Category Archives: Reason

Update III: Ass-troturfers

Conspiracy, Democrats, Economy, Healthcare, Media, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason, Socialism

I’m talking about the media. The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that end up becoming part of the narrative and serving to fuse fact with fancy. I refer to the way town hall attendees against Obama Care are being discounted as stooges for “corporate interests.”

It was wicked when the neocons presented antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as something other than what she was. And it is execrable now that MSNBC is tarring impassioned Americans on the Right as something other than what they are. It doesn’t matter with which small or large groups these protesters, left and right, seek solidarity and solace. What matters is the case they present against socializing medicine. The rest is just ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US is at.
I don’t care if George Soros, as alleged by this neocon outfit , came to back Sheehan. Her cause was just. She spoke extremely well against the ongoing travesty in Iraq.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow intoned like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their little foot soldiers conspiring against state health care. The forces of darkness against the forces of light. She arrived at her scoop by following a few links on the internet and ominously reading out some posts, which she framed as secret memos. Unlike comrade Keith, at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of those evil corporatists. And how delightful he turned out to be. “Do the oil companies fund us? No, but I’d love them to. I urge them to support us.” And so he went.

She looked confused. (Rachel’s inner voice: “When will all this free exchange of funds be outlawed? Oh pretty please, Obamby.”) But at least she was a good sport, which is more than one can say about Chris Trickle-Down-The-Leg-For-Obama Matthews and other Obamaheads.

I must say, Maddow is so smarmy and self-satisfied. I can’t bear to watch her coiling and uncoiling as she expounds ominously on conspiracies that are really unremarkable events and associations.

Update I (August 10): The woman of the frozen face and equally unsupple mind—Nancy Pelosi—has teamed up with the Ring Leader, Steny Hoyer (House majority leader), to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American.” As if the number of podiums the parasitical class monopolizes were not enough, the parrot press has given another sizable platform to this excuse of a team: “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Pay attention to how the dastardly duo:

• Conflates the political will with the will of the people. (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care.”)
• Dishonestly fails to acknowledge that the protests mirror the polls:

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that more Americans disapprove (50%) than approve (44%) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy. There is a tremendous partisan gap in these views, with 74% of Democrats but only 11% of Republicans approving. Independents are more likely to disapprove than to approve of Obama’s work on healthcare.

• Contends that health care drives our economy. In truth, production should drive a healthy economy, not consumption of services. The former enables the latter.
• Sell yet another government program as salvation for the nation’s ills. If you believe them, you deserve what they dish. The problem is, you intend to force your choice on me and mine; sell me into serfdom, using the power of the state to get your way.

Update II (August 11): SVENGALI SHIFTS INTO CAMPAIGN MODE. Obama showed his hand by emphasizing during his Town Hall that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group of people.

Naturally, MSNBC took him at his word, reporting enthusiastically on how little resistance BO met. Outside the Obama town hall the country was roiling—still is. Inside the Barack Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brain waves.

Tucker Carlson, who works for MSNBC and has certainly worked the political system, was unable to back-up the line the Obama organ—also his employers—was peddling. Most presidential town halls are screened and packed with supported, said Carlson. BO has just joined the rest in lying about the practice.

As BO’s charmed political life continues—suspended as he is in a third dimension—one of the few honest Republicans, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, confronted a more realistic setting. I say honest, because all Republicans bar a handful fit in the camp to which Specter defected.

In any event, Specter provided some much-needed comic relief. When asked by a patriot what he was going to do “to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution,” Specter replied: “When you ask me to defend the Constitution, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

That’s rich.

Note how Specter, like a true pol, “vowed he would never support any bill that increased the federal deficit or took away a person’s right to choose their health care coverage.”

And indeed, once the lumbering juggernaut of government-run health care becomes a fait accompli, Specter and his ilk will be perfectly correct to say that when they signed off on this violation of rights and usurpation of authority, he was promised the “reform” would not become a public plan.

This is just how the Hildebeest and her Democratic warmongers excused their vote to give George authority to go to war in Iraq: “We were betrayed; we had been told the power would not be abused.”

These people are beyond contempt.

Update III (August 12): TAMRON TITS-HALL is an MSNBC host. Tits-Hall’s beauty is inversely related to her brain power. (The combination of beauty and brains is as rare as it is lethal, I paraphrase Peter Brimelow.) But in the Age of the Idiot she fits right in. (Whereas some MSNBC babes are lovely, Foxette News anchors, I would argue, sport the porn look. They are molded in the Hugh Hefner mold: vulgar but fit for You Know What. This Fox News aesthetic is one of the few issues of disagreement with my good friend, Prof. Paul Gottfried. I think the pea brain Kirsten Powers is a dreadfully plain girl. Alex Witt, on the other hand, has going for her that Lara loveliness from “Dr. Zhivago.”)
But I digress. Here is Tamron; a beauty. Here are her fans; brainless..

I arrive, after that bit of titillation, at Tamron’s portion of the week (that’s what we Jews call a weekly segment read from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue). First she and David Shyster peddled the propaganda that healthcare protesters had been bussed in by political operatives. Now they concede that these angry “un-American” Americans are simply stupid. Tits-Hall, who could never be called simple (read what her fans say about her clever cleavage), believes “these people,” clearly alien to a member of the “multicultural noise machine,” don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are run by government; and they don’t get that INsurance (why do Americans place the emphasis incorrectly on the first syllable of this word?) is a third-party entity.

And this is reportage in the age of the idiot.

Your retort to Tits-Hall:

• From the fact that VA hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that incorporating more of the industry into the state gulag is insignificant, negligible, or that protest is rendered meaningless. Tits-Hall is one big non sequitur, which should be your most used word in the Age of the Idiot.
• The fact that there is already one mediating entity between doctor and patient does not mean that another, subject to all the wrong incentives, ought to be introduced.

Don’t count on Tits-Hall or Shyster to comprehend a reasoned argument.

Alien In More Than One Way (Part II)

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Constitution, Media, Propaganda, Reason

In Part I of this post, I ventured that the president was an alien on so many levels, and that I failed to see why the formality of his birth was more central than the insanity and un-American nature of his thinking.
The saga continued today, with Orly Taitz, leader and lead attorney for the “Birthers,” being “grilled”—or shall I say shouted down—by David Shyster and the brassy, breast-bearing Tamron Hall—two dye-hard, MSNBC Obama heads.

Taitz tried to state her case, but was bellowed at by these blowhards. Now, as I stated, I am uninterested in this initiative. However, two issues caught my attention:

With my knack for detecting bogus arguments, it appeared to me that Taitz—who for all I know may well be lying—did at least present arguments. An argument can be logically sound while being untrue. Her attack dogs did not; they just shouted and offered arguments from authority. This raises alarm bells for me; tweaks my interest.

The Birthers’ lawyer claimed that the Obama birth certificate was a culmination of a report to the press by parents or relatives, and was not stamped by a hospital. If this is true, then Taitz is correct: it is possible that the certificate was a misrepresentation of Obama’s place of birth. Of course, her contention may be untrue. But she presents a case that could be investigated.

Her other, perfectly coherent, contention can easily be verified by a constitutional scholar. Taitz claims that to confer presidential eligibility on their child, both Obama’s parents would have to be American. Obama’s father was neither a citizen nor was he born in the US.

And who would object to a request for the release of the following heavily guarded documents, unless Obama’s scholarly articles were devoted to an application of Critical Race Theory?:

Obama’s Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago.

I’d sure like to read his legal articles, if any.

Tamron and Shyster offered Ann Coulter in defense of their positions: the Queen Bee had called Birthers “crackpots.” Argument from authority is no argument at all. See what I’m saying?

To their taunts to Taitz that Coulter was surely not a member of “mainstream media,” Dr. Taitz ought to have replied: “Oh yes she is.” Whatever one thinks of the “Birthers,” and I don’t think about them much at all, one thing is indisputable: Ann Coulter is a mainstream Republican.

“The secret to becoming a successful right-wing columnist,” quipped Canadian conservative Kevin Michael Grace, “is to echo the mob while complimenting yourself on your daring. That’s all there is to Ann Coulter’s craft, the rest is exploitation of the sexual masochism of the American male—he just can’t get enough of the kitten with claws.”

Updated: Cronkite Dies; News Croaked Long Ago

Celebrity, Journalism, Media, Reason

He reported the news. Nothing but the facts, ma’am. He never pulled faces to demonstrate his exquisitely politically correct sensibilities; he focused on the events, not on himself; he did not promote a brand and an annual book, he wiped a tear once in decades of reporting, and expressed an opinion with the same frequency. He became a personality by default—through the professionalism he evinced and not by cultivating a persona. His political opinions may have been unpalatable, but Walter Cronkite’s professional performance bore little resemblance to the slobbering done by the current crop of cable and TV men and women.

Anderson Cooper, grizzled “newswoman”—who crumbled when the Rev. Wright scandal broke all over his presidential candidate—and cried, “How do we make this go away?”, Don lemon, the Black-In-America disgrace of an anchor, Contessa Brewer, big-faced idiot of the childish, whiny inflection, Obama Boy Keith Olbermann, Hard-for-Obamby-Ball Chris Matthews, FoxNews cleavages for W., Barbara Walters of the “cutting edge” anti-aging reportage and colonic crusader Katie Couric—how dare they claim they are a strand of the Cronkite DNA? How dare they claim to be filling the shoes and following the example of a decent reporter?

But this is precisely what these fools have been doing since Cronkite passed away: cementing their legacy.

The procession of shameless narcissistic, self-aggrandizing and promoting hustlers—these are the news men and women of contemporary America.

Update (July 21): I’m not terribly familiar with Cronkite’s broadcasts, but from the little I’ve seen, he was professional. Those who’re condemning him for his statism and personal politics, of which I’m unaware (and you’d certainly need to know a good chunk of his oeuvre to pronounce on his opinions, as they are not manifest like David Shyster’s of MSNBC are), are in error—exhibiting some categorical confusion and feeble mindedness. For if Cronkite did journalims as one is supposed to, his politics are immaterial. Most journalists are statist. What do you want, a Mencken? But if they stick to their reportorial duties, their personal beliefs should not matter.

Updated: Barbara Boxer Speaks Down To Head Of Black Chamber Of Commerce

Business, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism, Reason

Democrat Barbara Boxer takes a slow, labored, condescending tone with Harry Alfred, Head Of the Black Chamber Of Commerce. The Senator also makes sure that the testimonies she produces to counteract his are all from black groups. Watch Alfred deftly nail her for appealing to his race rather than to his facts. The annoyance in this little vingette is that only a black or Latin person could hope to get away issuing a similar challenge. And: there are very few such crusaders around.

Update (July 18): John Danforth is absolutely right: Mr. Alfred is locked in a performative contradiction. He is a participant in the discussion in his capacity as a representative of a racial organization, yet he objects when his data is discarded and his race addressed instead. Still, beggars can’t be choosy. Truth is in such short supply that we must welcome it even when it comes from imperfect, self-serving sources.