posted
It can be dangerous to remove denial too quickly.
It's just at this point, MM, when you hear some of the truly bizarre things being said by Kennedy and clan, I think it would take a triple double-dog-dare-ya scoop of denial in the opposite direction to try to suggest that their criticisms are close to the truth. In fact, one of the weaknesses in our collective democracies right now is the near absence of any smart criticism other than than the foaming-at-the-mouth kind. Democrats are not only failing as a party, they're failing as an opposition party. They are so full of hate and rage that God help us if their appeal, such as it is, catches on. We need more Zel Millers, Patrick Moynihans, Sam Nunns, and Joseph Liebermans. THAT the Democratic Party is still even a vital party astonishes me. They have become so extreme and whacko that it's hard to believe anyone could buy their bill of goods. And yet...
It might be a good idea, before listening to the almost two hours of streaming audio, to remove sharp objects and firearms to a remote location.
LOL. No thanks. I'll wait for the movie.
Posts: 5365 | From: Washington State | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
If you want to know were the Democratic party is coming from just listen to Air America Radio. John Kerry is certainly getting his hair brained ideas verbatim from that source. Dean goes without questions.
People hate President Bush because that is what they are being told to do. It is that simple.
The one thing that upsets conservatives about Bush is the way he has handled all the attacks. They wish Bush would go on the "offensive". Bush's non reactions has been his best suit. No matter what has been said Bush's best defence has been to remain silent. The facts do not support his detractors.
Case in point the CBS forged documents. Mary Mapes the lead CBS character behind the Dan Rather story recently to get around the facts declared new journalism standards that it is not the job of the journalist to make sure the documents involved in their storis are real but for others to prove they are truly forged. It was something like that just complete contempt.
For Bush remaining silent has been a brilliant strategy. Especially when the bar is moved so freely. Even his statement yesterday was a non statement that hit right to the heart of the matter. Do not rewrite the history.
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Your analysis, Rico, is not that different from Rush's: Let them speak...they're digging their own graves. And yet I run into people, particularly older people, who still get the bulk of their news from ABC, NBC or CBS and they are more trusting of these traditional sources of information and don't know much about Fox, Drudge, or just the various online sources of news that side-step the overt liberal mainstream media bias.
Case in point the CBS forged documents. Mary Mapes the lead CBS character behind the Dan Rather story recently to get around the facts declared new journalism standards that it is not the job of the journalist to make sure the documents involved in their storis are real but for others to prove they are truly forged. It was something like that just complete contempt.
That's just crazy. There's so much that is so crazy these days that I feel like I'm going to wake up one day and go "Ahh. OF COURSE! It was just a dream. I knew it had to be."
Posts: 5365 | From: Washington State | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
I don't normally quote The Nation, but Peter Eisener wrote:
"Maintaining an unprecedented degree of day-to-day control over the news is high on today's corporate agenda. The CBS case and that of Hazel O'Leary, caught paying corporate consultants to "evaluate" journalists, suggest the many forms of such "management" can take: dossiers on reporters; "nondisclosure" agreements with executives designed to intimidate whistleblowers; ever more imaginative and costly lawsuits to frighten news executives and their budget-minded bosses.... together, they are the beginnings of a newly integrated structure for the control and limitation of news-gathering."
Since this is a large portion of the President's base, is it any wonder some hate him?
Mary Mapes, the producer fired from CBS News for her role in the 60 Minutes story about President Bush’s National Guard service, has written a book to explain her side of the story. On today’s Good Morning America she talked to ABC’s Brian Ross about that book and the forged documents used in the Bush story.
A minute or so into the interview Ross and Mapes got into the question of the documents and whether the responsibility was to prove the documents authentic before airing the story, or if any documents could be used until someone else proved them to be false.
Mapes: "I'm perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there's proof that I haven't seen."
Ross: "But isn't it the other way around? Don't you have to prove they're authentic?"
Mapes: "Well, I think that's what critics of the story would say. I know more now than I did then and I think, I think they have not been proved to be false, yet."
Ross: "Have they proved to be authentic though? Isn't that really what journalists do?"
I repeat. That’s just crazy…and I’ve got a document here signed by Sigmund Freud to prove it.
Let me repeat.
The idea that some document that some journalist digs up is assumed to be authentic and has to be proven false is not idiotic. It’s not imbecilic. It’s not even moronic. It’s just plain crazy.
How crazy, you might ask? This crazy. Well…perhaps a bit more crazy than that. But you get my point.
Posts: 5365 | From: Washington State | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Looks like the Bush Bashers figured that the end justified the means. Two wrongs don't make a right, unless one tends to be dominated by control-paradigm assumptions, goals, strategies and responses.
---------------------------------------------------- This from page 62-63 of The Paradigm Conspiracy:
"CONTROLS DON'T WORK. The seventeenth-century social philosopher Thomas Hobbes described control worlds as culminating in a war of each against all, each entity trying to maximize his or her share. Buying the assumption himself, the only solution Hobbes saw was intervention by a "Leviathan," an all-powerful dictator, But we've tried that solution more than once. With a Hitler or Stalin---who spared nothing in the quest for absolute control--pain goes through the roof, and social order goes out the window.
In case we're unconvinced about the futility of the control method, the effects of insatiablility come out in society. In the post-World War II arms escalation, for instance, no amount of military might proved satisfying, The more firepower we commanded, the more we needed. After decades of a foreign policy obsessed with military control, we're faced with mind boggling debt levels, covert criminal operations at home and abroad in the name of intelligence gathering, past decades of mutually assured destruction (MAD) defense systems, and future decades of space-age weaponry against--whom? All the while, real life-and-death issues go unaddressed: pollution, squandering natural resources, poverty, unemployment, health care, public safety, education, even topsoil erosion (growing crops without ancient volcano droppings does not work).
Government by control creates a government in chaos. Taoist sage Lao Tzu predicted this long ago: 'Too obvious a growth in laws and regulations, and too many criminals emerge.' The control assumption creates worlds out of control."
------------------------------------------------- It seems to me that 9/11 sent us once again deeper into fear and the control-paradigm assumptions. This is not altogether a bad thing, as other parts of the world are still deeper into it, and we must contend with them as well.
posted
mm9 the Eisner piece just sounds like complete paranoia to me. What Eisner describes is no different than what is always been said that some invisible evil power has sway over how does he put it ".... together, they are the beginnings of a newly integrated structure for the control and limitation of news-gathering." Eisner has been putting in to much time controlling the news to make such statements. Which is really the heart to the matter. Claims are being made that evil corporate overlords are taking control of the media but in the past there were really only 3 news outlets. So in the past the news was really being tightly controlled by only three companies. Somehow those companies were devoid of being evil.
Look at the recent statements of Walter Cronkite. He is the denizen of when news could be trusted in the eyes of many. Cronkite recently declared "We're an ignorant nation right now. We're not really capable I do not think the majority of our people of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency of course. I don't think we're bright enough to do the job that would preserve our democracy, our republic." Imagine that. Cronkite is dead on. We are simpletons. John Kerry received 49% of the vote in the last Presidential election. Now that is a lot of dimwits. What did that number top out at 55 million ignoramuses by Cronkites standards.
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There's a spin doctor that calls it the "corporate" media, and another spin doctor that calls it the "liberal" media. It's actually a self reported 28% liberal and 43% moderate media. At least, that is how they describe themselves. Sure, you might have a point there about Eisner's manufacturing and Cronkite's not trusting people to make their own decisions.
John Ralston Saul says that since corporations used to pay 45% of the tax burden, but now pay only around 6-7%, the schools have been dumbed down due to lack of funds, which works against both democracy and corporate recruitment, so, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Ouch!
posted
So in the past the news was really being tightly controlled by only three companies. Somehow those companies were devoid of being evil.
I think that's good analysis, Rico. We now have so much more "diversity" in news sources today, WAY more than just three, and thus statements from those such as Cronkite show not only their arrogance and bias but their natural inclination toward elitist control. The news is something that only the ivory tower gods are qualified to disseminate. There's no telling what us ignorant rabble will do if exposed to "biased" sources of information. The Big Lie is that there is no media bias, that they're (as they see themselves – 43% "moderate") neutral observers. That pernicious lie was exposed once and for all, and without doubt, by Bernie Goldberg in his book, Bias.
John Ralston Saul says that since corporations used to pay 45% of the tax burden, but now pay only around 6-7%, the schools have been dumbed down due to lack of funds, which works against both democracy and corporate recruitment, so, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Ouch!
All we ever hear is how the schools need more money. And no matter how much we pour into them we're told that if they just had a little more than they could do their job properly. That's a thoroughly liberal M.O. And what the left tends to do is go for two-fers. They combine their requests for ever-greater funds (the very essence of control) with attacks on capitalism. Oh, if only the rich were taxed more then the poor would have everything they need. This is seemingly the only way they know how to think. They're stuck in the Middle Ages when perhaps everything was a zero-sum game. This paradigm will never work because the more you strangle the goose the laid the golden egg, the fewer eggs you get until it all collapses.
MM, I'm surprised that someone so interesting in control issues apparently sees only control in the functioning of the free market and, I guess, only wisdom and benevolence in the functioning of government. If this is not so then I wait with bated breath for the usual plethora of links to show that this ain't so. Posts: 5365 | From: Washington State | Registered: Sep 2001
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mmnine Saul appears to be Canandian and he does not appear to be an economist in the least. A lack of understanding in a subject can cause people to make assumptions on things outside their expertise which Saul seems to be in judging Corporate tax law. It is way more complex than Corporations used to pay 45% and now only pay 6-7%. I found this simple primer that suggest the highest the Corporate tax burden was to total federal revenue was about a third during the 1940's and 1950's which is a far cry than 45%. During the Presidential election last year it was shown that Kerry's wife who had an income of some $600,000 was only paying a tax rate of about 12% by diversifing her income into her "charitable" organization's.
If you really want to know what is wrong with the educational system it has nothing to do with corporate tax law. It has everything to do with the teachers that are highered and the teacher unions that have a strangle hold on the system. When 9/11 took place my nieces teacher reassured her class by saying that remember the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan. It is that type of teaching that is at the ground floor of the problem of dumbing down the kids.
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Brad the "diversity" is the funniest thing about the rhetoric on the media. There were actual laws that stymied diversity in the guise of making things "fair" in particular for radio. Under law content was controlled to what a station could air and not air. If a station had 1 hour of liberal talk the station would also have to have 1 hour conservative talk by law. How can the Federal government even have put such restrictions on speech. The law was repealed in the 1990's. Before the law there were less than 100 talk radio shows around the country. After the law was repealed there are more than 2,500 talk radio shows around the country.
The liberal spin is that fewer people have control on media. The reality is that the control the few people had on the media has been shattered. People like Cronkite see this as an assault on his personal elitism. That is why we are ignorant and he supposedly is not. Funny without doubt Cronkite voted for Kerry so that makes Cronkite a not to bright ignoramus by his own standard.
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He's been called "the world's most dangerous liberal" and they even have a "Krugman truth squad" over at National Review. I've read a few of his columns and like him so far. He's the only name which appears on the list of "100 People who are Screwing up America" that I'm not sure belongs there.
"Ideology, like theatre, is dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. At the core of every ideology lies the worship of a bright new future, with only failure in the immediate past. But once the suspension goes, willingness converts into suspicion-the suspicion of the betrayed. Our brilliant leaders abruptly appear naive, even ridiculous."
That is the best expression of why people hate George Bush. The system is failing and those who back it with ideological fanaticism will feel the betrayal most of all.
posted
That is the best expression of why people hate George Bush. The system is failing and those who back it with ideological fanaticism will feel the betrayal most of all.
I've got to agree with Rico. Remember after hurricane Katrina when the hysteria (glee, really) over the perceived Federal failures that were magnified, exaggerated or (They're resorting cannibalism!) were just plain made up. But I'd be the last to say the system is perfect and that rational improvements can't be made. But "the system is failing" becomes little more than "the sky is falling" if specific failures aren't mention nor improvements specified.
Posts: 5365 | From: Washington State | Registered: Sep 2001
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