Category — Journalism

Have you ever felt like THIS in the company of Progressives?* Enlarge the image.  You’re the conservative guy in the red leotard undergoing the liberals’ trepanning of your skull.  A tin-smith, trust fund grad of Middlebury is doing the nasty work.  He’s watched by a squishy, activist, humanist cleric and a bookhead - a journalist or an academic, no doubt. 

They’re looking for evidence of learning and native intelligence.   They assume you have neither, but they can’t resist the investigation or the effort to test you with esoteric compost.  They use expressions like “existential threat” incorrectly, like Mudslide Face, Charley Gibson in his interview with Sarah Palin. 

He thinks his weighty usage somehow describes Israel’s “right to exist”, and is entirely clueless that he’s wrong, that he’s dispensing jargon.  To modify an old insult, a journalist like Gibson is an intellectual in the same way that a mechanical rabbit is a quarry.  You can catch him, but what’s the use?  With bozos like Gibson, it’s “I Verbalize, Therefore I Am”, and liberals everywhere agree. He won’t get this treatment from The Boston Globe.  The Left doesn’t indulge in this kind of self-analysis. 

Liberalism today is a silly union of elite leftist ideas absorbed in ”higher education” with the old populist issues revealed in the fields and on the shop floor.  But that doesn’t explain the epidemic of smugness and snoot on the left.  Nothing in Progressivism automatically turns its adherents into diletantes, poseurs or colorful, but small-brained song birds.   That comes from something else.  Egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism undermines every pecking order.  Distinctions are impossible; maybe even sinful.  When pent-up liberal vanity is discouraged in terms of ownership or income or any of the other ways people express distinctions, it then leaks out in information-as-knowledge, and the chronic competition of my brain against your brain, and my fact against your fact.   Ridiculous.  They have no other outlet for their conviction that they compose a meritocratic ruling class, and it’s driving them crazy. 

  * “The Cure of Folly (Extraction of the Madness Stone)”  - Hieronymous Bosch

 To a five-year old boy who doesn’t want to go to sleep, a lullaby is propaganda…

 Woodie Guthrie

…this country was built on biased reporting….Common Sense by Thomas Paine built this country and it was a point of view…better independence than British rule.  There’s a point of view!”

Chris Matthews

Taken together, Guthrie’s dictum, and Chris Matthew’s moronic understanding of pamphleteering as a definition of journalism, explains the thinking behind the media whoring that tainted Barack Obama’s recent tour of our battlefields.   He’s their guy, and it shows.

Along the way, Obama dispensed little food pellets for Couric, Gibson, Williams, and the swarm of lesser media animals at his feet, conditioning their adulation and undiscriminating support.  They’ve decided, as they did with Carter and Clinton and Kerry, that Americans need to be convinced of certain things for their own good, whether they’re true or not. They need the lullaby, and Obama’s got the soothing baritone. 

Matthews is also right, to an extent.  The thing called journalism has been vicious, silly, factual, essential, revolutionary, irrelevant and just plain dumb over the past couple of centuries and more.   It’s never objective; it can’t be, but Matthews isn’t censorious about that. He celebrates the dissemination of ideology and viewpoint to persuade, and therefore mingles the instruments of elective democracy with the mechanics of a Free Press. But Matthews is also the guy whose tingling loins barely cooled for Clinton before heating up for Obama.  The man is not quite in control of himself, and I don’t want his hot, sweaty, meddling hands on the evidence.

Matthews’s monstrous conceit was evident at the mock state funeral for Tim Russert, with its volcano of white-hot self-adulation for…not Russert…but The Media itself.   The simple principle to apply to this Klown Kollege, and all others is this:  Assume an inverse relationship between the moral and intellectual calibre of a group and the praise it showers upon itself.   You’ll never go wrong.

Many of the great “journalists” or commentators of the last century, and those with whom Matthews associates himself, were also novelists, accomplished writers; misanthropes, jesters and muckrakers, they found things around them to be worth describing, and wrote the truth.  It’s ”point of view” with empirical evidence,  Chris, which usually speaks for itself.    It doesn’t require “bias” or propaganda.