Here's Hoping Nice Guys Finish Last This Time Too!

Not that it doesn't sound interesting...

Mr Obama, I have nothing against you. In fact you seem like a pretty nice man. Maybe a little too nice. I think your intentions are good but, honestly I think you are a babe in the woods. You remind me of other goofy and untested Democrats of the past. In some ways you remind me of Mike Dukakis.


Governor Mike Dukakis’ was a soothing, cool intellectual just like you. Unlike you though, the press felt free to ask him hard questions. When he was asked about his failed proson furlough program here in Massachusetts his naïveté lead him to a fatal mistake. In reference to the poster boy for liberals allowing evil to eat the innocent, Willie Horton, he was asked how he would feel about “rehabilitating” someone who raped and murdered his wife. His cool, bloodless answer scared a lot of people, and rightly so.

I know you don’t understand it so I will make it explicit: that is what people didn’t like about your conversation with Joe the plumber. You, like all the other liberals who want to take care of the rest of us, are cool and bloodless when it comes even to those closest to you when they don’t fit in with your intellectual ideas about how the world should be run.

And let's face it, the lengths that you, your media worshipers and your campaign people went to to assasinate Joe's character was just plain ugly. Not at all what we would expect from someone who works so hard at "nice". Yes but is it a socialist, totalitarian kind of nice isn't it. Ask a hard question or stand up for your private property and nice turns nasty in a hurry...

You talk about Change.

The question is, “Change what, Mr. Obama?”

I’m not so sure that I want you “spreading the wealth” right now. You keep saying that in a country as wealthy as ours we ought to be able to just provide health care for everyone. That’s a very nice thing to say but I sure don’t feel so wealthy at the moment and most of the people I know don’t either. I was watching when you talked with “Joe the Plumber too”. See, I really think that this spreading the wealth deal is dangerous. It can’t help but weaken our economic power by taking money from entrepreneurs like Joe who earned it and will most likely make it work My question on that would be why take the money from him, crank it through a bigger and less efficient bureaucracy who will then dole it out in chunks to someone who may or may not do anything other than to buy extra lottery tickets and cigarettes with it.

That’s not the kind of change I believe in…

We should not be thinking about weakening our economy- especially right now. If we do, we will no longer be able to take our usual role of supplying much of the creative power to pull the world’s economies out of the recession. What country do you think would take our place in that role? China, where the economy is so dependant on selling goods designed and specified here into our market that even in the less drastic conditions before the current increase in the slow-down, analysts were predicting the possibility of social unrest?

Do you mean the America hating, oil-rich despots and potentates of Arabia and Persia, with whom you say you will confer without preconditions, perhaps? No, their only role in the world’s economy is to make sure to exert the maximum drag on the worlds economy by ratcheting our energy costs up whenever possible. Here’s a suggestion: Why don’t you make it a precondition that they at least stop promising to use the proceeds of their blackmail to try to bring about our downfall as a civilization? Is that too restrictive?

Or maybe you hope that the once strong economies of Europe, you know, the ones that have been stultified by socialistic policies similar to the ones you want to implement here, will do the job?

Anyway, the whole mortgage mess seems to have been caused by the kinds of socialistic “redistribution of wealth” you have specifically advocated and your friends at ACORN have directly lobbied for. You have even been one of the greatest beneficiaries personally – in the form of donations from Fannie Mae. So we need to back off on the “4 more years”warnings because, frankly, John McCain looks more to me like the guy who can clean this up than you do. For one thing, you don't seem to hang around with a very nice crowd...


No, I don’t think that you are the guy to bring the needed change any more than I think any of those socialist countries are up to the job of pulling up the worlds economic socks- and if you become president, maybe we won’t be anymore.

Look, most of the rest of the world is Socialist or worse, every society has its ups and downs but there is only one that has fueled all of the ups for the past couple of centuries. There is no good time to change that.

Yellow Press is Alive and Well and Living in France

Growing up in Liberal Massachusetts, I had been taught that Yellow Press was a right wing device that was invented for arousal and exploitation of the basest emotions in the populace. As I was helping Richard Landes prepare the France2/Enderlin petition (if you have not signed it and forwarded it to everyone you know, please do so!) I made a very interesting discovery.

As the petition (see the preceding two posts) sails past thirty six hundred signatures this morning, I have been thinking about something Charles Enderlin wrote in a January 27, 2005 letter to the French newspaper Le Figaro. He was writing in response to an editorial, written by Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte that had appeared in the paper two days before. Jeambar and Leconte were among the hand-picked group of journalists that had been allowed to seen the imprisoned rushes. In their editorial they had debunked Enderlin’s implication that he was protecting the world from seeing the boy’s “unbearable” death agony when he edited the footage for broadcast. In fact, Jeambar and Leconte wrote that there was no such “unbearable” footage and that there was not even any clear proof that the boy was dead or, even shot.

Enderlin replied by reiterating his claim that the scenes he had cut were unbearable and that they showed that the boy was dead. Then he says something very odd and revealingly irrelevant. He writes, “Furthermore, for me, the image corresponded not only to the reality of the situation in Gaza but also to that in the West Bank. The Israeli army responded to the Palestinian uprising with massive firing of live bullets.”

This remark is a tip-off that even Enderlin himself is aware that his false accusation that the IDF shot the boy in cold blooded murder is indefensible (even though he is trying his best to defend it by hiding the evidence, stonewalling and rationalization). More importantly, though, it revels the prototypical attitude of Yellow Journalism.

I remember studying the Spanish American War when I was in High School and learning about how the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers used the explosion on the battleship Maine to inflame the passions of the nation. I remember too having it drummed into me that it was the tone of the headlines, the nationalism and the strident calls for revenge that made that episode a shameful exercise in jingoism and propaganda. It is only now, contemplating all of that in the light of the al Durah affair and, specifically, in reading Enderlin’s fatuous justification for his accusations that the real shame of Yellow Journalism has become plain to me. Ringing prose, loyalty to one’s country and defiant headlines are not Yellow Press. Yellow press is the subtle, decadent mixture of self-importance and prejudice that leads a journalist to decide that he knows what facts people need to know and what facts are unimportant- even if it means that he reports incorrect facts and hides actual ones.

Yellow Press was born as an outgrowth of Joseph Pulitzer’s vision as a publisher that, in contrast to the generally accepted ideal of impartial journalistic integrity, journalism should be used to as a vehicle of social change. As Wikipedia has it “Pulitzer believed that newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put (his newspaper) The World in the service of social reform.” Of course social reform is one of the early code words for what we today call progressivism and which is, in reality prototypical socialism. Pulitzer was then, as the newspaper establishment in the U.S. is still (with some exceptions) a left-leaning, self-righteous band of socialistic sympathisers.

The New York Times expressed this "social reform at the cost of truth" doctrine of activist journalism best when, in an editorial about the use of faked documents by Dan Rather, that, "Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate". Of course the Times was writing in support of Rather and his fatwah asserting the "accuracy" of the faked memos. Americans proved, once again, that we have the freest and most resilient people and government on earth when the blogosphere exposed this travesty and the outcry resulted in the sacking of Rather. Dan Rather was a far more potent media icon here than Enderlin ever was in France so one is left to conclude that it must be an indication of the endemic anti-Semitism and residual leftist western self-hatred that Enderlin and France2 are allowed to hide within and even take aggressive action (as in the law suit against Philippe Karsenty) under the protection of the French government and legal system.

The problem, then, with Yellow Journalism is not the strength of the prose but the intent of the writer. The yellow tinge comes from its purposeful (mis)use of evidence to make points and to influence opinions. It was not the headlines that were the root of the problem, it was the underlying assumptions that led to their being used to elevate lies and misrepresentations to the status of Assumed Truths.

So, it turns out that the last little “justification” that he “tosses off” betrays the corrosive bigotry and prejudice that underlies the blood libel he still defends. Enderlin still believes that he is the sole judge and jury of what Israel was doing in response to the gathering Intifada, that from the comfort of his hotel room and Bureau Chief’s office in Jerusalem, he was entitled to pronounce that, even if this instance was a fake, the accusation against the IDF was deserved because of other, even more imaginary incidents of which he had even less evidence and information. He has, in this simple rationalization, revealed that he is not a journalist but a propagandist of the most corrupt and insidious kind.

For the damage he has done to the profession of journalism alone he deserves to be exposed and the management of France2 must be asked to account for their dereliction in allowing their reputation and facilities to be used and depleted in this way. The release of the rushes in question will begin that process of exposure and accountability.

If you add to the damage Enderlin and France2 have done to journalistic standards, the spurious law suit against Karsenty, the terrible toll of lives lost, terror inspired and savagery rationalized by those false accusations, it is imperative that they be held responsible for, at the very least, an apology and an attempt to reverse some of the effects of this malfeasance.

Once the rushes are released and evaluated, if they show what Jeambar and Leconte say they show and assuming that France has laws against the incitement to violence and libel, there should be legal steps taken to punish Enderlin and France2. The maximum punishment (The incitement to violence, bigotry and terror that Enderlin and France2 have engaged in bear a very strong resemblance to Hate Crimes as defined by French Law. This is from Wikipedia: “In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation.”) should be sought, not just because of the grievous results of the al Durah blood libel but also to serve as an example and a deterrent to warn all other journalists that changing facts and fabricating stories to achieve political ends cannot and will not be tolerated.