Category Archives: Propaganda

UPADATE III: Fox News And Its Truth Deniers (Left-Libertarianism)

Business, Economy, Founding Fathers, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Ron Paul, Socialism

The following is excerpted from “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” now on WND.COM:

“The dueling perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment; often a RINO—preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.

This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.

The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others. …

The philosophical filth spewed by such characters – almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less – is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in D.C. can regulate “better” (read energy-squandering) industries into being by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy-efficient) industries (oil and gas). …

The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.

The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the ‘Bigfoot books,’ so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with ‘hoax materials.’

Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.” …

The complete column, “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” is now on WND.COM. Read it.

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Barnes and Noble is always well-stocked and ships within 24 hours.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher. Inquire about an Xmas special on bulk buys.

UPDATE I (Nov. 18): MSNBC has just inaugurated the nauseating “NOW,” which utilizes the dueling-perspectives panel discussed in my WND column to great effect. Here is the little RINO Lolita S. E. Cupp making a weak case for the right of a man to hire a lawyer, in a pathologically litigious country, which jails more individuals than any other: the USA. By “a weak case,” the hallmark of an establishment Republican (or whatever one chooses to dub this political species), I mean that grimaces, gestures, and a paraphrasing of the host replace serious argument. In particular, earlier in the debate, Cupp picked up on a catchy phrase the host had used, and repeated it again and again (“precipice politics) in order to conceal her vacuity. In the loud talking (for it wasn’t intelligent debate) about the Super Committee, Naomi Wolf was the only individual to zero in on the issue of a soviet-style politburo making decisions in a so-called representative democracy. (Wolf didn’t put it this way, but she made the point effectively. And, of course, the US was supposed to be a republic, not a mobocracy.) Otherwise, everything is all very friendly and flirty.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATE II: Via Facebook: What uncharacteristic intellectual pettiness it is to zero in on a trivial convention used in the column, instead of addressing the issue of natural law and reality, also the core of the column. This is what the column is about. However, maybe some here disagree that “truth is immutable, never relative.” And that “the little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.”

UPDATE III: LEFT-LIBERTARIANISM. To the “there is nothing wrong with Judge and Stossel” crowd: ‘Cmon: They are the best we have, but there is plenty wrong. They are left-libertarians. For a while, Paul was teetering there too, but was pulled back from the brink by the conservatism of the his base, the majority of whom do not think that, at 1 million a year, the US needs more immigration and that anchor babies are dictated by the Constitution.

UPDATED: Lincoln Myth Busting

History, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Republicans, States' Rights, War

I was one of the folks who contacted Tom DiLorenzo asking him to dispel any developing myths about Bill O’Reilly’s new book, which deals with that killer, Abe Lincoln. After all, who better to dispatch O’Reilly and his Abe-adulating Killing Lincoln, than the Lincoln Myth Buster himself? Writes Tom at LRC.COM:

“Quite a few people have emailed me begging me to critically review Bill O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Lincoln, about the assassination. They do this not because they have read the book, which is a big, boring bag of nothingness, but because they’ve heard O’Reilly spout the neocon party line about ‘Father Abraham’ on his television show and they smell a rat.

I’ve read the book, and it really is a big bunch of nothing. All it is is a narrative of the events leading up to the assassination. Over 100 books are already in print on the subject, and all O’Reilly and his coauthor do is cut and paste what others have written on the subject, but without including a single footnote! The authors also have the annoying habit of writing things like, ‘in his mind, he was thinking that . . . ‘ as though they could know what Lincoln was thinking when he did this or that 150 years ago. This is a standard practice of the ‘Lincoln scholars,’ who also constantly claim to know what was ‘in his heart’ (nothing but love and kindness, of course) in their writings.” …

MORE.

UPDATE: Thanks, Mari, for the Salon link. Of course, liberals would never pan a Lincoln book because it lauds a mass murderer who sundered the Constitutional scheme forever and sicced brother against brother:

“A reviewer for the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre has recommended that Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling new book about the Lincoln assassination not be sold at the historic site “because of the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.”

Rae Emerson, deputy superintendent at Ford’s Theatre, which is a national historic site under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, has penned a scathing appraisal of O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever.” In Emerson’s official review, which I’ve pasted below, she spends four pages correcting passages from O’Reilly’s book before recommending that it not be offered for sale at Ford’s Theatre because it is not up to quality standards.

UPDATED: Slimy Sex Trail Leads to Chicago

Aesthetics, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Politics, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans, Sex

Ann Coulter provides some good shoe-leather reporting, absent from US mainstream media, as she tracks the slimy trail of Herman Cain’s accusers back to … Chicago. And, if you want the exact GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates, the breadcrumbs lead straight to “David Axelrod’s apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive,” where “Cain’s latest accuser, Sharon Bialekhe” resided.

What does it say about the workplace that someone who looks and sounds as Bialekhe does has held respectable position’s in various industries? And she’s only 50; so ugly and lined despite all the obvious plastic panel beating her face has endured. In answer to the question of how to stay young, I always reply: When you get to your late 40s, what’s inside begins to manifest on the outside. You can’t hide ugly insides.

UPDATE: The Real Rush has it that the media’s extra-hideous attack on Cain is because, “Herman [is] Cain more of a threat than the other GOP contenders: He could win. So, neither the Obama administration, the Democrat National Committee, nor the liberal GOP leadership wants him to secure the Republican nomination. Blacks would vote for him. The guilted white fools who voted for Obama would vote for him. Conservatives would vote for him. Evangelical Christians would vote for him. Is there anyone left?

Sure there is. But you get the picture: With Cain versus Obama, it’s Cain in a landslide.”

MORE.

UPDATE III: Cain Crossed the Character Line (Classic Coulter)

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Reason, Rights

“What’s Herman Cain being accused of?” Brent Bozell asked CNN contributor Roland Martin. Bozell is the publisher of NewsBusters and heads the Media Research Center.

Here’s Herman Cain’s central conceit: He has lived as an individual. He has failed to make racial grievance the center and focus of his life. He seems incapable of picking at those old racial scabs. He has no suppurating racial sores. He does not identify as a black man, he is just an American man (with all the frailties and foibles that entails).

During the Civil Rights Movement, which has usurped all else in the annals of America, the craven Cain was … working.

“I just kept going to school, doing what I was supposed to do, and stayed out of trouble.” OMIGOD. Look where this pragmatic, goal-oriented work ethic has landed him.

Bloody Google spits up all the malign stuff, first. And the HuffPo and MSNBC won’t even do journalism, and tell us what Cain was doing with his “lazyass.”

Cain was, however, being a little too kind when he suggested that “African-Americans in this country had been brainwashed over the years into supporting Democrats.”

The decision to support the Democratic platform of pillage politics and perpetual welfare is also a personal one. Still, Cain has been maligned for daring to even suggest the black community thinks as a collective.

In short, for speaking the truth.

Ann Coulter: “To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”

“Google Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney, John Conyers, and then Google Allen West, Michael Steele or Herman Cain. … Our [blacks] are more impressive. There’s no question about it,” Coulter told retard Joy Behar.

A little crude, but probably correct, if you take away Michael Steele.

UPDATE I: In response to the thread on my Facebook Wall: It has to be obvious that libertarians do not agree with Cain or West on political philosophy. But both these men remain relatively impressive individuals. You should know by now that I’m no tinny ideologue. My comment obtains. Coulter makes a reasonable point. She’s a Republican mouthpiece, but she is not dumb (as CB claims). Gary Johnson may be allied with most of my political views, but, golly, is he weird or what?! Bordering on creepy.

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): CLASSIC COULTER. Sigh. Here’s a newsflash about the commentary at BAB and IlanaMercer.com. Just because I don’t support Cain’s candidacy and rickety political plank; and despite the fact that I’ve written enough about La Coulter’s establishment persona and positions—it does not follow that I will refrain from commenting about the Zeitgeist; the culture, the PC strictures it imposes and the interactions between the components of the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

If you wanna read bloodless (generally left-libertarian) political analysis (yawn), you know were to go.

Anyhoo: There’s a lot to laugh about in Coulter’s latest column. I dislike the rude “our blacks” crap. But I like speech; the freer the better. (And we already know that most American pundettes are crass and unladylike, so what’s new? At least Coulter is not stupid too):

The surge in conservative support for Herman Cain confuses the Democrats’ story line, which is that Republicans hate Obama because he’s black. … Cain is twice as black as Obama. (Possible Obama campaign slogan: “Too Black!”)
This is why the liberal website Politico ran with a story on Cain that had everything – a powerful black man, a Republican presidential candidate, the hint of sexuality – except facts. … If the details helped liberals, we’d have the details.
To have been accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s is like having been accused of molesting children at preschools in the 1980s or accused of being a witch in Massachusetts in the 1690s.

Coulter nails it!

UPDATE III: Actually, SB, my Gary Johnson aversion has nothing to do with “optics”; GJ can’t stop talking about himself. Ron Paul talks liberty. Steve Jobs was charming and suave. This guy is about his own goofy self.