Garbanzo Toons

The Best Laid Plans . . .

I had planned to write a scathing post firing the MSM due to the total abdication of their mission by so many mainstream journalists. Not surprisingly I'm not the only one bemoaning the lack of honesty and professionalism of the current crop of newsfolk. So rather than write, I'm going to link to others who have already written what I was planning on writing for the past two weeks. These links are much better written than what I would have turned out anyway. You would think that some of them are professional writers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the end of journalism.

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather’s career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We’ve known for a long time — from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions — that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.

Diana West points out some of the episodes of media failure to inform.

Despite the disgrace of our free-but-self-caged press, many voters have managed to learn for themselves that Obama has spent a lifetime associating with the kind of anti-Americans and subversives that, by rights, make him ineligible for a federal security clearance — something Daniel Pipes has noted. Many voters understand that when you "spread the wealth around" you are enacting a basic premise of Marxism, or communism, or socialism, or something once upon a time derided as plain old commie-pinko. But that was a long time ago, and the fact is, we just don't know how many Americans are still put off, if not outraged, by such things.


And maybe this becomes the most important question to be settled on Nov. 4: How many Americans still consider mixing with and supporting bomb-throwers and radicals to be un-presidential? How many Americans still consider a Marxist basis for economics to be, in fact, downright un-American?

The most forceful piece is by Orson Scott Card. He calls it, "Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?" You should read all of these in their entirety, but if you can read only one, read this one.

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

On the other hand, this did save me a lot of writing.

Labels: Diana West, MSM, Obama, Orson Scott Card, Victor Davis Hanson

posted by Harry @ 8:30 PM 3 comments

Another Nail In Great Britain's Coffin?

I think hyperbole is overused in today's political discussions (especially from the Stop Alito Crowd), so I hope I'm not engaging in it here, but this article by Diana West makes me wonder how much longer Great Britian can survive as a free non-Muslim country when it still fears to correctly name its enemy.

For the defense, Edward Fitzgerald says: "It is said he was preaching murder. But he was actually preaching from the Koran itself."


Well, which is it, gentlemen? He's preaching murder that has nothing to do with Islam; or he's preaching the Koran that has nothing to do with murder. For people trying to fend off jihad in their midst, the question becomes a distracting conundrum.


At the onset of the trial, prosecutor Perry predicted the defense would likely argue that Abu Hamza "was speaking as a follower of Islam and he was speaking the words of the holy Koran." This, Mr. Perry explained, was not the prosecution's contention. "This prosecution is not brought to criticize Islam or criticize the teachings of the Koran. It is brought because of what the defendant says."

Read the whole thing. Then you can tell yourself, if you're into denial, that this is just one episode in the whole country. But there have been a whole lot of other episodes.

For example, is the pig ban still on?

Labels: Abu Hamza, Diana West, Great Britain, islam, Koran

posted by Harry @ 9:02 PM 0 comments

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents

Multiculturalism is a popular topic these days. I can remember, many years ago, arguing in favor of Multiculturalism. This was before I understood how far the Multiculturalists are willing to go to destroy Western culture. My thinking moved to Multiculturalism as stupid, now I see it as evil. Other commentators have weighed in. Here is Diana West.

Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail.

It's as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

And then there's Melanie Phillip's take:

Muslims have been presented not as the community which must take responsibility for this horror, but as its principal victims.

This moral inversion is the result of the cultural brainwashing that has been going on in Britain for years in the pursuit of the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism. This has refused to teach Muslims — along with other minorities — the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness, in which minority cultures are held to be equal if not superior to the values and traditions of the indigenous majority.

Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled 'racist'.

When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.

The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.

The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.

Bruce Thornton has this to say:

For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries of origin.

This baneful idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don't be fooled by marketing: multiculturalism is not simply a call to respect cultures different from one's own. In reality multiculturalism is a therapeutic melodrama of Western crimes against peaceful peoples “of color” who were subjected to racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental degradation. Given its record of evil, the West owes reparations to all those victims, especially those who emigrate to the West. There these victims will be given public assistance and soothed with repeated public assertions and recognitions of their culture's superiority, coupled with ritualistic confessions of Western guilt and dysfunction.

Some consider this “cultural relativism,” but it isn't really. A genuine cultural relativism would hold that there are no universal standards by which to judge any culture. But most of the time, those who claim that cultures can be judged only in their own terms have no compunction in judging and condemning the West. Nor will they accept that Nazi Germany or the antebellum South or apartheid South Africa were just “different” and so beyond our judgment. And of course, if you pin them down on the standards and values and principles on which they base their condemnations, these will all turn out to be ideals like freedom or human rights or equality that have their origins and most complete development in the West.

This intellectual contradiction suggests that something other than coherent principle lies behind “Occidentalism,” the multicultural caricature of Western culture. Mythic ideas like the Noble Savage account for some of multiculturalism's allure: ever since the Greeks, visions of peoples living simpler, more spontaneous lives have attracted those living in more complex and sophisticated societies. The Romantic fascination with the exotic explains too the West's relentless appropriation of non-Western cultural artifacts.

So, in conclusion, Multiculturalism is an ideology of self-defeat, self-loathing, and suicide. And it's been forced upon us. No matter how they dress is up, or make excuses for it, Multiculturalism is an evil ideology.

Labels: Bruce Thornton, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, multiculturalism, Muslims

posted by Harry @ 6:57 PM 0 comments

Multiculturalism, Another Anti-Western Religion

Diana West offers an excellent assessment of multiculturalism and how it's allied with radical Islam in a quest to crush Western Civilization here at the Washington Times.

Only one faith on earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It's as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place, unrepulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.
I'm not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors who bravely and steadfastly risk their lives for civilization abroad and at home. I'm instead thinking about who we are as a society at this somewhat advanced stage of war. It is a strange, tentative civilization we have become, with leaders who strut their promises of "no surrender" even as they flinch at identifying the foe. Four years past September 11, we continue to shadow-box "terror," even as we go on about "an ideology of hate." It's a script that smacks of sci-fi fantasy more than realpolitik.

Yes, you should read it all.

Labels: Diana West, islam, multiculturalism

posted by Harry @ 7:43 PM 0 comments