The White House declared war on Fox News. Last night Fox responded.
Journalists who were attack dogs against the Bush administration are at least raising an eyebrow over the White House statements. I think the concern is off the mark to criticize the administration for poor political strategy. The demographics of the Fox News audience are irrelevant. It isn’t an issue of differentiating news programming from opinion programming. This is a heavy-handed attempt by the government to suppress free speech. It is not a matter to be taken lightly when government attempts to intimidate news or opinion.
Of all people, it is a T.V. critic who sees this for what it is. Of course a comparison has to be made to Nixon to make the point.
I have been writing for several months about how thin skinned the White House has been about press criticism — especially when it comes to the Fox News Channel. I have compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and believe me, I did not do that lightly. Nixon-Agnew was a very dark time for the First Amendment.
I have argued that whether or not you like Fox News, all of us in the press need to be concerned about the administration of President Barack Obama trying to “punish” the cable news channel for its point of view.
This campaign by the Obama administration is dangerous to press freedom, and it should concern everyone in the press, not just Fox. If you want to get a sense of little regard Team Obama has for the press in general, check out this “Time” magazine article.
The greater concern about the White House and the press is the overwhelming obsequious nature of the coverage coming from most news organizations.
Angry activists gathered outside a Richmond, Virginia strip club decrying abomination! and sounding alarm over the deteriorating standards in America. Prudish church ladies? No. It was the NAACP. The self-described libertarian owner of Club Velvet, Mr. Samuel J.T. Moore III, had unfurled an Obama as The Joker banner outside his building.
“This country is going to hell in a handbag,“ Moore said, “and the current administration is making things irreversibly worse.“
Mr. Moore is not the ideal champion of liberty.
Moore’s club is awaiting a state Alcoholic Beverage Control hearing on alleged violations. Earlier this year Moore was convicted of three misdemeanor charges related to having sex with a minor and another woman at his apartment in the club, and filming it illegally.
The bold Mr. Moore sent one of his “dancers”, Kaitlyn McGee, out to read a statement.
“Mr. Moore would like to say that anyone who believes that his banner is racist is an ignoramus.”
The ignoramuses from the NAACP said–
“…the Joker banner was typical of what they called escalating attacks on the president – from depictions of Obama as Hitler at rallies to South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s recent nationally televised address to Congress.”
“Racism is as American as apple pie,” Khalfani [King Salim Khalfani, president of the Virginia NAACP] said. “The presence of a president that as African blood is very, very troublesome to many in this country.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really bother me,” she said. “You could say a lot worse things about him.”
It isn’t clear from the reporting to which man she is referring. You could say that about either. In fact, I think it is a neat response to the race card. Just imagine the reaction.
There are an array of jokers in this mix at implausibly named Shockoe Bottom, but the assault on free speech is no laughing matter. No situation is too small—or too ludicrous—for the enemies of liberty.
In this version Mr. Wilson isn’t the irascible man next door and The Menace isn’t a five-year old boy. The media’s version of Mr. Wilson and The Menace is an exuberant member of Congress named Wilson, the Menace is right-wing extremism. The two are not antagonists, they are villains coiled together in a swamp of hatred. The rancorous townhalls, talk radio and tea parties are part of this multi-headed monster.
As Juan Williams puts it:
It strikes me as something threatening..something angry is in the water here and it could go beyond the moment to, you know, people taking up arms, or attack. It’s extremism at work.”
Something bigger was at work. A culture of confrontation. Hate breeds hate, anger breeds anger, and I have been arguing in this space for years now that the American discourse – fueled by the Internet, talk radio and cable TV – has turned so mean it has nowhere to go but get meaner.
There’s something loose in the land, an ugliness and hatred directed toward Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, that takes the breath away. The thread of resentment is woven through conservative commentary, right-wing radio and cable TV shows, all the way to Capitol Hill.
The next step is violence, and thankfully to this point, we have not seen violence erupt from this partisan debate. But is it all that far away?
Here’s the post-show discussion on Fox News Sunday’s Panel Plus*. Brit Hume makes the excellent point that it has now become a matter of what Joe Wilson said not the so-called incivility of his behavior. It is toward the end that Juan Williams expresses his worries about the Right.
Dick Durbin and others claimed insurance companies and “people like them” were behind the townhall protests. This was to discredit the angry turnout as manufactured and counterfeit. Today the drug industry announced they are spending $150 million for TV ads to back the White House healthcare plan.
Taking the ‘manufactured’ charge at face value, insurance companies are contemptible for acting in their corporate interest, but not drug companies. (Not today anyway.) Shouts of individual Americans who go to townhall meetings are to be silenced while slick big government propaganda may intrude into our homes.
U.S. drugmakers stand ready to spend $150 million to help President Barack Obama overhaul health care this fall, according to numerous officials, a staggering sum that could dwarf attempts to derail Obama’s top domestic priority.
The campaign, now in its early stages, includes television advertising under PhRMA’s own name and commercials aired in conjunction with the liberal group, Families USA.
Additionally, the industry is the major contributor to Healthy Economy Now, which recently completed a $12 million round of advertising nationally and in several states. The ads were made by firms with close ties to Democrats and the White House and generally reflected the administration’s changing rhetoric on health care
By the White House tally, overall advertising so far by PhRMA and other supporters of the bill has swamped efforts by opponents. Republican strategists concede it would be extremely difficult to match an effort of the size PhRMA is planning.
The Truth is our defense against the charges of corporate interests buying the voices at townhall meetings. The other side has no defense against charges that their indignation is hypocritical. Big money backs big government for big power. There is something far more valuable than money backing the individual voices of citizens speaking out at townhalls. It is the spirit of liberty.
The flowery phrases of the left are shallow and trite. They play on sentiment to achieve a deceitful end. Common speech is common sense, unpolished yet infused with the wisdom of real life. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”—get lost. “I am the mob” has arrived.
This was a telling exchange between Helen Thomas and CBS’s Chip Reid (not exactly crusaders in our Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™) on one hand, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the other.
Some of the media people are beginning to realize the pitfalls of a government that is a bit too anxious to assert control, now that the control is turned on them. The complaint involves a media event that presents itself as spontaneous and genuine but is in fact scripted and pre-packaged.
Genuine newshounds appreciate that, in a healthy democracy, the executive must on occasion be challenged. They also have a self-serving desire to be an active part of the process, rather than passive puppets.
You can read the full transcript here. The gist of the argument is this: Thomas and Reid object to the controlled scenario, while Gibbs, struggling with obvious discomfort, lamely assures everyone that it will all be okay because the scripted questions will be good ones. As the discussion heats up, watch how Gibbs starts giggling nervously — I think he at some level realizes he’s treating adults like children. (And I suspect that, based on this performance, Gibbs will soon be out of a job.)
None of us Vast Right Wing Conspirators™ are surprised. Our broad concern has been Mr. Obama’s propensity of asserting control over that which he has no business controlling. It’s completely consistent that the man who has grabbed banks and car companies, and now has the health care and energy industries in his crosshairs, is going to come down hard on any watchdogs that think they’re allowed to do their jobs without oversight.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
—-Salman Rushdie
The American ambassador to Denmark, James Cain, offered some advice to Danes on social integration. He compared Denmark’s social problems stemming from a rapidly increasing Muslim population to the American experience with racial integration. I think his comparison is superficial. Blacks were forcibly brought to America to work as slaves and then brutally discriminated against. Repairing the damage of slavery and segregation is not at all the equivalent of accommodating voluntary immigrants who wish to replace European culture with their own.
The advice Ambassador Cain offered up is very disturbing for its implications here in America. In particular, he was asked if American newspapers would have printed the Muhammad cartoons. I don’t think any American newspaper did. The ambassador speaks as though it was a malicious lark. It was not. At the time I couldn’t decide whether the Danish, and subsequently some European newspapers, were really acting in defense of free speech or just being arrogant. Eventually I decided it was both. The reaction—riots and death threats— to the publication of the cartoons vindicated the publication as a demonstration the press will not be cowered by intimidation.
There is much to criticize in the ambassador’s responses. He advises the President to visit a mosque. He parrots the PC bromide that it is the responsibility of the majority to placate the angry ethnics among us or suffer the consequence of justifiable violence. What concerns me the most is Ambassador Cain’s premise concerning free speech. It is a rationale suitable for tyranny. He says the cartoons could have been published in America because we wouldn’t censor the press but it is unlikely for something like the Muhhamad cartoons to be published because—
After Senator Trent Lott complained that “talk radio is running America,” and that “we have to deal with that problem,” I don’t think it’s an overstatement that many Americans were appalled. Last time I checked, “talk radio” was the last geniune Town Hall available to the American people, the manifestation of freedom of speech; a place where we could speak our minds and discuss the issues in detail. It is the voice of the sovereign.
And now, the Senate doesn’t like that one bit. Well, we don’t like Lott one bit and now Lott is finding that there are repercussions to what he, and every other Senate Monkey says and does.
U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has managed to rile up some of his core supporters – conservative talk radio shows nationwide from Rush Limbaugh to Neil Boortz as well as local Mississippi stations – with remarks last Thursday blaming talk radio for the collapse of the immigration bill.
“Talk radio is running America,” Lott said last week. “We have to deal with that problem.” [...]
Flagged by the Drudge Report on the Internet, the two-sentence comment reported by the New York Times has inflamed radio hosts and helped propel a small group of about 30 immigration bill protesters to Lott’s Jackson office Tuesday, including a few radio hosts, who delivered petitions against the bill. Monday night the Lott comments were debated on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes.” [...]
Lott’s office is downplaying the uproar over immigration, saying the minority whip wanted to get the Senate to act, not to get talk radio out of the picture. “Sen. Lott is one of the biggest talk radio participants,” said Lott spokesman Lee Youngblood. “He’s not going to do anything to pull the plug on talk radio.”
Caroline Espinosa, spokeswoman for Numbers USA, a nonprofit group opposed to the bill, said she had done a number of interviews recently on talk radio and Lott’s name kept coming up. “He doesn’t like what talk radio is saying on this particular issue. I did a show in Colorado and they were offended that Sen. Lott was trying to shut the people up.”
UPDATE: Apparently the Hot Air post is only aportion of the interview. Hutsutraw from the MySpace page has been kind enough to post the entire 5+ minute segment at YouTube, which I have embeddedhere. Thank you Darlene.
***
Thanks to Ian at Hot Air for making the video available. I think the subject matter–the ability of Americans to have a legitimately honest media and the freedom to speak one’s mind without being targeted for annihilation by the New Gestapo–is of special importance. All of us rely on being able to express opinions and ideas that may contradict the status quo, challenge authority or the ruling class. Inevitably, those actions will offend someone, either through sloppy remarks or ideas being labeled ‘offensive’ because they confront power at the source.
This renewed attack on talk radio specifically has never been about ‘decency’ or minorities being ‘offended,’ it’s about one thing–the use of those arguments as slogans in an attempt to get Americans to ‘buy in’ to the idea that a Gestapo is needed to protect us from ourselves.
Europeans bought that argument in the 30s and 40s. Are we willing to go down that same road? I think not.
Not only is the attack on Imus a small part of a larger move by the Soros Gestapo to silence talk radio as quickly as possible before the 2008 primaries and election, it is a reflection of the rank hypocrisy of the men who make money hand over fist objectifying and denigrating women (of all colors) with so-called rap or hip-hop, also known as “urban music.”
Imus is a straw man in this culture war; a war with an agenda to silence those who are unafraid of the left, who cannot be intimidated into pledging allegiance to the Soros/Clinton/Sharpton agenda of victimhood, hopelessness and malevolence.
In a column for the New York Post, Kinky Friedman has one of the most salient assessments of the situation so far, comparing Imus to those who attack him, and what his firing says of the people who advocated for it. Here’s a snippet, but obviously, read the whole thing.
…There’s no excusing Imus’ recent ridiculous remark, but there’s something not kosher in America when one guy gets a Grammy and one gets fired for the same line…
Political correctness, a term first used by Joseph Stalin, has trivialized, sanitized and homogenized America, transforming us into a nation of chain establishments and chain people.
Take heart, Imus. You’re merely joining a long and legendary laundry list of individuals who were summarily sacrificed in the name of society’s sanctimonious soul: Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, Mozart and Mark Twain, who was decried as a racist until the day he died for using the N-word rather prolifically in “Huckleberry Finn.”…
Speaking of which, there will always be plenty of Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons around. There will be plenty of cowardly executives, plenty of fair-weather friends, and plenty of Jehovah’s Bystanders, people who believe in God but just don’t want to get involved. In this crowd, it could be argued that we need a Don Imus just to wake us up once in a while.
In my new book, “The New American Revolution,” I explain how fascism can only spring from the Left; it is a framework that starts as an argument to elevate the oppressed, yet its true goal is to indoctrinate first its followers, and then everyone else, into accepting punishment of those who do not conform to the leftist worldview. This control and destruction of dissent is the foundation of fascism. It must be so, as the only way the Left survives is if it is able to condemn and silence its critics.
A case in point is brought to us by Ace of Spades with his exposure of some Ohio State University professors bringing a sexual harassment suit against a librarian. And why is this? Because the librarian sexually harassed them? Not quite. Librarian Scott Savage is facing that investigation because he recommended four books that do not conform to the leftist message, for a Freshman reading list. I kid you not.
And who are the offending authors and their books? The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum.
The Alliance Defense Fund is on the case. Here’s a bit of their report:
Shocked In Shockoe Bottom
by Pat_S on September 30, 2009 · 7 comments
A post by Pat
Angry activists gathered outside a Richmond, Virginia strip club decrying abomination! and sounding alarm over the deteriorating standards in America. Prudish church ladies? No. It was the NAACP. The self-described libertarian owner of Club Velvet, Mr. Samuel J.T. Moore III, had unfurled an Obama as The Joker banner outside his building.
Mr. Moore is not the ideal champion of liberty.
The bold Mr. Moore sent one of his “dancers”, Kaitlyn McGee, out to read a statement.
The ignoramuses from the NAACP said–
Speaking for herself, waitress and dancer McGee said–
It isn’t clear from the reporting to which man she is referring. You could say that about either. In fact, I think it is a neat response to the race card. Just imagine the reaction.
There are an array of jokers in this mix at implausibly named Shockoe Bottom, but the assault on free speech is no laughing matter. No situation is too small—or too ludicrous—for the enemies of liberty.
h/t ArtGal
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