Two Major Examples of Why We Can’t Trust the Mainstream Media
A few not to be missed articles or blogs have appeared in the past few days. The first is by the conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat. Most people, especially those who still buy the print edition, see his regular featured column. But fewer people read his blog, which appears only on the paper’s website, and for that, one usually has to search to find. Two days ago, Douthat wrote about the myth spread by many Democrats and liberals: that conservatives and Republicans want to institute a theocracy in America.
As Douthat points out,
[A] spate of recent articles have linked the Republican presidential candidates to scary-sounding political theologies like “Dominionism” and “Christian Reconstructionism,” and used these links to suggest that Christian extremism is once more on the march.
He wisely notes that
when candidates wear their religion on their sleeve, especially, the press has every right to ask how that faith relates to their political agenda.
But he goes on to caution the media that reporters and writers should not assume that
the most radical figure in a particular community is always the most important one, or the most extreme passage in a particular writer’s work always defines his real-world influence.
Because a column is limited in words, he did not present any examples, aside from referring to outgoing executive editor Bill Keller’s recent article in the paper’s magazine section, as well as the piece by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker. But he was not able to cite and comment in detail on what in particular was wrong with either of their presentations. Addressing the usual double standard when journalists write about beloved figures on the Left, and how they write about those on the Right, he comments:
If you didn’t spend the Jeremiah Wright controversy searching works of black liberation theology for inflammatory evidence of what Obama “really” believed, you probably shouldn’t obsess over the supposed links between Rick Perry and R. J. Rushdoony, the Christian Reconstructionist guru.
Now, on his informal blog, Douthat expands at length in a way he could not in his column. In particular, he dissects Lizza’s highly influential article. One has to realize that the attitude Lizza expresses towards a strong, avowed Christian candidate like Michele Bachmann is going to be picked up and cited by scores of readers, as well as the MSM, as proof that Bachmann is beholden to truly dangerous religious zealots.
First, Douthat acknowledges that Lizza was correct to ask Bachmann to talk to him about influences on her that led to her current outlook and especially to her political beliefs. This is fair ground. After all, many of us did the same when we urged journalists not to ignore the influences on Barack Obama of liberation theology and his own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Clearly, in Bachmann’s case, as Douthat writes, there is a connection “between her ideological perspective and the particular cluster of evangelical institutions where most of her political education took place.”
But, he adds, Lizza also spent a lot of space linking her — without real evidence — to Francis Schaeffer, a 1970s evangelical activist, theologian, and scholar. Lizza’s point was to create a link between Bachmann and what is called “Dominionism,” the new boogey-man of the Left, which is supposed to take over the nation if someone like Bachmann or Rick Perry become our president.
What Douthat does is tear apart the bulk of Lizza’s conspiracy theorizing, showing that he even gets Schaeffer entirely wrong. As he writes, those beliefs “are a long way from the claim that Christians ‘alone’ are ‘mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.’ Likewise, it seems rather strange to depict a writer who goes out of his way to critique the Constantinian settlement as a supporter of Christian ‘dominion’ over public life.” Schaeffer was accused by Lizza, for example, of wanting to propose the “violent overthrow” of the U.S. government if the current abortion laws were not overturned . Douthat points out that Schaeffer actually “insisted that ‘the distinction between force and violence is crucial,’ warning Christians considering civil disobedience to remember ‘that overreaction can too easily become the ugly horror of sheer violence.’”
Unlike Lizza, Douthat’s blog gives his readers Schaeffer’s actual views to consider, not a parody of them. The man was closer in thought to Thoreau or Martin Luther King, Jr., than to any advocate of armed terrorism. He notes that most New Yorker readers take Lizza’s article at face value, and since they know nothing about evangelical thought, believe most of what he says. If Bachmann’s mentors are shown to be essentially nutty zealots, then she too must be the same.
Obama’s errors in his letter are not merely linguistic. They suggest a deficit in metacognitive awareness. Metacognitive awareness refers to an individual’s ability to think about his own thinking. In other words, a person can have thoughts about something. Being able to judge those thoughts by bringing them up as objects in one’s mind and then judging the quality and validity of those thoughts is a higher act than merely having the thoughts themselves.
I was a university professor before I retired and noticed when I was teaching that I frequently had students who were highly verbal in class, but then often handed in quite poor assignments and/or did poorly on untimed exams. Their poor performance revealed that they could talk well in general, but when it actually came to exhibiting a real understanding of the course material, they were lacking. I suspect Obama is one of these types. They are not uncommon in the university setting and it is always a shock to realize that a quite personable, articulate individual is actually unintelligent when put to the test. The research on metacognitive awareness is rather new (less than 15 years old) and so public awareness of this kind of deficiency is not very great.
The conclusion to be reached about Obama is that he can think, but he is not very good at evaluating the quality of his thoughts.
“…they could talk well in general, but when it actually came to exhibiting a real understanding of the course material, they were lacking…”
I have met many people like this too. They were all conmen.
Gloria, are you perhaps referring to the shocking letter found only about a week ago by Jack Cashill? It is a mindblower and I am convinced that had it been made widely public in early 2008—Barack Obama’s presidential ambitions would have almost instantly ended. He would have never dared entered the primaries:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/early_obama_letter_confirms_inability_to_write.html
I was one of the few who clearly saw from the very beginning that Obama is poorly read and intellectually shallow. This letter should open the eyes of many previously gullible people.
I apologize for not realizing that Ron Radosh had already cited this letter in the second page of his article. Sorry about that. I should have paid more attention.
The Obama letter is astonishing. Nobody in 2007 could have imagined that somebody on the Harvard Law Review could write such a thing.
But it fits perfectly with just about everything that we have learned about Little Lenin, and more broadly, about the Black Caucus. I view Obama as a Maxine Waters who has been rigorously protected from scrutiny for his entire life. Maxine is Obama without the make believe media filter. She and he are totally unaware of just how stupid they are.
How dangerous is it to have people in positions of power who not only are fools and incompetants, but who are also determined to punish the people who they blame for holding back others as equally clueless as themselves?
We’re finding out, aren’t we?
Aren’t you overstating your objections a bit? Actually, more than a bit. Having just read Obama’s letter, I find that the typos and grammar errors are no worse that a typical comment to a PJM article. In other words, Obama’s writing is no worse than most PJM regulars are.
Even your relatively brief comment has a spelling mistake: “incompetants” should be “incompetents”.
Who among us fails to make the odd error when writing?
If this is all we’ve got to make the case that Obama is unintelligent or inarticulate in writing, it’s not enough to convince me.
However, Snarky, if someone wrote a letter to PJM as the Editor of the Harvard Law Review, then it would be astonishing to find subject-verb mismatches in it. It would be like finding multiple grammar errors in any one of Tom Friedman’s columns, or a grammatical error in a front page headline. There is a difference. Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.
No surprise here. I suspect if you can find a way to test for this, you’ll find a high concentration of such folk in two professions:
1. Sales.
2. Politics.
On another note, do you really mean, “unintelligent”? Or are they simply uneducated?
Or is it that he is hiding something? Hiding predisposes they have thought the problem threw and decided to muddle up the process to keep from being called down on any conclusions arrived at. People that speak well often have problems writing, Ideas move faster than they do. They then loses sight of what they write about. They are lazy intellectuals. Either way they don’t take well to discourse of their ideas, when in writing (proof).
And yet another reason:
“President’s Fraudulent Bus Tour”
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17204
Are you referring to his Potemkin bus tour? There’s a twist to this. Potemkin’s villages were fake but the tour really happened. In this case, the villages were real but the tour was a fake.
I’ve been a lone voice crying on the right on the subject of Obama’s memoir since the idea that it was ghostwritten first came to my attention. I don’t want to engage in a lengthy argument here, so I’ll merely state my positions point-by-point:
1. I don’t think Obama’s book was that well-written. Everyone else seems to think it was as if U.S. Grant or Winston Churchill were channelled through this young half-African kid from Hawaii who wrote a book about his absent father. It’s not that good a book: while the prose is clear and understandable, it’s also more or less pedestrian and flat: there’s essentially nothing there to admire, at least in my opinion. It’s also oddly focused, in that it’s about his upbringing, and focuses more on his absent father than his present mother–a subject he addresses in a forward he wrote when the book was reissued, but which critics on the right have largely ignored.
2. When I first heard the allegation that Ayers wrote “Dreams From my Father,” or ghost-wrote it, one of my “rules” popped up in the back of my head. If you’re presented with a theory and it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s a vague possibility that *someone* ghosted or helped edit or rewrite Obama’s memoir, but the idea that it was someone like Bill Ayers is too good to be true. Ayers, at the time, was a celebrity, toasted on all sides on the left for his principled stand in blowing up statues dedicated to dead Chicago policemen, and for attempting to blow up other things, and of course we all know he’s a famously wealthy trust-fund baby who’s never really had to work for a living.
3. A related point: at the time “Dreams” was written, Obama was essentially nobody. His one real achievement was being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. That’s an achievement, of sorts, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes you a household word nationally. Ayers, while he wasn’t a household word either, was better-known, by virtue of having been wanted by the FBI for a decade, and famously getting off when it was revealed that the Feds illegally wiretapped him and his friends to get much of the evidence that they intended to use against him. Ayers, whatever else he is, is an enormous egotist. The idea that a rich spoiled playboy like Ayers, with an ego of immense size, would ghostwrite the memoir of a nobody-ever-heard-of-him kid from Hawaii on the off chance he would turn into someone prominent, is just fanciful. He’d be much too busy formulating ways for schools to indoctrinate children with Marxist theory (he’s become a primary and secondary education guru in Academia, from what I understand) to bother with Obama’s book, and all the work it would entail.
4. One of the critics of my argument countered with the idea that no one ever writes a memoir or other book and publishes it, as their first and only book, and has it become a bestseller or classic. I pointed out two different things, in regards to this: first, “Dreams” wasn’t a bestseller or even that well-received when it was released. A number of years later, when he made the speech at the DNC, it was reissued and *then* it sold well, but not at its first release. And second, I just listed a number of authors who *did* publish only one book, memoir or other, with each of the books being considered classics: “Gone with the Wind”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, and among memoirs most notably “The Personal Memoirs of William T. Sherman” and “The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant”. This last is a bit controversial, in that at the time it was alleged that Mark Twain ghosted them, but later historians and critics have read Grant’s reports (from when he was a soldier) and dismissed the allegations. Grant also famously said that on books he was “even”, in that he’d written one, and he’d read one.
I don’t think comparing a letter Obama wrote, several years before, with the book that was published later, means much. Letters aren’t books: you write them more hastily (even if you’re going to publish it, and even if you have friends look it over). Go back and look at the first draft of the Declaration of Independence: it’s much more clumsy and long-winded than what they finally ratified. That doesn’t mean Jefferson didn’t write it: he did. He, Adams, and some others reworked the original wording so that it was more eloquent. So what?
Obama reportedly took several years to write “Dreams” and had several fits and starts, working in a frenzy, producing a manuscript that was rejected, then putting it aside for awhile and then returning to it. Of course someone at the publisher made changes in the book: that’s why they call them “editors”: they edit! Frankly, if he’d just written the book and published it with no hiccups or hesitations *that* might be a sign of something curious, but the story as it’s told is pretty believable. I strongly believe that people who think Ayers ghosted the book *want* to believe this, because it connects Obama to a radical goofball in a closer fashion. Wishing doesn’t make it so, unfortunately.
In looking back at this comment, I note that I didn’t want to write something lengthy, so I wrote this instead. *shakes his head* Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes…
Radical goofball? How about violent terrorist?
They were and are friends. You know the old birds of a feather saw, don’t you? Smart, upstanding citizens don’t hang out with and socialize with violent terrorists.
David N. forgets or neglects that Obama, his neighbor and friend, had sugar daddies from at least his Columbia days (as it turns out, he cultivated his own, his room mate, at Occidental.) Also missing from the tale is the fact that Obama got an advance from the publisher, notwithstanding that he was unpublished, even to an article to provide as a sample. He then, with self-inflicted writer’s block, couldn’t produce, the publisher made threats and Obama probably asked his pal Ayers for help.
I forget the chronology of Ayers appointing Obama to the Board of his Foundation that scammed the taxpayers to enable public schools to teach communist/anarchist ideology. Ayers knew Obama was a nobody destined to rise to prominence with a little help from fellow scamsters.
I still stand by my original point, advance from the publisher and patrons from various directions notwithstanding. Perhaps I took too long making my point, so here I’ll try (and probably fail) to be more concise.
When a publisher hires a ghostwriter, the ghostie wants his name on the cover of the book, and acknowledgement of his status re the book: after all, he does most of the work. If that’s not part of the deal, the ghostie has to do all the work, get paid, but get *no* credit, then he’s going to want more money. Obama didn’t have any at the time, so why would the publisher put up with this? Pay more money to protect the reputation of a black kid from Harvard no one had ever heard of before? I seriously doubt they’d even consider that for a minute.
So then the question becomes whether Ayers helped Obama privately, presumably without monetary compensation or credit. Why would he do this? Whatever else he is, Ayers is a megalomaniacal lunatic. Someone above criticized me for calling Ayers a “radical goofball”, presumably complaining that I wasn’t taking him seriously. Yes, he blew things up. As far as I know, the only people ever killed in the explosions were friends of his who were incompetent in assembling the bombs they were then going to (allegedly) use to attack an army social function. If he’d succeeded in that I wouldn’t be calling him a goofball; but incompetence in such things makes him more of a goofball and less of a terrorist. The only thing that he and his accusers can agree he did is blow up the monument to the Chicago policemen killed in the Haymarket bombing, twice. Haymarket is pretty obscure in modern America: I’d suggest that if you polled a group of 100 people you’d get 2-3, maybe 5 who know what happened there of the tops of their head…the rest would be ignorant or confused. My point is that this makes Ayers the sort of theoretical egghead who sits around on campus ranting about things no one else understands, completely confused that the rest of the student body doesn’t recognize his brilliance.
“Ayers, at the time, was a celebrity, toasted on all sides on the left for his principled stand in blowing up statues dedicated to dead Chicago policemen, and for attempting to blow up other things….”
Toasted on ALL SIDES of the left? The fact that the writer and so many on the right probably believe a statement like this goes a long way towards explaining their rage and confirming their nuttiness.
There’s someone in the left who objects to Ayers and his politics? I wasn’t aware. As far as I know, he’s a respected academic and education guru who expresses himself on occasion, and who hosted the afternoon soiree that launched Obama’s political career. I’m sure there’s someone on the left who objects (so I suppose I can be accused of a small excess of hyperbole) but really, the guy hasn’t been fired and continues to have influence. No elected official wants to be that close to him (he was a domestic terrorist after all) but that appears to mostly be because of his high profile, not because of his politics.
“There’s someone in the left who objects to Ayers and his politics? I wasn’t aware.”
Case in point.
PS – And don’t forget, David, it was Ayers’ “blowing up” things you cited. As for his recent politics, who knows? Maybe he’s moved from the extreme. Such things happen. Just ask Ron Radosh (who, alas, seems to have moved to the other extreme) and a host of neocons.
Btw, I pretty much agree with what you said about Obama’s book.
“As for his recent politics, who knows? Maybe he’s moved from the extreme.”
By his own statements, he has not.
“As for his recent politics, who knows? Maybe he’s moved from the extreme.”
As Mr. Crawford commented below, “By his own statements, he has not.”
Would 2001 be recent enough? Actually, September 11, 2001 is the publication date of the NYT interview with Ayers, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives….”
I continue to be amazed by the poignancy of its publication date…and also to see that the article is still available for free:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/no-regrets-for-love-explosives-memoir-sorts-war-protester-talks-life-with.html
Maybe you’d like to provide some examples showing that not to be true.
Again, case in point.
“…and a host of neocons…” Hyperbolic much?
Erm, repeating “case in point” isn’t an argument, it is spam.
This gets tedious. I’m gonna leave it at this: If everyone on the left subscribes to Ayers’ radical politics, then everyone on the right is a John Bircher.
Ayres ghosted the book. You’re a lousy researcher:
Andersen, in “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage,” writes that Obama was faced with a deadline with the Times Books division of Random House to submit his manuscript after already having canceled a contract with Simon & Schuster. Confronted with the threat of a second failure, his wife, Michelle, suggested he seek the help of “his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”
Obama had taped interviews with relatives to flesh out his family history, and those “oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers,” writes Andersen.
The author quotes a neighbor in the Hyde Park area of Chicago where Obama and Ayers lived, who says of the two, “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together.”
“It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both,” the neighbor said, according to Andersen.
Well, Cashill presents approxiately 1,000 times the information you present. You don’t even appear to have read Jack’s definitive research on the topic.
What you present are your personal theories, which seem based on a couple of hours thinking about a topic you know nothing about.
Who gives a shit about what you think if you can’t offer anything to support it.
Ron,
I think you are exaggerating Obama’s failures with the English language in your post. It is not unlike the smugness with which the average journalist greeted Dan Quayle’s inability to spell potato (potatoe?). I was never convinced of the intellectual superiority of Barack Obama. But I think you diminish yourself with such attacks.
Yes. Multiple basic grammatical errors, incoherant thinking, casual threats and a give-a-shit attitude about a formal letter published by the President of the country’s most prestigous Law Review aren’t grounds to call anybody stupid. He probably had a party to go to that day anyway.
I hold no brief for Obama’s verbal abilities. I think he is a terrible speaker even with the Teleprompter. He appears to be even more hopeless off the cuff. There is no reason to believe that he is a competent writer, in that he consistently mangles the language.
But I do have to point out that he went to school for a while overseas. It is likely that whatever English instruction he had when a child in Indonesia had a strong British influence—and it is common in British English to use plural verbs for what we in America regard as singular nouns. The British would say, “Parliament have done this or that,” where we would say, “Congress has done this or that”; the British regard the noun as describing a collective plural, while we regard the same noun as a singular unit.
If this type of English instruction was part of Obama’s early training, it would account for what Cashill refers to as his “fifth-grade” error.
That he hasn’t improved at all in his decades long “academic career” and as a “present politician” shows his stupidity.
I got a strictly British education from a strict Englishman and it would have been cuts for me to have ascribed the plural “have” to the collective noun Parliament. It was more than my backside was worth to take such liberties.
Simply not true.
This isn’t a matter of the treatment of collective nouns as singular vs. plural, it’s a matter of agreement between two parts of speech.
The Brits are certainly messed up on how they treat collective nouns, but they DO understand proper subject-predicate agreement.
For some excellent analysis of the MSM’s approach to religious topics, see GetReligion.org (http://www.getreligion.org/). They do a good job of dissecting coverage on topics such as Mrs Bachmann’s faith. (“Dominionism”? She’s a Lutheran, for crying out loud!)
Yes, they put their considerable ignorance on display every time they open their mouths on the subject, as do most libertarians and fiscons who opine on the subject.
Yes, Cashill’s evidence is circumstantial, but it is a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence– long, deep and detailed.
Any singular piece of the evidence can be nitpicked away, as a lawyer does at trial. But, in the end, after the lawyer has nitpicked each of many pieces of evidence, the jury is asked to consider the whole of the evidence, and whether it is mathmatically likely that all of those many things pointing to guilt could have happenned to one innocent person. What are the odds?
That is how it is with Cashill’s evidence. Go ahead, pick away at each individual thread presented, creating doubt in the mind of the jury of readers. But you will be doing that over and over, for a long time. What are the odds of very similar childhood stories, multiple nautical references by an author who has never been known to be a sailor (and Ayers, who is), and so many improbable coincidences in both the recollections and writing styles? The math says Ayers had a strong hand in Obama’s book.
Read all of Cashill’s work on this; there is no way a reasonable person will come to the conclusion that it is just coincidence. At some point while reviewing the lengthy evidence, an honest assessment brings the realization that there are far too many coincidences, and far too many depictions of events and childhood experiences that Obama and Ayers somehow had in common. The weight of the evidence is overwhelming.
To find cashill’s evidence, just google: cashill ayers obama
I don’t quite understand the obsession with whether or not Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book; there is plenty of evidence that Obama is a third-rate intellect independent of that.
To me it is more interesting to try and discern whether Bill Ayers is “Brother Jack” or “Brother Hambro” to Obama’s “unnamed narrator” (see the “Brotherhood” chapters of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man); puppetmaster or merely indoctrinator?
I don’t see anybody “obsessed” with it– certainly not anybody in the media. My point is that the dismissals of Cashill’s work are always done piece by tiny piece, in small, biased doses, rather than looking at all of the evidence.
I also find it more than a little interesting that an American President had his book ghostwritten by(Or, at least Ayers was a strong collaborator) an American terrorist. It is also interesting that the media has no interest.
When Dems and media are claiming that Obama is the smartest President ever, and when they rave about his writing skills, I do not have a problem with somebody like Cashill (He did his homework on this)providing a solid rebuttal.
Not obsessed. Interested. And, I always did like a good whodunnit.
There is nothing circumstantial whatsoever concerning Jack Cahill’s evidence. He posted Barack Obama’s own words! Furthermore, the current president was not making these grammatical mistakes while campaigning long hours with little sleep. He was writing in a publication that gave him plenty of time to double check his submission. Obama could have even asked someone to proofread his copy. The odds are incredibly high that he is so illiterate—that did not even sense anything was wrong.
It’s all circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence would be if someone came forward who had witnessed the ghost writing take place, or if early drafts of the book were found on Ayer’s computer.
I will concede that while Jack Cashill makes a very strong case that Bill Ayer was Obama’s ghostwriter—it is still circumstantial. This most recently revealed letter is entirely another kettle of worms.
We’re not talking about a court case here, under American rules of jurisprudence.
Battlefield rules are necessarily different.
Chris Hitchens trashed Perry, and all the Republican candidates in his incoherent article in Slate on Monday.
Hitch used to be an amusing DC bi-sexual town drunk for some– but
–he supported Obama and supports him for 2012
Why would any Conservative give Hitchens any time–his brother is a true Conservative.
Hitch is a devotee of Trotsky–and always was
Exactly.
Writing for Scanlan’s in 1971, regarding the “Jesus Freak” movement, Hunter S. Thompson (who was not a fan of either them, or Christians in general) observed quite accurately that “entire empires have been destroyed by vengeful freaks claiming a special relationship with God”. Today, we can see another example of this, in Islamism.
What Thompson forgot, and what many of his fellows on the left don’t think of either, is that an equal or greater number of polities have been wrecked by groups or even individuals who believed that they, themselves, were gods. Or at least a reasonable facsimile’ thereof.
I hold no book for a theocracy, of any stripe. Anyone foolish enough to think that a “Christian” theocracy wouldn’t be as bad as a purely secular dictatorship needs to read “Revolt in 2100″ by Robert A. Heinlein. RAH considered both alternatives to be equally disastrous, and noted that one tended to follow the other after whichever one came first over-reached in its lust for absolute power.
Where the “progressives” come a cropper is that they believe that their theology, based on their version of “reality”, justifies exactly the sort of hegemony they rant about the Christian Right wanting. The difference in their minds is that since theirs is not based on “superstition”, they are justified in using the very methods they accuse the “fundamentalists” of wanting. And where they have had unchallenged power for too long, they have proven that they are perfectly willing to use whatever means they can get away with to force everyone else to live the way they demand. (San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Washington D.C., etc.)
The Bible refers to the “mote-beam syndrome”, in which people accuse others of being wrong because they perceive those others to be behaving in a way that they consider “right” when they do it themselves. Today, we call it “projection”.
Whatever you call it, the more the Left complains and fantasizes about a “vast right-wing (Christian) conspiracy”, the more they sound like someone complaining that somebody else is beating them to the punch.
clear ether
eon
Heinlein’s early books were okay, but “Stranger in a Strange Land” was so idiotic, so lacking in the understanding of basic Human Nature (I’d say denial that Human Nature exists), that I decided at the time Heinlein had spent too long suckin’ on that bong. It happpened to many artistes in the 60s. Humans are social animals. Humans live in hierarchical groupings called ‘societies’. Societies, like another innate human behavior (language), differ in many particulars, but all operate according to universal rules. In all of recorded human history, the all-time record for a society without religion is the Soviet Union, at about 70 years. 70 years, and you might have heard that some fairly strict measures (killing many millions of people) had to be employed to achieve even that longevity. It’s also true that the nations of Western Europe are far advanced into secular societies. Yeah, and how are they doing at even the most basic human behavior — reproducing themselves. Entire societies engaging in slo-mo self-destruction. Although you may believe that a secular society is not a contradiction in terms, so far you have no evidence from anywhere, at any time, that such a thing is possible. And Western Europe, insofar as it proves anything, is looking like evidence that you are wrong. Unless you believe that continuing existence is not the bottom line for success.
Ron Radosh – Why would any thinking person take the MSM seriously? After Rathergate, after the studied indifference of the MSM to Obama’s ‘pastor,’ the ‘Reverend’ Wright, and after Eric Lichtblau’s factually challenged hit piece on Darrel Issa, the MSM is not to be trusted. We know where the MSM is coming from when they report on Bachmann, Perry, et al. They are going to paint any ominous picture they can of Bachmann or Perry or Palin that somehow is tied into the Christian beliefs of those candidates, and they will covertyly portray Christianity as some kind of demonic faith whose faithful are closet demons only too ready to impose their demonic faith on the rest of America. It’s all hooey to scare the American public into voting for O, and we should all realize that.
Evidently, the secularization of education is so extreme these days that, when history is being taught, nobody points out that the US has been a predominantly Christian country since its founding, and that there is nothing unusual about Christians being elected to public office.
If electing Christians to public office meant that we would be seeing attempts to establish “theocracies” all over the place, surely that would have happened by now!
There is nothing in Christian doctrine that requires, or even suggests, that Christians should live under, or attempt to establish, a theocratic form of government.
The opposite is true of Islam, which requires all observant Muslims to work to establish government under shari’a law, and to expand Islamic domination. But the leftists have made their own Faustian bargain with the Muslims, so don’t expect the leftist mainstream media to tell you the truth about this!
Perfectly valid points…
But you are arguing clear truths against an AGENDA of the left, so they are dismissed,
shouted down, or simply ignored altogether.
Simply stated, would Chris Mathews ever ask such pointed questions about Planetary age, Dinosaurs and Evolution of:
The REVEREND Al Sharpton? A rather prominent political figure,
with quite a lot to say about how we “should” be governed
The REVEREND Jesse Jackson? Another of the same.
The REVEREND Jeremiah Wright? Confidant and mentor of the most powerful man on earth,
such that a phrase from one of his sermons is the title of said powerful mans best selling book.
Do these people not carry political clout?
Have they no influence?
Do they not carry forward some of the basic planks of the Lefts foundational platform?
Havent they done so all of their “political lives”?
Better yet, would CNN, MSNBC, or the NYT ever question the double standard in now examining the theological particulars of a Republicans Christianity, while NEVER having done so for any other?
Of course not….
Which is why this next election cycle is war,
And why their chosen candidates must be destroyed.
If it comes from the New York Times or other MSM (old complicit media) sources, like, who cares! Krugman, Douthat, etc. Their time has passed. We don’t manufacture many buggy whips anymore for a great reason. Progressive Luddites, go away and let the world prosper!
As someone who makes a typo about once every other sentence, I was unimpressed with Cashill’s dissection of the grammatical errors in Obama’s letter–he should have had someone proofread it and did not. I was, however, impressed with this sentence in the original letter:
“I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review’s affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.”
It undercuts the argument that Obama’s Ivy League credentials and his position at the Law Review are proof of superior intellect.
Exactly! That’s the part that confirms that Obama did not rise to where he is without taking advantage of affirmative action. He clearly did NOT do it all on his own merits.
Whether he could have achieved the same things without affirmative action is an open question; no doubt his enthusiasts will claim that he would have been just as magnificent if he hadn’t employed affirmative action. But they’ll have a hard time erasing our doubts about whether he would have made it into Harvard or onto the Law Review without affirmative action. They can no longer claim that Obama did NOT use affirmative action since his own words say that he did.
Years ago I read an analysis of the psychology of the indoctrinated, ruthless Hitler Youth, SS, and other rabid followers who helped Hitler murder millions of Jews. The brass tack it all boils down to was taking small, mean minds with inferiority complexes and flattering them that they were the chosen, superior minds.
This explains liberals. Self-appointed pseudo-intellectuals who sneer at the intelligent adults in the room. These dopes are so stupid they will never realize they’ve been duped.
It’s always easiest to fool people by telling them whatever they wanted to hear in the first place.
STR,
And Muslims too…
Inbreed, unproductive, backward thinking illiterate cave people of shockingly violent nature, told THEY are the supreme culture of the planet…
Yeah, thats plausible
Shall we have a big chorus of “Of course!” — ? How could anyone ever have imagined that Obama, who can’t remain coherent for two minutes without the aid of a teleprompter, could have written anything as graceful as “Dreams?”
The marvel of our time is the vast number of persons who still believe in Obama’s intelligence, eloquence, and patriotism, with all the evidence that’s accumulated to the contrary.
No kidding! The dude can’t even call his DOG without a teleprompter! At least one wag has suggested that Obama’s dog probably has his own teleprompter to signal him when and how to bark!
At any rate, the evidence shows that not only Obama himself, but his whole family, is wanting not only intelligence but also ethics, morals, and common sense. Obama’s recently arrested illegal alien uncle Omar Onyango is certainly not the only family member who has been on the wrong side of the law.In fact, it’s an Obama family tradition.
Is that the best you’ve got??? Guilt by association?
Quit picking on the poor dog! He didn’t have any choice about who adopted him!
Ayers was a somone and Obama was a project. Convergence of purposes.
Leaked! AP Staff Advisory on how to cover Ground Zero Mosque
http://wwwtwosetsofbooks.blogspot.com/2011/08/leaked-ap-staff-advisory-on-covering.html
Spammers are contemptible, even when their motives are not (obviously) commercial.
Pay for your own publicity, freeloader!
Ron Radosh: “Two days ago, Douthat wrote about the myth spread by many Democrats and liberals: that conservatives and Republicans want to institute a theocracy in America.”
Ted Weiland: “Not all theocracies are Christian. Some are Jewish, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and some are secular. There is no escaping theocracy. A government’s laws reflect its morality, and the source of that morality (or, more often than not, immorality) is its god. It is never a question of theocracy or no theocracy, but whose theocracy. The American people, by way of their elected officials, are the source of the Constitutional Republic’s laws. Therefore, the Constitutional Republic’s god is WE THE PEOPLE.
“People recoil at the idea of a theocracy’s morality being forced upon them, but because all governments are theocracies, someone’s morality is always being enforced. This is an inevitability of government. The question is which god, theocracy, laws, and morality will we choose to live under?”
Excerpted from “The Preamble: WE THE PEOPLE vs. YHWH” at http://www.missiontoisrael.org/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt3.php.
“…about the myth spread by many Democrats and liberals…”
You give them too much credit when you use the word “myth.” The mainstream media creates and spreads LIES! You will see lies about the “good” things Obama has done and evil things that true Americans are alleged to have done.
You can see this today, in the reporting on the war in Afghanistan and our undeclared war on Libya. Cheney defends going into Iraq in a book and the media goes crazy; Obama has still failed to report to Congress on his war in Libya and the media has other things to cover.
And, we’ll see this contrast in the coverage of EVERY topic from now ’til the election and after on every non-anti-American move of the new Republican President and Congress.
It has to be clear, to anyone following these news sites, that there is currently, and has been, a conspiracy to undermine the American Constitutional form of government.
The fact that America has so many former active and convicted terrorists with ties to the current administration, should clearly indicate that they have not shied away from their intended covert activity.
With a complicit media publishing their fairy tales of who the boogey man really is, they have secured a major victory on the American Democracy, but, there is ample evidence they will not stop at this point.
At the (purported) end of the Cold War, it was said that “Communism would someday be missed”.
That day has been upon us, since there are no suitable boogeymen outside the U.S. that are as easily ridiculed. The insurgents are still active, only against and within, the U.S.
They are engaged with more passion.
The U.S. is always engaged in war; This is a war between the Left and Right for the thoughts and minds of a gullible populace, and ultimately, their wealth of prosperity.
The mainstream media is why I come to sites like this one. Hell, I don’t even watch my local news anymore and I live in Texas! Mainstream media, what a joke. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
What a difference a half-a-century makes. In 1960 John F. Kennedy was the subject of vile and repellent attacks claiming that, as a Catholic, he was unfit to be President because he would be taking his marching orders from the Pope and would subordinate American interests to those of the Church. Sadly most of these attacks came from the extreme Right and were rightly criticized by old-line liberals.
Today the shoe is most firmly on the other foot. The Left is beavering away with an equally repellent campaign to delegitimize any (Republican) candidate who claims to have strong religious beliefs. Suddenly people like Perry, Romney and Bachmann should be rejected out-of-hand due to their (rather unremarkable) strains of Christianity. The dinosaur media and their handmaidens are engaging in something that was wrong in 1960 and is wrong today….Religious bigotry pure and simple. The fact that most of the “prestige” press such as the NYT and WaPo goes in for this does not make it any less nauseating.
Let’s see, God is absolute goodness and absolute truth. No wonder the left abhors Him. (and more than a few on the fiscal/libertarian right) Small wonder our forefathers understood that our rights only come from “nature’s” God.
Does the left wish to deny the need of a society for God and therefore take away the only reason man has any rights? Yup.
It’s not hard to figure out their prime motive, if you’re not one of them -those who can’t have seriouos competition to their almighty super-state.
It’s no accident that the American Communist Party has the very same goals. At least they understand what they need to do for their total takeover of America.
I saw the Cashill piece at AT — but did not have a chance to get a comment to them, so herewith: “and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind.” Is this sphrase so terrible without “who”? I see President Obama as a neo-aristocrat. To this perhaps should be added: a neo-aristocrat who needs to review his drafts more carefullly. With respect to the Radosh caveat about lib journalists, why should we expect anything different?
And, an Example of Why We Can’t Trust Immigration Authorities:
Uncle Omar and Aunt Zeituni
They keep popping out of the woodwork.
Most of us have relatives we wish were related to other people. Unless we’re Hispanic, few of us can claim or want to claim as familial relations people who break the law by sneaking into our country and then add insult to national injury by driving drunk.
Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, seems to have any number of such relatives, only two of whom have been caught. So far.
The latest is Obama’s dear Kenyan uncle, Onyango Obama, who joins Obama’s dear Aunt Zeituni Onyango as a felon. Uncle Onyango added drunk driving to his resume’ whereas Aunt Zeituni has merely lived on the public dole for more than a decade.
Uncle Omar, as Nephew Barack called him in Dreams from My Father, is the half-brother of Barack’s late father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., full brother of Zeituni Onyango, and uncle to George Obama, another Senior offspring and half-brother to America’s president and current resident of a Nairobi ghetto, all of whom are Kenyan natives.
Barack Junior’s is a complicated family.
Omar apparently shares more than his half-brother’s genes; he shares Obama Senior’s propensity to drink and drive though Senior seemed to have done most of his drunk driving in Africa where he wrecked three cars, lost his legs in the second accident, and died in the third.
Somehow, Senior, Uncle Omar and Aunt Zeituni made their way to America, Senior long enough to make a baby in Hawaii. Poor George hasn’t gotten here as yet and subsists on a buck a week in his hovel.
Uncle Omar, 67, was charged with DUI, negligent operation of a motor vehicle and failure to yield the right of way when he rolled through a stop sign in Framingham, Massachusetts. The police noted his speech was slurred and he tested with a blood alcohol level of 0.14%, 0.6% over the limit. He denied he had been drinking, then admitted to imbibing two beers, a pretty unlikely quantity unless each brew was half a gallon.
The plot thickens.
Police subsequently discovered that Uncle Omar Obama had a valid driver’s license and Social Security identification but wasn’t supposed to be in the country in the first place. He’s an illegal alien and is currently being held on an immigration detainer, usually a prelude to deportation by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Apprised of the incident, Deval Patrick, the African-American governor of the Bay State, responded with a typically-unresponsive, politicly-motivated comment unrelated to the issue, “You know my stance: Illegal is illegal. We need comprehensive immigration reform.”
Don’t bet on Onyango Obama being shipped back to Kenya, though. He has a few aces up his sleeve, a nephew in D.C. and a sister in Boston.
Asked by police whom he would want to contact, Uncle Omar said,”I think I will call the White House,” which usually doesn’t accept collect calls and had no comment on the situation.
No doubt he will also drop a dime and call fellow Bostonian Zeituni who knows all the ins-and-outs on beating America’s feckless immigration system because she has already done it. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5312)
And the Bush Twins underage drinking eposode got way more Mainstream Media coverage than B.O will face now.
They learned their lesson with Billy Carter…
Only do guilt by association on REPUBLICAN extended families.
No matter how newsworthy, when its going to hurt “our guy”, lay off.
This is the same left leaning media that seems comfortable with Islamic encroachments into the social, religious and legal facets of US life. These accompanied by Sharia Law and all that entails. This portends the ultimate in theocratic rule.
The problem is that Conservatives do not know how to respond to the rude questions about faith.
“God is a personal God. Jesus is my personal Savior. There is no theocracy in my belief system.”
“I refer such questions to professionals. Please ask Rev. Sharpton or Rev. Jackson… or even Rev. Wright, if you have a strong stomach.”
Or best, “Will you come to my church? Will you pray with me? Have you been saved, brother? Would you consider making a donation? Etc….”
Reagan knew how to have fun with these guys. Today’s Conservatives only know how to joke with their own side, not the other side.
Yeah!
That’s one of the many reasons they hated him. They were forever his straight men, handing him the lines, and winding up as the butt of the joke.
He was masterful!
I particularly love the line in this video at about 1:25.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRwyuWcCps0
Yes he was masterful as that clip shows, but Ronnie isn’t one of the candidates, is he?
My question is;
How much golf did Obama play before getting elected CEO of America?
Off topic: Citing Unreliability, Germany Rejects Airport Body Scanners
After extensive testing, Germany has decided not to deploy body scanners at the nation’s airports. Germany field-tested the scanners with more than 800,000 passengers over ten months and concluded the devices produced too many false alarms and were not effective. In an interview with ABC News EPIC’s John Verdi said, “when they can’t distinguish between body sweat and explosives, they aren’t making anyone safer.” Italy also recently removed the scanners from airports after the Italian Civil Aviation Authority concluded that they were inaccurate and inconvenient. EPIC has petitioned a federal appeals court to rehear the organization’s challenge to the controversial program, citing erroneous findings that the devices would detect liquid and powdered explosive. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. DHS (Suspension of Body Scanner Program).
Lets look at his school records and see what his IQ is, shall we? Oh, he has hidden those? My, one wonders why?
Obama is not educated; indoctrinated is more precise. He is a marxist ideologue lacking full comprehension of the necessary consequences of the application of communist principles. In other words, a typical liberal.
But his great deficiency is his total lack of morality. He has sometimes self-identified as a moslem; but also as a christian. He is certainly not the latter; nor is his mentor, Jeremiah Wright. The NT says that Jesus Christ saves those who obey Him, Heb.5.9, and babykilling, sex perversion promoting reprobates do not meet that definition; nor do spewers of hate like Obamas “pastor”.
Click on “Antisocial Personality” and see that Obama fits all of the factors used to measure sociopathy. The most powerful man in the world is a psychopath.
It is time for all of you dolts who put him where he is to repent and remove him from office; then arrange to undo all the evil he has so far accomplished.
Get to work!