Posts Tagged → NPR
The McCain in my soup
What seems like a hundred years ago, in the summer of 2000 I served as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Staying with my old Philly friends Mark and Bill in their back bedroom, I was able to easily access the convention center by foot.
Being a burly lad, I was put on “security,” which involved wearing a special yellow or red shirt, standing at certain choke points and doorways in the convention center, checking credentials before allowing people to pass to some next destination, and answering questions about the location of bathrooms.
Most of my security role was done at the entrance to the main stage, where speakers and media activists (“reporters”) entered and exited. From this doorway, the speakers walked out onto the stage to speak from the main podium, and the media things sauntered, pranced, sashayed their ways to nearby desks set up to look at the podium and speaker.
Cameras were set up to capture both the speaker and the media commenters looking at the speaker. Sitting en banc like a panel of judges, the media personalities were represented as a real-time source of expert analysis and useful commentary. Of course, that is exactly the role the mainstream media plays at a Republican convention: Judge, jury, and executioner, heavy-duty criticism. At Democrat conventions the same media people are giddy cheerleaders.
Why anyone thinks that these celebrity personalities add anything useful or valuable to the experience is beyond reckoning, except that the mainstream media have done a very good job of arranging their own roles at these conventions. The political parties do not necessarily need them there. The Republicans would do well to not have them at their conventions.
Anyhow, three distinct memories of that 2000 Philadelphia convention stand out in my head, all of them from my unique VIP security role at the entrance on to the main stage.
The first memory was NPR activist Cokie Roberts. Like all the other VIPs at that stage entrance, my job was to walk from the stage entrance and get her at the far end of the tunnel where a temporary FBI office was located in a small room. Police officers and FBI agents populated this end of the tunnel, providing heavy protection for the VIPs. From there I would then accompany her back down the tunnel to the stage entrance. Once there, the protocol was to look around and make sure everything was clear, no unpermitted people around, and then point the VIP toward their destination: the main podium, or, with Cokie Roberts, the press desk ahead and slightly off to the left.
Sharing the same physical space as Cokie Roberts is unpleasant. Her smug self-importance sucks up all the energy in the immediate vicinity. Cokie was like a saucy queen, and the air was full of expectation. I felt diminished in her presence. Yet I stayed close to her, walked her to the doorway, pointed her to the media desk, and there she sat, lips pursed, looking feline, watching her prey through slitted eyes.
OK, that is one memory.
The second memory is of that same exact location and security role. I walked Bob Dole down the tunnel to the stage entrance, looked around, and sent him out to the podium. I had never been in Dole’s immediate space before, but true to form he was clutching a pen in his damaged hand. Dole took a bit extra direction, and I had to step out onto the stage apron and take him by the elbow so that he was fully oriented toward the podium.
Dole spoke, and began walking back toward the doorway. I took a step forward and extended my hand to help him feel comfortable, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a strange looking man slowly and very carefully edging his way toward us. I have no idea how this guy previously evaded my view, or how he even got there, given how well secured the back stage was. I am a keen hunter and my eyes miss almost nothing around me.
And yet here was this white haired but not terribly older man suddenly materializing out of nowhere and now bearing down on a frail Bob Dole. Dole was now a couple steps into the tunnel and heading back up toward the FBI office, where he would get an armed police escort to his next stop.
Like out of a movie, the white haired guy’s arm shot out toward Dole and the guy was suddenly hurtling through the air in a complete and very athletic dive towards Dole that did not match his somewhat older appearance.
Well, the old wrestler automatically took over in me, and just as the guy’s hand was about to grab Dole’s arm, literally just a few inches away, I was all over the guy. He was strong, but I was stronger, and within a couple seconds I body slammed him flat onto the concrete floor, his outstretched arm locked painfully sideways by my left arm, my legs intertwined with his and his struggling body splayed out and largely immobilized in a classic wrestling move.
The FBI guys came flying down the hallway and covered me in what is now called a dog pile. I was immediately suffocated beneath a steaming pile of heavy bodies smelling of dry cleaned suits and shoe polish. Whatever people may think about FBI agents today as a result of the corruption by Comey, McCabe, and Stzrok, those agents were super physical and aggressive. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Loved it because the bad guy was stopped dead, hated it because I could not breathe, and then again happy to know the weird son-of-a-bitch underneath me was being turned into a pretzel by all the hands reaching around me. Within about twenty seconds I was pulled off by three FBI guys, while a uniformed cop and two other agents were cuffing the weirdo hand and foot.
The white-haired weirdo guy was trussed like a hog and quickly carried up to the FBI office. I, too, was hustled up there, pushed from behind as a wall of guys swarmed the tunnel and then pushed the weirdo and I into the little FBI room.
Once in the room, the guy was cuffed to a chair and the questions started flying. Within a minute or so he was identified as a Polish national who had a long history of stalking Bob Dole and trying to assault him, all around the world. The guy was an obsessive kook and already known to law enforcement.
I was asked my version of events, congratulated on stopping the weird guy, with one of the big Irish cops giving me a big smile and saying how much he enjoyed watching me slam the guy down so hard. A couple of the FBI agents said they didn’t know anything was amiss until they heard the guy’s body smack the concrete so hard.
During the melee just a couple feet away, Dole had shrunk back against the tunnel wall, still clutching his pen, looking scared (why not) and two agents took him by the arms and hustled him back up the tunnel. That was the last I saw of Bob Dole.
From the little FBI room, I was accompanied back down to my spot at the stage entrance, patted on the back, and instructed to stay vigilant. Hey, I was never so important before or again!
The third and last distinct memory I have of that convention also involved the VIP entrance, because it was from there that I got to watch Senator John McCain deliver an emotional speech about wanting the presidential nomination so badly, and yet being denied it.
McCain delivered an interesting and very personal speech. He had just been through hell, with the Bush team pulling a lot of dirty tricks to eventually stop McCain’s momentum late in that hard-fought primary race.
From my view at the edge of the stage, I could see in McCain’s adam’s apple a huge lump had appeared while he spoke. I actually watched it grow. I had never before seen such an enormous lump in someone’s adam’s apple. This moment was obviously much more emotional for McCain than I would have expected from such a battle-hardened candidate, and I doubt that the many TV cameras there captured it.
What that huge lump in his throat brought home to me was how heavily and personally invested McCain was in his pursuit of the presidency. As opposed to Senator Bob Dole, who had torpedoed the 1996 Republican challenge to Bill Clinton by insisting that it was “his turn” to run, despite his lack of emotion, lack of energy, lack of passion.
John McCain is now dead, and with him goes a large part of strange era in Republican politics.
Like a lot of American conservatives, I retain mixed feelings about McCain. He was good and bad. He was both patriot and sell-out, warrior against and enabler of our domestic enemies, and so on. I had supported him in 2000 and 2008, but in recent times I had really disliked the guy for his policy sell-outs. He was the fly in my policy soup.
But when I think back to that huge emotional lump in his throat at the 2000 Republican Convention, I think of a man passionate about America and his cause to protect and improve it. Whatever his reasons for taking such strangely contrarian, incongruent positions in the past couple years, McCain remains in my mind as a once-principled all-American who at one time had my strong support.
Rest in piece, Warrior McCain.
A Day of Infamy: The Day the American Media Declared War on the American People
Today is a Day of Infamy like the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a Day of Infamy, except that this day is marked by a treasonous insider attack by fellow Americans on the entire American people.
Today, the American press openly and joyously colluded and coordinated amongst themselves to attack the American president, for merely being the president they don’t like. This is also an attack on the American people, who overwhelmingly chose this president over another candidate.
After two solid years of openly biased and partisan media attacks on the president, something like a measured 97% negative reporting on President Trump across the print and cable media, today the establishment media dare to present today’s nationwide editorial attack as some sort of unbiased, carefully measured, well-deserved action.
But the media are not balanced, thoughtful, careful analysts, or fair-minded arbiters of fact and truth. Rather, the mainstream media are openly a partisan activist arm of ONE political party. They are completely one-sided. Their attack today is just one more partisan attempt to damage a president they did not cheer for, cover for, and promote in 2016.
As if the American media is above criticism!
The media deserve the criticism they have gotten, because they have earned it over and over. The American media are indeed the enemy of the American people, because that same media is not in the news business, it is in the partisan political activism business. The media has prostituted the glorious First Amendment, and hidden behind it while using it to launch partisan political attacks. This destructive warfare has severely damaged America’s social fabric, because the role of the press is supposed to be honest, holding everyone in government accountable. Not just politicians the establishment media don’t like. Even as Mueller’s fake and falsely justified witch hunt is under way, the news media will not report on that actual facts about the illegally obtained FISA warrant used to begin the investigation in the first place.
The political activists posing as “news reporters” on CNN, NPR, CBS, MSNBC, the NYT, Washington Post, etc. deserve every bit of criticism they have received, from the president on down to local citizens complaining that the Patriot News here in Harrisburg harangues, hectors and lectures people about subjects John Micek and the other editors there have no interest in learning about. These activist “reporters” are just a bunch of politically partisan liberals who think they are in charge of all information the American people receive, and these “reporters” get angry when people call them out on their falsehoods.
Without inflicting damage on the president, the American media has severely damaged American democracy and representative government. American democracy is damaged by the media because they constantly cover up for crooked politicians it favors (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), and constantly attack politicians they did not support, including politicians the American people do want.
Today’s nationwide editorial attack on the president only proves that he has been correct all along. It demonstrates that once again the media are not treating him fairly, that they collude, plan and plot among themselves. They are not delivering actual factual news to the American people. Rather, the media delivers one false narrative and fake set of facts after another after another, in an attempt to shape public opinion, not inform it.
The media have traded away their credibility in their drive to attain certain political outcomes, including damaging this president’s public standing so the mid-term elections will be better for the media’s chosen political party.
So today is just one more day of liberal propaganda, the same as yesterday’s propaganda and the week before and the month before that.
Today is a day of shame, a day of infamy, because it is the day the American media made it openly public that they are indeed the enemies of the American people.
Duly noted.
NPR’s alternative facts undermine media credibility
Seasoned NPR employee Mara Liasson asked a question at a White House press briefing the other day, and it has taken me days to accept the brazenness of her bald-faced lie.
Asking Trump Admin spokesman Sean Spicer about allegations of voter fraud, Liasson asserted that Trump had claimed the number of fraudulent votes in the November 2016 election were between three and five million.
Unfortunately, Spicer is new and did not challenge Liasson’s lie. Trump never claimed that number. He did say he believed between one and two million of the votes for Hillary Clinton were fraudulent. How Liasson arrived at five million votes is something only she knows.
But we know why she did it: Mara Liasson is personally opposed to the Trump Administration.
Unfortunately, Mara Liasson is like the other NPR employees, she is a partisan political activist. Her personal politics shapes her professional behavior. Nothing that Mara Liasson does is news reporting, as in reporting of actual facts. Her brazen creation of alternative facts in this one instance resembles her many prior years of alternative facts creation and fake news aimed at her other political enemies.
In one public moment, Mara Liasson has re-opened the worm can of fake news and alternative facts, used to attack and undermine the mainstream media’s political enemies.
And NPR fans wonder why their credibility is so low, and why there are so many loud calls to defund NPR and strip it of the publicly owned intellectual property it manages, like its trademarks and logos.
UPDATE: Fifteen minutes after writing this, I read a New York Times article published today, written by Richard Fausset, another political activist who wears the credentials of a “news reporter.”
What catches my eye right away is the following statement by Activist Fausset:
“The scrambling of what’s real and what’s illusion began well before Mr. Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway offered the concept of “alternative facts” on Sunday when commenting on false statements by Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and before Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims on Monday that millions of illegal voters cost him a popular vote majority.”
Is censorship American?
Wasn’t calling someone a “censor” one of the worst things you could do, way back when?
After all, the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits infringements of free speech, guaranteeing to all citizens the right to speak our minds.
Enter the mainstream media, captured by one political party since the 1960s and now an unabashed arm of that single political party.
For so long has the mainstream media been an integral part of just one political party and its agenda, an orthodox culture has developed around it.
Deviation from the script, the narrative, the talking points of that orthodoxy and media results in huge amounts of flame, vituperation, scalding attacks. Even worse, two generations of Americans have not been taught critical thinking skills. Oh, that narrative is drilled into their heads by the media, Hollywood, their high school teachers and college lecturers. But the ability to discern correct from incorrect, false from true, accurate from inaccurate is a skill that has been purposefully cast aside.
Now that the media has been thwarted and bypassed by alternative modes of communication, the ultimate result being the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, a new effort is under way to reestablish control over the information flow. Information must flow with the orthodoxy, the narrative, the agenda. So when new voices, critical thinking voices, bubble up from the huddled masses and serfs below, the media strikes back.
“Fake news,” is what the media calls irony, sarcasm, and also honest, factual reporting that does not fit with the media’s established agenda. Now FakeBook is working hard with a cadre of “fact checkers” funded by billionaire anti-American activist George Soros and staffed by hardened politicos, to censor news and information that does not fit the agenda.
Even the ACLU has embraced this move to shape public opinion. Once upon a time, the ACLU was against censorship, but now that power and control might be lost to the exercise of free speech, even that once vaunted group has thrown in with the censors. We cannot have those puny serfs making up their own informed minds!
Is it American to be a censor, to censor what people can read, or to block or shape what information Americans can obtain? I don’t think so. I believe it is fundamentally un-American. The great irony of all this is that the LA Times, the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR et al all routinely publish news and information that can only be called fake. This information is grossly inaccurate and at best a misrepresentation of some fact the media do not like.
Who would have thought that in 2017, the protected establishment media would be seeking ways to silence alternative sources of information, so that they can maintain their hegemony over the flow of information, ideas, and public opinion?
Among some Americans today, being a censor is the proudest thing they can be, and that is sad. How do we get our nation back?
is “racism” now dead?
Like the little boy who kept falsely yelling out “wolf! wolf!,” and who was then eaten by one when his genuine cries for help were ignored, false accusations of racism, sexism, etc have burned out the audience they were aimed at.
Politically motivated fakes are a dime a dozen.
So ludicrous have accusations of racism become, that Caucasians have been told they are racist merely because of their skin color.
Not their actions. Not their words. But just their skin color.
This is the most racist thing possible, of course. Ascribing character traits based on skin color is nothing but racism.
And the self-appointed arbiters of and supposed guardians against racism said nothing about this hypocrisy. Many of them encouraged it overtly or by acquiescence.
Likewise, the accusation of sexism is applied to just about any man, regardless of his actions. It’s silly, but it’s routine. Those of us with daughters in college are not sexist. We are bankrupting our families so our daughters can be all they can be.
And of course there’s the unreal “islamophobia” accusation, now part of the politically correct package of false failings.
Westerners are naturally phobic (afraid) of beliefs and the people who hold them, when they are associated with cruelty, violence, injustice, unfairness, and hypocrisy. Islam’s book, the Koran, calls Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists cows, donkeys, apes, pigs, and so on. The Koran mocks and denigrates over half the global population, and enslaves all of its own women, and yet we are bad people for resisting it? For being afraid of it? I am terrified of Islam!
The “wolf! wolf!” shouting also includes environmental policy these days. Apparently a reasonable person cannot think for herself, and judge all the facts on her own, without running the risk of being negatively labeled a “climate denier.”
Of course the truth is that our free-thinking woman here is in fact denying fake, politicized science that is about 10% science and 90% shouting. She is entitled to be skeptical.
Today a video is circulating the Internet. It shows a “white” man being dragged from his car and brutally beaten by a raging mob of “black” people, incensed that he dared to vote for a candidate they did not approve. He voted for Trump, apparently. His attackers repeatedly accuse him of this failure.
And the national media, politicized as they are, have ignored it. The Jesse Jackson Klan has ignored it. This video does not support their false narrative that white people are violent racists.
The video shows just the opposite, that racism and violence are epidemic in the American black community.
Most of the American public distrusts or disbelieves the establishment media, and the self appointed guardians of social causes, with good cause. Like in the 1700s, when governments held the communication channels, citizens now communicate facts and ideas around the censors at ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, BBC, NYT, etc. The more these fake “news” outlets engage in social engineering, and lies, the more the citizenry will push back and ignore them.
What is sad about this is problems like real racism will then be generally ignored, or worse, allowed to grow, like among African Americans. Racism, as an accusation, is now almost dead, because it cannot be taken seriously, except in very narrow circumstances. The white guy beaten by the black mob is a good place to start.
You cannot keep crying wolf and expect good people to come running. Eventually they think you’re a fraud.
The day after
The day after Netanyahu’s historic speech before the US Congress, people who care about real things, for good or for bad, are doing 180-degree analyses of its impact, the merits of the policy he advocated, the audiences he addressed, the politics behind, surrounding, and in front of him, and implications of a nuclear Iran for America.
Shocking was the news blackout by the major TV networks and NPR/PBS.
While Netanyahu was speaking, I dialed into WITF, the local NPR affiliate here in Harrisburg. Instead of listening to Netanyahu speak, as any listener would normally expect if any other head of state were addressing Congress, I was treated to a sarcastic discussion about health care by advocates for ObamaCare.
NPR is already an especially egregious mis-use of taxpayer money, and this one latest example serves to illustrate how corrupt and intellectually bankrupt NPR, PBS, and their affiliate stations are, despite couching themselves as sources of real debate and substance.
NPR’s news blackout of Netanyahu is done for one reason: To serve the interests of the Obama Administration, which itself not only did not attend the speech, but also issued empty, juvenile statements immediately after Netanyahu finished.
If you are NPR and you are blacking out Netanyahu’s speech, then you are not a real news organization. Rather, you are a political activist, an advocate, far from some kind of fair-minded arbiter of plain fact that you represent yourself to be.
Likewise, here in Harrisburg, the staff of the Patriot News has fallen all over themselves to protect Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse from the legal fallout of his decision to hold onto illegal anti-gun ordinances.
I am a plaintiff in a suit against the city over these illegal ordinances. Yesterday our attorney Josh Prince scored a default judgment against Harrisburg City.
When people like Mayor Papenfuse engage in official lawless behavior, it’s not some sort of hip civil disobedience, it’s tyranny. Government must absolutely live by its laws. Papenfuse believes he is above the law, and that deserves a broadside by newspapers everywhere. But like NPR and the mainstream media’s blackout treatment of Netanyahu, the Patriot News serves a different master – liberals at war with the foundations of Western Civilization. So Papenfuse gets away with legal murder. Iran readies to commit nuclear genocide.
That is a hell of a thing to confront first thing in the day.
You call that a scandal? I’ll show you a scandal
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is rightly under fire for shutting down eastbound traffic lanes across the George Washington Bridge into NYC.
Emails, texts, and other sources used by Christie’s senior staff paint an unflattering picture of a guy using every means possible to punish politicians, and citizens, who don’t do what he wants. Like endorse him for reelection. It’s criminal behavior on its face and also because at least one person died due to traffic backups and slow ambulance service.
Amazing now how the American media is buzzing with this scandal, but the deadly Benghazi scandal (abandonment of US personnel and subsequent coverup of their cruel deaths) and the criminal IRS political scandal (destruction of elementary Constitutional principles in government behavior) are nearly off the media’s radar. Where’s the buzz about these huge scandals? Where are the public demands for justice, the mocking, the sneers, the tongue-clucking among network news anchors that they now employ against Christie?
On one hand, we have a scandal about traffic. On the other hand, we have multiple scandals about earth-shaking abuse of power, criminal negligence, undermining of the Constitution that holds America together and guarantees citizen rights. It’s impossible to justify reporting on the bridge, but not on Benghazi, IRS, US Dept. of Justice malfeasance, etc.
I regularly listen to NPR radio, and this double standard was especially strong there, as would be expected.
This double standard, or political activism masquerading as journalism, is just one more example of how the national media have abandoned their watchdog role and are now partisan cheerleaders.
According to the establishment media, Obama can’t do anything wrong; Republicans can’t do anything right. It’s shameful and all the more reason for new, additional fair and balanced news outlets. It’s why citizen reporters are the real journalists.
Who Won the VP Debate?
Last night USA VP Joe Biden and US Congressman Paul Ryan debated for the VP position.
Plenty of pundits weighed in during and after the debate, including me, and I won’t re-hash that here. We sent out several real-time tweets about Biden’s rude behavior and NPR reporter Martha Raddatz’s anti-Ryan aggression. Raddatz was supposed to be an aloof moderator, but as would be expected, she represented her NPR credentials to the T. She interrupted Ryan 31 times and was named by CNN commentators as “the third debater.” Raddatz is a demonstrated partisan Leftwinger, an activist posing as a news reporter.
Biden brought artificial passion, which is in demand after Obama’s catastrophically bad performance at last week’s presidential debate. Despite Biden’s disrespectful behavior, his constant laughing, interrupting, obnoxious sneers and running commentary, he did appeal to a certain group of highly partisan Democrats who are looking for a sign of life.
Ryan was both reserved and serious, and a little lackluster. Voters want real passion, real interest in the issues, a genuine drive for action. Ryan did not demonstrate that kind of passion. That is a hall mark of political insiders.
Neither candidate won, but if Ryan was too quiet, Biden was too goofy. He reminded people of a nervous person who is laughing out loud to appear confident, when inside he is not. And the Obama campaign has reason for losing confidence: The national polls are demonstrating a slow and steady turning of the American voter, away from the Obama Administration and toward the Romney-Ryan campaign. A majority of Americans are now supporting Romney, and the former swing states are lining up behind Romney. A greater question is this: After losing this election, will liberals admit the inferiority of their beliefs?
My Morning Drive with NPR
Early yesterday morning’s two-hour drive involved a sparse radio channel selection in rural Pennsylvania.
Northern Schuylkill County is, after all, The Skook, and thus devoid of radio signals or much else emanating from the early Twentieth Century.
In a world of handheld oblivion, to some, including me, this insularity is a charming reminder of the rural good life. Rural people are largely content, and contentment is its own form of riches.
However, this long drive through raped coal fields also necessitated taking what I could get on the radio to help keep me awake, and that fell to the many taxpayer funded National Public Radio “public” radio signals along the way. Not even country stations had staying power beyond thirty seconds before fuzzing out and melding with some other vague music sound.
Having once been a fan of NPR, and still occasionally listening to NPR out of morbid fascination, I decided to open my heart and give another open-minded listen to what has become a notorious gateway for All-Things-Leftist propaganda.
“What the hell, it’s a long drive, might as well listen to these guys. They are the only stations coming through strong, anyhow,” I mused, while sipping the other second coffee.
Coffee quickly became passé, as I choked halfway through a sip and then involuntarily devolved into increasingly animated banter with the various NPR personnel as they were successively trotted out with the morning’s news items.
Within seconds, a skyrocketing heart rate, eyes bulging, and spittle flying meant caffeine was no longer needed to get me awake and keep me alert. I was there.
Was this some sort of Skook Zone reaction to news I couldn’t accept because of partisanship or unwillingness to consider inconvenient facts?
Categorical denial right here, no, it was not.
My sudden screaming match with the radio was a result of profound disgust and a sense of grating unfairness. A feeling of being violated by snobby DC Swamp dwellers who have no sense of propriety for factual accuracy or for the proper use of public tax dollars coerced from American citizens, and then turned against them.
To wit, Exhibit A, NPR news anchorman interviewing former US State Department career official and Washington, DC, insider Nick Burns about the situation with North Korea: Burns accuses Trump administration of “hollowing out” the US State Department, the US EPA, and the US Department of Interior, in an effort to undermine these agencies and their effectiveness. The notion being that failing, bloated federal agencies filled with unaccountable bureaucrats are what the American taxpayer really needs most.
The focus of Burns’ complaint was on the US State Department and how “enough” career foreign service personnel are not being hired to “adequately” represent the United States abroad. No alternative perspective was presented, no alternative view was sought. It was simply a careerist DC bureaucrat complaining to a sympathetic NPR employee about how the new administration was altering decades of government mismanagement. One long anti-Trump bitch session.
Exhibit B followed on the heels of Exhibit A. NPR reports that the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau leadership role is being contested by a holdover from the past administration, a woman who was appointed to lead the CFPB by the former administration in its last days. This woman has filed a lawsuit (already appealed because she lost the first round) challenging the new administration’s right and ability to appoint someone else as the head of the US agency.
Nowhere in this “report” is it mentioned that this is at best a symbolic contest, or at worst a leftist shopping around for a leftist federal judge who will throw the rule of law out the window in the search for political dominance. Thereby granting said former federal employee the right to unilaterally override the President of the United States on selecting senior federal employees.
Nowhere is it mentioned that the new administration has full authority to hire, fire, and appoint senior staff to executive branch agencies, and that decisions made by past administrations are null and void.
Nowhere is the rule of law mentioned.
Nowhere is this growing activist federal judge phenomenon mentioned.
Instead, it is reported as apparent support for an Obama-era employee and Obama-era policy (“under assault” by the Trump administration) with no alternative view offered, and no factual view presented, such as such a lawsuit would be baseless.
This report is a live, on-air anti-Trump bitch session.
Exhibit C followed on the heels of Exhibit B. This involved an NPR anchorman interviewing an NPR “foreign correspondent” about the current tensions with North Korea. NPR’s anchorman categorically states that President Trump uses “bellicose language” that antagonizes NK’s homicidal dictator into being even more homicidal.
The “foreign correspondent” replies that President Trump uses “antagonistic” words because anything else would require America to “make concessions” to NK on its threats to use nuclear weapons against America.
Nowhere in this anti-Trump bitch session is it asked how America is supposed to concede to North Korea in a way that preserves American security.
Are we supposed to allow NK to bomb us just a little bit?
Maybe only California and Hawaii, but nowhere else?
What parts of American security are less valuable than other parts, and which ones should we concede to North Korea?
Nowhere is it mentioned that “bellicose language” is often used by national leaders everywhere when warning off other nations that have threatened them with annihilation.
I mean, isn’t it the responsible thing for a president to do? Or is he supposed to play nice, like Neville Chamberlain did with Adolf Hitler, hastening Hitler’s rise to power and enabling his genocidal wipe-out of Europe?
The on-air discussion between the two NPR employees comes across as sympathetic to North Korea and hostile to President Trump.
Exhibit D followed on the heels of Exhibit C, and involved another discussion between NPR staff about Project Veritas.
Project Veritas is James O’Keefe’s response to a corrupt media-political industrial complex protected by organizations like NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.
Project Veritas conducts inside sting stories where media personnel and politicians, including NPR staff, openly and often gleefully disclose on hidden camera that they are hypocrites, liars, politically partisan, and that they happily use their supposedly neutral and professional reporting roles to advance a partisan and extreme political agenda.
When they become public, these private disclosures are bombshells, because the lid comes off the corrupt media-political industrial complex, allowing the Great Unwashed to peer in and see what a corrupt cesspool is being funded with their tax dollars.
Establishment media like NPR don’t like Project Veritas, because it has taken over the role of investigative reporting that places like NPR, the Washington Post, and the New York Times used to do and which they still claim to do, but do not do.
In this discussion between NPR personnel, project Veritas is simply alleged to have edited its videos in “misleading ways,” without describing how they are misleading, and thus is just a bad outfit unworthy of consideration.
Over the years I have watched many of these Project Veritas tapes, and they don’t seem misleading to me. People like NPR’s former CEO are caught on hidden video saying things that fly in the face of their public claims about being balanced, fair, accurate, neutral, professional.
Part of this NPR on-air discussion about Project Veritas is really a defense of the crossover of overtly partisan and political agenda-driven editorial roles into news reporting at organizations like The Washington Post.
Not that this is surprising, given that NPR openly crossed that professional line decades ago, now openly serving as a communications arm for one political party and Leftist ideology.
Noah Rothman at Commentary Magazine is interviewed about this, and he provides another fascinating view into the Washington DC Swamp.
Rothman is represented as a political conservative, and therefore as an outsider source lending credence to the NPR allegation that the fruit of Project Veritas has been poisoned, because… it is just so mean. And edited.
But instead of lending credibility, Rothman comes across as a bitter clinger to the Never-Trump mantra, a guy who cannot let go of his DC Swamp allegiances in the Age of Trump & The American People.
If anything, Rothman reaffirms what many people like me already believe, which is that Washington, DC, is full of self-important nitwits who have self-selected a small circle of similarly minded people from both major political parties to reinforce an artificial and meaningless debate between Leftists and Moderates while they mutually feast upon the carcass of the American People.
That artificial debate is really about how fast or slow to grow the American juggernaut government, and how quickly or slowly it should erode, grab, undermine and other remove liberties, rights, and Dollars from the forgotten American taxpayer.
This whole narrow circle of likeminded Republicans and Democrats is euphemistically known as the DC Swamp, which candidate Trump pledged to drain, and which President Trump is mostly draining. Rothman is one of these Swamp people and he shares much in common with the interviewers at NPR, much more than he shares with the average American.
Listening to these people bitch and moan about how unfair it is to see their swamp drained is annoying. That they argue for the failed status quo is annoying. That they never mention the interests of the American People is startling, and indicates just how insular and out of touch they really are.
After all, American government runs by the consent of The People, not unelected bureaucrats and self-adulating pseudo intellectuals who sit around DC cocktail parties and politely, mildly debate the speed of our nation’s ruination.
During my morning drive through The Skook, NPR comes across as a farce. It is clearly not a news organization. From what I could tell, NPR is just one long anti-Trump bitch session.
CLICK! goes the OFF button, and I drink the remainder of my coffee, lost in my own thoughts of how far America has fallen and how lucky people are to live in such rural places where the simple things are still the best things in life.