printThe 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.)
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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.
Does the name “WALTER M. MILLER” ring a bell with anyone?
Well, to continue, just the names Skinner & Heldman grind in my ears. Jeffers makes me puke. These deniers of economic realities and their social justice solutions are, quite simply, mythology in the making. Fascism, Communism, and philosophically-similar myths are what perverts what could be productive self-actualizing individuals into messengers and actors who eventually conclude that the mass extermination of their scapegoats is appropriate. History repeats…but are the repeats based on facts or fictions?
TRUTH IS HARD TO FIND.
http://www.keepingthedoor.com/2009/09/06/a-canticle-for-leibowitz-a-review/
Where are the geographic locations of the entities – the vaults of recorded historical truth – and who are their masters – the supposed guardians of recorded historical truth – and how is the veracity of the messengers of truth proven?
http://www.fast-rewind.com/rose.htm
“a blueprint for a progressive conspiracy to help save the country.” – Alter
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” – Rove (?)
In the past, when such things still mattered, each statement may have served either to have the claimant committed to the stocks, prison, or a mental institution.
Now you get to be the rear end of the ruling class.
The Cable folk dropped Fox Business so I no longer get Stossel, Napolitano, and the statists.
I disagree, however, with your labeling of the big government hypocrite Warlfare-Welfare statists as “RINO”. The 80% – 95% of the Republican party mainstream worship Bush/McCain/Romney/Gingrich/Perry/Cain/Santorum and the professional hacks who control the Republican party. Like the communists of old, they applaud on command and cheer Drug Plans and Educational Initiatives offered by Republicans and boo on command if the same baloney comes out of the mouth of a Democrat.
I met Ron and Carol Paul at a fundraiser in Virginia and several other people who are committed FIRST to liberty, the Constitution, and limited government – and second to various politicians. I discussed our local VA-11 Congressional Republican candidate whose only item he would cut from the government was “waste”. Several of us talked how we preferred and admired Marine James Webb (pro-gun anti-war Democrat now retiring from the Senatorial whorehouse) over professional Republican George “Macaca” Allen (a primary opponent of George Allen was at the Paul fundraiser). Many of us at that fundraiser would happily support Ron Paul if he ran as an independent in Fall 2012 (but it would probably sink Rand).
I confess guilty to honing in on “RINO” – 40 plus years of watching ‘conservatives’ and ‘Republicans’ stink does that to me.
The MSNBC giggle squad (your link) is babbling on the babble of the process of the process…… god this is all so hopeless….. My nephews Macaws and Cockatoos make more sense
Perhaps the biggest denial is that “politics” or “the voters” can create their own version of Economic Law (such as government creating wealth from nothing) any more than they can change the laws of Physics.
Thank you, Ilana. You have expressed what was my only real complaint about the Judge’s show (I don’t see Stossel’s show very often, but I do read his WND columns).
Why, I would say to myself, is the Judge putting someone like Nancy Skinner on his ‘Freedom Panel’ when she obviously doesn’t believe in freedom? She may be a good talker, but is that reason enough to put her on his show and dilute the freedom message in the process? I think the ‘Fair and Balanced’ thing has gone a little too far. To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have to be fair and balanced – they are the balance!
Mr. Pauli, your two posts here made me think that the term RINO, intended as a negative, is really a compliment. The king of all RINOs is indeed Ron Paul, who, as the most genuinely conservative politician out there, behaves nothing like real Republicans have behaved from the beginning, as big government statists. Those of us fooled into thinking the Republican party, at least at the institutional level, has ever truly been the home of any form of conservatism our founders would recognize need to wake up and see reality for what it is.