No shit, Sherlock. With the latest in the continuing soap opera that the media have created around the Obama Administration, the latest instalment concerns a rogue general getting wasted with his aides and a reporter from a Left-leaning rock publication and pissing on, not only the President, but also the Vice President, the Ambassador to Afghanistan, the highest-ranking civilian envoy and two serving United States Senators, both decorated war heroes and former Presidential candidates and one a Republican.
And here it comes again … a plethora of pundits weighing in on what the President should do, should say, yadda yadda … As much as the way Stanley McChrystal’s words have questioned the legitimacy of this White House, so, too, do all the talking heads from …the LEFT as well as the RIGHT, in their opining of how the President should behave.
It seems as though we’ve just got through last week’s brouhaha of MSNBC in meltdown, than we’re gearing up for another round of political pundits pontificating on what the President SHOULD do or what he MUST say in these circumstances. Bad enough, that the Right demonise him as alien, who doesn’t look like them; worse, that the Left not-so-subtly excoriate him, because he doesn’t act in the way they think such an “alien” should act.
The Left’s cognitive dissonance is a euphemism for something openly uglier for which they criticize the Right. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet … or not, as the case may be.
As for the pundits, I’m sick of people whining about this talking head or that one “speaking for me” or “speaking for the Left” … Pardon me, unless we’re all struck mute, we have voices. And if we need people to speak in public for us, that’s the duty of our ELECTED representatives; and if they aren’t doing them, they need reminding. The day Americans have to have corporate talking heads on television “speaking for them” is the day when the end isn’t far off. These people speak for themselves, their networks and their wallets.
McChrystal’s from the military; the pundits are from the infotainment industry. I’m sure neither Roosevelt, whose third administration gave infamous birth to the military industrial complex, nor Eisenhower, who warned us against the complex’s evil potential, ever had this sort of unholy, if untintentional and indirect, association in mind.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Liar Liar Pants on Fire: Manipulative Media Types - Part II
Keith Olbermann doesn't vote.
True dat. He confessed as much in a post-electoral episode to the ladies of The View in November 2008.
A political commentator who doesn’t vote? Unheard of. OK, there’s no law – in fact, there’s tact – which says a commentator doesn’t have to disclose his or her political persuasion. Some had no need to do so – example: we always knew Bill Buckley was a Republican and Gore Vidal a liberal of the Democratic persuasion.
But then, until recently, we only had a few bona fide political commentators amongst us. Ed Murrow, Huntley-Brinkley, even Wise Uncle Walter, would shudder, rather than admit that they were commentators. Rather, they were newsmen, challenged with the duty of reporting news as fact and showing truth to their viewers, allowing them the respect and licence to make up their own minds about the subjects presented.
Today, everyone and his dog is a political commentator – or strives to be, until they’re caught in an intellectually compromising position, and then they protest that they’re only comedians or entertainers.
And that’s the crime of the 24/7 cable media today: news has got to have an entertainment aspect in order to hold the increasingly immature public’s short attention span.
Thus, Olbermann, a pompous and pedantic man, seeks to emulate Ed Murrow, and succeeds in becoming a narcissistic clown with no respect for his audience.
In the wake of last week’s Presidential Oval Office address, Olbermann resorted, nearly, to visceral carpet-chewing in his over-the-top critique of a speech, to which, it was clear, he didn’t listen in any way.
Olbermann and his colleagues, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, spent their analysis period, vicariously, criticising Obama’s message to his constituents – and, specifically, to his constituents directly affected by the Gulf oil spill – on the content of what THEY wanted the President to say to THEM.
It was the height of disrespect, both to the President and to the people in the Gulf. It was tantamount to telling these people that they were patently too stupid to realise what the President was saying was wrong – in the pundits’ opinions – and that they should be displeased and demand that he should have delivered their message.
It doesn’t surprise me that Olbermann should feel this way about his listening public. The French have a saying about people with an inflated opinion of themselves. Roughly translated, the French would say Keith Olbermann “farts above his nose” - meaning, he’s above smelling the whiff of his own bullshit.
I caught his Friday show online, which was being hosted by Laurence O’Donnell, except for the final bit, a Friday feature wherein Olbermann, seated in a comfortable chair, effects to READ a story from the works of James Thurber to his viewing audience. That’s right – a book at bedtime with creepy Uncle Keith.
What more proof that a commentator has absolutely no respect for the acumen of his audience than to have him read them a bedtime story?! What’s next? An invitation to climb into Uncle Keith’s ample virtual lap for a cuddle and a lullabye?
And isn’t this proof positive that, not only the neocon Right – who effected to keep their constituency reduced to the level of frightened children – but also the ueber Left, seek to keep the hoi-polloi in a distinctly puerile state of mind?
Olbermann’s show, at any rate, is like an echo chamber. For the most part, it’s a countdown of his five news items of the day, including someone who ranks as being his “worst person in the world” (again, childish hyperbole), along with the occasional “special comment” – Keith’s special message imparting to his fans his own iconic opinion about a particular incident or agenda. If there be any guests at all, they reflect Keith’s opinion and no divergence. Who said the Rightwing march in lockstep?
Last week, however, Keith made a major mis-step in his gratuitous critique of the President’s speech. Apparently, he received a plethora of messages left on his Facebook page and his Twitter account, in addition to the messages which melted down NBC’s switchboard, that his loyal viewing public were more than just mildly pissed off with Keith’s behaviour.
To say that Keith was mildly put out with the criticism received on the part of his adoring fans would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that he can dish it with the best of them, but – like his fellow Cornell alumnus and fellow narcissist, Bill Maher – he can’t take criticism. He issued a nine-part tweet, following it up with a special comment on his program, essentially bidding his recalcitrant viewers a cold good-bye, reiterating that perhaps they’d been watching his program for the wrong reasons.
Well, I’d like him to clarify what the right reasons are; because, quite frankly, I have a bit of a problem with anyone telling me or manipulating me into any point of view – much less, I have a problem with anyone who doesn’t vote seeking to influence my opinion on any political figure.
We all know the non-voters. We hear them enough in our daily lives – people who always have an opinion about a politician or government, but don’t vote because “all political parties are the same” or “all politicians are crooks” or whatever. Keith says he doesn’t vote because he feels he has to remain impartial. That’s bullshit.
Keith doesn’t vote because he’s simply afraid of commitment to one political philosophy. He’s ueber liberal – one can never imagine him adopting support of any Rightwing politician; but the fact that he doesn’t vote at all, precludes any right he has to criticize a politician from any side of the political coin.
My father had a name for such people. He called them “Pot Luck Peters,” saying that, like people at a pot luck dinner, they had to take the government on offer and lump it; because the act of voting gave a person a voice.
As a “Pot Luck Peter,” Keith takes Obama as he is, just as he had to take Bush; and his complaints, his whinges, his whines and all his special comments, should fall on deaf ears, simply because Keith doesn’t vote.
One should be wary of being influenced by someone who seeks to get others to vote vicariously in his manner, while he sits back and watches his own opinion get propagated as fact. I’m glad a lot of people said they’d turn off Keith. I hope they do.
Keith’s entitled to his opinions as much as he’s entitled to take the corporate penny from MSNBC who pay him for his particular brand of infotainment. But he should make his listeners aware that he doesn’t vote.
Inability to commit is a sign of social immaturity; basically giving your viewing public a polite eff-off because they dared to criticize your behaviour is another childish gesture too.
Time to turn off Uncle Keith and his sinister bedtime stories. Time to think for yourselves.
True dat. He confessed as much in a post-electoral episode to the ladies of The View in November 2008.
A political commentator who doesn’t vote? Unheard of. OK, there’s no law – in fact, there’s tact – which says a commentator doesn’t have to disclose his or her political persuasion. Some had no need to do so – example: we always knew Bill Buckley was a Republican and Gore Vidal a liberal of the Democratic persuasion.
But then, until recently, we only had a few bona fide political commentators amongst us. Ed Murrow, Huntley-Brinkley, even Wise Uncle Walter, would shudder, rather than admit that they were commentators. Rather, they were newsmen, challenged with the duty of reporting news as fact and showing truth to their viewers, allowing them the respect and licence to make up their own minds about the subjects presented.
Today, everyone and his dog is a political commentator – or strives to be, until they’re caught in an intellectually compromising position, and then they protest that they’re only comedians or entertainers.
And that’s the crime of the 24/7 cable media today: news has got to have an entertainment aspect in order to hold the increasingly immature public’s short attention span.
Thus, Olbermann, a pompous and pedantic man, seeks to emulate Ed Murrow, and succeeds in becoming a narcissistic clown with no respect for his audience.
In the wake of last week’s Presidential Oval Office address, Olbermann resorted, nearly, to visceral carpet-chewing in his over-the-top critique of a speech, to which, it was clear, he didn’t listen in any way.
Olbermann and his colleagues, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, spent their analysis period, vicariously, criticising Obama’s message to his constituents – and, specifically, to his constituents directly affected by the Gulf oil spill – on the content of what THEY wanted the President to say to THEM.
It was the height of disrespect, both to the President and to the people in the Gulf. It was tantamount to telling these people that they were patently too stupid to realise what the President was saying was wrong – in the pundits’ opinions – and that they should be displeased and demand that he should have delivered their message.
It doesn’t surprise me that Olbermann should feel this way about his listening public. The French have a saying about people with an inflated opinion of themselves. Roughly translated, the French would say Keith Olbermann “farts above his nose” - meaning, he’s above smelling the whiff of his own bullshit.
I caught his Friday show online, which was being hosted by Laurence O’Donnell, except for the final bit, a Friday feature wherein Olbermann, seated in a comfortable chair, effects to READ a story from the works of James Thurber to his viewing audience. That’s right – a book at bedtime with creepy Uncle Keith.
What more proof that a commentator has absolutely no respect for the acumen of his audience than to have him read them a bedtime story?! What’s next? An invitation to climb into Uncle Keith’s ample virtual lap for a cuddle and a lullabye?
And isn’t this proof positive that, not only the neocon Right – who effected to keep their constituency reduced to the level of frightened children – but also the ueber Left, seek to keep the hoi-polloi in a distinctly puerile state of mind?
Olbermann’s show, at any rate, is like an echo chamber. For the most part, it’s a countdown of his five news items of the day, including someone who ranks as being his “worst person in the world” (again, childish hyperbole), along with the occasional “special comment” – Keith’s special message imparting to his fans his own iconic opinion about a particular incident or agenda. If there be any guests at all, they reflect Keith’s opinion and no divergence. Who said the Rightwing march in lockstep?
Last week, however, Keith made a major mis-step in his gratuitous critique of the President’s speech. Apparently, he received a plethora of messages left on his Facebook page and his Twitter account, in addition to the messages which melted down NBC’s switchboard, that his loyal viewing public were more than just mildly pissed off with Keith’s behaviour.
To say that Keith was mildly put out with the criticism received on the part of his adoring fans would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that he can dish it with the best of them, but – like his fellow Cornell alumnus and fellow narcissist, Bill Maher – he can’t take criticism. He issued a nine-part tweet, following it up with a special comment on his program, essentially bidding his recalcitrant viewers a cold good-bye, reiterating that perhaps they’d been watching his program for the wrong reasons.
Well, I’d like him to clarify what the right reasons are; because, quite frankly, I have a bit of a problem with anyone telling me or manipulating me into any point of view – much less, I have a problem with anyone who doesn’t vote seeking to influence my opinion on any political figure.
We all know the non-voters. We hear them enough in our daily lives – people who always have an opinion about a politician or government, but don’t vote because “all political parties are the same” or “all politicians are crooks” or whatever. Keith says he doesn’t vote because he feels he has to remain impartial. That’s bullshit.
Keith doesn’t vote because he’s simply afraid of commitment to one political philosophy. He’s ueber liberal – one can never imagine him adopting support of any Rightwing politician; but the fact that he doesn’t vote at all, precludes any right he has to criticize a politician from any side of the political coin.
My father had a name for such people. He called them “Pot Luck Peters,” saying that, like people at a pot luck dinner, they had to take the government on offer and lump it; because the act of voting gave a person a voice.
As a “Pot Luck Peter,” Keith takes Obama as he is, just as he had to take Bush; and his complaints, his whinges, his whines and all his special comments, should fall on deaf ears, simply because Keith doesn’t vote.
One should be wary of being influenced by someone who seeks to get others to vote vicariously in his manner, while he sits back and watches his own opinion get propagated as fact. I’m glad a lot of people said they’d turn off Keith. I hope they do.
Keith’s entitled to his opinions as much as he’s entitled to take the corporate penny from MSNBC who pay him for his particular brand of infotainment. But he should make his listeners aware that he doesn’t vote.
Inability to commit is a sign of social immaturity; basically giving your viewing public a polite eff-off because they dared to criticize your behaviour is another childish gesture too.
Time to turn off Uncle Keith and his sinister bedtime stories. Time to think for yourselves.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: A Trilogy of Manipulative Media Types - Part I
Liar:
On Thursday, according to The Huffington Post, President Obama hosted a small lunch for a select group of Progressive media types.
Amongst the guests were Susan Collins of the New York Times, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I wonder if Rachel’s main course included a healthy serving of crow, considering the luncheon took place 24 hours after the President effected the establishment of a $20 billion escrow account, as well as $100 million from BP for clean-up expenses in the Gulf as well as a cover for wages lost on the part of those people whose livelihoods were affected by BP’s negligence/incompetence, and 48 hours after her celebrated attempt at biting satire by establishing herself as “Fake President Obama” in a mock-up Oval Office, for the purpose of instructing the President (and the nation) on what, precisely, Rachel had wanted the President to say in his Oval Office address.
Suffice it to say, that, in Dr Maddow’s opinion, the President’s address was distinctively below par, and what she had wanted him to say, was infinitely better.
Yes, I know it was meant as satire, but Rachel’s forays into satire lately have fallen a bit flat.
Still, she was invited to this luncheon, which had probably been planned a long time before the Oval Office speech, and the President is good-natured and thick-skinned enough probably to have ribbed her about her effort, with good grace, and maybe even gave her a tour of the real Oval Office, itself. He seems to be that sort of soul.
But I hope she did have to swallow a bit of crow that afternoon and that a little bit of egg stuck to her face, especially considering that, 24 hours after her attempt, the President had shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that however vague and directionless his Oval Office speech appeared to be on Tuesday evening, by Wednesday afternoon, we were given no doubt that there was intended and well-planned action behind the narrative.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to second-guess a President, just as sometimes it’s necessary for a President, the gambler-in-chief, to play his cards close to his chest, especially regarding the 24/7 cable news media.
Rachel is young, clever, ueber-intelligent and with a high level of political acumen. She’ll learn from this, and she should. In fact, she’s probably the only person, certainly the only woman, in that cable news equivalent of Animal House with any kind of either personal of professional integrity, and she deserves better.
In fact, near the end of what I hope will be the President’s second term, perhaps he and Rachel will meet for an interview and share a laugh in the real Oval Office about her attempted foray into the fake one.
One noticeable absentee from the luncheon was the self-styled Queen Mother of the Progressive Movement, herself. In fact, near the end of what was really a very short, concise article (by HuffPo standards, anyway), was a pithy sentence, which simply stated, “Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, was invited to the luncheon, but could not attend due to scheduling commitments.”
Really?
Who, in their right mind, turns down an invitation for lunch with the President at the White House? Certainly not someone who had righteously railed against the too-big-to-fail financial CEO’s who let it be known earlier this year that they were too important to travel to Washington for any sort of negotiation with the President. Huffington, rightly, called them out for being distinctly disrespectful – not that she hasn’t, on many occasions, herself, been openly and scathingly disrespectful of Obama as President of the United States.
Her recent assessment of the President was that he was a “Nowhere Man”, in a low, sarcastic and inaccurate criticism of the fact that, in her estimation, the President paid far too much attention to honouring Paul McCartney at the White House, when he should have removed all White House operations, physically, to the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
If she were, indeed, too busy to lunch with the President, not only was that the height of disrespect, it was also amazingly hypocritical, considering her slating of the financal fat cats.
But I don’t think she was too busy or double-booked for this event. I don’t think she was even invited.
A media whore like Huffington would kill for the opportunity of sitting down at a table to eat with the President and monopolise the event. Her site would be filled, for days thereafter, with a plethora of photographs:-
- Here’s Arianna being greeted by the President, upon her arrival at the White House. See how he bows from the waist.
- Here’s Arianna at the table, seated at the right hand of the President.
- Here’s Arianna on the sofa with the President. See how her hand lingers on his knee.
You get the picture (pun intended).
After days of photos, there would be an infinity of blogs, replete with Presidential name-droppings:-
“I told the President, over lunch on Thursday …”
“I’m pleased that he President appears to have listened to what I said …”
“The President told me …”
“As I was saying to the President …”
But, no … Arianna had a conflict of schedules, and couldn’t attend, even after making continuous and gratuitous Obama-bashing part and parcel of her meme, almost since the President assumed office in early 2009.
Seen from that angle, his reeks of disrespect. The action speaks volumes in saying that this President is such a disappointment as to be totally insignificant and unworthy of this grande dame’s attentions; and, subtly, by extension, he should be singularly unworthy of her dittoes’ attentions too. It was a dismissal.
Yet, it seems, a worm of deceit is turning, because many of the people commentating on the article, regular readers of her aggregate, saw through the deception.
Arianna wasn’t invited. She never had been.
It was a lie.
Thursday evening, I received an e-mail from a close friend, who lives and works amongst the great and the not-so-good in Washington. Considering the fact that, living in England, I’m five hours ahead of the East Coast, it would have been about 3pm when he sent the correspondence.
Knowing I’m not the greatest Arianna fan, he thought he’d rib me by saying he’d seen her that afternoon. Arianna, on Thursday, was indeed in Washington, DC – eating lunch in The Palms, an ueber-posh, ueber-expensive steakhouse on 19th Street … alone.
Maybe she does consider him an irrelevance, and maybe she did decline the invitation; but maybe, in view of the fact that a lot of her criticism and shilling has bordered almost on a point of sedition, it was the White House, who thought she was irrelevant. Maybe the “Nowhere Man” saw fit to remind her that exactly what the word “nowhere” means, in terms of influence, or perceived influence.
On Thursday, according to The Huffington Post, President Obama hosted a small lunch for a select group of Progressive media types.
Amongst the guests were Susan Collins of the New York Times, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I wonder if Rachel’s main course included a healthy serving of crow, considering the luncheon took place 24 hours after the President effected the establishment of a $20 billion escrow account, as well as $100 million from BP for clean-up expenses in the Gulf as well as a cover for wages lost on the part of those people whose livelihoods were affected by BP’s negligence/incompetence, and 48 hours after her celebrated attempt at biting satire by establishing herself as “Fake President Obama” in a mock-up Oval Office, for the purpose of instructing the President (and the nation) on what, precisely, Rachel had wanted the President to say in his Oval Office address.
Suffice it to say, that, in Dr Maddow’s opinion, the President’s address was distinctively below par, and what she had wanted him to say, was infinitely better.
Yes, I know it was meant as satire, but Rachel’s forays into satire lately have fallen a bit flat.
Still, she was invited to this luncheon, which had probably been planned a long time before the Oval Office speech, and the President is good-natured and thick-skinned enough probably to have ribbed her about her effort, with good grace, and maybe even gave her a tour of the real Oval Office, itself. He seems to be that sort of soul.
But I hope she did have to swallow a bit of crow that afternoon and that a little bit of egg stuck to her face, especially considering that, 24 hours after her attempt, the President had shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that however vague and directionless his Oval Office speech appeared to be on Tuesday evening, by Wednesday afternoon, we were given no doubt that there was intended and well-planned action behind the narrative.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to second-guess a President, just as sometimes it’s necessary for a President, the gambler-in-chief, to play his cards close to his chest, especially regarding the 24/7 cable news media.
Rachel is young, clever, ueber-intelligent and with a high level of political acumen. She’ll learn from this, and she should. In fact, she’s probably the only person, certainly the only woman, in that cable news equivalent of Animal House with any kind of either personal of professional integrity, and she deserves better.
In fact, near the end of what I hope will be the President’s second term, perhaps he and Rachel will meet for an interview and share a laugh in the real Oval Office about her attempted foray into the fake one.
One noticeable absentee from the luncheon was the self-styled Queen Mother of the Progressive Movement, herself. In fact, near the end of what was really a very short, concise article (by HuffPo standards, anyway), was a pithy sentence, which simply stated, “Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, was invited to the luncheon, but could not attend due to scheduling commitments.”
Really?
Who, in their right mind, turns down an invitation for lunch with the President at the White House? Certainly not someone who had righteously railed against the too-big-to-fail financial CEO’s who let it be known earlier this year that they were too important to travel to Washington for any sort of negotiation with the President. Huffington, rightly, called them out for being distinctly disrespectful – not that she hasn’t, on many occasions, herself, been openly and scathingly disrespectful of Obama as President of the United States.
Her recent assessment of the President was that he was a “Nowhere Man”, in a low, sarcastic and inaccurate criticism of the fact that, in her estimation, the President paid far too much attention to honouring Paul McCartney at the White House, when he should have removed all White House operations, physically, to the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
If she were, indeed, too busy to lunch with the President, not only was that the height of disrespect, it was also amazingly hypocritical, considering her slating of the financal fat cats.
But I don’t think she was too busy or double-booked for this event. I don’t think she was even invited.
A media whore like Huffington would kill for the opportunity of sitting down at a table to eat with the President and monopolise the event. Her site would be filled, for days thereafter, with a plethora of photographs:-
- Here’s Arianna being greeted by the President, upon her arrival at the White House. See how he bows from the waist.
- Here’s Arianna at the table, seated at the right hand of the President.
- Here’s Arianna on the sofa with the President. See how her hand lingers on his knee.
You get the picture (pun intended).
After days of photos, there would be an infinity of blogs, replete with Presidential name-droppings:-
“I told the President, over lunch on Thursday …”
“I’m pleased that he President appears to have listened to what I said …”
“The President told me …”
“As I was saying to the President …”
But, no … Arianna had a conflict of schedules, and couldn’t attend, even after making continuous and gratuitous Obama-bashing part and parcel of her meme, almost since the President assumed office in early 2009.
Seen from that angle, his reeks of disrespect. The action speaks volumes in saying that this President is such a disappointment as to be totally insignificant and unworthy of this grande dame’s attentions; and, subtly, by extension, he should be singularly unworthy of her dittoes’ attentions too. It was a dismissal.
Yet, it seems, a worm of deceit is turning, because many of the people commentating on the article, regular readers of her aggregate, saw through the deception.
Arianna wasn’t invited. She never had been.
It was a lie.
Thursday evening, I received an e-mail from a close friend, who lives and works amongst the great and the not-so-good in Washington. Considering the fact that, living in England, I’m five hours ahead of the East Coast, it would have been about 3pm when he sent the correspondence.
Knowing I’m not the greatest Arianna fan, he thought he’d rib me by saying he’d seen her that afternoon. Arianna, on Thursday, was indeed in Washington, DC – eating lunch in The Palms, an ueber-posh, ueber-expensive steakhouse on 19th Street … alone.
Maybe she does consider him an irrelevance, and maybe she did decline the invitation; but maybe, in view of the fact that a lot of her criticism and shilling has bordered almost on a point of sedition, it was the White House, who thought she was irrelevant. Maybe the “Nowhere Man” saw fit to remind her that exactly what the word “nowhere” means, in terms of influence, or perceived influence.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Make Mine a Double Standard
Early in 2009, shortly after the President’s Inauguration, Glenn Beck took to the airwaves to warn people that soon the President would be coming for their guns; yes, indeedy, he’d be sending the police after people’s beloved guns. So urgent and heated was Beck’s warning that one poor, deluded man took his precious guns, went to the local copshop and blew away five policemen, before turning the gun on himself.
Immediately, cries arose from the Left that Beck, or his employer, Fox News, should be prosecuted. Although Freedom of Speech contains strictures against incitement to crime or riot, Beck’s diatribe did nothing of that sort, directly. In this regard, Beck is the master of the soupcon of suggestion. That’s his schtick. He didn’t tell the victim to take his guns and defend the Second Amendment, he planted a suggestion, and the fellow acted upon it.
Later, we witnessed the killing of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, and people, rightly, reckoned that this was a Rightwing reaction to a black man in the White House.
Still later on, we were introduced to the rather ludicrous Tea Party, with their “Don’t Tread on Me” peculiar interpretation of Jeffersonian democracy and their misunderstanding that their cries against perceived socialism might incorporate their Medicare, Social Security or disability allowances. When they appeared with their mis-spelled signs and pictures of Obama as Hitler or an African chieftan, we knew exactly what they meant to say when they cloaked their racism in terms like “socialist,” “communist,” or “Nazi.” And we were rightly offended.
So offended, that when Glenn Beck actually turned the tables and declared Obama a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people, no less an intellectual powerhouse (not) than Arianna Huffington, with her intense and expert knowledge of the Constitution, demanded that Beck be denied his First Amendment rights, irrespective of the fact that those same rights that allow Beck to declare the President of the United States a racist, also allowed this faux neocon disguised as a Progressive-for-Profit the right to demand that the Vice President of the United States resign in protest of the President’s as yet (then) undisclosed plan for the war in Afghanistan and lead a protest movement – something just about an inch short of sedition.
Such were the outcries, as the fundits from the Right got more and more outrageous, culminating in Glenn Beck’s disgusting parody of the President’s daughter a few weeks ago.
As stated, quite rightly, people vehemently protested against such behaviour from the Right.
But, what happens when someone not identified with the Right makes an incongruent statement?
Imagine several scenarios.
Imagine Rush Limbaugh in a broadcast, referring to President Obama as “President Sanford and Son.”
There would be hell to pay from the depths of the sofas of the sedentary Left. Blogspaces would implode. The cable news network – most likely CNN and MSNBC, for Fox would strategically ignore it – would obsess about it for weeks. Limbaugh, for the umpteenth time, would be Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” There would be calls for Limbaugh, at most, to be taken off the air, at least, to apologise. Of course, neither result would occur, but the Left, quite correctly, would never let Limbaugh forget about that verbal faux pas.
Or, imagine Beck opining that when he knew there was a black President elected, he wanted to see a black President in action, watch him swagger into the boardroom of some corporate CEO, with a gun on his hip, ready to kick ass and demand if this mothafucka didn’t wise up, he’d get shot in the leg. In other words, present a white person’s grossly exaggerated stereotype of a ghetto justice-dispenser and market that as how the President should behave as a black executive.
Once again, the infotainment media would be rife with protest from all sections and factions of the Left, from the moderates to the loonies. And, again, they’d be right to be offended. Such a stereotypical depiction by Beck would be as offensive as the Tea Party’s mock-up post card of the White House watermelon patch.
But, although both of these aforementioned incidences occurred, it was neither Rush nor Beck who uttered the words, and this, perhaps, is the reason why you’ve heard no comments, no protests, no outrage from the Left.
They were spoken by Bill Maher.
Three weeks ago, in a meltdown episode of Real Time, when Bill’s faux atheism was revealed by quirky conservative atheist, S E Cupp, he ended the program with his signature editorial, this time criticizing the President as a backward-looking, underachieving, bumbling black man, out of his depth in governing a country. By pointedly referring to Obama as “President Sanford and Son,” Bill channeled the ultimat 70s image of a man so laid back and incompetent, he couldn’t even manage a junkyard.
Instead, Bill called for corporate mogul, Steve Jobs, to govern America, the same way he managed Apple, and thus, move the country foreward. Never mind that the editorial had been based on a commencement speech the President had made or that one sentence from that speech had been removed and spun centrifugally by Bill and his writers in order to obtain a totally different meaning than originally intended, the “Sanford and Son” reference drew a gasp from the audience, but nothing from anyone else on the Left.
Huffington strategically left this part of the editorial off her aggregate. Olbermann said nothing. Bill’s icon, Chris Matthews, a man who sometimes admits that he “forgets Obama is black”, was curiously mute.
Silence.
In the program which aired on May 28th, Bill admitted in his opening monologue the real reason why he was disappointed in Obama. Obama, he said, was too professorial. When Bill voted for a black President, he wanted a black President delivered. An articulate rapper, with a ghetto mind and sense of justice, who kicked ass at the point of a gun worn on his hip. That’s the man he voted for.
Well, sorry, Bill. I didn’t vote for a stereotype, I voted for the person best qualified to do the job.
I was actually grateful that Bill as much as admitted his cognitive dissonance in this regard, because I think this has been a disconnect with a great many so-called Progressives with regard to Obama and his cool, calm, demeanor. They voted for John Shaft and, instead, they got a cross between Carlton from The Fresh Prince and Dr Cliff Huxtable. And, so, like Bill, they didn’t get the man whom Bill referred to in his post-Electoral editorial as a “kickass black ninja.”
Stereotyping is a form of racism too.
This time, various fans of Maher made protest about this remark, but from the mouthpieces of the Left … crickets. Lots of excuses, mind you, from his dittoes … Bill’s a comedian … it’s supposed to be funny.
Sorry, Bill’s a comedian only when his mouth doesn’t engage with his brain and he says something that backs his ass against a wall. That’s when he reverts to “I’m a comedian” mode.
Witness: “If u get a flu shot, u r stupid.” (But that’s a joke, funny ha-ah.) Sorry, not even close.
And, sorry, again, but stereotyping isn’t funny. Not for African Americans, not for women and not for any ethnic minority.
Which leads me to another anecdotal incident.
Imagine, if you will, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh attending a public function, during Jewish Heritage Week. Imagine a Jewish broadcast unit with camcorder and microphone, calling one of them over and asking for some thoughts or message to the Jewish community during this week. Imagine either man saying his message would be for the “Jews” to get out of Palestine. Get out of Palestine and “go home.” When asked to qualify where, exactly, “home” was, imagine either Beck or Limbaugh, replying, “Germany. Poland.”
There would be a shitstorm of protest from the Left. Beck’s remaining sponsors would fold up their merchandise tents and slope away. Limbaugh would be vilified.
Helen Thomas, octagenarian doyenne of the Left, knew very well what she was saying when she uttered the above sentiment, and she knew how it would play. The new babes of the ueber Left would associate “Palestine-Left Bank-Gaza” and have her back. But this has nothing to do with either the Left Bank or Gaza, and it happened a few days before the initial Gaza flotilla incident.
Thomas would have been 28 when the UN created the State of Israel from a territory heretofore known, loosely, as Palestine. Prior to that official act, the British government, big guns in the Middle East, during their raj, set the wheels in motion for the establishment of a Jewish state with their British Mandate for Palestine in the 1930s. She certainly would have remembered that, also.
Thomas, a professional wordsmith, was honing her art at its best, using the utmost double entendre to convey subtly that she really didn’t approve of Jews being in the area formerly known as Palestine at all and that the few elderly who’d made the actual transition from holocaust to Haifa, as well as any of their descendents, and various other assorted immigrants, should just go back from whence they came – even if that meant going back to places where they were labelled personae non gratae, tortured, imprisoned and displaced.
We on the Left freely label people in Arizona “Nazis”. Some of the people still alive who remember the formation of Israel had first-hand experience with real Nazis.
Within the past week, and many times before during the Netanyahu government, Israel has done a fair enough job touting herself as her own worst enemy in the eyes of the world. Criticizing that would have been justifiable, but being clever and inching across a message that the country doesn’t deserve to exist at all, not good. Just as Pat Buchanan’s suggestion that the status quo prior to the Civil Rights amendment was preferable to the present day.
Bill Maher is as constant in his unwavering support of Israel as he is in his equally unwavering support of the death penalty, both ideals giving the lie to his touted Progressivism. It will be interesting to see if he touches upon this incident with Thomas in his show this week, and to see how it plays against his own much-stated belief in freedom of speech, which is about as valid as his Progressive politics … not.
Immediately, cries arose from the Left that Beck, or his employer, Fox News, should be prosecuted. Although Freedom of Speech contains strictures against incitement to crime or riot, Beck’s diatribe did nothing of that sort, directly. In this regard, Beck is the master of the soupcon of suggestion. That’s his schtick. He didn’t tell the victim to take his guns and defend the Second Amendment, he planted a suggestion, and the fellow acted upon it.
Later, we witnessed the killing of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, and people, rightly, reckoned that this was a Rightwing reaction to a black man in the White House.
Still later on, we were introduced to the rather ludicrous Tea Party, with their “Don’t Tread on Me” peculiar interpretation of Jeffersonian democracy and their misunderstanding that their cries against perceived socialism might incorporate their Medicare, Social Security or disability allowances. When they appeared with their mis-spelled signs and pictures of Obama as Hitler or an African chieftan, we knew exactly what they meant to say when they cloaked their racism in terms like “socialist,” “communist,” or “Nazi.” And we were rightly offended.
So offended, that when Glenn Beck actually turned the tables and declared Obama a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people, no less an intellectual powerhouse (not) than Arianna Huffington, with her intense and expert knowledge of the Constitution, demanded that Beck be denied his First Amendment rights, irrespective of the fact that those same rights that allow Beck to declare the President of the United States a racist, also allowed this faux neocon disguised as a Progressive-for-Profit the right to demand that the Vice President of the United States resign in protest of the President’s as yet (then) undisclosed plan for the war in Afghanistan and lead a protest movement – something just about an inch short of sedition.
Such were the outcries, as the fundits from the Right got more and more outrageous, culminating in Glenn Beck’s disgusting parody of the President’s daughter a few weeks ago.
As stated, quite rightly, people vehemently protested against such behaviour from the Right.
But, what happens when someone not identified with the Right makes an incongruent statement?
Imagine several scenarios.
Imagine Rush Limbaugh in a broadcast, referring to President Obama as “President Sanford and Son.”
There would be hell to pay from the depths of the sofas of the sedentary Left. Blogspaces would implode. The cable news network – most likely CNN and MSNBC, for Fox would strategically ignore it – would obsess about it for weeks. Limbaugh, for the umpteenth time, would be Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” There would be calls for Limbaugh, at most, to be taken off the air, at least, to apologise. Of course, neither result would occur, but the Left, quite correctly, would never let Limbaugh forget about that verbal faux pas.
Or, imagine Beck opining that when he knew there was a black President elected, he wanted to see a black President in action, watch him swagger into the boardroom of some corporate CEO, with a gun on his hip, ready to kick ass and demand if this mothafucka didn’t wise up, he’d get shot in the leg. In other words, present a white person’s grossly exaggerated stereotype of a ghetto justice-dispenser and market that as how the President should behave as a black executive.
Once again, the infotainment media would be rife with protest from all sections and factions of the Left, from the moderates to the loonies. And, again, they’d be right to be offended. Such a stereotypical depiction by Beck would be as offensive as the Tea Party’s mock-up post card of the White House watermelon patch.
But, although both of these aforementioned incidences occurred, it was neither Rush nor Beck who uttered the words, and this, perhaps, is the reason why you’ve heard no comments, no protests, no outrage from the Left.
They were spoken by Bill Maher.
Three weeks ago, in a meltdown episode of Real Time, when Bill’s faux atheism was revealed by quirky conservative atheist, S E Cupp, he ended the program with his signature editorial, this time criticizing the President as a backward-looking, underachieving, bumbling black man, out of his depth in governing a country. By pointedly referring to Obama as “President Sanford and Son,” Bill channeled the ultimat 70s image of a man so laid back and incompetent, he couldn’t even manage a junkyard.
Instead, Bill called for corporate mogul, Steve Jobs, to govern America, the same way he managed Apple, and thus, move the country foreward. Never mind that the editorial had been based on a commencement speech the President had made or that one sentence from that speech had been removed and spun centrifugally by Bill and his writers in order to obtain a totally different meaning than originally intended, the “Sanford and Son” reference drew a gasp from the audience, but nothing from anyone else on the Left.
Huffington strategically left this part of the editorial off her aggregate. Olbermann said nothing. Bill’s icon, Chris Matthews, a man who sometimes admits that he “forgets Obama is black”, was curiously mute.
Silence.
In the program which aired on May 28th, Bill admitted in his opening monologue the real reason why he was disappointed in Obama. Obama, he said, was too professorial. When Bill voted for a black President, he wanted a black President delivered. An articulate rapper, with a ghetto mind and sense of justice, who kicked ass at the point of a gun worn on his hip. That’s the man he voted for.
Well, sorry, Bill. I didn’t vote for a stereotype, I voted for the person best qualified to do the job.
I was actually grateful that Bill as much as admitted his cognitive dissonance in this regard, because I think this has been a disconnect with a great many so-called Progressives with regard to Obama and his cool, calm, demeanor. They voted for John Shaft and, instead, they got a cross between Carlton from The Fresh Prince and Dr Cliff Huxtable. And, so, like Bill, they didn’t get the man whom Bill referred to in his post-Electoral editorial as a “kickass black ninja.”
Stereotyping is a form of racism too.
This time, various fans of Maher made protest about this remark, but from the mouthpieces of the Left … crickets. Lots of excuses, mind you, from his dittoes … Bill’s a comedian … it’s supposed to be funny.
Sorry, Bill’s a comedian only when his mouth doesn’t engage with his brain and he says something that backs his ass against a wall. That’s when he reverts to “I’m a comedian” mode.
Witness: “If u get a flu shot, u r stupid.” (But that’s a joke, funny ha-ah.) Sorry, not even close.
And, sorry, again, but stereotyping isn’t funny. Not for African Americans, not for women and not for any ethnic minority.
Which leads me to another anecdotal incident.
Imagine, if you will, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh attending a public function, during Jewish Heritage Week. Imagine a Jewish broadcast unit with camcorder and microphone, calling one of them over and asking for some thoughts or message to the Jewish community during this week. Imagine either man saying his message would be for the “Jews” to get out of Palestine. Get out of Palestine and “go home.” When asked to qualify where, exactly, “home” was, imagine either Beck or Limbaugh, replying, “Germany. Poland.”
There would be a shitstorm of protest from the Left. Beck’s remaining sponsors would fold up their merchandise tents and slope away. Limbaugh would be vilified.
Helen Thomas, octagenarian doyenne of the Left, knew very well what she was saying when she uttered the above sentiment, and she knew how it would play. The new babes of the ueber Left would associate “Palestine-Left Bank-Gaza” and have her back. But this has nothing to do with either the Left Bank or Gaza, and it happened a few days before the initial Gaza flotilla incident.
Thomas would have been 28 when the UN created the State of Israel from a territory heretofore known, loosely, as Palestine. Prior to that official act, the British government, big guns in the Middle East, during their raj, set the wheels in motion for the establishment of a Jewish state with their British Mandate for Palestine in the 1930s. She certainly would have remembered that, also.
Thomas, a professional wordsmith, was honing her art at its best, using the utmost double entendre to convey subtly that she really didn’t approve of Jews being in the area formerly known as Palestine at all and that the few elderly who’d made the actual transition from holocaust to Haifa, as well as any of their descendents, and various other assorted immigrants, should just go back from whence they came – even if that meant going back to places where they were labelled personae non gratae, tortured, imprisoned and displaced.
We on the Left freely label people in Arizona “Nazis”. Some of the people still alive who remember the formation of Israel had first-hand experience with real Nazis.
Within the past week, and many times before during the Netanyahu government, Israel has done a fair enough job touting herself as her own worst enemy in the eyes of the world. Criticizing that would have been justifiable, but being clever and inching across a message that the country doesn’t deserve to exist at all, not good. Just as Pat Buchanan’s suggestion that the status quo prior to the Civil Rights amendment was preferable to the present day.
Bill Maher is as constant in his unwavering support of Israel as he is in his equally unwavering support of the death penalty, both ideals giving the lie to his touted Progressivism. It will be interesting to see if he touches upon this incident with Thomas in his show this week, and to see how it plays against his own much-stated belief in freedom of speech, which is about as valid as his Progressive politics … not.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Amanda BC
I have a confession to make. I’ve never visited Canada in my life, although my British husband adores the country, has visited almost every inch of it and would love to live there someday.
Me, I’m not so sure.
One “meets” a lot of people in traipsing about the Internet. Most, I would hope, are normal people with normal everyday hopes, aspirations and goals. Some are – well - not-so-normal, but life’s like that.
Yet, normal or not, it never ceases to amaze me how many ornery, mean, bitter and downright rude people whose paths one crosses in surfing the Internet. I mean, I try to be an open-minded person. I’m originally from a rural part of a Southern state, but I’ve lived and travelled around much of Western Europe, and there are few things or people I’ve seen or met that shock me.
Travelling or living abroad, one encounters all the insipid, nationalistic prejudices that prevail between one nation and another – many of which have fomented over hundreds of years. The animosity between the French and the English has its roots in the 1066 Norman conquest. The dislike of the Northern English for those who live in the Southeast has existed since time out of mind, a jealous borne from the provinciality and dirty industry wealth of the North juxtaposed with the easy, profligacy of the “soft South.” The Scots hate the English because an English Queen died, her heir was the Scots’ king; he headed South and never looked back. The Irish hate the English because of years of subjugation and brutal rule. The French distrust the Germans, but grudgingly work with them in order to play the big dog in the EU. The French consider Africa to begin “at the Pyrenees.” The Mediterranean countries consider Africa best served in Africa. You get the picture.
With the dislike, come the caricatures: the stiff, upper-lipped Englishman, the drunken Scot, the ueber-romantic Frenchman reeking of Paco Rabanne and garlic, the macho Spaniard or Italian, the goose-stepping German, the stupid American.
It’s easy to generalise, but some people generalise to such an extent or a degree that when actually confronted with people from other places, they let generalisations override actual initial impressions.
Generalisation, at the moment, is rife in the US. It’s always been about, but somehow the Internet shoves this more in your face. The attitude of the Northeastern coast and the entire West Coast to the rest of America (“flyover country” or “shit-kicking inbreds toting Bibles and guns”), Teabaggers thinking anyone remotely left of centre to be card-carrying socialists or communist, the piously moral assumption of some liberals to criticize the South and Southerners as a whole with impunity – it’s all there to find on the Internet.
This worries me, because I find myself falling prey to the very generalisation I abhor.
This generalisation is exemplified by a regular commentator on Huffington Post, a child-woman (or so her dynamic would indicate) known only as Amanda BC.
Amanda BC is Canadian. She lives on Vancouver Island, and – apparently – she has precious little to do all day long but read the radge served up as fact on that aggregate and comment in the ugliest and rudest fashion possible, directing most of her invective towards American commentators and never ceasing to let them know how stupid they are, how they’re responsible for every known ill extant in the world and how Canadians are as pure as the driven snow.
Tell that to the baby seals you club. (See, there I go generalising!)
She regularly tells other commentators directly how stupid they are, she drones on and on about how incredibly ignorant Americans are, she addresses other commentators directly as “fascist”. And, yet, such comments remain and are allowed to stand as per the “moderators.”
Her latest offerings come as a collective invective against the crisis in the Gulf.
As I said, I’ve never been to Canada and I’ve known only a few Canadians in my life, and those were people living and working in the US. Very nice people. But it would be so easy for me to generalise about the rest, based on this foul-mouthed little madam’s screeds. I guess the first thing I want to know is why there seems to be a propensity of Canadians commenting almost exclusively on American news and information sites (term used loosely) and about matters almost exclusively American? Yes, we share a continent, but I see precious few Mexicans weighing in about political agendae in the United States and there seems to be more cutting issues applicable to Mexicans than Canadians … but that’s – dare I say it? – a generalisation.
I live in the UK. I read some of the blogging comments on The Guardian’s website and also on the BBC. When an American strays inadvertantly into “British” territory to comment on all matters British, they are politely told where to go.
This worries me, because it’s making me hate without reason. It’s closing my mind and making me intolerant. Is she genuinely nasty? Does she have self-esteem issues? (How I’d love to ask her that, or any other Canadian commentator offering up such venom-laced observations). Maybe, even though she lives on Vancouver Island, she’s never visited the United States, or maybe she has and is jealous. Maybe she can’t get a green card. Or maybe she’s just a vicious, vindictive, little bitch who gets pleasure from reminding people of their own inadequacies in order to mask her own.
Anyway, she’s putting me off visiting Canada, and she’s putting me off Canadians. Let me just generalise and say, who the hell wants to visit a place where they club baby seals to death?
Arrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh! You see … if the public exist on generalisations and stereotypes, how easy it is for the dumbed-down, mundane media to feed that addiction?
Me, I’m not so sure.
One “meets” a lot of people in traipsing about the Internet. Most, I would hope, are normal people with normal everyday hopes, aspirations and goals. Some are – well - not-so-normal, but life’s like that.
Yet, normal or not, it never ceases to amaze me how many ornery, mean, bitter and downright rude people whose paths one crosses in surfing the Internet. I mean, I try to be an open-minded person. I’m originally from a rural part of a Southern state, but I’ve lived and travelled around much of Western Europe, and there are few things or people I’ve seen or met that shock me.
Travelling or living abroad, one encounters all the insipid, nationalistic prejudices that prevail between one nation and another – many of which have fomented over hundreds of years. The animosity between the French and the English has its roots in the 1066 Norman conquest. The dislike of the Northern English for those who live in the Southeast has existed since time out of mind, a jealous borne from the provinciality and dirty industry wealth of the North juxtaposed with the easy, profligacy of the “soft South.” The Scots hate the English because an English Queen died, her heir was the Scots’ king; he headed South and never looked back. The Irish hate the English because of years of subjugation and brutal rule. The French distrust the Germans, but grudgingly work with them in order to play the big dog in the EU. The French consider Africa to begin “at the Pyrenees.” The Mediterranean countries consider Africa best served in Africa. You get the picture.
With the dislike, come the caricatures: the stiff, upper-lipped Englishman, the drunken Scot, the ueber-romantic Frenchman reeking of Paco Rabanne and garlic, the macho Spaniard or Italian, the goose-stepping German, the stupid American.
It’s easy to generalise, but some people generalise to such an extent or a degree that when actually confronted with people from other places, they let generalisations override actual initial impressions.
Generalisation, at the moment, is rife in the US. It’s always been about, but somehow the Internet shoves this more in your face. The attitude of the Northeastern coast and the entire West Coast to the rest of America (“flyover country” or “shit-kicking inbreds toting Bibles and guns”), Teabaggers thinking anyone remotely left of centre to be card-carrying socialists or communist, the piously moral assumption of some liberals to criticize the South and Southerners as a whole with impunity – it’s all there to find on the Internet.
This worries me, because I find myself falling prey to the very generalisation I abhor.
This generalisation is exemplified by a regular commentator on Huffington Post, a child-woman (or so her dynamic would indicate) known only as Amanda BC.
Amanda BC is Canadian. She lives on Vancouver Island, and – apparently – she has precious little to do all day long but read the radge served up as fact on that aggregate and comment in the ugliest and rudest fashion possible, directing most of her invective towards American commentators and never ceasing to let them know how stupid they are, how they’re responsible for every known ill extant in the world and how Canadians are as pure as the driven snow.
Tell that to the baby seals you club. (See, there I go generalising!)
She regularly tells other commentators directly how stupid they are, she drones on and on about how incredibly ignorant Americans are, she addresses other commentators directly as “fascist”. And, yet, such comments remain and are allowed to stand as per the “moderators.”
Her latest offerings come as a collective invective against the crisis in the Gulf.
As I said, I’ve never been to Canada and I’ve known only a few Canadians in my life, and those were people living and working in the US. Very nice people. But it would be so easy for me to generalise about the rest, based on this foul-mouthed little madam’s screeds. I guess the first thing I want to know is why there seems to be a propensity of Canadians commenting almost exclusively on American news and information sites (term used loosely) and about matters almost exclusively American? Yes, we share a continent, but I see precious few Mexicans weighing in about political agendae in the United States and there seems to be more cutting issues applicable to Mexicans than Canadians … but that’s – dare I say it? – a generalisation.
I live in the UK. I read some of the blogging comments on The Guardian’s website and also on the BBC. When an American strays inadvertantly into “British” territory to comment on all matters British, they are politely told where to go.
This worries me, because it’s making me hate without reason. It’s closing my mind and making me intolerant. Is she genuinely nasty? Does she have self-esteem issues? (How I’d love to ask her that, or any other Canadian commentator offering up such venom-laced observations). Maybe, even though she lives on Vancouver Island, she’s never visited the United States, or maybe she has and is jealous. Maybe she can’t get a green card. Or maybe she’s just a vicious, vindictive, little bitch who gets pleasure from reminding people of their own inadequacies in order to mask her own.
Anyway, she’s putting me off visiting Canada, and she’s putting me off Canadians. Let me just generalise and say, who the hell wants to visit a place where they club baby seals to death?
Arrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh! You see … if the public exist on generalisations and stereotypes, how easy it is for the dumbed-down, mundane media to feed that addiction?
Friday, May 28, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Masters of Illusion and Intolerance
I am an atheist.
When I was seven years old, my father told me that there was no God and that he was Santa Claus. I was upset about the Santa Claus part, but I put the "no God" revelation on hold until I could think about it properly and continued in my Catholic upbringing until I’d reached a point, around about fourteen or so, where I realised that my father was probably right.
However, my parents also raised me to be respectful of other people’s faiths and beliefs. I went to school with Jewish kids and Protestants. I went to school with kids, who were Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Holy Rollers, who played with snakes. Such was a rural upbringing in the South in the early Sixties. Whenever I sought to criticize another’s religious persuasion, my mother was quick to admonish:
"Those are their beliefs; don’t criticize them. That’s wrong."
I put that admonishment down to good breeding on her part, and, although I can honestly say I heard her dish the dirt on many a neighbour in a gossip-fest with one of her sisters or a neighbour, I can honestly say I never heard her condemn another person’s faith, religion of lack of either.
So, whilst I don’t believe in God, I don’t condemn or ridicule anyone who does, unless they seek to impose that belief on me and condemn my non-belief as wrong. Later on, after having left education, I realised that this philosophy is basically the tenet upon which our Constitution is founded – we have the freedom in our country to believe and worship or not to believe and not to worship and not be persecuted by anyone for our religious or non-religious choice.
This is why our government was founded, specifically, without any sort of established religion as part of its identity. Therefore, we are a secular nation. That a certain tranche of society within the country chooses to believe otherwise, chooses to believe that we are, in effect, a Christian nation, is a fallacy. It’s when they appropriate a particular faith – the Christian faith, or rather, the Protestant end of the Christian faith – attach it to the flag and wave it about, that it becomes distatesful, offensive and wrong.
It’s when the likes of Sarah Palin mounts the podium to proclaim the Christian Right as being in possession of the sole identity that is "Real America" which mirrors a particular brand of perverted Christianity, which is petty, mean, vulgar and exclusive. The Christianity I studied preached tolerance, inclusiveness, love and charity to all, without exception. A particular meme of the Catholicism of my childhood, as a matter of fact, appears, as well, in a teaching of Islam: love the sinner, hate the sin.
Throughout life, I’ve had friends who believed and friends who didn’t. Two of my closest friends from college are a practicing Catholic and a born-again Christian. They accepted my cynicism and secularism with openness and aplomb. We get along fine. They even pray for me in times of strife, and I thank them for that. It certainly can’t hurt. When they’re under duress, I let them know that they’re in my thoughts.
Hand-in-hand with that, my parents – lifelong Democrats and liberals – taught me, as well, that our kind, politically and socially, were traditionally tolerant and open-minded. We recognised change in society and changed with it.
So forgive me if I’ve spent the better part of my adult life believing that anyone to the left of the political scale was just that: tolerant and open-minded, because of late, I’ve seen a lot of the opposite on the Left side of the fence, and it’s not been pretty to see.
Friday night, I saw the worst sort of narrow-minded, ugly, bear-baiting intolerance come to the fore during the panel discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher.
And it concerned religion.
I must admit that I’ve long held Bill Maher’s atheism as suspect. For the longest time, until last September, Bill refused to be categorised as an atheist. An atheist, he’s on record as saying, is as definite in his belief that there is no God, as a fundamentalist Christian is in asserting that there is one. The truth is, he stated, we simply don’t know. When pressed, he actually admitted that he believed in a higher entity, just not the traditional God the Father image which is foisted on society as a whole.
He’s made this assertion, perfectly reasonable, in several interviews and even in his documentary Religulous, which was released in 2008. With this assertion, the closest definition of Bill’s belief was agnosticism. Then last September when he received the Richard Dawkins Award as "Atheist of the Year", all hell broke loose in the atheist community because Bill wasn’t an avowed atheist, but also because Bill, who presented himself as a rationalist who believed in science, actually only believed in science, as long as it didn’t pertain to medical science – or Western medicine, as Bill described it.
When various high-profiled atheists in the scientific community started questioning Richard Dawkins’s judgement in bestowing the award, Bill "admitted" his atheism.
Bill, who likes to joke about women doing anything for shiny objects, professed he was an atheist ... in order to receive a shiny object.
Two Fox News reporters have been known to "convert" to Islam in order to save their lives.
On Friday’s panel, Bill had the author S E Cupp as a first-time guest. I admit I didn’t know very much about the woman. She’s an author, a conservative and an atheist, who advocates for people of faith. She’s also very young.
Several people, avowed atheists in the blogosphere, have admitted difficulty in believing that she is, in fact, an atheist, because she has said that she accepts and understands why people believe in Christianity or whatever faith they follow, and because she has stated that, one day, it’s plausible that she, herself, might be open to the idea that there is a God.
I think, perhaps, those esteemed, blogging voices (many of whom are probably very young and/or very obtuse), take more exception with the fact that Miss Cupp is a conservative, rather than her unusually open-minded view of religion and religious followers. Let’s fact it: "conservative" and "atheist" juxtaposed is the most curious of oxymorons.
On Friday night, Bill Maher, with a copy of Cupp’s book in hand, asked her if she didn’t consider people who believed in God as "delusional". This is what Bill thinks. He never forgets to tell us this at every opportunity – that people who believe in God suffer from a neurological disorder – to the deafening applause of his studio audience.
And so, he asked Cupp, fellow atheist, this selfsame question.
He didn’t get the answer he expected.
Cupp replied that she didn’t think believers were deluded. Bill asked her again, clearly not believing the answer he heard the first time, and she reaffirmed her reply, even enhancing it by saying that she knew many intelligent, articulate, well-informed people who believed in God and were in no way deluded.
But Bill pressed on, insisting, unwilling to believe that another person, a non-believer, could be so openly accepting of people of faith.
"Look," Cupp tried to explain, "I totally buy into faith and religion. It works for some people." And she proceeded to explain how various studies had shown that people with religious faith were happier in themselves and how these sorts of people seemed to respond well and benefit from various medical treatments, due to their abiding faith; but still Bill pressed on, determined to get her to admit that religious people were delusional, determined to wear her down, until suddenly, Cupp snapped:
"I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but I’m not the one who’s angry with Him."
For one split second, there was a deafening silence before more than a smattering of applause erupted. Bill, for his part, had the panic-stricken look of a deer caught in the headlights of a car.
A raw nerve had been touched and brutally, if unintentionally, exposed. S E Cupp, who – prior to that evening – had never met Bill Maher before, had exposed his Achilles’ heel for all to see, read and comprehend.
For this man is not an atheist; he is someone who believes in and is angry with God and, by extension, religion.
There followed, for the next fifteen minutes, one of the ugliest examples of bigotry, intolerance and close-mindedness I’ve ever seen on any television screen. That it emanated from one who sees himself as a spokesperson for the Progressive Left was positively sickening.
One of the other panelists was Cory Booker, the newly re-elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey – a Democrat and a Christian. Booker never referred to his beliefs as a Christian, but entered the discussion in order to give some concrete examples of how Christians, through their religious organisations, can make a difference in communities and how various churches do, in some instances, work well in areas of deprivation and poverty.
It was at that particular instance that we saw Bill suddenly morph into Bill O’Reilly. He repeatedly cut Booker and Cupp off mid-sentence, refusing to let them get any point across and directly criticizing and belittling Booker for his faith.
Booker was summarily "reminded" by Bill that every war that had ever been fought was fought because of religion, that religion causes people’s deaths, that every ill in the world could be traced directly back to a person’s religious faith. Each time Booker sought to retort – logically – Bill swathed his every remark. When Booker attempted to get a word in edgeways by remarking that Bill didn’t know everything, Bill replied, prissily, "You’re the ones who know everything, like what happens after death!"
Booker objected strenuously, saying that he certainly didn’t know, but then retorted that he didn’t care to hear anymore of what Bill had to say, that Bill was beginning to sound more and more like the proselytising fire-and-brimstone Baptist preachers he regularly excoriated. "You’re intolerant," he stated with finality.
Thus, occurred the second split-second pin-drop moment, followed by the audience’s applause. The camera caught Bill, on live television, looking like a small child who’d been roundly told off by his parents for naughtiness. He looked near tears.
"I’m not intolerant," he protested, weakly, before accusing Booker of saying he was prejudiced and explaining in the most pedantic manner that he wasn’t pre-judgmental at all, merely judgmental, without ever realising in his hubris, that both were inherently wrong.
The whole exchange dominated the entire twenty minutes allocated for the panel portion of the show and afforded the reptilian Darrell Issa summary accordance, subsequently, to interrupt Booker’s explanation of the Miranda rule, just in time for Bill to call a halt to the proceedings for New Rules.
Although I was appalled by the episode, I wasn’t surprised in the least. Bill’s behaviour is something that’s becoming as common amongst people who purport to be a part of the Progressive Left as it is their Rightwing, teabagging counterparts. These people aren’t on the street, waving pictures of Obama as Hitler or a witch doctor, or spitting at Congressmen; but they’re hunched over laptops, tapping out four-lettered insults to anyone who doesn’t pass the purity test of agreeing lockstep with what they perceive to be accepted liberal dogma. They abhor racism, but they laugh at Bill referring to the President as "President Sanford and Son". They nod in agreement when he derides the state of Arizona’s inordinate treatment of the Latino population, but see nothing wrong with Bill’s alpha male admonition to the Muslim community that they’d better honour our First Amendment – in other words, our way or the highway.
These are people who consider Dylan Ratigan the height of journalism, not only when he shouts down a conservative "guest" to the point that he doesn’t allow the man the opportunity to answer at all, before flinging an ad hominem epithet his way and ending the interview in feigned disgust, but also when he screams insults at Debbie Wasserman Schulz, a Congresswoman and a breast cancer survivor, for her support of what he perceived to be a flawed healthcare bill.
These are people who attack anyone, even of their own political persuasion, if they admit to a nominal belief in God. Pardon me, but I thought our Constitution and our country abhorred any persecution of any faith. And I also thought my atheism was simply my lack of belief, not a dogma to be imposed on others as right. What’s right for me is not right for anyone else. Bill pointed out, quite rightly, to S E Cupp that communism was a state religion of sorts. Atheism is not a religion by any means, and people who proselytise it as the right way, the only way are as bad as those people who condemn anyone who doesn’t accept Christ as the only way to eternal hell.
He sounds like a male version of Sarah Palin, just as snarky, exclusive and mean. When I ran across a remark made by one of his biggest fans recently, a woman who is a former politician and living in the Pacific Northwest, commenting derisively that she supposed Bill had encountered "some dots of intelligent life in flyover country" after his return from stand-up in Indiana and Wisconsin, I knew then that – although he may not intend it – he’s becoming a demagogue to people who are so bereft of the capability to think and opinionate for themselves, that they parrot his own attitudes and beliefs, no matter that they are as inconsistent as the mood in which he awakens every morning.
This year, he derided S E Cupp her ability to speak out, as an atheist, for people of faith. Last year, he commended Brad Pitt, another self-avowed atheist, for his commitment to doing so. People who believe in God or practice a religion are delusional and suffer from a neurological disorder, yet Bill pals around with practicing Catholics Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Paul Begala and P J O’Rourke. Please don’t tell me he’s trying to convert them.
Maybe they remember Bill in their prayers. Maybe he secretly wants to be like them. Maybe it’s time certain people who purport to be part of the Progressive Left, check their exact position on the political spectrum – because if you move far enough to the Left, you come out on the Right ... and neocons are lapsed liberals.
When I was seven years old, my father told me that there was no God and that he was Santa Claus. I was upset about the Santa Claus part, but I put the "no God" revelation on hold until I could think about it properly and continued in my Catholic upbringing until I’d reached a point, around about fourteen or so, where I realised that my father was probably right.
However, my parents also raised me to be respectful of other people’s faiths and beliefs. I went to school with Jewish kids and Protestants. I went to school with kids, who were Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Holy Rollers, who played with snakes. Such was a rural upbringing in the South in the early Sixties. Whenever I sought to criticize another’s religious persuasion, my mother was quick to admonish:
"Those are their beliefs; don’t criticize them. That’s wrong."
I put that admonishment down to good breeding on her part, and, although I can honestly say I heard her dish the dirt on many a neighbour in a gossip-fest with one of her sisters or a neighbour, I can honestly say I never heard her condemn another person’s faith, religion of lack of either.
So, whilst I don’t believe in God, I don’t condemn or ridicule anyone who does, unless they seek to impose that belief on me and condemn my non-belief as wrong. Later on, after having left education, I realised that this philosophy is basically the tenet upon which our Constitution is founded – we have the freedom in our country to believe and worship or not to believe and not to worship and not be persecuted by anyone for our religious or non-religious choice.
This is why our government was founded, specifically, without any sort of established religion as part of its identity. Therefore, we are a secular nation. That a certain tranche of society within the country chooses to believe otherwise, chooses to believe that we are, in effect, a Christian nation, is a fallacy. It’s when they appropriate a particular faith – the Christian faith, or rather, the Protestant end of the Christian faith – attach it to the flag and wave it about, that it becomes distatesful, offensive and wrong.
It’s when the likes of Sarah Palin mounts the podium to proclaim the Christian Right as being in possession of the sole identity that is "Real America" which mirrors a particular brand of perverted Christianity, which is petty, mean, vulgar and exclusive. The Christianity I studied preached tolerance, inclusiveness, love and charity to all, without exception. A particular meme of the Catholicism of my childhood, as a matter of fact, appears, as well, in a teaching of Islam: love the sinner, hate the sin.
Throughout life, I’ve had friends who believed and friends who didn’t. Two of my closest friends from college are a practicing Catholic and a born-again Christian. They accepted my cynicism and secularism with openness and aplomb. We get along fine. They even pray for me in times of strife, and I thank them for that. It certainly can’t hurt. When they’re under duress, I let them know that they’re in my thoughts.
Hand-in-hand with that, my parents – lifelong Democrats and liberals – taught me, as well, that our kind, politically and socially, were traditionally tolerant and open-minded. We recognised change in society and changed with it.
So forgive me if I’ve spent the better part of my adult life believing that anyone to the left of the political scale was just that: tolerant and open-minded, because of late, I’ve seen a lot of the opposite on the Left side of the fence, and it’s not been pretty to see.
Friday night, I saw the worst sort of narrow-minded, ugly, bear-baiting intolerance come to the fore during the panel discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher.
And it concerned religion.
I must admit that I’ve long held Bill Maher’s atheism as suspect. For the longest time, until last September, Bill refused to be categorised as an atheist. An atheist, he’s on record as saying, is as definite in his belief that there is no God, as a fundamentalist Christian is in asserting that there is one. The truth is, he stated, we simply don’t know. When pressed, he actually admitted that he believed in a higher entity, just not the traditional God the Father image which is foisted on society as a whole.
He’s made this assertion, perfectly reasonable, in several interviews and even in his documentary Religulous, which was released in 2008. With this assertion, the closest definition of Bill’s belief was agnosticism. Then last September when he received the Richard Dawkins Award as "Atheist of the Year", all hell broke loose in the atheist community because Bill wasn’t an avowed atheist, but also because Bill, who presented himself as a rationalist who believed in science, actually only believed in science, as long as it didn’t pertain to medical science – or Western medicine, as Bill described it.
When various high-profiled atheists in the scientific community started questioning Richard Dawkins’s judgement in bestowing the award, Bill "admitted" his atheism.
Bill, who likes to joke about women doing anything for shiny objects, professed he was an atheist ... in order to receive a shiny object.
Two Fox News reporters have been known to "convert" to Islam in order to save their lives.
On Friday’s panel, Bill had the author S E Cupp as a first-time guest. I admit I didn’t know very much about the woman. She’s an author, a conservative and an atheist, who advocates for people of faith. She’s also very young.
Several people, avowed atheists in the blogosphere, have admitted difficulty in believing that she is, in fact, an atheist, because she has said that she accepts and understands why people believe in Christianity or whatever faith they follow, and because she has stated that, one day, it’s plausible that she, herself, might be open to the idea that there is a God.
I think, perhaps, those esteemed, blogging voices (many of whom are probably very young and/or very obtuse), take more exception with the fact that Miss Cupp is a conservative, rather than her unusually open-minded view of religion and religious followers. Let’s fact it: "conservative" and "atheist" juxtaposed is the most curious of oxymorons.
On Friday night, Bill Maher, with a copy of Cupp’s book in hand, asked her if she didn’t consider people who believed in God as "delusional". This is what Bill thinks. He never forgets to tell us this at every opportunity – that people who believe in God suffer from a neurological disorder – to the deafening applause of his studio audience.
And so, he asked Cupp, fellow atheist, this selfsame question.
He didn’t get the answer he expected.
Cupp replied that she didn’t think believers were deluded. Bill asked her again, clearly not believing the answer he heard the first time, and she reaffirmed her reply, even enhancing it by saying that she knew many intelligent, articulate, well-informed people who believed in God and were in no way deluded.
But Bill pressed on, insisting, unwilling to believe that another person, a non-believer, could be so openly accepting of people of faith.
"Look," Cupp tried to explain, "I totally buy into faith and religion. It works for some people." And she proceeded to explain how various studies had shown that people with religious faith were happier in themselves and how these sorts of people seemed to respond well and benefit from various medical treatments, due to their abiding faith; but still Bill pressed on, determined to get her to admit that religious people were delusional, determined to wear her down, until suddenly, Cupp snapped:
"I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but I’m not the one who’s angry with Him."
For one split second, there was a deafening silence before more than a smattering of applause erupted. Bill, for his part, had the panic-stricken look of a deer caught in the headlights of a car.
A raw nerve had been touched and brutally, if unintentionally, exposed. S E Cupp, who – prior to that evening – had never met Bill Maher before, had exposed his Achilles’ heel for all to see, read and comprehend.
For this man is not an atheist; he is someone who believes in and is angry with God and, by extension, religion.
There followed, for the next fifteen minutes, one of the ugliest examples of bigotry, intolerance and close-mindedness I’ve ever seen on any television screen. That it emanated from one who sees himself as a spokesperson for the Progressive Left was positively sickening.
One of the other panelists was Cory Booker, the newly re-elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey – a Democrat and a Christian. Booker never referred to his beliefs as a Christian, but entered the discussion in order to give some concrete examples of how Christians, through their religious organisations, can make a difference in communities and how various churches do, in some instances, work well in areas of deprivation and poverty.
It was at that particular instance that we saw Bill suddenly morph into Bill O’Reilly. He repeatedly cut Booker and Cupp off mid-sentence, refusing to let them get any point across and directly criticizing and belittling Booker for his faith.
Booker was summarily "reminded" by Bill that every war that had ever been fought was fought because of religion, that religion causes people’s deaths, that every ill in the world could be traced directly back to a person’s religious faith. Each time Booker sought to retort – logically – Bill swathed his every remark. When Booker attempted to get a word in edgeways by remarking that Bill didn’t know everything, Bill replied, prissily, "You’re the ones who know everything, like what happens after death!"
Booker objected strenuously, saying that he certainly didn’t know, but then retorted that he didn’t care to hear anymore of what Bill had to say, that Bill was beginning to sound more and more like the proselytising fire-and-brimstone Baptist preachers he regularly excoriated. "You’re intolerant," he stated with finality.
Thus, occurred the second split-second pin-drop moment, followed by the audience’s applause. The camera caught Bill, on live television, looking like a small child who’d been roundly told off by his parents for naughtiness. He looked near tears.
"I’m not intolerant," he protested, weakly, before accusing Booker of saying he was prejudiced and explaining in the most pedantic manner that he wasn’t pre-judgmental at all, merely judgmental, without ever realising in his hubris, that both were inherently wrong.
The whole exchange dominated the entire twenty minutes allocated for the panel portion of the show and afforded the reptilian Darrell Issa summary accordance, subsequently, to interrupt Booker’s explanation of the Miranda rule, just in time for Bill to call a halt to the proceedings for New Rules.
Although I was appalled by the episode, I wasn’t surprised in the least. Bill’s behaviour is something that’s becoming as common amongst people who purport to be a part of the Progressive Left as it is their Rightwing, teabagging counterparts. These people aren’t on the street, waving pictures of Obama as Hitler or a witch doctor, or spitting at Congressmen; but they’re hunched over laptops, tapping out four-lettered insults to anyone who doesn’t pass the purity test of agreeing lockstep with what they perceive to be accepted liberal dogma. They abhor racism, but they laugh at Bill referring to the President as "President Sanford and Son". They nod in agreement when he derides the state of Arizona’s inordinate treatment of the Latino population, but see nothing wrong with Bill’s alpha male admonition to the Muslim community that they’d better honour our First Amendment – in other words, our way or the highway.
These are people who consider Dylan Ratigan the height of journalism, not only when he shouts down a conservative "guest" to the point that he doesn’t allow the man the opportunity to answer at all, before flinging an ad hominem epithet his way and ending the interview in feigned disgust, but also when he screams insults at Debbie Wasserman Schulz, a Congresswoman and a breast cancer survivor, for her support of what he perceived to be a flawed healthcare bill.
These are people who attack anyone, even of their own political persuasion, if they admit to a nominal belief in God. Pardon me, but I thought our Constitution and our country abhorred any persecution of any faith. And I also thought my atheism was simply my lack of belief, not a dogma to be imposed on others as right. What’s right for me is not right for anyone else. Bill pointed out, quite rightly, to S E Cupp that communism was a state religion of sorts. Atheism is not a religion by any means, and people who proselytise it as the right way, the only way are as bad as those people who condemn anyone who doesn’t accept Christ as the only way to eternal hell.
He sounds like a male version of Sarah Palin, just as snarky, exclusive and mean. When I ran across a remark made by one of his biggest fans recently, a woman who is a former politician and living in the Pacific Northwest, commenting derisively that she supposed Bill had encountered "some dots of intelligent life in flyover country" after his return from stand-up in Indiana and Wisconsin, I knew then that – although he may not intend it – he’s becoming a demagogue to people who are so bereft of the capability to think and opinionate for themselves, that they parrot his own attitudes and beliefs, no matter that they are as inconsistent as the mood in which he awakens every morning.
This year, he derided S E Cupp her ability to speak out, as an atheist, for people of faith. Last year, he commended Brad Pitt, another self-avowed atheist, for his commitment to doing so. People who believe in God or practice a religion are delusional and suffer from a neurological disorder, yet Bill pals around with practicing Catholics Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Paul Begala and P J O’Rourke. Please don’t tell me he’s trying to convert them.
Maybe they remember Bill in their prayers. Maybe he secretly wants to be like them. Maybe it’s time certain people who purport to be part of the Progressive Left, check their exact position on the political spectrum – because if you move far enough to the Left, you come out on the Right ... and neocons are lapsed liberals.
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