Bash the Messenger

What Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have done

 Bash the Messenger, Russia  2 Responses »
Aug 142008
 

There is a point about the Russia-Georgia conflict that is huge, but which hasn’t gotten much coverage in our media. It’s the fact that leaders of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia all went to Georgia to show solidarity with that country and its president. It seems the U.S. media are too preoccupied about with what’s happening in terms of the Bush administration and our own electoral politics in order to pay much attention to how this is going over among those countries.

I understand that Russia can’t be very happy with U.S. influence in the region. We need to be very careful and respectful of any such concerns. And I think we need to try to understand what Russian people like Alexander Sedov from Ekaterinburg are telling us. (He gives lots of helpful comments in my Kino Reticulator blog, and commented here on my previous post.) Kosovo changed things, and there is a feeling of solidarity with the people of South Ossetia.

But, unfortunately, Russia no longer has much of an independent press, which means we have to make allowances for their own information sources. (Not that our media are as independent-thinking as they should be. Witness the complaint with which I started this article.)

But the leaders of these other countries do not seem to think that the main issue is what Georgia has done to South Ossetia. They include slavic peoples, and they do not seem to think Kosovo and slavic solidarity trumps whatever else is happening there. They obviously view it as a plain threat to their own countries.

Like I say, what they have done is huge and should figure large in our understanding and response to the conflict.

A clever way to drive a post

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Aug 022008
 

Image

The image is from Google News. Note that Obama admits that he was race-baiting, but somehow that’s not what appears in the headline at the Washington Post. (You can go read the article if you don’t believe me.) Instead, what makes the headline is an accusation for which the Obama camp offers no basis whatsoever. And the other newspapers aren’t much better, in that they offer their headlines to Obama to use as a megaphone. And I’ll bet Obama didn’t have to pay a dime of his campaign stash to get this kind of spin.

The stench of fascism

 Bash the Messenger, electoral politics  1 Response »
Aug 012008
 

I had almost forgotten about this. After Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964 Pat Brown said, “The stench of fascism is in the air.” We conservatives used to put up with that kind of talk a lot, and learned to just let it roll off.

But now watch what happens when you point out that the leftwing fascists are acting like fascists. We get lectures about how we shouldn’t throw the fascist label around so casually.

Enderlin

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jul 092008
 

So you think the mainstream media are an incestuous pack of hounds, promoting their agenda by attacking targets on the right and covering up scandals on the left? If you read this article by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in The Weekly Standard, you’ll never again have such a charitable view of them.

Grantrepreneurs

 Bash the Messenger, Free speech  No Responses »
Jun 272008
 

Ezra Levant has added a necessary word to our vocabulary: Grantrepreneur. So I’m adding him to my blogroll. How else am I going to keep up with the human rights violations of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions? Go to Google News and search for information on Ezra Levant or Steve Boissoin. You get absolutely nothing from those people who used to criticize George W. Bush for not paying any attention to what people in other countries think.

The great uncompromiser

 Bash the Messenger, electoral politics, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Jun 262008
 

Over at townhall.com there is an article by a Christopher Wills titled “Obama record shows a liberal open to compromise.”

And what are the examples of how Obama has ever been open to compromise and where he departed even a tiny bit from hardline left positions? There are none.

The only substantive examples show an unwillingness to compromise one iota, for example on abortion.

Towards the end of the article there is this statement: “While Obama could compromise on crime and gun control, he didn’t budge when it came to abortion.”

But examples of actual compromise on those issues are nowhere to be found. The article does tell us that Obama “worked with” the law enforcement community on some of their concerns. But what “concerns” those were is left unstated.

If you look at the actual record as described in that article, or anywhere else, you have a candidate who is uncompromising in his mission to grow the welfare-police state.

But peeve

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jun 252008
 

Some people shouldn’t be allowed to use the word “but.”

In the July Smithsonian magazine’s “From the Editor” section, there are some words from Andrew Curry, who wrote the feature article in the issue:

People have this perception of Vikings as bloodthirsty barbarians, killing people and then hopping on their ships and sailing away. They could be brutal, but what that stereotype overlooks is the organization and the willpower they had.

Nonsense. It overlooks nothing of the sort.

Does Curry think that most bloodthirsty brutes are slackers? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are such people, but those aren’t the ones we hear about.

Hitler and the Nazis were brutal. Does anyone find this to contradict the fact that the Nazis were also well organized and that they celebrated “The Triumph of the Will.”

And what about gentle people? They can be willful and organized, or they can be lazy and disorganized.

There is no “but” to it.

I call Curry’s kind of talk one of my “but peeves.”

Chicago Tribune coverup

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jun 242008
 

Two Chicago Tribune reporters write about George Carlin, ending their article thusly:

“Our attitudes have changed a lot,” Luntz said of the country. “We’ve become more tolerant, but, more important, we’ve become less outraged.”

Still, Carlin’s “seven words” retain their power.

You certainly won’t see them in this newspaper.

That’s not the only thing you won’t see in their newspaper. You won’t find a word in the web edition of their paper about Mark Steyn and the “Human rights” commission in Canada, either. Or if they did tell about it, you won’t find it by using the search function on their web site.

I wonder if they have anything to say about speech codes on college campuses, or the “free speech” zones that some of them use to restrict free speech.

Don’t shoot the messenger, they like to tell us. Well, if the messenger fails to deliver an important message, maybe that’s precisely what should be done.

George Carlin Mark Steyn

 Bash the Messenger  1 Response »
Jun 242008
 

George Carlin is dead, yet none of the news articles have pointed out the dramatic reversal. Carlin was arrested for talking about the Seven Words you cannot say on television. Liberals (back when there were such things) used to praise Carlin for daring to speak about topics that had been kept away from television.

And now, people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are being hauled before so-called human rights tribunals for speaking on topics that are no longer allowed in Canada. The dispute is getting a lot of press in Canada, but what do those people in the U.S. who used to praise George Carlin have to say about it? Nothing.

Go to google news and search for the terms “George Carlin Mark Steyn.” Not a single one of the articles about Carlin mentions Steyn.

Disgusting.

AP non-profit

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jun 162008
 

Here’s something I never would have guessed:  The Associated Press is a non-profit organization.  It was mentioned in passing in this article I found on Drudge, “AP to meet with blogging group to form guidelines : AP and blogging group to discuss possible standards for quoting AP news stories online.”  How can they be independent of the government if they’re non-profit? 

I hope nobody is going to tell me, “What’s so strange about that?  After all, the Drudge Report is a non-profit, too.  And so is Rush Limbaugh’s outfit.”  They aren’t really, are they?   

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