Category Archives: Media

Sycophants’ Supper, 2015 & Cecily Weak

Affirmative Action, Celebrity, Ethics, Journalism, Media

The nitworks have been all guffaws and genuflection in anticipation of their correspondent’ participation in what I call the “Sycophant’s Supper.” Other than to reproduce my annual post distilling the essence of the event, I’m pleased to report that “the un-watchful dogs of the media” have at last begun to ask whether they indeed have any business frolicking with the president and his minions. Here’s how the dolled up twits at CNN are parsing their craven, journalistic co-optation, annually, at the event, and all year round:

Should the press party with those they cover?

Something along those lines.

Barely A Blog’s annual Sycophant’s Supper post reminds our readers of the following:

Almost all—your favorite opinionators, too—attend the annual Sycophant’s Supper, where they cozy up to Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé Knowles. (Kudos to the few, such as former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who’ve excoriated the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or who’ve refused to attend, irrespective of the political affiliation of the man ensconced in the White House.)

The annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner is where the most pretentious people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome’s provinces. Those gathered at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or its Christmas party, are not the country’s natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy.

The events and the invited say a great deal about the press, its ethics and code of conduct. Like nothing else, the Sycophant’s Supper is a mark of a corrupt politics and press, as the un-watchful dogs of the media have no business frolicking with the president and his minions. This co-optation, however, is the hallmark of the celebrity press, in general. The days following these glitzy events, the Gilded Ones spend genuflecting to … themselves.

As for this affirmative action stand-up comic: WTF!!!!!!!! And I thought Jimmie Fallon’s Millenial humor was weak. Fallon is Jay Leno compared to this bleating bimbo.

Bush Groupie Dana Perino Writes Somethings

Art, Bush, Conflict, Media, Morality, Propaganda

Dana Perino and Megyn Kelly teared up today, as they recalled together (on a show that is billed as news analysis) the warmed-over wisdom and fortune-cookie profundities that tumbled from the mouth of George W. Bush. This was one of the more repulsive scenes that American television has thrown up, of late, although not quite as repulsive as the the success of Perino’s schmaltzy book.

The thing, which I assure you has zero edifying content—Perino is a cipher in a skirt whom only the predatory political process could have elevate—is # 1 on Amazon. Or so said celebrity journo Megyn Kelly. Stomach turning too is the number of “Shares,” “Likes” and fawning comments this bimbo and the anchor enabler received on Facebook and beyond.

Dana, in case you haven’t seen her around (lucky you), was a spokesperson for a man who was barely able to speak. She always smiles with pride when her boss’ “modest” government expansion is hearkened to nostalgically on Fox News. You remember the broad sweep of the Bush limited-government program: Medicare Part D, “No Child Left Behind,” and the fiscal fiascoes that are the wars in Middle East and South-central Asia.

On another show—where Dana’s female cohosts appear swaddled in ugly, short, rubber or spandex frocks—Dana exhibited her appreciation of art by promoting her boss’ paintings. As you can see, Bush’s “art” shares a certain barren quality with the art of another mass murderer.

As much as these two women attempt to delude themselves and their fans that they are non-mainstream and oh-so ethical; they are part of a “media circle jerk” whose very essence is antithetical to ethics. Here, Dana uses her perch at Fox News to promote her book. Megyn Kelly uses her own slot to promote her husband’s books and the books of other colleagues and pals like Perino, ensuring that literary claptrap gets a rapturous reception and ratings.

Lincoln Died Today; His Cult Never Says Die

Fascism, History, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

Today, in 1865, is the day John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, well after the 16th President of the United States had already done insurmountable damage. The heroic Lincoln myth-buster, Tom DiLorenzo, marks (but doesn’t mention) the anniversary with a detailed and well-sourced swipe at the cult that never quits:

… These are all the main ingredients of a modern Lincoln cultist, as [David] Brooks demonstrated in an April 7 New York Times column entitled “What Candidates Need.”

“I have two presidential election traditions,” Brooks wrote. “I begin covering each campaign by reading a book about Abraham Lincoln [probably not one by Yours Truly], and I end each election night, usually after midnight, at the statue of the Lincoln Memorial.”

Brooks should be credited with bravery for being anywhere in public in Washington, D.C., The Town That Lincoln Built, after midnight. He does not say if he holds a séance there, or just prays at the foot of the gigantic statue of the corporate lawyer/lobbyist in an armchair that is the Lincoln Memorial.

Reading most books about Lincoln by “Lincoln scholars” will generally make one stupid and misinformed, as Brooks very ably demonstrates. This is because all such books are bundles of excuses, phony rationales, and fabrications. They are all written like defense briefs in The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln, authored by third-rate lawyers or law students. Being a “Lincoln scholar” means fabricating an excuse for everything. The bigger and more elaborate the excuse, the more “prestigious” is the “Lincoln scholar.”

For example, when the high priestess of the Lincoln cult, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, wrote in her book, Team of Rivals, of how Lincoln was actually the source and promoter of the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery, she praised him for it. Rather than condemning him for supporting the explicit enshrinement of slavery in the text of the U.S. Constitution, Goodwin heaped praise on Lincoln because this slick political maneuver, she said, helped “save” the political fortunes of the Republican Party.

Another example is how, in his last book on Lincoln, Harry Jaffa tried for the ten-thousandth time in his career to explain away Lincoln’s admonition in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that he was “opposed to making voters or jurors of Negroes.” Lincoln opposed giving “Negroes” the right to vote in the 1850s, Jaffa wrote, so that they could have the right to vote in the 1950s. This of course is absurd nonsense but also a good example of the dishonest academic hocus pocus known as “Straussianism.” …

… The complete column is “The Very Model of a Modern Major Lincoln Cultist.” Read it.

UPDATED: By Mistake, Maureen Dowd Said Something True

Business, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Taxation

To borrow from Camille Paglia (who was once interesting, but no longer), Maureen Dowd is a “catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen; empty vessel. One pleasure of reading online is that one never has to see anything written by people like Maureen Dowd [Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Thomas Friedman, Cynthia Tucker, on and on]. I ignore their hypertext like spam for penis extenders.”

Ditto.

However, I heard another sorority queen, the likeable, lovely but celebrity courting Megyn Kelly, mention that Dowd had penned an unfavorable piece on Hillary. So off I trundled to suffer through the tedium of “Grandmama Mia!” which is without one original or insightful idea.

By mistake, Dowd does say something true when commenting about “the ostensible and obscene $2.5 billion that [Hillary] is planning to spend to persuade us to make her grandmother of our country.”

She should give the kids some of the money, suggests Dowd. If Dowd liked Hillary she would, however, want Mrs. Clinton to keep the cash so that she could do all those “wonderful” things once elected.

Dowd is a dumb-dumb. She doesn’t understand that any politician makes the world a better place by giving money allotted for buying votes to privately run charities, instead of spending these billions on buying votes so as to get into office and pass programs, ostensibly for the poor, that ensconce bureaucracies that consume the lion’s share of the revenue stream coerced from taxpayers, in perpetuity.

UPDATE (4/15): Even better: Start a real business—as opposed to a foundation—with all those billions of dollars. Disinvest from politics. As Maimonides, I believe, instructed, it is better to give a poor person a job than a donation.