Category Archives: South-Africa

UPDATE II: One more Media Matters con man (A Liberal’s Moral Compass)

Classical Liberalism, Founding Fathers, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Rights, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from y “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM:

“Terry Krepel authors a website called ConWebWatch. ‘The focus of ConWebWatch,’ Krepel declares on the site, is ‘the ConWeb—large, well-funded, Internet-based conservative ‘news’ organizations [such as] NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com.’ (I’ve inserted words in parenthesis so as to alert the reader to the edit. Accurate reporting should enable readers to distinguish editorial from authorial input.)

As a biographical note, Krepel adds that he ‘became employed by Media Matters for America in July 2004.’ At his Huffington-Post perch, Krepel is duly described as a ‘Media Matters senior editor.’ Media Matters for America purports to be a ‘progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.’

Our ace writer ought to have stated that he has been employed at Media Matters since 2004. ‘I became employed’ thus might be ugly English for, ‘I was once but am no longer employed by Media Matters.’ Conversely, perhaps this is a fellow whose intelligible written English is confined to the words ‘racial discrimination’?

Himself Krepel describes as ‘a veteran of 17 years in professional journalism as a newspaper writer, designer and editor. I know the ins and outs of the business and how it can be used and misused—and I see how the conservative Internet media is misusing journalism.’

His mission Krepel defines as documenting ‘the distortions, excesses and hypocrisy of these conservative media sites.’ Almost daily Krepel will dissect what Joseph Farah, Erik Rush, Aaron Klein, Jerome Corsi and others on WND.com and CNSNews.com have to say.

His method, crows Krepel, is to ‘hoist the conservative media on the petard of hypocrisy, accuracy and objectivity’ by ‘using their own words.’

Untrue; at least in my case.

Krepel has libeled me, but not by ‘using [my] own words'” … Disputes about democracy notwithstanding, there can be no disagreement over Krepel’s crappy journalism.”…

The complete column is “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

A newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy is also on sale.

UPDATE I (Sep. 2): With the same ease with which Krepel left-off quotations around my original words—so as to seamlessly introduce his interpretations of those words—so too could this purveyor of crappy journalism have suddenly “added” the required quotations, once exposed. In anticipation, I have captured the original (June 12) Krepel item. The omission begins with, “Washington and Westminster,” and ends with “the disaster that is post-apartheid South Africa.” Here it is in the original:

UPDATE II: A LIBERAL’S MORAL COMPASS. Terry Krepel thinks he has hit a home run on the Facebook thread at “One more Media Matters con man.” There, Krepel implies that Eugene Terre’Blanche deserved to die, even though the old man was the non-aggressor at the crime scene, and had served his time in jail for his past transgressions (which I am not here adjudicating).
Heaven’s! I’m speechless. All Krepel has demonstrated is that left-liberals (like himself) are every bit as blood thirsty and bereft of a moral compass as the neoconservatives they often critique.
Every remotely sane individual can see where this kind of sentiment leads. And every libertarian can see why the US is in such terrible moral shape. There is no difference between affiliates of the political factions as far as ethics go. “So long as my guy is killing off the guys I dislike—I’m WINNING”: That’s the pervading mindset. Justice be damned.

Neocons Are Second-Handers

Conservatism, libertarianism, Literature, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, Ron Paul, South-Africa

Readers often conflate popularity with quality. Periodically, a reader who’s recently stumbled upon the commentariat’s dirty little secret—libertarians who’ve been writing predictive op-eds for over a decade—will suggest that this writer petition one of their favorite, famous, thoroughbred neoconservatives for an audience. “Show your latest book,” the well-meaning reader will urge, to this or that NYT best seller neocon, pseudo-conservative, know-nothing.

Take the “portfolio,” goes the well-meaning chap’s advice, and seek a pat on the head from a particular dufus whom my reader, for some reason, considers to be a Delphic oracle.

Of course, in the larger scheme of things, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” should survive long after the various neocon books.

Liberals this; liberals that; Bush was great; Cheney too, the world is dead without America; Europe sucks; we’ve discovered that debt and big government are bad now that Obama’s in power:

If you don’t already know that these titles and their authors all have precious little to impart for posterity—you should!

Mark Steyn’s freshly presented tired ideas are one of many such examples. Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. However, The “One-Man Global Content Provider’s” epistolary razzmatazz should never be confused with unconventional analysis, as explained, by way of an example, in “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot.”

As for this writer and her relationship with mainstream neoconservatives: Been there done that. I may one day write about the almost-flirtatious sweet nothings some big-name neocon-cum-conservatives whispered in my e-ear when I first appeared on the US scene. There were dinner invitations too, one at least was even attended.

All that was before I registered, on Sept. 19, 2002, the first of many principled objections against their war of choice on Iraq. That was before the neocons discovered I was not an S. E. Cupp, a Margaret Hoover, or a ditzy Dana Perino.

After that fatal date, I became a political persona non grata.

The neocon modus operandi is to ignore and vilify truth-tellers such as Ron Paul, so long as the truth is unpalatable. After a period of time has passed—say five years hence—Ron Paul’s economic and foreign policy prescriptions (or my analysis of the New democratic South Africa and its lessons for America) will become quite kosher because it will no longer be possible to deny reality. Then the usual gasbags will proceed to “borrow” ideas they have not originated.

Seldom will originators be credited, not by neocons, at least.

When it comes to Machiavellian machinations, however, neocons are originators second to none.

American Renaissance Review

Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

Dr. F. Roger Devlin has reviewed “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” in the August 2011 issue of the American Renaissance. Dr. Devlin’s review is not a critical review, but a contents-driven one. And a good one at that, as he distills the facts of the book at a furious pace. Intelligently so too.

Unlike the many factoids that marred the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis (utterly absent in my book) of Prof. Paul Gottfried’s review of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (a copy of which was captured here on BAB), Dr. Devlin cleaves to the facts of the book. (Incidentally, rather than correct the Gottfried review so that it vaguely captured “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” impetus, the reviewer and editor showed their “courtesy” by simply removing the thing from Taki’s Magazine. My mother used to use the adjective “peruvian” to describe incivility. I believe that word was removed from the dictionary because politically incorrect.)

In any event, unexamined in Dr. Devlin’s review are interwoven points of political philosophy. What do I mean? As a classical liberal, for example, my complaint against apartheid is not that it “disenfranchised” or “denied the majority its democratic rights,” since “citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights.” Rather,

It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable. Nevertheless, denying people political privileges does not amount to depriving them of natural justice.

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, 2010, p. 231)

Dr. Devlin’s tack is conciliatory and is perfectly congruent with AR editor Jared Taylor’s surprisingly non-confrontational, data-driven journalism. (I intend to post about Mr. Talyor’s latest book at a later date.)

Perceptively, Dr. Devlin highlights one of the crucial points my book makes about democracy:

A prerequisite for parliamentary democracy is that majority and minority status should be fluid—that the ruling majority party should, at each election, be almost as likely to become a minority as to retain its majority. In a multiracial polity this does not happen. Parties represent racial groups rather than different philosophies of government, and elections become racial headcounts.

You can order this issue of American Renaissance here, where Dr. Devlin’s review is summed up as follows:

“In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, author F. Roger Devlin reviews an important new book by columnist Ilana Mercer entitled Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Mrs. Mercer, a South African emigré, has sounded a ‘fire bell in the night’ with her sobering analysis of a once thriving First-World nation that is now descending into the abyss of savagery, genocide, starvation, and hopelessness. Mr. Devlin also summarizes her critique of raw numerical democracy and her effort to set the record straight on the Apartheid system—and most poignantly, her warning to the people of the United States.”