Tag Archives: culture

Press Arrogance Confessed

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The AP has confessed press arrogance, even though it likely didn’t intend its statement to be that. In David Bauder’s article concerning journalist efforts to downplay Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ ducking interviews at every opportunity, Brauder wrote

[F]or journalists, the larger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.

Bauder then cited Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden:

For the teams behind candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible[.]”

Of course. They’re wresting that control away from an intrinsically mendacious guild.

Gatekeepers. Because men of the journalist guild Know Better what us average Americans should know about the political doings in our nation. These Wonders presume to censor gatekeep that information, to decide for us what we should hear and how we should understand what we hear, and they’re distressed that there are so many other means through which politicians talk to us.

Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Lies of the Press

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These are lies of the Left, too, as Leftist as the press industry has gone. In their editorial regarding former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, the editors summarized some claims embedded in the NABJ‘s opening question, posed by Rachel Scott of ABC News:

“You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals…saying they were not born in the United States”; told “four Congresswomen of color…to go back to where they came from”; and “attacked black journalists”

I heard that part of the interview in its entirety; the quoted parts are incomplete, but contain enough to identify the dishonesties in Scott’s question.

Not born here: the only rival Trump said anything of the sort about was then-Presidential candidate and then-President Barack Obama (D), and it’s obvious he was using an already long-extant conspiracy theory to troll Obama and the credulous press, not making a serious argument.

[F]our Congresswomen of color…to go back to where they came from: what Rose dishonestly excluded from her claim was the context: the four Congresswomen were objecting to Trump’s characterization of the African nations of their heritage by insisting that those nations had much to teach us—and Trump—about how to do things. What Rose further excluded from her question was that Trump was not telling those Congresswomen to go back where they came from; he was telling them to go to their old nations, learn those lessons they claimed their nations had for us, and then come back and educate the rest of us.

Attacking black journalists? This is the intrinsic racism of Scott, the NABJ, and the American press at large. Trump attacks the press and nearly all journalists without regard to race or ethnicity. That includes black journalists, but it does not single them out to the exclusion of other groups of journalists.

It’s…unfortunate…that the WSJ‘s editors chose not to call out Scott for her lies about what Trump had said.

How Concerned?

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Just the News recently ran a poll of its readers—entirely unscientific, since the respondents are far from a random sample even of readers of JtN, and JtN makes no bones about this with any of its polls—that asked How concerned were you by FBI Director Wray’s testimony on attempt to assassinate Trump? regarding FBI Director Christopher Wray’s initial House testimony that he couldn’t be sure that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the recent assassination attempt, was hit by a bullet—it might have been, speculated Wray, a piece of shrapnel.

You can guess how the poll went (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two won’t count), but that’s not what’s important here.

What’s important is the speed with which “the FBI” reacted to pushback on that “uncertainty” and moved to correct/adjust Wray’s testimony to indicate that Wray was, after all, confident that Trump was hit by a bullet. The initial testimony and the clarification, especially as it was a response to the hooraw over that initial testimony, when taken together are concerning: the whipsaw change suggestd that the FBI and its Director were not thinking overmuch about what actually had happened.

What has become of the FBI’s claim to operate on facts, wherever those facts might lead? What has become of Wray’s respect for facts?

Race and Gender in our Presidential Election Campaign Season

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Sadly, this is being thrust into the faces of us average Americans, riding on Progressive-Democrat Vice President and nominal Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Joshua Jamerson, John McCormick, and Tarini Parti put it in their WSJ article,

Harris’s rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, expected to become official early next month, has thrust race and gender into the center of the contentious 2024 presidential election, in a country where scars of racial segregation and sex-based discrimination still linger.

It’s true enough that those scars still linger; it’s true enough that there remain instances of actual race and sex bigotry. However, the only ones thrust[ing] race and gender into the center of the current election season are Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their frontmen of the press. It was, after all, then-Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden who announced that his choice for his Vice President candidate would be, first and foremost, a woman who was black—qualification was a distant tertiary consideration. Then it was Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden who announced that his first pick for the Supreme Court would be a black woman; her qualification for the bench again was a distant tertiary consideration.

Now pressmen are (see above) making a big deal about Harris’ race and gender as somehow qualifying, in addition to making her merely popular; qualification for office, even her experience as VP, are distant tertiary and quaternary considerations. This is manufacturing racist and sexist bigotry where it does not exist—here, in candidates for office. It’s hard to get any more invidiously bigoted than that. Yet here is where Party is, along with their press communications arm.

This is despite the article’s authors contradicting themselves later in their piece:

A Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 23 to 25, after President Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris, found 81% of respondents said Harris (who is also of South Asian descent) being a Black woman made no difference in whether they would support her for president.

Us average Americans—which is to say, us honest Americans—don’t give a rat’s patootie about Harris’, or any other candidate for office’s, race or gender. We only care that, beyond being old enough and a born-American citizen, the candidate actually is capable of handling the demands of being President. Even those constitutionally mandated minimal eligibility criteria (note: these are not qualification criteria) are background considerations; our primary concern is whether the candidate is qualified for the Presidency, what that candidate’s claimed policies and goals are, and what that candidate’s empirically demonstrated history of achieving those goals is.

For pressmen and Party politicians to give primary emphasis to race and gender in the present season is at once their confession that their candidate has no record worthy of campaigning on, and nakedly insulting to us Americans.