Using CNN’s line of thought, Target stores have been inciting hatred since 1962! This reminds me of a few books on the PC lifestyle the Left loves to try and inflict on us all. A fun read on this topic was written by Michael Smerconish entitled Muzzled. In his opening sentences of his first paragraph he says this:
MUZZLED. In a word, it’s what we’ve become. Words and actions in this country have become MUZZLED by those among us in favor of political correctness who would sacrifice the rugged individualism that has been the hallmark of our nation. It’s a trend that has been building for a while but is now totally out of control.
And in the final sentences Smerconish writes a fictitious letter to his son. But with all this talk… is it not headed this way? I mean, if “crosshairs” can be scrubbed from TV, how long before the actual crosshairs? Which is why putting Constitutional judges on the Supreme Court is key. Here is that fictional ending:
You know your dad; I was never comfortable when they passed the mandatory handgun hand-in.
Maybe I should have seen it coming.
I mean, when Congress finally declared the NRA to be a hate group, the handwriting was on the wall.
But they really took the gun outlawing too far. I mean, when the citizen ban was expanded to police, that was just too much for me.
At Hot Air, Allahpundit wonders: How did America survive through all the years CNN aired this program
This weird 1984/Animal Farm/Fahrenheit 451/Brave New World way of thinking that infects the left is crazy! However, since the Democratic Party is leaning left these days, there is some history people should know about maybe why it is that the Left loves to control language in a Politically Correct fashion. Here is a decent 3-part YouTube presentation of the ideas behind this language control:
HotAir is reporting an aid saying that the death threats to Palin have increased dramatically:
An aide close to Sarah Palin says death threats and security threats have increased to an unprecedented level since the shooting in Arizona, and the former Alaska governor’s team has been talking to security professionals.
Since the shooting in Tucson, Palin has taken much heat for her “crosshairs” map that targeted 20 congressional Democrats in the 2010 mid-term election, including that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was the main target of Saturday’s attack.
Friends say Palin, a possible 2012 contender, was galled as suggestions of her role in the tragedy have swirled.
Is the Left responsible for this spike in hatred? What is — God forbid — Sarah Palin is hurt? Do the pundits, personalities, etc., have any responsibility for this — using their own thinking displayed with connecting Palin to this tragedy? Here is a conversation from FB I had on this topic. I posted the following statement with a link to a post I had:
If the Arizona shooter was influenced by national hatred, which rhetorical side do you think he was influenced by: [quote from story] As we all know, the Tea Party movement is teeming with Bush-hating, 9/11 truther, antiwar, Christian-hating, “Left-wing pothead” zealots
Here is the first comment I agreed with, so here is the second comment and this kicks off the discussion in earnest. (Keep in mind all people that comment mean no malice and are friends, albeit from the other side of the political — and religious — spectrum) Misspellings included:
sorry, but liberals don’t affiliate themselves with supremacist orginizations like American Reniassance as Jared did – all the “news” agencies that “report” Jared a leftist are extreme conservative sites, while the actual newsworthy sites (AP, even Fox) paint him as unstable with ties to a racist orginization. Being back in college for Biotech we are constantly reminded to vet internet info …But I agree with Reagan, time to STOP blaming society and blame the individual. You gotta admit, when an extremist Right winger goes off the deep end, bombs and guns are involved Federal Agents are killed, Abortion Dr’s are perforated, Federal Buildings blown up, offices and people attacked- when a liberal goes off the deep end, they move to the forest and build a teepee to live in.
Me:
Yes, he was crazy, bottom line. But if he was influenced by something, it was by people who
a) hated Bush
b) 9/11 truther
Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.
c) antiwar
d) hated Christians
e) was an atheist
f) Left-wing pothead
[added later]
g) fixated with Giffords 3-years ago ~ before Obama, Health-Care, and the like
you are ridiculous… and stubborn….and obviously care more about pointing fingers and making yourself feel better, than actually taking a step back and looking at what political rhetoric in this country is coming to. in stead of spurring healthy debate, politicos (on both sides) obsession with the mass media outlets, and their attempts to cater to every fringe constituent they can, has created a media monster that has more to do with “I know you are but what am I” and less to do with developing policies and legislature that reflect the peoples’ best interests…. good thing you cant own guns or I else I would be waiting for the day you finally cant take anymore from your leftist friends and the liberal media and make a list and start picking off libs…..don’t get any ideas.
My response:
My point is that the only people making rhetorical attacks — to which my blog (for those not aware of it: https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/) is responding to — are from the left. Please, tell me whom on the right that are equal to Senators and MSNBC pundits are making rhetorical claims about Sarah Palin being behind this (via crosshairs) or calling Tea Partiers Nazi’s and fomenting the national mood that makes someone shoot people. YES HE WAS A NUT… but if Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Andrea Mitchell, Sheriff Dupnik, Ed Schultz, E. Steven Collins, Michael Smerconish, Woopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Mark Shields, Bill Maher, Matt Bai, Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva, Democrat Rep. Bill Pascrell, Democrat Rep. James Clyburn, Democrat Sen. Bob Kerrey, ETC, ETC
Of course I cannot forget Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (who caucuses with the Democrats) fund raising letter just a couple of days after the shooting:
Given the recent tragedy in Arizona, as well as the start of the new Congress, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a few words with political friends in Vermont and throughout the country. I also want to thank the very many supporters who have begun contributing online to my 2012 reelection campaign at www.bernie.org. There is no question but that the Republican Party, big money corporate interests and right-wing organizations will vigorously oppose me. Your financial support now and in the future is much appreciated. What should be understood is that the violence, and threats of violence against Democrats in Arizona, was not limited to Gabrielle Giffords. Raul Grijalva, an old friend of mine and one of the most progressive members in the House, was forced to close his district office this summer when someone shot a bullet through his office window. Another Democratic elected official in Arizona, recently defeated Congressman Harry Mitchell, suspended town meetings in his district because of the threatening phone calls that he received (Mitchell was also in the cross-hairs on the Palin map). And Judge John Roll, who was shot to death at the Giffords event, had received numerous threatening calls and death threats in 2009.In light of all of this violence – both actual and threatened – is Arizona a state in which people who are not Republicans are able to participate freely and fully in the democratic process? Have right-wing reactionaries, through threats and acts of violence, intimidated people with different points of view from expressing their political positions?
Remember this by all the same people and then some?
….On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.
Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.
“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.
“We cannot jump to conclusions,” said CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. “We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever.”
“I’m on Pentagon chat room,” said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. “Right now, there’s messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam.”
The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, “I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president’s remarks.
“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a “transparent” investigation into the shootings “so the American people don’t jump to conclusions.” And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN’s John Roberts was quick to intervene. “Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions,” Roberts said to Hoekstra. “By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?
My point is that most of the rhetoric I have seen (and still is coming from the Left) are from liberal pundits. And this card often used by them:
The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as “racist.” And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill “xenophobic.”
Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.
One-word put-downs of opponents’ ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual — their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors — liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.
This is easy to demonstrate.
Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:
Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant
And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:
Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment
These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.
This psychological hatred from the Left towards Bush and now Sarah Palin is what is making the mood of the nation bitter. And it may have bad consequences that I am sure the Left will accept as warranted — ate least some.
Obviously this young man was schizophrenic, and this was the cause of his spree. However, if you have persons trying to pin this on Palin or the Tea Party… here is the beginning of what I am sure will be qualities of the left:
A classmate of the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords this morning describes him as “left wing” and a “pot head” in a series of posts on Twitter this afternoon.
Caitie Parker did not immediately respond to our request for an interview, but her “tweets” in the hours after the shooting paint a picture of Jared Loughner as a substance-abusing loner who had met Giffords before the shooting. She says, Loughner described the congresswoman as “stupid and unintelligent.”
We’ve confirmed that Parker and Loughner went to school together at Mountain View High School in Tucson and that both attended Pima Community College, so her claims of knowing Loughner seem to be legit.
Parker “tweets” that she and Loughner were in the band together and were friends until 2007 when he became “reclusive” after getting alcohol poisoning and dropping out of college.
She describes him as “quite liberal” and as a “political radical.”
Jim Wallis has been the subject of some recent blogosphere humor. Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Most folks who receive donations from billionaires tend not to forget them, so pray for Jim Wallis’s memory.” Scholar William Voegeli wondered whether Sojourners “is drowning in money,” since Wallis didn’t remember that megabucks leftist George Soros gave $325,000 to his organization. With Jim’s denial appearing Clintonian, Baylor’s Francis Beckwith imagined Wallis saying, I did not have financial relations with that Soros.
This all grew out of my mention halfway through a July 17 WORLD column that Soros gave money to Sojourners. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Of course, Soros would find the religious left useful in drawing evangelical votes from conservatives and electing candidates who support abortion, same-sex marriage, socialism, and other unbiblical causes. Nor was it surprising that Jim, trying to keep his organization afloat, would take the cash. Yet Jim last month told an interviewer twice, “We don’t receive money from George Soros.”
It’s almost an axiom of politics that denials of evidence raise more questions than the original accusation—if the evidence still exists in one form or another. Other people besides myself had seen grants to Sojourners listed on pages in online reports from Soros’ Open Society Institute. Jay Richards wrote in National Review Online, “I have physical copies of these pages, which is good, because these pages seem to have disappeared from the OSI website (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence).”
The pages had disappeared—an OSI spokeswoman eventually said, “We are overhauling our website”—and that was disappointing, because I wanted people to be able to see for themselves proof of the Soros-Sojourners yoking. What to do? I examined on the Foundation Center website IRS Form 990s filed by Sojourners—but nonprofit groups merely have to list revenue from grants, not spell out their origins.
A stalemate? No, wait—OSI online grant pages were gone, but what about OSI’s Form 990 for 2004? (Grantmakers typically list their donations, and IRS forms cannot be so readily scrubbed, right?) Let’s look—wow, 283 pages, lots of income statements, various reports, no mention of Sojourners. But then . . . Grants to U.S. Public Charities . . . Yes! On page 225: Sojourners, 2401 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009. “To support the Messaging and Mobilization Project: Engaging Christians on the Importance of Civic Involvement.” October 2004: $200,000.
This comes with a big thanks to The Religion of Conquest, who hat-tipped me about this set of videos by Jamie Glazov. Jamie is an editor over at FrontPage Magazine and his articles are highly recommended. Wikipedia has this on him:
Glazov’s father, Yuri Glazov, was a Soviet dissident during the Leonid Brezhnev period, and signed the Letter of Twelve, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. His mother, Marina Glazov, was also an active dissident, typing and circulating Samizdat, underground political literature. Glazov’s father took the risk of applying for a visa to exit the USSR. Avoiding imprisonment, Yuri Glazov and his family left the USSR in 1972 and settled in Halifax, in 1975, when Jamie was nine.
So my question is this then, considering the below examples (old and recent), if one who watches MSNBC cannot see the liberal bias in MSNBC… what does that say about their cognitive skills? BigJournalism has the ratings from the election night, and FoxNews trumps the liberal media… here is what the cable networks drew on average From 8-11 PM ET:
FNC: 6.957 million total viewers, 2.43 million A25-54
CNN: 2.423 million total viewers, 1.03 million A25-54
MSNBC: 1.945 million total viewers, 669,000 A25-54
Fox gets a better mix of watchers compared to other news outlets — a more even mix of political watchers in other words:
And it is why Fox slams MSNBC in the ratings daily! We find others agree (Media’ite) with the idea that Fox’s coverage was superior:
“Fair and Balanced” is a tag line for Fox News that often gets derided by its critics (and sometimes most deservedly.) But that does not mean that they don’t deserve credit when credit is due.
To be fair, NBC did join coverage earlier, after an all-new Biggest Loser.) Fox News, for all its image as the Republican-friendly network, actually seemed to have the most reserved coverage in tone of the three big cablers, going with a more reserved set and less flashy graphics (granted, by cable news standards) than its competitors. A whiteboard was even employed.
Credit where due, Fox also had a more, well, balanced panel much of the night than its competitor MSNBC. Holding forth from left of center for Fox were the recently-high-profile Juan Williams and Democratic political guru Joe Trippi. MSNBC’s main lineup, on the other hand, was basically its center-to-left lineup of nightly hosts: Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell.
Politico also drew a similar distinction between the coverage and analysis provided by MSNBC and Fox News:
Although Fox News took the most criticism during this campaign season for its alleged bias, it was MSNBC — whose new “Lean Forward” tagline inspired CNN’s promo — that wore its point of view most on its sleeve Tuesday night.
MSNBC’s election coverage was led by a panel comprised mostly of its opinionated prime-time hosts (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, along with frequent contributor Eugene Robinson), with nary a conservative voice in the mix. In contrast, Fox News’s was provided by two anchors from its straight-news dayside, Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier, along with a panel that included conservatives like Karl Rove as well as liberals like Juan Williams. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity stopped by only briefly.
Verum Serum adds to the mix with the following stories:
Mediaite’s round-up did not include this similar conclusion from left-of-center NPR:
On MSNBC, however, the voices vied to dominate. From left to right — visually, not ideologically — the channel’s analysis was handled by Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., Eugene Robinson, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. (O’Donnell waited his turn to talk, but the others didn’t stand on courtesy.) They made up a lively liberal bunch, but hardly a varied one, with nary a feint toward balance.
Fox is at least making a pretense of maintaining the traditional separation between news and commentary. Then there’s MSNBC, which is being anchored, more or less, by liberal yakker Keith Olbermann…Occasionally they bring in the hyper-aggressively liberal bloviator Ed Schultz, setting up the image of the left quizzing the far left.
The Washington Post offered a pox-on-all-their-houses approach, which nevertheless criticized the biased MSNBC coverage. And sure enough the biased anchors at MSNBC provided plenty of far-left insight. Rand Paul’s victory speech was an occasion to predict the end of global civilization (no really). Marco Rubio’s win in Florida immediately led to a discussion of ethnic authenticity. Chris O’Donnell asked Michelle Bachmann if she’d be “hypnotized” to laughter from the panel. Lawrence O’Donnell warned Rachel Maddow not to compare any “human being” to Glenn Beck. And so it went.
