Last night I was reading the WSJ as is my wont when I saw an article penned by Jacques Barzun. About ten years ago I read a book by him on prosody. At the time he was in his nineties, and I was surprised he had written such a good book. He wrote another one about ten years ago on the history of the last 500 years.
I googled last night, and Barzun was born in 1907. I don't know if there are many writers who live to be 103. I can't think of any others. Wodehouse died at 96. Philippe Soupault died at 93. Sophocles apparently wrote Oedipus at Colonnus in his nineties. His sons said he was senile and so they should be able to take his land. Sophocles showed the jury Oedipus at Colonnus and they said he was of sound mind (not so sure about Oedipus himself). I think Barzun's survival is a wondrous thing.
At any rate, Barzun's article was about how the ancient Greeks valued scholar-soldiers, and how we should, too. Barzun taught at Columbia for decades. In 1968, Columbia outlawed the ROTC from appearing on campus. But they said if the military got rid of DADT, they would allow them on campus. Now the military has done just that, and Columbia has reneged and said we don't want a bunch of uniformed people on campus making us into a militaristic campus. They took back their word. Barzun said that Harvard meanwhile has allowed the military back on campus, as have many other campuses. I wrote to Stuart Kurtz about this and he came down on the side of the ROTC. I'll let Stu speak for himself:
"Our military can either fulfill its role as one of the great supporters of our democracy, or it can become democracy's greatest enemy, as has happened with some frequency in Latin America (c.f., Argentina, Chile for relatively recent and notorious examples). If it is to continue to serve in the former supportive role, it is essential that a certain fraction of our best and brightest choose the services as their career.
Now, I've been at schools with active and visible ROTC programs (Michigan State, Illinois). The notion that these schools became militarized through their ROTC programs is laughable. On the other hand, it seems to me that Columbia's position, if taken broadly, will tend to intellectually impoverish the military, and with it, to weaken its (small d) democratic commitment.
Historically, the military has sometimes been ahead of the country socially (e.g., during the Civil War, when the Union Army used African American units to good effect, and during the Eisenhower administration when the services were integrated), and sometimes behind (e.g., during WW II, when African Americans were generally used as servants or laborers, and only infrequently as actual combatants, a reflection of the Jim Crow south rather than of the nation as a whole). Recently, they've been a bit behind on homosexuality, and a bit ahead in terms of race. I think there was merit to drawing a line on homosexuality, as Harvard did. Their policy is that campus based organizations could not discriminate, and the services did. Hence, no ROTC. Now that DADT is dead, the objection no longer holds. Hence, ROTC is welcome back at Harvard. Columbia's position, though, of erecting a new barrier immediately smacks of bad faith."
Meanwhile, another Democratic stalwart, my friend Hazard Adams, also disagrees with Columbia's position, and says, "they should get over it."
As much as we can disagree here, those who stick around (and aren't ejected) still have some things in common. We agree that there is something to be said for truth and honesty, and that if our word is given, it's our word. Plus, (Stu said this), most of us agree that truth can be found in Scripture, and we accept it as a common source of appeal.
At any rate, Hallelujah for Jacques Barzun! He gives us all hope.
91 comments:
The House of Intellect was the first book I read as a college student. It didn't do much for me at the time. It was all about philanthropy, whatever that was. I kept looking in the university catalogue to see if there were courses in it and if you could major in it.
The first Barzun book I remember reading was "Darwin, Marx, Wagner"; and I also found "The Modern Researcher" of great use as a vade mecum when writing my MA thesis in history many years ago.
I liked some of stu's comments (and believe me, I do look for opportunities to praise them) on the ROTC issue at Columbia, though it should be pointed out that Columbia, Harvard, and other schools initially axed their ROTC programmes to placate anti-war and anti-military agitators on their campuses. Only much later did they discover their opposition to the government's DADT policy banning open homosexuality in the military, perhaps as a legal hedge against the Solomon Amendment, which, properly enforced, should have denied federal funding to all institutions of higher learning banning military recruiters from any of its schools.
Nevertheless, I do hope the new policies work well enough to the advantage of our military and our country, though I'm concerned about the effects of creeping PC (as may have had a disastrous influence in the case of Major Hasan) in military command circles.
JADL,
This notion that PC dominates at Columbia is probably correct. There is one good professor in Philosophy named Jeremy Waldron who has a good book called God, Locke, and Equality. I liked the book. I doubt if he would do any harm to any minds.
But they also have Judith Butler in philosophy -- she's more or less the queen of gender bending self-indulgence, it's seemingly her only concern. She leans heavily on Foucault and Lacan, and has the worst kind of perverse fascination with pimps and prostitutes and child prostitution and so on, thinking it's a wonderful world. I can't understand why people like that have managed to gobble up so many resources that could go to other lineages of endeavor, and even gobble up the CDC's budget with all the problems of their erroneous consciences that nevertheless present themselves as princesses and princes of self-righteousness.
The horror of the rgc selfishness that poses as self-righteous knowitall elitism is a symptom of our time, I think.
Not sure if anything can really correct this fascination with gender bending and perversion which basically takes us back to Nero's Rome and yet puts it all in the light of radical activism against Christian morality which is way too restrained, I guess, for their utter immorality. So we have to pay for their goofiness, as they use up the CDC budget, and make our country far less strong, not only in terms of our borders but our internal boundaries, which become susceptible to strange inclinations which make no sense to anybody outside of that sick sphere of self-indulgent solipsism represented by the likes of Foucault and his myriad prancing and mincing acolytes.
But I don't really know if everybody at Columbia is a moral pervert convinced that self-indulgence in things sexual is the highest aim of adult life.
they have a guy on Fox from time to time from Columbia who's very far left (he used to be at Temple). He's slowly learning how to present himself as more moderate on Fox, and he's very friendly with O'Reilly.
Columbia has been on Fox from time to time as very unfriendly to the Minute Men, and very unfriendly to any notion of pride in American life or in its traditions.
The campus itself however doesn't strike me as too ghastly. Their library is ok. The neighborhood is ok. The food is ok.
The local bookstore (Labyrinth) has become a cesspool of the Foucauldian sensibility: one perverse stupid book after another completely without any moral awareness outside of the rgc sensibility.
Sad and weird. But Waldron is also at Columbia (he makes actual sense) and no doubt there are others like him. The ROTC crowd if they did attend Columbia would probably learn how to pick their profs, and stay away from poisoned apples offered by the likes of Butler from her gingerbread house.
The left at universities is morally deficient in any number of ways, part of which has to do with the basic building blocks of their moral vocabulary.
One of their top phrases in 69, went, "Make love, not war."
In this simple phrase a lot of problems lurked. They thought that f-ing someone was moral, because it wasn't killing someone. Of course, it frequently led to an abortion, so it was in fact killing someone.
Inconvenient truths all over the place in the leftist vision.
But it wasn't really love, love someone, it was MAKE love, as if you can manufacture it with sufficient blind gyrations.
And then they demonize war, as if saving someone, caring enough to sacrifice your life for that of another, is morally deficient. So naturally they don't want to go into Libya.
Dubya still understood that war could be a moral thing.
BO doesn't get it. He doesn't know this. He thinks it's always imperialistic.
But war can also mean sacrifice, and often has in the history of humanity clear back in our nation's history to at least the Civil War.
I know GM is mysteriously on the side of the left in this. All war is evil in his mind. But it's often an act of the very highest charity that humankind can conceive.
But probably no one at Columbia can conceive this. Barzun still can. Stu still can. We still can.
Most of the left is down with Nero. They think it should all be bread and circuses, with lots of gender-bending.
At Columbia, the moral prof Judy Butler thinks gender bending is the highest moral act any individual can perform.
Even Nero wouldn't have gone that far. Even Caligula wouldn't have gone that far. There's no pig who would conceive of this. Not even an ant. It's just today's left.
Be the worst that you can be should be Columbia's recruiting slogan for its philosophy program.
Butler looks to Foucault, who in turn looked to Sade, as the highest of moral philosophy.
"Be the worst you can be."
I wish they'd at least be honest and hang it from the front of their philosophy department's front door.
(On the other hand, they do still have Jeremy Waldron, who is quite good.)
Yes, Kirby, Judith Butler's a lamentable case of an academic forever beyond retraining as a useful citizen.
And she's is the worst, in the sound judgement some years back of the editors at the journal "Philosophy and Literature," where she earned the journal's prize as "bricoleuse" of the worst academic prose by beating out the nearly as execrable Homi Baba.
Reading only a few pages of her jargon-drenched, "body studies," "post-structuralist" verbiage, from which only occasionally some highly dubious assertion emerges (like some expression of support for the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah she is delusional enough to call "progressives"), is like the effect of a heavy shot of xylocaine into one's cerebrum.
I didn't know she's now going to Columbia (from her present lair at Berkeley), but I suspect the allure of more money and royal perks like copious jet-setter conference jaunts and evanescent class and office responsibilities might have tipped her hand.
JADL,
Only much later did they discover their opposition to the government's DADT policy banning open homosexuality in the military, perhaps as a legal hedge against the Solomon Amendment, which, properly enforced, should have denied federal funding to all institutions of higher learning banning military recruiters from any of its schools.
I've done a bit of poking around. Here are my thoughts, which are not intended to be dispositive, but as a basis for further discussion.
The key issue here (at least according to the Wiki article on the Solomon Amendment) was access by military recruiters to Law Schools, and was in response to a requirement by the Association of American Law Schools that member institutions themselves cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, nor can they permit potential employers who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation access to their students.
So while I believe you're correct in believing that many schools closed down their ROTC programs in response to the Vietnam era anti-war movement, this seems not to have been the issue the Solomon amendment was targeting, and as such, you've got the causal chain wrong. It seems to me that the causal chain that lead to the Solomon Amendment was: DADT, then the AALS resolution, and then the Solomon Amendment.
And I dispute your claim that the Solomon Amendment was never properly enforced. The trigger for the remedies of the Solomon Amendment was not that an institution prohibited ROTC and/or access to military recruiters, it was instead a determination by the Secretary of Defense that an institution did so. As far as I know, the Secretary of Defense never made such a determination. Clearly, the framers of the Amendment wanted to leave the SecDef with discretionary powers, and while it may be the case that various SecDefs of both parties (William Perry, William Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates) made discretionary choices that you'd have made otherwise, their choices do not constitute a failure of enforcement.
Their problem was that Law Schools are difficult targets. There are fundamental constitutional issues of freedom of association and prohibition of quartering without consent that make legislation requiring access constitutionally dubious, and Law Schools are extraordinarily capable of defending themselves. The Solomon Amendment tries to avoid the difficulties by taking the indirect approach of tying federal funds to access. The problem here is that Law Schools receive little or no federal funding (and the Civil Rights Restoration Act doesn't apply to the military). And attempts to broaden their target surface by going after the entire institution are either going to be capricious or counterproductive.
Robert Gates has been especially adroit in his handling of the matter, appeasing conservative elements in the military by leaving DADT in place as long as possible, and then abandoning before it an adverse judicial finding that would have very likely resulted in judicial remedies. In effect, he's managed to maintain control of the process in the face of a changing social environment by lowering the military's judicial target surface.
Interestingly enough, by isolating itself, Columbia has made itself vulnerable to a SecDef determination in a way that it wasn't when it was "traveling with the herd," because it loses the cover of a defense based on capricious enforcement.
How much does Columbia U stand to lose in federal dollars? Where does one find such information?
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/does-raw-video-of-npr-expose-reveal-questionable-editing-tactics/
interesting stuff about all the careful editing of that undercover NPR video by the Ihavenoethics guy...
Rather than stay and fight the charges the Schillers jumped ship, rats that they are, heralding the possible sinking of the ship of NPR itself. O'Keefe has now sunk Acorn, and probably soon NPR, as well, as communist enterprises who were not on the side of the people, as they claimed, but on their own side, scarfing up what goods they could find, and serving us treacle, while really spreading a kind of polluted factional politics in which no real good sound values existed. It's too bad. I think NPR is sunk, just like ACORN. Squirrelly idiots who couldn't distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, and have now smashed on the reefs of O'Keefe's righteous anger.
Meanwhile, the attempts to present the Tea Party as a "racist, racist" group (since they have no other negative comment they have to double it up to make any other comment), have mostly been found wanting because totally untrue. This isn't racism. It's about making sure the ship of state is financially sound again, and that brave entrepreneurs rather than piratical rats, are in charge.
The whole left is sinking under the weight of rgc evils, just as the left of the Khmer Rouge, of Stalin, of Mao, of Honnekker, have all sunk. Ceausescu has been rotting in his grave for 20 years. NPR isn't quite Ceausescu. Ceausescu is what NPR would be if they could be, but they always had to leave open at least lip service to freedom, which is why they kept on the likes of Juan Williams.
Once they dumped Williams, the jig was up.
Columbia U. still has a few good men: Waldron in philosophy, and probably a few others. It's not just a rat's nest of gender-bender perversion experts who don't care about anything beyond their solipsistic selves (let the CDC clean up their warts and other sexual diseases that are costing the nation billions).
O'Keefe is like the Minute Men of olde.
As is, in his own way, Barzun. It's never too late to serve your country, Barzun seems to want to say. May he have many more years, and many more salvos.
O'keefe is not like the minutemen of old -
He's like the Michael Moore of the right.
Kirby,
Schiller should have been more circumspect, more moderate.
But remember, our God is a God of Truth. One of the Ten Commandments that you so often celebrate is "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor," and that is exactly the sin you're celebrating when you compare O'Keefe to the Minute Men of Olde.
Either you care for the truth or you don't. Either you're a scholar or you're not. Please read the article that Brett pointed to. or any of the thousand other articles that made the same point. And then, consider your choice in celebrating O'Keefe's false witness, and whether or not that represents the person you believe yourself to be.
Brett, no one anywhere takes Michael Moore seriously. He's a joke even among the left. O'Keefe has been much more effective.
Stu, we don't know what the NPR execs have said or done, and those shilling for the Schillers are not going to tell us the truth, either, any more than NPR itself wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They have a slanted truth, but they want the whole community to pay for it. I rather like the channel when I can get it -- especially coverage of arts events.
But it's not fair that the whole community pays and only 3% of the elite has their viewpoint covered.
I think O'Keefe caught the secular elitists in their act. It seems truthful to me, even if it was selectively edited to make it somewhat worse. Actually, I thought Schiller came off pretty well. He stood up to the interlocutors here and there. But dropping out without a contest confirmed the guilt he felt. The terms "racist, racist" came right out of his mouth wrt the Tea Party. That's enough to show his incredibly slanted viewpoint, very much comparable to the other Schiller. And I think if there is any truth to this it has yet to have any evidence behind it except for wishful thinking on the part of the left.
Why would you want such a slanted person telling the news as the official news of America?
Perhaps all the news is slanted and biased at this point, and our truths are no more than what the three men and the elephant represent, but we should at least have mixed political coverage, from right and left. There is more leftwing discussion (Colmes, et al.) on Fox than there are righties at NPR, and NPR is paid for out of federal funding. It really isn't right.
I often listen to extremely far left coverage on NPR when I'm travelling. Actually, I find it refreshing to hear such out and out hoot owls discussing their viewpoints as I'm very familiar with those viewpoints, but not via any major media outlet. I went to far left schools like Evergreen and later the UW and knew people who thought like this. The representation of them was fair and balanced, even if there was some cutting here and there. He still said what he said, and never contested it.
You never hear anyone on NPR who is even remotely centrist. Juan Williams is hardly a rightie. He loves Obama, and has many times stood up for Sharpton and Jackson and that crowd while talking with O'Reilly andGeraldo and Greta. If we believe in truth, then we should shut NPR down.
Or we should argue for fair coverage of more diverse viewpoints from within its spectrum of offerings. At this point, any truth it offers is slanted to the far left. They are even left of Brett and you. It's the most uniquely one-dimensional political viewpoint in the entire media sphere perhaps (until you get to maybe super tiny demographics?). I can't think of any station that is more slanted except perhaps MSNBC.
Kirby, are you saying that since the link I posted shows that there were some extremely underhanded and downright deceptive editing choices in the O'Keefe piece, that the website I linked to must be 'shilling' for NPR?
That's what I inferred from what you implied - that being said, "The Blaze is a news, information and opinion site brought to you by Glenn Beck and a dedicated team of writers, journalists & video producers."
So it's not a site 'shilling' for NPR in any way, shape, or form... It's just a site that shows that O'Keefe lied with editing...
Kirby,
I've not see the video, but I have read many accounts of it. None deny that Schiller characterized the Tea Party as racist. And I haven't read of anyone leaping to defend that judgment. But the Blaze article makes the point that in the full video, Schiller is recounting the judgment of two Republicans, a judgment that he later agrees with. The effect of O'Keefe's edits, though, is to take Schiller's quoting of Republican sources and place those quotes in his mouth. That's false witness.
Splicing together answers with other questions, that's false witness. And there's much more, in the Blaze article.
Trying to make this an argument over NPR values isn't going to work. There really are three issues here.
1) O'Keefe's willful lies, his choice to edit videos so as to create an intentionally misleading impression, his decision to bear false witness.
2) Your willingness, even after O'Keefe has been repeatedly exposed as liar, to continue to view his videos as constituting evidence of anything other than his own perfidy. You'd be on slightly stronger ground basing an opinion on the "full" video, but as the Blaze article points out, even the "full" videos show evidence of significant editing. If you want to make the case that NPR has a liberal bias, that's an argument we can have later -- but O'Keefe's video is inadmissible, and the fact that you still give it any credit at all reflects poorly on your judgment. The only difference between this and the fraud that Dan Rather fell for is that you have the evidence in front of you that it is a fraud, and yet you continue to believe.
3) Your willingness to excuse O'Keefe, as if the "good work" he's doing in discrediting groups that you see as advancing liberal views is somehow a justification for bearing false witness. Not only are you presenting yourself as someone who prefers lies that confirm your views to actual truth, you're putting yourself in the position of blessing those lies, and calling them good. Is that really what you want to do?
Or do the Ten Commandments merely principles of convenience for you, something that you can raise to criticize and judge your opponents, but non-binding on your allies?
I'm willing to believe that O'Keefe skewed the truth in order to skewer those he set out to skewer -- but I wouldn't characterize NPR as liberal, which in turn skewers and skews the truth. NPR has a viewpoint and in turn skewers anyone who doesn't agree with it. They threw out Juan Williams because he represented a position that they didn't like: it wasn't far left enough. As I watched the video it was clear to me that there was a lot of editing being done. But if your argument is that the video puts a lot of lies into Schiller's mouth and has no truth to it, or if your argument is that O'Keefe invented the people that he reported on in the ACORN video, or their bizarrely skewed ethics, then I'd say you're wrong. NPR like the far left media in general is a Philistine crushng the heads of anyone who stands against it day and night. O'Keefe is just one guy with a camera. O'Keefe shot a rock at the giant's head and brought it down. He's done this now not once, but twice. Sure, it's an act of war.
I wouldn't know who the blogmeister is that Brett dredged up. They say they work for Glenn Beck. I doubt if this is true. We're dealing here with a whole complex of lies and spin, and he says, she says.
Obviously, you guys want to defend NPR, and wouldn't do the same if MSNBC were to attack Fox, or if the protesters at Madison punched a Fox newsman in the face, or called him a racist, and tried to kncok him down.
We're in the midst of a cultural war. In war, passions rise, and people lose their judgment, and in the fog of battle there are some bad decisions made. I don't know O'Keefe. I was plenty shocked at what he showed in his ACORN video. This video with Schiller is not nearly as bad to my mind. You should watch it so you know what you're talking about.
Remember, just because someone says they're something doesn't mean it's so. Schiller pretended to be from an Arabic group. The left can now pretend to be working for Glenn Beck.
Nothing is quite what anyone says it is, that's the one thing we can bet on.
Barzun is what he says he is, and WSJ is what it says it is.
But outside of that, in the tribal lost world of the internet, Wikileaks, and the new guerilla journalism, truth has already been a casualty for years. It's all a matter of spin.
Still, the "racist, racist" quote comes at the end of a long paragraph spoken without cuts by Schiller. That, to my mind, is enough to condemn him as a totally biased individual. And is why he stepped down. Watch the vid. JADL linked to it already. It's all over the net.
Kirby, I agree with your assessment of the O'Keefe video, both that the editing does make a some difference in the degree of Schiller's culpability, but it's still pretty indicative of his ignorant and visceral bigotry against the Tea Party. It should be added that almost all media interviews are edited, including a number of them of with conservatives (e.g., ABC ["Always Be Cutting"]'s Gibson interview with Sarah Palin) in which editing practices served to make the conservative's responses look much worse than they were. Here's one short article on this:
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/12/11/always-be-cutting/
But there are other issues exposing NPR management's underhandedness and acquisitiveness, for example, the willingness of Schiller's companion exec at the interview, Betsy Liley, to suggest ways to mask (possibly through anonymity) the source of a large donation from a group supposedly affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. And then there's Schiller's suggestion that major newspapers are controlled by "Zionists," etc.
I'm beginning to think stu's biblical invocations about bearing false witness in contested political issues are wearing a bit thin, but to apply it to your comparison of O'Keefe to Paul Revere is ludicrous.
Kirby,
Obviously, you guys want to defend NPR
Actually, neither Brett nor I have attempted to defend NPR in this discussion. You keep raising, in the attempt to deflect us from the question we're raising, which is a necessary preliminary to any debate, and that is, "what evidence is admissible in this discussion?"
So far, you've taken the position that lies, fabricated evidence, fraud, and indeed false witness, are admissible evidence so long as they are in support of your position. I will ask you a third time, a final time, to reconsider this position.
The worst thing about the Schiller video is how he eats: spearing delectables from all over the table, while mindlessly asserting that the Tea Party is racist, racist. Seemed like nice work if you could get it.
I think it's more fair to think carefully about each individual, and each action, and to talk carefully about it.
My great problem with rgc is that it unfairly lumps individuals into giant groups, and is itself racist, sexist, and classist in doing so, and comes up with uncomfortably easy and unfair labels to do away with anyone who challenges their assertions. It's a kind of bigotry that goes essentially unchallenged, and seems to be the name of the game at NPR, and everywhere a so-called "liberal" elite gathers (they are in reality anything but liberal, but are completely biased, one-sided, and totally unfair both in their demonization of those who cling to guns and God, and also unfair about what they themselves have contributed to national defense (nothing) cultural understanding (nothing), the work ethic (nothing), and to the lack of sexual diseases (generating fantastic new ones in the name of make love, not war).
Too lazy to go to war, and using a euphemism to cover up a lazy lasciviousness, all too often.
The graft that was on the table in the form of the five million was almost reprehensible.
ABC's demolition of Palin was a planned sabotage that implicates their entire network in fraudulence and deceit.
I've long thought that Fox's only crime was having a different viewpoint. They actually have more liberals on their shows than any other station has conservatives. Colmes, Geraldo, Juan Williams, and many others including Frank Luntz are constantly on Fox programming.
I see Fox as the truly liberal channel, as they let many varieties of people speak.
That's very important. MSNBC will occassionally let a conservative on for a few minutes, but Madcow is about to go ballistic and can barely control herself when she does this.
I grant that Hannity is almost as bad as madcow. I can't watch Hannity for that reason. But O'Reilly is not afraid of intellectual dissonance.
And yet another NPR exec, Susan Schardt, admits what everyone already knew: NPR currently pitches to its white, liberal, college-educated, elite audience.
Not that I don't listen to NPR on occasion, especially their music programmes, but the crone who hosts their nationwide talk show is as insufferable as the hokey left-pitched "Prairie Home Companion" show of that rascally idiot Garrison Keillor. A few shows that feature opera (I'm a buff), or talk about jam-making, animal husbandry, vegetable festivals, or baseball history are OK, but the political reporting and commentary oozes mandarin liberal bias, and their "human interest" stories likewise, though conveyed by usually soothing voices ("all the better to insinuate, my dear!") sometimes interspersed a with Ken Burns-style nostalgic piano tinkling in the background.
I'm pleased to say Ann Arbor at least has a once-a-weekend talk show ("Joshua's Trail") hosted by three black Christian conservatives who direct their topics and commentaries to African-Americans in particular.
Kirby - The Blaze is obviously not a liberal website...just take a look at it!
It's like Glenn Beck's version of HuffPost (except so far from what I've seen it seems less sensationalistic) - still, they provide a fair look at the video-editing that O'Keefe did...
Here's Wikipedia on The Blaze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blaze_(blog)
I doubt that Stu and I are very much fans of the way Michael Moore creatively edits to make things seem different than they are -
Yet you seem unwilling to consider that those who share your viewpoint might employ the same tactics...
This is a bit troubling - You've fallen back on your ad hominem "whatever source disagrees with me must have a liberal bias..."
Even though this line of argument is itself fallacious, it's been shown to be false because the source that you're citing as having a liberal bias is a conservative website formed by Glenn-Beck...
You then go on to concoct a conspiracy theory that Glenn Beck's website MUST be run by liberals.
Again, when you're 2 or 3 steps away from being reasonable, it's dumbfounding.
Just look at that website I posted, understand that it's coming from a conservative source, and then we can talk about what it means.
But if you refuse to look at the website, refuse to acknowledge that it's a conservative website, and refuse to consider the possibility that someone who agrees with you might have employed nefarious tactics to make a point...
Well then, there's just no possibility for discourse on this topic, is there?
I breezed through the Blaze and I suppose I don't care about the bias in O'Keefe.
I assume bias.
If we to say that no one with a bias could report, there would no reporting. Obviously everyone has a bias. In France, the papers are deliberately for their given demographics. There is an anarchist paper (Le Monde Libertaire), and a soft liberal paper (Le Monde), and various papers for the business right (L'Observateur and Le Figaro), and various other papers that don't hide their viewpoints. We have the ridiculous notion that a journalist should be a political neuter, as if that's humanly possible.
Stu wants me to discount O'Keefe because he has a strong viewpoint and is determined to make us think as he does, using editing to make his points stronger.
But every channel does this, even in terms of the things they choose to cover.
What is objectionable is that tax payer money go to those who only report one viewpoint. NPR is absolutely repugnant in this sense.
I don't care if someone has a bias. I assume it. It's just obvious.
I think Fox is actually more sophisticated and honest because they declare their viewpoint right up front.
But they also ALLOW other viewpoints (MSNBC doesn't, but is slowly trying to do so, but they know their own viewpoints are so vapid and weak they are terrified of what people might say which might blow their own stupidity out of the water permanently).
The pretense of being objective is an invalid pose.
Stu holds to this line that because O'Keefe had a bias he should be sidelined, and I should wish to sideline him. That's silly. If I were to sideline O'Keefe on those grounds, I'd also have to sideline Chris Matthews (who I laugh at because he's a fool who only thinks of the news as a chance to cover the Big O in a protective mantle), and Charlie Gibson, and all the other goofballs of the left behind media who desperately wish to get rid of Fox because it exposes their own viewpoint as non-neutral.
Be biased, be rude, be vituperative, at least it's honest. And occasionally, get in a good remark that's true.
O'Keefe let Schiller hang himself by just letting him talk. Schiller admitted his bizarre bias. He doesn't want to take taxpayer money, and says they could almost go it alone. He also says the Tea Party is racist.
That's fine, I just don't think the majority should be paying for a minority to have a nationally produced radio program that is so filled with bias as to constitute viewpoint discrimination. If there's a national radio program, there should be equal time for Christian conservatives. Our religion is no more strident than the religion of secular humanism, at least to my tender ears.
Probably even robots would be biased in terms of news reporting (reporters on TV often try to hide their excitements and passions which is why Belushi as a weather reporter was so hilarious thirty years ago). The reporters pretend to be robots in terms of their tone and objective language, but everything including choice of story shows obvious bias. Fox was the first to totally point this out on TV, but radio programs with the likes of Limbaugh and others had long before stepped into that role. I always felt this was more sophisticated because it reminded me of France, where people let their passions show. Obviously people care about what happens in politics. One thing I like about the Madcow left that's beginning to pop up is that they show their biased aspects.
I'm not against Schiller having bias. I'm against him having the bias, and pretending not to, while taking Federal funding, flanked by his Democratic machine determined to keep the funding going for what is essentially their propaganda wing.
Go ahead and run your propaganda machine. Go ahead and call your opponents racist, but do it out in the open, on your own dime.
Also, don't break any laws, as Columbia U. is doing wrt the Solomon Amendment. You can't take public funding and be a biased organization.
Kirby,
Stu wants me to discount O'Keefe because he has a strong viewpoint and is determined to make us think as he does, using editing to make his points stronger.
No, Kirby, I'm ok with viewpoints. I am not ok with lies. I want you to reject O'Keefe because he is a liar. I want you to reject him because the evidence he brings is fabricated, and fundamentally untruthful.
I'm willing to debate NPR and bias vs. viewpoint (you seem to use the former with your opponents, and the later with your allies, but whatever), but not if lies constitute evidence in this forum.
I am fundamentally disturbed by your stance. If you want to argue that NPR is biased, there are plenty of other sources, plenty of sources that have opinions but which don't resort to manufacturing "evidence." Sources that scholars can cite in good faith, and have differing opinions about in good faith. But scholars cannot differ in good faith about the opinion of proven liars.
It seems to me that you're putting the god of your beliefs ahead of the true God. That's a dangerous place to be.
Kirby - it's like you're at an abandoned waterpark.
You keep moving from one ride to the other.
I know that doesn't make sense, but you aren't responding to the issues that are being addressed...
It's not the fact that O'Keefe is biased that's troubling -
It's that to promote that bias he lied - and then you take lies as truth... Which is lame of you to do.
Kirby, I think we may have gotten it wrong on the Schiller case, but in any case, I think you've redeemed us both in this discussion by commenting on what struck me too while while eyeing Schiller in the video: his eating habits! You've got it, by Anacreon!
Schiller's display of voracious Rabelaisian gluttony (in Christian eyes the sixth sin of "gula" or "gola"), his aggressive kow-towing towards his plate, his shoveling away huge forkfuls at a time (as if he knew his expense account had nearly run out at NPR), and as you say, his long-armed harrying and spearing his culinary prey all over his domain on the table--and in a fashionable Georgetown DC restaurant (mirabile visu!)--all were perhaps overmuch for his NPR overlords to bear watching and was but salt thrown in the eyes of his liberal, college-educated, white, liberal donors, as they politely, and elitely, lowered them from his porcine display. Yes, yes, that's it, Kirby!
Did he say the Tea Party was racist, racist, or not? If he did, then that's enough bad for me to want him out at NPR.
Stu admits to never having seen the vid, but nevertheless seems to say he knows what's in it.
Brett thinks a secondary site can tell us what's in the vid and what isn't.
But seeing is believing. In this case we see Schiller saying the Tea Party is "racist, racist." I'd condemn him for poor grammar if nothing else.
Stu and Brett want O'Keefe to be a saint or else his evidence can't be admitted. But there are no saints except Christ and the four Gospel writers.
I think if we weren't to allow bias we wouild have to close the humanities down. Isn't the way the Heisenberg Principle has been interpreted is to say that the researcher always changes the evidence?
Kant says we can never arrive at the thing in itself, but are always going through flawed interpretations, of our own and of the set-up. Still, a truth exists.
Schiller came off as an ignorant bigot. If this was not true, then why would he have so quickly flown the coop? Why would the other Schiller also fly the coop?
We have to remember that Stu (and probably Brett as well) still think that ACORN is a valid group in spite of the fact that the entire Congress has voted to defund the outfit.
Shortly,t he same thing will happen to NPR.
I'd give O'Keefe some credibility on the account of being a David for our times, and bringing down one Goliath after another.
Now, if he somehow made Schiller say that the Tea Party was "racist, racist," if he somehow managed to put those words into Schiller's mouth, or made him say that NPR didn't want public financing, then I'd discount O'Keefe's testimony.
But I seem to recall that Stu was not willing to believe anything O'Keefe had captured with regard to ACORN (not exactly my favorite organization, but the entire Congress voted to defund them after the revelations we saw).
This is muckraking.
I assure you that Upton Sinclair sometimes exaggerated things, too.
It's not even clear if Orwell ever shot and killed an elephant.
Jesse Jackson almost certainly smeared MLK's blood all over his shirt in order to enhance his credibility.
Sharpton outright lied about Tawana Brawley, or at least now knows he was wrong.
Clinton said, I did NOT have sex with that woman, and yet he's stilla round.
And yet, O'Keefe should lose all his credibility because someone on some blog site says he made too rapid a cut here or there. Is this not evidence of bias in itself?
Kirby, I am a bit taken aback by stu's vehemence toward you with his "final warnings" and "retro me Satana!" calls for you to "reject" O'Keefe, and, failing that, perhaps setting you before the seething abyss, where those who fall are destined for eternal fire and ever . . . last . . . ing pain.
I finally got a chance to read the whole Wiki on O'Keefe which presents him as a very serious liar. I didn't have a moment to myself all day. If he's deliberately cutting and splicing like this, and as he apparently did to ACORN as well, then that's quite bad, and I don't support it, or him.
In the Schiller piece, he apparently really did say that the Tea Party was a kind of evangelical Christian move (when it's not), and he cites some Republican higher-ups who think that the Tea Party part of the party is "racist, racist," when in the vid itself it looks as if Schiller himself is saying that about them.
That Schiller says these things without attributing (citing a specific source) is still evidence of what HE thinks. I know there have long been elements of the Republican party who don't like the Christian right (Kevin Phillips is an example) but that doesn't mean they're "racist, racist," which Schiller still cites them as believing, which in turn he thinks corroborates his own beliefs. This is still wrong, but if ... O'Keefe is deliberately putting words into others' mouths that don't belong there then that's bad.
There have long been lots of liars playing these tricks in the left, too.
Orwell apparently never shot an elephant, just made it up.
Clinton really did have sex with the woman.
(Brett still likes Clinton, and presents him as an upstanding member of his potty (sorry about the misspelling)).
Spitzer is back on TV as a journalist for CNN.
But no, only O'Keefe is to be trundled up and dismissed because he went too far.
Muckraker Ida Tarbell who got her own postage stamp in 2002 was a muckraker who killed an oil company while hiding the fact that her brother was an oilman. This is fairly common. I never hear any leftists dismissing her.
http://lutheransurrealism.blogspot.com/2009/06/ida-tarbell.html
No, it's just O'Keefe and his inconvenient truths.
I think almost everybody lies. I don't like it, but the left is at least as guilty of this as the right. But the left is always ready to forgive its own.
I still don't know the truth of what O'Keefe did. Perhaps what ACORN did broke no actual law. What about the advice they gave to the would-be pimp played by O'Keefe himself as to how to repackage the sex slavery of the adolescents they were purportedly pimping out in sex traffic? Was it all a lie?
I suspect this Wiki page is fraught with lies and half-truths.
Who do you believe these days?
Kirby,
Did he say the Tea Party was racist, racist, or not?
Actually, no. He was quoting a Republican. O'Keefe edited that out, just one of his lies.
Stu admits to never having seen the vid, but nevertheless seems to say he knows what's in it.
O'Keefe's a known liar. I just wait for the debunking sites to do their thing, as they have before.
Stu and Brett want O'Keefe to be a saint or else his evidence can't be admitted.
Bull. I want him to follow essentially universal standards for custody of the truth. Manufacturing lies is outside of those standards. And O'Keefe is a repeat liar. As far I as I can tell, he has never brought anything to public discourse that was honest.
But there are no saints except Christ and the four Gospel writers.
Time to return to catechetical class. According to Luther, we're all saints. And sinners. Do we make mistakes? Of course. Do we struggle with righteousness? All of us who are trying do. O'Keefe isn't trying.
Stu, I'll renounce O'Keefe if you renounce Bill and Hillary Clinton (Hillary because she claimed to be taking live fire in Serbia, when she wasn't) and also Obama (he said he wouild take government funding and no more for his campaign, but then reneged, and also renounce Orwell (who never shot an elephant), and Ida Tarbell (who didn't divulge that her brother was an oil man or that her father had been ruined by Standard Oil so that she was not exactly unbiased in her presentation of the truth.
Renounce these, and I'll renounce O'Keefe. You first.
Kirby,
I'll renounce O'Keefe if you renounce Bill and Hillary Clinton (Hillary because she claimed to be taking live fire in Serbia, when she wasn't) and also Obama (he said he wouild take government funding and no more for his campaign.
Interesting ploy. I'm not buying.
I don't know the Hillary live fire claim (and this wouldn't reflect on Bill, although he has his own problems). But I did some searching, and found a Guardian article which describes her as having made "exaggerated claims." This suggests that there was some foundation. But she's not unique -- Mark Kirk (the Republican Senator from Illinois) also made false live-fire in Serbia claims.
I see three arguments that are somewhat exculpatory in the cases of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Kirk. First, they're politicians, and make no claim to being journalists. And I don't think anyone should take the unverified word of a politician as evidence. Second, they were reporting on personal experiences, and there's both a fragility of human memory and a tendency to self-aggrandize that is all but universal. Third, both Clinton and Kirk are usually honest, with the usual caveat that all politicians exaggerate their worth and gold-plate their experiences.
As regards Mr. Obama, I believe that when he said he'd take government funding, he honestly intended to do so. Later, when his unprecedented fundraising ability was proven, he decided to forego funding. Certainly, there was a tactical advantage in doing so (indeed, you applauded his decision at the time). Again, if we're to write off entirely politicians because they don't deliver on promises made during the campaign, we're going to have write off all the winners. And who cares about the losers?
I don't care about Orwell or Tarbell.
I don't see O'Keefe as having any of these excuses. He only enters the debate when he has a lie to tell. If there was a real analogue on the left, I would denounce them. After all, there are good arguments behind the positions I take, and good evidence, and I'd view someone who was adding lies in support of my positions as diminishing them, and making them less credible. You should feel similarly offended by O'Keefe. After all, if there's good evidence, credible evidence, why bother fabricating it? O'Keefe's lies make your position weaker, not stronger.
BTW, I thought you'd all be amused to know that I got a Rasmussen robo-call today. Given that the usual Ras sample size is 400, I'm sure you'll all sleep better knowing that when their economic confidence survey comes out tomorrow, I personally represent just under a million people. Woohoo!
Well, of course you don't care about Orwell or Tarbell, since they are more or less on your side. So why bother with them. Then for some reason you hold journalists to a higher standard than the politicians for whom journalists now form a phalanx, destroying Palin, and destroying whoever they wish, with badly edited videos. That a piratical loner like O'Keefe could play the game, too, is somehow too much. He must be banned. He has the wrong politics! And you won't even watch the video or any coverage of it.
Here's a two minute piece from Fox. I couldn't find anything that babied it down any further:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXinMaw-1qg&feature=related
Even though Schiller may not have broken a law, you get a pretty good glimpse of him: he hates the Tea Party, and thinks of them as uneducated racists, even though the NYT has said they are actually better-educated and better off than most other Americans.
So the fact that Schiller has a viewpoint that is totally at odds with the facts doesn't bother you.
And you won't even listen to your own guy talk.
It's just a pack of lies! Must be, since it doesn't accord with the view I'm used to hearing in the lunch room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXinMaw-1qg&feature=related
It's an eleven minute video.
Woiuld you at least denounce Charlie Gibson for doing essentially the same thing to Palin?
It's well established that Gibson and also Katie Couric laid in wait for Palin, and changed the video around to make Palin look stupid, playing into the narrative that Tea Party people are stupid violent racists, a narrative you tried to get going again after the Loughner shooting (a view you never apologized for).
"I'm sorry I was wrong."
"I'm sorry what Gibson did to Palin."
"I'm sorry what was done to Palin by Katie Couric."
I suppose for me, if one side is going to cheat and throw elbows and pretend to shoot elephants and pretend to be on the up and up with regard to oil companies that they defame, but that doesn't bother you, why should it bother me when O'Keefe, an unfunded video guy without much of any organization, manages to topple NPR and ACORN, groups that are government funded nests of Democratic corruption?
I don't see why one side should be held to severe standards of truth, but you don't care at all if your side started it and has been doing it for most of the last century, if not here, then the extreme untruths propagated by those countries where the slimeballs of the left did manage to win it all: N. Korea, Vietnam, or China, where truth has no rationale whatsoever.
NPR is a Ministry of Truth?
Kirby,
It's well established that Gibson and also Katie Couric laid in wait for Palin, and changed the video around to make Palin look stupid, playing into the narrative that Tea Party people are stupid violent racists, a narrative you tried to get going again after the Loughner shooting (a view you never apologized for).
Then show me the proof. Show me where they associated answers with different questions. Prove that they've fabricated evidence, and I will certainly denounce them.
We have proof that O'Keefe lied, and that every video that you rely on of his is a fabrication of evidence. I guess your position is so weak that you can't find fact-based support.
why should it bother me when O'Keefe, an unfunded video guy without much of any organization, manages to topple NPR and ACORN, groups that are government funded nests of Democratic corruption?
Because he's a liar. Because he fabricated evidence. Because he does not bring the truth. Anyone who does so, whatever their party, deserves to be excluded from the debate.
There are gradations. There are misunderstandings, mis-statements. They're forgiveable, but they do reflect on a person's judgment. But fabricating evidence isn't forgiveable. Neither is using evidence that you know to be fabricated.
I wrote this before reading the posts that followed:
*******
For Fark's SAKE Kirby, try and listen to what I say:
The site I posted shows some of the real, unedited, raw footage that O'Keefe obviously edited in a bearing-false-witness kind of way.
When it comes to the 'racist, racist' comment, the context brings into question to what extent Schiller agrees with that statement, and to what extent he is quoting higher-up Republican officials.
Either way, neither Stu nor myself have argued that Schiller is totally above reproach in this - we have simply argued that O'Keefe Isn't.
Stu and I don't want O'Keefe to be a saint - he can be a murdering philanderer for all I care in this situation - but we do want to point out that he's not like the minute-men of old - he's like Michael Moore in that he uses creative editing to create false and/or exaggerated versions of the positions and statements of the parties he's interviewing in an underhanded, undercover way.
******
As it now stands, you're asking something very strange of me - to have somehow previously decided to denounce Ida Tarbell? Huh? Why haven't you denounced Billy the Kid recently? Are you FOR murder!??!?!?!? :-)
In any case, I think that Stu asking you to totally denounce O'Keefe was probably a step too far -
I was asking you to consider that he was lying and exaggerating through editing, yet you seemed totally unwilling to consider this possibility, going so far as to assume that the website founded by Beck was a liberal website...
What I would ask of you isn't to Totally denounce O'Keefe, necessarily, but to denounce the instances of his lying...
I, of course, denounce Clinton's lies about his affairs (and the fact that he did have an affair).
This doesn't mean I denounce him totally as a human.
Hate the sinner, not the sin.
Here though, Kirby, you were very unwilling to hate the sin and call it what it was...
When it comes to Clinton, I support much of his activity as president that (along with the fiscal restraint of his Republican congress) helped lead to a budget surplus and an incredibly prosperous time in American history (crime rates lowering and all too).
When it comes to O'Keefe, I'm not sure what you support about him - his two acts that have gotten him renown have both involved high levels of lying, both in getting interviews and in the editing with which he presented them.
In terms of asking me to apologize for things that happened to Sarah Palin...do you have links to raw footage that reveal that Sarah was more onhertoes than she appeared? That Couric et al. edited that video to make her seem stupid?
As far as I know, she just asked Sarah questions that Sarah had a hard time answering...questions that a v.p. nominee should have been able to answer easily.
If the reality is different, please point me to somewhere that shows this...
And unlike you, I'll go right ahead and look at it instead of calling it a rightwing website before I have any clue what I'm talking about:-)
The one take-away that you should, uh, take...away...from this, is that it would behoove you to look at the evidence Before making judgements.
All of us, of course, need to do this. I would posit that lately you are a worse offender in this regard than most.
Your second, 'eleven minute' video, was in fact a repasting if that 2-minute Fox News broadcast...what was the original 11 minute video you were posting?
I've already seen the whole 'Okeefe' version of the video...
JADL provided this link to a study of the cutting technique used on Palin. But for Republican candidates the entire media outside of Fox, including newspapers outside of the WSJ, and academia excluding Liberty University and two or three others of the more than 6000, constitute a gauntlet that they have to run.
Here's this on the technique that Gibson used:
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/12/11/always-be-cutting/
What Couric did was just as obvious.
And these are people that are inside the mainstream media at the top levels. O'Keefe is an independent guerilla video artist with no real backing. Even Glenn Beck apparently thinks his technique is too scandalous.
But I don't see why the right has to have all the morals while the left has seemingly none.
Hmm,
Brett writes,
In any case, I think that Stu asking you to totally denounce O'Keefe was probably a step too far
I don't believe I ever asked Kirby to denounce O'Keefe, merely that we agree that his lies are inadmissible in debate. I'd go so far as to say that his lies have barred him from future participation, but I don't expect Kirby to do so. But I do expect to ridicule him for gullibility, indeed, for a failure of scholarly judgment and even integrity, each time he cites that serial liar.
Kirby writes,
Here's this on the technique that Gibson used
I read the article. First, there's no claim made that Couric manipulated evidence.
Gibson's case is a bit more complicated. He (or more likely, his producers) are accused of abridging answers. The claim is made that these abridged answers were misleading, but no specific instance is given (this is very much unlike the Blaze's analysis of O'Keefe, which backed up accusations with specific instances of manipulation).
I have yet to see a journalist who doesn't edit their interviewees responses for length, or for that matter, an interviewee who is perfectly happy with the journalist's edits. Heck, I've been interviewed, and have had the same experience. The question here is really whether Gibson's edits were outside of journalistic norms, i.e., did they so distort the candidate's responses as to create an intentionally misleading impression? Absent specifics, this isn't a credible accusation so much as fuel for the fire of partisans.
I suspect that if we analyzed Gibson's interview of Obama, you'd see the same sort of editing. Indeed, I had the impression during the election that Gibson bent strongly towards the Republican candidates. The article you cited has me contemplating a re-evaluation. Certainly, the campaign's job to present their candidate in the best possible light, and their opponent in the worst possible light. It is the journalist's job to present the candidate as accurately as they can, and so in pretty much every case you'd expect the journalist's view of (and attitude towards) be somewhere in-between the view presented by the candidate's campaign, and that presented by the opposition. This is not, in and of itself, evidence of bias.
But I don't see why the right has to have all the morals while the left has seemingly none.
Classifying Gibson as being of the left is laughable.
Kirby, I wish I had more time at present to delve into this discussion--perhaps later today.
But stu's impression "that Gibson bent strongly towards the Republican candidates" in the last presidential election is risible nonsense and yet again reveals his parti pris blinders that ever narrow his vision.
Here's another link from a conservative media watchdog using more specific evidence (with video links supplied) in comparing Gibson's coldly hostile interview technique in the case of Palin with his "softball" handling of the Obama interview:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/brent-bozell/charles-gibson-s-palin-double-standard.html#post
JADL, your help has been much appreciated. I'm sometimes nonplussed by Stu and Brett's "not getting it," to use the old feminist phrase, of how conservatives are so violently set upon by the liberals, to the extent that lynching us is almost their sport, and yet, they feel they are the ones who are castigated and mistreated. It's weird and strange, and sometimes I feel as if I am losing my mind.
The sanity of your responses and their clarity provide very good back-up.
The way in which Palin was set upon by Gibson was startlingly obvious. the way that BO got a pass from the media was also startlingly obvious. It's as if the right has to do everything three times as gently as the left.
Had the Tea Party OCCUPIED the Rotunda in Madison, can you imagine the outrage?
The left rabble destroyed that wonderful old building's fixtures, but will the media say anything. No, because the left rabble never polices its own, ever.
Orwell gets a free pass, Tarbell gets a free pass, the Clintons get a free pass, Reverend Wright gets a free pass, but O'Keefe. No, he's a monster, because he's a conservative. He must be destroyed, he must be muzzled, he must be silenced.
Gibson does the same thing to Palin but using all the resources of one of the oldest TV channels. Not a problem. There are no issues with this. It's normal. To even question it, is to make oneself laughable.
Very curious double-standard!
JADL:
The link you posted about Gibson's approach to the Palin interview is so far afield from what happened with O'Keefe that it totally fails as an analogy -
Gibson asking 'unfair' questions is 100% not the same thing as O'Keefe
a) lying about who he was
and
b) lying about what the NPR exec. said through editing.
"Orwell gets a free pass, Tarbell gets a free pass, the Clintons get a free pass, Reverend Wright gets a free pass, but O'Keefe. No, he's a monster, because he's a conservative. He must be destroyed, he must be muzzled, he must be silenced."
Clinton did not get a free pass - his transgressions were front-page news for nigh a year... Neither Stu nor I would go around citing his affair and lying about it as a positive thing. We wouldn't defend him for it. Why you think we would, I don't know.
Orwell and Tarbell are all, like, dead and stuff. I'm not sure why they matter in this conversation, except as distractions from your unsupportable viewpoint wrt O'Keefe.
And Reverend Wright got disowned by Obama.
I don't want O'Keefe to be silenced - I want him to follow the law and not bear false witness.
When he does other things, I'm fine with it...I just don't know of anything he's done that's gotten him any attention or was of any value on the public stage that didn't include one or both of those things...
Did you ever think, Kirby, that maybe you're the one with the double-standard?
O'Keefe is doing a service to the nation with his guerilla videos. These are giant public agencies he's taking on and taking down. ACORN was worth billions and was going to be the beneficiary of even more money, and was going to be a key player in Obama's administration. They're now sunk, but they still manage to take money from individual bank accounts according to a program on FOX last night. Money gets taken from private accounts but no one knows where the money is going. It just disappears into ACORN accounts, but no one seems to know why or how. ACORN is not supposed to still be taking in money.
NPR is a Marxist outfit in sheep's clothing. For O'Keefe to investigate them he can't just appear as a right-winger, or else they will tell him what he wants to hear. NPR has giant secrets. According to Juan Williams they are like Securitate in Romania. It's an administration in which everyone is afraid, and it works by spreading fear inside and outside. It's funded with federal dollars from inside of federal buildings and isn't taxed, and yet is completely run by a Marxist elite that has never been elected to any office.
The public has the right to know what's going on in there.
O'Keefe, as I see it, is providing a public service by getting at the inner workings of that secretive agency within the shadow government of the left.
I don't think they get a free pass.
They should pay their own freight, and pay taxes.
There is a long tradition of muckraking in the Anglophone countries, and Ida Tarbell is part of that, as is George ORwell. We have always said that the right to know supercedes the right to privacy when we are talking about powerful organizations that have a broad impact on the country. Meat packing industries weren't happy about what Upton Sinclair wrote about them. But this eventuated in the Purity Acts of 1908 which have helped out all Americans.
Now the shoe is on the other foot and it's an imperative that we investigate corrupt unions, corrupt aspects of the federal government that have gone rotten with a Marxist elite, and other corrupt people and practices.
Reverend Wright didn't get a pass from the media, but for a long time, Stu was willing to give him a pass, and still considered him an outstanding American and Christian. Not sure if he's revised that viewpoint. He was supposed to send me one of his books for us to read together. Maybe he abandoned that.
At any rate, we have the right to know. There ARE rules regarding how one can get information, but I'm not entirely certain of what they are at this point. Tapping Mary Landrieu's telephones was declared a malfeasance of some sort. Recording Schiller has not been written, I think because he's a top public official, who have fewer rights than ordinary citizens, because they have such an enormous impact on the rest of us.
Kirby,
O'Keefe is doing a service to the nation with his guerilla videos.
Undoubtedly. He's showing that evidentiary basis of the right-wing case against NPR is so weak and unsubstantiated that sustaining it evidently requires falsification of evidence.
We have always said that the right to know supercedes the right to privacy when we are talking about powerful organizations that have a broad impact on the country.
Not always. Ask Bradley Manning how well that argument is working for him these days.
But we've also always held that evidence that has been proven to be falsified detracts from the case that it was intended to support. Certainly, it seems reasonable to question both the motives and the integrity of people who insist on bringing such evidence forward.
Reverend Wright didn't get a pass from the media, but for a long time, Stu was willing to give him a pass, and still considered him an outstanding American and Christian. Not sure if he's revised that viewpoint. He was supposed to send me one of his books for us to read together. Maybe he abandoned that.
Well, I consider the Wright case unproven one way or the other. People whose opinions I respect still have a great deal of respect for Wright, and I'm not going to dismiss their testimony lightly. And I think his fall is a perfect illustration that enforcing political correctness is by no monopoly of the left. I'd like to go forward with the Wright project, but we've both been swamped, and in truth, you never seemed particularly enthusiastic. If people are willing to take it seriously, I'd be willing to go forward, but not until summer, when things loosen up a bit for me.
Recording Schiller has not been written, I think because he's a top public official, who have fewer rights than ordinary citizens, because they have such an enormous impact on the rest of us.
Indeed. But no one is arguing that taping Schiller in and of itself was wrong. What was wrong was in the fraudlent manipulation of the videos, e.g., taking Schiller's words out of context (e.g., the "racist" remark), or in associating answers to one question with another in ways that intentionally misrepresented what he was saying, and what he believed, or in providing narration and titling that presented "information" that was not accessible to Schiller.
For example, we have the remarkable situation that a non-existent organization sent representatives to talk with Schiller, we have no evidence that they ever disclosed a relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, yet the notion that the did know is accepted as gospel when our only source of authority is someone who has shown a repeated willingness to lie in order to make this kind of point.
The House just voted to entirely defund NPR:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll192.xml
It was 229-196.
Probably the senate will never allow it to come to a vote, and if it does, the president will veto the bill.
The libs like a biased archipelago of stations reporting the news entirely their way from coast to coast. Who wouldn't?
I rather like NPR when I get to listen to it, except when they report politics. Then it's like the Marxist hooligans have censored every truth.
They did manage to defenestrate Juan Williams, but I wonder if those won't be the final straw that takes the whole network down, ultimately.
We'll see.
What worries me is that the universities will be next. For decades they've slid further and further left, and now even to be a classical liberal is to be hated. You have to be a Marxist sociopath to get a position in any of the larger colleges of universities.
It's wrong to do this with federally funded institutions.
All it's going to take is a Republican president, and the legislature back in the hands of the Republicans (Trump just threw his hat in the ring) and the whole thing is coming down: all our funding will be gone.
This will be a very bad thing, but since the left has committed intellectual genocide against political diversity on campuses, the same thing is likely to happen to them. You reap what you sow, and all that.
My own representative, Chris Gibson, was one of nine Repubs who voted to maintain NPR funding. I am not sure why he did this. He's a good egg, I think.
This country needs all the news it can get, but it needs it from more diverse sources. We need conversations between groups, not just horrific groupthink, following by stinging dismissals.
Kirby, I think you've done a pretty bang-up job in defending what is valuable in O'Keefe's work, though like the work of the major media, it should be vetted with some care.
Brett, the question is not only about Gibson's questions, but his hostile demeanor and ABC's selective editing of the interview with Palin.
On reportage in disguise, the major media and NPR have all dabbled in it from time to time. If you require examples, I think I can provide a few for you.
Clinton did get a free pass to continue as president, even though Ken Starr did present sound evidence of perjury and obstruction of justice, both removal offences. I think he lost his law license over it, but he subsequently made much more in selling his influence than he ever could practising law.
Obama ditched Rev Wright only after being caught out as a follower, and the major media, save Fox, tiptoed around this issue for fear of being called out as racist and because they were cheerleading for Obama anyway.
Kirby, your "Blogger" service is blocking again.
Kirby, I think you've done a pretty bang-up job in defending what is valuable in O'Keefe's work, though like the work of the major media, it should be vetted with some care.
Brett, the question is not only about Gibson's questions, but his hostile demeanor and ABC's selective editing of the interview with Palin.
On reportage in disguise, the major media and NPR have all dabbled in it from time to time. If you require examples, I think I can provide a few for you.
Clinton did get a free pass to continue as president, even though Ken Starr did present sound evidence of perjury and obstruction of justice, both removal offences. I think he lost his law license over it, but he subsequently made much more in selling his influence than he ever could practising law.
Obama ditched Rev Wright only after being caught out as a follower, and the major media, save Fox, tiptoed around this issue for fear of being called out as racist and because they were cheerleading for Obama anyway.
James, I've been finding I have to try several times to get a post through. So save them and try several times. This interruption in service comes and goes. I don't know why.
Not sure why NPR didn't defend O'Keefe if his viewpoint is so easy to defend. The whole video can be seen online. I think NPR realizes how badly Schiller reflects on them. His attempt to insist that his own opinions of the Tea Party are shared by an unnamed faction of the Republican party are difficult to source. What did he mean by this? Kevin Phillips? Is there someone else? You'd think he would have sourced his triumphalist assertion with regard to a third of the American electorate as dismissable due to incipient Nazism. Not sure Nazis would even need TWO "racist" assertions. Not sure how you can simply dismiss 40 million people who won the last election cycle on the basis of a single word without so much as a single shred of evidence. NPR is not the public's radio. It's not a national radio. It's just a sick malevolent faction's sock puppet.
NPR was defunded today by the House. It's not legal until it gets past Obama's goons in the Senate, and then past Obama himself, but it still reflects a rapidly rising tsunami against the Democrat party.
Kirby - you don't like NPR. That's fine. I get it. You want its internal workings exposed. I agree with you. You think what O'Keefe did was ethical.
You're wrong.
JADL - there is a substantial, salient difference between ones demeanor when conducting an interview and lying. Thus, the Charlie Gibson analogy does not relate to the point I am making about O'Keefe.
I may have missed it, but I need evidence wrt your claims about the Palin interview.
If you want to have a separate argument about the media as left-wing, we could - but probably not in this comment box, as it's different from the issue at hand -
The ethics of O'Keefe.
And they are bad.
Yet Kirby supports them.
And what is it you always say there, JADL? Tu quoque is the go-to response of the right? I mean left? I mean...
And JADL - wrt Clinton, you present a false choice...either Clinton gets kicked out of office, or he gets a free pass.
There are many lines in between, and he did Not get a free pass.
Nobody here is PRAISING Clinton for his sins.
Kirby is PRAISING O'Keefe for his sins.
That's where the rub is.
If I went around saying I supported the way Michael Moore edited Bowling for Columbine when he showed Hugh Heffner saying 'from my cold dead hands' and implying he was doing so at a rally in Littleton directly after Columbine, you'd probably think I was being blinded by my viewpoint and ethically unsound, right?
If so, you'd be correct.
Lying through editing against lying through editing is a proper analogy...
For guys who are so smart, I really don't get why you can't just admit that "While O'Keefe's actions did eventually lead to the dismantling or harming of institutions with which I have problems, his way of doing so was flawed and the evidence he used was falsified and exaggerated."
Again, if there are things that are true that are wrong with NPR and ACORN, those are the things that should be used to attack NPR and ACORN.
Not lies.
And Kirby, when you say why didn't NPR defend O'Keefe I assume this is a typo and you mean Schiller?
The answer is the same as wrt Juan Williams -
They are knee-jerk weaklings.
correction to my last posting under Kirby's name (I had to send it by email, hence the posting under Kirby's name, I guess), in relation to President Clinton: "offences meriting removal from office"
Kirby, you just made the point I was going to with stu, but perhaps you meant to say, "why didn't NPR defend themselves against O'Keefe if his viewpoint is so easy to attack"? Yes, why didn't they defend Schiller then?
I've heard enough of Rev Wright and his nutter-buddy Louis Farrakhan to suggest this is where stu might more easily find real racism, anti-semitism, and nutty conspiracy rubbish rather than in the Tea Party. Nevertheless, I'd be willing sometime in future to revise that view if presented with sound evidence to the contrary.
Contra stu again, I did hear on the video of the interview the O'Keefe poseurs say that their Muslim group was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whereupon a bit later in the interview, Schiller's companion exec Betsey Riley suggested how they might make their donation free from curious eyes over its source. And then what of Schiller's eager acknowledgement that unlike NPR, major newspapers were controlled by "Zionists" (often synonymous simply with "Jews," considering who Schiller's interlocutors purported to be)? Unless O'Keefe used a fabricated voice-over, Schiller proved himself to be a self-damning loose cannon, but I applaud his candidness, as opposed to the sneakiness of innuendo and insinuation plied by a number of other NPR reporters and affiliated tools. Sometimes it leaks out, as in the story of Midas's ass's ears and the reeds, e.g., with the poisonous death-wish NPR analyst Nina Totenberg directed against Sen Helms some time back. There are other examples of NPR staff and associates' similar gaffes, and they're not pretty.
At any rate, I'm pleased that the House defunded NPR; I think they will survive just fine, but I do think they're fighting tooth-and-nail against defunding primarily for symbolic reasons and to try to hold on to their self-generated cachet as an "objective" news source worthy of taxpayer funding. But I've noted on occasion even in their supposedly neutral-topic programmes like "The Folk Sampler" a distinctly liberal bias.
Didn't 60 Minutes use hidden cameras years ago? Hidden cameras are becoming a norm. It was hidden cameras that caught the Rodney King beating. If you had asked the police, may we film you while you are beating that man? I doubt if they would have agreed to this request.
When there are public figures involved, they have less right to privacy than others because what they do is newsworthy insofar as their actions impact the rest of us.
Does Brett think it was wrong to video the cops beating Rodney King?
Was that unethical?
If not, why is what O'Keefe did different? NPR is a giant public station with very powerful executives.
Was it wrong to out the ACORN workers who were complicit in helping a pimp figure out child prostitution tax issues?
Muckrakers have been doing this at least since Upton Sinclair. Did Sinclair go into Chicago meat packing plants and say, I'm going to write a novel about this place.
Did Ida Tarbell ask permission from Standard Oil before she wrote her expose?
The entire video is out there on the net. Yes, he cut it down for those who have a busy day, and want to get the impact version.
But I can't see anything he did as wrong, or at least not as wrong as what Schiller said, and did. Schiller didn't commit a crime per se (he wanted the money to go through regular channels, and insisted on the letter of the law in this case) but Schiller did cite unknown sources to back up his own belief that a third of the American people are "racist, racist" which implies he doesn't think they should be allowed to hold gatherings, or speak.
This is wrong. The Tea Party are not Nazis. But even if they were, they would still have the right to speak and gather, and NPR should try to get their perspective.
I grow weary of your illogical leaps, Kirby...
It wasn't the hidden cameras that we were directly condemning.
It was the lying-through-editing.
Just like I condemned Michael Moore for the same.
You can piffle about with straw-men all you want, Kirby.
Brett, the entire video is available for anyone to see.
All journalists edit.
You can't show an hour of unedited video and get anyone's attention.
Things have to be cut down to three minutes or less. Even then, many people won't watch.
I watched the 11 minute version.
I also watched the Couric and Gibson vids. As JADL said, why doesn't ABC release the unedited original, or are they afraid that they will be found out?
It's very double-standard-ish-alitarian.
The reason ABC doesn't release the full video of Palin now is because that shiat happened like 2 years ago and there's not an outcry for them to do so.
The reason they didn't before is because there was no outcry for them to do so, And...More importantly...
They're old media and don't quite get how things can work in the digital age.
Still, you can say that Courci MAY have edited things to be lies...
You can't say they did, because you don't have evidence.
If you go around saying that they Did do so, without evidence, well then that's assumptuous and presumptuous and shows that you are not arguing in good faith.
And yes Kirby - all journalists edit.
The question is whether they do so to tighten, or if they do so to directly deceive.
O'Keefe did the latter.
Thus I condemn him doing so.
Would, again, condemn anyone for doing so...
Kirby, here's a link to the Gibson interview with Palin and a sample of ABC's editing technique to make Palin look less informed; it also shows how ABC cut her full responses to questions to make her seem more bellicose, and thus more dangerous to the peace if elected.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/13/abc-news-edited-out-key-parts-sarah-palin-interview
JADL, to what extent do you think O'Keefe is guilty of bearing false witness against Schiller? Brett and Stu keep screaming that he's way off the rails.
Should NPR have tried to save Schiller?
Do you think Schiller is a good egg?
Brett seems to think Schiller is an outstanding citizen, and that he was framed by O'Keefe to look like a bad egg, but he was in fact a very good egg.
Where do you stand on this?
I haven't had time this week to ferret out all the information. Quite busy with things: preparing for the regional spelling bee with meetings, and going over our freshman comp requirements, and finishing up with the literary journal for the school, in addition to grading papers, and ferrying kids about to their various activities, and trying to keep ahead of the reading for Great Writers (John Irving), in addition to preparing and making tests for philosophy and then grading them, etc.
The O'Keefe controversy has been peripheral to me. Do you think he (O'Keefe) poisoned a good man's reputation, and made things up, and made him say things that he didn't believe?
do you think Schiller has a balanced view of Republicans, and the Tea Party, and thinks they're worthy of trying to cover fairly? Brett seems to think Schiller is a good egg who's been smashed into egg salad by the lousy liar O'Keefe who doesn't care abut the truth about Schiller, which is that he's the most fair and balanced citizen in all of Christendom. Or at least that he's a good egg.
Is that fair, Brett?
Is it fair that you like Schiller?
Brett compares O'Keefe to Michael Moore. Now Michael Moore is fat, and Schiller is thin. Fat people are gross, but they aren't necessarily evil. Brett argues that fat Mr. Moore is not phat because he lies. Moore's lies are evil, and no one takes him seriously.
The right takes O'Keefe seriously. So does the center. So to some extent does the left. He brought down ACORN, and he brought down NPR. (NPR will probably bob back up, since Obama still owns the Senate, for now, but it is slipping out of his hands soon.)
At any rate, Brett seems to think O'Keefe is evil and Schiller is good.
Is that fair, Brett?
Do you think, JADL, that O'Keefe went too far in covering Schiller? If so, do you think he went further than Couric and Gibson did when they threw dirt at Palin?
What are the rules in journalism?
Brett allows hidden cameras, and has no problem with them, he now says.
He thinks however that you can't edit the video to make your subject look worse than they actually are. They have to be exactly what they are, whatever that is. Do you agree with this?
It's too much to say that I think Schiller is 'good.' In fact, I said he was not 'above reproach.'
It's your approach, not mine, that posits very-awesome against very-evil all the time:-)
One problem I have with the right is that they, as a whole, tend to take their hyperreactive pundits more seriously than the left -
Rush Limbaugh and O'Keefe are more powerful than Michael Moore.
I think this says less about those three and more about their constituencies...
To this discussion, hidden cameras are pretty much beside the point...
I won't condemn hidden cameras in every circumstance, nor will I say that they are always legit. Depends on the situation. With O'Keefe, the hidden-cameraness and the lying about who they are is less obviously troublesome than the lyingediting.
JADL: I read the transcript, and perhaps it's just the nature of reading direct transcripts, but I don't really see how including the stuff that was cut out would make Palin seem more intelligent...
You have statements like this:
"We cannot repeat the Cold War. We are thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War, without a shot fired, also. We’ve learned lessons from that in our relationship with Russia, previously the Soviet Union.
We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along."
Where the poor grammar, convoluted syntax, and repetitiveness hurts me head (and 'without a shot fired' is a stretch anyway...)...I don't see how that does anything to take away from the illogic of the previous, oft-mocked statement that you can see Russia from Alaska, and that is evidence for her credibility as someone with international experience...
I mean, read it full through, and I don't see there being much of a difference:
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation(sic) that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals. That’s why we have to keep an eye on Russia.
And, Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?
PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.
Though it would have been fairer, I think, for them to include Palin talking about how she met with foreign 'leaders' in response to the 'head of state' question -
It would have shown that she does meet with leaders...even if she does answer the wrong question.
And though her answer to 'then wouldn't we have to go to war with Russia' question had a lot of deleted-flubginess that I'm sure she's glad were deleted, they should have included this:
****
It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.
His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.
*****
So there are a few dubious editing choices - there's nothing so glaring as O'Keefe's putting Schiller's response to something about reservations as a response to something about Sharia law, but there are some edits that make her seem more bellicose than she really was...
At the same time, some of the edits cut out 'the stupid' as the internets would say...
So I give Gibson's people one thumb down, and O'Keefe's two...
I think we'd have to both watch the full hounr-long video, and then watch the edited version and then read all the commentary. This would require a minimum of 3 hours that I don't have, but that I suppose I might be able to find over the next week.
But then we would have to compare this to Couric and Gibson but the problem is that we don't have the originals in those cases.
If Schiller is bad, how bad is he? Is it wrong to see the Tea Party as racist? Many superlibs feel this way (even though when you make them try to provie it they can't -- it's just emotionally easier to demonize the opposition).
Ok, we'll talk.
Kirby, I'm not sure what good or bad qualities Schiller might have except what I noted from O'Keefe's video.
From that I find him at once smug and bigoted in his willingness to slander the Tea Party as a whole as well as to pander to potential Muslim donors by telling them that major US newspapers (unlike NPR) were in the pocket of the "Zionists," but also naive and overly-eager to acquire the proferred large donation for NPR and for his own credit. I don't think Brett has touched on this question yet, nor stu, who also denies O'Keefe's poseurs referred to their group as founded by Muslim Brotherhood adherents, though I distinctly heard this in the video.
I do think the NPR moguls made him the "fall guy" and a scapegoat who could conveniently be banished to cover for their own smugness and bigotry (as we saw in the Vivian Schiller/Juan Williams episode), so I'd normally be inclined to toss him a little sympathy, but for the ugly qualities I noted above.
I think O'Keefe has provided an estimable service to the right in his muckraking efforts, though I think he'd do better to rein in his youthful enthusiasm for striving to provide the sensational through selective editing. As I said before, the full taped video of the Schiller interview blunts a bit Schiller's culpability of his remarks about the "racist, racist" Tea Party (who knows if these supposed Republicans he referred to as supposedly prompting him to say this even exist except in his own imagination?), but only a bit. And O'Keefe did release the full video version, as you say, so that the short and long versions could be compared.
I wouldn't pair O'Keefe with Michael Moore, the vice-figure with the thirty-pound neck goiter who makes Falstaff look clean-cut by comparison. Moore's a known liar, hypocritical "live high--talk low" agitator, and anti-American socialist bum. Didn't see much hand-wringing on the left when he produced his crappy, lying propaganda pieces.
I think what O'Keefe did to Schiller is small potatoes compared to what Gibson, et al did to Palin before the election, considering the much more significant consequences for the nation at stake.
Kirby, sorry for the late submission, but our wi-fi service went out again for 6 hours.
The difference between O'Keefe and Moore is that Moore is fat?
Yes, this is true, but has little to do with the ethics of their approach.
O'Keefe is a known liar - he's not a socialist, but he's a partisan Republican...I guess I could call him a punk and such, but that seems puerile.
The Left may not have been all that anti-Moore - but I'd posit that they weren't as pro-Moore as Kirby is pro-O'Keefe.
In any case, I'M not as pro-Moore as Kirby is pro-O'Keefe, and there's the rub:
I'm mature enough to denounce the unethical activities of those who share some of my viewpoints...
Kirby at least Pretends that he is not.
That he's decades older than me makes this troubling.
I don't think the Gibson/Couric interviews played so huge a role in impugning Palin that it had a direct effect on the outcome of the election.
There were a lot of moments in Gibson's interview that were cut out that would have served Palin poorly, too - in any case, I have already denounced a few places where the editing should have been different...there's a certain version that would have served Palin the best, but leaving all of it in there would have made it clearer that she's less extreme politically, but also buttressed the criticism that she's not presidential (and not all that smart). ...
Schiller did not know before the meeting that the imposters were supposed to be part of the Muslim brotherhood (the edited video makes it seem certain that the opposite was true...) and over the course of the conversation the imposters revealed that they had some old, tenuous associations to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the imposters distanced themselves from that supposed background.
That being said, the NPR fundraisers refused the 5 million dollars they were supposedly about to receive.
So here's the thing - the left is too accepting of Moore. The right is too accepting of O'Keefe.
But what about us, as individuals, here on this blog? All of us genius or near-geniuses here should be able to distinguish between those who agree with us but behave unethically, and those who agree with us and behave ethically.
That y'all (Kirby moreso than JADL) are so unwilling to denounce the activities of someone from your own side, and to tu quoque your lives away with examples that don't apply to the person you're having the discussion with (me) is flimsy and flamsy and flotsamyjetsamy silliness.
You don't Have to be such immovable right-fighters...
The Gibson/Couric analogy is much weaker than the Michael Moore analogy -
If you're looking for a righty analog to couric/Gibson, that'd probably be Bill constant-interruptus-O'reilly talking to Obama.
He was much more aggressive in his interviewing style than Gibson or Couric, though I'd have to do some checking to see how he edits thangs.
(Fox News in general, though, does a TON of really heinous things with editing...oh, and on the record, I don't have much of a problem with O'Reilly's aggressive, condescending interview style with Obama. I kinda like the chutzpah. It's just that Obama responded to an unfriendly interviewer much better than Palin did...)
So I think we should get clearer analogs - news stations like Fox and personalities like O'Reilly are much closer to analogs for Couric/Gibson and ABC...
The only real differences between Moore and O'Keefe are the fatnesslevels and that O'Keefe is newer and a more talented imposter and Moore is a more talented filmmaker (regardless of his lack of ethics, he knows how to spin a yarn and tell a story and excite an audience...not an easy feat, I assure you).
In terms of editing, they do very similar things...with regards to interviewing, Moore's more of an unfair baiter/misrepresenter of himself and O'Keefe goes for a more outright impostery approach.
The myside'salways right, yourside'salwayswrong thang y'all got goin' is tiresome.
I didn't like what Couric and Gibson did to Palin, frankly. On the other hand, I think they had the right to do it. A pol has to be tough, and has to rise above their circumstances, and not get broken down. A lot worse will happen to them than happens at ABC. So I think it might be good what happened to Palin.
I think the same thing about what happened to Schiller. Let's vet these people.
I do think that Obama didn't get enough vetting. They lobbed softballs to him, and we're left with an indecisive Hawaiian fellow who likes things mellow and has probably smoked too much crack.
That said, I think he is doing just what he should have done in Libya. Dubya would have been in there last week, and would have saved 5000 rebels in the process, but our planes might have been shot down a bit more, and the Maltese air force might not have joined with us.
Now there's at least one group of rebels left, and it may not be too late to save them.
At any rate, about Moore, I can't see how he matters to anyone. I don't want his vids. I saw something about a motor city (Not Detroit) about thirty years ago and thought: this guy isn't even trying to think, and he's been incredibly ineffective (and fat, even then), so I'm not sure what he has to do with Schiller.
Schiller is effective. He sends shock effects that are 9.0 on the Richter scale. He brings down huge organizations.
If these organizations are so vulnerable as to be unable to survive a single video shot, I think it's good that Schiller is doing this public service. Let him continue.
Kirby and Brett, over at The Daily Caller, Patterico, Flopping Aces, and a few other sites on the right, one can find an even stronger case than I've made for Schiller's culpability, along with much closer analyses of the full interview, thanks to links provided by law prof Glenn Reynolds.
And speaking of law profs, Kirby, I'm sure you've heard about the dozens of serious death threats (in addition to instances of vandalism, intimidation, harrassment, and gangsterish extortion-like boycotts directed against businesses) against Wisconsin Republican legislators and even against UW law prof Ann Althouse (who generally votes D) and her husband, who've been chronicling the protests (part peaceful assemblies, part left street carnival, with a good measure of mob actions thrown into the mix--14 protesters were arrested at the capitol building antics in Michigan the other day).
At any rate, even a few lib sites like the Huff Post wonders about the major media silence about all this that only serves to expose liberals' calls for "civility" in political discourse just a few months ago as flaming hypocrisy.
In comparison the assemblies of the Tea Party look much more benign and peaceful.
I challenge stu to defend what amounts to a rash of thuggish and menacing behaviour by the left. Here's but a compilation taste:
http://biggovernment.com/jjmnolte/2011/03/17/20-days-of-left-wing-thuggery-in-wisconsin-when-will-obama-democrats-and-msm-call-for-civility/
Unions have often been given a pass on thuggery and violence in the past, and our inept Vacationer-in-Chief to date seems only to have denounced the Republicans and supported the side from which the mob actions and thuggery have come. A clear message from the President could have helped reduce the increased frequency of these attacks, but to date I haven't heard of one. I don't expect much from Attorney General Holder's utterly politicised and corrupt office either.
Kirby - you keep mixing up Schiller and O'Keefe in terms of names...Which is cool. I do the same thing in most of my scripts.
In any case, Moore is not as currently relevant as O'Keefe - I just use him as an analog because when he Was more relevant, he employed similar tactics to O'Keefe.
Thus, O'Keefe is like a more currently-relevant version of Michael Moore wrt his ethics.
You compared him to the Minute Men of old - I said no, this is a lame comparison, he's a lying deceiving manipulator - he's like a currently-relevant Michael Moore of the right.
That's the central argument we've had, and which I have very obviously been proven correct (he edits in a way that both exaggerates the claims of the other party, and he does edits to make the other party address one topic with words taken from discussions on a different topic...)
I denounce Michael Moore's lack of ethics. I denounce O'Keefe's lack of ethics.
You, on the other hand, insult Moore, and praise O'Keefe...
A double-standard of epic proportions.
And yes, we have in the whitehouse a collected, intelligent, and cool-headed Hawaiin who tends to make the correct decisions.
I'm likin' it...
Vacationer-in-chief is a strange moniker given to Obama, considering that recent Republican presidents have a stranglehold on their number of vacation-days.
"stranglehold on the rankings of having the most vacation days."
The shocking acceptance of the mob behavior on the part of the MSM has said it all, I think. The murderous notes from Madisonians that Althouse has received have been no surprise to me. I know how the left works. They work through whining, guilt-tripping, and finally through murder itself to attain their ends. Law is only acceptable insofar as it is completely on their side. When it isn't, they feel entitled to Thoreau the entire thing under the bus.
Or to get on a bus and leave town, if they are supposed to help enact laws.
It's been one shock after another to watch this. Now there's a guy in Madison named Shankman who says that he and all his friends will threaten Althouse and her husband, throwing baseball bats on their lawn, and harassing them whenever they appear in public, until they leave town.
So far, no one on the left has stood up for the Althouse family. Perhaps they have, but I'm not aware of it.
You are not permitted to challenge the orthodoxy of the left. Freedom of speech belongs only to them. It's an incredible insight into the mob behavior and incredible violence toward political difference that the left sanctions and puts on display. The mob is their muscle.
I feel sorry for the Althouse family.
It's only a principled few like them that can make the difference between law and total disorder, and rule of mob tyranny.
The irony of it is that Althouse voted for Obama, and is a feminist whenever women's issues are concerned.
But she's still not far ENOUGH left for the howling mobs and their goons.
Leftists have been far safer when and where the Tea Party has gathered.
The thing with Loughner was, that while He wasn't a teapartier, it brought out that many teapartiers had sent death-threats to Giffords and Judge Roll.
I do think that those who have been uncivil should be condemned for their incivility - just like we condemned those teapartiers and their ilk who were similarly uncivil, but you all pretended that they never existed.
Claims that these outliers on either side represent the majority should be met with disdain.
I do not view teapartiers generally as dangerous and/or uncivil.
I do not view protestors in Wisconsin generally as dangerous and/or uncivil.
There are some from both groups who have been dangerous and/or uncivil.
It would take an unbiased study of epic proportions to create an accurate comparison of who's more uncivil to whom...
Actually, Moore has made "gust" [sic] appearances in Madison and in Lansing recently to whip up the fervour of the protest groups and mobs, so he's been a player in this sad game.
O'Keefe and Schiller! I'll try to keep them straight.
At any rate, I haven't seen much of Moore's movies. To me it's like reading Ayn Rand -- I can't actually do it.
O'Keefe's vids I've seen. They are short and sharp.
Moore wades into a viewpoint, and I'm not willing to go very far with him. Perhaps about as far as an inch, but not a mile.
O'Keefe's vids are over before they began, and the quick assertions he gets out of Schiller, "Tea Party is racist, racist," even if this is ultimately put in someone else's mouth (some unnamed Republicans) to make it more palatable, is still demonstrably HIS triumphalist and dismissive commentary on the patriots who form that group.
At any rate, there are some missing reference points that you want me to key into, Brett. But I can't watch Michael Moore. About thirty years ago I saw him film about what happened to some town in Michigan, forget the name. I just thought: well, the unions squeezed the town like aphids on a tree and sucked the profit out of it, so the companies went elsewhere.
End of story, at least for me.
So I never watched anything else he made. When he comes on MsNBC I just flick the channel. Even Madcow is not as irritating to me.
She tries really hard to be likeable and fair, even though she is neither. Moore is just an obnoxious club fighter with no class at all.
O'Keefe is hard for me to place. His scenarios are inventive and can be pressed into oneliners that mount true outrage.
Given that the right is completely outgunned by the left -- the right has only one channel compared to fifty channels for the left, and given that they have only one newspaper (WSJ) compared to 1400 for the left, it's amazing they are still in the fight over the ruling principles AT ALL.
That an unprincipled film maker may still have principles, is something of an irony. The left has been firing shots like this at the right since at least Tarbell and Orwell (one could rhyme them should one choose).
Of course, the history of this thing is of no interest to the left.
They just want to focus on O'Keefe.
Civility, as some wag said, is something the left is only concerned with when the right fires back. After a century of leftist propaganda, it's nice to see a young David take out a Goliath or two. First Acorn, and then, NPR.
The same organizations will rename themselves and get back in the saddle (Acorn already has), but the idea that public funding for biased, looney-tunes organizations, should be cut, is O'Keefe's message. It's one that resonates with a lot of fed-up centrists and conservatives.
NPR is a leftist bully paid for with federal money. They should have to play more fair, or they shoiuldn't be allowed to continue to use public money. O'Keefe's point is dead right.
Maybe he edited a bit to get Schiller to say this, or to say something that would lead most of us to this conclusion.
Maybe he knew what he wanted all along, and when he got it, he presented it.
But Schiller never contested it. NPR never contested it.
So, as far as any of us know, what O'Keefe said was the truth.
He got Schiller to make his point for him.
His point is totally valid.
Perhaps his style isn't (we could argue for the next century looking at Orwell, Tarbell, Moore, Couric, Gibson, others for comparisons), but his point is still valid.
Was ACORN also a completely biased organization grown fat on the public dollar?
Yes.
The universities, sadly, will be next. Expect ouir budgets in Republican leaning states to be cut to nothing.
I hate that the left has caused this to come to pass. They should have played fair. Now that they are being called for their bigotry, they call the other side bigots.
But leftist bigotry and inability to allow that the rich and the entreprenurial are the geese that lay the golden eggs, and that people of principle like Christians merely have another set of principles to which they are beholden, (we're all scum that they want to run out of town) is unfair. The whole left isn't like this. but when that left speaks up, they too are run out of town. So they are silenced.
It's bad, it's sick, and it should be stopped.
Here, most of us believe that the two sides can talk. Outside of this tiny sphere and its ten discussants, most of leftist America doesn't believe in this. Freedom of speech, and the first amendment, is only for them.
Others should be silenced. No time on TV, no time on radio, no time anywhere. Got a newspaper? We;ll throw it in the garbage.
Got a viewpoint other than ours? We'll murder your family, and blacken your name, and call you racist. Look what happened to Republican legislators in Wisconsin. Does Stu object?
No, he's silent.
What you say, though, Brett, does make sense (I took so long to post the last two comments that some may not notice you added a quite good comment but so early that it comes before my last two comments).
a true study of who is harder on whom would require a monumentally unbiased perspective.
There was a lone conservative on the local paper who got to publish a short column once a week. He taught at a nearby college in Accounting. He said the death threats and potential harm to his family was so palpable that he had to quit after five years.
I don't hear leftists saying the same things. You're very safe if you are leftist activist in this country.
Mostly because the right is Christian and can't hurt other people as a rule.
I do get the sense that O'Keefe is not a Christian, and doesn't go by the usual rules of not bearing false witness that the right in general feels constrained to uphold.
We are generally held back by the Ten Commandments.
The left has (in general) no such compunctions, and usually have come to the conclusion that all power comes from the end of a gun or to put it in another way, might is right.
The Republicans at least since Lincoln have argued that right is might.
This is not exclusive. A few on the left have been true Christians. MLK was, and this is why both sides honor him.
The Christian principles built this country, and allowed it to have different sides, and to operate according to individual conscience.
Increasingly there is a rightist group and a leftist group, and perhaps the notion of bearing false witness is not a mortal sin in their eyes.
I suppose one conclusion to come to is that we few here should not lower ourselves to that standard, and to honor those in the other camp who don't either. I hear what you're saying about this, Brett, and wanted to thank you for it.
I think MLK knew this, too.
The left for me has become a violent rgc might is right group who actively denounce the ten commandments, God, and anything but their own power and whims. It's matriarchal.
What I like about the Christians of both sides is that we're patriarchal -- we still believe in ruling, transcendent principles that make it possible to argue with one another.
I'm sorry if I've been too busy this week to manage to put my words around this concept.
I am stretched so thin that I barely have the luxury to formulate an independent thought.
But if I did have time and such a luxury, it would be to go back to something Stu said: that we should not bear false witness against one another.
Of course, we are all sinners, and our parties are filled with people who will bear false witness either because they don't have that principle as part of their political DNA, or part of their personal make-up.
I don't know enough about O'Keefe to say whether he does or not.
It's pretty clear that what Schiller says is an absolute lie about the Tea Party and that he's not ashamed to say anything to disparage that group.
How many real Christians are there at NPR?
I'd guess none.
80% of America is Christian. Does that radio channel represent us EVER?
If not, why should we pay for them to try to attack us with their secular humanist viewpoint that only belongs to a small minority?
the same thing would have to be true about the universities, where secular humanists and Marxists sit upstream ready to throttle and destroy the viewpoint of the salmon going up the stream?
Very few get through their reeducation with their spiritual values intact.
Brett, do you have evidence for your claim that "many Tea Partiers" sent death threats to Rep Giffords and Judge Roll? Of course I'd condemn this vicious practise on whatever side it came from, but I'd like to read sound evidence for your claim.
"The right has (in general) no such compunctions, and usually have come to the conclusion that all power comes from the end of a gun or to put it in another way, might is right."
FTFY:-)
Your broad-stroke attacks of the generalized left don't really hold much substance or water with me these days...
Brett, when a 103 year old guy has to come out of retirement to condemn his institution you know there's something wrong.
I think there are death threats (sadly) for almost every famous American. Apparently ALL the senators and congressmen receive them continually.
Chris Gibson will appear at the fire station two blocks from my house in two days. He's my congressman. He voted to keep funding for NPR. I'd like to ask him why he did that.
Kirby, I've seen several of Moore's propaganda flicks, the last one being "Sicko," which aims to praise Cuba's health system at the expense of ours. Moore's a willing Marxist tool on this issue; he knows quite well wealthy foreigners and celebs can go to the few Cuban show hospitals that are far beyond the access of ordinary Cubans. And who believes with a straight face the health "statistics" Cuba sends to the UN? Recently he's claimed the wealth of the rich is a "national resource, that's ours" and should simply be confiscated.
At any rate, it's clear to me that Schiller just as willingly assented to the "racist, racist" remark, whatever its supposed source. And Schiller's remark that major US newspapers are in the pocket of the "Zionists"? Is there a supposed source other than Schiller for that?
The Zionist remark by Schiller isn't representative of the PC left and is surprising. Maybe it is representative, but is something hidden. It certainly came up constantly with virulent leftist J., who was constantly calling me Kirby-Stein, and related nomikers.
It's not clear to me what Cuba really does in terms of health-care. They claim they have one doctor for every thirty people. Each doctor only makes about a hundred dollars a year. Same as everybody else. You can't get off the island, they don't have internet access except for party members, and even for them if you get off the accepted state web sites you can be arrested for four years.
So it's not exactly a picnic in Cuba. Gay people were arrested for four years and put in reeducation camps up til a few years ago. Castro has recently apologized for that.
The left is nuts. It's like they have willing blinkers so much do they want to believe in that stupid system.
Their statistics have no oversight, so they can say anything they want to the UN.
Much like Obama's numbers from the budget office on healthcare, they just invent things, and later on we can find out what they really mean, as Pelosi says.
I guess I never posted this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/08/national/main7226269.shtml
And to be clear and not so conflationary, I should have said 'those who share political views with the teaparty,' (since the death threats came before, perhaps, the TeaParty was a national movement...)
And Giffords was on the receiving end of general threats and vandalism, though not quite so clearly direct death-threats...
And I'd also point to what Kirby rightly noted - that congressmen and women receive threats from members of the opposing side rather frequently...
Apparently everyone gets deaththreats, but usually the people sending them are nuts, like Loughner. That is, they aren't thinking clearly.
That is to say, no normal people in their right mind thinks about hurting other people. They just don't do this. Or if they do, I think they pray that the anger will pass.
I'll bet it's less than one in a million who actually sends or makes a death threat. It's an extraordinarily crazy thing to do.
Can you even IMAGINE doing it?
It's just plain weird to even imagine doing it. What kind of person does it, much less goes through on it? It takes an absolute weirdo, if you ask me.
Most of us are busy caring about our families, and making them dinner, and balancing the books.
I mean apparently everyone in congress gets death threats as does the president. Normal people I don't think get them. But at the Congressional level, and up, they do. But I can't imagine that it's more than three hundred people who send them. It's just not something normal people think about doing. IS IT?
But there are probably 330 people in the country who are as crazy as Loughner. One in a million. Doing something about it is even more rare. But those people do exist. Cho, Loughner, Chapman, Manson, and very few others. Usually loners whose families have rejected them.
Have you noticed that most of our holidays are based on family life. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Easter, even Halloween to some extent are all family days, and mostly for children.
I think the weirdos don't fit in during this time, and get pretty upset about it.
Also, I don't think that weirdos (in addition to not being able to appreciate their families) also dislike their country. A thousand Mogadishus is what they wish on their families and country.
Not good.
Hating Congressmen of either party is part of a larger symptom, I think.
It's ok on the other hand to hate the actions or the policies of another side. But if you find yourself hating actual people and wishing them harm, then it's time to check yourself in.
Post a Comment