to give a shout-out to an anti-politician: Actor Wesley Snipes, who “was sentenced to three years in prison for a “history of contempt over a period of time” for U.S. tax laws.” Snipes got bad legal advice, but he’s a hero for acting on his contempt for legalized theft.

Update (April 26): MSM, which is seldom to be trusted, keeps reporting that the American people cannot tolerate the scrappy competition between Hillary and Barack. We are led to believe that, as I put it, Americans are so delicate they cannot stomach “a vigorous race for the highest office in the land because it is, well, vigorous.”

Presuming this is true and Americans are as soft as MSM portrays them—at least the ones that aren’t brewing with bitterness and bigotry and doodling with guns—why do you think this is so?

Could it be that the emphasis in schools on cooperative as opposed competitive endeavors—on the girlie over the boyish mindset—has something to do with it? The fact that everyone gets a prize at school for something, rather than for winning or being the best—could this be a factor in crippling the competitive spirit?

If the media is to be believed, Americans will soon be assuming the fetal position and whimpering in the corner if Hill and B. Hussein don’t stop exchanging barbs.

Boohoo.

Updated: Elections Fatigue (& A Shout-Out To An Anti-Politician)

America, Education, Elections 2008, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Taxation

What’s there to say about the interminable electioneering we’re being subjected to? I have less and less to say by the day.

For one, the candidates do not represent me or uphold my rights. If anything; they promise to violate them. The Hillary-Hussein-McCain unholy trinity caters in one way or another to the burgeoning American welfariate.

I’m also repulsed by the unchecked chauvinism of the elections coverage. Not a word about world events have I heard in weeks, perhaps months. America’s pathological, election-time self-absorption makes a mockery of the idea that the US is suited to lead the world. Shouldn’t a world leader take an interest in the world?

I believe the last debate between Hillary and Barack was actually worth watching if only for the performance of a journalist whom I’ve praised in the past: Charles Gibson. Gibson actually flouted the common consensus about his job description and asked the messiah some tough questions. He has a pattern of such subversion.

Alas, by that time, I was so thoroughly fatigued, I failed to watch.

Let me take the time, however, to give a shout-out to an anti-politician: Actor Wesley Snipes, who “was sentenced to three years in prison for a “history of contempt over a period of time” for U.S. tax laws.” Snipes got bad legal advice, but he’s a hero for acting on his contempt for legalized theft.

Update (April 26): MSM, which is seldom to be trusted, keeps reporting that the American people cannot tolerate the scrappy competition between Hillary and Barack. We are led to believe that, as I put it, Americans are so delicate they cannot stomach “a vigorous race for the highest office in the land because it is, well, vigorous.”

Presuming this is true and Americans are as soft as MSM portrays them—at least the ones that aren’t brewing with bitterness and bigotry and doodling with guns—why do you think this is so?

Could it be that the emphasis in schools on cooperative as opposed competitive endeavors—on the girlie over the boyish mindset—has something to do with it? The fact that everyone gets a prize at school for something, rather than for winning or being the best—could this be a factor in crippling the competitive spirit?

If the media is to be believed, Americans will soon be assuming the fetal position and whimpering in the corner if Hill and B. Hussein don’t stop exchanging barbs.

Boohoo.

Sullivan Slobbers For Obama

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Media, Neoconservatism

As you know, pundit Andrew Sullivan was one of the failed “experts” who provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

To be fair, Sullivan distinguished himself from the rest of the nation’s philosopher-kings in that he did recant. Deep in a Time Magazine column he buried an expression of “a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me.” This alone makes him infinitely nobler than most other teletwits who’re shoved down the collective gullet by media, and who were all wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq, and many other grave matters.

Of course, the media is every bit as mired in moral and intellectual confusion as the pundits they feature . If they exposed their failed experts, they’d be exposing their own moral and intellectual flabbiness. They’d be beaching themselves, which is how they all ought to end up—beached.

The same Sullivan, wrong for so long on such a crucial matter, appeared on Meet the Press, April 6, intoxicated—drunk with love not for war, this time, but for Obama. Bami is absolutely sincere about everything he says, Sullivan almost sobbed. Thankfully, a wry Christopher Hitchens was there to provide a counterweight to Sullivan’s emotional effusing.

“Richly revealing was the way Obama tarred his maternal (white) grandma with the taint of racism,” not once, by mistake, but repeatedly. You’ll all agree that was quite something to behold. Hitchens certainly thought so. He smiled and said something to the effect that never before had he seen put into practice the expression throwing granny to the wolves. Or throwing granny under the bus. Obama’s outing of his infirm, 86-year-old grandma as a racist, fit to be lumped with the vile Rev. Wright—that was a first for to Hitchens. (And to me; most good people show respect to their grandparents.)

In response, Sullivan oozed denials, the sum total of which amounted to, “Leave him alone, you nasty man; Bami didn’t mean it that way.” Andy dominated the remainder of the conversation with “arguments” of a similar caliber.

I paraphrase the gist of what Dr. Thomas Szasz once said to me: Hitchens may be wrong on many issues, but at least he’s highly intelligent.

And what a conversationalist!

Back to my main point: Crunchy con Sullivan should not be listened to when he prostrates himself at the feet of Obama and asks that we do the same. For too long he’s dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage on some pretty defining issues. Isn’t it time his status as “experts” for whom public goodwill runs eternal be revoked? At least Hitchens, unlike Sullivan, didn’t vow that he had looked into a candidate’s eyes and seen his soul.

Liar, Liar, Obama On Fire

Africa, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Media, Race

If the media cared to cover the two Democratic candidates fairly, you’d hear more about Obama’s lies. But it so happens that the mindless ones don’t even bother with the appearance of an even reportorial hand with respect to the two.

Hillary’s “A Thousand Arabian Nights” about Serbia have been cast as the tall tales of a pathological liar. Barack’s beefing up his community activist’s résumé—he was never a professor—that’s merely a white lie. (I myself have referred to him by his undeserving honorific, professor.)

Barrack’s false claims-making concerning his “Camelot connection,” and the way in which his parents met—these episodes of amnesia have been framed as an “overstatement” by the Washington Post.

The less than truthful speech Obama gave at Selma is worth attention, replete as it is with his stock-in-trade strident race rhetoric. With respect to this particular biographical tidbit, slavery, colonialism, white hypocrisy, and black victimization (the stuff of Afrocentrism) are front-and-center in his address. Less so the benevolence that brought the elder Obama and other African students to the US.